Anecdotes and Realizations

 Now, it's been a while since I wrote a long array of blogs. No judgey. But, writing brings back good thoughts. Writing brings back that feeling of relief knowing that someone somewhere could read what I have to say, if they would just search for 'Anjali Paruvu Opinions'. Isn't that on your search history? Anyhoo, I wanted to put into words what makes me want to articulate the flying mess of consonants and vowels into blogs with short, simple sentences. All my life, I have had thoughts (big shocker, Anjali!). Wacky ones, funny ones, mean ones, sad ones, and a lot of question ones. These question ones were questions I thought no one cares about. Or if they had thought it, they would have thought it was unimportant and left it alone, right? How could I have a question no one thought of? I'm no genius.  But, the more questions I left unasked, the more thoughts I leftunspoken, the more injustices I didn't protest, the worse I felt. And it never even clicked for me. ...

 Recently the 70th Miss Universe beauty pageant took place, and the world went ga-ga as Harnaaz Sandhu from India was crowned winner. She has quite an inspiring story. Her mother , having fought patriarchy, became a successful gynaceologist . Sandhu stands for womens' rights and menstrual hygiene. This is truly inspirational and she would be a wonderful role model. Except for the fact that the only reason I know about her is because she participated in a  pageant that stands for an archaic system of ranking and comparing women that should not exist today.  Beauty pageants in general are  horrifyingly degrading and outmoded in ideologies. A group of women stand around in minimal clothing, awaiting judgement from a panel of people, rating their bodies, their chest sizes, their waists and deciding who the 'most beautiful' girl in the universe is. How can this still be a thing? And a popular thing, at that? One can argue that nowadays pageants give more importance to the...