Our Metro Rides Home

“Purush yaatriyon se anurodh hai ke varisht nagrikon, viklaangon aur mahilaaon ke liye aarakshit seaton par na baithein.”

The audacity goes unnoticed in this announced statement while one travels in the metro train. What is noticed is the intended-to-be-noticed deference. Deference to who? To of course, the aged, to physically challenged people and ah! obviously to ladies. One would wonder why not? Well, because one doesn’t know what such a “respect” entails.

Having seats or maybe even whole train compartments for one’s type is a privilege, isn’t it? As long as one does not probe into reasons for such a provision. Atleast I am not comfortable with knowing that two compartments in the Delhi Metro train are reserved for me just because I happen to a female. Not to say that this makes me any less proud of belonging to this sex; what, however, irks me is the strange complicity played out by most of my sex, a complicity in the kind of Positive Discrimination which, no matter how chivalric or reverential it may look, remains at the end of the feminist day only a kind of discrimination.

I sometimes wonder while in the trains, why no other woman feels the need to let go of these created boundaries. The answer is as instant and from as deep within as the question, not to forget each being as infuriating as the other. Yes, i AM specifically disgusted by the new Metro rail reservations for women. They’d explain it by quoting instances of eve-teasing, which I do not deny from being the worst form of oppression that every woman today has felt at one point or other. I am far from withdrawing support or voice from the rage against women-molestation. What, though, I suggest is happening behind our backs, literally when we are travelling “safely” in the women’s compartments, is something more dangerous and more insinuating. It is something that will end up bringing the need for liberation into just a need for isolation. Eve-teasing is still happening, and on the same trains as the ones proudly flaunting women’s reserved compartments, and it is happening in a way much worse. Women, poor unlucky ones, who do not happen to fall in the minority that fits in those two compartments, and have to, by dint of lack of time or space, travel in the “general” category, male-ruled compartments, well these women, they are in for some good psychological, physical, even maybe emotional grilling during the metro ride. Come on, these men own the rest of the public space, don’t they now? After all they are the majority that forms the crowd.

It’s foolish to ignore the classification of all “minorities” in one apparently privileged group, as against the one major mass, that is, the young, healthy (only physically i may say) Indian male. Now did i point out one of the most interesting things about our women? While these “general” category men, intruders as they now are in the women’s own little metro-ride-worlds, are strictly prohibited entry into these reserved areas, there are surprising allowances in these “forbidden territories” (those who like may take the pun and work on it): either old men, or male children, or even absurdly non-Indian males. How the criterion takes stead, I fail to formulate, unless of course i delve into deeper, more troubling grounds of imperialist histories and ageist feelings. What however, is common, to any allowance and funnily even to non-allowance is that, our women, all of them, even me, maybe, are unknowingly (in my case even knowingly) contributing to the female sex becoming the minor sex. Oh I won’t deny that the percentage of women born is very low in comparison to men (not to bring up the whole sex-ratio idea here), or even maybe that the ratio of women travelling to work every day to that of working men is skewed (even though it might be bullshit!). But what i do detest is unconsciously closing possibilities for being recognised as of an equal percentage, if that’s what “equality” or liberation means for some out there.

I wish it was only about being counted up to. In fact it might even not be the issue. My real problem lies in non-recognition. And sometimes major misrecognition. Of discrimination for respect, of sexism for chivalry and of hazardous strengthening of false stereotypes for just safe-travelling. I do travel in these reserved compartments, being conscious of the fact that what gets me this comfortable, spacious ride is my sex and it’s hardly reverence for the sex that procures it for me but a certain unconscious disdain, for “the weaker sex”. I belong to the utilitarian tradition, and i make the most of it. Even when one may call me a steaming hypocrite, i do choose to travel in more capacious compartments. What i, however, have is the consciousness. What i need from the rest of my co-travellers too, is consciousness, the consciousness that this boundary that makes you rather safe in the public sphere is a strengthened form of sheer positive contempt and loving condescension. Go figure and don’t forget, if looking at how boring stereotypes can be, the “feminine pink” of the “Women Only” sticker!