Looking at the human experience – especially as it intersects with desire, sexuality, sex, body, age, violence, hunger and thirst – through the lens of the psyche.
In this audio documentary, Menaka Rao, an award-winning health journalist, examines abortion through the lenses of health, law and disability. Using research on court procedures and interviews with specialists and stakeholders, including women who have had or wanted an abortion, Menaka lays out the socio-legal landscape of a woman’s need for a safe abortion.
The much-discussed arrival of AI-generated text into the literary realm has cast us into a new era of authorship: nothing you publish online is free from its radar, ever. In this excerpt from her investigative book Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (HarperCollins, 2025), Vauhini Vara writes about how the accessibility of these tools, trained on huge data sets but constantly trawling the internet for more, brought an avalanche of ‘polished’, writing.
Vauhini Vara’s book is a personal history refracted through the history of technological capitalism. She shows us how generative technology, a mere imitation of human articulation, reaches a dead end when it comes to communication. She traces the then and now of digital innovation, and what is being mediated for us emotionally through the companies that design our personal chatbots.
The Third Eye presents Harishankar Parsai’s Ek Ladki Paanch Deewane (one girl, five lovers) as part of our feminist fiction anthology — because we don’t need women to call themselves feminists in order to be interested in their lives.
This is Part V in a series on the psyche and sexuality, based on the author’s research, reflections and analysis, and looks at the sexual fantasies that seemingly pose a threat to our feminist politics. The essays in this series explain key psychoanalytic concepts and offer pedagogical possibilities while working on sexuality.
The digital world was supposed to give us the freedom to exist as we are, as who we can be. Yet, we’ve seen patriarchal structures underlying the way intimacy is shared online. Dating apps animate the romance of seeing our fullest selves — but do they continue to be liberating opportunities? Or is this one more way of getting locked into an identity?
The figure of the ‘stand-up comedian’, a lone performer who directly delivers jokes to the audience mostly without props, is very new to South Asia. But the ‘jester’ or the ‘fool’ is a scandalous — and thriving — figure in popular folk theatre, an art form that continues to captivate the majority of the region.
When young landlord Chainsingh sets his eyes on Muliya, a young Dalit woman who regularly peels and gathers grass from his field, he is spellbound by her beauty and grace. Happily married and simply uninterested, Muliya fiercely refuses the landlord’s advances. But when Muliya realises the power she holds over this dominant-caste man, will her desire change?
If you have lived through or ever wondered about the era of rented cassette tapes and video parlours, this essay is for you. At the heart of this piece is a feminist curiosity around what women were doing, gazing at and blushing about during the heyday of video films.
Legal sanctions permit little, if any, breathing room for queer intimacies. And yet, such experiences of desire survive in silos, real-world or digital. Cybercafes, anonymous chat rooms, and dimly-lit apartments are all witness to the loneliness epidemic — exacerbated all the more for queer folks despite recent protections.
