Don’t know whether I should call it ironical or coincidental that the much celebrated month of March highlighting Women’s Day closes with the onset of April Fool’s Day! Welcome to the mayhem in my mind regarding Women’s Liberation and the Modern Indian Women.
Trust me when I say, I was the atypical feminist all set to wage war against the privileged male bastion, holding them responsible for every wrong in the right gender’s life. Been There Done That!
But the progress of time and the striking reality of the cliché we all believe as feminism has changed a lot, in the way I see and believe. In fact it has brought me to a threshold where I don’t think, question and let alone believe the so called feminism; I just wonder…
Nah, I am not turning into a male, I cannot be that imperfect 😉 but I feel all that hue and cry about feminine liberation rose and tread ways all through these years, almost a century and then ended up with someone shouting APRIL FOOL at the end. (Sounds like the Month of March… Doesn’t It?)
We wanted liberation, career, appreciation, and what not… We ended up with double work (office and home), inequality at work place, size zero, and a generation of women pouting like chimps to make one look sexually attractive without realizing that POUT is synonym to SULK!!!
I am not complaining, I am just wondering.
Some of us have managed to create the Work-Life Balance, at least in India with the help of the Great Indian Kaam Wali Bai (house maid). Her liberation is yet to start so let us not tread into that topic and linger around the more happy liberation of the educated class. We, who lost the narrative many years ago, thanks to the liberation of the Indian Television. Yes, I am talking about the Nazi Movement in Indian television with the turn of the millennium. We were just in process of admiring and accepting the struggle and survival of women portrayed in realistic format like Buniyaad, Udaan, Aarohan, we chanced upon Ekta Kapoor and in came long running shows which told us that we are not perfect unless we manage to get out of bed with at least a pound of make-up and 2 kilograms of jewelry all set perfectly. The fact that we can wake up with saliva dripping down are cheeks, with hair like a sloth bear was completely hushed up and we were supposed to marry the same man again and again (at least thrice) even if he has just returned from the dead. Whining and pining to be under the male and scheming against our own gender (anything remotely female – even the house pet), was glorified and we were typecast as well covered, sari clad, scheming witches or worse, victims of our own gender, with the main job of serving a fifty member family.
Cupid or our very advanced Kama Dev had no role to be played as love was projected as a sin and our only dharma was to marry the man chosen by our family. (Liberation went out of the window)
All I did was liberated myself from watching television and stuck to the good old paperback. And for many years it continued until forty became the new young and popped up a series of streaming services like Prime and Netflix on the internet. Feminism and liberation took a new turn.
I started watching the online streaming new age series (thankfully not never-ending) and the April Fool feeling cropped again. Suddenly the thirty some-things heading towards the new young, working their way through the seniors and millennial generation in perfectly tailored body suits and stilettos were the central character(s). They moved in groups of three or four and had an agony aunt in the form a gay friend. This I presume was the outcome of a certain popular series ‘Sex in The City’.
The problem, while some of the series were entertaining to watch, a realization dawned upon me – I have to stop idolizing the sari clad, jewelry hanger of the ideal Indian Woman and start looking up to an overly ambitious, wickedly cunning, sex starved married woman who is ready to ditch her best friend by going around with her hubby… HELL NO, THIS IS NOT WHAT HAPPENS IN REALITY
The 40 something woman is way more mature than her 20 year old cousin still figuring out love on Tinder. She knows how the Stupid Cupid plays its games and has once at least foolishly given into its scheme, only to emerge into a wiser self, knowing what it means to be sorority sisters. She has learnt that sex is highly overrated and can result in prototypes of the male bastion (only just cute to look at) and then all said and done no matter how she slogs in service at office or home there will always be something not rightly done, so she may just leave it and sprawl along with her girl friends, enjoying a glass of wine, chatting.
She doesn’t need her man to accompany her to the discotheque or a blood and gore movie, for she would rather sneak out to the theatre to feel the real emotion with girls who understand the e-word and its upheavals during the hormonal disarray.
I wonder if the makers of these programs really look into the schematics of the middle aged woman’s social make-up carefully. When they will look beyond the glamour and gaiety, they will notice that the only thing she starves for is to pack off her male and his offspring to some remote vacation place, get into her pajamas and hang around with her sisters from another mother, ranting away through the night, eating and drinking and finally waking up like a Sloth Bear with no one around to judge her for anything and everything.
Stupid Cupid doesn’t fall into her scheme of things and is nothing more than a cute chubby baby flying around with an arrow in hand with no diapers. She is ready to pull his cheeks and coochee-coo it once in a while but, dare he try to mark her with the arrow; he is in for a surprise. For, he is now dealing with the woman who knows that Women’s Day is a sham and she doesn’t want to be a super hero to anyone.
She is not falling for the months of Spring-Trap any more, be it Valentine’s Day in February or Women’s Day in March. She knows that at the end of this tunnel, life springs out with a loud April Fool. So, she has chosen the path less taken. She is ready to give Cupid a lecture on why he should cover himself up, when in public, and not trouble people by poking arrows.
Originally posted on Momspresso
Through The Coloured Glass 
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