Life

|By Mari Marcel Thekaekara|New Internationalist| A child rapist, acquitted by a lower court, was finally convicted this October, after an 18-month legal battle by the child rights activist group, HAQ. The details of a child rape leave any normal person sickened and horrified. How anyone can rape an infant is, to the average human being, beyond comprehension. Yet more and ...

|By Mari Marcel Thekaekara|New Internationalist| An abandoned Australian baby, born to a surrogate Indian mother, has apparently caused some concern in Australia. In India, where life is cheap, one more baby born, abandoned or dead, in a land of over one billion, rarely makes waves. The baby in question was left back with the Indian birth mother because the Australian ...

See how a former gangster and drug addict changed her life, her children’s, as well as the lives of  young, “up-coming gangsters”. Her secret weapon to reach the troubled youth? – Dance.  That’s our kind of success story.  

What happens to the destitute when they die? St. Joseph’s Hospice in India is an example of those who provide shelter, food, clothing, medical help and, when needed, last rites for the destitute, aged or mentally ill.    This video offers a glimpse.

|Our Better World| Surrounded by poverty, a group of engineering students in Mumbai decide to meet a few of the thousands of street children in their city, to learn about their lives and hear their stories. They came across Salaam Baalak Trust, which helps street children with food, shelter, education and also offers friendship and a sense of belonging.

|By Sanjib Guha| Shubhada Varadkar, an Odissi exponent from Mumbai, has survived quite a few tough battles in her 51 years to reach a juncture where she can proudly announce that she is more an achiever than a tragic icon. Besides being a professor of Economics at a Mumbai college, Shubhada also served as a news reader for Doordarshan before ...

|By Sanjay Pandey| Ganga and Jamuna Mondal, professionally known as the ‘Spider Sisters’, have been working at travelling circuses since infancy. “We started working in circus when we were just three months old. Our father would take us to circuses across the county. So we practically started earning as infants,” narrated Ganga, the talkative one among the sisters while Jamuna ...

|By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist| Another horrendous rape. Two young girls, 14 and 16-year old cousins, were abducted, raped, tortured and hanged from a tree last week in Badaun, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.  It’s a completely sickening scenario. No, far worse than sickening actually. But it’s hard to churn out words or emotion, day ...

|By Mari Marcel Thekaekara | New Internationalist | Goa, about 40 years ago, was just Goa. Home to a laid-back people who spread all over the world because the Portuguese colonial masters did little to educate or create job opportunities for the local population. To the average Indian, indeed to most coastal people, except for Caucasians, beaches were places where ...

Phones, I-pads, headphones, laptops, consoles! The truth is, technology, as wonderful as it is, seems to have created a generation of one handed zombies.Today everything is expressed via text messages or done over the internet. In all this technological mayhem, we forgotten that we live in the real world.. While we are so busy reading about others’ lives, we miss out seeing what ...