Zi (10) finds himself growing up in a world that is filled with rigid expectations. Everyone around him — his family, his friends, his neighbours — seems to have a say in who he should be. Surrounded by all this noise, his voice remains stifled, yearning to break free.
When software engineer Rajat Mittal (39) conceptualised Zi in his book ZardoZi (2024), he was holding up a mirror to every young boy who grows up cocooned by Indian societal expectations. Any outliers to the norm are ousted. In fact, at many points in his own life, Rajat felt he had a lot in common with Zi. Dance, art, poetry, and theatre interested him at various junctures of his life, but he was handed the “be a man” speech at every turn.
Now a father to a son and daughter, Rajat finds himself rethinking the script of gendered norms. While role-modelling is one way, the newsletter Boyish, which he ran for years, was an urgent call for men and boys to question time-tested archetypes constructed by society. Isn’t it time we do away with the alpha male paradigm? He seems to think so.
“The world needs to be kinder to our boys,” Rajat echoes the voice of history.
Gender equality shouldn’t be skewed towards either sex
A paper studying suicide rates in India between the years 2009 and 2018 indicated that male suicide victims accounted for 66.2 percent, nearly double the percentage of female suicide victims (33.8 percent). Psychologists blame pent-up emotions. Explaining that co-dependency is a merit rather than a flaw for humans, Rajat attributes this issue to patriarchal norms, which prevent most men from embracing vulnerability.
Boys are deemed tough from a young age, he observed while growing up in Uttar Pradesh. Speaking about his schooling days, Rajat shares, “Boys were beaten hard for their mistakes, while girls got a gentle tap.” The contrast was evident.
He continues, “It was just assumed that boys were tough and could take the harder share of something.” As boys grow into men, these presumptions turn into rigid tropes — “Be macho, be tough, don’t cry, be a man”.
While Rajat was aware of these issues, it was only after he returned to India following his master’s degree abroad that he fully realised the extent of these societal norms. It wasn’t just men who were paying the price of society’s expectations. Women’s issues weren’t getting a spotlight either, especially conversations around puberty and menstrual health, which remained shrouded in stigma.
And so, in a bid to contribute to positive discourse, Rajat started Menstrupedia in 2012, which has taken period and puberty awareness to 13 million girls across Indian hinterlands.
His next initiative ‘She Can You Can’, also drove a positive female-centric narrative through a compilation of stories about iconic Indian women. The idea was to bring these legends out of the footnotes of history and into the public eye, where children could see them as role models.
When men try to subvert the system, they are often met with critique and ridicule. It is disheartening how men’s multifaceted identities have been simplified into narrow tropes. And so, Boyish was a breath of fresh air that encouraged male vulnerability. “Men often feel challenged on their maleness for sharing their emotional side,” Rajat points out. Boyish attempted to change this.
Why can’t men be whatever they want to be?
“What is a man in middle-class India unless he is ambitious and pursuing economic leadership?” Rajat wonders aloud. He argues that by glorifying the hustle culture, society is raising a generation of boys who “have little idea of a self outside of an economic engine”. Zi, the little boy in his book, was one example. To highlight the rigid expectations placed on men’s roles, Rajat portrayed Zi as a boy who loved embroidery but was forced into playing soccer.
Embroidery, he notes, is a symbolism “to communicate the core idea that boys are often discouraged from pursuing feminine hobbies and are geared into believing that a degree in STEM or finance is their only calling”. This is also the case when it comes to expressing emotions.
A study probing the ill effects of macho posturing found that women cry between 30 and 64 times a year, and men only cry between six and 17 times. But who should be blamed for this emotional stunt — biology or society’s unrealistic pressures? The latter, say pop culture experts.
In fact, Rajat points out that biology gets more blame than it deserves. For instance, in matters of intimacy, the archetypal male is portrayed as one who always desires sex. Contesting this ‘predatory nature’ of men, Rajat says, “When it comes to discussions about sex, men are often labelled as the problem. As a result, they lose the currency of touch entirely outside the bounds of their families — and even within families, it is not fundamentally encouraged in some settings. The idea that men are always ‘on’ is wrong. We are not machines; we are human beings.”
Raising Boys Right
Urging society to tweak the misogyny it has been breeding for decades has inevitably come with its challenges. But underlying this fight is Rajat’s core belief — that with every boy who decides to be himself instead of being ‘man enough’, a more-informed generation of men is raised. Elaborating on how he puts this into practice with his young son, Rajat shares, “I wanted to give him a slightly different flavour of being masculine. He enjoys colouring and sometimes uses his hands and feet as the canvas.”
There isn’t any reprimand when this happens. Explaining further, he says, “The connotative conditioning that ‘colours on the body are a feminine thing’ starts in childhood and then spirals into lipsticks and nail polishes in adult life. Let him love colours as much as he wants to.”
While he practises many positive parenting behaviours, Rajat says the most integral one is a young boy’s playtime with his father. “Growing up, Indian boys don’t really interface as much with their dads — something that was very true for the last generation, at least. But, I fundamentally believe that we are in the golden era of fatherhood in India. I think this is going to be the best generation of fathers.”
While he is raising his son to have a different flavour of masculinity, Rajat hopes that through every piece of content he puts out, he will inspire a ‘Zi’ somewhere in the world to follow his dreams.
Edited by Khushi Arora, Pictures source: Rajat Mittal
