🎧 Scene-Setter: The Songs That Sing To You
There are two kinds of songs that make a woman feel powerful.
The first kind are songs where someone sings to you or at least sings in a way that makes it feel like they could have. Songs where you enter a room and suddenly the air shifts a little. Someone pauses. Someone looks twice. Someone thinks wow.
And then there’s the second kind of songs, or maybe the moments around them, where you realise something quietly revolutionary: arre… mujhe kisi ke gaane ki zaroorat hi nahi hai.
I can hold the room myself.
This blog was supposed to go up on Women’s Day. Very neat, very thematic. But my period arrived like an extremely punctual guest and my body decided productivity is a slightly overrated concept anyway. So instead of writing about womanhood, I spent most of that day horizontal with a heating pad, thinking about the unfairness of cramps.
And somewhere in that slightly miserable, slightly reflective state, I realised that maybe the interruption itself was the most honest start to a blog about being a woman. Sometimes the body takes over the narrative. Sometimes softness wins over productivity. Sometimes the most feminist thing you can do is say, blog kal likhenge.
At the exact same time, Harry Styles released his fourth studio album. For about ten minutes I was convinced this post would simply become a ranking of that album. (Opinions are still forming but Coming Up Roses is currently my favourite.) The more I thought about it, the more I realised the blog I wanted to write wasn’t about a new album at all.
It was about the music that quietly shaped how I understood being a woman. Which, ironically and beautifully, begins with One Direction. And then, ten years later, explodes into a completely different kind of feminine energy at a Sunidhi Chauhan concert.
🛍️ The Mall Moment: My First Blueprint of Power
My earliest memory of wanting to be a powerful woman didn’t come from a book or a speech or some intellectual feminist awakening.
It happened in a mall.
I must have been twelve or thirteen, wandering around aimlessly, probably holding a cold coffee my parents had paid for, when this woman walked past me. Perfect posture. Effortless outfit. Not flashy, not dramatic bas composed in that way some people are.
I remember exactly how she walked.
Not fast, not slow. Like someone who had nowhere urgent to be because wherever she stood would become the centre anyway. Her heels made that soft tak-tak sound that echoes slightly in malls. No awareness that a thirteen-year-old girl had just paused mid-step thinking: haan. mujhe bhi aisi hi banna hai.
Just someone whose presence rearranges the room. That was the blueprint.
And if I trace the emotional rehearsal for that feeling honestly, it leads me back to a group of extremely dramatic British boys harmonising in my headphones.
💿 Girlhood Soundtrack: The Era of Being Noticed
These are not the One Direction songs people usually talk about. Not the stadium hits. Not the obvious chart-toppers.
But if you listen to them together, there’s a strange thread connecting them: female aura.
Women entering rooms and shifting the atmosphere. Women being admired not because they tried to impress, but because their presence itself feels electric.
And that matters.
Because when you’re thirteen, the world is constantly instructing girls to shrink. Sit properly. Speak softly. Don’t take up too much space. But these songs were quietly suggesting something else.
They were saying: a woman can be the centre of gravity.
And the older I get, the more I realise how much the way men treat women can shape how confidently women occupy space. Admiration that feels curious instead of possessive. Encouragement instead of intimidation. Appreciation instead of competition. I’ve been lucky to have male friends in my life who practice exactly that, who celebrate strong women instead of shrinking them.
But strangely, the earliest rehearsal for that belief came from boy-band lyrics.
🎤 Magnetism: C’mon, C’mon
Take C’mon, C’mon.
On the surface, it’s just a flirt song. A guy spotting a girl across the room, heart racing, asking her to dance. But teenage me heard something bigger.
She heard that a woman could simply exist in a room and someone would be fascinated by that existence.
You didn’t have to earn attention by shrinking first. You didn’t have to perform sweetness or politeness or perfection. Sometimes someone just notices the spark.
And that tiny belief is powerful when you’re thirteen.
🖤 Presence: Little Black Dress
Then came Little Black Dress, which might be the most cinematic lesson in feminine aura that One Direction ever recorded.
“Little black dress just walked into the room. Making heads turn can’t stop looking at you.”
That line did something to my brain chemistry.
Because the song isn’t really about the dress. It’s about the moment someone enters a space and everything shifts slightly. Heads turn. Conversations pause. The air changes.
And what I loved about it was that the admiration didn’t feel creepy or evaluative. It felt curious.
Like someone was discovering a force of nature.
🎈 Chaos Energy: Girl Almighty
Then there’s Girl Almighty.
Which honestly might be the most chaotic but accurate description of feminine energy ever written. And, also has a title that would have made a perfect alternate for this blog’s name.
The girl in that song floats through the room like she’s on a balloon. People say she’s fake because her energy is too big to process.
But she doesn’t shrink. She just keeps floating.
There’s a moment in performances of that song where Harry Styles drops to his knees while singing about her. Teenage me watched that clip an embarrassing number of times. Not because kneeling itself mattered. Obviously, admiration isn’t built on dramatic gestures and men deserve to feel special and admired too.
But what stayed with me was the emotional posture of that moment.
It suggested a world where admiration didn’t automatically mean hierarchy. Where a woman could be dazzling without someone needing to reduce her first. Where appreciation could look like awe instead of control.
And that idea that men and women can admire each other without anyone becoming smaller felt quietly revolutionary.
✨ Devotion: Olivia
Then there’s Olivia.
This one stayed long enough to become tattoo-adjacent in my life.
The song describes a woman who feels completely out of someone’s league. Someone luminous enough to inspire pursuit. And yet the narrator still tries, still reaches, still insists she’s worth the effort.
The lines that stayed with me were: “The summertime and butterflies all belong to your creation.”
Teenage me heard that and built an entire worldview around it. That if you could imagine something vividly enough. Anything: love, adventure, belonging, maybe the universe would eventually conspire in your favour.
Also teenage me was extremely confident about marrying Harry Styles. The only obstacle between us being geography, fame, and the minor logistical detail that I was thirteen.
But otherwise the plan was solid. Ask twenty-three-year-old me whether that ideas still excites her and the answer is still yes. Some dreams age beautifully.
🌙 Softer Power: The Solo Songs
As the boys grew up, the music softened. And so did the definition of feminine power.
Harry Styles’ Matilda isn’t about spectacle at all. It’s about a woman leaving behind something painful and slowly building a life that belongs to her. I don’t personally relate to the exact kind of pain the song describes.
But I recognise something deeper in it: almost every woman carries some story of resilience. Some private chapter where she had to grow through difficulty.
The power in that song isn’t admiration. It’s understanding.
And Louis Tomlinson’s Perfect Now carries a similar tenderness. The line “some queens don’t need a crown” feels like the grown-up cousin of What Makes You Beautiful.
Not “you don’t know you’re beautiful.” But simply: you are already enough. Even on days when you forget.
🔥 Sunidhi Chauhan: When Womanhood Got Loud
Then came Sunidhi Chauhan. I attended her concert the night before Women’s Day, and something shifted.
If One Direction once made me want to be the girl someone couldn’t stop looking at…Sunidhi made me want to be the woman who owned the room.
She paused mid-concert and said something almost casually: “I’m performing at twenty percent tonight.”
For a moment the room went quiet. Because performers don’t usually say that. Especially women. We’re used to polish, perfection, control.
But then she laughed slightly, shrugged, and launched straight into Kamli, Sheila Ki Jawani, Desi Girl with the energy of someone operating at two hundred percent anyway.
She’s forty-plus, dressed like the most captivating person in the room, moving with the confidence of someone who knows the stage belongs to her.
And slightly tipsy me kept repeating: “How is everyone not hypnotised by her right now?” Which, in hindsight, is a very drunk observation. But also not entirely incorrect. Because she had that same aura I once saw in the mall.
🌊 The Curls
And then there were her curls.
Long. Glorious. Completely unapologetic.
I grew up with wavy-curly hair that always looked its best at the beach: wind-tangled, slightly chaotic. But for years I straightened it for every event that felt important. Straight hair meant polished, respectable, acceptable.
I haven’t used heat on my hair in almost two years now. But watching Sunidhi stand there with curls bouncing under stage lights was glamorous, loud and powerful. It felt unexpectedly emotional. Because so many of us spend years smoothing ourselves out.
Straighter hair. Softer voices. Smaller ambitions. Seeing someone command a stage exactly as she was felt like permission.
Like femininity didn’t need to be polished to be powerful.
🌺 The Realisation
Somewhere between the music, the crowd, the curls, and the chaos of that night, something clicked.
One Direction had taught me that a woman could be adored. Sunidhi Chauhan reminded me that a woman could be unstoppable.
Walking out of that concert, I realised something funny. The teenage girl who once believed someone else would make her feel powerful hadn’t disappeared. She had simply grown louder.
🌸 Closing Thought
If music taught me anything about womanhood, it’s this: Strength and vulnerability are not opposites. They’re collaborators.
Some songs teach you how to feel unforgettable. Some songs teach you how to become unforgettable.
If you’re lucky, life lets you learn both.
The Devil is in the Dee-tails :) 
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