The Rebelle blog

"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...

With barely two hours of sleep last night since I spent it watching Kanhaiya Kumar's brilliant address at JNU campus, I woke up today morning to realise I had a host of deadlines to meet. Kanhaiya's call for freedom (Azaadi) kept lingering in my ears and the utter brevity to see so many people share their thoughts on social networking sites about his stance on socialism, secularism, equality and freedom from politics. With that fire in my belly, I wrote a first draft for a friend's branding consultancy website. I have no previous experience on writing corporate profiles but as they say, if you read well, then you can write well. (I would like to whole-heartedly believe this statement.) I realised how scattered student movements are in India. When I was in college, we didn't have any association, no affiliations with political parties of course, but no inkling towards social realities as well. All the students did was attend classes, sit at campus hot spots sipping...

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...