Author: Akshara Sharma

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
— William Shakespeare

Tell me the name of a woman who was raped.

Chances are, a story comes to mind.

Now tell me the name of her rapist.

Not the case.Not the incident.The man.

Can you remember him as easily?

That difference has haunted me for years.

Because it reveals something unsettling about the way we tell stories, the way we assign blame, and the way we remember women.

A woman can spend an entire lifetime being a daughter, a friend, a student, a lover, a mother, a dreamer.

Yet one act committed against her can become the thing by which the world remembers her.

Not because it defines her.

But because we allow it to.

And perhaps that is why Shakespeare’s question feels so incomplete.

What’s in a name?

For some women, everything.

I often wonder if Shakespeare would have asked the same question had he been born a woman.

Because for women, a name is never just a name.

Before a girl is old enough to understand the world, she is taught that her name carries weight.

Protect it.

Guard it.

Don’t bring shame to it.

Remember whose daughter you are.

Remember what people will say.

She learns early that her name does not belong entirely to her. It belongs to a family, a community, a lineage, a reputation built long before she was born. She is told that generations of honour rest quietly upon her shoulders.

One wrong step and everything will come crashing down.

What fascinates me is that we rarely place the same burden upon boys.

Girls inherit responsibility.

Boys inherit freedom.

And perhaps that is where patriarchy begins—not in laws or institutions, but in the stories we tell our children.

The stories that teach daughters to be careful and sons to be brave.

A woman is rarely allowed to exist as herself.

Her name is never permitted to stand alone.

The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that woman has historically been treated as “the Other”—defined in relation to men rather than as a complete human being in her own right.

Centuries before Beauvoir, literature had already begun documenting this truth.

Take Helen of Troy.

For centuries she has been remembered as the woman whose

beauty launched a thousand ships. Her name became

synonymous with desire, temptation, and catastrophe. Yet the

wars, ambitions, egos, and political calculations of men

surrounding her often occupy far less space in popular memory

than Helen herself.

Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter is forced to wear her shame upon her chest for society to witness.

Tess in Tess of the d’Urbervilles bears the consequences of a violence she did not create.

Anna Karenina is remembered for her transgression long after the society that condemned her escapes scrutiny.

Again and again, women become symbols.

Warnings.

Lessons.

Their names survive because their suffering does.

And perhaps that is why these stories endure.

Because they are not merely stories.

They are mirrors.

We have all known a Hester.

A Tess.

An Anna.

Perhaps we have even been them.

The little girl who was told not to laugh too loudly.

The teenager who learned to monitor the length of her clothes before stepping outside.

The woman who apologised for taking up space.

The mother who introduced herself as someone’s wife or someone’s mother before remembering that she had a name of her own.

Patriarchy does not always arrive as violence.

Sometimes it arrives as erasure.

Quiet.

Polite.

Almost invisible.

It chips away at a woman until her identity becomes secondary to the roles she performs for others.

She becomes indispensable.

Yet somehow invisible.

And then, one day, something strange happens.

The world remembers her name again.

But often only when she has failed.

Or when she has been failed.

A woman becomes a headline.

A man becomes a detail.

When a woman commits a crime, her name races ahead of the facts. Her gender becomes part of the story. Society does not merely ask what she did; it asks what her actions say about women.

She is made to represent an entire sex.

Yet when a man commits a crime, he is often granted the luxury of individuality.

His actions belong to him alone.

The burden of representation falls elsewhere.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way we remember violence.

Think of the stories that haunt us.

How often do we remember the names of the men who committed the crime?

Not the case.

Not the trial.

The men themselves.

How often do their names become permanently etched into public memory?

Rarely.

Yet we remember the women.

We remember them so vividly that the violence done to them becomes inseparable from their identities.

A young woman is assaulted.

And suddenly the world stops seeing her as a student, an artist, a daughter, a friend, a dreamer.

She becomes “the victim.”

The crime follows her name everywhere.

As though the worst thing that ever happened to her is now the most important thing about her.

The man who committed the act is remembered for what he did.

The woman is remembered for what was done to her.

There is a profound cruelty in that.

One person committed the violence.

The other endured it.

Yet somehow it is the survivor who is forced to carry it forever.

The crime attaches itself to her identity like a shadow she never asked for.

Patriarchy performs its oldest magic trick here.

It shifts the weight.

The burden should belong entirely to the perpetrator.

Instead, it migrates to the victim.

She carries the questions.

She carries the whispers.

She carries the scrutiny.

She carries the memory.

She carries the shame that was never hers to begin with.

Even our language betrays us.

We speak of women whose lives were ruined.

Rarely do we speak of the men who ruined them.

We remember the wound.

We forget the hand that inflicted it.

And in doing so, we commit a second injustice.

The first was the crime itself.

The second is allowing the victim’s name to become synonymous with the violence while the perpetrator’s name fades into obscurity.

A society reveals its values not only through whom it punishes, but through whom it remembers.

And for far too long, women have been remembered by what men have done to them.

Perhaps that is why Shakespeare’s question unsettles me.

What’s in a name?

For a woman, everything.

A history.

A burden.

A warning.

A prayer.

A battlefield.

A woman spends a lifetime protecting her name, only to discover that the world was never truly interested in knowing it.

What it wanted was a story.

And for centuries, women have been asked to carry stories that were never theirs alone.

Maybe the measure of a just society is not whether we remember women’s names.

Maybe it is whether we stop attaching shame to them.

Maybe it is whether we stop making women custodians of honour while excusing men from accountability.

Maybe it is whether a girl can inherit a name without inheriting a burden. We have made them carry stories they did not write, crimes they did not commit, and silences they did not choose.

Maybe it is whether one day a woman can introduce herself to the world and know that her name belongs only to her.

Not to honour.

Not to shame.

Not to tradition.

Not to fear.

Just to herself.

And what a revolutionary thing that would be.

“Some books become classics because they survive time. Others become classics because time refuses to move past them.”

When Thomas Hardy published Tess of the d’Urbervilles in 1891, many readers were scandalized. Not because the novel glorified immorality, but because it questioned society’s idea of morality itself.

More than a century later, that question remains disturbingly relevant.

Tess Durbeyfield is often introduced as a tragic heroine. But to reduce her story to tragedy is to overlook Hardy’s quiet rebellion. He was less interested in the fall of one woman than in exposing the structures that made such a fall almost inevitable.

The novel asks uncomfortable questions.

Why is a woman expected to bear the consequences of violence inflicted upon her?

Why does society extend sympathy more readily to men than to women in matters of sexuality?

Why do reputation and virtue become inseparable when judging women, while the same standards seldom apply to men?

These are not merely Victorian questions. They continue to surface in courtrooms, news headlines, workplaces, and conversations around the world.

One line from the novel has always stayed with me:

“Why didn’t you tell me there was danger?”

Read in isolation, it appears to be Tess lamenting a personal betrayal. Read today, it acquires another meaning. It becomes the question many women continue to ask a society that teaches caution only after harm has occurred.

Hardy does not offer easy answers. Instead, he forces readers to confront an uncomfortable truth: social judgment often falls not upon the one who causes harm, but upon the one who survives it.

That is why Tess of the d’Urbervilles has never really belonged to the nineteenth century.

Its landscapes may be Victorian.

Its people are not.

Perhaps this is the enduring power of literature. Great novels do not predict the future. They illuminate the recurring patterns of human behaviour, reminding us that while technology transforms our lives, prejudice often changes only its language.

Reading Hardy today is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is an encounter with questions we are still struggling to answer.

And perhaps that is the true measure of a classic—not that it is old, but that it continues to challenge every generation that opens its pages.

Some books end.

Some conversations don’t.

This is the beginning of Still Speaking—a series in which we return to writers whose words continue to speak across generations, not because history stands still, but because the questions that define us often remain the same.

If Tess were living in 2026 instead of 1891, would we treat her differently—or have we simply found new ways to judge the same woman?

I have spent fifteen years building a career.

Fifteen years of learning, working, adapting, leading, and proving myself. I earned my qualifications, gathered experience, met deadlines, managed responsibilities, and did everything that society tells us to do if we want to succeed.

And yet, today, I find myself doing something I never imagined would be this difficult.

I’m looking for a job.

Not because I lack experience.

Not because I lack education.

Not because I lack the skills.

But because I am a mother of two.

Every interview begins with hope and ends with the same unspoken question: Can she really manage?

Sometimes it’s phrased politely.

“Are you comfortable with late-night shifts?”

“Can you stay back whenever required?”

“Will your family responsibilities interfere with work?”

The moment I say that I need predictable working hours because I have young children, I can almost see the conversation change.

Suddenly, fifteen years of experience seem less important.

My qualifications become secondary.

My achievements are overshadowed by one assumption—that motherhood makes me less committed.

What hurts isn’t that companies have business needs. I understand that.

What hurts is that flexibility is often treated as a privilege instead of a modern way of working.

Why is it so difficult to believe that a mother can be productive, dedicated, and ambitious without sacrificing her children or working endless hours?

The irony is that motherhood has made me a better professional.

It has taught me efficiency because every minute matters.

It has strengthened my decision-making because children don’t wait for perfect answers.

It has sharpened my ability to prioritise, negotiate, multitask, and remain calm under pressure.

These aren’t weaknesses.

They’re leadership skills.

Yet many talented women quietly disappear from the workforce, not because they choose to, but because the workplace still expects careers to be built around a life with no caregiving responsibilities.

We celebrate women on Women’s Day.

We praise working mothers in speeches.

We applaud resilience on social media.

But when it comes to hiring, too many employers still see motherhood as a liability rather than an asset.

I refuse to believe that this is how the story ends.

Somewhere, there has to be an organisation that values results over presenteeism.

That understands productivity is measured by impact, not by how late someone stays in the office.

That recognises experience, commitment, and capability without penalising a woman for raising a family.

I’m not asking for special treatment.

I’m asking for a fair opportunity.

To every mother scrolling through job portals after putting her children to bed, rewriting her résumé for the hundredth time, wondering if anyone will give her a chance—you are not alone.

Your career didn’t lose its value the day you became a mother.

Your experience still matters.

Your education still matters.

Your ambition still matters.

And one day, I hope employers will realise that too.

Until then, I will keep applying, keep believing, and keep reminding myself that my worth is not determined by a job offer.

It is defined by everything I have already achieved—and everything I am still capable of becoming.

– Akshara Sharma

Across the country, students are protesting.

They are demanding fairness.

Transparency.

Accountability.

They are demanding that examinations mean what they are supposed to mean.

That merit should matter.

That years of preparation should not be undone by corruption, negligence, or leaked question papers.

Their anger is justified.

Anyone who has spent months, even years, preparing for an examination knows that a leaked paper is not merely an administrative failure. It is a theft.

A theft of time.

A theft of effort.

A theft of trust.

And yet, as I watch these protests unfold, I find myself haunted by a more uncomfortable question.

What happens if they win?

What happens if every paper is secure?

Every examination fair?

Every result transparent?

What happens then?

For decades, we have told young people that education is the great equaliser.

Study hard.

Get good grades.

Earn a degree.

Build a future.

It was not presented as advice.

It was presented as a promise.

A promise repeated by parents, teachers, institutions, and governments alike.

Work hard now, and life will reward you later.

But look around.

Students are more educated than ever before.

Degrees are multiplying.

Qualifications are increasing.

Competition has become relentless.

Yet stable employment remains elusive.

The destination seems to move further away with every milestone reached.

Some spend years preparing for examinations.

Others collect degrees, certifications, and achievements.

Many emerge from the system carrying not opportunity, but uncertainty.

And so I wonder whether the paper leak is the disease or merely a symptom.

Because a fair examination is important.

But fairness in an examination is not the same as fairness in a future.

A student can lose an opportunity because a paper was leaked.

But a student can also lose hope because the opportunity never existed to begin with.

This is the contradiction at the heart of modern education.

We continue to worship degrees while quietly devaluing what they are meant to provide.

We have created a generation that is extraordinarily qualified and increasingly anxious.

A generation told that education is empowerment, yet forced to ask what empowerment means when knowledge does not guarantee dignity, security, or work.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

A student may spend years mastering a subject, clearing examinations, and proving competence.

Meanwhile, an economy driven by visibility and attention often rewards those who capture an audience rather than those who cultivate expertise.

This is not an argument against content creators.

Nor is it nostalgia for a simpler past.

It is an observation about a society whose relationship with effort and reward appears increasingly fractured.

When hard work and outcomes drift too far apart, faith begins to erode.

Not faith in education.

Faith in the promise attached to it.

Perhaps that is why these protests matter.

They are about leaked papers, yes.

But they are also about trust.

Trust that institutions will be fair.

Trust that effort will matter.

Trust that the future is worth preparing for.

The tragedy is that many students are fighting to preserve a system whose promises already feel fragile.

They are defending the integrity of examinations while privately wondering whether those examinations still lead anywhere.

That is not cynicism.

It is a question society has yet to answer.

Charles Dickens warned of education that produced facts without wisdom.

Rabindranath Tagore imagined education as liberation rather than mere qualification.

Yet somewhere along the way, we reduced learning to credentials and credentials to competition.

Students are no longer asked what they wish to understand.

They are asked what they wish to clear.

What they wish to qualify for.

What they wish to become employable enough to deserve.

The result is a generation trapped in an endless cycle of proving itself.

One more examination.

One more degree.

One more certificate.

One more attempt.

Always one step away from the future they were promised.

Never quite arriving.

And perhaps that is the question buried beneath the protests.

Not whether a paper was leaked.

Not whether an examination was fair.

But whether the promise itself remains intact.

Because if education is to remain meaningful, it must offer more than credentials.

It must offer possibility.

It must offer dignity.

It must offer a future that feels attainable rather than perpetually deferred.

The students protesting today deserve justice.

But they also deserve honesty.

A secure examination system is necessary.

It is not sufficient.

The real challenge lies beyond the examination hall.

In the kind of society waiting outside it.

Because when young people begin to lose faith not only in institutions but in the future those institutions were meant to build, we are no longer facing an educational crisis.

We are facing a crisis of belief.

And no leaked paper, however damaging, is as dangerous as that.

Every little girl knows how the story ends. The prince finds Cinderella. The glass slipper fits.

The wedding bells ring.The castle gates open.

And then, mercifully, the story stops.

Because fairy tales have always known where to end.

They end before the difficult questions begin. They end before Cinderella learns that

belonging often comes with conditions. Before she discovers that every kingdom has rules.

Before she realises that acceptance is sometimes offered in exchange for pieces of herself.

No one asks whether she missed the girl who once danced barefoot in the ashes.

No one asks whether the castle loved Cinderella, or merely the version of Cinderella it found

acceptable. Perhaps that is why fairy tales end at the wedding. Because if they continued,

they would have to tell a different story.

A story about women who spend years learning how to belong.

A story about women who mistake self-erasure for love.

A story about women who become so skilled at adjusting that they wake up one day unable

to remember where they end and everyone else’s expectations begin.

This is not Cinderella’s story.

This is ours.

Every little girl grows up hearing stories about houses. The house she will build. The house

she will belong to.The house she will one day call home.

The version of herself she slowly edits until she becomes acceptable to the people already

living there. No one notices because it happens gradually.

The house does not devour her all at once. It eats her in pieces.

A little confidence here. A little freedom there. A boundary. A voice. A self. It teaches her

new codes. At first, the changes seem harmless.

Those taunts gradually become your inner voice.

Soon, Cinderella becomes fluent in a language she never chose to learn.

Scholars call it code switching – the practice of altering one’s language, behaviour,

personality or identity to fit a particular social environment.

We, women know it all to well. We call it adjustment.

The daughter who once spoke without hesitation, learns to measure every sentence. The

tragedy is that the gatekeepers of this kingdom are often women themselves-women whoknow the ache of shrinking, yet ask the next generation to shrink a little more. Women who

inherited the architecture of patriarchy and became its most devoted caretakers.

Perhaps this is why women across centuries have written so passionately about freedom.

Virginia Woolf wrote that women need a room of their own. We misunderstood her. We

thought she was talking about walls and doors.

She was talking about psychological space.

The freedom to exist without constantly negotiating permission.

The freedom to think a thought before wondering who it might offend.

The freedom to feel without first calculating its consequences.

But how many women truly possess such a room?

How many wake up every day measuring their words, their tone, their emotions, their

desires?

How many spend years becoming acceptable versions of themselves?

We tell women that marriage is about finding a home.

Yet countless women spend decades searching for themselves within it.

Sylvia Plath wrote of suffocation long before we learned the language of emotional labour.

The women who compromise their bodies in the name of survival, are celebrated and

glorified for their sacrifice to keep the castle spotless to the outsiders.

Kabir questioned the value of rituals that lacked compassion. Rituals that drains ones moral

beliefs and principles, how can they please the divine.

Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi reminds us that the deepest violence is often the attempt to

strip a person of their dignity and identity. The dignity that strips off every moment we

suppress our voice, every second we succumb ourselves and act against our personal beliefs.

Until one day we don’t that voice from within, also becomes silent.

The relentless pressure to become.

Not who you are.

But who others need you to be.

The daughter-in-law.

The wife.

The caretaker.

The peacemaker.

The absorber of pain.

The keeper of family honour.

The one who forgives.

The one who understands.

The one who remains silent.

“Ignore. Ignore. Ignore.”

Until one day she looks at her own life and wonders:

Who am I ignoring? The perpetrator? Or myself that is screaming and crying to break free.

When did I stop belonging to myself? Am I so flawed?Perhaps that is why so many women cry in private. Also because the tears invite judgement

of being “too sensitive” or “over reacting”.

The tears are not always about a single insult.

Or a single argument.

Or a single disappointment.

They are grieving a thousand abandonments of self.

The dream they postponed.

The opinion they swallowed.

The boundary they ignored.

The disrespect they rationalised.

The apology they never received.

The version of themselves they buried in exchange for acceptance.

And the cruelest irony?

Even after all of that, belonging is never guaranteed. Instead we are expected to act grateful.

A woman can spend years sacrificing herself for a family and still be made to feel like an

outsider when conflict arrives.

The transaction was never real.

Because true belonging cannot be purchased through self-erasure.

That is not belonging.

That is occupation.

Across centuries, across languages, across cultures, these writers were asking the same

question:

What does it cost a human being to become acceptable?

We know the answer.

We have been paying for belonging with pieces of ourselves for generations.

Homi Bhabha called it mimicry.

The colonized subject was encouraged to become almost the same, but never quite.

How familiar this feels to us.

The daughter-in-law is welcomed as a daughter, in theory, yet quietly reminded of the

difference.

She is invited to belong, but only through adaptation.

She learns new customs, new codes, new loyalties, new silences.

The kingdom applauds her transformation. Or do they ever? Even a mere

acknowledgement?The promise of even partial acceptance remains forever just out of reach.

What struck me most in Bhabha’s work was the idea that colonisation is not merely about

controlling land. It is about controlling narratives and identities. It is about deciding whose

version of reality matters.

How many women have been told:

“That’s just how this family is.”

“You need to adjust.”

“Don’t make a big issue out of it.”

With every such statement, our interpretation of own experience is slowly questioned. Our

reality becomes negotiable. Our feelings become secondary. Our voice becomes something

that requires permission.

And yet, like every colonised people in history, we resist.

Sometimes resistance is loud. Sometimes it is quiet.

Sometimes it is refusing to accept humiliation as normal.

Sometimes it is pursuing education after marriage.

Sometimes it is earning an income.

Sometimes it is setting boundaries.

Sometimes it is simply saying, “This hurts me,” when everyone else expects silence.

The irony is that we live in an independent nation. political colonisation ended decades ago.

Yet many women continue to experience forms of emotional and cultural colonisation within

the walls of their own homes.

They are expected to leave behind parts of themselves in exchange for acceptance.

They are expected to prove loyalty through self-erasure.

They are expected to maintain peace even when that peace comes at the cost of dignity.

The struggle for freedom is not always fought in parliaments, courts, or battlefields.

Sometimes it is fought at dining tables. Sometimes it is fought in kitchens. Sometimes it is

fought in the quiet moments when a woman decides that her self-respect is not negotiable.

The goal is not rebellion for its own sake. The goal is not conflict. The goal is belonging

without surrendering identity.

Perhaps that is the freedom many women are still searching for.

Not freedom from family.

Not freedom from marriage.

But freedom to remain fully themselves within it.

If colonisation is the demand that one identity must dominate another, then true

independence begins when a woman no longer has to choose between belonging and being

herself.

The fight is about power. The battle was never between genders. The power play to subdue

one is pure schadenfreude that seems incomprehensible, especially in domestic circuits. A

fight for a throne that doesn’t exist.

The biggest act of rebellion that a woman can commit, which is feared, is to own her self and

her identity. To not allow anyone to erase or subdue her.

Perhaps the question was never whether Cinderella belonged in the castle.Perhaps the real question is this:

If belonging demands transformation, silence, performance, and self-erasure, was it ever

belonging at all?