Today's Woman

All the characters referred to in the below blog are fictitious and bear no resemblance with anyone living or dead whatsoever. Any co-incidence is purely co-incidental and unintentional.

Jahnavi gets up at 5 in the morning. She has got two hours with herself before her office cab will be arriving to pick her up. Before that she has to prepare the breakfast and make preliminary lunch preparations in addition to the daily chores. Some days will be more hectic when she might have to cater to a couple of e-mails as well from office. It will take an hour’s ride to the office and it is no less hectic after reaching there. Working with one of the top-notch software companies in the world, workload is never less. Being in the troubleshooting department, issues can come up any moment. Meetings need to be organized, juniors have to assigned work, boss wants the updates on critical issues and so many other issues needs to be handled. Jahnavi does all this with a firm resolve. The day’s work is wound up by evening and she has to take the evening 6:30 cab to reach home. In the evening’s traffic she will reach home by 8 or 8:30, and after reaching there she has to again cook. Her dad is waiting for her to return. She is fully exhausted and stressed out with the hectic day in office and also has a long list of chores pending before she can blink an eye. After cooking and finishing off in the kitchen she has to prepare for her GMAT and also finish some pending office e-mails. By the time everything finishes, it is almost 12 midnight. Tired she goes to bed. But sleep eludes her as she has got one more thing to worry about. She has got to think of something about Siddharth, her estranged husband, who is trying his level best to bring her back but she cannot stand him a moment in her life. Her parents, her cousins, some of her close friends, all have been trying to convince her to give Siddharth one more chance. But Jahnavi, who is completely shattered and disillusioned with Siddharth’s indifference, insensitivities and a one-sided relationship, is fighting her fight alone. So it seems it is like an agony being a woman, a working woman. We will come back to Jahnavi, but before that let us have a look at Kamini.

Kamini on the other hand, has just finished her college in Arts and is nowadays at home. She is the only daughter of her parents and has been pampered a lot since childhood and all her wishes have been fulfilled even before she sneezes. She has a younger brother as well. She is very arrogant, stubborn and ill-disciplined. Just after she finishes her studies, her parents find a match for her. A software engineer, working in an MNC in Bangalore and he is the only son of his parents. Jignesh is a dream son-in-law for anyone as he is a very family oriented person and wants to give his family nothing but the best. But Kamini has her own dreams, getting married to a software engineer working in am MNC, having a decent salary, owning a flat in his own name in Bangalore, all she could think of is a life full of luxury with no restrictions. She also had this confidence in herself and in her so called “Love Gestures”, that she would be able to convince Jignesh to live separately from his parents. Her parents also coaxed Jignesh beyond limits to achieve this goal. But Jignesh was a hard client. He would never do something that his conscience does not allow him to and strongly objects to Kamini’s and her parents’ unjust demands. They subject him and his innocent parents to mayhem of mental cruelty by not only maligning them socially but also going to the extent of filing false criminal cases against Jignesh and his parents and force them to come to a compromise. But Jignesh is a fighter and vows to fight back but does not give in. And so it may seem like it is an ecstasy being a woman as the law allows her to get as vicious as she wants and can have the confidence of making her unjust demands conceded to by shedding crocodile tears and unleashing a string of fabricated lies. But little does Kamini know that she herself is her biggest enemy. Time will teach this lesson to her.

So here we have two different women. Jahnavi who has given everything she could do to not only make her relation work, but also to prove that a girl can handle office and home simultaneously. And we have Kamini who has only known to lie and shed crocodile tears to gather false sympathy and trap Jignesh. Jahnavi knows very well that in the current legal system she can easily force Siddharth for a divorce, but she is a woman of substance and principles, who will not want her husband to go through legal hassles, and neither will she ever separate a son from his mother, “because a mother is a mother”. These are two examples of “Today’s Woman”, or is this title itself a misnomer. They are just examples of the different facets of the “The Fairer Sex”, and since it relates to the timeline of “Today”, may be it is convenient to refer to them as “Today’s Woman”. But it is not the woman alone. Kamini could not have done all this without her parents’ illegal support and faulty upbringing. Jahnavi’s parents also realize that their daughter is not happy with Siddharth, still they are advising her to re-consider him, for they know it takes a moment to break and years to make. And is it not the fact their upbringing is also reflected in the fact that Jahnavi, though disillusioned by Siddharth, still wants the divorce to go through peacefully. She is fighting with her parents for Siddharth’s sake. Hats off to Jahnavi and her parents. In spite of these agonies Jahnavi should take pride in her strength wherein she has put herself at stake for the betterment of people she loves. To me it is an Ecstasy being Jahnavi and an Agony being Kamini.