Kusum Choppra

My mother found it very difficult to wrap her mind around my later day dressing sense, especially cotton clothes. In the Ahmedabad where I have lived for over four decades, cotton is the norm, summer and winter – just thinner or thicker.   And Ma lived her life in silks, satins, chiffons, crepe d’chines and velvets.   As a pampered daughter of an importer/exporter of fine fabrics and accessories from all over the Far East and Europe, I too had grown up in the finest of clothes.       Until Ahmedabad taught me the value of cottons to cope with hot weather.    The varieties seemingly endless and the comfort so endearing.   Besides I ran an outfit that tailored everything for a handloom and handicraft   organization, Gurjari …..  How could I possibly wear anything but cottons?   The wonder of block prints, with vegetable dyes taking on so many different hues, different for each village with its own soil and water chemistr...

Holding a new book in your hands is a visceral experience, akin to holding a new baby.  One that is a celebration of women determined to lead life to the full is more exuberant. That is what my book NIRBHAYA & OTHERS WHO DARED is all about --- a pean of hope to combat the trauma of December 2012’s Nirbhaya.    Add to that tadka of helping young students to achieve new goals and life suddenly become exciting. When Nirbhaya started malingering with the publishers, I devoted myself an NGO, Balajanaagraha devoted to inculcating citizenship into young minds bored with the mind numbing civics textbooks. After days of rounds of school, four schools agreed to take the leap forward and I was getting up unusually early to trot forth to a different school every day of the week with my bag of tricks. High point: two days after the launch of my new Nirbhaya book, on December 2, 2014 my students presented their civic projects, written and oral before a jury of three. ...

I have always been very proud of being an Indian to the core. Despite a lifetime in the Far East, my father, a proud media man in the INA (Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose), never gave up his Indian passport. In college, I even won a Femina Best Letter award for a letter in which I wrote that I felt truly Indian because few people recognized me as a Sindhi. Most took me for Punjabi, Maharashtrian, Bengali, even Muslim, depending on the clothes I was wearing when I met them. Then I became even more Indian:   a Sindhi   married a Punjabi,   children born and bred in Gujarat,   a Sindhi-Parsi son in law, a Sindhi-Gujarati daughter in law and another Kashmiri.     Sara Hindustan Hamara!! I was born in Singapore and brought up in Jakarta, Indonesia.   That made for an Overseas Indian mentality which looks back at India with a romantic attitude, enhanced memories of a happy childhood and detailed ones of India’s drawbacks.   Fortu...

I just lost a response I was giving Elizabeth on her post about the unnerved feelings during promotions of her book. Perhaps because I'm new to the SheWrites system. Sorry haven't posted since joining as I was going through several upheavals. Just about balancing out to start the process of marketing my new anthology of hope for Women traumatized by a host of issues, from domestic violence, widowhood and divorce to rape and inheritance. Writing was exciting, giving twists and unexpected turns to each story. But the new onerous task of marketing here, there and everywhere is frightening to say the least. I'm looking back at my adventures with my protagonists in the anthology titled Nirbhaya & Others Who Dared and those of my next novel which is partly written with quite bit of nostalgia, as I unravel the intricacies of modern day marketing of a book that tells the tales of a gang rape survivor, a stalked woman, a lady army officer, different attitudes to divo...

What is in a name? asked the Bard centuries ago. Today…. plenty. Apart from the numerological implications of a name, surname and nickname….  Look at it this way: The name plate is a signature of Male Ego.    His name is there is bold letters.   May be his father’s too, or sometimes his mother’s. If the wife’s is there, it becomes a big issue. That is even in times when men are often forced to buys homes in their wives’ names to escape a chunk of tax. Then there are the emergent double barreled names:    wife and husband, both names.    Otherwise the wife with double surname, her maiden one and her marital one.    In the case of Muslim ones, the names of her father and her maiden surname.   Where’s the room for one more? Guess where all these thoughts come from? LOL ….. lounging in the tender sun and just looking around.    The name plates were a reminder of neighbors.    Other...