Rama had never thought that she would be one of those. Then again, Prakash had also seemed so…..But what was the point of thinking about all this now? Unless one was actually planning to act, over thinking things always caused trouble. And Rama did not have the courage to act.
Rama was a ‘modern’ girl, from [...]

Talking about vaginas is not sexy – not in the least bit. I’m not saying it couldn’t be made sexy, but we choose to keep that out and instead simply talk about them – making ourselves vulnerable, being honest, for once emerging from the forts we’ve constructed for ourselves. That fort is sexy – it doesn’t care about anything but its own defence, plays power games and cannot, will not love – loving you see, is vulnerability. That’s how it differs from admiration – to admire and to be admired involves no risk.

“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 [...]

What did Indira Gandhi mean as a woman, for women, and in the realm of feminism? She has been held up as a model for women politicians and too often the “India has had Indira, we have no dearth of women politicians” rhetoric obscures reality. Her iron fist of populism on the one hand, and choking authoritarianism on the other, have been demonized and reified alternatively by different quarters

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.

The unimaginable agony in Polanski’s personal life is really no excuse for his act in 1977. There have been plenty of holocaust survivors and most of them have lived respectable and decent lives. Krakow’s Ghetto and Auschwitz are nightmares whose scars cannot be replaced by the accolades he has been showered with. But then, they are no excuse for his sexual misconduct either. And then again, a man, whose wife was murdered, must understand that violence against women is a crime.