Mind the Gap

On India’s 75th Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stressed on the need to support ‘nari shakti’ (women power) and called for a ‘change in the mentality’ towards women. Later that day, 11 men serving a life term after being convicted of gangraping and murdering 14 people in the 2002 Gujarat riots walked out of Godhra jail and went […]

Source: BREAKTHROUGH In a week dominated by chatter around Netflix’s new release, Darlings, comes the sombre news of yet another woman dying by suicide on August 3 after eight years of marriage and unceasing domestic violence. “I kept thinking he’ll reform,” Mandeep Kaur says of her husband Ranjodhbeer Singh Sandhu in a video that has gone viral ever since she

Until she was found on Friday, Pooja Gaud was Girl Number 166 in the missing girls’ file at Mumbai’s Dadabhai Naoroji Nagar police station. Nearly 10 years ago, on January 22, 2013, she had disappeared while on her way to school. Just seven-years-old then, she had squabbled with her elder brother over the sharing of a Rs

(Right, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and left, Droupadi Murmu) When Pratibha Patil was elected the first woman president of India in 2007, there was some discussion on whether the word rashtrapati could apply to a woman. Some felt that the word pati, literally a husband but also used in a larger sense of lord or head, was

It took a ruling by a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court to finally allow an unmarried woman to have an abortion at 24 weeks. The 25-year-old woman conceived while she was in a live-in relationship. At 18 weeks, her partner abandoned her. At 23 weeks and five days pregnant, the woman approached the Delhi high court

To understand how sticky attitudes to women in public life can be, you have only to look at Nagaland. In many aspects, the north-eastern state does very well for women: lowest crimes against women; child marriage is virtually unknown (this is true not just for Nagaland but pretty much all of the northeast); and, at 76.11%, female literacy is

In her first summer break home from the American university where she was studying, K* sought an appointment with a gynaecologist to understand why her periods were irregular. Unlike many doctors, this one skipped the euphemistic are-you-married question and asked directly: “Are you sexually active?” Ok, thought K, so far, so good. Then came the

Surabhi Yadav/women_at_leisure Sometimes they eat mangoes, in other places they chit-chat while cutting grass. Some lie on cool floors on hot summer days as they scroll through their phones, others have their hair oiled. There’s napping. A lot of it. What does women’s leisure look like? When Surabhi Yadav got on to Instagram in 2018

Few would have heard of the 64-year-old Droupadi Murmu before the BJP announced her name as the NDA’s nominee for president of India. But few have been able to ignore the symbolism of her candidature. When she is elected on July 18, she will become India’s first tribal (and second woman) president. It’s a done

The woman in the purple sari climbs one agonising step after another, scaling up the wall of the well. At its bottom, another woman scoops a few cups of water into her bucket. This will then be hoisted by ropes by people waiting above, while she will clamber up the same perilous route, using iron

By Saurabh Kirpal The summer of ’69, as the song by Bryan Adams proclaims, were the best days of his life. Sadly, life wasn’t quite as good for the LGBTQI+ community in the June of that year when, faced with consistent police brutality, riots broke outside the iconic Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New

The seven member jury, two women and five men, in a Virginia courtroom has reached a verdict after a six-week trial. Both actors are liable for defamation but Depp has been awarded a significantly higher amount of US$15 million (reduced to $10.35 million to conform with Virginia law) to Heard’s $2 million. Heard has said