Skip to main content

A question of choice

If you haven’t watched the latest video starring Deepika Padukone declaring her choices, its ok you still have time to catch up. The video has spurred backlashes procuring articles from many female writers and bloggers and fans stating their disappointment. Shoba De the famous Indian writer talked about the confusion – she said she was confused if the video was about women empowerment or was it an advert for an international shampoo brand and the volume it gives to a beautiful woman’s hair just like Deepikas’.

One of the fans wrote a letter stating the actress is biased when it comes to women empowerment. I believe the ABC Roast video shows her laughing at lewd jokes passed at someone masturbating to Farida Jalal and Semi Grewal’s dildo but at the same time came out strongly when the Times of India published pictures of her cleavage. Now don’t be so harsh I thought to myself, she is just a pretty girl who has all the right things going for her while at the same time making big bucks. She would be the perfect poster child to talk about women empowerment after her admission to being depressed and appearing on the Burkha Dutt show. That was brave of her not everyone will admit to being depressed. It apparently qualifies her to take up issues that haunts women in Indian society – where female foeticide is highest in the world, where men in Bihar are literally carving a new path to bring in their new brides and where well we haven’t yet forgotten the India’s Daughter documentary.

And then we now have the liberty to watch the Men’s choice video too. Thanks to the social media the Men’s choice video too has gone viral and thank god for that because I couldn’t bear to watch Deepika slipping her dress and saying ‘it’s my choice to have sex with whom I want’. The men’s choice video (yes the men in the video are handsome) strikes the right note and it is subtle too. It doesn’t blame the woman’s choice video but in fact deals with the subject maturely by staying true to the message i.e. men and women should be respected for their choices equally and that if men choose to have sex with their girl friends and choose not to marry them then it is their choice. Aren't women being hypocrite when they blame their boyfriends for not marrying them or classifying cheating husbands as dogs. Shouldn’t men have the right to choose too or have women in showbiz become so vain that they feel choice should no longer be synonymous to men?

Many of my own friends in facebook have resonated their opinion against this statement and I write for all my friends who are equally harmed by this shampoo oops Deepika’s my choice video. I don’t think I or any of my friends would be empowered if we chose to have sex outside of our marriage it would simply mean we cheated. And it applies to both men and women – its time women in show biz decide how they want to be empowered. Do they still want to be paraded in bikinis in item numbers while their male counterparts are fully clothed? Do they want to play femme fatales forever or do they want to start taking social cues as to how they want to portray themselves in their movies too.
I also believe that the women appearing in the video don’t need any kind of empowerment, they all seem to be from show biz, fashion and business industries. These women made a choice to be in their professions and if broadsheet media wants to sell their papers by publishing Deepika’s cleavage she didn’t refute to dancing in bikinis to sell her movies and make money. While the video has managed to ridicule what empowerment is for women I hope the director (what’s his name?) and the artists appearing in the video take some grassroots lessons on how India is faring when it comes to women being treated equally not just at work place but at homes too.

Appearing in chat shows and videos and talking about choices does not shed a positive light on the plight of millions of girls and women who face discrimination even in their mother’s wombs. It’s about time women as powerful as Deepika start lending their voices to serious social issues which not only concerns her cleavage but also millions of girls who don’t get to go to school simply because they are girls. Girls who are raped because they are dalits and girls who get married off as young as 9 because the dowry hassle.

I poke at social issues that bother me and sometimes I am biased when it comes to women empowerment but this choice video has taken feminism to a newest height even I can’t fathom.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A letter to my future teenage daughter

My dear daughter, you are only seven today but you will soon be seventeen. And when you become 17 I know the world will no longer be the same for you and I. We will be together in the same house but we will be distant apart in our heart and head. I was once 17 you know. And like everything else nothing is constant so before you grow up too fast I am writing a letter to you and the million other 17 year olds just like you. Love life - you are going to fall in love - hard. So hard that you are often dizzy with love. A love that is insignificant but withholds you from achieving all your dreams. Dreams that you dreamt when you were barely ten. Dreams that your parents dreamt for you when they first held you in their warm loving arms. Dreams that your mother dreamt for you when you were just a tadpole in her growing tummy. You are 17 and you have just graduated high school. At the verge of becoming an adult. You think you are big enough to make decisions and that you know the best f...
14 comments
Read more

Leave the girls alone

Recently I read an article written by an Indian woman on how she forgot to raise her son well while she paid particular attention to raising her daughter to be an equal citizen. When we talk about gender equality we often focus on girls. How we should raise them - encourage them to fight for their right; admit them to the best schools; never tell them ‘they can’t do it’ and raise their expectations rather too high. I am a mother to a six year old girl and I often cringe every time I tell her – she can do anything if she wants. While we focus too much on raising our girl’s right we forget to pay attention to our sons.  I lived all my life in a boarding school, the first ten years in an all-girls school. Life wasn’t smooth. We felt foreign to the other gender. We giggled and burst out crazy if a boy approached us. We acted nonsensical at times. We didn’t know how or what they were. They were exclusive – all we saw was the other gender – foreign - boys. We lived in our own b...
Post a Comment
Read more

#mymetoo

The first time I saw a picture of vagina was when I was in grade three. The vaginas would always show up in our bathroom walls. Drawn with coal, often the pubic hair sprouting in every direction. I went to an all-girls boarding school and the only males we had in our school were cooks and bera dais. There was also this son of a housekeeper in charge and an unknown lunatic who would flash his nuts from the back of our dormitory which was situated right below the pine trees, occasionally. Of course, we never saw his face or the fact that he was never caught didn’t surprise me even back then. These were the kind of things I believe weren’t considered dangerous. I was too young to think about the perpetrator. I had never thought about those vaginas scrawling for almost three decades and suddenly I now realize that those drawings were in many ways the first kind of sexual assault for me or for my friends. I and my friends would stare at the scrawling quickly and never talk about it l...
Post a Comment
Read more