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No regrets, it was only a repartee

A few days ago, I put up a Facebook post on the interaction between Claire Underwood and Hannah Conway. For those of you who don't follow the brilliant Netflix series , Claire is the evil better half of (equally, if not more, evil) American President Frank Underwood and, by extension, the First Lady (let's not get into how these two make evil seem so smart and delectable that, many times, one is tempted to sup with the devil).
Hannah, distinctly less evil (on the face of it, at least) but imbued with overreaching ambition, is the wife of President-hopeful Will Conway (elections are within striking distance). The two men in their lives are involved in a face-off at the highest level, so about time the ladies got snarky.
Here's how they went for the jugular.
Hannah Conway (to the child-free Claire): "Do you ever regret not having children?"
Claire Underwood (to mom-of-two Hannah): "Do you ever regret having them?"
Why did I put this up on Facebook?
Because it is one of the best repartees I've ever come across. The closest to this was one other I'd overheard when I was a trainee journalist, way back in the 1990s, and a formidable senior editor was shouting at someone for slipping up on a story. She ended her diatribe with: "I'm the senior editor! [subtext: I will brook no argument]." The chap at the receiving end (who claimed it was not his fault because there had been a communication lapse) had a repartee ready; only (and obviously), he was too scared to vocalise it. "I wanted to tell her - 'You may be senior editor but, hey, I'm better looking'," he regaled us (bunch of gangly trainees) later, while we giggled furtively. Silly and personal, I know, but it still makes me laugh when I take a trip down memory lane.
I'm a fan of repartees. Which is exactly why I put up the "do you regret not having children" interaction on my wall. Most of my friends, thankfully, belong on the same wavelength as I do, so their 'Likes' were because (I hope) they believed (like I did) it was a superb play of wits.
A few of them, unfortunately, totally miscued the social media 'situation': they assumed it was a "parenting" issue, and it was the matter of "having children" versus "not having children" hogging centre-stage.
So every now and then, a comment was popping up, extolling the virtues of how great being a parent is. Maybe it is, but that wasn't the point of my post - even though, if I wanted to go deeper, Hannah's query was outrageously out of line and anti-feminist, so Claire's gorgeously clinical rip-through response is actually a fitting endorsement of what women all over the world are fighting for: life choices.
And if I had posted an interface along the lines of: Fat woman to thin woman - "Do you feel bad because you're so thin?" and thin woman countered with - "Do you feel bad being so fat?", I'm fairly positive there would have been "LOLs" galore. Sadly, Hannah vs Claire was taken out of context. In the process, I got a peek into a rather judgemental mindset of some folks who clearly feel that the childfree Claire (yes, I know, she's evil but that's not really relevant here) should not have been allowed to trump the kids-in-tow Hannah.
This made me wonder: what if the exchange had been flipped. Say it was Claire asking Hannah, "Do you ever regret having kids?", and Hannah had come back with, "Do you ever regret not having any?" - how would have that had gone down in virtual reality? Much better, I suspect.
- sushmita@khaleejtimes.com