The Finger Wrap: Engeyum, Epotthum & Election

Rakhi Sawant announced she is contesting the elections from the Mumbai North West constituency. The latest on that: She is launching her own political party called Rashtriya Aam Party (RAAP), and is hoping to receive green chilli as her symbol.

Adivasi activist Dayamani Barla will be contesting the elections from Khunti in Jharkhand on an AAP ticket — a decision she made after her release from jail. She had been arrested for leading a 400 people protest against the allotment of adivasi farmland to campuses of elite institutions when barren land could be found nearby.

Transgender and activist Kalki Subramaniam will be contesting the elections as an independent from Pollachi, her hometown in Coimbatore district. One of the issues she said she will be focusing on will be of the farmers who have lost their land (which was known for agriculture) to real estate developers.

Both BJP and the Congress wooed Sri Ram Sene members (Pramod Muthalik and Dinkar Shetty respectively) only to dump them soon after because of their pub-attacking history.

Of the 268 newcomers to the 2014 Forbes Billionaires list, 42 are women—a single-year record and, more notably, the highest-ever percentage of newcomers (and of women billionaires overall—172 out of 1,645).

Mid-Day runs a scathing piece talking about Bollywood’s racist underbelly, about how skin colour is confused for talent. Meanwhile in Hollywood, comedienne Tess Paras hilariously parodies Lorde’s Royals to talk about how non-white actors are typecast into side-characters.

200 women from the local institutions in Madurai have been recruited to meet on weekends and work on their coding skills in this cool venture. Meanwhile Kate Losse of Model View Culture breaks it down why all of the efforts to get more women into tech will fail as long as the tech culture assumes their labour is less valuable.

In a 192-page decision, Shalini Phansalkar-Joshi, the judge presiding over a gang-rape case, singled out the doctor who used a test to measure vaginal laxity on a 19-year-old call centre worker and proceeded to call the test “degrading, unscientific and archaic”.

Manu Joseph, author and ex-editor (Open), weighs in on the CCTV footage from the Tarun Tejpal rape case in Outlook. Journalist and author, Aman Sethi, responds with his reading of the episode on twitter, arguing that CCTV footage is not central evidence and should not be taken out of context.

An African City — a new web series has been gathering quite the buzz as it tells the story of the “Afropolitan Returnee” and as one viewer aptly put it, it is “Sex and the City meets Americanah where she [the book’s protagonist] goes back to Lagos.”

A new study finds that when compared to Indian women with less education than their husbands, Indian women with more education face 1.4 times the risk of “intimate partner violence”, 1.54 times the risk of frequent violence, and 1.36 times the risk of severe violence. Women who were the sole breadwinners in their family faced 2.44 times the risk of frequent violence.

Another study says that the primary reason that women fake orgasms is to not hurt their partner’s feelings. They also fake it to avoid negative emotions associated with the sexual experience, or to increase their own arousal or sometimes to just end sex.

In the wake of the Russia’s annexation of Crimea, some Ukrainians have started boycotting Russian goods. A guerilla group of women on Facebook have also started a campaign to deny sex to Russian men, called “Don’t give it to a Russian”.