After God-knows-for-how-long, counted in centuries, including the periods mentioned in the land’s epics, sympathising with the home-maker tied to her dawn-to-dusk daily chores of keeping the family hearty and healthy, particularly cooking by burning smoke-spewing firewood and drawing water from the well, her lot has lately witnessed a mountain of relief, thanks to supply of smoke-free cooking fuel and piped water in her home. The rising cost of feeding the family with variety of dishes and keeping the proverbial wolf out of the door are no longer the exclusive bother of the urban-based chief wage-earner. The home-maker, willy-nilly, has turned from home-bound member of the family into a proactive life-partner in the widest sense of the term, raising the family’s economic strength in the process, only the gender-difference remaining unchanged. The role of common-place gadgets to cook, communicate and commute, in facilitating the home-maker to expedite all her tasks with near-zero discomfort, thanks to the known and unknown inventors, cannot be expressed in words nor over-exaggerated.
On not-too-often-happening occasions when the mercurial lady, toiling 365 days a year is incapacitated, one’s mind may get enlivened by the narratives in the epic Mahabharata mentioning Draupadi’s akshayapatra that kept her five husbands well-fed and the entourage of the ill-tempered Durvasa served with sumptuous food. But, dreams rarely become real-life experiences.
