Love Me, Baby | Verve Magazine
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June 10, 2013

Love Me, Baby

Text by Sohini Datta.

This is for the young Indian Power Woman who has a fancy job, an enviable lifestyle but no love

Few things in the world are more important than boys. It’s true. Women are wired to get absolute happiness out of nail polishes and being loved by a man which their friends envy. There is nothing wrong in that; I am unabashedly picking out baby names by the second date.

But for those of us who grew up in the ’90s, rebelled in mini-skirts against parental regimes and tried experimental drugs with our first salaries, life as a modern woman has been refreshingly different. We are driven by passion, ambition and most importantly individualism. This unique word speaks of the woman who spends her Lolitasque age buried in books and earns more than her male peers by prime marriageable age. She is elegant, ferociously aggressive about life goals and sincere at work. Lest we forget, she still loves nail polishes and boys. These are our quintessential ‘women in power.’ Those who have juggled MBA degrees and eight-hour meetings successfully with post-work speed dating and cosmopolitans with the girls! Later in life, they continue juggling babies and fancy designations but we are speaking of the younger ones here.

So there is the Neruda-quoting, name-dropping, Gin-n-Tonic-drinking nouveau 20-something- year-old, woken up suddenly one fine day. She is staring at herself in the mirror, in full bloom of the quarter life crisis that one faces at 27 and can see a closet of toy-boys in the background. She never did have time for a serious relationship….and now as she settles into a cushy job, she can see that ‘love’ is finally on her schedule.

Like everything else in life, she is the go-getter, so she decides to go out and get one….slightly perturbed that most of her girlfriends are 30 and single and can’t remember the last time they had sex. Fast forward four months and she has recently broken up with a gorgeous hunk she met over New Year’s. She felt 16 and believed in magic all over. She had picked china patterns by the time he started telling her that she was too caustic. She walked away defeated…because the Indian Man is wired…or maybe all men. Ninety nine per cent of them steer clear of women who are independent and would rather settle for one who is more ‘domestic.’ And the one per cent that do walk over the threshold, would still succumb to caveman tendencies and crave for women who ask them if they have eaten, before and after, each meal; ‘younger’ women who care more. All for the sake of cuddles…and even after that the man may dump her for a 23-year-old….more wife material, less sarcastic bitch. And self-doubt walks in…she questions herself, her knowledge, post-graduate degree, fancy job and fancier house. All of this that she built for erself… because a man with not even one-fourth her qualifications has just informed her that she is unfit for his love.

Let’s face it, if you are mediocre (being a total intellectual snob here) and believe in love like you do in the lyrics of a Bollywood song, you will probably be happily posting your wedding photos on Facebook as you read this article. But if you have decided to live life according to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers or think an ideal date is reading Flaubert’s Lolita in his arms and role-playing thereafter, you have signed up for the Single Power Women’s Club. The more successful you get, the more men who-can’t-differentiate-between-lose-and-loose will not want you. Face it and adopt a dog. And on your next work trip abroad, remember to pick up that fancy toy you have been eyeing….you will need it.

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