Now Women Distract Male Students in University Libraries
Looks like a board out of the hoary past of pre-independence days? Well, not quite. With just a minor change. Now it is “Women (and dogs?) not allowed”. Where? The Maulana Azad library of the Aligarh Muslim University.
No women or dogs allowed in library: Aligarh Muslim Univ ban on girl students is a shame
Only, I don’t think dogs would be disallowed inside the library, at least not by any official diktat. Dogs are after all ‘man’s’ best friend. But women??? Oh no, no, they are different. They distract men, lead them into temptation and sin. Remember the original sin? It was Eve’s fault after all!
We learn from the mistakes of our elders and betters. So the AMU has no intention of allowing a repeat of the original sin – at least not in the sacred precincts of their libraries. So all scheming Jezebels are kept out, so the men can study in peace and aspire towards more lofty goals for their lives. The library is no place to allow women and distract hard working male students.
Long live education in India! We are surely a “developing” country – we have even sent a satellite to the Mars which landed in the very first attempt. Thanks to all our great scientists – all males of course!
Jyotiba Phule, Savitribai Phule, Dhondo Keshav Karve, Raja Ram Mohan Roy and others, my blood boils when I think of what you did for women’s education in this country. Please forgive them, for they know not what they do. I wonder how many people in today’s generation outside of Maharashtra have heard of you. All I can tell them is to ask Wikipedia.
So we can now look forward to a return of the “good old days” that existed before “Indian culture and tradition” was wiped out by the decadent ideas and laws introduced by the British.
showersandpetals 
November 14, 2014 at 7:39 pm
Good one swati… I am appalled at the ruling by AMU…. It is not only insult to women for obvious reasons…..but it is also insults the men there… do men lack so much willpower that the mere sight of a girl in the library will send them into paroxysms of lust and distract them from studies… For all the talk of women empowerment and equality….it is indeed sad that in realty there are many who are sending us back to stone age…
November 17, 2014 at 1:25 pm
Hi Sumi, you absolutely nailed it. What you seem to forget is that men remain babies all their lives and need to be protected from the evil women of the world. Wasn’t it after all a woman who led him astray in the Garden of Eden? How many times do we hear “our son is very innocent, but she seduced him” when men marry women of their own choice?
November 21, 2014 at 3:43 pm
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-30108462
November 21, 2014 at 4:06 pm
So now, going by the same logic cited in the report above, all girls should be prevented from going to schools!
December 4, 2014 at 9:35 pm
Why should respecting animals be looked upon different than respecting humans?
December 7, 2014 at 4:23 pm
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/dec/02/schools-cant-cope-child-sexual-exploitation-schools-bristol-headteacher
December 10, 2014 at 2:09 pm
Arianna Huffington’s refreshing piece on India:
Some of our most innovative business leaders have drawn on principles that can trace their origins back to India, finding that yoga, meditation and renewal are a much-needed counterpoint to a Western workplace culture fueled by burnout, stress, sleep deprivation and exhaustion. Consider the book that Steve Jobs asked to be given out at his memorial: not a business manual, not a book about tech innovation but The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, one of the people who helped popularize meditation in the West. As Yogananda wrote:
Intuition is soul guidance, appearing naturally in man during those instants when his mind is calm. Nearly everyone has had the experience of an inexplicably correct “hunch,” or has transferred his thoughts effectively to another person. The human mind, free from the static of restlessness, can perform through its antenna of intuition all the functions of complicated radio mechanisms sending and receiving thoughts, and tuning out undesirable ones.
Jobs had spent time in India and was particularly taken with the role of intuition in the everyday lives of Indians. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world,” Jobs said. “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”
And this power of intuition and mindfulness is increasingly, and conclusively, validated by science.
December 10, 2014 at 4:35 pm
So does that justify this kind of discrimination against women?
December 11, 2014 at 4:11 am
No it doesn’t.. but another question arises: what explains the educated Indian woman’s inability to see anything positive? Why is it that the only female bloggers who discuss spirituality and yoga and meditation are from the west? (I can show you a thousand such, but not one from India). Is our education the “cultural bomb” discussed here?
The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people’s languages than their own.
December 11, 2014 at 2:16 pm
I strongly disagree with the statement that the educated Indian woman has lost the capacity to see anything positive in her surroundings. Nor am I disputing that our country or our culture has some positives, but the fact of the matter is whatever is positive is good. It is the way it should be. However, being proud of our culture, traditions and country does not imply that we blind ourselves to whatever is wrong or sweep it under the carpet. If we need to change anything to make it more relevant to our present times, we need to first sit up, take notice of what is wrong, talk about it, discuss ways of changing it and get on from there with action.
Why do women in the West talk more of spirituality and yoga? Well, they are inculcating a change in their life styles by picking up something that is alien to their original cultures. Why is it that Indian women do not talk of it? This sounds like “if they don’t have bread, let them eat cake instead”. Which person facing serious day to day existential issues is hardly likely to be talking about spiritualism and yoga?!
Why don’t Western women talk of issues being taken up by Indian women? Because, allowing for the fact that rapes and violence is NOT NON-EXISTENT in Western society, they do not face the kind of discrimination and brutalization as Indian women.
What most detractors of efforts by Indian women (to highlight the problems they face in their day to day life) refuse to do is to accept the fact that things are bad. I, as a middle aged woman in this country, was born and raised in times when we dreamed of more opportunities, made efforts to get out of our cloisters and made some progress. The next generation had it seemingly better. To my great horror and disappointment, we seem to be regressing into the dark ages of history, going by the number of rapes in the country. It is sad if parents cannot send their kids to school without fearing for their safety, allow their daughters freedom allowed to their sons – because they fear for their safety. Women need to work the same as men to make progress in their careers, but they can’t go out without fearing molestation in buses and public places or return from work without fearing worse. How do we expect women to progress if we allow try to turn a blind eye to all the discrimination and crime against women? Worse still is the fact that the onus of their safety is being placed squarely on women and women alone. Males seem to be free of any expectations of adhering to norms of civilized behaviour – which I hope is not a hallmark of only WESTERN culture. This news about the university refusing to allow women into libraries is just one more example of this syndrome – may be just one example but being practised by a very reputed and big organization. So we can only imagine what happens in relatively obscure places and organizations.
Why is that demands for civilized behaviour and fair treatment is being equated time and again to demands for ‘westernization”? What critics of such demands and upholders of ‘Indian culture’ seem to miss is that by doing so, they are accepting that true civilized behaviour is a ‘Western’ concept. They forget that women were held in high esteem during Vedic times (yes, Indian culture) and their status in society was highly diminished only after our country was ravaged by foreign invasions. So which ‘identity’ or ‘culture’ are we talking of – the one which was the result of invasions or our own original culture?
December 12, 2014 at 5:14 pm
“yad bhaavam tad bhavati”… as we feel, so we become . Thoughts become things. This applies to individuals. This applies to societies too. Negativity and outrage actually contribute to more crime and disorder.
I don’t know how the westerners know this, but they know it well for sure. When the Boston Marathon was bombed, the ladies were doing everything to keep the morale of the citizens high. Finally, when the perpetrators were caught, the city spontaneously gathered to cheer the police force. (Yeah! Did that ever happen in India?) The heroes they were looking were right there — the police officers. And their media covered this extensively. In cheering them, they erased a bad chapter in the city’s history. We saw this even during 9/11.
And here is the point I like to make — crime against women (and crime in general), is quite high in Hindi states, especially where migrants are high in number. But peninsular India has lesser crime than many parts of the west. There are villages in parts of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Orissa where crime is perhaps the lowest in the world — with no law and order enforcement. Why can’t our educated folks see these islands of hope. Why are ladies from peninsular India joining this chorus of JNU Leftists about the “hell that Indian society is”. Yes our norms are conservative — we disapprove of PDA and skin-shows — so what? They are not signs of liberation or modernity. Why is it so difficult to accept this?
Urban areas are getting worse due to migrants and free access to porn (vitiated chakras). But it is not like crime is non-existent in the west. Let’s learn from western media and from the Boston ladies….. and let’s not look at India from Indian media’s lens.
December 12, 2014 at 6:11 pm
While I have nothing against the observations you have made, the point is the category of crime or discrimination is very different. You mention the case of the Boston Marathon bombing. That is a completely different class of crime. It is not against one individual, it is not against any one class, it is against an entire society.
When I talk of the discrimination in the above case or talk of the situation of women in the entire country, I am talking of the impingement on the human rights of one half of the population. If you want to compare how news is reported, I would like to remind you of the terrorist attack on Mumbai. There was no dearth of appreciation for the police force or for the brave hearts who were involved, or empathy for the victims for that matter. To say that we don’t appreciate positive events in our country is not exactly accurate. the problem is mentioning issues seems to be taboo. It is seen as an attack on our culture. It is time to wake up and look at things with a more positive perspective – yes, look at criticism positively and make changes in a positive direction.
As you have yourself admitted there is a lot of migration from one state to another. It is one country. What affects my fellow women in another part of the country might soon affect me. It is not as if peninsular India is free from crime or moral policing. Remember all those attacks on pubs as well as on private parties by a certain radical fringe group and the way they man-handled the women?
Talking of clothes and conservative, let us not forget that this is a democratic country. If people are free to be as conservative and traditional as they like, they have no right to intrude on the rights of people who choose to dress or live differently. While I agree that one’s modernity is not reflected by the clothes one chooses to wear, the reverse is also true. Those who choose to dress differently do not deserve to be raped nor do all women deserve to be kept out of colleges or temples or any public place for fear of the morals of the weaker sex (who are so easily tempted) being corrupted by these ‘Jezebels’.
No one is claiming that the West is free of crime. However the extent and impact is certainly different. Yes, we have many good things going for us and let us keep those, but let us not be so chauvinistic as to refuse to see the positives in other cultures and accept those. Like we take delight in the fact that the West is awakening to the good side of our life style and culture, let us also adopt some good things from their culture.
March 8, 2015 at 4:01 pm
Hypocrisy, loads of it:
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March 8, 2015 at 10:08 pm
?????
March 12, 2015 at 3:37 pm
One girl has the courage to look around through her own eyes:
What we strive for, a world safer for women, is an evolutionary goal. Evolution needs each of us to build strong steps to climb upon and build the next steps. And this flight to evolution can be built upon strengths and not by blowing up weaknesses. If the documentary makers are indeed interested to contribute to the cause truly, they would be making inspiring videos of those day labourers whose daughters have made good headlines instead of promoting negative stereotyping about cultures that they hardly tapped into. They would be showing the resilient women and supportive men instead of claiming to show mirrors that are not. They would be appealing to reason and evolution of minds instead of publicizing terrorizing statements by sick minds.
If we are to broadly categorize the Indian men, there are many advancing towards the much awaited gender equal world. They hold dreams for their women and might have fears for them as well. Keep in mind, that rural father or elder brother who sends his daughter/sister to work and study but has a problem with her going to a cinema. Appeal to his vision to broaden even more and call him over to the side of your ideal world . Don’t threaten his roots and push him to the other side, for that would make the world tougher to women and defeat the very cause!
February 17, 2016 at 3:07 pm
“I never want to get a job because I’m female. I want to get it because I earned it and I deserve it. People should be judged on how well they do the job and deliver results and whether they do it the right way. That’s how I like to be judged, most people are like that.”
February 17, 2016 at 9:01 pm
Nobody is demanding reservation or charity. What we need is to be treated as human beings equal to the other half of human beings.
June 2, 2016 at 6:01 am
Teacher on the run after 13-year-old allegedly gets her pregnant
A 24-year-old Texas middle school teacher is on the run after being charged with sexual abuse…
June 2, 2016 at 9:41 am
So going by the logic of the Univ in question, there should be no more female teachers or female students in schools either!
November 25, 2017 at 4:59 am
Henri Le Saux wished to dismantle Hindu spirituality so that it could be Christianised. So as part of the project, he visited Hindu pilgrim centres of South India and integrated his experiences into Christianity.
November 25, 2017 at 1:55 pm
VEry interesting article, but just what has it to do with the subject of this blog post?
November 18, 2018 at 8:36 pm
I agree, especially when it comes to posters who post on blogs only to promote some product or the otehr.