How Early is Too Early?

AT THE PRESCHOOL that I run (where I also teach), there’s a certain action song we sing that goes like this: Cook like mummy, Yum, yum, yum, (repeat thrice) Let’s have fun together! Drive like daddy, Knit like grandma, Cough like grandpa…. …and by the time we come to “Be like teacher, Shh, shh, shh!” [...]

Is it just me…

…OR ARE THERE other folks out there who don’t find this funny? No, I’m not wildly outraged. And neither am I a curmudgeon whose sense of humor is permanently trekking in the Himalayas. I’m well aware that sexist ‘jokes’ exist and we’re expected to ‘lighten up’ and not bristle in annoyance at the historically derogatory [...]

Girl Friday at the University

She wanders like a flimsy ghost in the two-hundred-year-old university where love thrives in large abandoned third-floor classrooms, monkeys shag on corridors, restless gossip piles up like dirty dishes in the canteen, and young women learn some tough lessons.

Gender Denied: India’s Transgender Community

AS CHILDREN, we were scared of them. At traffic signals or on local trains, they would stroll up, their gait nonchalant, voices raised. Above all, different. (What is it about us that fears difference so much?) Last month, while on a project visit to slums in Chennai, I felt a twinge of discomfort when I [...]