Leisure in an Unequal World: Assessing Causal Relativity Between Resources and Leisure

Leisure in the global sense is an unfamiliar phenomenon in the toil-ridden lives of the marginalized and poor women in Indian villages, where moving out of homes in groups, into the open fields for privy is a leisure activity. Leisure for them is freedom from the restrictions on mobility outside the home. The multitude of toilets built with government aid, being used as storage places for fodder prove the argument of this deliberate choice of practice of leisure by women . Examining the data collected by questionnaire categorized in four leisure activities like reading a newspaper, listening radio, watching television and sitting at the computer. Study revels with 30 married women age group of 18 to 40 in backward villages of Bundelkhand. Findings are that nearly 78% of women do not have access to all besides most of these activities are considered leisure activities indulged by men. The resultant recurring themes were of denial and lack of resources. The data affirmed that television is most popular mode of leisure and access to computer negligible. As a gender norm women practice enormous denial: whether in food, leisure time, questions of health, desires etc...They prioritize their tasks as wives, mothers, sisters and daughters and 99% of them adhered to the retrograde practice of purdah system. All these activities were directly related to the level of education and income of the household. The study reaffirms the implication of possibility for enjoying leisure activity -as defined globally is directly proportionate to one’s education and resources “instability and uncertainty that characterize the world today have their origin in the fact that an immense and vertiginous accumulation of wealth by a few has precipitated the dispossession, impoverishment and exclusion of millions of human beings in all latitudes of our planet.”