'Infidel' by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This true story is about Hirsi Ali's physical journey from Somalia to Amsterdam to the United States. Emotionally, she engages the readers to experience the dust, poverty, clannish rules, political upheaval of Somalia, and her movement from one country to another. Readers heave a sigh of relief when she runs …
Alice escapes her drab life in England by marrying the handsome Bennett Van Cleave, son of a wealthy businessman, and comes to rural Kentucky. Her dreams of a glamorous life are dashed when the America she hoped for turned out to be cold, lonely, miserable, and immensely boring. She soon realizes that her husband can’t …
Continue reading The Giver of Stars – Women Empowerment in the 1930s?
Archetypes stem from the "Collective unconscious".
Thou Shalt Not! Besides our abundant egos, we humans also have a sufficient amount of envy, jealousy, and sadism coursing through our blood. Although most of us don’t set out to deliberately hurt anyone, we secretly take pleasure when someone we don’t like lands in a pickle. We may even rejoice, thereby practicing schadenfreude. It is …
"City of Girls" by Elizabeth Gilbert takes us into the caverns of the 40s and the 50s New York City. Vivian Morris, a would-have-been-straight-laced Vasser graduate ends up being a promiscuous and down-in-the- pits kind of girl - but she is not without merit. An exceptionally resourceful and skilled seamstress, she also becomes an adept …
Continue reading City of Girls: Racy, Earthy and Oh So Profound!
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones is akin to the threading of a quilt worn out not by time but by circumstances. A passionately woven tale of stirring, deep, inseparable love. In the true Shakespearean style, an event as trivial as Roy helping an elderly lady take an ice bucket to her room completely upends …
Continue reading An American Marriage: Time, Circumstances, Love – What Happens Next
When I stand at my kitchen sink washing dishes greased with a welter of Indian curries and sticky dough, I let my mind wander to experience a more colorful palette than the turmeric and paprika floating around with the soap suds. Through those iridescent hollow spheres, I see the embellished sets, the ebullient characters, and …
Continue reading Appreciating the Epic Directorial Vision of Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Hubris - When false belief sets in and reality slips away, when new money and sudden power settles over someone like a layer of thick dust and fogs their perceptions, when psychotic delusions and manic energy gushes through the veins, and when the line between virtue and vice diminishes. Alexander Pope sums up the impact …
google After all those years as a woman hearing ‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, ‘I’m enough.’ -Anna Quindlen Gone are the times when women in their 40s were considered matronly, dry, unattractive and past their prime; […]
We are women, hence the strength to go on…. Way back in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “I hesitated a long time before writing a book on woman,” De Beauvoir begins. “The subject is irritating, especially for women; and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism; it is now …
Continue reading Feminism – The Brand, The Benchmark or a Woman’s Prerogative
prachi jain 