Reflections
.. and thank you!
In college, I used to write an opinion column called “Abstruse Musings” in our student-run daily newspaper every fortnight. I wanted to be a journalist for a long time but development economics happened to me. Writing changed from sitting in the college library café and thinking hard about what I wanted to get out of my system and to the audience this week, to writing e-mails, meeting notes, reviewing research papers, and writing about policy. It’s still writing, but it has less adrenaline, and feels less personal. This blog series reminded me of the Fridays in the college library café. This series was personal and made me nervous.
I started this blog series because there isn’t a lot of mainstream writing about the women who made modern Indian ideas and institutions. I had no idea that people would engage the way they did — not just academic twitter, some of the most avid readers have been the older alumni from my school. Doing this blog made me realize that it had to be done. My most feminist friends did not know a lot of these #bossladies, and I don’t blame them — they don’t show up anywhere in mainstream memory unless you go hunting. My parents didn’t know about a lot of these women. One accomplishment has been injecting the millennial term #bosslady across generations :P
Anyway, I wanted to say thank you for reading and engaging. This was a proof of concept that passion projects are worth pursuing even though there is never any time to do anything. Apologies for not writing last week, a lot was and is still going on in Delhi and across India. But I did not want to leave this series hanging in the air, and needed to give it proper closure — I hope I am not being tone-deaf to the suffering everywhere.
I’ll most likely be back again with some other writing passion project. Hoping that will be a less turbulent time, with more accountable political leaders, and most of us healthy and vaccinated.
Warmest wishes and a lot of love,
Aditi
