Or so we would like to believe. This aint a feminist post, blasting away at how superior women are, but more like a blast away on how indispensable both men and women are!

Though I do subscribe to the hackneyed notion that women make better care-givers and are natural nurturers, life, of this age demands a lot more from the female kind. Rising up to life’s challenges women have grown over the past couple of decades playing perfect yins easily donning the hats of intelligent mothers or considerate bosses. We are today, continually made aware of the strides women have made to become empowered in recent times, but I personally am very smitten by the lives my Grandmothers led, or the heroines of Austen’s tales. Though lacking in formal education they exhibited exemplary prudence and wisdom with commendable grit and courage.

When we graduated from the nation’s premier college for architecture, we girls were forever cautioned by our wary professors with phrases by the likes of, it’s a man’s world, and architecture is a male-dominated profession. In line with their views, research suggests that women are not designed to bear excessive stress, finding the “fight or flight” mentality suiting men absolutely inapplicable, women they say are more likely to “tend and befriend”. Now as an interior designer I smile when people verbalize their preference over having women designing.  In a rare case of gender bias I have begun to notice that suddenly many a times, life and its myriad offerings are fairer for the fairer sex!

This, 8th of March, is International Women’s Day, or rather International Working Women’s Day, at its onset marked to celebrate the social, economic and political achievements of working women. Preventing it from turning into a mix of Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day the United Nations give the day, every year a different theme with a strong undercurrent of hope that serves to laud the struggles women went through, or still go through to become empowered and face that thing called life!

The UN theme this year is Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it! As key figures or rather backbones of every family, empowering women does literally empower humanity. I can hardly stress upon the crucial role our mothers play in bringing us up and holding us together. While the general theme for the International Women’s Day is “Make it Happen”. Urging everyone to pitch in to empower women and hence empower humanity.

Man or Woman, this women’s day do look at the bigger picture, doing your bit to the cause of a better humanity. For when we come to think of it, we are literally on a blue planet in a pink universe.

Men, on their part, are starting to raise the bar helping break the proverbial glass ceiling that is not confined just to the workplace. Here’s an instance: http://www.heforshe.org/

P.s And to be fair to the boys, November 19^th is International Men’s Day!