This week's interesting stories from around the world.
Progressivism, public toilets and more – Here comes the week with its short but thought-provoking edition.
The first is a highly sensitizing post from Sangitha on dealing with child misbehaviour. “When what they’re faced with isn’t something they are capable of handling, we’re likely to see behaviour that isn’t without our realm of acceptable,” Sangitha writes, as she exhorts every parent/adult to ‘understand’ rather than ‘judge’ a difficult kid.
“I do think the right to go to the bathroom is a basic right”, says this activist from China as she strives to bring the government’s attention to woeful lack of adequate toilets for women. Sadly, some things remain the same everywhere.
Sayantani finds her feminist beliefs in conflict with her love for Jane Austen. “Do we shut off our internal social critic? Do we, as Zeta Elliot has suggested, forget about a certain part of ourselves while we read about such dissimilar characters — to the point that we don’t even recognize this erasure of self?” – she ponders, in an attempt to reconcile her political commitments with her personal choices. A compelling read, and one we owe to Prathama of Towards Harmony.
Hannah Mudge debunks the myth of empowered women in Christian societies by revealing how women are shackled by stereotypes that society and the media perpetuate. To quote her – “It just came as a bit of a surprise to me, that despite all the teaching about self-worth and imago dei and not buying into all that worldly stuff, young women were still being drawn in to the performed femininity that the magazines, the rom coms and the women’s pages in the tabloids require us to ‘do’ in order to feel acceptable.”
Jia brings an appalling story on parental apathy to a daughter’s abusive marriage.The outraged author writes – “We have still not been able to teach our girls that nothing, NOTHING, can excuse any kind of abuse, and that they have all the right to walk out of ANY relationship at the first hint of it!”
“At one point in my career, I decided to stop worrying about the ramifications of being a woman and just started worrying about what I set out to accomplish.” This comes from Carissa Reiniger who shares her success mantra. Truly, a woman worth emulating.
*Photo credit: Jay Morrison (Used under the Creative Commons Attribution License)
New mommy on the block. Bookworm, nature-lover and wayfarer in the suburbs of imagination. Fascinated by the power of the written word. And the read more...
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In marriages, too, two different individuals live under one roof and tend to grow together. But, unfortunately, at times, their individual growth is impaired due to many external factors.
For Suniti, it was an altogether new experience. She and Rahul were like chalk and cheese.
Somewhere in the endless quest for perfect skin, glossy hair, six pack abs, fitting in with the current fashion trends and presenting a flawless self to the world, we lose ourselves.
Truth is beauty and beauty is truth. Penned beautifully by the great John Keats, eons ago. Cut to modern times: beauty is as far from truth as possible.
Dads too have a right to being a parent - can we have baby care rooms in public spaces that are accessible to Indian fathers too, please?
Dads too have a right to being a parent – can we have baby care rooms in public spaces that are accessible to Indian fathers too, please?
Voices are heard only if they are raised…and here I want to raise mine. Maybe, many would consider this to be a trivial issue and write it off, but when it is about a child, (my baby in this case), I just cannot afford to ‘zip my lips’ and ‘somehow adjust’ to the so-called parameters that has already been set, and things shabbily worked around them.
The movie Toilet Ek Prem Katha throws up questions about women's right to make their own decisions. No, it's about so much more than a toilet!
The movie Toilet Ek Prem Katha throws up questions about women’s right to make their own decisions. No, it’s about so much more than a toilet!
Moving out of the movie theatre after dedicating important two and half hours of my day, I felt as if something fruitful had happened. As the name suggests, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha revolves around the struggles faced by a newly wed couple when the wife comes to know that her marital home doesn’t have a toilet. Being an educated woman and moreover sensitized to the ill-effects of not using a toilet, she is not ready to adopt the practice of open defecation. She has the support of her husband who is fond of quick solutions or shortcuts to a problem, and finds many different ways to make her use a covered toilet instead of understanding the real problem women face because of this practice.