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

by Shrayana Bhattacharya

The puzzle in Delhi is perhaps not why some independent women fall for toxic bachelors, but why they resign their love lives to the trappings of male power and prestige. Why do so many successful women acquire a taste and tolerance for inequality in their private lives?

Men explained my job to me, finding my obsession with it an ungainly, unattractive attribute for a woman.

had been socialized into desiring women who were cheerleaders or status symbols.

The Delhi scene, where feudalism wore Prada and pretended to be a market economy, only made matters worse.

And a part of success was being invited to the right places and showing up with the right person.

But in those long, lazy, languorous afternoons and evenings, I found a man who was completely at peace with himself because he never needed more in life.

The next day I suggested we break up. He smiled and agreed. I never did fit in, he said. ‘You’re too serious, you take everything too seriously.’ I could never separate the Church from the State.

Following our separation, when the days collapsed under a deluge of uncertainties,

Delhi is often described as a capital city in search of its own country.

And there I was, in the great tradition of weak-willed women, attempting to cloak all my feminine anxieties under the farcical shroud woven by male control.

Muddled by the lack of romance in film and life, I decided then to collect and write stories about us fangirls. These stories would be a private ode to silly girls in ordinary places who dreamt of a more equal and dignified kind of love. Stories to escape the tiring and hopeless race to find the One.

Tired of being statistically rigorous in my regular work life, I decided to follow a curated selection of fangirls instead of using rigid sampling rules to select the women I interviewed.

‘I think many men would also stop working if they had a choice and society did not pressure them.

Urban Indian men are also arguably world champions at shrugging off their childcare and housework duties.

International Labour Organization (ILO) between April and June 2018, an urban Indian woman spends five hours on household chores every

‘But once I was pregnant, we decided that I would leave work as his skills as a father could not substitute for my skills as a mother.

Your teenage hormones are unaware of morals or feminism, so you shamelessly sing ‘Yeh kaali kaali aankhen’, besotted by Shah Rukh’s confidence, on-screen charm and good looks.

your college library. You save

explains the inevitability of it all. Your father is

You desperately want that gaze, you want those arms to hold you with that look, the look of a man who worships a woman for her spirit and self.

state government of Delhi, attempting to complete research on how welfare programmes were functioning in city slums.

student-led surveys in the slums and colonies of Delhi to understand employment patterns of urban women,

forever seeking impact; overeager faces fumbling for data and a foothold, we mask our insignificance with postgraduate degrees from Harvard.

It was a public works programme for the elite—a hundred days of guaranteed employment for the idle Indian intellectual.

Everyone was only interested in when I was marrying.’

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.

Honestly, I feel every actress who does an item song should donate to a scholarship fund for girls to offset the harm she is doing.

We only want boys who don’t want us. Those who we think are above us, better than us. You won’t admit it, but that’s your problem also.

On the one hand, she loved her new freedom to date and fuck as she pleased. In the same breath, she bemoaned the pitfalls of her own freedom, sad that she had jettisoned traditional protections offered by finding love through arranged marriages and community ties.

She credited competitive sport for her gumption.

Sports also allowed her to run free from the strangulating courtesies and politeness of everyday life in her household.

For it was Delhi’s romantic scene that triggered her—how it was designed and who it humiliated.

‘Can you imagine any of us breaking up with someone because they don’t speak Hindi?’

‘They can switch their feelings off like a tap.

In fact, I was convinced we were enabling each other’s melancholy.

For Gold was a creature of public bravado—

We would measure ourselves against other people, convinced we failed to possess what they did. We were always running a deficit:

Her body wasn’t absorbing any emotional nutrition coming her way,

But ‘tanhai’, which is Persian tends to dominate in film vocabulary, carrying with it the promise of solitude and the pain of loneliness.

Rahul, kidnaps a woman he is obsessively in love with, Gold announced that she could relate to and empathize with Rahul.