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.