The word Semina is a take on 'seminal' and 'femina'. This blog is about Political Science, philosophy, spirituality, health, sustainability, gender equality and so much more.
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Sunday, 17 May 2026
A Guide to Inner Wholeness, Memory, and Emotional Integration
Monday, 23 March 2026
This life is for play
Sunday, 25 January 2026
Happy Repuic Day, 2026!
Tuesday, 28 October 2025
The Middle is the Resolution
Sunday, 19 October 2025
Plastic Pollution: Why Urgent, Economically Sound Global Action is Needed
A Global Treaty on Environment and Public Health: A Vision for a Just and Sustainable Future
A Global Environmental Health Treaty: A Vision for a Just and Sustainable Future
Wednesday, 27 August 2025
Rethinking Legal Personhood for Nature: From Symbolism to Sustainable Governance
Sunday, 3 August 2025
Call it what you want
Wednesday, 30 July 2025
ICJ Issues Landmark Advisory Opinion on Climate Obligations of States: Legal Clarity for a Warming World
Historic Climate Ruling from the ICJ!
On July 23, 2025, the International Court of Justice issued a landmark Advisory Opinion on the obligations of States regarding climate change marking a critical moment in the fight for climate justice.
Countries are legally obligated under international law to protect the climate, not just by treaties like the Paris Agreement, but also under customary international law and human rights law.
These obligations apply not only to emissions reductions, but also to adaptation, cooperation, and support for vulnerable states.
Countries that fail to act or enable harmful emissions through fossil fuel subsidies, for example, may be committing internationally wrongful acts.
The Court confirmed that all States have a shared legal interest in holding each other accountable.
This is the first time the ICJ has laid out such a clear, unanimous legal framework around state responsibility for climate change. It sets the stage for more climate litigation, international cooperation, and stronger legal tools to protect our planet and future generations.
Read the full opinion here: https://lnkd.in/dCt-8chg
Tuesday, 29 July 2025
Where you belong
You do not have to reach, or try, to earn the way you fill my sky. You live in me so quietly, like roots that breathe beneath a tree.
No measure made of time or talk
defines the path on which we walk.
Even in silence, love holds true,
my stillness leans toward you.
I keep you not with grasp or chain,
but in the way I speak your name, only in thought, where no one hears, softened by hope and untouched by fears.
You are stitched into my simplest days, in quiet looks and in gentle ways.
The kind of love that needs no sound,
yet everywhere, it is all around.
No need for words to prove your place. You breathe in all I do. Like petals fold to hold the rain, my silence gathers you.
The Art of Letting Go: Embracing Self-Reliance and Rediscovering Yourself
In a world that often prioritizes tangible gains like services, money, and personal benefits, it is easy to feel disheartened when relationships fail to meet your emotional needs. If you’ve ever found yourself giving endlessly, only to feel underappreciated, this post is for you.
Let us start with a harsh truth: people aren’t always looking for love in the way you may be offering it. They might be seeking something transactional like support, convenience, or even validation. That doesn’t make them inherently. It is simply how many navigate life. However, what happens to you, the giver, when you’ve invested your heart and soul into someone who doesn’t reciprocate in the same way?
The answer lies not in blaming others but in redefining how you approach love, relationships, and most importantly, yourself.
Caring through others: the trap of emotional dependency
When you care for others more than yourself, it is often because you’ve learned to find validation through them. You pour your energy into pleasing them, thinking it will secure their love and your sense of belonging. However, here is the hard part: when love is conditional i.e based on what you provide rather than who you are, it leaves you empty.
It’s not their fault entirely, nor is it yours. However, it is your responsibility to shift the focus.
Why Self-Reliance is the Greatest Love Story You’ll Ever Write
The world changes when you start to prioritize yourself not out of selfishness but out of necessity. Becoming self-reliant doesn’t mean rejecting others; it means filling your own cup first. It is about listening to your heart and taking actions that resonate with your true desires.
Here are some powerful questions to guide you:
- What does my heart truly say?
- Is this what I really want, or am I doing it to please others?
- What do I want to do now, not out of obligation, but out of joy?
- Is this action light and freeing?
- Will this choice build a better future for me tomorrow?
When you let these questions guide your decisions, you stop seeking external validation. You start building a relationship with yourself that is unconditional, nurturing, and empowering.
People are not bad. They are just human
Here is another hard truth: the people who let you down may not even realize they are doing so. Most are just navigating their own struggles, caught up in their needs and desires. They are not bad. They are human.
Understanding this allows you to release bitterness and resentment. It gives you the freedom to set boundaries and move forward without anger weighing you down.
How to start your journey of self-reliance
- Detach with love: Stop tying your worth to others’ opinions or actions. You are enough, even if no one else validates it.
- Prioritize self-care: Invest time and energy in activities that nurture your mind, body, and soul.
- Set boundaries: Protect your energy by saying no when something doesn’t serve your well-being.
- Surround yourself with positivity: Seek out people who uplift and inspire you, not those who drain you.
- Celebrate small wins: Every step you take toward self-reliance is a victory worth celebrating.
The power of choosing yourself
When you stop seeking love through others and start finding it within yourself, everything changes. You no longer act out of desperation or fear of being alone. Instead, you make decisions from a place of confidence and clarity.
This shift doesn’t just transform your relationship with yourself but it enhances your relationships with others too. You attract people who respect and value the authentic you, rather than the version of you molded to meet their needs.
The takeaway
Life isn’t about pleasing everyone, is about honoring your heart. It is about aligning your actions with your desires, building a future that serves you.
So, the next time you feel tempted to overgive, pause. Ask yourself: Is this what I truly want? Am I acting out of love for myself or out of fear of losing someone else?
Remember, self-reliance isn’t isolation it is liberation. When you choose yourself, you are not just living; you’re thriving.
It’s your turn. What does your heart say? Listen carefully. It knows the way.
Thursday, 17 July 2025
Why small things matter so much to women in romantic relationships
Saturday, 5 July 2025
Why Gender Equity at Work Needs Legal Muscle, Not Just Motivation
Every time a woman walks into a job interview and is asked if she’s married, when she plans to be, or whether she intends to have children questions rarely, if ever, asked of men, we are reminded that gender inequality isn’t about capability. It’s about structure.
It’s not that women don’t negotiate, or that they lack ambition. It’s that workplaces, education systems, and even the public space itself have been built with a default male body and mind in mind. Women, on the other hand, are expected to shrink — their presence, their expectations, and even their biological rhythms. We often hear women are less confident, more “emotional,” or less self-promoting. These aren’t personal shortcomings. They are symptoms of a society that quietly teaches women, from puberty onward, to doubt themselves and then punishes them if they speak up.
We cannot solve this by simply asking women to “lean in.” What we need is law. We need policy. We need systemic scaffolding that holds up equality even when the culture around it does not.
1. End Discriminatory Hiring Practices
It is currently legal in India to ask a woman if she plans to marry or have children in a job interview. There is no explicit provision in Indian labour law — including the Equal Remuneration Act, Maternity Benefit Act, or even POSH, that bars this line of questioning. It should be. A clear provision under the Equal Opportunity Code must be introduced, making such questions illegal, with penalties for non-compliance.
Every job interview must come under a formal anti-discrimination clause, similar to the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) framework in the U.S. Companies above a certain size should be required to file anonymised interview data for third-party audit.
2. Mandate Pay Transparency and Negotiation Audits
Women, statistically, negotiate less often and less aggressively than men. But the larger issue is structural: most organisations don’t offer pay transparency. That creates space for gender-based wage gaps to go unnoticed or worse, justified. Governments must legally mandate pay bands for all roles in medium and large organisations, and require that HR departments conduct annual gender audits of salaries, promotions, and negotiation success rates.
This is already being done in countries like Iceland and the UK. There’s no reason India shouldn’t follow suit.
3. Enforce Equal Representation in Decision-Making Roles
India’s corporate boards are still overwhelmingly male. Even in 2025, women make up less than 18% of board members in the top 500 NSE-listed companies. A 33% reservation for women on boards, not as a token but as a compliance requirement should be enforced with clear penalties. This isn’t just a gender issue; companies with gender-diverse leadership tend to perform better financially and show higher ethical standards.
We also need the same enforcement in public offices, university senates, and workplace grievance committees. If women aren’t at the table when rules are made, those rules will continue to reflect male default assumptions.
4. Make Workplaces Hormone-Aware, Not Just Gender-Aware
Much of our current workplace model such as 9-to-5 routines, monthly reviews, linear productivity cycles, is built on male hormonal rhythms, which operate on a roughly 24-hour cycle. Women, whose bodies follow more complex hormonal patterns across a 28-day cycle, are held to a standard they didn’t help design.
This is not about special treatment; it’s about accommodation. Companies should be encouraged (and eventually required) to create flexible productivity models for menstruating and menopausal employees. These could include cycle-aware leave banks, hybrid work windows, and the right to opt out of non-critical meetings during certain phases.
This also applies to education. Girls going through puberty face both objectification and alienation in classroom settings. Teachers must be trained to recognise the psychosocial effects of adolescence on girls, not just discipline them for “distracted behaviour.”
5. Protect Women’s Right to Simply Exist in Public
The very act of a woman standing still in public space can invite suspicion. She cannot loiter. She cannot be idle. She must have a “purpose”, preferably work, errands, or care-giving. Otherwise, she is sexualised, policed, or pathologised. This is what sociologists call the “male default of public presence.”
Local governments must redesign public spaces through a gender-equity lens more seating, better lighting, community-driven vigilance committees (not surveillance), and strong anti-harassment enforcement. Cities like Vienna have implemented “gender mainstreaming” in urban design. It’s time Indian cities did the same.
6. Build Legal Protection for Unpaid and Invisible Labour
One of the most devastating contradictions today is that being a traditional wife or homemaker is no longer socially recognised, yet workplaces do not accommodate the unpaid labour women do at home. Care work, emotional labour, child-rearing, and household management continue to fall disproportionately on women, with zero legal recognition.
We need a legal framework that offers pensions, healthcare coverage, or time-banking for homemakers not just as welfare, but as a rights-based recognition of their contribution to the economy. Kerala’s new budget offering monthly pay to homemakers is a small but meaningful step in this direction.
7. Reimagine Masculinity Through Legal and Cultural Reform
Finally, none of this is good for men either. When women are punished for being too feminine, and men are punished for being too “soft,” both are trapped in rigid roles that crush mental health, empathy, and personal growth. Gender-sensitive school curricula and public awareness campaigns must target boys too — not to shame them, but to liberate them from hyper-masculine expectations.
Gender justice is not a “women’s issue.” It’s a societal reset.
The Bottom Line
A woman’s worth is not determined by how well she hides her pain, smiles through discrimination, or pretends to be either a man or a superwoman. The problem is not that women are weak. It’s that society, policy, and law still treat their strength as an exception, not the norm.
What we need is a complete rewiring of how workplaces, public spaces, and institutions perceive gender. Not as a box to be ticked, but as a foundational principle of fairness and dignity.
Until then, every policy that ignores the emotional, biological, and structural reality of being a woman in today’s world is simply unfinished work.
Why Marathi Cinema Remains Underrated and What We Can Actually Do About It
Monday, 28 April 2025
The clouds and the forests, a love affair.
The clouds and the forests, a love affair.
Clouds are meant to be in the sky.
So what if they wander or pass by?
Does it mean the forests lose their view?
Do they not deserve the clouds too?
Both deserve each other’s grace,
beyond the limits of time and place;
beyond what society tries to arrange;
an illusion built to keep people in place. .
There’s something deeper and something true,
that’s felt by clouds and forests too.
Even if they don’t fit in the society's narrow frame,
they know their truth and they don't need fame.
The forests wait for clouds above.
The clouds return for vapor’s love.
Though unseen now by society’s eyes,
one day their bond will open people's inner eyes.
What stays forever, who can say?
Those stuck in boxes fade away.
They suffocate to keep things right,
but miss the joy and pure delight.
So what if they make the world feel pleased?
They stay alive but with hearts that go on without ease.
What of the happiness that can’t be seen,
but feels so real, so true and so keen?
Does it hold no value at all?
Is it impractical after all?
They’ll never know what dreamers have set to find
and what the feelers and the visionaries bind.
It doesn’t matter how long it will last.
Time is an illusion, future and past.
Only now is true.
That's where the clouds and the forests rule.
The villagers hide in fear,
as they can't grasp the sounds they hear.
They can only watch our forests and clouds
dance to the howls of the wolves.
Let society chase the ghost of tomorrow,
a shadow that only deepens their sorrow.
The clouds and forests thrive in the now,
whispering secrets as they wow them now!
For only the now is true, only the now is real.
Nothing else can one command or feel.
Take care of the now with all your soul,
and it will guide your steps without a toll.
All this, the clouds and the forests teach.
They neither make a speech,
nor do they build a cage.
Their life alone fills every page.