Gender
As we grow and experience intimate relationships, pleasure becomes taboo or is only okay as a performance for another person, rather than our right as human beings.
Everyone talks about how nobody can put a price on how much homemakers do for us, but nobody talks about the kind of behaviour they are subjected to almost every day.
Why must others judge her appearance and grace
When true beauty is not confined to a face?
In a world obsessed with the outer shell,
She knows in her heart inner beauty dwells.
Friendship – a place where we can be ourselves as we truly are, with no artifice. A place of peace,…
CSE’s ‘natural habitat’ is often considered to be the classroom, but as our contributors show us, CSE also lives, breathes and thrives in habitats as disparate as neighbourhood parks, jobs-training centres, playgrounds and sports fields, law schools, family discussions, and digital spaces.
Vulnerability – is it a condition we find ourselves in? A state of being we choose? Let’s keep it very simple: it depends on the approach we take to defining it. In the former approach, we are ‘done to’, while in the latter we are consciously ‘doing’.
In our mid-month issue, Mahika Banerji describing herself as being ‘massively function-less’ and as having ‘no mobility’, takes us into her world, not a world of sob stories but one that holds promise of fulfillment…
As we see through this issue of In Plainspeak, stories have in them the power of exposing brutal truths about society and therefore also bring with them the possibility of reform, change, and hope, and when not possible, temporarily escaping into other worlds.
In our mid-month issue, we have the second part of the Shikha Aleya’s interview with six different people talking about aspects of sexuality and diversity from their own particular space of personal knowledge, as well as work, advocacy, art and activism across diverse fields.
Cricket, football, hopscotch, whatever the game, we have all wanted to be included for the sheer joy not only of exercising body and mind but also of being part of a team, of being noticed and celebrated. Sports and athletics offer us a playground to explore and express parts of ourselves that may otherwise forever lie dormant.
It’s time to scrape off the thick dark crusts of carelessly slapped-on murky hues of toxic masculinities and to bring out the brushes and the paints to paint masculinities in their true and glorious colours of life, freedom and love.
100 issues, 8 years! Thank you, dear readers and contributors! As we planned for this issue to put on our…
To remind us of what spaces that are safe, inclusive and self-affirming for each person could look like, we have curated a selection of articles from the last five years of In Plainspeak for this anthology – our gift to wish you a wonderful 2026.
This month’s offering of articles, poems and fiction is an eclectic mix that (mostly) reflects what was borne out of the pandemic, and its impact on sexuality, intimacy, relationships, and more.