-
@ asyncmind
2025-01-19 20:43:41
Ah, the Indian Male. Born into a chaos he didn’t create, tethered to a narrative that ensures he’ll always be the bridesmaid, never the bride. Colonialism didn’t just leave him with railways and bureaucracy—it left him with a carefully crafted role: the perpetual sidekick, the cartoon villain, the placeholder in history’s great drama.
In the colonial script, he exists not as a hero but as an extra. He’s the conniving tax collector to the noble white sahib, the sweating laborer in sepia-toned photographs, or the bumbling antagonist to Bollywood’s fiery heroines. He is the eternal foil, the necessary contrast to someone else's shine. If he dares to dream of being the protagonist? Sorry, that role is reserved for the firang or, at best, a hypermasculine, sanitized fantasy.
In Bollywood, the Indian Male is plenty young, but his youth is just a commodity for the market. He runs, he fights, he loves, but all in vain. If he isn’t groveling at the feet of an exotic femme fatale, he’s playing cuck to her triumph, watching her steal the limelight while he wrestles with generational trauma and a population density problem. The fiery heroine dances while he queues at the ration shop.
For the first 40 years of his life, he is struggling. Struggling against the crowd, against nepotism, against the laws of thermodynamics, against his own parents' belief that he’s a failure for not being a doctor or engineer. His youth is not a time of vitality—it’s a curse of endless lines, meaningless jobs, and one-room apartments with peeling paint. He fights the curse of too many: too many people, too many expectations, too many rejections.
And yet, salvation arrives—not in the form of glory or self-fulfillment—but in his 60s. Yes, only then does society declare him worthy. Only then can he sit in plastic chairs at weddings, spouting wisdom no one asked for. Only then can he achieve the zen-like status of the elder: a potbelly, a pension, and an unlimited supply of unsolicited advice. Until then, he is invisible. A man-boy. A cog in the wheel of India's great, unwieldy machinery.
So, here’s to the Indian Male: the sidekick to history’s heroes, the villain in his own love story, and the quiet struggler who only becomes visible when it’s time to fade away. May he one day find the freedom to rewrite his script—not as an accessory, not as a cuck, but as something better. Or at least, let him skip the 40 years of struggle and jump straight to the pension.