Mother's day fail: Calicut Univ's atrociously titled awards for mums

Mother’s day can be an emotional one for many women but Calicut University’s attempt to honour mothers with awards turned into a regressive exercise, with mums getting handed titles such as “Best Physically Challenged mother, Teacher mother, Sports mother, Tribal mother and Social Worker mother.” According to a Times of India report, the University’s Golden Mother Award ended up drawing criticism from academics, women’s group, and even the mothers who were handed the awards. One of the awardees also wondered why the title had highlighted the fact that she was disabled. P G Ratnam, a 57- year-old differently-abled schoolteacher who was given the ‘Best Physically Challenged mother,’ told TOI, “It pains me to receive the Golden Mother award under the category of physically disabled mother. I don’t know if such a description was needed at all for the award given to me.” [caption id=“attachment_1515661” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational Image. AFP[/caption] The report also says that “Ratnam had got the job of schoolteacher at the age of 45 after a legal fight spanning 22 years.” Another member Fathimathu Zuhra told TOI, “In the guise of honouring women, the varsity has established further chapters of discrimination by categorizing mothers in terms of their community, ethnicity and their differential ability. How can you categorize mothers like that?” However the list of Award titles was supposed to be much longer. Convenor of the Award, Convenor of the Golden Mother Award, E Pushpalatha told TOI that the awards were supposed to be across 18 categories initially but had to be scaled down due to lack of response. Adding insult to injury was the fact that SFI students turned up to protest against the awards, says the report. While the idea behind the awards might have been noble, to honour mothers from diverse backgrounds, the way in which the University went about coming up with the titles was just plain wrong. To label mothers as ‘Sports Mother or a Tribal mother or even Social worker mother," seems to imply that mothers need to be awarded based on some particular quality, as though the ones who don’t do social work or aren’t from a tribal background, are undeserving of awards. Given that even the awardees were also angry at the way the prizes were titled, it’s safe to say that Calicut University’s Mother’s day attempt was a terrible fail.