Girl Up Neev

One must always count our blessings as some of us are not even equipped with basic amenities like shelter and clothing. Even though we don’t want our old clothes anymore, it’s almost guaranteed that someone else does. There are disaster victims, underprivileged people, and children in need of clothing, and your donations can help. When you throw away your clothes, they have no chance of reaching people who need them the most. With keeping this idea in mind, we at Girl Up Neev collaborated with Rotaract Club of NMIMS’ SOC for ‘ Dhaagein ’- a clothes distribution drive . The event aimed to collect clothes and other kind donations from the privileged class to distribute them to those in need. Keeping in mind the current situation and the availability of members in different cities, the club planned to focus on 5 cities i.e., Mumbai, Delhi, Guwahati, Pune, and Nagpur. Apart from these cities, donations and distributions were made on small scale in other cities as well like Bangalore ...

An excerpt on female foeticide in India   Female foeticide is the selective abortion or elimination of the female child, with or without the consent of the mother, after the detection of the child’s gender through a series of medical tests. This is usually done under familial pressure from the husband or the in-laws or sometimes, even the woman’s parents. In India the ratio of boys to girls is 924:1000. That is, for every 1000 men, there are only 924 women. This statistic was calculated in 2019 and over time there has been a decline in boy to girl ratio in India. The girls have not vanished overnight. Decades of sex determination tests and female foeticide that has acquired genocidal proportions are finally catching up with the states in India. The frequency of female foeticide in India is assumed to be an estimation derived from its high birth sex ration, that is the ratio of boys to girls at birth. According to recent UN reports, “Every day around 7000 girls are killed...

  IMPACT OF SEXUAL POLICING ON WOMEN I interpret sexual policing in terms of women as enforcing supposed norms on women about their bodies, where most of what they do is constantly under scrutiny and their bodies are constantly sexualized based on how much skin we show or how outspoken we are or whether we drink or smoke these factors are taken as signals of our willingness to attract male attention. Women are constantly under scrutiny, their clothes, their behaviour, their makeup whether its at home or in public places, which creates binds that constraint movement and access for women, so much of the way women’s sexuality is policed is done in the name of keeping us out of harm’s way. Victim-blamers love telling women to keep our knees closed and our hemlines long if we don’t want to be raped and in my mere 20 years of existence this has always lead to increased anxiety and frustration for me, feeling this constant judgement and fear whenever I walk down the road irrespective ...

"For me hearing my baba say “Mera bahadur baccha” was one of the highlights of our relationship. As a child, having my loved ones around was all that really mattered to me. I didn’t ponder about the materialistic things. To be a child is a warm and nurturing feeling. When I was 7, my ‘one and only’, my baba passed away, I felt like my world crumbled, My childhood with him was like a reservoir of love and happiness. Irrespective of everything around, he gave me love as I’d never known or felt.  A year before that I had lost my younger sister Raheen and that just increased the love and attachment I shared with baba. He always said, “My daughters are my everything” and he spent all his time just showing it to us through his actions. Two days before his death he told me that he’s coming home and I should wait for him. The jolly little child that I was, I was beaming with excitement. All I would do the whole day was keep singing “Mere baba aagaye, mere baba aagaye!” But the next I saw ...

  RECALL JUNE 12: CHILD LABOUR    Child labour, work that deprives children of their childhood, potential, dignity, and that is destructive to their physical and mental growth. However, children or adolescents who contribute to work that does not affect their health and personal development or interfere with their schooling is not considered as child labour. An example of the same can be when a child is helping his/her parents at home.  Children who discontinue school due to family indebtedness or are expelled from the school are more prone to child labour. Girls from socially disadvantaged groups are at a higher risk of being forced into child labour. For India, child labour has long term adverse effects. The economy of a country will only prosper when the country will have an educated workforce, skills, technology and the younger generation will be a part of human capital in the future. If child labour to a huge extent continues then there will be a trade-off with ...

Walking into any menswear  section of shops, one will find shades of pink in striped shirts. Similarly, women too storm the workforce in grey and blue color outfits to fulfil their career aspirations. This revolution makes everyone claim “ pink is the new blue !” Pink is the new blue can be portrayed in two ways, of which one is to show women’s dominance in today’s world compared to the past when they didn’t have the will of their own. The other being the stereotypic definition of gender, based on colors pink and blue. When people find a woman working at a construction site or driving a taxi that too at late-night shifts, one might comment “Pink is the new blue”. But if they discover a man performing household chores or looking after his children, would we ever spot them exclaiming “Blue is the new pink”? It’s highly uncertain! The point is the elimination of the belief that men are supposed to mend cars, and women are supposed to do household chores and look after their...

“Life is not a bed of roses, there are thorns too”. “One must learn to adjust in order to be happy”. “This is life, everything is not going to happen according to you”. Women have been taught these things for ages. They are expected to adjust to every situation. Indeed, life is a continuous process of adjustment but there is a difference between adjusting and remaining silent against all the wrong one is facing. I have loved watching daily soaps or as others would likely call it ‘typical saas-bahu drama’. I always thought they were just mere scripts being enacted by the characters on screen for entertainment. However, now as I observe the women around me it is heart-breaking to see what each one is going through. Those episodes were not just the dramatic representation of the characters in the script but also the sad reality which is not easily perceptible. Women have always been victims of unfair practices since olden times. Though we have come a long way, certain things remain un...