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Nina Godiwalla’s Suits tells the story of an ambitious young woman, beginning a challenging corporate career – with several odds stacked against her.
Let me start by saying that I loved Suits. As a smart young woman who wants to build a successful career, Nina the protagonist is someone I could relate to even when I despised her for making unsavory choices. I also liked Nina the writer; the story flows smoothly most of the time and the writing is even and very readable.
As the subtitle (“A Woman on Wall Street”) suggests, Suits follows Nina as she goes to work on Wall Street – more specifically, as an intern at JP Morgan and later her first year in corporate finance in Morgan Stanley. This is Wall Street of some years ago, so she finds herself mostly surrounded by white men, in a culture that doesn’t welcome diversity or independent thought. The narrative then, is gripping (“What will she do next? Will she survive?”) as well as scary (“THAT happened? Why doesn’t she quit? This is just not worth it.”)
Nina finds it a bigger change than most because not only is she a woman, but also the daughter of first-generation Parsi immigrants who grew up in a suburb of Houston, Texas, far away from the cutthroat world she finds herself in. All her life, she has struggled to prove herself to her father, for whom no achievement in school seemed big enough to celebrate. Behind her ambition to make it in Wall Street is this little girl’s urge to please her father, to be the family favourite. My only complaint about the book is that the narrative often shifts too suddenly from the present to the past and back again. You’re reading what seems like the beginning of a story about one of her new colleagues, and then you find yourself reading about an episode from her childhood, and there is no attempt to tie the two threads together.
However, I found both threads of the story interesting. Learning how Nina’s background and her parents made her the person she is, helped me understand more about the choices she made as a young woman just starting out with her career.
Read this if you have any kind of corporate career, or if you want to be glad that you don’t. Read this if you want to know what it was like in Wall Street at the height of the boom; the blatant money-grubbing and lack of ethics repulses without shocking, given what we know now. Read this for a story of a young woman struggling to balance her upbringing with her own desires, and root for her as she finally grows up.
Publisher: Hachette India
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Unmana is interested in gender, literature and relationships, and writes about everything she's interested in. She lives in, and loves, Bombay. read more...
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People say that women are the greatest enemies of women. I vehemently disagree. It is the patriarchal mindset that makes women believe in the wrong ideology.
The entire world celebrates International Women’s Day on March 8, 2024. It should be a joyful day, but unfortunately, not all women are entitled to this privilege, as violence against women is at its peak. The experience of oppression pushes many women to choose freedom. As far as patriotism is concerned, feminism is not a cup of tea in this society.
What happens when a woman decides to stand up for herself? Does this world easily accept the decisions of women in this society? What inspires them to be free of the clutches of the oppression that women have faced for ages? Most of the time, women do not get the chance to decide for themselves. Their lives are always at the mercy of someone, which can be their parents, siblings, husband, or children.
In some cases, women do not feel the need to make any decisions. They are taught to obey the patriarchal system, which makes them believe that they are right. In my family, I was never taught to make decisions on my own. It was always my parents who bought dresses and all that I needed.
14 years after her last feature film Dhobi Ghat, storyteller extraordinaire comes up with her new film, Laapataa Ladies, a must watch.
*Some spoilers alert*
Every religion around the world dictates terms to women. The onus is always on women to be ‘modest’ and cover their faces and bodies so men can’t be “tempted”, rather than on men to keep their eyes where they belong and behave like civilized beings. So much so that even rape has been excused on the grounds of women eating chowmein or ‘men will be men’. I think the best Hindi movie retort to this unwanted advice on ‘akeli ladki khuli tijori ki tarah hoti hai’ (an alone woman is like an open jewellery box) came from Geet in Jab We Met – Kya aap gyan dene ke paise lete hain kyonki chillar nahin hain mere paas.
The premise of Laapataa Ladies is beautifully simple – two brides clad in the ghunghat that covers their identity get mixed up on a train. Within this Russian Doll, you get a comedy of errors, a story of getting lost, a commentary on patriarchy’s attitude towards women, a mystery, and a tale of finding oneself, all in one. Done with a mostly light touch that has you laughing and nodding along.
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