Archive for the 'Women' Category

Taslima fury hits India again

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on March 3, 2010
in Faith, India and Women
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An article apparently written by exiled author Taslima Nasreen has sparked  attacks on newspaper offices and protests in the Shimoga and Hassan districts of Karnataka. Two people have died as a result. 

In an article written in 2007, Nasreen has apparently criticised the burqa. This article was translated to Kannada and published in a local newspaper, the Kannada Prabha.

In the wake of violence caused by the reproduction of her article, Nasreen has issued a statement saying her article had been ‘misused’.

The article appears on the author’s website. The Quran does prescribe purdah, sh writes. But that doesn’t mean that women should obey it.

Read Taslima Nasrin’s article, Let’s Think Again About the Burqa here

Kabul makeover

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on February 11, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Fashion, Society, Terrorism and Women
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Reality-TV shows like Afghan Model are rewiring Afghan culture—for better and for worse. Kim Barker in The Atlantic:

Anita Khalwat wears heavy makeup, fake eyelashes, and a green spangly head scarf, loose dress, and pants fit for an Afghan wedding. But she’s no bride. She’s a warrior in heels and metallic nail polish, preparing to appear on Afghan Model, a new TV show that aims to find the top fashion star in a war-torn nation where neither of the two main languages has a word for “model,” and where threats by the TV-hating, women-loathing Taliban have turned an appearance before the cameras on a rickety, rainbow-lit white stage into a political statement.

“Hide your hair today,” one judge, Hozair Amiri, tells Khalwat before a recent taping. “Please.”

Khalwat, her green head scarf showing off a good part of her highlighted brown hair, looks at Amiri almost fiercely. With less than perfectly white teeth, a generous nose, an average body, and a hip thrust more fitting for a hockey rink than for a runway, the 23-year-old Khalwat would never make the tryouts for America’s Next Top Model, the Tyra Banks vehicle that Afghan Model tries to emulate. More:

Take a bow, Sonia Dara

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on February 11, 2010
in Fashion, People and Women
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A screenshot of the Sports Illustrated Web site. Sonia Dara was photographed by Riccardo Tinelli in Rajasthan.

She’s 5′11″, has dark brown hair, brown eyes, measures 32″-24″-34.5″ and wears a US size 2. The daughter of Indian immigrant parents, Sonia Dara was discovered at an actors and models talent convention. She’s been seen at Cosmo Girl, Vogue India and Seventeen. Umm, did we say she’s also a sophomore at Harvard College?

Sonia sizzles in her first appearance in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (photographed by Riccardo Tinelli in Rajasthan). For more photographs and a short video, click here

And below, from May 2009 edition of The Harvard Crimson:

Likewise, Dara, who is represented by Elite Model Management in New York City, balances a blossoming modeling career with the demands of school. According to her mother, Poornima Dara, good grades were a prerequisite for her daughter to model in high school.

“We’re the first set of South Asian parents to encourage their child to do modeling,” Poornima Dara said. “We encouraged her because she showed us that she can multitask, model and get a 4.0 GPA. If she weren’t able to multitask, we wouldn’t have encouraged her.”

Dara said her parents have always been supportive of her aspirations, and her mother moved with her to New York City the summer before her senior year in high school to support her aspirations.

“The biggest kicker is that it’s kind of an unorthodox career for an Indian,” Dara said, adding that many of her acquaintances back home wondered if she went into modeling because she was doing poorly in school.

In actuality, Dara says excelled at school, studying for her Advanced Placement tests while modeling with Elite. “They’d call me ‘the AP kid’ because I was the only one taking AP’s and a lot of the other girls got their GED’s,” she said of her time in New York. More:

Gandhi and women

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on January 27, 2010
in India, Leaders, Sexuality and Women
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Mohandas Gandhi held India back when it came to women’s rights — and his own behaviour around them could be bizarre, writes Michael Connellan in Guardian’s Comment is Free

Courtesy: Outlook India

Mohandas Gandhi whose death anniversary falls on Saturday, was an amazing human being. He led his country to freedom and helped destroy the British Empire. Little wonder India worshipped him, and still worships him, as the Mahatma – “Great Soul”. In the west he is viewed as a near-perfect combination of compassion, bravery and wisdom.

But Gandhi was also a puritan and a misogynist who helped ensure that India remains one of the most sexually repressed nations on earth – and, by and large, a dreadful place to be born female. George Orwell, in his 1949 essay Reflections on Gandhi, said that “saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent”. If only.  more

The hidden beauty parlour of Helmand

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on November 16, 2009
in Afghanistan and Women
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Make-up and fashion have become a form of resistance for many women in Afghanistan. Katrina Manson reports from Lashkar Gah in The Independent:

Pamela Anderson and Afghanistan’s most dangerous, conservative province might not at first glance seem to have much in common. But step into a busy, cramped room in Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand province, and there she is: blonde locks, wide darkly made-up eyes, and petulant pink lips smiling down from a large mirror.

The crinkly laminated poster of the Playboy model’s face is not the only surprise in a room filled with hairspray, fake eyelashes and lipsticks. For this is a hidden beauty parlour in a land where women appear in public only when shrouded in full-length burkhas that obscure even their eyes. Tucked into a private home down a dusty dead-end alley, women are indulging in playing at dressing-up in the province in which the fight against the Taliban rages and where more than 90 British troops have lost their lives since the start of the Afghan war in 2001.

It’s the night before Roya’s wedding, a white dress hangs on the wall, and she is leaning back. Wearing light, flowing fabrics of red, blue, gold and purple dotted with sequins, three more giggling women pack into the parlour. More:

Osama bin Laden: sunflower enthusiast with a passion for fast cars

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on October 18, 2009
in Terrorism and Women
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Osama bin Laden’s first wife has given a revealing insight into the complex character of the man behind the world’s most wanted terrorist. From The Telegraph, London:

osama_bin_ladenNajwa bin Laden has published a memoir claiming he was a contradiction of personality traits.

She reveals he was a disciplinarian who would beat his children for showing too many teeth when they smiled, but maintained a passion for sunflowers and fast cars his first wife has said.

He also banned the use of electrical appliances in his home and tried to toughen up his sons by making them climb desert mountains without water.

Details from the home life of the founder of al Qaeda have emerged in the book Najwa has written with his fourth son Omar.
Growing Up Bin Laden charts his journey from teenage newly-wed to the face of international terrorism, revealing along the way that he was fond of mangos and the BBC.

Alongside details of his domestic life, the memoir portrays a man who became increasingly severe as he was pursued by the Western powers. More:

A matrimonial site for transsexuals

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on August 27, 2009
in Sexuality, Society and Women
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From the Times of India:

Kalki Subramanian is young, liberated and looking for an Indian man who is loving, compassionate, educated. Oh, and one more thing – he should be OK with marrying a transsexual.

But Kalki isn’t leaving her hopes for a suitable boy to destiny. The founder-director of the Sahodari foundation, that works for transgenders, is setting up a matrimonial website for transsexual women – the first of its kind in the world.

With the Internet matchmaking portal, to be launched on Thursday, she also hopes to create a debate about the issues of matrimony and adoption for transgenders. “There has to be legal clarity for transsexuals to live a better life. We have been discriminated against and exploited for very long”, she says.

Unlike, other dating services in the world, where transgenders are set up with other transgenders, www.thirunangai.net will give transsexual women a chance to find a man of their dreams. Thirunangai, incidentally, means respectable woman in Tamil.

In a country where the boundaries of sexual tolerance are shifting daily “especially after the Delhi HC has decriminalized homosexuality – there’s a thin line between acceptability and discrimination as far as transgenders are concerned. Hijras supposedly have a sanctioned place in Indian society with more than 4,00 years of recorded history. But the estimated 2,00,000 members of the community face harassment. More:

Obituary: Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur

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on August 24, 2009
in India, Obituaries and Women
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From the Economist:

gayatri-deviTHOUGH India has not been ruled by princes for many decades, it is not hard to find princesses about the place. Bollywood stars, for example, in sheaths, shades and bling, whose every move and change of wardrobe is recorded in flashy magazines; fashionistas, aping Kareena’s T-shirt or Priyanka’s bobbed hair, who spend their afternoons eating ice cream in Delhi’s malls; and the VIPs, or VVIPs, who force their cars through the traffic with horns blaring, and who refuse the indignity of being searched at airports.

In contrast to these one may sometimes find, at high tea at the Delhi Polo Club or in the lounge of the Taj hotel, the genuine article. Gayatri Devi was among the most famous of these. Her beauty was astonishing, praised by Clark Gable, Cecil Beaton and Vogue, but liner or lipstick had nothing to do with it. She had a maharani’s natural poise and restraint. From her grandmother, she had learned that emeralds looked better with pink saris rather than green. From her mother, she knew not to wear diamond-drop earrings at cocktail parties. A simple strand of pearls, a sari in pastel chiffon and dainty silk slippers were all that was required. The fact that she looked equally good in slacks, posing by one of the 27 tigers she personally eliminated, or perched, smoking, on an elephant, merely underlined the point. She was a princess, and a princess could make Jackie Kennedy appear almost a frump. More:

Memories of a princess

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on August 19, 2009
in India, Society and Women
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Sunanda K. Datta-Ray in the Telegraph:

gayatri-deviEveryone has a story about Rajmata Gayatri Devi of Jaipur. Mine is quite mundane, but revealing. As the night wore on at a private party at the Hindustan International Hotel, my companion became more and more agitated because Devi, as British newspaper obituaries called the Rajmata, had sent out for a taxi three times but no taxi could be found. It was intolerable that the rich and glamorous queen-mother should be stranded without transport. Would I lend my car? Please! It would only drop her in nearby Bhowanipore where she was staying.

I agreed reluctantly and watched Gayatri Devi, a Bengali woman and a European man climb into my tinny little Standard Herald. Her Highness had no idea whose car it was and didn’t care. Off they went as the party wound down, the band packed up, the waiters stopped serving champagne and the guests said their goodbyes. It was the small hours of the morning when my car returned. Lal Bahadur, my self-effacing Nepalese driver, explained they had ordered him to drive to the Grand Hotel where, obviously, the party continued for some time while he waited in Chowringhee. (The Grand had not yet turned sideways to create the present courtyard entrance and parking lot.) The sahib was presumably staying at the Grand for the two women had then gone to Bhowanipore.

That was not the end of the matter. One of the memsahibs – I recognized Gayatri Devi from his description – had lost her scarf. It was green wool. They had sent Lal Bahadur back to the Grand but it was not there. It had to be at the Hindustan International. He was to find the scarf and take it back. To hell with her, I muttered, and went home. More:

Kashmir’s girls learn how to fight back

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on July 6, 2009
in India, Politics, Women and human rights
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From the National:

Humaira Saima feels a grasping hand on her shoulder and springs into action without a second’s hesitation.

Spinning around, the 18-year-old delivers a swift punch to the face of her hapless assailant, then sends him reeling with a high kick.

Luckily for her would-be attacker, Ms Saima’s self-defence manoeuvres take place in the safety of a class where she is honing her skills amid fears of a real assault.

For the teenager is one of a growing number of girls in trouble-stricken Kashmir who have decided to take drastic action to protect themselves in the face of all-too-frequent attacks on young women.

A month ago, Nelofar Jan, 22 and her 17-year-old sister-in-law, Aasiya, were allegedly gang-raped and murdered by Indian security forces.

The discovery of their bodies in a shallow stream in Shopian, 52km from Srinagar, the summer capital of India-administered Kashmir, has sparked ongoing riots and protests. Many of those who took to the streets and were subsequently arrested were women. More:

The secret love letters of Afghan women

Published
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on June 19, 2009
in Women
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Documentary photographer Lana Slezic at Mother Jones:

“There is no room for love in Afghanistan,” said a young teenage girl to me one day as we sipped tea in the sitting room of her family’s apartment in Kabul. She said it as if it were true and had been true for years, for as long as she could remember. And not in that moment, but in the twilight of that evening and for several years after, her remark caused me to reflect on the kind of space that love itself can consume. An endless space without dimension, like a sketch without charcoal or a raindrop without water-more space than even the glorious mountains of the Hindu Kush could ever take up. Yet in the tiny precipice of this Afghan girl’s heart, where love and all of its beautiful unknowns should have blossomed, it didn’t, it couldn’t. More:

Electrifying women

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on June 8, 2009
in India, Innovation, Women and environment
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India’s “barefoot engineers” light up the world. From Ms Magazine:

Neither Satyanarayan Sinha nor the four women he introduces as his team look like adventurers. Dressed in clean cotton clothes that have seen better days, they might be a group of peasants in any rural Indian village. And, indeed, they work out of the village of Tilonia, bordering the desert of the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, a place where life includes smoky wood fires, poor-quality drinking water and other hardships imposed by climate and poverty. But these women are used to transcending their circumstances: They are “barefoot solar engineers” who bring solar-powered light to rural India.

For example, during a trip they took to the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, they cut their way through dense jungles, venturing into remote areas where no government official would go. There, the team trained two women chosen from each nearby village at a workshop in the city of Hyderabad-trainees who in turn taught others in their villages to construct and run solar energy units. One hundred batteries, hung on long poles, were carried through the 20-kilometer-long mud paths to the main post office servicing the region’s villages, and that became the battery pickup location. More:

Kamala Das: 1932-2009

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on June 7, 2009
in Books and Women
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Vijay Nambisan in the Hindu Literary Review:

kamala_dasKamala Das’s last public act, a few weeks ago, was to donate her ancestral home to the Kerala Sahitya Akademi. She knew she wouldn’t be going back. It was the ultimate renunciation in a life not barren of sacrifices, for, Nalappat House w as the wellspring of her poetry. She had said in a poem, and to her neighbours when she left Kerala in 2006, “I’ll return here after death, in whatever form, as a bird or a deer. I’ll be part of this earth.”

She was brought up in Calcutta, and she would have been a poet in any case, for, it was in her genes. But her precocious childhood was illumined by the sojourns in her tharavad in Punnayurkulam in Malabar, and the family’s literary history flowed as easily into her as the hues and scents and traditions of Kerala. All of those inform all her best work. Leaving Kerala was hard, but her illnesses left her no choice but to be looked after. More:

Leaves from her book

From the Indian Express:

While being trundled to a snake shrine in Punnayoorkulam in a wheelchair on March 8, 2005, Kamala Das had told her entourage, “I have come to say goodbye to Punnayoorkulam. I will return as a bird and flutter all over here.” That was the writer’s last visit to her native village, in central Kerala’s Thrissur district, where she had bloomed into a storyteller, poet and painter. Last Sunday, she returned to rest in the pages of her works, written in English and Malayalam over the last six decades.

Walking down the narrow road in Punnayoorkulam, one understands why the writer desired to come back to the village as a winged creature. A lone tree from her cherished old world stands tall, weathering change. Amy-as she was known to family-can roost in the short branches of the famous pomegranate, which had grown with Kamala Das and figured in her works, escaping the axe only because it stood in the snake shrine. More:

Diplomatic community

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on May 25, 2009
in Women
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The National spoke to the wives of ambassadors in Abu Dhabi. Among them, Sunita Mainee Ahmad, wife of India’s ambassador to UAE, Talmiz Ahmed:

“We have been here since August 2007, but this is not my first posting as an ambassador’s wife. My husband Talmiz has been ambassador in Oman and Saudi Arabia. I was brought up mainly in England where I practised as a maritime lawyer. I still work as a consultant here in Abu Dhabi for Clyde & Co. I have twin daughters who are both trainee lawyers in London.

My husband’s priority is to encourage investment into India, to develop trade, business and foreign relationships. I support him in all the promotional activities he does, but my role is also to promote India with the women here. So it is a two-pronged approach. I am not one of those women who play bridge and have endless lunches. I use my time to promote professional and cultural events such as a recent event showcasing dances and traditional costumes of India.

I am personally involved in all the events, from the lighting to the rehearsals. I get women involved from the Indian community and I encourage them all to voice an opinion. I am known as an “approachable” ambassador’s wife.

I do my own cooking for many of the events. In an Indian home you watch your mother and learn from her. When my husband and I got married he was posted to South Africa so I started experimenting there because I no longer worked full-time as a lawyer. Now, whenever I have diplomatic dinners of up to about 50 people, I cook. I plan the menus and start organising the shopping three days before. I might cook about 10 dishes for a dinner. I have loads of recipe books, but my favourite is still Delia Smith. More:

A hand that lifts India’s downtodden women

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on March 7, 2009
in India, Innovation and Women
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Ela Bhatt, whose Self-Employed Women’s Association offers a safety net to poor working women, is a Gandhian pragmatist for the New India. Somini Sengupta in The New York Times:

ela_bhattTHIRTY-FIVE years ago in this once thriving textile town, Ela Bhatt fought for higher wages for women who ferried bolts of cloth on their heads. Next, she created India’s first women’s bank.

Since then, her Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, has offered retirement accounts and health insurance to women who never had a safety net, lent working capital to entrepreneurs to open beauty salons in the slums, helped artisans sell their handiwork to new urban department stores and boldly trained its members to become gas station attendants – an unusual job for women on the bottom of India’s social ladder.

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Burns biggest killer of young Indian women: Lancet study

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on March 2, 2009
in Women
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Geeta Gupta in The Indian Express:

Fire-related incidents are behind maximum deaths among young women in India, says a study to be published in the international medical journal The Lancet.

According to the study, death due to burns is not only behind most deaths among women between 15 and 34 years of age, the number is six times higher than the official national statistics in India, compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

The study estimates over 1.63 lakh (163,000) annual fire deaths in India, 2 per cent of all deaths in the country. Of these, 1.06 lakh (106,000) occur among young women; the ratio as compared to young men being 3:1. This age-sex pattern is consistent across multiple local studies.

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Witness to a kidnapping

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on March 1, 2009
in India, Society and Women
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Meera Nanda is a fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advance Studies, New Delhi, and the author of “Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India.”

She witnessed the kidnapping of a young woman in front of a court in Chandigarh where she had gone to seek justice. A Sikh man who said he was the girl’s father told the crowd that had gathered that it was her brothers and cousins who had “taken her home.”

But why did they treat her like this?

He said she was having an affair with a Muslim man and that was not acceptable to him.

She writes in The Hindu: “I can’t get this young woman out of my mind as I watch the recent wave of protests against the spate of violence against women unleashed by Sri Ram Sene and other hoodlums in Mangalore and elsewhere. While I fully support their right to choose to go to a pub and make other lifestyle choices, I worry that they are defining their freedoms way too narrowly.” Read the rest of the article here.

The night of the murder

Published
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on February 28, 2009
in Crime and Women
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The brutal decapitation of Aasiya Hassan in the Buffalo, USA, allegedly by a husband she was seeking to divorce has brought honour killings to the fore. Asra Q. Nomani investigates for The Daily Beast

aasiyaOn the night of Feb. 12, 2009, Aasiya Hassan was allegedly murdered and beheaded by her estranged husband Muzzammil Hassan in the office of their jointly operated American-Muslim TV venture, Bridges Network Inc. Their two children—four-year-old Rania and six-year-old Danyal—were in a car outside the building, waiting for her with their father’s 17-year-old son from an earlier marriage, according to people familiar with the details of the case.

It isn’t clear where the children were when police discovered their mother’s body, but the account reveals how the unhealthy cycle of family violence can ensnare the lives of children when it goes untreated. Coupled with details revealed in a Flower Mound, Tex., police report, when Aasiya Hassan went to the police with Muzzammil Hassan’s brother, seeking protection from her husband, it seems that the extended Hassan family had long been struggling with how to handle Muzzammil Hassan’s allegedly mercurial and violent ways. Flower Mound police official Wess Griffin said that family violence “wraps itself around everybody.”

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Fatima Bhutto: A beauty to tame George Clooney – and even Pakistan?

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on February 21, 2009
in Pakistan and Women
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With her good looks and glossy aura, Fatima Bhutto, the bright new star of a revered political dynasty is causing quite a stir in both Hollywood and her own troubled country. William Langley in The Telegraph:

fatima_bhuttoBeauteous she may be, but Ms Bhutto lacks little by way of seriousness. Her family name goes hand-in-hand with the turbulent politics and violent, 60-year fashioning of Pakistan, and with the country writhing in a state of crisis – riven by religious fundamentalism, awash with factionalism and corruption and beset by economic collapse – the clamour for her to stand for office is growing. While she has resisted the pressure so far – saying that she doesn’t believe in “birthright politics” – nobody pretends that any Bhutto of sufficient brains and class can stay out for ever, and it is widely expected that she will contest Benazir’s old seat, in the family fiefdom of Larkana, north of Karachi, in the next general election. While such a move is guaranteed to unleash the colourful and uproarious celebrations that traditionally accompany the entry of a new family member into the fray, it will do little to answer the questions of what actually Fatima stands for, and whether, given Pakistan’s fabulous record of failure, it will make any difference.

Until now she has made her name largely as a newspaper columnist for forthright, if stodgy, opinion and as the author of two books of poetry. Educated in New York and London, equally at home in the cultures of the East and West, her celebrity has grown to the point where she causes a stir wherever she surfaces. Attracted by her good looks and glossy aura, a film producer recently offered her a part in a big-budget Bollywood musical, but she backed-off. The Bhutto brand, she sensibly reasoned, will only stretch so far.

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Does Pakistan have no shame?

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on February 12, 2009
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Asks Fatima Bhutto in The Daily Beast, reporting on a campaign on intimidation as the government is trying to force rape victim Mukhtaran Mai to drop her case

mukhtaran1In 2002, an illiterate woman named Mukhtaran Mai was punished for something her brother did. He committed the unforgivable crime of falling in love with a young woman outside his tribe. So, in accordance with tribal tradition, a local council of elders decided that instead of punishing him directly, his sister Mai would be gang raped and paraded across her small village of Meerwala half naked.

Five days after this rape occurred, Mai did the unthinkable: She pressed charges.

Her defiance of custom—reporting the rape instead of silently accepting it—made headlines worldwide. Nicholas Kristof and Time magazine championed her case. Glamour magazine declared Mai “Woman of the Year.” But now, the Pakistan government has shown that it holds her in considerably lower esteem.

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Bring on those chaddis

Published
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on February 12, 2009
in India and Women
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As the pink chaddi campaign gathers steam, opinion is divided on the way forward. Sagarika Ghose in the Hindustan Times says the battle for freedom and progress needs to go beyond flinging underwear at maniacs.

Both the zealot and the sex symbol claim to be the defining face of a new India. Pramod Muthalik, the Sri Rama Sene chief, claims to represent a tidal wave of public revulsion against Western culture. In sharp contrast, bare midriffs and cleavages stare down from hoardings as if to declare proudly that it is they who represent the aspirations of every young Indian. A Facebook group, ‘A Consortium of Pub-Going Loose and Forward Women’ (a group to which your columnist also belongs) is now planning to send ‘pink chaddis’ to Muthalik in protest. Undoubtedly, the Sene’s actions are loathsome and unacceptable, but sending pink underwear to perverts is pretty undignified too.

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Also in the Hindustan Times, Amrita Nandy-Joshi says the battle that started in Mangalore is all about parorchial definitions of what makes a ‘good woman’.

The controversy that started at a Mangalore pub seems to resemble a frantic chase scene from a slapstick film, where characters forget who was chasing whom and why. While the Sri Rama Sene shooed women out of the pub, members of the National Commission of Women chased the pub owners to check if they had the requisite licence.

Miles away, Rajasthan Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot, bristled against the pub and mall culture, while Union Minister Renuka Chowdhury threatened to lead women for a ‘pub bharo andolan’. Women’s activists swarmed out with placards, as television screens flickered with public reactions. To heighten the drama, Pramod Muthalik warned that he and his men would forcibly marry off couples found dating on Valentine’s Day! Amid the uproar, a central and thorny issue has long stood neglected — the colonisation of a woman’s body and the spaces around it, all in the name of ‘honour’.

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Previously on AW:

The pink chaddi campaign

The Pink Chaddi (panty) campaign

Published
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on February 10, 2009
in India, Society and Women
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pinkIn response to the recent acts of moral policing by right-wing Hindu groups, a Bangalore-based group has launched a campaign to support India’s “Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women.”

[Last month, members of a self-styled pro-Hindu moral brigade forced their way into a pub in India's coastal city of Mangalore and assaulted some young girls for "violating traditional Indian norms" and behaving in an "obscene manner." The men belonged to a right wing group called Sri Rama Sene (Lord Ram's Army). Read that story here]

The “Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women” will collect pink underwear and send them to the men behind the pub attack on Valentine’s Day on Saturday.

The “Pink Chaddi” campaign started as a group on Facebook on February 5 by a young woman, has already enrolled more than 3,000 members – women and men — with many more circulating mails asking people to donate pink underwear to temporary offices set up in different cities, or to send the material directly to Sri Ram Sena office.

Says Nisha Sudan, a journalist working with a news portal who started “The “Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose and Forward Women” : “We had to respond in some way or the other because if we don’t then these guys will win. Pink chaddis are nothing but a metaphor to how disgusting they are.”

Here’s the link: http://thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot.com/

pubWhat can you do?
Step 1: It does not matter that many of us have not thought about Valentine’s Day since we were 13. If ever. This year let us send the Sri Ram Sena some love. Let us send them some PINK CHADDIS.
Look in your closet or buy them cheap. Dirt-cheap. Make sure they are PINK. Send them off to the Sena.

The address to send the package is:
The Pink Chaddi Campaign,
C/O Alternate Law Forum,
122/4 Infantry Road
(opposite Infantry Wedding House)
Bangalore 560001
Karnataka

The last date for collection is 11 February for Delhi and 12th for Bangalore.

Creating a new constituency

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on February 3, 2009
in Politics and Women
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Why has the urban Indian woman failed to enthuse politicians? Namita Bhandare in Mint.

The pub culture debate with new votaries jumping into the fray with each passing day—health minister Anbumani Ramadoss being the latest—refuses to die down. So, here’s my take for what it’s worth.

First, my first reaction to outfits such as Shri Ram Sene and people such as Pramod Muthalik is to dismiss them as a bunch of right-wing crazies. There’s no shortage of this breed that sees itself as the custodian of Indian culture—at least its vision of what that culture should be. You cannot engage this creature in any sort of meaningful debate in civil society. And to give it any sort of publicity is to play into its hands.

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Bare knuckle tales

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on February 3, 2009
in Sport and Women
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For some Muslim girls in Kolkata, the future lies in a boxing ring as Dola Mitra finds out in Outlook.

muslim_boxer_1_200902091Sixteen-year-old Farida Khan is in the dressing room. She has just gotten into a pair of baggy, shiny boxer shorts. It’s the first time in her life that she’s wearing anything that doesn’t reach till her ankle, like a gown or a voluminous salwar-kameez…. Given a choice her aunt, with whom she lives in Calcutta’s cramped Khidderpore slum, would cover her up in a burqa. And now here she is, prancing around in an outfit that “would give Chachi a heart attack”.

Under her breath, Farida mutters a mantra her coach has taught her: “If you fear, you can never be a boxer.” And there is nothing she wants more than to be a boxer.

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An Afghan bride’s struggle for justice in India

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on January 31, 2009
in Women
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From The Washington Post:

Twenty-year-old Sabra Ahmadzai finished her final high school test in Afghanistan, took out a bank loan and then flew to India on the last day of November. She came to look for an Indian army doctor who she said had deceived, married and then abandoned her in Kabul, making her an object of shame and ridicule.

In India, Ahmadzai’s journey has become a rallying point for young women across college campuses who find in her a source of inspiration to question powerful hierarchies of traditional societies. The students in three universities in the capital are trying to set up a “Justice Committee for Sabra” by enlisting eminent lawyers, retired judges, professors and independent activists.

The first thing Ahmadzai did in India was confront her husband in front of his first wife and children. But Ahmadzai did not stop there. She also filed a police complaint and challenged the Indian army, meeting with government officials, women’s groups, human rights organizers and student activists.

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Pakistan may not be ready for its beauty queen

Published
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on December 23, 2008
in Pakistan, Society and Women
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Though conditions in Pakistan might be relatively unfavorable for aspiring beauty queens, Miss Pakistan World is at home in New York. Susan Dominus in the New York Times:

Natasha Paracha, 24, a United Nations worker, was crowned Miss Pakistan World this May in a pageant held in, well, Ontario. NYTimes

Natasha Paracha, 24, a United Nations worker, was crowned Miss Pakistan World this May in a pageant held in, well, Ontario. NYTimes

If you live in the East Village, you may have seen the reigning Miss Pakistan coming out of her walk-up not far from St. Marks Place. You may have glimpsed her celebrating her victory with some friends at the Hudson Hotel, or entering one of the jazz clubs where she likes to hear live music.

Every once in a while, you can catch Miss Pakistan, Natasha Paracha, 24, hopping out of a cab in her rhinestone tiara, fresh from an appearance. “Give me that tiara!” a young man with his boyfriend called out to her on such an occasion a few weeks ago. “I want it!” She flashed them a megawatt smile but kept the tiara, which she normally stashes in a floral-patterned box in her closet.

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And click here for Miss Pakistan World

Modern love: Sudha & Narayana Murthy

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on November 25, 2008
in Leaders, Society and Women
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In a world where platitudes often mean everything (“I would like to thank my beautiful wife for all her support,”), the Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murthy come off as a couple deeply, deeply in love with mutual respect, sacrifice and honesty as the main ingredients of their enduring marriage [via The Issue]. If you have a love story to share, do send it to AW via comments.

Narayanan Murthy about his wife Sudha Murthy:

My wife is a happy person with the ability to see the positive in a situation. Her cheerful disposition helps her make friends easily. She is one of the finest managers I have seen, meticulous about completing every task on time with quality and within budget. Sudha was the only female student in her Engineering class at Hubli, a conservative town in North Karnataka. She was a first ranker in all ten semesters in her Engineering degree, winning gold medals in every examination. Besides being a fine engineer, she is a great writer too. She has sacrificed so much for me and the children giving up her job as manager in Bombay in 1981 to move to Pune. Without that sacrifice, I am not sure if I would have been able to found Infosys along with my six colleagues. Her positive way of looking at things, being happy in every situation and her ability to relate to the poor are the things that I admire most in her. When you meet an interesting person like her it is very easy to fall in love.

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Sudha Murthy on her husband, Narayanan Murthy:

It was in Pune that I met Narayan Murty through my friend Prasanna, who is now the Wipro chief, who was also training in Telco. Most of the books that Prasanna lent me had Murty’s name on them, which meant that I had a preconceived image of the man. Contrary to expectation, Murty was shy, bespectacled and an introvert. When he invited us for dinner, I was a bit taken aback as I thought the young man was making a very fast move. I refused since I was the only girl in the group. But Murty was relentless and we all decided to meet for dinner the next day at 7.30 p.m at Green Fields hotel on the Main Road, Pune. The next day, I went there at 7 o clock since I had to go to the tailor near the hotel. And what do I see? Mr Murty waiting in front of the hotel and it was only seven.

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Where a baby girl is a mother’s awful shame

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on November 24, 2008
in India, Women and human rights
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Over the past 20 years in India, 10 million female babies have been aborted. The pressure to have sons is terrifying – mothers who bear daughters are beaten or cast aside by husbands and in-laws desperate to escape the financial burden of a girl’s dowry. Now mothers are being urged to ’save the girl child’ as the country tries to end decades of tragic abuse. Gethin Chamberlain travelled around Delhi earlier this month and met some of the growing number of women who have been affected by the practice of aborting female foetuses. Her report in the Observer:

womenThe birth of Rekha’s second daughter should have been one of the happiest days of her life. Instead, she lay on the bed of her home on the outskirts of Delhi, the newborn child on the floor, screaming in terror as her mother-in-law poured paraffin over her.

This was her punishment, the older woman said, preparing to strike a match: Rekha had failed again to deliver a son and it would be better for everyone if she were dead. Suddenly the door burst open and her neighbours rushed in, roused by the frantic screaming. They bundled Rekha and her daughter out of the house, never to return.

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Forced marriages: the trail of misery and fear in Britain

Published
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on September 26, 2008
in Society and Women
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A helpline for victims has been inundated with callers. Jerome Taylor was given exclusive access to their harrowing stories. From The Independent:

The home Baljit Kaur Howard has made for herself in a quiet Ipswich cul-de-sac is a world away from what she calls her “previous life”. In her sitting room, a mug of tea in hand, she rests her head on her new husband, Phil. “It’s taken me a long time to learn to love Phil,” she says. “Before we met I’d never known what it was like to be loved unconditionally.”

Bal, as she likes to be known, was 17 when her father announced that she was going to be married to a family friend she had met only once before. She then spent eight years trapped in an oppressive, loveless marriage. “I had always expected to have an arranged marriage, but I did not expect a forced marriage,” she says. “I told my father that I didn’t want to marry him. He just said, ‘You’d better get used to the idea. If you run away I will find you’.”

Now aged 39, Bal considers herself lucky. She escaped, but in doing so has been disowned by her family.

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Honour killings persist in a man’s world

Published
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on September 20, 2008
in Women
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In Babakot, Pakistan, three teenage girls aged 16-18 are buried alive by their male relatives for daring to choose their own husbands. Shahid Qazi and Carol Grisanti have that story in MSNBC.

In a tangle of bushes and trees outside a remote village in southwest Pakistan, six close male relatives of three teenage girls dug a 4-foot wide by 6-foot deep ditch, on a sweltering night in mid-July, and allegedly buried the girls alive.

The girls’ crime: they dared to defy the will of their fathers and the customs of their tribe and choose their own husbands. The mother of one of the girls and the aunt of another were shot and killed while begging for the girls’ lives, according to local media reports.

The incident has touched off widespread condemnation from human rights groups, but also a sturdy defense from local officials. “This action was carried out according to tribal traditions,” said Israrullah Zehri, a senator representing Balochistan in the upper house of Pakistan’s parliament in the capital Islamabad. ”These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them,” he said.

We visited the scene and interviewed locals to try and learn more about this gruesome crime.

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