Salaam-e-Ishq

Saw it with BikerGirl yesterday. Matinee on a holiday; I thought the theatre would be full, but it wasn’t.  We got our tickets, plonked ourselves confortably on our seats and sat and watched a more-than-three-hour-long movie.
I had fun; lots of fun. There were bits where I smiled with the characters, almost cried with them, there [...]

Birds, again

As is usual at this time of the year, I’m watching birds build their nests. Two sparrows, building nests in the same tree. Hopping over once in a while to tweet at one another. Showing each other bits of grass and fallen feathers, contemplating them with all the seriousness of people looking over upholstery in an [...]

“Civilised debate”

Kalpana Sharma writes in the Hindu of how “the vicious anger of a group of men who feel women have wronged them seems to be out of proportion with the reality“, and of how it’s important to have a civilised debate if you want to maintain perspective.
A day or two before I read that, I [...]

Greer, Pratchett, and what science ignores

I wrote earlier today of how science ignores women and their reality, in the context of discovering what I have may be catamenial epilepsy. And then, on the bus home, I was thinking of Germaine Greer’s comments on menstruation*
It is assumed that nature is a triumph of design, and that none of her processes is [...]

Gendering Science

There’s a doc I consulted in Delhi - this fantastic older woman who, post-retirement at the top of her field in India, is an active researcher and clinician. She’d seen me first when I was in college and she was the Head of Neurology at NIMHANS, then when I was in Delhi and she moved [...]

Compassion

BikerGirl and I (me?) were having a heart-to-heart, and began to wonder about writing that evokes empathy, and writers who are good at doing it. Or speakers, for that matter. There are books, articles, essays that create that strange feeling, an identity with what is being written about. Situations, people far from our own realities, [...]

Body (or, What could be)

Her back hurt from all the contractions. The muscles in her thighs felt like she’d been climbing flight after flight after flight of stairs. Tomorrow, the cramps would begin.
She sat before the screen, refusing to pay attention to the pain. It was easy when she had people to talk to, conversations she had to pay [...]