Man and woman

Book Review by: gurtey

Original Author: gurtey

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In my younger days there used to be articles almost in every number of a very popular weekly called

‘My magazine’ on the ever-green topic of ‘Man and Woman’. Lively debates they were, of a very broad spectrum, ranging from punning jests to serious sword-crossings in gender acrimony. Even phonetically, we were amused to read that a woman is ‘double you oh man’, ‘woe to man’ or ‘woman included man’. I belonged to a group of students who were believed to be orators in the making with great promise for the future. These came in very handy to us in mock discussions we held as speakers in the periodical meetings under the auspices of the Debating society of our school. History is replete with stories of the continual struggles between the two sexes, one, that is man, trying to be still dominant and the other, namely woman, battling hard to consolidate the advances already gained and to achieve total equality. While this array of forces for adversarial confrontation may never end, the fact remains that, so long as men are square- shouldered and women are round-shouldered, they have different and equally important roles to play as assigned by nature and should willingly agree on peaceful co-existence. In any case, they are so anatomically designed by the Maker to be drawn to one another in a way that is subject to self-regulation. Walter Savage Landor, in one of his ‘imaginary conversations – ‘queen Mary of Scots and Captain Bothwell’ – projects a revolutionary idea that when a man and woman must unite notwithstanding social prohibition. Psychiatrists may find in it a proposition that they can freely elaborate upon in their Ivory towers. All who believe view ‘ethics’ cannot altogether be jettisoned in life, will vehemently oppose any thought or philosophy that promotes promiscuity.
I now take the occasion to tell a true story where an iconoclastic experimenter very nearly wrecked the lives of a man and his wife. There was a king whose realm was confined to what would be no more than two or three districts in our present day parlance. There was nothing for the people to ask themselves whether their loyalty him was misplaced. Everything went on smoothly until one day he turned from a normal individual into a voyeur. Like some psychological freak who derives greater delight in anticipating than in the actual experiencing of a pleasure, he developed an unhealthy mania. It was to catch hold of, at random, a man and woman and watch, himself unobserved, how they reacted toward each other with nobody else around. In his daily round on his palanquin through the principal
Streets of his domain, one day he espied a remarkably beautiful woman. H e set afoot inquiries regarding her identity and also picked on a servant in his retinue to be the partner for his experiment. As it so happened, the man of his choice was a God-faring person. Moreover, he knew the lady whom he held in great reverence. For himself he decided to flee from the state. As the king was likely anyway to go ahead with the experiment, he lost no time in alerting the lady and her husband. They packed their belongings silently and migrated to a distant place that very night, bidding good-bye to the state.
How the couple fared later is another story which I shall relate some other day.