Suggestions

Empowerment

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The Sarees She Left Behind

I was 13 years old when I lost my beloved Nani, my maternal grandmother. It was a young enough age to not have created noteworthy memories yet an old enough age to register memories deeply. Since then I have put together the
April 25, 2024
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Ki Niye Palabi?

T’s eyes were puffed and tired. She also had a headache. Sleep had proved elusive last night. And not just for her family but also for others who shared that slum location as their address. A few nights earlier, some houses in
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Why is Nobody…

All Joined and Disjointed – but I had to say it all. (Also, I am an idiot) The wave and nod of the watchman or sabziwala or the old lady with the sun-baked skin, are not part of their work or role
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Summer of 2024

This summer, my mother spoke a new language with me; soaking methi overnight in a copper tumbler I watched her apply nariyal and rosemary oil – fursat se My mother and I are singing a song we were never taught, yet the tunes feel familiar This summer,
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Collaborative Quilt Chronicles

Worked on in upcycled denim, this Quilt was a collaboration between a daughter and mother. It could have been just an ordinary family heirloom. However, it foregrounded several facets of family, community and village life in the way it unfolded. The denim
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Men are Weeping Everywhere

Scrape your ears until the music stings.David Allen Sullivan Toughness is all the muscle proof we need to weaken a storm. Ignatius Valentine Aloysius Stupid! says the boy thrashing the hedge with a stick. Stupid! Thwack. Stupid! Thwack. He can’t see what
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Dirty Girl

Dirty – is such a dirty word. A neat little package of judgment summed up in 5 letters from the morally superior, their final verdict on your personal hygiene or lack of it, your roving mind and your desires that the virgin
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A Mad Woman’s Forgiveness

“Mumma, I’m feeling giddy,” I whisper in a tired-sounding breath. This is the second time in one week and the nth time in the past couple of months that I’m giddy. Ma and Papa were initially impressed by my vocabulary as a
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Not The Wife Material

It was time for my parents to find a suitable boy for me. It gave me exciting encounters, interesting revelations and a name for my Substack account. This was during a two year period when Udit and I were ‘on a
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Red Lipstick

‘I was her friend even before I was born.’ This thought raced in my young mind as my mother, and I crept silently to Lily’s mother’s room. The room was huge, with a high ceiling and windows with ledges and ornate
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Growing up with Afro Curls

Life in the 1970s and 80s was not easy for a child, school was full of bullies, teachers were yet to be sensitive to child psychology, and parents were not too eager to be concerned about their children’s mental health. It
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Divorce Stigma

Sometimes I truly wish to be a thing, just a thing, Rather than a human being. No emotions ,no heartache, no tears. This human life is only a misery. I am not from zoo or other planet, Yes I belong to
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The Three Women in my Life

The Three Women in my Life: Lessons in Courage, Resilience, and Triumph “Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds Baked in a pie.” Many afternoons after I returned home from school in 2002, I would memorise lines from this wonderful English poem. I was hooked on
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Loving Minu Tai

…and learning from her. A meditation on love, loss and healing Minu Tai and I were given two vastly different lives to live. I’m not adding a photograph of Minu Tai to this essay — so here’s a description — an agile
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Meeting My Breasts for the First Time

“My breasts are, literally, the softer parts of me. As flaunt-worthy as the more culturally-celebrated stronger parts of me,” asserts writer and Odissi dancer Swaati Chattopadhyay “Swaati, are your breasts in front of your waist?” “No.” “Then keep your hand where your
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The Story of My Hair and Now

‘I wish I could do it. It needs so much strength and courage. I don’t have it’, stated a random stranger, admirably pointing at my shaved head. ‘Well, you just need a barber to do this, not really courage’, I responded.
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The Summer of My Freedom

The sofa smelled like toast. My head had been forced into its corner. The upholstery was frayed in this part, and I could see a tiny brown piece of bread tucked into a crevice in the cushion. This would be the
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A Mum- Loaned to Me

Soon after my first birthday, my mum died of a sudden heart attack, leaving my heartbroken father with ten children to care for. I was the youngest, and besides my incredibly patient and caring father, I had many older sisters
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The Impelling Power of Powerlessness

Once, while returning from a conference by the metro bus in the bustling city of Istanbul, I witnessed a fair-statured woman with an autistic girl getting in and taking their seats in the rear. The woman appeared in a perfectly calm disposition;
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My Poems Speak of a Scene or a Thing

Nishi Pulugurtha In Conversation with Jhilam Chattaraj ‘the brown leaf between barbed wires that draw borders stuck held up and hanging’ — Nishi Pulugurtha Raindrops on the Periwinkle (Writers Workshop, Kolkata, 2022) is a volume of form poems – haiku,
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Language Matters in Mental Health

As humans, we use language to shape how we perceive the world and the people around us. We have a choice of words to describe ourselves and others. Our choice of words influences how we view mental health and well-being. Considering
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The Country of Red Mud

Seva, a city girl, was travelling to a remote school where she had volunteered to teach. Vidyamandir, situated in Laal Matir Desh (the country of red mud), functioned as a philanthropic wing of a mining company. The school was built with neat prefectures of one-storied structures consisting
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A Journey Gone Wrong -Book Review

Book Review: A Journey Gone Wrong Author: Gita Viswanath  Pune: Vishwakarma Publications (January 2022) Gita Viswanath’s recent novel, A Journey Gone Wrong (2022), lives up to the promise of her critically acclaimed first novel, Twice It Happened (2019). Both have significant
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The Memory of My Abortion

Ever since the shocking and regressive judgement was declared, we in India have been watching a new newsmaker in the western media. The Foetus. Pro-lifers have always wanted us to think of it as a ‘person’. As if that was not
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Introversion is Not Shyness

You may have or have not heard the word “Introvert”. Like how many times have you happened to hear it? But, if you do not know what it means, have you ever considered putting up your effort to see whether these
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Wisdom Can Be Life-Changing

Imagine… A life free of stress. A life without anxiety. A life with happy relationships. All this seems utopian given the challenges we all face, but that may be because we have been looking in the wrong place for the answers. Wisdom,
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Bharti Singh’s Zero Maternity Break

Is it a personal choice or a public policy failure? Celebrities maintain a social media presence across multiple platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube in this digital age. They present public-private selves by sharing both sad and happy moments
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You Better Not Fall

I fell off my bike, but that’s ok. Everyone falls at least once in their life. Some from the chair, some from the bed, others slip and fall. I should feel lucky for not getting injured. But what about the pain that
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Why Tamil Translation Matters

    Why Tamil? For an author, having your work translated into another culture is the ultimate compliment. Your story has travelled into other imaginations. Fake I.D. was a family history mystery of a teenager finding on the day of
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Women (Not) Making News

“What inequality? There are more women than men in the newsroom these days!” This incredulity characterised many conversations with women journalists I met in 2011-12 as part of my research on gender in the newsroom. In India, the two
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Who Was bell hooks?

Just in case, you woke up early on Thursday the 16th December 2021, read the news of the passing away of bell hooks, and had never heard of her, wondered who this woman of colour was, please do not feel
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Broken Sisterhood

Rich or poor, black or white, privileged or underprivileged, women live on the fringes. Even those who are educated and occupy important positions in society often find themselves susceptible to the atrocities of men and the patriarchal culture that
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Witch-hunting In Rural India

Dumka, Jharkhand Witch-hunting is one of the worst forms of human rights violation. Since historic times, this evil practice in India has resulted in sexual harassment, atrocities, and the murder of thousands of women. In rural areas where literacy levels are
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Life – A Path of Choices

The shape, the form and the structure of our life right here right now is a series of choices that grew and expanded consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and unintentionally over the years. What choices do you engage in every day? What
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Giving A Voice To Women’s Mental Health

No Shame To Talk About Mental Illness A 2019 report by researchers from the University of Birmingham (the first UK cohort study looking at the associations between domestic abuse and mental illness) reported a “strong association” between exposure to intimate
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Garden Meditation

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience; everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.” ~May Sarton. Our tiny backyard garden is a year-round source of peace and produce.Gardening
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Single By Choice

The best way to live one’s life is to live with freedom. A life that is spent doing what we want, how we want, and being happy with our choices is the one with the least number of regrets. This definition
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Each Story Is Different And Unique

Society tries to put us, women, into boxes.Like the models in a glossy magazine cover, we have to be flawless; trophy wives with beauty, body, and brains; superwomen who balance home life, career, and child-rearing with ease. We have to be perfect
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Recovery

The events of the last few months have been too much. The world has been too much. The Virus. George Floyd. Black Lives Matter. Rio Tinto. 434 Aboriginal deaths in custody. 55 Indian journalists arrested for doing their jobs. Our
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And They All Fall Down

The necessary overthrow of our idols in our journey of individuation. We’ve seen a lot of statues being forcibly taken down from their plinths and pedestals, in the past few weeks, as the #BlackLivesMatter movement has started to increase in
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The Alphabet Of Women

March 2018. I lay horizontally at the foot end of my bed as my two young daughters finally slept. It had been a tumultuous night of fevers and restlessness and yet, despite my fatigue and worry, my mind was busy.
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Love in The Time of COVID-19

  Every global event brings with it valuable lessons for humanity. This COVID-19 breakout is also teaching us something. We’ve all been sick before and we all know that the only certainty of birth is death. But what we keep forgetting is that thing
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Want To Step Off The Hedonic Treadmill?

Hedonic Treadmill- An ironically unusual euphemism for humankind’s persistent preoccupation with happiness. The renewed continuously search for increased levels of happiness and the invariable adaptation to new-found happiness is a psychological phenomenon termed Hedonic Adaptation or Hedonic Treadmill. We aim at
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Unfolding

Joseph, my friend in Vancouver, sent me some old black and white pictures. They depict scenes in Sri Lanka when the country was known as Ceylon, the Paradise Island. These pictures are interesting, provoking a variety of emotions within me. 
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Woman Of Vision- Bakes By Bella

Entrepreneurs are disruptors by nature: progressive thinkers, impatient with limitations, people who go their own way – and not on the roads generally travelled. Melissa Dharmadasa, the creator of BakesByBella, highlights this when she says: ‘The mind is a
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