For reprentational purpose
Any discussion of women's empowerment brings to light the inequality that exists between them and their counterparts, men. Their cultural status shows up in the treatment meted out to women, irrespective of whether they have gained public recognition—norms that become behavioural, get symbolised and customised. Culture justifies these existing standards, but sometimes also challenges the basis for inequality.
The disparity is part of our collective consciousness. Inequality of opportunity can affect women’s access to basic rights such as healthcare, education, water and sanitation. While they need to stand up, get paid well, and not accept abuse, for this to happen, their self-confidence needs to be built from the time they are young.
Often women themselves justify adhering to the norms that perpetuate inequality while complaining about it being an unfair world. Not just in India, but globally too, female beauty is measured in body weight and physical appeal, for which benchmarks have been set that are ridiculously outdated. In the entertainment business, more and more women go under the knife to re-sculpt their bodies. It is a double-edged sword, for they veil their cry for equality while matching up to fit the glamour, one-size-fits-all parameters to get work.
Women would do well to develop awareness about their feminine qualities of compassion, caring and forgiveness. To get to any peace in our lives, we will have to shut out the noise outside and find the calm inside. It strikes me that we are far from our own innate, beautiful realities like a butterfly is from a rainbow.
We are surrounded by negativity in some form or the other, which impacts how we live. Most people, by the law of karma, are unhappy with their lives. The suffering that Buddha talked about, with its cause and effect theory, affects each one of us every day. But He also found a way out, which I had the privilege of learning and meditating on.
Training the mind, planting positive affirmations to calm the nerves, and building a personality unaffected by how others see us, are just some of the techniques I employed to face the world. Life is not meant to be fair—it never was and never will be. But there’s a way out: in being fair to yourself by knowing who you truly are. And you are beautiful deep inside.
Anu Aggarwal
Actor, speaker, yogi and author
Instagram: @anusualanu
