The Accidental Dentist

 UNLEARNING HARMFUL GENDER NORMS: Why it's important for a just and inclusive world. The UNDP's GSNI (Gender Social Norm Index) report for the year 2023 was published in June, and it clearly states that  without tackling biased gender social norms we will not achieve gender equality as reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). WHY IT EXISTS: Years of cultural practices are handed down to generations, as holy grails, with absolute authority over life. They are blindly followed without questions. Slowly and gradually they become part and parcel of daily life. So nuanced is their presence that it's never noticed. Not until you actually sit down with it and have a talk. Not until that. Limiting beliefs are the genesis point of gender norms. A woman can't lead, a man can't cook, this color is for girls, and those toys are for boys. We have created gender roles that are leading towards a lifelong cycle of inequality. If those gender norms are left unchallenge...

'A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.'  Woolf's A Room of One's Own is a testament of the truest nature. An ode to all the lost voices. A justification for the dreams lost.  A Room of One's Own is a long essay that Woolf based her polemic on the lectures that she gave in 1928. It is a landmark of feminist thought about creative inequality and women's struggle for independence. In the 80-page book, her analysis of women's lives will make you stop mid-sentence countless times. She'll take you on a journey of disparity among the sexes, differences that it has on the viewing of the world, the unfairness in the opportunities, and how all of that combined leads her to deduce the importance of independence a woman needs in order to write fiction or write at all.   Woolf dissects many themes in her book, Mainly revolving around the shameful underinvestment of society in women's education that thus led to gendered language...

Years ago, a young girl came across a book, with a daunting name she didn't fully understand and an author she hadn't heard of. She gambled, flipped the coin in the air, and purchased the book. She won't admit that she was short on money that day, or that she had to borrow some from her driver, or the fact that ever since that bookshop disappeared from the plaza. Of course she won't, it makes everything less believable.  She read the first half of the book while sitting in the car on her journey back home. There wasn't enough ink in the pen that she held in her hand or the space in the margins of the book to hold her confession. A teary confession of a lost daughter finding the words that guided her home. She found the vocabulary for her expression. The language that can describe the turmoil her soul was in. A companion stretching out a hand and reassuring her that she isn't alone in her thoughts. Validating her opinions, confirming her fears, and upholding her ...

   AVOIDING WRITING, LIVING AND WHY IS IT ESSENTIAL FOR SOUL? Again a white unharmed page stares back at me. Again I don't want to ruin it with my interpretations of things, because that's the excuse I use most of the days for not picking up the pen, for not ruining a page. Who needs to know what I think? Why does it even matter? Isn't that what everything narrows down in the end, mattering!  For a better part of my time, that's how I convince myself to not think about that itch in my hand, that continuous knock on the door. Leave it, don't pay attention. And by the simplest act of ignoring I let those ideas rot, turning themselves into black tar, tar that covers every inch of my brain's room. Because believe me I have let a lot of those ideas there, waiting for them to decompose, giving them time, not to bake but to end. I have never been gentle with those stories. I have starved them of an audience, I have locked them away labelling them too personal to share,...

10 minutes and 38 seconds in this strange world by Elif Shafak , yesterday when I turned the last page I was left with an uneasiness I couldn't pinpoint. As hidden as the protagonist is in my world, the uneasiness equalled that. The unseen, the unnamed, the ones who carry the burden of sins for the so-called honourable. The ones who have seen more ugliness than words can write have seen society naked the righteous and pious stripped to their wickedness. The ignored and the non-existent. Like the ghosts lingering at the back of our minds, they do too. But we accept ghosts, we acknowledge them. We as a society outcast these women for the immorality of men. The seller of human flesh, the bidder of sex, marketing the obscenity, the mistress of the night, are called by many names. Dancing girls, prostitutes, call girls, Tawaif. They are the harsh reality we try to sweep into the darkness of night, by restricting them to red light areas, by snatching their right to respect. Because thos...

I kept asking myself, what language does the war speak? What translation do those who oppress understand? People born and raised in hatred, can they ever shed the past and sit with the loss of Palestinian? Is acceptance too much to ask for, is liberation not a birthright? The history doesn't lie, it doesn't until it's made too. '48 Nakba , the Palestinian catastrophe, when almost two-thirds of the entire population was displaced, to make room for current Israeli residents. The very people who have nine generations buried in that land were made landless. Home addresses were ripped off of their existences. Those two-third, their grandchildren are the ones now waging a war for their rightful return. Meanwhile, a twisted ideology was so deeply engraved in current Israel, that no one is willing to have this conversation. When the peace solution is offered for Palestinians when the so-called concerned parties jump in, and that too after thousands are mentally and physically s...

I have witnessed more hatred than my heart can tolerate. More grief than I can process. I have been exposed to years of pain and suppression in the past few weeks. If I talk about myself. But I can’t. Right now, it’s not important. Right now, it doesn’t matter. Because what I have felt in the past few days, it's not the fraction of what the Palestinians have gone through! The horrors of suppression, the anxiety of losing one’s rightful home, the forever trauma of a troubled history! A war inherited and with it the loss of thousands. It makes me wonder, have we forgotten that a higher power will hold us accountable? Are we forgetting that there is a life after this one? One where we’ll have to answer for every single deed, where you can’t hide the atrocities and can’t justify them with your foreign policies.  When Al-Aqsa was attacked, I waited for the thunders to struck and for the earth to crack open and swallow, I waited for the miracle. I cried on the night of the 27th and pray...