Housewives treat the Net poorly; like a step-hobby.
It was the purest expression of wry amusement. I'm talking of my mother's face, at that momentous juncture in life when I first sat with her at the computer to show her the whole new world of the World Wide Web. Whatever preliminary surfing I demonstrated seemed to impress her mildly. It took me a while to guess she was doing me a favour by feigning interest. Just one thing made sense - no sense of awe, this, but practical sense - email. It was nice not to have to post letters.
It could be the nurturing / binding attribute of housewives that mostly attracts them to the element of connectivity in the Internet. Freshers to the Net use email; then they send ecards as they graduate. "I chat online sometimes"; the Net-savvy ones go on to create family albums and then email the link to all family and friends. Everyone in the family is so happy about the homepage and the doer is proud, her pivotal position in the family reaffirmed and reiterated.
Smart indeed are these women, they don't get carried away by fanciful things like shopping on the Net, or for that matter, using an expensive Internet connection for valuable information they don't really need. They do participate in contests, but that's because it's been written hoarse about in the daily papers and because there is a small chance they'll win a prize there.
"Who has the time to surf? I think surfing is for women who have no other work to do. It's timepass. You don't get anything concrete out of it," said one particularly vociferous housewife. This pretty much sums up how most Indian singularly-housewife women felt about the Net.
By and large, housewives live on the Net by proxy. "My Deepu knows all this Internet very well," says Asha. Deepu could be Asha's 8-year-old son or daughter. Mercifully, gender bias is losing energy here. Alternatively, "My husband uses the Net. I tell him what I want to mail XYZ relative, and he only does it," they say, with much relief and a slight intonation of being able to delegate work to their commercial halves.
The Net, to the average Indian non-working housewife, is something she is proud her children can use.
But there is a breed of young housewives who have caught a glimmer of light through the unwieldy load of information on the Net. Madhu, a new mother, says, "I'd heard of some Montessori style of education for small kids. Indeed I found lots of information on the subject through the search engines, and am now looking for the right pre-school for my daughter."
One gathers, housewives aren't terribly loyal to particular sites. They're just looking for situation-specific information; which site gives it, is not important.
There are others who want to find work. Women, whose talents and temperaments don't suit the traditional home-businesses of supplying food, selling dress material or giving tuitions to school kids. "I was a qualitative market researcher before marriage, and that's what I want to get back part-time to. Redforwomen.com seems to offer some such opportunities. I'm still looking," says one determined housewife. That's something, she at least finds the Net worth looking at!
Speak to some more women and you'll come across someone like Veena: "Some months ago, I was going through a personal crisis. I was battered and lonely. One afternoon, I just happened to look for other women in a search engine. Suddenly, I stumbled upon so many pages of women's organisations as well as names of other women who had survived worse situations. I wasn't lonely anymore. There was a world outside my hellhole. I didn't want to speak to friends and neighbours, but I did email some of the women I found on the Net, and they wrote back. Nothing changed dramatically, and I'm past all that now. But I'm stronger for the knowledge that I have like-minded support beyond my immediate surroundings."
Housewives are just about beginning to get on to the Net.
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