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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 workings of the human mind. read more...
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As parents, we put a piece of our hearts out into this world and into the custody of the teachers at school and tuition and can only hope and pray that they treat them well.
Trigger Warning: This speaks of physical and emotional violence by teachers, caste based abuse, and contains some graphic details, and may be triggering for survivors.
When I was in Grade 10, I flunked my first preliminary examination in Mathematics. My mother was in a panic. An aunt recommended the Maths classes conducted by the Maths sir she knew personally. It was a much sought-after class, one of those classes that you signed up for when you were in the ninth grade itself back then, all those decades ago. My aunt kindly requested him to take me on in the middle of the term, despite my marks in the subject, and he did so as a favour.
Math had always been a nightmare. In retrospect, I wonder why I was always so terrified of math. I’ve concluded it is because I am a head in the cloud person and the rigor of the step by step process in math made me lose track of what needed to be done before I was halfway through. In today’s world, I would have most probably been diagnosed as attention deficit. Back then we had no such definitions, no such categorisations. Back then we were just bright sparks or dim.
When Jaya Bachchan speaks her mind in public she is often accused of being brusque and even abrasive. Can we think of her prodigious talent and all the bitter pills she has had to swallow over the years?
A couple of days ago, a short clip of a 1998 interview of Jaya and Amitabh Bachchan resurfaced on social media. In this episode of the Simi Grewal chat show, at about the 23-minute mark, Jaya lists her husband’s priorities: one, parents, two kids, then wife. Then she corrects herself: his profession – and perhaps someone else – ranks above her as a wife.
Amitabh looks visibly uncomfortable at this unstated but unambiguous reference to his rather well-publicised affair with co-star Rekha back in the day.
Watching the classic film Abhimaan some years ago, one scene really stayed with me. It was something Brajeshwarlal (David’s character) says in troubled tones during the song tere mere milan ki yeh raina. He says something to the effect that Uma (Jaya Bhaduri’s character) is more talented than Subir (Amitabh Bachchan’s character) and that this was a problem since society teaches us that men are superior to women.
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