“The Perfect Cup of Chai” is necessarily subjective, but I am convinced that it is my son who makes the perfect cup of chai. Just the right balance of water and milk, brewed to the right strength and served in my favourite mug. When he returns home from for the holidays, I give him a day or two to recover before asking him to brew me evening tea!
I didn’t actively set out to teach him to brew tea, though. It was something he picked up on his own, when he realised that I liked to relax with a mug tea right after getting home from work. It started with him rescuing the water I had put onto boil and forgotten about, and before long, I got into the habit of giving him a call when I was almost home so the tea would be ready by the time I finished cuddling the dog after getting home!
It was, however, just sometime he did for me, till I started noticing a trend whenever I had an interaction with mothers’ groups. All of them were bursting with dreams for their daughters. They were willing to make sacrifices to ensure the girls went to college. They were determined to defy society if it demanded that the girls be married off before they were ready to get married. It was easy to get caught up in their excitement- wasn’t that exactly the women’s empowerment that we all hoped for?
But was this really empowerment? By focussing only on empowering the girls, weren’t we actually making it harder for them? Were we pushing them towards a life where they were expected to have a full-time job and also manage the household? While empowering the girls, shouldn’t we also be looking at enabling boys to support the empowered women?
I started telling the women about how my son made chai for me every evening. “Allow your daughters to dream”, I would say, “but also teach your sons to do their share of the work at home.” Because it is only when men and boys learn to do their share of the chores at home that we can move towards a gender equitable society.
[I wrote this as a part of the #BlogchatterFoodFest]
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