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Kalki Koechlin Nails Everything That's Wrong with Our Society in One Epic Performance

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Kalki Koechlin's latest performance covers everything that's wrong with society's prejudices against women.

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15 Virginia Woolf Quotes That You Would Want to Learn by Heart

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"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

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let me tell you something: no one is going to look at you, broken and shattered and think - damn, you are beautiful. no one is going to come pick up your broken pieces off the floor and assemble...

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"Destroy the idea that men should respect women because we are their daughters, mothers, and sisters. Reinforce the idea that men should respect women because we are people." -Radleigh Lauren...

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One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821-February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream - or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did. The piece, which first appeared in the altogether revelatory A Writer's Diary (public library) under the title "The Dream of a Queer Fellow" and was later published separately as The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, explores themes similar to those in Dostoyevsky's 1864 novel Notes from the Underground, considered the first true existential novel. True to Stephen King's assertion that "good fiction is the truth inside the lie," the story sheds light on Dostoyevsky's personal spiritual and philosophical bents with extraordinary clarity - perhaps more so than any of his other published works. The contemplation at its heart falls somewhere between Tolstoy's tussle with the meaning of life and Philip K. Dick's hallucinatory exegesis.

The story begins with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg on "a gloomy night, the gloomiest night you can conceive," dwelling on how others have ridiculed him all his life and slipping into nihilism with the "terrible anguish" of believing that nothing matters. He peers into the glum sky, gazes at a lone little star, and contemplates suicide; two months earlier, despite his destitution, he had bought an "excellent revolver" with the same intention, but the gun had remained in his drawer since. Suddenly, as he is staring at the star, a little girl of about eight, wearing ragged clothes and clearly in distress, grabs him by the arm and inarticulately begs his help. But the protagonist, disenchanted with life, shoos her away and returns to the squalid room he shares with a drunken old captain, furnished with "a sofa covered in American cloth, a table with some books, two chairs and an easy-chair, old, incredibly old, but still an easy-chair."

As he sinks into the easy-chair to think about ending his life, he finds himself haunted by the image of the little girl, leading him to question his nihilistic disposition. Dostoyevsky writes:

I knew for certain that I would shoot myself that night, but how long I would sit by the table - that I did not know. I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl.

You see: though it was all the same to me, I felt pain, for instance. If any one were to strike me, I should feel pain. Exactly the same in the moral sense: if anything very pitiful happened, I would feel pity, just as I did before everything in life became all the same to me. I had felt pity just before: surely, I would have helped a child without fail. Why did I not help the little girl, then? It was because of an idea that came into my mind then. When she was pulling at me and calling to me, suddenly a question arose before me, which I could not answer. The question was an idle one; but it made me angry. I was angry because of my conclusion, that if I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl? I remember I pitied her very much: so much that I felt a pain that was even strange and incredible in my situation...

It seemed clear that if I was a man and not a cipher yet, and until I was changed into a cipher, then I was alive and therefore could suffer, be angry and feel shame for my actions. Very well. But if I were to kill myself, for instance, in two hours from now, what is the girl to me, and what have I to do with shame or with anything on earth? I am going to be a cipher, an absolute zero. Could my consciousness that I would soon absolutely cease to exist, and that therefore nothing would exist, have not the least influence on my feeling of pity for the girl or on my sense of shame for the vileness I had committed?

From the moral, he veers into the existential:

It became clear to me that life and the world, as it were, depended upon me. I might even say that the world had existed for me alone. I should shoot myself, and then there would be no world at all, for me at least. Not to mention that perhaps there will really be nothing for any one after me, and the whole world, as soon as my consciousness is extinguished, will also be extinguished like a phantom, as part of my consciousness only, and be utterly abolished, since perhaps all this world and all these men are myself alone.

Beholding "these new, thronging questions," he plunges into a contemplation of what free will really means. In a passage that calls to mind John Cage's famous aphorism on the meaning of life - "No why. Just here." - and George Lucas's assertion that "life is beyond reason," Dostoyevsky suggests through his protagonist that what gives meaning to life is life itself:

One strange consideration suddenly presented itself to me. If I had previously lived on the moon or in Mars, and I had there been dishonored and disgraced so utterly that one can only imagine it sometimes in a dream or a nightmare, and if I afterwards found myself on earth and still preserved a consciousness of what I had done on the other planet, and if I knew besides that I would never by any chance return, then, if I were to look at the moon from the earth - would it be all the same to me or not? Would I feel any shame for my action or not? The questions were idle and useless, for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew with all my being that this thing would happen for certain: but the questions excited me to rage. I could not die now, without having solved this first. In a word, that little girl saved me, for my questions made me postpone pulling the trigger.

Just as he ponders this, the protagonist slips into sleep in the easy-chair, but it's a sleep that has the quality of wakeful dreaming. In one of many wonderful semi-asides, Dostoyevsky peers at the eternal question of why we have dreams:

Dreams are extraordinarily strange. One thing appears with terrifying clarity, with the details finely set like jewels, while you leap over another, as though you did not notice it at all - space and time, for instance. It seems that dreams are the work not of mind but of desire, not of the head but of the heart... In a dream things quite incomprehensible come to pass. For instance, my brother died five years ago. Sometimes I see him in a dream: he takes part in my affairs, and we are very excited, while I, all the time my dream goes on, know and remember perfectly that my brother is dead and buried. Why am I not surprised that he, though dead, is still near me and busied about me? Why does my mind allow all that?

In this strange state, the protagonist dreams that he takes his revolver and points it at his heart - not his head, where he had originally intended to shoot himself. After waiting a second or two, his dream-self pulls the trigger quickly. Then something remarkable happens:

I felt no pain, but it seemed to me that with the report, everything in me was convulsed, and everything suddenly extinguished. It was terribly black all about me. I became as though blind and numb, and I lay on my back on something hard. I could see nothing, neither could I make any sound. People were walking and making a noise about me: the captain's bass voice, the landlady's screams... Suddenly there was a break. I am being carried in a closed coffin. I feel the coffin swinging and I think about that, and suddenly for the first time the idea strikes me that I am dead, quite dead. I know it and do not doubt it; I cannot see nor move, yet at the same time I feel and think. But I am soon reconciled to that, and as usual in a dream I accept the reality without a question.

Now I am being buried in the earth. Every one leaves me and I am alone, quite alone. I do not stir... I lay there and - strange to say - I expected nothing, accepting without question that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I do not know how long passed - an hour, a few days, or many days. Suddenly, on my left eye which was closed, a drop of water fell, which had leaked through the top of the grave. In a minute fell another, then a third, and so on, every minute. Suddenly, deep indignation kindled in my heart and suddenly in my heart I felt physical pain. 'It's my wound,' I thought. 'It's where I shot myself. The bullet is there.' And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice, for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.
"Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom."
I cried out and was silent. Deep silence lasted a whole minute. One more drop even fell. But I knew and believed, infinitely and steadfastly, that in a moment everything would infallibly change. Suddenly, my grave opened. I do not know whether it had been uncovered and opened, but I was taken by some dark being unknown to me, and we found ourselves in space. Suddenly, I saw. It was deep night; never, never had such darkness been! We were borne through space and were already far from the earth. I asked nothing of him who led me. I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and my heart melted with rapture at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not remember how long we rushed through space, and I cannot imagine it. It happened as always in a dream when you leap over space and time and the laws of life and mind, and you stop only there where your heart delights.

Through the thick darkness, he sees a star - the same little star he had seen before shooing the girl away. As the dream continues, the protagonist describes a sort of transcendence akin to what is experienced during psychedelic drug trips or in deep meditation states:

Suddenly a familiar yet most overwhelming emotion shook me through. I saw our sun. I knew that it could not be our sun, which had begotten our earth, and that we were an infinite distance away, but somehow all through me I recognized that it was exactly the same sun as ours, its copy and double. A sweet and moving delight echoed rapturously through my soul. The dear power of light, of that same light which had given me birth, touched my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my death.

He finds himself in another world, Earthlike in every respect, except "everything seemed to be bright with holiday, with a great and sacred triumph, finally achieved" - a world populated by "children of the sun," happy people whose eyes "shone with a bright radiance" and whose faces "gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility." The protagonist exclaims:

Oh, instantly, at the first glimpse of their faces I understood everything, everything!

Conceding that "it was only a dream," he nonetheless asserts that "the sensation of the love of those beautiful and innocent people" was very much real and something he carried into wakeful life on Earth. Awaking in his easy-chair at dawn, he exclaims anew with rekindled gratitude for life:

Oh, now - life, life! I lifted my hands and called upon the eternal truth, not called, but wept. Rapture, ineffable rapture exalted all my being. Yes, to live...

Dostoyevsky concludes with his protagonist's reflection on the shared essence of life, our common conquest of happiness and kindness:

All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know that men could be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live upon the earth. I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men... I saw the truth, I did not invent it with my mind. I saw, saw, and her living image filled my soul for ever. I saw her in such consummate perfection that I cannot possibly believe that she was not among men. How can I then go astray? ... The living image of what I saw will be with me always, and will correct and guide me always. Oh, I am strong and fresh, I can go on, go on, even for a thousand years.

[...]

And it is so simple... The one thing is - love thy neighbor as thyself - that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.

A century later, Jack Kerouac would echo this in his own magnificent meditation on kindness and the "Golden Eternity."

A Writer's Diary is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with Tolstoy on finding meaning in a meaningless world and Margaret Mead's dreamed epiphany about why life is like blue jelly.

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The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream

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One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821-February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream - or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did.

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"What I can do is offer myself, wholehearted and present, to walk with the people I love through the fear and mess. That's all any of us can do. That's what we're here for." ~ Shauna Niequist
Until we have become whole, we will attract those who are meant to teach us lessons about who we are.

This isn't about just learning to love who we are, but about welcoming each and every part of ourselves without shying away from the aspects we see as contradictions.

To love is a journey that first begins with the formation of our true self.

While many of us have grasped the idea that there is no one out there who can truly be our other half, we still are learning lessons about ourselves or who we choose to be with.

Every single one of us is on a different path, with different philosophy about love. Yet we all have similar lessons to learn.

To be whole means that we've discovered the truth about who we are. Not who we have been told we are, or who we have been conditioned to be-but our truest self-apart from anyone else's expectations.

This means that we have to make the conscious choice to follow our intuition-our hearts will lead us in an authentic direction. This can be one of the most difficult aspects of life, because we are taught to consider others in our choices.

But in reality, we are not living our life for anyone else.

Until we can feel comfortable with who we are, then we will continue to attract individuals who teach us lessons about ourselves.

Personally, part of my journey toward love has involved learning that sometimes what I thought I wanted was the very thing I didn't need. I was raised as the " good girl." I never wanted to disappoint my loved ones and I upheld the conservative norms that were expected of me. But during this period of my life I never stopped to actually consider whether my actions truly aligned with who I was. It was easier to continue blindly doing what I thought I should, instead of stopping to whether it what I really wanted.

So at the time, I didn't attract a whole person, but another half who was meant to cause chaos and upheaval in my life forcing me to awaken to who I wanted to be.

It wasn't easy and it also wasn't the end of my journey or lessons on self-love.

To be able to identify as whole we first have to discover exactly what we are made of, and what our purpose is here on Earth. For many of us, we can only experience these lessons with someone who reflects back our insecurities and our past wounds.

One time I chose a man who was emotionally unavailable, because I hadn't yet become comfortable with my own truth or ask for exactly what I needed.

Honestly, I still hadn't accepted the truth of what I wanted, so I didn't expect anyone else to either.

I desperately tried to blend in and fulfill his needs, swallowing down my own truth, and start on the path of traditional love, fulfilling the typical pinnacle moments that many identify as lasting love, such as marriage and children.

Yet, no matter how much I tried to utter the words he needed to hear, I just never could.

I was just a half, trying to find completion by fulfilling the needs of another. I was trying on his capes that I was never meant to wear. Instead I finally made the choice to take them off and become the woman who I really was all along.

Truthfully, I had been scared of her for a long time.

She was different, her thoughts didn't align with what everyone else was doing and it seemed that what she wanted things that didn't exist. This woman didn't just dance to the beat of her own drum; she flat out created her own music. The most frustrating aspect of her was that even to me, she never made sense.

She was wiser than her years and experiences. She didn't fit into one box comfortably, and seemed to enjoy so many things that it was impossible to decide which her favorite was.

But one evening, I sat her down and looked her in the eyes, realizing that in order to become whole, I needed to accept her.

I needed to love her exactly for who she was, and instead of trying to fit her into someone else's life, I needed to let her create her own life.

This isn't an act that was done overnight, or without tears or heartbreak but once we let ourselves balloon out in our entirely whole, beautiful selves, we will finally be in the position to welcome another whole individual into our lives.

We won't try fitting into their molds, or cutting their sharp corners in an attempt to make them fit into ours. We simply will finally be in a place to accept another exactly for who they, because we have learned to accept ourselves for who we truly are.

Until we have made the choice to love who we really are-contradictions and all-we will continue to attract those who only love a fraction of ourselves.
Relephant:
One of the best things in life:

~
Author: Kate Rose Image: Deviantart/Chris Hay Editor: Ashleigh Hitchcock
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Until We are Whole, We will Continue to Attract Halves.

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get elephant's newsletter "What I can do is offer myself, wholehearted and present, to walk with the people I love through the fear and mess. That's all any of us can do. That's what we're here for."

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"What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?" Mary McCarthy asked her friend Hannah Arendt in their correspondence about love. The question resonates because it speaks to a central necessity of love - at its truest and most potent, love invariably does change us, deconditioning our painful pathologies and elevating us toward our highest human potential. It allows us, as Barack Obama so eloquently wrote in his reflections on what his mother taught him about love, "to break across our solitude, and then, if we're lucky, [be] finally transformed into something firmer."

But in the romantic ideal upon which our modern mythos of love is built, the solidity of that togetherness is taken to such an extreme as to render love fragile. When lovers are expected to fuse together so closely and completely, mutuality mutates into a paralyzing codependence - a calcified and rigid firmness that becomes brittle to the possibility of growth. In the most nourishing kind of love, the communion of togetherness coexists with an integrity of individuality, the two aspects always in dynamic and fluid dialogue. The philosopher Martin Heidegger captured this beautifully in his love letters to Hannah Arendt: "Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves."

This difficult balance of intimacy and independence is what the great Lebanese-American artist, poet, and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883-April 10, 1931) explores with uncommon insight and poetic precision in a passage from his 1923 masterwork The Prophet (public library).

By way of advice on the secret to a loving and lasting marriage, Gibran offers:

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

Complement this particular portion of the wholly enchanting The Prophet with Virginia Woolf on what makes love last, philosopher Alain Badiou on how we fall and stay in love, Anna Dostoyevsky on the secret to a happy marriage, Mary Oliver on how differences bring couples closer together, and Joseph Campbell on the single most important factor in sustaining romantic relationships, then revisit Gibran on the seeming self vs. the authentic self and the absurdity of our self-righteousness.

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The Difficult Balance of Intimacy and Independence: Beloved Philosopher and Poet Kahlil Gibran on the Secret to a Loving and Lasting Relationship

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"What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?" Mary McCarthy asked her friend Hannah Arendt in their correspondence about love. The question resonates because it speaks to a central necessity of love - at its truest and most potent, love invariably does change us, deconditioning our painful pathologies and elevating us toward our highest human potential.

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"Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic."

While many have attributed this quote to Frida Kahlo, it's actually from a poem entitled "Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell." When I tracked it down, I felt chills from the beginning:

"leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone..."

I felt myself sink down into the words, felt them resonate deep within me. Because I know that leaving isn't enough. I know from tough, personal experience that you can leave a relationship with your body and stay inside of it in your mind. I did that once. The relationship was good and gone, but I remained mired inside of it for weeks after.

It's not enough just to leave. We have to find a way to move on, too.

I love the idea of retraining one's heart and changing the locks-because it is absolutely essential to the process of letting go. I love how McConnell brings the attention back to a place of gratitude, to self-love and to the belief that we all deserve a lover who looks at us as if we were magic.

I will print this out and hang it somewhere that I'll see every day. I'll let those words stay with me, each one precious and perfect and crying out for us to stop holding onto what is gone and start cherishing these beautiful lives that we have. I want to sit with a cup of tea in the morning and read these words slowly. I want to devour them on a quick lunch break over a cup of soup, or think of them while I'm running at the gym. I want to drink them in at night while I sip a glass of wine.

I want to feel them deeply and allow them to fill me up.
by Marty McConnell
leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks

[...]

you make him call before
he visits. you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don't lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand...
*Follow the above link for the full poem.* Author: Crystal Jackson Image: courtesy of editor Editor: Toby Israel
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"Take a Lover who Looks at You like Maybe You are Magic." ~ (Not) Frida Kahlo

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get elephant's newsletter While many have attributed this quote to Frida Kahlo, it's actually from a poem entitled "Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell." When I tracked it down, I felt chills from the beginning: "leaving is not enough; you must stay gone..." I felt myself sink down into the words, felt them resonate deep within me.

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10 Excerpts from Meena Kandasamy's Rebellious Poetry for Every Indian Girl

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10 quotes from Meena Kandasamy's rebellious poetry is a must read for every Indian girl.

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'Her Job Is Not to Make Herself Likeable': Adichie's Powerful Essay on Raising a Feminist Daughter

Acclaimed Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has always been extremely vocal about her stand as a feminist and the need for others to be the same. Her writings have made her one of the most prominent faces in the literary circle.

Recently, she wrote an extremely powerful essay titled, "Dear Ijeawele, or a femininst manifesto in fifteen suggestions," where she elaborated on how to raise a feminist daughter. The essay is written in the form of a letter to a mother.

Here are some excerpts from the powerful essay.

"Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that. The pioneering American journalist Marlene Sanders once said to a younger journalist, "Never apologize for working. You love what you do, and loving what you do is a great gift to give your child."

"You don't even have to love your job; you can merely love what your job does for you - the confidence and self-fulfillment that come with doing and earning. Reject the idea of motherhood and work as mutually exclusive."

"Remember in primary school we learnt that a verb was a 'doing' word? Well, a father is as much a verb as a mother...Sometimes mothers, so conditioned to be all and do all, are complicit in diminishing the role of fathers...What is the worst that can happen? She won't die at the hands of her father. So look away, arrest your perfectionism, still your socially-conditioned sense of duty. Share childcare equally. 'Equally' of course depends on you both. It does not have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping but you'll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You'll know by your lack of resentment. Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist."

"Do not ever tell her that she should do or not do something "because you are a girl."

'Because you are a girl' is never a reason for anything. Ever.

I remember being told as a child to 'bend down properly while sweeping, like a girl.' Which meant that sweeping was about being female. I wish I had been told simply 'bend down and sweep properly because you'll clean the floor better.' And I wish my brothers had been told the same thing...The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. Cooking is learned. Cooking - domestic work in general - is a life skill that both men and women should ideally have. It is also a skill that can elude both men and women."

"It is the idea of conditional female equality. Reject this entirely. It is a hollow, appeasing, and bankrupt idea. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of women, or you do not."

"Books will help her understand and question the world, help her express herself, and help her in whatever she wants to become - a chef, a scientist, a singer all benefit from the skills that reading brings. I do not mean school books. I mean books that have nothing to do with school, autobiographies and novels and histories. If all else fails, pay her to read."

"Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions. But to teach her that, you will have to question your own language. A friend of mine says she will never call her daughter 'Princess.' People mean well when they say this, but 'princess' is loaded with assumptions, of her delicacy, of the prince who will come to save her, etc. This friend prefers 'angel' and 'star.'

So decide for yourself the things you will not say to your child. Because what you say to your child matters. It teaches her what she should value."

"A marriage can be happy or unhappy but it is not an achievement.

We condition girls to aspire to marriage and we do not condition boys to aspire to marriage, and so there is already a terrible imbalance at the start. The girls will grow up to be women obsessed with marriage. The boys will grow up to be men who are not obsessed with marriage. The women marry those men. The relationship is automatically uneven because the institution matters more to one than the other. Is it any wonder that, in so many marriages, women sacrifice more, at a loss to themselves, because they have to constantly maintain an uneven exchange? (One consequence of this imbalance is the very shabby and very familiar phenomenon of two women publicly fighting over a man, while the man remains silent.)"

"Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people...Please do not ever put this pressure on your daughter. We teach girls to be likeable, to be nice, to be false. And we do not teach boys the same. This is dangerous. Many sexual predators have capitalized on this. Many girls remain silent when abused because they want to be nice. Many girls spend too much time trying to be 'nice' to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the 'feelings' of those who are hurting them. This is the catastrophic consequence of likeability."

"We often use biology to explain the privileges that men have, the most common reason being men's physical superiority. It is true that men are in general physically stronger than women. But our use of biology is selective. 'A child first belongs to the father' is a common sentiment in Nigeria. But if we truly depended on biology as root of social norms then children would be identified as their mothers rather than their fathers because when a child is born, the parent we are biologically - and incontrovertibly - certain of is the mother."

"It will probably be a bit awkward but it is necessary...With her, don't pretend that sex is merely a controlled act of reproduction. Or an 'only in marriage' act, because that is disingenuous. (You and Chudi were having sex long before marriage and she will probably know this by the time she is twelve) Tell her that sex can be a beautiful thing and that it can have emotional consequences and tell her to wait until she is an adult and tell her that once she is an adult, she gets to decide what she wants sex to mean to her. But be prepared because she might not wait until she's 18. And if she doesn't wait, you have to make sure she is able to tell you that."

"Saintliness is not a pre-requisite for dignity. People who are unkind and dishonest are still human, and still deserve dignity...There is sometimes, in the discourse around gender, the assumption that women are supposed to be morally 'better' than men. They are not. Women are as human as men are. Female goodness is as normal as female evil.

And there are many women in the world who do not like other women. Female misogyny exists and to evade acknowledging it is to create unnecessary opportunities for anti-feminists to try and discredit feminism...That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy. It shows us, too, that not all women are feminists and not all men are misogynists."

"Teach her not to attach value to difference. And the reason for this is not to be fair or to be nice but merely to be human and practical. Because difference is the reality of our world. And by teaching her about difference, you are equipping her to survive in a diverse world.

She must know and understand that people walk different paths in the world and that as long as those paths do no harm to others, they are valid paths that she must respect. Teach her that we do not know - we cannot know - everything about life. Both religion and science have spaces for the things we do not know, and it is enough to make peace with that.

Teach her never to universalize her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people. This is the only necessary form of humility: the realization that difference is normal."

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Original Artwork by Suvojyoti Roy

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'Her Job Is Not to Make Herself Likeable': Adichie's Powerful Essay on Raising a Feminist Daughter

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'Her Job Is Not to Make Herself Likeable': Adichie's Powerful Essay on Raising a Feminist Daughter Acclaimed Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has always been extremely vocal about her stand as a feminist and the need for others to be the same. Her writings have made her one of the most prominent faces in the literary circle.