And Just like that.....
It was a cold and foggy evening of December 2001(last week i ..dont remember the date).I sat in Centre for Science and Environment sipping 6th or maybe 7th cup of canteen chai trying hard to file a environment story on Volunteerism.
Unable to concenterate i decided to surf the net-I opened google and started to search for all the websites related to uttaranchal (my favourite passtime).
As usual came across a lot of beautiful pics and lots of websites related to Uttaranchal.
A site-www.uttaranchal.ws (this one was meant to change my life...)
appealed to me instantly- it had a page called webfriends. I was excited hoping to find some of my school friends or people i had lost touch with..
Very excited i clicked on a page and the first posting that caught my eye was from Rajiv Shah ( Had never heard of this name before). There was an instant connection-same last name and Nainital.
I decided to write back saying i was glad to find a Shah listed-the only one at that time among hundreds of unfamiliar listings.
And just like that....on that cold December evening my life was about to change.
Starting that evening the number of outgoing and incoming mails slowly increased in my mailbox . A month later my cellphone was ringing more than it usully used to ....
and just like that ........ exactly a year later( December of 2002 ) Rajiv and myself got married!
Monday, January 30, 2006
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Does a mom get to choose her friends?
Does a mother get to choose her friends?I being one would say NO!As my daughter has turned 15 months quickly i cant help but realise an urgent need of social interaction for her.Since there are very few kids in my apartment i cant help much.So how do i get her to be friends with the few kids who are her age?I soon found the answer to that question-A play group.So now my daughter is a part of a play group in Uptown Charlotte Library.To my suprise i too have found new friends....where?The mothers of the kids who are my daughters friends...I never needed those so called new friends but now i have many of them...Its my daughter who has chosen them for me.I guess as a Mom i am happy being friends with them but may be an indivisual i would need friends with whom i connect more as an indivusual than as a mom only.At the moment i am playing a big role of a mom and i guess i am happy putting myself aside and playing just MOM!!FOR MY LITTLE ONE...
Does a mother get to choose her friends?I being one would say NO!As my daughter has turned 15 months quickly i cant help but realise an urgent need of social interaction for her.Since there are very few kids in my apartment i cant help much.So how do i get her to be friends with the few kids who are her age?I soon found the answer to that question-A play group.So now my daughter is a part of a play group in Uptown Charlotte Library.To my suprise i too have found new friends....where?The mothers of the kids who are my daughters friends...I never needed those so called new friends but now i have many of them...Its my daughter who has chosen them for me.I guess as a Mom i am happy being friends with them but may be an indivisual i would need friends with whom i connect more as an indivusual than as a mom only.At the moment i am playing a big role of a mom and i guess i am happy putting myself aside and playing just MOM!!FOR MY LITTLE ONE...
Human Trafficing
Hard truth: India is haven for child sex
Jameela (14) and Ashfaq (12) are part-time cleaners of houseboats in Kerala’s backwaters. Their employer has told them they have to entertain foreign guests in a “different” way. They don’t mind, because they need the extra cash to take care of their ailing mother. Besides, everyone knows how on Kovalam beaches, bikini-clad aunties and Western uncles roam freely with “paid lads” — even as the police dismiss them as “isolated” cases.Andre (54), an Austrian tourist, was in Delhi just before Diwali last year. He wanted to send $100 to fellow paedophile Lindsay Ashford (an activist trying to decriminalise paedophilia in the West). He met some boys at a cybercafe across the road from his Paharganj hotel, and casually mentioned his tastes, promising them Rs 600 if they could help him out. Three days later, the police picked him up, but had to soon let him go — they hadn’t caught him with a child. He immediately fled the country.On 16 December, 2000, Sangeeta Punekar, child rights activist, accompanied the Mumbai police in a raid on the Madh Island hotel room where Swiss couple Wilhelm Marty (59) and Loshiar Lily Marty (56) were having sex with two girls — aged 9 and 11. The room was filled with paraphernalia and they had recorded the sex. Wilhelm shouted: “You Indians are all corrupt, we can buy you.” They were sentenced to seven years imprisonment, but when they got bail in 2004, they fled the country.India has become one of the hottest child sex tourism destinations. A report, Trafficking in Women and Children in India, sponsored by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), highlights this, mentioning not just Goa, which since the 1990s has uncovered rackets by Freddy Peats and Helmut Brinkmann, but also Alleppy and Ernakulam districts of Kerala, where houseboat tourism has lately seen a boom.But the reports findings tell only part of the story. “The attention paedophiles are paying to India is preposterous,” says Rakesh Gupta, a child rights activist. “They’re mentioning the Golden Triangle — Delhi, Agra and Jaipur — in their anonymous blog posts.”Most paedophiles heading for Kerala start in Delhi, where police estimate the existence of 10 cartels specialising in child sex tourism. “With nearly a lakh homeless children in the Capital, it’s easy for paedophiles to come and exploit them,” says Dr Rajat Mitra, who heads Swanchetan, an NGO specialising in rape trauma.Mitra tells of a time he saw a European in Connaught Place walking with two boys. He stopped the foreigner and asked him how he knew the boys. “Are you the police?” the foreigner aggressively asked, and disappeared. The urchins — good-looking ten-year-olds — said that “uncle” had promised to give them toffees in his hotel room.First-time visitors often find children within three to four days of arrival — delivered to their rooms as bellboys. All they need to do is hook up on an Internet group message board and find the “right” contacts.In Kerala, “sex on the water” is the latest rage for paedophiles. Foreigners usually book houseboats for weeks, and they’re a safe bet. “It’s difficult to track a boat in the winding backwaters,” says a senior policeman in Kottayam. “There are no fixed stopovers and most houseboats carry their workforce, so it is difficult to identify the victim,” he says, admitting the bust a few years back of a German who had procured 38 children from nearby Karnataka, a rare occurrence.In Mumbai, nearly 70,000 minors are abused yearly, estimates Kusumbar Choudhury of Save the Children India. Given that the sex tourism trade is as invisible as it is efficient, there are no hard numbers, but it is believed that the kids come from all corners of the country, as well as Nepal and Bangladesh.Why India, suddenly? Mitra says that the earlier hotspots were Bali and Bangkok — crackdowns in both places have seen a shift in the trade to India. Punekar believes it’s because Pakistan has strict Islamic laws and Sri Lanka has ethnic conflicts, so paedophiles head to democratic India. In addition, Indian hotels and tourism are coming up to international standards. Also, as the Martys taunted, India’s law enforcement is either ignorant, lax or corrupt (or all three).Mumbai’s activists have found that the paedophiles appear far from seedy; they are often highly qualified professionals with a well-thought out plan. And the local contacts have learnt the trade quickly. “Touts who frequent popular spots in Mumbai are highly sophisticated and speak English well,” says Choudhury. He adds that they are clued into the Internet guides and discussion forums where they may find potential customers.In Delhi, the police are fairly clueless. They know that the begging cartels, which began in the 1980s, have caught on to sex child tourism. NGOs claim that street children have caught on to the signs — a ten-rupee bill waved in a certain way, for instance — and that good money makes it difficult for social workers to reach out to them.There’s also a domestic demand. A police officer talks of two public urinals near the New Delhi Railway Station that has become a major destination for local paedophiles. “For Rs 50, ten-year-olds perform oral sex,” he says. “A traffic constable once followed a man who had wrongly parked his car, and stumbled onto this.”The NHRC report says the problem of child sex tourism in India is compounded as there is a “silence of the community and an unwillingness to speak out” on this matter. Only Goa has come up with extensive legislation, but more initiatives from the government are required.URGENTLY!!
Hard truth: India is haven for child sex
Jameela (14) and Ashfaq (12) are part-time cleaners of houseboats in Kerala’s backwaters. Their employer has told them they have to entertain foreign guests in a “different” way. They don’t mind, because they need the extra cash to take care of their ailing mother. Besides, everyone knows how on Kovalam beaches, bikini-clad aunties and Western uncles roam freely with “paid lads” — even as the police dismiss them as “isolated” cases.Andre (54), an Austrian tourist, was in Delhi just before Diwali last year. He wanted to send $100 to fellow paedophile Lindsay Ashford (an activist trying to decriminalise paedophilia in the West). He met some boys at a cybercafe across the road from his Paharganj hotel, and casually mentioned his tastes, promising them Rs 600 if they could help him out. Three days later, the police picked him up, but had to soon let him go — they hadn’t caught him with a child. He immediately fled the country.On 16 December, 2000, Sangeeta Punekar, child rights activist, accompanied the Mumbai police in a raid on the Madh Island hotel room where Swiss couple Wilhelm Marty (59) and Loshiar Lily Marty (56) were having sex with two girls — aged 9 and 11. The room was filled with paraphernalia and they had recorded the sex. Wilhelm shouted: “You Indians are all corrupt, we can buy you.” They were sentenced to seven years imprisonment, but when they got bail in 2004, they fled the country.India has become one of the hottest child sex tourism destinations. A report, Trafficking in Women and Children in India, sponsored by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), highlights this, mentioning not just Goa, which since the 1990s has uncovered rackets by Freddy Peats and Helmut Brinkmann, but also Alleppy and Ernakulam districts of Kerala, where houseboat tourism has lately seen a boom.But the reports findings tell only part of the story. “The attention paedophiles are paying to India is preposterous,” says Rakesh Gupta, a child rights activist. “They’re mentioning the Golden Triangle — Delhi, Agra and Jaipur — in their anonymous blog posts.”Most paedophiles heading for Kerala start in Delhi, where police estimate the existence of 10 cartels specialising in child sex tourism. “With nearly a lakh homeless children in the Capital, it’s easy for paedophiles to come and exploit them,” says Dr Rajat Mitra, who heads Swanchetan, an NGO specialising in rape trauma.Mitra tells of a time he saw a European in Connaught Place walking with two boys. He stopped the foreigner and asked him how he knew the boys. “Are you the police?” the foreigner aggressively asked, and disappeared. The urchins — good-looking ten-year-olds — said that “uncle” had promised to give them toffees in his hotel room.First-time visitors often find children within three to four days of arrival — delivered to their rooms as bellboys. All they need to do is hook up on an Internet group message board and find the “right” contacts.In Kerala, “sex on the water” is the latest rage for paedophiles. Foreigners usually book houseboats for weeks, and they’re a safe bet. “It’s difficult to track a boat in the winding backwaters,” says a senior policeman in Kottayam. “There are no fixed stopovers and most houseboats carry their workforce, so it is difficult to identify the victim,” he says, admitting the bust a few years back of a German who had procured 38 children from nearby Karnataka, a rare occurrence.In Mumbai, nearly 70,000 minors are abused yearly, estimates Kusumbar Choudhury of Save the Children India. Given that the sex tourism trade is as invisible as it is efficient, there are no hard numbers, but it is believed that the kids come from all corners of the country, as well as Nepal and Bangladesh.Why India, suddenly? Mitra says that the earlier hotspots were Bali and Bangkok — crackdowns in both places have seen a shift in the trade to India. Punekar believes it’s because Pakistan has strict Islamic laws and Sri Lanka has ethnic conflicts, so paedophiles head to democratic India. In addition, Indian hotels and tourism are coming up to international standards. Also, as the Martys taunted, India’s law enforcement is either ignorant, lax or corrupt (or all three).Mumbai’s activists have found that the paedophiles appear far from seedy; they are often highly qualified professionals with a well-thought out plan. And the local contacts have learnt the trade quickly. “Touts who frequent popular spots in Mumbai are highly sophisticated and speak English well,” says Choudhury. He adds that they are clued into the Internet guides and discussion forums where they may find potential customers.In Delhi, the police are fairly clueless. They know that the begging cartels, which began in the 1980s, have caught on to sex child tourism. NGOs claim that street children have caught on to the signs — a ten-rupee bill waved in a certain way, for instance — and that good money makes it difficult for social workers to reach out to them.There’s also a domestic demand. A police officer talks of two public urinals near the New Delhi Railway Station that has become a major destination for local paedophiles. “For Rs 50, ten-year-olds perform oral sex,” he says. “A traffic constable once followed a man who had wrongly parked his car, and stumbled onto this.”The NHRC report says the problem of child sex tourism in India is compounded as there is a “silence of the community and an unwillingness to speak out” on this matter. Only Goa has come up with extensive legislation, but more initiatives from the government are required.URGENTLY!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)