Indian rickshaw-puller forced to take baby to work

                   rickshaw-puller Bablu Jatav says there is no-one to care for his daughter after his wife died

Offers of help have been coming into BBC Hindi after it reported that an Indian rickshaw-puller is carrying his month-old daughter in a cloth sling around his neck after his wife died.

Bablu Jatav's wife, Shanti, died on 20 September, soon after giving birth to their first child in Rajasthan state.
Mr Jatav, 38, says since there is no-one else to look after the baby, he takes her to work with him every day.
Now a local charity has agreed to help Mr Jatav take care of the baby.
"Shanti died soon after delivering the baby at the hospital. Since there is no-one to look after my daughter, I keep her with me even when I pull my rickshaw," Mr Jatav, who lives in the town of Bharatpur, told the BBC.
"We had this baby after 15 years of our marriage, my wife was so happy when we were blessed with a daughter, but it is very sad she passed away."
Taking the baby to work has created its own set of problems - on Tuesday, she had to be taken to hospital to be treated for dehydration.
Mr Jatav says life is tough and he is struggling to keep afloat.
"I have to pay 500 rupees [$9; £6] a month as house rent and 30 rupees daily to rent the rickshaw," he said.
Mr Jatav said he was afraid to re-marry because "my first priority is to care for and bring up my baby girl".
Meanwhile, after a report on Mr Jatav's plight was published on the BBC's Hindi website on Thursday, calls to help the family have been coming in from India and abroad.
And on Friday, a Bharatpur-based local non-governmental organisation agreed to help Mr Jatav care for his baby.
source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-20000997

Peace Process in Void

                                    ‘One country two armies’ situation ends in Nepal

‘One country two armies’ situation ends in Nepal! unfortunately,it does NOT.Unlike blustered by the people of the Special Committee for the Supervision, Integration,and Rehabilitation, peace process has not come to conclusion instead the "ignominious recruitment" of Maoist combatants into Nepalese Army has (more or less) led the whole peace process astray. As devised earlier, the intent of peace process was to minimize any prospect of arm struggle.Contrarily,the integration process has failed even to acknowledge this. The pundits of conflict management politicized the whole peace process. Their prolonged squabble on numbers and rank of combatants in integration was just bargaining chip for bigger pie.Maoists had interest in gaining high hand in army structure while non-Maoists hastened to dissolve the former's "P.L.A". What about the 2/3 of politically-indoctrinated  guerrilla-warfare-trained Maoist combatants?Who guarantees that they won't take up arms again,that they won't be used again?

India-Nepal in Assymetrical Relationship

From distant past to current unfolding of political drama, issue of nationalism has always become easy and handy tool for Nepalese political parties. It is not surprising that Baidhya-led Maoists want ban on Indian vehicles and 'obscene' movies. Nevertheless, the hardliners are partly right in that they seem not to acquiesce to unequal relationship imposed by the Indian government to the date. How come the Indian vehicles have frivolous access to Nepalese transport business and Nepalese ambulance (let alone private ones) can not enter into Indian territories!! Does not it sound little unjust? My concern is: the two nations should revise existing treaties based on equality. On doing so, initiation should be taken from both sides in diplomatic levels. Hopefully, CPN-Maoist's move would prove to be helpful rather than detrimental in taking this first step.
 (In response to Prashant Jha's article http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/maoist-splinter-continues-ban-on-indian-vehicles/article3952207.ece#comments)

Sexuality: Freedom for Pleasure

                                

In many cultures today, men’s sexual needs are placed above those of women. It is not uncommon for a woman to take little initiative in her own sexual experiences when her culture does not acknowledge or teach female sexuality.
Yet male domination in the bedroom is slowly becoming history as women are confronting it around the globe. Organizations and activists around the world are finding that educating women and men about female sexuality is not only empowering, but it helps to decrease gender violence, teen pregnancy and HIV transmission, and is leading to healthier sexual relationships and new perspectives on female genital mutilation.

The sexual revolution of the ’70s has allowed women to claim their right to pleasure and to better know their body. However, 30 years later, the female orgasm remains mysterious to a lot of people – both men and women.

Most of us can recall that scene in the movie “When Harry Met Sally” and Meg Ryan is moaning and groaning having an alleged orgasm. In the movie she is obviously faking it. The movie endeavors to show that women have the ability to confuse or mislead their men into believing that they are actually having and orgasm.

Unfortunately for men, no matter how much they scream or moan, they cannot fake an orgasm – as well, let’s face it, a masculine orgasm is rather messy.

During the 1970′s the sexual revolution enabled women the ability to lay claim to a right of pleasure in the bedroom; for the first time in public society, women were able to better understand their own bodies and discover what it actually is that enables/causes the orgasm. However, we are now 40 years since that revolution and for many men the onset and occurrence of feminine orgasm remains a total mystery.

For more, http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/female-orgasm-explained/

Prognosis of WW-III

Portraits of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, left, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, shown at the Photokina in Cologne, Germany.

ADVOCATES of airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have long held that the attacks would delay an atom bomb for years and perhaps even buy Israel enough time to topple the Iranian government. In public statements, the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, has said that an attack would leave Iran’s nuclear program reeling, if not destroyed. The blow, he declared recently, would set back the Iranian effort “for a long time.”
The question of what prompts the speedups would seem to go far beyond the Iranian crisis and atomic history because the number of latent nuclear states (ones that could make bombs but choose not to, like Japan and Germany) has risen around the globe in recent decades. The estimated number now stands at around 40.............http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/sunday-review/how-to-help-iran-build-a-bomb.html?ref=world

Violence in everday life

On Guha:

adivasi youths in their base

The other day, I read Ramchandra Guha's article Adivasis, Naxalites, And Indian Democracy(2007). He explores how the maoists in India have moved into the lives of adivasi . The failures of the state and of the formal political system have provided this space for Naxalites in their lives.This is an example of how force emerges when the total system is in fiasco. The system failed not on its own rather ensued by the inaction of the agency involved. About the inertness of the agency, Guha argues, "Leave alone acting on various reports documenting the problems faced by the adivasis, the government has often not even tabled the reports in Parliament". The adivasi of Chattisgargh  are victims of its failure and negligence.
More recently, I read news on http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-andhrapradesh/article3590873.ecem about indiscriminate shooting at a small village of the region. Dozens of adivasi were slaughtered who had gathered to discuss a land dispute.Actually,the systematic violence had not loomed so far in public. But this one is a blatant apparition of violence in its physical form. Moreover, the carnage proves Indian government's passivity for political initiative on the adivasi uprising.This will eventually complicate situation  as more agitated and frightened adivasi youths are likely to be solicited by the maoists of the region. But, will their joining the maosits redress all the calamities brought by the government?

more adivasi youths have joined maoists

On a different Note:

This morning , the Hindu brought a sensational issue in light. I would like to co-relate my recent reading of Guha with this news; how systematic violence is persistent from the top to bottom in every social structure. Violence prevails not only in the form of physical form rather it exists in everyday life is  the theme I grabbed.

victim children at private school

At a private school in a city of Banglore India, children of poor families admitted under the "Right to Education" (RTE) quota were forced to go through an Odyssey of discrimination and humiliation.  Very systematically, the school management carried out the most heinous crime of violation of child rights. Following are some outrageous acts they conducted:
-they make the "alien students" to stand separately during the assembly
-these students' lunch boxes are checked before they enter their class
-the teachers did not enlist them in the attendance register.
-the teachers make them sit in the back benches
-they cut off tufts of hair on top of their heads to distinguish these children
   These kids are victim of symbolic violence that permeates everyday lives. I do not know, how these little ones react when they grow up.Will this seizure of discrimination and violence in their life remain all over their lives? Will they be able to transform this as an energy to make a counter attack (maybe in a creative and constructive way)?
 http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/article3650505.ece?homepage=true