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February 18 - March 3, 2022
Less hearteningly, millions were losing jobs, employers were withholding wages and those of us with resources were drinking away our pain and fear with liquor delivered to our homes.
The surge in registrations for online matrimonial sites through the health crisis in India suggests that my discomfort is shared by many.
Espousing the virtues of Shah Rukh marks a woman’s enthusiasm for expressing desire rather than becoming desirable.
Life can often be described as the distance we travel between the people we are and the people we want to be.
Why aren’t family and friendship enough? Why doesn’t my professional life make me as happy as my ex did? Why does a man’s love matter so much? It’s one thing to read, retweet and recite great feminists. It’s quite another to live their lessons every day as a scared single woman in Delhi. I am sorry for being this self-obsessed when women in our country are protesting and struggling, but I can’t deny my hurt. Where can I deposit it? Can you help me?
A woman on celluloid is always the Beauty, the Bitch or the Bechari, never even our own muddled desi Bridget Jones.
cinema hall was a place of no apologies, a place where we retired from the male gaze,
I tried and tried when I was younger to learn something about love, and since it wasn’t taught in school, I turned to the movies for some clues about what love is and what to do about it.
If India’s employment rate helps us track our economic transformation, popular Hindi film extravaganzas track our moral transformation.
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.
just eleven per cent of adult Indian women who had never been married.
And most Indian women learn to love the men they marry.
only five per cent of Indian women above the age of forty had stopped giving birth after just one girl child.
Her economic success allowed her to find love on her own terms, she did not need a man to support her family or herself. It allowed her to indulge herself, Shah Rukh and her fandom.
Strange how people obsessed with talking about removing class divisions keep using all kinds of cultural markers to suggest how gauche others are, to keep them down.
‘interesting careers in arts and letters or policy’ in India were only available to people with enough family money to take risks and serve long and underpaid apprenticeships.
just over eight per cent of Indians have college degrees and under five per cent file income tax.
Such extrapolations would suggest that not only is India becoming more unequal, but inequality between the mega-rich and the merely rich continues to grow.
Men must earn money and women must earn love.
the responsibility for keeping track of other people’s feelings and needs has by default been devolved to women.
women accounted for only 10.7 per cent of the workforce in 2019.
The poverty of choice plagues our women.
‘pure relationship … where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only insofar as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it’.
In a country where only five per cent of women exercise exclusive control over who they marry, we belong to an empowered minority.
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.
You build a fragile femininity, always wanting to be the fangirl in relationships, seeking men whom you can place on a plump patriarchal pedestal.
few experienced emotional equality or domestic parity in their relationships with men.
Poverty and precarity dictated their decisions to work. Marriage and motherhood were not lifestyle decisions, they were the only path to love, status and security.
