I wrote a post recently to address a special kind of pressure that floats in our society at all levels, on all kids, bachelors, newly married couples, social and anti-social persons - The Great Indian Relatives Pressure. This pressure is worse than that of peer, employer, family, relationship, or you-name-it etc.


The post received comments from various people from various backgrounds, who could easily relate this pressure in their lives; and that made me ponder that even we all suffer from it, we as a society are doing nothing to deal with it. Perhaps, we are too used to living in a hypocritic system where we like to backbite about things that we happily do, secretly.


Our society talks about the ideal girl or boy, and tries to fit us in that idealistic frame that was perhaps architected centuries ago. It still has some weird expectations from us - girls and boys both. We still expect the females of our society to be stupid, naive, with-no-sense-of-fashion, fragile, timid etc - and encapsulate all this into one armour called as 'Sanskari (Cultured )'. We still expect the males of our society to be ruler, sometimes responsible and most other times an untamed horse, one-who-runs-the-family-dynasty etc - and encapsulate all this into one sentence as 'Ladke hain, galti ho sakti hai (Men will be men, they may make mistakes)'.


If a family has only boy children, it would unhesitatingly make remarks on how-an-ideal-girl-should-be, or how-some-relative's-daughter-is-not-so-ideal, and vice-versa. This lopsided view on the current roles of men and women in our society creates an inevitable pressure that affects everyone of us - the promoters and the sufferers, mostly adversely.


We forget that we are promoting a culture, a perception, an environment which is toxic for everyone who is breathing in it. According to a 2012 study by the World Health Organization (WHO) suicide is the third highest causes of teen deaths in the world. In India, 38 per cent of its youth is reported to have been suffering from depression - and the worse part is that people don't seem to seek help for their depression here. Of all the 1,35,445 suicides in India in 2013, 68 per cent of these were between the age of 15 and 29, surrounded by family and friends.


Deepika Padukone's talking publicly about her depression, became the most talked about, shared, floated video in the last couple of days. Internet world seems to have divided into two groups - one who is encouraging this stand by her, calling it a bold step, and the other who is criticizing it, calling it a mere publicity stunt. But whatever you call it, we need to address this serious problem that is eating up our life-bandwidth and moving us to a rather hazardous zone. The sooner we do, the better.  


Now coming back to my point, the repercussions of living in an intensely hypocritic society force us to live dual lives - one that pleases our family, relatives and society, and the other that struggles to meet our emotional, physical and financial needs. The everyday relentless effort that we are doing to balance this seasaw game of life is slowly but continually pushing us into a deep valley devoid of happiness, values, and all else that we Indians used to be so proud of once.


We need to stop creating and promoting this pressure. We need to stop asking senseless questions. We need to stop interfering in others lives. We need to be bold and expressive about what we want. We need to behave more like humans than robots who are told what to do by the men who used to in our land centuries ago. We need to adapt to the changing times. We need to stop living the ideals that no longer exist or reconcile with todays needs. We need to redefine what we need as a society, and we need to comply to this new definition fast.


The sooner we do, the better!   


Hope you enjoyed reading it. Please provide your valued feedback, comments, suggestions on this in the comments below.

Cheers!
Swati