Are you a FaFaa fan?

For the uninitiated, #FaFaa is Fahad Faasil, the Malayalam movie star who has been stealing hearts with his stellar performances in diverse roles. 

FaFaa’s latest movie is Avesham. A thorough entertainer, the movie is a hit. The claim to fame for FaFaa is that he finally carried off a mainstream movie. He has proved now that he is a “mass” hero. Mass, meaning most people. And what works for most people? Let's break it down. Actually, let's break down one aspect - the women in the movie.

The movie has three roles for women. 1) A mother 2) A group of college girls who look adoringly at the recently-turned-brave male students 3) Two sex workers.

Ok, 3.5. There was an admin person announcing hostel rules. 

The movie chronicles the journey and experiences of three college-going male students and their relationship with a male gangster. Nothing wrong with that. Men’s lives are men’s lives and it is ok to not have a prominent female character in the story. The problem was the presence of women - in a stereotypical way and as mere props. The mother character especially troubled me.

Call me woke or pedantic, but I wonder how many others noticed this aspect of the movie.

When I shared my observations with my sociologist daughter she dismissed it saying, “That’s what men think women do in life”. After fighting for voting rights, defying norms and going to college, graduating in masses, working through balancing traditional roles and career demands, and making their way steadily through the system, is that all the men still think about women?

You may want to say that it is not all men. I agree. But you see, this is the problem with “mainstream”. We normalise #GenderRoles and expressions so much that we can’t see the gaps between the change we want to see and what we propagate. Mainstream reflects what is part of our DNA as a society and a culture. Changing it requires something as radical as a genetic mutation. Something as impactful as a meteor hitting the Earth, which once changed the entire makeup of this planet.

So, we provoke. Mirriam Webster defines "provoke" as to cause people to think seriously about something. To enable serious thinking, we bring forward stories and ask some deeply unsettling questions. Questions ranging from the place of women in the society to what it means to go beyond talking about #sustainability. You may want to stop reading, get angry, dismiss it, but we request you to read them. As uncomfortable as they can be, that's the only way.

Because working with that discomfort is how we can tackle the following facts.

• Less than 10% of all PE funding goes to women-run #startups and #womenentrepreneurs

• Women-run enterprises face structural and systemic barriers to scale their ventures

• Less than 10% of #AngelInvestors are women. I counted 2 women among the top 60 Angel investors in India listed on a prominent angel investment platform.

• This world faces polycrisis at a scale never seen before. We have problems to tackle at the environment, social and humanitarian levels.

Ashoka India’s website declares, “We believe that the most powerful force for good is a systems-changing idea in the hands of a formidable #socialentrepreneur.” We believe that too.

Belief is something and doing is something else. When we continue to sideline women and relegate them to mothers and adoring onlookers, that's the stereotype we reinforce.

Men holding those roles create invisible structural barriers and women holding them create aspirational deficits. I recently chanced upon a 2014 video by Minister Smriti Irani recalls inviting Dr. Tessy Thomas to head India’s first IIT council. Dr Thomas choked she says, and asked the minister, “Did you really think of me?”. A distinguished eminent scientist like Dr Tessy Thomas needed others to open doors to opportunities for her. However, once opened, she walked through them in style and aced every position she took up.

The challenge is to see these doors. Within ourselves and outside. We can't open the doors we don't see.

Where and how do we see them?

Maybe we can start with movies. And question the women characters – the presence of them and the absence of them.