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Our obsession with 'fair and lovely', often makes us overlook everything else in a person. April 2016 Muse of the Month winner.
Our obsession with ‘fair and lovely’, often makes us overlook everything else in a person. April 2016 Muse of the Month winner.
This year, we bring you the Muse of the Month contest. Congratulations to all the winners of the April 2016 contest.
The cue for April 2016 was:
“How like the flowers we are,… knowing nothing of the fate we simply inherit from others.”– Jaishree Misra, Rani.
The fifth winning entry is by Krshka Afonso.
Kaavya dressed with care, it must look like it was her very first time, even though she had lost count of the number of times she had done it. She took a selfie, and sent it to her mother. The quickness of the thumbs up reply meant that her mother was sitting with her phone in hand. She would be waiting until Kaavya called her later to report how the meeting went.
Well, atleast she now had Ma’s approval on her attire. The last time, her mother blamed the failed outcome on her dressing. As if that could change anything! Kaavya had been upset, but knew she meant well. She wasn’t sure of her relatives’ intentions though, the way they kept pestering her and made it impossible for her to enjoy any family
events since she had turned twenty-five. Even that was nothing compared to what happened after she turned thirty. You are too choosy, too proud of your salary, you should be humble, you should compromise. She was tired of hearing it, knew that her parents had to hear worse. So she had silently gone to meet men she wouldn’t give a second thought to. And then endured the humiliation when they, one after another, rejected her. Every man she met judged her by the one thing she could not control, what she had been handed with, her dark complexion.
She was educated, excelled at her job, kept herself fit. She was the one her parents, friends and colleagues called when there was a problem. All her achievements meant nothing in a world which only saw that she was not married. It had started to peal at her confidence, at her pride. She was not able to concentrate on her work, and the results were starting to show.
Some of these men made demands to compensate for her complexion. Thankfully, her father chased them away. But she was still afraid that she would have to marry the first man who didn’t reject her, no matter what she thought about him.
Let’s see what happens today, it can’t be as bad as what I have seen before. She thought, as she approached the coffee shop where she was to meet suitor number 29. From the man who didn’t pick up the bill to the man who couldn’t hide his disappointment as she came to his table; from the man who spoke in mono syllables to the man whose first question was her salary; she had seen it all. And not heard back from any of them.
She had of course laughed it off with her friend, that was the only way to keep her sanity, but every time she lost a little of herself. She decided that she won’t go through this anymore, she will tell her parents not to set her up with any more guys. If things get bad, she will apply for an international transfer at her company.
A smart man stood to attention as Kaavya pushed open the glass door. His eyes shone with sincerity and strength. “Hi Kaavya, I am Mihir”, he stretched out his hand. Not the self-entitled smirk she had been accustomed to seeing, but a warm smile. “I read your poems online. I am so happy that you agreed to meet me”. Kaavya felt a glow within her, in that moment she knew that it had all been worth it. All that she was, all that she had endured, were so that she could be here.
A long journey had ended, and a new one just started.
Krshka Afonso wins a Rs 250 Flipkart voucher, as well as a chance to be picked one among the 10 top winners at the end of 2016. Congratulations!
Image source: dark-skinned woman by Shutterstock.
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I huffed, puffed and panted up the hill, taking many rest breaks along the way. My calf muscles pained, my heart protested, and my breathing became heavy at one stage.
“Let’s turn back,” my husband remarked. We stood at the foot of Shravanbelagola – one of the most revered Jain pilgrimage centres. “We will not climb the hill,” he continued.
My husband and I were vacationing in Karnataka. It was the month of May, and even at the early hour of 8 am in the morning, the sun scorched our backs. After visiting Bangalore and Mysore, we had made a planned stop at this holy site in the Southern part of the state en route to Hosur. Even while planning our vacation, my husband was very excited at the prospect of visiting this place and the 18 m high statue of Lord Gometeshwara, considered one of the world’s tallest free-standing monolithic statues.
What we hadn’t bargained for was there would be 1001 granite steps that needed to be climbed to have a close-up view of this colossal magic three thousand feet above sea level on a hilltop. It would be an understatement to term it as an arduous climb.
Why is the Social Media trend of young mothers of boys captioning their parenting video “Dear future Daughter-in-Law, you are welcome” deeply problematic and disturbing to me as a young mother of a girl?
I have recently come across a trend on social media started by young mothers of boys who share videos where they teach their sons to be sensitive and understanding and also make them actively participate in household chores.
However, the problematic part of this trend is that such reels or videos are almost always captioned, “To my future daughter-in-law, you are welcome.” I know your intentions are positive, but I would like to point out how you are failing the very purpose you wanted to accomplish by captioning the videos like this.
I know you are hurt—perhaps by a domestic household that lacks empathy, by a partner who either is emotionally unavailable, is a man-child adding to your burden of parenting instead of sharing it, or who is simply backed by overprotective and abusive in-laws who do not understand the tiring journey of a working woman left without any rest as doing the household chores timely is her responsibility only.
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