Ambitious bitch or sati savitri?

Shobha De has blogged about this article on Sunanda Pushkar by a journalist Vrinda Gopinath. Reading that article on Su made me see red. I don’t know which newspaper/magazine published this story, but Shobha has blogged the entire story on her blog.

The article is a nice example of how shoddy journalism can get. The writer seems to suggest that Shashi Tharoor was merely a victim and that Sunanda does not really belong to the ‘class’ of people who really deserve to be popular, and Su just used Shashi to get where she had to get in the Dubai/Delhi circles. The whole article screams bitchiness and it seems like someone paid the journalist to do a hatchet job on Sunanda.

I will post the parts I found objectionable in this whole story and why I found them so:

Their lives would have soon settled into a mundane routine if it were not for Sunanda’s hyper hunger to rise above the plain folks. She begged her friends for invitations to glam events and then cashed in on the ’90s marketing trends of organising small-time fashion shows.She soon catapulted into the world of event management, of the C-class variety—of starlets and bimbos—but stunned her colleagues with her insatiable ambition.

It seems like the writer is saying that Sunanda’s hyper hunger to rise above plain folks is bad because she is from a small town and she should not aim so high. And is that why she is being labeled as being in c-class of event management? And what about that ‘insatiable ambition’?

Says a former rival acidly, “Sunanda would claw her way to a sponsor and have him eating out of her hands, she was not a girl’s girl.”

Oh yeah. Those girls who have men eating out of their hands. So bad…boo!

Sunanda was the p3p Queen of Masala Dubai, chasing the glittering mirage with vampire-like thirst—hyper networking and coursing business deals.

Now, tell me which businessman worth his salt is not a networking machine? I cannot think of a non-networking-hungry person ever being a great success?( unless we are talking about Mukesh Ambani, who has lots of baap ka paisa.) And why is that wrong? Why is she likened to a vampire? Just because she is a woman and she is supposed to rise to great heights just by her own hard work and not like other men who use the fact that they are well-connected?

Sure, it’s hard to make friends when you are living between two cities, but as a hostess sniffs, “Sunanda invites people she meets on a plane for an intimate dinner with the minister. It may be first class but this is not Dubai, this is Delhi, where pedigree counts, not wannabe.”

Notice how the ‘hostess’ who said the above quoted lines sounds like she is nursing a bruised ego? While she may have taken the ‘accepted’ route to fame and riches, being the wife of a rich ‘pedigreed’ man, here comes sue with her talent for being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people and sweeps everyone off?

It seems like if a guy had done whatever Sunanda/Sue had done to get to the top, they would be called cut-throat, ambitious, but never bitched about the way Sue was. In fact, how many people are talking about how Shashi Tharoor or for that matter Lalit Modi got where they did? How many people have explored how these men might have side-stepped ethics and stepped upon people to rise to fame? Why is everyone then beating Sue down? And what is so wrong with being an ambitious woman? She might have broken hearts on her way to the top, but she did not seem to have really done anything illegal(perhaps until now, when she garnered her sweat equity from IPL-Kochi). I am not saying she is doodh ki dhuli, but they are making her out to be some vamp out to use all the men to rise up the social ladder.

One particular Outlook article I read about Tharoor talks about how he is not new to providing personal favors to women he ends up having a relationship with. So how come Tharoor is the poor guy and Sue is the sexy siren who wooed him and then threw him by the wayside? And why should a high society woman either be an ambitious bitch or a sati-savitri-wife of a rich man? Why can’t she be a little bit of both, or neither?