If you are passionate about teaching, then Hackberry offers you franchise opportunities to turn this passion into your profession!

ReadSocial Issues
July 3, 2017

Aunty Mat Kaho Naa! Shilpa Shetty Comes To The Rescue Of ‘Aunties’ Everywhere

Have you ever been addressed as 'Aunty' by folks not much younger than you? You will relate to this.

Prashila Naik
Have you ever been addressed as ‘Aunty’ by folks not much younger than you? You will relate to this.
Shilpa Shetty just did something groundbreaking, and no one really seems to have noticed. No, I am not talking about her Youtube channel where she prances around with fantastically styled hair and that perennially swelte body, sharing ‘simple’ healthy recipes and other health related tidbits. Her channel is after all steadily gathering a decent sized subscriber base and every video running into a few hundred thousand views and thus a steady stream of ad revenue (smart!)
Neither am I talking about her visit to an Austrian spa that she had gifted herself on her 40-something-th birthday (News courtesy: Indian Express). Shilpa is now alongwith all her myriad ‘roles’, an ambassador of the Swachch Bharat abhiyaan. Whistles! Whistles! But even that is not the groundbreaking something I am talking about. It is the very fact that in one of the ads for this abhiyaan Shilpa is addressed by a young girl of around 8-9 as ‘Shilpa didi’. The first time, I thought I had mis-heard this. So I ran to the TV screen the next time the ad came around. This time I made sure I missed nothing. The little girl had indeed called Shilpa ‘didi’.
I felt a little tear slide down my cheeks. For all the harried women like me who were called aunties even when we were entitled to be called didi or sista or heck, even a more androgynous ‘bro’, Shilpa had gone ahead and asserted herself in all her 40-odd years old glory. She has made an aunty obsessed Indian society take note of the fact that a woman can stay a didi across myriad generations and across changing hair textures, all if she manages to stay slim, stay relevant, and most importantly evolve with the changing trends. If this is not groundbreaking, what is! Swachhta be damned. Shilpa definitely deserves to be the ‘anti-aunty’ abhiyaan ambassador.
Growing up, I was often told to address men as ‘uncle’ and women as ‘aunty’. And so the biggest conundrum my 5 year old brain faced was how should I address my neighborhood friend’s elderly grandmother. It just made no sense that I call two generations of women the same word ‘aunty’. And when I raised this all important question with my mother, she brushed it aside in a manner that only mothers can do. And yet, apart from a few such stray digressions, the path to aunty-dom was more or less a cake-walk as a child.
The real struggles began when I made the entry into an awkward adulthood. At the ripe young age of 24, I had the shock of my life when whilst on a househunting soiree on the lanes of New Bombay, a request of “Can you pass the ball aunty” was made by a bunch of cricket playing boys  who were certainly not much younger than I was then. I did pass the damned ball, but the doubly-whamy-rude awareness of not being able to find a decent house and having entered auntyhood all at once left me more than a little <insert sad smiley face emoji>. I remembered the famously anti-aunty Pooja from Ekta Kapoor’s maiden (and my only favorite) venture Hum Paanch. Pooja aunty often expressed anguish at being addressed as Pooja aunty with her iconic catch line, “aunty mat kaho na”. I wished I could yell at the boys, hold them by their non-existent collars and tell them the same, or better still cast a curse on them that they would turn into premature uncles. But none of that was done of course. Lost and confused, I expected my rather forced entry into the world of aunty-hood.
It probably is our Indian culture that imbibes the treating of everyone from our guests to our teachers like Gods that led to this obsession with annointing people foreceful relations. Like the auto rickshaw driver who becomes your bhaiya, even though that might also subconsciously contribute to prevention of, hush hush, rape and all. Or the middle aged maid who comes to your house and calls you didi even if with the laws of didi-hood it is you who should be bloody well calling her that. Or even the mother-in-law of your best friend who has to be addressed as aunty, because God forbid we call her by her name or don’t call her anything at all.
But somewhere the whole concept of respect has gone for a huge toss, and the addressing nomenclature is as stony-faced as an actual stone. Aunty has become less a way of showing genuine respect and more a means to denigrate. Remember Smriti Irani and the famous Aunty-national?
Of course, if you do not agree with a woman’s political ideologies or her opinions, instead of being critical of it with reason and sense, you jump straight down to headlining her appearance, or rather the lack of it in this case. Call a woman a aunty, and show her her place in the scheme of things. Or for that matter even the most beautiful woman in this world and Bachchan bahu post her motherhood-in-late-thirties had to do a Ae dil hai mushkil with a younger Ranbir Kapoor and seductively shimmy to a redux of a Farida Khannum classic to shut down all her naysayers so that she could get back to being a ‘hot MILF’ from a ‘fat aunty’. Argh!
And so Shilpa Shetty asserting herself as the didi of a girl decades younger than she is, marks the redemption of all the Pooja ‘aunties’ in the world, yours truly included. Finally we have our female public figures giving company to ageless male figures who forever continue to be our bhaijaans even as we start adding decades to our ages. As they say, every aunty will have her day.

Liked this post?

Register at Women's Web to get our weekly mailer and never miss out on our events, contests & best reads! Or - get a couple of really cool reads on your phone every day - click here to join our Telegram channel.

Women's Web is an open platform that publishes a diversity of views. Individual posts do not necessarily represent the platform's views and opinions at all times. If you have a complementary or differing point of view, sign up and start sharing your views too!

Comments

About the Author

Prashila Naik

Writer and technologist currently based out of Bangalore read more...

14 Posts | 48,959 Views

Stay updated with our Weekly Newsletter or Daily Summary - or both!

Doing Good is #BeautifulInDeed

Social Issues
November 25, 2021

I Needed Many Wake-Up Calls To Finally Walk Out Of My Violent Marriage…

We are conditioned to normalise domestic violence out of fear of abandonment. Thinking that 'trauma bonding' is better than no bonding holds us back from speaking up!

Aakriti Dhir

(Trigger Warning: This post may be triggering for survivors of domestic violence. This post has been published especially to honour the International Day For The Elimination of Violence Against Women.)

Everyone said my perfect husband was like Lord Ram…. but this is how he took unfair advantage of my tolerance!

My grandmother was very fond of my husband whose name is synonymous with Lord Ram’s name. Every call she made to my husband started with the bhajan “Aaj sab mil mangal gao, Awadh mai, raam aye hain“. (Hail everyone, sing praises, Lord Ram has come in the kingdom of Awadh.) It was a mandatory welcome song whenever she met him or even spoke to him on the phone. Yes, his attributes were like that of Lord Ram. His attitude, chivalry, persona, fair skin, smile, height, physique and charm illustrate the perfect image of Lord Ram.

Read Full Article
Short Stories & Poetry

As Days Went By She Realized That There Was A Part Of Him She Could Never Reach…

He was a generous man but she hardly knew much about the investments or their financial health. A couple of times, she had asked him and he had been vague. Now when she thought about it...

Chandrika R krishnan

He was a generous man but she hardly knew much about the investments or their financial health. A couple of times, she had asked him and he had been vague. Now when she thought about it…

The Muse of the Month is a monthly writing contest organised by Women’s Web, bringing you original fiction inspired by women. 

Chandrika R. Krishnan is one of the winners for the November 2021 Muse of the Month, and wins a Rs 750 Amazon voucher from Women’s Web. The juror for this month, Anuradha Kumar commented, “This introspective, quiet, story with its depiction of the relationship between two relatively older people is quite impressive. A lifetime spent together can bring familiarity and still allow for many mysteries and secrets. Also, the structure of the story, shifting from an external perspective to an internal monologue is well-done.”

Read Full Article
Load More Related Articles
write
advertise
intern
All Categories
Art & Culture As You Write It Attend Books Campaigns Career Growth Crime & Law Disability & Inclusion Entrepreneurship Fashion Feminist Fitness & Wellness Food For Young Women Humour learn LGBTQ Money Newsmakers Parenting Parenting Tips Participate Pop Culture Read Relationships Sex & Sexuality Short Stories & Poetry Social Issues Sports Stories From Moms Travel Women's History Workplace Issues