The tumultuous passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha evoked many emotions in us as my mother and I watched it on TV like millions of others. My 87-year-old mother has seen the world transformed around her. Her route to empowerment has been education. In turn, she became a teacher and had the satisfattions of teaching the daughters of her students. The world around her has been transformed from the time when women of privileged were expected to maintain purdah, and were certainly not encouraged to step outside their homes. Her sisters, too became educationists, and they blazed their own career paths.

I wrote a on something that goes back to my childhood. Please click here to read it. I have narrated this incident in the book  Woman: Many Hues Many Shades published by Lahore Book Shop, Ludhiana. When I was asked to write for the book, which is a compilation of articles, I cheekily said that if Khushwant Singh wanted to write on his grandmother, I would do so about my mother. Of course, his Portrait of a Lady is a classic. Please click here to read a review of the book.

Among the women achievers I have written on are Prof Upinder Singh, co-winner of the Infosys Prize in Social Sciences: History, and earlier Rupa Bajwa, who won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the XXIV Grinzane Cavour award.

The feminist in me is seldom far from the surface, least of all today!