Ekta Kapoor’s Coffee and a Tale of Wives

Posted on April 7, 2011 by secondsaturn

Ekta Kapoor turned out to be effortlessly articulate with a definite command over the English language. This is notwithstanding the fact that English is the lingua franca of the Hindi film industry and one of the markers of success in the business is able to speak the language effortlessly. But Ekta’s choice of words, her vocabulary of adjectives, her syntaxes, her figures of speech reveal fluency over the written form of the language in a sharp contrast to the glib of Karan Johar. Ekta’s accent too is of an educated Renascent Indian, a relief from Madhuri’s poor English spelt out in a forced yankee tongue, or the effulgent Preity Zinta or Kareena who seem to think and talk in English but may not be able to construct sentences requiring more education and erudition. Ekta’s huge empire in the television, she said, was the by-product of her desire and ability to tell good stories. Indeed, Ekta does have the ability through the use words and phrases and metaphors to create vivid images in the minds of the listeners. And hence Ekta also vividly bared her mind and heart to the listeners when she spoke of a peculiar psychological affliction within her – an intense female jealousy by which she can stand no woman purporting to be in an affine relation with a man. This includes her father’s female fans all of whom she imagines as potential threat to her father’s fidelity and she cannot seem to stand her brother’s girlfriends.  This jealousy is serious because in her childhood when she was not as yet wholly socialized, she would scratch, maul, hit, or punch any woman irrespective of her age that included little girls.

The suspicion that any and every woman is interested in having sex or possessing otherwise men of her blood family is a serious psychological disorder, emanating from the strange social world that we inhabit. In broader terms, this mental illness among women like Ekta can alone go a long way in keeping women out of participation in public and civic life and circulate the thesis that if a woman is not married, she is a threat to the society. Such a mentality had once been very cruel to widows; it is this mentality that is now harassing women who decide to be independent entities. It is this mentality of Ekta’s that she shares with the nation that makes her tell stories of such suspicion of women towards women and make its viewers consume them greedily. The problem with such construction of every woman in the civil space as a potential threat to a married couple is unfortunate; unseen to most feminists and gender social scientist, women empowerment can never happen until and unless women overcome the fear of women. This fear lies at the heart of women oppressing women, a fact that men love to cite whenever they sense female bonding. The gay activists by seeing sex in everything have also contributed steadily to possibilities of larger female and hence human bonding.

As I was mentally composing this note to post it in the facebook and walking through the corridors of Aurobindo Place, I heard a shrill voice in an unstoppable outburst. I looked around for the source of the sound until I found it emanating from within one of the shops and not an irate customer but the wife of the shopkeeper, who also sits at the counter shouting her head off at her husband. This was the third casualty of the shopping complex!! There are two other shops where I have seen the husband and wife, both of who sit in the counter quarrel in a way in which the woman publicly humiliates her husband. The other day, at the stationery shop from where we have been buying our papers and pens for over quarter of a century now, the wife now in her mid-fifties misbehaved with Madhusree. On another occasion, the wife at the counter of the appliances shop misled me in such a way that I came out of the shop empty handed. The goal that these women work towards is to disgust and discourage customers away from their shops; a sly way of sabotaging their husband’s wealth, something that so many women do but we never seem to recognize as an academic problem. At the root of this sabotage by wives lies a deep insecurity, an irrational fear that husbands may stray. Why stray? With who? No, this is not true but women conjure this up in their own minds. So when the teenaged daughter of the owner of the appliances shop steps inside the air-conditioned zone, her mother screams at the top of her voice within my hearing that her father has many “female friends” and is enjoying himself. I am revulsed enough to move out of the shop and decide not to visit it again.

Aurobindo Place Market is like the atavistic Meena Bazaar of the Mughal forts, where the women of the modern day aristocracy visits. It is a shopping complex where women do almost all the shopping; this is not a small fact, but a rather significant one because only socially empowered and economically independent women do their own shopping, in the rest of the cases where women have less power, they are either accompanied by the men or as in the lower middle class Kolkata, they never emerge in bazaars. Women shopping are thus a matter of social class, the higher you go, the more relatively, I insist relatively, independent the women are. They drive their own cars, they do their own shopping, they take their own purchase decisions, wear resplendent clothes and perfume, they have interesting hairdo. This “bibiyana” instills sharp pangs of envy among those wives who yearn for such wealth and its consequent freedom.

Looked at more empathetically, the wives of Aurobindo Place are a trapped lot. They emerge from social classes that have little money to let women be free; they must depend on their husbands for their needs. The fathers never handed them over what was due to them has legacy and instead has passed it on to the husbands as dowry. With this dowry the men have set up shops; sometimes even pressurized women to leach their parents for more. In these shops now visit the women they always yearned to be but cannot be. The unbearable jealousy against the women of the upper class gets construed as imagined romances and infidelities of their husbands; the dainty, flowery, genteel fair sex will not even cast a glance and paan chewing, oily faced, pot bellied ugly men that the shop keepers are. But the wives would love to think that way because using such excuses husbands can be cornered, mentally tortured and also be beaten out of the shop floors where the wives would emerge as the sole proprietors, collect the money, steal much of it and then on the sly slither into the corner of the complex and so what their women clients do, grab and gulp an aloo tikki. I have seen this happen many times with the wife at the counter of the stationery shop. She (and I realized this only now after twenty five years) would charge a rupee or two more each item and then sneak out behind Wimpy’s to bite into a burger. After I realized what I saw, wives have become persons to be pitied. All that uncontrolled outbursts and public humiliation of their husbands, snide comments, rude behavior and dishonest business are concealed class wars that are fought between woman and woman, secretly, silently and invisibly.

I have often wondered why Ekta focuses so much on the family and what the role of the family is in the larger scheme of things and why the family must now be the metaphor of everything starting from the office, to the club, to the apartment home and the State ! The format of the family where every kind of conflict must arise, be located and also resolved is typically a domain of the woman. The protagonist is a virtuous wife because of her sexual insecurities emanating from other women; she senses no threat to her being from her husband, but from other women related variously to her husband or known to him as his colleague, or friend or even neighbor. Ekta, in her own insecurities betrays the fact that she too holds in her mind an image of herself as the wife. No wonder then that she denounces sex, finds sin it all the time, fears it as a danger to her existence and snubs it as “down-market”. Interestingly Bollywood insiders had never been so class conscious before now because before Ekta, Sonam was saying that trying to look sexy was tacky; this is a way of admitting in a manner of self defense that sexiness is a property of the upper classes in which they wish to belong to but do not and that women of the reference class are all threatening to the women of their class. The metaphor of the family then centers around women, and through this women break their bonds with every other woman, suck up to men, give them powers, make them the masters, get abused and beaten up and hold the giant structure of patriarchy. The family is then a silent process of patriarchy, not run by men but by women. Women steadily give up all that is valuable to them by subjugating themselves when they draw on the powers of men to give them identity, security and social worth. This is the feminine constitutiveness of our society, something that is so subtle, so hidden and so speechless that it has remained invisible and silent even to the feminists.

Ekta Kapoor places herself in the midst of this war. She uses woman against woman; her protagonists are usually the wives from the social class of the shopkeeper, a class that earns money more easily than it earns its freedom. These virtuous wives, no matter how much they tout their traditions, their devotional arsenals, within their hearts they know that they are incarcerated, harassed, dependent, subjected and controlled. These women therefore displace their frustrations against other women who they construe and construct as vamps. Hence smart, rich, successful and independent women in Ekta’s serials are also the dangerous ones who the wives can only contain and compete against when they themselves get trigger happy, or corrupt or lascivious. The good woman turns bad when she must emerge out of her oppression while an entire issue of the class war is relegated into the unconscious and woman gets pitted against the woman. This huge class war which is fought at the level of women is then neatly packaged and put forth in tele soaps as the consensus of the media. It is through these soap operas that the powers of the lower middle class housewife, through who women are everyday breaking bonds with other women, taking themselves away from public life, compromising on their autonomy are constituted as a grand consensus. Everyone is supposed to be happy to be or to be with a Parvati or a Tulsi. But Parvatis and Tulsis are miserable in their everyday lives; the wives of Aurobindo Place show all.

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Days At Avadi

Posted on March 31, 2011 by secondsaturn

I got some old photos from home this time, taken many seasons ago, when one winter for the Christmas vacation, we went to Avadi to create some entertainment for Dadu. The “we” included my parents, my younger brother Pam, Madhukaka, a much younger cousin of my father and his elegant and charming wife, Chitrita Kaki. Dadu, who was then in the seventh year of his widowerhood, often fell to nervous anxiety and depression out of a feeling of boredom. One way he could overcome this was by meeting the members of his family, most of whom, in their prime years were away in the towns of their postings. In Avadi, lived Dadu’s nephew, my father’s older cousin, Montu, who Pam and I just called Jethu.

I never knew of Montu Jethu a.k.a Jethu, till he suddenly visited our home in Dover Lane while Ma, Pam and I were away visiting Bachi, who had just been posted to Bombay to “man” SBI’s research wing in the Head Office. When we returned, we heard from Dadu that Dhirenda’s son had visited home with his family. I recalled this name as belonging to one of Dadu’s brothers who died young leaving behind his adolescent children and wife, one that also died in a short while after her husband’s death. The young children were brought up by the oldest boy, Montu who left his studies and joined the “military” as a soldier. This very Montu “returned” home so many moons later and one of the persons he met up was my grandfather, known to him as Chhobu Kaka.

The house was agog with intense excitement, not so much with our return but with the accounts of Montu’s visit a week before that. Gita, our young maid was so excited that she had seen a soldier in flesh and blood who called Dadu as Kaka, wore a kara like the Sikhs and was very smart. His wife, the other household help Kanakdi gushed, was so smart, had such a sharp nose and wore a beautiful sari. It seems that she sang a devotional song for Dadu and her sweet voice was heard resonating in Gita and Kanakdi’s ears even then. Baba could not stop raving about the daughters, Shubhra and Shukla and while I had not yet seen them, I knew that they were to be my role models hence on. Jethu was just at that time posted into the Indian Army’s military research wing to design what we now see as the Vijayanta Tank. His home was to be at Avadi, a suburb of Chennai, fourteen kilometers away from Mount Road. It was to this home that we were now to repeatedly visit, sometimes as a transit to other places in Tamil Nadu, or to be dumped when the sambars and Chettinads got too much on Pam and my stomach as Baba and Ma tireless travelled through South India, or when we fell ill and needed to be diagnosed, or when we were just bored and needed a holiday.

Avadi’s home was idyllic; it was like a first class train compartment with rooms in a row and a covered corridor in front. The lattice of the corridor was tiled and painted brown while the house was painted in white. From the tiles hung flowered creepers, trees threw in huge shades; shrubs marked the borders of the premises. In the backyard, jackdaws cawed, squirrels ran as Jethi laid out her pickles to dry. The bathrooms were huge and so was the kitchen and spacious nooks and corners where Jethi stored her jellies and homemade wines !! The corridor was lined with books, the windows dressed in cute checked curtains and simple mats and durries with minimalistic wooden furniture made the home look more like a scholar’s than a soldier’s. The living room had an elaborate music system that Shubhradi would put up each morning and dance away to Santana’s music, while Shukladi would tune in to radio Ceylon to catch Hindi film numbers. The home oozed of peace, focus, concentration and of the family’s moral and intellectual confidence. No wonder then a visit to Avadi would fill me up with the right kind of vibrations that one needed to go on with.

Jethu and Jethi knew everything. Jethu knew all about machines; he could fix anything from hair dryers to jeeps. He had an amazing thirst for knowledge and read books on all subjects. He made elaborate notes on everything and anything, right from washing clothes to local history of Mylapore. If he had to accompany us on a trip to the Deep South Jethu made sure that he knew mythology, history, architecture and geography of the Pallavas, Cholas and Vijayanagar back and forth. He was also a very talented photographer and a good amateur sound recordist, recording Dadu’s songs, my reading of Jane Eyre, Pam’s giggles and much to Jethi’s changrin, her eternal arguments with Shubhradi and agitated exchanges with Rayappa or Nagamma, the domestic helpers on whose stolidity the home at Avadi stood firm and organized.

Jethi did everything; she cooked, made pickles, stitched, embroidered, made doodles, fixed toys and trinklets and sang. But she also knew how to wince a lathi and a dagger and knew some essential Krav Maga; being a soldier’s wife was never easy. Jethu labeled each one of her kitchen jars as sugar, salt, holud, dhone, randhuni and so on. Jethu fabricated special spoons and jammed them into the sugar pot, or the oil can so that at each pouring not more than one spoon could spill out. This needed intense research, but Jethu did all of that. He re-engineered his ambassador with dual control systems because Shubhradi and Shukladi were taking driving lessons. For most of the times, the car was painted ink blue and was called the Saptarshi, after the seven soldiers who were in his company and died fighting when he charged into Rawalpindi in the 1967 campaign against Pakistan.

I loved every inch of the home at Avadi. The convenient hooks where one could hang one’s clothes, the giant tub where Rayappa, the orderly soaked the linens, the stove on which water for tea would boil on through the day because the Dasguptas are heavy tea drinkers, Jethu’s corner for Jethi’s harmonium, and the pen for the chickens when Jethi experimented with poultry farming. There was a first aid chest kept conveniently in the pantry at the end of the house, from where Jethi rushed out with cotton and betadine when a squirrel sharply bit into Rayappa’s forefinger when he tried to catch the rodent at Pam’s request. There was also a bathroom beneath the staircase where Shukladi cut out and pasted Amitabh Bachchan’s photos, because in the halcyon era of Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh was the underdog and had no right to be seen in the more public spaces such as the study desk or the library along the corridor.

Jethu was a typical Dasgupta male, who believed that marriage meant the end of life for a woman. He tried to plan careers for his girls sitting in his exile at Avadi. Shubhradi was to study medicine and had made up her mind; Shukladi was flummoxed over what she should pursue, modeling or painting, or prepare herself for marriage. Rajada was away at IIT and in Avadi, he was a mere photograph on Jethu’s desk. It was a home a la Jane Austen, girls and a father with Jethi being forever exasperated at Jethu’s leeway to his daughters. Jethi complained often of Jethu’s leniency between her domestic chores, her music practice and her tending of the huge hound, Jackie, the mildest mannered, friendly and affectionate dog that I have ever met. Jackie had once killed a Cobra, his trophy that Shubhradi put in a solution of formaldehyde obtained from the Madras Medical College laboratory.

Shubhradi and Shukladi were enamoured by Chitrita kaki, who according to them was the most beautiful and dainty creatures ever created. Madhukaka was a typical St Colamba and IIT Kanpur person, abrupt, smart, matter of fact and a workaholic. So Shubhradi and Shukladi thought that he was not romantic enough and insisted that Madhukaka develop some romance into his personality. All of us used to laugh and Jethu recorded our laughter. The days at Avadi went on like this; just like a slice of life from a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film. This photograph is one among such million moments. Rayappa took the picture; he omitted Jackie who was slouching at Dadu’s feet and in the subsequent photographs we can see him more clearly.

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Reading about Autism – Mark Haddon: The Curious Case of the Dog At Nighttime

Posted on March 25, 2011 by secondsaturn

I have just finished reading Mark Haddon’s book called the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The protagonist is an autistic child and like all autistic children, excels in observing details closely but unable to absorb a gamut of information to obtain a holistic picture. He focuses deeply and acutely and is unable to make a holistic picture of things around him. All that he does is to note the details down and leaves the reader to piece together his numerous observations into a grand story. One glance at the pages leaves us in no doubt that Karan Johar’s film, My Name Is Khan has been totally inspired by this curious case of the curious child written in a curious style of the autistic mind. As a film produced in the industry assembly line of Bollywood, the Khan film belongs to the larger group of films made on disabilities – Black, made after the Miracle Makers, a take on the life of Hellen Keller, Koi Mil Gaya, a story of a spastic child with amazing learning skills and life skills, Pa, a film on a child afflicted with an ageing diseases. When different abilities have caught Bollywood imagination, surely it has to do with some advantage that such “disabilities” now accrue.

 I think that somewhere the digital society is inundated and choked with a surfeit of information that beat us down through every moment of our existence. There is too much news, too many views, too many visuals, too much music, too many books, too many films, too many events and not to miss out, too much food to eat and taste. We get breathless by trying to even glance at every option that comes to us and making a well reckoned choice is a near impossibility. In such a state of affairs in the world, our disabilities become the only way to eliminate some options and slow down the rate of stimuli hitting upon us every moment at an alarming pace. Being disabled gives us the time to absorb things at a pace at which our brains would be more comfortable with. When the world is far too fast for us, it is only by slowing ourselves down that we can bring some sanity into our existences. Hence being disabled is a preferred state of being, like Picassian portraits, utterly broken to the point of being repulsive and even grotesque for those challenged the idea of the world doled out to us as being the most perfect while it was not. In a world like ours where choices drown our sanity and a surfeit of images camouflage reality, the only way to beat the gloss to access the gross is through disability. Disability has truly become a different ability.

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Bhangra on women’s day..

Posted on March 9, 2011 by secondsaturn

Madhubani posted a series of songs renditioned by Kali Dasgupta together with his interviews. In the ensemble of songs from many regions, there were a few bhangras along translation of lyrics. Hence I knew for the first time in my life what Bhangras were really about. I always associated the Bhangra with the exuberant and joyous culture of the Sikhs, shrugging shoulders with a musical nasal snort to keep the beat on; a vivacious and vigorous movement of the body and colourful costumes of silken lungis, pagris and dupattas. I felt that the Bhangra was an invitation to actually shrug the woes of the world off with a wnahu, wnahu..little did I realize until Madhubani opened my eyes to it that it is indeed so. I used to imagine that the Bhangra is by males while the Giddha is by females. Only after Madhubani’s post I realized that in either case, the lyrics were composed by women.

In one of the lyrics among Madhubani’s posts was a song composed and sung by women as they made their chapattis in the community oven, known as the Sanjha Chula. The women sung how unfortunate they were because their husbands were away fighting wars. If they returned home alive, there was little comfort for they would have to return to fight each time till they died. If, however, the husband came back home dead, there also was no comfort because the husband was fighting for the British and his widow could also not be called to be a martyrs widow. So either way, a woman was doomed, wnahu, wnahu, khair, chhaddo ji.. koi nahi, koi nahi. This is almost ascetic resignation, an active, this worldly asceticism, something we have all along imagined to be the monopoly of the Protestant Christianity, but is seen to be very much present among the women of Punjab, Sikh women, who beneath the soot of the oven live life in the mundane everyday routine and cope drudgery and despair with the sublimity of saints !

There is another point I cannot fail to notice. Which British were the Sikhs fighting for? If it was for the East India Company, then the song may be dated to the Mutiny of 1857. If it was later, which is unlikely, given the archaic nature of the language used, it could refer to the later wars that the British fought. But why was the British an enemy of the Sikhs? In those days, one would imagine that the enemies of the Sikhs were the Mughals and the Afghans; why would the British not be just another power in the game? Were the Sikhs thinking of themselves as a nation? Were the Sikhs imagining a sovereign India? Surely, historians would say that the idea of the nation was not yet formed. Whatever the case may be, whether it is Sikh nationalism, or Sikhs in Indian nationalism, it is the women, from behind the sallow salvers and sooted ovens helped weave the discourses of the nation through their songs of sorrow that one had to shrug off and proceed on to live another day. It is possible that the weeping women of Punjab laid the foundation of nationalism. It is also possible that elsewhere in the country, it is so. When intellectuals accuse men in Nandigram and Singur of putting women in front of the human pile to protest against military crackdowns, I think that they miss this huge hidden history of women who actually founded the idea of the nation and nationalism.

Logically speaking, at least in India, women are the ones to discover spaces. This is because they migrate on exogamy, they are traded as slaves and carted as prostitutes; they also leave homes to become Mira. Who else but they would know the value of space, who else but they would know similarities of culture and religion across disparate lands?

I also see women at the foundation of the modern State, raging amazons in the French Revolution charging through the Bastille; a Matangini Hazra, the veiled women in Iraq, the armed woman holding up her children in Afghanistan. It is women who are vulnerable to disorder in a society; it is they who suffer from the lawlessness of the Hobbesian states; it is they who desire the rule of law, the institutionalization of justice the most.

.. all of this light comes to me from the Bhangra sung by sad women sitting down in circles as dusk falls on the land of the Punjab and it is time to roast the rotis.

Thousand thanks Madhubani ..

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Khana-Mihirer Dhibi. Bani Basu. Bengali novel.

Posted on March 3, 2011 by secondsaturn

Thousand thanks to Sarvani for introducing me to Bani Basu’s writings. I had heard a lot about this firebrand feminist author but never quite read her works. Sarvani handed me a hard bound book by the author named Khana Mihirer Dhibi as a present. I was immediately taken up by the title of the book, because I never cease to be intrigued by Khana, a maverick forecaster and wisehead, a person whose “sayings” are as relevant to us as they were since they were first uttered. My mother’s mother had a pool of knowledge on simple household remedies (totkas) and whenever I asked her where she learnt them from, she used to casually say that these wisdoms were from Khana.

 Khana’s was one of the first stories that I ever heard, precisely because she got her tongue cut since her utterances were creating trouble for everyone around her for being so true. It was a story that my girl cousins and I had to listen to on hot afternoons when I would be on a vacation visiting my mother’s parental home. Mihir was her husband, or father-in-law, a famous astrologer and one of the nine gems in the court of King Vikramaditya. The king’s rule marked the Golden Age of the Guptas in early mediaeval India. I was always a bit sceptical about Khana’s dates because her couplets were composed in such modern Bengali that I wondered whether the vintage assigned to her was correct. May be many sayings in later Bengal closer to the modern period would pass under her name so that their authors may hide behind her and save their own tongues from getting cut. These wisdoms of Khana, or merely assigned to her, had mainly to do with farming and the rains. The couplets composed in a “meyeli” or womanly tone tipped the farmers about when to sow and when to harvest and how to make sense of the seasons. Clearly, they referred to wisdom about farming practices. Khana, is then the holder of farming secrets, secrets that women have held since time immemorial.

Bani Basu’s novel explores the centrality of women in human civilization. She insists that it was woman who was at the core of settled agriculture because she was the one to have discovered farming. Ironically, it was she who at once ‘seeded” and held the civilization by inventing sowing of seeds and reaping them. Woman tamed animals because they tended them; men could only hunt. Men knew weapons but women made instruments. Hence, it was woman and not man that turned in the giant wheel of civilization to give humanity its settled future. God then was a Woman, the First “Man” was also conceptualized as a Mother and the Feminine was worshipped as a cosmos constituting order. Then the men took over, they misappropriated the women, displaced them and made them subservient in their own order. The mystery is how did this happen?

Exploring patriarchy in the early days of the human tribe, when some tribes knew agriculture and some lived only on hunting, the author shows that patriarchy came when the less civilized defeated and killed the more civilized people. The origin of patriarchy lay not in the reproductive order where men claimed their children as property, something that is somewhat contained in Engel’s theory, because human beings in those days did not as yet learn to connect sex and reproduction. Instead, patriarchy emanated from the moral superiority and hence authority of the medicine man, one who could cure the injured and those mostly indisposed by warfare. Such men had a natural authority over human beings in general and women in particular.

There was another kind of man, the greedy warrior, one who forced themselves on women, the rapist, the marauder, the killer. Other men organized to fight such rogue men; patriarchy could have had its sources here as well. But women in those days were great warriors as well and not always did they have to look towards men to fight. In fact, fighting women, women leading armies were more common than men being involved in battles and raids. Women did not need strong men because in the dawn of civilization women were strong themselves. Women were attracted to the medicine men because it was through them that the tribe could survive. But the medicine man could not have invented the patriarchal social order. Patriarchy was established through the crude physical might of man not over women in general because woman was strong too but at times when women were weakened like the waned moon either when she was pregnant or menstruated.

The motif continues even today as women marry and have children, and because these events make them physically weak they are forced to compromise into the male order. The other problem lies in women themselves, when women move across “tribes” through marriage. The author shows that women across the bloodline can never trust one another; ever suspicious over the motives of those who are not related to her through the blood line, women miss out on female bonding, exploit other women and in such non-reflective ways allow men to take over completely.

It is not as if men want specific things from women. Men want to use women for their own satisfaction, sexual, cultural, social, material and emotional. Women give into this unthinkingly, unreflectively. Woman’s bondage is thus a lack of awareness, a lack of reflection all through civilization. In the aeons of time, woman has been too involved in her own food economy and war management. She has never had the leisure to sit back and reflect. Hence it was another kind of man, too weak to fight or to farm, who sat back and kept account of the periodicity of moon, path of stars and the season of crops. Such men became the scientists and the discoverers, setting out the agenda for human thinking. Such men were also physically weak and jealous of their importance as producers of knowledge. Mihir was one such man; Khana ventured into this guarded territory that was unfortunately Mihir’s. She was impaired because she dared to be equal to her husband.

Then there are three kinds of men namely, the medicine man who women love; the violent one to whom women lose out if they happen to be pregnant and the scientist, a man who actually lays the wickedest trap for women by setting out the agenda for the Mind of Civilization. It is really the last category, the scientist, who is the worst offender and the most potent threat for women for he tells us how to think and what to think about in the world around us. It is this scientist, who behind the cover of his discoveries tells us that women are to be discredited, that they are weak and should be contained and kept. Only Khana realized that women, were they to lead tribes and protect humanity, had to reflect, think, infer and theorize. Khana knew that only command over science and knowledge would be a woman’s path to dignity and equality, to fairness and justice. Only as thinker could women could regain her freedom from patriarchy. Hence Khana was attacked and decimated. And hence was Khana.

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Sabaash Suzanna

Posted on February 27, 2011 by secondsaturn

Suzanna Anna Marie had six married husbands and one constant by-stander. She was an Anglo Indian, lived in Mussorie, her father was a contemporary of the legendary Jim Corbett and lived in a huge estate that she inherited as her father’s only child. After her father’s death, she was left an orphan, in her huge estate among servants who were unflinchingly loyal to her. She was a devout Christian, philanthropic and the charming benevolent face of a European civilization that mingled and merged seamlessly with the Indian counterpart. She lived at a time when Victorian values of romantic love and monogamist marriage was at its peak and the law neither allowed men and women to take on spouses while the present one was alive, nor could the marriage be dissolved through divorce. Marriage was made in Heaven and was supposed to be the image of perfect happiness and innocence on earth. In such times, six husbands of Suzanna died one after the other, each one under circumstances those were unnatural. Though there was never any evidence of her involvement in any one of them, interestingly she was always present when the deaths happened. Hence, the great mystery around Suzanna, the protagonist in Ruskin Bond’s novella Seven Husbands of Suzanna and now a film called 7 Khoon Maaf directed by Vishal Bhardwaj.

Suzanna killed each husband in cold blood after meticulous planning and in ways in which the forensic department was thoroughly beaten. In each case the husband was the contrarian image of what she desired in him. The serial murders raise the question in one’s mind whether it was not her who is to be faulted because surely not everyone under the sun can be bad. But as one sits through the film, more than the book, one gets a picture that is startlingly true but is not unfortunately acknowledged to be one. This truth is that romantic love that is consummated in a monogamist marriage and which is supposed to be the ultimate happiness for a woman is one of the greatest lies of our civilization. 7 Khoon Maaf exposes this lie.

Suzanna is fiercely loyal to the one she loves, she sets him on a pedestal, worships him, looks after him, completely surrenders her to him. Her marriage is pure romance because she has enough for her material needs to be taken care of and her husbands are looked after by her rather than her by them. Hence her marriage is never based upon any material need; it is based on a strong need, no, not for companionship alone, but on the need for a husband to who she can unconditionally surrender in an unrestrained manner. She is hugely intelligent for she is knowledgeable about wild animals, game hunting, about horses and jockeys, of poisons and potions and has a penchant for poetry and ear for music. When distressed, she does not lose her mind, but gets into the act of carefully resolving her problems. After bad experiences with marriage and romance, she still seeks love and men, which means that her faith in life as a whole and in the human race is unshaken. This is possible because she is confident and capable, materially secure and intelligent and essentially spiritual and charitable. These qualities in her make her capable of unconditional surrender and unerring loyalty. She becomes a Muslim and in love with Sufism, she becomes a Russian maid when in love with a Russian, a Bengali bride for a Bengali husband and a muse for an aspiring musician. These virtues make for her sexuality as well as spirituality.

The husbands in each case are less than perfect; one is an egoist who uses his wife as a trophy and then, despite her complete surrender to him, suspects her of infidelity. He is cruel and violent and hits to kill or to permanently impair. Such a man is a liability in the Kingdom of God that houses only love, compassion, fidelity, trust and loyalty. The second is a cheater, a plagiarist and a womanizer; the third, a poet who despite his rational and progressive lyrics is a male chauvinist and therefore, a sexual pervert. In an age when there is no divorce, a harassed wife must kill him to end the marriage. Yet, Suzanna could have abandoned him and walked off. But Suzanna does not do that precisely because, as a completely contented self-contained person in herself whose sexuality is indeterminately intertwined with her sexuality, she must maintain the world as a Kingdom of God; precisely in the manner she inherited it and which is why she cannot allow the dirt in the form of the mentally and ethically warped men polluting the beautiful world.

The film does not appeal to those sensibilities which do not have a clear sense of the perfect. For most of us, marriage is a compromise; it is a contract to pool resources and live on. We are mediocres, who marry for food, shelter and to bear and rear our progenies. But for persons who are beyond these measures, for whom romance is a spiritual fulfillment and monogamist marriage an obvious outcome of such love, it becomes difficult to tolerate persons who are unworthy of the total surrender that Suzanna gives to them. Suzanna’s journey is thus through the spirituality of the Western civilization, its moral force by which the West once prevailed over almost the entire humanity. If colonialism’s immorality was ever bailed out, it was because of the underlying spirituality of the West, enshrined in its asceticism that held through its Enlightenment and the Renaissance and that lay as the foundation of its world conquering capitalism. Suzanna is this ascetic of the West and hence her life ends in a Church as a nun, where she as Mira, also weds and dances with Christ. Through her many weddings, she had searched for this God and not frail men with fragile spirits. Christ is her only suitable paramour and husband, for none other than He can be a worthy image of perfection for Suzanna.

Suzanna became what she was because of some “big lies” of civilization; she fell into the ideological manipulation that romantic love was the fulfillment of a woman and that a monogamist marriage was the natural progression of that love. She also fell into the trap that women had to surrender, never to assume agency, never to emerge in command of her life. This forced subservience, this perfidy of love, which was manifested in her nudity, suggested in darker hues of the camera when she surrendered to Arun, the man who she did not get to marry, were to constitute the paradoxes of her existence. These lies of civilization made her seek happiness in nonexistent truths and eventually aroused her moral anger manifested in the serial murders.

Observed carefully the murders are Suzanna’s essential personality; she is imperial and inwardly imperious. She kills the bully to protect the weak from him; it is only the last murder that she really “commits” and that too in self defense. Otherwise, just as Suzanna never takes lead in romance but leads men to propose to her, she also drives her victims to their own death. She arranges things out there, as if laying a trap, ensnares her victim where he dies in due course. In each case she draws upon a vast pool of knowledge, presence of mind, steely nerves and the ability to see right into the law of evidences that eventually becomes her defense against accusations.

Suzanna is that soul of the West that it has lost to itself. She is the spirit of Christ, the Joan of Arc, the archetypal Madonna who in the aeons of time held civilization; for it was woman who discovered agriculture, it was woman who knew how to grow grains, how to tame animals and tend them when men only knew to hunt and eat them; it was woman who first rode on horses and made instruments where men only knew how to make weapons; women made houses where men only could divot mounds. This is why women are at the heart of every art, contained within the idea of the aesthetic; she is the civilizing force of humanity, she is also its spirituality. But women were divested of fruits of their labour, made to believe that men could only fulfill them. Hidden under a heap of cultural mores and social codes, she remains buried as a passive force. Only Suzanna tricked us with her grave, she did not die when we thought that she was dead. Suzanna is Christ resurrected, she awakes when the world sleeps, to reclaim that seed of civilization that belongs to her, for she is all, the male and the female, yin and the yang, Creator and the Destroyer, contained in the image of a woman, charming and coy by day like Lakshmi but terrible and ferocious by night like Kali; representing the Woman Power, not merely as a procreator, but as Creator Herself, the Original (Womb)Man that all civilizations know but have decided to forget. Suzanna connects us with the core of our civilization so that we may live beyond the end of Time, by recalling Time’s origins. Suzanna is not the erotic redness of earth, nor the ethereal blue, nor the puritanical white; Suzanna’s colour is Black, signifying a Brahma beyond Light, or an eternal mourning of the mystic on earth, despairing for Perfection, or the colour of the Black Widow, the deathly spider that devours the male after mating.

Sabaash Suzanna !!!

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Eve Teasing – Bengal’s Bane

Posted on February 19, 2011 by secondsaturn

The murder of Rajeeb Das, a teenager in a Kolkata suburb has Bengal all shaken up once again. Rajeeb Das was escorting his sister back from her work when some drunken lumpens in the street corner in a Kolkata suburb wanted to molest her. These drunken vagabonds murdered Rajeeb Das brutally when he protested. The venue of the crime was the front gate of the District Magistrate’s bungalow. As the bad characters were beating up this child, the older sister ran up to the guards at the officers’ gates and begged for help; the policemen on duty refused to relent. The sister helplessly watched her brother being pounded to death. This shameless act of eve teasing has left Bengal gaping because for long the Bengalis pretended that they were one great ethnic group that guaranteed freedom to women. Among many lies in the world, this is indeed one.

I never experienced Bengal as a space where women can move freely. Gazes, eye movements, body language, and lewd comments would make my life miserable in the state of my birth. I always wore loose clothes, had no hair do, never used make up and looked every inch a plain Jane which in no way could ever appeal to any man as an embodiment of feminine desirata. Yet, I and not my friends who were more beautiful than I and who were commensurately conscious of their endowments, was the target of the obnoxious obscenity. I could never understand the puzzle. I started excelling in physical sports so that I would end up looking stronger and more weather beaten but there was little let up in the concerted effort of Kolkata men to make me uncomfortable. I started feeling hemmed in and cornered, molested and mauled in Kolkata. I stopped venturing out. I left Presidency College in eight days flat as soon as my name appeared in Jadavpur University’s admission list only because I could never get myself to board buses where men did not know how to behave. Soon, the road became a nightmare for me. Unable to bear this constraint, I decided to leave home at last to breathe free in Delhi, a city that is supposed to be India’s crime capital apart from being the political capital of the country. Another woman friend, who had similarly migrated to Delhi for her masters education agreed that Delhi was a far freer zone for women to move about than Kolkata. In Delhi, my grand aunt was the other person to second my thesis about Kolkata and her ghastly stories about eve teasers helped me realize that eve teasing has been a part of the city’s culture since aeons of time.

After the Rajeeb Das murder, Nilanjana Sanyal, a teacher of Calcutta University’s psychology department wrote a piece in Ananda Bazar Patrika in which she tried to theorize eve teasing as consumerism. She decided that rapists attack women out of lust and hence murder who ever stands between them and their platter. She suggests that the growing consumerism lies at the heart of a class competition which translates into competitive consumption and hence such men rape women as they would compete to buy a car or an apartment home. Somewhere her ideas have been laid out in a wrong order.

Bengal has never had a record for treating women well; Sati, female infanticide, child marriage, ill treatment of widows, large scale prostitution and institutionalized concubinage seem to have originated in Bengal. This is perhaps why Bengal also had its share of strong women and when the social reform movements started here, modernity empowered women against a tradition that had reduced them to statuses of chattel. Since the men who were on the side of women during the social reform movement were also the economically powerful and socially effectual, to believe in women’s freedom became a statement of culture that often went with the upper class. Throughout the 20th century, it was fashionable for families to send women to schools and colleges and in some families women drove cars and rode horses.

Despite such social reforms, because the economic conditions of the state did not improve commensurately to bring about fundamental changes in the ways in which opportunities were distributed, the Bengali man’s attitude towards women’s independent career, women’s right of inheritance, women’s access to family property remained where they were. While it was no longer politically correct to repress women, but the Talibanistic psyche persisted. Hence, when my grand aunt went out for work, young men would encircle her on the pavements with such verbal obscenity that it seemed to her to lbe no better than a physical violation of her modesty. This was not a male desire for her; this was an act of male intimidation of women to drive her indoors, precisely the effect eve teasers want to achieve.

I realized that eve teasers always gang up; a boy may be perfectly sober as an individual but as an eve teaser he is invariably a part of a gang. Eve teasers operate out of ‘posts’, specific locations along a street, very much like ‘hafta” gangs, or armed goons who ask for extortion money. Both are born out of social envy of non-performers and both ask you to leave the public space if you have done better than them or if they perceive that you have more advantage than them. This is why when my bearded male cousin came to Kolkata with a job, the gang that was tolerant of me around the locality paan shop was obnoxious with him. Eve teasing uses women as a site to attack households and families who they envy. No wonder then in the Rajeeb Das murder case, one of the assailants, Chandan Roy is also an extortionist. Seen in this way, eve teasing falls under the category of kidnapping, extortion, Talibanism and terrorism; the psychology of the criminal in each of the above cases is identical.

The Bengali man’s conservatism about women’s clothing, his discomfort with women driving, his problem with women thinkers and politicians emanates from the same psychology as that of eve teasing; intolerance of women as autonomous individuals and consequently of those families where women are freer. The liberation of women is directly related to the higher rank of families in the social mileu; Bengalis have never tolerated success because they have hardly ever had the opportunity or the motivation to become successful.

Bengalis have been a defeated race. Kolkata has steadily declined, jobs have progressively depleted, incomes have fallen and Bengalis have migrated to other states. Men have been emaciated economically and culturally and the only way they feel that they can hold on to their own is by holding on to their women in doors. The control of women has risen in proportion to the loss of control of the men in dealing with their external world. Bengal is the only state where in the 1970’s and 1980’s, women were openly discouraged by the men in their families do not to appear in competitive examinations because if they qualified they would be ‘taking away” the seat of a man and eventually ruin an entire family. That a woman could work and also run a family seemed to be absent from the mindscape of Bengal. The mighty Ghatak made Meghe Dhaka Tara in which his female protagonist was portrayed as an object of pity because she had to go out and work to support her family !!! Pity was also a way, not unlike eve teasing, to confine women into their homes.

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Egypt…

Posted on February 8, 2011 by secondsaturn

There has been a usual enthusiasm about the mass uprising in Egypt over Mubarak’s “misrule”. Most of my friends from India (I do not have foreign friends) were hugely exuberant about what appeared to them as a Freedom Movement totally led by the masses and hence the ultimate expression of liberation. I was of course sceptical and expressed my reservations in my status in which I said that the mass hysteria in the country would end up in the Muslim fanatics replacing the dictator. I eventually removed the post from my status because I felt that Egypt could perhaps be an exception to an ochlocracy. I was thrilled when Supriyadi (Mrs Roy, our teacher from MHS) posted a link in which her son-in-law, Nezar from Berkely expressed similar reservations about Egypt’s Freedom Movement.

We in India take our story for granted. India’s Freedom Struggle has been the largest mass movement that the modern world has ever seen. What is interesting is that this movement has been fairly participatory, commanded almost the whole of our existence and world view, been more or less persistent, somewhat loose and unorganized and often leaderless and what is more striking, it has been basically non-violent. The Indian Freedom Struggle was neither a struggle against political anti-incumbency, nor a cultural assertion; instead it was a humanist effort at securing institutional support wherever oppression existed in whichever form. This is why; the Indian Freedom Movement had such a universal appeal precisely because political power was merged with social emancipation. The Freedom Movement of India became the basis of what we know as de-colonization and the idea of the Third World, a world of nations born out of popular struggles against colonialism, emanated from the Indian soil. Before India’s Freedom Movement, colonialism was looked upon as a civilizing process where the superior Western civilization was supposed to be civilizing savage cultures of the colonized people. The Indian Freedom Movement told them that it was immoral to rule over sovereign people.

My friends who imagined that Egypt’s Freedom Movement would be something similar took our history for granted. Freedom Movements can fall into traps of the military junta, or religious fanaticism or even into crony elites. It took a huge amount of effort for many kinds of freedom struggle leaders to bring such a mass of loosely gathered people into getting into the discipline of democracy, rule of the Constitution, a rational society, universal justice, acknowledgment of rights and establish modern values in everyday life. India undertook a long and a painful journey towards galvanising a mass into a disciplined democracy and a sustainable sovereignty. It required not only sacrifice of life and sometimes of property but also a sacrifice of interests positions when elites colluded into the interests of the masses, the privileged spoke from the point of view of the poor; the Brahmin included the untouchable and the men allowed spaces to women. It was not an easy thing for a society of the 19th century that held customs like sati, infanticide, social seclusion of widows, untouchability as sacred and beyond doubt into a society that outlawed each of these consecrated customs and made them into cognizable crimes. It was not easy for a society dominated by zamindars and other feudatories to abandon such unquestioned domination into equality before law; it was not easy for a society dominated by Brahmins to allow secularism among Hindus to flourish. And each of these have been attained and the processes within our society that made such achievements possible are worthy or exploration by sociologists, especially those in Egypt, Afghanistan or even in Kashmir and Manipur and Nagaland.

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Death Wish In A Dying Culture – Guzaarish

Posted on February 1, 2011 by secondsaturn

For quite some time now I have been sensing that India is in the grips of a death wish. The growth rate of population is slowly coming down, the size of family is decreasing and while life expectancy is on the rise, the huge scale of female genocide seems to convey that here is a civilization that no longer wants its reproductive capability to be protected. The uncertainty over livelihoods is increasing for most Indians who live off land, depend on forests and work in factories. The middle class who had somehow secured a future for themselves, death also looms large as living gets costlier and requirements of a long list of consumer products portend to throw households into an irretrievable debt trap. Each day prices rise, wages refuse to raise, competition gets intense and need for qualifications grow heavier. The middle class runs fast to stay in the same place, trying to desperately save resources to launch children into respectable income classes. This uncertainty of social position, the precariousness of one’s income class, one’s difficulty in negotiating so many contenders to education and employment makes the middle class invest huge anxiety and paranoia into just maintaining a status quo. This anxiety and uncertainty over a future is the reason translates itself over what we witness as a death wish of our civilization.

Within our families, boys get preference over girls and expectedly enough the more upwardly mobile a household is, more it tries to kill its girls. The declining ratio of female to male is becoming a scandal in our country. We tend to cast off the aged and the sickly and India, a country which is famous for its family now requires laws to ensure that children look after parents. It is therefore only keeping in trend with such tendencies that Guzaarish is a film where the hero, a paralytic patient seeks death.

In the public sphere, we are intolerant of other people. Road rage says that we cannot tolerate our fellow travellers, crime against women says that men hate them in the public space, ethnic and communal politics says that we wish to eliminate a part of our population on basis of ascriptive profiling.  Economic growth excludes the poor, drives them off the land, crushes farmers and chases away migrants. This is a political culture of death wish. Guzaarish is a film that is located in a culture of death wish.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali specializes in the opera style. The opera is a form of musical performance that originated in 16th century Florence, a high point of Renaissance that also saw a clash between the forces of the republicans and the Duke of Florentine, a conflict in which the latter won and imposed a tyrannical order crashing all semblance of a republican system. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were important persons in this period who showcased their works in Florence seeking perfection of form and order, a perfection that resonated the perfectness of the new institutions of tyranny, often supporting political and/or intellectual authoritarianism. The opera is a form that was born out of this search for a perfection and which has its roots in tyranny as well as despair against it. It is interesting that Sanjay Bhanshali adopts the opera format as his distinctive style.

The opera contrasts with the melodrama, the latter having originated in France during the Revolution some two centuries later in one major score. While the melodrama celebrates the bringing forth of a perfect life by working through the existing conflicts and contradictions, the opera is a monological assertion of deep emotions sharply articulated and acutely intonated so as to silence every contesting voice and expression. Melodrama thrives on drama as its name suggests while the opera needs to be “watched” and “seen” as spectacle, as its name suggests. Melodrama contains melody, or music but that is more as a background score in order to help its thesis grow and resolve, while the opera makes a visual spectacle of its melody emanating from the voice of the singer/actor. The Hindi formula film has adopted the essential form of the melodrama and punched it with the high pitched voices of its singers as in an opera and made a spectacle of its music. The operatic tone of the formula cinema has ensured the cinema’s position as a spectacle. But Bhansali tilts slightly more towards the opera and in this create a whole new genre of addressing the popular film. Guzaarish is an instance of it.

The idea of an opera is death because only death can be perfect in a way in which life cannot be. Guzaarish seeks death only as perfection. The hero of the film suffers from a paralysis that makes him totally immobile and only euthanasia can help him overcome his pain and hence the film becomes a representation or a Guzaarish for mercy killing by the patient. While the hero seeks death, he also shows us not the imperfection of life in general but the imperfection in his own life; a life which had been so perfect for him once that it seems utterly unreal and dreamlike. The life that he leads at present is so unpromising that it leaves no hope for any improvement. The hero, therefore looks to death to help him attain the perfectness of life that he yearns for, a situation that may hold equally well for a terrorist who hopes for a utopia that only death can earn for him. Most of us are lured with such five star lives through media images of advertisements, serials, sets of reality shows, magazines of lifestyle, celebrity role models that the objective conditions of our lives can never deliver unto us. Studies on young boys trained as terrorists reveal such impossible gaps between ideas of perfectness of life and the empirical conditions of their income opportunities. Death comes in as the untested belief that promises to deliver dreams and hence the dream to die and the death desire being the only romantic angle to life.

The other angle in this death wish is of course plain economics of household budgets. With economic liberalization comes the retreat of the State leaving the space to the market and private initiative. This change in the economic game playing requires new kinds of skills and knowledge that requires new kinds of investments into human resources. Since the State has already withdrawn from the arena, education falls substantially on the households. There is a competition over the household resources; what gets cut are expenditures on “non earning” investments like a girl’s education and care of the old and the infirm. Guzaarish, is a desire to get rid of the indisposed and non- earning. The dire financial condition of the hero and the hopelessness over his health gets insisted upon through the defence lawyer and the attendant doctor. In the formula of the popular cinema, the star is the self of the viewer and for those viewers who have liked the film, must have, at some point of time seen themselves in the hero, condemned to live in an insufferable life. For a sociologist, the main research question is why some viewers feel their condition to be like that of a quadripalgic hero; what are the pains of such viewers, what are their despairs, fears and desolations?

It is not as if the film did not contain life; a caring nurse who is self dissolving in that care; a host of fans of his radio show, good friends and loyal staff and a surviving elderly mother. All characters not only care for the hero but their lives seem to have been totally organized around caring for the patient, loving him, desiring him. Yet, the hero wants to die and everyone else eventually agree because of his unbearable pain, perhaps not so much of a physical pain as it is an emotional pain of being utterly physically dependent. It is the pain of imperfection, an imperfection that exists vis-a-vis only an idea of perfection. The concept weighs down upon the content, the abstract is held above the concrete. This is a pursuit of perfection, a perfection that only can be imagined and which is so transcendental that it can never be realized in that which exists. Hence Guzaarish.

Yet there were huge opportunities for the hero to prove a point; he could have proved the superiority of the mind over the body, he could have exerted heroism by winning through his mind, he could have reproduced by training many magicians, he could have either forgiven or ruined his enemy’s child and extended the conflict between the nurse and her husband a little more. In all of these, the hero could have been at the centre of a drama, secured his agency and assumed control of life that tries to deny and defeat him. But were the hero to do this he would have become the star of a melodrama and not of opera. The opera format requires the hero to be cynical of life, disdainful of the lesser mortals who believe in it and by claiming the worthiness of transcendental perfection decries life as it exists. Possibly, the viewers who seek themselves in the hero too conceal such disdain towards life.

I keep thinking of Anand, a film that genuinely seeks life over death. Every moment of life becomes beautiful when contrasted with death. It is a film that seeks blessings of life rather than be contemptuous of it. It is a film of the 1970’s, an age when we were still underdeveloped, militarily weak, grappling with food crisis; we did not have millionaires. But we had a polity where we sought to include the poor, the marginal, and the downtrodden. We were also a country that believed in a plural and an inclusive politics, a politics that fought privileges to get more space for the periphery, a culture that imagined itself to be on the side of the downtrodden. In the days such as these, we were a nation that had hope and not despair, yearned for life instead of death. This is why, Anand, a film made in these times looked for life everywhere and tested its limits against death. The hero of Anand faced with a certain death scraped every bit of life as savouries; the hero of Guzaarish, in his desire for death casts every savoured moment of life as crumbs. When compared and contrasted Anand and Guzaarish tells us that while we have seemingly done well in terms of GDP, we have also moved from life towards death, from hope into despair.

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Independent Woman vs Housewife – Ma Exchange 2

Posted on January 28, 2011 by secondsaturn

Apara vs Sarita: The Independent Woman vs Housewife

  • Apara Mehta, separated from her husand Darshan Jariwala, both television actors swapped her place with Sarita Beri, the wife of Sudesh Beri, yet another television star and film actor. While Apara is the famous mother-in-law of Tulsi in the serial Kyon ki saas bhi kabhie bahu thi, Sudesh is better known as Loha Singh, a character he plays in a serial that I have never watched.
  • Apara is a devoted actor and as her husband says of her is that she is so complete in herself that one can neither add nor subtract from her. The husband looks upon her “completeness” as something that leaves no role for him and hence he chooses to remain absent from her life except as an occasional helper. The daughter is devoted to the mother and she looks upon Apara as the Empress of her life and of her fate. Apara is happy being single again, self contained in that single state of being, contended and in equilibrium. For Apara, her own personal journey is important and while marriage, family and even her career can only be a part of that journey, they cannot constitute the whole of it. Apara remains totally independent even without the need to depend on her profession for moral support. She has a sense of achievement in having brought up her child and looked after her widowed mother single handedly and to have given them a dignified life style.
  • Sarita is a housewife in a joint family with a mother-in-law and a sister-in-law (devrani) to contend with. She is a whole time housewife and looks upon her role as a wife, a mother, daughter-i-law and others as the source of her fulfillment. She has no clue to what Apara says about her journey as a person. She and her husband confuses Apara’s self search as being merely a career or a working woman. Were Sarita to work, then her job profile would have added another attribute to her sense of self, which in any case is “defined” by her externalities.
  • In terms of income, social status, access to public worthiness, the two families can be considered as equal. But Sudesh’s family upholds patriarchy, Apara’s denounces the same.
  • Apara’s home has more aesthetic and functional appeal. Its colours are vibrant with distinct theme. Her household is better organized. She does not have a full time maid, something which she perhaps cannot afford as well. Her mother is forever on the phone talking to relatives. Her daughter is loyal and devoted to her and though she is open to the idea of doing some household chores, she leads a much protected life and has never entered the kitchen. Apara’s family is much disciplined and they willingly submit to discipline.
  • Sarita’s home is organized but lacks aesthetic appeal and a theme. Since the house is home to a joint family, it looks somewhat cramped. The house has a full time maid, capable and efficient. Sarita’s home has far less disciplined and they resist discipline. Sudesh accused Apara of being excessively disciplining because she was a “working woman” and hence not kind enough. Kindness, a feminine quality, is seen to be an anti thesis of discipline and is assigned to a housewife. Sudesh looks upon his wife’s discipline as a challenge to his will and hence authority.
  • It needed Apara to groom Sarita’s son as an actor; Sarita because of her confinement within the home proved to be a bad mother as far guidance to children was concerned. Both were equally capable in the kitchen but in child rearing, Apara turned out to be better.
  • Sarita felt that Apara was incomplete because she did not have a “man” in her life, Apara looked upon Sarita as a failure because she had no identity left anymore.
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