New Delhi: Everybody is so busy in accentuating the war with COVID 19 that the champion in providing the essential services so far in the shutdown period has largely been missed. The lady of the house. No award, no appreciations, no honour, no recognition but she is silently doing the chores with a smile and alleviating the boredom of the hubby and others in a conventional middle-class family.
Much to the ignorance of the families, she is maintaining a healthy balance between fattening calories and nutritive diet. For that she has to either dig through the old recipes or take fresh notes from her friends on mobile. Generally, the confident lady of the house knows that the cooked food with new recipes would content the gluttony of the family at this hour. Flawless they would generally say as none of them have the experience of an expert that the lady of the house has attained in the last many months or years.
Since the maids are on short reprieve from a hard toil, the onus of cleanliness is now on the shoulders of the lady. Underestimating her abilities, the lady of the house is a woman of determination and strength but no petals showered on her nor has she been bestowed the honour of getting the title of a ‘new house warrior’.
The memes on the social media have been jovially highlighting the travails of the men. Dozens of tik-tok clips ‘manufactured’ for the occasion have shown men mopping, washing clothes, kneading flour displaying the belief that happens to jibe well with the basic perception that men are working like ‘mazdoors’ (labourers) during the shutdown. All these so called hilarious memes stem from people who take pride in showing off their male chauvinism perhaps.
All the definitions of a homemaker fit the woman who is the lady of the house. Between 1960s and 1980s Indian women were basically devoted to bringing up the children and maintaining the household. The working ones were restricted to theatres, cinema and hospitality industry. It is true that only about 2 per cent of women had started competing with the male colleagues and had taken up jobs for adding income to their household and secondly for the pride in becoming independent and self-reliant. But by 90s they had stepped out of the homes and charmed their way into the male bastion with brilliance. From bank employees to professors to media persons to scientists to doctors to engineers, Indian women were everywhere opening a new era of women empowerment.
More than 30 women in urban cities and major and mini metros are contributing co-bread winners but in this shutdown, they are actually outshining while balancing the ever-demanding children and the idiosyncrasies of the stay-at-home d
