In course of my work, I had to inaugurate a beauty pageant of transwomen from the north-eastern states of India just a few years ago. An array of emotions fought inside as I lit the inaugural lamp along with the
Censorship: the practice of silencing/ obliterating something because it is considered inappropriate. It is practiced variously: adult censorship seeks to determine what is appropriate for young people; social censorship determines what is acceptable in which social situation; governments determine what
So, who is an underdog? The dictionary defines an underdog as a loser/runner-up/second best/small fry and so on. But the term has a far more politically significant connotation in common parlance. To side with the underdog means supporting the wronged,
1. Pahalgam. A happy and carefree 18-year-old, sitting on the rocks of the river Lidder, shivers at the sudden sharp drop in temperature. Within minutes, she’s thrilled with her first experience of snowfall. A family vacation in Kashmir—a favourite tourist destination;
Time was at a loss. Satyavati did not have a heaven. Where was she to be put then, post her stipulated time in hell? Heaven is where one goes. And heaven, of course, is what you had wanted in your
Refugee is a political term, connected to, but not quite the same as, a person seeking refuge. The term ‘refugee’ is inseparably connected with international borders and internal strife in the country of one’s birth. In the 1951 Refugee Convention,
Spoiler Alert: Read this piece at your own risk if you intend to watch the movie and haven’t yet managed to. I must acknowledge at the outset that I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Hindi remake of Jeethu Joseph’s Drishyam.
The feminist struggle in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s, now known as the second wave of feminism, was marked by the beauty dilemma. Susan Brownmiller, a pioneering American feminist, expresses the debate succinctly in the following passage:
On 8 March this year, this qafeteer found herself tagged in a Facebook status update by Srijit Ghosh, a 20-year-old budding architect, with no claim to fame whatsoever. Just a school friend’s son. Since I have his permission to quote
The victory of the Aam Admi Party has been lauded in mainstream media even culminating in a form of cult-hero worship. Paramita Banerjee interrogates the ideology, through which the ‘auraat’ gets subsumed under the category of ‘admi’ …. Well, that