In 1974 as a very junior reporter at The Montreal Star, some senior reporters alerted me to a two-part major piece of reporting by Noel Mostert in the New Yorker magazine. The article was about oil supertankers, the skill required to navigate and operate them and their widespread pollution of the sea.
Rupture, Loss and Living – Minority Women Speak about Post-Conflict Life, K. Lalita, Deepa Dhanraj, 434 pp. 2017, Orient BlackSwan Press.
Samson Nakkala is a man who has spent most of his life working to empower low-caste women in a range of rural communities in India’s state of Telangana, formerly part of Andhra Pradesh.
Visiting India over many years I have seen most of the country’s highlights, but I never experienced a famous hill station reminiscent of the British Raj. However, after a recent visit to Chennai, I was fortunate to discover a charming boutique bed and breakfast called Clive and Curzon a short flight away in the heart of the Nilgiris hills.
Behind the Nobel Peace Prize that was recently awarded for 2015 to four civil society trailblazers in Tunisia stand millions of ordinary unsung Tunisians who deserve recognition. Without them the hands of the National Dialogue Quartet would have been tied.
In the wake of the proposed charter on Quebec values, more and more alarming stories are surfacing about employment discrimination against Muslims, mostly from North Africa but also from Iran.
In the debate that has led up to the tabling Thursday of a charter of Quebec values, too many Quebecers, including some well-known Quebec feminists, appear to be supporting the idea of excluding Muslim women who wear head scarves from major employment opportunities in Quebec society.
Keeping the revolution alive, female activists play an invaluable role in effecting change in the country that gave rise to Arab Spring.
“Le nouveau portrait de la situation linguistique dans la métropole reflète des tendances particulièrement positives et encourageantes. Des données tirées du dernier recensement démontrent que parmi les habitants de l’île de Montréal, pas moins de 85% parlent français.”
The Language Situation should be embraced for the opportunities it offers, not fought over.
It was my first night in the city of Sidi Bouzid where a humiliated street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death a year and a half ago – launching the first of several Arab Springs.
On the opening day of the 2011 Global Microcredit Summit in Valladolid Spain, this November the mood among 2000 delegates from over a hundred countries was sombre.
A special pleasure for me at the 2011 microcredit summit in Spain was spending time with Nandini Azad, one of the current powerhouses in the Indian anti-poverty movement, who has distinguished herself for path-breaking grassroots development not only in India but also in several other countries.
Despite the preponderance of men on podium of the microcredit summit, it was Muslim women from Pakistan, Tunisia, Lebanon, Sudan and Egypt, who offered some of the most inspiring leadership models at the sessions in Spain this year.
In 2007 Justin Ang, now a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, was part of a group in Singapore called Youth that Care that raised $20,000 to help people in Tsunami-afflicted fishing villages in Thailand pay off a debt burden to loan sharks so they could be free to build up small businesses.
In a small house in Hamilton Ontario, I was sipping an Indian soup with Ela Bhatt, founder of the one-million-strong Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India.
Grassroots women that have set up farm collectives of their own in Kerala have now entered municipal politics where they will take community development to new heights says Ananya Mukherjee-Reed, a Toronto professor and researcher.
Cooperatives run by women are the way to protect marginalized Indian women from the worst aspects of the commercialization of microcredit, says SEWA leader Ela Bhatt and Indian development volunteer Vithal Rajan.
In 2005 I let my imagination fly with a short story set in both India and Montreal. It appeared late in 2005 in The Little Magazine, a literary journal published in Delhi.
At the end of my first trip to India I went to Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat hoping to do research on the Self Employed Women’s Association but instead I ended up in the middle of mob violence by Hindus against Muslims. In my book, see chapter 9 - Into the Inferno.
A little money goes a long way when you start a business in a small Indian Village
In a big City in India, it helps if you’re a gymnast if you want to use your legs to move around.
Social activists turn up evidence that reveals Hindu groups coerced marginalized people