The day after the US presidential inauguration, when it was decided that Mickey and Donald would rule the nation for the next four years, I woke up to slurs of protest against the orange-faced, golden-haired, blue-eyed commander-in-chief of America. I live right across the once towering, now tearfully tormented Trump Tower in Chicago, at whose foothills women held delightful demonstrations of their dissent. This was just one of the 600 sites across the world where enraged women fuelled by feminism decided to tell the world that “Love, not hate, makes America great”.
Being married for five years, it’s not hard to imagine what angry women sound like just by looking at them from a distance, which is exactly what I did from the closed environs of my 500-sq. ft palatial penthouse on the fifteenth floor. They appeared to be marching peacefully along the glistening Chicago River, where the sun’s rays comforted the icy water, allowing it to shed its tears, as each sheet of ice wistfully cracked and melted away on an unusually warm January winter morning, which I believe is half the reason that most of them could come out to protest. The last time we attended a peaceful protest, it was against the hawker establishment in Dadar Parsi Colony. Since that was a matter dear to me, my girls marched with me. Now, as it was a matter dear to womankind in general, we decided to show solidarity with the newest member of our family for her first protest.
Just as we stepped out, we were greeted with rallying rants of “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries” and “Threaten the pu**y and you’ll get clawed” from the “bottoms against misogyny” brigade. Women of all colours, shapes, and sizes united to “fight like a girl”. The LGBT community, the Hispanics, and the immigrants all came out to make the world realise that “love trumps hate”—albeit, in my opinion, a little too late. The woman heading the march was a Pakistani lesbian Muslim married to a brown Hispanic girl; imagine the grudge that this one couple alone must have against Trump. I walked through the crowds with my little daughters, a little confused and overwhelmed but also a little hopeful, as they clapped and giggled through the rhapsody, imagining it to be one of their nursery rhymes from Mary Poppins—Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS.
This got me asking myself, what do women really want? This question has been asked over centuries, with movies and books written about it and great playwrights such as Shakespeare searching for answers. Like everything in life, wants are age dependent. I’m at a stage where both my girls currently want is only the iPhone, the iPad, Kit Kat, cupcakes, and ice cream. These five items, when delivered either individually or in varying combinations, will get you the most ecstatic expressions, kindest kisses, and most humongous hugs. As they grow older, I’m sure I’ll grow twice as old with their demands.
I am a man who believes that women are superior to men in every single way, and in my opinion, every man with a little bit of common sense should have that same admirable attitude. This belief can instantly restore peace from an atomic level to a universal one.
There is a reason why women were chosen to bring human beings into this world. While men are busy subspecializing, women are mastering multitasking. Women are more emotionally evolved, intellectually intriguing, and ferociously funny. My two-year-old knows I’m a doctor and work at a ‘hopistal’. There is no greater joy in the world than to return home from work, and, as I open the door, be greeted with thunderous proclamation of my arrival in the form of a “Dada!” followed by an Usain Bolt-like dash-hug. Sometimes, I manage to lift her up in time; sometimes we both get badly injured.
I hope that when they grow up, they are treated fairly. I hope they define their own fair. I wish that when they grow up, there is not only equality but also equanimity. I desire that they do not have to go out onto the streets and protest; that what is rightfully theirs will be theirs, without them having to make themselves heard. But sometimes, to stay quiet is to take the side of the oppressor, and I hope they never do. I anticipate that by the time they are in their teens, the world will be a nicer place to live in: a kinder, calmer version of its current melodramatic self. More for my sake than theirs.
Unfortunately, patriarchy is so entrenched in our system all over the world that it could only change if God was a woman. Somewhere in all our hearts, we already know She is, don’t we? She just lets men have their way because they aren’t as tough as women to have it any other way. But after this election, even God has gotten busy. Soon, I hope there will be equal pay, equal rights, and equal say, contrary to the situation in my house where I have none of these—if I don’t yield, the protests of my little ones can silence any morcha anyone has ever been to.
I look forward to being back in India soon—an India that I hope remains rooted but simulataneosuly becomes more progressive than so-called first world America. The most democratic country in the world will now have a protest every fortnight. Grace will be at half-mast for the next four years in America.
