When Empowerment Forgets Humility

 

When Empowerment Forgets Humility

Mary Kom is not just another sportsperson, she is a national conscience shaped by struggle, discipline, and sacrifice. This is an ample reason that her recent remarks about her husband on national television are not just disappointing but they are morally unsettling.

To publicly state that one’s husband “survived on her earnings” is not a statement of strength. It is cheap and it is a shameless declaration of dominance. Marriage is not an economic audit. It is not a contract of superiority. It is a covenant where roles fluctuate, where one sometimes carries the other without turning that burden into a public spectacle. If the ace boxer played and earned, her ‘unemployed’ husband must be looking after the kids and managing the house in her absence. Sacrifices, if not applauded, must not be questioned.

More disgusting was her assertion that her husband could never have become a Sunil Chhetri by playing football in the streets. This was not merely dismissive, it was philosophically hollow. Champions are seldom made in academies. They are forged in streets, alleys, fields, and forgotten corners where ambition precedes facilities and determination squashes adversity. Most Indian icons, including Mary Kom herself, rose not from privilege but from deprivation. To ridicule that pathway is to deny the metaphysics of struggle itself. By uttering this, she has yet again proved that success, often, settles after burying gratitude and throws out humility.

For centuries, society demanded silent endurance from men. A man was expected to provide without protest, absorb humiliation without complaint, and suppress emotion in the name of duty. His failures were personal, his responsibilities collective. He was valued not for his inner life, but for his earning capacity. A successful man can often live happily with an ordinary wife, but a successful woman rarely finds peace with an ordinary man.

Women, understandably, seek financial stability in a partner. That preference has never been questioned. But what remains unspoken is its collateral damage. How many men have strangled their emotions because they could not match the financial status of a woman’s parents? How many love stories died not of incompatibility, but of comparison? How many men walked away, not rejected, but rendered inadequate by balance sheets they were never allowed to outgrow?

These silences never make it to televised conversations.

When economic roles reverse, especially in relationships, something disturbing often emerges. Partnership quietly mutates into power. Equality slips into entitlement. What should have been liberation begins to resemble retribution. Empowerment, then, is no longer about dignity, it becomes about leverage.

This is where modern discourse collapses. If patriarchy was wrong because it reduced women to dependence, then empowerment cannot justify reducing men to dependency with contempt. Power does not become moral by changing gender. Arrogance does not become virtue by changing voice.

Icons, like Mary Kom must understand that words spoken from height do not fall lightly. They shape moral climates. Public humiliation from a pedestal normalizes the idea that worth is financial, sacrifice is shameful, and love is conditional. This is neither progress, nor evolution, nor empowerment. It is cultural erosion. It is giving strength to the notion that women empowerment is going in a wrong direction.

Marriage is not a marketplace. Masculinity cannot be invalidated by economic vulnerability, just as femininity is not elevated by public derision. True strength lies in restraint. True power lies in the ability not to humiliate.

A relationship is judged not by who earns more, but by how it treats the vulnerable, especially within the private sanctity of family. When empowerment forgets humility, it ceases to be justice and becomes yet another form of tyranny. And history is unkind to tyrannies, no matter which gender wears the crown.

© Gaurav Sharma 

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