Capturing the Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life....

Why do men survive heat, knives, and 14-hour shifts in hotel kitchens—but freeze at the sight of a gas stove at home? Because masculinity doesn’t fear labour. It fears care. This piece is about how cooking becomes masculine only when it brings power, visibility, and status—and why equality is far more threatening than fire. If Masculinity Can Survive Heat, Knives and Long Hours in Hotel Kitchens, Why Does it Collapse at the Sight of a Gas Stove at Home? Because the danger masculinity fears is not heat or knives—but the loss of privilege. A hotel kitchen does not threaten masculinity; a home kitchen does. The difference lies not in labour, skill, or effort, but in what cooking means in each space. In a hotel, cooking is power without care. In a home, cooking is care without power. Masculinity survives where cooking brings: Authority over others Public recognition Wages and status Distance from emotional responsibility A hotel kitchen is hierarchical, competitive, and visible....

This blog reflects on the curious comfort society finds in older women’s voices in Kerala—a comfort often misread as feminist progress. I argue instead that this late-life acceptance betrays a deeper patriarchal anxiety. Drawing on feminist theory, I suggest that menopause operates as a socio-political threshold: women become audible only after their bodies are stripped of sexual threat and social unease. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital, this blog tried to negotiate with how legitimacy is unevenly distributed among women based on caste, marital status, and compliance with normative femininity. Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective regulation explains why youthful women are marked as disruptive, while Judith Butler’s performativity helps frame menopause as a reconfiguration of gendered intelligibility. Dalit feminist critiques further expose the caste limits of this acceptance, revealing respectability as an exclusionary economy rather than a universal reward. Women a...

In Kerala, a woman turning twenty is rarely allowed the luxury of being just twenty. Instead, her age becomes a question—posed not to her, but to astrologers, doctors, neighbours, and extended family. The question is never about her aspirations, her intellectual curiosities, or the life she imagines for herself. It is always about marriage—and urgency. This essay reflects on a disturbing social choreography where astrology and selective medical science join hands to discipline women’s timelines. It examines how fear masquerades as care, how ambition is framed as risk, and how even the most educated societies reproduce an iron ceiling so thick that women are prevented not only from breaking through—but from even imagining what lies beyond. When the Stars, the Womb, and Society Conspire: The Iron Ceiling Over Women’s Lives in Kerala In many Kerala households, a daughter turning twenty is not merely a marker of adulthood; it is treated as a deadline. Her horoscope is taken to an astrolog...

We like to believe names are personal. Intimate. Chosen. But names are also political—quietly carrying caste, gender, lineage, and power in their syllables. In Kerala, most of us inherit our identities through our fathers’ names, long before we can speak, choose, or resist. That erasure of the mother is normalised early—through birth certificates, school registers, and bureaucratic forms—so early that we rarely pause to question it. But what happens later is far more intriguing. Why do so many women—educated, financially independent, professionally accomplished—choose to change their surnames to their husbands’ after marriage, especially on social media? Why does love seem to demand renaming from women alone? And why, in an age of choice and empowerment, does this gesture still feel so natural that questioning it sounds impolite? This is not a post about legality or tradition. It is about the quiet politics of choice, the soft grammar of patriarchy, and the unsettling question of why w...