Rarely does a woman come out of the fog and into the limelight looking like she had a makeover, especially if she is doing things that she believes is for the betterment of humankind. Most women who leave their mark look just like they would were they mediocre.
Margaret Thatcher, well she came dressed in a frock, seeing her vision through her sharp pointy eyes, and speaking to the men who ruled the world, with her handbag dangling off her elbow, looking just like any other woman of her time.
She was a woman with the passion and fierceness we all have in us as women. She was one of us, living in our time, experiencing the same growing up phobias as we all do, and she took a step ahead, in a single instance, one foothold at a time, because she needed change and she, she took a stance.
All the negative conversations, those same ones we all battle, inside our heads, inside our homes, inside our places of work, inside the mindset of the whole world, come out in us in doing nothing, came out in her as huge milestones which barraged and ceased the negativity in its tracks. Negativity which changed to awe in the worst of the voices.
I remember seeing her in a photograph taken where she is sitting alone on a sofa in her home leafing through paperwork. I see all of us women, in that photograph, sitting in our sofas, contemplating. Only she was leafing through pages that would manifest the future of our world. And we, what do we do really?
And that picture of her at the door of Number 10, she is waving, as if saying hello to a neighbour, just like we do to our neighbours. Except our chores are not cutting a path to speak for those whose labour turns the wheels of our lives in a world ruthlessly geared to feed greed.
How many family confrontations must she have faced, telling her for her own benefit ofcourse, to stop? How many angry men did she have to turn a deaf ear to so they might listen and hear what she must say? How many jealous women had there been who scorned her for simply doing what we all should be doing? Oh, what was the nonsense and the behind the scenes and the back biting and the sneering and the God- knows- what- else, did she have to ignore rather than endure?
She will be remembered as the Iron Lady. No need for a new word to be coined for what she left on this Earth. She made everything very clear, and she made herself understood. This icon of a woman would not have rusted away had it not been for the nature of things on Earth to perish. May the soil into which she will lay send us her energy and her zeal and ground us to our purpose as she was to hers.
Written By: Tasnim Jivaji
Monday April 8, 2013
