The other day I was having tea with my mother in law while trying to decide a menu for an upcoming family get together. When suddenly she said “Beta, now if I tell you that you should also know how to cook a little, you will start with this new ‘My Choice’ thing. I went to the club yesterday and all my friends were saying that their daughters-in-law have recorded this video and play it at full volume. They were showing it to me; Hai Bhagwan, all these big words, ‘remember you are my choice I am not your privilege’. Beta I want to ask you, is this all you girls think about? Sex before marriage, sex after marriage, when do you find time to work or look after your children?”

So I told her, “Mummy, I wrote these words to make people and more importantly
Sometimes we curtail ourselves and our opinions to stay within the role that society assigns us because we live in denial and are afraid to go against everything that we thought was true all these years. Take this controversy as an example, you would think that all the women would support the initiative to empower themselves but it so happens that some women aligned themselves with the non-supporters of the initiative, just because the statements made in this video went against everything that they learned while growing up, after all we are products of our environment. But we can choose to step out this mold that society has assigned us and instead choose to be a product of our vision. We are so set in our ways that we don’t even realize that they are wrong, we grew up hearing that the man of the house works and the women is the one who sacrifices her career to raise their children, aren’t they THEIR children and not only hers, shouldn’t there be a compromise. In the same way we are hiding behind our jobs and roles in life and just letting things continue in the typical ‘chalega’ fashion by continuously restricting ourselves from questioning