Do you take this stranger?

For an India in California, a visit back home invites a fresh look at the notion of arranged marriages. Swati Pandey (second from right in photo) in LA Times: 

Gorakhpur: It was near midnight at the Railway Club, a posh spot at the train station in Gorakhpur, close to the Nepal border. Hundreds of guests had gathered four hours earlier to eat made-to-order dosas and Indian-Chinese fusion finger-foods, to watch green, red and gold fireworks explode over palm trees and to dance to bass-heavy Bollywood tracks.

My cousin’s wedding would soon begin.

A family astrologer had recommended the date and advised that the wedding start after 10 p.m. and conclude before 4 a.m. Those last hours would end six days of ceremonies, the first reunion of my maternal family in two decades and my first full Hindu wedding. They would also end my uncle’s efforts to arrange a marriage, and a future, for my cousin.

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Disappearing daughters: India sex selection crisis worsening

From ActionAid:

Shocking new findings from ActionAid reveal a growing crisis in India where the number of girls born and surviving compared to boys has hit an all time low.

Findings from sites across five states in north and northwest India reveal that the sex ratio of girls to boys has not only worsened but is accelerating compared to the last national census in 2001.

Latest figures from one site in the Punjab, India’s richest state, show the number of girls has plummeted to just 300 compared to 1000 boys amongst higher cast families.

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A match made in cyberspace

The matrimonial service shaadi.com has revolutionised the way Indians find their future spouses. Boasting 10 million members and a million marriages in 11 years, the site has been a runaway success. Anita Sethi in The Telegraph, UK:

Dressed in pale-green shalwar kameez and pink slippers, Usha Bala Gossain opens the front door of her terrace house in Slough and greets me cautiously. She leads me into her living-room, its pale-green walls decorated with plastic ornaments of mangoes and peaches, and offers me a can of Coca-Cola. A pungent smell of curry wafts through the house. Usha’s only child, Pooja, has lived here since she was two years old; now 24, she will soon leave the family home following her marriage to her fiancé, Kushu, and embark on a new life in Nottingham.

The fresh-faced couple emerge from upstairs, dressed in matching white outfits and holding hands. Tonight, Pooja, an economics graduate from her local university, Brunel (she now works in a bank), will celebrate her hen night. She eagerly answers text messages and calls from friends. A limousine has been booked to drive them to London.

Kushu, 26, explains how meeting a suitable life partner can be a difficult business for many Asians, in Britain and around the world. ‘The majority of Asians our age seek their parents’ acceptance of their partner,’ he says. ‘Asian parents don’t like the idea of dating or casual relationships that are not necessarily going to lead into marriage.’

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Schools not statues

Posted by Namita Bhandare: My new column in Mint argues for a moratorium on statue-building. Build schools, hospitals, heck, even public parks instead. What do you think?

How wonderful it is to harbour ambitions to build edifices taller, bigger, better than the Statue of Liberty. But has the irony of the fact that Lady Liberty represents welcoming freedom to struggling immigrants escaped our elected representatives in Maharashtra?

The Maharashtra government’s grand plans to construct a 309ft-high statue of the state’s most iconic figure, Chhatrapati Shivaji, in the Arabian Sea will cost taxpayers Rs100 crore, probably more. For that price we will have a statue in the sea that is taller than even the Statue of Liberty. Imagine that!

It’s a colossal plan in hubris. Statues are symbols that represent a value system. When you construct a mammoth statue of a man who is without doubt the state’s most iconic figure, regardless of cost, regardless of ongoing farmer suicides, regardless of malnutrition deaths and regardless of pathetic infrastructure, you are sending out a message: This is a government that stands for cosmetic change; if it cannot rival the infrastructure and liberalism of New York, it can at least have a statue that is taller than its most enduring symbol.

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Inside the world of UK Muslim women

A major survey - carried out by Muslim women’s magazine Sisters and Ummah Foods, a halal food business - shows most want to marry their soulmates and enjoy high street fashion, while keeping a delicate balance with their Islamic values. From The Observer:

She wants to marry her soulmate, shops in Primark, TK Maxx and Topshop, and dreams of starting her own business. Meet the typical Muslim woman in Britain today.

A thousand women throughout the country have responded to the biggest lifestyle study of Muslim women undertaken in the UK. It appears to show that Muslim women have established a delicate balance between a desire to live a contemporary lifestyle and tap into consumer trends while sticking to values underpinning the Islamic guide to life.

The survey shows that 58 per cent of Muslim women do not think the racial background of a partner matters, although two-thirds believe it is very important for their man to be knowledgeable about Islam.

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Click here for Sisters Magazine

Mothers of courage

Neelam Katara wins a six-year battle for justice for the murder of her son, Nitish Katara. Despite the political connections and wealth of the guilty, Vikas and Vishal Yadav (who, according to a court verdict murdered Nitish six years ago because they disapproved of his relationship with Vikas’s sister, Bharti Yadav), Neelam fought a long and often lonely battle.

The Times of India traces the story of how the veil was lifted and fear was conquered for the truth.

Though Bharti Yadav successfully hid behind a veil in public when she came for her court deposition in 2006, she helped the trial court unveil the motive which led to the conviction of her brothers in the Nitish Katara murder case on Wednesday.
It was Bharti’s two day in-camera testimony, during which Vikas refused to come to court on the ground of illness, that convinced additional sessions judge Ravinder Kaur that her family was aware of her relationship with Nitish. “He knew of the relationship and had no courage to face Bharti for his misdeeds,” observed ASJ Kaur, refusing to believe Bharti’s claim that though she was “very close” to Nitish, her family didn’t know anything and so Vikas and Vishal couldn’t have been enraged about the affair.

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And for another profile in courage, Teresa Rehman in Tehelka speaks to Laishram Gyaneswari, one of the 12 Manipuri mothers who stripped in order to shame the Indian army

IT’S EARLY HOURS on Imphal’s Nagamapal Road. Fateh Chand Jain, proprietor of the Indo-Myanmar Furniture Shop, is unlocking its wooden shutters. He deflects enquiries about his wife, Ima Laishram Gyaneswari, with a self-effacing wave: “You put your questions to her. I don’t interfere in her matters.” But press him a little more and he speaks with pride of how this 56-year-old Meitei homemaker joined a dozen Manipuri imas, mothers, on July 15, 2004, to lay storm to the Assam Rifles headquarters at Kangla Fort. Stripping naked, they thronged the gates, screaming their outrage at the rape and alleged custodial murder of Thangjam Manorama, a 32-year-old suspected member of the banned People’s Liberation Army. Jain recalls how he didn’t even know what his wife had left the house for that day; it was only in the afternoon that he got to know of the imas’ unprecedented act of protest. “I had an inkling my wife might be involved. She had touched my feet before she left the house, something she usually does when she leaves for something important. But this time she didn’t tell me where she was going.”

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Aarushi Talwar: a media circus that says something about us

Posted by Namita Bhandare: My new column in Mint looks at the double murder of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar and her family servant, Hemant — and the ensuing media circus with a gullible and desperate press clutching at the angles fed to it by an incompetent police force

Because I was out of town with no television access, I missed the first few days of the Aarushi Talwar murder story where a 14-year-old and the domestic help of the house were found murdered in Noida. Yet, even though I came in late, it was obvious to everyone that the story had more holes in it than a tennis net.

Despite the missing links and the questions that seemed to have no answers, it was clear that this story was a best-seller in terms of reader and viewer interest. It had all the ingredients: a shockingly violent crime; a double murder; a bright schoolgirl who had everything to live for, and middle-class, educated parents who seemed as bewildered as we did in trying to understand the motive.

And sell it did. For the next few days, TV channels and newspapers simply couldn’t give us enough of the Aarushi story. Was it a sex crime? Apparently not, said the police; there was no sign of an assault. Was it a love crime? There was some prurient speculation as police released details of calls made some 600 times to a single number in the past six weeks. Was it honour killing? We struggled with the various labels as we tried to sort out the pieces of the puzzle, grabbing the various angles thrown to us by the police.

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Previously on AW:

• A mother’s story
• How not to investigate a murder
• For the latest news updates on the double murder click here, here and here.

Indian sex workers get life insurance

Sex workers in India move one step closer towards legalisation, reports AFP in The Smart Set

Sex workers in India now have the option of taking out life insurance cover — a move they hope will speed up their bid to legalize the profession, a charity said Monday.

“Sex workers approached Life Insurance Corporation of India, which agreed to provide insurance coverage,” said Smarajit Jana, chief adviser to Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Committee for Indomitable Women), a group representing 65,000 sex workers.

“We have started by signing up 199 sex workers in Sonagachi, one of Asia’s largest red light districts, housing over 10,000 women involved in the business,” he told AFP.

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[Pic: Sex workers in Sonagachi/AFP Deshakalyan Chowdhury]

Chattisgarh loses the plot

A year after the arrest of Dr Binayak Sen, one of the state’s most eminent doctors, Chattisgarh state authorities have gone and arrested another civil liberties activist, journalist and film-maker Ajay T.G., reports Siddharth Vardarajan in The Hindu

On May 5, the Chhattisgarh police announced the arrest of Ajay T.G., a Raipur-based journalist and filmmaker, under the State’s draconian Special Public Security Act (PSA). He has been charged with sedition under the Indian Penal Code and with having unlawful contact with a banned organisation, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), under Sections 3, 4 and 8 of the PSA. Like Binayak Sen, who was arrested last year on May 14, Ajay is a leading member of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. He is also a prominent social worker whose contribution to the education of young girls from poor slum-dwelling families is well known. The circumstances leading to his arrest are so bizarre and reflect so poorly on Chhattisgarh’s approach to dealing with the naxalite problem that they bear recounting in some detail.

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For information and updates on Dr Binayak Sen’s arrest click here.

Twenty-two Nobel Laureates have written to Indian President Pratibha Patil asking for the release of Binayak Sen who was recently awarded the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. They want him to personally receive the award at a ceremony to be held in Washington  D.C. on May 29. Read that report here

[Pic: A file picture of Dr Binayak Sen with his young patients in Chattisgarh]

City of dreadful knights

Sagarika Ghose in the Hindustan Times says regional chauvanism rather than urban infrastructure is the priority of politicians who control cities like Mumbai and Bangalore

Ah, the great Indian city! The lack of urban infrastructure destroying the infrastructure of the human soul. By 2020 Mumbai will have a population of 20 million. Bangalore, already with 6.5 million inhabitants has seen phenomenal growth. Three hundred million Indians live in urban areas; the figure will spurt by 40 per cent in the next 11 years. Whatever the rural romantics may say, India’s future is irreversibly urban. Mumbai and Bangalore are symbols of the urban Indian dream, the first, whose present chief minister claims will be a new Shanghai, the second, which a former CM wanted to make into another Singapore.

But forget Shanghai and Singapore, which instead are the voices that are speaking the loudest for the Indian city? The new voices that are yelling into the urban skyline are anything but urbane or metropolitan. In Mumbai, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray has declared war on north Indians, mimicking what he calls their strange accents, noisy pujas, nasty civic manners and demanding preferential treatment in jobs for local Maharashtrians. Raj Thackeray wants north Indians out of Mumbai. In Bangalore, as the campaign for the forthcoming assembly elections gathers momentum, another ‘son of the soil’ is also demanding reservations for locals. H.D. Deve Gowda’s political manifesto demands 30 per cent reservation of jobs in the infotech and biotech sectors for local Kannadigas.

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‘Good art flourishes in freedom’: Big B to health minister

After breathing fire and brimstone against smoking on screen — he wants an official government of India ban on actors lighting up in movies — India’s health minister Anubami Ramadoss spoke out on April 30 against movies that show actors drinking alcohol. Ramadoss lashed out at actors for scenes that showed them drowning their sorrows in alcohol. “Actors drinking on screen will encourage youngsters to take up the habit,” he said.

Bollywood’s badshah, Amitabh Bachchan is not amused. A democracy must treat its citizens as ‘autonomous individuals capable of rational judgement’ writes Bachchan in an open letter to Ramadoss in his blog on May 4. Quit preaching censorship and spend on public awareness campaigns on alcohol abuse, he tells the minister.

I appreciate your concern for the general health of our nation, particularly so as this is your professional remit as minister. Indeed, I admire and encourage your speaking out against addictive and dangerous substances that cause early mortality and violence by their abuse.

However, these addictive substances are structural aspects of our economy and it is in this manner where government action would be most effective: penalties for their production and sale would convince an electorate of the serious intentions of your administration. Due to the intimate relationship between a healthy and dynamic democracy and education, punitive financial measure MUST be allied to better public health campaigns that do not merely pronounce upon behaviours, but actually inform and persuade.

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Prayer, hope and a family reunion

Sarabjit, the Indian prisoner on death row in a Pakistani jail, will be meeting his family today after 18 years. Baljinder Bobby, Arshdeep report for NDTV

The family of Sarabjit Singh has crossed over to Pakistan through Wagah Border on Wednesday to meet him. It will be a family reunion after 18 long years.

They will meet Sarabjit at the Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore.

”We have taken all the things we know he loves. I am also carrying 18 rakhis. I have waited all these years to tie them on my brother’s wrist,” says Sarabjit’s sister. This is an anxious moment for Sarabjit’s daughter as well. She was only 23-days-old when her father left for Pakistan and never returned.

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Gods in the manger

In its eagerness to be politically correct, India has lost an opportunity to exploit its cultural heritage, writes Renuka Narayanan in the Hindustan Times

While the politically fearful (read: history departments) and the politically opportunistic (read: politicians) twist and shout on ‘mythomania’ and the Hindus-in-the-middle (read: most regular people) wonder if they should say, “Excuse me for living,” foreigners happily use our Saraswati for their Lakshmi. Want a supremely ironic example? Even as Indians still squabble about the religious and political correctness of singing Vande Mataram, look at Indonesia, a country with the world’s largest Muslim headcount — well over 200 million, making over 88 per cent of its total population while Indonesian Hindus account for merely 1.81 per cent. And yet Indonesia happily called its national airline ‘Garuda Indonesia’ way back in 1950, making its maiden flight to Mecca in 1956. To add a piquant twist, Garuda’s first aircraft was involved in daring airdashes during the country’s freedom struggle against the Dutch with the day of its first flight on January 26, 1949, later recognised as Garuda Indonesia’s official birthday.

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Previously on AW: Ramayan trail in Sri Lanka

Why the torch must go on

From Namita Bhandare: my column on the Olympic Torch in Mint

In just a few days from now, the Olympic torch will arrive in Delhi, bringing to a head the debate whether it is right or wrong to carry it.

The debate, in fact, was kicked off weeks before the torch was anywhere in sight. Indian football captain Bhaichung Bhutia’s early decision to opt out of the Olympic torch relay to protest China’s crackdown in Tibet was hailed nearly unanimously as an “unusually conscientious decision”.

On the other hand, film star Aamir Khan’s decision to run with the torch with a “prayer in his heart for the people of Tibet” has met nearly as unanimously with derision and condemnation. Over the next few days, the debate will only become more strident and shrill.

It seems clear to me that the Tibet cause has left most middle-class Indians cold. These are the same middle-class Indians who turn a blind eye to routine abuses by state power whether in the form of encounter killings or brutal crackdowns on public protest as seen in Nandigram, West Bengal.

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For sale: 13-year-old virgin

Families auction the innocence of girls to the highest bidder. Sue Ryan from Bharatpur, India, in The Telegraph, UK:

Thirty miles west of the Taj Mahal, on the road to the pink city of Jaipur, tourists on buses pass a sight that the guide books rarely mention.

A mile beyond the town of Bharatpur in Rajasthan, where the highway is being widened to four lanes, traffic slows down for roadworks. But the workmen who lounge by their bulldozers have their eyes on something else - a cluster of makeshift shelters where girls, several under 18 and at least two younger than 15, can be seen strolling or sitting, in view of the dusty carriageway.

Tonight, one girl in particular is attracting attention as she sits on a stool by a fire so that she can be seen by passing vehicles. Her heavily made-up, striking face and beautiful pink sari make her look as if she were on her way to a party. But the truth is different. Suli, 14, is a virgin and a bidding war is being held for the right to be the first to sleep with her.

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Welcome to America…you’re under arrest

S Abbas Raza, editor of 3QuarksDaily posts his stories of a Pakistani trying to get by in New York in The Smart Set

It was about five years ago. I was returning from Pakistan and standing in the immigration line at JFK, completely exhausted after a 20-hour flight. When my turn came up at the counter, the INS agent looked at my papers, typed a few things into his computer, and then asked me to follow him to a large room at the side of the immigration hall. I was informed that I was being detained. Two agents handcuffed me and led me to another smaller room. When I asked what I had done. They said things like, “Oh, you know what you’ve done. We know who you are.”

“Who am I? What have I done?”

“You should know that better than we do, now shouldn’t you?”

When I asked to contact a lawyer, I was informed that I hadn’t yet been admitted to the United States, and so had no legal standing. No lawyer would be called, nor would I be allowed to call anyone else. They took my cuffs off, fingerprinted me (very difficult because of my sweaty palms), recuffed me, and then left me there.

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Some Asians families in US choosing sons

From Associated Press:

Having sons is important to many Asian cultures, and now American families from those groups seem to be asserting the same preference. A new analysis of the 2000 Census shows that among U.S. born children of Chinese, Korean and Asian Indian parents the odds of having a boy increase if the family already has a girl or two.

The findings “suggest that in a sub-population with a traditional son preference, the technologies are being used to generate male births when preceding births are female,” co-authors Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund said of their findings, appearing in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The great Kerala dowry bazaar

Craze — and demand — for gold in dowry has sent bullion prices soaring, turning marriage into a very hard bargain for women. From Tehelka:

In Kerala, marriage is worth its weight in gold. On January 20 this year, though, a bridegroom-to-be’s happy hopes of a windfall met with a rude shock. In a small village near Kollam, 26-year-old Sreekala walked away from the marriage venue, and later filed a case, when the groom’s family insisted that the entire dowry including 100 sovereigns of gold be paid before the knot was tied. Despite several social reform movements and decades of “revolutionary” Left rule, Kerala remains plagued by dowry.

It’s amidst this widespread sense of humiliation among the state’s women that the Class X-educated Sreekala has quickly grown to be an icon of self-respect. Though the groom’s family later adopted a more conciliatory stance, Sreekala refused to withdraw her complaint under the Dowry Prohibition Act. A week later, on January 27, her cousin Ramesh married her in a ceremony that saw hundreds of cheering attendees from across the district.

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Real-life stories of gay Muslims

In The Times, UK, a review of A Jihad for Love, a film about gay Muslims by Parvez Sharma. Parvez was born and raised in India, and educated in India, the US, and the UK. He lives in New York.

Inevitably, Parvez Sharma filmed some moving testimonies in A Jihad for Love, a collection of real-life stories that show what it is like to be gay or lesbian and living within, or in the shadow, of Islam. The stories come from Iran, Turkey, India, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

Sharma isn’t your typical campaigning film-maker. He shows how tough life can be for his subjects though he believes strongly that gay activists have behaved arrogantly in their condemnation of Iran which is symptomatic of a larger phenomenon of “Iran-bashing”. He adds: “Around 70 per cent of Iran’s population is under 30: issues are being talked about, it’s a vibrant society. And don’t forget history: a long time ago the West looked to the East as a place where homosexuality was tolerated, sometimes celebrated.”

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Indian flirts fall in love with text messaging

From International Herald Tribune:

Mumbai: In this romantically corseted society, Ashish Chettri is as close as you get to a Don Juan. He is an irrepressible flirt: a skirt chaser who claims to pursue three women at a time, a loquacious utterer of compliments, a ceaseless seeker of dates.

And that’s just with his thumbs.

Like millions of Indians today, Chettri is a solely cellular Casanova: a suitor who flirts brazenly by text message, but pretty much only by text message. Text messages have invaded courtships everywhere. But the short messaging service, or SMS, is proving particularly revolutionary in India, where it is paving a secret passageway for the young around deep-rooted barriers to premarital mingling.

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In Afghanistan, a young girl braves abuse to follow Olympic dream

Nick Meo from Kabul in The Times, UK:

Many of the athletes at Beijing will have had to overcome obstacles to get there but only one Olympian is likely to have had her training schedule dogged by a sexist hate campaign.

As if the Olympic team of Afghanistan does not have enough trouble with run-down facilities and a woeful shortage of funds, its sole woman competitor has had to prepare herself mentally for the biggest challenge of her life while dealing with sinister midnight telephone calls, the open derision of her neighbours and even police harassment.

The attitude of the officers who tried to arrest her this week was nothing new for Mehboba Andyar, 19, who lives in a slum in Kabul.

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Partition’s survivors break long silence

In the Washington Post, Rama Lakshmi on an ambitious 10-year project that seeks to chronicle the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan 

Every year in March, Bir Bahadur Singh goes to the local Sikh shrine and narrates the grim events of the long night six decades ago when 26 women in his family offered their necks to the sword for the sake of honor.

At the time, sectarian riots were raging over the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and the men of Singh’s family decided it was better to kill the women than have them fall into the hands of Muslim mobs.

“None of the women protested, nobody wept,” Singh, 78, recalled as he stroked his long, flowing white beard, his voice slipping into a whisper. “All I could hear was the sound of prayer and the swing of the sword going down on their necks. My story can fill a book.”

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Goa: A creaky paradise

“Forty years ago, Goa was a trip. Now it’s also a business, a disease,” writes Sudeep Chakravarti in Hindustan Times. Chakravarti’s novel, Once Upon a Time in Aparanta, set in present-day Goa, will be published later this year.

Two days ago, a friend and I were breakfasting at a chic café in Baga, a bizarre Goan confluence of the digital hippie, Indian yuppie and those whom I simply call Charter Jack and Charter Jane - “Oi, mate!” and chips with everything. A French couple, replete with tattoos, wearing worn clothes, BO, and a girl of about six came and sat by us, burnt some charas, rolled a joint, and began to fumigate the vicinity. My friend, a Goan preparing to adopt a girl, was outraged at the couple’s nonchalance in doing something so openly in Goa that would land them in jail in their own country, besides possibly placing their daughter under State care.

“I can’t believe these guys,” she spat. “They should be whipped. And this Scarlette,” she continued, “how could her mother leave a 15-year-old girl by herself in this day and age, in an area known to be unsafe, known for drugs and raves and what not and go away on her travels? Would she do that in England? No. But this is Goa, right? So now the girl is dead.”

Scarlette Eden Keeling, flower-child of a flower-parent, is dead, after allegedly being on an extended trip of substance abuse, after allegedly being raped by a manager of a shack at Anjuna beach. Less than an hour’s drive north of where I live, in Panjim, Anjuna was once the eastern extremity of Woodstock.

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Mothers and monsters

In the media’s hands, Scarlett Keeting’s mother Fiona MacKeown has become a scapegoat for the middle classes. Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian, UK:

Compassion is not a response the media seem able to sustain. That small window that affords a degree of respect for the grief of the bereaved seems to shrink ever more, but even so the treatment of Fiona MacKeown, the mother of the 15-year-old murdered on a Goa beach, has plumbed new depths of harsh judgmentalism.

While MacKeown struggles to get the police to take on the case of her daughter’s killing, she has a second child lying in hospital in the UK with a broken neck from a car accident that happened shortly before her daughter’s death. This goes well beyond the platitude of a mother’s worst nightmare. Yet even such circumstances have not inhibited the torrent of criticism and contempt that has poured down on this woman’s head. Open season has been declared on every part of her family life, her parenting style and even her appearance. She is blamed for abandoning her daughter in a resort while continuing her travels; accused of a recklessly indulgent style of parenting; and criticised for her mode of grieving. Almost every article refers to her hair - it is “lank”, a “curtain” and, most unforgivably, grey.

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Previously on Asian Window:

• Scarlett Keeling: What her mother had to see
• In Goa, another family’s search for the truth
• Jean-Baptiste Talleu: Has anyone seen this man?
• Who killed Scarlett Keeling?

Africa’s lost tribe in India

From Agence France-Presse:

It’s a village like thousands in India — a few corner shops and dusty lanes dissecting small, mud-and-brick houses into haphazard rows on the edge of lush fields.

What sets Jambur apart are its inhabitants — some 4,000 men, women and children of unmistakably African origin called Siddis, and virtually all of them poor. “They’re the lost tribes of Africa,” said Ashish Nandi, sociologist at New Delhi’s Centre for Developing Societies.

But the Siddis in this village 470 kilometres (290 miles) southwest of Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of the western state Gujarat, say they know nothing of their origins as descendants of African slaves.

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Wiki link on the Siddis:

Gandhi in the pavilion

Sagarika Ghose in the Hindustan Times on two very different leaders

Two young Indian men are on a unique journey. Rahul Gandhi, 37-year-old MP from Amethi and bearer of India’s most important political surname has just returned after racing around Orissa on his ‘Discover India’ tour assuring tribal elders that he is their ‘sipahi’ in Delhi. And Mahendra Singh Dhoni, 27-year-old superstar captain of the Indian cricket team has returned home in triumph, heading into a hysterical welcome in Ranchi where thousands thronged his home.

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Indian cricket’s small town wonders

Small towns are reaping the benefit of the BCCI’s initiative to take opportunity to the doorsteps of talent — regardless of where it is located, reports G Shekhar Luthra in Mail Today

Mushrooming private academies and government sports hostels at the grassroots level have also contributed the interminable supply of talent. Since the opportunities were already there, all the young cricketers had to do was lap them up. Take R. P. Singh or Praveen Kumar of Uttar Pradesh for example. The moment they got international opportunity, they seized it with both hands. Now, there is no looking back for these two Men in Blue. Manoj Tiwary of Bengal also comes from a lower- middle class family and had a hard time reaching a stage where he is recognised in millions of households across the country. Unlike in the past, when cricketers had to migrate to bigger cities to get recognition, the present- day players have no such problem, not least because the media has become hyperactive in unearthing talent from all over.

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Ajit Kumar travels to Meerut to find a town proud of its newest star, Praveen Kumar

LOOK dad, this is our SUV.” The extremely expensive, huge machine lies beside a pile of cow dung, right next to an open sewer. But daddy is a proud man. Praveen Kumar has risen to become the latest addition to Team India’s arsenal of hungry, aggressive, no- nonsense cricketers. Two man- of- the- match performances in one week in the recently- concluded Commonwealth Bank series have landed him right in the middle of frenzied media attention and overflowing public gaze. The 21- year- old is better known PK to those close to him. The son of a constable, this Meerutbased lad impressed everyone with his prodigious swing and immaculate control with the white ball.

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Sandeep Narayan finds out what Manoj Tiwary, the son of a class IV railway employee treasures most

A CHEQUE of Rs 58 lakh, an IPL salary of Rs 2.7 crore and numerous free gifts and prizes; yet, the most cherished item Manoj Tiwary says he possesses is a pair of gloves worn by Sachin Tendulkar on his final one- day international in Australia. Therein lies the irony of the whole story. The son of a class four railway employee has just been showered with more riches than he could ever imagine, but all Tiwary talks about is a pair of gloves gifted to him by his childhood idol — besides, of course, the euphoria he felt when he finally donned the Indian colours.

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Women-only hours at Harvard gym sets off a storm

Harvard University has banned men from one of its gyms for a few hours a week to accommodate Muslim women who say it offends ‘their sense of modesty to exercise in front of the opposite sex’.

 

To read the CNN report and related stories click here.

Writer Ali Eteraz is opposed to the move. Here’s why: 

Among the many gyms at Harvard University, there is now one which for six out of the seventy hours its open, becomes “women’s only” in order to make it easy for conservative Muslim women to work out. Andrew Sullivan opposes it, calling it Sharia at Harvard. Mathew Yglesias isn’t particularly threatened.

First of all, Volokh doesn’t think it violates Massachusetts anti-discrimination law. Muslims are going to say: well that seals it. Its legal, we can do it. Sure, but just because something is legal doesn’t mean its right: it is legal to sentence a drug-addict to a longer term than a murderer. Legal? Yes. Is the law wrong? Yes. Therefore, do not wave “the law” in my face.

I oppose this measure to the extent that it engages in religious favoritism, because the intention of the rule is to benefit Muslim women.

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Also read Retributions for another view: 

Is this a fair decision? There are couple of important theme to consider here. First, Harvard and America are increasingly multi-cultural societies; reasonable accommodations should be made taking into account cultural/religious differences. Second, as the world’s best known university, Harvard sets the standards: has an appropriate message been given? Third, has the issue been highlighted only because Muslims are involved?Okay, let’s deal with them one by one.

In a test of Harvard’s famed open-mindedness, the university has banned men from one of its gyms for a few hours a week to accommodate Muslim women who say it offends their sense of modesty to exercise in front of the opposite sex.

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Foreign couples turn to India for surrogate mothers

Reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding enterprise in India. Amelia Gentleman reports from Mumbai in International Herald tribune:

Yonatan Gher and his male partner plan eventually to tell their child that it was made in India, in the womb of a woman they never met, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked out from an Internet line-up of candidates.

The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 4,000 kilometers, or 2,500 miles, from Gher’s home in Tel Aviv, nurtured by a team of doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.

As they waited to see if the fertilization process had been successful, Gher, 29, and his partner sped around the streets of Mumbai in the back of an autorickshaw, drinking in scenes of a country they had never previously visited, staring at the unfamiliar faces of Indian women and children and “trying to imagine our child,” he said.

(Photo: Surrogate mothers at the Kaival Hospital at Anand, in the western Indian state of Gujarat in February 2006. AP)

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IHT also has photos and audio of an Israeli man searching for a surrogate mother

US religious landscape survey: Hindus are the best-educated

An extensive new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious affiliation of the American public and explores the shifts taking place in the U.S. religious landscape:

In a study that highlights the fluidity of religious affiliation in America today, Hindus stand out as the group with the most stable religious identity. Ninety percent of Hindus marry within their own faith, and eight-in-ten Hindus who were raised Hindu remain so as adults, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, released last week by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Nearly half of Hindus in the U.S., one-third of Jews and a quarter of Buddhists have obtained post-graduate education, compared with only about one-in-ten of the adult population overall. Hindus and Jews are also much more likely than other groups to report high income levels.

Key summary of findings:

Demographic portraits:

Is this the last chapter for the write stuff?

Namita Bhandare in Mint says that there is something inherently honest about the old fashioned art of handwriting

Two days ago, I did something I hadn’t done for years: I wrote a letter—on paper, with pen. The letter was to thank Dr Nandu Laud, one of Mumbai’s most eminent orthopaedic doctors, for the care and concern he had shown my husband when he recently fractured his shoulder along with a rib. Through that trying week at Breach Candy Hospital, Dr Laud was there for us—answering silly questions, taking calls at odd hours and assuring us that all was well.

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A man’s mourning resonates from Staten Island to Sri Lanka

A legal permanent resident from Sri Lanka who manages two Subway sandwich shops on Staten Island finds himself without a relative in the US, struggling to adjust to life with a newborn while mourning his wife, who died three weeks ago. Nina Bernstein in The New York Times:

It sounds like a throwback to another century: A healthy, middle-class woman sickens late in her pregnancy, gives birth and dies two and a half weeks later, leaving her young husband to care for their newborn son alone. Even the new father, Indika S. Arachchige, 34, grieving in their Staten Island home under balloons and streamers that exclaim, “It’s a Boy,” still cannot quite believe that so much everyday American happiness could be swept away so fast.

A pending autopsy may explain the death of his wife, Tai Ling Feng, 36, a Taiwan-born United States citizen who worked in a bank. But to the young widower and the multiethnic circle of friends who had cheered on the couple’s courtship as a uniquely New York love story, immigration law now seems to be compounding a New York tragedy.

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Our freedoms, your lordships

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express says some Supreme Court orders are inimical to liberal values 

All due respect to the Supreme Court, it is now fair to say that unwittingly some of its orders are giving aid and succour to all those tendencies that are out to subvert liberal values in this country. For the second time in less than a year, the Supreme Court has passed an order that should send a shiver down the spines of all those who care about freedom and the possibility of open-minded scholarship. In an order passed in the context of a Special Leave Petition 8931, the Supreme Court has suggested that “after hearing the learned counsel for parties at some length we feel that if Paras 2,5,7 and 8, of the Schedule are omitted, interest of justice would be best served.” The court clarifies that this suggestion shall “not in any way affect the merits of the issue involved,” which shall be examined after the response of “respondent no 4” is received.

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The curious case of Kashmir Singh

The case of Kashmir Singh seems to get curiouser and curiouser. Released after 35 years in various Pakistan jails following a pardon by President Pervez Musharraf of espionage charges, Kashmir now says he was, in fact, a spy. Sarabjit Pandher in The Hindu has the story:

In a reversal of his stand that he had no role in espionage, Kashmir Singh, who was released from a Pakistani jail after being incarcerated for 35 years, on Friday admitted that he had gone into Pakistan “on duty” to spy for the Indian Military Intelligence.

However, he refused to divulge details about who controlled the operations.

Addressing journalists at the Press Club here, Mr. Singh, with his wife Paramjit Kaur by his side, narrated his experiences of crossing the border on numerous occasions to collect information required by the MI.

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Earlier, in Mail Today, Manoj Joshi regrets the fact that both India and Pakistan treat their spies as expendable pawns

The story of Kashmir Singh cannot fail to stir the heart of every Indian. Here is a man, convicted for spying, who spent 35 long years entombed on the death row in Pakistan. Singh says he was not a spy; that does not matter. Even if he was one, he was a pawn in a larger game that routinely has dozens of agents crossing the border, or the Line of Control in Kashmir, to gather low level military intelligence. Their task is to update what is called the enemy’s “ order of battle”— the location of armoured or infantry units, artillery batteries, air force squadrons and cantonments — the pieces of a real life chessboard.

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New Delhi’s quiet ‘citizen revolution’

In Washington Post, Rama Lakshmi reports on the success of a government-citizen partnership initiative

Seven neighborhood activists sat across from a bureaucrat last week with a long list of complaints about damaged streetlights, uncollected trash and what is known here as the monkey menace — hordes of monkeys straying into homes through windows and balconies. The bureaucrat offered tea and biscuits, took copious notes and ordered immediate action to resolve the problems.

“We also have a complaint against your accounts officer,” thundered Satya Paul Gupta, 78, who heads his neighborhood association. “He sleeps on our files and keeps telling us, ‘Next week, next week.’ “

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One night at the call centre

Jagmita Thind Joy, a reporter with The Indian Express, becomes Lisa for one night at a call centre and finds out what it takes to sound all American in the middle of the night:

It was meant to be just one night. But it took many days to get to it. Taking on a pseudo name is of course easy but it takes time to turn your nose into an asset. The true blue American twang, as I discovered, comes from there and only there. Not being a Reshammiya protégé and with a training-is-must diktat, my chances of a one-night stand with the call centre seemed bleak. That was until I got the go-ahead from Satjit Kaur, owner of SMM Technologies India Pvt Ltd that operates the back end business for a California-based company through a website. So a date was set-with Jimmy, the supervisor at the company’s call centre tucked away in a not-so busy part of town.

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A day in the life

A commuter moves from one train to another in Mumbai, India. Reuters photo in The Telegraph, UK:

In thriving India, wedding sleuths find their niche

Emily Wax in The Washington Post:

Like a lot of young Indian couples, they met on a matrimonial Web site and within a matter of weeks were picking out the wedding invitations, reserving the horse-drawn carriages and having the bride fitted for a pearl- and gold-encrusted sari.

Judging by his online profile, the groom was suitable and eager to be a good spouse: a quiet, stay-at-home kind of guy who never drank and worked as a successful software engineer. Perfect, thought the bride, a shy 27-year-old computer engineer. Too perfect, according to Bhavna Paliwal, one of India’s wedding detectives, who are being hired here in growing numbers to ferret out the truth about prospective mates.

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