These Veere need much weeding!

If you are making a film on girl power and how your girl gang is bent on questioning a man’s right to all the fun, why not celebrate the same with a title that justifies the same themes? So Veere Di Wedding itself is a very misleading nomenclature for a film that wants to put its women on a pedestal. It’s like saying you can’t be cool enough if you are sisters from different mothers, you got to be ‘brothers in arms’ or bros before foes’ because that is way cooler. It’s like making a film on Queen Elizabeth to showcase her as a quintessential epitome of female dominion and then calling it The King! If you want to make a film about women, be (wo)man enough to make the gender specificity shine through in stead of trying to force it to succumb to an indirect gender bias. There are several other lessons we need to unlearn before we start labelling our films ‘feminist’ and ‘liberating’.

1)    Got a fiery spirit, will smoke: So if you are a modern, 21^st century girl-loving, men-deriding, Type A personality who loves to wear the pants, your favourite accessory is not a clutch sweetheart, it’s a cancer stick in your hand. You see, if you have to look gutsy, free-spirited and bold, you got to smoke baby. Smoke till those lungs start screaming feminism from your nostrils and exhaust the other gender into claiming your worth.

2)   Love risque, play frisky: So as per the new feminist lingo in town, if you are standing at a public place, could be a bus stop, could be a bar table, and you see a nice butt obviously attached to a person of the opposite gender, go ahead and give a squeeze to that sweet little tush. You thought that was obscene and so totally no-can-do? God! Didn’t you know that if you are a feminist, you get away with these things? So what if the man in question did the same to you and you’d probably pull a martial stunt on him and make him kiss the edge of your killer stiletto for it? Most men itch for that little gesture of lust after all, and if a woman is volunteering to do it, who’s he to see red?

3)   Need props, try men! So you are dancing at your best friend’s sangeet, or that annual Holi bash in your neighbourhood? Adding a prop was never so easy! Go beyond those loud dhols and oh-so-girlish ghunghats. Use a man as a prop, the more lanky, flat-bellied chiselled and dork-looking, the better. Get him to sway in the background, embellish your Royale Play wall, make him nuzzle over your knee and look at you all puppy-eyed, dying to be petted, or better still, let him drool over your shoes as you point your manicured glitter-studded nail at the door or wherever else you would like him to go fetch!

4)   Sing in a man’s voice: Fed up of all those sexist, chauvinistic and bawdy lyrics that Punjabi rappers keep crooning to? Switch places and change the words to get back at the opposite side, the more offensive and lurid your vengeance, the better.

5)   Get boorish, kick butt: Go on a superwoman binge watch- Wonderwoman, Catwoman, Black Widow, or the warrior women of Wakanda, trip on all of them and infuse enough steam in yourself to get in to a boorish brawl at a public place with another woman. You see, unless you aren’t aggro enough, you aren’t man enough and hence not feminist/liberated enough. 

In other words, make sure you imbibe all those traits that we have been calling out as misogynistic for so long among men and then go ahead and emulate those, with a high dose of feminine chutzpah. Then, and only then, have you arrived, my dear, Bridget Jones kissing, Sex and the City loving, Daenerys Targaryen (but secretly) mean muscle-wielding Cersei Lannister-worshipping woman that you are. Live upto your gender by misleading your clan into doing everything that is wrong with the other gender in the first place!