Patriarchy is obviously a myth

If it weren’t for our knowledgeable ministers, we would know very little about the world and how it operates

I had no idea that patriarchy was just an excuse to mark inefficiency. I thought it was an all-pervasive malignant system that had treated half of this country’s citizens as less than human for as long as I could remember, but I was clearly wrong. It had been an excuse all along, and I found this out only a few weeks ago, thanks to one of our most learned ministers who revealed the truth in public.

For those who weren’t lucky enough to get that update, the reason patriarchy doesn’t really exist is this: if it did, India wouldn’t have had female politicians, scientists, or activists. We have them, which means there is no patriarchy. This argument didn’t make sense to me at first, because it felt like the equivalent of saying that Bombay’s roads are world-class because there are no potholes outside Mantralaya. Then again, given that I am probably less educated than most of our current politicians, I had to eventually concede that I must have had the wrong idea. Indian women must have been in power all along without my noticing it. I must have been brainwashed into thinking of them as marginalised.

This wasn’t the first time I had learned a valuable lesson about the world and how it functions, so I was grateful to the minister concerned for debunking a myth that has been around for too long. It happens very often actually, for those who care to listen in to what our elected representatives say whenever they find themselves in front of a microphone. A month ago, for example, the same minister—clearly an underrated thinker of our time—informed us that there was nothing to stop investments from coming to India. There was no red tape, only red carpets.

It was another eye-opening moment because I had always been given to understand that setting up a business in India was like having your teeth pulled out, one at a time, without an anaesthetic. To double-check this assumption, I looked at what financial experts had been saying lately. A lot of them listed problems such as lengthy approval processes, an absence of fixed timelines, and foreign exchange regulations that didn’t make sense. To me, it sounded suspiciously like bureaucracy, but the minister said it wasn’t true, so I had to agree. Maybe the rest of the world was constantly pumping money into the country, again without my noticing it.

We can learn a lot from our politicians if we stop treating them like escapees from the circus and start looking at them as founts of untapped wisdom. Doctors could rethink how they approach the treatment of cancer, for instance, because a minister recently pointed out that patients could cure themselves by cleaning cowsheds and lying in them. He also had good news for those struggling with high blood pressure, explaining that they could cut down on medication within 10 days by simply petting cows.

To be honest, I don’t always accept everything these erudite men and women say, because they have shared a few strange notions in the past. One of them said that mobile phones should not be given to girls, another said that incidents like rape occurred because of the consumption of fast food, one connected hormonal imbalances to chow mein, while another didn’t want to send corrupt industrialists to jail because it would discourage investment. I acknowledge that these may all have been great ideas, but I had problems accepting them and blame my own inadequacies.

I keep reminding myself that this is a country blessed with wisdom, provided we know where to look for it. Scientists may have access to journals to put across their points of view but, often, the sharpest explanations for how things work come from politicians who have spent years studying these things. It’s how I found out that clouds and rain could prevent enemy radars from detecting Indian fighter jets. It changed the way I looked at technology, and I was grateful.

I hope children start to pay less attention to what they are taught in schools, and more to what their ministers are saying. They govern us for a reason, after all, which is why India is probably a superpower already and we just haven’t acknowledged that fact yet. I leave you with the last big lesson I learned, from arguably the most intelligent Indian alive today. Contrary to popular belief, AI does not mean Artificial Intelligence. It means ‘American Indian spirit’. Who knew?

When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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