It’s official. If you want a weird angle…nay…solution to a problem, ask Sonam Kapoor. The newest piece of wisdom to come from her stable is on the issue of equal pay. While we all rage over the injustice of women getting paid less and corporate attitude towards it, Sonam has a simple solution – ‘Stop complaining’ and ‘don’t work for those who pay you less,’ she says.
“They complain about equal pay and I understand that. If you think you deserve something, fight for it and the best way to fight for it, is by not doing it. So don’t work for those people who you think are not paying you enough. Don’t complain about it,” Sonam said during a session in ‘Movie Mela’ event at the 17th Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.
This seems like a blown up version of this age old consumer motto – If you have a problem with this product, then don’t use it.
But what she’s really saying seems more like this: If you don’t want to get robbed then don’t buy a TV.
I am sure you can all see the ludicrousness of this statement.
At the same event but a different session, even Deepika Padukone had something to say about the issue. The Piku star said she was not “unhappy” with her pay, but believed there should be “some semblance when it comes to the current generation of stars.”
A straight answer that seems more to the point – Diplomatic Deepika as usual. But if you want popcorn entertainment value, just follow Sonam’s statements any day.
Here’s what is really wrong with Sonam’s statement. ‘Don’t work for people who you think are not paying you enough’ is a good motto if you can afford to sit and wait for the right job. Which automatically eliminates about 98 percent of the female population and 99 percent of the male population. Because let’s face it, nobody can afford to sit around kicking their heels while waiting for the right job, unless your parents are billionaires or you are Sonam Kapoor, it seems. There’s either payments to make, family to support or in the case of the woman – the marriage-babymaker clock which keeps ticking. So if you want a career, you better get it now before you have an armful of babies. ‘Get job first and money in the pocket, bargain about the price later’ is the only motto by which the normal everyday people can live.
Secondly and most importantly, ‘not working for them’ can NEVER EVER be an alternative to complaining about unequal pay, because it’s everywhere – all around us. The only thing we can really do is demand that Equal Pay be made a constitutional amendment and in the meantime work from within the system.
In the meantime, Sonam also went on to add that she is a ‘complete feminist’ and there is nothing to be shy about it. We are glad she is being unequivocal about feminism while many other actresses in the industry claim to be ‘not feminist'(Katrina Kaif), ‘gender-equalitist-but-not-feminist'(Parineeti Chopra), ‘part-feminist'(Alia Bhatt). We might as well throw in ‘quazi-feminist’, ‘neo-feminist’, ‘pan-feminist’,’militant feminist’, ‘angry feminists of the 90s persuasion’…
What we really, I mean REALLY need is, for some well-meaning author to step up and pen-down a book called ’50 Shades of Feminism’. But I am sure if I just wait for a year or two, celebrities would have invented many more types of feminism, enough for me to compile it all in one article called ‘The 50 Shades of Feminism According to Bollywood.’
So watch out for it in 2017.
Image Courtesy: BCCL
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