The festival venue in Herat

The international Afghan film festival was organized for the first time on the occasion of Women’s day in the Afghan city, Herat. Cinema is difficult in Afghanistan, where religious, cultural and political problems come in the way of freedom of expression.

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.

“Kashmiri society seems to be turning intolerant towards the girl child. We seem to be nearing a society that desires to have an all-male population,” writes Rabia Noor.

Why does violence against women happen in the first place? Can one hold social and economic backwardness responsible? And what role does one’s upbringing play in creating the ‘Indian male?’ In her third blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet speaks about how the male identity changes when a person migrates from his village to a big city like New Delhi.