'People-work'

  HIV and Sexuality – Has India Missed the Bus?  HIV remains exceptional in that it carries the seemingly immutable burden of being synonymous with immoral behaviour. Open and safe conversations on sexual rights and freedoms in the context of both disease and pleasure should have been the method of decoupling HIV from prevailing notions of morality. India’s HIV programme over the past 25 years chose not to do this. In September 1998 , to the utter horror of HIV activists, the Supreme Court of India pronounced the following in a judgement – “AIDS is the product of undisciplined sexual impulse.” It was hearing the case of Mr. “X” v. Hospital “Z”. The appellant Mr. “X” was a person living with HIV whose confidentiality had been breached by hospital “Z”. The appellant sought damages for breach of confidentiality, which had led to his marriage being cancelled, and ostracism by his community. This judgement, till it was revoked in 2003 after an outcry from activists and la...

Below are some important quotes from the book   'The Hindu View of Life' By Dr S Radhakrishnan , the first President of India and a renowned scholar and philosopher  The material of this slim book was first delivered as a series of lectures in 1926 at Oxford. pg 4 While fixed intellectual beliefs mark off one religion from another, Hinduism sets itself no such limits. Intellect is subordinated to intuition, dogma to experience, outer experssion to inward realisation. It is an insight onto the nation of reality (darshana) and / or the experinece of reality (anubhava).  pg7 The Hindu attitude to the Vedas is one of trust tempered by criticism, trust because the beliefs and forms which helped our fathers are likely to be of use to us also; criticism because however valuable the testimony of past ages maybe it cannot deprive the presentt age its right toinquire and sift the evidence. pg9 Hindusim is therefore not a definite dogmatic creed, but a vast, complex, s...

Notions of sexual morality and decency can be divisive externalities in an otherwise value driven discussion on human rights.  Here is how. AmnestyInternational 's  call for decriminalisation of sexwork has yet again pried open the divisions between the women’s empowerment movements around the world. Abolitionists have long argued that sexwork is not only demeaning for women in and of itself, but worse, it leads to trafficking of women and girls and hence should be abolished. Sexworker movements, on the other hand, have hailed the Amnesty policy as a hard won victory. This is a  debate  where notions of morality and decency clash for primacy over justiciable Rights.  The beleagured battleground seems to be the sexworker's identity, her sexuality, her voice and her agency.  

It is haloed  moment when a child, a small notebook in hand, takes her shoes off at the door and enters the room of her Guru, her music teacher. She is very likely in a space that has music particles in the air, notes swung through the octaves of imagination and many hours of grinding riyaaz one note at a time till the sound of each one fuses with the singer. Sound becomes prayer. She enters the habitation of prayers as she steps into the space of her Guru. Learning music used to be a common in small town households in India when we were growing up in the 70s and 80s. Almost everyone I knew used to be enrolled for learning some kind of music - Hindustani classical, carnatic classical, Indian or westerm instruments, and so on. Parents would make time to ensure kids were ferried to classes being held somewhere in the neighborhood. It was a quasi social gathering where parents met other parents and shared notes, while their children sat infront of the Guru, and imbib...

Transcript of a video for a seminar on " Emancipation of Women - Threat & Challenges" with theme "Men will learn to listen" - organised by the PUCL at Jamshedpur Women's College, Jamshedpur. Good evening everyone! And my greetings to everyone there! It is indeed a great pleasure to be speaking to my friends in Jamshedpur, a city that I owe everything to. I have been requested to speak on the issue of women’s emancipation and in that context about whether men should be listening more, indeed to other men, and definitely, to women. Because listening, as an exercise, is key to the way we perceive society, it is key to the way we interact and learn from each other, it is a fundamental building block for what we otherwise call respect for each other. The women’s movement was built around listening and through the 70s, till today, if you see women who are empowered and are able to reach out for their potential it is because they have learnt o...

Given how much we outrage on social media on a range of issues, it may be worthwhile to step back to check on the anatomy of what we call outrage:) It is very likely that we are using the chapeau term ‘outrage’ for the three methods we typically deploy to express our disagreement with an event, a policy decision, an ideology or even a trend: 1)     Outrage 2)     Lynching 3)     Angry lament And then there is debate, of course, to the extent that is possible on social media  What sets outrage apart from the others is that it quickly moves ahead of the right vs wrong paradigm to suggestions, solutions and alternatives. Therefore outrage on social media has shown its rare power to galvanise emotion and action, to give everyone with internet the option to rally behind solutions of their choice, new pathways of their imagination.  It is for this reason that we need to allow outrage on social me...

This is Ruchika holding up her class 6 project on 'water conservation' which got the highest marks in her class. Encouraged by this victory, she has since made projects on topics such as dances of India, health benefits of sports and types of food. She walks into the living room, where I also have my work desk, and announces the topic of her latest project, saying "Mujhey information nikaal ke do (Please pull out the information for me) ". She starts the conversation with a half apologetic smile and an already-victorious glint in eye. And within minutes, as the google search throws up stuff, her face turns intent, her eyes flit across the screen with an urgency and speed as though if she were not fast enough all this information may just go away out of her reach, never to return. Then she selects what she finds useful. Takes a print of a funny illustration and laughs out loud. Then she puts her finger on the screen on a word she can neither pronounce nor ...

Childhood fevers have a place of reverence in my memory ledger. They have created my template of good values and bad. They have taught me how to be cared for, and how to care – in that order. They have given my delirium a script and a meaning, place and purpose. These were not long bouts of debilitating illness. Just a few days of high pitched flaming fevers, sometimes from the burning sun, sometimes from prancing about in untimely rain; at other times, for unexplained reasons. In April 1979, a Hindu-Muslim riot broke out in the small town of Jamshedpur in eastern India, built around India’s first iron and steel industry. I was born and raised here. As all communal riots do, the reason was small and simple based on a sinister plan. It was a popular Hindu festival on that day; devotees were to gather in a procession which would go across the city carrying religious flags to celebrate. 

The whole lame and twisted logic to now defend the fundamentally undemocratic process of snatching farmers' land without their consent and without a social impact assessment is to say that a majority of respondents in a CSDS survey would rather not farm under the current conditions.

Dear Honourable Members of Parliament and Legislators, As part of the nationwide AIDS Momentum Campaign, we bring to your notice the grave concern of civil society members about the Government of India’s recent approach to our country’s HIV/AIDS prevention and care programme. More than 150 organisations across the country are of the strong view that any move by the government towards shrinking organisational and budgetary support to the AIDS response will lead to a reversal and upsurge of the epidemic among the most vulnerable groups and beyond.

The anti NGO stand of the Govt of India, egged on by a rabid TV media has revealed more about the Govt than about the motives of the NGO in question, or those like them. 1- It has revealed that the Govt will do anything, including pulverising citizens rights, if the interests of corporates seem in danger. The Greenpeace activism had the potential to harm the Adani like entities. 2- It has revealed that the Govt has such shoddy relations with its counterparts in the developed world th at an NGO activists foriegn visit seems like a threat. Wasted foreign trips by Modi. 3- It has revealed that the Govt will hide behind the argument of energy security of India to support the energy giants and mining giants. All this, while the poor who are purportedly the beneficiaries of this future 'energy security' may be annihilated in the process. 4- It has revealed that while the Govt finds it laudable to beg the developed countries for FDI , foreign funding for NGOs is 'slave...

In the bitter cold of January 20th,  Roobina, a young woman , was forced to deliver her baby on a pavement in Bhopal because she was not able to pay the thousand-rupee bribe allegedly demanded at a free government-run hospital. The baby boy died minutes after being born. While hospital authorities have denied all allegations and the matter is being investigated by the local police, the incident is deeply symptomatic of a failing health system and its unsuspecting victims. Gandhi may have someone like Roobina and her dead infant in mind when he gave the famous dictate to the drafters of the Indian Constitution, saying “Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.” In another India, far from Roobina’s, the private healthcare industry is valued at $40 billion and is projected to grow to $280 billion by 2020. The current growth rate of this perennially and most rapidly growing area of...