Watching the young lady clad in jeans negotiating with supreme confidence even as her parents watched was a revelation. She was probably swinging a better deal to buy a flat in one of the premier properties in Bangalore. Obviously from a middle class background and a techie to boot, it was sheer joy to see her getting a lower price in front of her parents.

The ads these days on TV no doubt depict the true picture of  emerging, confident, no nonsense young ladies who know what they want in life. There was a time when we hardly used to see girls on the roads or if they were seen they would always move in groups. It was  was rare to find women in engineering colleges and none of my friends studying in the colleges in Mysore ever had  classmates of the fair sex .

But what we see now-a-days, to the envy of our generation is, women outnumbering men in all spheres and also outshining them. This trend is really worth appreciating though there are still reports of husbands battering wives and in-laws burning them.

However, the joy of watching ‘birds’ as they moved in groups to the Maharani’s College on JLB Road, in Mysore is no more there. All the  young women have become mobile and they zoom around in their two-wheelers for tuitions, parties or having plain fun. It is also a lovely sight to see women carrying their parents as pillion riders.
Women’s independence is hitting you in the face in all directions as you see them sitting in coffee shops holding books in hands quietly by themselves showing that they have truly arrived.

The neatly clad woman in saree coming to pick up  used plates in a hotel on Kalidasa Road in Mysore was another revelation as how to far even smaller towns have moved in this direction. There is no domain that they have not occupied now. Even the so called male-dominated fields like petrol bunks, hotels, driving autorickshaws, taxis are all being taken over slowly by the so called weaker sex. This not only shows the paradigm shift of how the older generation has come to accept the shift but also of the Gen-next male adapting to the new roles.
The IT boom in the country has undoubtedly played a major role in these role reversals, of at last, parents banking on their daughters to see better days in life. This in turn has had a cascade effect on all walks of life with the woman proving that she can stand up and be counted, as this headline aptly in a newspaper proves, “Girl lights father’s pyre.”