So this year, I decided to keep mum about the glories and follies of women on March 8. No, do not mistake me for a male chauvinist or anti-feminist or whatever. Its just that I didnt want to ride down the clich lane of doing the woman-talk on a particular day of the year.

Theres nothing wrong putting up a woman-glorifying headline or painting things pink on the social media to celebrate International Womens Day. The only aspect that seems to be bothering in this whole scenario is the once-in-a-year frequency of these doings. Women are all around you, all throughout the year. It is highly bemusing that we tend to talk about them only on March 8 (Imagine a calendar without March 8 though we should be grateful at least for this, some might opine).

Exceptions are part of the story and can be utilized to argue against the aforementioned point. But its high time that we got past exceptions, just exceptions. What women want today, is normalcy. A normal acceptance of women the way they are in society. Forget equality. We are talking about realizing and educating ourselves that all public spaces are womens as well, and that they have the right to decide and choose their path. Not all men want a white-collared job, some are travelers, some entrepreneurs and so on. And theres hardly any debate over this.

What women need for themselves is a similar kind of acceptance in the society, irrespective of her decisions.

People are different, and so be their decisions and ways of life. A woman might be a CEO in a company, or another might have chosen to leave her job to tend more to her family, and then there are those juggling between both. But are we able to accept all these women the way they are? Are we educated enough to accept her in each of these contexts? This is where the concept of normalcy pops in.

In todays world, women seek normalcy before anything else; to consider it normal when you see her out during the late hours, to consider it normal when you see her travel solo, to consider it normal when she is vehement about her career, to consider it normal when she paused her career to happily tend to her newborn, to consider it normal when she is enthusiastically managing both work and home. Each International Womens Day floods in an unconventional story of a woman which is again in dire contrast with the notion of normalcy. And that leaves me confused if I should go with the flow, or sit back and ponder.

What do you think?