nilanjana s roy

Month: December 2012

  • Jantar Mantar, December 30

  • For Anonymous

    That girl, the one without the name. The one just like us. The one whose battered body stood for all the anonymous women in this country whose rapes and deaths are a footnote in the left-hand column of the newspaper. Sometimes, when we talk about the history of women in India, we speak in shorthand.…

  • Near India Gate, A Blocked Protest: notes on my city

    (Note: There are so many ways for a city to exclude its citizens. Yesterday, talking to the police who were there to prevent this small, sincere band of protestors from marching up to India Gate, I asked a few how they felt about guarding the Gate from us–all 300 or so of the women’s rights…

  • The best of 2012: a personal reading list

    (Published in the Business Standard, December 25, 2012. I had limited space, so this is a very truncated list–fiction-heavy, with a strong bias towards Indian writing.) On the power of words: Indian poetry seldom wins prizes or lands on bestseller lists, and yet the strongest, most radical and most powerful of contemporary Indian writing has…

  • Talking rape

    Survivors, not victims: This goes beyond semantics. The rape victim, in the minds of many Indian families and some of the media, is expected to suffer a kind of death along with her rape. It is not the violence that people are thinking about, when they say “her life is over”, of a rape victim;…

  • At the heart of Delhi, no space for you

    What do they want? (Home Minister Shinde, of the students) The students in Delhi who were protesting on Saturday didn’t know exactly how to get to what they wanted. Some thought that the death penalty and castration for rapists would do it, some thought appealing to the people in power might do it, some thought…

  • India Gate, Dec 23: photos

    The presence of the media inevitably changes the nature of protest–Kashmir and the North-East are invisible because they’re not on TV, as many pointed out yesterday, but Delhi’s protests will always attract full coverage. That also changes the nature of a spontaneous protest: everyone from casual gawkers to politicians really wants to see themselves on…

  • Notes from Raisina Hill

    “We want justice! We want justice!” I went to the protests at Raisina Hill expecting very little. Despite the anger over the recent, brutal gang-rape of a 23-year-old by a group of six men, who also beat up her male friend, protests over women’s violence in the Capital have been relatively small. But the crowds…

  • Executing The Neighbour

    (Published in The Hindu, December 20, 2012)   Like so many other men and women in Delhi, my friends and I kept a quiet, helpless vigil on Tuesday night for the young 23-year-old woman in Safdarjung hospital. All day long, on TV, in private conversations, on social media, the demand for justice was voiced, with…

  • Riffling: Reading about Reading

    Riffling: Reading about Reading A list of books about books and reading.