My favourite 2015 #longreads, Indian women edition
Simply because I saw this giant Autostraddle collection of 215 pieces and felt the need to collect my favourite Indian longform of 2015 (all written by women).
Caveat: Some of these people are my friends! I have the extraordinary luck of being friends with some of my favourite writers, yes. YMMV, etc.
In no order:
Snigdha Poonam, The Fixer
It was only after meeting Prasad that I started to wonder obsessively about what the options were for a twenty-four year old who was as desperate to move up as any other young man in the country – but who had decided against taking the next train out to Delhi, or becoming someone he was not.
Padmaparna Ghosh, The Slave Ship That Ran From Kerala to New Orleans
“They said, ‘You’ll be working for a good company, and there will be decent accommodation. Later on, you can bring your family,’” says Andrews.
Supriya Sharma, Chhattisgarh report: How Modi government’s new approach is undermining a decade of gains in rural India
Even technology cannot eliminate corruption in rural India, as long as asymmetries of information and power prevail. As Chhattisgarh accelerates its Aadhaar enrolment – 81% people have been enrolled as of the third week of April – a mini-industry has grown around it.
Neha Mathews, Inside the World of India’s Badass Women Gamers
Bhavika Tekwani, a Mumbai-based software engineer who has been playing videogames since she was in Grade 10 tells me, ‘They all accept you eventually, but I do this thing where I have to demonstrate how much I know or how often I play to be considered a “real gamer”. This has to be repeated every time there’s a new dude in the team. They automatically assume he is skilled, [but] they don’t assume the same for me.’
Deepika Sarma, Why I <3 My Menstrual Cup
Yesterday, as I was buying eggs at my local grocery store, I saw a massive “Super Saver” pack of Whisper Ultra on the shelf. Six months ago, I’d have pounced on it with delight. Now, the corner of the shelf in my cupboard that I used to reserve for those giant packs is occupied by the two tiny cups that have made a world of difference to my life.
Nishita Jha, Behind the Lens of Women’s ‘Nudies’*
‘She’s 22. You know what young girls are like.’
Nisha Susan, What My Mother Tells Me About Nurses
I am in hospital with my mother.
Shruti Ravindran, The Company We Keep
An increasing number of researchers and practitioners have gone from dismissing hallucinated voices as worthless ravings symptomatic of psychosis to listening carefully to what they say. What they have heard has been infinitely varied and surprisingly complex. And the effort to deal with these complexities is leading to entirely new, even inventive forms of treatment.
Rohini Mohan, How Deficit Rains Fill the Lives of Farmers with Uncertainty
In mid-August, the Karnataka government declared what growers had known for months: the worst drought in 40 years in 27 of the state’s 30 districts. The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) found its grim forecast of deficient rain unfortunately validated. By early September, north Karnataka had received rainfall 43 per cent below normal. It had rained poorly in the region in 2014 too, but this year, 135 of 176 taluks were affected, four times the number last year.
Sharanya, On Three-Quarters of the Neapolitan Novels.
It’s been a while since I trusted fiction so productively, held it close to my heart so keenly.
Nilita Vachani, Inside Job*
I was now determined to find the domestic worker whose name was linked to the largest insider trading trial in the history of the United States. Kumar had implied, under oath, that Das was complicit in all the arrangements made in her name. I found this hard to believe, knowing how little power Indian domestic workers have in their relationships with their employers.
*Thanks Budhaditya for reminding me of these!
