Dog Blogs Travel Trips

I’ve been following the global #MeToo Movement for a few years now, torn between celebrating the outpouring of sisterhood and solidarity for survivors of sexual harassment and appalled at the shame and ridicule they were being subjected to for speaking out. The #MeToo implosion in India followed a scarily similar turn of events, raging through in a brief, glorious burst of fierce feminist energy, only to wither away in legal imbroglio. The list of accused was vast and varied, from actors to artists, comedians and politicians, journalists and the judiciary, and of course, The Woke Bois [1] of the desi world. Every sector was riddled with salacious stories of the misdemeanors of men. The ones in the development sector were especially exhausting. The names of self proclaimed champions of the crusade against patriarchy cropped up repeatedly. @sanitarypanels The survivors, and their supporters, however, had a whole different drama to deal with. The initia...

"Buddha doesn't refer to a person, but a state of mind which we all are innately equipped with. Buddha means awakening..." ~ Rinzin Dorjee , Writer & scholar, Dehradun. Vikalp Sangam is a platform for groups and individuals working on alternatives to the currently dominant model of development and governance, in various spheres of life. Its major activity is the convening of regional and thematic Confluences across India to facilitate networking of these groups. The briefing note on the ideologies of this Alternates Confluence read much like a theoretical module from my University degree! We were hosted at Prakriti Sadhana Kendra, Vidya Bhawan. Barely 15 km from the city, the Ashram is cocooned in the dry forests of the Aravallis. The crisp, cold air of Rajasthan was radically different from the lush, tropical Goa. Ninety or so social activists, healers, herbalists, teachers, trainers, farmers, khojis , feminists,...

The country is suffering, while the elite are engaged in Facebook wars. Nothing is going to change till each of us makes up his or her mind to fight patriarchy, caste, communalism and injustice. The working class continues to exist on a pittance, and the politicians continue to roll in rivers of money.  I was standing near a chai-paratha shop on the streets of Delhi when a luxury sedan pulled up. The obese man behind the wheel rolled his (illegally) tinted glass down, bellowing, ‘ abbe oye bhen-chod, paani laa .’ The little chai-shop boy complies, holding out the paani-bottle from a safe distance…I’m assuming that comes with the experience of being cuffed by the customers, and he says, ‘ ye lo ’ … (please note: no  bhaiyaa !) As the man stretches out for the bottle, he shouts,  ‘ Izzat se baat kar, chutiya …’ I struggle to keep the disgust from showing on my face as I wonder why anyone should respect this heaving, gasping, sweating blob of flesh with ...

“… cutting up women is a sport older than cricket but just as popular and equally full of obscure rituals and intricate rules that everyone seems to know...” ~ Mohammed Hanif , Our Lady of Alice Bhatti I'm reading Our Lady of Alice Bhatti as I travel trip my way across India, meeting women for our newest campaign - an ambitious one where we're hoping to dismantle patriarchy using videos and discussions. I'm looking for young women, who want to work with us as Correspondents, to document patriarchy preying on them in its own unique style in their areas. As I read about Alice, a fiercely independent former jailbird, from a poor, ‘low-caste’ Christian family in Pakistan, I am disgusted by how similar life for women in India is to the life of Alice. As I travel from Goa to Kerala, and move to Tamil Nadu, I met Nandhini, from a tiny village just outside Tiruppur town, in Tamil Nadu. She’s just opened a beauty salon, enrolled in English classes and is pretty pissed off wi...

In conversation with the Believer a few weeks ago, he said to me, "Whenever something bad happens, everybody keeps saying 'God is watching'. There's this assumption that God will 'fix' everything. What if I am meant to be God's warrior? Maybe I'm the one meant to avenge all the bad shit in this world." His anger wasn’t misplaced. He’d just finished working on a horrific, disturbing story, and this inclination to begin believing that violence might be the best way to ‘punish’ violence seemed to be his only source of salvation. What was disturbing was a gentle, happy-go-lucky, God-loving soul gnashing his teeth in rage and frustration. Destroy the demons. A few days later, I found myself standing on the other side of a glass door, squinting at a 150 strong crowd of social activists crammed into a conference room. Sickening curls of claustrophobia. So many people. Such a small space. Deep breath, step inside. Walk past the crowd. Slowly,...

In early 2015, the organization I was affiliated with had an opportunity to expand their network to West Bengal. The euphoria of finally getting a chance to explore my motherland almost drowned in the agonising amount of research and data crunching I had to do, identifying key issues, organisations and movements across the state we wanted to work with. Scenes from the illegal quarries, Birbhum, West Bengal The data was baffling – West Bengal boasts of being the sixth largest economy in the country, and the state’s power infrastructure and roads and railways network is top notch as compared to the rest of the country. Despite having literacy rates higher than the national average, over 30% of the youth in Bengal remained unemployed in 2012-2013. 47 million unemployed young people. This was the same year the state recorded the highest rates of violence against women in the country. Savage destruction of fragile ecology of the Sundarbans and the North Bengal, at the foothills of th...