Freedom of Expression. A much debated, analysed, construed and scrutinized issue. The press battles for its freedom, being the first to be clamped down in times of crises. A writer struggles to find the freedom to voice his or her thoughts, while trying to keep in mind the sentiments of the readers, and the state. [...]

The construct of the “manly Englishman” of Colonial times was an idea painstakingly created in the vicinity of Oxbridge and exported worldwide in the rhetoric of imperialism and as justification for colonialism. As I type, I look around the New Bodleian Reading Room at Oxford, where I am. Several men around me are working away [...]

I cannot help shuddering. It goes beyond keeping children away from all this. What worries me equally is that a lot of gamers are older men, men in their 20s and 30s and even older. Men who have more access to women in offices or on the streets than say, teens.

So where does the offender figure in our understanding of rape? Do we understand the brutality enough to actually be able to pardon it?

But what if a man does change? Does he have the right to lead a normal life?

“Oh Fuck!” is something I hear all around me everyday, as pens drop, essay deadlines draw close or the coffee goes cold. I tried the other day, to put that phrase in other words and came up with “Oh, sexual intercourse!” Upon examining dictionaries for etymological significance, there’s “Oh, strike!” and “Oh, Copulate!” Not so [...]

A couple of years back, a gentleman on an Indian adoptive parents’ chat group wrote the following post, “It’s better to go for surrogacy as it is guaranteed, unlike adoption. We only have to wait 9 months unlike adoption where the wait maybe 1-2 years. And the child’s health and genetics are 100% guaranteed. And the child will be our own.” As you can imagine, several adoptive parents replied so furiously that he apologized over and over for his insensitivity.

To me, this guy’s attitude was the perfect example of the reasons I condemn professional surrogacy. Because it’s about control. And exploitation.

If the previous generations grew up with the idea that a woman’s ultimate joy in life is waiting on her husband, this generation is being fed ideas of a ‘liberated’ woman– a woman who has all the freedom to roam the city, delightfully competing with peers to spend her father’s or husband’s money on clothes and manicures

Sexual desire still makes the slut. Its repression makes the good woman – the “slut” image getting more and more popular doesn’t obliterate the fact that the sexual image associated with the “slut” is still violent – a sexuality of power and domination where the woman adds to the excitement by being what she is.

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??

In the 50’s, women were photographed through a technique called the “butterfly lighting”. In this form of lighting, the light would fall on the woman from the top and make her cheekbones look higher and give an ethereal touch to everything. The man however was yanked from the studio and its artificial lighting and dunked square into natural environment. The way men and women are represented through art and photography is something that needs to be looked upon more closely.