Ladies first

Young girls these days are spoilt for choice when it comes to role models

There is not much about the young that arouses my envy. I don’t grudge them their top-notch metabolism, their wrinkle-free complexions, their insouciance that all will turn out okay, or even the fact that life is full of endless possibilities for them. That’s because I was young once myself, and I know what a tortured time this can be for most of us.

This is an age when we are yet to get truly comfortable in our skin, no matter how firm and unpigmented it may be; when we are tortured by the spectre of failure as well as dreams of success; when we feel things so deeply and viscerally that it marks us for life. This is a time when the best of us are often reduced to emotional wrecks, tossed on the waves of our hormones and the moods they induce.

These are only some of the reasons why I wouldn’t want to relive my youth, for all the money and anti-ageing face-cream in the world.

But there is one thing that I do envy about the young girls growing up right about now. And that’s the fact that they have so many positive female role models in the world they live in. Growing up, my generation had to be content with such stock figures as Indira Gandhi and Mother Teresa. But while these were towering and inspirational personalities in their own right, they were not relatable in quite the same way as the female role models of today are.

And they are everywhere: from sports to arts; from politics to business; from the movies to the media. Wherever you look, there are strong, brave women taking on the world – and winning.

Let’s take sport, to begin with. Yes, we had P.T Usha and Ashwini Nachappa, both leading track stars of their time. But that was about it. There were no tennis or badminton stars on the international circuit who looked like us. And few of us even knew what our female cricketers looked like, though we may have been familiar with Diana Edulji’s name.

How things have changed since then! Sania Mirza has been a bonafide international tennis star for nearly a decade now, winning international titles and endorsements deals with equal elan. Badminton champion Saina Nehwal has won over 20 international titles, an Olympic bronze medal, and attained number one ranking in the world. Somewhere along the way, she has managed to find the time to become brand ambassador for a range of companies as well as for the Government of India campaign to promote the girl child.

And now we have a new stable of stars in the Indian women’s cricket team, all of them with inspirational stories behind them. There’s Mithali Raj, best-known for reading Rumi on the sidelines before she lights up the green with her fiery shots all across the field. And keeping her company are such stalwarts as batting wizards Harmanpreet Kaur and Punam Raut, all-rounder Deepti Sharma, and fiery fast bowler Jhulan Goswami (no relation, alas!).

A quick look at the movie business also gives us hope. Gone are the days of heroines who hid behind Mummy’s pallu or depended on their ‘Godfathers’ to shore up their careers. Today, the film industry is full of independent women, who have succeeded by dint of their own efforts. These are women who make their own rules rather than play the roles prescribed for them. Whether it is Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra, who left the security of Bollywood to make a splash in the West, or Kangana Ranaut and Anushka Sharma, who revel in their ‘outsider’ tag and create their own opportunities, the landscape is heaving with female stars who are not just strong and confident but also secure in their self-belief. And these are qualities that every young girl can aspire to, whatever career she chooses.

The banking sector is as rich in female role models as it is in term deposits. The largest bank in the country, the State Bank of India, is headed by Arundhati Bhattacharya, the first woman to be appointed to that role. Chanda Kochchar is the managing director and CEO of ICICI Bank, the second-largest bank in India (and the largest in the private sector). Shikha Sharma is the managing director and CEO of Axis Bank. Naina Lal Kidwai is the country head of HSBC India. Kalpania Morparia is CEO of J.P. Morgan, India. I could go on, but you get the picture.

The media landscape is also dotted with strong female figures. While NDTV gets the credit for producing the largest number of female stars – Barkha Dutt, Nidhi Razdan, Sonia Singh – others news channels are now fast catching up. Navika Kumar rules the airwaves at Times Now while Mirror Now’s Faye D’Souza is fast carving out a place for herself in the overcrowded media landscape. And then, there’s my friend, Priya Sahgal, whose discussion programmes on NewsX are an island of sanity in this era of outrage-fuelled TV.

Publishing is also rapidly being overrun by women bosses: Meru Gokhale at Penguin Random House; V. Karthika and Sudha Sadanand at Amazon Westland; Diya Kar Hazra at HarperCollins India; and Chiki Sarkar, who heads her own start-up, Juggernaut.

So, if you are a young girl growing up right about now, what do you see around you? You see strong, capable women, following their dreams, working hard, creating their own path, and enjoying the journey. And it gives you hope – even the certainty – that you can do just that in your own time.

How I wish I had had that when I was growing up!

  

Love's labour lost...

A tale of two 'break-ups'; and the life lessons we can learn from them

"Shame" read the stark slogan engraved on the wall. That was the image that Virat Kohli, India's newly-anointed Cricket God fresh from his triumphant innings against Australia in the World T20 tournament, posted on Twitter with a tweet that read: "Shame on people for trolling @AnushkaSharma non-stop. Have some compassion. She has always only given me positivity."

The same image turned up on his Instagram account with an even more searing message: "Shame on those people who have been having a go at Anushka for the longest time and connecting every negative thing to her...Shame on blaming and making fun of her when she has no control over what I do with my sport..."

Yes, I know, Virat also made it clear in this message that he didn't need respect. And that instead people should respect Anushka, and have some compassion for her. But it is hard not to respect a man who stands up so firmly and so publicly for his ex. (Well, she is his ex at the moment of this writing, but who knows what the next week may bring; there is already fevered speculation that they are 'just on a break' and may get together again. But I digress.)

There are some who would dismiss Kohli's public defence of his former girlfriend as the very least he could do ("It's just basic human decency, yaar, what's the big deal?") But to the rest of us, used as we are to the sight of messy celebrity breakups with both parties washing their dirty designer jeans in public, it was a sight for sore eyes.

Here, at last, was a man who didn't rubbish his ex the moment she was out of his life. Au contraire, he was taking on those who would rubbish her, most of whom purported to be his 'fans', and telling them where to get off.

But then, Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma never really played by the rules of celebrity relationships. They didn't give gushing interviews about how much they loved each other; but equally they did not hide the fact that they were together. They would travel on the same plane, Anushka would applaud her boyfriend enthusiastically from the stands, and he would tweet proudly about her new releases.

Together, the couple taught the prying Indian public the difference between secrecy and privacy. And they did this with grace and humour, even though it can't have been easy for either of them to deal with those carping critics who blamed Anushka's presence in his life for Virat's poor form during that period.

And when their love story ended and social media began trolling Anushka because Virat was back in good nick, it was Kohli who went batting for her with the kind of ferocity that only he is capable of (both on and off the wicket).

Strangely enough, even as Virat and Anushka were giving us tips on the art of the good break-up, there was another pair of celebrities driving home the lessons by helpfully posing as a cautionary tale.

Yes, I am talking about Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut. Now, we don't know for sure if they ever had an affair (so, please Hrithik, no legal notices for this piece) or if they were anything more than colleagues. All we know is that Kangana referred to a 'silly ex' in one of her press interactions. Hrithik reacted by tweeting that there were more chances of him having an affair with the Pope than with any of the ladies mentioned in the media.

To cut a long story short, the sorry saga culminated with both parties slapping legal suits on one another. In his legal notice, Hrithik's lawyers alleged that Kangana was delusional and suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, leading to mental health professionals raining fire on Hrithik's head. For good measure, Hrithik also got sued by a Catholic fringe group for insulting the Pope. (Honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up!)

What these two parallel narratives provide for us is a ready primer for how to deal with a love or a 'professional relationship' (there, there, happy now, Hrithik?) that has run its course.

First up, don't share details of your relationship or the break-up. It is nobody's business but your own; keep it that way. As the saying goes: never complain, never explain.

Next, don't give in to the temptation to bitch about your ex. No matter how loud people may swear that theirs is a 'mutual decision' most relationships end with one person being left and the other doing the leaving. And often the desire to paint the other party as a devil is overwhelming. Well, learn to resist it. Shut up and let the moment, the week, the month, the year pass; and so will the temptation to hurt the one you once loved.

And finally, even when the love has faded never forget that this was a person that you once adored. Remember how hard you fought to protect them when you were together. Bring the same passion to defend them when you have drifted apart. That is the best way to pay tribute to the bond you once shared (and also be a decent human being).

In other words, when it comes to matters of the heart, be a Virat, not a Hrithik.

Leading lights

Has Bollywood finally accepted that a heroine can power a movie just as well as a hero?

After all the brouhaha that surrounded the making of Mary Kom, the movie – most of it centering around why the filmmakers couldn’t have got an ethnic Manipuri rather than the very north Indian Priyanka Chopra to play the lead role – I must confess that I was rather curious to see how the film turned out in the end. So, for once, rather than wait for the DVD to come out, I actually ventured into a cinema hall to catch the movie, first day, first show.

And I wasn’t disappointed. Yes, it was over-the-top in parts, the usual Bollywood clichés were well in place, and some characters were played at the level of caricature. But what made the movie work was Priyanka Chopra. She didn’t just play Mary Kom; she was Mary Kom. And she achieved this not with prosthetics, make-up and mimicry, but by taking on the legendary boxer’s fighting spirit and making it her own.

Just a few scenes into the film, and you forget all about Chopra’s ethnicity. All you care about is her performance, remarkable in its range and nuance. She brings Mary Kom alive on the big screen: her rebellion against her father who didn’t want her to box; her slow-burning love for Onler, her devoted husband; her stormy relationship with the boxing federation; her fiery determination to make a comeback after the birth of her twins; and more.

Such was Priyanka’s dominance that you didn’t even notice the lack of a leading man in the movie (her on-screen husband is not just supportive but strictly supporting-actor material). And that’s what stayed with me after the film had ended (with an evocative playing of Jana Gana Mana, which had the entire hall standing in teary silence): the fact that this was a woman’s story, told from a woman’s point of view, without any pandering to masculine sensibilities.

Does this mean that Bollywood has finally grown up and realized that you don’t always need an over-muscled man in the lead for a movie to do well at the box-office? Is Hindi cinema finally willing to give its heroines what they have always longed for: a meaty role to sink their teeth into, and a film to carry on their own shoulders?

Well, it is early days yet, but the signs are rather encouraging. Last month saw the release of Rani Mukherji’s Mardaani, in which she plays an angry young cop, who runs down a trafficking ring with a combination of detective work, brute force and a liberal use of swear words. Yes, the kind of role that Amitabh Bachchan played in another lifetime; only this time it was a woman in the lead role. And though the movie was not a superhit, garnering only modest success at the box-office, Rani herself received good notices, proving that audiences are not entirely non-receptive to such women-centric films.

This is a change that has been a long time coming, but has become more and more evident over the last few years. Sridevi’s English Vinglish, released in 2012, was one of the first signs. A small-budget, quirky movie about a middle-aged housewife who discovers herself anew as she signs up to learn English in New York, when she arrives there to help organize her niece’s wedding, this became a surprise hit, on the basis of Sridevi’s sparkling performance (and a brilliant effort by writer-director Gauri Shinde).

The following year belonged to Kangana Ranaut’s Queen, in which she did a marvelous job of playing a West Delhi Punjabi kudi who is jilted at the mandap but decides to go off on the honeymoon of her dreams anyway, even if it is on her own. Yes, there was a hero of sorts, the man who jilts her, but this was Kangana’s show all the way. And she pulled it off with both nonchalance and elan, proving that a heroine can power a movie at the box-office just as well as a hero.

The pioneer of this trend, though, was undoubtedly Vidya Balan. She started off with Dirty Picture, playing a Silk Smitha-type character in one-size-too-tight clothes, and ooh-la-laaed her way to a superhit. She went on to make waves with Kahani, in which she played a woman who may or may not be pregnant but is indubitably in search of her missing husband. And though her latest outing as Bobby Jasoos, a wannabe detective who specializes in weird disguises, bombed at the box-office, Balan herself got rave reviews.

But while these breakout hits (peppered with the occasional flop) are all well and good, the proof of the pudding would be when big budget blockbusters like Happy New Year depend not on a hero like Shah Rukh Khan but on a heroine like Deepika Padukone to draw in the crowds. Or when a superhero is not called Krishh or Ra.One but Radha or even Sita.

Come to think of it, both Priyanka and Deepika would fill out a superhero (or should that be superheroine?) outfit admirably. Super Shakti: Rakshasa Slayer anyone?