my patis.

this is an article by an outsider - may i add, also a feminist! :-)

"The other day, some of us were discussing about how hip and progressive we were as compared to our mothers (smirk, smirk).

But later I realized that I was just bull-shitting myself. For one thing, my mother never felt ‘ugly’ if she didn’t get time to wax her legs every month. She certainly didn’t feel illiterate if she didn’t know beta carotenes and vitamin enriched forest berry mumbo-jumbo was what every woman needed for whatever. And she didn’t spend a fortune based on the advice of condescending salesgirls who were beauty market victims themselves.

Never mind my mother. Let’s take a look at my grandmother. Where my mother squirmed to tell me about periods, some of my grandmother’s bedtime tales had to do with the womb! I remember her telling me that I was born from a lovely warm bag in my mom’s tummy. Ok, so it’s not factual sex-ed and she didn’t differentiate stomach from uterus or abdomen. But at least she made the attempt to tell a fascinated 5 year old about her biological origin, until her daughter sternly told her not to. And she did sneakily complete the story - when I was ready to be born, the doctor did an operation and took me out and then they stitched up my mum, and she had to tie a plastic sheet over her tum every time she bathed till the stitches dried up – in one long whisper. I think it was the detail of the plastic sheet that really made her sound so convincing. And I listened to it with morbid fascination, whereas my mother’s explanations of we-asked-god-and-got-you seemed positively insultingly boring.

But the best was my grandmother’s mother, my kollu-pati. That lady discussed menstruation and sex with her daughters, apart from home remedies for gynaec and child-related problems – something that my grandmother didn’t do for my mother. So when it comes to body consciousness, I can’t hold a candle to my kollu-pati. She was the ‘hippest’ of us all. "