1 minute reading time
I don't have an essay in me today. Just go look at this:
Visible Work, Invisible Women on PARI.
It is an online photo exhibition by P. Sainath documenting rural women's labor across India.
Dear choice feminists, please look at it. Corporate girlbosses celebrating another boardroom promotion, please look at it. Hustle culture bros who think work is typing on a Macbook in an air conditioned Starbucks, please look at it too.
No moral lecture intended. Just look at the photographs.
We talk so much garbage online about empowerment, lean-ins, glass ceilings, and individual choices. Meanwhile, the entire engine of this country runs on millions of broken backs that never show up in GDP figures or get a single column of corporate puff journalism.
Sainath didn't try to be a messiah or give people a tidy happy ending. He just went out there with a camera and pointed it at reality.
That's it. Go see the photos.
Image Credit: The Gleaners by Jean-François Millet (1857) via Wikimedia Commons