The Way They'd have us Roll.

Just saw Star Plus’ promotion ad.
Description: A young woman, barely in her late twenties. The role she essays is that of a modern 21st century woman.
So she is up obscenely early, wakes her toddlers up, readies them for school, whips up a meal that’d but Sanjeev Kapoor to shame.
Next pit stop: the pati parmeshwar.
She, the epitome of dew-eyed freshness, saunters in; lovingly wakes said hubby up and moves on to charm and win her next target: the in-laws who love the very earth that their beti-in-a-bahu’s-disguise walks on.
After this, the same macho lady gets to her job [where she is seen as a TV news presenter- whose electric persona blows everyone away]. After she is done, effortlessly, climbing the every ladder of success there is to climb, she and her elegantly shod feet makes a quick detour home, where viola! The entire family is waiting for her just so that they can celebrate the youngest tot’s birthday. But like you guessed, nothing ever happens in this family without the smiling courage of the woman in question.
So she ambles in, late as ever, and everyone (who prior to this were sulking and nodding off in their chairs while looking at the door with ill-suppressed longing) immediately perks up and the celebrations finally begin.
This, Star Plus will have you believe, is a regular day in the lives of thousands of women across our country. And the woman who this ad revolves around, who so effortlessly juggles everything that is thrown at her, is the ideal woman.
To everyone at Star Plus, i have two things to say. Who are you trying to fool and convince?
And, why in the name of all that is awfully patriarchal on your channel, are you making our lives more difficult?
More and more women today are dealing with multiple roles in the family. Gone are the days when the woman was the nurturer, the care taker and giver of the family. Thanks to globalisation and the advent of nuclear families women are doing so much more with their lives. [here, I’m mainly referring to women in the urban strata’s of society who have the means and the opportunity to make these economic choices. Many may even argue that there are women in the lower, poorer sections of society who essay these multiple roles with the same amount of ease, if not more.]
However, some things, notions, expectations haven’t changed. Women are still expected to care, rear and bear. Everyone assumes that just because one is a woman, one will know how to cook, clean, take care of kids and perform other such wholly ‘feminine’ tasks.

And there are instances where, women who do not relate the performance of such tasks to their sense of identity are brow-beaten by society and family to learn to ‘accept’ what everyone assumes will be and should be their ultimate role in life. They may do other things. A woman can work if she wants to. She can aspire to be as successful as she wants, but she is also continuously reminded, time and again, that her future does hold babies, the promise of marriage and a family- even if that’s the last thing on her mind.
I know many women who are extremely successful- professionally. They earn enough to live comfortably and to take care of their immediate family. These women are mostly in the age group of 27-32 years of age. They are very well educated and know their minds. But one thing that is common to all of them is that they are all single. And the interesting thing is most of these women are not single out of choice. Yes, there was a point where they put their careers ahead of the pressing need to get hitched and now society looks at these ‘aging’ spinsters with pity and horror. How will they now find good boys from good families? How will they rear beautiful children? How will they live?
And more often than not, because these women are a minority they buy into this belief. The belief that you need to be in a stable heterosexual relationship, that has gained approval of society, in order to be blissfully happy.
And if this wasn’t bad enough, the media makes things so much worse. As if the constant portrayal of the ideal kind of physical beauty [read skinny and fair- which more than 80% of our population isn’t and never will be]isn’t bad enough, you have something like Star Plus telling you what you, as a woman today, should be able to do and should be doing-if you aren’t already. No pressure.
It’s not an ideal world, Star Plus and neither are we women living in it.
Not all of us like washing dishes and cooking up storms in the kitchen. Not all women want kids and no, not all women swoon at the sight of a gurgling baby.
Not all women want to come back to a house full of expectant people, whose lives will collapse if the lady in question doesn’t smile wide enough or make their favourite food for dinner after a hard days work.
I know a lot of women love the fact that they can do all of what I just said and so much more. Who doesn’t want to have that perfect life? We’d all like to walk that tightrope with grace and dignity-ideally.
But like I said it’s not an ideal world.
Everyone falls once in a while. Everyone has those tough days, months even, when nothing goes your way. And, if you’re a woman, everyone expects you to just deal with it and still be the support system that you are to so many people.
And, it is in times like these, when you and your ad with ideas of an ideal woman, serves to do nothing but complicate life further. The pressure is not just from within the structures that we call families but also from external sources that define the way in which families think, operate and what they find acceptable. The notions of idealism are bred and nurtured by such ads and exemplified narrations of virtues.

Just a Game?

I have been meaning to write this for a while, especially because this incident happened two weeks back. But back then, I was too involved, too incensed, with what had happened to allow for this post to make any more sense than a mere rant against the evils of the world.

But time has lent perspective to my understanding of the event and it is with this insight that i’m writing this.

Two weeks back, two friends of mine had decided to spend a free Sunday at a local mall in Chennai that is quite far from our college. The most economical and speediest way to get there is to take the local train. Now a local train station is a stone’s throw away from our college- it is the Indira Nagar MRTS station. The station, is like all other local train stations in Chennai, in an absolute state of abject dereliction. It has two entry ways, the latter one being in that part of the building that has been abandoned where you’ll see construction material lying stacked and rusted and water collecting in imitation of miniature cess-pools.
Now, my two friends had chosen to walk through this second door, as we all generally do because its closest to us when walking from the college.

It’s 3 o’clock. It’s a bright, sunny day and the girls are walking to the ticket counter that’s just a couple of feet away.

This is when they see a man walking towards them. He seems like every other man that you’d run into while travelling on one of these trains. Except, he wasn’t.

He suddenly lurches towards one girl, puts his arm around her in a half nelson hold and starts dragging her behind the closest pillar. All this while he keeps trying to shove his face into hers, while the girl too shocked by what happened, remained immobile.

My other friend, realising what is happening and quick to react to the situation- hit the man on the head with her phone and started screaming for help and trying, unsuccessfully, to pull the man away- all at the same time. The sudden screaming jolted my captured friend into action and she started screaming as well.

No one came to their rescue. The girl finally managed to release the hold the man had on my friend. The startled man stumbled back and began running out of the station. The two girls ran after him, not aware of what they were going to do even if they did catch him.

When they reached the entry of the station they were horrified to see the man run pell-mell into the incoming traffic, with nary a concern for his life or those driving the vehicles that he was running into.

The man never looked back and the girls watched him run into the very lane that goes to our college.

Noticing the girls shouting, a group of boys (they mustn’t have been more than 20 years of age) crossed the road and entered the station and started walking towards the girls.

Before the girls could reassure them that they were fine, they heard a piercing whistle followed by the lyrics of a bawdy hindi film song.
The startled girls looked at the boys with absolute disbelief. The people they’d assumed were trying to help them, were on their own little eve teasing trip.

Being clearly outnumbered, the girls hastened to get out of the train station and out of the line of fire.

For many days after this incident occurred, my roommate was traumatised. She refused to step out by herself and she’d jump every time she saw any man walk towards her. She’s still adamant about never setting foot in that station again.

She had just one question after the incident occurred. ‘Why?’, she asked me.
Why, is what i asked myself.

What was that men are after? What drives these men to such acts?

The intent in the above scenario clearly wasn’t rape. And more often than not, eve teasing is never about causing any physical harm to women.
It’s more about the power that you enjoy over that individual- that brief moment where you know that you have the ability, should you choose to use your ‘masculinity’ in that manner, to stimulate mind numbing fear in an unsuspecting female.

Do these men otherwise feel so emasculated that the only way to remind themselves of their burgeoning manhood is by violating the personal space of women they don’t know?

Or is the reason more personal? Why is it that more often than not, it’s the poor men from the slums, who are otherwise mostly unemployed, uneducated, generally part of a ‘gang’ that resort to such activities that more often than not are directed towards women from the middle/upper classes of society?

Is it their way of bringing natural justice to themselves for the lot that they were given?
Something else that is intriguing is the attitude that most women take towards such incidents.

Obviously, there is the initial element of shock. ‘How could this have happened to me?’
But, what galls me is how, more often than not you always wonder- ‘Should I do something about it?’ You’re asking yourself, what is the appropriate reaction?

Why are we, as women, so scared to do something? And this is something that I have noticed is generally the norm with women from the higher echelons of society- the ones from middle/upper class. The women from the lower middle class or from the poorer sections of society surprisingly will react to eve teasing with more immediacy, outrage and firmness.
They won’t hesitate to put these men straight and they will make a scene. [Obviously, some women from the upper classes I am referring to will also react similarly in some cases]. But the fact still remains, that there will be more times when someone will tell you, ‘this happens all the time. It’s happened to all of us. The best thing to do is to not react.’

And we’ll listen.
I know there was a point when I did. When I was so incensed with how violated a man made me feel when he flashed me on a crowded train.
But, I didn’t react.

And in hindsight, the answer becomes obvious. I didn’t want to make a scene. Somewhere in the back of my head, I was wondering if I’d done something to provoke him. I didn’t know how the man would have reacted. What I would have done?
I consoled myself thinking the man was mentally sick- that he needed help.

I’d been raised to avoid confrontations. It’s easier to sit back and accept that this happens often. That it happens to everyone. That, men are evil. That, the best thing to do is avoid such situations.

But, the answers are never that simple and straightforward.
A lot is at play here. Can we women unlearn decades of what has been told to us repeatedly?
Even if we can, how much can be unlearned?
Is the society that we live in, the society whose wrath we are so often scared to incur, willing to accept such changes?

And what upsets me more than anything else, is that it takes incidents like these and considerable hindsight, that bring about the change in any individual.