From our reading pulpit

Paromita Vohra, whose work we follow, is featured here as a share. She is a filmmaker based in Mumbai.


“Where is the room for secret, dark places in our nature, where strange flora, petalled and bacterial, bloom, alerting us to our own leanings? This fertility, in dark, wet, sometimes lonely places of the self, is an emotionally inefficient but regenerative process. There are no relationship agreements to be made here, no guarantees of love or success, and the permanent risk of being inconvenient to some and irrelevant to others.

The business of being yourself, or becoming yourself, is mostly a helpless act, often bloody and cyclical, born from the risky collisions with other minds, hearts and bodies.”

Published by Hema Malini

I am a trained sociologist and an archival researcher. I am the principal investigator for an archival research project on the Brahma Kshatriyas of Hyderabad and also founder of choosingwellness.org. I also go by my other name Malini. I am a translator of notes that remain in the margins to bring the user of technologies into sharper focus. I use the term community researcher, immersive researcher to talk about the work I do. In the past, as a Director and user experience lead at Code for Princeton I worked with non-profits, community groups, users, and subject matter experts to identify areas of need. I translated this into conversations with brigade members, developers, potential users, and other stakeholders. The applied ethnography and social research skills got me to meet with a diverse set of people across the broad middle class spectrum in Urban India. Living and working in New Jersey for the past several years has given me a breadth and width of understanding and engaging with people adding critical diversity to my bracket of "users" and experience all rolled in one.