PATRIARCHY

Watching old movies is a journey back through time, revisiting the social attitudes of our past.  A lot has changed during the last six or seven decades, much of it for the better. Thank goodness I don’t have to wear a white shirt and necktie just to go downtown nowadays, but back in the 1950s that was the norm, the required male attire. I remember my father somewhat awkwardly putting on his dress-up clothes, struggling with his necktie. Being a former fisherman, Dad was skilled at tying all sorts of complicated knots, but that necktie was one he never quite mastered.

We are living in darker times and these are turning more darker with each passing day. Killing of children in conflict zones like Kashmir, Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan is continuing with no stop to these. From 2008 onwards in Kashmir we have seen in popular uprisings, how children have been killed and blinded by state backed forces. Year after year, we[Read More...]

  Recent months have seen a righteous outpouring against the pervasive abuse, harassment, sexual assault, discrimination, humiliation, and degradation women are forced to endure in every realm of life. This is extremely positive and takes on heightened importance in light of—and, no doubt, is fueled by—the ugly shock of Trump, a bragging sexual predator, assuming the presidency and using the[Read More...]

Gender inequality is not only a pressing moral and social issue but also a critical economic challenge. India has a larger relative economic value at stake from advancing gender equality than any of the ten regions analysed in a McKinsey Global Institute report, The Power of Parity: How Advancing Women’s Equality Can add $12 Trillion To Global Growth. The report[Read More...]

For my entire adult life, I’ve tried to help homeless people. For years, I wrote for Street News — a once-popular advocacy newspaper mostly produced and sold by homeless people in New York City. I’ve spoken at rallies in support of homeless people from coast to coast. Mostly, I never left my house without a pocket full of change to give out[Read More...]

  Not long after Nirmala Geghate took over as sarpanch in Wanoja, a remote hamlet in northern Maharashtra, groups of young men stopped hanging out in front of the   shop at the village square, where they used to ogle and catcall female laborers who walked by in dusty saris. There were several ripple effects of the new found women power[Read More...]

  In an ashram perched high on a hill above the city of Guwahati is a small exhibit commemorating the life of India’s most famous son. Alongside a bed  where Mahatma Gandhi himself  slept is a display reminding visitors of something the man himself said in 1921: “Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so[Read More...]

From every nook and corner of the world, a term; “Progress and Development” resounds regularly. Over this term, there is existing competition among nations. Nations strive hard; utilize a big chunk of their budget on this name. However, the concept of progress and development we hold lets us down at once especially the moment we experience moral bankruptcy, discrimination, injustice,[Read More...]

                                      Ay Chaand Yahan Na Nikla Kar! Yeh  Des Hai Andhe Lougoo Ka! (O! moon. Do not Rise here! Our’s  is a country of Blinds!)          These verses of Habib Jaalib are a fair display of our contemporary world. The[Read More...]
The post Frightened Roses! appeared first on Countercurrents.

The recent dastardly incidents of the rape and murder of Zainab in Kasur, Pakistan, Ayesha in Mardan, Pakistan, Asifa in Kathua, two young girls in Jind and Panipat in Harayana, and also the unabated rape incidents in other parts of India, have and must shock us all. Here in Kashmir, as we are yet to come to terms with the[Read More...]