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Happy Women's Day!!

  This morning, while talking to a family member, the subject came up, why I turned out to be different than the rest of them. 

I don’t know exactly when it all started.

 I grew up in India, in the seventies and eighties. 

My sisters and I used to watch a TV show named Rajani. Rajani was a homemaker, a mother. She was fearless, she was not afraid of anyone or anything. She saw any injustice happening, in any form or shape, to anyone; she would speak up. Not only did she speak, but she also made it her business to seek justice. She was not afraid. The show would air on Sunday mornings. I wanted to be like her, so much so that I disliked going to church not wanting to miss the show. In those days, if you missed it, you missed it, it won’t come back. I wanted to be “Rajani.” I was probably ten or eleven years old then. 

Then there always was Jhansi Ki Rani, who fought for what was rightfully hers, with a kid on her back. I wanted to be like her…as the years passed, realized that I could neither be a Rajani nor a Jhansi Ki Rani. I could be both though only on my home front and nowhere else. I believe I have carried my children on my back and pretended to fight in a war. (The proverbial Jhansi Ki Rani literally did that) I would have to worry about repercussions of my actions; I couldn’t go around doing what I wanted to do, when I wanted to.

 As a young girl then, there were many limitations as to how I behaved and what I did if for nothing else but for my own safety. My family never stopped me from doing what I wanted to do, just the environment!

 The “Rajani” in me however surfaces every now and then, like it did last night. I was at the school for a band concert and there was a parent who was continuously on the phone, texting to the person next to him, other kids seated next to him chatting, giggling during the performance. After 10 minutes of it, I couldn’t take it and had to tell them to knock it off. My rambling on this “International Women’s Day!”

Image copied from Google; Rajani played by Priya Tendulkar.

 

 
Images of me with my children. 


 




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