Elisa Patnaik

A distant cousin of marriageable age on the lookout for an ideal match kept on ‘rejecting’ one marriage proposal after another. His mother, my aunt, who was both baffled and hassled at his…

A single female colleague of mine in her early 30s, who had recently shifted to Bhubaneswar, was frantically looking for a house. She soon started panicking when she was unable to find a…

“Wintering is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress or cast into the role of an outsider.”

All the young and middle-aged married men I know whose wives died untimely, have remarried. On the other hand, all women in the same age group who had lost their husbands, are still single.…

How I wish there was a special word for female friendships! To encompass the huge gamut of emotion, experience, support, strength and sharing that connotes female friendships. Somehow,…

It was more than a decade ago and I was travelling in a bus from Bhubaneswar to Puri for a work assignment. A middle-aged lady sitting next to me began chatting and though I wasn’t keen for…

We have seen our own mothers, aunts and other female relatives and acquaintances surrendering the most productive years of their lives anchoring marriages, raising children and families. And…

The other day, my husband showed me a social media post with a photograph of a post office with two separate queues for male and female with the former much longer and with a comment –“In…

Life is short. A year 365 days. And a day 24 hours. All of us want to experience a fulfilling, productive and enriching life filled with moments that satiate and nourish our body, mind,…

I vividly remember an incident that occurred in Bhubaneswar a few years ago. My close friend along with her friend who was visiting from outside Odisha were travelling in a city bus. Those…