Weaving a human infrastructure from the fabric of friendship is costly and uncertain.

Because only the deepest dissatisfaction with reality drives us to dwell in fantasy.

Shah Rukh personifies the neoliberal ethic, an example of how to make it in India's mythical meritocracy

"The silent solidarity of solitary women"

Johar's hyper-sentimental romantic dramas, in particular, are important as barometers of how mores are shifting

Love is youthful and naive in popular Hindi cinema, it becomes an attitude or a noun, not an action or verb in these images.

According to Census of India, she was a demographic anomaly, part of a minority of just eleven percent of adult Indian women who had never been married. At her age and in her class, the vast majority of Indian women were wives with at least two children.

Beyond the tremendous psychological stress, the impact of such curricula is more insidious, converting a creative student body into orderly subjects of comparison and competition, perfect units of productivity.

'Money is a construct for those who have plenty of it'

Strange how people obsessed with talking about removing class divisions keep using all kinds of cultural markers to suggest how gauche the others are, to keep them down.

Achievement was socially manufactured. This was particularly true in countries as unequal as India, where caste determined your starting place in the world.

In 2005, Manmohan Singh's government amended the Hindu succession act to allow property to be inherited by women. Amidst the pandemic, in August 2020, the Indian Supreme Court further clarified that women could claim these property rights even if they were born before the 2005 amendment.

Roland Barthes -- the architecture of love

A key theory explaining the decline in female employment in India centers on how economic growth has made it possible for millions of families to practice conservative values by withdrawing women from paid jobs. Sociologists call this the [[sanskritization effect]]

"my competencies seemed like disabilities in the dating pool"

Attention from a desirable man becomes the only currency that matters, if you meet the great success and social validation ini your youth, you are unlikely to remain a faithful fangirl.

In your late teens you surmise; an ideal man is also the best man, the one who consumes the limelight and will always be better than you, better than most, coveted by all. The love of such a man can make you powerful, because you will bask in his reflected promise and potential. To secure the love of such a powerful ideal man, you will need to be as perfect as possible.

You have crafted what economists who study power and bargaining within families call a 'separate sphere', where spouses live as separate units within a marriage.

Once, her career advice to me was another Shah Rukh quote: 'Don't become a philosopher before you become rich.'

Sendhil Mulainathan: '[[hidden tax]]'

The working world is unfair to many women, yet, even when they succeed, they must confront another series of challenges.

Their hard won successes are taxed in ways that men's are not. The taxes I'm talking about aren't paid in dollars and cents or imposed by the government. They take the form of annoyance and misery and are levied by individuals, very often by loved ones. I can call these impositions taxes because they take away some of what an individual ears, diminishing the joys of success.

We need families and loved ones to stop imposing taxes on women's desires for achievement outside the home.

[[Carl Jung]] once described the [[paradox]] as a human being's ultimate possession. For him, a sense of paradox was essential to 'comprehending the fullness of life'.

"My father thought of my education as a hobby and marriage was my main occupation."

Vanity murders vulnerability, it ensures the end of all authentic feeling.

Muslim women were more active in home-based garment work. while Hindu women were dominant in home based manufacturing of incense sticks.

The biggest impact I have seen is that women become more important, more visible and better respected as community members once they start to [[organize]] themselves for worker issues successfully. Their voices and needs are heard not only outside, in factories, but also inside, within their homes. No one sees them as dependent on others.

Educationists have agued that children need pre-primary schooling to absorb early lessons better; Pedagogists would say that they were too young and ill-prepared for primary school curricula.

In 1985, Devaki Nirmala Banerjee produced one of the moost significant works in Indian feminism and agrarian studies -- a volume of essays that they collated and edited, called the [[Tyrrany of the Household]]

The burden of care ultimately rests with women. And the women we were surveying in Rampur had no rest.

Money in casual labour was too casual

'Anytime a girl does anything outside for work or college, people around will say bad things here. That is why she had to marry a foreigner.'

It's impossible to grow up as a woman in India without knowing what it is like to have to always seek permission to be yourself.

We are active participants in discriminating against our own sex -- be it how poorly we pay women from lower castes for their labour to how unfairly we survey ourselves and other women; the amount we feed girl infants compared to how we feed the male ego; how we socialize our daughters to prime themselves for the male gaze and become subservient in their own homes.

"Many women have no sense of their own possibility both because they have never had a chance and also because they bear the weight of so much cultural and physical intimidation. Education, media, and affirmative action will probably all be key in trying to get them to feel that they can take on the challenges thrown at them by the economy and our very broken society."

To him, professing support for gender equality in public was simply a way to perform good manners iand modernity, to look like he held moral integrity without being moral at all. The world did not incentivize young Varun to investigate his biases.

The patriarchy won't collapse with a noisy smash but will gradually unravel.

In a country where everyone voices the grievance of neglect or feels looked down upon, we need someone to acknowledge us.

The idea that all social interactions are strategic acts, from which we must extract personal gain, has become common sense.

[[marketing orientation]]

of the modern personality, where individuals experience themselves as others purely as commodities -- as objects to be consistently marketed or transacted with.

The exchange valorizes heartache-- there is honour in being heartbroken. Love becomes an attitude of generosity towards oneself and the world, not a self minimizing transaction.