Why
do so many successful and beautiful women end up so fragile and brittle?
Especially those who have not managed to move into the seemingly safe zone of
marriage and family before their shelf life expires ...
In
Women Who Run With the Wolves, the writer Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes the
concept of 'hambre del alma' or the starved soul. She explains that sometimes
soul-starvation can come from the environment - a woman finds herself in a
culture that does not quite support her, feeling always that she is in some way
alone and different.
Under Viveka Babajee's awful suicide lies a
larger story, an ongoing hazy nightmare filled with phantom wolves and women
running with them, sometimes towards them. The question is, why do so many
successful, beautiful, competent women end up so fragile and brittle? And why is
there such a discrepancy between their external and internal worlds? While the
disconnect may be more amplified in show business, it doesn't stop there.
Clearly, there is something disturbing in the way society treats and perceives
women - and in the way women perceive themselves, especially those who have not
managed to move into the seemingly safe zone of marriage and family before their
shelf life expires.
As a Mumbai socialite drily puts it, "At the end
of the day, every one is looking for love, no matter how successful. Every woman
needs to become a desperate housewife before she becomes desperate." Show
business has serially spawned divas who have ended up lonely, miserable and even
mentally unstable. Way back in the 1900s,a maverick singer called Gauhar Jaan -
the first woman to have ever been recorded and one who could command any price,
including a whimsical demand that an entire train be booked for her entourage -
ended her career impoverished, after being brutally cheated by the man she
loved.
The Hindi film world has numerous examples of gorgeous women
who walked into sunset boulevard, suddenly bereft of trappings and, above all,
of love. Meena Kumari drank herself to death; Madhubala ended up as a reclusive
mystery woman; Suraiya became a creaking chandelier who would wear kilos of
make-up and jewels right to the end. Sadhana closeted herself and refused to
take a lifetime achievement award because she said she wanted her fans to
remember her the way she was. And no one can forget how Zeenat Aman allowed
herself to be brutally mishandled by the men she loved.
As film
critic and director Khalid Mohamed says, "From what I've seen, over the decades
in the film and modelling world, women are always secondary citizens. Some make
a breakthrough using their beauty and sexuality, but they are always conscious
that they have a limited shelf life compared with their male counterparts. Some
cling on with the hope that they will continue to be popular. Others look for
marriage, and if it doesn't work, things go terribly wrong."
Psychiatrist Dr Ashit Sheth explains the peculiar fragility of women
who are viewed as sex objects: "This kind of woman desperately
wants
to be understood internally. The fear of being abandoned by society and losing
whatever she has created so far is very strong. I see this among air hostesses
these days. Because, when they join the airline, their world changes so
dramatically. In the end, emotional needs are felt by every body - whether you
are a dog or a human being."
But does this vulnerability stop at
showbiz or does it extend to women across the board? Activist and publisher of
Zubaan Books, Urvashi Butalia suggests that whether she is a corporate
executive, a model, or a village panchayat head, a woman usually has to pay a
deep personal cost for success; she is often forced to make a choice between her
career and family. The tragedy is that she can't seem to have both. "I have no
doubt that the hollowness of success at the cost of all other things hits men
also, but it hits women very differently," says Butalia. And that is, perhaps,
where the "soul-starvation" comes in. "When the image in the mirror - of beauty,
success or talent - doesn't match the image inside, you have the breeding ground
for vulnerability," says literary critic and writer Nilanjana Roy. "Many of the
great women writers had this: not so much a fragility as the lack of an extra
skin, coupled with an abnormal sensitivity to their environments. I think of
writers like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf; all of them struggled
and often overcame their tendencies to depression, learned to use their
insecurities and fragilities as material, but in the end were brought down by
this."
Roy questions the prevailing culture "which insists that the
beautiful and the successful should be placed under the burden of also having to
be flawless - why they can't always ask for or get the help and support they
need. We still live in a society where it's considered a sign of weakness to ask
for help, or to admit to having problems; the surface counts for more than
what's going on inside, and that burden is doubled for the beautiful and the
successful."
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