First appeared in http://raisingworldchildren.com/2017/07/05/marital-symbols-significance-ring-mangalsutra/ . Find out what my real marital symbol is. What is yours? I Don’t Need a Ring On Me A few weeks before I got married, I had an engagement ring,my first marital symbol . The first… Read More »I don’t need a ring on me!
A piece of mine is on KQED Perspectives this morning. If you are near the radio, listen in at 8.43 AM How do you cope with the obsession of coming first in your children? https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/2017/07/01/first/ Recently, I was finishing… Read More »First! (on NPR)
Traveling with small children can be stressful. There is, after all, relentless planning, panic-inducing air-travel, tantrum-ridden eating-out and ceaseless tantrums and sleepless nights to contend with. But the things we experience together traveling are not available in any brochure. Travel brings us priceless moments of growth for both children as well as parents.
We humans have some baffling little habits, and not returning shopping carts to the stand is one for the anthropology class. It’s not because we are pressed for time. We are happy to spend forty minutes every day back and forth in our oversized minivan to go to the gym and run on a stationary treadmill for another forty minutes. But we will not spend the extra forty seconds to walk an empty shopping cart back to its rightful place.
There are a lot of grand festivals that are celebrated in India, but it is a humble one that I treasure the most. It is not Diwali with its lights, gaiety, and splendor. It is not Holi with its splash of color and joy. It is not Ganesh Chaturthi with its pomp and processions. The festival I hold most dear to my heart is Ugadi or New Year. I don’t know if it is the symbolism or meaningfulness or the family time that comes with the festival, but celebrating it is one of my greatest joys.
There is an unhealthy obsession with white skin in India. It is like a hidden disease. It infects everyone, is largely undiagnosed and by the looks of will remain uncured for a long time. Unfortunately, the over $400 skin whitening industry in India seems only too eager to play on people’s ignorance and prejudice so it can increase its line of products and profits. In 2010, AC Nielson had reported that this industry was growing annually at the rate of 18%. At a time where we are having critical conversations about tolerance, integration, and multi-culturalism, this growth of the skin whitening industry is a disturbing trend. We need strong social messaging, a conscious move by thinkers and leaders to gently move people away from this thinking. It is not impossible. But it does need all of us to come together and resist.
There are some words which carry within them entire cultures and centuries of thinking. Translating them to another language does not achieve much. It fails to convey the purport, the essence around the word. To truly do that, one would… Read More »A tale of Jugaad
My first experience of a St. Patrick’s Day parade in America was at Chicago in 2002/3. I was studying at the University of Notre Dame – home to the spirit of the ‘Fighting Irish’. A bunch of us decided to… Read More »For the ‘Fighting Irish’ spirit
Jan 21st, 2017 – the day of the Women’s March will go down as an important date. Half a million marchers are said to have gathered in D.C alone. Independent estimates state there were more than 3 million marchers in… Read More »Why I marched
When we open our front door to step out, there is a neat row of little toys that meets the eye. Camel, Elephant, Duck, Dinosaur – they all stand sharply, on guard duty, on the porch beam right under our… Read More »Toys on Sentry Duty
http://www.justsimplysarah.com/women-who-inspire-meet-sandhya-acharya/
Author Interview: Sandhya Acharya – South Asian Children’s Book Author
As I began researching the economics of getting a children’s book published and distributed, I was surprised at the different elements involved. Most of us don’t know what goes behind it, so thought it might be interesting to know… Read More »Why Kickstarter part 2
– Traditional publishers receive, by one estimate I read, more than 20,000 manuscripts of which 30 are chosen that is ~ 0.1% – Multicultural content in children’s books at maybe 10% (this is a researched statistic). South Asian will be… Read More »Why Kickstarter part 1
