바카라We women... are becoming like court jesters. We tell the horrible truth, everyone smiles in polite agreement, but it has no impact바카라, writes Mrinal Pande in this collection of newspaper columns. Impatient with easy assumptions about India바카라s forward march, she doesn바카라t pull her punches. An example: 바카라the milk of human kindness was never more tax deductible!바카라 (My personal favourite is the [Mallika] 바카라Sherawatting바카라 of the women바카라s rights movement.)
Pande raises important questions about language and power. She points at the joints in the twisted body of the nation to show how one set of problems feeds off, and bleeds into, another set. For instance, child marriages in Rajasthan are not just about tradition and patriarchy but also extreme poverty.
Pande illuminates the links between linguistic racism, urban feminism and an unethical media when talking about women like Prabha Devi, the only woman barber in her village, and Lad Kanwar, who explains why maternal mortality doesn바카라t hit the headlines the way farmer suicides do. There are all-too-brief forays into economic home truths, via tamancha (small desi firearm) manufacture in UP, a priest shortage in Maharashtra, Agra바카라s ailing ambulances, and Mineral Water Baba. One wishes the book had more of these.
If only Pande바카라s writing could be taken out of the column straitjacket. All this book needed was to be treated like a book in its own right.
