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'For every Kangana, every Shreya, every Teri complainant -- for every woman who challenges power, tries to rise in the world, or owns her own decisions, we'll produce thousands of Jishas.'
Mital Saran takes on India's male establishment.
There's a serious possibility that a woman will be President of the United States, leader of the free world.
A woman!
With her hormones and hysteria and moon-driven moods -- irrational, emotional, indecisive, jealous, weak-willed, bird-brained, vain, easily confused.
Hillary Clinton has been going about screeching about equal rights, equal pay, and rights for sexual deviants. That's fine, but how's she going to manage ISIS and Putin -- threaten to cry?
Can she handle work and home?
What if she quits to spend time with family?
Plus she's wrinkly and wears pantsuits. And there are rumours that she might, might, might field Elizabeth Warren, the equally female Senator from Massachusetts, as her running mate.
A broad in the White House is bad enough, but two? We should never have let them out of the kitchen.
At least Donald Trump is a committed bigot, decidedly self-regarding, and reliably xenophobic.
A manly man, with the firmness to thrash dissenters, the spine to bomb ragheads, the braggadocio to take on the Commies, the confidence to be President with only the shakiest understanding of which country is where, and the open-mindedness not to not have any discernible plan for how to Make America Great Again.
The Orange One is adaptable enough to make it up as he goes, and he's got the world's top advisors (somewhere).
His own party hates him, but he's crazy rich and has a hot wife, and frankly, he's a man, and we're used to men in the Oval Office. At least he won't redecorate it in pink and make it smell like potpourri.
Speaking of women and serious business, did you hear about Shreya Ukil, at Wipro in the UK, raising a stink because someone groped her and paid her less than the men? That's the market rate for women, sweetheart, suck it up.
Instead of being grateful for having a job at all, she had the gall to sue the company for millions. And, ridiculously enough, it looks like she won. Talk about stabbing a boss in the back. She fleeced the place, regardless of the outcome of the case.
Like that witch at Teri, who got her star scientist boss fired by whining about his attentions. First she refused to come to work because of him, and then complained about lost earnings! Meanwhile, she destroyed an eminent career over her stupid little feelings. If anyone deserves to be disgraced it's her, for making India look bad internationally.
Speaking of witches, did you see Kangana Ranaut on television, cool as ice, saying that she doesn't care about being called names, because that's really old? Outdated, she called it. She'll discover the meaning of outdated when nobody wants to marry her because of her reputation.
Who does she think she is, with her National Awards and her sangfroid and getting on prime time to tell them where to get off? No wonder she's being called a witch and a slut and a psychopath.
I know what you left-wing liberals are thinking: That these women represent the kind of steely empowerment that women across the world strive for -- the triumph of hard work, grit, and unyielding resistance in the face of misogyny. Maybe.
But we are powerful, traditional, and entitled; we're the patriarchal establishment, and we aren't going gently into the night.
You want social growth, we'll make sure it comes with growing pains.
For every Kangana, every Shreya, every Teri complainant -- for every woman who challenges power, tries to rise in the world, or owns her own decisions, we'll produce thousands of Jishas.
Jisha was a 30-year-old Dalit woman living with her largely ostracised mother in a village in Kerala. She was studying law to help improve their lives. What we did to her is so horrible that people have even forgotten to debate the ethics of using her name in the press.
Jisha was probably strangled and raped, but also stabbed over 30 times and injured in the head, and possibly bitten all over her back. We left her in a pool of blood with her intestines spilling out of her body.
You remember Nirbhaya in Delhi, right? Bit like that, except Jisha wasn't on a near-empty bus, cruising a darkened city with strangers aboard -- she was at home.
Here's how powerful we are: Nobody has been arrested, and it took the police six days to cordon off the scene and collect forensic evidence. Of course, it wasn't Delhi, so it just takes that much longer to register.
Can you imagine the number of cases that never make it to the news?
Remember your place, ladies. Because the further you get from it, the more we'll remind you of where it is -- and this country has already had a woman prime minister.
