Ladybug's field notes

 As I was reading about leaving a toxic relationship with one's mother and it brought back so many dreaded memories of the time that I was trying to get out of non-functional at best and abusive at worst marriage. As I read through the article by a psychologist talking about a client and came to these lines:  "She: I will lose all my relatives one by one. Nobody understands I am victim of a toxic mother. They will believe my mother and that I left her when I became independent ." ... it brought back the memory of my ex-mother in law shouting at me over phone! "You are such an ungrateful wretch! You are selfish beyond any imagination. I must say that you can't think of anyone else but yourself. Just because you now earn more than him now, you want to leave him!" I stood holding the phone in shock! I always thought of her as a well educated woman who clearly saw I had much more empathy than her own son as she clearly prefered me over him to take care of her wh...

 "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...

It was only the other day when I wrote the line, "the potential of our youth can only be fulfilled in a gender-just world" as part of an essay. The line stayed with me for a long after I ended it. Now a days, I often catch myself repeating this thought. Why do I emphasize the strategy of bringing-in elements of gender empowerment and gender-equality in almost all the projects that are brought to me as a professional? Why do I always try to wear this lens?  I, who have no degree in gender studies. It is probably because, I have learnt the hard way that unless inequality is attacked upfront, one runs the risk of running programs that with discriminatory elements at multiple levels? Or the fact that this indeed affect sustainability.  This year in all my field visits, I observed something interesting. I observed it for the first time in Purulia, in February. We were talking to a group of girls in a school in Hura Block. They were part of the adolescent empowermen...