Trust me, the name of this North-Eastern state is no hyperbole — In the third week of October this year, my parents needed a break. They were emerging from a rough month and a half. So my partner flew in and we kidnapped them for a quick trip to Meghalaya. I thought they were being cliché when they named the state “abode…

Casteism & Death Pollution in India — My two remaining grandparents passed away this past September. Within a fortnight of each other. They had been married for 60 years, not necessarily because they reached developed country grandparent age but because child marriage was rampant in my grandmother’s generation. This was by no means my first brush with…

Testing what we know from watching our mothers in the data — Today, I came across this poignant twitter thread where a daughter recounts her working mother’s “second shift” and that to make things worse, her mother’s commute time was longer as well. My mother works, wakes up at ungodly hours and pays a steep price to maintain her trade outside the…

The sole female chief minister (head of state government) in India today — Banerjee grew up in a lower-middle-class part of south Calcutta (now Kolkata), and her father died when she was young. Still, she was able to go to college, eventually earning several degrees, including a bachelor’s in law and a master’s in arts from the University of Calcutta. She became involved…

The “Kyunki” Studies Duo (IYKYK) — Two remarkable studies on the effect of a coresident mother-in-law on outcomes of the daughter-in-law in the Indian context dropped last year. Both made waves. However, their findings are seemingly at odds with each other. On one hand, Anukriti et al. find that a coresident mom-in-law (or “mummy-ji”) acts as…

Individualistic on paper, Collectivist in practice I should be doing a 100 different things on my to-do list right now. Instead, I will write this piece before this framework disappears from my head. There’s a good chance that you the reader have a 100 different things to do as well…

Women and work in India, part lived experience and part data — When women of my mother’s generation worked, they mostly had jobs, not careers. The women of my grandmother’s generation worked “out of compulsion”. In the 60s, my father’s mother managed to escape the violence in Bangladesh with her children in tow. One afternoon, she had set off with other women…

Shaadi = Marriage in Hindi — My partner and I got married on November 17th in the most pared down Indian wedding situation possible. We drove 2 hours to a court in UP to get our registration done since courts in Delhi were not functional because of peak pollution and restricted activities. I could not have…

I would pay my partner, Anurag, to have him plan trips for me. He is very good at it. Instead, I get to go on beautifully laid out trips for free. I have spent the past week jouncing across South Karnataka following his itinerary assembled over a month. It was…