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

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

But she refuses to bargain with her romantic expectations. Maybe it is all those silly Shah Rukh films and interviews. I have mad standards, I am expecting a movie star in real life, we hear her say to herself. The price she pays for these ‘standards’ are loneliness and some social discomfort. Her exes don’t face such terrible odds in love, they’ll do all right. No man in Delhi with the same attributes as her will face the same shallow pool of romantic options, and the resulting fears and predicaments. If I were a man with the same job and degree, I would be swimming in a sea of dates and attention. But I am not a man.

Nearly half a century later, in 2005, Manmohan Singh’s government amended the Hindu Succession Act to allow property to be inherited by women.

2005 !!!!!

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.

Earning love is, of course, far more laborious than earning money. In

For women, love is hard work. Beyond the drudgery of domestic chores, the responsibility for keeping track of other people’s feelings and needs has by default been devolved to women. In our society, it is women who must display consideration and patience, who must respond with equanimity when, as is the norm, love’s labours are neither recognized nor duly rewarded.

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.

Oxfam has found that Indian women put in 3.26 billion hours of unpaid care work every day, estimated to be a contribution of nearly `19 trillion to the Indian economy.

In a republic of ‘hurt sentiments’ where innocuous web series, tweets, stand-up comedy routines or food cultures trigger legal cases and public protests, there is hardly any mass outrage about women being erased from the workforce.

In my early thirties, I finally understood that many of the straight men my age, those who operated outside the arranged-marriage market, had been socialized into desiring women who were cheerleaders or status symbols.

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.

Women have to fight with tradition and have to accept losing the fight.

Real life required far more bargaining. A man could love you, he could be persuaded to marry you, he could be a terrific father, but he wouldn’t necessarily champion your freedom.

And so, Shah Rukh The Star will persuade your adolescent self into believing: Being a man’s wife means being something truly special. A husband will value and honour your inner integrity; he will co-sponsor your emotional well-being.

As per the India Human Development 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.

‘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.’

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.

Love is supposed to defy logic, not be entrapped by it.

Love becomes an attitude of generosity towards oneself and the world, not a self-maximizing transaction between two people.