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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 |
October 29, 2009By Guest Contributor By Lalit Narayan
Miscarriage A curtain of rain separates Today the air is chilled downpour wet. *** Tags: abortion, medicine, violence | Category: Desipundit, Our Bodies, Poetry, Violence Against women, Women's Lives |
October 26, 2009By Aparna Singh
Tags: aravanis, femininity, gender and sexuality, gender definition, third sex, transgender, transsexual, womanhood | Category: Desipundit, Gender, Identity and Destination, Media, Women's Lives |
October 22, 2009By Guest Contributor By Ramapriya Gopalakrishnan
Leafing through pictures mailed by a friend, I find one of me on the beach laughing uninhibitedly with my hair streaming in the wind, and I smile to myself thinking ‘this is so me.’ I am a single woman in her thirties, have never been married and have no ‘special relationship’ with any man. Yes, at times, I do long for companionship and romance but for the most part, I revel in my being single. I enjoy the time and space I have and the freedom to explore love, life and relationships in my own way without the responsibilities that come with being a wife or a mother. Yet, living in a patriarchal society where a woman is expected to prize above all, the role of wife and mother, being single also means having to regularly encounter reactions ranging from the sympathetic to the malicious. Tags: Marriage, single women, singlehood | Category: Culture, Desipundit, Marriage, Morality, Relationships, Society, Uncategorized, Women's Lives |
October 16, 2009By Guest Contributor To Get Myself Some Water Our love toils about one period. When you finally discard everything you have On a white horse I am still bleeding, and my inner thighs are sore. First published in Hutt *** Tags: poems about women, Poetry, poets, women | Category: Celebrating Women, Identity and Destination, Love, Marriage, Poetry, Sex and Sexuality, Women's Lives |
October 14, 2009By Guest Contributor By Martin Lehmann-Waldau The Indian parliament recently showed intense activity to promote women’s representation in decision-making bodies. Some months back, a bill was passed that reserves a staggering 50% of seats for women on the panchayat level. Currently under review and soon to be debated in the Lok Sabha is the Women’s Reservation Bill that promises 33% of seats in Parliament to women. To give an international comparison: the current German Parliament has 32.1 % women in Parliament (1980: a mere 9 %). In Germany, a legal quota system does not exist. However, parties have internally introduced certain reservation systems for women (Green Party: 50 %, Socialist Party 40% etc.). Women however are still largely underrepresented in top ministries as well as top commercial jobs. Tags: women's reservation bill | Category: Desipundit, Institutions, Law, Politics, Women's Lives, Work Life |
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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 
ALL I KNEW WAS that this non-profit group called 
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