January 2012 marks my return to a place I prepared for academically but never mentally: teaching university students. I went from undergrad straight into graduate school and then on to finish a PhD. Along the way I lost sight of what I really wanted because of the grumpy academics that lined the walls of the [...]
Voluntary Foot Binding: The Millennial Edition
by Mohanalakshmi on January 30, 2012 in Culture
After saying I needed another account like I need exposure to Ecoli, I signed up for Pinterest. Call it peer pressure, or my mind’s need to indulge in the very visual after hours of wrestling with words, I’ve been pinning my heart away. My boards (the groupings of images I select) reflect my interests or [...]
Why You Don’t Have Qatari Friends: Part One
by Mohanalakshmi on June 11, 2011 in Uncategorized
On Thursday afternoon, I co-hosted a teleclass to go with the course I wrote for the Global Academy on living and working in Qatar. Both writing the course and preparing for the teleclass were cause for rumination on 6 years of living in Doha. The most interesting part of the teleclass was when participants asked [...]
For Babies and Puppies — not Grown Ups
by Mohanalakshmi on April 1, 2011 in Uncategorized
In an age where diversity is defined as relations between the races and women’s struggles are thought of being long over, I raise a hand in dispute. I constantly have to draw my own boundaries and define myself – not allowing others the permission to apply other words, particularly a word so ineffective as cuteness. [...]
You ain’t got these moves
by Mohanalakshmi on February 13, 2010 in Uncategorized
After a very stressful week and promises to myself as well as my close friends that I would not touch my email all weekend (despite not having a Blackberry, I often am ‘that girl’ these days on my Nokia if there is wireless internet available), I tried to pull together some modicum of energy to [...]
Who will help you with your coat on?
by Mohanalakshmi on May 3, 2009 in Uncategorized
For a long time I faced this question myself: should I settle for the nearest man in my life or should I pursue my dreams? Being a South Asian the customary reaction from friends and family was a sidelong glance any time I came home announcing my latest plans. A look that said, "Okay, but then what?" I thought [...]
The newest accessory?
by Mohanalakshmi on November 2, 2008 in Uncategorized
Lately it seems that if you are without a child and a woman between the age of 25 – 25 then you’re society’s newest oddity. This is a funny realization because I qualify in this category, but more so because for most of the last seven years I qualified in another equally condemed status: single woman, no [...]
Shorts no more
by Mohanalakshmi on July 6, 2008 in Uncategorized
A friend and I were at the mall recently and found ourselves discussing why neither of us wear shorts anymore. This is odd, particularly for me, the girl child who argued fiercely with her mother to wear the fashionable cut offs in high school that gave Daisy her “dukes.” She found it equally so since [...]
a new kind of ladies’ night
by Mohanalakshmi on November 20, 2007 in Uncategorized
“What goes on at ladies night?” This seems like an ordinary question; men are often mystified about those nights the trustworthy and stable women in their lives run out with girlfriends, dressed to the nines, with a shouted “Don’t wait up,” over the shoulder as the door shuts in their face. In [...]
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