What Daughters Carry
By Mahak Sharma As India begins, slowly and unevenly, to talk about the invisible labour of care, as young women name burnout not as a phase but as a way of life, and as digital surveillance quietly settles into our most intimate spaces, a familiar question returns with new urgency: who is still carrying the weight of everything that cannot be measured? There are things daughters carry that never enter a suitcase. They carry them in the spine, in the way their shoulders lift at raised voices, in the reflex to apologise before they even know what they’re apologising for. They carry inherited silences, habits they never consciously chose, and fears that feel older than their own age. Some of what they carry is love. Some of it is fear. Some of it is a legacy they never consented to inherit. Today, daughters also carry phones that never sleep. Live locations. Emergency alerts. Work notifications at midnight. The pressure to be visible, productive, emotionally aware, endlessly resilient. T...