A debt that we all have

I was thinking of writing this article on women’s day but I thought let us remember ‘nari shakti’ beyond the celebration day. Let us make it a convention of looking towards them with reverence even beyond the celebrated day. But, hey why do we even need to remind ourselves about the ‘nari shakti’? Aren’t we all in one way or the other surrounded by women? We are not taking about some project tiger where the agenda is to increase the number of tiger! We are everyday interacting with them in fact we are in this world because of a woman! So, certainly we need to change our outlook towards them.

I can say this with lot of conviction that it is NOT easy to be a woman. We men give lots of excuses for our failure. Many of us have appeared for IIT JEE or CAT or even for that matter board exams. Imagine you are in examination hall and you are having loose motions. I am sure we will give this as an excuse for not getting selected. Perhaps, we are not trained to perform in such situation. But don’t forget that there might be lakhs of female students who might have studied very hard, yet on the day of examination she might be having menstruation period. So, if the invigilator gives them an extra minute to write please don’t get offended.

The government has given a mandatory 24 weeks paid pregnancy leave. Sometimes, many in industry feel that it is too much a burden, but trust me that 6-month leave is nothing as compared to the pain that a woman goes through. Gaining 20+ kg of weight and then losing it brings a lot of changes in the body. They are doing it for the human race. We find it difficult even to loose belly fats forget about losing 20+ kg of weight! Every woman is different, some may need the maternity leave during the 6^th month of pregnancy some may need it in 9^th month. There can be a woman who may find it difficulty in working even as early as 3^rd month of pregnancy. Now, we cannot always look at government to make laws and implement it for every female welfare thing. We owe to our mother and sisters a huge debt that we can only be repaid by being soberer and kinder to our female colleague. We can give them less burden during pre and post pregnancy. We should not give them poor ratings due to this. I certainly believe that the female should have some extra casual leaves as compared to their male counterparts. It is very difficult for female to climb the corporate ladder because raising a child in itself is more than a full time job. Hence, the pain that the tradeoff causes is immense.

I knowingly did not cover female feticide, or startup funds for woman entrepreneurs. On all these topics I will be writing more in the form of advice while the above mentioned things can be implemented by many of us. There are many things that we can do, it is not that what suggestions I have given is sacrosanct. There are government agencies and many NGOs which are working on woman welfare, but with our small effort in offices we can at least initiate our ‘debt’ payment.