IDEALITY CRISIS

I am twenty one, at the threshold of womanhood. Tomorrow I shall be a complete woman. Get married to a man with a sound bank balance and a good status in society. Love need not be the paramount criteria (after all love can not provide one with two square meals a day). Implicitly there will be many advocates of ‘Love at first sight’ but my understanding fails to understand why doesn’t Kareena Kapoor rise in love at first sight with a middle class boy? Does the eyesight fail then? Yes the shortcoming is entirely of the eyesight not of Kareena Kapoor. After all we all have heard of inter caste marriages; internation marriages; interclass marriages but have we ever heard of ‘Inter status marriages’? Point blank ‘No’. Anyway, marry, have a dream honeymoon, after sometime beget children and also asphyxiate your soul trying to be the ‘trophy woman’, the ‘trophy biwi’ and the ‘trophy maa’.

Yes how can I forget I am educated too and in the coming years by hook or by crook, I am sure to add many more degrees to my portfolio to sound something like ‘Dr.(Mrs.) XYZ, BA, MA, Ph.D….’. God it will be very difficult for my little children to learn up their mother’s name. But I can’t help it, my existence would be almost incomplete without those ABCDs before the name that I was given by my parents at birth and slightly changed post rebirth as Mrs. Something. How can I agree to be left behind in the vogue of being the economically independent woman. I would surely be a ‘working woman’ (Mind it, cooking, cleaning etc can’t be categorized as work, so the woman who does only that is not a working woman). I shall be successfully juggling between home and office. As I hear those so called Indira Nooyi’s proclaiming that they keep their personal and professional lives completely away from each other, I am surprised as how one can keep the right arm of the body in the bedroom and the left arm of the body in the living room and ask the body to function normally.

Now after all this endeavour will I be successful in proving myself as an ideal woman in life. A section of the intellectual society may hail me as a powerful emancipated woman or rather a superwoman. (Why doesn’t Forbes and its other cousins ever claim woman who manage the most difficult households, eccentric husband and demanding children as powerful. May be because they are not ‘working’). The other sections of the intellectual society may accuse me as a destroyer of the family.

Looking forward to my prospective womanhood, I am perplexed, confused not about my identity but about my role as a woman. I know I can never remain silent but to what extent should I speak. Why should my feminity and my education be at loggerheads to each other? Can humanity ever reach to a ubiquitously agreed definition of ‘An Ideal Woman’.