|
|||
January 28, 2010By Dilnavaz Bamboat
Even as I write this, I am NOT, repeat NOT PMSing. I understand there are some women who experience physical and emotional fluctuations in the days preceding Leak Week. I, fortunately, am not one of them. I do not cramp, I do not moan and I certainly don’t have my menstrual cycle whirring my tear ducts into overdrive. Tell me I’m PMSing, though, and I’ll ask you how you’d like your eyeballs for breakfast. (And yes, I vaguely get the self-fulfilling prophecy here.) January 19, 2010By Guest Contributor By Janice Pariat
Bertha & I Tonight I feel like Bertha Mason *** To Sylvia When I put away Ariel *** Janice Pariat is a freelance writer now based in her hometown Shillong after many years of being away in Delhi and elsewhere. She studied English Literature in St Stephen’s College and Communications at Westminster, London. At the moment Janice is working on several projects – a graphic novel set in Shillong, a first novel as well as a collection of poems based on women literary characters and writers. Tags: bertha mason, janice pariat, poem, sylvia plath | Category: Art, Celebrating Women, Desipundit, Love, Marriage, Poetry, Women's Lives |
January 13, 2010By Anindita Sengupta THE BANGALORE QUEER FILM FESTIVAL (BQFF 2010) is calling for submissions. The deadline is 30 January 2010. Details here. The festival will be held at the Alliance Francaise de Bangalore on 26, 27 and 28 February 2010. The BQFF 2010 is a non-ticketed free event aimed at providing a venue to screen films based on themes related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex (LGBT or Queer) communities across the world. This is the second edition of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival. The event is presented by Good As You (a support group for LGBT people, est. 1994), SWABHAVA (a non-profit organisation working with LGBT issues in Bangalore, est. 1999) and WHaQ! (a support group for queer women, est. 2009). While sincerely apologising for this short notice, the organisers request you to send in films for consideration/preview as early as possible. For more information please contact the organisers at blrqueerfilm fest[at]gmail.com. January 01, 2010By Guest Contributor By Susan Kiguli
Mothers Sing a Lullaby Mothers sing a lullaby In these camps without happiness Mothers sing a lullaby Mothers become a lullaby Tags: poem about mothers, Rwandan genocide poem, Susan Kiguli, Uganda | Category: Desipundit, Identity and Destination, Justice, Law, Motherhood, Poetry, Politics, Society, Women's Lives |
December 17, 2009By Guest Contributor By Sridala Swami IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY devoured every one of the three books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, you have at least heard of it: the story of the girl with the dragon tattoo who plays with fire or kicks the hornet’s nest. She is Lisbeth Salander, abused child, accused adult and unlikely crusader along with Mikael Blomkvist of the magazine, Millennium. Over three books, the story is one of a giant cover-up to protect a secret organisation within Swedish intelligence. It is about the blind eye that is turned upon a mafia dealing in, among other things, human trafficking; the involvement of those in power and the denial of a woman’s human rights just so that a long-forgotten secret can remain buried. The sub-text of the series – made clear through telling epigraphs to each section – is of violent crimes committed against women in the name of national security or in the interests of keeping up appearances. It is a tale in which the silence surrounding the crimes makes society complicit in them. The Millennium Trilogy is fiction. There are protagonists whose lives align with the investigations they conduct with varying degrees of commitment and interest. They can stand against the State because it is in their interest to have the truth brought out into the light and written about. And because it is fiction, people will listen and are capable of examining their society afresh in light of the new facts they are shown. Justice is possible in crime fiction as it is often not in real life. Tags: shopian CBI report, shopian rape case, shopian truth, steig larsson | Category: Books, Desipundit, Institutions, Justice, Law, Our Bodies, Rape, Violence Against women, Women's Lives |
December 10, 2009By Guest Contributor By Sonal Makhija EARLIER THIS MONTH, the ‘Staying Alive: Third Monitoring and Evaluation Report 09’ on the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (PWDVA) was released in Delhi. The report tracks the implementation of the Act for the third year in a row and has become a way to document jurisprudential development of the law and create a monitoring system. Findings are shared at a national conference annually at which civil society organisations can question state officials and examine progress. This has inadvertently come to operate as a social audit. The naming and shaming as well as applauding and deriding of state departments in a public forum fosters accountability and drives state governments to take necessary action. For example, this year, Minister for Law and Justice M. Veerappa Moily recognised the need for fast-track courts to deal with cases of violence against women, easy availability of free legal aid and prioritisation of women’s cases in courts. Tags: act, domestic violence law, domestiv violence | Category: Desipundit, Domestic Violence, Justice, Law, Uncategorized, Violence Against women |
December 01, 2009By Anindita Sengupta
It reminded me of this time I was talking to someone about writing for UV. She’s a quiet, dark-eyed girl who rarely gets emotional. On this occasion, she did. ‘What’s the point of all this talk?’ she said suddenly. ‘We just become more and more aware of our rage. And don’t know what to do with it.’ Tags: feminist fatigue, futility, India gender gap, silence, WEF report | Category: Desipundit, Gender, Identity and Destination, Media, Uncategorized, Women's Lives |
November 19, 2009By Dilnavaz Bamboat
The world premiere of Eve Ensler’s ‘I Am An Emotional Creature’ was some things expected and many not. It began regularly enough, with the usual spine-tingling statistics on female abuse, neglect and violations. Essayed as a relentless spiral of separate pieces without an intermission, the portrayals of women from around the world shifted from mediocre to spectacular as the play progressed. Moments of intense pain in “Free Barbie” were interspersed with a more defiant stance in “The Refusers” and stories of prostitution in Eastern Europe, military sex slaves in Ghana, bulimia in North America, child labor in China and forced cosmetic surgery in Iran tumbled out unapologetically, amidst joyous expressions of dance and womanhood. Woman cried, laughed, screamed, spoke, vented, explained, twirled and chanted their right to be emotional creatures and engage in the feminine act of dance as a form of expression. November 16, 2009By Guest Contributor By Sanyukta Saha
The novel has been read as a fictionalised documentation of the Ajmer Sex Scandal of 1992. However, Dirty Picture, tracing the personal narratives of two sisters Reena and Bharti, uses the incident as a site to critique exploitation at the levels of gender and class. Tags: Ajmer sex scandal, Anuradha Marwah, Dirty Picture | Category: Books, Desipundit, Prostitution, Society, Women's Lives |
November 08, 2009By Sharanya Manivannan
One phrase from her rebuttal is particularly striking: I believe that the history of women can be seen, in some ways, as a history of language. Language, of course, is more than just words – it’s phrasing, intonation and intent as well as vocabulary. The uproar over Trunk’s tweet went well beyond shock that she had reacted with relief to the miscarriage – it was really more about the fact that she had trespassed some code of conduct by which women are expected to speak, or keep silent about, certain things. And even the way we’re expected to feel those things. Tags: abortion, Eve Ensler, miscarriage, Penelope Trunk | Category: Art, Culture, Desipundit, Identity and Destination, Media, Morality, Our Bodies, Women's Lives |
|
|
||
|
Copyright © 2010 Ultra Violet - All Rights Reserved |
|||
7 comments
THAT’S NOT THE TITLE of a sitcom. (Though it could be –think I should sell the idea?) I once said that to someone. Meant it too. And I’m so proud of the way I restrained myself from going for his jugular when the oh-so-patronizing “Honey, it’s PMS” (hand pat included) was tossed my way, like a puppy receiving a biscuit.
YESTERDAY, I WAS LOOKING at 
THE AUDIENCE WAS FLUSH WITH estrogen, but had a heartening dose of the Y chromosome. I wondered if the cocktail reception that preceded the event was a marketing ploy or a genuine attempt to fortify our spirits for what was to come. I found out soon enough.
IQBAL HASAN’S PAINTING of a young woman sitting on a chair with an older woman standing beside her makes for the cover of Anuradha Marwah’s third and latest novel Dirty Picture. As a reader and someone who has seen these paintings in a plush Lahore restaurant called The Cuckoo’s Den, incidentally located in the heart of the city’s red light area, I immediately identified it as one of several painted by the artist to document the lives of prostitutes in this area. Most locals are shy of admitting to the existence of prostitution in the city. For them, the red light area in the forted city still has certain mujra performances by ‘artists’ and nothing else. The painting illustrates in brush strokes what Anuradha Marwah documents in words – exploitation of women and the lower classes through a deep-rooted mechanism of inequitable gender constructions often obfuscated by ill-disguised hypocrisy.
PENELOPE TRUNK CAUSED A tremendous 
And now I don’t wanna sound like one of those,...
Top Posts