NavDharmyug

In the past few days, attempts were made to re-define Women empowerment and emancipation with two independent events. In one of the event, a left-leaning, establishment-hating poet of sorts was caught making immoral demands on underage girls, who were supposedly his fans or friends. The second event which was somehow positioned as a matter of woman's dignity was when many times Congress Parliamentarian, supposedly in the possession of expensive diamonds gifted by a tax-evader was caught having a dangerously deriding and derogatory laugh in the parliament, during the speech of Prime Minister, in spite of being chided by the speaker of the House, who happens to be the Vice-President of India. This brought in a minor rebuke from the PM, who compared this laughter which feminists struggled to defined something between crackle to smile with a soft sound, with that of characters in the TV serial Ramayana of yesteryears. The rich and powerful politician, Renuka Chowdhury , infamous fo...

The Bell Jar Author: Sylvia Plath ( Under the Pseudonym "Victoria Lucas) Published: 1963 Pages: 234 Amazon Link: Click Here " Doctor Gordon's waiting room was hushed and beige.  The walls were beige, and the carpets were beige, and the upholstered chairs and sofas were beige. There were no mirrors or pictures, only certificates from different medical schools, with Doctor Gordon;s name in Latin, hung about the walls. Pale green loopy ferns and spiked leaves of a much darker green filled the ceramic pots on the end-table and the coffee-table and the magazine-table." "But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew." I had been meaning to read this book for long time. I was restrained by two things- One, the book did not seem to be availa...

We live in a cause-heavy world. We have too many causes hounding for attention in public space. So many, that we have stopped taking them seriously. Furthermore, the elite, rich and English-educated in India, who consider themselves as the inheritors of what is called a “White-Man’s burden” have further made the masses cynical towards the causes they endorse on account of great hypocrisy that they have come to represent. So they will write editorials about empowering women and downtrodden, but then we find them tweeting about their maids not having bank accounts or citizen-identification to enable them to move to digital economy; you will find them tweeting about how their hearts are shattered at cruelty against dogs, but the next tweet, five minutes later, you will find them salivating over cow meat. Real causes have become a casualty here.           Amid all this frivolous noises, old classic literature, thinkers from the past offer...

“ What chance would the craftiest biographer stand against the subject who saw him coming and decided to amuse himself .” – Wrote Julian Barnes about Gustave Flaubert , in Flaubert’s Parrot ( Click here to read review ) , a semi-biographical fiction on Flaubert. Essentially his point is let the writer be, as a person, that is. Jane Austen makes for an even difficult person to be traced. Mr. Austen Leigh (Jane Austen’s nephew) wrote about her, “ I doubt whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note whose personal obscurity of was so complete.” It sure does help when we consider the work of a writer which defined the way we looked at things for generations to come. That is the reason having spent one chapter arguing against it, Barnes ended up writing Flaubert’s Parrot and I end up writing here about Jane Austen. But this is not a biography, not even a biographical note (which can be found on Wiki - Link here ), rather a homage and an ode.   ...

"Surely since she was a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of her life, she will soon give over this pretense of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as a woman thinks about a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write a short note (and as long as she writes short notes, nobody objects a woman writing either)"  I had read the above passage in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and was immediately hooked. Orlando was the first novel of Ms. Woolf I had ever read and much too late in life.  I had stayed away from her, fearing the feminist credentials of her, which are almost as famous as her writing is. However, Orlando was such an eye-opener. It is such a vast canvas over which the story is spread-out. She masterly tells the story, with a easy efficiency of a master who is totally in control of her craft. Orlando was of course followed by Mrs Dolloway and The Waves, all masterpieces in their ow...

Today is the day of Indian, or should I say, Hindu festival of Karvachauth, much popularized by Bollywood. Initially a festival of Northern India, now it is widely celebrated. The festival is primarily of a day of fasting, observed by married women, praying for the long life of their husbands. As is the practice, the festival is marked by severe criticism every year by over-jealous atheists, fanatic feminists and bigoted secularist, who claim that the festival is patriarchal, regressive and anti-woman. If one considers those rants to be true, one would believe that there is huge amount of physical and emotional trauma that womenfolk are subjected to, in order to get them around to fast on the day.  However, if one were to visit any of the markets in Delhi, the scenario is quite contrary. You will find happy, joyous women on the streets of Delhi, excitedly visiting beauty parlors, with their husbands dragged themselves behind them, holding the kids as wife gets Mehandi to her ha...

The strongest aspect of a woman, uncontested, unwinnable for a man is motherhood. Kali is the eternal, divine mother. She represents the silent darkness of the time when nothing was there, and from there, from darkness, from nothingness, she shaped life. She is every woman, every mother, which stands in darkness, so much so that she herself becomes darkness ( Kali~ Darkness) and creates life, beholds life, births life and nourishes life. The light emerges from the darkness, and the colors rise from the lack of colors. She is the dark womb from where the feeble light of human life takes first breath. She is the consort of Mahakaal ( Kaal-Death), Shiva - The lord of death, Mahakali . She is death. Hinduism celebrates life as well as death. Death being the moment, where we clean our slates and start afresh. Therefore, both death as well as life are intermingled, interconnected and interchangeable in their meaning. Death can be looked at as the end of life; can also be looked at ...

There's nothing international about the woman who taught a three year old alphabets at the doorsteps of a kitchen, handed rolled paratha on way to school.  There's northing international about the woman who held a young man's hand in a smouldering summer day and sat in a lonely prayer outside an ICU fourteen years back. There's nothing international about the woman who took a part of her being and handed me over the most amazing of her creation six years back. There's nothing international about the woman who struggles to keep her space in a hostile and competitive world and still try to teach alphabets to her child, at the kitchen door and hand her over the rolled paratha as she leaves for school.  There's nothing international about the woman who ties a thread to my arm every year, and looks at me as if I were a guardian and protector of her soul.  There's nothing international about the woman who reads what I write and sometimes, even loves ...