Where feminist theory comes out to play, where the ism itself is gloriously complicated in the actual living of lives; radical, messy, round shapes in square holes. We look at collectives, communities, protests, articulations of self and everyday, paying attention to seasons and emotions, finding the feminist cosmos in raindrops.
It was 1989. I think. I had been asked to speak to a group of women who worked in NGOs across Tamil Nadu. The meeting was organised by Legal Resources for Social Action (LRSA), a group in Chinglepet not far from Chennai. I was to unpack the historical contexts of legislation that pertained to women’s lives.
On Dr. Ambedkar’s 131st Birth Anniversary, The Third Eye asked a few professors and teachers about how Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar influenced their teaching.
I once had a student who didn’t speak much and said only what she wanted to say and even then, very little. She wasn’t shy or afraid to speak. She was just so careful with words that she refused to speak until she knew exactly what she wanted to say.
Srija’s Mind Map is imagined by Devika Sundar, an artist who works with art as a restorative, meditative medium, to express collective themes of invisibility, illness, memory and impermanence within personal and shared human experience.
I learnt the verbal construction of grammatically correct English sentences for the first time in Class IV when my friends secretly chuckled at my mispronounced words. Until then, I hadn’t realised that my excessive knowledge of Tamil had done nothing to win them over. The convent school in my small town seemed to like my English; what happened along the way?
Lists, of any kind, are subjective and offer only a partial view. Given the rich history of non-fiction films in India on the urban – across time and geography – condensing them into a list will always be an incomplete task.
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).
Jyoti was the first girl from her village, Sawau Moolraj in Rajasthan to migrate to the city for a better education—a decision taken by her parents because the village had no such infrastructure. Since then, Jyoti has been an outsider-insider, moving in and out of her village home.
Nasreen looks at the metropolis of Delhi from the terrace of her house in Kashmiri Gate, the only space where she can move freely. She takes us through her private and her public as she thinks about her friendships, her various rendezvous, and her desires standing at the top of her terrace.
Ruhaan’s Mind Map is imagined by Kalki, a transgender activist, artist, entrepreneur, poet, actor and inspirational speaker based in Tamil Nadu. Presenting our fourth Mind Map of the series, where Ruhaan and Kalki discover that helping put the past behind us may be the greatest reward of art.
