Skip to main content

Reading Mirror

Chup by Deepa Narayan was an emotionally difficult read for me. I stopped many times along the way feeling depleted. Finally finished reading it on my way home a few weeks ago. Indian women will find some part of their story told in this book in the words of other women or in the author's narrative. The story is not a pleasant one and Narayan does not hesitate to emphasize that point over and over - hence the recurring feeling of depletion as you read. 

I had to wonder if this book will resonate with Indian men or people from outside of India. There are some universal themes there but the focus is very sharply on the Indian woman. The one theme that stood out the most for me is the lack of trusted relationships between women - we are indeed a house divided. I am guilty of not preferring to work for a female boss and conversely do not enjoy managing female employees. I did not have the courage to introspect the reasons for the this - what exactly drives that behavior in me and many other women.

Narayan talks about the lack of trust between women - believing we can actually have each other's back. Perhaps this is a driver. I mentor early career women and find it very satisfying. From the feedback I have heard, my mentees value their relationship with me. But I would not want to convert that people management situation where those same women worked for me. I would rather they used the lessons learned from our conversations to go work elsewhere for someone else. In personal life, the lack of trust bleeds to lack of anchoring friendships that can tide a woman over crisis. 

I have tried with atleast four women I thought were my friends - reached out to them in my most vulnerable time. All four of them decided it was best to move on from me once the crisis was over - they simply did not want to have my "normal" self in their life. I might have been an interesting or even worthy "project" for them so they did what they could to help in that bad patch. But without my project-worthiness I was not someone they wanted to deal with at all. I wondered many times over the years why that was but never could find a satisfactory answer to that question. Maybe it is the inherent lack of trust.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more