I wonder how many of us realise the big change we have been passing through for some time now. It is not technology, it is not globalization, it is not emigration it is women. The women are slowly taking over the world, and high time too, if you ask me.
The next president of the United States, the richest and the most powerful nation in the world, is almost certainly going to be a woman, the first woman to do so since the birth of the republic 231 years ago. In India, a woman rules over the biggest party, and therefore, the country. Women are taking over top jobs in business, media, banks, and nearly everything else, including governments. They have clearly half the world in their delicate -and not so delicate - hands, and soon will take over the other half.
I am writing this column from Pune, a smallish town a couple of hundred kilometers from Mumbai. From the way things are going, it has already been taken over by women, lock, stock and barrel. They are everywhere and you cannot but notice them.
I go down from my hotel to a nearby restaurant for a cup of tea at the crack of dawn, and half a dozen young girls are already there, and have grabbed all the newspaper. They have arrived on their scooter, and some in their cars, and are busy with their laptops. I have never worked on a laptop in my life. They are in their twenties and early thirties; I am nearly thrice their age.
They seem to be everywhere. They run banks, restaurants, libraries, internet services, printing presses, and at least one of them runs a motor car company. You see their faces all over local newspapers, just as we used to see men's ten and twenty years ago. On the road, every other scooter is driven by a women - or a girl - and woe betide small men like me who dare to overtake them.
Twenty or thirty years ago, women rarely ventured out of doors. There might be an occasional female in a bank, or perhaps at an airline desk. But your natural tendency was to avoid them. If you wanted some serious work to get done, you always went to a man, even though you knew he was not really up to it. But it helped salve the man's ego, and also yours.
I once asked one of the great Birlas why there were no women in their offices. Even their typists were men. “It's a matter of policy.” I was solemnly told. “We don't hire women for strategic reasons. Which is also why we keep miles away from such businesses as hotels and liquor. I first came across swarms of women in offices and factories in Britain after the war. This was natural since men had gone off to war and somebody had to do the job. But even then, women worked mostly as secretaries, and rarely as executives. Once I was surprised to find a woman interviewing me on the BBC a couple of years after the close of the war. She told me she had worked for George Orwell and was now a programmes officer in her own right.
My professor was a woman too, but she was only one among scores of men. But when she became an FRS (Fellow of Royal Society) we were speechless. A woman and a scientist? Actually there had been several such women in the past, but we were still highly surprised.
I have a feeling Hillary Clinton is going to do for the entire female world what Margaret Thatcher did for England. England has never been quite the same after Thatcher - she did for UK what Indira Gandhi did for India - and Hillary will turn the world upside down when she takes over the White House. After winning the White House, what else is there to win?
This article was originally published on December 13, 2007.
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