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Showing posts from February, 2013

Vagina woes

Some five years back, when I was shopping with my mother in the streets of Darya Ganj, a fine young black boy gathers the courage to pinch my rear, not once, not twice but three times. I was daring enough to gather equal courage to pull him back from the collar and paste a slap on his face and surrender him to the mob, leaving him at their mercy. The question, however, is whether all this was really required? Why did he have to do a pitiful deed as such to be only humiliated at the end? Probably he hadn't anticipated the consequence. And that's thanks to the social structure - a patriarchy that condones and exalts sexual harassment, an administration that has no stringent laws for the protection of the fairer sex and above all a matriarchy that celebrates manhood and embraces suppression under its so-called 'valour' in the name of culture and religion. "Being a woman is terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men." - Josep

Advertisements : en route to Materialism

Abraham Maslow in his Theory of Human Motivation stated that while people aim to meet basic needs, they seek to meet successively higher needs in the form of a hierarchy. This theory seems to have become the mantra of advertisement industry that not merely caters to human needs but also creates them, thus establishing a materialistic culture. It is true that the ultimate decision to buy a product is in the hands of the consumer but advertisements do modify consumer needs, building a new from the previous. People find their selves buying things they do not need. The kind of materialistic culture that advertisements have created can be well estimated after the launch of iphone5. The name sells! Not many of the millionaire sons who would have ordered Iphone5 even before its launch in India would know that the only significant difference between iphone4s and iphone5 is the so-called “brilliant 4-inch retina display that allows you to see more of everything”. What intrigues one i