All through my childhood and teens I wasted a lot of time and effort in pleasing people around me. Somehow it seemed important to keep everyone else happy even if it meant neglect of one’s own happiness. Part of this behaviour could be blamed on nature but lot of it was nurture. In the environment in which I grew up a girl was never allowed to forget that she would one day go into another house and it was very important to be accepted by everyone there by winning them over with one’s kindness, generosity, and willingness to sacrifice and put one’s needs after everyone else’s. And the training began in one’s own house from a very young age. Looking around one saw that it was the norm in the family – women who slogged away from pre-dawn to late hours in the night for the family, women who suffered in the hands of in-laws and husbands and never complained. Living in a family steeped in traditional ways, the injustices were not obvious. It seemed just the way of life and a very normal one at that. And the irony was that these very same women who were victims of traditions were also its chief guardians and keepers of culture. It was their duty to ensure that the traditions were preserved and passed on to successive generations!

True, these traditions were attributed a lot of significance , symbolism and mysticism in order to make them worthy of being preserved. It is all about packaging right? Like a jihadi suicide bomber feeling important about his mission and expecting reward in the life after, women carried on the yoke of tradition and even felt proud of it.

I do not know exactly when but somewhere in my 30s I began to question traditions and began to discard practices which did not seem relevant to my life. I had no problem removing the mangalsutra or not wearing a bindi or not observing fasts (vrats) to ensure my husband had a long life. As for brahminical practices such as madi, echil, pathu and theetu, I discarded them the moment I had my own kitchen.
For the uninitiated , these are Tamil words and I only know the Tamil words for these practices and this is what they roughly are.
Madi is when you ensure purity of the occasion with a head bath and wearing washed clothes that have been untouched by anyone who is not observing madi. In case of accidental contact with someone who is not in a madi state, they bathe again and wear fresh madi clothes or wet clothes to renew their Madi. This is a superior form of untouchability not to be confused with the untouchability practised among castes and was constitutionally abolished.

Echil ( literally meaning Saliva) is mixing food from one another’s plate or touching anything with the same hand while eating food. For example while eating, if you touch the vessel containing rice with the hand that is being used to eat , you have sullied all the rice in the vessel with your echil. Consequence: it becomes unfit for consumption by others and has to be entirely consumed by the person who has sullied it or thrown away. So every time you have touched echil you have to wash your hand before touching anything else with the same hand.

Pathu: Cooked items are usually not mixed with uncooked items like curd, milk, salt, water, oil etc. You cannot touch them with the same hand with which you have touched cooked items. You touch the vessel containing curd with the same hand which has touched the cooked rice and all the curd becomes Pathu and cannot go back into the storage but has to be consumed or thrown away. One is supposed to wash hands every time after touching pathu items and before touching non pathu items. Complicated? ya, if you entered a traditional brahmin kitchen it would be full of people obsessively washing their hands between handling items pathu and non-pathu.

Theetu: This is the opposite of madi. It is a state of impurity when you have not had your bath. it is also observed for a certain number of days when there has been a death or birth in the family. During this period the family does not celebrate festivals or do puja (prayer). A mensturating woman was also considered impure ( theetu) when she had her monthly periods and was isolated. There has been a lot of discussion among Indian women bloggers about this practice in the past month and I am not about to add to all the fuss about a natural biological function in a fertile woman's body.
As far as I know it was essentially a practice among brahmins who were also great observers of madi. I refused to be isolated even as a 15 year old and if that made their gods angry, I was willing to face the consequences. But my sister in law told me how she had to sleep in the bathroom on ‘those’ days because they lived in a small house and there was no extra room where she could be kept isolated. As a teenager she spent those days in fear of cockroaches and rats that had a free run of the bathroom. That made my blood boil. I am not sure if God was happy with her family for treating her like that on her most vulnerable days. Enough said about my thoughts on the practice of isloating mensturating women.

Anyway as I said, I have discarded all these practices many years ago. I keep a safe distance from all these traditions in my normal day to day life and it poses no problem to anyone around me. But when there are occasions when I am forced to be part of functions which involve people who are deluded to be keepers of tradition and culture, I have trouble. I have a choice to pretend and follow tradition and please them or be true to myself and be unpopular. Not just unpopular but I also end up hurting their sentiments. Recently we had a family reunion and a wedding in the family was being discussed. I was shocked at the meaningless ceremonies people wanted to have and the amount of money budgeted for the same. I can understand their insistence on the basic rituals but when they introduced new practices because ‘everyone is doing it these days’ and justify it as a ‘new tradition’ I opened my mouth and became instantly unpopular.
N.e.w T.r.a.d.i.t.i.o.n? do you see the irony, the oxymoron?
If you do not, here is a definition of the word tradition:
1 a: an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom)
(thanks: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tradition)

It doesn’t matter that I or the other person can afford the additional expenditure. It does not matter that by silent acquiescence I can keep a lot of people happy. I do not want to be guilty of being a party to some custom which may become part of ‘tradition’ in the coming years adding to the financial burden of some middle-class tradition-fearing parent in the years to come. simple? sensible? Why is it so difficult to get it across to otherwise intelligent people?

Traditions can be a security blanket when you need something to give you a sense of comfort and belonging. This probably explains the enthusiasm with which the Indian diaspora religiously celebrate festivals in their new homes - celebrating Holi, when it is not heralding spring in their country of residence and Sankranti when it is not harvest time. Tradition can provide a framework for one's life, it can give guidelines but the minute it begins to oppress a certain section of people, it requires re-examination. There is something seriously lacking in your tradition if it needs fear and authority to keep it alive and if it falls flat on its face when faced with rational examination. Such traditions should be questioned and it is ok to discard them if they make no sense in the world we are actually living in. They were observed for a certain reason in earlier centuries and are obsolete in today's context and it is better to shed the excess baggage. That is the only hope for what is good in our tradition in the 21st century. Or else the baby will get thrown along with the bathwater. But I guess that would be ok in the cause of Madi ! ( just kidding hehehe)

I saw a telugu film Stri which was screened on DD around International women's day. It was the story of a woman hopelessly in love with a womanising, alcoholic, gambling, good-for-nothing guy. She forgives him every time he commits a crime and tries to get him out of it, even when he sets her hut on fire while she is sleeping inside because she refuses to give him her chain which he demands for a prostitute he is enamoured with. The villagers save her but she risks their goodwill by refusing to testify against her lover. Even when she finds him with the other woman, she only blames her for trying to steal her husband while she is willing to forgive him. In the end she is about to be handed over to the police for helping him steal some cargo from a boat hoping he could have a fresh start. In her heart she knows that he would take the money straight to the prostitute while she would suffer beatings in the hands of the police. The film ends with her saying "But once he has spent the money he will have no one to go to and he will come back to me as I am the only one who really loves him."

I was angry, furious and in tears. Why was this woman shown in a favourable light? Why did this film win awards? Why was it shown in International film festivals? Was she someone to be admired? Was she a woman to be celebrated? Is this a celebration of the all forgiving, suffering, masochistic Bhartiya Naari? A perpetuation of the culture that deified Nalayani?
We all know it happens around us everyday - in the lives of our domestic helps. We know it happened in the years when women were helpless and dependent. And sometimes even to educated working women today. The other day a relative was telling me how her colleague puts up with an alcoholic husband who has lost his job and spends half her money so she has to struggle to make ends meet. Apparently when he is sober he is the most loving husband and she feels helpless to leave him, especially now that he is jobless and has no one else. She blames it on his circumstances. She consults astrologers in the hope of the stars changing and bringing miraculous changes in their life.
Why can't she see that he is exploiting her kindness and leave him and realise that is the only way he will come to his senses?! It is not a show of strength but one of weakness - one that is not willing to let go and help him seek professional help. Or do such women enjoy a sense of power in being there when they come back destroyed every time? If so, they both need psychiatric help.

Why do we need to showcase films that celebrate such doormats? I agree that it celebrates the capacity of a woman to love and forgive. But I think the need of the hour is to tell women to stand up for their rights and not be forgiving of such criminals. The girl in Stri is so drunk with her suicidal sacrificial tendencies that she requests the writer she meets on the boat to write her story. For what? Immortalise her stupidity? Does she expect to acquire the status of a Sati and be worshipped for her lack of self worth and sense?

I remember being brought up on a diet of such stories of sacrifice and masochism. Women burning themselves like camphor and sandalwood, like a lamp that destroys itself while spreading light all around. And it seemed such a romantic thing to do. Americans have a nice word for this : "losers." This is precisely the kind of anger that I feel when I see representations of Paro ( Devdas) and Lolita ( parineeta). Romanticising women treated shabbily by men. Women smothered by possessiveness - as if they are objects to be owned. At least you can justify these characters by saying they are from a period where the role of a woman was perceived differently.But Stri? Today? It is not enough to have laws against abuse and facilities for education to empower women. Women must rise above these stereotypes and empower themselves. And can we expect some help from media in putting an end to idealising doormats? Bring on the Chak de s and Dor s please. Stri s are passé and we can manage quite well without them in the sisterhood.