It seems one cannot open an Indian newspaper without reading about at least one rape happening somewhere every day. This time it is a gang rape of a journalist in Mumbai. The bastion of the last city supposedly safe for women has also fallen. Mumbai continues to be much safer for women than many other…
What is worse – being sentenced to twelve years in prison because you were the victim of a rape, or being “pardoned” by your country’s President on the condition that you marry your rapist, thus entering a lifelong hell? Gulnaz’s story is horrific at multiple levels. A system which charges rape victims with adultery is…
It’s depressing how those Iranian women footballers are getting kicked around like footballs. The question is – can they play football with their hijabs or headscarves on? On one side, there is FIFA, sticking rigidly to its stand that hijabs can cause “choking injuries” and are thus unsafe to wear. On the other side, you…
In the past, I’ve written about theft from passengers’ bags by baggage handlers in Indian airports, and the mysterious chalk marks used by customs officials to mark certain bags for special treatment. Little did I know that singling out NRIs for stealing from their bags is an international practice. According to this news article, Michael…
With the cricket World Cup going on, I have been watching a lot of Willow TV. There are a lot of NRI targeted ads, but one in particular irritates me considerably. It doesn’t help, either, that given the frequency of ads and the constant repetition, I watch this particular ad quite a few times everyday. …
The other day, there was an interesting article in the Hindu on the subject of why women scientists drop out. The article quoted two research papers, which tried to analyze why there were so few women scientists at the highest levels. The first is the one by Kanta Rani and Rajesh Luthra of CSIR’s human…
So UBS has finally revamped its much-criticized dress code. The WSJ reports that the new version is a much more sober version than the hilarious original dress code. “Men will be required to wear a dark-colored suit, a white shirt and a red tie, and women a female equivalent of this,” Mr. Kern said. The…
It was just a generation ago that women fought for the right to wear pants. Even a few years back, many companies in the US considered business formal attire for women to mean a skirt suit (i.e. a jacket and a skirt) rather than a pantsuit. Business formal aside, many women in the older generation…
I am really glad I don’t live in Oklahoma. Not because it is right on Tornado Alley, but because the lawmakers have just passed the most misogynistic set of laws I can think of. The two bills were originally vetoed by the State Governor. But then both the State House and Senate overrode the veto…
Two things come out very clearly from the Ruchika Girhotra case – first, we need to distinguish between a “Molestation” and an Attempt to Rape, and second, we need to treat offences against minors differently. We all know the facts of what happened to Ruchika Girhotra – in 1990, 14 year-old Ruchika was molested by…
If you’ve ever wondered why there aren’t enough women in the Indian Armed Forces, now you know why. The Vice Chief Air Marshal P K Barbora of the Indian Air Force has just let the world know exactly how misogynistic he is. “In a few years time, we might see this change (women getting inducted…
The two headlines in today’s Wall Street Journal said it all. They brought out the history of women in the workforce in two short sentences. The first headline read “Recession Drives More Women to Work“. Below it, the second headline read “Returning Workers Face Big Pay Cuts“. And so the cycle continues. Women flood into…
I learnt today that “evil spirits”, whatever they are, like to reside only in women. Not in men, and certainly not in male priests. I learnt that anyone can diagnose at a glance that a woman has “evil spirits” in her. I wonder how one trains for this, but no diplomas seem to be necessary.…
She was cleaning out the shoe closet and neatly organizing all the shoes in it.? There were two things that struck her – first, each cubbyhole could hold one pair of her shoes, but only one each of his shoes.? So his shoes were occupying twice the space that hers were.? Second, she also realized…
The Niketa Mehta saga ended sadly with a miscarriage, according to HT news reports. Perhaps it was all the emotional stress of the relentless publicity, or perhaps the physical stress of going to the courts, meeting with lawyers and traveling on bumpy roads. Or perhaps, it’s the body’s own way of rejecting a foetus that…
The Imagined Universe 