Every year on March 8th, something rather miraculous happens.
The world suddenly remembers women exist.
Phones begin buzzing early in the morning with glittery WhatsApp messages that look like they were designed sometime around 2003. LinkedIn transforms overnight into a poetry competition. And men who normally respond to emails with a crisp “Noted.” suddenly write heartfelt paragraphs about how women are the backbone of society.
Backbone. Pillar. Goddess. Multitasker.
In the span of 24 hours, women are elevated from regular human beings to something resembling divine infrastructure.
“Happy Women’s Day to all the incredible women!”
“Women are the true power of this world!”
“You are the strength behind everything!”
All very touching.
Somewhere in the background, a man is forwarding the exact same message to 27 groups while waiting for his wife to bring him his evening tea.
Now, before this starts sounding like a rant, let me confess something — I quite enjoy the buzz of Women’s Day.
The flowers in offices. The cupcakes someone thoughtfully ordered. The HR emails with subject lines like ‘Celebrating the Power of Her.’ The panel discussions where everyone nods wisely while someone quotes statistics about empowerment they probably Googled fifteen minutes earlier.
For one glorious day, corporate India becomes a paradise of progressive thinking.
Men stand in a polite queue near the HR desk, holding roses like enthusiastic participants at a school annual day function. One by one, they present the flowers to their female colleagues with great sincerity.
“Happy Women’s Day!”
“You deserve this!”
It’s sweet. It really is.
And later that evening, somewhere in the same man’s house, his mother might gently ask, “Beta, can you at least put your plate in the sink?”
He looks mildly stunned, as if the request has arrived from an entirely different planet.
“Ma… I just came home from work.”
Respect for women is extremely important.
But let us not get carried away.
Now before we get too comfortable blaming the men, it might be fair to turn the spotlight slightly towards the other enthusiastic participants in Women’s Day celebrations — women ourselves.
Because when it comes to celebrating, we do it rather well.
There are Women’s Day brunches, Women’s Day marathons, Women’s Day spa offers, and of course, the essential Women’s Day group photos where everyone is holding coffee cups and looking meaningfully powerful.
Instagram fills up with captions like “Here’s to strong women.”
And then the celebrations end, and we return home.
To houses that were quietly cleaned, meals that were prepared, and kitchens that were organised by someone who woke up earlier than all of us.
Your house help.
The woman who has probably been empowering families long before the word empowerment became fashionable enough to appear on mugs and T-shirts.
She has already finished half a day’s work before most of us have even had our first coffee. She has cooked for her own family, travelled across the city, and then made sure our homes run smoothly enough for us to attend our empowerment brunches.
And yet somehow, no one handed her a rose.
No one told her she was a goddess.
She didn’t even get a cupcake.
This isn’t cruelty, really. It’s something far more common and far more subtle.
It’s invisibility.
The truth is that respect for women often becomes very loud in public and strangely quiet at home. We celebrate the idea of women with great enthusiasm — the speeches, the hashtags, the panels, the inspirational quotes.
But real respect rarely looks that glamorous.
Real respect looks like husbands who cook dinner without announcing it on social media.
It looks like sons who know exactly where the plates are kept in the kitchen.
It looks like daughters who understand that empowerment includes the woman who works in their home.
And it looks like workplaces where appreciation for women does not arrive once a year in the form of a rose and a well-meaning speech from HR.
So yes, by all means celebrate Women’s Day.
Post the pictures, send the messages, run the marathon, raise the toast and tag the strong women in your life.
But perhaps after the confetti settles and the hashtags fade away, it might be worth taking a quiet look around our own little worlds.
At the women in our homes.
At the women at our workplaces.
At the women whose names never appear in celebratory posts.
And then gently ask ourselves a slightly uncomfortable question.
Is my respect for women a one-day festival?
Or is it an everyday habit quietly woven into the way I live?
Because empowerment was never really meant to be an event on the calendar.
It was always meant to be a way of life.
And unlike those glittery WhatsApp forwards, that is one thing that shouldn’t expire at midnight on March 8th.
— Grace in the Grit
