It started as a joke. The first time I saw Rakhi Sawant on the small screen was when she insouciantly walked into the Bigg Boss house. Obviously the oomphy item girl had zero idea what she was in for – and neither did we! A few minutes into the episode and it was clear who the riveting star of this particular reality show would be. I was fascinated. My daughters thought I’d totally lost it! Evening after evening, I’d rush into their room to watch just one person – Rakhi. ‘You’ve gone mad,’ Arundhati, my 21-year-old, declared with the finality young people reserve for dotty mothers. Perhaps I had. But most viewers’ eyeballs were reserved for Rakhi. Outrageously outspoken Rakhi, who resolutely refused to conform or remain politically correct, while co-contestants tried every trick in the book to score brownie points over their rivals.

Meet the neo-desi power woman. Self made. Self taught. Gutsy. Ballsy. An original. No lineage. No patronage. No godfather. No Harvard degree. Nothing but raw guts and a strong survival instinct. Crude, upfront and disarming, this is the woman who is turning the stereotype on its head by…by…being herself. Whether it’s Mayawati, the ‘bob-cut walli’ Dalit leader in Uttar Pradesh, or that anonymous woman sarpanch outside Hyderabad, it is these women who are in the forefront of a major social revolution taking place in India.

For 60-plus years, we were force fed on several idealised female models. Forget mythology for the moment, or the stereotypes enshrined in the collective consciousness of the nation – the Sati Savitris who negated their own existence to better serve their Lord and Master. Till as recently as five years ago, the women we were supposed to look up to and emulate were in the Kasturba mould…strong-willed yet paradoxically submissive. ‘Look at Ba…. Look at her sacrifice…’ elders (generally men) would remind us sternly at the first sign of rebellion, particularly, marital rebellion. Well…nobody ever bothered to ask Ba what she felt about her life. Was she cool with the ‘sacrifices’? Or were they imposed on her? Too late now. Maybe we shall never find out her own experiments with the truth! But the operational word that dominated our confused and angry lives as women growing up in the ’70s,’80s and ’90s was ‘sacrifice’. How I hated the sound of it! Today...aaaah…today, sacrifice has been thrown out of the window by the 20-somethings. About time, too.

Writer Amy Tan once said ‘You see what power is – holding someone else’s fear in your hand and showing it to them.’ Today power has acquired a new definition. It is no longer boxed into ‘power over someone, or something,’ it is ‘power over oneself.’ To me, that’s the single biggest attitudinal shift as also the most major triumph. Women who wield genuine power in the 21st century are those who have assumed total control over their own lives, emotionally, physically, morally and most importantly, financially. There can be no meaningful talk about empowerment unless we address the first golden rule of the game, which is financial independence. A woman who earns her own money, pays her own bills and is capable of feeding herself, is the real power woman. Responsible, aware and in charge.