Do women never think beyond the age of 21? Don’t we do more than feel the this is all i want to be as if the future is closing in behind the walls. So why do girl fall the mystique of marriage when throw a career away?

It is an answer must we make for ourselves if we are to control our own destiny. As girls talk chirpily of love and family ask them in private and they admit unspoken unease of the question.

They don’t want to face a question those who know straight up seem to be the lucky ones because they don’t have to think about it. The engaged girls seem subdued, even a little angry – they know they will never use their degree. They say they will work in the community and keep interested in community issues, but its not the same. They will have no control of their destiny or of making society a better place.

It is as if femininity requires ignoring the question of your identity whereas to be decisive is to be masculine.

However, girls find that ignoring the question falls flat on their face in their  mid thirties when the last child is at school. Beings Sanjay’s mother is not enough. Suddenly, being Sandeep’s wife seems empty.

As Western consumerism invades India do women know who they are or are they chasing who they are being brainwashed they should be?

I admit to being totally stunned. “Brown is beautiful” I said arriving in India. “Why do you want whitening creams?”

Youth have always resented – while still loving – mothers who held onto their girls too tightly.  It took our own lives as parents to realise the aching pain of our mother own emptiness that protested the beauty of tradition because to admit it was shallow was to turn a woman’s whole life into folly.

Girls of the past took arts degrees and studied the beauties of poetry,  but soon drifted into the need to be popular. To be popular meant also being popular with boys – how else can you compete with the girls?

The creative or mental interests die – chasing boy after boy and feeling increasingly alone with oneself.

Perhaps Mr Right will fill the void ….. Then it was marriage, pregnancy and ….. Then you look in a mirror and discover you have become your mother after all.

Behind the facade of success, as The dust of work has filled the lungs and turned the songs of poor husky, the middle class talk politics and promotions, even the odd affair secreting whisky behind closed doors.

The choice is yours.  So how will you face the terrifying decision?

“Will I gave up my dream – or will I buck the social pressure and be who I want to be?”

However, the discontinuity of life’s role is only half the problem. What of the pressure to deny your heart aspirations in the first place?

Those girls who slid into their sexual roles as women had convinced themselves they did not have to choose. It seemed easy – but a decision put off is only delayed and waiting to be faced. It stunts our need to grow and face our need to live as fulfilled human beings.

The question of identity is not just for women only. Men have been made to decide early or be lost to usefulness. As the world changes their are fewer parental role models that the boys can relate too.

But why assume a girls biology denies her the need to ask the same yearning question? Victorian times denied woman the right to enjoy their sexuality, now we open careers to them and simultaneously crush the right to ask what it means to be a whole woman offering your entirety to the world.

Do not hide our women in a corner, allow them their identity. To be able to decide who we are to be is a question beyond once women. It is  a question of female identity.