The city was in an uproar. Everywhere little booklet biographies of Pele were published, sold and bought in droves. [Abhijit still has one of them], Calcutta having always been a literary city, and the merchandising juggernaut as yet a glint in the eye of international football [one assumes]. The game was to be played at [...]
Author Archive for aishwarya
Great moments in sporting history
Published by April 18th, 2008 in History, Humour and Sports. 0 CommentsAmrita learns that there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
Free food is the blessing and the bane of penniless grad students. Add to that the fact that I am Indian. In my first month at Stanford, my social life revolved completely around the availability of free food. I have masqueraded as a [...]
Automated Daydreaming?
Published by March 16th, 2008 in Culture, Media, Personal and Society. 0 CommentsTharini is wary of TV, and this is why:
This continued for a good 2 years. We got so involved in it that we would get agitated if Winkie didn’t go to bed quickly, making us miss all the action happening downstairs. We took to recording the episodes and catching up with all that we missed. We [...]
What Bangles Mean
Published by March 16th, 2008 in Culture, Feminism, Humour, Media, Patriarchy, Politics, Women and sexuality. 0 CommentsA women’s day news report about Renuka Chowdhury’s “empowerment bangles” has Rimi B Chatterjee musing on bangles and their cultural significance.
If women are socialised to see certain kinds of jewelry in certain ways, so are men. Indian dance and drama have turned the business of a woman putting on her jewelry into an art form: shringar. Men [...]
A central park for Panjim
Published by March 12th, 2008 in Activism, Community, Environment and public space. 0 CommentsMumbaiwallah draws attention to a campaign towards a park in Panjim.
Goans have long cherished their green heritage. But with the way things are going, it won’t be long before the hills are covered with buildings, open spaces turn into corporate parks, old houses are demolished to make way for a multi-storeyed car park. What will [...]
Anti-Charitable Contributions?
Published by March 12th, 2008 in History, India, Poverty and Society. 2 CommentsDid you know that in 1877 the British colonial government had passed an “Anti-Charitable Contributions Act”? I did not. Bala posts about this absurd piece of history that led to ten million deaths.
He has also unearthed large portions of the original text of the act. My favourite part, from Chapter IV which deals with examples of offences under [...]
Doubletake, Doublethink discusses the entry of romance novels into her life, particularly the figure of the Georgette Heyer man:
The Georgette Heyer Man (GHM for short) is a tall, loose-limbed, cynic with unruly hair and quite unremarkable features except for a smile that transforms his face. And yes, the eyes. Usually a queer light grey, very [...]
News channels have been serving us items about ‘ghosts’, supernatural ‘incidents’, television soaps news, page 3 type parties, kissing scandals, timeslots dedicated to comedy shows, while keeping journalistic professionalism at bay
Amit Sharma feels he is witnessing the death of Indian journalism and offers hilarious pictorial proof.
(Hat tip: Anshuman)
Kamalamba
Published by February 13th, 2008 in Art, Caste, Culture, Feminism, Music, Patriarchy, Society and Women. 0 CommentsVidya tells a story and has a few thoughts on caste and gender in the classical arts.
One day her father noticed her write namO namO rAghavAya anisham on the walls of her house and singing a lovely sindhubhairavi. He was happy and sad at the same time. He called his wife and said,”Look It is [...]
If men could breast-feed
Published by December 28th, 2007 in Culture, Feminism, Media, Patriarchy and Women. 0 CommentsFor example, it does seem to say that women are gamblers, they prefer gambling to taking care of their children. However, if you just look around you, the ad seems laughable, it is not the reality. In families with small children, it is men who go out more. An evening out, with friends at the [...]
No means no
Published by December 14th, 2007 in Cinema, Culture, Feminism, Media, Patriarchy, Women and sexuality. 0 CommentsDesigirl is incensed by the message about rape given by the Tamil film Varalaru.
The cherry on top of this sick icing happens a few scenes later, when the girl’s mum pleads his case to her now pregnant daughter, with the standard “He is a good man, sweetheart” line. Of course he is, if you discount [...]
Vishal loves Sudhir Mishra’s Khoya Khoya Chand.
Starring a bunch of well regarded actors who aren’t quite stars yet (and one wonders why), Khoya Khoya Chand is a gorgeous, quirky and ultimately satisfying movie about Indian movies. Om Shanti Om from a couple of weeks back also was an homage, but while it was a loud [...]
Working women
Published by December 8th, 2007 in Business, Community, Feminism, Patriarchy, Prejudice, Society and Women. 0 CommentsSo men are slowly no longer treating workplaces like an old boys club. Yet we are far from achieving true equity. And in some sense, I would think equity is not just about equal representation of women. It is about women being women and not having to completely change themselves to fit into a [...]
Land rights for sex workers
Published by November 24th, 2007 in Activism, Community, Feminism, Government, Human Rights, Justice, Politics, Society, Women and sexuality. 0 CommentsSonia draws attention to the Janakeeya Samithi’s attempts to oust sex workers from Bangladesh Colony in Kozhikode.
Most of the sex workers had built houses there with their savings and their children are studying in the nearby schools. Usually they come to the town to do sex work and return home early in the morning. Now [...]
Choxbox on the ghodiyu, a contraption guaranteed to put a baby to sleep!
These things don’t ‘belong’ to any family - they are passed on and on. The minute you tell the world that you are expecting a baby is also the minute you start hunting around for someone who has a little one who will [...]
Of pirated books
Published by November 20th, 2007 in Books, Capitalism, Culture and Theory. 0 CommentsRimi B. Chatterjee examines a pirated book she bought at an intersection in Delhi.
Look also at the maths. A cover price of Rs 295 (the same as City of Love) yields to the publisher only about Rs 180 since booksellers buy at heavily discounted prices. If we remove from this price the author’s royalty (since pirates [...]
Every night when thousands of call center employees pour out into the parking lots of their multi-storied tech parks, they are usually too exhausted to check significant information about the cars they travel in. They don’t remember number plates or the contractor’s name. Unfortunately, a lot of them are trying so hard to squeeze their [...]
Bikerdude reminisces about bikes he has owned and especially his relationship with his black Hero Honda Splendour.
When it grew old and would stop in the rain, Id take it aside and curse it gently until it sputtered reluctantly back to life. When it had its customary flat-tyre at 11pm on a Sunday evening, I’d always [...]
Are you a masticator or a gulper?
Published by November 4th, 2007 in Food, Humour, India and Personal. 0 CommentsChronic Worrier on her food-chewing habits.
The carrier aunty often moaned about how I chewed my food thirty two times before swallowing. (Imprinted into the sub-conscious no doubt.) She wasn’t the only one. I had a similar rep among family too. My aunts would goad my younger cousins into finishing their food faster by saying, Now [...]
On Kamala Das
Published by October 30th, 2007 in Feminism, India, Literature, Poetry, Women and sexuality. 2 CommentsRajesh discusses the way women writers are seen in India, focusing on the works of Kamala Das.
That her private life being debated threadbare even after she had turned seventy three should give us enough insight into the iron cast template for an Indian writer who happens to be a woman. However if you stick to [...]
An academic in America
Published by October 25th, 2007 in Culture, Theory, Travel and sexuality. 0 CommentsAniruddh Vasudevan is visiting the US and has an interesting account of his experiences as “the quintessentially exotic Other: dancer, Indian, queer”
What I am saying is that, I begin to feel that even when one travels for the first time somewhere, that romantic sense of “happy anonymity” that I used to believe in, is not [...]
Anindita Sengupta discusses religion and her own experiences as an atheist/agnostic.
It’s not something I can’t handle. We deal with unbelonging in so many aspects of our lives, all the time, anyway. I don’t have a problem with participating (in my limited way) in religious celebrations or rituals if it’s important to someone else. Nor do [...]
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