Drishtikone
The fairer sex is a tough tag to live up to.
As a girl growing up you are expected to be prim and proper, be soft-spoken, do well in studies. Being a bong is an added curse. You are expected to be musically inclined, twinkle toed and recite poetry at the drop of a hat. Phew!!
Sit properly, have you been beating your brother again, don’t laugh too loudly, your skirt is too short and when you protest albeit a bit loudly…you argue too much. Your relatives don’t make it any easier for you. They will ooh and ahh at your mother’s beauty and then their eyes will dolefully rest on your adolescent gangly frame. They will sigh and exclaim haven’t you become darker? You look so thin! So obviously you don’t have a love affair with the mirror. You hate your pudgy nose, your lashes are not long enough and list goes on. And then there is Maths to deal with.
Just when you have extracted yourself from the school-college mess, you are ready to embark on a new path, your career. At your work place you feel school-sick and long for days that have gone by. Funny considering all your school days you yearned to be an adult so that you could have wads of money to splurge on fancy shoes and a fancier wardrobe! Years of gorging on sohan halwa, ice creams and chocolates have started showing on your skinny frame. Gone are the days when you could finish an entire box of chocolates in one sitting. You have a best friend: acne which has fallen in love with your forehead (can’t say the same for your boy friend though). You learn a new word, sacrifice. And this is just the beginning.
Each new decade throws surprises at you, nasty or otherwise. In your 20’s you realize you are not that bad looking, but then you are too busy donning quite a few hats. You fall in love, marry (not necessarily in that order) and become a martyr at the altar of motherhood. You are stressed beyond belief.
In your 30’s life is finally looking up but discover belatedly that there are many things that cannot be taken for granted. Like gorging on that yumcious chocolate truffle cake from Wenger’s, sans guilt. Yes that’s the new word you have just added to your growing lexicon, guilt. We women love feeling guilty. Guilty about not being a good enough daughter, wife, mother…And to further the agony you start feeling guilty about the yummy feel-good treats. The mirror says you have sinned my child and you add that despicably boring thing to your routine that goes by the name of exercise.
All these years a visit to the salon was for a hair-cut, gradually you embrace something called a monthly maintenance routine. You squirm, your eyes water from sheer pain yet you smilingly put yourself through the ordeal in the hope of a better you. The salon staff suspiciously sounds like your mean relatives. They make your blackheads, corns (imagined or otherwise) seem like cardinal sins. You are given free well meaning beauty advice, which you have no intention of adhering to.
The beauty industry thrives on our insecurities. We are bombarded with ads showing PYT’s lamenting about ageing and graying. Imagine a gorgeous girl, who can’t even spell ‘ageing’ properly, telling you about lurking dark spots and imaginary fine lines! How is that supposed to make you feel? For years I pretended ageing happens only to Martians. Like many a free spirited woman I was convinced that a beautiful heart makes a beautiful you. Alas it is your heart that makes you succumb to the promise of eternal youth. You are amazed at the sheer number of anti ageing products that exist. There is one for daytime, one for night, one for under eye, for hands, cuticles and you wonder, what will they think of next. The many magazines you read, convince you that you need to be pampered. Go, spend an entire month’s salary on your spa treatment, you deserve it. Of course Cosmo tells you things that your husband prefers reading. You sense that the fashion industry is conspiring against you. They invent skinnies, jump suits all intended to make you feel fat. Your cute little exercise regimen is not enough. You enroll yourself with your neighborhood gym. You huff puff on the treadmill after a hard day at the office, lift weights, do crunches and have a dinner of steamed broccoli and carrot soup.
So if someone compliments me on my looks, my well maintained figure, I am ready to launch into a diatribe against the pressures of looking good. The hard work, the guilt, the sacrifice. I could just go on and on.
The agony we have to undergo for the ecstasy!
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