Last week I had to contend with seeing one of my feminist godmothers in a hospital bed in a state of utmost fragility. She's a single woman who had the audacity to live life on her own terms, always, and if today there exists in me any trace of fierceness and a preternatural discomfort with misogynist bullshit, it is the result of her imprint. When I left her I was convinced that there is only one thing that matters most in life--our capacity for nurturance. The feminist sisterhood is meaningless if it cannot accommodate within it the space for fostering ecologies of solidarity based on the caretaker's touch.

The evening I returned to Delhi, over drinks and dinner, I found myself in the midst of a heated argument with a male friend over the subject of vulnerability. He contended it was a sign of weakness and therefore had decided to make no room for it in his life. Like me, two feminist friends at the table felt the opposite. We posited that vulnerability had in fact become for us a survival strategy. I've written before about my decision to embrace vulnerability, but I'd also reflected separately about my own obvious issues with acknowledging when I need help, then mustering the courage to ask for it. My cisgender male friend and I had two different semantic considerations of the term. He understood vulnerability as a condition of fragility that easily exposes one to being attacked, whereas I perceived it as a state of being in which one is predisposed towards trusting others instead of functioning from a position of defensiveness. Both strategies were the consequence of forms of conditioning. He had been betrayed many times before in moments when he had allowed himself to be vulnerable. I had, too, but had decided some time ago that I wouldn't allow my behaviour to governed by my wounds. I had chosen to trust the world not because it hadn't failed me repeatedly, but in spite of that fact. To me, there is wisdom to be found in not allowing oneself to be defeated by the world's cruelty; to place one's faith in radical optimism.