Why Can’t Women Own Land?

Recently Wikigender and the Land Portal had organized an online discussion on ways to secure women’s rights to own land [for more click here].  Women may constitute approximately 50% of the human society (not counting India and China that are trying to push that percentage to zero!), however they own less than 2% of the land worldwide.  Why is this so?

I think that regardless of gender-neutral laws, even modern democracies like India that proudly flaunt their Constitution, have people in decision making capacities, as in government, law etc. who still apply the law within context of their old cultural mindsets.  So for example in a recent High Court ruling in Bombay regarding property dispute, the Court gave its ruling in the most gender-biased language that almost regards women like pieces of furniture that are moved from their fathers’ houses into their husbands’.  It said:

Growing Up On Dickens

David and his nurse Peggoty. Drawing by Jessie Willcox Smith (1910)

My Happy Birthday! post for Charles Dickens, one of my all time favorite authors (who’d be 200 if he was alive today)! Given that my grandmother is edging close to a 100, it doesn’t feel that old really!

My love affair with Dickens began with my 10th birthday, when a bachelor friend of my parents’, who had been invited to my birthday party, handed me the first thing that came his way: an unabridged version of Dicken’s David Copperfield.  Recently, when I asked a 10 year old if he had read David Copperfield, he said, “No, but I’ve seen him on T.V. He’s cool!”  I realized he was talking about the magician!

But Dicken’s David Copperfield was really my childhood magician. 

What I Hate About The Book Fair I Love!

Rita Banerji©. All Rights Reserved.

Yesterday I went to the annual Book Fair here in Kolkata.  It is one event that I look forward to all year.  I can devour books…I have eaten, breathed and lived them from the time I think I developed consciousness! 

Pot-luck Christmas Parties!

An Atlas Cedar -- my favorite conifer!

I know this comes 2 weeks late, but that is the intention! Because this is not a post about the recently past Christmas, but about the many Christmases I celebrated as a child, many years ago, and how much I miss them as I watch the Christmases of today.

Finding ‘I’ in Spanish Accents and Wind Chimes

This for me has been one of the biggest questions in establishing a personal identity: which part of me is me, and which part is simply a product of family, societal and cultural conditioning?

And for me the most important part of recognizing an individual and independent identity has been in the discovery of those things that I had not been exposed to by others — my parents, the society, culture and country I was born into.