THE BOY WHO WEARS A BINDI

Last night we were playing dress up with A. We made him wear my scarf as a saree and took my mom's bindi to put on his forehead. Awe, he looked like a pretty little girl and we all teased him and had fun. After sometime when we wanted to pack up, he came up and said "I want to wear the saree and bindi, I like it very much". My dad's jovial voice turned serious and he said "now don't ever dress him like a girl". This got me thinking.

Saree and bindi are not gender specific, are they? Look at our past, our ancestors wore dhoti and angvastram irrespective of their gender. And some communities still have their males wearing tilaks which are bindis in a way. Then why does a boy's liking for saree and bindi become alarming to us? Why do we buy kitchen sets for girls and doctor's set and mechanics set for boys? Oh wait, yes, we evolved. Now we get doctor's and mechanics set for girls too. But still no rolling pins and whiskers for boys. Do you see how we are creating imbalance in the society?

As described in yoga, within every human body is the ida and the pingala. These are energy channels or nadi which represent the basic duality of existence. Ida and pingala stand for feminine and masculine, intuition and logic, respectively. That means both the energies reside in every body! But nowadays, we don't look beyond bodies. We have confused characteristics with sex. Anything that is punished or rewarded when done by one sex but not by the other is gendered behavior, either masculine or feminine depending on which sex the behavior is "allowed" in.


No one is perfectly masculine or feminine—that is, no one tends to do only the things their culture defines as appropriate to just their sex. If I talk about us, between me and my husband, he is the one who takes more time shopping and he is the one who is better at housekeeping; on the other hand, I am the one who is least bothered about my looks and my attire and it's me again who cannot multitask when its worldwide proven that women are better at multitasking. Does that make me or him anything less of our respective sex? No. In fact, we are perfect yin and yang together but the ideologies that have been fitted in our heads since the very initial years about gender specific characteristics make us doubt ourselves and criticize other person's shortcomings.

There is a section of society that celebrates the men who enter the kitchen and women who step out for earning a living and then there is the other half of the society that mocks at these same people. But, ideally they shouldn't be treated any differently. When a man and a woman come together to set up a household, there are a set of responsibilities that are to be dealt with and who picks what should not be anyone else's business. As an individual, a person should learn to exist and evolve, for which he needs to learn to earn and to cook (and much more) but when two individuals come together they share the duties. And the future generation observes when duties are been taken care of. They are wired to replicate until they grow their own brains and till then what they have perceived so far solidifies as universal rules or habits. And thus, the cycle of imbalance continues.

We need to stop this cycle. We need to stop genderizing every activity, every characteristic and every attribute and let every individual bloom into his own person. Putting a bindi, helping me in kitchen or grooving with all hip circles on music will not turn my son into a gay or preventing him from all this will not protect him from being one if he is meant to be. My job is not to restrict his ideology and identity but to ensure that he gets an environment where he can boldly and respectfully be the best of whatever he chooses to be.