Lady boss assigns stringent deadlines to her team. Then she goes home, cooks several dishes for dinner and calls the husband asking him to come home soon. Husband has a lot of work to finish because he happens to be in a team where the boss has cracked the whip.
Of course, his boss is the wife and this is new India where women are smart, powerful and accomplished and husbands don’t have to tussle with their egos to report to their wives at work. The Airtel ad, whose plotline is described above, should have warmed our hearts, but it has anything but.
Feminists are frothing at the mouth because the ad depicts that even successful career women have to eventually conform to traditional roles. To my mind, this is a truly blinkered view. Liberal attitudes towards women imply that they should be free to do whatever they like. In this case, here was a successful and smart woman who likes to cook. And when she’s done cooking, she would like her husband to be home so they could eat together. What is regressive about that?
A lot has changed for urban Indian women in the last year-and-a-half. Conversations about safety and equality have come to the forefront of discussions. While a lot remains to be done, it is not just the glass half-full view that things are changing for the better. Yet, these knee-jerk reactions to what constitutes women’s roles is mindless hysteria, not measured analysis.
It isn’t feminism to demand that women only do what they haven’t traditionally done. It is feminism to demand that women be able to choose what they want to do — whether it is pulling an all-nighter at work, heading out for a drink and a dance, tending to a sick child at home or cooking a meal for the family. Sometimes this requires superhuman skills in juggling schedules and planning ahead. Often, some of it is near-impossible. Yet, the sheer fact that the woman is doing something because she chooses to is all the evidence of liberation one needs. It’s cutting the nose to spite the face to suggest that a successful career woman should not be allowed to go home and indulge in an activity she enjoys. Even if it happens to be playing the role of a ‘traditional’ wife.
Veena Venugopal,
Deputy Editor