Deepika Padukone – My Choice
By P.Parik
When I logged on to FB yesterday and saw people posting about? Deepika Padukone?, I thought to myself: “Must be the usual sensationalist rubbish churned out by Bollywood, much like what we’ve seen before- can it really be that bad”. It was. In fact, it was downright abysmal, and potentially damaging for young adults and yuppies who treat celebrities as their role models and are empowered to go down this route
The video began with a cliched, melodramatic monologue about individual choices and quickly reduced itself to sewage waste (and not the kind that can be treated). It reeked with individualistic chauvinism that would even make the likes of Ayn Rand and her fictitious Howard Roark squirm uncomfortably in their seat; a sour expression of the very thing that our contemporary arbitrators of equality are out to abolish.
Cutting to two quotes from the video:
1. ///”To have sex before marriage, to have sex *OUTSIDE* of marriage, or to not have sex at all… my choice”///
Even by Bollywood standards, this is profane, if not insane. How can suggestions of adultery be passed as a mark of freedom, empowerment, individualism or even a cool thing to do? Every choice comes bundled with a word familiar to many- responsibility. Yes, people are responsible for themselves, but also toward each other. By exercising this flavor of choice you are violating more than mere norms of propriety. You are violating his trust, and in turn the relationship you both invested in, along with certain implicitly agreed upon codes of conduct and decency, a.k.a fidelity. What a poor example you have set for other women
2. /// To have your baby or not… my choice ///
Since when was a mutually (dis)agreed upon decision the sole concern of a single individual? In every relationship there is the ‘other’. It takes a couple, working as unit, to arrive at these joint decisions by understanding one another, taking into consideration the wishes and aspirations of each other. One does not snub them away in this manner under the pretext of personal choices. Choices have consequences. When the consequence of one’s choices leads to the suffering of another, it is contingent upon you to re-think them.
The sad part is, if the man were to exercise these choices, belting out the same reprehensible attitude in a relationship that Padukone portrayed, women like her would be up in arms branding him as a male chauvinist pig.
The empowerment of women is a must, and this is quite possibly the worst ways to go about doing it. On a positive note, I am gladdened to see many women online calling out the immature ideals propped up in this video, and rightly so.
Although we feel Deepika’s video was built under the noble cause of women’s empowerment, here is a video that tries to help people digest how narrow-minded Deepika’s ‘My Choice’ video actually was, by re-creating the same video under a man’s perspective.
#MyChoice #Bollywood #Feminism #PseudoLiberals #Vogue
Lets not forget Deepika did this in sponsorship by Vogue, a company that promotes that sexualisation of women in its magazines, we live in Kali Yuga where these rascal hypocrites are preaching one thing but selling another.