Everything was a failure that day,” says Jyoti’s companion on that fateful ride. From the taxi drivers who ignored the rules to the police “not working properly,” to the hospital facilities, which were “very poor”, to the indifference of the passers-by. In her last blog in the series on the rape incident that occurred last year in December in India, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet tries to capture the plight of the average Indian citizen.

Anjali: Managing her work and personal life with finesse

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided to revoke the work-from-home policy last month. Her decision provoked a lot of outrage all over the world. CEO of the internet portal Best Buy, Hubert Joly, took a similar decision, but the criticism this time was much lesser. This is primarily because all hoped that Mayer, a female CEO, who was hired when she was 37 and five months pregnant at that time would bring in some cool business ideas to balance work and life out of work.

Who? A 39 year old Swiss woman tourist travelling with her husband.

Where? Datia district, Madhya Pradesh, India. The couple was on a cycling tour and decided to camp overnight in a forest a few yards away from the main road.

When? In the night of March 15, 2013.

What? Raped.

What happened to 23-year-old Jyothi, Nirbhaya or Damini as people know her, was a snowballing of attitudes and hackneyed traditional modes of thinking. In her next blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet talks about how Indian society is having a tough time deciding whether to be modern or to be western. Indian women are also partly unwilling to give up the comforts of tradition- of having the security and protection of the Indian family.

Meena Kandasamy leaves no stone unturned when she wants to express herself. Probably that’s the reason why her anger and her angst reveal themselves in her poetry through her “dark and dangerous” language.  Meena’s poem, “Nailed”  from her book “Ms. Militancy” is a good example.

Copyright: Clara Leone

Samar Minallah is a prominent human rights activist and documentary film maker from Pakistan. Her documentary “Swara: bridge over troubled waters” analyses the Swara tradition, according to which a family gives one of its girls as compensation to an aggrieved family instead of blood money. Minallah actively speaks out against what she calls “culturally sanctioned forms of violence against women”  and condemns the “patriarchal mindset” behind such violence.

Mitu’s twin daughters

Mitu Khurana is a doctor who been fighting for years against female foeticide. She has been a victim of her parents-in-law who tried everything in their power to stop Mitu from giving birth to her twin girls. She has now become the woman who champions the cause of baby girls and an activist who leaves no stone unturned to create awareness on the problem of sex selection.