This is what we hear it being called over and over every year. But when the festival is here, I always feel a sense of slight nervousness for the way the streets start getting clogged with women clad in ghastly red and loud jewelry. But most of all, the fear is for turning on a Nepali TV channel and having to watch the same Teej songs every year.
I have nothing, whatsoever for the "oppressed" women who take this day as a means to let their pent-up emotions out, who think it's okay to sing their woes and complain about their in-laws in songs, because it's probably the sole occassion to be able to do so in public. I have nothing against women who look forward to this day because it is an opportunity to visit their parents' home (knowing how our society frowns upon a married woman, should she even think of going to her parents).
What I do seem to have against this festival is the way it has begun to be a predominant show of new saris and jewelry and a way to spend on bangles, poteys and bindis that will eventually be stacked in dressers and forgotten who it came from as they stop being special when the month has passed. What annoys me is how some of us are still fasting for husbands who have absolutely no respect for their wives and how we still make a show of being the "woman in love" for a lifetime, when these are just shams. It puts the life out of me to think about it.
Why so much hue and cry about Teej when it doesn't change a thing about a woman's aspirations about the "ideal" husband and a happy marriage?!
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