Success is it?

Activist and publisher of Zubaan Books, Urvashi Butalia suggests that whether she is a corporate executive, a model, or a village panchayat head, a woman usually has to pay a deep personal cost for success; she is often forced to make a choice between her career and family. The tragedy is that she can't seem to have both. "I have no doubt that the hollowness of success at the cost of all other things hits men also, but it hits women very differently," says Butalia. And that is, perhaps, where the "soul-starvation" comes in. "When the image in the mirror - of beauty, success or talent - doesn't match the image inside, you have the breeding ground for vulnerability," says literary critic and writer Nilanjana Roy. "Many of the great women writers had this: not so much a fragility as the lack of an extra skin, coupled with an abnormal sensitivity to their environments. I think of writers like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf; all of them struggled and often overcame their tendencies to depression, learned to use their insecurities and fragilities as material, but in the end were brought down by this."

Roy questions the prevailing culture "which insists that the beautiful and the successful should be placed under the burden of also having to be flawless - why they can't always ask for or get the help and support they need. We still live in a society where it's considered a sign of weakness to ask for help, or to admit to having problems; the surface counts for more than what's going on inside, and that burden is doubled for the beautiful and the successful."

Read more: Smart women, unsmart choices - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships/man-woman/Smart-women-unsmart-choices-/articleshow/6124049.cms#ixzz10q3UhmDv