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?
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?
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?
When going into the cinema turned into clicking through OTT platforms during the pandemic, we adapted to the 1920 x 1080 screen size and relegated the good ol’ Talkies to nostalgia. But cinema is not only a medium for story-telling, is it? It also stands as a character, bearing witness to a changing city—who enters, who leaves mid-way, and who stays.
As part of our series ‘Mann ke Mukhaute’ exploring mental landscapes from an experiential standpoint, the second episode features Sudha Arora’s story Rahogi Tum Wahi, an account of a woman at the other end of emotional violence.
As part of our Public Health issue, we are turning an inward eye to look at our mental experiences, and how they intersect with the health and state systems. In an attempt to move away from pathological and clinical readings and move towards learning from lived experiences, our podcast series Mann Ke Mukhaute interweaves fictional stories and experiential voice notes.
As the outside slowly opens up to life after the deadly second wave of the pandemic, the inside is still grappling with absence, loss, death, fear and loneliness. This episode we meet people who navigated, and continue to navigate these feelings on their own.
Kaam ya Aaraam? Is that a gendered question?
