Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence by Shrayana BhattacharyaMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Hooter: A conversation on gender disparity in India across all spectrums
Using Shah Rukh Khan's fandom as a common thread and "clickbaity" version of a title, this is a culmination of fifteen years of research on something as simple as being a woman in India. She cuts across economic strata, age demographics, lifestyles across women who profess their fandom for SRK and how they relate to his persona on screen and off screen along with the movies he has acted in.
Understanding a woman may be a quest a lot of men are supposedly on, this book tries to capture thei aspirations blocked by patriarchy and other social constructs. She does get down to economics of unpaid labour but mixes it up with SRK and Bollywood to make it a lot more palatable to the average reader.
She weaves along the themes of finding love in this country as the aspirations and expectations of newer generations of women change, even if ever so slowly compared to how the world has been changing on the screen and off it. From an airhostess being the first female bread earner in her family to a freelance gig economy worker in the back lanes of India to a government officer - the various cross sections have different challenges and different outlooks but united by the fact that they are gender specific in a lot of cases and the double standards they have to deal with all the time.
The book doesnt try to provide solutions but just shares a story of many a woman and am sure in some form of the other - one character or the other - every Indian woman relates to this journey. A good book to acknowledge the reality. Obviously being a SRK Fan herself, you see a lot of retro fitting of concepts back to SRK movies which can feel jarring but you can give her a free pass there because that is what fandom is all about - more from the heart than the mind.
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