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February 3 - February 9, 2022
I experienced a mix of solitude blended with a lingering sense of loneliness.
Data shows that the majority of Indian women have sacrificed careers and the world beyond their homes, all for their family and children.
Weaving a human infrastructure from the fabric of friendship is costly and uncertain.
From the drawing rooms of Jor Bagh to the forests of Jharkhand, across diverse classes and communities, Shah Rukh Khan appears as recourse in many teary-eyed moments triggered by the drudgery and ignominy of being a woman in modern India.
indulging in fandom becomes a form of assertion, even protest, amongst poor and working-class women.
Life can often be described as the distance we travel between the people we are and the people we want to be.
But the messy beliefs on display serve as important guides to understand the lived experiences of Indian women without active Twitter handles, those considered too ordinary to find mention in the news.
Because only the deepest dissatisfaction with reality drives us to dwell in fantasy.
khichdi of boredom, guilt and relief.
All goodwill between them evaporated in that room, dried up by his lack of language and her expectation of an empathetic ending.
While the asymmetry of romantic power is unbearable, it is yet to be declared a criminal offence.
She doesn’t harbour hardened, cynical views on many things other than the chronic lovelessness that is the fate of successful women in her city.
I choose to exclusively care for a man while he chooses to exclusively care for himself.
Patriarchy, geography and her preference for handsome men who take an interest in their partner’s career ensure that she will occupy the romantic doldrums of Delhi, where sex is plentiful, but chances of an authentic connection are rare and depleting.
It’s one thing to read, retweet and recite great feminists. It’s quite another to live their lessons every day as a scared single woman in Delhi.
She is desperately seeking Shah Rukh, desperately seeking an escape from this landscape of endless romantic disappointment.
‘employee of the myth of Shah Rukh Khan’.
When we think of love, we don’t even realize how much we think of him.’
Shah Rukh exudes anxiety and vulnerability. He usually plays fragile figures
‘social outsider, wounded by rejection from the club of adarsh men’.
He is built differently from the other two Khans, with a gentler physical presence on screen.
Shah Rukh has been married to his high school sweetheart for thirty years.
Far removed from the patriarchal cow belt of the north, these women in the south adored Shah Rukh because he fit their notion of what it meant to be a good man.
India breaks his heart, and he collaborates with a motley group of underappreciated athletes to use sporting success as a tool for recovery and reconciliation.
My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist.
saddened that as an Indian Muslim you had to often ‘explain your Indianness’.
how he treated women in a dignified and respectful way.
He broke the mould with a more progressive and modern take on what makes a real man.’
Film critics highlight that he has always been a multiplex-friendly hero, popular with sophisticated, urban audiences as opposed to the mass appeal of icons like Salman.
I’ve always been sceptical of this mass–multiplex divide.
Men would constantly speak for and in place of women.
A woman on celluloid is always the Beauty, the Bitch or the Bechari, never even our own muddled desi Bridget Jones.
At the movies, most women remain gorgeous and mute.
Shah Rukh isn’t a feminist icon.
He isn’t a feminist icon, but certainly a female one.
a place where we retired from the male gaze, a place where we sought no permission to be ourselves,
It was one of those fleeting moments in a dark hall where we did not care about being pretty, pleasant and proper.
Love is youthful and naïve in popular Hindi cinema. It becomes an attribute or a noun, not an action or verb, in these images. It is an innate immutable feeling within a person catalysed by another, not a series of ever-changing interactions between two ever-changing people.
‘So, you get my poetry for your music, you get a chance to forget your lost love and broken heart, what do I get by being with you?’ Ayan pulls Saba towards himself and says, ‘Am I not enough?’
the ugliest men are with the loveliest women, and the women are insecure. The men think they’ve done these women a huge favour by being with them.
we are forever frowning or resting our bitch faces.
If New York is the city for epic encounters with strangers, New Delhi is the city where one avoids them in drawing rooms.
He is so comfortable being weak.
most men in Delhi can’t date or marry women who are more successful than them.
And so, through generations of accumulated capital and care, Vidya found herself able to afford tickets to watch any film she wished at any time, all on her own.
that achievement was socially manufactured.
India has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in the world.
She knew her grievances were petty, knowing fully well that you could not hate someone for what their parents gave them.
He escaped the curse of connectedness and scaled heights unknown.
disappointed that the BJP had won another term but relieved ‘that people like the Student continue to be irrelevant to the country’.
