This International Women?S Day ?Make It Happen?

Instituted for many years now, the International Women’s Day goes one step further to acknowledge the achievements, contributions, roles and responsibilities that women partake in through the course of their lives. This year in 2015 the theme constituted is “Empowering Women - Empower Humanity: Picture It!”, with the idea that all need to look towards women’s rights, moving towards greater equality, while mobilising all to do their part to achieve the same. The thought is that undeniably much has changed from a global perspective. The positioning and treatment according to women has seen a substantive move in the positive direction globally. Yet gaps remain. And these gaps probably are more glaring in our part of the world, in a developing and growing economy like ours in India. No doubt things are different here as well. Women have moved forward in all fields and their roles have transcended from the traditionally home-bound oriented to being more professionally inclined with women taking over more responsibilities and roles, balancing multiple facets of their lives, and building strong careers, running businesses, being heads of organizations, while also ploughing through the government based administrative systems as well as within the government itself. Yet, all of us would acknowledge and accept that much more is desired and there is a lot that can be done to make things much better than what they are. Each of us, individually and in our communities need to play our roles and do our bit in helping to bring about the change that we all want to see. It is not only about policies being instituted and rules being formulated, visions need to be aligned and goals need to be formalised in order to ensure that there is movement which happens in the right direction, in a direction that is oriented towards the greater good and emancipation of women and which brings about the change we all want to see. Talking about things, about the problems that exist, the way things and systems need to change is not going to be enough. Probably the time has come when more needs to be done in a concerted effort and all voices need to be united into a singular, strong voice of reason which can bring about a unified direction through the diversity of all those who move forward to bring about a change. So this International Women’s Day let us all pledge to “Make it Happen”.