Gender Disparity: A Reading of Preeti Shenoy’s Life Is What You Make It

Abstract

               Preeti Shenoy, an Indian novelist was born in 1971 in Kolkata. Her distinguished writings are Life Is What You Make It, The Secret Wishlist, The One You Cannot Have, It Happens for a Reason and The Rule Breakers. Life Is What You Make It was published in 2011. Through this novel, Shenoy focuses on themes like women oppression and exploitation. The novel focuses on the innocent love story of the protagonist named Ankita and its disastrous consequences. Shenoy addresses about a prevailing social issue for the first time through the portrayal of pseudo characters.

               The novel presents about the plight Ankita Sharma, who was forced to bring back her lost control. She becomes the reason for the death of her boyfriend as she had rejected his love proposal. When the letter that was written by her boyfriend with blood comes to the knowledge of her parents, especially her father she is punished severely that leads her towards depression and alters into bipolar disorder. Preeti Shenoy does not represent her as an individual character, but as a representative of all the women characters who are forced to battle against suppression by the male-chauvinistic society. Shenoy has taken up the tag of being one among the post-colonial women fiction writers who presents about the sufferings of the liberated women even in the modern, globalized twenty-first century.