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Started reading
February 11, 2024
The pandemic won’t propel me into becoming a marriage-obsessed fiend. I’m not moving in with my friends either.
A group of my closest single friends joke that we’ll rent an apartment building, with each one of us on different floors.
Life can often be described as the distance we travel between the people we are and the people we want to be.
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Because only the deepest dissatisfaction with reality drives us to dwell in fantasy.
Her professional life elicits a fierce loyalty. She feels a warm attachment towards clients and colleagues who’ve helped her survive and succeed. We sense deep gratitude for champions and mentors who have guided her through office life, its hierarchies and casual politics. She is proud of her achievements as a working professional of some import and value to her workplace. That pride—of being visible and valued in a system designed to sideline her, to render her voiceless—offers a reservoir of worth and meaning.
She is preoccupied with the sudden and surprising death of a long-distance romance.
While the asymmetry of romantic power is unbearable, it is yet to be declared a criminal offence.
Patriarchy, geography and her preference for handsome men who take an interest in their partner’s career ensure that she will occupy the romantic doldrums of Delhi, where sex is plentiful, but chances of an authentic connection are rare and depleting.
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It’s quite another to live their lessons every day as a scared single woman in Delhi.
‘In Kerala, we Malayalis watch good movies with good stories.
Romance involved barely speaking to the heroine, all the while protecting her by beating other men black and blue.
If New York is the city for epic encounters with strangers, New Delhi is the city where one avoids them in drawing rooms.
Following the end of her relationship, Vidya became increasingly shocked at the cavalier attitude of the men with whom she pursued relationships.
Only four per cent of all Indians with regular salaried jobs earned more
Being a fan was a problematic admission amongst our friends. We were expected to have grown up by now.
Instead, she became sarcastic and withdrawn, convinced that she lacked the beauty and skills required to socially succeed in the world.
India has one of the lowest rates of social mobility
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.
fourth method to map privilege in India, favoured by economists, is to simply use a person’s ‘consumption expenditure’—
fifth map uses some standardized metric of personal income to classify humans.
Data from 2018 suggests that women hold barely twenty per cent of the country’s household wealth, far behind the global average of nearly forty per cent.
Vidya felt victimized by her own lack of culture, clubs and connections.
Vidya considered herself too much of a Delhiite to let the exaggerated Tamil accents bother her. But she winced through most of the film.
I am implicated in choosing to pursue romantic partnerships prone to excessive trauma-drama,
The nice, sensible boys don’t do much for your loins, while some surprise you with affectations of the worst type of alpha male.
For all the single women I know, dating in Delhi feels like an incessant confrontation with one’s worst insecurities and inadequacies.
we quickly theorized that the upper-class mating market seemed neatly divided between males with unwarranted self-confidence and females with unwarranted self-doubt.
Talking about the data on women’s employment with ‘Ground Reality Uncles’ has become one of my preferred pastimes at Delhi society events.
Their CVs had become their personalities.
Convinced that they would save India from the ideas of those without doctoral degrees,
We’ve all suffered through these men—the clumsy Casanovas, the fat-shamers, the gaslighters, the bullies, those who deify tradition and family honour, all the while celebrating the treatment of people as products.
This partition was discriminating; it allowed sex and flirtation but prohibited authenticity and camaraderie.
They seemed to be standard-issue assholes of global shapes and sizes.
When the magnificent sex-haze of our initial months started to wear off, I noticed how clueless he was about his privilege, unwilling to acknowledge how status preserved his life of consistent gratification.
His social gatherings were anchored on the notion of ‘talking shit’.
Soon, I recognized that love affairs were merely the heteronormative icing on a dreary homosocial cake.
The social environment often felt like full contact sport.
Garden-variety sexism was rampant; women who were unknown entities were often accused of being gold-diggers or ‘operators’.
In the run-up to my application deadline and interview, I was a nervous wreck.
The selection process was extremely competitive and I was possessed by possibilities.
need to send out that application essay. I need to find all my academic transcripts.
What motivated you to apply for this position?
‘It was embarrassing and insulting for everyone. No one is impressed by your degrees and education here, nor by your interview. I wish you’d just calm down and stop being so frantic. Learn to talk about other things. Or sip your drink quietly.’
It was amidst the machinations of moving into my new apartment that I yearned to outsource all of life’s logistical decisions to someone else.
Delhi is acutely stratified:
Why do elite women give in? Why do independent women end up indulging toxic males in romantic pursuits?
Your own success ought to obscure any need to derive meaning from a man’s social or financial station.
