Stand Together

I am an Indian woman. I am the obedient daughter, the dutiful sister, the loving wife, the caring mother and the doting grandmother. I am more than I was destined to be and I am proud of it. I am a strong woman. A woman who can fight, a woman who can support, a woman you can rely on and a woman who can cry with you. I am all this. I simply have no defects. As a child I obey my parents. I bring them unfathomable joy. But there are those who do not want me. They kill me before I am born. There are instances where I have survived and when I survive, I repay my salvation in full with interest. I am trained to be a good wife from a tender age. At an age where my brother gets to play cricket in the street, I am set a task of learning to cook. I finish my cooking course as though I am a prodigy with a brilliant performance; a performance that lasts as long as I live. By the time I am out of my teens, I have turned my childhood nemesis of cooking into a therapy session. That is my accomp...

Belonging to a minority community in India is difficult. Minorities are asked to prove our loyalties time and again though we all celebrate Diwali, play holi, watch Bollywood movies and do everything that a normal Indian does. But, we are n ot very welcome in India. I read and hear hateful speeches all that time and they have a devastating effect on me. Especially now since I won't comply or appreciate anyone who wants to vote for Modi. I really don't care who you vote for but I care whose side you will take if Gujarat riots occur again. I have had a 'facebook acquaintance', accuse me of selling India off to Pakistan, China and other countries. What more must I do to prove I am patriotic as well? I cry every time I hear Jana Gana Mana in the foreign land I live in. But again, when this is what so called educated people believe, why take the trouble of proving myself? This is a real "comment" made by the same person and it has left me shaken and chilled to the...

I come from India, the largest democracy in the world, and I live in South Africa, one of the newest democracies and it so happens that it is election year in both these countries. Election years bring out all the cruelty and ugliness of the ‘elected’ or those who ‘wish to be elected’ and this is the biggest common factor in both these countries. In India, my home state, Andhra Pradesh, is being bifurcated. Economic development is being sacrificed for vote bank politics. What will a political party, which only wants to stay in power and is headed by a non-Indian woman, know about this region and that their disastrous decision will only work towards the downhill growth of the new state? No, they know nothing and they really do not care. In South Africa, politics is still very race based. The President blamed Apartheid for the country’s slow growth in his State of the Nation address. Politicians are busy playing dirty to a level that they criticize the clothes their competitors...