from Photographers Blog:
From man into woman
By Adnan Abidi
Hardeep Singh, a father of two, leaves his home in west Delhi every day at around 2 p.m. Dressed in a pair of light trousers and a shirt, he reaches a local charity, where he undresses to reveal his female clothes underneath and transforms into Seema.
The 33 year old is a male-to-female transgender, or “hijra”, as they are known in India. Living with two identities, by day, he is a married family man and by night, a hijra sex worker.
With no legal recognition in India, transgenders like Seema have little choice but to turn to prostitution to earn a living, which is something she hides even from her family.
from The Human Impact:
Does marriage stop prostitution? Indian village thinks so
Is marriage a guarantee that a woman won't be prostituted?
It's a question that played heavily on my mind recently when I went to the remote village of Wadia in India's western region of Gujarat to cover a mass wedding and engagement ceremony of 21 girls, which was aimed at breaking a centuries-old tradition of prostitution.
I arrived in the small, neglected hamlet on the eve of the big ceremony. Preparations were well underway.
Soon-to-be-brides sat inside the mud-walled compounds of their homes surrounded by singing female relatives, with "haldi" or turmeric paste smeared on the faces and arms - a South Asian pre-wedding ritual believed to make the skin "glow".
Sporting long, curled moustaches, large turbans and gold studs in their ears, old men idled on charpoys outside, smoking beedis under the shade of trees.
They told me they were from the Saraniya community - a once nomadic group who inhabited the arid landscape of Gujarat and the neighbouring Rajasthan.
from The Human Impact:
Undernourished and anaemic – the plight of India’s teen girls
The U.N.'s latest report on the state of the world's 1.2 billion adolescents gives food for thought, especially on the plight of India's girls aged between 10 and 19.
The report explores a range of issues affecting teenagers around the globe, from nutrition and health to sexual behaviour, knowledge on HIV/AIDS, attitudes towards gender violence and access to education.
Data from surveys of adolescent girls in India, and South Asia in general, are once again a reality check - which we shouldn't need but unfortunately still do.
Soon to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2050, India already has the highest number of adolescents in the world at 243 million, says the report by the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Yet nearly half of Indian girls aged 15 to 19 are underweight, and more than a quarter are underweight in 10 other countries including Bangladesh, Nepal, Niger, Ethiopia and Cambodia.
"Such undernutrition renders adolescents vulnerable to disease and early death, and has lifelong health consequences," says the report. "In adolescent mothers, undernutrition is related to slow foetal growth and low birthweight."
Did pro-India militias kill Western tourists in Kashmir?
A government human rights commission in Kashmir on Tuesday evening said it will review records from the 1995 abduction of Western tourists after a new book claimed that four of six foreign tourists were murdered by a pro-India militia to discredit India’s arch-rival Pakistan.
On July 4, 1995, Americans Donald Hutchings and John Childs, as well as Britons Paul Wells and Keith Mangan were kidnapped by the little known Al-Faran militant group while trekking in the Himalayas near Pahalgam, 97 km (60 miles) southeast of Srinagar.
Four days later, Childs escaped. On the same day, the captors abducted German Dirk Hasert and Norwegian Hans Christian Ostroe. Ostroe was found beheaded in August 1995. The others were never found.
Journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, whose book “The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 – Where the Terror Began” is about the abduction, claim that the four Westerners were murdered by a pro-government militia group who worked for Indian security forces.
After Ostroe was beheaded, Al-Faran was ready to strike a monetary deal to free the hostages and might have released them for £250,000, the authors claim. They say the deal was deliberately sabotaged.
“It appeared that there were some in the Indian establishment who did not want this never-ending bad news story of Pakistani cruelty and Kashmiri inhumanity to end, even when the perpetrators themselves were finished,” the book says.
Whatever the truth of that state of affairs, what is at issue is that tourists are also prime targets for ethnic conflicts. Tourists represent the nation state in a quasi sense, and so pay the high price if caught in ethnic conflict.
Budget in a bunker
The leather briefcase that the finance minister holds up for the cameras before he delivers the budget in parliament is one of the most curious hangovers from British colonial times.
But one tradition that gets little attention is the intense secrecy that surrounds the preparation of the budget.
Weeks before the finance bill is presented, finance ministry officials clam up, and refuse to speak in detail about the economy to the media. The basement of the Finance Ministry in the North Block of India’s central government secretariat, which has its own press to print the entire set of budget papers, is declared off limits to people not involved in the exercise a month before the big day.
The employees of the press and other staff and officers are locked in the bowels of North Block for the last seven days so that nothing is leaked. All contact with the outside world is cut off, their mobile phones are taken away and Internet connections shut down. Food is brought to them from outside, they sleep in bunk beds and the only people that are allowed to enter are doctors if someone falls sick.
“This is a part of the security measure put in place to ensure foolproof secrecy for the budget papers, and is part of a practice started in the pre-independence era,” the government’s manual on the budget process says.
One senior official told Reuters that the tradition of secrecy around a document that laid down taxes and spending for the year ahead, has now outlived the purpose it served in a rigidly planned economy.
from Photographers Blog:
Privileged witness to the start of life
By Vivek Prakash
It's an experience I will never forget. I have no children of my own, but when the day does come, maybe I'll be just a little bit more prepared for it.
I had come a long, long way from my usual cosmopolitan stomping ground of Mumbai, to a place just about as far interior as you can go in India. I was about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Rajasthan border in the state of Madhya Pradesh, in a village of about 700 people. This is very, very small by Indian standards. There were dusty roads that a car could barely fit down, mud houses, a scorching heat during the day which turned to a deep chill at night.
I had many ideas in my head and many questions too - what kind of emotions was I going to experience and witness? Should I be excited, or should I feel like an intruder, given the subject matter I was here to shoot? I had come a long way to shoot this, but now, standing in this little rural community health center with my camera, I felt conflicted.
Well, did you get authorization from Anguri about using her picture? That should help your conscience’s conflict.
Lucas
http://www.pictobank.com/
Bollywood stars kick up a fuss with real-life rumpus
Pow! Biff! Bang! Dishoom! Real life action by Bollywood celebrities has caught the nation’s eyeballs. Shah Rukh Khan was accused of roughing up Shirish Kunder some days ago and made ripples as he brought the media’s gaze from corruption scams and the election circus to the one thing that never fails to draw attention — a spicy brawl.
Now, Saif Ali Khan diverts attention from Vijay Mallya’s king-size woes for beating up a certain businessman in Mumbai’s Taj hotel. Saif was booked for assault, arrested and later bailed — insisting that he was only defending himself.
Salman Khan has lost his temper on many occasions, and so have many others from Bollywood. Shah Rukh and Salman engaged in a verbal duel some years ago, and it would have ended ugly had Shah Rukh’s wife Gauri and Salman’s then girlfriend Katrina Kaif not intervened.
The latest incident comes a month before Saif Ali Khan’s spy thriller “Agent Vinod” is set to release. Therefore, we are pushed to wonder — publicity or aggression? Or could these public spats be attributed to a heady mix of fame, power and alcohol?
It is acceptable in a movie for the hero to rough up the bad guys. The audience savours the good guy’s vengeance. But these men are not superheroes in their real-life avatars, and are bound by the law. Justice will take its course, but in the mean time, the nation’s politicians should be grateful their real-life foibles are pushed down the front page.
Human waste corroding Indian railway network
Human faeces is scattered across India’s 64,400 kilometres of rail lines.
One of the world’s largest surface transport networks, carrying 30 million people and 2.8 tonnes of goods daily, is being downed by those using it.
A government panel report this month said that human waste from open-discharge toilets used by passengers is damaging tracks and associated infrastructure.
The report recommended that toilets with nil or harmless discharge be installed within the next five years in all 43,000 carriages used by the railways.
“Apart from the issue of hygiene, this has several serious safety implications arising out of corrosion of rails and related hardware,” the report said.
Waste is dumped directly on to the tracks through small holes from western-style and squat toilets inside trains.
Only a handful of luxury tourist trains like the “Palace on Wheels”, running between New Delhi and Rajasthan, have bathrooms with well-built toilets.
Politicians like Mamta do not want common people and Industries to see growing. These guys know if they let them educate, give better facilities, give them opportunity to grow, then who will care for illiterate / poorly educated politicians.
We must dump these politicians like our railway is dumping human faeces.
India, Pakistan find common cause in shoddy national carriers
The two are nuclear-armed, arch rivals often threatening the stability of South Asia and with little common ground, but the sorry state of their national carriers puts India and Pakistan on the same pedestal.
India may be an emerging superpower and Pakistan seemingly always on the brink of a disaster, but the national carriers of the arch-rivals face similar woes.
Both carriers — Air India (AI) and Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) –- are struggling to stay afloat, battered by financial woes and mismanagement.
Amid a major cash crunch and reeling under heavy losses, Air India and Pakistan International Airlines are struggling to continue operations — a shame for the state-run carriers which often are the defining images of their countries.
“Financially unviable” is the term attached to both carriers by lenders and both airlines have so far just managed to survive on taxpayer money.
The Indian government, battered by allegations of graft, and with the opposition snapping at its heels, can’t even afford to shut the airline down primarily on fears of a political backlash.
While Air India struggles with striking pilots, the state of publicly-listed PIA is worse.
Comment by Pathozade is sheer nonsense. I cannot find anywhere the negative comments against Pakistan except to blame “mismanagment” for both airlines travails and a quote extracted from the news services. I have flown PIA Tues am Karachi/Islamabad, return Friday pm. This is the route all bureaucrats take, Islamabad nearly deserted on week-ends. We all conduct business from just one fortress like hotel up on the slope with beautiful (Shalimar-like) gardens owned by the Arabs. The only truly secure place save for the Presidential Palace. Once, in the company of former finance minister Shaukat, we were ejected from first class because an MP “co-opted” the seats. The owner of Dawn was on the flight. A fight ensued, degenerating into fisticuffs and shoving, and the flight was delayed an hour. Indeed the return Friday night flights are so full that, rules be damned, some passengers stand in the back and in the aisles.. This is reality.. Parveen
Love is in the air for Indians as V-Day police keep away
Conservative right-wing activists in India have their own version of how Valentine’s Day should be celebrated, if at all.
For them, couples found kissing, dancing and snuggling need to be humiliated publicly or beaten, especially if this behaviour is exhibited on the “day of lust and shame”.
For more than a decade, images of couples being chased by radicals or flogged by police had become as routine on Valentine’s Day as pink hearts and roses. This was a way of protecting Indian culture from being corrupted by Western influence.
Fortunately, not many paid heed. Indians have embraced this day of love with much gusto, and their resilience has paid off. This year, many of the self-appointed custodians of Indian culture have decided to go easy on romancing couples.
“What is the use or point. We cannot stop them from celebrating, and we are getting a bad reputation,” Om Dutt Sharma, a member of prominent right-wing group Shiv Sena told local media.
This resignation could be a result of the gradual depletion of media interest in their annual antics or a sign of an increasingly assertive Indian youth, who spent millions of rupees last year on Valentine’s Day — and are now using the internet to both register their discontent and also to reclaim the day.
Writer and literary critic Nilanjana S. Roy has organised a #flashreads event using social media. In an effort to “take back the day” and “protest against the rising intolerance that has spread across India”, protesters are encouraged to read works by banned writers in public areas on February 14.
If India declares holiday for Valentine’s day, India would not become a developed country nor Indians could wish away infanticide, dowry deaths, low women ratio and blah blah.
An Indian doing about his/her own business (as million others do in India) and I wonder if that’s a news to Abidi. Can’t buy it.
//In one of my favorite photos, I captured three elderly women giving Seema a look of disgust as she talked prices with a client.//
Can’t see the pic. Where is it?