EQUALITY - THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD CONCEPT

These days whenever we scroll the social media pages, somewhere or the other we find the word 'equality', be it any podcast, any interview or a blog post, discussion about 'equality' is raving these days. I thought why not write about my opinion on this specific topic. Our society has been termed as a patriarchal society because over the centuries we, women have always been ill-treated and considered inferior, we never had the power of decision-making in any sphere of life whereas gender equality has always been considered as a basic, fundamental human right by the same male dominated society. Though according to Indian culture women should receive the utmost respect because in our country, in some of the religions people worship women in the forms of Goddess. But when it comes to real life, people often forget that we, women , do exist. Isn't that hypocrisy? With evolving times, when we, women started realizing our strength, we started becoming vocal about our rights and thus began a revolution called women empowerment. The term equality is also a part of the same revolution. But it is the most misunderstood and misinterpreted one these days. Well, why is it important to understand the concept of equality is because even in this 21st century, no matter how progressive we have become or at least we claim to be, we still need to discuss and focus on empowering women from time to time, because still now we women often get judged for all our life choices, be it financial, professional or personal decisions. Let's talk about the basics first, as people don't even get it correctly. We need to understand when a woman talks about equality, she doesn't mean that she wants to be like a man or behave like a man in every aspect. What she means is equal opportunity, equal respect, equal value. Men and Women are not equal in terms of physical abilities, we are mentally, psychologically and physically different from each other. We are not meant to cater to the exact same thing. Men and Women have been created to maintain the balance.That's why we, women are creator, nurturer and men are protector and provider, that's why we are different and embracing this difference is true wisdom. There's no collision, no power struggle between men and women as we both are important for the society to maintain the balance. We bring different things to the table, and that's the beauty of coexistence. But now equality has been misinterpreted and defined only on the basis of equal financial contribution in a family. While there's no harm in equal financial contribution when both the man and woman of the family are earning almost the same amount of money, but this can't be a parameter to prove the point of being equal. Just the way it's absolutely unethical to determine the value of a man based on his socio-economic background, similarly it's completely wrong to judge a woman's credibility based on her financial contribution or even home making skills. Financial independence for a woman is crucial to survive, but constantly being judged for her decisions, life choices, ambitions and expecting her to be 'perfect' in all the areas of life based on the societal standard of perfection is a typical mindset that needs to be changed. It's so disheartening to see when women criticize other women for the same. A society can never grow without the spirit of uplifting each other not on the basis of gender but as a primary aspect of humanity.

Please understand it's not about superiority, inferiority or being perfect or ideal, it's about being the one who you are, embracing the differences, adapting the changes, celebrating the individuality and coexisting peacefully.