In India, interesting women in science and technology per se is not such a difficult problem. A lot of women study both the basic and applied sciences, and at entry level, the number of women in these professions is not poor, even it is not equal. Yet, as we move up the organizational charts, fewer women are in the picture, until, when one comes to the highest levels such as CEOs and board members, few women are left. A big part of the reason is of course that a large number of women drop out of the corporate world in their late 20s and early 30s – to have children and raise a family.

Few companies make it easy for women to rejoin and most workplaces are structured in such a way that women have to “choose”. So, yes, one of the systemic changes that is needed are more flexible workplaces, attuned to the needs of a diverse workforce.

But, career empowerment is not going to happen only through systemic changes. Empowerment needs to begin at home. While we can ask governments to ensure fair working conditions and suitable maternity leave, while we can ask companies to have more flexible workplaces, what are we doing at home?

As Shefaly says in her post, “For women already in the workplace, it is important to recognise that before we can negotiate harder and better deals for ourselves at work and outside our homes, we first need to negotiate better and fairer deals for ourselves at home. With the men in our lives.”

Not all the work on inclusive workplaces will help if women still bear all the burden for housework and childcare. In conversations with many new mothers, one of the things I’ve observed is that if she wants to get back to work, finding suitable childcare is still “her” problem, as though the husband had nothing to do with the baby being there! Studies innumerable show that women, including those who have a career, do far more than their fair share of housework. I also know that many women opt out the informal networking that helps further careers. While I respect that mothers want to spend time with their children, career growth requires such networking. Why is the idea of a man watching over his kids alone still so alien to us?

Unless this changes, unless the men in our lives start accepting equal responsibility for children, workplace efforts will not help. Taking off time for PTA meetings and doctor’s visits, staying home with a sick child, getting home early because the wife has a networking event that evening, doing your share of household chores – unless men take up all these seriously, companies will continue to see women’s needs for family time as “special needs”.

When 70% of the workforce, men, start demanding the space to do these – that’s when truly inclusive workplaces will happen. Why would men demand these? Current definitions of masculinity do not really place a premium on nurturing, so only a few men will demand them spontaneously. Many others, who are fundamentally decent people can perhaps be brought to realize the importance of their spouses’ careers. In the Indian scenario, where few people really know much about their spouses before marriage, can women negotiate such fairness?

That remains to be seen, but it is empowerment at home that will drive the empowerment at the workplace.

Your scarf spoke nine tongues.
I failed to know the purpose, seek the language
of splinters, shards, lazy salsas.
I thought the skies bowed to you even
as they turned mauve. Awe
filled my lungs, I breathed.
Shards slow danced, I felt your smile.
It smelt of something else.
Your ducking shadows traded with liquid limelight.

*******

“You were born to silence”, sang whispers
of the one who bore me for ten crescent milk moons.
And so I breathed in the silence
of the damp Oaxacan earth,
the silence of nopals, moriche, cacao fields,
the silence of achiotes as they painted my soul
and I yearned for harvest;
the silence by the creek
after cowbirds flocked to nests,
silence in the pauses of a distant merengue,
silence in the nook of an ancient
pottery tavern where gods were made
by hands.
Silence…

*******

I felt the cold of asbestos.
Much after, as I shuddered
on a sore bit of land
that reeked of sewage, puddles
of worm-infested waters
inching into my mouth, slower than a drip, I dreamt
of barbed wires, nine unspoken red fire fangs, fumes
from a neighbor maquiladora. I even dreamt
of the kneader I was meant to be. My heart
felt the weight of silence.

***

Divya Rajan’s work has been published in Poetic Chicago anthology, Apparatus, Read This, Gloom Cupboard, Danse Macabre, The Times of India, Femina, Asian Cha, and many others. She has been a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination in addition to other writing awards, and currently lives in Chicago where she co- edits poetry at The Furnace Review. She has recently finished work on her first chapbook, Chanting Silhouettes.

The above poem is an ekphrastic work inspired by artist Judithe Hernandez’s work titled, The Border, exhibited at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. More details about the Juarez- Chihuahua crisis can be viewed at The Juarez Project.

By Sreeparna Chattopadhyay

ROMAN POLANSKI is a free man. The Swiss government refused to extradite him to the US. Does a crime committed by an Oscar winning director cease to be a crime? Should Roman Polanski be treated any differently because he is the director of The Pianist? Does the fact that he raped and sodomized a thirteen-year-old girl more than thirty-three years ago diminish the magnitude of the crime or its impact on the victim? The girl, little more than a child at the time met Polanski during a Vogue photo shoot in Los Angeles, California. He drugged as well as plied her with alcohol before he assaulted her in a hot tub in 1977. The charges against him were very serious including assault on a child under the age of 14 with under Californian law at that time, statutory rape. According to some newspaper sources his victim Samantha Gailey’s lawyer made a plea bargain with him so that she could preserve the anonymity of her client. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor (a much lesser charge than his original offences) and spent a mere forty-two days in prison before he fled first to London (his home at that time) and then to France, his adoptive home.

Since then he has had an outstanding warrant against him in the US. However, there wasn’t an international manhunt for Polanski and his crime faded from public memory until a year ago when the US reissued a warrant and placed him under house arrest when he visited Switzerland to collect a lifetime achievement award. The actions by the American government may have had more to do with Swiss unwillingness to release information related to some of those at the helm of the Wall Street meltdown, than with their innate sense of justice.

Since his house arrest, the rich and the famous have rallied to his defence. His supporters include directors such as Martin Scorcese and Woody Allen and also French philosopher and intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy as well as many public figures in his adoptive country France. This I find less surprising. After all many of these are men with very flexible morals in their private lives.

What I find surprising are editorials such as this one by a female commentator in the ultra respected British newspaper Guardian. Agnes Poirier characterized attempts to arrest Polanski as ‘prurient hounding’. According to her

Finally, what was also most disturbing in the whole affair was the prurient voyeurism of Polanski’s detractors, indulging in the very details of his alleged crimes. Reactions to the case disturbingly revealed rampant moral McCarthyism. Anyone defending the film-maker was immediately accused of making an apology for rape. The end of the affair should hopefully bring back sense to those who had lost it for nine months.

Poirier does have a small point, in that in the retelling of the details of the crime we become unwitting (or sometimes deliberate) voyeurs and end up inflicting symbolic violence on the victim. In this instance however the crime deserves to be revisited, not least because Polanski’s actions are indefensible.

Perhaps attempts to re-arrest him are not true to the letter of the law as far as legal technicalities are concerned; after all he spent 42 days in prison as part of his plea bargain. But does the punishment fit the crime? A mere 42 days for this level of sexual violence on a defenceless child? If Polanski had been an ordinary citizen and not a talented director with many tragedies of his own (he is a Holocaust survivor and his eight months pregnant wife Sharon Tate was stabbed to death by a psychopath in 1969), he wouldn’t be the darling of the European media. He is talented, good-looking and tragic and that makes him interesting and allows commentators like Poirier to be dismissive of his detractors.

According to a documentary Wanted and Desired made in 2008 with Polanski as the primary subject, his victim does not want to see him in prison. That may well be the case and legally there may not be any recourse. But isn’t the job of commentators and journalists who have the ability to sway public opinion to be blind to personalities when crimes of this nature are concerned? When did talent and private tragedy, not to mention wealth and fame become reasons to not mete out punishments, especially for crimes as serious as this one? Why does the European media allow itself to become seduced by the cult and enigma of Polanski and not for one moment think of the drugged, traumatised and torn body of a thirteen year old Samantha whose trust in adults was probably destroyed for the rest of her life? I cannot help but see in my mind’s eye the Lolitalizing of young female children is what allows the likes of Poirier to defend the likes of Polanski. As a feminist and a woman I am utterly disappointed and disillusioned that Polanski walks free today.

***

Sreeparna Ghosh (nee Chattopadhyay) grew up in Bombay but now lives in Norwich, UK. She trained as a social scientist and is currently a University Survey Officer for the University of East Anglia. She enjoys cooking, reading, writing and taking long walks in the countryside.

He always snips off ends. My tranquil ends,
fins deep asleep. Hair is frond. Hair is leech.
Hair is auction. Hair is lintel. Hair is traffic,
sigh, umbrella butt. Gaya, Kashi, Vrindavan.
Coconut-flesh scalps, a manifesto. “Boy’s cut.”

He always snips off ends. Antennae
of lust, tendrils of moist defeat. Hair is vial.
Lady Godiva. Hair is oyster, hiding nudity. Scissors
– suspicion’s toolkit. Sita, Vedavati. Sharpness
a male moral – “Haircut’s our last ahimsa art”.

He always snips off ends. Kesh is a congested
city. 1984, shears, rape of the lock. Hair is pilot.
Haircut is amputation, tattoos on memory. Indira.
Taslima. Bun’s a burqa, beni a beauty of bridges. Bob,
Bang, Blunt. Hair burns, without waste, like a vowel.

He always snips off ends. Hair is shame’s prosody.
Hair is sex – a woman’s mistake. Hair is hotel. Chemo,
autumn, venetian blinds. Hair loss is Sibyl’s prophecy.
Hair is habit. Hair is rosary. Hair is vomit. Hair fall is debt.
Comb turns into procrastination. Haircut to humility.

***

Sumana Roy’s first novel, Love in the Chicken’s Neck, was long listed for the Man Asian Literary
Prize 2008. She’s working on a collection of stories about clothes, tentatively titled SML. She’d
like to work harder on growing her hair.

Closing date: July 20, 2010.
Job Profile:

IT for Change is looking for young feminist thinker-activists to join our research and advocacy team. We are in the process of building our strategic directions for the next 3 years in the area of gender, development and technology, and would like to expand our team to include young feminist researchers who have the skill to combine research, project management and advocacy. The field of gender and information society studies is evolving rapidly and impacting the development arena and women’s rights and citizenship in various ways. The position offers an opportunity to be associated with an emerging field that has much potential for leadership and innovative work.

The role involves working with the Director from concept design to coordination and execution of research projects and advocacy activities. Areas of work include e-governance and women’s citizenship; new media and local transformation; women’s movements and techno-social architectures; knowledge and technology politics; public health and new technologies. The candidate must be able to think strategically, work independently and author outputs of very high quality. The candidate will be expected to take on programmatic responsibilities in the organisation, prepare policy briefs and communication material, undertake dissemination of research findings for influencing change, organise national and international meetings and workshops, and continuously endeavour to broaden the organisation’s network of allies.
Who we are looking for:

* We are looking for researcher-activists with a drive for institution-building, familiar with the challenges and opportunities that NGOs in the South that straddle multiple spaces of influence from global to local offer.
* A commitment to team work and collaborative knowledge processes is imperative.
* Applicants should have an appropriate qualification in social sciences/development studies/gender studies with at least a post graduate degree and about 4 to 8 years of relevant experience in independent research and project management, and a demonstrated passion for feminist research and advocacy.
* The position requires a solid theoretical grounding in feminist frameworks on gender and development, and strong methodological, analytical and writing skills.
* Some acquaintance with ICTs for development and information society issues is preferable, but not absolutely necessary for candidates with a keen interest in learning about and building competencies in the area.
* Oral and written skills in one or more Indian languages is mandatory.

Depending on the background, the candidate will be considered for the positions either of research assistant or research associate.
To Apply:

Please send your complete CV along with a writing sample (preferably published work) to jobs@ITforChange.net.

The last date for receiving completed applications is 20th July 2010. Decisions about suitability for the position and remuneration depend on appropriate experience and competencies.

Website: http://www.itforchange.net/join-us.html

INDIA HAS NO

The 1999 Supreme Court case of Sakshi v Union of India was the first legal attempt to challenge inadequacies of the provisions in the IPC to make CSA an offence. The petitioner urged the Court to alter the definition of sexual intercourse to include all kinds of sexual penetration into any type of orifice of the body, not just peno-vaginal penetration. The 2004 judgment in this case admitted that there is wide prevalence of CSA, but did not alter the definition of ‘rape’. “An exercise to alter the definition of rape… by a process of judicial interpretation is bound to result in a good deal of chaos and confusion and will not be in the interest of society at large…,” the Court said. In response the Law Commission of India published its 172^nd report which recommended that the offence of ‘rape’ be substituted by ‘sexual assault’, which would make it gender-neutral and bring into its fold a range of sexual offences beyond forced peno-vaginal penetration.

Thus we have the CLA, coming over half a decade after the judgment, although CSA has been given an infantile short shrift. In the CLA, ‘rape’ has been redefined as ‘sexual assault’ and includes penetration of any orifice on a woman’s body by any part of the man’s body or any other object. Consent remains the guiding factor to decide what qualifies as sexual assault.  The age of consent is fixed at 18 years. However, “when penetration is carried out for proper hygienic or medical purposes” it is not sexual assault – thus it allows for gross misuse as defense for medical personnel who can be perpetrators of CSA.

The CLA has a separate section (376C) on “sexual abuse of minors”. Unlike the section on sexual assault this section is gender neutral and lists a range of penetrations into any of the child’s bodily orifices by a man or a woman to constitute CSA. However, this section deems consent completely irrelevant. The problem with such a provision is that it could actually lead to criminalising consensual sexual acts between young people: if a 17-year-old girl has consensual sex with another boy of the same age, the boy is considered to have committed CSA. There could also be a situation where both can be perpetrators and victims at the same time. Children’s experiences of mutual sexual exploration or experimentation can potentially turn criminal under this provision. The IPC stipulates the age of criminal responsibility at 7 years. It’s paradoxical that by virtue of this law minors are capable of scheming and executing a crime at 7 years, but not capable of consenting to sex with someone of the same age till they are 18! The importance of protecting children from sexual abuse cannot be denied, however to criminalize expression of sexuality is a warped expression of conservative morality.

Unfortunately, CSA has also been understood only as penetrative sex in this section. The fact that CSA can take forms where contact or touch is not required (exposing or made to expose genitalia, showing pornography etc.) or where there is no penetration falls outside of the ambit of this section. Non-penetrative and non-touch CSA gets covered under Secs. 354 and 509 of the IPC (outraging the modesty of a woman, which only includes the girl child), though these sections remain woefully steeped in the discourse of female honour. Ideally, it should be included in a graded fashion under the sexual assault section in the CLA. The CLA also does not include incest and the processes of grooming that precede sexual contact in any case of CSA. The tokenistic insertion of this provision in the CLA does great disservice to the demand of child rights groups and the Sakshi petition for a separate and dedicated criminal law on CSA. Though the CLA gives considerable attention to punitive measures by increasing punishments and creating new crimes, a glaring omission is the absence of any provision for children with disabilities whose vulnerability to sexual abuse may be higher compared to other children.

In a state of legislative overdrive, even if the CLA amends the IPC it would mean little for victim-survivors of CSA and the amendments certainly cannot substitute the immediate need for a separate legislation on CSA.

(This piece was originally published in the New Indian Express, Chennai recently)

WERE I 17 AND A POT OF MUSH, “those three words” would mean something entirely different. But as an almost-32- year-old (ooh, how I love announcing an upcoming birthday ) who has seen a bit of life and the world, the three words that get a rise out of me are these: What Women Want.

It has been the title and subject matter of a movie. Blogadda recently declared it the topic of their weekly contest. Freud pondered the question before reportedly labeling women “the dark continent”. And I have a sneaking suspicion it was part of undergraduate coursework in Aristotelian times. What Women Want 101: Enlightening souls, one confused sucker at a time.

My question is: Why?

Why have we as women participated in our own mystification and perpetuated an image of womankind as being enigmatic, conflicted and unfathomable? According special status to women’s supposedly inscrutable desires is a huge honking excuse for men unwilling to make an effort to reach a basic level of understanding about their current/potential partners. It’s offensive to be thought of as so irrational as to be the subject of such pondering. Just like it isn’t a compliment for all women to be called emotional creatures. Is this the kind of importance we need to be at the receiving end of? That my needs are supposedly so divergent from a man’s strikes a false note somewhere.

It’s puzzling. Did I miss a memo? Don’t men want the usual suspects—health, happiness and fulfillment— too? Meaningful work, a social safety net, monetary comfort, interesting experiences, solitude, overall well-being, learning and personal growth, the opportunity to contribute to the planet, perhaps a partner/family of one’s own/casual relationships? Are these really gender-specific? Correct me if I’m wrong. I’m curious to learn whether there is a gender divide when it comes to human wants, so do share in the comments section and specify your gender. Until then, this niggling feeling of sweeping generalization and gross gender stereotyping won’t go away. If there is something I do want, it is for people to realize that it is frequently okay to divorce your gender. I write this as a person. And this is what I want.

Now, for the few of you who may insist that you know nothing about Eat Pray Love, here it is in a nutshell: a financially successful but not particularly famous author finds herself getting divorced, going into depression, and then taking a year to travel in order to reinvigorate her life. In Italy, she indulges – eating her way through the first third of the year. In India, she joins an ashram (the book is extremely spiritual, and this section is so heartrendingly painful that you wonder why anyone would call this book fluffy… until you get to the next). And finally, in Indonesia, tying up the circle in perfectly fairytale style, she finds love.

All of this is a true story, told in a fashion that is alternately charming, mildly annoying, and deeply honest.

So when the sequel came out, of course I had to read it. Snarkily, with some of usual disclaimers, but with some real excitement about its subject matter (which trumped any reservations brought on by my passive-aggressive crush on the earlier book). Committed: A Skeptic’s View of Marriage picks up where Eat Pray Love left off – i.e. the author and her Brazilian-born, Bali-discovered lover float off into their happily ever after. Until the US government interfered.

As a foreigner whose trips into the country were not only frequent, but whose exits themselves were only border runs for visa renewals, Gilbert’s partner Felipe finds himself in trouble with Immigration. Fortunately, they are given a choice: if they get married, they can continue their lifestyle (sans border running, too!). Desperately, they agree — but both having survived divorce, the idea of remarriage is significantly terrifying. But the process is so complex that the couple essentially has to spend almost a year outside the country, waiting for the fiancee visa to come through, and Gilbert spends this time confronting her traumas and issues about the institution of marriage, its history in American society (paradigms which are increasingly emulated around the world), its relevance to contemporary life, and how it compares and has evolved (or not) based on cultural and religious circumstances — ruminations and research that eventually became Committed.

Committed is a feminist memoir, make no mistake about it. It is an empowering, thought-provoking read that I would recommend to anyone who 1. wants to marry, 2. doesn’t want to marry, 3. is concerned about civil rights and international affairs (in all senses of the term!). It’s important that the events it describes happened prior to Eat Pray Love’s insane success. Not unlike the happy coincidence of having met her new love at the end of her first book’s journey, a happy coincidence which resulted in an almost too-perfect book, everything that happens therein was spontaneous. Gilbert leaves little doubt that nowhere during her ten months of bad traffic and matrimonial panic wandering around Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia could it have occurred to her that she might exploit this bout of hard luck. She went through the experience with no guarantee of a platform to discuss, let alone capitalise on, it. Because of this, it is all the more relevant. This isn’t a celebrity memoir, but an ordinary couple’s absolutely commonplace struggle in a world that loves and enforces its borders even as it claims to have none.

Now, this sort of gets back to the problem with Eat Pray Love. Which was not, strictly speaking, a real problem with Eat Pray Love itself, but with exactly how the memoir got co-opted into the chick-lit category. Not chick-lit as in light and fun, but chick-lit as in delusional-inducing, Prince-awaiting, hearts-a-breaking. And that problem was that many – many, many, many – of us are where Gilbert was at the start of that book. Lying on the bathroom floor bawling. And in the course of a few hundred pages, in about a year, she was both literally and figuratively somewhere else altogether. And the book was so engaging that it made it look easy.

The problem, essentially, was the expectation created. I encountered this personally in my own life, and practically every woman friend who has read it has admitted to the same rues. Some of them had become especially resentful toward Gilbert. This was not a phenomenon restricted to my circles — a real backlash against Eat Pray Love and its author occurred among its disenchanted readership. Its most common contentions, as discussed on comment forums all over the Internet, were that Gilbert was selfish, and as a white American with some wealth, she was operating from a place of privilege and entitlement. “Not all of us can give up our lives and jetset for a year” was a common refrain — as though if only we could, we would also land ourselves true love and astronomical book sales (a phrase Gilbert’s own sister, married with children and obligations of her own, sarcastically echoes in one email exchange in the book).

But here’s the thing. I don’t think – especially having noticed Committed’s incredible redemptive powers – that Gilbert meant for her memoir to have anything to do with typically misguiding light literature aimed at women. How Eat Pray Love has been marketed – even by readers who recommend it – has not done it justice.

On its own steam, Committed is an important book, completely relevant to our world today and the choices we are faced with as thinking women who sometimes have no alternative but to acquiesce to a fundamentally patriarchal institution (even if we believe we want it, with eyes open or closed). But it’s also a most marvellous redemption for Eat Pray Love’s unintended consequences (and there were some). As she points out almost guilelessly in the introduction, prior to Eat Pray Love, Gilbert was mostly known for writing about men. Her three prior books – Stern Men, Pilgrims and The Last American Man – were explorations of masculine life — fiction and nonfiction about “supermacho characters: cowboys, lobster fishermen hunters, trucksters, Teamsters, woodmen”. As a journalist, Gilbert had even gone as far as dressing in drag for a week, complete with a birdseed filled condom stuffed in her pants.

She doesn’t mention this in this book, but it occurred to me that even before Eat Pray Love, it is ironic that the most lucrative of her projects was probably when a magazine article she wrote about her bartending experiences became the basis for the decidedly fluffy rom-com flick Coyote Ugly. Sadly, between that and Eat Pray Love, her broader scope of work was overshadowed. Call it Gilbert’s chick-lit curse. And Committed, quite decisively, breaks it.

The truth is, I am still bawling on my floor. And I do wish I hadn’t ever heard the word-of-mouth that hyped Eat Pray Love as some sort of semi-prophetic text, because it did result in a few regrettable actions for me at the time (oh hey, a few good anecdotes too). But Committed’s redemptive powers are such that not only does it completely absolve Gilbert of any hand played in the prolonged miseries of some of her readers, but it also elevates her, in a way that Eat Pray Love couldn’t possibly, to the role already assigned to her by the same masses of sad readers: that of the high priestess, the knowing one, a Solomon-like figure who could provide a solution.

Marriage, whether we like it or not, is a necessary decision for many of us. Whether the larger bodies we aim to please are governments, families, societies or own guilt-tripping demons, it can be an inevitability. Committed does two things, and does them beautifully — it strips the institution of its veneer of romance. And then it reinstates it, at a far more meaningful level.

Committed will probably help many more women’s hearts and choices than Eat Pray Love did because there is absolutely nothing here but gritty realism — the facts of the world and its requirements, and how a relationship must necessarily be an accord of solidarity in negotiating these facts and requirements. It will also, hopefully, further the cause of same-sex marriage. As Gilbert most unselfishly points out in the book, she and Felipe are fortunate to even have this choice. Across the world, most lovers of the same gender do not. And when it comes to the paperwork — immigration, insurance, death and taxes – they suffer in ways that heterosexuals can take for granted that they won’t have to.

And Eat Pray Love, that old bugaboo? Let’s just say I am really looking forward to the film. Aren’t you?

The first one is a mushy love story, the second an MMS sex scandal and the third, about the media’s voracious appetite for ’stings’. It is the second and third stories that really hold your attention; the first one is slow to heat up and I almost forwarded a little of the first 10-15 minutes. Yet, my mind keeps going back to it. (This post isn’t a movie review though.)

*Spoilers here, beware!*

When the love story of Rahul, aspiring director at a film institute and Shruti, the “Simran” of his film begins, it is hard not to think of this love story as more a paean to DDLJ than anything else. Cheesy like the film they are making, it is hard to imagine that Rahul and Shruti really love anything beyond the feeling of being in love.

And yet, given the conservative family Shruti comes from, there is no possibility of their dating or getting to know each other. Love must lead to an elopement and marriage almost immediately. Rahul’s blithe confidence that after marriage, the family will “come around”, is almost revolting to watch in its stupidity. The end, when it comes, is gruesome, even though nothing of this honour killing is really shown.

Just yesterday, the Supreme Court has issued a notice asking the Central Government (and a few states), why they are doing nothing to combat the recent spate of honour killings.

The thing about us Indians is that we pride ourselves on our superior ‘Indian values’; we lose no chance to deride Western societies for their (alleged) lack of affection, ‘family values’ and morality. Nowhere is this more evident than in our smug attitude to the upbringing of children. It is so common to hear people talking as though Indians are the only people that know how to bring up children well – everywhere else, children are neglected, spoilt, abused and grow up to have no love for their parents.

And yet, this is the country where a good chunk of people are all too ready to sacrifice their children in the name of honour, society, family name and blah blah. Honour killing is one extreme end of the spectrum, but the unwillingness to accept children’s choices and their happiness as a primary consideration exists in many other forms, ranging from emotional blackmail to being ‘cast out of the family’.

Gajar-ka-halwa aside, we need to stop kidding ourselves. I suppose we have good and bad parents like everywhere else, but no magic beans that qualify us as the best parents on earth.

Toilets, trees and gender? Can there be a connection? Is there a gender angle to a business story? Is gender in politics only about how many women get elected to parliament? Is osteoporosis a women’s disease? Why do more women die in natural disasters? These are not the questions journalists usually ask when they set out to do their jobs as reporters, sub-editors, photographers of editors. Yet, by not asking, are they missing out on something, perhaps half the story? This is the question this book, edited and written by journalists, for journalists and the lay public interested in media, raises. Through examples from the media, and from their own experience, the contributors explain the concept of gender-sensitive journalism and look at a series of subjects that journalists have to cover – sexual assault, environment, development, business, politics, health, disasters, conflict – and set out a simple way of integrating a gendered lens into day-to-day journalism. Written in a non-academic, accessible style, this book is possibly the first of its kind in India – one that attempts to inject a gender perspective into journalism.

Kalpana Sharma is an independent journalist, columnist and media consultant based in Mumbai. She writes regularly for several newspapers and websites on a range of issues including urban development, gender, contemporary politics and the media. She was, until 2007, Deputy Editor and Chief of Bureau, The Hindu in Mumbai. She has also written and edited several books and is a founder-member of the Network of Women and Media, India.

Laxmi Murthy, Rajashri Dasgupta, Sameera Khan and Ammu Joseph also collaborated on the book.

___

Have you written a book that would be of interest to feminists? Send me details to see it here.