India among top human trafficking destinations: UN

Wednesday, October 03, 2007
New Delhi: India is emerging as a leading destination for human trafficking in South Asia, with over 35,000 young girls and women from Bangladesh and Nepal being brought into the country every year, the United Nations said on Wednesday."Human trafficking is world's third largest profit-making illicit industry and in south Asia India is among the favoured destinations. Women are mostly brought from Bangladesh and Nepal," said Gary Lewis, chief of UN office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

"In India 20,000-25,000 women and children are trafficked from Bangladesh annually, while 5,000-15,000 are brought illegally from Nepal for the primary purpose of prostitution and slavery," Lewis said ,"The more devastating fact is that now Nepali girls below 10 years are being forced into the trade. In the 1980s (trafficked) girls were mostly in the age group of 14-16 and in 1994 the age further reduced to 10-14. But last year girls below the age of 10 were found trapped into the human trafficking business. This not only puts their lives in peril but also exposes them to higher risk of HIV/AIDS. 2-3 million people are trafficked annually in and out of India and, most disturbingly, a large number of people from states like West Bengal and Orissa and the northeastern region are trafficked to metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai for various reasons.’

According to the UN definition, trafficking in persons means the recruitment, transport, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion abduction, of fraud, for the purpose of exploitation.
P.R. Nair, project coordinator with UNODC, said: "People from these states are trafficked to work in dance bars, pubs, restaurants, friendship clubs, massage parlours and for domestic chores."
Asked about what initiative the UN is taking to curb human trafficking, Nair said: "We are closely working with states and are also providing special training to police officials dealing with human trafficking victims. Nair said that 96 rescue operations have been conducted so far this year and 800 victims including 662 minors were rescued. "A total of 1,008 traffickers and 220 customers were also arrested."
Roma Debabrata, who runs an NGO 'STOP' for such people, said the need of the hour is more and quick conviction of those involved in human trafficking.

Whose Lives are This Anyway

With All the Rigor of Pity
Count them
You may count them. They
Are not like the sand on the sea shore. They
Are not like the multitudes of stars. But Single people.
In a corner, in the street.

Yes, count them. Watch them
Watch the sky from their ruins.
Get out from between the stones, and Return. Where to return. But count them,
For they serve their terms in dreams.....

(Yahuda Amichai)



This was the railway track, where just one day before, these kids were flying colorful kites over the sky. The date was 15th August 2007, Independence Day of India. They were flying kites to celebrate the day. They love their country, they cheer and dance when India wins a cricket match. They cry when India loses...
That day, while flying kites three of them got crushed under a fast running train. They were looking to the sky and to the colors of their kites at that time....
Well, it hardly matters. India is one of the fastest developing country in Asia just after China.
Wheels of development are moving fast. No matter who and what comes on the way. Kids still love their India. They cheered when it won Asia Cup in Hockey and wept when it lost to England in cricket...
(These and many more photographs are taken by a very young and brilliant photographer Marcus Fornell, touring India through all modes of transportation...Train, Aeroplane to Bullock-carts. A few days before, he fell from the camel and received bruises on chin and got one of his camera lens broken. However, he has brought fascinating pictures from the deserts and villages of colorful Rajasthan.
Want to see ? Go to Incredible India: http://marcusfornell.blogspot.com

ईशप का गधा विख्यात कवि रितुराज की नयी कविता है।
उनकी एक और नयी कविता देखिये

देर रात का प्यार

तेज गति से दौडती गाडियो के शोर मे

मैने उसे पुकारा

पहले खिड्की से झान्का

बिजली जली थी भीतर

शून्य मे लिप्त अन्धेरा था आन्गन मे

हम छिप गये पाप करने के अकेलेपन मे

रोशनी बुझा दी गयी थी

दो कछुओ की तरह हम सम्हल-सम्हल कर

बढ रहे थे एक दूसरे की ओर

सान्स के तार मिलाते

सभी दौडती गाडिया बहुत दूर निकल चुकी थी

एक जो खडी थी उसने सीटी मारी

जैसे हमारा इन्तज़ार कर रही हो

उस समय दो यात्री अन्तरिक्छ मे

उपग्रह से बाहर निकल कर विचरण कर रहे थे

There is still a word - 'Class'

Class Is Still Critical
John Pilger
A state of parallel worlds determines almost everything we do and how we do it, everything we know and how we know it. The word that once described it, class, is unmentionable, just as imperialism used to be. Thanks to George W Bush, the latter is back in the lexicon in Britain, if not at the BBC.
Class is different. It runs too deep; it allows us to connect the present with the past and to understand the malignancies of a modern economic system based on inequity and fear. So it is seldom spoken about publicly, lest a Goldman Sachs chief executive on multimillions in pay or bonuses, or whatever they call their legalised heists, be asked how it feels to walk past office cleaners struggling on the minimum wage.
Just as elite power seeks to order other countries according to the demands of its privilege, so class remains at the root of our own society's mutations and sorrows. In recent weeks, the killing of an 11-year-old Liverpool boy and other tragedies involving children have been thoroughly tabloided. Interviewing Keith Vaz, chairman of the House of Commons home affairs select committee, one journalist wondered if "we" should go out and deal personally with our vile, mugging, stabbing, shooting youth. To this, the nodding Vaz replied that the problem was "values".
The main "value" is ruthless exclusion, such as the exile of millions of young people on vast human landfills (rubbish dumps) called housing estates, where they are forearmed with the knowledge that they are different and schools are not for them. A rigid curriculum, a system devoted to testing child-ren beyond all reason, ensures their alienation. "From the age of seven," says Shirley Franklin of the Institute of Education, "20 per cent of the nation's children are seen, and see themselves, as failures . . . Violence is an expression of hatred towards oneself and others." With the all-digital world of promise and rewards denied them, let alone a sense of belonging and esteem, they move logically to the streets and crime.
Take Afghanistan, where the irony is searing. In less than seven years, the Anglo-American slaughter of countless "Taliban" (people) has succeeded in spectacularly reviving an almost extinct poppy trade, so that it now supplies the demand for heroin on Britain's poorest streets, where enlightened drug rehabilitation is not considered a government "value". Parallel worlds require other elite forms of exclusion. At the Edinburgh Television Festival on 24 August, the famous BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman made a much-hyped speech "attacking" television for "betray[ing] the people we ought to be serving". What was revealing about the speech was the attitude towards ordinary viewers it betrayed. According to Paxman, "while the media and politicians feel free to criticise each other, neither has the guts to criticise the public, who are presumed never to be wrong". In fact, ordinary people are treated in much of the media as invisible or with contempt, or they are patronised.
Not once in his speech did Paxman refer to Iraq, nor did he tell us why Blair was never seriously challenged on that bloodbath in a broadcast interview. That the BBC had played a critical role in amplifying and echoing Blair's and Bush's lies was apparently unmentionable. The coming attack on Iran, led again by propaganda filtered through broadcasting, is from the same parallel world, also unmentionable.

UDAY PRAKASH: Paul Gomra : The Deranged Poet of Highway by Amitava Kumar

UDAY PRAKASH: Paul Gomra : The Deranged Poet of Highway by Amitava Kumar

Words do play magics

Charles Simic
Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1954 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958.
His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his Bachelor's degree from New York University while working at night to cover the costs of tuition.
His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008), My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); and Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.

Country Fair

If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
It doesn't matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,
One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.
Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.
She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

From Hotel Insomnia, published by Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.

Eyes Fastened With Pins

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.

I read these poems and liked them immensely…so you also share the pleasure with me..
Uday Prakash

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America's crusade as Israel's. On 16 August, the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30bn military "aid package" for Israel, the world's fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the world's tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history.