Love in the Time of Corona

She scanned through the magazine for girls who looked like her with deeper hues, flat nose, and thick hair. The day she turned fifteen she scrubbed herself with bleach while screaming for God, whispering over and over again "the darker the skin, the deeper the struggle" releasing a sigh that made her soul shake.” ―  Ijeoma Umebinyuo India and her obsession with the white/fair skin tone is not new. Being colonized for centuries, the post-colonial hangover hasn’t got any better. Walking through the lanes and streets of any big or small city, beauty parlours are adorned with the newspaper and magazine cut-outs of unbelievably beautiful fair-skinned Indian actors. These cutouts attract both men and women and make the beautician inside an unsung hero for the dark-skinned humans. Old household methods of making skin ‘fair’ have been in use since ages and sadly in 2020 are still being used. From scrubbing the paste of gram and curd to ‘brighten the skin’ ...

SHARIA LAW, SHAH BANO VERDICT AND THE INDIAN MUSLIM WOMEN INTRODUCTION Since the inception of human collectives, some rudimentary form of legal principles and law has existed   to protect the community, not just from external threats but also to ensure the well being and security of its members and to deal with them, if they cause any harm to each other. Once society developed, and Religion was introduced, it became the source which established the principles on which, the way of life of an individual was to be determined and how society was supposed to deal with any violations of the natural or religious laws. The grip and rules of religion, thus differs from region to region and community to community.   To understand the personal laws of Muslims, i.e. the Sharia, it is important to understand the conditions and context in which Prophet Mohammad led to the birth of Islam and how the society at that time interpreted it. Historically Arabia was a land of tribes, n...

It has hardly been 200 hundred years since women started raising voices against the subjugation and violation they had been suffering at the hands of men, society and patriarchy. What started in the 1800s  with a demand for equal voting rights in the West was coincided with the social reform movements, particularly aimed at the plights of women, being carried out in the Indian subcontinent. The reforms were initiated by Men, later on joined by women from upper castes and upper class families and  backed  by legal authority the British Government in India. And since then, women and men have time and again started movements against evils and inequalities of the society. As put forward by Krishna Menon and Meenakshi Malhotra, Women’s politics involves two aspects- one that of their participation in what we call ‘political’ and the other refers to their understanding of the politics of their own oppression. Feminists scholars had made the public-private dichotomy very clea...

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power because they control the minds of the masses.” -Malcolm X The inclination of the Indian media towards sensationalism rather than the credibility of the news is reason enough for the criticism it has been facing. As a democracy, India has freedom of the press. However, in India, it seems highly unlikely to be able to separate the media from politics; in fact, it seems to have turned into an extension of the State itself. Unlike older times when journalists would sometimes even risk their lives to show their viewers the reality, when journalism was defined by the courage of the reporters, nowadays all that we see are anchors sitting inside their lavish studios, spewing hate and throwing their biased opinions to the viewers. In 2019, India’s rank in the Press Freedom Index was 142 nd , out of the 180 countries included in the index....

‘ The Manusmriti equates homosexual sex to a man having sex with a menstruating woman or having sex during the day, and the punishment involves purification rites: bathing with clothes on, and fasting for a night, and eating specific cow milk and urine related products. Failure to purify can result in loss of caste. The crimes of heterosexual adultery and rape, and deflowering a virgin, have much higher fines and more intense purification rituals. (XI:175) ’ I have grown up in a highly privileged orthodox Bihari family with strict rules and stricter gender norms. At a very young age I realized that something is different in me which made me stand out of the crowd. Growing up gay has its own set of challenges which unfortunately is not acknowledged by the majority of people and homosexuality still remains a taboo topic in society. Looking back to the earlier times and comparing it with today’s situation would be stupid because though the world is getting inclusive each passing ...

It's a Saturday afternoon, but feels like just another day when you have been quarantined for 5 weeks. Things have randomly sorted their own schedule and there isn't anything actually to not feel okay. Or maybe there isn't anything to feel, you don't know. Then suddenly you receive a text from a friend who is not (feeling) fine and there you are listening and helping them through it. And again, you forget how were you feeling. When you are listening to someone, you sometimes feel so vast that you can hold so many feelings, emotions and other things which are told to you, inside you and still feel too short to let them out, because you are the Confidant. You can hold and not spill, you can listen and not lay out what you feel to them, because at that time you are helping and can't seek help. There is a certain position you find yourself in, where you might be there for everybody but for yourself, you hold. You will not mention it, because you love them, you...