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My divorce will come through soon, but people are already asking me about getting married again. WHY would I want to?
When a person gets divorced, society wants to know about their plans for remarriage already. Let me explain why I have an objection to it.
Have you seen the movie Shawshank Redemption? Watch it for the last half an hour at least.
In that, Andy, who is in prison for a crime he did not commit, spends 20 years digging a secret tunnel to the outside. He then makes his escape one stormy night, crawling his way through this cramped tunnel, then wades his way through a sewage tunnel, full of shit, the length of 5 football fields, before he finally reaches outside the prison grounds and falls into a stream. He then starts running and tears off his dirty shirt and puts his hands up in the air with the rain falling on him, and you see on his face the utter relief and gratitude and joy of FREEDOM after 20 years.
THAT is how I feel now that I am getting my divorce. That Andy is me. Telling me to get married again is telling me to go back into that prison, wading through all that shit again, only to stay constricted and trapped inside a little hole of a cell that patriarchy calls marriage.
It cannot contain who I am anymore. It cannot contain who I have become. It cannot contain my spirit or my light. It is a prison for women like me who have become fierce, outrageous, disobedient, outspoken, rebellious. This system will always try to break us down. That is the only way it will survive.
In the battle between the individual and society, the individual will always have to sacrifice themselves for society to continue. If more and more individuals refuse to toe the line and demand authenticity, then society as it is today will perish but a new, more authentic one will take its place.
A lot of us are ready to sacrifice who we are for our children or families. Some of us are not ready to do so even then. As long as there is a balance between the numbers of such women, society as you know it today will continue.
But for me, I have tasted freedom and there’s no way I am getting back into that cell again.
I don’t equate love, friendship, companionship, loyalty, commitment, or intimacy with marriage. Not every marriage has all of that but you can have all that with or without ”marriage”.
Image source: a still from the Hindi short film He Said She Said
Karishma has been writing short stories since she was 8 and poetry since she was 12. She ended up studying Zoology, then Montessori, and then psychology, always feeling ‘’something was missing’. She worked in the read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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