Mud on one's own face?

This was brought to my notice by a post by Anil Jagalur, who also shared the link to the photograph with me. I feel the need to write about it because I want to protest against the women shown in the picture as well as the newspaper which published it. I, as a self-respecting woman, do not endorse the views, ideas the women in the picture seem to represent.

They say, often times a woman is woman's own enemy. I do not know how true this is, but one look at this picture published by The Tribune (for the complete article, click here) seems to just validate the above statement.

The picture shows a group of women protesting against India's recent exit from World Cup in Patna. While one of the women is holding a poster of Sachin Tendulkar, you see hands of several other women (not shown in the picture) with bangles. One needn't really rack one's brains about what the picture is all about. The picture captures the supposedly traditional insult heaped on men in this country. How many times have your heard of a wrong doer pay for his "sins" by tonsuring his head, blackening his face, wearing bangles and riding on a donkey? The only thing missing in this picture is the donkey. The symbolism of wearing bangles cannot really be lost on anyone - the idea is to compare Sachin to women wearing bangles. What is that supposed to mean? That women wearing bangles are always losers (like Sachin and the Indian Team); that the worst insult to Indian team or to the master blaster like Sachin is to equate them to women?

The picture immediately reminded me of this extremely abominable and sexist song from the movie Desh Premee: I do not remember the scene too well, but it had Amitabh Bachchan, the "exemplar male" of Bollywood, trying to get rid of Hema Malini, when she sings: "Jate ho to jao par itna sun lo; thodi choodiyan pehan lo ek ghaghara silwa lo; aurat ki hifazat jo kar na paaye, uss mard ko kya kehte hai yet toh batao". This is not all; the stanzas that follow are even more insulting to women (read here). While I was growing up, I did not like this song at all, and hated it even more because it was sung and enacted by a woman. The picture evoked similar feelings - it shows women bringing dishonour upon women and ironically reinforcing all the stereotypes. To me this is derogatory to all women.

The Indian cricket team's loss was just that - a loss in a game. Nothing more, nothing less. No one really died. But what exactly are we achieving by these kind of protests except denigrating ourselves?