In Indian mythology, women used to have a room to be angsty in. I won't say women in general, but queens did. They could go weep, cuss, curse, mutter, fling their jewels and wipe off their kohl and just brood. Like be passive aggressive to the point where everyone in the kingdom knew they were brooding and then at the end of the hissy fit, they either got what they wanted or they didn't, with the added bonus that they felt better. So this 'Kop bhavan' has been modernized by me and I call it my 'cope room' now. When I want to unplug, oil my hair, cry, not go out, sulk, I can just turn my bedroom into my cope room.
I don't know if it's me growing old, or it's social media, but I just see a lot of people around me harking back to our cultures in the times gone by. CULTURE. Errrrrrgh. Tradition. Bleeeeghhhh. It's like a daily micro aggression for me. 'We used to live in joint families. Today's kids don't know to get along with each other and respect elders'. Duhhhhhh!!! You didn't teach your kids to respect their elders. Most others did. You are the one who broke away from the joint family and don't want to live with your brothers in the first place. I get that. No one wants to live in a village, tilling the land in the hot sun or worse, live in a two bedroom apartment in a city with 6 married siblings. But if you want your married children to live with you, it's not a joint family, it's just children living with their parents. Haven't we all enjoyed the merits of spending quality and quantity of time with our loved ones during COVID? So yeah the universe has a way of balancing out our extremes. Also, (hush it's a little secret) you can be a cultured family, without being joined.
Then there's thoseidiots, who will go on and on about our traditional attires. Let's do a saree marathon! Yeah it's fun to see a million sarees. But other than a nice insta post, it does nothing. It's not helping weavers. (most sarees come from a factory anyways). No one's going to shed their gym attires and start training in sarees. But you'll see people going ' Women can do whatever they want in sarees'. No they can't. And in the past, no they didn't. Also women, are already going to offices, parties, cooking and sleeping in their sarees. Don't make them train with sweat running down their thighs and the sun burning their bare backs. It comes at a great cost to comfort. And please don't show me Milind Soman's mom running a marathon in a saree with no shoes. Are you serious? I need slippers in the house even, coz I have air conditioning and I need warm feet. And no, I'm not jumping in a swimming pool with 6 meters of pleated fabric either. And I'm truly grateful for all of it.
Then there's food. I was recently admonished for buying my son a drink of 'Bubble (Boba) tea'. Really? Should we all go back to a life pre-sugars? Yes we'll drink buttermilk and fermented cumin water or something but is that even a life? I believe in having a piece of fruit occasionally. But no instant noodles, no white bread, no chocolate, no greasy bacon? Just a balanced diet of a vegetarian thali every day? No one did that. And if they did, some wretched soul - mostly a woman in a saree - was slogging away over the cooking pots. We were not healthier 'back then' - whenever 'then' was. We were dying of polio and rickets and tuberculosis. And child birth. But there was no diabetes and hypertension you argue. Uggghhh The latter two are manageable and hit you in your 30's and 40's. Our thali (read khichdi coz that's what they mostly ate) eating ancestors were long dead at that age.
I'm not dead at 30. I want my pakoras, pastas, pizzas, popcorns and pepsis. Yes they're all bad foods but if you haven't had a white- chocolate Frappuccino at Starbucks, have you even lived? Even a little? We have invented technology and processed foods to help us slurp it down instead of chewing and grinding and munching on grains and bones. Ditto with apparel. If we want to go full on old culture - we should say goodbye to anything covering the upper body and/or giving it support. But we want our lycra, and our padded shoes and our yoga pants. Why do we want turn the clock backwards? Ditto with living arrangements. We choose our families and our living arrangements. We shop for good quality semen, look for labs with clean petri dishes, hire healthy uteruses, and invest in the best i-pads available to create our own modern version of the happy family.
We've moved on. There's no going back. We have to adapt. The past looks rosy but it wasn’t! The 'Kop Bhavans' in history were dank attics. My 'cope room' is a modernized space where I can sulk AND type AND blast music. I however cannot use it as leverage to get what I want because :
1. I'm not a queen and
2. It's 2024.
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