Losing your husband should not mean giving up on your life!!!!

I read somewhere couple of days ago where a grown up son rebukes a boutique owner for selling a colourful sari to his mom which she intended to wear at his wedding. WHY? Because she is a widow!!!!! According to him people will talk as widows should not be wearing bright and colourful sari.

I was appalled and heartbroken at the same time! For the love of everything that is pure in this universe, I cannot fathom the reason as to why people in the olden days would subject the girl to such harshness of shaving her head, breaking her bangles (literally), wiping the vermilion off her face and take away all the colours of her life except white!!!!! Oh yes, and call her ‘bad luck’ because apparently her poor deeds in her past lives have eaten into the husband’s life force.  Also because she is ‘bad luck’ please by all means take away all her freedom and stick her to a corner of the home so that she can be ceremoniously avoided by everyone.

Leave the poor woman be… she just lost her husband and now she has to lose herself too…

Well… olden days were olden days… we cannot do anything about the past, but now what is the excuse? This young man that I spoke about earlier had no business telling his mom what color to wear or not! It is a matter of pride for many families that we have conditioned our children with traditional values; however we also need to understand that as parents or as an extended family, we are driving these antiquated ideas into their heads from childhood. It is actually our fault that they grow up to be such sorry excuses for educated human beings.

I am dying to ask this patriarch without a cause and other such patriarchs the following questions…

• If a widow wears a colourful outfit then does her love/respect/grief for her erstwhile husband gets diminished?
• If she eats food according to her choice whom is she harming?
• How does her choice of sari or food affecting your life?

This is 2017 and we must move on. Having traditional values is good as long as it is helping the humanity to move forward, but it is high time to rid ourselves of all the obsolete traditions that do nothing towards improving humanity but hinder our growth as true human beings.

Image Courtesy – IMDB