A Curriculum the World Forgot to Write
My mother is approaching ninety. She is mostly bedridden, convalescing from a major hip surgery, and she spends most of her wakeful hours in prayer. Every day, a different god receives special attention. Last Saturday it was Varahi Amman — one of the seven sacred female goddesses of the Hindu tradition, she who it is said will grant you whatever you wish if you pray to her in the prescribed form for forty-eight days continuously.
But that is not my story.
It was election time in Tamil Nadu. And in Tamil Nadu, when elections come, everything stops — including, critically, domestic help. Every cook, every caregiver, every person who keeps a household running goes back to their villages to cast their vote. Democracy is non-negotiable. My mother’s care, suddenly, was.
My sister came over to help.
And here is where the story begins. Because what followed was a quiet, revelatory, faintly humiliating education in how differently two people raised in the same home, by the same parents, eating the same food and breathing the same air, can understand the word help.
My idea of helping was to be present. To ensure that my mother was attended to. To be available, in a supervisory, managerial, mildly emotionally supportive way. Swiggy could handle the food. The cleaning could wait till regular help returned. The bed could remain un-made for a couple of days. The clothes can pile up. The pile-up was temporary. Systems would resume.
My sister — a force of nature — rolled up her sleeves and simply began. She cooked. She cleaned. She administered medication with the precision of someone who had clearly been tracking dosages in her head for weeks. She changed sheets, managed the physiotherapist’s visit, fielded calls, anticipated needs that hadn’t yet announced themselves, and did all of it with a cheerfulness so genuine and so complete that it defied not just my imagination but my entire model of what a human being is capable of sustaining.
I watched, and I am not proud of what I felt first, which was bafflement. How can we be so different? Same parents. Same house. Same gods on the wall. And then, slowly, something more honest: how little I knew. Not just about my sister. About women. About what they carry, what they see, what they do — quietly, completely, without waiting to be asked or thanked or even noticed.
There, in my mother’s bedroom in Chennai, with Varahi Amman looking on from her framed portrait on the wall — a goddess who grants wishes to those devoted enough to pray for forty-eight days without interruption — I received the beginning of an education I should have been given at fourteen.
This is the article I wish someone had written then.
In 1991, the United States National Institute of Health finally mandated that women be included in clinical drug trials. Nineteen ninety-one. Which means that up to the twentieth century, the standard adult human body used to test medicines, calibrate dosages, and profile side effects was male. And women — who metabolise differently, whose hormones interact with compounds in ways male bodies simply do not — were sent home with prescriptions designed for someone else entirely.
Before we locate this comfortably in America, consider: those medical textbooks were translated into every language on earth. They were taught in Bangalore and Beijing, Cairo and São Paulo, Lagos and London. The male body as the default human template was not an American invention. It was a global export, and every nation received it without question and made it institutional.
In India specifically, the National Family Health Survey data reveals something quietly devastating: women consistently underreport pain, delay seeking care, and are less likely to be investigated seriously when they do present. Not because Indian women are physiologically different. Because the culture of dismissal is older here, more textured, more woven into the domestic fabric. The woman who suffers without complaint is considered virtuous. The woman who insists on being heard is considered difficult.
The scandal is not American. It is human. It is ancient. And it wears a thousand faces — including, I now understand, the face of a man who thought that being present in a crisis was the same thing as helping in one.
Uncle Claude responded to my query on societies that were still genuinely matrilineal. Turns out the Mosuo people of Yunnan province in southwestern China live in one of the world’s last functioning matrilineal societies. Property passes through the female line. Children belong to the mother’s household. Men are respected, present, valued — but it is women who hold the structural continuity of family and land. And here is what is quietly remarkable: Mosuo women speak about their bodies, their cycles, their physical experience with a vocabulary of normalcy that women in most other cultures do not have. There is no shame architecture around the female body because the female body was never required to be ashamed.
Contrast this with India. Where a menstruating woman in millions of households — across caste, across class, across religion with remarkable consistency — is still considered impure. Where she may not enter the kitchen, touch the pickle jars, approach the temple. Where the first conversation a young girl has about her own body is frequently one of prohibition. Don’t go there. Don’t touch that. Don’t let the men know.
This is not ancient history. This is today’s story.
The irony is almost unbearable: the very civilisation that gave the world Shakti — the primordial feminine energy that animates all creation — that worshipped Kali and Durga and Saraswati and Lakshmi and yes, Varahi Amman, with genuine awe and genuine terror — is frequently the same civilisation that tells a girl her blood is dirty.
My mother prays to seven female goddesses with the devotion of someone who genuinely believes in their power. And yet the culture that produced her prayer also produced the idea that she, as a young woman, would have been temporarily unpermitted from her own kitchen. Reverence and understanding, it turns out, are not the same thing. You can worship a goddess and dismiss a woman. India has been doing both, simultaneously, for three thousand years.
What a fourteen-year-old boy in Patna or Pune or Palakkad should know is what his counterpart in Stockholm learns in mandatory school curriculum — that the female hormonal cycle is a sophisticated biological system, not a monthly inconvenience. That oestrogen enhances verbal fluency and social cognition. That the luteal phase brings heightened emotional sensitivity that is neurologically real and physiologically driven. That the woman who seems different on different days is not unstable. She is tidal. And tides are not chaos. They are among the most predictable, most powerful forces in nature.
Research from American emergency rooms found that women waited an average of sixty-five minutes to receive pain medication. Men waited forty-nine minutes. For the same reported level of pain. In India, this disparity barely registers as a statistic because the baseline is so much further from justice. A 2019 Lancet study on pain management across South Asia found that women were significantly less likely than men to receive adequate pain relief in hospital settings — and significantly more likely to have their pain attributed to psychological rather than physiological causes. This in a region where stoicism in women is not merely expected but celebrated as evidence of good character. The woman who suffers quietly is good. The woman who demands to be taken seriously is hysterical.
Endometriosis — a condition in which uterine tissue grows outside the uterus, causing pain that sufferers describe as being stabbed repeatedly from the inside during what should be ordinary days — affects an estimated 42 million women in India alone. The average diagnosis delay in wealthy Western countries is seven to ten years. In India, where gynaecological complaints are routinely handled with a combination of paracetamol and matrimonial advice, many women never receive a diagnosis at all. They receive instead a suggestion to get married, have children, and see if that helps.
It is cruelty out of ignorance. And ignorance has a curriculum solution.
In Kenya, community health programmes run by organisations like AMREF have demonstrated something quietly powerful: when health workers — men and women both — are trained to take female reported pain seriously, to ask different questions, to listen before concluding, outcomes improve measurably. Not because the medicine changed. Because the listener did. A boy taught at fifteen that female pain has been historically dismissed — that there is a documented pattern to it and a cost measured in years of unnecessary suffering — becomes a different kind of doctor. A different kind of husband. A different kind of son.
There is a comic strip — by an artist named Emma Cilt, published in 2017 — that went quietly viral because millions of women read it and felt, perhaps for the first time, that someone had given language to something they had been carrying for years without a name. It is called You Should’ve Asked. It describes the mental load — the invisible, unceasing cognitive labour of managing a household. Not the physical tasks themselves but the remembering. The planning. The anticipating. The knowing that the school project is due Friday and the milk runs out and the mother-in-law’s blood pressure medication needs refilling and the plumber was supposed to come last week and still hasn’t. Endless.
I think of my sister.
She did not arrive at my mother’s house and ask what needed doing. She arrived and already knew. She had been tracking it — the medications, the physiotherapy schedule, the dietary restrictions, the emotional temperature of the patient, the logistical gaps created by absent help — from a distance, in the background, while also running her own home and her own life. The data was already loaded. She simply began executing.
I arrived and waited to be briefed. Veni, Vidi, Vici.
Research by sociologists confirms what Emma illustrated: women overwhelmingly bear the cognitive labour of family management even in households where physical tasks are nominally shared. The division of labour is visible and can be negotiated. The division of mental load is invisible — and therefore unacknowledged, un-thanked, and unrelenting.
The most maddening thing about mental load is that it cannot be solved by good intentions. A partner who says just tell me what to do has missed the point entirely. The noticing, the deciding, the delegating — that is itself the load. To ask to be delegated to is to ask your partner to manage you as one more dependent in an already full house. In Denmark — where gender equality is constitutionally enshrined, paternity leave is generous, and the social architecture is more equitable than almost anywhere on earth — studies still show women carrying a disproportionate share of mental load. The dishes get shared. The remembering of whose turn it is to do the dishes does not.
In India, the mental load is not a background hum. It is a full orchestral performance, every day, without intermission, without a programme note, and without applause. My sister conducted that orchestra for three days with a smile. I didn’t even know there was music playing.
The goddess Kali stands on the chest of Shiva — tongue out, garlanded with skulls, her eyes wide with a fury that is simultaneously terrifying and clarifying. She is not angry because she has lost control. She is angry because she sees clearly. Her rage is diagnostic. The tradition understood this: darkness in the feminine is not pathology. It is the necessary counterpart to creation. You cannot have Lakshmi without Kali. Light requires its opposite to be visible at all. And yet in practice — in the home, the office, the street — female anger was made impermissible. Female grief was made embarrassing. Female ambition was made threatening. The theology said one thing. The sociology did another. The goddess got the temple. The woman got the instruction to smile more.
Vienna in the early twentieth century produced Freud — who spent his career attempting to explain female psychology and largely got it wrong, famously despairing what does a woman want as though desire in a woman were a pathology requiring diagnosis rather than a reality requiring respect. The same city produced the remarkable Lou Andreas-Salomé, who wrote about female interiority with a precision and courage that most of her male contemporaries could not approach. The culture celebrates Freud. It barely remembers Salomé.
What neuroscience now shows — and what should be taught to every sixteen-year-old on earth — is that emotional complexity is not weakness. Women demonstrate, on average, higher emotional granularity: the ability to identify and distinguish between fine-grained emotional states. Greater bilateral brain activation during emotional processing, which produces richer emotional memory and more nuanced interpersonal attunement. What reads as too emotional to an outside observer is, in functional terms, a sophisticated social and psychological instrument of remarkable precision. The woman who cries in the meeting is not failing. She may be the only person in the room accurately reading what is happening.
Rwanda, emerging from genocide with 64% of its parliament female — the highest proportion anywhere on earth — did not achieve reconciliation through the suppression of emotion. It achieved it partly through the formal inclusion of emotional intelligence in governance. The Gacaca community reconciliation courts were significantly shaped by women’s participation. The emotional register was not excluded from the political process. It was recognised as political. This is what happens when a society stops dismissing the way women process the world and starts building institutions capable of holding it. Rwanda’s parliament — born of catastrophe, rebuilt by necessity — discovered something that more comfortable societies have been slower to learn: that when women hold structural power, the quality of governance changes. Not because women are morally superior. Because they bring a different set of priorities, forged by a different set of experiences, into rooms that had previously heard only one kind of voice
No society has achieved full balance. Let us accept that. But some have come closer, and understanding how is the curriculum within the curriculum. The Khasi of Meghalaya — in India’s own northeast, a corner of the country the rest of India largely overlooks — are matrilineal. Property and family name pass through the mother. The youngest daughter inherits the ancestral home. Men are not subordinate — they hold political power in traditional councils — but women hold economic and domestic continuity. Khasi women describe a relationship to their own bodies, their decisions, and their authority that is measurably different from women on the plains. Why did they get here? Partly ecology — matriliny often develops where male absence due to trade or warfare makes female structural continuity necessary. Partly because small, coherent communities in protected geographies can preserve alternatives that large empires steamroll. The Khasi survived, in part, because the hills gave them room.
Kerala within the mainstream Indian tradition comes closer than almost any other state — higher female literacy, lower maternal mortality, greater female workforce participation, longer female life expectancy. This is the result of nineteenth century social reform movements, of matrilineal traditions among certain communities, and of unusually high investment in female education by the enlightened princely states of Travancore and Cochin. It is also the result of something harder to measure: a culture that, more than most others in India, permitted women to be educated without immediately treating that education as a threat to their marriageability.
Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index for fourteen consecutive years. It did not achieve this through sentiment. It legislated parental leave in ways that made it economically irrational for fathers not to take it. It achieved near gender parity in parliament not by waiting for culture to change but by using policy to force culture’s hand — and then watching culture catch up, as it always does when the incentives are right. But before the policy came the education. Icelanders have been teaching both boys and girls about gender dynamics, household equity, and emotional labour in schools since the 1970s. The law consolidates what the culture has already decided to believe. The culture gets there first. Through curriculum.
The lesson across all these examples is the same. Balance did not arrive because men became less powerful. It arrived because women’s knowledge — of bodies, of households, of emotions, of community — was finally admitted into the structures that make collective decisions. It arrived when what women knew was treated as knowledge rather than feeling.
Let me end where I began. In a bedroom in Chennai. An old woman in prayer. A goddess on the wall. Two siblings, raised identically, responding to the same crisis in ways so different they might have come from different planets. My sister did not think about what she was doing. She simply did it — completely, cheerfully, with an attentiveness to detail and a stamina of care that I am still trying to properly account for. She cooked food that my mother would actually want to eat. She noticed when my mother was tired before my mother said so. She held the whole situation — logistically, emotionally, medically — in her head simultaneously, and managed it, and still had warmth left over at the end of the day.
I was present. I was well-meaning. I was, by my own estimation, helping. The distance between what she did and what I did is the distance this curriculum must travel.
Now, imagine the Indian doctor who learned at seventeen — formally, in school, with the same seriousness we give to chemistry and history — that endometriosis is real, that female pain is systematically undertreated, that the correct response to a woman describing pelvic agony is investigation, not reassurance. She gets her diagnosis. She gets her life back.
Imagine the Indian husband who learned at fifteen what mental load actually means — who doesn’t wait to be asked, who notices that his wife is running seventeen simultaneous background processes and quietly, without announcement or credit-claiming, picks up twelve of them. Their marriage becomes a collaboration rather than a managed imbalance.
Imagine the Indian father who encounters his daughter’s emotional complexity not as a problem requiring matrimonial solution but as a rich interior life deserving of space and genuine curiosity. Who asks her what she thinks. Who waits, actually waits, for the full answer.
Imagine the Indian policymaker who studied, as a formal subject, the relationship between female education and economic growth — the well-documented finding that every additional year of secondary schooling for girls produces measurable increases in national GDP — and who therefore treats the girl child’s education not as charity but as the most reliable compound interest available to a developing nation.
These are not fantasies. They are outcomes. They follow, with reasonable predictability, from education. India of all countries should understand this. It has the theology for it. It built entire cosmologies around the primordial feminine. It named the fundamental energy of the universe after her. It placed her in every temple, every home, every prayer. My mother prays to Varahi Amman for forty-eight days to have her wishes granted. The goddess, tradition says, is extraordinarily responsive to devoted and persistent attention. Perhaps that is the oldest pedagogical insight in the culture: that what you attend to carefully, over time, with genuine devotion and without interruption, will eventually reveal itself to you completely.
We simply forgot to apply it to the women sitting right beside us.
We had the goddess. We forgot the woman.
We had the prayer. We forgot the curriculum.