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February 3 - February 9, 2022
I knew what I wanted in life. I wanted to be like the men around us. I wanted to watch films without having to take permission or feel guilt.
‘They can’t control our performance in jobs or exams, so they make us feel bad about ourselves.’
The Indian Institute of Infinite Confidence.
public works programme for the elite—a hundred days of guaranteed employment for the idle Indian intellectual.
Being middle class was a state of mind, a series of moral choices.
Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost.
the world was extracting emotional rents from the Accountant.
They take the form of annoyance and misery and are levied by individuals, very often by loved ones. I call these impositions taxes because they take away some of what an individual earns, diminishing the joys of success.’
parents may change their attitudes if they see that a girl has a better chance of a good job than a boy.
Unless women feel safe and confident about pursuing their ambitions—be it work, family or both—unless families and loved ones celebrate and support their work outside the home as much as what they do inside, increased female employment shall probably fuel greater conflict and stress for working women.
I feel every actress who does an item song should donate to a scholarship fund for girls to offset the harm she is doing.
In these glittering new temples of Indian consumerism, old tensions of caste and class are still rife. Teenage entitlement remains eternal. I suppose everything cannot change.
seeming to discover himself as he discovers her.
a man for whom communication was intrinsic to connection and love.
She thought of beauty as a clear marker of a cultivated sense of self. A sign that a girl found time for herself, that she appreciated herself.
twelve per cent of all commercial pilots in India are female, the highest proportion anywhere in the world and twice as high as Western countries such as the US and Australia,
No one thinks of celebrating the accomplishments of the female in-flight crew
Gold had to manage the expectations, annoyances and attitudes of hundreds of people every day.
how the role of women in the workforce is imagined in a patriarchal society
She was the first female member of her family to take up work outside the home; the first to live in Delhi. Certainly, she was the first in her family to fly.
remember her late at night, sitting in our courtyard, staring at the stars. She said this was the only time she had to herself.
but I suppose I have been sad in ways she never had to experience.
‘The problem is also with us girls. We only want boys who don’t want us. Those who we think are above us, better than us.
They never said it clearly, but I knew that my family thought that a girl’s only job was to marry well.’
my education as a hobby, and marriage was my main occupation.’
Claiming comfort in public space, being at ease with one’s body in the company of strangers, remains an everlasting hurdle for Indian women.
‘As many as half of the young men and parents of adolescent girls surveyed felt that the best way for girls to be safe was that they avoid certain public spaces altogether, or that they should simply avoid going out after dark.’
Where it was perfectly acceptable for a young man to deploy the grammar of love and romantic commitment to three women at the same time, yet withhold the offer of marriage, and eventually use the lack of said offer to suggest that he was never ‘serious’ in the first place.
‘Come, Fall in Love.’
There was a sudden expansion in the supply of migrant single people dis-embedded from their traditional communities, working in service-sector jobs
But Love made her angrier—the sheer inequality of the business of loving.
She knew that the market for love—this whole heterosexual mating game—was a profoundly unequal space, in which a young, straight, attractive and accomplished Indian man operated with the complete certainty that no matter how his body or prospects changed, there would always be a young, attractive, accomplished woman waiting to give birth to his children.
We have rules here, and they exist only for girls.’
They spoke in discrete lectures, offering discourses rather than conversations,
‘You have to look spontaneously beautiful.
I am not at all proud of the Jaisalmer fort or the city.
But she was so proud of Paris, behaving as if she built the Louvre herself! I don’t love my past as much as they love theirs.’
elegance became something white people had invented to make brown people feel bad about themselves.
It seemed to her that the burden of emoting, waiting, playing it cool was all hers. I asked her if this was any different from the women of her parents’ generation.
pleasures and pain of young women navigating the demand and supply of romantic commitment.
He never humiliates her or makes her feel small.
I think they all wonder how jealous she’d make their friends at the club.
this sexiness is actually an attitude.
He would show her off to his male friends, and in exchange, he would pay for her extravagances and offer protection from Jaipur’s male gaze.
But everyone goes to the gym to look good in bed.
she applied concealer on her spirit,
Wax strips for the soul.
She believed that not one single person was as single as she was:
persistent sense of isolation amidst a crowd, described by the cultural critic Olivia Laing as the very definition of loneliness.
on an academic island of red-brick buildings, starchy WASPs and fall foliage.
