I grew up here👇🏼 in India in the 1990s:

A very middle class upbringing in small rural towns in Uttar Pradesh(U.P.), trying really hard to become cities. Back in the 1990s in these interior towns of U.P., gender roles were strictly defined and rarely “broken”. More disturbingly, they were rarely questioned.

Moving upwards in life meant moving to cities, and that is what I did too. But when I got there in my post-teens, something was unsettling. My value system was set and it was often at conflict with the more fluid, liberal take on gender roles that I found in the cities.

I was not alone. There was a sea of other boys and girls who were part of this migration and with such tremendous change, so much newness and possibilities, many of us clung to what was familiar and what our conditioning had taught us. It was the one way we felt normal. The kids who grew up in the cities were not much different, mind you! Kind of a tomato-tomahto situation.

The early 20s is an exciting time. Boys are on the cusp of becoming independent, of becoming a man. The sense of masculinity is taking shape. But while our culture and media taught me that men are defined by machismo, a small opening had opened up, via which a slightly softer version of masculinity seeped in.

And it felt more natural and relaxing to me.

Change takes time. I was well in my late 20s, perhaps early 30s by when that small stream had grown into a sizable pool almost. I was getting more comfortable in my own skin, with my own body and the “man” I had become. And my biggest gripe with the comfort was, why so late? What could have happened if this happened earlier for me.

Growing up, I was a skinny, frail boy who was constantly at the short end of the stick on the masculinity metric. It taught me a lot of anti-patterns and cost me a lot of precious time. There was no room to question this toxic version of masculinity.

But now that I am in a safe space, I want to open a dialogue about it. And with that intent, this series is born, where I share one essay every month. In each month’s essay, I will discuss a stereotype about masculinity and tell the story of an Indian man who has defied that particular stereotype.

If this is a topic of interest for you, I invite you to this discourse. These stories will ask you, as they have me, to think more deeply about masculinity and taken together, this series will hopefully nudge you to open a meaningful discourse about it. This is not a scholarly researched paper or provocative clickbait content. I am not a gender expert or compensated by page views. Rather, this is a common man analysis of what one man learnt about masculinity growing up.