Reference to Barkha Dutt's article in HT-Lib Service, TV-Style

Who is the liberal amongst us all?

I am surprised and saddened by a whole generation of educated women who have watched the K-serials and either lauded or felt mesmerized by the persona created by a la Tulsi or Paravati. I would have understood an uneducated woman responding to it with enthusiasm but can’t comprehend the enchantment in the other.

I almost feel as much threatened by the impact these serials have had on women who were in some cases pioneers in their own small ways when they started out in life. This generation of women that constitutes our grandmothers, mothers or mother-in-laws and aunts have fought and made difficult choices at one stage or another in their lives to create a change, to achieve that one right that would separate them from the repressed and help them move into the modern and liberal world.

Mind you they didn’t get that easily. My eldest aunt’s right to education came after a long struggle; perhaps my mother had it easier than her! My mother-in-law is a teacher for heaven’s sake. My husband’s aunts are all educated, self sufficient and independent. They must have battled with their own to win the right to just be who they want to be. They couldn’t have had it any other way.

Such women from normal, middle class families created the category of the working women in yesteryears. These same women in other circumstances create a hierarchy while in the company of women from the villages or small towns. They see themselves as different.

Why then do they find it so easy to consort with the likes of Tulsi? Why then is my generation being compared with the likes of Tulsi and shown lacking in many ways?
Why then have they lost their ability to understand and respect the small victories they helped us achieve? Our conception by all means wouldn’t have been possible if they had not broken the first barrier. After all we are what we are today, because they took that first step ages ago. Sometimes I feel the uneducated have shown me more respect, appreciation and tolerance. They seemed to be growing and evolving whereas these educated women have become complacent in some way, have stopped the process of accepting growth, change and building new ideas.

Maybe the dynamics of what represented liberal and modern then and now has changed but surely they are capable of sensitivity or awareness of an individual’s right to form, dignity, and independence as well as the right to self-expression which is exactly what they fought for in the past.

So who is the liberal amongst us?

Why does the woman in us split and become two contrasting people? Sometimes I feel we are a nation filled people who have no idea of the word tolerance or an individual’s right to personal space. Sex, gender, religion, education, profession, caste, place, people, name, brand, lifestyle-all these categories exhibit a clear lack of tolerance or an individual’s right to personal space or freedom in term’s of self expression.

If educated, independent young women who are leaders in their profession and in a position to make a difference in society begin to respond to such regression by not raising a voice what will be the outcome of their conception? If they allow the split or allow it to coexist with their other self, what might just happen? That thought worries me.