Maybe you aren’t a violent would-be sex offender.
Maybe you are a nice guy with a libido.
Maybe you actually do respect women.
Maybe you can see my brains and my spirit in addition to my body too.
Maybe you can be a real friend.
Maybe you’ll stand by me longer than a night or two.
But consider this,
I live in [...]

For the first time ever,
in my conscious memory,
none of my dreams
or things that I look forward to
in the future with anticipation
have anything to do with a man.
Isn’t that something? Even if it did take me three decades to get to it.
It was so worth it.

Yesterday I went out with a friend whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in eight years. This is one of my memorable Facebook moments since that’s how I found him after all these years. It was an odd, intense friendship back then and for various reasons, we just lost touch. How wonderful it was [...]

The Knife comes up against a different kind of gender stereotype and defies it in his own way.
One opinion voiced in the article was that men cook by rules, follow recipes to the step… wouldn’t know that you can dilute coconut milk powder in water if there is no coconut milk and so on. The [...]

It occurs to me that I’m in the final stages of recuperation. Or rather, I’m like someone who was ill for a very long time without knowing it, then hospitalised, recovered, had a relapse and is now watching the last of the scabs fall off, the scars fade away.
Melodramatic, isn’t it? That’s what the decade [...]

Late one night as I was driving down the city, I looked up at a huge billboard of Sushmita Sen, an advertisement for Kiah jewellery, which said,

You are the occasion
You are the celebration
I told him,
I really love that ad!
He smiled and said,
You would. It celebrates you, after all.
~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~
Earlier in the month, I wrote about my [...]

I loved, loved, loved the series. I’ve quoted the episodes on this blog ad infinitum. Look, I even have a special SATC quote generator running in my sidebar!! And of course I went for the movie with my galpals decked out to the nines and full of trepedition. The movie wasn’t quite as great but [...]

I went diamond-shopping this weekend. Last year I received a corporate pat-on-the-back with a financial award. Someone suggested that I spend it on jewelery instead of frittering it away on clothes, books and shoes. It took me months but I finally agreed.
It’s not even the first major purchase I made, even for jewellery. I saved [...]

I’m reading a book called Rubbish Boyfriends. But hang on, that’s not all that’s responsible for this mood o’ mine. I’ve been talking (and talking and talking) to the following women:
A has been steadily (as opposed to happily) married to a ‘Who says we get it right the first time?’ pedigree-carrier.
B is married to the [...]

I’ll be a mother some day, I said
He said, You’ll need a man for that.
I replied,
I didn’t say I wanted to be pregnant.
I said I wanted to be a mother.
You don’t need anybody but a child for that.

Books, clothes, lingerie, perfumes, shoes, music – they’re all expensive. Can’t be helped. Some things are worth paying for. And myself is definitely worth it.
Charge it to my card, please.
The best part of financial independence is not needing to account to someone else.
~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~
A modern Indian woman is an Indian woman still. Family will always be [...]

Women…….
burnt their bras. donned leggings and in some cases the pants in the family.
picked up swords and knives and eventually guns. also ploughs. and pens. and hammers.
went to work. demanded a vote. ran for politics. were good leaders. and bad ones.
learnt maths and science and accounts. flew aircrafts. then rockets.
threw hand grenades. wrote poetry. and [...]

Choice…that’s a good word. The key word for my generation of women. What sets us apart from the women who fought for a vote, the ones who burnt their bras or threw off their aprons and went to work? The fact that we have a choice. We are the ones who are enjoying the fruits of their labors, their sacrifices. As much as I crib about the state of things and how we are still backward in our stereotyping attitudes, I know I’m exceptionally lucky.

I don’t have to have a career. I could just as well be an liberal-minded daughter-in-law and then a modern mum. Or I could be an independent businesswoman. I could be a professional, a social worker, a writer, a travel correspondent….anything at all. I could be any combination of all of them.