Pinku-Enchanted Life

For a long time now every story of abuse against women has boiled my blood. Four years ago becoming the mother of a girl child added a few more notches to the temperature as I became more acutely aware of the inequalities and challenges a woman faces at every step of her life. Media reports on the brutality being meted out, the growing gap in gender ratios and the total lack of empathy amongst the powers that be coupled with remarks too often heard - what can we do....and the helplessness echoed in that statement, propelled me to think of something WE COULD DO. We can go on STRIKE and force men and the society to realize our importance and the need to treat us with understanding and respect as fellow human beings. So here is what I have started and I hope you will join in, for without you it wont work. #WomenOnStrike

The Voices of Bahai performed at the Lotus Temple auditorium on the 25th of June 2010. We had escaped respective work dreading calls from work calling us back to our desks at about 6:30pm. The program was to begin around 7pm. We walked into the lounge area to see the doors to the auditorium still closed. Lotus temple is known to be an Indian place so delays of about ten fifteen minutes are taken as a regular feature. However this friday the minutes ticked on with the doors still shut firmly. By this time the entire lounge area was filled with people, mostly the old and retired who had difficulty standing but were reluctant to leave. The volunteers finally after half an hour brought out chairs along with the information that the program was delayed due to technical issues and would start in another fifteen odd minutes. We waited while wondering what a large contingent of North east students were doing there. The usual audience to these programs always tend to be atleast three times thei

I have been meaning to write for a long time, a film here, a feeling there have all begged to be jotted down. However life has been extremely busy since the beginning of the year and the way it looks, it promises to be so till the end of the year and beyond. January was when I was on the weekdays frantically trying to achieve the numbers at work and shopping for my adopted brother’s wedding on weekends. Early February was when the marriage took place and I assumed life would now become easier with a young girl in the family to look after mom and brother so that I could concentrate on work and my own home. Me and mom and tried our best to make it a wedding complete in all respects. Both of us for various reasons had not gone on a honeymoon when we got married. We ensured the new couple did. We tried to give them the space and time that most new couples complain about not having. And yet we could not ensure that they be a happy twosome. Frequent quarrels and unnatural demands erupte

Late October, the chill just beginning to make itself felt, a gathering of people from all walks of life and the staging of an amazing piece (I use the word Piece for calling it a mere play would be to confine it to the rigidities one expects in the genre). It was called Mein Istanbul Hoon . The occasion was the celebration of the 50 years of the National school of Drama and the topic chosen was momentous too – a glimpse of Istanbul past and present as reflected through the various books of Orhan Pamuk – the Nobel Laureate. The stage put up on the lawns of the Indira Gandhi National Center for Arts had as backdrop the huge peepul trees and the slowly growing dark winter sky. It began with a beautiful musical composition which instantly took us to the streets of Istanbul as if on a flying carpet. The young Pamuk and his angst at being misunderstood by the world at large, his mother’s high hopes for her son, whom she wants to make an architect are beautifully shown. The tinge of sadness