Pray to God. She's Powerful.

     A century and eight decades ago, a girl was born. Married away at 9. Started imparting education to a girl when she was my age. Started a school for girls when she was 17. Had people throw dung-balls and stones at her when she had the guts to go teach girls. Fought against child infanticide. Even after her supportive husband had died, when Pune was under a stupid Plague Control Board, she, with her adoptive son, attended to the affected. She contracted the disease herself while getting a child to a health-care centre, and died of the plague. She'd performed her husband's funeral rites, the onus of the supposed lion-son.
     Savitribai Phule. What makes her different from any other woman who lived when she did? I totally believe, that in Society (with a capital S to show its 'significance'), the cause of a woman's distress is oftentimes another woman. Consider 'another woman' to be a mother who buried her baby-girl because her husband asked her to; a woman who 'just chid' her daughter-in-law and left scald marks all over her body; a woman who sells her daughter so that 'the future bread-winner' of her family, her son, may live off all the drugs and bidis he covets; a woman who sees her daughter being repeatedly raped by her own sire and brothers (read-pimps); a woman who pushes that little angel to live the life of a devdasi or a courtesan.

    But I prefer to still call it a Happy Women's Day. It is not a day for those hags who kill their own species in an effort to make hay while the sun shines. It is for those women, who flowed against the current, fought with that pimp, rescued that daughter, made her a lady    it's for the Sitas of the world who, rightly, did not think their husbands worthy of their testimonies of purity; for the Mother Teresas    the saints of the gutters; for the Phoenix, that rose from her own ashes. The last part, I am very sure of.