Women writing turns from hobby to skill

Now that the wedding season is on, I see brides flaunting red bangles on hennaed hands and gracefully carrying the vermillion dot on their forehead. Most of them are in tight fit jeans and sport branded shoes. Just like their attire, the awkward amalgamation between tradition and modernity is waiting to be a part of their life. A new bride is often introduced as someone’s daughter-in-law or someone’s wife in social circles. The struggle for identity begins that very day.

For small-town girls, the need for identity is a lot more than for their metropolitan counterparts. This is largely because of the limited job opportunities and a relatively traditional family set-up in smaller towns. Then there are always the same half a dozen groups that are you are bound to bump into at social gatherings. The need to be remembered is far more. The few who exhibit their exceptional culinary skills over a dinner, earn the title of master chef. The ones who wear the trendiest clothes are fashionista.

Every girl is trying to carve a niche for herself in modern families with traditional values. The younger ones want to be addressed by their first names, avoiding the ‘Mrs’ tag.

Fighting for my own identity, I was introduced to an elegant woman in her sixties, who had a flair for writing greeting cards with flowery adjectives. She was often known as “the aunty who writes very well” and that was perhaps the identity she earned for herself in the town she was married in. I happened to ask her one day why she never tried to get her writings published? To which she replied, “In our time, no one thought of getting published. We maintained a diary that was kept neatly under a stack of clothes in our cupboards and on days we wished to pour our hearts out, we would write without the fear of being judged. It was like our escape from reality, or our own version of freedom of expression.

She then narrated stories of women writing after finishing the household chores. “My friend would write about the struggles of her newly married life in the form of short stories and call them ‘marital bliss or miss’,” she said. Writing was a personal hobby those days.

Every woman has a heart full of emotions. Somewhere in life, she maintains a flowery diary to document her struggles, heartbreaks and achievements.

Writing a diary is essentially a feminine occupation. Her polite question to me was “what do you do for living?” “I’m trying to bring that diary out of the closet,” I said. It didn’t hit her why a girl would want to bring something as private as a diary out of the closet.

Women still write but the diaries have transformed into blogs or Facebook posts or tweets. It is now a skill that women want to exhibit and not just possess as a personal hobby. In a small town like Hoshiarpur, there is a whole new generation of aspiring young women writers. They are well read and well versed. They have taken up writing as a parallel profession. May be just a handful but when I meet a woman who talks about her writer’s block over her solitaire rocks, she becomes Ms First Name in my mind. Nothing is more beautiful than a woman who carries her intellect as a badge of feminine pride.

NOTHING IS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN A WOMAN WHO CARRIES HER INTELLECT AS A BADGE OF FEMININE PRIDE