THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

Indigenous Women Challenging the Global Agenda by Maya Dollarhide, Sushma Joshi, Voices Unabridged, 10/26/03 From the High Sierra of the Andes to the Sami territories of Scandinavia, indigenous women, a silent minority in international affairs, are just beginning to find their voices and discover their rightful place in the global community. This past May hundreds of indigenous women, some from the most remote and desolate regions of the world, traveled to the United Nations in New York City. They came armed with an ambitious agenda and a vast array of topics to discuss at the second session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Whether dressed in business attire or traditional clothing made of bright, hand-woven fabrics and intricately beaded shawls, these women proudly illustrated their nations´ diversity while banding together to form a collective front of unified tribes. High on their agenda was the quest for women’s rights, an issue that united them despite the striking d...

WOMAN'S INHUMANITY TO WOMAN Woman's Inhumanity to Woman is one of the first books by a Western feminist that attempts to look at how women treat each other with the oppressiveness women have always attributed to men. While domestic violence, rape and harassment by men against women occur daily on a worldwide scale, women also continue to oppress, dominate, wound, undermine, backstab, overwork, underpay, beat and kill other women around them. Chesler, a psychologist and bestselling author who was part of the Feminist Movement of the Seventies, points out that it is integral for feminists to deal with women's sexism, and not let it remain a silent and taboo topic as it has in the past. Psychological studies show that women are more prone to indirect aggression, which can be both verbal and non-verbal, and includes gossip, backbiting, rumors and shunning. This often leads to "social death" of the victim, and can be a painful and isolating experience. In some c...

THE JOY OF SUCCESS Susan Ford Collins was studying dysfunction for a year at the National Institute of Mental Health before it occurred to her: why not study the habits of highly successful people instead? That was the seed that started her on her path to writing the Joy of Success. What is success? What skills make people successful? And how can these skills be taught? These ideas led her to shadow hundreds of successful people in all fields. She narrowed down her findings to quantifiable skills that she observed in her subjects, and started to teach these skills in workshops. Within months, she started getting calls from major corporations like IBM, Dow Chemical and Digital who wanted her to come down and share her process with their employees. Susan Ford Collins is an animated woman, talking about her subject with tremendous energy. "It takes a lot of passion to make your dream come true," she starts off. Her first research subject was no other than Buckminister...

THE BIG BLACKOUT Sushma Joshi, The Kathmandu Post I was in the computer lab of the New School at downtown Manhattan at 4:11pm, August 14, when the lights went out. The noise of two hundred hard drives shivering to a halt was oddly disconcerting. The air-conditioners took a couple more seconds to shut down. The lab, always lit perpetually with fluorescent lights, stocked with about two hundred colorful computers, and humming with unseen machinery, suddenly felt dim, dark, abandoned. I tried to eject my disk, but couldn't. Unlike a Mac, this machine did not have a tiny hole where you could stick the sharp end of a paper clip and manually eject the disk. "When is the light coming back?" I ask the security guard. The man looks scared as he answers, "I don't know. The lights are out all over Manhattan." That's when the intercom starts to crackle indistinguishably. "Please exit the building immediately!" the jarring voice repeats in an infinit...

GOOD JOB! Sushma Joshi, September 4, 2003, Kathmandu Post Over many discussions with friends of Nepal who have chosen to live in America, I have come to the conclusion that one of the biggest differences between the two cultures is people's attitude towards success. More precisely, the celebration and acknowledgement of success. While Nepal might seem like a celebratory culture (all the badai you receive would make you think so), and yet the heart of it, we remain, surprisingly, a stubbornly goal-oriented culture, willing to acknowledge and praise only the most visible and socially sanctioned successes, never the process of reaching there. When I talk about celebrating success, I am not just talking about the big ones: the First Division, the prestigious job, the rich husband and the beautiful wife, the healthy children, but also the smaller, day to day struggles that happen to us as we navigate through increasingly complicated work and social environments. For instance, a...

Personalities: Walking the World for Peace By Sushma Joshi (Sushma Joshi is a writer based in NYC. She can be reached at: sushma@alumni.brown.edu) The Nepal Digest, Year 14, Volume VIII, Issue 1, Published On Sunday Aug 24, 2003 (Bhadra 07, 2060), New York, USA A year after two airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers, thousands of people gathered on September 11, 2002, to remember the event. In Washington Square Park, New York City, hundreds spoke out against war on an all night vigil. The country was engaged in bombing Afganisthan, and there was talk of war against Iraq. Activists from all ages and backgrounds rallied to the call for peace. As the night progressed, Keika, a friend from Japan, met up with Japanese friends who had walked for a month in a peace march from Albany to New York City. "The oldest person in the march is a Nepali monk, and he is seventy-three years old," she said. "He was one of the most energetic people in the walk." My interest ...

Hundreds of people, young and old, the well-dressed and the fashion-resistant, gathered at the Riverside Church on May 13, 2003, lining up outside the revolving gates to enter that New York institution. And no, it wasn't a rush of new religious awakening that had brought them there - it was a small, petite dark-haired woman, in short cropped hair and a dimpled smile, dressed in a simple white sari. Arundhati Roy, former actor, architect, screenwriter, aerobics instructor, author of the Booker prize-winning bestseller God of Small Things and now a passionate anti-globalization essayist, was the subject of their undivided attention. Howard Zinn, best-selling author of A People's History of the United States, would dialogue with her after her lecture. Three thousand people crammed into the Church, from the pews to the balconies. Two large screens projected the video image of the speaker to the packed balconies. Reverend James A Forbes Jr., senior minister of a Church that has host...