"You guys don't realise the power you hold." An editor said this at a workshop when I was at Mint. "A newspaper is good for wrapping sardines after two days." A journo told me this recently. It was his teacher's advice against getting attached to the job or the stories. 🧵

Do you know about a poetry festival, one that has run for close to eight years, one that invites 100 poets every time, and has never once invited a woman in Kerala? What my next guest on Sora could not get past was not the women who were left out but the poets who kept turning up and never once asked why. And then one evening the students at her college put on a Sufi night, Sameer Binsi sang, her novel came out the next day, there was a Sufi dance at the launch, and that was all it took, slowly, the way a small fire takes the wind, it became the only thing Kerala was talking about. I asked her what exactly is the problem with a woman writing about Sufism, and we discussed the way a woman's 'home' disappears after marriage, why she cannot stand the word 'marumakal' (daughter-in-law), about the girls who dance wearing a hijab during Onam in protest against Kanthapuram and then promptly get shouted at when they get home, and about why she thinks no political party in this state will touch the question of a Muslim woman's inheritance laws. A woman who also says the first feminist she ever met was her own father, a woman who had three children before she turned 30, who read her books with those children climbing over her. A woman who spent the last month on every television channel in Kerala taking the abuse and the support in equal measure, and who still gets up early and sits at her own kitchen table, to write: Shabnam Noorjahan.