Freedom at noon

Pain to be a victim. It can only be experienced and cannot be explained in simple words. But for all those who plan to execute tragedies of our time, these victimization of people are not important. And that is why many failed to gauge the pain that went to a large number of people when the Gujarat mayhem was in progress.
When I go through the books that documents ethnic cleansing or pogroms in the world and see the horrifying pictures of history, I cannot estimate the pains those people who suffered have gone through. That is simply because the paragraphs and the books cannot bring the agony to life. But what agonizes me are the reasons. In a majority of cases, there are no reasons at all. Whimsical minds worked overtime to create hatred and the lust for power eliminated those who would have never been harmful to any of these powerhouses.
The result : millions and millions died for reasons they nor their near and dear ones cannot answer for generations. Neither can their killers do. Reasons actually don’t exist at all.
I am no international expert on war crimes to explain in details of why and when the deaths occurred and whether those responsible should be tried for war crimes. What I understand is a limited world view. A window of humanity and compassion. A mission for relative peace. In our endeavor to earn and have a decent living, we became journalists.
Among a community that cherished government jobs, a change in track was a little difficult. More so, if you already have a government job and you quit it for some silly freelancing. What about the pension? – A common question that doodled like a noodle all along, everywhere.
But I was sure that I had to leave. All my ten years in the government job went into thinking about quitting the job. Deadlines after deadlines expired but I did not quit. It was only after ten years that I took the bold- by my standards – to quit. And I really don’t see logical reasons for behind it. I just see what my career would have been had I remained with the department. I would have been yet another retired government employee with a little house and a car with children being married off. I didn’t want that life because I wanted to broaden my world view.
There are several reasons that I am unfit for any government job. My wavelength never matched with anyone in the department or vice versa. The first and the foremost is patience that I hardly possess. The second most important is the ability to gauge where money can be generated. The third and the most horrible to tolerate useless and the world’s biggest fools called bureaucrats. This is what irked me throughout my tenure and I could hardly match the endurance that some of my colleagues had embraced and compromised. The net result is that no officer liked me. There were exceptions but barring a few, everyone thought that I was exceeding my limits.
I used to get reports from friends about the murmur people had about me. The most common was that I was arrogant and care little for even my superiors. But none had the courage to tell it on my face not because they feared me but because they knew that no body would pass this ‘compliment’ on them even if they replace me.
By the sheer strength of the department and also taking the hierarchy into account I was nobody in the department. A simple Tax Assistant who had to take the help of friends to file his own return. A very simple complaint from some lower level staff was sufficient to transfer me or to take any action against me. But thankfully I never gave such an opportunity because I was not interested in bribes.
Since I was never interested in bribes, I never worked in field and hence I had no knowledge of the nitty gritties of the tax calculation. There were several occasion that I still remember when I had to hang my face down when confronted with some simple questions related to taxation.
My interest in the department continued to fade day by day and I started thinking of how soon I can leave the department. My problem was peculiar. I was never interested to join the mainstream media and waste my whole life covering some beat in either the corridors of the state assembly or the stinking board meetings of municipalities. I had different ideas but it was difficult for me to venture out without any proper and alternate income.
But I enjoyed in whatever I did during my tenure and many of those experiences prompts me to write much more than a mere nostalgic paragraph. The most farce and the memorable journey is the visiting of Public Accounts Committee.
Committee on restructuring, committee on audit, committee on one or the other thing propped up almost every month to the typically non-functional but auto-run government department. So hardly had the officers and the staff finished reporting lengthy reports and fudged figures to one committee, another committee resurfaced. All consisting of MPs whose names were as alien to the department officials as they were to their own constituency.
Bureaucrats drawing whopping salaries, borrowed from World Bank and IMF since taxpayers money had already been drained to feed and protect politicians, had no other job to do than pleasing this committees. Their accommodation, food, logistics, welcoming and sending them off were all handled by these bureaucrats. I sometimes wondered when they get time for assessment of the tax returns, their primary job.

Here I learnt that it is very difficult to remain straight especially when you reach to a certain level. Ask any poor bureaucrat and he will tell you how remaining non corrupt in a government department is a very difficult exercise to practice. If you want to feed your three-member family, you have to be in the gang. Otherwise, the salary government gives cannot make both ends meet. Then why do these people work for a meager sum? This is the question many people ask when confronted with complaints of low salary. There cannot be two answers to this. And the only answer is that they are not even fit in the government jobs, where else they can enter.
The system of recruiting people to jobs is outdated now. But it is still followed. People who answer from four options given as to where Sabarmati is located or 2x3x5 enters the corridors of the government department. Without any technical skills and without any type of training, they train themselves in one natural gift god has bestowed on them - bargain for themselves and their family. What is wrong in that?
Not that I came with a silver spoon and had enough to withstand the onslaught. But I enjoyed writing and more I enjoyed earning from that. So I lived a life style that was equivalent to the most corrupt person in my category. I did realize that many had questions as to how I survived without taking anything for ten long years. More when the annual increment was Rs 10 when I joined in 1993 and Rs 100 when I left in 2002. This was not even enough for my daily petrol bills. So I was confident of earning from my writing double or triple the salary that I draw from the department. But I was not confident enough to put my papers so easily.
So I stayed put and in the meantime major eyewash called ‘Restructuring’ took place. The only people who benefited from it were again the bureaucrats. From two Chief Commissioners, there were several chief commissioners. From a handful of commissioners, there were more commissioners than peons. The two Chief Commissioners had no jobs to do and therefore some of them passed their time visiting moffusil charges and some of them had women to fiddle with. With the arrival of more Chief Commissioners, the visits increased and the installments that some of these moffusil charges have to hand it over to these visiting dignitaries multiplied thereby putting more pressure on the tax evaders to fund more.
In the meantime, this restructuring got me transferred to Mehsana, some 90 kilometers from my house. I decided to go rather than begging to be retained for some time since I was already in a mood to quit. I thought I would also see some moffusil charges.
Mehsana was a mess. Nothing was proper except the routine under the table dealings. No staff, no computers, no stationary and the most non-cooperative staff ready to stab you on your back. Here I also decided to become corrupt. Corruption need not be always in the form of cash or kind. You can easily use freely available time to bribe. I bribed ‘time’ and began coming at 11.30 and leaving at 3.30. So I bribed one hour each during morning and evening which was not liked by any of my superiors and colleagues. I had a very silly and unfounded reason that none of my work is pending and so I should be allowed to maintain my timings, which actually was against the government rules. But I could not compromise with my writing and so I had to decide my next step and it was during a chilly December day that I tendered my resignation.
Days after I put in my papers that I realized how free I am in this world. There is no one to boss me around and I had my liberty to study, read and also to decide which stories to do and which one to avoid.
The decision to resign did not come overnight. There were strong grounds for me and it was some sort of financial stability. I was lucky enough to get a break in a medium which I never thought was my cup of tea. Radio always fascinated me and working for this medium was something dream come true. So I accepted the challenge and started working immediately.
I had to improve a lot for working in the Radio segment. The first and the foremost was to cut down my pace of talking which was rather very fast. I realized it in Manila when I spoke for a minimum 20 minutes and at the end; I realized that none of the 19 participants in the seminar got an iota of what I had said. I asked them to be very frank to say whether they understood what I said or not. One of the brave souls said he didn’t and then I slowed down and gradually slowed down so that I can adjust to my listeners as well.
The second was to change a slight south Indian accent that I had. I have had no problems with this accent in print segment. So I began searching for some radio crash course, which can also teach me the right voice for radio. But the editors at California told me that they had no problem in my reworked voice and was perfectly alright for a newscast. But I continue to learn from people whom I admire as good speakers. One of them is Nick Gowing of BBC and the other is the FSRN newscast reader Deepa Fernandez.
From a bonded government laborer, it is a different world as a person who is at his liberty to decide his own schedules. But unlike some of my friends from the Western countries, we are bound by social commitments, which consume a large chunk of the time. Commitments towards parents, spouse, children. It is a duty one can’t ignore. One should never.

Pix (c) Binu Alex

Feudal mindsets

Saharashri ka sandesh deshvasiyon ke naam. This is what I read on the Sahara Samay channel while Subroto Roy was addressing a self discovery speech. For a moment, I felt I was listening to an address from the Indian prime minister or the President. Subroto may be Almighty to his employees, not to me. Why on earth should he address me? And that too from a feudal mindset and a feudalistic surrounding. The entire episode looked like a king addressing to his subjects. The speech was full of information about projects that he termed as making India from a developing nation to a developed nation. Nothing could have been more disgusting for me than to listen to this bluffing. This precisely means that he is earning nothing and dedicates the entire profit for the benefit of the nation. Sahara is India and India is Sahara is what I should understand from this speech.
Someone remarked to me that America is a rich nation with poor people while India is a poor nation with rich people. Behind India’s woes and worries, people like Roy made merry making. In what is now called para banking, he established offices to collect money from gullible investors to create a big conglomerate. Even the government purchased land from farmers and sold it to him to make valleys and housing complexes. So much so that each politician want to see their faces with this person. Even music albums immortalized his rags to riches story. Fine. But why should I be bothered? I have no interest in listening to a person who may or may appear in public just because a magazine questioned his existence.
This is what is keeping India away from developing into a nation with sensitivity. In my opinion, India is still a theoretic state in the sense that it has little feeling towards its people. None of the policies are framed keeping in mind its people. One of the latest example is the WTO agreement that Kamal Nath has entered into making drugs unaffordable for Indians. We cared less to see our own people and instead obliged to international commitments. People in India starve while we splurge billions in defence expenditure in the name of protecting the country we care little about protecting its people. Our enemy is Pakistan while we have entered into friendly pact with poverty, malnutrition, starvation, female infanticide and nepotism. What will you do protecting a country of malnourished citizens?
Our government servants act as if they own the country. They are little or no different to people like Roy. While they rule the kingdom they are designated, business conglomerates rule the entire nation. They have say in each budget. The finance minister calls for meeting of CII, FICCI and chambers of commerce to discuss what they expect from the budget. If their needs are not fulfilled, they make a big hue and cry. No finance minister has ever cared to call a poor guy in a remote place as to what they need. If at all he has done, the response would have been very simple. They need their daily wages so that they can survive and look after their families. Their ambitions and aspirations are simple yet never fulfilled. Our industry’s aspirations are a never ending process. The more you accede to them, the more they demand. They need tax holidays to open their business. But these same tax holidays are not translated into betterment of people.
Yes, logically, the business houses do business for profits. Their primary concern is making profit and their accountability is towards their shareholders. But then they should do business in the same way as a tribal in Panchmahal work in any construction site in the country. They should not plead to the government for land on lease which can next be compared to free land, tax holidays, tax exemptions, tax evasions, voluntary disclosure of evaded income, excise exemptions and the list is endless.
This is exactly how businessmen like Roy or Ambani are doing the business. No single business house can claim to be doing business without government doles. They have high connections to reach the government whereas the poor laborers have little idea how to reach even their legislator.
So coming to Roy’s address, the question again props up as to who he called as ‘deshvasiyon’.

Pix (C) Binu Alex

Immortalizing Characters

Human natures are strange. Sometimes it makes you laugh and at some juncture also force you to cry. Some characters are unforgettable. Some are immortalized in movies and novels while some are immortalized in human brains. You may be facing a lot of problems in your career or life but seeing people who are really funny characters make you forget those moments. I would not name these characters here. The first one is a character who can be best described as one of the most selfish person I have met. When he arrived in the city, I forced a relative of mine to rent out his newly acquired flat to him at a cheaper rent. He continued to visit our group during his weekly holidays and we used to go out for dinner. But in more than a year of the outing that we had, I have never seen the color of his purse. He would rather sit quietly without bothering about the bill each time we went to a restaurant. We always felt that we had undertaken a long bond to feed him. But after the meals, he would never forget to enter into a cyber café and talk to his girl friend, whom he had befriended on net. Obviously she was not an Indian. Early morning into the house and he would take his breakfast only after the lunch hours because the nighttime chatting never allowed him to see the beauty of early morning sun. But as soon as he woke up, he did one thing and that is to move the newspaper from the doorstep the stack. The collection of newspapers on one corner of the house kept room looked as if he is working archive fresh newspaper stocks because it never got opened. Ironically, he worked for a newspaper. Ultimately he went to the country of his girl friend and got married. But he never told his marriage news to any one including any one of us. But couple of my friends forced him to admit it. Back to India with his wife he never offered a single cup of tea to any one of us. What’s worst, he never told me that he got married and never met me again after the marriage. But while he was in the city bankrupting all friends with his no nonsense approach for denying payment of any type of bills, there were other funny characters in town in the same profession that he was in, journalism.
Another was a colleague of this funny one. Let’s Call him Mr X. If there were at least a thousand like Mr X, detergent brands would have lost its charm. For he is the one who is allergic to water. He also glues his clothes to his nature, never to wash at all. Fairy tale stories about this character are laugh riots. As soon as he reaches home, and that too some body else’s, he would sit with his regular quota of sweets, some times more than a kilo. By midnight, he would go to a corner of the room, unzip the pants and it falls down to the ground. Because of the high content of salt particles on clothe, the pant would rather stand straight. He would take his legs out of it and lie down on the floor with the shirt, which was almost down till the knee. There is also a reason behind the length of the shirt. Like his allergy to water, he was also allergic to undergarments. Morning he would go to the same corner where his pants firmly stood and put both his legs into the leg room of the pants, pull it up, zip it and leave to the office. What a character? Some of his friends narrated his embarrassing experience in one of the Mumbai suburban stations. As the train was leaving the station, he ran in the thought that he would make it. But his pants deceived him. Rather his waist deceived him as the pant made its way down to the floor of the platform. With no undergarments and the shirt in a swinging condition, the scene would have been a lift from Mr. Beans show. But he was not bothered. He pulled the pants up and waited for the next train amidst some amazing looks.

The other character I would not forget is from the government department where I worked when I was prime. People called him JP and he was a head clerk when I last saw him in the department corridors. The first time that I met him was in a section where we used to go to fetch our monthly salary. He comes to the office in spotless white. He is fair and good-looking and would rather keep the Commissioners and above on the back burner with his charisma. But his real nature was worse than any class four employees. There are witnesses who said that JP would approach cloth merchants for favours in the name of his officer. In one such incident, JP reached one of the whole sale cloth traders in Ahmedabad asked 100 meters of lined cloth that is used to stitch underwear for elderly people. The trader was curious enough to know why he wanted such a huge pile of cloth to be delivered to his own address. Pat came his reply, “saab ke kuch mehmano ko nikar chahiye” (Some relatives of saab want to stitch underwear). The trader was stunned and asked him whether saab had sent him for this purpose. While he made his way out, he nodded his head but did not notice one of his own colleagues sitting in the same office for another purpose.
Poor saab would not have even dreamt of stitching a hundred meter underwear. Rather his appearance shows that he would prefer some trendy undergarments.
JP is very particular in his timings in the office. He has a small brief case and the security guards always itched to give him a 21 gun salute when he entered the office. Their bashing of shoes would even make 9/11 collapse to shame. Such was the respect that they gave to him. The only problem was that they thought he was the highest ranking authority in the department though they sometimes doubted seeing his parrot green scooter. But if they had brains to think and ponder over it, they would have replaced JP in the department. So they don’t think and the first criterion for the salute is costume.
Two floors above, he had a special table and chair. He would sit on his chair and start talking about his overnight deeds to his already bored colleagues in the room. The fingers would slowly go to the lock of the brief case and any new onlooker would be impressed to see that he took the files home so that the pending works are finished. But surprisingly, it is not the file that comes out of the brief case. It is rather a blouse. A blouse.
But it is no surprise to his colleagues in the room. They are seeing it for years. He would then take a needle and some thread and start stitching the hooks of the blouses so that it is delivered before noon. The blouse belongs to one of the lady members in the office and those who wear his stitched clothes agree that he is a number one tailor. But the ultimate pleasure is that these same people have no knowledge how he spreads around the news about the size of their bosoms. He is actually a data bank for the information on the sizes of each and every part of a majority of the lady employees. And he displays these data with great punctuality and pride. Amidst all these drama, one thing that is very punctual is not to be loyal to the department that pays him the salary. There are obviously more characters.
To conclude

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(Audio) Employment Guarantee Act in India

A campaign is now underway in India to garner support for the fundamental right for the country's residents to be free from hunger and malnutrition. While a bill called the Employment Guarantee Plan is under consideration in the Indian Parliament, the county's poor continue to starve while government warehouses overflow with grains. FSRN Correspondent Binu Alex reports from Panchmahal, one of the poorest districts in western India.

Duration : 3:55

Free Speech Radio News Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Why farmers in Gujarat stay away from suicide

When the entire south India passed through a series of suicide incidents, I wondered how the farmers of Gujarat read it with a pinch of salt in their local newspapers. They had felt dejected on the reasons for the suicides. Many of these readers went through the same trauma but never thought of committing suicide. There is always a tomorrow is what they said when asked why they didn't take the ultimate step. The Gujarati resilience and the business culture helped them to survive. Not only survive but also progress.
As Andhra farmers face, these farmers also face sinking wells and rising debts. But why is that they don't take the steps their counterparts in south take. The reason is simple. Gujarati farmers make their life large while the farmers in Andhra cannot see beyond their one time debt and one time crop failures. Even when the state faced worst drought, there were hardly any suicides reported. This extent not only to farmers but also to all the Gujaratis whether they are big time traders and businessmen or to small time salt pan workers. They know how to overcome problems. They face the problem head-on and try to solve it. But this does not undermine the problems the farmers in south India faced. I asked a tribal farmer in north Gujarat's Sabarkantha district what is his opinion on not being able to get into the field for three consecutive years. Though his reply was simple, it created a dent in my thinking. This fifty plus farmer and his family have faced droughts, debts, crop failures throughout their life and the drought was nothing new for them. "It's part and parcel of life and life is too precious gift to give away so easily. We have learnt to safeguard it," he said in Gujarati with heavy tribal accent.
Later I realized that his family of five walked five kilometers one way to reach the site where the government organized drought relief work. All the five earned less than Rs 50 per day and walked back another five kilometers. Officially they should have got Rs 200. But the balance is pocketed by the middlemen. But they have no complaints. "If we resist, even this will vanish."
Life in Gujarat is practical experience. A Gujarati's schedule can never be bookmarked nor planned. Whether it is plague in Surat, cyclone in Kandla or earthquake in the entire state, Gujaratis have come out of all these disasters with flying colours. I have had the experience of approaching beauracracy in Kerala related to some household matters and each and every official that I approached pointed me towards the other. Everyone gave me advises on what I should do to get my work done. I got all the red tapes on paper from these guys. But none demanded money probably because it is not open. But I had a very easy going in Gujarat to transfer all these papers to Kerala. You go to one table and the guy will do the rest. You just have to sit and watch. He may be expecting some money but his expectation is not beyond Rs 50. Anyhow, I did not pay. But I am sure he may have made some cursory remarks but as soon as the next customer arrives, he forgets me. This is what the farmers also do. As soon as the rain arrives and their land gets fertile, they forget the past three years of drought. They look towards the next step. If the crop fails, then they look towards the next crop, next season, next rain and next harvest. There is always a 'next' attached. There is always a hope attached to this next. What these farmers say is that the farmers in south India do not believe in this 'next'.

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I am not more an aethist

At the departure lounge at Bangkok’s international airport late last year, Wolfgang Rollick, a German settled in Bangkok put forth a general query that baffled me. The question was simple and short. How does India run with such a vast differences of opinion and cultures? To each of my answers he had another intriguing question and ultimately I put the onus on the almighty that runs the show. In spite of being an atheist, he agreed the existence of almighty seeing a country like India making progress, albeit at a snail’s pace.
I reached Delhi’s international airport with three bottles of Johny Walker bottles each containing 500 ml. Coming from a duty free zone, I would have been the most foolish guy around to gift my Delhi based editor a packet of Marlboro or Swiss chocos. Moreover, this was affordable and palatable for any journalist. After an enduring hour and a half where I had to face a lot of questions from the emigration and customs officials, I was almost out. I was virtually interrogated for having a moustache that contradicted from my nine-year-old passport photograph. In between, I didn’t realize that somebody put a cross mark with a chalk over my black hand baggage. In the next hour, I realized what Rollick was discussing about. In order to confirm what Rollick debated, I parted with one bottle to the preying hands of an inspector of Customs.
My flight sponsorship ended at Delhi. I was part of a seminar on Media and Violence by virtue of a journalist who covered the Godhra train burning and the carnage thereafter.
Back from the capital in a sleeper class lower berth that I had to swap with an upper one, I made a deep introspection as to how the country runs and still couldn’t find answers. Perhaps, very few have the answers and that is because we are a nation devoid of responsibility, tolerance and above all identity.
I feared even I could become an atheist.
Incidents, one after the other, puts India in international news bulletins and prestigious western newspapers, which had hitherto, denied news of Indian success in various fields. But the news not only created more disgrace and humiliation for the people settled there, it has also put the greatest democracy in the world to shame.
Let’s forget what has happened after the Godhra carnage. Let’s forget that some right wing Hindu fundamentalists have allegedly massacred some 1000 innocent children, men and women just because they were not born to the same caste as the fundamentalists belonged. To bring those culprits to book, you have to name a Mr X or Mr Y. Here the culprits are what the government calls a mob that reacted naturally. But what about the compensation? The poor victims have nowhere to go to ask for compensation. There are thousands of villages in Gujarat districts (except Dangs) where the attack took place and witnesses say there are still many who are unaccounted for. May be migrated or may be killed. But there still no sign of any effort even to try and locate these ‘missing’ people leave alone paying any compensation. Legally a person is presumed to be dead if he/she is missing for seven years if direct evidence is not available. Noted lawyers point out that this law is a matter of interpretation and the courts can award compensation on the basis of circumstantial evidence through logical consequences.
Still worse is the government asking for undertaking from the beneficiaries of the compensation. Don’t presume that the compensation is millions. It is a mere 2000 or 10,000 rupees that these people have to bent on their heels to bargain for human lives. The people of this country still have no idea how many have died though constitutionally it is the duty of the state government in place, to inform the public the figure and the dimensions of the problem. For each person died in thousand of villages, there are two missing. With the then CEC asking for special revision of electoral rolls, more stories of gross negligence of administration appeared, merely to remain a statistical data. Time we have a well oiled Right To Information system in place.
Almost four years down the ladder, we have already forgotten the trauma because we really haven’t faced it. Even the government machinery is busy trying to erase marks of any human tragedies that may have gone unnoticed. This is the value that we Indians give to the human lives. Remember this is the state where cows are protected. There was a department functioning under the CM to protect the revered cows, which have become nuisance to the traffic movements in the whole state. Not a single soul raised their voice to protest this apathy. Everyone enjoyed the show and patted the buffoonery remarks the CM has been making about constitutional authorities and the ‘5 crore’ people of Gujarat.
Gujarat case is one of the finest any atheist to believe in God. Take the case of a victim who wants to file a case and then argue it in the court. It is impossible. What he can do at the most is to give a petition to the jurisdictional police station and then see the prosecution section, appointed by the state government, plead his case. This precisely means that the pleader appointed by state government, largely believed to have presided over the massacre, will argue the case for the victims. How on earth these people can get justice? The state government has clearly forgotten or no one has even raised a voice to form a separate human rights court, duly constitutional, to try the criminals of the riots. Supreme Court has held state government responsible for any human rights violations and has directed it to take even the remedial measures.
Can you ever imagine going to a locality, pull children and women out, hack them and then burn them and enjoy the flesh burning? Are we in India or Papua Guinea? I could not defend a charged victim who confronted me in one of the relief camps saying Gujarat is no more vegetarian. A more sophisticated trader nearby added that Gujarat has become a land of cannibals.
Gujarat has recovered from this cannibalism but it has failed to give a meaning to this recovery. Gujarat’s resilience and business acumen was appreciated during the earthquake. And now we neither have any resilience nor any morality. Our society still continues to defend the Gujarat carnage. Various dimensions have already been given to it. More to come.
It is truly said that politicians last from elections to election and NGOs last from disaster to disaster. It was a provoking news item that appeared in the largest read vernacular dailies of Gujarat that prompted the miscreants to attack children and women. The report said that Muslims kidnapped ten Hindu women from the train and raped and mutilated them. This created an electrifying effect on the sentiments of many. The news item later turned out to be a fig of imagination amongst the corrupt practices these newspapers adopt to make some ‘additional’ money. I was surprised to find that none of the reporters that these newspapers pay have seen Muslim localities nor have talked any victims to balance the stories? “They will hack us to death,” screamed one of the Chief Reporters. But why will they do it? If the reporters themselves felt guilty, then there was no need to ask the locality people why would they hack someone from a particular newspaper? Wherever I went to cover stories, mainly in relief camps, I was first screened to ensure that I am not from these vernacular dailies before opening their mouth. Some of the columns that these papers carry may provoke some respected journalists but to me it evokes laughter. One column suggested that the convent educated English journalists, who have no idea of the geography of Gujarat, must be given uniform – as Hitler did – so that people on the streets identify them and thrash them. Another suggested that the use of words like pogrom, massacre, carnage etc. is too harsh for the intensity of the incidents that took place. Though I was a naïve in this field with only ten years of experience then, I felt pity for these columnists.
But today when we go back to the carnage time, we are forced to ask where were the women’s organizations when women were humiliated? Where was Sonia Gandhi, Brinda Karat and scores of women activists? These are the same people who appears in talk shows to defend the women. They have neither gone to any victim or have visited any place. The humiliated gender in Gujarat still remains in their stigma without knowing what to do next. While their body pain presses them to file a criminal case, social stigma withdraws the pressure. Main question is who to name? Who is the culprit? They can’t file an affidavit that a mob has robbed their modesty. So they suffered in silence. Their modesty still melts in tears when asked to recount the experience.
Just one experience makes me feel where the country is heading to
Back to the first question again, how does India run? It is because there is Almighty.
And I am no more an atheist.

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(Audio) Global Marriage in a South Indian Village Causing Problems

Poverty and social problems have forced girls from a South Indian village into global marriage. So far, some 600 girls have married foreign tourists. While some men stick to the marriages, many of them simply leave the women and children behind. Binu Alex reports from Trivandrum
Duration : 3:57
Free Speech Radio News Friday, May 13, 2005

(Audio) Tsunami Rehabilitation Lagging In India

More than one hundred days later, and after millions of dollars in aid, survivors of the December tsunami in Southeast Asia say that relief efforts are worsening, as they continue to live in unsanitary conditions. Tsunami victims are often sandwiched between government delays and their own trauma and poverty. FSRN correspondent, Binu Alex reports from Colachel in South India.

Duration : 3:35

Free Speech Radio News Wednesday, April 20, 2005

(Audio) Patents Bill Will Negatively Affect Cancer and AIDS Patients

The Patents Bill that the Indian Parliament passed last month came into effect last week. Considered by many as a major legislative step against the poor, under mass pressure from multinational lobbies, the bill makes drugs much more expensive for millions of people suffering from diseases like cancer and AIDS not only in India but the world over, especially in poor and developing countries. FSRN Correspondent Binu Alex examines the issue from Mumbai.
Duration : 3:39

Free Speech Radio News Monday, April 11, 2005

(Audio) Indians Living with HIV/AIDS

In February, India began its first AIDS vaccine trials on humans to prevent the spread of the disease. Though the event is being marked as historic in a country with a high HIV rate, some activists feel there is little being done for people currently carrying the virus. FSRN correspondent, Binu Alex reports from Mumbai
Duration : 3:41
Free Speech Radio News Tuesday, March 29, 2005