Archive for the 'Society' Category

Law will let Afghan husbands starve wives who withhold sex

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on July 10, 2009
in Afghanistan, Culture, Society and human rights
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Jerome Starkey from Bamiyan in the Independent:

An Afghan law which legalised rape has been sent back to parliament with a clause letting husbands starve their wives if they refuse to have sex.

President Hamid Karzai ordered a review of the legislation after The Independent revealed that it negated the need for consent within marriage.

President Barack Obama described it as “abhorrent”, Gordon Brown said Britain would “not tolerate” it, and other Nato countries threatened to withdraw their troops unless the legislation was drastically re-written.

The amendments were passed to the cabinet this week and signed by Mr Karzai on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch said last night.

The women’s rights activist Wazhma Frough, who was involved in the review, said that conservative religious leaders had pressured the Justice Ministry to keep many of the most controversial clauses. More:

Click here for Human Rights Watch.

Pakistan’s forbidden drink

Published
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on July 10, 2009
in Pakistan, Religion and Society
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Gay but not quite happy

Published
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on July 9, 2009
in India, Sexuality and Society
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Jawed Naqvi in Dawn:

AN apocryphal story told by the late Prof A.M. Khusro when he was vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University goes thus: in 1603 James VI of Scotland became England’s first Stuart monarch.

Within 10 days of arriving in London, he demanded that Shakespeare’s troupe come under his own patronage. So they were granted a royal patent and changed their names to the King’s Men, in honour of King James.

One day, waiting for The Merchant of Venice to begin, the king asked his senior aide to inquire into the inordinate delay in the show. ‘Sire,’ said the official after a visit to the green room. ‘Portia is being shaved.’ Good-looking boys played female roles in Shakespeare’s England. In India, upper-crust women in Maharashtra would, as recently as the early 20th century, choose their exotic nav-waari saris according to the fashion of the day.

The legendary Bal Gandharva, who depicted many famous female characters from Marathi stage plays, set the standards. Bal Gandharva is still deified as an essential cultural grooming in upper-crust homes. He was of course a handsome man who sang beautifully in the Natya Sangeet format of old Maharashtrian theatre. More:

In India, a gay activist tries to build a broad-based political party

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on July 7, 2009
in Culture, India, Politics and Society
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Emily Wax from Bangalore in the Washington Post:

Popping out of an auto rickshaw, Manohar Elavarthi unloaded a backpack stuffed with protest posters. Soon he would be rushing to a street demonstration, one that would bring together low-caste Dalit activists, Gandhians, cross-dressers and members of domestic workers unions.

Elavarthi aspires to be the first openly gay man elected to a major political office in India, like Harvey Milk in the United States. Elavarthi is credited with being the first gay figure in India to build a mainstream political coalition across a wide spectrum of historically marginalized groups.

“Our dream for Indian politics is to build a common front of lesbians, untouchables, eunuchs and low-paid workers — people who really need a voice in this country,” said Elavarthi, who has received death threats for his views, largely from right-wing religious groups and police. “India — the new India — is really changing. We need to build a party around social justice for minorities. It would be a sign that India is a true secular democracy.” More:

Forced marriage: ‘I can’t forgive or forget what they did to me’

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on July 5, 2009
in Bangladesh, Culture and Society
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Humayra Abedin, a doctor from east London, was held hostage and forced into marriage when she visited her parents in Bangladesh. She was freed from her vows on the orders of a Bangladeshi court soon after The Independent on Sunday highlighted her plight. She spoke to Nina Lakhani of IoS about her abduction:

humayra abedin“My face was covered with a piece of cloth by men who told me they were policemen, before they carried me out into an ambulance which was parked outside the house. They held my arms and legs, carried me like a prisoner, while my parents stood in the background.”

She was driven, kicking and screaming, to a private hospital, on the request of her family. During the journey, she was held down and gagged by three people as they tried to stop her shouting.

“This was the first time I thought, ‘this is it, I am dying’,” said Dr Abedin. “I begged them to stop.” And so began the nightmare.

For the next three months, every morning and every night, she was forced to swallow dangerously high doses of powerful tranquillisers used to treat people with psychoses. She was kept locked in the hospital, constantly told she was a disgrace by staff and relatives, and denied contact with the outside world. But she could make it stop, so her parents and psychiatrist told her, if she agreed to give up her life in England, marry the man her family had chosen for her and stay in Bangladesh. She refused. More:

Farewell to an India I hardly knew

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on July 5, 2009
in Culture, India and Society
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Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

Mumbai: The first thing I ever learned about India was that my parents had chosen to leave it.

The country was lost to us in America, where I was born. It had to be assembled in my mind, from the fragments of anecdotes and regular journeys east.

Now, six years after returning to the country my parents left, as I prepare to depart it myself, the mind goes back to the beginning, to my earliest pictures of it.

India, reflected from afar, was late-night phone calls with the news of death. It was calling back relatives who could not afford to call you. It was Hindu ceremonies with saffron and Kit Kat bars on a silver platter.

India, consumed on our visits back, was being fetched from the airport and cooked a meal even in the dead of night. It was sideways hugs that strove to avoid breast contact. It was the chauvinism of uncles who asked about my dreams and ignored my sister’s. More:

Is there life after democracy?

Published
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on July 5, 2009
in India, Politics and Society
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a-roy

Activist and writer Arundhati Roy in Dawn:

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: ‘Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia . . . is that what you would prefer?’

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all ‘developing’ societies aspire to be is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy-too much representation, too little democracy-needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? More:

377: Accept it and move on

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on July 4, 2009
in India, Society and human rights
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In The Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta applauds a brave new Delhi High Court judgment for upholding our Constitutional values of  liberty, equality, privacy and a check on state power.

The white and the red rose: Currier & Ives, 1860s, from the Library of Congress

The white and the red rose: Currier & Ives, 1860s, from the Library of Congress

There come moments in the life of a nation when it has to confront its deepest prejudices and fears in the mirror of its constitutional morality. The Delhi high court’s judgment in Naz Foundation vs Union of India, decriminalising private, adult, consensual homosexual acts, does just that. The judgment is a powerful example of judicial craftsmanship. It is, unusually amongst recent judgments that are constitutionally significant, clear and precise. It embodies the right combination of technical rigour in thinking about the law, with a persuasive vision of the deepest values those laws embody.

There will be an appropriate time for a detailed legal analysis of the judgment. Many will, doubtless, latch on to the judgment as offending something called our tradition or our values. But to interpret it this way would be a mistake. What the court says is this. Under our constitutional scheme, no person ought to be targeted or discriminated against for simply being who they are. If we give up this value, we give up everything all of us cherish: both our liberty and our right to be treated equally. This judgment is defending our values. Simply put, the judgment says that the state has no presumptive right to regulate private acts between consenting adults. It protects privacy. That is our value. The judgment says that individuals should not feel so stigmatised that they are unable to seek medical help. That is our value. more

[pic: cc, Bobster]

India’s ‘Gay Day’

Published
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on July 3, 2009
in India, Society and human rights
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The Hindustan Times

The Hindustan Times

The Asian Age

The Asian Age

The Indian Express

The Indian Express

The Delhi High Court on Thursday legalised homosexual intercourse between consenting adults by overturning a 149-year-old law which describes a same-sex relationship as an “unnatural offence”. Homosexual acts were punishable by a 10-year prison sentence. The Indian media has hailed the ruling. More here, here, here, here.

Designer Wendell Rodricks, who celebrated his silver jubilee with his French partner last year, on why the court verdict isn’t just about gays. In the Indian Express:

I never ever thought of myself as a criminal. In fact quite frankly, I do not think about myself at all. I go about my work, enjoy traveling, mingle with friends who are from all walks of life and embrace life as a huge learning curve. Along the way, I learnt that I could be a criminal in the eyes of the law. A certain section in the Indian Penal Code was a dragon that could awaken from its slumber and put me in trouble.

People who talk against amending Section 377 have not even read the law. They call it a gay law which it isn’t. It pertains to all Indians, clubbing together paedophiles, rapists, gays and ordinary couples who indulge in “sex against the law of Nature”. That means that married couples who have oral sex, or anything other than what the missionaries ordained, are criminals. Even if they do this in the privacy of their bedrooms. More:

India bans “sexy housewife” porn site

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on July 2, 2009
in Art, Culture, India, Society and entertainment
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babhiteaser

The Indian government has quietly blocked a comic-strip hard-core pornography site, savitabhabhi.com. The Telecom Department has asked all Indian Internet Service Providers to block access to the year-old site about the “sexual adventures of a hot Indian bhabhi.”

The creators of the site, that gets 60 million visitors each month, about 70 per cent from India, has started a ‘Save Savita’ online campaign, a Twitter stream and a Facebook group.

“Savita bhabhi” (or sister-in-law Savita) is a buxom, newly-wed housewife who seems to seduce just about anyone who knocks at her door — from neighbourhood teenagers playing cricket in the street to door-to-door salesmen.

Previously in AW:

And click here to read the Global Post story.

NY police plays cricket to build relationships

Published
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on June 29, 2009
in Cricket, Society and Sport
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From the New York Times:

The Gateway Cricket Ground in Brooklyn is a spartan place - a grass oval tucked in by the Belt Parkway, in the shadows of the towers of Starrett City and beneath the flight path of Kennedy International Airport.

But on Tuesday morning it was crowded with players, some toting paddlelike bats, and filled with the sound of leather balls struck by wood.

The sport they were playing is as ancient as it is baffling to most Americans, yet the New York Police Department has chosen cricket as a way to foster relationships with newer immigrant communities.

The Police Department established a cricket competition for young men in the city last summer; the project was a success, and on Tuesday, play began for another season. Interest has expanded, with 10 teams and 170 players involved this year, compared with 6 teams last year. More:

Click here to watch the NYT video.

History in the making: it’s legal to be gay in India

Published
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on June 29, 2009
in India, Sexuality and Society
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Gay pride parade in New Delhi, 2009
Gay pride parade in New Delhi, 2009

[Updated July 2]

Hearing a public interest litigation, the Delhi High Court has ruled that consensul sex between adults of the same gender is, finally, legal. Read that story on CNN here.

In Kafila, Nivedita Menon says ‘three queers for the Delhi High Court’. That story here.

To download the full text of the 105-page Delhi High Court judgment on pdf click here [courtesy Kafila]

One day before India’s second national Gay Pride parades kicked off in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, the Congress-led UPA government hinted that it might do away with a 150-year-old law, drafted by Lord Macaulay, that makes homosexual acts a criminal offence.

India’s gay and lesbian community has long been asking for the government to decriminalise section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that makes sexual acts ‘against the order of nature’ a crime that carries a punishment of up to 10 years in jail. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and writers like Vikram Seth had, as far back as 2006, issued an open appeal to ask the government to do away with this section. And Naz Foundation, an NGO committed to spreading awareness about HIV/AIDS had in 2002 filed a public interest litigation in the Delhi High Court asking for section 377 to be amended.

During UPA-1, then health minister Anbumani Ramadoss had considered the idea of decriminalising homosexuality, arguing that pushing homosexuals underground only encouraged the spread of HIV. But Ramadoss encountered stiff resistance from the then home minister Shivraj Patil (sacked in the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai terror strike) on the grounds that repealing the act, or even watering it down, would encourage delinquent behaviour.

Now, with UPA-2 picking up reforms with zealous fervour, law minister Veerappa Moily has said that he is in favour of a ‘review’ of the law and that home minister P Chidambaram is also in favour of the idea. The ministers will now call for a formal meeting with health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad to find out his views.

Yet, even as the gay and lesbian community rejoiced over the news, there are signs that the Centre will find it very difficult to build a consensus on the issue with religious leaders already rejecting the idea and the BJP Opposition cautioning restraint (read that story here).

Is it time to say bye bye to section 377? What do you think? Do send in your comments.

Meanwhile, read about this developing story here, here and here. Also, what was ancient India’s stand on same-sex relationships? Read Manoj Mitta’s story in the Times of India here.

India’s best gossips

Published
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on June 28, 2009
in India, Politics and Society
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From Outlook:

Arun Jaitley: For this lawyer-politician, gossip is not just social currency or amusement, it is a genuine passion. Journalists lucky enough to be invited into his inner circle say that his public persona is quite unlike his private one: once he is sure he is among friends, he entertains them with his rich fund of stories about the private lives of everyone, including journalists and editors…

Jairam Ramesh: His prime asset is that he’s a born storyteller. One of the most pursued dinner guests in town, he is witty, amusing and never short of stories to share…

Malavika Singh: The soirees held by her parents, Raj and Romesh Thapar, in the 1960s were legendary-a collection of who’s who from across the world gathering for exclusive dinner parties where conversation was indistinguishable from gossip. She carries on the tradition.

And there are more:

Also in Outlook: Sheela Reddy on gossip and politicians.

‘India is racist, and happy about it’

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on June 27, 2009
in Culture, India and Society
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Diepiriye Kuku, a Black American PhD student at the Delhi School of Economics, narrates his first-hand experience of footpath India in Outlook:

In spite of friendship and love in private spaces, the Delhi public literally stops and stares. It is harrowing to constantly have children and adults tease, taunt, pick, poke and peer at you from the corner of their eyes, denying their own humanity as well as mine. Their aggressive, crude curiosity threatens to dominate unless disarmed by kindness, or met with equal aggression.

Once I stood gazing at the giraffes at the Lucknow Zoo only to turn and see 50-odd families gawking at me rather than the exhibit. Parents abruptly withdrew infants that inquisitively wandered towards me. More:

Why I left Pakistan to give birth in the U.S.

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on June 26, 2009
in Pakistan and Society
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Ayesha Javed Akram at DoubleX:

Lahore, Pakistan: When I saw two pink lines slowly emerge on the home pregnancy kit I keep hidden in a cupboard in my bedroom, I sat down on the bathroom floor in shock. Within minutes, I realized the lines weren’t going to disappear no matter how intently I stared at them. Rushing to our bed, I shook my husband awake, placed my mouth close to his ear, and shrieked, “I’m pregnant.” And then, after a pause, “We can’t have the baby here.”

When other excited first parents would have become engrossed in preparing a nursery and shopping for baby clothes, my husband and I began getting our visas sorted out, making travel arrangements, and applying for time off from work. We were headed to America to have a baby.

As Pakistan’s military desperately fights Taliban in the north, and the rest of the country suffers through frequent suicide bombings and security threats, those with money have silently begun purchasing residences abroad. Others have started applying for Canadian or U.K. citizenship. And upper- and middle-class Pakistani mothers, desperate to provide their children with exit options, have started indulging in what’s commonly called birth tourism. Almost every pregnant Pakistani woman I know is scheduling a trip abroad in her sixth month of pregnancy, so that she can stay and deliver the baby in a country that allows your child to become a citizen if he or she is born there. As of 2009, only a handful of countries permit birth-right citizenship. The most prominent are Canada, Mexico, and the United States. More:

Comparing India and Thailand

Published
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on June 23, 2009
in Culture and Society
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bangkok

Aakar Patel in The News:

A visit to Thailand takes the Indian aback because the civilisation is so advanced. We’re used to landing in cities and discovering that they are more modern than ours, and have superior infrastructure. Indeed, it’s not easy for the Indian to name a nation whose cities are in as much disarray as his. This difference is fine when we go to Europe or America, because we see white people in a different way, and expect them to be better than us. But a coloured race showing its superiority is troubling. And the slap in Thailand comes not from infrastructure or modern cities, but from culture.

Thais behave as Europeans do. Let us look at how.

Traffic is disciplined, and always in formation. Cars and rickshaws stay in their lane. This is not because they are policed (I have visited Thailand a few times and cannot say what a traffic policeman looks like), but because that is the culture.

Bangkok, with two million (20 lakh) cars, has evening jams as bad as those in Bombay. But these are silent jams, and this is the second thing we observe in Thailand: people do not honk. Cars remain in their place, moving forward when their turn comes. There are no signs that instruct them not to: they just don’t honk. But why not? Because there is trust that the driver in front and to the side is going to act correctly — and inevitably they do. Cars do not cut across each other or scramble for position or occupy space merely because otherwise someone else might. In India the trust is missing and, that is why, so is the discipline. More:

[Image: Audrey Sel / CC]

India’s ‘Burqa rapper’

Published
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on June 20, 2009
in India, Music and Society
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Click on the video (above) for her version of Wild World, and below, No More Bhopals at a concert in Chennai, India. “…in a way, the burqa helps creates shock value,” she says.

Gopu Mohan in the Indian Express:

How do you say, “I’m a conservative Muslim, but I’m also cool?” Perhaps you should rap it. The medium, after all, is the message. This is certainly what one young woman, Sofia Ashraf, believes. When on stage with her band Peter Kaapi, she raps, clad in a burqa, about what it is to be a traditional Muslim who is also modern and trendy.

“I can’t sing to save my life. In college, when we wanted to try something for a cultural programme, I tried rapping and it went well,” says the 22-year-old freelance graphic designer and copywriter, who is also the lyricist and rapper of the Chennai-based ethnic rock band Peter Kaapi. Incidentally, Peter, in city slang, is a person who speaks in English as if it is a matter of prestige, while the word kaapi is synonymous with the state.

“When I started trying rap during my college years, I was not trying to register a political message or social protest. It was more about teenage ideas like creating an identity. Even the crowd was not right for our songs about Islam. Along the way, somewhere, I started talking about myself.” More:

Sex selection comes to America

Published
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on June 15, 2009
in Culture and Society
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Census data on births among Asian-Americans may reflect not only a preference for male babies, but a growing embrace of sex selection, demographers say. In the New York Times:

birthThe trend is buried deep in United States census data: seemingly minute deviations in the proportion of boys and girls born to Americans of Chinese, Indian and Korean descent.

In those families, if the first child was a girl, it was more likely that a second child would be a boy, according to recent studies of census data. If the first two children were girls, it was even more likely that a third child would be male.

Demographers say the statistical deviation among Asian-American families is significant, and they believe it reflects not only a preference for male children, but a growing tendency for these families to embrace sex-selection techniques, like in vitro fertilization and sperm sorting, or abortion.

New immigrants typically transplant some of their customs and culture to the United States - from tastes in food and child-rearing practices to their emphasis on education and the elevated social and economic status of males. The appeal to immigrants by clinics specializing in sex selection caused some controversy a decade ago. More:

Shashi Tharoor on ‘Indian strategic power’

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on June 15, 2009
in Economy, India, Indian elections 2009 and Society
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Shashi Tharoor is India’s Minister of State for External Affairs. He won the recent Parliament election frlom the Trivandrum constituency in Kerala. Prior to this, he was the UN Under-Secretary General for Communications and Public Information under Kofi Annan. He is also a prolific author. Tharoor wrote this piece in Global Brief:

indiaAs an Indian, I have become a little concerned about the proliferation of those who speak of India as a future ‘world leader’ or even as ‘the next superpower.’ The American publishers of my most recent book, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, even added a gratuitous subtitle suggesting that my volume was about “the emerging 21st century power.”

Now, I appreciate that this is not entirely unreasonable. Many thinkers and writers I respect have spoken of India’s geostrategic advantages, its economic dynamism, political stability, proven military capabilities, its nuclear, space and missile programmes, the entrepreneurial energy of India’s people, and the country’s growing pool of young and skilled manpower as assuring India ‘great power’ status as a ‘world leader’ in the new century.

And yet I have a problem with that term. The notion of ‘world leadership’ is a curiously archaic one. The very phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world’s most populous country by 2034? Is it military strength (India’s is already the world’s fourth-largest army) or nuclear capacity (India’s status having been made clear in 1998, and last year formally recognized in the Indo-US nuclear deal)? Is it economic development? There, India has made extraordinary strides in recent years; it is already the world’s fifth-largest economy in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, and continues to climb, though too many of our people still live destitute, amidst despair and disrepair. Or could it be a combination of all these, allied to something altogether more difficult to define - the ‘soft power’ of its culture?

Much of the conventional analysis of India’s stature in the world relies on the all-too-familiar economic assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and one of those paradoxes is that so many speak about India as a great power of the 21st century when we are not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our people. So it is not economic growth, military strength or population numbers that I would underscore when I think of India’s potential leadership role in the world of the 21st century. Rather, if there is one attribute of independent India to which I think increasing attention should now be paid around the globe, it is the quality which India is already displaying in ample measure today - its ‘soft power.’ More:

[Image: Global Brief]

From Versace couture to a jail in Mumbai: a socialite’s long and lonely road

Published
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on June 9, 2009
in Fashion and Society
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Mumbai socialite Sheetal Mafatlal, president of Mafatlal Luxury, and wife of industrialist Atulya Mafatlal, was arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle in diamond and gold jewellery. Sheetal Mafatlal brought upscale brands like Valentino to India. Namrata Zakaria has her profile in the Indian Express:

A favourite story about Sheetal Mafatlal is how she would hate being called a page-three perennial. “I belong on page-one dahling,” she said at one of her many parties. This was, of course, before news of her husband’s family dispute made national headlines four years ago. And before Monday morning, when Mumbai woke up to front-page reports of her being detained at the airport for alleged duty evasion - she was arrested today for allegedly not declaring jewellery worth over Rs 50 lakh.

Later in the day, a city court remanded her to judicial custody until June 12, a ruling some legal experts felt was harsh - her lawyer Satish Maneshinde said “some disgruntled opponents of the Mafatlal family and industry” had tipped-off police and other authorities. This is not how Sheetal would have liked to make news. But none of her friends, many of Mumbai’s beautiful society ladies, said a word in her defence. Or spared a thought wondering if she was being made a victim as her lawyer alleged.

Not too long ago, these friends had enjoyed the expensive champagne and mutton raan her art-filled home on Altamount Road was known for, and had Sheetal light up their parties, swilling from crystal tulips, dressed in the latest couture, and only couture made from European designers’ ateliers. More:

First comes marriage

Published
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on June 7, 2009
in India and Society
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Farahad Zama in the New York Times column, Modern Love. Zama lives in London and is the author of “The Marriage Bureau for Rich People“:

“What kind of girl do you want to marry?” my mother had asked me.

This was about 20 years ago, when I was just three years out of college, working as a software developer for an international bank in Bombay (as it was called then), and traveling the world.

I was visiting my family in Vishakhapatnam (also known as Vizag), a coastal city in South India, on a quick holiday. To say that I was embarrassed by my mother’s question is an understatement. This was not the usual kind of conversation I had with my parents. I was sitting with my mother, my sister and an older male cousin on the bed. My father, as usual, was busy working at his table in the living room.

“Whoever you chose,” I replied with a shrug. I was a well-brought-up boy, after all. More:

The lives and faces rebuilt after acid attacks

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on June 7, 2009
in Bangladesh, Crime and Society
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Jessica Salter from Dhaka in the Telegraph:

She was attacked by her husband of 15 years on her way home from a garment factory where they both work. “He is a drug addict and has been for a long time. All of the time he asks me for money and for things. He usually beats me to get my money,” she says through an interpreter.

“On that day he again was asking me for money, and I had said no. That day I went to work, finished work, and when I went to leave he was waiting for me. He attacked me with acid straight in my face.”

Lucky, who is 26 and a mother to two young sons, was helped by people on the street. When she got home her village leader told her to go to the police who referred her to a special hospital and rehabilitation centre for victims in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, run by a charity.

Her story is depressingly common for retired British plastic surgeon Ron Hiles, who has operated on hundreds of acid attack victims - mostly women. Last year the small 40-bed clinic in Dhaka, called the Acid Survivors’ Foundation (ASF), treated 700 patients. “There are a lot of women called Lucky and Beauty who come to the clinic who have had their faces destroyed by an acid burn,” he says. More:

Jemima Khan’s broken country

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on June 7, 2009
in Conflict, Culture, Pakistan, Society and Terrorism
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Jemima Khan. former wife of Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan with whom she had two sons, in the Sunday Times:

The day I’m leaving for Pakistan a round-robin e-mail pings into my inbox from an address I don’t recognise, Wise Pakistan. The message reads: “It is important you watch this to see what’s coming.”

Ten men are lined up and each one is filmed talking inaudibly to camera. The first man is pinned to the ground by four others. His throat is slit like a goat at Eid and his head held aloft by his hair. The Urdu subtitle reads: “This is what happens to spies.” It’s a Taliban home video - to jaunty music - of serial beheadings. There are plenty of these doing the rounds nowadays.

I’m off to Pakistan for the children’s half-term. They visit their father there every holiday. I lived in Pakistan throughout my twenties. Now it’s a different place - the most dangerous country on Earth, some say - and my friends and family are worried.

For my last four years in Pakistan we lived at the quaintly named House 10, Street 1, E7. Two months ago a bomb exploded 100 yards from the house, killing four people; about 1,500 have been killed this year in terrorist attacks. More:

Market economics, Indian style

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on June 7, 2009
in Culture, Economy, India and Society
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Anand Giridharadas from Mumbai in the New York Times:

It is surreal to live in the so-called third world, in a country belatedly stumbling on capitalism, and to hear Americans, of all people, heralding its end. It feels like watching your parents fight for the first time.

Nations like this, that used to suppress money, now bow at its altar. But as tens of millions of Indians and Chinese and Russians enter the age of malls and MasterCard, they may be stunned to hear from rich lands that greed is out. It’s hollow, this capitalism. It’s derivatives of derivatives, money making money on money. Private jets are sin. Debt is dumb. Restless wanting is so pre-2008.

“To straighten a bent stick,” Michel de Montaigne wrote, “we bend it in the contrary way.” But a stroll through this money capital of India may remind capitalism’s new doubters of why they believed in it to begin with, and may warn against bending the stick too far. More:

Child marriage: Can a TV sensation in modern India change an ancient tradition?

Published
by
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on May 25, 2009
in India, Media and Society
. 0 Comments

Jason Overdorf from new Delhi at GlobalPost:

Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers - notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law - the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.

Called Balika Vadhu, or “Child Bride,” and set in rural Rajasthan, where marrying off daughters before they hit puberty is still a common practice, the show has caught the imagination of urban viewers across the board and throughout India, ushering in a revolution of sorts in cable television programming.

It has helped Colors, an upstart channel launched by Viacom and Network18 in July last year, supplant Rupert Murdoch’s Star Plus as the most-watched Indian television network - a title Star Plus held for nine years running. And it has unleashed a new wave of progressive programming devoted to issues facing India’s “distressed daughters.” More:

Will India lose its charm as it becomes ‘world class’?

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on May 22, 2009
in India and Society
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Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

“But you haven’t eaten anything! Come, come, you must have something. At least take some bread. Please.”

They barely serve peanuts aboard American airlines these days. But just a few years ago, in India, it was not uncommon to encounter flight attendants who took it personally when you did not eat.

Their behavior was not that of a pre-programmed employee following a script. It was the universal response of an Indian to an Indian, a horror at the thought that someone in your charge might go hungry.

Then the Indian airline industry became what business-book writers label “world class”: it got with the global program, signing on the dotted lines of the contract with modernity.

Delays waned. Aerobridges were erected. New airlines were born. More:

British plastic surgeon helping acid victims

Published
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on May 17, 2009
in Bangladesh, Health and Society
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In Bangladesh, thanks to Dr Ron Hines, cosmetic surgery is rebuilding lives. Rachel Shields from Dhaka From the Independent:

Ayesha Siddique refused to be sold by her husband. Photo Kiron/MAP in the Independent

Ayesha Siddique refused to be sold by her husband. Photo Kiron/MAP in the Independent

It is about as far away from the nips and tucks of TV makeover shows and celebrity magazines as you can imagine, but then Dr Ronald Hiles has never had any interest in helping pampered princesses take inches off their thighs or years off their faces.

As he speaks from a clinic on the edge of the sprawling slums of Dhaka, his description of what he has achieved in 25 years of pioneering work is modest, to say the least: “Lying on a beach isn’t my idea of a holiday. I prefer to do something useful.”

And so, while many of his contemporaries are happy whiling away their summers on the Côte d’Azur, the former president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons has spent his holidays for the past two decades helping Bangladeshi burns victims to rebuild their lives. More:

A glass of wine with your samosa?

Published
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asianwindow
on May 13, 2009
in India and Society
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Saritha Rai at Global Post:

BANGALORE - Ever thought that a chicken tikka could be paired with a rose, or a palak paneer (cottage cheese in spinach) with a sauvignon blanc?

Aparna Bhagwat, 26, an architect who works at a Bangalore-based design firm, absolutely thinks so. So do her girlfriends.

In a country where drinking used to be taboo for women, and socializing meant sitting around watching the men get smashed, record numbers of urban women are taking to wine drinking, making it socially acceptable and even fashionable.

“Wine drinking is classy,” said Bhagwat, who has acquired a taste for red wine in the past year. She has enrolled herself in a wine appreciation course.

As Indian women increasingly become independent, financially and otherwise, and begin asserting their spending power, wine drinking is becoming the rage. More:

A pocket-size leveler in an outsize land

Published
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asianwindow
on May 11, 2009
in India, Indian elections 2009 and Society
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Not since Americans and their automobiles in the 1950s, perhaps, have a people and a technology wedded as happily as Indians and their cellphones. Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

Sometimes a technology comes along and crystallizes a cultural moment. Not since Americans and their automobiles in the 1950s, perhaps, have a people and a technology wedded as happily as Indians and their cellphones - small and big, vibrating and tringing, BlackBerry and plain vanilla.

And neither India nor the cellphone will be the same after the pairing. India now adds more cellphone connections than anyplace else, with 15.6 million in March alone. The cost of calling is among the lowest in the world. And the device plays a larger-than-life role here - more so, it seems, than in the wealthy countries where it was invented.

Of course, in so vast a country, India’s nearly 400 million cellphone users still account for only a third of the population. But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, becoming that rare Indian possession to traverse the walls of caste and region and class; a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. More

Pakistan: Struggling to see a country of shards

Published
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asianwindow
on May 3, 2009
in Pakistan and Society
. 1 Comment

The country’s competing impulses are so different that they are hard to see together in the same frame. Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times:

Lahore: On a spring night in Lahore, I came face to face with all that is puzzling about Pakistan.

I had just interviewed Mobarak Haidar, a Pakistani author who was confidently predicting the end of the world. Islamic extremism, he said, was a wild animal that would soon gobble up Europe and all of Western civilization. “All the world’s achievements for the past 500 years are at risk,” he said in a gloomy tone, sitting in his living room. Soon there would be no more music, dancing or fun of any kind. The power went out and candles were lit, adding to the spookiness.

And then, as I climbed into a car to go home, a wedding party came out of nowhere, enveloping us in a shower of rose petals. Men playing bagpipes marched toward us, grinning, while dancing guests wriggled and clapped, making strange-shaped silhouettes in our headlights.

So which is the real Pakistan? Collapsing state or crazy party? More: