I AM NOT YOUR AUNTY

Can people please stop auntifying women so casually and so callously

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I was 25 when I got married and 27 when I had my first child. My nextdoor neighbour, a 70-yearold lady who introduced herself as "Nanda aunty," doted on my newborn. She would often take him into her home for ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch, fussing over him as if he were her own grandchild. One day, her granddaughter - a young woman in her early twenties - dropped by. Looking at my baby, she said to me: "Aunty, can you please send your son for a while, I want to play with him?" The irony hit me instantly.

Here I was, just a few years older than her, married with a baby in my arms, yet to her, I was already "aunty." She wasn't married, and I was, but instead of seeing us as contemporaries, she placed me in another generation altogether.

In India, it seems, you don't need wrinkles to become an aunty - Sometimes all it takes is a mangalsutra... or a bindi or a baby- or so it seems! Here women get auntified much before they age.

Somewhere between their late 20s and early 30s, a switch flips-and suddenly every child in the neighborhood, every shop assistant, even the random delivery boy thinks it's perfectly fine to call them "aunty." And the worst when women (less than a decade apart) call you aunty.

The word itself isn't offensive. In fact, in its original sense your mother's friend-it's affectionate. But when it's used so randomly and callously it is not acceptable.