Unfaithful wives across seas

She gave him shelter while he was at the port. He gave her children, who belonged to her, not him, writes Devdutt Pattanaik. Read on: 

For nearly 2,000 years, Arab traders used the monsoon winds to travel across the sea to India. Along the Western coasts, in Kerala, Karnataka, and Goa, they met people who allowed them to marry their daughters but did not let them take these wives back home. These were matrilineal communities, where the son-in-law lived with the wife in her house. She gave him shelter while he was at the port. He gave her children, who belonged to her, not him.

 

From India, the Arabs took cotton, sugar, and spices to be sold in the Mediterranean. They also took the idea of the placeholder zero, the decimal system, concepts such as infinity and calculus. Indian merchants had invented the remittance system known as Hundi, by which you could deposit money with one banker in one port and collect money from another banker in another port. In the Islamic world, this came to be known as the Hawala system, which enabled merchants to take money across the sea, without fearing pirates. Stories were exchanged too and retold as they were narrated in India: big stories located within bigger stories.

Here is the frame story of Suka Saptati, a Sanskrit collection of 70 erotic tales told by a parrot to a bored merchant’s wife.

Illustration/Devdutt Pattanaik

The merchant was going on a long voyage across the sea and feared his young and beautiful wife would be unfaithful. So he begged his old friend, a parrot, to stop his wife from breaking the marriage laws. Every evening, the bored wife would want to step out of the house and find a lover for herself, the parrot would tell her an entertaining erotic story until she fell asleep. In this way, it told her 70 stories, until the merchant returned from his voyage, carrying gifts and love for his bored wife.

Now, here is a similar frame story from the Arabian Nights, involving a king who doubts the faithfulness of wives. 

The king found out that his wife was unfaithful. So he decided he would marry a virgin every evening, enjoy the night with her and kill her at dawn. That way he would not give his wife the chance to be unfaithful. Finally, he married an intelligent girl who figured out a way to protect herself. At night, when the king lay in her arms, she would tell him a story but never complete it the same night, forcing the king to keep her alive the next day till he heard the end of the story. But when night came, the intelligent girl, now the queen, would end one story and start several more, so delightful that in order to know the ending of those stories, the king would spare her for another night. Thus, a thousand and one nights were spent listening to stories, by the end of which the king learned to trust and love his wife. 

Both stories capture the anxiety of sea-faring merchants wondering if their wives back home had other lovers. Maybe this is why Hindu merchants stopped crossing the sea. Those who did lost their caste. Travelling was outsourced to Arabs who controlled the Indian Ocean until the arrival of the Portuguese 500 years ago.

(Source: Mid Day)

Why are we still uncomfortable with the idea of widows finding joy and meaning in life?

I was around eight-nine years old, when my grandfather’s sister arrived from Mangalore. She towered over me, despite her stoop, her grey-blue eyes resting kindly on my face, her knobbly fingers stroking my cheeks. There was something different about this figure clad in a rough muddy red nine-yard sari and a white blouse, with elbow-length sleeves and buttons that reached her throat. I noticed her bare arms, neck and ears, which was unlike the other women in our house, whose ears flashed diamond earrings, whose necks were adorned with a mangalsutra and whose wrists made music as the gold bangles they wore clinked together. It was when the sari pallu covering her head slid down her neck that I noticed her shaven head. I remember gasping almost audibly, though she was quick to pull it back over her head.

Never having seen a woman with a shaved head before, my spontaneous reaction was to ask my mother why grandma wore her hair so short, only to be shushed into silence. Mother’s eyes conveyed that I was never to speak about it again. I must have appeared rude to the grandma, as I watched her from the corner of my eyes wondering why she wore the same muddy red sari and white blouse every day, till I saw one set spread out on the clothesline and another on her body, and realised that it was her ‘uniform’. It was when an older friend who had came home to play with me remarked, ‘Oh, your grandmother is a vikesha, just like my Sumati Ajji, who lives in our village,’ did I realise that there were other women like her. Varsha told me that vikeshas were women without hair; whose heads were shaved when their husbands died. ‘My Ajji too wears the same sari,’ she said. I remember snuggling up to grandma several times a day, wanting to hug her, an inexplicable sadness enveloping me.

My mother was widowed at 23, and I had heard how, when some relatives had approached her to remove her mangalsutra and wipe her forehead, a beloved, firebrand elderly relative, ‘Ba’ to the young and old, had stepped forward like a warrior, her hands on her hips, daring anyone to do that. She was a rebel, way ahead of the times, and sensitive enough to stop the cruel practice. When I was older, mother told me how Ba had commanded, ‘Go, take a bath and leave the rest to me.’ When mother had come out of the shower, Ba had dried her hair, braided it, and adorned it with a fragrant mogra gajra, applied a red kumkum tikka on her forehead and insisted that she wear a printed floral sari. Such was Ba’s vehemence that none dared to oppose her diktat. Mother had the support of her parents too, who encouraged her gently to complete her graduation, appear for qualifying exams and take up a job in a bank.

Not all women are so fortunate. I remember a widow shrinking back, as I applied haldi kumkum on her forehead, as I did, to the other women accompanying her, and then being admonished for my ‘blunder’. From that day onwards, I stopped following the custom that is followed in some homes, of applying haldi-kumkum (reserved only for a sumangali– a married woman whose husband is still living) while taking leave of women guests. I did not want to be party to this discrimination. I also stopped conducting the haldi-kumkum ceremony to which only sumangalis are invited. Blindly following prescribed customs that blatantly marginalised a few revolted me, and I realised that being vigilant, questioning and taking concrete steps, however small, were fairly effective forms of protest.

When I got married, mother refused to ‘give me away’. Despite the liberalism she was exposed to, her mind was so conditioned that as a widow she was unlucky, her fears made her resolute. My cajoling had no effect on her. The family opined that it was her comfort that mattered. One of my regrets is not knowing her mind before the ceremony, for had I the slightest inkling, I would have opted for a registered marriage. I have seen several other widows in the family shrinking away from performing religious rites. Nobody seems to mind, so deep-rooted is its acceptance.

A few things have certainly changed. Widow remarriage is no longer as taboo as it was. Education and financial independence have ensured that widows do not have to toe the line of regressive customs, at least in urban areas, though I say this more out of observation than any statistics at hand. We still hear stories of unwanted attention and ill-treatment at the hands of family members. Though we have come a long way from the horrendous practice of Sati, we need greater humanitarian strides if we are to speak of the true empowerment of widows. The plight of the widows of Vrindavan, driven out of their rightful homes, and living in penury and loneliness, comes to my mind, as also that of widows around the world who are ostracised or branded as witches.

It’s time we acknowledged that a bereaved woman going through the emotionally wrenching event of losing her life partner does not need a misogynist code of social conduct that disarms her. All she needs is a way forward to lead a highly meaningful and joyous new life.

(Source: She The People TV)

“I wouldn’t take no for an answer”

 How a solidarity-based sisterhood movement spread across rural India

“I can’t read and write, but I know how to fight legal cases,” says Akkatai Teli, now 67, a resident of Shirol region in the Kolhapur district of western India’s Maharashtra state.

Early in her life, people warned Akkatai to choose her battles wisely. Contrarily, she chose every struggle. Three decades later, in 2021, she says, "No woman should face what I have gone through, so I fight for everyone."

Akkatai has helped over 1000 rural women by bringing the perpetrators of domestic and sexual abuse to justice. This solidarity-based sisterhood movement has spread through fifty villages in western Maharashtra’s Kolhapur and Sangli districts.

Women in India face the most danger, statistically, from their own spouses and the families they marry into. 

Government statistics from 2019 show that 30% of reported crimes against women in India fell under the category “Cruelty by Husband or His Relatives”. 

 

Compounding this danger is a legal system that moves at a snail’s pace, if crimes are reported at all. Akkatai’s story highlights how important social support is to overcome these barriers.

Picture of Akkatai Teli by Sanket Jain, 2021. Graphic design by Gabriela Ramirez.

Her Call to Action

In the early 1990s, while selling fruits in the nearby Jaysingpur town, Akkatai Teli saw a grandmother weeping. Upon enquiring, she found that a resident had raped the woman’s five-year-old granddaughter. The past she was trying to forget stood in front of her. Akkatai rushed to a local official, a member of the legislative assembly from her constituency. “I told him about the case and asked him to phone the police.”

From her previous experiences, she knew approaching the police directly wouldn’t be helpful. But the elected politician was lackadaisical too. With no option left, she stormed the police station: “I wouldn’t take no for an answer.” To her surprise, the police did file a complaint and started an investigation. “The case lasted for five years, and the culprit was jailed per the civil court’s orders,” she says proudly. 

 

This victory inspired Akkatai to start a movement.

The World Health Organisation states that globally one in three women has been subjected to violence. That’s roughly 736 million women. Akkatai wanted to change this using the power of solidarity.

She knew legal battles in India could take decades. The Indian judiciary ranks 69 amongst 128 countries in the World Justice project’s Rule of Law Index report, 2020. The country has 40 million pending court cases. Akkatai didn’t want to become another statistic. 

The Back Story

It started in 1963. “I was 9 years old. My grandmother took 500 Indian Rupees (€ 5.5) as a bribe [from the man’s family] and got me married,” she recalls. Her husband, Mahadev, 14 years older to her, sold country liquor and “drank alcohol like it was water”.

 

“For two decades, he would beat me from midnight till morning. He murdered someone in the community and was jailed,” she says, “He even sold the kitchen utensils to buy alcohol.” Akkatai started working as a fruit vendor, farmworker and often doubled up as a labourer in a tobacco factory at the age of 12, only to have her bare-minimum earnings taken by Mahadev. “I have lost count of the number of times we slept on empty stomachs,” she says, referring to how Mahadev devastated not just Akkatai but the childhood of her two daughters. 

Despite numerous attempts, she couldn’t return to her maternal home because of the social stigma associated with divorce and women who leave their marital homes. Even today Indian women are often told by their families and society that no matter how bad their marriage is they should stay in it till the end of their lives. For Akkatai, the violence stopped only after Mahadev died of alcoholism in the late 80s.

"This society has decided that women should face all kinds of atrocities. I wanted to change that."

Akkatai Teli, Indian sisterhood movement

Her First Legal Battle

Akkatai’s first encounter with the legal system began in 1990 when she couldn’t bear injustice anymore. “After Mahadev passed away, the violence stopped, but my in-laws had planned hell for me,” she remembers. They ended up selling Mahadev’s almost two-acre farm without Akkatai’s signature and consent. “I went to the police station, but no one helped me.” 

 

Akkatai, who had not been educated beyond the first grade, faced immense challenges. “I walked into the Jaysingpur civil court alone.” The court officials informed her of a provision where the government could assign her a lawyer. The family sold the land to four different people to make matters more complicated, which meant fighting four community strongholds, who belonged to the privileged castes. 

That’s when Akkatai met advocate Dhanajirao Jagadale from the town of Jaysingpur.

“Her determination and courage not only helped her win the property case, but also inspired several other women to come forward."

Dhanajirao Jagadale, advocate

It took almost sixteen years to win her first case. “Things kept getting difficult, as the goons would threaten me physically and mentally even at 2 AM,” she says. 

 

Akkatai also reached out to the local media. “The local coverage would inspire more women,” she remembers. “I want more women to come ahead and fight their battles using the power of solidarity.” It has helped her receive the support of at least fifty community women.

Building A Solidarity Movement

Whenever Akkatai gets a call from a survivor of domestic violence, she first comforts them. “At times when there’s a threat to a woman’s life, I even shelter her safely in my house,” she says.

 

In India, 77 percent of the women who face domestic and sexual violence never talk about it. To correct this, she has written her contact number on the wall outside her house. “My house is an SOS centre for women. I get calls from victims even at 2 am.” 

 

Revealing her contact number has also led to her receiving death threats over the phone. “I don’t fear anything. I always sleep with a sickle beside me. Now many local people support my work,” she explains. She has also taken legal action against such threats.

The excuses for violence range from birthing a female child, dowry, alcoholism, the marital family’s disdain towards women, suspicion regarding extramarital affairs, women talking to neighbours or men outside the family, and many more.

Fighting For Justice

Upon receiving a complaint, Akkatai visits the government’s special cell for women and children to register a complaint and obtain legal documents, which can be used in court. 

 

“Each case takes at least eight to ten years,” she says. Talking about the challenges of the Indian judicial system in India, lawyer Gowthaman Ranganathan tells Unbias the News:

Judicial backlog is a persistent problem. Lack of judicial appointments and lack of infrastructure are two big reasons.

Gowthaman Ranganathan, lawyer

Nalini, a Delhi based lawyer, says: “I hear from my colleagues in district courts that judges too work amidst a lot of pressure, where someone would be trying to bribe them while another person would be threatening them.”

Meanwhile, the legal costs and the mental trauma often forces people to withdraw. “Not many people are aware of the legal remedies and their rights,” she adds.

Physical and Mental Harrassment

This reminds her of Rekha Desai*, another woman she helped. Rekha states: “His family members lied to me and said that he was a bus conductor while he was a gambler.” Within a year of the marriage, she found out that her husband was having a relationship outside of the marriage. When she began confronting him, he resorted to physical violence. “For eight years, he abused and beat me. Even his family members would mentally harass me.”

 

When Rekha returned to her maternal home for a few days, she met Akkatai, who assured her safety. Before filing a complaint, Akkatai usually speaks to both the parties and only then proceeds. “Rekha’s husband threatened us, and even abused me, ” says Akkatai. 

 

She began her preliminary investigation by talking to the villagers at length. “I found everything about his illicit affair, the gambling, and how he sought local politicians’ help to silence Rekha,” says Akkatai. 

Long Road to Justice

Before filing a case, Akkatai held multiple conversations with Rekha over two months. “We first filed a case in the civil court mentioning that Rekha was lied to, deceived, and that her husband physically and mentally abused her every day.” It took three years for the first verdict that came in Rekha’s favour. Rekha says, “The court ordered him to pay me INR 5000 [€ 57] monthly as interim maintenance amount.”

 

Rekha’s spouse contested it in the district court – 50 kilometers away from Rekha’s remote village. “Every month, there would be a hearing which would take at least eight hours,” she says. “Even this result came in my favour, and now the court fined him,” says Rekha. Her husband then roped in a few relatives trying to bribe Rekha into giving him a divorce. “What shocks me every time is how a man thinks he can decide everything,” says Akkatai. 

So far, Rekha has visited multiple courts over 100 times across five years. Each hearing cost Rekha and Akkatai a day’s income.

Akkatai asked Rekha not to opt for divorce till the dues were settled. “The property is in her husband’s name. As per the law, even his wife and children have a say in it. How can we give up that right?” asks Akkatai. In India, there are no accurate datasets available on how much land women own. A 2018 state of the land report puts it at an average of 12.9 percent. 

 

“He didn’t even pay the monthly maintenance the court asked him to. We won’t settle for a divorce,” says Akkatai. After fighting for several decades, she learned such legal complexities. “I would discuss with lawyers, ask them questions till the time it made sense to me,” says Akkatai of acquainting herself with the legal provisions. 

What Allies Can Do

Narayan Gaikwad, a 73-year-old farmer from Kolhapur’s Jambhali village, has seen Akkatai fight cases from the start. “With tremendous pressure and red-tapism, sometimes Akkatai loses her calm. That’s when I take the case forward,” he says. Narayan has helped Akkatai in several instances and ensured the local police at least registered the case.

Building a support system is essential; otherwise, victims can’t endure the fight.

Akkatai Teli, Indian sisterhood movement

Advocate Dhanajirao Jagadale says, “Often, the lawyers fighting the case of perpetrators keep delaying the hearing. Prolonging the case builds mental pressure on the survivor to withdraw.”

 

Advocate Gowthaman Ranganathan believes it is important to remember the contribution of the feminist movement in getting legislation against domestic violence. Till then it was seen as something that happens within a man’s home and is personal. He agrees with the need for reform and better implementation:

 

“Laws can exist but it is the economic dependence that keeps women in violent situations. Judicial academies organise gender sensitivity training for officials but we can have more such workshops. Protection officers, appointed to support women facing abuse, need to be prompt and in accessible locations. So-called men’s rights’ movements are pushing the narrative that the law needs to be reversed because it is being misused. We need to counter that narrative too.”

 

Akkatai, who has spent her lifetime fighting, is not tired. “If I can just get the support of a woman lawyer, I can make the entire Kolhapur district safe for women,” she says. 

“Keep fighting the good fight. Keep questioning everything. The answers might change someone’s life,” Akkatai Teli advises.

* Names have been changed

(Source: Unbias The News)

What’s in a surname? The female artists lost to history because they got married

 A new biography of the painter Isabel Rawsthorne highlights how talented women have often missed out on the recognition they deserved

Generations of female artists, composers and writers have been lost to history because their names changed after marriage. According to growing academic consensus, the conventional switch of surnames at the altar has erased a key cultural legacy. And the story of the painter and designer Isabel Rawsthorne, told in a new biography, is among the first to make this powerful argument.

A star of the London art scene in the late 1940s and 50s, Rawsthorne was billed as one of five key artists to watch alongside Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Yet her striking paintings are now attached, piecemeal, to the three other names she used. As a result, she appears simply as a string of footnotes, best known as the muse of her famous lovers, the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Alberto Giacometti.

Dr Carol Jacobi, author of the new study of Rawsthorne, Out of the Cage, published by Thames & Hudson, believes it is a question of now hauling significant female artists “out of the shadows”.

“Power really does reside in a name,” said Jacobi, a curator at Tate Britain. “When Rawsthorne died no one connected her to the artist known as Isabel Lambert, who had created so many designs during the Festival of Britain, nor to the bohemian muse Isabel Delmer, and certainly not to the promising artist Isabel Nicholas, who had exhibited in London in the 1930s.”

Jacobi believes many artistic legacies have been mislaid this way. A child prodigy such as Emma Jones, said Jacobi, has limited recognition now only because her husband, Alexis Soyer, made sure her work was credited when she died in childbirth, aged 28, in 1842. Other artists yet to be retrieved from the margins include the American modernist Helen Torr, whose career, despite early acclaim in the 1920s in New York, was overshadowed by her husband, the abstract artist Arthur Dove.

In Scotland, Margaret Macdonald, wife of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, is gradually being acknowledged beyond academic circles. She created many features of her husband’s popular work, shaping the “Glasgow Style” of the 1890s, as he acknowledged, writing: “Margaret has genius, I have only talent.”

The problem is widespread across culture, according to the crusading academic Anna Beer, author of Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music. “The problem really started in the 19th century when the idea of a wife as property took hold,” she said. “Before that, in the previous 200 years, women artists and musicians often hung on to a family name if it positioned them helpfully as part of a creative dynasty.”

Three Fish, a 1948 painting by Isabel Rawsthorne. Photograph: © Warwick Llewellyn Nicholas Estate

Beer also believes an immoral taint on artistic effort in the Victorian era stopped women putting themselves forward. Writing for public consumption was seen as akin to prostitution. “So you can see why women chose to publish anonymously or adopted men’s names,” she said.

Rawsthorne’s extraordinary life began in 1912 when she was born to the middle-class Nicholas family. As a child growing up on the Wirral, her aptitude for art was clear. At 16, she found a way to try life drawing, which was forbidden, by hiring a room where fellow art school students could model.

The Mysterious Garden, a 1911 watercolour by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. Photograph: National Galleries of Scotland/Getty Images

Arriving at the Royal Academy of Art in 1931, on a rare scholarship for a young woman, her studies were cut short when her father died. But by then she had staged her own shows and met Epstein and his wife, Margaret, eventually moving in with them as a convenient life model. When she became pregnant by Epstein, she decided to hand the baby over to the couple.

Francis Bacon’s portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne. Photograph: © The Estate of Francis Bacon

Moving to Paris, her painting style developed and she married the British journalist and anti-Nazi “black propaganda” supremo Sefton Delmer, taking his name as a form of protection during travels in civil war-torn Spain, where they were captured briefly by rebels. She gathered intelligence and worked for a period at the covert propaganda bureau in Aspley Guise, near Bletchley Park, run by her husband.

As her art moved from surrealism towards studies of animals and human figures, she returned to Paris and met Giacometti, whose work is believed to have been strongly influenced by her long, lean form.

Back in London and divorced from Delmer, she was the subject of a series of exhibitions and began a relationship with her second-husband-to-be, the celebrated composer Constant Lambert, a man initially also engaged to prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn.

A study of prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn by Isabel Rawsthorne, 1968. Photograph: © Warwick Llewellyn Nicholas Estate

Now “Mrs Lambert”, she worked on the designs for the notoriously risque Festival of Britain ballet Tiresias, performed in Britain in only one production at Sadler’s Wells. A show at the prestigious Hanover Gallery in London followed and she was once again hailed as a talent.

After Lambert’s death, she moved to the Essex countryside and married her third husband, the composer Alan Rawsthorne. “That was Isabel’s surname when she died but, of course, no one connected it to her previous lives,” said Jacobi, adding that none of these marriages brought her the position or security others might have sought. “Instead, Isabel just had to start again at least twice because of her new married identities.”

A 2016 YouGov poll found that more than half of single British women still planned to change their name at marriage, although this marked a 30% fall on the current rate. Separate research has also noted a growing trend to adopt a double-barrelled joint surname on marriage.

What’s in a name, as Shakespeare’s Juliet asked? Well, according to Beer, it is a strong bit of branding for any artist and, in the case of a male genius such as Shakespeare, several different spellings of his surname, coupled with scant archival evidence, did not stop the building of a legacy. “Scholars can find a way around it if they want,” she said.

(Source: The Guardian)

'Our wish, our photos': Couple abused and trolled for viral wedding shoot respond

The couple, who got married in September, did a photoshoot recently and uploaded the pictures on social media.

Quirky, candid, romantic — pre-wedding or post-wedding photoshoots have become a ritual beyond the ceremonies for many young couples. When Hrushi Karthikeyan and Lakshmi got married on September 16, they could not hold an extensive wedding ceremony or do a photoshoot due to the COVID-19 restrictions. But when they decided to get a photoshoot done recently, the couple had a theme in mind — a boudoir session, where the couple ‘appear’ scantily dressed. Hrushi and Lakshmi chose to drape white sheets around them for their photoshoot.  

With the help of a photographer-friend Akhil Karthikeyan, the couple got the photoshoot done at a beautiful spot among the tea plantations in Vagamon in Kerala’s Idukki district, where they celebrated their honeymoon last week. 

“Most wedding shoots are cliched, where the bride and the groom, wearing traditional veshti and saree, hold hands and walk around the temple. We wanted to do something different and decided to do a post-wedding shoot,” says Hrushi. The idea was suggested by Hrushi’s family friend Akhil Karthikeyan, who runs Wedding Stories, a wedding photography company based in Thrissur. 

The couple, who had already uploaded their wedding ceremony pictures on social media, put up these post-wedding pictures, too. However, their excitement was short-lived. Soon after they posted the pictures on Facebook on Thursday, the pictures were met with abuse, trolls and vulgar comments from social media users. 

Well, the reactions to the photographs were predictable. While a few people appreciated the couple and the photography, and others criticised in a respectable way, many posted derogatory and abusive comments.

“Both of us were very much clothed throughout the shoot. It is impossible to not be clothed as we were shooting outdoors, in a rather public place in Vagamon. That the photographer was able to capture aesthetic shots of us, is purely his creativity and camera skills. However, most users, especially on Facebook, began moral policing me and my wife over the nature of the pictures,” says Hrushi, adding that none of his family members objected to this shoot.

Speaking to TNM, Lakshmi said "I am somebody who wears off shoulder clothes and shorts. Showing my neck or legs does not qualify as nudity. But I was hit with a storm of horrible comments when the pictures were posted on Facebook. Initially, we responded to some of the comments, but then the pictures went viral and it was overwhelming to have to respond to trolls. So we decided to ignore it."

Hrushi also said that while the comments on Instagram, where Wedding Stories had posted the same photos, were positive, most of the comments on Facebook were abusive and vulgar. 

“If a woman wears anything but a saree in Kerala, the male gaze immediately changes, insults start pouring in, not to mention the moral policing and slut-shaming that follows,” he says, adding that Lakshmi’s family began to feel uneasy due to the social media abuse. 

Many abusive memes, too, have popped up after the photos were uploaded on Facebook. 

Apart from trolls, Lakshmi says her neighbours and distant relatives too called up her parents and complained. 

“They kept talking about privacy and why we would shoot 'something' (the intimacy) that should be done within four walls. 

On the internet, they slut shamed me and insulted my family and posed questions such as “are you wearing clothes underneath?,” she adds. 

Lakshmi says she had a conversation with her parents and cleared the air. “They realised that people are of different sorts and that it doesn’t work if we have to consider the opinion and judgements of everybody else,” she adds.

Despite the harassment, Hrushi and Lakshmi don’t intend to take down the images from Facebook. They have also decided not to respond to the trolls, or take legal action. 

“This will fizzle out in a day or two and I don’t want to waste my energy on responding to these trolls. So, I will not file a police complaint,” says Hrushi.

(Source: TNM)

Widow wins legal fight for IVF with husband's sperm

 A widow has won a legal battle to have IVF treatment using her late husband's sperm after a ruling by judges.

The man - identified as JB - died from cancer, but had stored sperm in the hope of one day starting a family.

He left instructions in his will, however, he did not sign the necessary forms before his death.

His widow instructed lawyers to go to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and judges ruled in her favour.

The man lost his life in 2019 after he and his wife, identified as SB, consulted doctors about starting a family.

The court heard that when JB stored his sperm he gave written consent for it to be used for intrauterine insemination - a method of conception where sperm is introduced directly into the uterus.

Following his marriage, JB made a will which stated that his donated sperm should be donated to his wife for as long as possible and for as long as she may wish.

SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Day before he died

However, medics discovered the day before he died - when he was unconscious - that he had only completed forms which provided consent to intrauterine insemination.

Doctors have told SB that her best chance for conceiving children is through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) - a different technique in which eggs are removed from the body and fertilised in a lab.

However, JB had not signed the necessary forms needed for his reproductive material to be used for IVF.

This prompted her legal team to go to Scotland's highest civil court to obtain an order which would allow JB's sperm to be used in this way.

They argued that JB had given permission in his will for his semen to be used for IVF.

Effective consent

Lawyers for NHS Grampian did not oppose the move but the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) was unable to conclude that JB gave effective consent for the purposes of the legislation governing the matter.

Their lawyers stated that the will did not make reference to the creation of embryos or to the purpose to which sex cells were to be used.

However, HFEA's legal team argued that if the court should find the necessary legal requirements were met, the authority considered there would be no impediment for SB to begin IVF treatment.

On Friday, judges Lady Dorrian, Lord Glennie, and Lord Woolman ruled in favour of SB.

Lady Dorrian - who gave the judgement - ruled that the man's statement in the will meant that he intended his sperm to be used in IVF treatment.

The court ruled that the terms of the dead man's will amounted to effective consent to the use of his sperm for IVF treatment.

Lady Dorrian wrote: "It is the sort of provision that would only sensibly be made by a man contemplating his death in the near future, and seeking to make his wishes clear."

(Source: BBC)

Mothers doing extra 31 hours more housework each week than before coronavirus chaos, study finds

Women doing more household chores than fathers by average of 12 hours

Mothers in the UK are having to do an additional 31 hours more housework each week than they did before the coronavirus crisis, a study has found.

The report, carried out by Boston Consulting Group, warned this extra work is equivalent to having a second job and is causing a tremendous amount of stress.

Researchers found women are doing an average of 12 hours more household chores than fathers are.

Parents’ lives have been massively disrupted by the Covid-19 lockdown due to nurseries, primary schools, secondary schools and sixth forms being forced to close across the UK in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus.

The research into working parents found the additional household duties being undertaken by parents range from chores around the home, to childcare and homeschooling.

Some 60 per cent of mothers said their capacity to do their jobs has lessened during the coronavirus emergency due to additional domestic duties, while 49 per cent of fathers said the same.

Researchers found 70 per cent of parents do not have any type of external support in providing care and education for their children.

The study, which polled 3,055 working parents in the UK, America, France, Germany, and Italy, found similar gendered patterns in other countries too.

Researchers found women with children across these countries now spend an average of 65 hours a week on unpaid labour around the house — with this figure having almost doubled since the Covid-19 crisis. This is almost a third more than fathers, who are doing an average of 50 hours a week.

It comes after a study by the London School of Economics recently found coronavirus is exacerbating the gender gap as women bear the brunt of childcare responsibilities and homeschooling during lockdown — whether they’re working or not.

The report found women are more likely to deal with homeschooling, childcare and chores around the house even if they are juggling this with working at the same time.

But this trend is being bucked in some households, with childcare being distributed more equally in 20 per cent of homes that include a woman, man and dependant children, due to fathers being furloughed, laid off or working from home.

Professor Barbara Petrongolo, an economist involved in the report, said: “There are a substantial minority of families where fathers now shoulder the bulk of childcare. Together with the way we are adapting our working lives to cope during the lockdown, this gives me hope that in the long term, a more equal society will emerge.”

The report found women are more likely than men to lose their jobs in the forthcoming recession because a larger number work in sectors — such as hospitality, leisure, tourism and the arts — that are forecast to be hardest hit.

(Source: Independent)

Criticism is my love language

Nine years into my marriage, it’s taken a global crisis to make me a nicer person.

I have filled a spray bottle with vinegar, like the instructions said, and coated the shower with it, but nothing is happening.

My toddler daughter bangs on the glass door with a box of Band-Aids, grumpy that I’ve stopped drawing shapes in the steam. “Heart!” she yells. “Girl! Duckie!” But I’m tormented by the hard water stains. I hop out of the shower, naked, past the protesting baby, to grab my phone and re-read the directions.

Ah. Leave vinegar for 15 minutes before wiping down. Fifteen minutes I don’t have, because my son needs breakfast before home-school starts. Today, I am foiled. But, thanks to the pandemic lockdown, I’ll have another chance tomorrow, and the day after that, and probably for another month beyond. Just kidding. We have two kids under 6, I’m lucky if I shower twice a week.

Like many families, we have found comfort in the structure of our pandemic routine: some school, baking, a board game, a walk. Snatched work calls during naps or TV time. Writing badly, late at night. Every day is … exactly the same. As the world beyond our doorstep careens out of control, our lives recede indoors, and my shortcomings on the domestic front are magnified. All I can see is everything I’m doing wrong. For years I’ve been able to delegate or avoid duties I’m not very good at, but now, in our house-shaped bubble, I have nowhere to hide, and neither do my flaws.

Ping Zhu

Shortcoming No. 1: I hate cleaning. Growing up, I cleaned our house for my allowance, and that’s the last time I did it semi-willingly. My husband and I, in our normal lives, both work full-time, and have, fortunately, been able to outsource this task for years. But now we’re home, and I’m having to face that I’m a half-hearted housekeeper at best. I’ve tie-dyed the sheets by mistake, I can only get the kitchen to about 70 percent clean before my brain and body short-circuit, and those hard water stains in the shower won’t budge.

Thankfully, my husband is a tidying savant. After he’s done with the dishes or floors, I ooh and ahh, my mood lifts, my heart sings. It’s a pleasure to behold. He accuses me of Tom Sawyering him as I go on and on about how beautiful the house looks, but it’s true. And I’m trying to be nice. Because, shortcoming No. 2, the Big One: I’m not nice enough to my husband.

When Rodney and I got married, nosy parkers had a lot of questions about how we were going to raise our children across cultures. (He is a Jewish New Yorker; I am a Kashmiri Hindu.) Just a day at a time, like everyone else, we said. And we haven’t had a single cultural issue, except one: My people are Olympic-level bickerers, and his are not. To the untrained eye, a Kashmiri couple figuring out where to go for dinner looks like the tense setup for a movie about imminent divorce. But to us, competitive sparring is what makes life interesting.

There’s no higher compliment given a Kashmiri than “sharp” or “clever,” traits displayed in our conversational style — teasing, skeptical, lively, but overall, yes, argumentative. Bickering, the long back-and-forth volley of conversational points, is our signature pastime. The writer Scaachi Koul once shared a video of her Kashmiri parents deciding where in the car to place a take-out samosa, and watching them pick each other apart, and then eat it together, made my eyes well with homesick tears. Our parents don’t talk about how much and why they love each other, they’ve mostly just stayed together. And argued. And made up over food. For thousands of years.

Now, I’m nice enough. Even if it is my cultural inclination to point out what everyone could be doing better, I’ve learned with my son that the more I tell him he’s having a super day, the more super he behaves. The baby’s a baby, so expectations are low, for now. But like any human, I have endless opinions on everything my partner does. Normally this trait is softened by our limited hours together, as busy working parents. But now, with a surfeit of quality time, I have to watch that I don’t drive him away. (He is now my only friend, after all.)

Without loving words to balance out my critiques, my husband points out, not for the first time, that all he hears is a long list of flaws. This is not a feeling I want anyone trapped in a home with me to feel! So now, in our 9th year of marriage, I’m shaking off my native tongue to learn a new language: When I feel something nice about him, I’m supposed to share that feeling with him, out loud.

This should be easy, and it is, for so many. But in traveling from my heart to my tongue, my feelings drift, mutating into grotesque, prickly shapes. I walk into the kitchen, where my husband has sauteed shrimp and greens for dinner. It looks delicious! What I mean to say is “Thanks for making dinner, it smells wonderful!” 

What I actually say, watching him season the chard, is “Ugh, you and the fish sauce!”

Then there was the time I made some generic couscous, ignoring the special kind he bought on his last grocery run. What I meant to say was “Oh, yes, thanks for going to the store, we’ll try it next time!” But instead I said, “I don’t like that one, so why would I ever use it?”

I know even as the words come out of my mouth that there’s something wrong with them, and he sighs patiently, waiting for me to catch up. And some days, I do. Over the weekend, I was hitting an energy wall, and he took the kids for a walk. Later in the day, like a freshman stuttering through my first conjugations, I said, “When you … noticed I was having a hard time, and took the kids out so that I could have a couple of hours to myself … it meant a lot to me, and I feel so much better now. Thank you.”

It’s the kind of thing he says all the time, and the kind of thing I want to say more often. But practice makes perfect, and right now I have a seemingly endless number of days to keep trying.

As for the shower door? Still cloudy. But I hear a baking soda paste can do wonders, and I intend to forge ahead, on both fronts. Clearly, putting all of my warm feelings for my husband into the words he deserves won’t make the virus evaporate. But on some days, attempts at self-improvement feel like a way out of this Kafkaesque time loop. And I hope my efforts mean that our family unit can come out of this stronger, better, kinder — and maybe even cleaner.

(Source: NYT)