At
that point, till 'Lean In' happened, it didn't matter how often and how
bored I felt, by the constant repetitions and lack of substantive
content in these book, what remained constant was that I simply couldn't
get myself to wrap up reading on grounds that the books weren't good
enough. Instead, I always ended up thinking that it was me who wasn't
good enough. Think of it, this way - if I were a serious reader,
wouldn't I be able to finish a book cover to cover, even if I found them
mediocre ? Would I ever be taken seriously by serious readers if I ever
disclosed to them that I cannot often read certain type of books, end
to end ? Every time I would reach a stage when I knew the books would
have gone repetitive, I would keep them by my bedside, and keep reading,
every now and then flipping to the end page to see how far I was from
the end - because if I didn't finish reading till the last word, someone
would see me or I would get caught in a conversation somewhere on the
planet, and wouldn't be taken seriously. There was this fear - a
constant fear - and quite crippling at times, to sift through a book I
had clearly considered mediocre or unworthy, just for the fear of being
exposed.
It seems what I felt was the 'imposter syndrone' about which I might have heard earlier may be, but basically got around to knowing that it was a real thing, especially one which women suffer from quite a bit. It isn't a fancy thing - just one where one feels inferior and absolutely incapable of internalizing achievement and constantly lives under fear of being "outed" as a fraud. Sandberg drives home a point that women suffer more from Imposter Syndrome, than men do and cites an example from her life where her brothers were always more confident than she was. It wasn't until my younger brother almost laughed off at me for reading Bus-Pop end to end, that I realized between a white Jewish woman living in America and an Indian brown women living in India - there wasn't much of a gender construct difference, for, we both had brothers that did have more confidence than we did. My brother, almost non-nonchalantly mentioned to me, that it wasn't ever necessary to really read Bus-Pop with much seriousness, and that if one skimmed through the book and heard the author's interview or talk on Google or Ted, it was just about enough.
Since then, and much later, I read Virginia Woolf's "A room on one's own', where Woolf mentions says if Shakespeare had a sister, an imaginary Judith Shakespeare, who was brought up differently from William Shakespeare - say, she was told she could not write poetry because women are not good poets, or that she could not be good at mathematics because women are not good at STEM - would she write in the manner that male William Shakespeare did and be as successful as William was ? Most probably not. In the worlds of William and Judith, Sheryl and her brothers, and me and my brother - it was the same story everywhere - the lack of access of knowledge, and even the courage and ease to pursue it, gets so truncated and difficult and often, impossible, if you are a woman. Woolf in her book mentions how hundreds of men have written about women, and on women, and as woman, as their lead characters, but so few women have been able to write about themselves.
Years and years, it angered me. When I was told my men I had dated, that they found me intellectually stimulating for my knowledge of humanities, but "aggressive" when I refused to be part of a patriarchal rituals like Rakhi Bandhan or Bhai Duuj (which are Indian gendered festivals where women celebrate and pray for the long lives of their male siblings, and not vice versa). The fact that I could not think and choose my own identity - from gender to religion - was allowed only in theory, but not in practice. My parents have often told that I was more aggressive than my brother in my refusal to follow social norms - because even refusal to participate in any social norm that was clearly inequal or patriarchal must be done with politeness.
Understanding my anger as a woman was easy, because I was a woman, and clearly a minority in most gender equations. My anger, legitimate, as also the anger of women, of colour or religion, different from mine, also equally legitimate, was a narrative I could relate to. That was a happy space, in my late twenties, when I had come to make peace with my anger, and felt no shame in my behaviour, but early thirties, brought in another dimension - what about anger of a group, who was alien to me, and in which matrix, where I was a majoritarian privileged group.
When I first read Ahmbedkar's 'Annihilation of Caste' and compared it to everything I had read by Nehru and Gandhi after this realization, I was able to rationalise Ahmedkar's 'angry' style of writing for the first time, as opposed to the much smoother style of style by more privileged Nehru and Gandhi.I had almost discarded once in my late teens dalit author Kancha Illiah's 'Why I am not a Hindu' as a book without merit, and now, after a decade, I realised that I was the William Shakespeare, and he was the Judith in this case. Then, the peace I had felt, from the finding my voice in Judith, was replaced by the guilt I felt upon my discovery that I have been ignoring many Judiths all my life.
It seems what I felt was the 'imposter syndrone' about which I might have heard earlier may be, but basically got around to knowing that it was a real thing, especially one which women suffer from quite a bit. It isn't a fancy thing - just one where one feels inferior and absolutely incapable of internalizing achievement and constantly lives under fear of being "outed" as a fraud. Sandberg drives home a point that women suffer more from Imposter Syndrome, than men do and cites an example from her life where her brothers were always more confident than she was. It wasn't until my younger brother almost laughed off at me for reading Bus-Pop end to end, that I realized between a white Jewish woman living in America and an Indian brown women living in India - there wasn't much of a gender construct difference, for, we both had brothers that did have more confidence than we did. My brother, almost non-nonchalantly mentioned to me, that it wasn't ever necessary to really read Bus-Pop with much seriousness, and that if one skimmed through the book and heard the author's interview or talk on Google or Ted, it was just about enough.
Since then, and much later, I read Virginia Woolf's "A room on one's own', where Woolf mentions says if Shakespeare had a sister, an imaginary Judith Shakespeare, who was brought up differently from William Shakespeare - say, she was told she could not write poetry because women are not good poets, or that she could not be good at mathematics because women are not good at STEM - would she write in the manner that male William Shakespeare did and be as successful as William was ? Most probably not. In the worlds of William and Judith, Sheryl and her brothers, and me and my brother - it was the same story everywhere - the lack of access of knowledge, and even the courage and ease to pursue it, gets so truncated and difficult and often, impossible, if you are a woman. Woolf in her book mentions how hundreds of men have written about women, and on women, and as woman, as their lead characters, but so few women have been able to write about themselves.
Years and years, it angered me. When I was told my men I had dated, that they found me intellectually stimulating for my knowledge of humanities, but "aggressive" when I refused to be part of a patriarchal rituals like Rakhi Bandhan or Bhai Duuj (which are Indian gendered festivals where women celebrate and pray for the long lives of their male siblings, and not vice versa). The fact that I could not think and choose my own identity - from gender to religion - was allowed only in theory, but not in practice. My parents have often told that I was more aggressive than my brother in my refusal to follow social norms - because even refusal to participate in any social norm that was clearly inequal or patriarchal must be done with politeness.
Understanding my anger as a woman was easy, because I was a woman, and clearly a minority in most gender equations. My anger, legitimate, as also the anger of women, of colour or religion, different from mine, also equally legitimate, was a narrative I could relate to. That was a happy space, in my late twenties, when I had come to make peace with my anger, and felt no shame in my behaviour, but early thirties, brought in another dimension - what about anger of a group, who was alien to me, and in which matrix, where I was a majoritarian privileged group.
When I first read Ahmbedkar's 'Annihilation of Caste' and compared it to everything I had read by Nehru and Gandhi after this realization, I was able to rationalise Ahmedkar's 'angry' style of writing for the first time, as opposed to the much smoother style of style by more privileged Nehru and Gandhi.I had almost discarded once in my late teens dalit author Kancha Illiah's 'Why I am not a Hindu' as a book without merit, and now, after a decade, I realised that I was the William Shakespeare, and he was the Judith in this case. Then, the peace I had felt, from the finding my voice in Judith, was replaced by the guilt I felt upon my discovery that I have been ignoring many Judiths all my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment