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

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...

  If marriage is so exhausting for women, why does society push it so hard? A feminist unpacking of love, labour, and the world’s most successful social contract, 'marriage'. Why Does Marriage Still Thrive—Even When It Politely Chains Ambitious Women? This blog began, as many feminist awakenings do, with a “well-meaning” comment from family. My second cousin responded to an earlier piece I wrote on working women and domestic labour—especially cooking, that sacred skill women are expected to retain no matter how many degrees they acquire. Apparently, intellectual ambition is admirable, but only if it does not interfere with dinner. Her message, however, was refreshingly sharp. She wrote that she is constantly warned—by colleagues, friends, and the informal Ministry of Social Wisdom—that marriage traps women in a lifelong loop of care work, emotional management, and unpaid labour. At the same time, she is urged to  finish her PhD quickly  because “it’s time to get married,”...

After forty, something shifts. You stop apologising. You start asking inconvenient questions. This is one such question—about kitchens, care work, and why feminism must begin at home. The Question That Arrives Late—but Necessarily:  Who Decided that Cooking is a Woman’s Destiny? This question dawned on me only recently—and perhaps it had to. There are moments in a woman’s life when clarity arrives late, not because she lacked intelligence, but because social conditioning is remarkably efficient. Even women who proudly see themselves as empowered often wander through a maze—one constructed by marriage, motherhood, and the quiet tyranny of expectations. The forties, interestingly, tend to dismantle that maze. They return to women a question they were never encouraged to ask: Who was I before I became everything everyone needed me to be? Who This Question Is—and Is Not—For Let me be clear. This question is not directed at working mothers who have parental support, domestic help, or...