Of women, dignity and life itself

In a unique line of thought RATNA RAJAIAH draws appealing comparisons between Roberto Benigni's masterpiece on celluloid, ``Life is Beautiful'', and women's right to life.

``DON'T COMPROMISE yourself. You are all you've got.'' - Janis Joplin.

What could ``Mary Poppins'', feminism and Roberto Benigni's ``Life is Beautiful'' have in common? It's a question that many would say is begging the asker to tie himself/ herself in several Gordian knots, but before that happens, let me traipse down another path fraught with quicksand.

Feminism. Funny thing is, despite so many years of experience as a woman (and some would say as an educated, aware and modern- thinking one, though those could be qualities that severely handicap in a world where, as supposed descendants of a man's rib, even women refer to God as `He'), I am confused and uncomfortable with the term ``feminism''.

Maybe because I have heard the word ``feminist'' being too often used as a veiled insult to imply a screechy-voiced, ugly harpy who thinks that bras are yokes and men yokels and wears her feminism on her shoulder in the form of several vicious-looking boulders to be chucked at anyone who disagrees that the world would be a much better place peopled only by women, if it wasn't for the minor matter of procreation.

Not that I'm not grateful to the feminist movement. I am. Because of it, I can now vote (though who there is to vote for, I sometimes wonder) and choose what happens to my body and my mind.

Even though I also know that these choices are available to just a small percentage of women and even to those whom it is, it's often nothing more than a mirage that lulls you into believing that you are in charge of your life, but in fact the reality is quite different.

I am grateful to all the women who fought so that my life is what it is today.

I just wish that sometimes we'd fight the fight with a little more charm (that which they say we women are so amply endowed with in lieu of intelligence!), be a little less sour and shrill about it.

Which makes it about time to bring in the Mary Poppins bit. No, there is no hidden feminist message in the film, though there is a scene where the children's mother Mrs. Banks, leads a suffragette parade that sings:

We're clearly soldiers in petticoats

Dauntless crusaders for women's votes

Though we adore men individually

We agree that as a group they're rather stupid..

But that's not my point, which is actually about another song that Mary Poppins later on sings to her wards. It goes something like this:

That a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,

The medicine go down, the medicine go down.

Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down

In a most delightful way.

Now it's a bitter medicine that we women want the men to swallow. We are asking them to rethink several centuries (ever since Mr. Neanderthal clubbed her and dragged her into his cave by her hair?) of arranging the world order where a woman - except when she's his mother - fits in somewhere below his car and somewhere above his accountant.

Not only that, we are asking to have a say in this re-arranging of furniture which includes uncomfortable things like equal opportunity, equal pay and an equal right to decide who's turn it is to nurse Munna's flu.

Bitter medicine? I'd say it's nothing short of heresy, (or is it blasphemy?), a bit like the peon wanting to sit in on the board meeting. And what makes this an even more bitter pill to swallow is when most of the time, we women are so pinched, so humourless about administering it.

Humour? You want us to joke and laugh about the fact that every year thousands of women die before they even get to be little girls and if they do make it, are burnt, beaten, bought and sold and live a large part of their lives as virtual slaves? (We can console ourselves that at least in India, unlike as in parts of Africa, we don't have female circumcision. But then, I suppose they could console themselves that they don't burn their brides.)

No. Discrimination against women is no joke. But why don't I explain it a little differently? Recently I saw a film called ``Life is beautiful''. (Three years too late because the film won the Oscar for the best foreign film in 1998. But, as that old saw says, better later than never.)

A sweet, enchanting poem of a film about... well, about racial bigotry that finally put 6 of the 8 million Jews in the world at the time, as little Giosue, the Little Italian Jew in the film tells his father Guido, to be ``cooked in ovens'' and reduced to soap and buttons.

Sweetness and enchantment about something as horrific as racism? (And what is it that women are subjected to but a form of racism?)

Yes, it is possible and Benigni demonstrates it time and again through the film. You see, racial prejudice is a hideous, terrible thing in the eyes of an adult.

To a child, it's merely a puzzling, inexplicable thing that adults do. When Giosue asks his father (played with incredible comic charm by Benigni himself) why some shops in his town display the sign ``Jews and Dogs not allowed'' while they allow everyone into their little bookshop, when Guido explains to his son the concentration camp and what goes on inside as a game where you get points for not asking for a snack and where the winners get to win - not their lives but a real, life-size tank! - the terrible incomprehensible senselessness of it all is driven home as it never had before - at least to me.

But the most wonderful part of the film is that throughout all of this - even when Giosue says he wants to go home and not in the smelly train in which they came in and Guido, knowing that the only way out of the camp is as smoke through the ovens' chimneys, promises that they will, by bus - Guido never once lets go of his fight to keep alive.

Not just his little son and wife, but the belief that ultimately good triumphs - life over death, joy over sorrow, sanity over insanity.. It would have been so easy for Guido to teach Giosue to hate and teach him to keep alive fuelled by hatred. But he doesn't.

Maybe because he knows that the only hope is to break the chain. Of hate and injustice and the perpetuation of a world order that believes that only a few are superior and the rest only fit for subjugation and slavery.

Maybe because he can see that only when we see the terrible futility of it through our children's eyes, we can thus make it powerless to control their future.

That is the ultimate and most beautiful triumph of the film. That Guido protects his son from being forever tainted by hate (something that he buys with his own life).

In the end, little Giosue's innocence lies unsullied, untouched like a sparkling dewdrop in the morning sun. And the last sight of his father winking at him, as he is led away mimicking the nazi goosestep, by the German soldier, is Guido's undying legacy to his son, a secret conspiracy that the two of them entered into, to beat the silly fellows at their game and win.

And win they do, as the huge American tank of the American army comes to liberate the camp, rumbles towards him and Giosue thinks that it is the prize that his father promised they'd win. ``We won!'' he later tells his mother joyously when he is reunited with her, ``We won!''.

The story of the Holocaust has been told in many and powerful ways - no more powerfully than in cinema. (``Schindler's List'', ``The Diary of Anne Frank'' in recent memory..)

So have the stories of women similarly disconnected from their right to human dignity and life. But rarely have I seen it told with such sweetness, such beauty and more importantly, with such hope. And therein lies the ultimate power of the film.

We women have much to fight for. Dignity, Liberty, The right to choose. And sometimes even the right to life. So here's my wish for us girls this year.

That someone will make a movie as charming and sweet and graceful and filled with hope as Benigni's film about the terrible, wonderful beauty being a woman.

That it will be seen all over the world and win many, many awards including those Oscars and everyone (hopefully amongst them, a whole lot of men) will say, like Guido did, ``Being a woman is a fable. There is sorrow and like a fable, there is wonder and happiness.''

And in awed respect for such a wonder, make a little more safe space, along with the rain forests and Ridley's turtle, for us women in this world. Where we can live and grow and be empowered to be the beautiful God's creations that we were meant to be...

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognise the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place. - Margaret Mead

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