A couple of days back, a website posted an article about a lady in her twenties saying no to a guy that her parents had arranged for because he didn't want her to carry forward her canine love, and she unabashedly shared their private chats. The website had the title of the article as "OH MY GOD YASSSSSSS" and frankly I expect nothing other than that from Buzzfeed. Simultaneously I came across this yet another plastic show on MTV where four girls are vrooming cross country in their heels and pouting, talking about first world problems and sharing their amusement seeing on earthen pots in villages, ripping the local ladies for lyrics in the local dialect and then composing a "rock" version of the same.
So let's talk about it. Is their something wrong in asking a girl who might be your wife for the next thirty years to give up her pets whom she has known and loved more than you? Absolutely. But did the guy ask that by putting up a hoarding on a junction? No. So what is the need for you to make that conversation public? Playing the victim? What about a simple no. Block the guy if he still pesters. What about taking it up with authorities if he still harasses you, but why make something that is supposed to be intimate and between prospective partners an online embarrassment for the guy. And let's not even begin to discuss about a sponsored show featuring first world girls and third world problems.
The fact is that feminism is such a misunderstood and misconstrued phenomenon in our country. To me it always meant a simple thing: more power to women to balance the scales. Not this plastic crap. But instead of being the balancing act, it has become a tool to settle scores, something I daresay a counterpart of the male chauvinism that runs as the basis of our social setup.
Pink released this weekend, another Shoojit Sircar movie with its typically Bong flavour. I am yet to see it myself but what I have heard it is something closer to the original idea of feminism and a struggle against the system. Also Parched is hitting the screens which again tries to establish things as they are in a rural background and what women suffer and go through.
I am a proud and unabashed feminist. I believe in parity and equal opportunities. Much of the debate around feminism in India is distorted and to an extent run by marketing propagandas. I wish people are little more sensible and not everything is cloaked under blanket terms. Heck forget definitions and meanings, just empower the lady sitting next to you such that she is capable to make an independent stand in accordance with a little commonsense. Empower a Dipa to vault into excellence, a Sindhu to smash and if need be a Sakshi to out muscle. Not that we haven't come along but there is a long way to go.
Ciao.
