No Regrets: The Guilt-Free Woman's Guide to a Good Life

By Kaveree Bamzai

This is not a self-help book. It's a book that tells us what not to do, what to remember and what to forget. From being a mother to lessons learnt from our own mothers; managing money to marriage; coping with pain and anger to taking ownership of our health and growing old, Kaveree Bamzai, first woman editor of one of India's largest newsmagazines, a wife, and mother of two boys and two dogs, tells us how to live a guilt-free life, with a little help from a host of highly accomplished women. With sparkling advice from Naina Lal Kidwai, Arianna Huffington, Sudha Murty, Smriti Irani, Twinkle Khanna and Sania Mirza, among others, No Regrets is the go-to book as we fumble and stumble through life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Sep 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353571436

Kaveree Bamzai

Kaveree Bamzai has been a journalist for over three decades. A graduate of Delhi School of Economics, Chevening Scholar, and wholehearted supporter of good causes, from Save the Children to CII's Committee on Women's Empowerment, she now presides over a chaotic household while managing a fledgling career as a writer.

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INTRODUCTION

Everyone wants you to be perfect

F

EW women in India are fortunate to have been born, and even fewer are blessed to have been educated. So how do we still find the will to live? Now this is not me being facetious—being alive and educated is a great gift from enlightened parents in India. Female literacy is 65.46 per cent compared to 82.14 per cent for men. As for female infanticide, of the twelve million girls born annually in India, one million would have died within the first year itself. But even for women like us, it’s a miracle that we don’t collapse under the weight of our mythology, history and culture. Throughout history Indian women have always paid a huge price for the choices they’ve made. Let’s take Sita, daughter of Janak, wife of Ram, queen of Ayodhya. Reduced to a trial by fire to test her chastity because she made the mistake of being abducted by Ravana, she chose to return to the Earth from where she had come. There’s Ahalya, wife of a sage, Gautam, who is seduced by Lord Indra and then turned to stone by her unsympathetic husband for it, freed only by the graciousness of another male God, Vishnu, who placed his feet on her. Then there’s Shakuntala, abandoned at birth by her parents Vishwamitra and Menaka, left to fend for herself in the forest. She chances upon the king Dushyant who marries her, only to leave her and then forget her when she comes to his court because she isn’t wearing his signet ring.

And those are just the celebrity women of their era. The list of women done in by uncaring, unfeeling and forgetful men is long. Women who show obvious interest in men are condemned to having their noses cut off—yes, that’s Surpanakha. Women who make the mistake of mocking men are condemned to disrobing—yes, that’s Draupadi who angers the Kauravas by calling Duryodhana the ‘blind son of a blind man’. Those who laugh, even if innocently as Ganga did at the sage Durvasa, are banished from heaven, and condemned to flow on earth.

Our literary heroines don’t fare any better. There’s Elizabeth Bennet, plucky, smart, outspoken, delightfully rude. She has to learn to swallow her pride because dour Fitzwilliam Darcy goes out of his way to help her feckless family, thus earning her eternal and, dare I say, coerced gratitude. Mr Darcy may be the most repressed man in English literature, but Jane Austen somehow makes us believe that he will loosen up once he is dazzled by Elizabeth’s sociability. She didn’t get around to writing its sequel but P.D. James did, and Darcy didn’t seem any less buttoned up to me in Death Comes to Pemberley. Emily Brontë gets our lovely Catherine involved with Heathcliff, a man who clearly had anger-management issues, and we, silly girls growing up to be women, swoon—over him, not her. And there is Daphne du Maurier’s ultimate ingénue Rebecca, living with an unhelpful husband and the ghost of his dead wife, whose legend is forever embellished by the scary Mrs Danvers.

It’s a wonder that we grow up as functioning adults, believing in love, happily-ever-afters, and the whole caboodle that good girls go to heaven (even if we may have taken a detour and tried to be the bad girls who go everywhere). We are either supremely stupid, marching to our doom with a smile on our faces, or supremely self-aware about the realities of life and resigned to our fates.

You cannot be what you cannot see. This doesn’t give women too many choices on how to be, how to exist, whether in the public or private domain. Just look at the options in the public domain—all you have to do is examine the women politicians, trying so hard to fill the so-called rational, sensible, strategic space usually occupied by men, because anything else, especially anything that is emotional and visceral would be considered to be ‘typically female’ and therefore ‘irrational’. The alternative is to be self-effacing, self-cancelling, blending into the background, being the eternal wallflower. Such is our luck that even when an iron woman like Indira Gandhi wins a war, declares an emergency, and still manages to win a popular election to return to power, she simply falls to pieces when her beloved son dies, never ever able to recover either her self-belief or her self-confidence. And if history offers Hillary Clinton a chance, one who has survived an unfaithful husband and years of being reviled for wanting to work, she loses to a man who fits the textbook descriptions of bully and misogynist.

Teddy or Professor Baer? Why not both, or neither?

So what has modern feminism given us after all these years? And here I speak for what is technically considered the first wave of feminism connected to equal suffrage for men and women. After years of wanting only ever to be Jo March in Little Women and choosing mature virtue over callow passion, we’re suddenly told that perhaps we don’t need Teddy or Professor Baer at all, that we can be Jo March without them, just as Simone de Beauvoir could exist without that parasitic pomposity of Jean Paul Sartre, thank you very much. As she told us in The Second Sex, throughout culture, ‘man occupies the role of the self, or subject; woman is the object, the other. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. She is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. He extends out into the world to impose his will on it, whereas woman is doomed to immanence, or inwardness. He creates, acts, invents; she waits for him to save her.’ It was time to change that, and it was possible only through autonomy won by economic independence.

In the 1960s, Betty Friedan told us that women didn’t have to be ‘Stepford Wives’ and that the pervasive unhappiness that marked their seemingly perfect lives, embodied in the iconic American TV series Mad Men, was curable. That they didn’t need to live up to the feminine mystique, the societal assumption that women could find fulfilment through housework, marriage, sexual passivity, and child rearing alone. In India, we revelled in the liberties which the freedom struggle enabled and the Constitution guaranteed, and those rights that were not mentioned, were quickly addressed by pioneering legislations such as the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955.

The 1990s saw a new kind of assertion that went beyond economic independence and equality under rule of law. In the USA, the clash between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill in 1991 during the senate hearings for the former’s confirmation, sparked a battle against sexual harassment that is still being fought in corner offices and street corners. In India, we heard the term ‘sexual harassment’ for the first time even earlier, in 1988, when IAS officer Rupan Deol Bajaj accused the director general of police in Punjab, K.P.S. Gill, of molestation. Later, Bhanwari Devi braved the powerful Gujjar community when she took the men who gangraped her to court.

We are now officially living in the age of hashtag feminism, from #MeToo to #TimesUp. An age that has seen widespread awareness of sexual abuse on campus, in the workplace, on the streets. The gangrape of a young woman in December 2012 pushed India into reforming its sexual harassment laws to make punishment for rapists more stringent, and a series of high-profile men being caught molesting and raping colleagues and co-workers surfaced, among them a powerful editor-turned-minister, an image guru and a movie director.

But the more things change the more they remain the same. As women, we rarely saw ourselves reflected onscreen except a brief period in the 1980s when Indian television decided to show women as they were, whether they were Kalyani, the IPS officer of Udaan, or the activist–homemaker Rajani of the eponymous show. Critics like Vibhuti Patel argued that these stereotypes of the New Indian Woman created by Doordarshan who managed to rise above adversity, achieve success in fulfilling their goals, and channel their energies towards selfless social goals, ended up valourizing them within the discourse of liberal nationalist politics and citizenship.

By the 1990s we saw the single working women of Tara, the angry young woman of Shanti and the divorced woman of Saans, and we thought we could be versions of the reel-them—real, flawed, fearless. We didn’t pay much attention to the fact that Simran was allowed to ‘jee le apni zindagi’ but didn’t really have any life skills in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. Or that Nisha had done a course in computers in Hum Aapke Hain Koun but hadn’t spent time developing a spine, or that in Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak Juhi Chawla’s Rashmi was a doll but one who had no clearly identifiable life goals except to marry Raj.

Because we can’t all be cool moms

Things were no better when we saw mothers being projected onscreen. In Mother India, poor Radha had to shoot her demon spawn who clearly did not know how to behave with women. In Deewar, the Maa had to abandon her son, Vijay, who did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. And in Trishul, Vijay again went about destroying his ‘najayaz’ father through all manner of shenanigans including wooing his step-brother’s girlfriend. It was all in the name of his late mother, who had no chance to protest, having been removed from the scene much before in the script.

The point is that whatever women do, we can’t win. So just as Sheryl Sandberg tells us to ‘lean in’, to not just bag a seat at the high table but to speak up at it, to find a supportive partner and to get rid of our inherent impostor syndrome, Anne-Marie Slaughter tells us we can’t have it all. Her thesis, first put down in The Atlantic in 2012, is that even with a supportive spouse, intense professional commitment and a willingness to live life in chapters, the deck is still stacked against any woman who wants to reach the top of the career ladder while also caring for growing children or ageing parents. And then, before we knew it, other powerful women jumped in and told us that life is not perfect, that we can only pretend to have it all. In the words of former PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2014, ‘Every day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions. And you have to co-opt a lot of people to help you. We co-opted our families to help us. We plan our lives meticulously so we can be decent parents. But if you ask our daughters, I’m not sure they will say that I’ve been a good mom. I’m not sure. And I try all kinds of coping mechanisms.’

And that’s someone who used to get $30 million a year in salary and had a net worth of nearly $150 million. Rich people’s problem, you say?

No. Turns out these are every woman’s problems. Upon the release her last book, Unfinished Business, Slaughter said, ‘Knowing what I know now, I wish I had taken one day a week when they were between 0 and 5 to be with them. I could have said, Every Friday, instead of day care, every Friday is a mom day. We would have done fun things. It would have mattered. And it would have been a pleasure for me.’ Really, really? Couldn’t someone have told me this earlier? Anyone?

No one did. Not our role models in real life, our fantasy women, women we’d grown up with in our heads. Women we had assumed were powerful, successful, in charge of their destinies, were now revealed to be just like us: confused, unsure, lacking clarity and, horror of horrors, in the case of Sheryl Sandberg, just as manipulative as men. We knew how to laugh about our lives, because Nora Ephron had taught us in Heartburn. She had taught us what to do when the husband cheated, when the dream died, and the marriage ended (every solution usually involved eating mashed potatoes with a forkful of cold butter). She taught us to write about it so we could control the version, so it could make you laugh, so it wouldn’t hurt as much, and so we could get on with it.

It has to be you—but does it?

Getting on with it is what women do very well. It’s in our DNA. At work, if there’s extra work to be done to meet an important deadline, we will do it for the team. If the maid hasn’t shown up for work, we will stay home and take care of the children. If the driver is absent, we pick up the keys, or in the case of people like me who don’t know how to drive and have no patience to give directions to Uber drivers, flag an auto. No matter who is absent, it’s we who fill the vacuum, while also deciding the menu for the day at home so everyone gets a nourishing meal, while also sitting through interminable, time-consuming meetings devised by ageing men who have to do none of this, completing the assignment for the day, picking up the dry cleaning on the way, and oh by the way, there is no multigrain bread in the house and babyjaan (who is now a very large twenty-one-year-old) would like some prosciutto ham on his pizza today.

Of course, by no means should you expect anything resembling gratitude from any member of the family when you come home triumphantly laden with all this and that feeling of a job well done—except, of course, the dogs (mine are a growing labrador named Loop and an ageing beagle named Snoop) who will wag their tails with great vigour knowing their dinner is near. The dinner being what you will make for them, and not hopefully you, although that day may well come.

You’re expected to be the Cool Mom, hair never out of place, perfectly poised, balancing home and work, never demanding, never complaining, never nagging, managing babies, dogs, husband, boss, in that order and equally efficiently.

No one has expressed this angst for me as well as Pamela Druckerman in Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, on the result of raising children French style, as ‘a fully functioning society of good little sleepers, gourmet eaters and reasonably relaxed parents’. All we have to do, we are told, is to feed infants grown-up foods like fruits and vegetables rather than bland cereals and stick to fixed schedules; leave the babies crying on their own if they’re not sleeping through the night by the time they’re four-months-old; and exert your authority by declaring, ‘C’est moi qui décide’ (It’s I who decide). Of course, Druckerman wrote this in the era before Leila Slimani’s Lullaby, a hideous account of what happens when your too-perfect bebes turn out to be coached by your too-perfect nanny who is basically the female version of American Psycho. Moral of the story? Even French mamans can’t have it all.

Running to stay still

The point in all this is that I would love to be perfect. I would love to be the woman who wakes up with the six o’clock alarm, slaps together her teenage boy’s healthy breakfast (two multigrain toasts, four slices of mozzarella cheese, three poached eggs, a tall glass of milk, eight walnuts and eight almonds, plus a banana) and his mid-day meal (four pieces of grilled turkey breast, a portion of broccoli, carrots and cucumber), goes for a run, gets to work, be in time for lunch with the boys, husband, and dogs, and then rushes back to work, manages the multiple egos of multiple bosses, finishes the assignments for the day, and still finds time to look soignée for an evening dining out with friends, attending a book launch or turning up at an art show.

It’s not impossible. I know friends who do manage this feat quite well. I, however, am not one of them. On any given day, I start out with the best intentions, promising myself that this will be the first day of my new diet and exercise regime. I do not know of the number of gyms I have joined, paid up for, and then not turned up for. I always have a good excuse, mind you, which ranges from intrusive

Reviews for No Regrets

[rathika · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyable read, perfect for women! Love the way she captures, the highs and lows revolving around women in this world! Captured beautifully in this book. Thank you Kaveree Bamzai, - I hope your pen remains poised to capture all your great thoughts into more beautiful books!