Last January, I heard that a female student who jumped off a running bus in Jakarta and died because she was being harassed and the bus driver refused to stop the vehicle. It reminded me of so many other stories about rape in public transportation. The victims vary from students and career women to housewives.  But is a ‘wrong mentality’ to blame in this case?

 Two little girls were sitting on a crochet table cloth spread under a tree in the garden. A woman was sitting on a green wooden bench nearby, multitasking as she talked on a cell phone and kept an eye on the girls simultaneously. Sitting some 50 meters away from them, I could hear the woman titter. The person on the other end of the phone was probably cracking jokes. The sound of her laughter put an inadvertent smile on my face.

‘Woman’- what does this word signify? There seems to be an old definition and a new definition. Let’s take a look at both. The old one refers to a woman as the symbol of dignity, respect, a homemaker, some one who is dependent; and the modern definition includes words like independent, attractive, bold, equal etc. But do these definitions actually describe

It’s been a very bad year indeed for women in India. As the world settles into the New Year, India’s daughters are mourning the death of their “braveheart Nirbhaya,” the 23-year-old who was brutally raped and has now succumbed to her injuries.  This is symptomatic of the agony, pain, humiliation and wretchedness that Indian women suffered in 2012.

As a journalist you often read and write about crime and a point comes when writing the number of dead becomes a routine and you do not feel the loss anymore. In fact you do not find it interesting enough or you do not even consider it a story worth mentioning, if the number of casualties were too low or if the violence was not too brutal. But also there comes a time when words fail you, something so horrendous happens that it does not just touch you; rather it shakes you