Chup Quotes

“Stay unfit for leadership While we may not have a science of leadership, we have developed a finely honed science of non-leadership. It is embodied in the training of women we have seen so far. Train girls to feel unsafe, live in fear, stay at home, shrink, judge themselves and their bodies, make girls feel wrong, inferior, immoral and dirty; don’t let girls speak, reason, question, have an opinion, argue, debate; teach them modesty, to wait and follow; make girls suppress their emotions, seek only approval, always please others perfectly, especially men, never say no, avoid conflict, never negotiate, and never initiate action, and then bundle all this behaviour and spray it with morality. This training would make anyone unfit for leadership. No wonder only 5 per cent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women. Studies show that confidence matters more than competence in influencing and selling ideas to others. And women are less likely to ask for a big job or assignment; it is risky and immodest to shine or want to shine.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Jyoti, 36, is stylish, with a shaved head, and is raising two young daughters. Jyoti says, ‘Trust means faith in someone for your own peace of mind. The biggest reason I trust easily is because it brings me peace to imagine that the world is good, that I am in no immediate or long- term threat from anyone. Having doubts destroys my peace so I choose to be at peace by trusting.’ She listens well to other women and displays what researchers call both cognitive and emotional empathy.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“I have realized that every woman on earth is jealous of another. Even my closest friends, they are always jealous, not genuine with their advice, even when they are happy for you, there is comparison in their hearts. Males will never be jealous. Monica,”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Carefully groomed in fear and dependence, women as a category are doomed the moment we classify these behaviours as personal  faults.  Women  start  to  hide  in order to hide their flaws. And if women as a group are such faulty, fearful, helpless, irritable and irritating creatures, why would any smart woman want to associate with even more of them? It would be smart to run from women and run them down. This is exactly the intent of the careful construction of a cultural design that fills girls with fear and flaws and trains them to go into hiding, to be alone. Akeli hoon”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“There are more restrictive rules for girls than for dogs, cats or cows. Everyone knows these common boundaries, ‘boundations’. These restrictions often continue through college and even till the day girls get married. Curfew hours range from 6 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. For Abhisha, 20, studying commerce, the curfew hour is still 6 p.m. or 6.30 p.m. She says wistfully, ‘I have a lot of dreams, like sometimes to hang out with my friends, but my mother and father allow nahin karte , they don’t allow it. Because they think it is not safe for women. I feel they won’t allow me sleepovers, so I never ask, I feel anxious that they might refuse. Hesitation hoti hai , there is hesitation.’ Once she hesitatingly asked her father permission to go somewhere and he did not allow her. She did not talk to her father for a year, but she did not defy him or fight back. She says, ‘Now I have let it go. It was something small. But it affected me a lot.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“When I asked Dimple what hurts her the most about her father, she said unhesitatingly, ‘He doesn’t trust me. Always restrictions.’ Now Dimple goes out when she wants, but she no longer trusts herself to make any decisions about work or boyfriends. She stays frozen in fear. Restrictions prepare girls to be fearful even when the restrictions are removed and when they are technically free. Bahar nahin jao , don’t go out, is perhaps the most universal restriction. Aarushi, 19, a student at Lady Shri Ram College who fought with her parents for the freedom to go out, says, ‘Now it is very difficult for me to go out. There is always fear. You know people are watching. You have to protect yourself and there is no one with you. You don’t feel relaxed outside; you feel relaxed only when you are at home. I can’t just go freely anywhere, even when my parents don’t say come home early.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“When I asked Dimple what hurts her the most about her father, she said unhesitatingly, ‘He doesn’t trust me. Always restrictions.’ Now Dimple goes out when she wants, but she no longer trusts herself to make any decisions about work or boyfriends. She stays frozen in fear. Restrictions”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“We got freedom but there were so many boundaries. If we were given that liberty, I would have been standing somewhere in life. I had to fight with my dad for everything.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Fault finding, with everyday ordinary things like how a girl combs her hair or how a girl stands or talks, is a strategy intended to dampen confidence”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Silent fear disconnects her from others and she blames herself. In Indian culture, the fact that most fathers hold power has a big impact on their children’s self-esteem. When mothers say ‘ Papa se pooch ’, ask  Papa, girls know who has the power. As power holders, fathers’ criticism has a particularly harsh sting on girls. Criticism and constant fault finding are a core soul- sucking strategy of fear-training. I found women’s accounts of their childhood particularly empty of praise, a pattern confirmed by Dr S.  Anandalakshmy,  who  has been India’s leading scholar in child development for over four decades. She was also my professor in college. An astute observer of families, she said, ‘Yes,  it’s true, we don’t praise easily and girls receive much  less praise than boys.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Sabina, 24, who works in an advertising agency in Mumbai, was brought up by no-saying, fear-filling parents. When she was young and even now, she says, ‘I feel scared to ask, I hesitate, I don’t know why, even for valid issues, like with teachers . . . Some kids are able to say what they want, whether the answer is yes or no. But me, I am stupid, I never say anything. I never ask so I never get, and then I curse myself.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“I call the way girls are raised ‘fear training’, literally, training girls to become fearful. It is training based on no and don’t. No, you can’t do this. No, you can’t do that. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t go there. Girls get little practice in testing themselves in life; they start to live an unpractised life. The very thing girls long for, life, slowly becomes fear of life. The paradox is that, as adults, women find it hard to say no to other adults. But they have no difficulty in raining no down on their young, powerless daughters. The problem is not the occasional boundary-setting no, but the constant, unrelenting no. A regime of noes cracks the confidence of girls.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Isolation is the enforcement mechanism that classifies women’s problems as personal rather than systemic and therefore political. Political problems are  important  and worthy of public attention but personal problems are, well, just personal and private, and not worthy of public scrutiny or public policy. Personal problems are a personal responsibility. Dysfunctional women deserve to be ignored.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“depressed woman is no threat. Millions of depressed, helpless, malfunctioning, even screaming and isolated women are no threat.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“But her parents love Amu. And Amu too loves her parents dearly.  She still reports her joys and successes  to her family first, particularly to her father. But her traumas, her failures, her deep questioning about what  is right and what is wrong she keeps to herself. There   is no great Indian family ready to hold her and listen with empathy and compassion, clarify assumptions and values and come up with solutions to new problems in new times. Listening deeply is not agreement. It is just listening deeply.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Boys and girls have to be trained to respect and honour their own bodies and each other’s bodies. India’s unbalanced sex ratio, increasing inequality and habit of keeping girls at home, while young men travel in bands will make women even more vulnerable in the future, not less.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“When healthy sexuality is difficult to achieve for heterosexual women and men, the dilemmas of a young person navigating a  different  sexual  orientation  that  is legally a criminal act are difficult to imagine. India’s attitude towards homosexuality is gradually moving towards acceptance. This is despite the flip-flop of the courts in removing section 377 of the Indian Penal Code written by the British Raj over a century and a half ago. This act criminalizes ‘carnal activities against the order of nature’, a reflection of British sexual fears rather than Indian culture which at that time had a much more relaxed acceptance of the human body, fluidity of gender and sexuality in its many forms. Section 377 legalizes fear of homosexuals.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“It is a time of sexual change, but not everything has changed. The Hindustan Times-MaRS Youth survey of 2014, for example, shows that while 61 per cent of youth believe that premarital sex is no longer a taboo, 63 per cent want their partners to be virgins and in Delhi this number is even higher at 67 per cent.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“One of the core themes to emerge is that even while women are aware of their sexual rights their sexuality is still dominantly about  making themselves desirable to men. Women assess their body and their sexuality through a man’s eye. They want to please. Navtara, 19, says, ‘I sought appreciation in physical appearances . . . so if a guy was not making a move on me, I felt there is something wrong with me.’ Just”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Growing up in ‘loving’ homes that deny bodies, deny sexual zones of the body, deny sex education, categorize girls’ bodies as dangerous, dirty and polluting, and expose girls to inappropriate touching or sexual abuse, makes establishing healthy sexuality a Herculean task for both adult women and men.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Some people put a spin on these old cultural practices and claim they are good for women because it ensures they get rest during their most vulnerable periods. This is an even more dangerous argument, because it distorts a harmful taboo that isolates women into a form of ‘caring’. It converts mistreatment into societal generosity. Why do women need to be labelled dirty, dangerous or impure or kept isolated or not given food in order to rest? Women’s rest is regulated because if a woman were to decide when she wants to rest she begins to exist. Culturally that is a sign of trouble.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Many girls still learn the bare biological facts from friends, movies and the Internet. Parents, schools and legislators fear that once children know about sex they will become sexually active. Yet  several  studies  from the USA show that making ‘virginity pledges’, for example, makes no difference to the extent of sexual activity among young people and that, contrary to fears, comprehensive education about sexuality leads to delay and less engagement in sex, with fewer partners, as well as greater use of contraceptives.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“But pretending that sex does not exist has serious consequences. Surveys establish that 50 per cent of children in India are exposed to some form of sexual abuse and 20 per cent to extreme forms. Fearful parents unwilling to deal with the widespread presence of sexual predators amongst us expose their uneducated and therefore unprotected children to sexual danger.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“When parents are uncomfortable with sexuality, it leaves little girls unguided, unprotected and alone, and curiosity can tip into sexual abuse.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“When the forbidden zone is so buried in shame that it is called ‘shame-shame’, it is impossible to be rational and logical. When even grown women confuse the place of urination with the place where a baby comes from,    it displays a dangerous ignorance about basic anatomy. Most women are not sure about this, really. Grown women continue to use the words that children use for vagina. Men, on the other hand, have a lot of words for vaginas, none of which are used in polite company or denote respect. Most are used as swear words. This is true all over the world. No”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“If girls do not objectify their own breasts, others do it for them.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“Anjali, 19, studies at Gargi College, in Delhi. She and her younger sister were raised disguised as boys but without the freedom. They were always dressed in boys’ pants and shirts even as little girls. There were no frocks or dresses. A barber always cut their hair short. No hair clips or ribbons. No make-up, not even kajal. They were denied all signs of femaleness in clothes, hair, jewellery and they were kept at home as much as possible. Once, when Anjali returned home with nail polish on her nails from a friend’s house, her mother hit her and the nail polish was scraped off. These restrictions continue in college. Anjali feels suffocated and slipped me a note in a college classroom requesting me to intervene.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“A strong woman wears a salwar kurta, a sari, pants   or a dress. A strong woman speaks in Hindi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Kannada or English. A strong woman is vital, joyous and alive with dreams, hopes and thoughts. A strong woman can love and care deeply for her family. A strong woman chooses marriage and family, early, late or never. A strong woman chooses to stay at home and never work outside the home or chooses a career and family passionately. A strong woman chooses to compete and excel or not. A strong woman chooses what and when to sacrifice for her family and society. A strong woman cares and pleases but also knows when to stop. A strong woman is not by definition oppositional; she chooses when to collaborate, when to oppose, when to support and when to be a solo player. A strong woman is unapologetic about her choices, yet she has the wisdom to know when she has wronged someone and the humility to say ‘I am sorry’ without making ‘sorry’ her life mantra.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“It takes a strong woman, and usually a male sponsor, for a woman to emerge as a powerful leader in a man’s world.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women

“work I don’t like to come in the limelight, I like to work in the background. I don’t like head-on controversy, I don’t want to attract upheaval, I don’t want to create a problem, I want shanti , I don’t know why. You learn it from your childhood, women’s likes and dislikes don’t get so sharp, so it’s not really a sacrifice – it’s an attitude to get along from childhood on.’ She says she rose to the top because of supportive male bosses.”
― Deepa Narayan, Chup: Breaking the Silence About India’s Women