Festival seasons are the hardest for me.
They are a reminder of how easily we call inequality as "culture" or "tradition", how something can look sacred, sound pure, and still feel deeply unfair.

Every time I see a ritual begin, I feel a knot in my stomach. The rice, the diya, the thali circling someone’s face, the touch of feet are all so familiar and normal. Someone says, “It’s just a ritual,” and everyone smiles. Except me. I cannot stop noticing how devotion always seems to move one way.

They call it culture. I call it conditioning. And when I shift uncomfortably or question the need for it, the air changes. Suddenly I am the one making things awkward, the one who cannot “just let people be,” or the one who is putting people on the spot, or overanalyzing again.

I am not angry at the women who do it. I am angry at how easily everyone accepts what I cannot, at how normal inequality can look, and at how peace is preserved by pretending not to notice.

But what scares me most is not the ritual itself. It is the silence of younger women who are fighting for equal rights and pay in offices, yet staying quiet at home. The curious eyes of daughters and nieces taking it all in. The next generation of women we are raising within our own homes. They see us smile through things we do not believe in, and they will learn that this is what womanhood looks like: graceful, giving, uncomplaining.

That terrifies me. Because what we call love, they might mistake for duty. What we endure in silence, they might accept as normal. And what we justify as culture, they might grow up to repeat with pride. I wonder if they will think peace and silence are the same thing.

The Price of Being Quiet

Most women do not pause to ask why a ritual exists or who it serves. It is not apathy; it is habit passed down like a family heirloom. You do what is expected, you smile, you move on.

The woman who pauses to ask “why only us?” becomes the disruption. In a house that values non-confrontation, her question feels like noise. It takes just one question to make everyone uncomfortable.

When a woman asks that question, the room shifts. People do not argue with her, they just get uncomfortable. They change the subject. They laugh it off. Some reach for random anecdotes from mythology, as if ancient stories could settle present-day unease. Others call it a matter of personal choice, that a woman can decide for herself whether to do a ritual or not. But that word choice is often used to end the conversation, not start one. No one wants to admit that something so small could carry so much imbalance. So her question turns into a problem, and she becomes the person who “reads too much into everything.” It is strange how the act of noticing itself becomes an accusation.

When Equality Turns Into Performance

Every time the question fades, the ritual grows stronger. It gains another layer of justification, another story of choice or respect or tradition. And when someone finally suggests that men should do the same, it feels like progress but it is not. It is only a different version of the same performance.

Imitation does not make it equal. It only makes it symmetrical. The point was never to make men do what women do. It was to ask why anyone must prove love or devotion through submission in the first place.

We like to think reversal fixes imbalance, but it only rearranges it. A man touching his wife’s feet may look modern, but the act still rests on hierarchy, one giving and one receiving. True equality would not need a mirror at all. It would not need a ritual to explain itself.

What We Call Harmless

The hardest part about questioning ritual is that it rarely looks harmful. There is no visible oppression. The women smile. The men look proud. There are just happy faces and festive lights. How can that be wrong?

That is what makes it so enduring. Inequality dressed in happiness and festivities feels safe. It hides behind devotion, behind phrases like it is just a ritual and why overthink everything.

But I have learned that this softness has a cost. It teaches generations of women to make themselves smaller for the sake of peace, and generations of men to never notice.

The Inheritance We Do Not Want to Leave

We are careful about what we feed our children, what they read, what they watch. But what about what they witness, the small, repeated scenes that script their idea of normal?

When young girls watch women bow in reverence and men receive it as their right, they absorb a map of power. When they see us stay silent to keep the peace, they learn that peace is the woman’s job. They start believing that love means endurance, not equality.

That is the inheritance I fear the most. It is passed quietly through festivals and living rooms, in gestures that look harmless but shape entire lives.

Be Angry, Without Apology

For a long time, I thought my anger made me the problem. Now I see it as awareness that refuses to be numbed. If it shakes a patriarchal home, let it. I will say out loud, “This does not sit right with me anymore.” Or I will step out of spaces that silence me.

Maybe that anger is a ritual of its own. It is not performed with lamps and lights but with honesty, a ritual of asking, of unlearning, of refusing to pass down discomfort wrapped in devotion.

I do not want symmetry. I do not want performance. I want meaning, gestures born of respect, not expectation.

Maybe the real celebration will begin when no one has to explain why.
Until then, I will keep noticing. I will keep calling out. I will keep refusing to smile through what does not feel right, and I will stop sharing spaces that do not allow honesty.