Maa Durga, Woman Power and the murder of a girl child

Maa, it's autumn now in Bengal. The air is getting nippy, the sky is clear blue and in the countryside, the kash flowers are swaying their heads in gentle air. All these heralds that You are coming to Your father's house. On your four days stay at your father's house in Bengal, we Bengalis worship you as an annual ritual. We hold you in veneration. Maa, You are the symbol of woman power to us. The woman who gives birth, who nourishes and cares, yet when the time comes, she vanquishes the demon. Then are we hypocrite, Maa? On the auspicious day of Mahalaya, the very day which is synonimous to the commencement of Devi Paksha, a girl child was murdered this year. This gruesome murder of a child pains me very much. Being a mother myself, the picture of her wailing mother suffused my mind with great sorrow. Why this contradiction, Maa? On the one hand, we make a great show of worshipping our mother idol, and on the other, our daughters are being tortured every day. Every day as I turn the pages of the newspaper, there are news of women, and even minor girls, being raped, murdered, dowry deaths, female infanticide and the list is endless. When will You end this, Maa? For once, You come alive, hold Your Trishul firmly and demolish the demons who are torturing You every day, for it's You who live inside each daughter, each woman, each mother. When will that day come? Do you have any answer?

Puja Shopping

Puja Shopping: The Journey from Traditional Shopping to e-Shopping

With Durga Puja round the corner, it's time for shopping for Bengalis. It's the time of the year when everybody wants to look their best. Newspapers and TV channels display advertisements by various shops and shopping malls. Recently, I came across an advertisement by a prominent retail chain with the theme "Sarbajanin Shopping Pujo". This truely captures the flavour of the season. As for me, I am always hard-pressed for time. My hectic schedule leaves me very little time to indulge in the luxury of month-long shopping. For me, for the past few years (since I got the job and became a working woman, to be more specific), shopping has been a round-the-year affair. I don't wait for the festive season for it. I do shopping whenever I manage to spare my time and decide that something is nice enough to be purchased. This year, though, shopping has been a different experience for me altogether. With the boom of e-commerce, I am spoilt for choices when it comes to shopping. Also, I can afford to indulge in shopping from the cosy comfort of my home. So, this year, most of my shopping was done online. 

I bought a few salwar suits and kurtas from BIBA, my favourite brand. Then another two kurtas from RANGRITI. I bought some lovely earrings from  Flipkart. This year's shopping experience was truly amazing and entirely different.

I bought this kurta from Rangriti.

I think it'll look lovely when paired with red coloured churidar and dupatta. This earring, bought from Flipkart, goes well with it.

Long live e-commerce!!!

Indian Diaspora and Bollywood

Indian Diaspora and Bollywood

For diasporic Indians, the Bollywood movie experience was one way of going back, of revisiting, albeit briefly, the homeland that one has left behind. But after the 1990s owing primarily to the purchasing power and imaginative hunger of this very nostalgic diaspora, Bollywood registered a radical shift in both its form and content. Bollywood's visual culture became more global and cosmopolitan so as to attract audiences in the West. In the 1990s, the diaspora had become a market to reckon with, a territory for film distribution, whose earnings could supplement, if not rival, box office collections from India itself. The process of not only globalizing itself, but spreading images of India abroad and thereby Indianizing the globe is happening in unprecedented ways. From being the subaltern second cinema of the world, it is becoming the dominant second cinema of the world- may be not as dominant as Hollywood, but dominant nonetheless.

Reference:

An article by Makarand Paranjape.