Thursday, April 30, 2009

RAPE:India's fastest growing crime


RAPE is the fastest growing crime in India and New Delhi has seen more than 10 rapes last month alone.

As an embarrassed government gets ready to enact tougher rape laws, the victims continue to face an insensitive police and criminal justice system.

Nearly three years ago as India was celebrating the festival of lights, the world dimmed for an 18-year-old as she was returning from work late in the night.

Iris was first stalked by four drunken men and then raped by one of them in the heart of New Delhi.

"The whole night he raped me. My hands were tied and my voice deserted me," Iris recounts the incident.

And the trauma didn't stop there.

The police first refused to lodge an FIR and when they finally did, no medical tests were ordered.

Instead in a misguided attempt at justice they got her married to her rapist.

Two years on, with a child she conceived the night she was raped, Iris is out on the road, deserted by her husband and looking for justice again.

"Some times I feel I should commit suicide," she says.

Iris is part of statistics that have got sociologists worried.

The reported cases of rape have grown by 700 per cent since 1953. Last year 20,000 rapes were reported in the country. And India's rape capital New Delhi has seen 10 cases last month alone.

One case was that of a minor girl being raped by a policeman.

Sociologists say reasons for this sudden increase is a complex mix of migration, shrinking spaces in cities and the high visibility of women outside their homes.

However, law enforcement agencies argue that actual rape cases haven't increased substantially, what has is their reportage.

And in any case since 80 per cent of the accused are known to the victims, it's a crime virtually not preventable.

Joint Commissioner of Delhi Police Kawaljeet Deol would know.

She helped set up the crime against women cell in the capital 24 years ago.

She says though the police is often blamed for being insensitive to rape victims, their real culprit is the criminal justice system.

The trial of rape cases is very long and intimidation for the victim. Many victims turn hostile because of this," Deol says.

No wonder then that the conviction rate for rape is as low as 27 per cent. In a country where a rape is reported every 30 minutes, it's a statistic that should put all of us to shame.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Indian Women Burnt To Death


A leading medical journal,The Lancet, published a paper last month,which reveals the high burden of fire-related deaths in India. While the report is a damning indictment of fire-related deaths for young women—who are three times as susceptible as their male peers—it also indicates the glaring inaccuracies in mortality-related surveillance in India.
The numbers alone are a cause for worry. Fire-related deaths account for around a quarter of all deaths for women in urban areas between 15 and 34. And in rural settings, the figure is well above 10%. While public health scholars have long documented gender discrimination, these new figures, if correct, are some of the most glaring in recent memory.
The researchers at Harvard, Cambridge and Johns Hopkins Universities estimate 163,000 fire-related deaths in 2001, which is a whopping six times that reported by the police.
The implications of such a figure are staggering. There were about 117,100 maternal deaths in India in 2005, making it the focus of international aid related to maternal health; indeed, the United Nations named maternal health a Millennium Development Goal. But, as The Lancet authors note, “Our estimate of fire-related deaths is almost 50% higher than this number (of maternal deaths), and among women alone the estimates are comparable.”
While the authors note that it is difficult to determine the specific causes of deaths, previous studies—as they note—have identified three major clusters of explanations: kitchen-related accidents, self-immolation caused by poverty or domestic violence, and homicides related —in some capacity—to domestic violence. It is difficult to evaluate what can be done from here. These gendered fire-related deaths are inextricably linked to complicated socio-economic processes and cannot be solved with a simple quick fix.
But to start, an efficient, accurate and third-party injury surveillance system for India is necessary. It’s a shame that foreign-based academics are the ones reporting these numbers. And as they note, many in the police force are linked to lax registration of reports or accept routine bribes from families to avoid investigation. Police reporting cannot be trusted, and a third-party agency, which compiles all official interactions with hospitals or funeral homes, for example, is imperative.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Domino Harvey


Domino Harvey was born on August 7, 1969 in the United Kingdom. Her father was the famous actor, Laurence Harvey, and her mother was a supermodel named Paulene Stone. She was named Domino after her mother's friend Dominique Sanda.
When she moved to Beverly Hills, she found the city to be very boring and uppity. Rather than hanging out with the other rich folk, she preferred playing with nun chucks, throwing stars, and knives. She always looked like a misfit, preferring to wear sneakers and leather jackets rather than dresses and makeup.

As a young girl, she was something of a tomboy. When her parents gave her dolls to play with, she would cut their hair and rip their heads off. She also fought boys frequently and got into plenty of trouble. Domino was fascinated by the martial arts and took classes in judo, becoming very skilled in the martial arts.

Following in her mother's footsteps, she decided to become a model and was hired by the Ford Modeling Agency. However, she did not enjoy the job and found it boring so she decided to quit. Over the next few years, she worked in a nightclub, ranch, and even volunteered at a fire station for a while.
At the age of 22, she decided to become a bounty hunter after seeing an ad in the newspaper looking for bounty hunters to hire. Her mother had been telling her to get a job and she attended the seminar advertised in the newspaper, which was hosted by Ed Martinez, a professional bail recoverer with over 2500 fugitive arrests under his belt. Although she was initially regarded with some amusement, Ed recognized her potential and recruited her into his bounty hunting crew.

She started out her work as a bounty hunter by hitting on the target at a bar or restaurant, while wearing provocative clothing. She would then draw them outside and her fellow bounty hunters would jump on the target and restrain them. The local newspaper did an article on her life as a bounty hunter and her mother found out as a result, but later bought her a Kevlar vest for her birthday to show support.

Soon, she was running around toting guns with the other bounty hunters and participating in gun fights and apprehensions. Her favorite weapon was a double-barreled shotgun named "Betsy" that was given to her by Choco, a fellow bounty hunter and friend. She developed a passion for guns and purchased quite a collection to use in the field.
In 2004, a film was made about her life, starring Keira Knightley as Domino. The film was done in a very strange way, called "bounty hunting on acid" by Tony Scott. The movie was panned by critics and released to a very mediocre box office run, getting back less than half of its budget of $50 million.

On May 4, 2005, she was arrested by the FBI and charged with dealing methamphetamines. At the time of her arrest, she was in possession of $2 million worth of the drug. She was released on $1 million bail, but faced the possibility of serving ten years or more in prison if convicted.

On June 27, 2005, Domino Harvey was found dead in her bathtub. The cause of death was found to be an overdose of fentanyl, a strong painkiller that is 80 times stronger than morphine. The film about her was released after her death and dedicated to her.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Janis Joplin


The Cosmic Giggle must have been in full-tilt hysterics on January 19, 1943 when the oil refinery seaport of Port Arthur, Texas, won the heavenly crapshoot as the birthplace of rock & roll's first female superstar, Janis Joplin. In retrospect, Port Arthur's most famous daughter both defied and defined the Texas town that raised, rejected, reviled, then ultimately rejoiced in her brief, mad existence. In a way that she never would have admitted then (but might now), Port Arthur made Janis Joplin what she was -- a more tolerant, nurturing atmosphere might have diluted the fire that burned within her.And that fire is what everyone knows about Janis Joplin: her incendiary stage performances, her masochistic tango with the bottle, her tumultuous love life, and her fatal dalliance with drugs. Janis Joplin's musical legacy is also a part of Austin's history -- how the disheveled folkie/UT student playing at west campus hootenannies and Kenneth Threadgill's bar on North Lamar took off for San Francisco with some other Texans in the Sixties and changed the history of rock & roll.

On the surface, she seemed the perfect icon for stardom in the late Sixties: She fit no standard of beauty yet exuded a raw sensuality that mirrored a movement which rejected societal standards by creating its own. When Janis Joplin arrived in San Francisco, in 1966, the year before the Summer of Love, its music scene was already in a nascent, post-Beat hippie whirl. Young people flocked to the Bay area as if to Mecca by the thousands, searching for identity, reason, justification, maybe just something as simple as acceptance. This is the irony of all the great Sixties icons -- Joplin included: that their desire for acceptance was at the heart of their rebellion, and that their ultimate embrace by the masses came about because of this rebellion. The sad part about rebellion, however, is that it usually follows rejection, and that was something Janis Joplin knew deep down in her soul.

The Janis Joplin of legend set the standard for the blues mama image of white female singers. Blues mamas have to be hard-livin', hard-lovin' and, of course, hard drinking. But life in the Gulf Coast town was not exactly hard; like much of the town's population, Janis' father, Seth, worked at the Texaco refinery and the Joplins resided comfortably.

By all accounts, Janis had a happy childhood, but her entrée into womanhood was less than graceful. As a teenager, she tended to gain weight, her soft child-blond hair turned brown and unruly, and she developed acne that would scar as well as shape her looks and personality. She became an unwilling member of an elite club of misfits, a woman who avoided mirrors because of pitted reflections, knowing that the scars underneath caused by the ones on the surface are the most painfully inflicted. Rejected and made fun of by most of her peers, she sought and found solace in the works of other outcasts -- writers, musicians, artists. When your society rejects you, you do the obvious: You reject it.

Joplin felt like an ugly duckling because she didn't fit anyone's notion of beauty. Port Arthur was a one-high-school town, and to be rejected by the school was to be rejected by the town. A culture that puts a premium on marketable feminine beauty has no use for the Janis Joplins of the world, and why should it? Her kind of beauty can only be captured in its natural state -- candidly or in performance. Look at the posed shots of Joplin and you'd swear her eyes plead with you to like her, really like her. Now, look at the performance photos, where she's recklessly lost in song, or examine the candid shots of her, where Joplin's face is soft and vulnerable in repose. In front of the photographer's camera in a studio she was naked to the world, but in front of an audience, she came alive, transforming into a vibrant and seductive entertainer who channeled every honker and shouter she ever heard on the Texas radio in the thick, black night.

For kids in East Texas' "Golden Triangle" -- Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange -- the promised land of booze and blues lay just across the Louisiana border. While the big-city sound of Bobby Bland and gritty rhythm of Lightnin' Hopkins filtered in from Houston, 90 miles away, Slim Harpo, Clifton Chenier, and swamp pop royalty like Tommy McLain, Rod Bernard, and Dale & Grace reigned in the roadhouses and dance halls of Cajun and swamp country that ran off Highway 90 between Lafayette and the Lone Star border. From the moment it crossed the Sabine River, that highway was lined with clubs and juke joints with names like the Big Oaks, Buster's, the Stateline -- joints that attracted the locals as well as nearby Texans.

Clandestine forays over the border -- called going "on the line" -- were a rite of passage, in those days, and one that Joplin was exposed to early on because she ran with the boys in high school. On weekends, they would load up and drive across the state line where the brass-heavy bands were tearing up the clubs. Gulf Coast bands like the Boogie Kings and Jerry LaCroix & the Counts specialized in the hits of the day and infused their sets with raucous dirty dancing and hip-grinding ballads. These bands might be dismissed as cover bands today but back then they functioned not only as living jukeboxes, but also as keepers of the flame. At this strip of clubs across the border, American rock & roll resonated endlessly in the night, its bluesy beats and frantic rhythms greased by the free-flowing booze; Texas drinking age was 21, Louisiana's 18.

The rowdy blues Joplin saw live in Louisiana were a marked contrast to the classical music she was raised on in Port Arthur and the omnipresent country music found in Texas. Jazzmeisters like Dave Brubeck and folksingers like Odetta were cultivated by her circle of friends, who likewise found the question-authority philosophy of the Beats palatable. Her knowledge and quest for understanding inspired her to not just appreciate but to learn the music, taking up guitar as well as singing. By the time she graduated Thomas Jefferson High School in 1960, she was imbued with an unusually well-rounded knowledge of music as well as a desire to explore its core.

What happened to Janis Joplin after she graduated high school is well known: College courses at Lamar Tech; a lifestyle-expanding trip to Venice, California; more college courses back in Port Arthur where she played coffeehouses; a mid-summer 1962 trip to Austin resulting in her move here. From Austin, her life is even better documented. She played the folk circuit for a while locally but left Austin for San Francisco and, briefly, New York. Burnt out and drug-weary, she returned to Port Arthur briefly in the summer of 1965 and tried unsuccessfully to conform to the straight life. Her rebellious nature reared its head during a trip to Austin that fall; she stayed and never returned home to Port Arthur. Seven months later, she left for San Francisco. It was June 1966. Janis Joplin had finally gotten out.

On October 4, 1970, four years and four months after she bolted from Austin, Janis Joplin overdosed in her room at the Landmark Hotel in Los Angeles, having scored a particularly pure batch of heroin. Her career had been virtually meteoric, but her ascent as the first goddess of rock was doused by her sad, lonely death, which followed that of Jimi Hendrix, who'd died two weeks earlier. Jim Morrison would die within a year, and whatever glow the Sixties had was finally dimmed for good.

What would Janis Joplin have been like today, Undoubtably mellower; likely dried out and cleaned up, because if she wasn't alcoholic at the time, she surely would have been soon. The toll would not have shown well on her face, but blues mamas are supposed to look the part, anyway. By dying young, she is frozen at the pinnacle of her success -- brilliant and shimmering in the easy grace of audience acceptance and approval. She is, forever, raw iron soul.


THE LORD NEVER DID BUY JANIS A MERCEDES BENZ.SHE HAD TO FIND HER OWN CAR,AND IN TYPICAL JANIS FASHION,IT WAS AN EYE-POPPING,TRAFFIC-STOPPING HIPPIE MOBILE,THE 1965 PORSCHE CABRIOLET SUPER C WAS A CLASSY EXPRESSION OF HER LIFESTYLE.CUSTOM PAINTED IN PSYCHEDELIC HUES WITH IMAGES OF JANIS AND BIG BROTHER ON ONE FENDER AND A BLOODIED AMERICAN FLAG ON THE TRUNK.


Gloria Steinem


Gloria Steinem travels widely as a feminist activist, organizer, writer and lecturer. Her books include the bestsellers Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Moving Beyond Words, and Marilyn: Norma Jean, on the life of Marilyn Monroe. She was an editor of The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History. Steinem co-founded New York Magazine and Ms. Magazine where she continues to serve as a consulting editor. She has been published in many magazines and newspapers here and in other countries, and is also a frequent guest commentator on radio and television.

She helped to found the Women's Action Alliance, the National Women's Political Caucus, and Choice USA. She was the founding president of the Ms. Foundation for Women and helped create Take Our Daughters to Work Day. She recently co-founded the Women's Media Center and GreenStone Media. She has served on the board of trustees of Smith College, and was a member of the Beyond Racism Initiative, a comparative study of racial patterns in the U.S., South Africa, and Brazil. She has also co-produced a documentary on child abuse for HBO, and a feature film for Lifetime.

Ms. Steinem has received the Penney-Missouri Journalism Award, the Front Page and Clarion awards, National Magazine awards, an Emmy Citation for excellence in television writing, the Women's Sports Journalism Award, the Lifetime Achievement in Journalism Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Writers Award from the United Nations, and most recently, the University of Missouri School of Journalism Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism.

Other recognitions include the first Doctorate of Human Justice awarded by Simmons College, the Bill of Rights Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, the National Gay Rights Advocates Award, the Liberty award of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Ceres Medal from the United Nations, and a number of honorary degrees. Parenting magazine selected her for its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995 for her work in promoting girls' self-esteem, and Biography magazine listed her as one of the 25 most influential women in America. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. She has been the subject of Lifetime and ABC biographical television documentaries, and The Education of a Woman, a biography by Carolyn Heilbrun.

She is currently at work on Road to the Heart: America As if Everyone Mattered, a book about her more than thirty years on the road as a feminist organizer; and with the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College on a project to document the grassroots origins of the U.S. women's movement.




Moses Znaimer interviews Gloria Steinem about being a "groovy chick" and an ex-Playboy bunny. (1968)

Friday, April 24, 2009

"I AM WOMAN-DUSTY SPRINGFIELD"



I am woman, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back and pretend
'Cuse I've heard it all before
And I've been down there on the floor
No one's ever gonna keep me down again

Chorus:
Oh yes I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to, I can do anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman

You can bend but never break me
'Cause it only serves to make me
More determined to achieve my final goal
And I come back even stronger
Not a novice any longer
'Cause you've deepened the conviction in my soul

Chorus

I am woman watch me grow
See me standing toe to toe
As I spread my lovin' arms across the land
But I'm still an embryo
With a long long way to go
Until I make my brother understand

Oh yes I am wise
But it's wisdom born of pain
Yes, I've paid the price
But look how much I gained
If I have to I can face anything
I am strong (strong)
I am invincible (invincible)
I am woman
Oh, I am woman
I am invincible
I am strong

(fade)
I am woman
I am invincible
I am strong
I am woman

Hello Everyone and Welcome to my Blog!

This blog is basically about WOMEN.In this blog I'll be writing about different women who are/were wizards in their own fields.I'll be writing about women rights,rape,domestic abuse,sexuality and women empowerment,but before you jump into conclusion,let me tell you,I'm not a feminist or anti-men.Women are oppressed in each and every corner of the world and in every society.So,I just felt the need to start this blog and I feel it's high time for people to realize that it's time to get active and fight for the rights,instead of just sitting back and saying "let somebody else do it."I'm just an ordinary girl who has seen women's sufferings and I'm just trying to draw attention to all these issues hoping that one day world can see us as an individual and not as a WOMAN.