Disclaimer of Liabilities: Articles are uploaded in the spirit of humour and motivation. Please don't personalised it to extent that is detrimental to your mental health. But take to heart the lessons from the world around us and learn the good factors to improve our character.
Dear Hardworking ACCA men,
The world is becoming complex. It was complex a long time ago where women rules the world in a certain society in India. Alert! Such practice can spread with the author Jo Piazza best selling book. Many parents or mothers might be thinking to let the women wear the pants, so to speak.
To prove yourself as men useful, invest lots into your qualification and experience. Hone skills to add value to enterprise and ultimately your self.
Please read and may this NOT HAPPEN to you. If it does, well Jo Piazza may have another sequel book.
Remember, to succeed one must be focused and disciplined. Exams are round the corner, minimise idle time but invest in contructive time sharperning Exam Techniques.
Best regards,
Entrepreneurial approach to life - Marcus
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Jo Piazza is the author of the new book How To Be Married
in which she crowdsourced marriage advice from around the world in an
effort to figure out how to have a successful partnership. This is an
excerpt from her travel memoir.
I would have missed
out on one of the most interesting models for marriage and partnership
in India if I hadn’t started talking marriage with this tuk-tuk driver
outside the Kamakhya temple in Guwahati, India.
“You can’t leave
without going to Meghalaya,” he insisted. At this point I was used to
being told I couldn’t leave India without seeing at least one thing, be
it the Taj Mahal or the new Taco Bell in Delhi.
“What’s special in Meghalaya?”
“It’s
the place where the
women are in charge. They’re the heads of the
family,” he explained. It was all he had to say. I changed my plans.
That’s
how I ended up in Shillong, the capital of the northeastern state of
Meghalaya, so close to the border with Bangladesh that the two cultures
spill into each other.
Author Jo Piazza crowdsourced marriage advice in India. (Jo Piazza)
The Khasi and Jaintia hill tribes of Meghalaya are
matrilineal. Property and assets are passed down through the youngest
daughter in a family. All of the children
take the mother’s name instead
of the father’s. The husband moves into his wife’s home, often bringing
with him just a single suitcase of his things—a few changes of clothes,
maybe his guitar or his cricket bat. It’s the women who run the
households and are l
argely in control of the finances and the major
financial decisions. The men work, but they often hand their money over
to their wives.
Meghalayan tribes have been matrilineal as long as
anyone who lives there remembers, since long before the British came,
back when all of what we now call India was just a medley of tribes
linked by geography. No one could tell me for certain where the
matrilineal tradition originated. It’s as old as the oldest stories they
talk about.
I’d traveled to more than thirty countries in the
past two years and never been anywhere, including the States, where
women were institutionally favored above men.
The way the women in
Meghalaya control the money and the property made me think of my own
marriage and the dynamic between money and power. When Nick and I first
met, I earned the higher salary, which made me feel like I had the right
to manage our finances and make major decisions.
I drove into the
bustling capital, where I was supposed to meet up with a translator
named Sukher, a
petite, soft-spoken, and meek man in his twenties. His
shoulders curled into his body in a way that made him take up even less
space.
“Of course the men just accept that the women have power
here. That’s just the way it is,” he told me very matter-of-factly in a
voice as low as a whisper. “
It’s important to listen to my wife. She
makes good decisions.” His wife is the second daughter in the family,
but not the youngest. This means that she doesn’t stand to inherit any
of the family’s property. I kept asking why it was the youngest and not
the eldest daughter who inherited. The answer makes a lot of sense. The
youngest daughter will be around the longest, so she’ll be able to use
the family property and money to take care of her parents and then the
older siblings as they age.
Sukher had recently moved into his
wife’s ancestral home in a neighboring village called Mawlynnong and he
commuted into Shillong each day to work as a translator and tour guide.
He and his wife had been arguing because Sukher wanted to move closer to
the city to make his commute for work easier, but his wife was adamant
about not leaving their village.
In the end, she won.
Sukher
dutifully led me into Shillong’s Khasi market, which was tucked down a
dank, narrow alleyway, past a series of winding side streets, dark tea
shops, and counters for placing bets on professional archery. They love
professional archery in Shillong, and skilled archers are the equivalent
of NFL football players in the United States or soccer stars in Europe.
The Khasi market is a series of never-ending stalls where the women
sell everything from betel nuts and banana leaves to tobacco and fancy
dresses for less than five American dollars. Elsewhere in India the men
control the markets, but here the
women do the buying and the selling.
The
only men I saw
sat quietly in the backs of the shops, sometimes
making change, feeding a baby, or running an errand for their female
boss.
The women of Meghalaya in India control the money and property. (Jo Piazza)
I struck up a conversation with a young woman from the Jaintia
tribe named Daphi, the proprietor of a small dress shop. The shop had
been passed down through the women of her family for three generations. A
photograph of her deceased mother hung above the counter, gazing down
at her daughter with pride. Her mother’s younger sister owned the dress
shop across the way, and they teased one another about which stall had
the
prettier dresses and better deals.
“My mother made all of the
decisions for our family herself,” Daphi told me. “When I get married, I
will be the one to make the big decisions. This is just the way our
culture is.” Daphi was the youngest daughter in a family of two girls,
which meant that ownership of the store went to her when her mother
passed. “It’s a lot of responsibility,” she explained. “But I hope to
find a husband to share it with me.”
“To share it with me” was an
interesting choice of words. I asked Daphi if she thought that being the
owner of her shop would present problems in her future relationship.
“I
don’t think so. I think that I will always consult my husband and we
will have discussions about all of our decisions. I saw my mother do
that and my female relatives do that. We involve the men. Why wouldn’t
we?”
I thanked Daphi for being so honest and bought two colorful
Indian nightgowns from her and one fancy child’s dress from her aunt
across the street.
Down the alleyway I ran into a woman named
Diana standing barefoot in front of tall bins of betel nuts, wearing the
traditional Khasi checked kyrshah, or apron. Her hair was pulled back
in a tight ponytail revealing a high, regal forehead.
She told me
she was forty-two years old and that she’d been married for more than
twenty years. She and her husband had three boys.
She’d love to have a
girl who could inherit, but she was too tired to keep trying. Instead,
her sons would be the heirs when she and her husband passed away.
Diana laughed when I asked about the merits of living in a matrilineal society.
“This
is the best place in the world to live. In other places it is hard to
be a woman,” she told me, her positive pride in her culture evident in
her thrown-back shoulders and expanded chest.
“We are a very
special people, you know.” Her eyes danced with mischief. “Obviously
it’s the
women who have the power. Doesn’t that make sense?” she said
and smiled, flecks of betel nut caught in her teeth. “I never do
anything at home. My
husband does the cooking, the cleaning, everything.
But he does that because
he likes to do that. You have to have an
understanding in marriage. Marriage is a compromise. If he needs help,
then I help him.” She leaned in close to me. “You have to give the men
some understanding. You work hard to understand each other, but the men,
they need it more.”
The Khasi and Jaintia
women control the money
and the property, and yet every woman I met talked about understanding
and compromise. They told me it wasn’t their place to force their
husband to do things. They stressed that no matter who controls a
family’s wealth, the most important thing in a marriage is an
understanding of equality between the two partners, compromise.
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