Evescape

    OPINION Am I allowed in? By Dr. Shalini Yadav I love writing. Over time my writing revolved around being a mother, a daughter, a wife, in my roles of a woman. I’d never imagined that there will come a day when I would be writing from the outside in. As someone who falls in an hitherto unexplored category…a widow. I found that all occasions in the world for celebrating womanhood leave this one category of woman out. Every such celebration brings into startling focus in a widow’s mind the question… Am I allowed in? What am I supposed to do? Where do I fit in with this huge multitude with a significant part of whose life I can no longer identify? Whose ongoing stories of love, companionship, shared responsibilities I can empathise but not identify with anymore. It’s no longer a world I inhabit. No longer the path I walk. Who am I? Where do I belong? Because like it or not, a widow is a pariah, even to the women’s world. Even today. Subtly, but surely. It wasn’t until I was be...

This International Women's Day, Kita Devi and her friends had a lot to celebrate! Zhurram, 30 something, hails from Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. Dressed in a salwar kameez, she is sitted on a bench, engrossed in copying some letters written on a black-board. Sitting besides her on the same bench is Indravati Berma (24), a mother of two and native of Basti, a district in Uttar Pradesh. On the bench behind them is Zannathan Nisha Ali, also from Basti and Rukma Saren from Karnataka. In a tiny class room of a dilapidated government school building in Borda, some three kilometeres from the commercial town of Margao, the lives of these women are getting transformed. Thanks to the Chalo School Mega Drive initiative, women in their 30s and  40s, all from the migrant population, are able to read, write and do math. The education of these women is the beginning of a virtuous cycle, for themselves, their families and the entire community. For educating a woman means transforming liv...