A long way to go for the urban Indian woman

By Ritika at 26 February, 2009, 3:52 am

There’s a new MMS scandal making news in the nation and this time it’s in Noida. The girl in the video is a 23 year old MBA student who rebuffed the marriage proposal of her erstwhile boyfriend and the jilted lover responded by sending her striptease video to all.

Though this time (thankfully and finally!) most of the TV channels refrained from covering the scandal, the leading English dailies published the story with photos of the girl (with face morphed) on their frontpage. I wonder, if the editors of these dailies are really the torch bearers of the new age Indian woman, would they publish the photos of the girl? To my eyes, it’s clearly the fault of the boy who stooped to such levels and it’s his photo that should be published and damned and he should be made a social outcast.

Now, no one will waste a single breath in giving lectures on the losing morality of Indian girls, where as, the boy’s crime will go un-noticed. The newspapers have just helped in accentuating that school of thought. Here the girl’s choice of forgoing the relation was not pardoned and in the Mangalore pub attack, their choice to visit pubs is abused. And these are not the woman of small towns and villages but they are the symbols of the new age urban Indian woman. I have seen innumerable examples of such backwardness in the independent women capital of India, i.e., Mumbai, which I consider as the best place for woman in India.

A friend’s parents are facing difficulty in finding a suitable match for their daughter in their traditional community because most of the families want a MBA housewife. These boys are not raised in any small town but in Mumbai and are educated in the best of colleges. Another friend faces the dilemma that she cannot wear western wear at home and cannot wear Indian at office, so she keeps a change at her office, just like Bittu of Delhi6 (if you have seen the movie). A colleague’s engagement was broken off because of dowry demands and the guy in question was a graduate from one of the most reputed b-schools of India.

Such incidents make me wonder how far we need to go in creating a truly liberal society that gives the Indian woman choice to live her life her way. Looks like, there is a lot of groundwork to be done in our urban society before we proceed to reform the rural hinterland.

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