Dear sir,

In response, I have a question for you.  You turn seventy-five soon, don’t you?  And around the age of sixty, you brought home a computer so you could speed your work the way you had seen your colleagues and peers speed theirs.  The computer benefited your children and grandchildren.  In fact, your grandchildren, most not yet ten and twelve, seem to have superhuman skills when it comes to finding information on the net.  They type as though they had wings and not fingers jutting out their palms.  But you, who got the computer home and who knew about the computer before your children had ever touched it, have learnt little of the maze and labyrinths that vein the internet.  You make typing a heroic deed.  And you are terrified of pressing the wrong button and sending the computer into some sort of hysterics.  Honestly, your skills are abysmal, but I admire you.  I admire you for wanting to learn, for understanding that the buck does not stop with you, that it is your investment that has eased your children’s lives and made superheroes out of your grandchildren.  But that does not take away the fact that nothing can make up for the sixty years of your life when you knew nothing about the magic called the computer, the sixty years when you did not type and browse.  In the last fifteen years, you have managed much, but definitely not enough.  Should we then judge you and call you incompetent?  Should we dismiss your attempts?  Should we mock your staccato attempts at typing and framing emails?  Should we conveniently forget that you write masterful letters but the world of letters has ended and forced you towards a new path?  Upon this new path you walk a little unsteadily perhaps, but you walk courageously, carrying very well the sixty years upon your back.  Should we trip you and push you for this determined but unsteady walk?

A woman, dear sir, has entered the world of strict commerce only so late.  Your own mother never saw the inside of a school, your wife’s education was a joke, your sisters studied until they hit puberty and a husband was found for them.  Even today there are young girls in your family who are raised to become wives, eventually living solitary lives in their nuclear family kitchens.  Sir, when you criticise women for not being efficient enough when they bravely enter a space that was never modelled to accommodate them, you are forgetting their history.  You forget that the economic world, so long denied to women, is a vast system, much vaster than the internet and the SMS you are struggling with, and will take time to be learnt.  In the meanwhile, women, most of whom continue to straddle the two worlds—domestic and public—are taking strong steps.  They have very little precedence to learn from.  Sir, you and your kind are bad role-models.  You are critical without understanding.  You are forgiving of your own self and willing to cite your own history in your defense, but you are not willing to extend that history to your female counterpart.  You term a woman incompetent because she becomes vulnerable during childbirth.  Sir, a woman during childbirth is vulnerable while contributing to society.  You, in your old age are vulnerable and taking from the social system.  How do you suggest we treat you?

Dear sir, if you were to live a healthy life for another fifty years, I am convinced you would match your children and your grandchildren in their computational skills.  Your fingers would metamorphose into wings too.  In fact, your experience as a person who has seen the merits of other ways of living would possibly put you in a position of advantage, would rectify and improve cracks and lacunas in the current system.  That is the nature of evolution.  Practice makes perfect, is that not what you taught me?  Experience wields wisdom.  

If your female counterparts struggle, as you claim, in certain areas it is not because of a genetic make-up, it is because of a historical make-up.  Even as I type I am watching three girls and two boys bicycling past me on a busy road.  It is a pleasure watching them and I wonder where they are off to.  But sir, in a tradition where women are the last ones to eat in their families, most women are also the last ones in their families to learn skills which are taught early to men.  Driving, for instance. Or sports.  Or the skill of managing accounts.  The skill of being independent, of being happy with their selves and their bodies, the skill of stepping out of the house without being chaperoned, the skill of wanting to compete, to win, to demand, to be comfortable with wanting.  These are new skills for most of us.  Our history, shaped by you, is one of dependence, diffidence, deference and domesticity.  It will take us some time to either unlearn what you forced us to learn and take on new roles, or, in a harmonic world, mingle our strengths with the new world and shape it in new directions.  

I was a little piqued by your annoyance over the fact that the women in your family no longer spend “careful” time in the kitchen; that they use “short-cuts” like readymade spices and electrical equipment to speed up the meals.  The taste, you complained, is not as becoming as was the taste of dinners some thirty years ago.  Dear sir, has it occurred to you that some thirty years ago you added lengthy sums on fat, cumbersome ledgers.  In fact, I remember you bent over thick registers, green and red pens ready before you, counting and re-counting to ensure you made no mistake.  I remember too that you eventually used a calculator to speed up the process.  Today, there are no ledgers and registers in your spacious office.  Today, you work on your computer—not a PC but a laptop you especially had a son of yours buy for you.  Are you not annoyed by yourself for not spending “careful” time over your accounts, for speeding life up with “short-cuts” and electrical equipment?  Speed can mean variety.  Your speed allows you leisure for rest and entertainment, both of which are essential for happy living.  Why do you grudge the women their right to happy living when you yourself are so actively engaged in happiness and leisure?

Dear sir, my intention is not to critique your life.  In fact, you are a person I admire immensely.  Despite your staggering walk in the changing world, you signal transformation and courage.  Without you, the coming generation will not be the dreamers or the learners they should.  My intention is simply to bring to your notice that the women you critique are the ones shaping the coming generation.  Your support will make their journey easier, just like our support makes yours.  Your support will mean more people in the world can have happiness and leisure, which are not sole birth-rights of men alone.  

Despite our differences, however, I must admit I look forward to our conversations and dialogues.  Dialogues, I believe are gateways to change and growing minds.  So here is to more dialogues between you and me, the male and the female, the old and the young, the set and the emerging.

Best, Smriti