The Rebelle blog

Nothing is less likely to inform the ignorance of their basking than telling them it is abysmal. - George Bernard Shaw A few days ago, I read something about Cultural Appropriation and I honestly can't to my utter embarrassment remember anything more about the article. Today, on 28th August 2017, Judiciary in India delivered a powerful prison sentence to a fake godman who dominated the news for his notoriety for years. 20 years in prison for two sexual assault cases pending since the last fifteen years. It is indeed a big victory apart from the cynicism of few who moan the delay in justice but they forget that in India, justice delayed is often justice denied! I read the original letter written by one of the sexual abuse victims to the then PM, Vajpayee. That letter is chilling in details, giving a detailed account of Ram Rahim's many crimes that includes raping 35-40 sadhvis (nuns), murdering people and abusing women in his so-called dera- a place of worship. Unfortuna...

My first post in March after such a lull and it has me ranting. I'm an Architect with no experience in Residential Architecture. So when we decided to remodel our house, I knew my parents would be looking for my inputs. I started by searching Home Designing websites and some blogs written by practising architects with more than 20 years of field experience. I have to say that redoing involves a lot of stress and lot of fact crunching. I have been looking at samples of flooring and wall tiles, kitchen designs and bathroom fittings and fixtures. All the building services lectures come back flitting to me. I was almost tempted to retrieve the building services drawing sheets and go over details. It's no wonder that building construction is in so much demand everywhere. Interior designing is way too overrated and over-hyped. I have witnessed as a layman prior to my architecture education, the enormous amount of treachery that goes with unassuming people who are conned by contract...

"Let us try to open our minds to a new idea." I met so many amazing women this year and I wish to acknowledge them all. Some younger than me, a few older than my mother; all of them inspired me with their compassionate and kind demeanour. I believe I learned some great life lessons from all of them. I met some in movies and books and for me they are as real as the ones I met in flesh and blood. There are ideas and energies that keep me on the brim of unexplored territories and sharing them with all these encouraging women has resulted in a far better reality than I could have anticipated. Our power lies in our being and radiating that knowing to those beneath us and creating opportunities for their own exaltation. My being sketchy about the year gone by is just another example of how much we share happiness around us. Our constant whirlwind engages us in a stupor far more controlling our life's reins than we ought to permit it.  I became part of some conversatio...

All my resistance to buying monsoon footwear landed me in a soup a few times in September. I ended up sitting through an entire day in wet sports shoes that made my skin itch horribly not to mention red rashes that made me throw away the shoes for good. So last Sunday upon my Mother's umpteenth persuasion to buy new shoes I landed up at a local shoe store to buy some workable comfortable monsoon footwear. I thought I was clear when I told the salesman to show me comfortable non-slid grip sole shoes or sandals when he kept showing me all the fancy strapped slick sandals that all the women were wearing and are popular in the market. Finally to get rid of all the glitter and strap, I chose ballerina flat sole shoes that I thought would be comfortable for walking and some running too. Imagine my horror when I wore the shoes for some 8 hours straight and nearly killed my feet from swelling. These are the worst kind of shoes designed for women-kind, I wonder why women tend to harm ...

Suddenly I've started feeling envious of all the 24 year-old youngsters. Not that I'm old compared to them, but I wish I WERE 24 today to possess the same energy, liveliness and excitement to do things. With these thoughts I was reeking in a wee bit misery last night, when I decided to install the Amazon Kindle app on my phone. It asked me a few preferences and rate some books for further reading suggestions. To my utter surprise, I saw books by Cheryl Strayed on the list. I had read about Strayed's WILD because of the movie promotions. So, I started off by reading Brave Enough: A mini instruction manual for the soul, intrigued by its title. The book consists of Quotes that helped Cheryl (forgive my first name calling, but I feel like she is my soul sister after reading the book), go through stressful times in her life while growing up. She writes about noting quotes that inspired her, everywhere in her house and places where she could read them always. I instantly knew w...

I was disturbed yesterday after a conversation I had on the internet with a new acquaintance over sexuality, roles of men & women in society, action and intention over using a term like Rapist. It all started rather weirdly after being asked by him if I would meet him for a conversation. Since he was a stranger I joked I would meet him if he's not a serial killer. To which, he responded, he is not a serial killer but a serial rapist which left me rather shocked. I asked him about his casual reference and usage of the term, and he replied saying he pitied me for my brooding over using a term about which he said he had no bad intention. I wonder if there is a good intention of ever using a term such as Rapist? What followed was a rather maligning attempt by him over my capabilities of lame justifications I would be doing in my life. This is how women are abused, silenced and tormented in internet world by men. If these statements made by men do not qualify as a potential ra...

This has to be the longest title of any post I've written here. Like I wrote in the last post, I attended my best friend's wedding, then came home, went to my local library and picked up a book on people who love to read. Therein, found Dr. Shriram Lagoo's personal experiences of how he started reading and what he read through his medical college years, as an actor which he admitted gave him a lot of time to read. One of the books he mentioned was "Marriage and Morals" by Bertrand Russell. I did some internet searching and settled on an online reader. That said, Russell kills the traditional conservativeness SO, SO, highly prevalent in the Indian society today as was in the western society back then. The European conservatives were not impressed by Russell's rather outrageous take on something of an institution that was made sacred through ages of hard work of bourgeois and puritan value enforcers. I have also quite coincidentally been listening to Doll...

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.” —Sylvia Plath  No amount of feminism is ever going to stop mothers from constantly worrying about the presence of grey hair on their daughters' heads or their sense of clothing. My mother is also no exception. When I ask her opinion about what kind of outfit to wear for a dear friend's wedding, she gives me a list of the entire wardrobe, some of which I don't even remember ever putting on myself. And when I reject outfit after outfit giving reasons like the colour's too bright or too embellished or too fancy for a wedding, she shoots me her awful look and goes on a long tirade. Some of which includes how could I possibly not want to wear good clothes or if I buy them to adorn the wardrobe or that I had no sense of personality and that people judge you by clothes and me looking like a hawk alienates people. There is more but I ...

"One of the things the women’s movement does is to make you feel pain. You have to have a lot of courage to accept that if you commit yourself, over the long term, not just for three months, not for a year, not for two years, but for a lifetime, to feminism, to the women’s movement, that you are going to live with a lot of pain. In this country that is not a fashionable thing to do. So be prepared for the therapists. And be prepared for the prescriptions. Be prepared for all  the people who tell you that it’s your problem, it’s not a social problem, and why are you so bitter, and what’s wrong with you? And underneath that is always the presumption that the rape was delusional, that the battery did not happen, that the economic hardship is your own unfortunate personal failing. Hold onto the fact that that’s not true: it has never been true." — Andrea Dworkin, “Feminism: An Agenda,” from Letters from a War Zone, 1988 We would have hoped that 16 years into th...

I first heard this song in late October two years ago. Then on International Women's Day on March 8th last year, a casual talk on the portrayal of women in movies and literature on twitter set a discussion going. There is always a Penelope waiting for an Odysseus, who remains faithful and protects her virtue keeping suitors at bay, while her husband is away. Why? Why do we never find an Odysseus who waits for his Penelope when she is not ready? Do we ever find representation of women as other than waiting damsels in distress? This song titled, "Ek Radha, Ek Meera" from the Raj Kapoor directed movie, Ram Teri Ganga Maili speaks of the anguish Meera and Radha go for loving the same person. I am not going to dissect the song, but hearing it over and over, one can't help feel a bit sorry for Meera. Torn between bhakti (devotion) and love, these two represent women from all ages and lands. Why, it is Descartes himself who wrote something on the lines of how both...

Two things I've come upon after reading books like 'The Beauty Myth' and 'The Unfinished Revolution' is that the cultural and sexual terrorization of women happens all over the world including the richest nations. The other being that this oppression needs more voicing out and a collective united mass movement across the globe. It can't just be conscious in developed countries but equal ferocity needs to be seen in developing and under-developed nations. As I was reading about the plight of the Roma women in Albania and Serbia, the statistics left me shaken. We deny human rights to children, women and the differently- able with a scary intensity. Imagine differentiating between women from South East Asia/Africa/Latin America/Middle East because their cultural and societal norms prevent women from using and asserting their rights to living independent lives. More or less, our language unites us in documenting their tormented stories because they are same ev...

http://theladiesfinger.com/2015-is-ending-where-are-the-women/ And while we read this article, I am also reading about the murder of Allison Baden-Clay, 43, a Brisbane resident who was killed by her husband in April 2012 and now the court verdict is out wherein he won the appeal against his murder conviction instead being accused of manslaughter. So yes, such judgements get passed not only in India but everywhere in the world. A woman is murdered and all the court does is convicts her husband of manslaughter, not murder. How convenient for the judiciary! The Reeva Steenkamp murder verdict proved how blinded the legal system is! Her cold blooded murderer got away with an 'accidental self-defence' argument. He'll live the rest of his life, alive and doing things while that young woman will lay forgotten. That is what is happening with women! We don't exist- we don't matter, unless we speak up. At least a voice is a reminder to the other gender to look around and s...

So this comes from an article I read early in the morning today on Medium. It's written on the likes of Dark complexion and girls like the author who herself has one, embracing the skin and experimenting with bright colours on her body. She writes of some incident where her bright yellow outfit and bobbed hair with bright pink lipstick got censored by some women at a body shop. As I kept reading the article and came to the end where the author posted her pictures in different bright coloured outfits she wore, I thought about the need felt by us women to still justify our choices whether they are regarding make-up or our hairstyle or the most important of them all, clothes. One recent personal experience of mine that I think is quite harmless to write about here is when during a friend's wedding, this common girl friend of ours gave me some jewellery to wear because it went with my outfit, applied a dash of lipstick and blusher on my face while telling me it looks great on...

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...

I've been talking to a lot of people these days. This is for one of them. While interacting with different age groups, I've realised how much I get to learn from them. Sometimes I've felt too stagnated and opinionated on certain issues, these people help clear the fog instantly. Also it's a great idea to put forth our views without feeling repressed or judgemental about them too. I believe when such freedom of thought is accorded, people open up more comfortably and the conversation gets a direction. In this age of instant communication mediums, we've lost that subtle art of expressing our feelings. There are a hundred messages from our coworkers and friends and acquaintances all that begin and stop within two sentences usually: "Hi. What's up? Been long." Not that I wouldn't be happy when someone I haven't spoken to in ages greets me first, but the happiness is really short lived when I discover we don't have anything to carry further ou...

Kiran Gandhi is all over the internet and for the right (err!) reasons. She ran the London Marathon without a tampon, bleeding but finished the race. Since it first got published, I've read several articles on her, lauding her actions and leading to a widespread debate on menstruation and period hygiene. While the articles and reports have been positive, the comments section reeks of misogyny and sexist opinions. Some call it 'ridiculous attention grabbing action', some say its unnecessary because tomorrow someone will run with poop and urinate and what not! What exactly is Kiran's point in doing this? She ran the marathon bleeding because in her own words, " I ran with blood dripping down my legs for sisters who don't have access to tampons and sisters who, despite cramping and pain, hide it away and pretend like it doesn't exist." Now how can we and why must we criticise someone like her?! People don't think it's a taboo when girls as ...

So I read a very interesting article today that showed a cerebrum divided into two parts- the left and right. The article was decoding women's skills based on their brain parts. Accordingly, a woman's left brain functions include number & math/scientific skills, written & spoken language, analytical & logical reasoning, objectivity and right side of body control, whereas, her right brain functions include music/art awareness, intuition, creativity & imagination, Face recognition, emotions, subjectivity and left side of body control. It almost made me laugh because it seemed absurd to imagine one side of my brain trying to work difficult math problems and failing at it while scaling through a foreign language smoothly without any difficulties. Having studied anatomy in school, I was always even then very curious as to why the brain shows different usage in men & women. Is it because men rule the roost and really put in a good use of their brains while wom...

   The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency caught my attention with its bright cover art.  Its so African, I  thought. I love reading about cultures and I am still not over my fascination with Turkey. This has been on my to-read list since a year and I couldn't have got a bigger surprise  than  yesterday after  spotting this book in a monsoon books sale at a very charming place nestled in Khar.  I adore books that revolve around women (except maybe, Catherine Earnshaw). A lady detective sounds supercool when Sherlock Holmes is being watched religiously in my home.  While reading this book on the train, so many young girls asked to see my copy and were very eager to hear about the plot. It was exciting to see their zeal caused by the title during their conversations. My experience hasn't been any different. Like I imagined it to be, this is the simplest books I've read that has bought happiness to me. It has been such an easy read....

We mustn't judge harshly- after all, we must always remember that many times our own actions may be misconstrued. One of my most favorite things to do on an idle day at home is to go through book shelves and leaf through passages from some beloved books. I laid my hands on "On the Contrary: Essays by Men and Women" edited by Martha Rainbolt and Janet Fleetwood. This book has the finest articles contributed by social and political thinkers like Aristotle, Maya Angelou, Eldridge Cleaver, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, Lillian Hellman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy, John Stuart Mill, Susan Sontag, E.B.White, Virginia Woolf..and many more. Adrienne Rich in an article titled "Taking Women Students Seriously" writes: Suppose we were to ask ourselves, simply: What does a woman need to know? Does she not, as a self-conscious, self-defining human being, need a knowledge of her own history, her much-politicized biology, an awareness of th...

This is one of my most favorite books on Essays by Women. This list of contents was written by someone on Goodreads and I am happy to share it here because its important to have access to some of the most brilliant minds in Journalism. Not all of these articles are written by Journalists. Feminists and Social Thinkers and Writers like Susan Sontag, Alice Walker, Erica Jong, Sylvia Pankhurst, Betty Friedan, Joan Didion, Rebecca West have written searing pieces that ought to be read by all men and women, alike.  I read this book, way back in 2010 borrowed from American Library and still remember sharing my views and discussing articles while reading,  with women co-passengers   during train journeys. They were all pretty excited about the title of the book. I remember talking about Godhra Riots and Women Journalists like Teesta Setalvad who took up the fight on behalf of the victims. Its all fresh in my memory. I long to read this book again. Its tricky to find it in b...