First Blog Post: The eternal struggle.

Hello.. My name is Aarushi and I am 28 years old and this is the year 2018.

I am a fully-grown up woman living in New Delhi with my family and I have a job, which also I enjoy and am vaguely good at, at least I think so if no one else. My life is a series of Mondays to Fridays with weekends packed in the middle. The weekends are primarily me expending as little effort as possible and doing my best impression of a lifeless corpse. In this seemingly mundane cycle I do find time over the weekend for other thing I love which is going to the cinema.

Last weekend I paid an arm and a leg (the forever rising inflation in our country) to watch this amazing movie called The Post with Meryl Streep who plays a very reluctant leader of a very good newspaper company. Her character inherits the role from her husband after his death, which is tragic in itself also but for her more so because she never thought that she would have to be in charge and is struggling with her role throughout.

The diffident woman faced a lot of difficulty in standing her own ground in a room full of men, who were more than ready, as men always are to tell her what to do, how to do and what not to do. The movie is based in a different era where the roles of men and women were more static and clearly divided, clearly understood by the fact that she was not even an option to inherit her own father’s company and she was genuinely happy to see it go to her husband.

This made me think how this is definitely not the case nowadays even in a modestly progressive country like India and how gender roles have certainly gone more fluid. Women are competing with men in every sphere imaginable physical and intellectual. While we have come a long way from complete patriarchy we still seem to be a generation stuck in transition. We have highly educated women pursuing careers while still not completely baggage free are juggling the expectations of work with the expectations of family or society depending on what is more important for them.

On the other hand the men who support their women and enjoy having contribution in bringing home the bread still end up feeling insecure about the confident and self assured woman by their side. Let me also be clear not all men feel this way all the time, its just that sometimes sharing the limelight is not easy.

We are the generation confused and fumbling through the rules. Strong women who make choices for themselves feel guilty for wanting someone else take the lead for them once in a while. With the men continuously struggling with having to evolve and behave in a manner so completely different than what they have seen growing up and understood till now.

So we need to understand that even though our gender roles are fluid but there should always be room for consideration and empathy. Everyone wants to be taken care of sometimes, even independent women and independent men.