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January 19 - February 1, 2023
Because only the deepest dissatisfaction with reality drives us to dwell in fantasy.
While the asymmetry of romantic power is unbearable, it is yet to be declared a criminal offence.
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.
India’s prestigious schools produce what Rabindranath Tagore once called ‘a community of qualified candidates,’ compelling young students to become ‘victims of the mania of success in examinations
Social scientists use six methods to map hierarchies of privilege and class in India. The first is caste.
Second, political scientists such as Devesh Kapur have suggested that we use college degrees and a person’s ability to pay income tax as measures to define the middle class.
A third broader method that economic sociologists such as Maryam Aslany use combines the nature of a person’s job, income, lifestyle, education, social ties, aspirations and attitudes to identify the middle class.
in 2011, she found that twenty-eight per cent of India belongs to the middle class, of which about three per cent are upper middle class and fourteen per cent are in the lower middle.
them. A fourth method to map privilege in India, favoured by economists, is to simply use a person’s ‘consumption expenditure’—their ability to buy goods such as food and smartphones.
A fifth map uses some standardized metric of personal income to classify humans. In 2015, a Pew Global Research study defined ‘middle income’ populations as those that earned between US$10 to US$20 per day.
a sixth map of India is needed. This map relies on measuring ‘wealth holdings’. Wealth or a person’s net worth is tough to estimate. The government does not transparently release all tax and income data. However, statisticians approximate by adding up the value of land, buildings, vehicles and financial assets owned by an individual, and deducting their debts and loans.
later, in 2005, Manmohan Singh’s government amended the Hindu Succession Act to allow property to be inherited by women. Amidst the pandemic, in August 2020, the Indian Supreme Court further clarified that women could claim these property rights even if they were born before the 2005 amendment.
Combining tax data, survey data and national accounts statistics, economists Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel try to create a sharper measure of national income in India. Using these methods, with all their limitations, they find that the top ten per cent owned fifty-six per cent of national income in 2015, increasing from thirty-five per cent in 1992.
In fact, amongst India’s economic elite, concentration of wealth has amplified. The wealthiest one per cent of Indians owned twenty-one per cent of all income in the country in 2015, up from just ten per cent in 1992.
Statistically, the Gini Index amongst India’s top ten per cent—a measure of the degree of wealth inequality with 0 representing total equality and 100 representing total inequality—increased from 37 in 1991 to 49 in 2012.
Anand and Thampi find that wealth correlates well with caste. In 2012, the average wealth of a ‘General’ caste person—a statistical term to indicate upper castes—was four times that of a Scheduled Caste person.
despite the growing inequality across castes, in 2012, the Gini Index of wealth inequality amongst urban upper-caste people (77) was as high as the wealth inequality across all Indians (74).
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.
The edifice of India’s economy is built by the money men make and trade held together by the invisible love and unpaid care women offer.
A 2017 World Economic Forum report found that sixty-six per cent of Indian women’s labour goes unpaid. Only twelve per cent of men’s labours were unpaid.
Despite sharp increases in the numbers of educated women, this distribution of labour has remained the same for the past two decades. As India’s economy grew at an average of seven per cent between 2004 and 2011, the share of women in the labour force fell to 32.6 per cent before plunging even further between 2011 and 2017 to a historic low of 23.3 per cent.
In 2017, as in 1993, nearly seventy-one per cent of urban Indian women between the ages of thirty and thirty-four were engaged solely in unpaid housework. Even amongst urban women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine, close to seventy per cent (69.4) exclusively attended to domestic duties.
I explained that less than a quarter of India’s wealthiest urban women work for an income. Women with postgraduate degrees have the highest chance of being employed. However, the per cent share of postgraduate men with jobs is nearly double that of women with the same degree.
‘These job gaps widen in northern states. However, gaps exist in the more progressive southern states as well. For example, in Tamil Nadu, nearly eighty-three per cent of urban men with postgraduate degrees were in the workforce compared to 46.3 per cent of women.’
‘If I narrow the 2017 numbers further to exclusively focus on urban populations between the ages of fifteen and fifty-nine years of age,’ I said, ‘which helps us avoid counting children and the elderly, 74.2 per cent of men were employed. The same estimate for women is 19.8 per cent. Even in states reporting the highest share of women with jobs, Sikkim and Andhra Pradesh, less than a third of urban women work for an independent income.’
The two cities reporting the highest share of women with regular paid jobs are Raipur and Coimbatore. Raipur makes me scratch my head. Coimbatore is easier to explain, home to one of India’s largest garment zones
large. In Bengaluru, for instance, only 22.2 per cent of women are in the labour force compared to over three-quarters of their male counterparts. And urban men tend to earn more than urban women too, in each bracket of class, caste and education.
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.
Very aptly worded
The 2017 government employment survey tells us that the seemingly ubiquitous female faces in the media—billboard models, journalists, authors, musicians, creative professionals, performing artists and sportswomen—account for about 0.5 per cent of working women in urban India.
Whoaw that's a tiny percentage!
In 2016, a survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) amongst Indians aged fifteen to thirty-four reported that eighty-four per cent of their marriages were arranged. Nine out of ten of these weddings were within the same caste.
Even in 2021, a well-designed Pew survey on social attitudes found that more than sixty per cent of all Indians wanted to ensure women did not marry outside their respective caste groups. Using such data, activists argue that caste and patriarchy are married. They highlight how families desire control over women’s bodies and mobility to maintain the purity of their caste networks. Such control is a key reason why women’s employment opportunities are minimized; the ultimate goal is to reduce any chance of boyfriends or workplace romances from taboo communities. In fact, a key theory explaining
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For the past fifteen years, half of all OBC or SC men have always been employed. Female employment rates within these groups have halved in the same period. Sociologists posit that these gaps are not only due to discrimination, but also because communities want to emulate the puritanical practices of the upper caste, among whom female employment is the lowest.
Despite rapidly increasing educational attainment for girls and declining fertility, 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.
‘Unsurprisingly, a minority of Indian women earn an independent income. Women’s dominant role as caregivers with men as breadwinners is an enduring characteristic of India’s urban employment landscape,’
If we wish to define a line to divide women across the social spectrum into the haves and have-nots, the ability to find free time or independently ‘buy leisure’—drink, smoke cigarettes, watch movies, go to the beauty parlour, attempt self-care or do absolutely nothing—emerges as one of the strongest statistical and sociological definitions in all of south Asia. The poverty of choice plagues our women.
Privileged women are often those who exercise complete control over their bodies and how they spend their time.
In Delhi, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be busy building his harem. The natural corollary is that single women in possession of independent incomes must run in the opposite direction.
:D
bet. Anthropologists say that the northern parts of India are part of a ‘classical’ patriarchy belt. Women transact in the ‘patriarchal bargain’—putting up with all kinds of indignities imposed on them by men and family life, because the gains from cooperation seem vital.
In a country where only five per cent of women exercise exclusive control over who they marry, we belong to an empowered minority.
Sociologists call it the ‘discouraged workers effect’, where women feel discouraged to work as their husbands make significantly more money than them and the workplace does not treat women fairly.
According to data collected by the International Labour Organization (ILO) between April and June 2018, an urban Indian woman spends five hours on household chores every day, while an urban man spends twenty-nine minutes on housework. India ranks in the bottom five countries of the world when it comes to the share of men helping in housework, alongside Pakistan, Mali, Cambodia and South Korea.
R. Sivabhogam, who in 1933 became the first Indian woman to qualify as a chartered accountant. She was the sister of the acclaimed Indian educationist and social reformer R.S. Subbalakshmi.
‘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.’
Survey in 2012, eighty per cent of Indian women need approval from a family member to go outside the home to visit a health centre. Three out of five women need permission to visit the local grocery store. In 2015, only forty-seven per cent of urban women could go unchaperoned to a public space.
If I was getting married, then there would have been a big explosion of joy. I guess a good job is not seen in the same way, but I really think it should be.’
‘The working world is unfair to many women, yet even when they succeed, they must confront another series of challenges. Their hard-won successes are taxed in ways that men’s are not. The taxes I’m talking about aren’t paid in dollars and cents or imposed by the government. 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.’
‘I think we need lots of safe hostels and scholarships for women and to find ways to reduce the money families have to spend if a girl wants to study and pursue a career,’
In India, families are prepared to spend on a boy’s studies and on a girl’s marriage. That mentality has to change. Even with scholarships, hostels and reserved jobs, if men, parents and in-laws don’t feel happy about women wanting to study and work, nothing will ever improve.’
And can you remember any film that tells young girls that they need to find pride not in the man they are with but in being financially independent?
