The biggest enemy of Women in India is Women. This was true because of a few incidents that I was a party to occur in the last week.

My wife and me are regulars at a posh Urban Talwalkar Gym in the winter capital of Maharashtra. A gym which propagate a high end “hygienic” sauna/ change room and who never bends it rules by giving a rupee on charity. The incident happened on 11/8/17 at around 3.30pm. After a grilling workout session when we changed and were walking out, the receptionist stopped my wife and asked did she has her menses. We were shocked. Then she had the gall of telling that they had employed a female caretaker to stand outside the toilet where my wife had gone to the toilet and shower. This stringent policing was done by the Talwalkar staff as they found some blood stains in the waterlogging of their posh toilets. When my wife walked out of the toilet she was asked whether she has her menses ON. How shocked she was and was speechless. A qualified Doctor was zapped as if she was a teenager who had her first menses at puberty. It rang a bell of her pubertal days, almost two decades since she attained her puberty. India is still the same, physiological change of the woman body is still considered taboo.

Talwalkar’s are very hygienic as they don’t allow people to wear outside footwear on their gym arena, they wipe all the machines and weights dirtied by the sweat of people. What they forgot is many of their toilets are stained with Tobacco chewers and choked due to improper working of their flushes. So a small stain of blood due to menses is a BIG taboo than tobacco-stain or foul stool smelling toilets.

When we further thought about this episode my wife remembered sharing the changing room that a day with a young girl and she thanked God as she was at the receiving end by the Rude All Women Talwalkar Reception staff. If it was the young girl, she would have got a big verbal bashing by the Reception girls.

Menses are a normal physiological change which happens to a woman’s body and it is the Sabhyata of our community which has made it a taboo. Girls with menses are not allowed to enter a temple, sit with the family during lunches or social occasion. Recently all the girls in a hostel were stripped naked by their warden as she found some bloodstains in the bathrooms. In spite of teaching the girls about the basic of menses, they were humiliated and punished.

The purpose of this the note is to let the higher authorities of all the gyms around the country to provide basic sanitation toiletries in all their changing room so that they can set an example of respecting the one because of whom we are in existence. The Mother of all……