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Can a woman have it all? A great career + a great marriage + great children? If she is a successful career woman who does have a great marriage and great children , then she must have had great nanny because frankly speaking housekeeping and child rearing are time consuming jobs in themselves and to manage a career on top of these two demanding occupations would mean
a) that you are a super woman or a super manager who happens to delegate responsibilities so well that all aspects of her life are well taken care of or
b) you have a part time job which allows you to be a part time housekeeper and you are a part time mom with your children away in boarding school.Home makers and career women have had this debate for years with each one thinking that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. While women who have deadlines to meet and companies to run feel that those stay at home moms have a blast , the stay at home moms feel envious of the career women in their power suits and decision making skills. But are these two identities mutually exclusive? Why does it have to be an either/or situation? Can’t a woman have it all?
Indra Nooyi’s comment that a woman can’t have it all is yet another addition to the never ending debate of whether or not a woman can have it all. Some women feel that they can have it all while there are others who feel that it is always a question of either / or. One thing is for sure that all women have, whether they have it all or not, is some measure of guilt.
For those who have it all, there is the guilt of having it all while there are so many women who do not.
For those who don’t have it all, there is the guilt of not exploiting their full potential either as women ( those who have opted not to have children or marriage in pursuit of a career) or their aptitude (those women who’ve opted not to have a career in order to have a marriage and/children).But the funny thing is that no man feels the guilt. Even a non-traditional husband who stays at home and changes the nappies does not feel guilty for not exploiting his aptitude and potential and the man who reaches the top of the ladder definitely does not feel guilty that he didn’t attend his child’s PTA meeting because he had a business dinner.
So essentially, whether a woman can or cannot have it all doesn’t really matter, what matters is that every woman will have the guilt of being themselves.
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a phone / telephone book / directory Polski: książka telefoniczna (Photo credit: Wikipedia) With the rains still playing truant till yesterday, I decided to take advantage of the dry spell and catch up with some shopping. Like most women, I’m a sucker for shopping and the word SALE is like a carrot to this donkey who finds it hard to resist. Supposedly to beat the blues on wet days, the July sales in Mumbai have now become a regular feature of Mumbai’s shopping scene come rain or shine. The last time I had a blast during the sales was two years ago when there was a wedding in the family to shop for. This time too there is a wedding in the family to shop for hence the need to go to the Sales.
Vandana and Saroj at Chandralok on Napean Sea Road are great for fabrics especially if you’re looking for something dressy particularly suitable for Indian functions where you can choose from handloom and lace, cotton and silks to synthetics and traditional weaves with zari and bootis and all those embellishments that go to making your outfit different from the rest. Another shop which has similar stuff but catering to a different audience is Soni Moni at Tardeo right near the Mall.
I went practically berserk at these shops, feasting my eyes on the gorgeous colours and textures that were rolled out before me. It was fun watching the other shoppers too putting one fabric against the other trying to mix and match colours to make up the dress they had designed in their mind’s eye. Strangely enough at Vandana and at Soni Moni I came upon two ladies who were shopping for themselves and were generous enough to give me advice on my purchase. It turned out that both these ladies were designers and also volunteered to stitch my garments if I so desired.
I was grateful indeed for their contact details because I greedily bought up all those yards without any tailor in mind and would have gone straight to them were it not for the distance away from home. Then, as it happened Kay wanted the number of a seamstress I’d been to and that set me thinking that I’d go back to her. After all a seamstress is different from a tailor and less uppity than a designer. There’s something gracious and old fashioned about a seamstress who would design a dress and tailor it with old fashioned attention to detail. Sadly I’d thrown away her card and then dug out her number from the telephone directory a big three volume tome that is long out dated. Luckily I did manage to track down the seamstress and will get the clothes stitched from her…….
But this whole exercise set me thinking about tracking down people. In the good old days if one wanted to trace someone particularly in a new town, all one had to do was look carefully through the telephone directory and you were sure of getting there. But with directories now no longer published and telephones being mobile, how does one find out the whereabouts of a person?
There is no telephone inquiry, nor is there a telephone directory nor for that matter are there seamstresses any more.
Twenty- five Seven 