After all, you have to wonder why we face so many problems in our society. And you have to question why the government -- be it the opposition or the current party in power -- refuses to take any steps to better our situation, instead only making things worse with their political games, their ego battles and their tug-of-war between power and money. So maybe I had it all wrong and this is the way it was intended to be.

I'm slow, I think. I always have been. Even as an awkward, gawky teenager with glasses and braces, it always took me longer than my classmates to memorise the periodical table in chemistry, or figure out a simple multiplication equation without writing it down and counting on my fingers, or even (funnily enough), understand the reasoning behind why a comma doesn't belong in certain places, or why my sentences were too long or too short, or why my English teacher claimed that my content was too "dull." Similarly, I'm afraid, I am slow in this line of thinking.

I'm slow because I don't understand why people have become so indifferent to suffering, why materialism has become a greater value than morals and ethics, why corruption and crime play mind games with each other, vying for who can be the best at what they do, and why equality on every level -- be it related to poverty or gender -- is such a grossly unexpected commodity.

Although I grudgingly accept the fact that as a woman, I am more socially fragile than a man -- in terms of what people will say about me, how people react to me in public, and how safe I am when I go out -- it still makes me angry and I hate it. It makes me mad that my brother can walk out on the streets in jeans and a t-shirt and no one will look twice at him, whereas when I go out "properly" dressed in a shalwar kameez, I will most probably be subjected to some kind of harassment, be it someone staring, passing comments, or touching me. It frustrates me that a woman who is more educated than her husband is not congratulated or celebrated, but kept hidden away -- like a dirty secret, someone to be ashamed of. It infuriates me that girls younger than me are often robbed of their innocence too early in their lives, and are blamed for it -- sometimes even ostracized or killed for it. When these grave injustices are done in the name of religion it further enhances my anger. Common sense can only take you so far -- especially when religion comes into play, because no one wants to get on the wrong side in this particular case.

I get angry about these things, but it is an egocentric anger, not a do-gooder one, because I know that as a woman, I am in as much danger as anyone else. I cannot run away or close my eyes to the fact that being a woman puts me in a separate category, and not one that is overall pleasant. Instead, no matter what class or what part of society a woman is in, there is almost a hundred per cent chance that she is regarded as beneath her male counterparts.

I am unable, however, to put myself in a situation outside of the closed box that I have created for myself--the one that I shelter myself from the outside world with, because reality bites, and who needs reality when you can watch Shah Rukh Khan on DVD and forget all about the floods drowning half the city and threatening thousands with infectious diseases?

I suffer from what people refer to as selfishness and greed. I like eating at nice restaurants, I like driving in an AC car, I get frustrated when I cannot afford a designer outfit or purse, with matching shoes, and I never spend a minute's thought on the poor old woman in her tattered sari living two blocks down from my apartment in a tin hut. Her house is halfway under water at this point. Every morning she trudges through the disgusting slimy green water, with her sari hiked up around her knees.

I'm slow, though, because it takes me a while to realise that the same sense of injustice I feel as a woman, when a man looks at me funny or passes a jeering remark about me, is similar to what this woman feels every day, when I pass her on my way back home and she stares at me, wondering why God gave her this fate and not mine.