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I’m sure those of you who participated in our My Favourite Female contest and others as well, are waiting for the results; here they are! The best written entry award a.k.a first prize goes to Amodini, who picked Mma Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies Detective agency series as her favourite character.
Short excerpt from Amodini’s entry: In Precious Ramotswe, the author, Alexander McCall Smith has succeeded in creating what I call a truly human character. Mma Ramotswe appears real; a real-life walking-talking person, with a heart and a brain and a mind of her own, a set of convictions, her very own beliefs, a value system on which she relies, and the capacity to negotiate the vagaries of daily life and fickle human nature with patience and an enviable composure. In other words, just like the rest of us; only better.
As decided, we’re giving two second prizes, and these go to Starry, who wrote about Anne of Green Gables and Ankita Prasad, who chose Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium series. Ankita sent her entry via mail and we will be publishing it here soon, with the other entries. (Incidentally, Starry also won a prize at our first Mommy Guilt contest!)
Here’s an excerpt from Starry’s entry: Anne is not a glorified heroine. Impetuous and harum-scarum, she gets into exasperating tangles even as a grown-up, she match-makes with hilarious results and lands in uncommon adventures.
And one from Ankita’s: As a techie who lives and breaths a world which has a low female to male ratio, the fact that Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is an expert hacker tickled me pink. In a society were (sic) women are expected to toe societal norms to a larger extent than men do, it was a pleasure to read about a girl who always dealt with society on her own terms, without giving an inch.
Amodini will receive a Rs. 500 Flipkart/$10 Amazon voucher while Starry and Ankita will receive Rs.250 Flipkart/$5 Amazon vouchers. While there are only 3 prize-winners, we received a number of amazingly well written entries, and shortlisting from the over 25 entries received was a tough task! (Sadly, we had to omit some otherwise well written entries because they went over the 500 words limit). It was also interesting to note how many ‘children’s heroines’ made it to the list – Enid Blyton’s ‘Naughtiest girl Elizabeth Allen’ and tomboy George among them. With the contestants’ permission, I hope to publish some of these as well here.
Many thanks to our judges Devaki Khanna, Freelance Writer and Editor and Nivethitha Kumar, Co-Founder of literary e-zine The Banyan Trees.
Founder & Chief Editor of Women's Web, Aparna believes in the power of ideas and conversations to create change. She has been writing since she was ten. In another life, she used to be read more...
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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