The new Indian woman is everywhere

Bad girls are the new good girls. Ask any mother of this era — she rues a daughter who won’t wear mini skirts, drink cocktails or behave bratty.

There was a time the heroine types got all the press. They made garam-garam rotis for the whole family, including the mother-in-law embedded permanently in the puja room.

When their time came and their own only son got married, they moved into the recently vacated puja room without a murmur and lived the rest of their lives smiling light-headedly from the joss-stick fumes.

But no more! Even before Emraan Hashmi told some wannabe, ‘Chipak ke rehna, heroine bana doonga,’ even before Sheila and Munni waged their war of the hips, even as the very last woman to mouth, ‘mei aapke bachchey ki maa banne waali hoon,’ mouthed those words, the good girl had officially retired.

It is her turn now —0 not her brother’s — to say, ‘Maa, mei first class first aayi hoon.’ And when a stranger in town croons, ‘Roop tera mastana,’ there is no need to retch about like Julie or Juno. Hello, there is always the morning-after pill.

The line between behenji and babe is blurring all the time. Mothers with teenage daughters look like siblings. The man in the museum is alone because his wife is in the city on work. And at office parties the tittering male cluster is there for decorative purposes — as husbands of staff.

In fact, the new woman has more testosterone than the man in her life — what with metrosexual men called in to emote and empathise and generally generate more estrogen on an evening out than she ever can in a lifetime.

It unsettles the new man vastly to hear his woman pray, ‘Give me today my daily sex’, at the end of a day when all he wants is a headache.

No longer the paragon of all virtues, the new woman wants to try all the wrong things. Nor is she willing to play damsel in distress to please some silly man who wants to go about rescuing her. The times when men could be men are officially over.

Women are breadwinners and can buy their own diamonds and bungalows. How is one to impress them? Men can only grow their hair, pierce ears and cook up a storm with their own two hands to win a lady’s heart.

Genetically programmed to recline sullenly at girl-seeing ceremonies while his family acted as his PR machinery to patao some poor girl into an arranged marriage, he now has to learn the ABC of wooing someone for himself.

How to appear intelligible is the more immediate challenge — how to look like a hero is a distant dream. His chances of going to jail for the right causes are also slim now that the country has gained its independence.

The new Indian woman is everywhere. In business, in bars, in beaches, in bikinis. With or without a man on her arm. Being neither good nor bad, actually. Just chilling.