The Burping Bullfrog

When I was in college, I had a wonderful lecturer for English – Ms. Mythili Nair, a shout-out to you, wherever you are.  I was both excited and terrified of English classes because she would give us unusual assignments, and I was sure I was going to mess it up.  The other girls in my class (all-girls college – for context) seemed much smarter, cooler, and up-to-date than I was, and it was my constant fear that I would be demoted to the lower streams (I was in the advanced stream).

She once gave us an assignment to critique an essay.  I forget the specifics, but the crux was that someone had, a century ago, written what was then, fantasy, about there being machines to do all household chores – washing clothes, etc., and that all a woman had to do was turn on the switch and her chores would be done.

Every Monday, Ms. Nair would return our notebooks (the paper-kind, yeah, yeah, I am old) marking us on our assignments, but she would hold back a few she thought were good that she would read out in class.

So, she came into class with the stack of notebooks and said that only one person had done a reasonable job on it, and the rest didn’t quite get it.  

And that one person was, drum rolls please, me.  And my critique got read out in class, while I silently prayed that the ground swallows me whole.

I had critiqued the essay from a slightly feminist point of view that even in a hypothetically advanced future where machines could do everything at home, it was the responsibility of the woman to switch the bally things on.

That is just a one-line summary of a possibly 1000-word fairly fiery essay that has been lost to posterity now.

Fast forward to today.

I read an article online today titled “Retired IFS officer wife’s hilarious guide to vegetable shopping goes viral; Fans react, ‘Happy wife, happy life’”. It is about the wife giving detailed instructions to her husband about every item on her shopping list 

Image from the newspaper article.

Cute and all that, no doubt.  

But I had the same feeling I got when I was doing Ms. Nair’s assignment on the machines.  It’s the woman’s responsibility to educate her man about buying vegetables?

And despite the light tone, micromanagement?

I need to stop overthinking unimportant things.