What Lies Beneath, A Feminist Exhumation
Are our lives governed by principles of carcerality, the most common being confinement, surveillance, and punishment? And what role does public space violence play in building a carceral logic into our lives?
Are the bargains that we make with the patriarchy system simply compromises, or necessary survival strategies that women craft for themselves? Reflecting on her own
In the finale episode of Season 1 of the F-Rated Interview, Suneeta takes us through her childhood in the mining town of Mahoba where she went from reading whatever scraps of newspaper she could find to becoming an award-winning journalist with Khabar Lahariya. For Suneeta, crime reporting is a source of great pleasure as she gets to look powerful people in the eye, and ask them questions.
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.
In this episode, Safina narrates bitter-sweet experiences of reporting within one’s own community and listening to women who are so rarely heard by anyone, let alone the mainstream media. Having found her feet in freelance journalism without giving in to the temptations of sensational breaking news, she states how free she feels when she is not bound by the editorial processes and policies of the newsroom.
In Kashmir, ‘young’ and ‘addiction’ have become synonymous. Now, a band of youngsters enjoying their youthful time around a lake is seen with intense suspicion and concern rather than amusement and well, nostalgia. (Jawaen chu jawaanihun lutf tulaan, as they say in Kashmir).
Food has been an issue for most of my life. It has stood like a giant question mark between my relationships, my friendships, outside my home, inside my home.
In November 2021, a group of eleven women found themselves sitting together in a room in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. Three of us (Anushi, Ekta and Angarika) had traveled from Bangalore, and the rest from different parts of Madhya Pradesh. There was a nervous energy in the room. “Why do you think we’ve all come here?”
The fourth episode features Neha Dixit who claims that journalists need their legs more than their brains. As she narrates experiences from sting operations and press releases, she demystifies investigative journalism and reveals how it’s not one mysterious tip but rather mundane legwork that breaks the biggest stories.
The third episode features Nidhi Suresh who takes us to Lakhimpur and Hathras, and makes visible the violence that takes place on the scene post the crime. She negotiates quid pro quo with local reporters and highlights the importance of slow and quiet questions even (and especially) when hordes of reporters are covering one story.
