ThinkHer

When the morning bells ring at 6'o clock with the TikTok of the big winding clock that adorned the drawing room we hear our father calling us to wake up and be ready with for the day. Along with that we hear the adjustment of the nob of the big radio kept in the tall tripod radio stand. Because it was the AM (Amplitude Modulation)era and there was much difficulty to get the sounds clear especially if there were any clouds or disturbances in the atmosphere. The sounds get clearer with the iconic signature tune that represented All India Radio composed by Walter Kaufman. Then comes "Vante Mataram',a small briefing up of news and the bhajans, mostly lead by Lata Mangeshkar's "Meera Bhajans". And this used to be our daily routines on an era where radio broadcasting ruled as the primary media till the 1980s. Created by Chat GPT Everyday life - the games, the goodness, the cheer, the songs whether in Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, English, Tamil or Malayalam - all were eq...

Haimabati Sen, born Haimabati Ghosh, was among the earliest female physicians in colonial India. A woman who transformed her unimaginable early trauma into a lifelong mission of healing and social change. Her life embodies resilience, quiet courage, and a refusal to accept the limitations imposed on women of her time. Haimabati was born in 1866 in the Khulna district of the then Bengal Presidency, into a Kulin Kayastha zamindar family. Her father, a zamindar, was unusually liberal for his time — he allowed her to wear male attire and to study alongside her male cousins, a rare privilege for a girl in that era. Y et, societal norms prevailed. At the mere age of nine, she was married off to a 45-year-old widower and Deputy Magistrate with two daughters nearly her own age.  Her husband’s behaviour exposed her, at a very young age, to unsettling and sexually abusive circumstances. He forced himself on her, leaving her frightened and still — “like a piece of wood,” she later wrote....

In the crowded pantheon of science, Ada Lovelace stands out as a rare woman whose name has survived the fog of time. Unlike many of her contemporaries, whose accomplishments were buried under the anonymity of their male peers, Lovelace has remained visible, appearing in graphic novels and reimagined period dramas as both scientist and legend. She is often celebrated as the world’s first computer programmer while others have dismissed her as an overhyped amateur, known more for being the daughter of the poet Lord Byron than for her scientific contributions.  Ada Lovelace daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet Born Augusta Ada Byron in London on December 10, 1815, she entered the world in the shadow of her father’s tumultuous fame. Her parents’ marriage dissolved just weeks after her birth, and Byron left England, never to see his daughter again. Her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke, whom Byron teasingly called the "Princess of Parallelograms,” was determined that Ada would not inherit her ...

 I believe that a nation that has to protect its women rather than empower them has a problem. One has to understand that power hides itself in the language of protection and purity. This is where the statement, "Fundamentalism uses women's bodies as a battlefield in its struggle to appropriate institutional power", by Malathi De Alwis, makes sense. Malathi de Alwis ©Colombo Telegraph Malathi de Alwis is a pioneering Sri Lankan anthropologist, feminist scholar, peace activist and a teacher. Born on 6 October 1963 in Sri Lanka, she earned her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. She spent her career unpacking the uneasy alliance between gender and nationalism. During the turbulent decades of civil war in Sri Lanka, she stood out as a voice that asked difficult questions. Her work has been indispensable to understanding Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and its construction of the good woman. Her PhD work, titled- Maternalist Politics in Sri Lanka: ...