A good day to you all, and a very good day to all the women in the house. While I love everyday, I enjoy celebrating women’s day especially because a lot of the invites or wishes that I received today are in pink, and pink is unabashedly my favorite color so at a point I feel like I am looking at the world through the rose-tinted glasses and that suits me just fine. Today I am told women are asked or rather motivated to be empowered and wonder if that can be elicited, phew I even helped arrange and attended a talk to the neighborhood Pournamikas (sweepers) who were encouraged and told their rights. And that brings me to the point I try to make today, are you allowing yourself the right to be yourself? Women sometimes don’t stand up for each other, or sometimes they do, it really depends on how the woman is to herself is what I have found time and again. How one treats oneself is how one treats the world, and that depends quite a bit on one’s worldview. But then how one treats oneself largely depends on how one was treated and that brings round and round in circles which we never seem to break out off! (and thats also why enlightenment is so very rare I suppose, the circles and the karmas never seem to leave us alone)

Talking of circles, I am also at the moment of the world-renowned organization called Ladies Circle India, there are chapters all over the world, and what women do in these circles is empower and be empowered, a motto of another ladies’ organization that I am a part of, read FICCI FLO, and what all these organizations have in common is women getting together to make something of value. Not much unlike the Lijjat pappad women folk bringing out pappads of excellent delicious value. And when women commune there is a lot to be said, and a lot to be heard, which is excellent, but I often wonder whether the women of the pappad brand the ones carrying their 11th Louis Vuitton for the first time are listening to themselves? That one unique voice may well not be supported by the trends of society but could do so well to stand by itself. I myself, feel my voice disappear or unseen when I have louder voices talking with authority around me, but then its not just the talk, it is all the things that we see.

What Christy Harrison of Anti-Diet calls instruments of oppression! Wonder what I am talking about? The wristwatch, the weighing scale, the labels on our clothes, the Small, Medium, Large, the size of our plates, spoons, forks, the whole concept of sizing, of scaling, of timing. The wellness traps of the shoulds, the have-tos, and the musts. Or simply the talk of others telling this and that. Oh the pressure they put is immense but even without criminalizing them, the very sense of telling one to be this or do that is a premise to tell oneself to not be oneself and that is truly the pity, for it may not be one life, we may be cats at the end of the day with 9 or so lives, but even then the atrocity of not being oneself, of not being in line with one’s intuition is the issue I’d like to address. So let’s hear it for our intuition, that one thing that may be run down just as easily as it tries to surface. I listen to music to tap into my intuition whenever I feel spacey and disconnected but even music today has lyrics that can affirm against you! There is really no escape from the world and into yourself unless one shuts the senses and that’s just so unnecessary for the senses are the bedrock of the living.

So this women’s day I am supplanting all the information I have been reading in tomes of self-help books, Anti-Diet By Christy Harrison, The of Creative Thinking by Rod Judkins, The Sleep Solution by Chris Winter, The 4 hour work week by Tim Ferriss, The Conscious Parent by Shefali Tsabery, Where’s my Couch by Sunil Kumar, Be Water my Friend by Shannon Lee, On Nature and the Environment by J Krishnamurthy, Karma by Sadehguru and a lot more, and channeling all that intellectual stimulation into hopefully tuning into myself. I am the mother I want to be, I am the creative I want to be, I am the architect I want to be, I am the person I want to be, and its probably time to be the woman I want to be! How does one eat an apple for what it is, enjoying it without being conditioned into thinking oh the banana is probably more healthy, at least it does not have a coating of wax on it, or probably not looking at the clock and deciding its 2pm and high time I eat my lunch, or look far below into the weighing scale and remember the chart in the Doctor’s office that you need to weigh 60kg, or whatever it is! Sadhguru claims to have been enlightened simply by staring at a tree, the Blessed man did not have to toil like the Buddha meditating for years, or even may be lucky enough to keep his body parts to himself, but he does talk like an enlightened being, no doubt in that.

This women’s day and for all the others to follow, I’d like to be more than the company I keep, more than the books I read, more than the people I meet, more than the food I eat, more than the community, I’d simply like to be me, hear me and feel me. It would be terribly nice to nurture my intuition for what it is rather than what I am told it should be. I’d like to eat that cupcake and twirl on the song of my choice without being looked down on by my choice of consumption or the choice of song, Lady Gaga it is! I only ask myself to let me be my woman. Oh well, wouldn’t that just be lovely. On that note I head to my first women’s day party for the day, I have two more that follow through the day and hope this cherubic spirit doesn’t leave me after subjecting myself to all the other ladies in the house. What can I say after all I am a human, before being a woman! 😉

Wooman wooman woman let me be your woman, and thus the song plays on in my head.

And now thanks to Doja Cat its in yours too! 😀