“It is women who usually lead men astray.” A harmless joke? Or a deeply rooted cultural script? Why is it that men who are raised to be decisive and powerful suddenly become helpless victims after marriage? This piece explores the strange disappearance of male agency—and the convenient resurrection of the ‘cunning wife’ trope in our social imagination. Let’s talk about accountability, patriarchy, and the politics hidden in everyday language. “It Is Women Who Usually Lead Men Astray” — A Familiar Script in a New Voice I stumbled upon the sentence while casually flipping through Malayalam television channels: “It is women who usually lead men astray.” The speaker was no fringe commentator. He was a well-known, well-educated public official—widely respected, articulate, and socially influential. He sat there beside his wife, smiling, explaining that he was fortunate to have a partner who shared his values and supported his life choices. On the surface, it sounded harmless. Perhaps even a...

Academic brochures once foregrounded ideas. Today, they foreground faces. When did scholarship become a visual spectacle—and what does it say about power, visibility, and expertise in academia? When Ideas Need Faces: The Rise of Academic Visual Spectacle This blog emerges from an unease I have been carrying for a while—one that crystallised only recently. It is about how the culture of digital visual spectacle has quietly but firmly entered academic spaces, especially in the post-pandemic world. Most of us are familiar with academic brochures announcing seminars, conferences, invited lectures, and workshops. There was a time—not too long ago—when these brochures focused on the idea: the theme of the event, the names of invited scholars, their institutional affiliations, and the titles of their talks. That was the grammar of academic publicity. But today, there is a new, almost unquestioned addition to this space of supposed intellectual deliberation: the photograph of the speaker. ...

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...

  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...

A math problem. A lunch-table question. A moment that exposed how deeply gender stereotypes survive—even in higher education. This reflection examines how gender blindness, institutional power, and misplaced ideas of “strength” quietly undermine feminist ethics. When Gender Sensitisation Meets Gender Blindness This reflection emerges from my engagement with the academic community—not as an abstract theorist, but as the Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies, working at the uneasy intersection of policy, pedagogy, and lived experience. I was asked to curate a short-term Gender Sensitisation Programme for faculty members from Arts and Science colleges. What unfolded during that week was both revealing and unsettling. During one session, a resource person cited a seemingly innocuous example from a school mathematics textbook: Ravi buys five spinning tops; Maya buys eight bangles . The point was straightforward—how early educational materials naturalise gender roles by quietly align...

Institutions are comfortable with feminism as long as it remains polite, predictable, and procedural. The moment it questions power, it is re-coded as hostility. Drawing from encounters in gender sensitisation programmes and Internal Complaints Committees, this reflection examines how feminism is repeatedly misheard—not because it is unclear, but because it is inconvenient. When Feminism Is Misheard as Hostility There are moments when society makes a deliberate mishearing of feminism. Instead of recognising it as an ethical and political framework concerned with dignity, justice, and quality of life, feminism is reduced—conveniently—to male-bashing . This reduction is not innocent. It is a refusal masquerading as misunderstanding. For decades, women have tried to correct this caricature. Yet some ears remain closed—not because the explanation is unclear, but because acknowledging feminism as a holistic critique of social arrangements would demand discomfort, self-reflection, and accoun...