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…

May 30, 2010

Good Girls Don’t Talk to Boys

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 [...]

April 30, 2010

To be or not to be: On Queer Nazariya

By Raheema Begum
I JUST ATTENDED the Queer Nazariya film festival in Bombay and I loved the experience. In the discussion about queer communities, law and culture, Ponni Arasu, a gay rights activist from Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, spoke of the need for the queer community in India to redefine itself and its goals after the [...]

June 12, 2009

Remembering Kamala Das

ONE OF INDIA’S most beloved writers, Kamala Das, passed away after a long illness on the morning of May 31  2009. A poet and memoirist, she died at the age of 75, after a long and conflicted career.
Predictably, many of the obituaries focused on the more controversial aspects of her writing and life, particularly where [...]

July 17, 2008

Widening the Prism

A FEW DAYS AGO, when I thought about the conflict parents face when their daughters become “too liberal”, I was really thinking from my own perspective as an educated, young, urban professional. When a commenter mentioned that liberalism does not yet extend to accepting choices such as homosexuality, I was, at first, a bit startled. [...]

March 24, 2008

The Shaming of Scarlett Keeling

THAT VIOLENCE against women rarely grabs any attention except for in the presence of gruesomeness, sensationalism, drama and tragedy is already known. But more disturbing by far than the fact that the murder of a teenage tourist in Goa last month has been making headlines precisely due to its cocktail of all the above elements [...]

November 13, 2007

The Immorality of Saying ‘No’ to Sex Education

OVER THE YEARS, sex education has been debated either in the context of concerns about population control or AIDS prevention. Does education about sex and sexuality have to be perceived only within the confines of these two arenas? In the wake of the Central Government’s attempts to introduce sex education from Class VI onwards, the [...]

September 07, 2007

Under Wraps: Drawing the Curtains on Female Sexuality

THESE QUESTIONS go out to the ladies who have lived any part of their lives in India: Ever been sanitary napkin/ tampon shopping? Ever had your purchases wrapped up in a newspaper/ bag, “safe” from the eyes of the world? Now here’s my gnawing question: Why?
Menstruation is a topic that is very rarely talked about [...]