What you saying, woman????

“I think the purdah system should be abolished”!!!. Oh dear! There goes the dodo.

I wasn’t really too excited by the prospect of Pratibha Patil being made first citizen of my country because of some instincts which were inexplicable to me then. She just had to open her mouth and make some noise for me to dawn upon the realization that my instincts had already unobtrusively comprehended the irrepressible truth- that there were no brains behind all the big talk.

Her first public utterance after being chosen by the U-Pratibha-Alliance as the nominee for the post of the president was audaciously characteristic of self flattery- one that seemed to hail the decision of the ruling party coalition of having chosen her. What cheek! And then you go as far as asking age old traditional customs to be abolished in a night’s hours.

I confess that I have a proclivity of siding with the conservatives generally. Disregarding that too, in the pure spirit of enquiry, I wish to ask what essentially is wrong with the purdah system? In countries like England and America, it has, of course, come to be identified with a suspiciously-eyed, even hated, community- the Islamists. So much is the attention even the Sikhs attract, as much as does every brown man or a black man. I, for one, trust human ingenuity enough to believe that it can identify a south asian or an east asian, for example, rather comfortably, even without a burkha or a pagdi or a kimono. We are different races of people all over the globe and all races have physical charachteristics typical of them. Thereby, even as the question of the burkha or the pagdi being prospectively banned in England sounds perverse to me; the suggestion of my probable president, Pratibha ji is something I simply I cannot digest.

The purdah is a tradition that has not harmed any woman till date. I fail to see what this lady is trying to arrive at.

She calls her nomination a big step for the women in the country. I am not too sure too many women think so. I, for one, don’t.