Joyous Devi

The OscarSoWhite was a hugely evocative issue   that just couldn’t be ignored nor was meant to be, at the recently held Oscar Award Night. The protest was centred around the lack of representation by the Black actors, technicians etc. in the Oscar awards, which this year as in the past was dominated by its White candidates. Chris Rock, the anchor made hugely entertaining if sharp side sweeps about it, which was aimed at making those concerned squirm and hopefully give the whole process of representation and nomination a rethink. The underlying message – Stop, colour bias and   racism.   In India the bias about colour is equally loaded though it has a different narrative. Here   it is   largely viewed as a definition of   beauty, as in fairness of complexion equals to being beautiful.   But since   I say largely, it obviously means there is an underside to it, which impacts the more obvious frivolity of colour and complexion. And that is th...

'Ritual purity, a great injustice to women' - The Hindu

Joyous Devi: Travelling Monologues

Leafing through the in flight magazine on the London New York leg of my journey, the intriguing title caught my eye – Room a-Genders!  The  column that followed gave some interesting insights about the changing hotel scenario.  It talked about how hotels, which typically project a ubiquitous male presence, with smoke filled rooms and corridors lined  with empty bottles of  booze,  are  slowly yielding to a gentler, more women friendly ambience as  a recognition of the greater presence of women guests. The Hyatt in London, apparently earns 37 percent of its revenue from its  women guests and this is not an isolated instance. In keeping with this changing trend, the hotel industry, never slothful in its response to changes, is increasingly getting into the act of structuring their traditional male friendly facilities to accommodate the  solo travelling power brokers – women! The article  goes on to specifically mention the increasin...

In an antique land, a modern-world kingdom | The Asian  Jordan – In an Antique Land Arriving in Jordan is supposed to be a hassle free, visa-on-arrival convenience aimed at bestowing  a charmingly Arabic welcome to  the harried, cattle-class fatigued visitor. Mine, didn’t quite fall in that category though, preceded as it was with an encounter with a suspiciously  querying visa officer, followed by three senior ones,  before my passport was stamped.  Enough to put a dampener on one’s mood one would agree.  But I decided to shrug this irritant aside, attributing the  brusqueness to the region’s currently troubled reality and instead  decided to concentrate  on the country that lay beyond its Immigration Section. And that was a revelation. Jordan is in many ways a matchless confluence of ancient stories replete with the whispers from empires long lost, Biblical  allusions and a  kingdom of the modern world. Roads w...

Joyous Devi: Urban Slums - A World of Images

The world on the other side of  the huge plate glass window revealed  itself in its  changing facets,   as the day shifted from  early morning   to the time when  the lights came on in the city, to  when these too were snuffed out. The view,  from  the eight floor restaurant of the  luxury hotel that I was standing in, as a result of several interesting circumstances, left one with mixed feelings. It showed a Mumbai rakish and suave in its  self-assurance, matchless in its fused identity of big money and glamour  and yet as my eyes roved over the changing landscape of luxury hotels,  forgotten relics of building  and the  ceaseless  activity centred around the construction of various infrastructural projects, they were arrested  by the naked visibility of its other face. One, raw with need  and the hunger to clamber up the slithery steps to a better life....