Women Empowerment for Human Empowerment

Mahabharata - an ancient Indian epic revolving around the feud between the sons of two brothers, Dhritarashtra and Pandu, of the Kuru dynasty in the Hastinapur kingdom. Pandavas were five sons of Pandu and Kauravas were a hundred sons of Dhritarashtra. Pandavas were Yudhisthir, Bheem, Arjun, Nakul, and Sahdev. Duryodhan was the eldest among the Kauravas. Now the kingdom was run by the blind king Dhritarashtra as Pandu has long ago given up the throne due to a curse and then died when the Pandavas were ver y young. Though Yudhisthir was the eldest among all the Pandavas and Kauravas, Duryodhana considered himself the rightful heir to the throne. When Yudhisthir was declared the heir of the throne of Hastinapur, Duryodhana schemed to kill Pandavas and their mother by burning them alive i n a palace made of a flammable substance, lacquer. Pandavas were able to save themselves and t heir mother from the fire. After that, they married Draupadi. Destiny led to such an unusual arrangemen...

  A Woman Has No Home and No Surname Unfortunately, this is the truth of a woman’s life. I have battled this idiom, called it unfair, and stressed the fact that women are luckier to have two homes but the truth became clear as sparkling water when I was forced to leave my matrimonial house. I had no home to call my own. Homeless, I was taken away by my brother to my paternal house. No! Actually, it is my maternal house. After being in the marriage for more than twenty-five years, my mother earned the prestige of having a home in her name. But I was in the marriage for fourteen years, still, I was not considered a part of their house. Only after two months did I get permission to stay in the matrimonial house, citing it as my legal right. Where do women go for the days in between? These two months presented a stark reality of this society where a woman truly does not have a home.  Image Credit: Endo-Resolved A year back, I finally got the PAN with the surname of my husband, bef...

When will the obsession with fair skin end? When a child is born, it is oblivious of the fact about its skin color but as it grows the people around make it realize what the skin color is. The way people talk to a fair-skinned baby and the way they interact with a dark-skinned baby differs. It is easily visible to the child in talks, looks, and ways of handling. As the child grows they begin to observe how their skin color is compared to others. If the skin color is fair then they feel relieved that they are up to the societal mark and if not then the pressure begins. The seed for the need for fair skin is rooted right then and as the child grows into an adult, the obsession with fair skin keeps growing. The societal obsession has played its part and now the advertisers are doing their part by showcasing fair skin people as beautiful and smearing the same fair skin person with dark make-up to show how ugly they look when they are dark. The songs and movies never fail to stream how a fa...

Why do women give the least priority to their health? Mala is a thirty-year-old housewife who is juggling looking after her one-year-old daughter, doing household chores, and taking care of her in-laws and her husband. She was married at the age of 25, before that she was disciplined about her exercise and diet regime. But after marriage, she hardly gets time to exercise. She needs to be ready at 8 am so that she could serve breakfast to her father-in-law, then prepare tiffin for her husband and send him off at 9 am. This requires her to be in the kitchen at 7 am and this does not leave her with enough time to do her exercise. Now that she has a daughter it has become impossible for her to think of her health. Though she knows only proper exercise, diet and rest can give her mental and physical health yet she has never made other family members aware of her needs and this has become a routine for all. Nancy is forty years old and she works as an assistant manager in an IT company. Thou...

What is it that people remember most about their lives? Probably marriage! It is empirically the most important part of our lives. I always believed that marriages are made in heaven.  It was perhaps the only part of my life for the past fourteen years. But, unfortunately, when this marriage part of my life came shattering down, I had nothing to cling to except my two kids. So here I was in the middle of nowhere, knowing not a thing about what to do with my life. I have never thought of my life without marriage. I have never thought of my life living outside the web that my marriage has created around me. Knowing that certain activities in the domain of our marriage are wrong morally and as a person would view it outwardly, it should not be accepted inwardly. But the comfort of my marriage and its deadly tentacles never let me think of life outside it, and I was so engrossed in it that I blocked that part of my mind that could reason. Finally, when the activities of my spouse becam...