The I Column
Despite the intervention of many well-meaning aunties and friends over cups of chai, I don’t think I was aware of how truly strange, let’s even say ridiculous, I looked at the time. Because although I was wearing kurtis nearly every day, I didn’t really understand the ‘rules’ of wearing kurtis.
I am a 25-year-old cis woman and I recently had sex with another woman for the first time. It was new, it felt nice, but it just didn’t feel safe.
Introduction: As this first-person account of Anita, a Devadasi in Maharashtra, Western India illustrates, issues of consent and violence/coercion cannot…
I knew that I was gay since time knows when. The society made me know. Be it my friend’s snarky…
Her eyes are open now, she looks at him. There is sadness there. “What my love? What happened?” he asks….
What is fiction? Is it born of reality? Or does it birth reality, reflecting it back at me until I see the things I do not see? Until I find the person that is me? Until I dance my horse dance under moon, under stars, in a room full of people who like horse dancing just as much as they like the swirly skirt and the pot-bellied person doing the Bhangra.
This piece won’t write itself as an opinion piece or a review of experiences that happened or were bound to…
Being a journalism student once, and having a network of seniors and batch mates who came from a journalism background,…
My first ‘date’ was at a festival screening of an understated French-Canadian film that featured a tremendous amount of chatter and Chopin. I qualify ‘date’ because, while I was certainly on the brink of tumbling head over heels, the object of my affection, let’s call her ObjA, was blithely unaware of the romantic hopes that hinged upon our meeting.
In the middle of this pandemic, can one seek sexual support in the form of a hook up with one’s best friend, ‘just because’? Is it redefining boundaries, is it sympathy sex, is it simple indulgence, or is it something that one or both might later resent?
This article was originally published here. This article not based on any studies I know of, but then I know…
“I feel comfortable with who I am,” he responded. “I’m at ease with myself. I don’t wake up and hate myself. I can’t tell you how amazing that feels.”
“I know how that feels,” I told him.
Have you ever heard the old adage, “You have to love yourself before anybody else can love you”? Well, I grew up interpreting this in the absolutely most terrible way possible.
I did my schooling and higher studies in Delhi. Thanks to a compulsorily uniform attire at school, the differences in socio-economic backgrounds of students were successfully erased. But as one enters college, one’s attire gets significant attention, especially for a person from a weak socio-economic background. This transition period from school to college is also the age of sexual anxieties, experiments and experiences.
I did not know what feminism meant, but I remember being told I’m too rough for a girl. Or, was…