I absolutely don't want to suggest that women are unreliable because we're mothers - on the contrary. But the question of who brings up the kids has a material effect on all women's careers.

Everything a teenager does, says or looks at, however transitory, contributes to an aggregated virtual self that might one day have consequences for its real-life counterpart. How many of us would keep all our relationships and reputations intact if every transgression, mistake or youthful folly was held in public view?

The devadasis have a multilayered story, a story in which poverty, deprivation and injustice against women is central - but what has happened to them is absolutely an outcome of imperialism and the impact of British rule in India.

When I was 13, I had a weekend job at the Photographers Gallery Bookshop in London.

Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

The Internet is a whole new world opening up.

If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.