‘Women today are honorary men’

The diva is back. After Surviving Men, Shobhaa De is out with her latest Spouse. Ashwini Bhatnagar gets India’s publishing sensation to talk about marriage and women, and what it has done to men. "Men will now have to strategise if they want to survive women — who can’t be charmed any longer," advises De

The breaking up is not only in India but all over the world. The driving force behind any social change is economic. It is money. Today, with more and more women in the workplace, they have an income to call their own and they are better empowered to opt for marriage or out of marriage. This is driving the change. The men, I don’t think, have changed their attitude. And why should they? The institution has suited men for centuries. Now it no longer suits women.

Bad for the family. I am not saying that women’s empowerment per se is bad for the family but the rate at which marriages are breaking up and for the reasons that they are breaking up, it is bad for family and society at large. It leads to a lot of instability and a generation of extremely confused and unhappy young people. This can never contribute to a better society.

In a way, yes. But only because we are in a transitional period. I don’t believe that an empowered woman would necessarily have a negative approach either to her family or society. Right now we haven’t arrived at that next stage. Internationally, if you examine the very empowered women, they are either single or have gone through multiple divorces. But this has to be broken through. We have to break the idea that to be successful, a woman can’t enjoy a happy family life. You can do it. And, to do it, you have to make compromises. It is worth making a compromise for.

It depends on a woman’s targets. It is working very well in truly modern marriage in which the husband doesn’t have an ego on sharing housework. I have seen it working very well where the husband becomes a house-husband and stays at home looking after domestic issues. In corporate India I can name three such husbands. They have stayed home because they know that their wives are better qualified and capable of earning the big bucks. Yes there is a social stigma of living off a woman’s earning but these men must be extremely confident of the role that they are playing. They would also believe that in marriage, as in a job situation, there cannot be two bosses. There can only be one person who calls the shots. That person can be the wife or it can be the husband and, in different stages of marriage, the roles can be switched. This really is a sensible way of looking at marriage without an ego involved.

Very difficult; unless you have a common commitment and that commitment should be to the family and to each other. That is not so easy. You will have to put a lot of individualistic aspirations on hold, both husband and wife.

There is no other formula that will work. Over centuries, men and women have been partners in life. If she compromises on one level, he is also compromising at another. Most times we don’t even know the compromises that the men make, unless they articulate them.

In any relationship, even a business one, there are so many areas where you have to give in; there is nothing wrong in it. If you have a common goal, a common purpose, there is nothing wrong in that.

A smart woman is one who doesn’t give up her own spirit, her own priorities. She doesn’t compromise with any area of her life and doesn’t complain also. She has made peace with her choices.

I think that they are going to a stage where they are beyond being charmed or if they want to be charmed, it is on their own terms. In a way, it is a loss. It kills romance, it kills seduction, it kills the mating ritual. Women are too darn smart now. Unfortunately what has happened is that they have become honorary men. All the things that made them so alluring—the mystique, the mystery—they are gone

Yes. There is no doubt about that. But I think it is a kind of a backlash. It is a reaction to centuries of being repressed. Suddenly she has found a voice, she has found identity, she has found money…

Urban middle class society was not repressive at the superficial level. The outward symbols of being progressive were there. But not when it came to her choices. There was bound to be a reaction. Today, she can articulate her anger (at such situations).

No. The mistake most people make is to confuse my fiction with who I am. Fiction is liberating, it is fantasy. It is not a reflection of your own life. This book and all my other non-fiction is a direct representation of what I feel and what I think. This is what I believe in. These are my values. You can challenge them; you can throw them out of the window.

Fiction is a different genre altogether. It should not be confused with the persona. Very few fiction writers go into non-fiction and non-fiction writers go back and forth into fiction and non-fiction. Therefore, the confusion. There is nothing that has changed in my life and there is nothing that has changed in the way I have lived my life. What I write in fiction is fiction.

Persona in writing is not something that you can create. It is what you acquire depending on what you have stated in your writing.

Persona is important to an extent as we live in a marketing-driven time. Khushwant Singh also has a persona, Ruskin Bond has his own. I happen to be a woman, so my persona gets analysed more than theirs. And, therefore, I have to learn to deal with it. I have to learn to be on top of the persona and not the persona on top of me. I must know who I am, I must know what I am saying and why I am saying it; and I have no ambiguity in my mind about that.

It is something that comes automatically to me. It is also a part of my commitment to what I do. Nobody in this world who happens to be in any public domain can pretend that they don’t have a persona or that the persona doesn’t matter to them. Unconsciously or otherwise they are all aware of it and they play that particular role when they need to play it. Whether it is a movie star, politician or an artist, each of them have a persona to cope with or deal with.

But with women it goes to a ridiculous extent because the public gets a vicarious pleasure out of prying into their lives. For any women who writes or has a strong sexual content in her writing (and in my case because of the glamorous persona I project), there is an additional interest, an additional element. It doesn’t bother me. I have made my peace. I am not going to spend the rest of my life explaining my appearance. This is how, look—take it or leave it. This is what I say through my writing—take it or leave it.

I would have made a lousy actress.

That’s not the point. This is what I wanted to do. Whether I am great (writer) or not is for the readers to judge. I do what I do to the best of my ability.

Yes, yes. The book is not even out and it has sold 10,000 copies. It is a record. It gives me a lot of pride.

No, no. A superstar is not a label I am preoccupied with. I enjoy writing.

I am happy if I have conceptually or otherwise liberated women of some of their mindsets. But to think of iconic status is ridiculous. You can’t plan for it, you can’t cold bloodedly set out to either become an icon or superstar But if your work translates into that and people begin to look at you in a certain way, it is extremely gratifying. And I would be lying if I said: ‘Oh I don’t care at all if I am viewed as someone who has contributed towards change.’ I do believe that in Asian societies we needed that trigger to set the process off.

If you begin to analyse success you are in trouble. Of the cuff, success to me is a total package. I cannot isolate one element or the other. I cannot say that I am successful because I am a successful writer. There are other areas of my life which are far more important to me and if I were not successful in those I wouldn’t call it success. If I had to give up on my children, on my family or was compelled to make career choices at their expense, I would rather not have that success. I am glad I have managed to do so in an integrated way. To be on top of your time is success. To not to have to do anything under pressure is success, not to have to write another book, is success.

Never. It still interests me. The dynamics of a changing society still interests me because there is a trickle-down effect. Forty years ago what I witnessed as an elitist phenomenon is today a middle class phenomenon. That’s why what happens in my social circle still fascinates me. I can never get bored of monitoring the goings on there.

You will need a lot of strategising. Now, any equation, even within marriage, is a power equation. Today, women are in a better position to negotiate. Men will have to think of ways to out-negotiate them.

Yes, only the mind matters. This is the century of the mind and women are driving it.

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