Ladybug's field notes

"I am the demon! Come have a look at me!" as he pushed himself into the car. It was past midnight in May. Delhi was hot as hell and Haryana looked as menacing as one has read in newspaper, that late in night. I touched my earlobe many a times as we looked for her house in old part of the city. My friend noticed my nervousness and talked in a calm voice with the driver as we took detours and u-turns through dark and semi dark alleys. The girl we were trying to reach was in dire need and we had to reach her. I did not know her. She did not know me. We had never seen each other. She could hardly give me the address. I absolutely did not know the locality. I could not get a known driver. I only knew that I had to go. I only knew I probably could only ask this friend to accompany. She only knew that I was her sister-in law's trusted friend. And she had to leave the home that night with her 3 year old kid. Her home was the most dangerous place for her that night. She was so de

This blog post came to my mind while going through many writings in the recent past on how a whole generation of us have been taught to establish man woman equality. And on a lighter vein, how seriously we took that role!  When I joined the development sector, I was out to prove anything that a man of my age could do, I could do too. And working in SRUTI, a NGO that supported activists in far flung areas of the country, I was subjected to the toughest of the tests in this regard. To begin with SRUTI was highly skeptical about adding a woman to their team (of men, largely). I had to jump into proving that I was no less than a "man in the team" the moment I joined. I joined on 5th of May and I was sent to Jhabua area of Madhya Pradesh for a month starting 11th of May. This post is specifically about the struggles of washing one self in the areas where there was no concept of a bathroom and men, with whom you were travelling did not think they should try to make any extra

Today after a long time I was thinking about our time in Banaras Hindu University (BHU). We had studied there in the mid 1990s. BHU has a large number of hostels for students which made it one of the most sought after university of our times. A time when Kolkata did not have many residential colleges and hence BHU received horde of students. I do not know how it is now. BHU or Varanasi was our first encounter with North India and its culture. In our cities we had faced taunts on the road, catcalls, comments on how we looked etc which was called "eve teasing" in common parlance. I have a problem with this term. It probably does not describe the grave impact it can have on a girl's life. I am relieved to note that others are also finding that expression strange. It is being called sexual harassment. and the #askingforit campaign by Breakthrough  http://www.breakthrough.tv/  has been launched to show the falacy of the term. Coming back to BHU, however, what we faced the