Join us this Women’s Day for a conversation that begins not with theory, but with something far more familiar: performance.
About the Lecture
To grow up as an Indian woman is to grow up learning choreography.
You learn when to laugh loudly and when to lower your gaze. You learn how to be impressive without being intimidating, desirable without appearing desiring, ambitious without threatening the fragile ecosystem of belonging. Very early, you understand that different rooms require different versions of you.
Because admiration and respect are rarely offered to the same woman at the same time.
So we negotiate.
We soften in one direction and sharpen in another. We edit our desire. We dilute our anger. We rehearse humility. We call it maturity. We call it culture. We call it adjustment, until the line between performance and personhood begins to blur.
This lecture explores the Madonna–Whore complex not as abstract psychology, but as lived experience. How does this split shape the way we love? How does it show up in the guilt that follows wanting more? In the fear of being “too much”? In the exhaustion of never being enough?
About the Speaker
Utkarsha Jagga is a psychologist and founder of The Coping Central. Her work explores relationships, especially the ones we’re told matter most, and the many quieter ones that sustain us without applause.
She works at the intersection of loneliness, friendship, intimacy, and the subtle ways people learn (or fail to learn) to rely on one another. Her thinking is rooted not just in research, but in the ordinary rituals through which people survive hard days: shared meals, difficult conversations, companionable silence, and imperfect showing up.
About unLecture
unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from St. Stephen’s, Delhi who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive. unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.
Where it is
Address : Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters | Panchsheel Park, Basement, Ground floor and First floor Building no. 12, Panchsheel Community Centre, Shahpur Jat, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi, Delhi 110017, India
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