A decade ago, I lived in a foreign country. That was when I started using social media. For a few years, it was about catching up with old friends, sharing pictures and gossiping about what had changed. It seemed like our forgotten friendships could be revived through the magic of the internet. If anyone had then told me, that the internet would eventually be isolating people, I would have called them raving loons.
A blogger friend of mine recently wrote an article about being an over enthusiastic newly wed. Being ambitious, she always aimed high and marriage was no different. She took it on as something to excel at. So she was eager to tackle everything from being a working woman to running the household like clockwork. Being highly competent, she managed just that. Well at least until the couple was blessed with a beautiful bundle of chaos and then the expectations she had built up back fired and caused marital issues that required a lot of work to fix.
Papa and I have been together for a little over 16 years and today is our 9th wedding anniversary, and we spent over an hour, locked together in a room. Aren't you curious about what we did? I'll tell you in a moment. But here is some back story first.
When we were kids, we were badgered by grown ups to read the news or watch the news in order to educate our selves and shed our ignorance of the world we lived in. In our times, news was quite boring and I wonder how many parents succeeded in getting their kids to actually read or listen to the news.
A blogger friend of mine has blogged several times, about a couple of issues that bother her. One is, the strange emotionally charged attitude we have to the English language and the other is the discrimination, dark skinned people in India face. After some thought, I have come to believe, it is possible, that these two seemingly disconnected issues, could indeed be linked.
Sometimes, in our enthusiasm to to extinguish patriarchy and gender bias, we lose sight of he important stuff and follow formulas and mantras. Do we forget, that is what got us here in the first place?
We all know that pregnancy radically affects a woman's body and hormones. But, until recently, very little was known of the effects of pregnancy on a woman's brain.
Criminalizing marital rape would send the clear message that: We as a nation do not condone marital rape.
Bigotry is on the rise in some parts of the world. Be it in the form of racism, sexism, religious intolerance or something else. People are becoming more comfortable with publicly expressing harsh hostile opinions directed against certain groups. So what can we do about it?
My husband (referred to as Papa in my blogs, because that is what I often call him, since our daughter christened him Papa in spite of all our efforts to get her to call him daddy) and I met in degree college, whilst doing our B.Sc in physics. I had hoped to join IIT's Physics department, but I did not get through the second round of JEE (IIT's prestigious Joint Entrance Exam). Having spent 2 years working tirelessly on getting through the JEE, I had hardly considered what I would do if I did not get in.
We have come to recognise that patriarchy hurts women in so many ways, from depriving them of education, fulfilment of dreams and their full potential, to more drastic problems like domestic abuse and rape.
Papa (my husband) and I like to spend a few hours a week discussing our lives, or our relationship or Physics or some esoteric subject. This weekend we were talking about something and somehow we ended up on the subject of competition. We are both fiercely competitive people. But somehow we realised that we don't really compete against each other. So we thought about it. How did that come to be, we wondered.
Most large societies evolved to be patriarchal. Many of us today are fighting against patriarchy and struggling to rectify the situation, but a question does come to mind. How or why did most large societies evolve to be patriarchal? What is the evolutionary biology explanation for this?
Having lived in the US for 8 years this is one of their traditions that I found most enjoyable. Halloween is a little unusual for a festival. Its not even a holiday. Its just a fun way to spend the evening.
Papa, and I have been a couple since I was 18. We met in degree college, and 2 years later we were graduate students in different universities in the US. Now we have been together for 15 years and married for 8 years and here are some heart warming memories.
I was reading the very popular facebook post by Tannishtha Chatterjee about her humiliation on some comedy channel about the colour of her skin. “How is it funny to call someone dark? I don’t get it..” she says and she is right of course. But that got me thinking about jokes in general. There is a whole category of jokes that stereotype people and make fun of them as a group. Any of these sound familiar?
Often in the fight for equality and rights for women, the virtues of women are highlighted. Their endurance and emotional strength is emphasized. But what I don't understand is this. Do women need to be strong or successful or productive to deserve basic rights and equality?
I moved to the US at the age of 20 for grad school. I lived alone and was financially independent. Neither earning a living, nor living alone, nor doing research made me feel as much a grown up as something else did.
