"Frailty thy name is woman," pronounced Hamlet. Closer home, Dushyanta declared: "Streeyaha swabhavataha kutilaha." The one and only Manu dropped the literary veil and settled the issue with a prosaic law: "Through their passion for men, through their mutable temper, through their natural heartlessness, they (women) become disloyal towards their husbands, however carefully they may be guarded in this world."

Social theorists may have convinced us now that questions of caste, class, race and nationality will prevent men and women of this world from standing united or divided purely on the basis of gender. But this one, surely, is one of those rare things that has held mankind together across time and space: an enormous urge to research on the "essential nature" of women and put them down in a definition. As deities and damsels in their generous moments and as witches, seductresses, tormentors and weeping willows in others.

After a range of such efforts at hammering women's rounded selves into square holes one of those exasperated researchers even threw up his hands in despair and said that tracking the ways of a woman is as difficult as looking for the footsteps of a fish in an ocean!

But everything changes with time and so have the attributes of "quintessential womanhood". It's got extremely complex and layered. Thy name still remains frailty, cunning, patience and so on. (One crucial definition calls woman the beast that carries the entire burden of ancient values and traditions, you remember?) But it's now also consumerism, gossip-mongering, obsession with lip liner...

Of course, every woman worth her gender has always felt breathless and queasy in these square holes. Every time someone said a "thy name" kind of dialogue, she sure muttered under her breath: "Come on, that one describes more you than me!" We may never have heard her, though, considering that holes aren't exactly known for great acoustics. One suspects Gertrude's closet may have hidden a tale or two about the frailty of Senior Hamlet, and about Dusyhanta, the less said the better. I mean, some cunning it must take to impress a woman by killing a bee!

Let's face it. Women still mutter a great deal under their breath and keep a great deal more locked up. But isn't Women's Day a good time to open closets and wash some dirty linen? It was in a great closet-cleaning spirit that I shot off this question to all my women friends: name qualities that men generally attribute to women, but better describe men themselves.

The question seemed to bust the bolts of many bursting closets and what came my way was a virtual flood. The list pointed a finger right back at men for being... gossips, compulsive shoppers, disorganised, fickle, hot-tempered, possessive, jealous, forgetful, superstitious, switched off when someone's talking, hooked to television and telephone by turns, bad drivers, great sulkers, always late for appointments, obsessive about their looks... A list that threatens to take this entire page if I reproduced it in full.

Many of my respondents followed up their lists with stories, quotes and statistics. One suggested that both Gertrude and Shakuntala could stand shoulder-to-shoulder and throw a famous Sharon Stone line back at Hamlet and Dushyanta about how while women can fake you-know-what (remember the unforgettable delicatessen scene in When Harry Met Sally?), men can fake whole relationships. Yet another guessed that shopping stories in newspapers never carry pictures of men only because objects of their desire - such as bikes and electronic gadgets - don't come in dainty little bags. Some of them sent back smart quotes by women on the lines of: "Women gossip. When men do it, it's called networking."

Smarter ones offered their own memorable quotes: "Mood swings without PMS?! How does that even happen? High one day and sinking low the next. Always tired. Tired equals grumpy. In effect, mostly always grumpy," said one friend. Even before I was done with reading the first, she sent me another mail: "With men, who said what to whom, when and where doesn't end there. Boy will have strident views on every link in the chain. She shouldn't have said that, he should have done that and they cannot expect that result. Not just gossip but also opinionated takes on gossip. And you thought that was reserved for the ladies washroom?"

A television journalist friend who barely has the time to run a comb through her hair before popping up before the camera, wrote: "Men complain about women being too conscious of their bodies, of fretting and fuming every time a roll of fat says hello from under the shirt. Oh, but look which sex is signing up for gyms left right and centre? And raising their arms and thrusting their chest to the barber for a mirror-polish shave. And losing sleep over their trousers getting tighter around their tummy." She had more to say, but that can't be repeated in polite company.

I heard many more stories on how the beauty industry is right now busy powdering, puffing, nipping, tucking, covering, camouflaging, bleaching and generally making mankind fairer and lovelier. Women who run unisex saloons told me how mothers come accompanied by teenage sons, and their eyebrows done in a jiffy, wait patiently for the young lads to finish their elaborate facial and black head removal procedures.

As I was ruminating over all the stories, with a self-congratulatory washerwoman spirit, my television journalist friend put a self-critical thought in my head: "Don't women construct as many stereotypes about men?"

Can't deny that, can we? Don't women say men talk only cars and money, men are sloppy, men are loud and noisy from all ends, men can never tell green gram dhal from black gram dhal...

But the crucial difference is that most of it (with the possible exception of that noisy bit) is what men would acknowledge with a macho pride. And it rarely becomes part of commonsense (and sometimes codified as law!) like it does with women.

A good way of checking this out is to do a random search for quotes on Google. You will come across "Hey hey! We are like this only!" ones by men as opposed to "Come on, we are not like that" ones by women. Women always sound a bit defensive; always struggling to get out of the square holes they are lodged in rather than trying to hammer men and their angular selves into round holes.

Is it simply a matter of power equations? Or do women resist such an act of revenge because they know exactly how it feels to be cooped up in a hole and they are too kind to push someone else into one? Virginia Woolf once said: "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse to be locked in."

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