“Baba, how does one become a Bayen (witch)?” Bhagirath asks his father Malinder near the dead lake as the shadow of his estranged mother looms over him. The recollecting of who his mother was and how she was ostracized as a witch from the Dom community in this story by Mahasweta Devi, is the unfolding of the myth of Bayen and the reality of witch-hunt.
When Muskan said “Hamare yahaan yeh sab chalta hi nahi hai” (These things aren’t allowed in our areas), we couldn’t help but notice that she said it for feeling love as well as anger.
Sahiba learns from Google, calls it her teacher and navigates her everyday—from getting things done to finding about her mental health—on Google.
In feminist organisations and within the academic discourse, we sit with the term ‘safe space’ quite often and roll it in our mouth to reiterate how multifarious and ever changing that term is.
‘Mera Chashma, Mere Rules’, a three-episode podcast produced by The Third Eye in collaboration with Partners for Law in Development (PLD), brought 4 girls between the ages of 18–20, hailing from different religions, states, social and familial setups to discuss the range of adolescent experiences which seldom become the subject of policy discussion.
We are turning an inward eye to look at our mental experiences, and how they intersect with societal structures. In an attempt to move away from pathological and clinical readings and move towards lived experiences, our podcast series Mann Ke Mukhaute interweaves fictional stories and experiential voice notes.
We have been meeting single women in small-town and rural India in our Ekal podcast series. In Episode 4, we meet a collective of single women in Marathwada, Maharashtra. What happens when the singular turns into a collective?
Meena, Annie and Nayantara–‘the three girls from St. Agnes’–feel that they rule the world. They are dancers, they light cities on fire travelling from festival to festival, they revel in each other, and oh that glory–friendships.
My first meeting with Annu was over a Zoom call at 7 pm on a Thursday. The past few months I had been meeting with women from rural areas and kasbahs who shared with me their stories of being ekal (single).
In this episode, Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own travels to the tehsil of Ajmer, Kekri in Rajasthan, and meets Annu, a 31-year-old woman who gives it her own meaning. What does this room look like today?
