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. Her questions about the self and measures to take care of that self made everyone on the Zoom call think ‘Main kab badi huyi?’ (When did I grow up?).
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.
“Tumhari chahat kya hai? Tum kya chahti ho?” (What do you desire?) When was the last time we asked an adolescent what they think about their desires? How can we see their lives from their perspective?
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. Then, college ends…
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 meanings.
In the second episode of the series, Madhuri talks to two single women from Uttar Pradesh – Seema, a 27 years old journalist and Shabo, a 28 years old mobiliser and informal worker who tell us how they found a family of ekal in the city.
What does it mean to be a single woman, when it’s not in a metropolis? What are the experiences of being single, without the romanticisation of the urban? What is the nature of singlehood that may not yet be defined, but may be as rich as life itself?
