My Hope For 2024: Maybe A Utopian World Will Come To Exist For Women

For 2024, I dream of a day, when maybe a utopian world will come to exist for women. This dystopia will die. A day when women will get complete control and power over patriarchy. And the world will become their oyster and the perfect place to flourish and thrive. 

A society where women find freedom of speech, expression and complete right of agency towards their reproductive health. They must be able to muster the courage to express themselves freely for safe sex and satisfaction too. Someday, maybe sex will cease to be skewed only for the version of male pleasure. Women too like men, must have the ability to enjoy it. They will soon realise that their body is not only to produce a child and an heir, while all along overlooking her sense of pleasure in the communion. The fear to be erased that if she expresses her needs, she might be labelled a slut. 

I always hope against hope that women in Iran find a way out of the oppressive regime that killed a 22-year-old girl for her visible hairline. Hoping the Iranian moral police realises that they too have hair and in the years to come, the angry women of Iran may rise in revolt, to tonsure men with a visible hairline and maybe a beard too. 
Wrath is dangerously strong among angry women. 

The horrific murder of babies in Gaza will give birth to angry mothers, who will avenge the untimely death of their children and their family members. May each of these women rise from the rubble like a phoenix. 

2024 must be a year of more rain for the farmers. More children of domestic helpers who will brave the change to become graduates and post-graduates. With this, they will change the fate of their poverty forever. May such mothers never fear the unknown for their children. 

LGBTQIA+ is legal in India. Here is hoping more women from the community find the freedom to express themselves and enjoy public places in togetherness with their partners, without being hit upon by men, who think they can become straight if they give the men a chance. 

Here is hoping the world stays green, moist, enveloped in warm sunshine and the liquid moonlight healing the broken parts of our planet. May the pregnant women in parts of the world that are at war, get food to eat, and a good hospital to deliver their children. They are bringing in the next generation of more people who respect history but don’t stand vigilant in wanting justice via wars and attacks. 

2023 was a year of reckonings, a lot of pent-up rage for babies killed across the world, and women defiled and murdered. Hairline becoming the point of contention for morality, justice not delivered and the grim reality of punishment and politics. In this heap of darkness, I pray that my writing throws light ahead for me, to not fall into a pit of nothingness. I end the year with gratitude for the light found among strangers and friends when I felt I would be buried alive in my grief. 

Hoping the rage is restrained yet continues unabated through my writings. My blood-dipped pen nib must become a brighter red with the coming year as I owe this honesty to my readers who have helped me find myself anew. 

Views expressed are the author's own.

Mohua Chinappa is an author and runs a podcast called The Mohua Show.