Sexual Violence in India: A Tale of Two Stories... for balance?

Some of us were shocked and outraged the other day when via CNN iReport, user RoseChasm, a South Asian studies student at the University of Chicago, shared with the world the horrifying tale of her harrowing experience of being sexually harassed, repeatedly, while in India.

Traditional Indian "Joint" Families: Are they quite the paragon of support?

In a recent post, noted Indian educationist and social commentator Meeta Sengupta has wistfully (as she herself noted) sung paeans to the traditional Indian family, also referred to as a "joint-family". Do read the eloquent essay in her blog, and I encourage you, dear reader, to interact with her. Understanding her point of view is important for another reason, too: it'd help clarify my position on this - in sharp contrast to hers. This is a matter of some significance to me, and hence I chose to respond via a blog post of my own. I think a disclaimer is important here: I greatly admire the wisdom and thoughts of Ms. Sengupta on different aspects of education, and we follow each other on Twitter. Rarely do I have an/any occasion to disagree with what she writes; however, this essay of hers seems one of those rare occasions, where I disagree with her thesis. This response is not to engender acrimony between us, but to present a viewpoint that is - as will be apparent - patently different from hers in this matter.

Noted Women Scientists of India - an attempt at enumeration

Priya Ravichandran (@binaryfootprint on Twitter), who is a program manager and writer with the Takshashila Institution, threw a challenge on Twitter the other day. She asked her followers to name top 5 women scientists of India without doing a Google search first. Easy-peesy, I thought. But as I tried to remember the names, I was mortified to discover that beyond Dr. Asima Chatterjee (a noted Chemist) and Dr. Sipra Guha Mukherjee (a noted plant biologist, who had taught us at the Jawaharlal Nehru University), I couldn't remember off-hand the names of any top tier Indian women in the pure sciences fields. Even in my dotage, this was embarrassing. So, I enlisted the help of my friends on Facebook (Viva la social media!) and asked them to come up with names. In this post, I am going to list those names that came up. One caveat: the list, understandably, may be slightly biased towards women in bioscience and related fields - since many of my friends and I are biology researchers. However, I'd love it if you, dear readers, could come up with other names, and leave them in the comments, along with a few words in description.

Courageous Woman Speaks About Her Rape in India And Official Apathy

Rape. Sexual Violence against women. Gang rape. Happening daily in the glorious nation of India. I have been expressing my outrage about this through my blog posts and via Social Media (Facebook & Twitter) for a while now (See here, here, here, and here), trying to encourage - and engage in - activism against sexual violence in whichever way I can, not only in India, but elsewhere in the world, too.

I don't know if all that outrage, that anger, that activism, those protests against sexual violence ever achieve anything; certainly nothing seems to change in a country like India. Barring some token political maneuvers, nothing has been done in response to the nationwide protest against the horrifying ordeal and eventual death of Jyoti Singh Pandey, and the outrages continue to occur. Faced with an apathetic, callous and intransigent system, even people like me, who make an effort to voice these concerns and shine the spotlight on sexual violence, do run the risk of getting inured to such incidents after a while - due to the sheer volume of it.

Twitter-bullying, Indian ishtyle

Noted FreeThoughtBlogger Ophelia Benson, certainly no stranger to the harassment meted out online to women who dare to speak out, has written long and hard about it (See here, here, here, and here; Twitter is a medium which seems to especially bring out the very worst that humanity has to offer, the bottom-feeders, the misogyny-laden online trolls who revel in their power of semi anonymity and physical distance, which enables them to hurl slights and abuses at women who try to go against a patriarchal society and make a difference. Ophelia, a grizzled veteran of battling misogyny and idiocy online and off, has recently conceded that sometimes it does get too much - the relentless abuses, lies and misrepresentations, not to mention the thinly-veiled threats of violence and expressed wishes for harm to befall her.

By the Grace of... Really?

For those not in the know, the Indian Institute of Management at Calcutta (IIM-C) is a premier educational establishment in the city of my birth. It is one of the top business schools in India, and according to the QS Global 200 Business School Report 2012, in the Asia-Pacific region as well. It offers several graduate (Master's and Doctoral degree and diploma) programs in Management and Executive Education.

It's not about the Honey (Singh)!

The first time in my life I heard about 'Indian Rapper' Honey Singh was when a dear friend of mine circulated a petition on Facebook - which called upon the General Manager of some Bristol Hotel, in the city of Gurgaon to cancel a scheduled show by the said rapper, because he allegedly promotes misogyny and violence against women via his lyrics. An example was provided in the petition; the lyrics in Hindi, attributed to Honey Singh, describe rather graphically the kind of violent sexual abuse the male protagonist wants to mete out to some woman.

The Cup of Shame Steadily Runneth Over

Indian News Media was abuzz since a couple of days by a remark by Mr. Shashi Tharoor, the Indian Minister of State for Human Resource Development, who tweeted his desire to have the new rape laws bear the name of the now-deceased victim of the brutal gang-rape outrage in Delhi. Under Indian laws, the identity of rape-victims are kept a strict secret, and the 23-year old victim has so long been referred to in the media variously as 'Delhi’s braveheart', 'Damini' (thunderbolt), 'Nirbhaya' (fearless), and 'Amanat' (treasure), perhaps to honor her desperate fight to remain alive after her grievous injuries. Now Mr. Tharoor has questioned the decision to keep the name of this rape victim a secret, indicating that the nation should honor her with her real name and identity. Expectedly, there have been a slew of responses on Twitter, supporting and decrying Mr. Tharoor's viewpoint in equal measures, while political machinations are already afoot to discredit him, with his own party distancing themselves from his remark in a cowardly manner. Let it be on record that I support Mr. Tharoor in this matter; our names form a large part of our identities, and if new laws are promulgated (and old one, strengthened) against rape and sexual violence against women, we as a nation can honor the victim by associating her real name with the said laws, as a mark of respect and remembrance. Similar practices exist in other civilized countries.

The Only Viable Solution to Rape Epidemic in India

Perhaps I ought to switch off my Twitter feed and Facebook time-stream for a little while. I don't know how much longer my brain can keep itself together from the continuous onslaught of terrible, terrible news emanating from my birth country. May I, ostrich-like, bury my head in the ground and hope that this horripilating situation would blow itself over?

Somehow I ain't holding my breath, while reports from state after state, highlighting escalating numbers of cases of rapes, gang rapes, and violent abuse of women, continue to come out from India, my country - where rape has assumed epidemic proportions.

Gun Violence in India: Tougher Laws or Tougher Implementation?

Gun violence and death from shootings don't just occur in the United States. Yes, I am stating the obvious. But sometimes, the obvious needs to be stated, repeatedly, in the hope that someone, somewhere will sit up and take notice. The terrible tragedy that occurred yesterday in Newtown, Connecticut, other such tragedies - Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora - in various places in the United States over the years, as well as the terrible toll gun violence takes on the lives of both victims and survivors, have at the very least ensured that some sane, sensible, rational people somewhere in this country are talking about it, expressing outrage, creating awareness and encouraging discussion on this issue. Perhaps some good may even come out of it.

Sadly, this awareness and understanding appears to elude some nations altogether. Take India, for example. Over the weekend, while people in the US were grieving over the Newtown tragedy, in North India an alcoholic, unemployed man shot dead his teenaged son on Saturday, for something as trivial as having been denied his "full share of dinner". Early on Sunday, in another part of North India, a young man shot at a waiter in a restaurant, angered by the waiter's refusal to eat the food the young man and his friends left over.

On Indian Immigrants' apparent fondness for US GOP

I was born and brought up in India, and I love that country dearly. But for the past 10 odd years, my home has been the United States, where I live my life, work and pay taxes, as well as engage in social processes and participate in communities. One process I cannot - although I personally feel entitled to - participate in, yet, is the political process, because I am not a US Citizen or Permanent Resident. But that hasn't stopped me from taking wholehearted interest in the local and Federal politics and government, because politics and policy affect lives, my life and those of my near and dear ones, and of millions of other people, seen and unseen.

Bravo, Sanal! A Profile in Courage and Conviction

It has been a while since I had written about Sanal Edamaraku, the president of the Indian Rationalist Association, a small but growing Indian organization that strives to debunk instances of pseudoscience, superstition and mysticism. For those who are unaware of Sanal's many accomplishments and his relentless efforts to unmask religious preceptors, or Gurus, and self-styled godmen, who claim to perform mystical 'miracles', I recommend the excellent website of this organization, the Rationalist International, of which Sanal is the founding president. In 2010, Sanal was in the news when he took a Tantrik guru upon his words, challenging the guru to kill him using only his 'mystical' powers. Needless to say, the effort didn't work well for the Guru.

Time for an "Occupy Science" in India?

Yes. Yes!! Oh, yes! This was my reaction while reading a commentary in April 12's Nature.

In a policy commentary article titled Bold strategies for Indian Science (Nature 484, 159–160;12 April 2012), Gautam Desiraju, a professor of Chemistry in the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the current president of the International Union of Crystallography, held forth forcefully on what he thought were the bottlenecks that seem to be holding back the progress of Indian science. I found much to agree with.

The Man Whose Name Boson Honors

In the past several days, the world was waiting agog for the news: is it there or is it not? As the Honorable Beeb reported:

The most coveted prize in particle physics - the Higgs boson - may have been glimpsed, say researchers reporting at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva... Scientists say that two experiments at the LHC see hints of the Higgs at the same mass, fuelling huge excitement. But the LHC does not yet have enough data to claim a discovery.

Although we may have to wait another year, the BBC article and the one on CNN, both highly informative, explain the excitement around the possible discovery of the Higgs Boson, a currently-theoretical, elementary subatomic particle that is purported to provide mass to matter, and is the integral part of the theoretical Higgs mechanism by which mass is proposed to be generated.

I, sadly, don't understand enough of quantam mechanics or mathematics to launch into an extensive discussion of the properties of the elusive Higgs Boson particle. A nice Q&A at the BBC Science & Environment website explains a lot of the concepts. I, on the other hand, want to briefly focus on the person, who introduced the principles of Statistical Mechanics guiding photons in 1924 and after whom physicist/mathematician Paul Dirac named the one of the most elementary of subatomic particles, Bosons. That person is Satyendra Nath Bose, the Indian physicist who made significant advances in the studies of Statistical Mechanics and Quantam Statistics.

Proposed (Dis)Honor Killing Bill by India Government

Writing at the Livemint.com Lounge today, Aakar Patel focuses on a new Bill proposed by the Government of India, called “The Prevention of Crimes in the Name of ‘Honour’ and Tradition Bill”. As Aakar notes, all the heinous acts which find mention in this Bill - committing and abetting murder, coercion - are already punishable, but the Bill's sponsor, Dr. Girija Vyas, Member of the Indian Parliament, intends to create a separate law that will allow the prosecution of perpetrators of specific gruesome acts, coyly termed as "honour killing". Aakar shares his concern that this Bill, if passed into law, will fail to address the intended problem, a deeper and convoluted societal issue.

The Curious Case of Two Indias

For a while now, I have been reading an interesting and engagingly written book by young British science journalist and author, Angela Saini, titled: Geek Nation: How Indian Science Is Taking Over the World. I would perhaps write a review of the book once I am done. In this post, however, I am going to share a few observations from the book that struck an immediate chord with me. I call it 'The Curious Case of Two Indias', referring to a strangely split personality of the country I was born and grew up in. India is, at once, progressive and retrogressive, modern and medieval, scientific and superstitious - a contradiction of existence; the book Geek Nation has ample illustrations of this dichotomy. I refer to a part that relates to my own experience.

Chronicle of Shame: Indian Manhood

It has been more than two years since I first reacted in anguish in this blog over what seemed to me to be nothing less than an epidemic of rape in the Indian subcontinent. I had asked:

What is it with Indian men and rape?

Is it about sexual gratification in a country where, inexplicably, sex is still a taboo subject and the Indian male is a lustful, prurient, sex-starved lot eager to carry out rape to fulfill a sexual fantasy whenever opportunity presents? Is it about power and control over certain individuals, or a group of people - an uncontrollable urge to dominate? Or, is it a violent response, a lashing out, of the patriarchal societal establishment to the increasing economic and social emancipation of the Indian women, whom it finds it cannot subjugate any further?

In India, it probably is all of the above.

As I have learnt more about the issues surrounding sexual violence against women, it appears that it is more of the latter than former.

Confusions galore: science and superstition

Modern India presents a paradox to the broader world without. While churning out copious science, technology and engineering graduates from prestigious institutions every year, this country of highly religious and tradition-following people evinces a close juxtaposition of science and religion, and of technology and superstitions. This highly apparent contradiction has always been a topic close to my heart; Angela Saini, a well-known London-based science journalist and author, had bravely taken it up for her project, which culminated in a book entitled "Geek Nation"; in this book, she makes a case for the rise of India as a scientific superpower despite the overwhelming influence of religion in the Indian society.

I'd love to read the book. It has been already released in the UK, and is scheduled to be published in India later this month; I don't know when it'd be available in the US, but soon, I hope.