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After much excitement and anticipation, I got my first bra in the seventh standard. I had awaited this moment ever since the girls in my class first started wearing their bras. It was a big deal! Almost as big as getting your first period–a rite of passage into adulthood. In hindsight, the bra made me feel very desirable. I wanted to be seen as a woman. It is strange. Even as a child, bras were so sexualised and gender coded that it was only at a later stage (after a particularly painful exercising session) that I realised they were first and foremost meant to support breasts....

Karl Marx evokes strong reactions from both sides of the political spectrum. His work has inspired thousands of people to mobilise against class oppression, yet he remains taboo in several parts of the world. Economics is no exception. Interestingly, while economists often dismiss Marx’s work (Meadowcroft 2008), he is simultaneously used as a strawman by professors to ensure that his critique never receives sincere engagement.1 As evident from the dearth of heterodoxy in most economics departments globally — as of 2016, less than 120 economics departments were offering Postgraduate or Undergraduate programmes globally (Jakob Kapeller and Florian Springholz 2016), Marxist perspectives in economics remain at the fringe....

Names have been changed to protect the identities of the interviewees. Illustrations and photographs by Madhushree unless mentioned otherwise. “Because we cannot see how much we have earned on the ticket vending machine, we have no idea if [on a crowded bus] the passenger has paid their ticket fare or not.” On February 3, 2021, Ebix announced that EbixCash, its Indian subsidiary, had procured a 7-year contract with Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Ltd (PMPML) to replace the old e-Ticket vending machines....

All names have been changed to protect the identities of the interviewees. Illustrations and photos by Madhushree. I am not a fan of Bike Taxis I have ridden a bike taxi four times. I was short of money all four times, so an auto or a cab was out of the question, and I didn’t have easy access to the bus. In India, three leading aggregator platforms- Ola, Uber and Rapido provide bike taxi services....

2022 was full of surprises and revelations. However, the lesson I hold closest to my heart was unlearning my internalised misogyny. I realised I looked down upon women I perceived as pick-me girls or not like other girls. While many people who engage in this behaviour enable sexism, it is more helpful to view internalised misogyny as a response or a reaction to patriarchy. As several cultural critics have started pointing out, even the hurling of labels such as pick-me or trad-wife tends to blur the lines between calling out misogyny and reinforcing it....

When I watched Black Panther, I remember thinking, “This is not just any superhero film. It has heart.” Actually, here is my orginal review of the film, that I wrote when I was 17. I remember crying in the theatre, feeling hopeful and moved. As a visual communication design student, the visuals had blown me away. Despite being fully aware of what Marvel does, I went into Wakanda Forever with a sliver of hope, but I was thoroughly disappointed....

Does art not also contain the opposite of this ‘Dionysian’ losing of oneself? Does it not also contain the ‘Apollonian element of entertainment and satisfaction which consists precisely in the fact that the onlooker does not identify [themselves] with what is represented but gains distance from it, overcomes the direct power of reality through its deliberate representation, and finds, in art, that happy freedom of which the burdens of everyday life deprive [them]?...

This article will be a work-in-progress node of my digital garden to hold my observations about social media in one place. If you know me, chances are you have heard me scream about quitting Twitter and joining Mastodon. I joined a little before the first wave of Twitter migration. While I had been wanting to get my friends to join Mastodon for a long time, I didn’t actually think they would....

Note: This arises from lived/autofictional experiences. I have quoted credible sources wherever necessary, but it shouldn’t be taken as scientific advice. The article is structured to reflect the circular and often convoluted train of thought caused by BPD. Feel free to read it out of order, in order, or link hop. This is an ongoing, growing digital forest. The what Opening up Everyone hates me Splitting How are you?...

TLDR: The base website is hand-written and uses Bootstrap. The blog is built with Hugo and uses the excellent PaperMod theme (with a single, minor addition). Hosting is via Cloudflare Pages. The website One of the primary design goals was that Madhu should be able to edit the blog and make textual edits to the website directly from GitHub. This ruled out fancy React-based SSGs such as Next or Gatsby. I eventually settled on Bootstrap and Hugo, picking Hugo over Jekyll simply because I liked how PaperMod looked....