India, April 1 -- I boarded a flight recently with my family from Phuket to Delhi. As we settled down in our seats, I observed a newly married couple a few rows ahead of us. The wife handed a pillow from her handbag to the husband. It was not the couple that struck me; it was the fact that the lady had kept the item to be used by her husband in her bag.

I was relieved that my two daughters had not witnessed the scene. There would have been loud protestations of sexist or even patriarchal behaviour. The same way that they protest about my wife packing my bags even after almost four decades of married life - for the simple reason that men are, or at least I am, not perfect in that department.

A few years into my service in the railways, I...