Believe us ! We can do everything

Recently we have lost one of the top woman motorcyclist from India named ‘Veenu Palival’.She died in a road accident in Madhya Pradesh when she was on nationwide road tour sponsored by Harley Davidson .Whenever there is mishap on road and a woman dies we undoubtedly blame woman and that’s what India is about. The day we lost her, I came across a group of men discussing the death and all about women on road. I was almost shattered by what they were discussing. They were questioning her career and the passion of choosing something that women generally don’t. And not only them, there are majority of population who thinks same way that who gives the key to road to a woman. Whenever you are on road and you see a woman driving parallel to you , you get conscious and 80% of the time you say something like ‘kaise chala ri hai’ or ‘pakka giregi’ or ‘mujhe bhi giraegi’. I have a question for all these things that- is that a woman driving next to you gives you a feeling of a competition on road? Or you seriously believe that as they are less physical strong than men so they cannot be a good driver. I don’t think that way because you do not need to lift a vehicle while driving or riding a bike which requires physical efforts, you only need to drive it. But the thing is from childhood, our psyche is set in a way that when a woman does something which we generally see a man doing, we lose our control and behave in a way that is not a part of progressive nature of society. Actually the problem is that we have also divided the type of task and categorized them on the basis of gender. Let’s not dig so deep otherwise I’ll miss the track. I want to share one more incident. Two months back, on my way to office I saw a scenario which is generally not common in Noida. A women auto driver carrying a bulk of passengers in a sharing auto was made a butt of jokes when they (fellow male drivers) noticed that she is a woman. They were passing malicious comments to her like ‘tu road me kyu nikal gayi’ and ‘accident karegi kya’ and started chasing her. These kind of scene makes a battle of questions in my mind. Why is this so difficult to accept that being woman does not make us less driver. One of the biggest example of breaking stereotype is Prema Nadapatti, the first and only BMTC driver who has been driving on Bengaluru’s busy roads from past six years after leaving a nurse’s job .She gives us a reason to have faith in women drivers. In a country like India. We need to understand that driving is not a gender-based task. It is important to have confidence in what a woman is doing and it is the responsibility of male population to support and have faith on us.