Ultra Violet is a place for Indian feminists. It’s a place for sharing stories and views and questions. It’s a place for exploration, opinion and information. It’s a place where we can come together to understand what other feminists around the country–or around the world–are saying. If you want to write for UV, please read this. More about UV here.

We’re Talking About…

July 01, 2010

The Redemption of Elizabeth Gilbert

LIKE MANY WOMEN, my reaction — or shall we say relationship? — to Elizabeth Gilbert’s juggernaut bestseller Eat Pray Love (first published and 2006 and by 2008 a global sensation) was complicated. On the one hand, the book is mildly embarrassing; Eat Pray Love falls squarely in the chick [...]

June 22, 2010

Indian Values, Raising Children

The DVD of Love, Sex aur Dhokha has been lying around at home for some time, but it was only over this weekend that I got around to watching it. Directed by Dibakar Banerjee (of Khosla ka Ghosla fame), LSD is actually three stories in one, with peripheral links to each other.
The first one is a mushy love [...]

March 01, 2010

Marriage and Feminism

By Sreeparna Chattopadhyay
OVER THE LAST FEW decades, sociologists and economists have been exploring the consequences of marriage for men and for women. Many of the studies indicate that married people are happier, healthier and richer than single or divorced people. Sometimes this masks the fact that marriage has more advantages for men than for women [...]

January 19, 2010

Two Poems

By Janice Pariat

Bertha & I
Tonight I feel like Bertha Mason
with a fire and sadness in my soul.
I pace my room – this attic of madness –
it keeps me sane. I think it keeps me
whole, somehow. There’s no breeze
through the window, just an empty
vastness of night and shadow and
half-lights. And the knock on my door,
well, it [...]

October 22, 2009

Single in the City

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 [...]

October 16, 2009

Two poems by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming

To Get Myself Some Water
~Translated from Ellen Lai’s ‘Grassland’, written in Chinese

Our love toils about one period.
On the bloody and lusty grassland
You transform me into your self-pitied crippled rabbit.
When you finally discard everything you have
That is inside your permanently bulging equipment,
You turn your back
And ride towards the flat horizon
On a white horse
Whose tail is momentarily [...]

September 16, 2009

Women and “our” housework

LAST SUNDAY, we had a couple of close friends over for lunch. As it happens with close friends whom one has not met for a long time, it turned out as a long, rambling lunch where we were still sitting around at 5 o’clock. By the time they left, it was late evening, and somehow [...]

July 17, 2009

Wishes For A Woman

ACCORDING TO THE calendar Parsis follow, today is my birthday. It is an event only family and very close friends know about, the more popular occasion being my date of birth next weekend. Of the seven people who wished me a Happy Birthday today, four followed it up with blessings for a good sasroo, i.e. [...]

July 16, 2009

Instant Divorces

LATELY, I SEEM TO BE hearing a lot about the break-up of marriages and subsequent divorces. There was the Hiphop Grandmom writing on incompatible alliances and how they’ve led to the breakdown of marriages. Then, today, over at the F Word Blog, I read a piece on how British Tory party members want a provision for a [...]

July 14, 2009

How to Conduct A Wedding

WITHOUT BEING hyperbolic, let me just say that this nearly made me upchuck my morning tea. The BJP government in Madhya Pradesh subjected 151 women to ‘virginity tests’. The women were to be part of a mass marriage scheme in Shadol near Bhopal. To avoid ‘complications’, the state government saw it fit to conduct physical [...]