While you are forced to abide by such discriminatory rules, don’t you sometimes feel like shouting at the top of your lungs: Enough!” What my friend says usually carries some weight, but all I could do in answer to this query was shrug my shoulders as if to shake off some invisible weight.

Six years ago, our class was asked: Given a choice, what would each of you like to be? Going along with most of the crowed, “Girl!” I blurted without thinking much.

Only one response stood out. “Mam! I would choose to be a girl were it not for my periods. Were it not for the unbearable backache and seclusion, as if I was an outcast. If I dare question, I am promptly quietened. Nothing that ‘displeases’ the Lord will wash.” What she said that day was a matter of debate for a fortnight. It had touched many of us. In a separate incident, my cousin was not allowed on board the ferry on our recent family vacation. Nobody dared speak out the reason.

It was long ago that female activists declared a war to safeguard the unwritten rights of women. But how many of them actually practiced what they preached?

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages princes’ places,” said Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. In simple words, so much remains to be done to ensure true equality.

It is easy to speak about women’s equality and what should be done to achieve it, but quite another to put one’s words into practice.

The reality is that social change lags far behind the rhetoric. While people in urban areas might find even talking about the issue out of fashion, the truth is that most of the country is still plagued by age-old biases that are hard to erase.

English poet and librettist John Gay might well have been talking about the self-proclaimed champions of women’s rights when he said: “An open foe may prove a curse/ But a pretended friend is worse.” Let us stop being hypocrites. For until each woman breaks out of her cultural cocoon and dares to walk that extra mile, the great gender divide might never be bridged.