These girls want more bucks, even more challenges
Shruti Prashar
TIME changes as it passes and so do we. Yesterday is either buried or kept as a signpost. No one wants it to become today or tomorrow. And as our numbers increase, the desperation of each face to become a person heightens. And in the vast churning Samudra Manthan, a woman too unveils to find herself a name. As Anees Jung puts it, "Rooted and ready to change, it is the women across the land who emerge as survivors, giving life, nurturing life, guarding life".

For success, adopt a persona
Cristina Odone
AT my all-girl high school in Washington DC, the most popular course on the curriculum was women’s studies. Twenty-five uniformed teenage girls sat in front of a (woman) teacher and learned that for years we had been victims of a pernicious white male culture that had robbed us of our rightful legacy.

These girls want more bucks, even more challenges
Shruti Prashar

TIME changes as it passes and so do we. Yesterday is either buried or kept as a signpost. No one wants it to become today or tomorrow. And as our numbers increase, the desperation of each face to become a person heightens. And in the vast churning Samudra Manthan, a woman too unveils to find herself a name. As Anees Jung puts it, "Rooted and ready to change, it is the women across the land who emerge as survivors, giving life, nurturing life, guarding life".

The four-wall syndrome has been blown off and a new Madonna complex is emerging. Women want to work as well as raise kids. Single mothers don’t sound like living dinosaurs . A woman who asserts herself and goes out to work, handles a job as well as a family, is not mocked at and perceived as going on an Icarian adventure. While some women are breaking traditional moulds, searching for an identity which was lost somewhere in the folds of their mothers’ heavy embroidered silk sarees, some have realised the importance of being an earning hand necessary to make ends meet.

Ambition is no more an attribute of men. Women too are driven to kiss the skies. They don’t mind being self-seeking, they don’t mind being called a "bitch". They can yearn for the flesh pots and pop the "freedom pill".

We interviewed a cross-section of career-oriented women to find out what kinds of jobs they are seeking and how they wish to pursue their choices. Though the dotcom euphoria has fizzled out around the world, we still find many people in India enrolling themselves for some or the other computer course. Computer institutes have sprouted around the city and many youngsters are still innocently trying to encash on the computer caboodle.

Meenu Pathania, a maths (hons) student is busy preparing for her MCA. She says, "Computers have suddenly become everything. It was impossible to resist the tremendous opportunities this field offers. I too decided to take the plunge." She emphatically adds: "A good college alone can guarantee a good job in a multinational, so one needs to really be cruel to be kind and sweat it out. Once I qualify MCA, I have an array of jobs to choose from — such as web-designing, software development and programming etc."She adds, shrugging her shoulders, "I definitely want to earn and work. I have no option but to work hard like mad."

Gani Chabbra, another girl fond of computers, has been studying computers since the past two years. But she is a little mild as she says, "I want to work because I want to be independent before my parents want me to tie the nuptial knot. It is important that in times of adversity, I have something to fall back on. I don’t want to be a babe in the woods. Once I complete my course, I’ll look for a job in a bank or a government organisation. The job has to be respectable".

Hot on the heels of the computer bandwagon is a career in business management. With liberalisation here to stay and foreign companies deluging the Indian market, we have many aspiring MBA’s.

Swati, the daughter of a neurologist, is at present doing her B.Com. She is all for a career in business management. She says, for me a job is a necessity. Not merely for boosting my self-esteem, but for being appreciated and accepted. Apart from the self-actualisation benefit, it will fetch me oodles of money. I’m not a lotus-eater. I am hungry to prove to myself and to the world that I am capable enough of doing a job that men think that they alone can handle. The money which comes from being a marketing executive or a financial expert adds more power to your elbow." She adds: "I am not going to leave my job after marriage."

Syal, another aspiring young woman, who is doing her MBA and wants to shape a career for herself in advertising, says: "Oh no! I can’t think of living without working. If I am made to sit home and raise kids, It’s all doom and gloom for me. A career is like air and water for me, I can’t simply do without it. Advertising is very creative and more fun than a barrel of monkeys. It’s a career which will not only make me independent but also add a few thousands to the family pocket. If tomorrow I’ll become an extra earning hand for my husband why not become one today for my father. I’ll not sacrifice my career on the altar of marriage.

With a bandful of tiaras already won at beauty pageants, there are hordes of girls who want to become models, but at the same time, a tremendous boost has also been given to the garment and textile designing section industry.

Courses in fashion designing are springing, sprouting like wild mushrooms where, apart from NIT and NIFD, many fashion gurus are opening their own schools to deliver their magic mantras. Chandigarh too has its own share of girls and boys dreaming of dressing up, a la Lara Dutta or Mehr Bhasin.

Mona Chaudhary, studying fashion designing at NIFD, is looking for a job in an export house. "At present, I’m not planning to become a Ritu Beri or a Hemant Trivedi. I am concentrating more on working as a fashion designer for export houses in Delhi, Chennai or more closer to home, Ludhiana. She feels, there are a host of opportunities in this field and they can be used to work wonders. Once you have carved out a niche for yourself, you can always venture out and start your own export business. "I am ready to patiently wait and climb the ladder. I’m in no hurry. Marriage doesn’t mean a dead-end for my career. I would continue working, even after marriage," says Mona.

There are many girls in and around Chandigarh who are working as frontline executives for computer centres, car dealers and mobile and pager companies. While some work as counsellors and receptionists, others are into customer care.

Teachers, traditionally the career associated with women is not on the priority list of most of the young girls. They want more bucks and yet more challenges.

We can hear her the young women whispering musically, what Tennyson once said: So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be.

For success, adopt a persona
Cristina Odone

AT my all-girl high school in Washington DC, the most popular course on the curriculum was women’s studies. Twenty-five uniformed teenage girls sat in front of a (woman) teacher and learned that for years we had been victims of a pernicious white male culture that had robbed us of our rightful legacy. Together, Teacher told us, we would spend the next semester blowing away the dust of history from female painters, writers, eminences grises whose influence had been deliberately belittled by the ruling patriarchy. And so our class busily raked through centuries, in a fruitless search for geniuses to rival Van Gogh and Dante.

This was the Seventies, when women’s lib was a new and glamorous cause for which an eager sisterhood linked arms and marched in the streets under banners calling for equal pay, legalised abortion, equal opportunities.

Girls and women both looked back on the frustrated potential of earlier eras and vowed Never Again. Women’s studies served a purpose: we needed to study our ancestresses more and more, in order to mirror their roles less and less. Twenty years on, women’s studies has given way to gender studies. Why do boys strike a tough-guy pose, take foolish risks and go in for violence in their prepubescent years, only to then gain confidence and academic honours in their adolescence? Why do assertive, confident and proud young girls ‘lose their voices’ when they hit adolescence? Psychologists, sociologists and now Jane Fonda, who’s just endowed a gender studies chair at Harvard, to the tune of US dollars eight million, are convinced that understanding gender will shed light on the family, the economy and crime.

Our goal - equal pay, equal opportunities, an end to discrimination and oppression - is social justice for women as for men. But too many women think that to attain it, they must take up the same weaponry as men: the hard-nosed, harsh-voiced, ‘my kid has flu but hey, I’m here for the meeting’ machismo that turns the workplace into a colosseum, and colleagues into gladiators fighting to the death over a scrap of meat - or a promotion or a bonus.

In this Russell Crowe scenario, there’s not much room for women to be women. Place a photo of the family on your desk, or change into a low-cut dress before you leave the office, and just see who the lions will breakfast on.

And so women cut and paste their personae to fit more easily in the company of men. Blurring sexual identity seems necessary in order to crush the cliches trotted out to distinguish woman from man: woman is emotional, man rational; woman is scatty, man organised; woman gossips, man discusses.

These stereotypes are no less offensive for burdening him just as much as her: a man forces himself not to weep or flinch just as a woman tries not to swear or sweat . To take on the cliches, woman has had to grow into an impossibly capable being. She must do more, longer and better than anyone around her, boast a husband, a few children, and a high-gloss finish too. It’s a balancing act that drains her, but dazzles her audience.

And while she’s out there, performing her guts out, she knows that it’s the men in the audience she’s playing to. They may be only half the audience, though in professional terms, they’re still more than that, but men are there none the less, a critical group that she can impress, charm or thumb her nose at. She must both compete with them and compete for them. This impossible double act has triggered an inevitable backlash and a generation of women who fear that, in blurring their identity into an androgynous ‘it’, they may be losing their audience share.

Hence the popularity of The Surrendered Wife, which hails geisha-style submission to husbands (‘Make yourself available for sex at least once a week, whether you feel like it or not’) and The Rules, which rehashes the dos and don’ts (‘Never have sex on your first date’) that 1950s American prom queens lived by.

Contradictory rules of engagement, then, define the battle of the sexes. Everyone is armed with prejudice and resentment, but no one is any longer sure who the enemy is. Is the supine wifelet in her babydoll nightie, eyes tightly squeezed and teeth clenched as she lets her husband have his weekly way with her the treacherous plotter? Or is the fiendishly competitive professional woman who brown-noses her way into her boss’s good books infinitely more dangerous?

Or is our foe the age-old one - man, in any shape or form? In all this, women are no better off, not in a Britain where they earn only 82 per cent of men employed in the same job, where childcare remains prohibitively expensive and the Government’s own Women’s Unit faces the axe after an inglorious stint as official promoter of women’s rights.

Gender studies is what kept Shakespeare writing, Picasso painting and Gershwin composing. It would be too much to expect the recipients of Jane Fonda’s largess to solve the age-old question of the difference between the sexes. But posing the right questions would be a good start.