Remember a man called Gandhi?

This is regarding Amrita Shah’s article ‘If women ran the world’ (IE, March 14). Shah’s logic is really simple. Women have enormous amount of goodwill for other women, and other people. So, if the world were to be ruled by women, we would not have ‘‘self-serving acts of aggression’’ like the impending war on Iraq. She quotes incidents and evidence from studies to prove her point.

Unfortunately, Shah forgets some very inconvenient truths. If women had so much goodwill for each other, then, why are the Bangladesh Begums not even speaking to each other? Why, if women have no inclination for self-serving acts of aggression, did Indira Gandhi impose the Emergency? Why, if women are so honest, did Jayalalithaa amass so much jewelry that it took days to compute their value? Why, if women are not vengeful, did she allow her police department to man-handle Karunanidhi? And pray, why was Benazir Bhutto so active in persecuting Nawaz Sharif? And to think that utterances made by Hollywood stars at award ceremonies are true reflections of their feelings is childish at best, ridiculous at worst.

Let’s face it, women have the same good/bad qualities as men. Let’s not forget that the calmest, kindest person who walked on the face of this earth was a man, Mahatma Gandhi. Let’s not forget that Martin Luther King and Swami Vivekananda were men. And let’s not forget that Nelson Mandela is a man.

There are good men, and there are bad men. There are good women, and there are bad women. What the world needs is synergy between the good women and the good men — that will make the world a better place, not one-upmanship between the sexes as Amrita Shah has unfortunately tried to advocate.