In the movie, Rex Harrison (Professor Higgins) is shown as a teacher, who is frustratingly attempting to teach proper English, to a cockney speaking flower girl from the street....
opinion
Perhaps, no man can ever be a woman. My dear father made me watch, as a fourth standard student, Rex Harrison’s movie, ‘My Fair Lady’, three times. I sense on the reflection that he may have been fond of Audrey Hepburn. He expected me to remember some interesting dialogues. In the movie, Rex Harrison (Professor Higgins) is shown as a teacher, who is frustratingly attempting to teach proper English, to a cockney speaking flower girl from the street.
Prof. Higgins gets emotionally entangled with the flower girl, who is much younger and drives him mad with her antics.....in exasperation, Prof. Higgins sings a song, based on Alan Jay Lerner poetry, the lyrics of which are most interesting, “Women are irrational, that is all to them, their heads are full of cotton hand rags, they are nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating, calculating, arguing, maddening, infuriating and...why can’t a woman be more like a man - men are so honest, so thoroughly square, eternally noble, historically fair, when you win will always give your back a pat, so why can’t a woman be more.” I had parroted these lyrics to please my father.
Hence, I would ask, as I grew, why can’t a woman be more like a man? And thankfully realised that no woman should ever be like a man. Men are cowards. They are timid. They are emotionally always a five-year-old even when being an octogenarian. A man who has to undergo cardiac surgery presents a look of having seen a ghost; compare this with the look of a woman, who goes under the knife, to bring new life into this world. A paragon of courage. This scribe, by way of clarification, is not related to Miss Havisham, the male hating mother of Estella, in Charles Dickens, ‘Great Expectations’.
Cowards are described as being a person who is not brave and is too eager to avoid danger, difficulty or pain. An ignoble lack of courage defines the pusillanimous man. Cowardice is a trait wherein excessive fear prevents an individual from taking a risk or facing danger. The trait indicates a failure of character. That’s generally a man. “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave,” said Mahatma Gandhi. All of us encounter bullies at school, who end up as cowards. Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seen or to be, when it suits him, A coward. Lies and deceit are the canopy under which a coward hides and resides.” In the words of Julius Caesar, “Cowards die many times before their actual death.” Our attitude and cultural influences prove these assertions.
It is said, truth is the first casualty of war. Nay. It is incorrect assertion. Truth is always the second casualty. The first are women and children. In the annals of human history, the use of women, firstly as a soft target to attack and outrage, and secondly to use them as a shield has always been the brain child of a man. No women would venture to think, the way men do, during wars and battles. If my readers think that I am claiming from the pages of antiquity then, let there be a re viewing of the recent footages of the war in Gaza. It is women and children who are at most risk; they are being brutally, ruthlessly and mercilessly attacked, butchered and made victims to the lust of men.
Ratko Mladic, known as The Butcher of Bosnia, and Slobodan Milosevic during the war in the Balkans in the late 1990s especially targeted young women and children. Since these cowards cannot engage in a man-to-man warfare, they hit at the ‘soft targets’ of the population to weaken the resolve of upright men. And regrettably the population globally of upright men is dwindling at the speed of a shooting star.
A man can kidnap or run away with as many women as he likes, and if he is caught, he carries no stigma or social reprimand. But if a woman elopes with a man of her choice, she is labelled as a ‘dishonourable woman’. Sadly, in our culture all the manifestation and substance of honour resides in a woman. Honour, thy name is, woman. If she elopes, she doesn’t dishonour just herself but her entire family, near and as distant as the mind can comprehend. To resurrect this false sense of honour, the woman’s life is either put out or she is harmed irrevocably, through acid burning of their faces and other parts of the body. In a case of elopement, the seductor is normally the man, so, shouldn’t he suffer the punishment of dishonour instead of the woman? It is seen that in most cases it is the woman who is susceptible to vows of commitment and love, and is made to pay the price. No paramour is shot, it is only a woman, who is asked and forced to give a sacrifice and lead her future life in anonymity, stigmatised and pronounced guilty. “The biggest coward is a man who awakens a woman’s love with no intention of loving her,” Bob Marley.
The past ruling generations of Japan, treatment of women of North East Asia is a horrendous tale from history; women were insultingly referred to as ‘comfort women’ - a disgraceful act of men. The atrocities by men upon women during warfare in particular and generally too in normal conditions are reflective of this cowardice.
We have cases in the courts of Noor Mukadam, Fatima, and so many other brave women who met a tragic end at the hands of a coward. The price of misconduct of men is paid by women in our society. Many cases of social and physical injustice are not reported by the mainstream media. In the past two years or so, men have been caught for the irredeemable harm and damage they have inflicted upon women. Their victims are mostly dead. They are alive. William Shakespeare in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ wrote, “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, men are deceivers ever.”
Joan of Arc, the defender of the French nation, played a crucial role in the Siege of Orleans. She led from the front ranks, and launched an attack to repulse the British army. An arrow did hit her between the shoulder and the neck, yet she made a final assault against the advice of her male soldiers and made the British abandon the Siege of Orleans. A brave warrior she then attacked the Burgundian camp, the campaign failed and Joan was captured. Twice she attempted escape, but in vain. She was later embroiled in a cooked up case of heresy that included a charge of dressing up like a man. She was put to death at a very young age. Women dare. Brave women include Chand Bibi, Razia Sultana, Rani of Jhansi - and from recent history, we had Bandarnaike,
Indira Gandhi etc who despite their political notoriety stood up for their respective nations. They proved that a woman’s instinct is often truer than man’s reasoning.
Jane Austen about 200 years back had complained about men’s domination as a biased version of history, where women’s exploitation wasn’t recognised. She wrote, “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.” Today in the 22nd century, the story is no different. The mistreatment of women continues unabated.
A gentleman is only a disguised man. Men consider women as game. Women are kind folk who still consider men as angelic, in spite of what they receive. We just need to remind ourselves of the many young girls, working as domestic helpers, who were murdered in cold blood by the scoundrels of the society. What surprises men is that all women are born with a minimum of three thousand years old mind and yet allow and permit themselves to their subjugation, and in most cases willingly and duly.
John Lenon, the signing sensation tried to ‘Imagine’ a different world and hence was put to the bullet. John sang, “Woman, I can hardly express,
My mixed emotions at my thoughtlessness,
After all I’m forever in your debt,
And woman, I will try to express,
My inner feelings and thankfulness,
For showing me the meaning of success,
Woman, I know you understand
The little child inside the man,
Please remember my life is in your hands,
And, woman, hold me close to your heart,
However distant don’t keep us apart,
After all it is written in the stars”
And as an apology from the coward men to all women folk out there, I am using Lenon’s lyrics,
“Woman, please let me explain,
I never meant to cause you sorrow or pain,
So let me tell you again and again and again,
I love you (yeah, yeah) now and forever...”
The writer is a senior banker and a freelance columnist.
