Hope lives in the town where the daughter of an autorickshaw driver grows up playing in the paddy fields of Wayanad, Kerala. At a school for tribal children, a sports teacher senses promise. And so begins S Sajana’s cricket journey, her ₹150 daily allowance enough to keep her going. Earlier this year, when she was picked for ₹15 lakh by Mumbai Indians for the Women’s Premier League, she was able to pay off her family’s debts. Hope shines through Gwalda village in Haryana’s Mewat district where non-profit Cequin found it impossible to recruit girls to play football in 2012. This year, when the…

What can we learn from the tragic death by suicide of a Bengaluru techie tormented by demands he said his estranged wife and her family were making on him? In a 24-page note and 80-minute video, Atul Subhash details instances of ugly marital strife including what he describes as extortionist demands: ₹3 crore to settle cases filed by his wife, another ₹30 lakh for visitation rights to his four-year-old son. He talks also of the legal process—40 trips to the family court in Uttar Pradesh—and, specifically accuses the trial judge of harassment and corruption. A police complaint has been filed against the…

There is much to be concerned about the year gone by. The politics was the most divisive that I can remember. Wars and genocide raging and women’s rights from Afghanistan to the US under attack. Unabated crime and violence against women and the sobering reality that for too many of us the home is the most unsafe place to be. And then, there were the books Provocative, lyrical, brutal, honest, thought-provoking, entertaining, wry, heart-rending. What were some of the best books of 2024? My four judges are prolific readers and writers. They come from journalism and publishing. Coincidentally, since none…

In his concern over declining fertility and prescription for women to have more children—three please—RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat joins the chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. If Bhagwat’s stated apprehension is the fading away of languages and culture with dwindling populations, the chief ministers know a smaller population could impact both budgetary allocations and Parliamentary representation. The angst might seem premature in the world’s most populous nation of 1.4 billion people. Yet, around the world from South Korea, which has the world’s lowest fertility rate at 0.78, to the European Union, where the number of births in the 27…

Lack of empathy, a misplaced sense of entitlement, an exaggerated tendency to complain at the drop of a hat—and more. A three-star general’s letter in the name of a “pragmatic performance analysis” is a damning indictment of the leadership of eight women commanding officers who were then a part of corps headquarters. The five-page letter by corps commander Lt Gen Rajeev Puri to Eastern Army Commander Lt Gen Ram Chander Tiwari lists seven subheads of problematic areas relating to women commanding officers (COs). Sometimes difficult to decipher due to its extensive use of abbreviations, the letter dated October 1, was reported…

They met in 2017 over a phone conversation. She was then working at a call centre. They met a few times and in January 2019 began a sexual relationship. She now says it was forced and he had threatened her. In September she filed a police complaint accusing him of rape. He filed a petition in the Delhi high court to have the complaint quashed. Nope, said the court. He came to the Supreme Court. This week, a two-judge bench of justices BV Nagarathna and N Kotiswar Singh ruled that a consensual relationship which doesn’t end in marriage cannot be…

Sabeela, 50-ish with an easy smile, might not know what the AQI is or even what the letters stand for, but she does know this much: There are no off days for her. The math is simple. No work equals no earnings. “Everyone has to eat, whether the air is clean or not,” the vegetable vendor tells me. And so, heatwave or cold spell; unseasonal rains or air crisis, her routine never changes: Wake up at 4 am, stock up on the day’s supplies at the wholesale vegetable market at Ghazipur and tend to her thela (cart) from 8 am to…

In a ruling that will have an impact across the country, the Gujarat high court has said anganwadi workers and helpers in the state are entitled to be absorbed as permanent employees with all the benefits of government employees. Justice Nikhil S Kareil has asked the Gujarat government to prepare plans to induct these women as permanent government employees. An estimated 2.4 million all-women anganwadi workers and helpers in India, 100,000 in Gujarat, are officially classified as ‘volunteers’ who get an ‘honorarium’ and none of the benefits of maternity leave, pension and other benefits of government employees. They perform a…

Less than 24 hours before American voters cast their ballot, pundits and pollsters were dead sure of a close verdict. “National polling is neck and neck but even swing states are so,” conservative historian Niall Ferguson said in an interview. We know now that Donald Trump won, and decisively, 301 to Harris’s 226. It’s a victory that comes on the back of women voters, Latino voters and even African-American male voters. Far from being a coin toss, all the swing states fell behind Trump. Kamala Harris had the better funded campaign with far more celebrity endorsements from Beyonce to Taylor Swift. Why did…

After the mob set Darshan Kaur’s husband ablaze, she gathered her three children, the youngest just 15 days old, and bolted. In the frenzy, the baby slipped from 19-year-old Darshan’s hands. But there was no time to stop. For the next three days, she and the remaining two children ran from the police station to gurudwara searching for a safe place. There was none to be found. For three days following the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, by her Sikh bodyguards, the capital city was the epicentre of a mass massacre, as mobs, allegedly incited by Congress leaders and spurred…

With just days to go before voting day on November 5, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris made an open pitch to women. On Wednesday in Wisconsin, one of the key swing states, Trump made a Hail Mary promise to protect women, “whether women like it or not”. Kamala Harris immediately seized on the comment as offensive to women by denying them autonomy. “He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly,” she said at an election rally in Arizona, another swing state.…

In July 2016, Sakshi Malik got on to a 14-hour flight to New York City. From there she connected to another four-hour haul to Rio de Janeiro. When she would return home a few days later, she would be carrying in her bag the additional weight of a small circular disc: A bronze Olympic medal, a first for any woman wrestler in India. The impact of that weight will be felt for decades to come. Growing up, Sakshi recalls in her book, Witness, co-written with Jonathan Selvaraj, dangals—or mud-packed arenas where men grappled—were hugely popular in Haryana. But, “When I first…