Life-en-treats

With the buzz for anti-ageing products, have  Indian women   succumbed to the pressure of looking young? Is embracing your age out of fashion? By Sushumna Kannan The reach and influence of the anti-aging research-industry is enormous. It extends to preoccupations with immortality and an end to aging altogether. Promises range from “turn back the clock,” “look upto 10 years younger” to “youthful skin in 5 minutes” or “30 seconds” even. Websites that explain their technology accompanied by “it changed my life” testimonials are now on the rise. We are bombarded with products to use from our teen years itself and the side-effects debate seems to have been overpowered.  A common view is that using anti-aging products is a woman’s preference. For instance, Sarada Balaji, Fulbright scholar and Professor of English at Tirupati says, “ Women use anti-aging stuff since they are themselves inclined to look young. Moreover, they are easily influenced when they see other women ...

A small interview/profile appeared in the New Indian Express (August 6th 2013). In the middle, a large photo of me! The piece has some bad editing that I wish wasn't there! Anyway... Link to article  

EPW, Vol - XLVIII No. 32, August 10, 2013  Empire, Media and the Autonomous Woman:A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought by Esha Niyogi De (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 2011; pp xxvii + 246, Rs 745. Sushumna Kannan ( sushumnaa@gmail.com ) is affiliated to the San Diego State University, US and Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, India. A host of popular as well as scholarly discourses today endorse some or the other version of liberalism. Even as most of us are caught quite unescapably in the spectrum of tradition and modernity, judging and being judged, what we are primarily debating it seems, is simply,  our  version of liberalism. And it would not be wrong to say that liberalism in numerous discourses today is seen as a kind of autonomy. It is in this context that the book under review draws our attention to indigenous works (literature) located in the colonial period and cultural works (dance-drama, films) produced by activist-thinkers in ...

Love has many faces is a refreshing set of poems fit to be read on a Sunday afternoon in your cane swing. If you are wondering what love and marriage could be like or want to fall back in love with your spouse, then you need to read the book you are holding in your hands. Or, if you happen to be a person with a penchant for following up on relationship-talk from everywhere, then too Love has many faces will engage and enchant you. The 50 and odd poems in this collection are mostly about relationships, the everyday and a woman’s experience of these two. The poems on relationships are sweetly romantic and filial in nature. And the light-heartedness of all the poems makes one wonder if the age of irony in literary writing is indeed over. There is a sense of freedom sought out even within circumstances that are neither adventurous nor outdoors. The walls of the house, doors and windows open up and alert us to the many nuances of experience we may have missed in our mundane moods. Th...