Happy endings

.. and no, this post is not about happy endings in Thailand.

But instead about the aspirational happy endings women aspire for. Whenever a girl decides to or actually does get married, the most common sentence to accompany it she finally got her happy ending.

It might the end of a long courtship, a long search, a long wait and just a long request list, but all these distinctly imply – that is it, it is finally over. Now when I wake up tomorrow I will be married and taken and the battle is won.

Why does no one ever wish a man this? Why is it not his happy ending? Contrarily he is often teased for ending his free life and happy times.

Is this all conditioning? Is this all about how we are taught to see things? Inability to look past one aspect of your life? So much so that when a feminist got married, she wrote up quite a story.  Is it so tied to failure and success? And more importantly, why is it an ending? Why not a beginning?  Why not just one aspect of your life which could end and it will not mean end of your life.

That big, brave world

Reading this interview made me think how sterile a rape can be in reportage. There is talk of doctors, swabs, semen, DNA and many other technical things but none of them ever talk about what it is actually is, a power trip really. You might want to read this too.. it proves, at least, to some degree that women are the worst critics for women.

Though I have to be honest. When the Shiney Ahuja news broke, I remembered thinking he may be guilty of cheating on his wife but having consensual sex with any other woman cannot be construed as rape just because he reneged on promises he made to the woman. That was my initial thought but since the blogs and media have made the issue murkier and now I do not even claim to know what may have happened exactly.

Even the Madhur Bhadarkar case was fashioned from similar circumstances. It usually pisses me off when women claim rape or any form of abuse because some promise has been reneged on and they have already dispensed with the favours, usually sex. To give Preeti credit, she had filed a cheating case on him but it seemed (through the coverage) that she was accusing him of rape. It seems to be a favourite method to claim the slighting of the Indian culture.

There doesn’t seem to be a conclusion to this in my head but  it is upsetting to see how the real issue almost always gets buried in any form of journalism today, for a better headline, it seems…