Maya Sharma Livres

Paving: Conversations with Incredible Women Who are Shaping our World is a provocative and stirring piece of brilliant writing from the up-and-coming Maya Sharma. Impressively, as she is still a student in high school, Maya has expertly featured many inspirational and powerful women from all walks of life and has interviewed them to gain their insights and wisdom on the world today. From their first-hand experiences, Maya's expressive conversations have delved into the difficulties that many women face in the modern world and deftly drawn valuable knowledge from the panoramic fount of the remarkable minds of these global influencers. From how they rose up the ranks to where they sit today, and the challenges they faced on their journey there, to how they stood against them, there is much inspiration and encouragement for the many ambitious women they have paved the way for. In fact, Paving is a force of its own, an audacious undertaking, and an eloquent book of thought-provoking answers and extraordinary stories. There is one pivotal theme: No matter what your circumstances, and whatever adversity you face, with perseverance, achieving your goal is always possible

Footprints of a Queer History is a simple narrative of queer stories marked by personal journeys, political consciousness, socio-legal struggles, friendships, and love; it puts on record, within the larger historical backdrop, our humdrum and unexceptional acts of everyday-living that are pierced with the pain of stigma and silence.Stories capture the voices of the marginalized, the rarely heard, and only stories can truly and fully capture their day-to-day reality. They transcend the limitations of defining human experiences and show the impossibility of telling the whole truth, arousing the imagination for that un-tellable tale and leaving room for the inarticulate to attempt those spillages of reality that can only be sensed.As you turn the pages in this book, you can hear the untold and the unstated in the stories—both unique and universal, you may find footprints that echo some parts of your journey in the everydayness of our human lives.

The narratives in this volume constitute immense challenges and small but profoundly significant triumphs. Located within a personal journey of emergence from a space fraught with silences and half-truths, the book documents the life-stories of ten working-class queer women living in north India. In doing so, it dispels the myth that lesbians in India are all urban, westernized and come from upper and middle classes. These real-life narratives create a space for voices with little or no privilege, providing these women with an opportunity to share their lived realities with one another and with others. The stories effectively challenge the notion of women as sexual beings without agency, and it is hoped, will influence the women's movement towards an inclusion of lesbian women in the movement.