As the eldest daughter of a Hindu family, I am expected to occupy a number of spaces that intertwine, merge and blur with the larger idea or identity that I like to believe is me, somewhere inside, that will still remain once the layers of cultural expectations, communally re-enforced values are taken away, not to [...]
All posts tagged Culture of India
Cartographies Of Struggle
Posted by Jaded on January 22, 2011
http://jaded16.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/cartographies-of-struggle/
Breathing As The ‘Eternal She’
As a DustyLady who completely and absolutely hates restrictive dichotomies, more often than not I’m squeezed into a tiny box of stereotypes so tight I eventually grow claustrophobic and completely disinterested, barely an inch away from completely disengaging myself from these situations. As Women Of The Broken World, we’re supposed to be either poor, limitless, undeniably open to possession [...]
Posted by Jaded on December 17, 2010
http://jaded16.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/breathing-as-the-eternal-she/
Tales This Tongue Didn’t Twist
There is a story my father likes to tell when people ask him what his eldest daughter wants to do ‘with her life’. It seems that I was 13 and determined when I’d interrupted his important business call to say, “When I grow up, I’ll be a famous Lady Author” with hands on my hips [...]
Posted by Jaded on December 14, 2010
http://jaded16.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/tales-this-tongue-didnt-twist/
Learning Relevance Through Erasure
One of the few things people connect with India besides Slumdog Millionaire and hub of cheap Third World labour are the epics Ramayan and Mahabharat — which are of course, anglicised to Ramayana and Mahabharata. Almost always, these epics are seen as the narrativisation of ‘the great oral tradition of storytelling’, basing this tradition in [...]
Posted by Jaded on May 6, 2011
http://jaded16.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/learning-relevance-through-erasure/