Mental health continues to remain a taboo topic in India despite the high suicide rates in the country. Roma Rajpal-Weiß, WTO Reporter spoke to Dr. Vikram Patel, renowned psychiatrist and the co-founder of NGO Sangath and the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine about the stigma attached to mental health in India and the measures that can be undertaken to give rich and the poor equal access to mental healthcare.

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India’s elite is once again getting excited about a video. This time it is a 2-minute video starring Bollywood actress Deepika Padukone and 98 other women including famous names like Director Zoya Akhtar and actress Nimrat Kaur. Padukone’s video ‘My Choice’ is the latest in the series of the Vogue Empower campaign that aims to raise awareness about women’s rights in the country.

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‘Singleton’ is not a privilege given to many women in South Asia. We are ‘protected’ closely by our families and then given away in marriage to the man who will ‘protect’ us. We grow up in one nest and then just before we get a chance to fly, the wings are clipped a little and we settle into another nest.

Photoshopped in India (Copyright: Esther Honig)

“Make me beautiful” was the assignment. Esther Honig, a freelance journalist based in Kansas City, sent out an unaltered photo of herself to Photoshop experts around the world and she asked the experts to make her look beautiful according to the beauty standards of the country. Her project Before & After compiles the astounding results that she collected. It went viral on social media last year. WTO Blogger Roma Rajpal Weiß interviewed Honig on her project.

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39-year-old Indian investment banker-turned-novelist Chetan Bhagat has touched the pulse of India’s youth with six bestselling novels. He talks to Women Talk Online about his first screenplay for the Salman Khan starrer, Kick.

Last week, an interesting post was doing the rounds in social media: 26 questions people from India are sick of answering. In the years I have been living abroad, I have been confronted with these questions over and over again. Do you speak ‘Hindu?’ Which caste do you belong to? But you actually pray to cows right?

As an afterthought, I thought one more question could be added to the list, the question that perhaps all Indians were confronted with in the year 2013: what is wrong with the men in your country? What about the ‘rape culture’ in India?. I have been repeatedly asked this question and I am always at loss for an answer. Where do I begin?