Category: Women in Worksplace

Mocking their Own Sensibilities: What Were Popular Female Actors Doing to Themselves Last Year?

In an outlandish scene in a treacherously banal film called Happy New Year released last year, lead actress Deepika Padukone listens naively awestruck as her co-star, popular Hindi film actor Shah Rukh Khan, taking advantage of her limited knowledge of the English language, makes vulgar comments any woman would be outraged at. Padukone who interestingly made headlines last year for …

Queen: A Fresh Perspective on Women

Bollywood movies are usually about heroism where a man rescues and comforts the female character and takes responsibility to fix all problems. Most sucessful Bollywood films have a male superstar in the lead role. However, looking at the recent trends in Bollywood we can see that there is a small shift from the typical movies to a new kind of …

Elections and Women

The 2014 Lok Sabha elections declared their results yesterday. First things first, congratulations to our new Indian Prime Minister, Mr. Modi. As a social media jockey, I have followed these elections very closely. There is no questioning the fact that these were the most ruthlessly fought elections in recent times where the ruling party was desperate to reclaim its power, …

Feminism or Basic Human Rights?

Growing up in an ordinary, military, middle-class family, I didn’t expect myself to become a feminist. When I was a teenager, the prevailing view was that feminism meant being anti-men. Feminists were women who were divorced, widowed, or victims of abuse and hated everything to do with men. They lobbied for women’s freedoms only so that they could take away …

Woman in a Man’s World

A walk near a construction site in my city made me think about the involvement of women in male-oriented jobs. What caught my eye was the large number of women working with their children at the site. These women were doing the same heavy lifting as men, while constantly taking care of their children. One of the women there told …

The Bollywood Hypocrisy Around Women Rights

A couple of weeks prior to Women’s Day, a documentary based on a women’s vigilante group, The Gulaabi Gang, was released in India. The production of this documentary started in 2009, after the director Nishtha Jain, met the organization’s leader Sampat Pal Devi. She has been a champion of women’s rights for decades. She has fought against child marriage, the …