Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

These ordinary women practising ordinary change are everywhere around us. Encouraged by education and access to information, a new generation of women, with a stronger sense of ‘I’, hopes for more. They watch films and lust after an actor. They have friends and casual sex. They dare to imagine a self which deviates from their prescribed function as dutiful caregiver. Their professional or personal success has little to do with an online or offline following. With acclaim or public attention. Their hope is not to be noticed at all, or to be noticed in their immediate world on their own terms. Primarily, they just want to be loved, paid well and left alone to do as they please. They seek affordable accommodation and friendly policing systems, not a benevolent patriarch’s protection. They seek men and families that can support their desires and ambitions, not treat them solely as providers of family honour, sex, children and care.