In India, despite the constitutional right to a "reasonable, fair, and just" procedure for a person accused of an offence, the prison system is overflowing with undertrials—those who have been arrested but are yet to be convicted.
Structural obstacles impeding access to public spaces is intensified for those excluded from groups that hold privilege based on caste, gender, sexuality, religion, and physical ability.
India’s culture of sexual repression creates discomfort around sex, so how does someone determine whether one is really asexual or if the aversion to sex is nothing but sexual repression?
Indian parents have an infamous reputation worldwide for their orthodox parenting techniques. Regardless of which country they raise their children in, they tend to follow the same archaic protocols for child rearing in which emotional neglect and manipulation are a staple.
Due to incessant mining, Jharkhand or “the land of forests” suffers from the 'paradox of plenty'—the impoverishment of the local population in a resource rich land. This photo essay is a stark reminder of the ruthless exploitation of people and the devastation of the once-green land.
Whether it is the lack of infomercials about contraceptive methods or the symbolic silence staged by censoring words like “vagina”, health spaces for women are often restrictively designed, with negligible emphasis on their lived experiences and their sexual needs.
Contrary to what they claim, period tracking applications are contributing to the curbing of women’s bodily autonomy by creating sophisticated forms of surveillance.
There’s something inherently perverse about how the patriarchy thinks about breasts. While it freely sexualizes and glorifies women’s breasts in a toxic bacchanalia of misogyny, women themselves aren’t free to do the same. Female desire, after all, is at the margins of India’s popular culture.
120 climate feminist organisations are coming together to push governments and financial institutions worldwide to take urgent action and to include more women leaders in the action for climate justice.
Queerness and its articulation are not static but dynamic; not homogenous, but diverse. Queerness is “liberation from” rather than “bondage to” fixed ideas—the latter would undeniably be a form of violence.
The conventional female lead we get to see—no matter how quirky the character, no matter how different, intelligent, brave, strong, or “badass”—is almost always skinny.
How can we redefine resilience from an empathetic lens? Is it solely the ability to bounce back and be strong in the face of adversity? How can we move away from looking at pain and distress as something that needs to be ‘fixed’ and acknowledge what it needs to heal?
How hereditary dancers’ communities were shamed and “rescued” by a Brahmanical morality that could not accommodate women whose sexuality transgressed the norms.
The casteism and cis privilege reflected in mainstream media are, sadly, very much a part of the Indian LGBTQ+ community itself—a space that is supposed to be for “everyone”.
Sexual abuse robs children of their childhood and has a “devastating, irreversible impact” on their well-being. But the conversation around child rights has only gained momentum in India the past few decades.
In a cis-normative world, dysphoria is often perceived as body negativity and trans persons’ desire to physically transition is often incorrectly viewed as a patriarchal aspiration.
I routinely traverse a minefield of reminders that I am living a double life. While I put on my best online activist hat and pontificate about queer rights being human rights, I deliberately omit doing so from the stance of a queer person. I am what you might term ‘partially closeted’.
When we march, we collectively offer solidarity to the oppressed and a message to the oppressors and their allies that we all bear witness to their crimes and are no longer passive bystanders. When we march, we act—with purpose and deliberation.
The Family Man (Season 2) is a series of missed opportunities to tell the story of power and pain of a community now displaced and isolated from their homeland.
What are healthy and unhealthy boundaries in a relationship? How do we recognize them? Why does every relationship need healthy boundaries? Setting boundaries can be uncomfortable and confusing, so, how do we go about establishing them? Ruchita answers these questions.
When I lost my 59-year-old father to suicide in 2019, I was forced to join what I call the 'dead parents society' and came to be introduced to the gargantuan force that is grief.
For as long as I can remember, I have been fat—first, a chubby kid and then, an overweight adult. Somehow, it never bothered me. No one spoke about dieting or achieving a target weight in my family. I was happy the way I was, or so I thought.
In this episode, we look at the relationship between social media and mental health. While social media can be valuable for networking and enhancing connections with loved ones, it can also worsen mental health issues. Ruchita gives us some techniques for managing social media behaviour.
The entertainment industry has a long way to go when it comes to depicting mental illnesses in a manner that doesn’t perpetuate stigma. However, a recent spurt of shows and films seem to have kick-started some nuanced and healthy conversations.
Inter-caste marriages reinforce casteist principles in insidious ways when lower caste spouses are forced to curate their lifestyle, food habits, and demeanour to match those of the dominant caste culture.
Caste endogamy is the defining feature of the hierarchical concept of caste and has stayed immutable through time immemorial. This perpetuation of caste supremacy via the concept of purity is primarily preserved today through the institution of marriage—especially arranged marriages.
The politics of intellectual property around life-saving pharmaceutical drugs has been marked by Big Pharma's brazen disregard for human lives, a cavalier attitude to laws, and a cult-like devotion to ever burgeoning profits.
The disproportionate dependency on technology continues to further curb the access to COVID-19 vaccination for those on the wrong side of the digital divide in India. What does the trend towards digitizing identity mean for transgender persons, a historically marginalised population group?
Cervical cancer is the fourth most commonly occurring cancer. In India, it is one of the leading cancers affecting women. The irony is that it is also one of the two types of serious cancers that can be prevented with a vaccine—so why don't people know about this?
The dependence of social media activism on virality creates a hierarchy of outrage. In this hierarchy, each cause is given weightage based on its value as a viral commodity. So who gets saved?
Slowing down the COVID-19 contagion requires physical distancing and masks. There is no other way to do this at any stage of the spread anywhere. The virus is deadly and it's hell-bent on spreading—it's designed to, as all viruses are.
In this episode, we discuss men's depression- what the symptoms can look like, and how men need to develop safer spaces for themselves and unlearn the violence they have internalized towards themselves and the people around them.
Organizing the working class without addressing the caste issue is a shrewd way of the privileged caste Communists to pave a way to maintain their grasp over power in the name of proletariats while the marginalized and underprivileged continue to languish in the prison of caste.
Plunged into crisis during the lockdown, deprived of the basic needs for survival, many trans people battled with mental health issues and deepened dysphoria.
