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Can we stop moralising about Gehraiyaan? None of us have the right to condemn adult women’s choices if we do not hold adult men accountable for their choices.
It doesn’t take conservatives to get butt-hurt about the most random trivial things.
Gehraiyaan movie is the new punching bag for conservatives for various reasons, from promoting infidelity in our society to it being a pornographic film, and how Ranveer Singh can allow his wife to get intimate with her male co-star!
The latest news is that the former police commissioner and ADGP (Railways) Bhaskar Rao couldn’t tolerate the movie for more than 20 minutes. So far, so good, as everyone’s entitled to their preferences.
But his outlandish reason is that he didn’t ‘approve’ of Deepika Padukone’s choices in the movie.
Again, the typical stereotypical and hypocritical response you’d expect from our sanskaari men.
When will male actors be held accountable for their ‘choices’ that corrupt our sanskaari culture?
While these men have an owl’s eye on women’s choices, they’re as blind as a bat to the men’s choices, be it in movies or otherwise.
Why couldn’t the retired commissioner blame Siddhant Chaturvedi’s choices in the movie? Akhir taali ek haath se toh nahin bhajti nahi! (You can’t clap with one hand). Besides, he’s the one who initiated this unsanskaari infidelity.
Why should the onus of upholding the honour and sanctity of a long-term committed relationship lie solely upon a woman’s shoulders?
Check the meaning of the above Punjabi sentence from Bigg Boss here.
I don’t know about you, but I find the hypocrisy of sanskaari men absolutely nauseating.
These sanskaari men wear western-style shorts and shirts but dictate what traditional clothes women should drape in or get disrobed from.
Talking of attire, Deepika Padukone and Ananya Pandey’s athleisure outfits have also come under fire. It’s a woman’s agency whether she chooses to wear sports bras onscreen or in the park like Kannada actress Samyuktha Hegde did, and was publicly shamed for it.
None of us have the right to condemn adult women’s choices if we do not hold adult men accountable for their choices.
We’ve seen female actors in movies like Fire, Lipstick Under My Burkha, Veere Di Wedding, and now Gehraiyaan draw ire from the conservatives.
A Kabir Singh can troll topless, smoke, drink like there’s no tomorrow, and get intimate with numerous women, and still be a sanskari boy. But if women actors play remotely similar roles on screen, they are corrupting our sanskaar, parampara, maryada, and whatnot.
Infidelity is all around us.
I remember seeing sanskari married men and women in our apartment having affairs as a child. Or fellow sanskari batchmates who went on group vacations and swapped their partners.
To pretend that infidelity doesn’t exist in our society is hypocritical. To blame movies and especially its women actors for promoting infidelity is ludicrous.
The conservative retired commissioner got a sane reply from Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who tweeted: “You should watch the whole film. It’s really well made with a few twists at the end. Deepika’s performance is amazing.”
Whether you loved the film or not, whether you thought the movie had depth or not, the one takeaway from Gehraiyaan that we can all agree upon is that we are all messed up human beings.
Deepika Padukone, who played the ‘bent but not broken’ character of Alisha Khanna with utmost sensitivity and conviction, drawing from her lived experiences with depression, says it best – “I didn’t see Alisha as wrong or right, that’s not the tonality of the film. The film is not saying that oh! look here are these flawed characters and let’s go on a journey with them and by the end of it dissect and decide who is right and wrong. The idea of the film is observational, that there are different kinds of people in the world. These kinds of people exist. Are we able to empathize with these characters? You don’t have to agree with her choices, I don’t agree with her choices. as actors, you have to step out of the lens of judgment.”
Gehraiyaan is about how all of us are perfectly capable of sinking into the depths of darkness. So, everyone deserves empathy and redemption for their questionable choices.
But somehow, this leeway is generously granted to only men and not women in our country.
So when will sanskari men stop policing women in our country? But again… Kaisa hai kaun hai woh jaane kahan hai? (Where is he, wherever he is? – the sanskaari man in deed and action).
I haven’t come across a single sanskaari man by deed and action until now. I have seen several sanskaari women, though. If you find him, please do me a favour and send me his number.
I’d love to meet this mythical creature.
Author, poet, and marketer, know more about Tina Sequeira here: www.thetinaedit.com read more...
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Neena was the sole caregiver of Amma and though one would think that Amma was dependent on her, Neena felt otherwise.
Neena inhaled the aroma that emanated from the pan and took a deep breath. The aroma of cumin interspersed with butter transported her back to the modest kitchen in her native village. She could picture her father standing in the kitchen wearing his white crisp kurta as he made delectable concoctions for his only daughter.
Neena grew up in a home where both her parents worked together in tandem to keep the house up and running. She had a blissful childhood in her modest two-room house. The house was small but every nook and cranny gave her memories of a lifetime. Neena’s young heart imagined that her life would follow the same cheerful course. But how wrong she was!
When she was sixteen, the catastrophic clutches of destiny snatched away her parents. They passed away in a road accident and Neena was devastated. Relatives thronged her now gloomy house and soon it was decided that she should be married off.
Women today don’t want to be in a partnership that complicates their lives further. They need an equal partner with whom they can figure out life as a team, playing by each other’s strengths.
We all are familiar with that one annoying aunty who is more interested in our marital status than in the dessert counter at a wedding. But these aunties have somehow become obsolete now. Now they are replaced by men we have in our lives. Friends, family, and even work colleagues. It’s the men who are worried about why we are not saying yes to one among their clans. What is wrong with us? Aren’t we scared of dying alone? Like them?
A recent interaction with a guy friend of mine turned sour when he lectured me about how I would regret not getting married at the right time. He lectured that every event in our lives needs to be completed within a certain timeframe set by society else we are doomed. I wasn’t angry. I was just disappointed to realize that annoying aunties are rapidly doubling in our society. And they don’t just appear at weddings or family functions anymore. They are everywhere. They are the real pandemic.
Let’s examine this a little closer.
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