India is one of the most gender unequal countries in the world. But the humble bicycle is helping women reclaim space in cities, opening up job prospects, and even encouraging their education opportunities.
Source: THE WIRE
The Wire is a news website available in English and Hindi, was founded in 2015 in New Delhi. It is published by the Foundation for Independent Journalism (FIJ), a non-profit Indian company.
Gotabaya may blame the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war or the earlier COVID-19 pandemic for much of the mess, but there is widespread unanimity that the problems are a product of bad governance for more than a decade.
There is no country that has more hungry mouths to feed than India, which faces not just food inflation that is roiling the global markets but also vulnerability to fertilizer production costs.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not called out Russia for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, but not because he wants to help broker a peace. Rather he only has domestic concerns in mind.
While the strategic issues are still being debated, the Indian government has dismissed the moral issue by concluding a cheap oil agreement with Russia. But are Indian consumers prepared to accept the true cost of discount Russian oil?
Holi is much more than just throwing petals and colored powders. In addition to being a celebration of life, family and fertility, its songs and dances can also be a vehicle to warn against life’s dangers, or depict intimate moments where the saris are wet and the bodies can touch. And the Bollywood film industry too is progressively moving away from a sanitized depiction.
The Modi government chose to abstain on the UN Security Council condemnation of the Russian invasion, but it underestimates how much India will be condemned on the wrong side of history in the minds of American leaders for years to come.
The true version of Hinduism teaches that one has to respect other faiths. That has been threatened the past century by ideologues inspired by the worst ideas of our times.
Many Muslim female students lament that several of their Hindu friends have turned their backs on them, despite the fact they have been friends for several years.
The inclusion of caste in its anti-discrimination policy by the California State Universities is as a major triumph for activists.
Facebook whistleblower Sophie Zhang says that the tech giant knowingly facilitates undermining democracy in India. Fair voting cannot be guaranteed if real people’s voices are drowned out by armies of fake online commentators.
As India debates raising the legal age of women to marry to match the age for men, one women writer asks what it means for her.
From helping the homeless to investing in schools, the Anjali Thagana Medai dedicates its profits to ways to help the living of the whole community
For an Indian growing up in the UK in the 1960s, racism was an everyday experience ranging from schoolyard taunts to threats of violence and persecution. And with the recent revelations of abuse suffered by Pakistan-born cricket star Azeem Rafiq, overt racism is still very much alive. in British society.
So a dozen of the top CEOs in the world (including heads of Google, Microsoft, IBM and now Twitter) come from a country with 18% of the world’s population. But there are other numbers our overly proud fellow Indians should be running.
The year-long national movement of farmers challenged the government of Narendra Modi against all odds, and ultimately prevailed by focusing on unity across India’s diverse ethnic, religious and geographic landscape.
Local villagers in western India have been forced to live with a mining waste site on the edge of town. What happens when you wake up one day and the giant mound of industrial waste has imploded?
Categories
A Touching Tale Of Leprosy In Kashmir
“We all have the same story here. After my family abandoned me, it was these people who adopted me and looked after me for all these years.”
Women who have found themselves in charge of a family after the sudden deaths of family members discover rules, regulations and laws making mockery of their situation.
Born some eight centuries ago, the famed poet and philosopher Rumi offered ideas on religion that bear little resemblance to the brand of Islam being imposed right now in Afghanistan by the Taliban regime.
The stigma around so-called “non-custodial mothers” has prevented us from expanding our own imagination of what motherhood can, or does, look like when it is practiced by non-residential mothers
Op-Ed INDIA — I don’t watch many Netflix programs, but a series recommended by my cousin has struck me like a bolt of lightning. Called How to Become a Tyrant, it presents what it calls “a playbook for absolute power.” Much of it is tongue-in-cheek, yet it’s based on the actual tactics and strategies used by Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Muammar Gaddafi, Kim Il-sung, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. So if you take it seriously, it tells you what you must do if you aspire to be India’s tanashah. And the remarkable thing is it feels uncannily like […]
It’s not just England and not just the reaction against the team’s loss in the European final. Europe’s football culture, and culture in general, reflect deep-seated prejudices that require a real response.
Aspects of discredited Israeli policies are being imitated in a country half a continent away.
NEW DELHI — I had never given thought to the provenance of funeral wood, until news reports revealed in late April that officials in Delhi had begun receiving requests to chop trees in city parks amidst the colossal surge in COVID deaths. It was a jolting statement to encounter, for it forced me to reframe a life-giver into a death-enabler in ominously stripped, urgent terms. Wood, of course, had been used for cremation since ancient times, but to think of it as coming from our very midst instead of some sequestered supply-area bore a sting of abrasiveness. Would our public […]
The need to prioritize comprehensive planning is just as acute in both in urban and rural areas.
Particularly in mega cities like New Delhi, the pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns have changed our audible environment. What does that tell us about where we’re heading?
From Malaysia, where she now lives, writer Mythily Nair laments the cold attitutes of some fellow diaspora members toward the catastrophic second wave washing over India right now.
People think doctors have lost empathy. But we feel each death, and every young life lost comes as a bolt out of the blue.
As the U.S. government pivots its foreign policy, the Taliban is ramping up plans to reestablish a totalitarian state. Regional support for a sovereign Afghan government has never been more urgent.
The raging COVID-19 epidemic, combined with an acute shortage of oxygen, has created a nightmare scenario in places like Nashik, in the northern part of Maharashtra state.
The government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sets off youth groups to enforce lockdowns and wants to control the ‘demand’ for oxygen cylinders.
A year after riots in Delhi and elsewhere, Muslims are being forced out of their neighborhoods.
Residents of the state’s ‘bastis’ get free rations and state-provided services on the back of ID documents with proof of address. But their homes are also subject to frequent demolition on the grounds that they are illegal encroachment.
A year after the world’s second most populous nation went into quarantine, a new study aims to calculate the cost in terms of mental health illness, suicide and inability to receive medical care.
Absent in India’s schools, which help reinforce power imbalances, is any real acknowledgement of street-level efforts to push back.
The contemporary crises of our world – climatic, democratic, technological, economic, epidemic – can no longer be understood or contained within the logic of nation states.
NEW DELHI — India is a cricket-crazy nation. We love our cricketers and some of us even worship them. Also, we love our cinema. We look up to the reel life heroes and admire them with the expectation that they are real life heroes. But what happens when these influencers do something unexpected? When we keep someone on a pedestal we, unknowingly, keep them in the position of authority and give them the power to influence us, our decisions. From their fashion sense to their political ideologies, we believe everything they do could be correct, since they’ve achieved something we […]
In a rush to bolster its image, the Modi government is giving away coronavirus vaccines that will do little for the country’s international standing and would be better served at home.
It’s stupid to expect people without any medical training to understand how each vaccine candidate has been evaluated. Public accountability offers an alternative.