uma shankari's blog

Good investigative journalists must have an abiding passion for finding the truth. They have the ethical duty to understand the motives of their sources, and understanding these motives is vital in any investigation. They should know how to distill accurate stories from masses of information, enable reluctant sources to talk and recognize assumptions, motives and biases.  Read More »

For many of us, sitting long hours before the desk can make the neck and back muscles stiff. The head is heavy — about 7-10 kilograms; keeping the head leaning forward stresses the neck and shoulder muscles.  Read More »

Three teenage Christian women were beheaded on Saturday by two assailants in eastern Indonesia as they walked to school near the Muslim town of Poso.This is an area that has a long history of religious violence between Muslims and Christians. Central Sulawesi and Poso in particular was the scene of bitter fighting between Muslims and Christians in 2001 and 2002. Indonesia has the world's largest Islamic population -- 88 percent of citizens are Muslim.

Religion gets to the heart of what we believe and what we value, and strong emotions are wrapped around those beliefs and values. Down through history, religion has been used to justify great injustices, including war and genocide.  Read More »

In November 2004, Amnesty International released a report Clouds of Injustice – Bhopal Disaster 20 years on. The report documented human rights violations on a massive scale of those affected by the Bhopal gas leak in December 1984 and subsequent pollution, including contaminated ground water. Amnesty says victims of the leak are yet to receive adequate compensation two decades after the incident.

Twenty one years ago around half a million people were exposed to toxic chemicals during a catastrophic gas leak from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. More than 7,000 people died within days. A further 15,000 died in the following years. Around 100,000 people are suffering chronic and debilitating illnesses for which treatment is largely ineffective.

A full set of Amnesty International recommendations addressing the human rights violations linked to the Bhopal gas leak and subsequent pollution can be found in the report at:  Read More »

For many elderly citizens, the children have migrated from joint families in their native home-town to far-away shores. With weakening kinship bonds, it’s an empty nest for them quite late in their lives, but parents have learnt to cope with loneliness. For some, staying in old-age homes seems to be a viable option; others have banded themselves together in groups, helping each other out. They don’t want to be alone in their loneliness.

Thousands of parents of Non Resident Indians sprinkled across Indian cities, have joined together into formal organizations like the NRIPA (Non-Resident Indian Parents Association). They're the other half of the glamorous story of successful Indians abroad, consisting of proud parents who don't want their children to give up the greener pastures across the Atlantic, but can't stop wishing that their family was whole once again, either.  Read More »

Nafisa Ali, the former Miss India and a well-known socialite-activist, says she wants to hug her. Mahesh Bhatt, the Bollywood film-maker, would like to touch her feet. Both of them were speaking in a popular TV show about the candid and defiant Nalini Jameela, whose autobiography in Malayalam, Oru Lyngika-thozhilaliyude Atmakadha begins thus “I am 51 years old. And I would like to continue to be a sex worker.”

The 152-page book has smashed sales record in Kerala; it has also exposed the prevalent double standards – for example, the senior police officials “enjoying” the favors at night, and getting them arrested the following day.  Read More »

It is a dehumanizing act - something that eats away the core that defines you as a human, destroys the self-worth and makes a living corpse out of you. Ask the students who have gone through the nightmare. Does ragging really help to bring them close to each other? Or is it simply a cruel exercise in sadism?

The recent death of an engineering college student in the city of
Jalandhar in
North India has once again drawn the authorities’ attention to the menace of ragging. Tortured and humiliated, the student jumped in front of a speeding train. As usual, televisions did justice to their role of informing the public, showing the grieving parents, shocked friends, et al. Just the same way they showed a similar story last year in Mumbai of a girl jumping from the hostel terrace. Interviews with friends and classmates of the victims have, time and again, confirmed that they were physically assaulted, and forced into deviant sexual behavior. Even premier institutions like IITs have had several cases of students leaving the institution they had joined after years of hard work, unable to cope up this exercise "to foster friendship"  Read More »

Don’t mess with the keyboard jabbers. They have the mightiest sword of ideas. And a raison d’etre – a higher purpose that can shake the fog out of dead minds.

Yes, we won’t let the government mess with you, said the Calcutta High Court to Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi writer, quashing a ban imposed on the third volume of her seven-part autobiography 'Dwikhandito' (Split in Two) by the Leftist government of  the Indian State of West Bengal. It was an assertion of the right to expression for the feisty writer, who fled her native country in 1994 after her book, 'Lajja',(or Shame), dealing with the plight of Hindus in
Bangladesh, had angered the religious fundamentalists. Since then she has lived in Sweden,
Germany,
France, the
United States and
India. She, like Salman Rushdie whose Satanic Verses caused a similar stir, believes Muslims are their own enemies – “Muslims would be the worst sufferers if Islamic fundamentalism is provided fodder because Islam harms Muslims most and not people from other religions."  Read More »