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February 3 - February 9, 2022
Urban Indian men are also arguably world champions at shrugging off their childcare and housework duties.
And you can only give a hundred per cent to one goal in life’.
‘discouraged workers effect’,
felt disproportionately responsible for the care of children and elders in their homes.
married working women would often finish an eight-hour shift at the office and spend another four hours managing or doing housework.
‘It’s not that my husband is not supportive or progressive. I think he would do more if I asked him for help.
I should stay at home and enjoy it
Shah Rukh had become a symbol of their youth, a time of optimism, a time when they believed it was possible to find a man who would love them as they were and always stand up for their choices.
Liberal women slept with a combination of married men and non-committal single men. Conservative women sang the song of ‘compromise,’ capitulating and marrying bores.
How did films configure the template of our desire? How did Shah Rukh become the ideal man?
The gendered implications will only occur to you much later.
Love will be a monogamous fairy tale.
The ideal man would be a foreigner to oppressive patriarchy by believing in the freedom to love and being able to shower his beloved with unabashed affection.
The film equates romance with doing the dishes and considerate domesticity without an ounce of sex.
All these men are revolting for love without rejecting tradition, though they are torn by its whims and strictures.
self-deprecating-self-aggrandizement.
Shah Rukh was part of the first generation of celebrities who benefitted from India’s telecom revolution.
These televised conversations marked the beginnings of the actor’s best performance till date: his version of the unapologetic middle-class superstar.
You occupy public spaces with an attitude of sustained vigilance. You shrink.
poster boy for marital monogamy.
women in the workplace were professionals, not sexual objects for male pleasure and conquest.
Attention from a desirable male becomes the only currency that matters.
an ideal man is also the best man,
Cultivating beauty will emerge as your permanent and primary job, a guaranteed pathway to love.
Fandom was a way to cultivate a self. Socially awkward, you escaped into fantasy. But fantasy extracts its toll.
Sexual romance never survives a shaadi.
Despite husbands making token offers to help, there was little most of them could actually do without the housework becoming even more onerous. Wives
We’re used to each other, and we’re building something, but it’s not the love Shah Rukh sold us.
You allow Shah Rukh to rise above the men he essays.
You fully acknowledge the triggering aspects of these films, and yet choose to celebrate the love Shah Rukh offered women in them. You are eager to suspend disbelief for your hero.
‘It was so unusual for a man to sell himself as a good husband.
Obscurabad.
As you finish middle-school exams with many distinctions, you imagine you are preparing yourself to live the life of an intellectual forever dressed in black.
The force of the husband’s family consumes the wife. Marriage, in your world, excommunicates a woman from herself.
‘I don’t think men can grasp how sad so many of us women are to marry them. If they knew, I don’t think they would want to go through with it.
Sex is not central to your idea of intimacy, conversation is.
He looks at his lovers with a remarkable register of adulation and admiration, a spiritual and bodily embrace you’ve never actually experienced.
shackled by the pillars that organized their lives. Workplaces, families and men are yet to fully adapt to the recognition, love and freedom these women expect.
elite women have usually represented a key segment of Shah Rukh’s multiplex audience.
Elite women, like Vidya or the Rajput Philosopher, had choices, no matter how constrained.
Poverty and precarity dictated their decisions to work.
Our lives are spent offering accounts for everything
Women make the best accountants—we have answers for everything, we expect to be probed, our lives are audited.
our successes, however small, surprise us.
Give an Indian man a good exam score, a good degree and a good job and he thinks he is God
Exam-based excellence was her retaliation for the male worship she perceived in her world.
certain that his sudden helplessness was a ploy to prevent her adventures in the world outside.
‘Whatever it is that’s holding you back, it’s not going away unless you stand up and start forging your own path with all your might. Stop whining and start moving.’
first axis of inequality within her home that she found spiritually unacceptable.
But he made me feel guilty about something so simple, about liking an actor and watching his films.
