Which colour would you like to wear on the most important day of your life? I say peach. But unlike me, most women in Pakistan would prefer wearing black, according to a Gallup survey in Pakistan. The empirical research was conducted to mark women’s day and was released recently. It studied several women’s issues, including their favourite colour and forms of violence they had been subjected to.

16-year-old Malala may be a heroine in her own right, having survived an attack by the Taliban. However, people in her country think there is a huge hype around her created by the local media. Afghanistan’s parliament is scheduled to discuss a law which will protect men who have committed crimes against women and bar dancers in Mumbai are getting back their jobs.

Find out which women’s themes made it to the headlines in South Asia.

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.

Fakhria (Zia) Maiwand, my lovely grandmother and daughter of Azizullah Maiwand the great-grandson of Tatar Baba, who was a known tribal leader in the Battle of Maiwand, in which the British Empire was defeated for the first time in history

“Waslat! Tell your cousin to move his head away from your shoulder or I’ll pick his eyes out” she yells at me. The lights have gone out in Kabul and it is dark in our apartment. With her long white hair and fair complexion, she reminds me of a ghost.

 Two little girls were sitting on a crochet table cloth spread under a tree in the garden. A woman was sitting on a green wooden bench nearby, multitasking as she talked on a cell phone and kept an eye on the girls simultaneously. Sitting some 50 meters away from them, I could hear the woman titter. The person on the other end of the phone was probably cracking jokes. The sound of her laughter put an inadvertent smile on my face.

She had a face that launched a thousand ships, they said of Helen of Troy. The “face” triggered the Trojan wars when Helen left her husband the departed for Troy with her lover Paris. Since then, the story has lived on as a reminder to the dangers of illicit love affairs and infidelity. Now at least one top soldier is in trouble again because of an illlicit love affair with a beautiful woman. This time around the lady in question is not Helen, but Paula. Paula Broadwell to be precise.

The first time I met her, I noticed her branded handbag, her golden wrist watch, her light pink wrinkle-free coat and a black chiffon scarf carefully wrapped around her head. I wondered if that was what she was all about. In my next talk with her, I realised there was more to her than her impressive carriage and subtle, yet strong arguments.