My articles are meant to be read with a pinch of salt, it is meant to create humor as well as to enable us to laugh at each other as we marvel and dwell in our universal differences. It is not meant to insult or degrade so don’t get your knickers in a twist if it touches on the fairer sex, I wonder what they mean by fairer sex coz there are a lot of dark women around as well as a lot of fair guys around just like me.
For example, women today are so proud to be single mothers, probably because they are financially independent, strong willed and not willing to compromise or maybe is it because there are just too many effeminate men around huh. It’s like this, you meet this woman for lunch and you say, hi I am Manjit, what’s your name” and she goes, “Well I am Suzy and I am a single mother”. I am flabbergasted; I did not ask her that! I am dying to ask her if she had a one night stand and things went wrong but I swallowed my tongue as she was wearing high heels. They can be very painful. She could have said I am a divorcee, a widow or a single mother but I guess she felt saying “single mother’, gave her an aura of power or it was more in keeping with the times.
In those days, that statement would have been frowned upon and the woman would have been considered a harlot but here was a woman holding her turf and being proud of it. I salute her, luckily I did not remind her the evil practice of sutee in India, where a widow was immolated (it means burnt alive, guess not everyone has a dictionary rite) upon the death of her husband, ouch!
Let’s look at the other side of the coin, you meet this bloke in the park and he is playing ball with his son. He comes and sits on the bench and you make idle conversation and he says his wife left him and he now takes care of his son, mind you he does not say, “I am a single father”. He could have said well he had a good time with a foxy lady and nine months later the package landed on his porch with a tag saying, “ Here is your unit trusts returns after nine months, enjoy the fruits of my labour”.
What we say and how we say things is how people perceive us, it is like you see a typical Chinaman drive past in a Mercedez Benz , the perception is that he is a drug pusher or a pimp. You see a Malay chap pass by in the same car and some people will say, “angkat gomen punya contract tak bikin beli kereta, bungalow and kawin lagi’. See an Indian guy and they will say sure gangster one, this dirty fella. That is perception, while all of the chaps above would have worked their butts off to earn that status, sit lazily back…mostly failures or losers and pass judgements.
Now that is perception and we pass this perception to our kids and they photocopy what we say and when we hear them saying things such as the above, suddenly we are aghast and we reprimand them so righteously as responsible parents. We forget that we planted the seeds of perception in their fertile minds a long time ago.
Time we stopped judging people and started looking at ourselves, people in glass houses should not undress.
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