Tanushree Sandhu

The word “beauty” in a woman conjures the image of a svelte lady with big beautiful eyes, long lustrous hair, smooth skin, a sharp nose, rosy lips and a captivating smile with dimples on her cheeks.

Who is a feminist? Are feminists groups of women fighting to change the world order, organizing a coup d’état to overthrow the “regime” of men? Are feminists women who organize rallies and scream slogans around the street?

For a woman belonging to the lower middle class,whose family shifted into a new country following the partition of India and Pakistan, life was a struggle. At the prime of youth, life takes on the scene of  a constant battle when you discover that you suffer from bipolar disorder. Saima Salman writes for “Success comes in all shapes and sizes.”

Most times, it’s about being fat, maybe too fat, as in the case of Holley Mangold, the US weightlifter who tips the scales at 157 kilograms and has been constantly suffering jibes about her ‘obvious’ weight problem.  But what is your take on the connection between how you look and what you achieve?

Dear readers, thank you very much for the enthusiastic response we received for our blog competition announced in June. It was very exciting to know what you think about education and the kind of experiences you have had at school.

"Slutwalk" programmes are an attempt to sensitize men towards their female contemporaries

Sherlyn Chopra is the first Indian woman to feature in Playboy. The Indian media is choc-a-bloc with news about the model, her life and challenges, the hardships she faced and the accolades she won after she was chosen to “decorate” the pages of Playboy. The media in India obviously knows that this will generate a lot of interest, and it has. Until now, Indian newspapers and magazines have been trying to create the impression that they are simply presenting the “facts” as they are. Strangely enough, in a country which has seen a couple of shocking incidents of crime against women in the past few weeks, nobody has commented on the social impact of Sherlyn’s “contribution” to Playboy or that of other scantily clad stars.

This is a blog entry for the DW-Womentalkonline blog competition.  Sudipta Mahapatra, an Indian software professional working in Bonn, writes about her heartfelt experiences and feelings of nostalgia for her years at school.