Will The Real Sanskaari Men Who Are Talking About Gehraiyaan Please Stand Up?

It doesn’t take conservatives to get butt-hurt about the most random trivial things.

Gehraiyaan movie is the new punching bag for conservatives for various reasons, from promoting infidelity in our society to it being a pornographic film, and how Ranveer Singh can allow his wife to get intimate with her male co-star! 

Say hello to the double standards of the sanskari men…again!

The latest news is that the former police commissioner and ADGP (Railways) Bhaskar Rao couldn’t tolerate the movie for more than 20 minutes. So far, so good, as everyone’s entitled to their preferences.

Again, the typical stereotypical and hypocritical response you’d expect from our sanskaari men.

When will male actors be held accountable for their ‘choices’ that corrupt our sanskaari culture?

While these men have an owl’s eye on women’s choices, they’re as blind as a bat to the men’s choices, be it in movies or otherwise.

Why couldn’t the retired commissioner blame Siddhant Chaturvedi’s choices in the movie? Akhir taali ek haath se toh nahin bhajti nahi! (You can’t clap with one hand). Besides, he’s the one who initiated this unsanskaari infidelity.

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Why should the onus of upholding the honour and sanctity of a long-term committed relationship lie solely upon a woman’s shoulders?

Tuada kutta ‘Tommy’ sada kutta kutta

Check the meaning of the above Punjabi sentence from Bigg Boss here.

I don’t know about you, but I find the hypocrisy of sanskaari men absolutely nauseating.

These sanskaari men wear western-style shorts and shirts but dictate what traditional clothes women should drape in or get disrobed from.

Talking of attire, Deepika Padukone and Ananya Pandey’s athleisure outfits have also come under fire. It’s a woman’s agency whether she chooses to wear sports bras onscreen or in the park like Kannada actress Samyuktha Hegde did, and was publicly shamed for it.

None of us have the right to condemn adult women’s choices if we do not hold adult men accountable for their choices.

We’ve seen female actors in movies like Fire, Lipstick Under My Burkha, Veere Di Wedding, and now Gehraiyaan draw ire from the conservatives.

A Kabir Singh can troll topless, smoke, drink like there’s no tomorrow, and get intimate with numerous women, and still be a sanskari boy. But if women actors play remotely similar roles on screen, they are corrupting our sanskaar, parampara, maryada, and whatnot.

Movies are a depiction of reality

Infidelity is all around us.

I remember seeing sanskari married men and women in our apartment having affairs as a child. Or fellow sanskari batchmates who went on group vacations and swapped their partners.

To pretend that infidelity doesn’t exist in our society is hypocritical. To blame movies and especially its women actors for promoting infidelity is ludicrous.

The conservative retired commissioner got a sane reply from Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who tweeted: “You should watch the whole film. It’s really well made with a few twists at the end. Deepika’s performance is amazing.”

Whether you loved the film or not, whether you thought the movie had depth or not, the one takeaway from Gehraiyaan that we can all agree upon is that we are all messed up human beings.

Deepika Padukone, who played the ‘bent but not broken’ character of Alisha Khanna with utmost sensitivity and conviction, drawing from her lived experiences with depression, says it best – “I didn’t see Alisha as wrong or right, that’s not the tonality of the film. The film is not saying that oh! look here are these flawed characters and let’s go on a journey with them and by the end of it dissect and decide who is right and wrong. The idea of the film is observational, that there are different kinds of people in the world. These kinds of people exist. Are we able to empathize with these characters? You don’t have to agree with her choices, I don’t agree with her choices. as actors, you have to step out of the lens of judgment.”

Gehraiyaan is about how all of us are perfectly capable of sinking into the depths of darkness. So, everyone deserves empathy and redemption for their questionable choices.

But somehow, this leeway is generously granted to only men and not women in our country.

So when will sanskari men stop policing women in our country? But again… Kaisa hai kaun hai woh jaane kahan hai? (Where is he, wherever he is? – the sanskaari man in deed and action).

I haven’t come across a single sanskaari man by deed and action until now. I have seen several sanskaari women, though. If you find him, please do me a favour and send me his number.

I’d love to meet this mythical creature.

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