THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

By Sushma Joshi The Kathmandu Post, 24 Feb 2002 A man lies dying on the stairwell of a crumbling tenement house in Bombay. The twisted plot of The Death of Vishnu, mathematics professor Manil Suri’s creation, originates out of that, spiraling like a stairway into social realism and the myths of Bollywood. Drawing from the non-linear genre of Bombay film scripts, and the hyper-linked, multi-plot structure of Hindu mythology, the story works its way slowly but inevitably into the unforgiving politics of religious violence and communalism that dominates the politics of contemporary India. While Vishnu lies delirious, in the throes of his last sexual fantasies before death, two Hindu neighbors play out their day to day rivalries and petty jealousies on his dying body, quarreling over who should pay for the ambulance. This middle class struggle is just another in a long tradition of jealousies and fights in their shared kitchen. Their husbands, meanwhile, ineffectually try to organ...

The stories are small, but with a spicy aftertaste that could be from nowhere else but the subcontinent. Talat Abbasi's Bitter Gourd and Other Stories is a collection of nugget sized, delectable tales laid out, in typical desi fashion, amongst the detritus of social stratification, family ennui, economic marginalization and diaspora. Gently dousing her stories with a generous portion of irony and satire, the Karachi born writer brings to the fore the small hypocrisies and the mundane corruptions of everyday life in Pakistan. Whether dealing with a birdman or a poor relation, a rich widow or an immigrant mother, Ms. Abbasi touches the mythic heart that ticks besides all these caricatures. The ghostly narrative influence of Virginia Woolf, with a pinch of Victorian lit thrown in for good measure, is discernable, although most of the voices are centered around the "how kind, how kind" echoes of South Asia. The book starts, appropriately, with a story about a feudal patro...

EkChhin : MS-Nepal Newsletter Oct-Dec 2001 Print this page A state of Emergency does not mean a suspension of human rights - Sushma Joshi A state of Emergency usually leads to the suspension of certain constitutional rights. The Nepali government, by declaring a state of emergency, has suspended certain rights to freedom, including the rights to freedom of opinion and expression, the freedom to assemble peacefully and without arms, and the freedom to move throughout the country. News can be censored, and people can be detained if they are believed to be a danger to the country’s sovereignty. Like the United States of America, which recently suffered a terrorist attack, Nepal has imposed these measures to stop political instability. In the United States, hundreds of people, mostly poor immigrants from Pakistan and other countries, have been detained in secret locations after the World Trade Centers attack. President Bush recently signed an executive order, without Congressional authori...

EkChhin :  MS-Nepal Newsletter Oct-Dec 2001 Print this page A state of Emergency does not mean a suspension of human rights - Sushma Joshi A state of Emergency usually leads to the suspension of certain constitutional rights. The Nepali government, by declaring a state of emergency, has suspended certain rights to freedom, including the rights to freedom of opinion and expression, the freedom to assemble peacefully and without arms, and the freedom to move throughout the country. News can be censored, and people can be detained if they are believed to be a danger to the country’s sovereignty. Like the United States of America, which recently suffered a terrorist attack, Nepal has imposed these measures to stop political instability. In the United States, hundreds of people, mostly poor immigrants from Pakistan and other countries, have been detained in secret locations after the World Trade Centers attack. President Bush recently signed an executive order, without C...

September/October 2000 FESTIVALS Women's day in Nepal Each year in Nepal, wives, mothers and daughters rejuvinate and purify themselves for the sake of their husbands and families By Sushma Joshi, Kathmandu Hinduism Today has received reports from Nepal that in 1999, members of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) attempted to discourage women from participating in the popular annual Teej festival and to create dissension among those who dared. The long line of women dressed in a thousand shades of red, are waiting to get a glimpse of an ancient stone image of Siva and worship Him with the flowers and vermillion they carry in their hands. Having fasted the previous day and night, some of them faint from the heat and hunger as they wait in line, sometimes for three hours. They are of all ages, girls as young as five accompanying their mothers and sisters, grandmothers with their walking sticks, young mothers with babies at their breasts. They come to a...

Trafficking - the selling of women and children for monetary profit, most often leading to bonded prostitution - is one of the most visible topics in South Asia. The media is saturated with stories of women and children sold into sex slavery, where they are deprived of their most basic human rights. Social movements in the sub-continent are now actively working with this issue. The debates, however, still see no clear-cut division between trafficking and prostitution. As the phenomenon of large numbers of women working as sex workers in urban areas continues to increase, this issue must be taken beyond the discourses of trafficking to include larger issues of the economics of migration and labor and the difference between forced and voluntary prostitution. For our first discussion on Bol!, we have invited Meena Poudel, the Programme Coordinator of Oxfam Nepal and a longtime activist, to discuss what the South Asian activist networks have been doing on the issue. ...