THE COVER HEADLINE of this Women’s Day Special issue will prompt quite a few ribald jokes and snide remarks, I am certain. But, somewhere, someone would read through the fine bunch of articles that Special Correspondent Anjuly Mathai has put together and it will spark conversations on what women want.
The cover story amplifies the voices of eight accomplished women such as Magsaysay awardee Aruna Roy, Lok Sabha member and DMK deputy general secretary Kanimozhi Karunanidhi, writer Meena Kandasamy, athlete Anju Bobby George, Cisco’s Daisy Chittilapilly, journalist and Rajya Sabha member Sagarika Ghose, filmmaker Rima Das and bureaucrat Dr Praveen Kumari Singh.
The cover highlights that the struggles are different for each woman. Some subtle, some in your face. Like the time when a plumber told our columnist Anuja Chauhan that the plumbing woes were because sanitary napkins were being flushed down the toilet. All this when there was no woman of menstruating age in the house. Kanimozhi told Senior Special Correspondent Lakshmi Subramanian, “Society does not respond to a woman’s point of view; it only responds to the woman.”
Our columns, too, look at women. Through his column, Scalpen, our new writer Dr Mazda Turel made me laugh when he described how a patient complained that his wife’s cooking skills had gone off. A tumour was pushing on his olfactory nerve, impacting his ability to smell and his ability to appreciate his wife’s cooking. Columnist Shobhaa De writes about actor Kalki Koechlin, who is “different in an industry that favours conformists”.
As always, despite this issue being a special, the offering is varied. Senior Assistant News Editor Ajish P. Joy looks at the White House showdown between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Senior journalist K.P. Nayar draws on his deep experience to argue that the White House fiasco is a reminder that India should fiercely protect its strategic autonomy in external affairs. He has peppered his article with anecdotes, like the time when the venerable Nelson Mandela dropped a bombshell at the NAM summit in Durban, with prime minister A.B. Vajpayee present. And the time Vajpayee’s principal secretary Brajesh Mishra stood up to Russian foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov.
From Dhaka, Pallab Bhattacharya writes about how the student uprising in Bangladesh has resulted in the birth of a new party, the Jatiya Nagarik Party. But the political arena is in turmoil. The future is anybody’s guess.
I remember the articles that THE WEEK carried in the mid-1980s when the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) went from student movement to ruling party in Assam. Prafulla Kumar Mahanta became the state’s youngest chief minister. After a long time, Mahanta was in the news this week over a video clip which allegedly showed his daughter slapping her driver with a slipper. She later stated that she reacted after he made inappropriate comments while being drunk.
Many of us thought in the 1980s that the AGP was a grassroots movement whose time had come and that it would stay for a long time. Today, the BJP is in the driving seat, with the AGP as an ally.
Time springs such surprises!