Feministaah

    Earlier this year, Glenn Close, won a Golden Globe Award for her performance in  The Wife , based on Meg Wolitzer’s 2003 book, about the unequal marriage between a writer and his wife. As Joe Castleman is about to receive a prestigious international prize (Nobel in the film, a lesser Finnish award in the book), Joan, his wife of 40 years, thinks of finally leaving him. Over the years, she has put up with his arrogance and his constant infidelities, when the truth is that without her, he would not be what he is.  She hates the idea of his acknowledging her in his acceptance speech, when all through their marriage, she has played the subservient wife, who is told that she can go shopping or for beauty treatments while the man is busy with important things; the woman standing behind her husband, who humiliatingly hands her his coat when he enters a social event; she sees to it that he takes his medication on time, brushes crumbs from his beard and bristles when...

A group of female acquaintances were chatting about this and that, and the conversation veered—as it does so often—to movies and  Zero  in particular, which all disliked not so much because Shah Rukh Khan played himself without any variation or because he was cast as a vertically challenged man, but because his Bauua Singh was so arrogant and obnoxious AND, two far superior women were inexplicably attracted to him.  Aafia, a brainy scientist (played by Anuskha Sharma) fell in love with him, wanted to marry him, had his baby (out of wedlock); when she was to be married to a scientist, a man her professional and intellectual equal, she ditched him and waited for Bauua to return from his trip to Mars.   The other female, a superstar Babita (Katrina Kaif), still hurting from a break-up, uses Bauua as a confidant and support system, seeing in him something that nobody else could (the audience certainly didn’t or the film would not have failed). The argument went: W...