For the August issue of Elle’s Indian edition, I write about turning 25. The editor says in her Editor’s note:

In this month’s special feature, ‘The Turning Point ’, we invited six writers to share their milestone moments. What they all had in common was that leap of faith, that bold decision, albeit one that had been brewing in their minds for a while, which led them to achieve the results they wanted.

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In the August 16-31 issue of The Caravan, check out my opinion piece “We Don’t Need No Men,” on how Indian women are traveling solo and very happily so. It was inspired by this blog entry on my experiences in Surat. My favorite part of the piece (and still one of my favorite stories) is this:

After being frisked three times while flying from New Delhi to San Francisco, the journalist in me had finally had it. As part of an assignment two months later, I met a security official at the San Francisco International Airport and asked him straight out: “Why do they always frisk me? Do I look criminal? Oh, it’s my skin color, isn’t it?”

“No, no,” the officer hastily explained, not willing to appear racist. “It’s not your skin color. It’s because you’re a woman traveling alone. Single women are typically marked out for checking.”