But then one day this crazy thing happened. This wonderful catalogue of these beautiful fairy tale pictures suddenly went sour. On the night of the Grammy’s, Rihanna was found weeping and screaming hysterically in her car. She had been badly beaten up. Chris Brown, her perfect boyfriend had beaten her up. Cinderella had been beaten down to cinders by her Prince Charming and the world was stunned. Suddenly there was too much of reality in the gossips rags.

It isn’t a crime being fat, you know. Yet, there have been days when all I have wanted to do was bury myself deep within the earth and never re-surface. The worst was when my parents decided to start looking for a groom for me. Invariably all dinner table conversations would revolve around the numerous grooms’ mothers who had rejected me because I was fat. There was also one such mother who wanted to talk to me.

To be frank, there can never really be an affirmative take on gender testing. And the world knows it quite well. Sometimes, it almost seems like an excuse, an excuse for humiliation. Maybe it is too emotional, but when science cannot prove it, in the 21st century what else can??

The world citizenry is thankful that the ‘global’ leaders could at least agree to set deadlines to curb problems such as poverty and illiteracy, through the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in September, 2000. They are pressing problems indeed but so is climate change, but what differentiates the two is that programmes like Garibi Hatao have an immediate positive impact on vote banks coupled with a lesser short run negative impact on the ‘growth’ rates of economies, whereas climate change agenda has neither mass appeal nor does the competing economies any good by slowing down the growth process to a more humane level. A common wo/man after all may not have the patience to try and understand the trade off between growth and development and if it does not capture the imagination of the mass, the agenda does not qualify even for mere paper plans; irrespective of the extent of good it can do the non understanding people. They are politicians after all, not messiahs. But yes, the world citizenry is thankful to its leaders for stepping beyond their White Houses and limousines, or did they?

It’s hard not to love Apu. The reader, as the viewer, grows up with him through Pather Panchali; leaves the nest as he does in Aparajito, braving death and the jungle of an unknown world, falls in love as he does in Apur Sansar, and finally goes on an eternal search for the self, culminating, [...]

The 2009 Nobel Prizes show us that women can be passionate and perseverant. We are fighting a battle for equality and this year a number of women have proved us right – we can think, we can discover, we can explore and we can win – just like the male of our species. I’d like to believe that this is more than pure accident, and that seeds of equality planted years ago are bearing fruit in the victory of these women. If we see greater numbers in the future years, I might be right – the world might be leaning toward better times for women.

A generation ago, she was born in a progressive family, a girl with curly hair, twinkling eyes full of dreams, and the mental strength of a mountain. Her parents loved her more than anything in the world but she never burdened them with her desires and played her role with love and care. Thus, she [...]

This is an imperfect world. Those of us that study its imperfections and ponder their causes and those of us that provide the support services that help people surmount and survive the challenges they pose, both know that angry polemics and esoteric theory go only so far. But humane and altruistic responses have a way of fixing at least one problem at a time, right here, right now. This may be the everyday essence of feminism. And every other ism.

At 5:45 on a Monday evening, as she watched her five-year old son swim under his instructor’s critical gaze, it came to Kaavya that everything about her was mediocre – she was a mediocre home maker, living a mediocre life, in a mediocre suburb in America.

Check out clips from Vaidehi Joshi’s Documentary- Arranged : A Match made in Heaven