Dear Readers,

A very happy new year to you all and welcome to the first 2020 edition of Eyra!

Let me begin by congratulating all the winners of Eyra 2020 awards and a very special thanks to our jury members who worked hard to help us award the most deserving candidate in each category. Please visit Eyra Awards 2020 in case you missed it.

Our new year resolution is to bring you more and more interesting content focused on empowering women with making their own choices and living their own lives. To this end, we have decided to enhance the Beauty section to include wellness and health awareness more and more. Let me point our here that even earlier, we always focused on content that enhanced inner beauty and confidence and we absolutely reject the stereotypical notion of beauty. Beauty, without a doubt, comes from within.

Moving on, this 25th issue of Eyra brings some thought provoking articles, which are purely designed for self introspection and analysis. We bring you an article, Nurturing your Goal, on the vision of life to help analyse the ultimate goal of life and how to set about achieving it. We realise upon reading it that health is a very important aspect of life and hence we bring you YOGA – Benefits BEYOND to highlight the lesser known benefits of practicing yoga, apart from the usual weight loss and fitness.

We also deal with mental fitness in this issue by bringing you a story of an illiterate woman who self-educated herself to become one of the most legendary and progressive authors of Bengali literature in The Literary Wonder Woman – Ashapoorna Devi. If she could surpass such a big obstacle in an era where female education was frowned upon, I think we have our lives much easier to achieve our dreams.

This brings me to a piece I penned on this Republic Day about women and their freedom. Do they really have freedom? Is it not time to fight aggression against them? Read all about it in Women and Freedom.

Lastly, coming to the more mundane routine, are we really treated equally at home and in the  workplace. I don’t think so. Being tired of the existing corporate culture, I have penned down my thoughts in A Message for Men. It is a personal message from me and hopefully other women like me who are tired of fighting the subtle inequalities we face every day.

I am really hoping this edition would bring a difference to at least one woman reader in our list. I look forward to more feedback from you.

Happy Reading!

Jyoti Shekar

Founder Editor, Eyra