Ladybug's field notes

 "Arre didi! It indeed happened like that. Neelam was asked to bring her 3 year old kid-brother to the adolescents' meeting. Her family gave her permission to come only on the condition that the brother will accompany. The boy fell in a drain on the way, Neelam had to go back home, get him cleaned and then come to the meeting again!" And everyone present had a hearty laugh remembering the incident! This can actually be material for stand-up comedians but in Rambakhs Kheda, near Lucknow, girls can only go out if their brothers accompany them. And these brothers can be as young as 3! All the assembled had a hearty laugh at the ridiculousness of the proposition that a yound child of 5 or so would protect the much older sister but so far it helped them get out of the homes, they were ready to bring the kid-brother along.  "How was the lockdown time?" Meena jumped to say how badly they fared with all family members in the same room for all the 24 hours and said, ...

When you talk of "feminism" and "women empowerment" the reaction of the larger public both off line and online is fear at best and vocal misogyny at the worst. As I work in an organisation that works on making discrimination and violence against women and girls unacceptable, we face this repeatedly in the villages that we work in. I for one, have always truly believed that a gender-just world is better for both men and women (even if I live within the gender binary) along with all the other genders. However, I often face a hostile reaction to the word feminism even from the educated. I have a doubt that it is majorly because of the word "fem" being associated with it and according to the norms of masculinity anything associated with females/femininity is often associated with inadequacy, lowering one's status, as well as becoming inferior. The so called woke men who engage in the issues of gender-justice and feminism also often come from a position o...

Visiting field areas for work is always an exhilarating experience as you get to learn much faster than you can learn from a report. As one keenly listens to people and their observations one tends make more connections in one's head. Many assumptions get challenged. Many new learnings emerge.  I recently visited areas around the Indo-Nepal border in Uttar Pradesh. One of the most interesting insight that I got during this travel is that there is active push-back to adolescents’ aspirations. The Community Developers or the field workers working in these areas found this active push-back as one of the greatest challenges in working with adolescents. I would have assumed it is around getting boys and girls to sit together for the sessions in the villages, which was surprisingly seen as a positive thing by the mothers with whom I talked to.  They felt it was important. However, I heard that the greatest challenge came from the village elders who think by engaging with...

In India, the current favourite line is that we need to stick to our roots and take lessons from our past. Our women are becoming too westernised. They want to choose their life-partners and all hell break loose. What can be more "western" than women trying to take the matters of their own sexuality in their own hands! Let's try to go back then. Although I surely realise these are dangerous times to write on these issues, but like Brecht said, what do we sing about if not the dark times, in the dark times. Well! He did not exactly say that. He asked us to keep singing. Here is my song bereft of the apparent music but who knows you may hear Bismillah playing Shehnai for I will talk of weddings (well! sort of) and the rules that guide it in these times.   But let me start from Mahabharata and that too at the very beginning. The Adiparwa when Pandu is talking to Kunti to convince her to get other men to beget children: He says, “In the olden days, we hear,” he begins, “...

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...