Arrupe Canteen is home to acidity-inducing Zinger burgers and a colourful range of other packaged foods that sustain a bustling college population. I try to be mildly health-conscious, especially when people are watching, so I usually keep my distance from its energy drink, chips and candy-covered counters.
I once taught a girl whose laughter made me think of falling water on stones. I recall the sound of it as clearly as I recall how often and how willingly she told me jokes. On the day her friends left on a trip, I asked her, ‘Priskilla, why didn’t you go to Bali?’ She said, ‘Ma’am, my purse was khaali.’
We send people to jail so we don’t have to think about them. What happens in jail, we’d rather not know. Or if we do, it’s through beefy heroes who beat the ‘criminal’ to pulp, preferably in slow motion.
Among the many gifts that the classroom throws in my face, one that I am equally envious and enamored by is the beehive of female friendships all around me.
In this new episode of Bolti Kahaniyan, Dipta Bhog narrates ‘Hekdi’, a story by writer Vijaydan Detha. This story is taken from the Hindi translation of his anthology ‘Batan Ri Phulwadi’ published by Rajasthani Granthagar.
Harjant Gill, a documentary filmmaker and scholar who has made multiple documentaries on Indian masculinity(ies), says, “One of the challenging things about talking about masculinity is that you engage men in this conversation and they don’t really know where to go with it, or like, how to even interrogate it…
Work on gender in the development and social sector has traditionally engaged with women and girls. It was only in the mid-90s that some NGOs started working with men and boys on issues of gender. One of the first entry points for this was population control and reproductive health where they were encouraged to use condoms and to accompany their pregnant wives to healthcare centres.
It is often said that a film should either entertain, engage, or educate (not in the same order though). And in our country, one obsessed with cinema, we expect a film to entertain us and make everything larger than life and extraordinary.
One evening, last year, I finally coaxed my mother to sit down and take pause from constantly running around the house. I had been following her around for days to have this conversation. Sometimes, she silently smiled, and at other times, she eluded me. But that evening, she let her guard down.
“A library is not about buying shelves and putting in books. Anyone can do that! It’s about how one can put their heart and soul into it. You have to invest dil se.”
