Cricket is religion! Sachin Tendulkar is the Ultimate God! Sourav Ganguly is ‘the God of the off-side!’ We eat, drink and sleep cricket! Sunil Gavaskar is the Little Master! Rahul Dravid is The Wall! Mahendra Singh Dhoni is the Captain Supercool! Yuvraj Singh is the Style Icon! Virender Sehwag is the Master Blaster! Harbhajan Singh [...]

The madwoman as a figure of hysteric rage has the power and most importantly, the potential to rebel against patriarchal modes of oppression – something that feminism as a movement hopes to achieve.

When George. W. Bush’s troops stormed into the Afghan soil flying the American flag as high as it never had been in the past, Bush proclaimed, “today the women of Afghanistan are free!” The authenticity of their so-called movement from ‘oppression’ to ‘freedom’ is debatable. As the elections drew near, the Karzai government gradually began to appease the fundamentalist Muslim clerics, especially the Shia clerics

Deborah Tannen sheds some perspective on this matter. She writes “For males, conversation is the way you negotiate your status in the group and keep people from pushing you around; you use talk to preserve your independence. Females, on the other hand, use conversation to negotiate closeness and intimacy; talk is the essence of intimacy, so being best friends means sitting and talking.”

Women, or rather girls, purportedly go out with boys with both or at least one of these. Shaving blades/creams/lotions–I am stretching my imagination here—maybe because women wouldn’t want their dates to look like ruffians with a daylong stubble. Magazines—this is the easy one—nothing else but women looking seductive would probably prompt them to buy those. And here is the clincher: underwear. Come on now!

Groaning with pain inwardly, I gritted my teeth and stood behind my colleague showing him how something was done. I eyed his chair longingly and realized I couldn’t really ask him to get up and give it to me without invoking either pity or disdain. Year after year of dealing with intense pain as my [...]

Knowledge is based on experience and experience is never gender neutral. Hence it is imperative that any body of knowledge must be inclusive of the experiences of the entire human population. Looking at the experience of only one half of the human race leads to the generation of fractional knowledge. Economics is a victim, so [...]

It’s outrageous how often women, who play a pivotal role in family and community life, are forgotten as contributive members of their households and society. Their duties are restricted to child-rearing and keeping house rather than administrative duties like money management. Through movements such as microfinance, some of this power is respectfully returned to women. They are then able to focus this advantage toward improving their families, businesses and communities with education, budgeting and financial planning, allowing them to be powerful economic agents of change.

Swapping the pearl pendant for the teardrop onyx one, she paused, the image in the mirror reflecting the uncertainty in her mind. Ten years. Ten years since she left behind stereotypes, conventions and the weight of expectations. Over the years she had traded in her salwars for dresses, her metti* for bare feet and her kumkumam* for an impassive blank face. Morph as she did into a nameless faceless entity in the great melting pot that was her adopted country; there were moments like today where she paused.

It’s time to let my world turn again. Sometimes it’s ok to give in.