What I'm Reading: Link List #6

Trying to clear this backlog of links PLUS trying to put off doing some real writing. The blog is a writer's frenemy! I'm awfully sleepy this morning, but I've already come up with a great name and concept for a YouTube channel: eMdorse, like when I endorse stuff? Recommendations and things. Now that I've named it, I feel like my work is done. Yay for ideas!

Onward!


Free + amazing short stories and essays in Out Of Print magazine. This time's issue is all about violence against women, and the editors are Samhita Arni and Meena Kandasamy and the whole thing is just SO GOOD, I urge you to put aside a great chunk of your evening, settle down with your tea and just have a read.


Oh Joy Sex Toy is a weekly comic at Bitch Magazine exploring sex and sexuality, and last week's one was about abortion. I haven't had an abortion, but I know the statistics in India are particularly high, and there's nothing to be ashamed/afraid of, and here is some information about what's going to happen in case you need it.

 

Via Ladies Finger (which you should subscribe to and like on Facebook, I want to link to all their links!) here is an important article called 10 Words Every Girl Should Learn about how often we use apology/apologetic notes in our conversations, and let's stop. We don't owe the world niceness. We don't owe the world anything (Except being kind to the enviroment.)

It's not hard to fathom why so many men tend to assume they are great and that what they have to say is more legitimate. It starts in childhood and never ends. Parents interrupt girls twice as often and hold them to stricter politeness norms. Teachers engage boys, who correctly see disruptive speech as a marker of dominant masculinity, more often and more dynamically than girls.

And my FAVOURITE story this week, how an Indian farmer adopted a little kitten and wound up with a BIG surprise.

Another day, he chased a little Black Bengal goat while its mother pitifully bleated her agony. However, this time he was seen by people in broad daylight. Golu had been caught red-handed. The neighbours decided to pay his owner a visit to ask him to contain this leopard cub or tiger cub or whatever it was... because it certainly wasn’t a house cat! But the moment they stepped into the compound of the house, Golu expressed his disapproval. He arched his back, his fur stood on end and his teeth gleamed as he surveyed the intruders to his territory.

Wrapping up with a lovely feeling essay. I hate cricket, always have, it's just so mind numbingly boring, and I'm actually kind of sneakily glad we lost this last world cup because that's a few fewer weeks I have to hear about it. Here's a story by Samir Chopra in Cric Info called Acknowledging The Indian Who Doesn't Care For Cricket. (Link via Nilanjana Roy, a fellow cricket hater.)

Yes, it's true. There are many Indians - millions! - who cannot bring themselves to care about bat and ball, willow and leather, stump and bail, and all of the rest. They are resolute in their indifference, and sometimes pungent in their hostility. This anti-cricket sentiment in India has a long and venerable history, going all the way back to cricket's earliest days, when passionate nationalists railed against the importation of this latest colonial imposition, this all-too transparent attempt to impose English culture on the Indian landscape, this latest way for insecure, grasping Indians to ape the manners and mores of their colonial masters, this inflamer of "communal" passions in pitting Hindu against Parsee and Muslim.