'Women play a crucial role in ushering in change in their communities'
By Anuja Agrawal

'How did such a strong woman living in a nondescript corner of Manipur emerge as such a pillar of strength?'
By Anjulika Thingnam

'I was fed throughout my stay on the farm on homegrown vegetables plucked right before my eyes'
By Aparna Pallavi

'After a day in the saltpans, I can never again think of white as a "cool" colour'
By Geeta Seshu

'Despite the worry that another tsunami could strike, the people here are moving on'
By Hema Vijay

'Where is the rest of the rice? The question kept nagging me'
By Linda Chhakchhuak

'The lyrics acquire a personal meaning for the young boy singing so earnestly'
By Manipadma Jena

'Here I was before a woman who was resilient enough to emerge unscathed every time she was attacked'
By Manisha Prakash

'Seeing the scene I was transported back to the 70s and 80s, when the women's movement was blossoming'
By Nirupama Dutt

'If the women refuse to sell fish, the men would be at a loss'
By  Prakriiti Gupta

'They had not become politicians even though they held a political office'
By  Soma Mitra Mukherjee

'She may look like any other ordinary woman but her achievements are not ordinary' By  Shuriah Niazi

'What was even more amazing was that almost everyone stopped to greet her and touch her feet'
By Swapna Majumdar

'There was no false modesty or shame about displaying the use of a female condom'
By  Tarannum Manjul

'It is a swim upstream every day for these women'
By  Usha Turaga-Revelli

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'Women play a crucial role in ushering in change in their communities' By Anuja Agrawal

Care-WFS Fellowship provided an exciting opportunity for me to explore and investigate new areas of women's lives and to revisit some familiar ones. It rekindled my interest in the extraordinary struggles the poor and the marginalised have had to face in order to lead even very ordinary lives.

Working on a feature on the proposed legislation on domestic workers, brought me in contact with the people behind Nirmala Niketan, an NGO that provides placement services to domestic workers from tribal areas. Over the years, many of these tribal women have given up domestic work and have become involved with the affairs and the running of the NGO in a rather impressive manner. I was very struck by how articulate many of them were and how easily they understood the import of my visit. I could write the article with such conviction precisely because I had seen the functioning of Nirmala Niketan with my own eyes.

Going to Morena for my second story was, for me, a visit to a familiar locale after a long time. Abhyudya Ashram was one of the first places I visited when I began my Ph.D. research. The ashram had changed little in the intervening years, I thought, except for the addition of a few new rooms and structures. I was soon lost in conversation with Ramsanehi. During our never-ending discussions on the Bedia community, which was classified as a 'criminal tribe' in colonial times, Ramsanehi conveyed his disaffection with the contemporary class of politicians by suggesting that by colonial criteria it is they - the politicians - who ought to be classified as the 'criminal tribe'. The TT on the train, who was exceedingly curious about my mission; the co-passenger, who was too indignant about the absence of butter in his Indian Railways breakfast; and the lurid posters of C-grade Hindi movies on the walls of Morena Railway Station are among the other little things from that journey that remain in my mind.

Visiting the Mahila Samakhya (MS) programmes for the empowerment and education of women in Saharanpur was a yet another combination of personal and professional interests. Although Saharanpur is my mother's home district, this was my first visit to the area. The weather transformed miraculously to favour my visit. Meeting the gutsy Nisha Chaudhry, who heads the MS operations in this district, and listening to the stories of how she has fought the patriarchal forces in her own life and work made the dominant media images of liberated women pale in significance. Lifebuoy ads on the walls of village homes were a bit uncanny and, as always, I felt uneasy and guilty when, after conversations on a range of topics, the village women turned expectantly towards me to pour out their personal woes and agonies in the hope that I might have some solution.

The fellowship's focus on women as agents of change forced me to look for positive achievements of women in all walks of life even though my sociological training warns me against reducing social change to individual action. I did find that women play a crucial role in ushering in change in their communities and society, even though the structural conditions in which they function often militate against such an outcome.

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