Two men in Kerala, settled comfortably in a tea shop, were watching a television mounted above old biscuit tins. On the screen, missiles flew across the sky like impatient comets. Buildings burst into flames. Dark smoke rose above burning oil refineries. One of them leaned toward the other and said, in the tone of a man confronting a grave philosophical question, “Chetta, what will happen after all this?”
The tea shop owner, who hears the entire wisdom of society every day and night, said, without turning away from the boiling kettle: “Gas cylinders will become costly.” The two customers absorbed this information with the seriousness of members of a parliamentary committee. “And then?” the first man asked. “The price of tea and snacks will go up,” the tea shop owner replied, wiping a glass. There was a short silence while the television continued its dramatic explosions. The second man, who had been concentrating carefully on the final sip of his tea, got up and said with quiet resignation, “The real war will begin only now. The battle between my salary and my wife’s management skills will start immediately.”
The wife’s early morning begins, not with poetry but with inventory. This is efficient civil service at work. Milk is boiled. Tiffin boxes are inspected with the seriousness of customs officers. Schoolbags are found after a mysterious search-and-rescue operation. Children are persuaded—sometimes through philosophy, sometimes through mild threats—to face the day. She remembers things with uncanny precision. She knows who likes less sugar, which electricity bill must be paid today, and which silence in the house indicates either a mathematics test or a broken window. Her work is not merely physical. It is investigative. It is psychological and observational.
History, unfortunately, is not very good at noticing such talents. It prefers to celebrate men who shout orders on battlefields or bang their tables at international conferences. Meanwhile, the quiet strategist who manages five overlapping emergencies before breakfast receives little more than a polite “What’s for dinner?” The modern woman, of course, performs an even more astonishing feat. She manages this domestic republic while also participating in the wider republic outside—offices, classrooms, boardrooms, and war rooms where people discuss killer apps.
At a recent valedictory ceremony, I offered an insight for women in leadership roles.
“Women,” I said, “are the agents of sustainability in systems designed for unsustainability.” Research during the Gulf War found that women were noticeably less enthusiastic about military action than men. However, when wars are framed as defensive, just or necessary, the difference between the two becomes smaller. What women demonstrate, however, is a certain practical habit of mind. Before approving large-scale disruption, they tend to ask inconvenient questions: What will this cost? Who will suffer? And perhaps most practical of all: what happens after we win? The ancient wisdom traditions knew this well. True greatness, they said, is not measured by the noise one makes but by the life one sustains.
By evening, the results of a woman’s invisible command at home are visible everywhere. A household functioned. A workplace moved forward. A tiny constellation of human lives called a family stayed in orbit. If this isn’t also leadership, what is?
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