Indian Values, Raising Children

By: Aparna Singh - June 22nd, 2010  Filed under: Art & Culture, Relationships & Marriage 7 Comments

Apu

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 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.)

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Good Girls Don’t Talk to Boys

By: Aparna Singh - May 30th, 2010  Filed under: Body & Sexuality, Relationships & Marriage 18 Comments

Apu

GOOD GIRLS DON’T TALK to Boys. And vice versa, although an exception may be made for good boys who are simply lured by bad girls.

Recently, I came across this new item that talked about a young girl in a Chennai engineering college who killed herself because she was ticked off for talking to a boy. It wasn’t just the scolding she received which precipitated the suicide, but the fear that her parents would have been informed of her heinous crime – talking to a boy.

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How Early is Too Early?

By: Dilnavaz Bamboat - March 20th, 2009  Filed under: Law & Institutions, Society 9 Comments

AT THE PRESCHOOL that I run (where I also teach), there’s a certain action song we sing that goes like this:

Cook like mummy,

Yum, yum, yum, (repeat thrice)

Let’s have fun together!

Drive like daddy,

Knit like grandma,

Cough like grandpa….

…and by the time we come to “Be like teacher, Shh, shh, shh!” I’m ready to pop a vein. [Read More]

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The Presence of a Uterus

By: Sridala Swami - December 20th, 2007  Filed under: Body & Sexuality, Self, Society 26 Comments

SEVEN YEARS AGO, I attended a wedding reception that I will never forget. A few months previously, I had just had a baby and this wedding was one of the first occasions when I was going out with the new arrival. It was quite traumatic for me: all I wanted to do was meet friends and enjoy a few conversations; instead I had to worry about feeds, secluded rooms and diapers.

There were three of us at a table – my (then) husband and I, and an old college friend who was independently a friend and colleague of the husband. U and G started to talk while I tried to calm a cranky child unused to so many people, or to loud music and noise. The conversation between them was animated and mostly about work. [Read More]

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Policing Change: A Personal Perspective on Violence Against Women and Children

By: Anasuya Sengupta - September 18th, 2007  Filed under: Law & Institutions, Society 5 Comments

A WELL-KNOWN TV news channel in English had a Women’s Day special recently, asking the question ‘Do we still need feminism?’ As someone who has worked with the Karnataka police for the past few years on issues of violence against women and children (and is a feminist), I found it startling and disturbing, that so many participants on that talk show – including a senior woman police officer from Punjab – had no sense of the extraordinary moment of crisis we are in, as a country, as a ‘civilisation’, as a community of human beings. [Read More]

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