The Gender We Forgot to Thank

It was Father's Day last week. I didn't post anything about it.

I posted what I always post — something honest and a little unglamorous. This time it was about how I write for myself, and how it's perfectly fine with me if not one single person ever reads it.

A friend read it and said, almost like he was doing me a favour: "It was Father's Day, yaar. You should've posted about that."

I just smiled. Because I don't chase the trending thing, and I don't write for views. Never have.

But here's what I didn't say to him. The truth is — I did want to write about Father's Day. I sat down to, more than once. And I couldn't. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I don't actually know what a father's emotion feels like. I have never, in my whole life, seen my father emote to me. Not once. No "I'm proud of you," no tears, no open arms — just a quiet man and a quieter love I had to learn to read between the lines. How do you write about a feeling you were never once shown?

So when the page stayed blank, it wasn't writer's block. It was the silence itself — the same silence I'd inherited — staring back at me. A blank page in front of a blank man. Because that's what we are, mostly. Men. Emotionally blank — not because we feel nothing, but because no one ever taught us the words.

So let me try anyway. Not because it's trending. For him.

We live in a world that adores its mothers, and rightly so. We have built an entire language of love around her — songs, films, festivals, a thousand quotes about the woman who gave everything. And we should. I would never take a single flower from that.

But somewhere in all that devotion, we quietly forgot the other half. The silent one. The man who got up before the house woke and came home after it slept. Who carried a weight he never named, did everything he could to buy a good life for people he loved, and asked for nothing in return. We mistake his silence for not caring. We mistake "I'm fine" for fine.

And here's the part that breaks me: he doesn't ask for anything not because he wants nothing — but because nobody ever taught him how to want out loud. How to say I'm tired. I'm scared. I need you too. He inherited his silence from his own father, who inherited it from his. Generation after generation of men handing down the same locked box and no key.

I know this because I've watched it. I've looked into my father's eyes and seen a thousand words sitting there — pride, worry, love, exhaustion, things he will go to his grave never saying. I've wanted to hold his hand and couldn't. I've felt the throat tighten, the eyes sting, and swallowed it, because that's the rule, na? Men don't get to leak. (Funny — the only place I've ever managed to cry it out is here, on a page. That's what writing does. It opens the box the man can't.)

Now the part that's going to start a fight in my comments. Good.

Why do we crown one gender's sacrifice and stay completely blind to the other's? I've thought about this a lot, and here's my honest, unpopular theory: our earliest education in love came almost entirely from women — our mothers, grandmothers, the teachers who raised our hearts in those first classrooms. They loved us, and they taught us — beautifully — to revere the sacrifice of the mother. But there was no one teaching us the language of the father's love. Because the father himself didn't have the words. So we grew up fluent in honouring her, and completely illiterate in honouring him.

I am not saying mothers don't sacrifice. They do, immeasurably, and I'll defend that to anyone. My point is sharper and quieter: why does the father's sacrifice get no language at all? Why is one love a festival and the other an afterthought?

And while I'm lighting fires — let me say the other thing too. There's a loud agenda these days that men and women are the same. With respect: we're not. Not one above the other — different. Wired differently, breaking differently, sacrificing differently. Pretending we're identical doesn't make us equal; it just makes us blind to each other. The tragedy of this social-media age is that we've taken two different kinds of love and shoved them into an arena to fight over who sacrificed more — as if love were a leaderboard. It's the stupidest competition ever invented, and everybody loses, especially the silent man who was never going to enter the contest anyway.

He never said "I love you."
He said "did you eat?", "drive safe", "is there enough in your account?"
He never cried in front of us.
He cried in the car, in the bathroom, in the dark —
and called it "kuch aankh mein chala gaya."

Read him. He has been speaking this whole time.

So no, friend, I didn't write about my father to chase views. I wrote about him because somebody has to learn to read the silence. Because there is a whole gender out there loving us in a language we never bothered to learn — and one day, too late, we'll stand at a graveside translating it through tears.

I hope that day comes earlier than that. I hope, someday, the other half looks at a tired man's eyes and actually reads them. Sees the thousand unsaid words. And I hope men — me included — slowly learn that opening the box doesn't make us weak. It makes us finally, fully here.

Love your mother. Loudly. Always.

But this week, go find the quiet man who built your life brick by silent brick — your father, your husband, your brother, the friend who always says he's fine — and tell him the thing he could never teach himself to say. Watch what happens to his eyes.

Because I didn't write this for one Sunday in June. I wrote it so that maybe — if even a few of you learn to read the silence — a man somewhere gets to love a little more freely. Not on a designated day. Every ordinary day. Tomorrow. The day after. For the rest of his quiet life. That's the whole reason these words exist: not to be applauded, but to make one man's love a little less trapped.

So this year, let me say it differently.

Not just Happy Father's Day.

Happy Men's Day. To every silent man carrying a whole world he will never describe — we are learning to read you. Slowly. Clumsily. But we are learning.

…When did you last see a man you love feel something — and did you look away, or did you stay? Tune in for next.