Women's Work, Freedom, and Delayed Marriage
Any stance or decision should be taken and accepted according to how well it suits the smooth running of life and its harmony.
Merely giving something the name and packaging of "progress" does not make it progress or make it right.
Merely calling something "conservative" does not make it wrong, stagnant, or regressive.
Giving things the names and packaging of freedom and peace does not make what one feels inside freedom or peace.
Freedom and peace are freedom and peace only if they are experienced, only if they are known inwardly.
Romanticism, and the beauty it offers, does not make anything right or practical.
The grapes in a picture are good only in the picture. They are no good for ending hunger and thirst, and they are not enough.
What is right is right only because it is right, only because it is beneficial and useful to life.
Only what is beneficial and useful to life remains and endures through the ages.
No work in any world, not even work regarded as great, is nobler than raising children.
Nothing else is greater than the work that nurtures, grows, and protects life.
All other work exists only to make the work of nurturing, growing, and protecting life easier.
If livelihood is not at stake, no woman needs to go out and work. Perhaps not even a man needs to go out and work.
For a woman who must raise children to have to go out and work is a great torment and punishment inflicted on the woman herself, however glamorous it may appear.
What is happening in the community regarding marriage:
What fascists in India want to happen in many communities is being carried out by girls (and to some extent boys) caught up in vague romanticism and the unsustainable hopes it has given them.
The aims are to delay marriage and to freeze population growth.
What the fascists wanted is exactly what is now happening in marriage: what the patient wishes and what the doctor prescribed are the same thing.
Like tying grass in front of an ox that pulls a cart, the fascists have used the illusions of job, equal age, and women's freedom to bring about among Muslims the same disaster that other communities had already experienced.
The ox gains nothing but exhaustion from walking and running.
The girls have become oxen who do not understand that the grass isn't there, can't be reached, and shouldn't be wanted.
The result is that men can't find wives and women can't find husbands for marriage.
Women who try to imitate men and be like men become mere oxen running around, having thrown away for nothing the life, freedom, security, and peace they once enjoyed in abundance.
At least the oxen have some excuse. They are only oxen.
Most girls who go about with the dream of a job are running like oxen, as if chasing a mirage.
Where are the jobs in India?
If not the man, then the woman: India doesn't even have enough job opportunities to guarantee a job for at least one person in a couple.
There aren't enough jobs in India to ensure that at least one of two people gets work, so that the two and their family could live.
Indian education does not lead to jobs.
There are not enough jobs in India for education to lead to.
India generally lacks both a meaningful education that qualifies students for jobs and teachers qualified to provide it.
And then girls insist they must get a job, don't get one, don't marry because they have no job, and so remain unmarried.
Having left this bank because they saw greener pastures on the other, but never reaching the other bank, they end up on neither bank, with no greenery, drying up in a Trishanku-like limbo of despair.
On one side, some families have jobs for everyone: men, women, and children, all in government jobs or high-paying private ones.
Where every member of a family has a government or high-paying private job, it is mostly in the upper castes.
On the other side, no one in the family has a job.
The story and fate of the vast majority of India's backward and minority communities is one of having neither work nor wages.
Even the men of backward and minority communities have no jobs.
And now women arrive with the mindset that they must work too.
Earlier, men would do whatever work they could find and support their wives and families.
Now the women of the new generation have themselves decided that men need not protect or support them.
On one side, neither men nor women have jobs.
This is because "job" has come to mean only a government job or a white-collar job.
Not even one in a thousand people in India can get a government or white-collar job. Almost all the available jobs are held by the upper castes, and jobs are cleverly given out only in the directions the upper castes intend.
Like a mirage that only appears from afar, government and white-collar jobs are in fact barely available to anyone in this country, especially anyone from backward and minority communities. Reservation exists only to create the impression that something improper is being given to certain people, and to breed hatred and division along that path.
Education, for the vast majority of the backward and minority communities, is mostly a waste of time and money and a way of accumulating disappointment.
India cannot absorb even one percent of its students into jobs.
Meanwhile, women have misunderstood that it isn't enough for a man to seek, find, and earn a job and bring home the income. They think it is a great thing for them to get that job and do it themselves.
On that basis women have stepped out of their secure nucleus in the social and family system, as though going back to that secure nucleus were no longer possible.
It is as if a new saying and philosophy is emerging that life is for the sake of work.
It is as if we have forgotten that work is for the sake of living (and only if needed at all).
People fail to understand that work is something done, and has to be done, only to live, only to earn a livelihood, and only because one has to.
Women fail to understand that if possible, not having to do work in which one must toil and act under someone's orders is freedom and peace. Men understand this to some extent.
Even men work only because they must, because they have to support their families.
Even men would prefer not to work if they could.
But women, who mistakenly think that getting and doing a job is something great, do not understand this.
Even so, ignoring her own physical and mental nature, she wants outside work.
As a result, either she doesn't get a job, doesn't marry, and lives in despair,
or she gets some minor job but still doesn't marry.
And if she does marry?
She is run ragged by the housework that inevitably falls to her and that her physical and mental nature makes impossible to avoid, along with the outside work she must also take on.
On top of this come menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding, the hormonal changes that happen to her alone, and mood swings.
In effect, besides a husband's orders (which may come only occasionally and very rarely), she ends up in the predicament of obeying 12 hours of orders at the workplace as well.
She has lost the freedom and peace she had at home.
She has lost the state of mind of living peacefully at home, and become like a market-street cow.
The nucleus of family and social life has been emptied.
Unrest has been given the name of peace.
Family quarrels have come to mean family life.
Under the name of work, women have taken on the task of relieving men of their burdens and responsibilities and making them idle. By taking outside work, they have made men irresponsible.
Because of the pressure of women's outside work and the emptying of the nucleus, family life has been thrown into disarray, strife, and imbalance.
It has been trapped in the misunderstanding that freedom means having to work.
Like moths that think fire is something beautiful, women think work is something lovely and have invited more and more bondage, unrest, and ruin.
Instead of a peaceful family life, there is either no family life at all, or one full of unrest.
In effect, what women are doing is taking on more obligations and burdens in the name of work, and buying unrest.
Women's thinking about freedom and their dream of a job resemble paying money to buy a dog that bites.
The same woman who failed to appreciate the value of freedom in simply sitting at home begins to understand it, once she has a job, only on Sundays and holidays, when she can rarely sit idle. Even then she is busy with the work to be done for the whole week ahead, unable to experience freedom and peace.
Beyond all this, there are other problems caused by delayed marriages, which result from the dream of a job that either can't be had or becomes a trap once had.
Late pregnancies and deliveries become complicated.
The benefits of the age difference between husband and wife are lost.
The resulting imbalance pushes family life into further crises and quarrels.
It was almost natural for a man to be at least five to eight years older than the woman.
Having lost this, family life at first doesn't notice the difficulty, but later suffers the consequences.
When a woman reaches menopause and its signs around forty, the man stands bewildered.
A new world is also created in which the woman suspects the bewildered man, grows irritable toward him, and quarrels with him.
Without other sexual solutions, and unable to understand and adjust to the physical and mental states women often go through in their forties, couples face the plight of lives splitting in two.
The age gap in marriage (the man being at least eight years older) was a long-term solution to exactly this problem.
The new generation also made the mistake of not understanding that a man attains the maturity of a 19-year-old girl only at 27 or 28. The difference is that it takes a large stretch of life before the mistake becomes clear.
By the time they begin to realize that husband, wife, and life after marriage are not what they imagined before marriage and before starting family life, things have slipped beyond recovery or correction. It is too late.
When a 28-year-old man married a 19-year-old girl, they seemed well matched because a man attains a 19-year-old girl's maturity only at 27.
That is also why, when peers marry, beyond the temporary attraction and celebration, incompatibility soon takes shape.
A woman who marries late, insisting on and practicing "same age," not only wastes her best physical and sexual years, but also delays pregnancy and increases difficulties, leaving too little time and physical and mental health to raise children.
Even the purely physiological fact that, by her own bodily nature, her first pregnancy should by all means happen before age twenty-five fails to happen.
For what?
Because of running after the mirage of a job.
Because of not understanding that work is for living, not living for work.
Because of misinterpreting the ability to live peacefully without working as slavery.
Because of buying unfreedom in the name of freedom.
Because of the foolish notion of "standing on one's own feet," which bought unrest, and now she can't stand on her own feet or on anyone else's.
Because of bathing and bathing the child called married life until it has been killed, together with family life.
Because it is enough for one of the two, husband or wife, to work in order to live;
because, given their physical and mental nature, it is enough for the man to do it;
because, given her own physical and mental nature, it is enough for the woman to look after the home alone and enjoy peace and freedom;
because it is enough to achieve harmony in life that way,
and this was not understood.
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