Beyond Bias Poem by Ananta Madhavan

In my ambitious youth I yearned to sip
Potions of other cultures, ways of seeing
Routines of life and scenes beyond the eyes
From an imagined England and the globe theatre.

I came across an idiom in French,
‘Cherchez la femme'. Apparently it meant
That in a dire complexity, or ‘when things go wrong,
Look for the woman; sorry to sound sexist'.

My male yen was roused, expecting romance,
Some hidden tale of dangerous liaisons,
Instead I found the source was a famous author,
A Frenchman called Alexandre Dumas (pere) .

His novel of adventurous Mahicans,1864,
Popularised this gender bias as detective fiction.
I coined an addendum to that crisp idiom:
‘Cherchez la femme, blame la dame'.