why.

Feminism is pretty important to me. It’s a loaded word and a lot of people don’t like it, but for as long as gender inequality reflects a female disadvantage it’s one I won’t mind using.  Thanks to a history of awful stereotypes and a fair bit of bullshit contemporary discourse (because being a feminist never saved anyone from being an idiot) it’s not necessarily the easiest movement to align yourself with, but once you get past a few misguided preconceptions I can’t say I understand why being a feminist has to come with such a stigma. It’s a principle not a character trait: being a feminist doesn't say anything about me at all other than that I believe in equality.

And that’s basically why I'm in India.  Proper, full, ‘let's-all-get-paid-the-same-maybe-get-a-few-more-women-in-power-eradicate-slutshaming-and-wouldn’t-it-be-lovely-if-noone-ever-felt-they-could-make-any-assumptions-or-take-any-liberties-just-because-I’m-female’ equality is still pretty far off in the UK,  but on the global sliding scale of severity it’s pretty hard to deny that you’re infinitely better off as a British woman. Obviously that’s not a good enough reason to ignore gender issues in the UK, but as someone who finds the whole thing pretty pressing in its entirety I’d like to get a first-hand experience of the bigger picture.

It’s also about knowing how lucky you are but not quite being able to appreciate it. Independence, freedom, and access to education and the arts are vital to my happiness and I really struggle with the idea that women across the globe are being denied all of the above in varying degrees, a lot of the time purely because they’re female. Obviously there’s fuck all I can do about world injustice and to be honest I think I’ll probably come home in eight weeks with more questions than answers, but by the looks of things it largely seems I’m idealistic enough to think it’s at least worth trying to make a difference.

Also I’m 23 and the world is massive and I want to go mad on seeing it.

As much as I love the comic image of accidentally kickstarting a global revolution by bumbling my way around Asia just trying not to set fire to something, I really don’t have any kind of grand ideas as to what my contribution to a women’s empowerment project in Delhi can realistically achieve. If I can make any tiny kind of positive change in the lives of a handful of women as individuals I’ll be absolutely ecstatic. If all I can do is learn a lot more about an important issue and gain a different perspective to take back home with me then I’ll settle for that too. 

If all else fails the guava juice here is INCREDIBLE and I have eight weeks to drench myself in it. Link to a b-plan guava juice review blog tbc. x