The Gun country, USA, has witnessed another mass shooting !
LGBTQ community attacked again by homophobic theists!
Liberal Democracy attacked again by Islamist terror !
Nastik Deliberations
Godless thoughts from god's country
The Gun country, USA, has witnessed another mass shooting !
LGBTQ community attacked again by homophobic theists!
Liberal Democracy attacked again by Islamist terror !
A mother burnt alive her 18-year-old daughter Zeenat Rafiq on Wednesday for marrying a man of her own choice in an area near General Hospital on Ferozepur Road, Lahore, Pakistan.
Parveen Rafiq, who confessed to having murdered her daughter for “bringing shame to the family”, was arrested at her home in a low-income neighbourhood on Mast Iqbal Road.
Zeenat Rafiq – AFP
Last week 19-year-old Maria Sadaqat was tortured then burned alive for refusing a marriage proposal from a school principal’s son in Murree.
In April a young woman was strangled and then her body set ablaze because she helped a friend elope in Abbottabad, another case that sparked revulsion.
Byra Reddy, a resident of Tamatampalli under Gownipalli police limits, Karnataka, India, allegedly strangled his daughter Priya Reddy (17). He was angry with her for her love affair with 20-year-old Harish, belonging to Ganiga (backward class), and suspected that they were planning to elope on Sunday.
Statistics indicate that about thousand people, almost always women, are killed both in Pakistan and India in a year in the name of protecting honour of the family.
Love and marriage are supposed to be happy events. But for vast sections of human society, even in this “enlightened” 21st century it is the cause of violence and sorrow, because of the culture of not respecting the autonomy of an individual, especially that of women.
From NYT website
Same lack of respect for autonomy of a woman and an undue respect for the athletic prowess of a rapist can be seen in this infamous court judgement in the Stanford rape case.
Both, the “honor” killings in Asia and trivialising of rape in USA, belong to two ends of the same universal misogynist cultural spectrum. The troubling thing to my mind is most people are shocked by the former but few by the latter.
After smallpox another infectious disease may be eradicated in near future. This year there are only two confirmed cases of Guinea worm infection. If things go according to plan, this horribly painful infection will be confined soon to history books.
This eradication is in many way unique. There is no treatment for Guinea worm infection. There is no vaccine.. So the tools for eradication are health education and preventive measures. Scientific knowledge of the way it spreads and common sense approach to prevent it spreading was the key for the success.
Medical worker Abaare Hussein extracts a Guinea worm from a child’s leg in Savelugu Village in northern Ghana in 2007.
Wes Pope/Chicago Tribune/MCT via Getty Images
In the annual report of the United Nations Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict for the year 2015, the Saudi government was identified as responsible for more than half of the killings of children in Yemen.
The United Nations verified a sixfold increase in the number of children killed and maimed compared with 2014, totalling 1,953 child casualties (785 children killed and 1,168 injured). More than 70 per cent were boys. Of the casualties, 60 per cent (510 deaths and 667 injuries) were attributed to the Saudi Arabia-led coalition and 20 per cent (142 deaths and 247 injuries) to the Houthis. In 324 incidents, the responsible party could not be identified.
In the annex to the report Saudi government was included in a list of forces harming children all over the World.
Protest against the Saudi-led coalition outside the offices of the United Nations in Yemen’s capital Sanaa August 11, 2015.
Reuters/Khaled Abdullah.
February 28, 2002, Ahmedabad, India
A mob of thousands of Hindus led by leaders of Hindutva organisations including the ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, attacked Gulberg housing society in which mainly Muslims lived. They brutally murdered around 70 persons, gang raped 10-12 women and burnt down scores of houses as handful of policemen watched. Among those killed was a former member of Indian Parliament,
After the massacre- Indian Express archive photo
Marrying before getting into double figures in age ?
May sound cruel and absurd. But not at all uncommon in India.
Latest analysis of 2011 census data reveals that 12 million Indians had married before they had reached double figures in age. Also around 120 million Indians had married before reaching the age of 18.
Many in India wrongly believe child marriages mostly happen among Muslim community. The data actually shows Hindus has an edge over Muslims in child marriages. 84% of under 10 marriages are from among the Hindus (80% of the population) while 11% are from the Muslims (13.5% of population).
Women from urban areas, on average, marry more than two years later than their rural counterparts..
The report also noted that the level of teenage pregnancy and motherhood is nine times higher among women with no education than among women with 12 or more years of education.
As many as 5.4 million (44%) married children under 10 were illiterate–80% of them female–indicating how lower levels of education correlate with early marriage.
A silver lining in these bleak statistics is there is a trend of decrease in child marriages.
As many as 102 million girls (30% of female population) were married before 18 in 2011; the number was 119 million in 2001 (44% of female population), a decrease of 14 percentage points over the decade.
Among boys, 125 million were married before 21 years of age (42% of male population) in 2011; the number was 120 million in 2001 (49% of male population), a decrease of 7 percentage points over the decade.
The legal age for marriage in India is a respectable 18 for girls and 21 for boys. Unfortunately the Muslim personal law gives an exception for girls. They can marry under that law on reaching 15.
From UNICEF India
Child marriages are a violation of child rights. It has a negative impact on physical growth, health, mental and emotional development, and education opportunities. It also affects society as a whole since child marriage reinforces a cycle of poverty and perpetuates gender discrimination, illiteracy and malnutrition as well as high infant and maternal mortality rates
According to UNICEF there are many challenges in eliminating child marriages.
There are many causes of child marriage in India and multiple barriers to its elimination. Poverty, weak enforcement of laws, patriarchal social norms intended to ensure family honour are significant factors that increase the risk of girl being married off while still a child. Also, girls from poor households are more likely to marry as children, since marriage becomes a solution to reduce the size of the family. The cost of marriage plays a big role in families sliding further into poverty, and these high costs contribute to girls being forced to marry when other ceremonies are taking place in the family or when older siblings are being married.
India, especially the rural areas, need huge development, both economically and socially, in a much more equitable way, to completely eliminate this curse of child marriage.
Doctor, we are not getting the anti AIDS drugs from government hospital. Can you somehow help?
I was asked this question in my clinic the other day.
Though I was surprised by that question, I was expecting such a situation ever since the Indian government announced big cuts in budgetary allocations for health in December 2014. Situation is becoming bad not only for AIDS program but many other public health programs.
Volunteers of National Service Scheme (NSS) pose with HIV/AIDS awareness messages on their faces during a face painting competition ahead of the World AIDS Day in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh November 29, 2014. REUTERS/Ajay Verma
Yesterday was a land mark day for online atheist community in India. The Indian Atheist page on Facebook got its 100,000th like yesterday. Congrats to all who are looking after the page.
Neanderthals has always been considered as not so smart hominid destined to be replaced through natural selection by us, smart Homo sapiens.
But the new discovery from a cave in France should make us think again about lack of smartness of our distant cousins.
Deep in a dark cave in southwestern France lie half a dozen mysterious structures that scientists believe were built by Neanderthals 176,000 years ago — about 140,000 years before the first modern humans arrived in Europe.
The structures, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, are located in what is known as the Bruniquel Cave. They are made of roughly 400 pieces of stalagmites, all roughly, almost eerily, the same size.
Archaeologists say these mineral formations were probably broken off the cave floor by ancient hands and then deliberately arranged into two large rings and a series of four round piles up to 15 inches high.
My state of Kerala in India has yet another Left front government. In 1957 , in the first election after the formation of the state, Kerala had created history by democratically electing a Communist party government. Since then the Communist led Left front has been voted to power 7 times, ruling more or less alternatingly, with Congress led United front.
The Left front consist mainly of two communist parties, the smaller Communist Party of India and the bigger Communist Party of India ( Marxist). Indian Communists, in theory, still aim for Communism through establishing a dictatorship state of proletariat. Before reaching that stage they believe that there need to be a people’s democratic revolution and for that their participation in parliamentary democratic politics is essential.
