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February 3 - February 9, 2022
I see her smug self-righteous social media posts and feel no solidarity with her.
The pandemic had triggered panic in Vidya, the Student and all upper-class people with cushy lives. We saw the plight of our fellow countrymen from our comfortable homes and knew we were somehow implicated.
a man whose interest in making money and escapist films made him hideously capitalist and terribly apolitical, the anti-thesis to an outspoken feminist hero.
Somehow, we ensure that men and women inhale what society expects of them, and magically, most of us play out our respective gender identities and idioms. Men must earn money and women must earn love.
‘Sexism decrees emotional care and love is the task of women and men come home too tired to deliver emotional goods.’
At the office or factory, you are paid money to accept the frustrating invisibility of your efforts.
sixty-six per cent of Indian women’s labour goes unpaid.
2/3rd labour unpaid!
six out of ten Indian women aged fifteen and older spent all their time exclusively on unpaid housework.
‘job-loss growth has not affected men, but only women in net terms’.
For women with jobs prior to the pandemic, between April and December in 2020, only forty-three per cent were able to continue working while nearly half never returned to paid work.
Despite the already low rate of paid employment
While the Covid-19 crisis pushed many Indian men from good jobs towards precarious self-employment, women simply exited the workforce.
there is hardly any mass outrage about women being erased from the workforce.
‘Ground Reality Uncles’
!
‘In our complex economy, the character of the labour force, employment and unemployment, is too heterogeneous to justify aggregation into single-dimensional magnitudes.’
No one is more sceptical of statistics than statisticians.
15.4 per cent of women hold regular salaried jobs.
And this includes the women who bworkbwith no choice
if women simply didn’t want to work.
Given the continent-like size and heterogeneity of India, it is perfectly possible to live in a micro-milieu which feels like New York, full of ambitious and professionally successful women, without recognizing how small and statistically insignificant these spaces are.
even with the strongest infrastructure and best reforms, families that can afford to rely exclusively on men for money will continue to guard women’s access to jobs because of an obsession with protecting their sexual purity.
supported legislating against inter-caste marriages to protect endogamy.
families desire control over women’s bodies and mobility to maintain the purity of their caste networks.
how economic growth has made it possible for millions of families to practise conservative values by withdrawing women from paid jobs.
India being the only middle-income country where a phase of rapid economic growth and poverty reduction has not resulted in more women working outside the home.
Dropping out of employment allows women to be flexible in how they allocate their energies
With homd being ths xclusive resoonsibility of women this isnt surprising
a 2020 World Economic Forum report on gender gaps in economic participation and opportunity placed India in the bottom five countries of the world, with Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.
Women’s dominant role as caregivers with men as breadwinners
men with pedigree, property and potential can sense their comparative advantage in the mating market and thus exert power.
while celebrating the treatment of people as products.
glamorous, unemployed women for whom marriage was an insurance policy were the norm in his social circle.
preserving their pickled adolescences in the brine of the other.
Beautiful, intelligent and bored, these ladies had invested their entire lives in priming and perfecting their minds and bodies. Now they waited to be desired at social gatherings,
Where you live has historically served as a credible signal
Why do independent women end up indulging toxic males in romantic pursuits?
Wealth ought to obfuscate any need for us to seek out or pine for the beneficence of a posh man.
In a country where only five per cent of women exercise exclusive control over who they marry, we belong to an empowered minority.
The Delhi scene, where feudalism wore Prada and pretended to be a market economy, only made matters worse.
Energies were channelled to decipher this city’s professional codes and patronage networks.
Competition was our raison d’etre.
There was a strange kind of honesty in the sex he was having.
Womankind was best suited to careers as supplicants—earning ad-hoc incomes in fashion blogging and social-media influencing.
I desired only an honourable fellowship.
These stories would be a private ode to silly girls in ordinary places who dreamt of a more equal and dignified kind of love.
We were very different people, but it seemed we saw Shah Rukh with the same pair of eyes. Ours
We were his first set of fans, the first generation of women to claim him. We made him a superstar.
he can dignify a woman so much that she will fall in love with him.
Tired of being statistically rigorous in my regular work life, I decided to follow a curated selection of fangirls instead of using rigid sampling rules to select the women I interviewed.
Marital status was an organizing principle of their selfhood
A sense of social persecution, confusion and guilt loomed large when we talked about their employment decisions.
a career has become a status symbol for women.
Divided by their impulses towards both motherhood and their careers, they were encouraged to delay their return to employment by the meaning they suddenly discovered in caregiving.
