Aswini Ashok

Patriotic lessons are seeded in our minds from time immemorial. Ever since we started school education, we were taught to be patriotic, through the sacrifices of great men who fought incessantly for the freedom of our country. Unfortunately, patriotism is taught only as a ‘concept’ of fighting an invader and the Patriots are only those who have fought the intruders. The evils within our own country and the system which made it accessible for ‘outsiders’ to conquer us is seldom educated. And the people who fought the internal system are never given the badge of patriots. Our History lessons were of valiant emperors, ambitious to spread their empire. The history of the subjects who form the majority of the kingdom is largely ignored. We know how mighty an empire was, but never know how satisfied the people were under that rule.  Thus we have fundamentally gone wrong in understanding ‘patriotism’, for which we are paying a big price now. The recent terror attack at Pulwama and the r...

       Comedy is a tricky premise. You either win all guns blazing or fall flat. There is no in between. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is one such experiment that fared well enough to receive so many accolades for its cast and storyline. However, as an Indian viewer, it is sometimes hard to interpret the jokes as we are unfamiliar with the socio-cultural background in which it is set. The late 1950s of New York City is something beyond our imagination of course. Maybe some of the jokes couldn’t have tickled our ribs, but the message they put across is always loud and clear. As an Indian woman, I have always believed that the emancipation of woman first comes through education and sexual liberation shall follow. This I found hard to understand in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, where the women seem to be sexually liberated, but for education, there is no due importance. Mrs. Weissman manipulating the women students in their post-graduate into believing that the Master’s degr...