The Rebelle blog

I am writing this in response to a very fetching interview I read in one of my email subscriptions today. Just a few days ago, I was moaning about unread emails and yet in the past few days, I've been reading quite a few articles from a mammoth sea of subscriptions I was sure I wanted to unsubscribe. Sometimes, reading too much makes us lose interest in the actual things we ought to read. Like last week, a new friend asked me if I had read Virginia Woolf and how did I find her writing style. To her, Virginia was morose, depressed, boring and confusing. She said she gave up reading her in college. Now, it's completely subjective but I do firmly believe that our reading evolves over time as we grow, particularly more so in phases that we seem to be struggling with educating ourselves, polishing our understanding of the world and stocking up on our views, basically that we have no clue when we would be spouting. So it happens that in trying to cross check our political views wit...

Life offers a beautiful and sometimes miserable concoction of moments and events that there is a terrible beauty about it. The world has become small and yet so unrecognisable that people are fighting to live just one more day. Those that embrace death do so because their efforts have gone futile in understanding the workings of this universe. No one is able to hear them any more. Do we honour them just one last wee bit and forget the brutalities inflicted upon them or do we emerge stronger and voice our dissent collectively evermore now? Nations are going to war. The blacks and dalits are back to where they began their journey less than 70 years ago under two great visionaries, Martin Luther King, Jr and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. The refugee crisis has heightened turmoil among classes. The rich versus poor dichotomy is emboldened like never before. Where do revolutionary ideas stand within this chaos that has infiltrated systems of justice and righteousness? Do we merely expres...

Sometimes I wish I'd documented all my thoughts about dismantling patriarchy in a diary or a journal when I was younger. I wish this now, because I recently read some letters I'd written to a distant friend on role of women in workplaces and this uneven household/work system. And I realised my thoughts on certain books like Wuthering Heights or Virginia Woolf's writings and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar have undergone a slight change. Maybe I was young, back when I first read these books. I was disappointed by the portrayal of women and it marred my understanding about the quality of life 19th century women lived in. SO, the thoughts on tramping patriarchy also arose from two recent incidents seen in India. One, the Happy to Bleed project which started as a reaction to some Temple Trustee's atrocious remarks against menstruating women in Kerala, by women of all age groups on Twitter and other social media. The other is the story of a woman breaking a 400 year old t...