Coming Soon! Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

We are pleased to announce two opportunities to discuss Katherine Boo's award-winning book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity. Ye Olde Pasadena group has selected this book for it's usual September 15, 6:30pm meeting at Vroman's Bookstore. Loyal Reader Cheri Dellelo is launching a brand new Rights Readers in Cleveland on August 4 at 6:30pm at Mac's Backs. Let your friends in the area know!

For enticement to read the book, watch the video above.  Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a former reporter and editor for The Washington Post. Her reporting has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. For the last decade, she has divided her time between the United States and India. This is her first book.  Here are a couple of enthusiastic endorsements from other authors we have read:

“There is a lot to like about this book: the prodigious research that it is built on, distilled so expertly that we hardly notice how much we are being taught; the graceful and vivid prose that never calls attention to itself; and above all, the true and moving renderings of the people of the Mumbai slum called Annawadi. Garbage pickers and petty thieves, victims of gruesome injustice—Ms. Boo draws us into their lives, and they do not let us go. This is a superb book.”

—Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains Beyond Mountains and Strength in What Remains

“I couldn’t put Behind the Beautiful Forevers down even when I wanted to—when the misery, abuse and filth that Boo so elegantly and understatedly describes became almost overwhelming. Her book, situated in a slum on the edge of Mumbai’s international airport, is one of the most powerful indictments of economic inequality I’ve ever read. If Bollywood ever decides to do its own version of The Wire, this would be it.”

—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dime

For March: Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl

We are looking forward to reading Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl in March,

In 2007, the booming port city of Lianyungang achieved the dubious distinction of having the most extreme gender ratio for children under five in China: 163 boys for every 100 girls. The numbers may not matter much to the preschool set. But in twenty years the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. When Lianyungang's children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. 

 

The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: rampant sex selective abortion has left over 160 million females "missing" from Asia's population. And gender imbalance reaches far beyond South and East Asia, affecting the Caucasus countries, Eastern Europe, and even some groups in the United States --a rate of diffusion so rapid that the leading expert on the topic compares it to an epidemic. As economic development spurs parents in developing countries to have fewer children and brings them access to sex determination technology, couples are making sure at least one of their children is a son. So many parents now select for boys that they have skewed the sex ratio at birth of the entire world. 

 

Sex selection did not arise on its own. Largely unknown until now is that the sex ratio imbalance is partly the work of a group of 1960s American activists and scientist who zealously backed the use of prenatal technologies in their haste to solve an earlier global problem. 

 

What does this mean for our future? The sex ratio imbalance has already led to a spike in sex trafficking and bride buying across Asia, and it may be linked to a recent rise in crime there as well. More far-reaching problems could be on the horizon: From ancient Rome to the American Wild West, historical excesses of men have yielded periods of violence and instability. Traveling to nine countries, Mara Hvistendahl has produced a stunning, impeccably researched book that examines not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies underlying sex selection but also the West's role in creating them.

For August: The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall

For our August mystery month we have decided to have a bit of fun with The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall:

Meet Vish Puri, India’s most private investigator. Portly, persistent, and unmistakably Punjabi, he cuts a determined swath through modern India’s swindlers, cheats, and murderers. 

In hot and dusty Delhi, where call centers and malls are changing the ancient fabric of Indian life, Puri’s main work comes from screening prospective marriage partners, a job once the preserve of aunties and family priests. But when an honest public litigator is accused of murdering his maidservant, it takes all of Puri’s resources to investigate. With his team of undercover operatives—Tubelight, Flush, and Facecream—Puri combines modern techniques with principles of detection established in India more than two thousand years ago, and reveals modern India in all its seething complexity.

Tarquin Hall is a British writer and journalist who has reported extensively on S.E. Asia and the Middle East for the British press. He is also the author of the highly acclaimed non-fiction books Salaam Brick Lane and To the Elephant Graveyard. The Vish Puri series is his first venture into fiction. He lives in London, England.

International Mother Language Day

Language buffs! Today is United Nations International Mother Language Day.  On this date in 1952, students demonstrating for recognition of their language, Bangla,  were shot and killed by police in Dhaka, the capital of what is now Bangladesh. Learn more here.  The commemoration promotes linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. If you feel like celebrating try this link
for a couple hours of linguistic and musical diversity.

I just discovered that National Geographic's Enduring Voices Project which documents endangered languages around the world has a YouTube channel.  If you enjoyed listening to samples of the Piraha language during our discussion of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes or our linguistic explorations in Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages you'll find more language rarities here.  Here is video of a Koro song:



See "Hidden" Language Found in Remote Indian Tribe to learn more about this very recently discovered Tibeto-Burman language.

Journey to North India

The imagery in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss is vivid enough without visual aids, but just for fun, check out this 'North India and Sikkim' slideshow from photographer Matt Reichel.

... We'd emerge to the tops of monasteries limpet to the sides of the rock, surrounded by chortens and prayer flags, the white facades catching the light of the sunset, all straw gold, the mountains rugged lines of indigo... Buddhism was ancient here, more ancient than it was anywhere else, and we went to a monastery that had been built, they said, when a flying lama had flown from one mountaintop to another, from Menak Hill to Enchey, and another that had been built when a rainbow connected Kanchenjunga to the crest of the hill. Often gompas were deserted because the monks were also farmers; they were away at their fields and gathered only a few times a year for pujas and all you could hear was the wind in the bamboo. Clouds cam through the doors and mingled with the paintings of the clouds. The interiors were dark, smoke-stained, and we'd try to make out the murals by the light of butter lamps... (page 169)

Deepa Mehta's Water

Amnesty International USA is supporting the film Water, directed by Deepa Mehta, a story about India's "widow houses," where women of all ages are taken to live apart from society following the deaths of their husbands. Read more about the film at the Amnesty website where there is also an appropriate opportunity to take action against gender violence. Mehta encountered threats of violence in making the film, detailed in this Talk of the Nation Interview. And here's the New York Times Review. 

"Water" is an exquisite film about the institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief. Serene on the surface yet roiling underneath, the film neatly parallels the plight of widows under Hindu fundamentalism to that of India under British colonialism. Though Gandhi and his followers are an insistent background presence, the movie is never didactic, trusting the simple rhythms of the women's lives to tell their story.

The film opens in Pasadena this weekend and a Rights Readers delegation is planning to check it out (with appropriate Indian feast afterwards!). 

Bringing Bhopal to LA Environmental Education Fair

This Saturday Group 22 members will once again be tabling at the Los Angeles Environmental Education Fair and we'll once again be calling attention to the campaign for justice for the people of Bhopal, India. Right now activists are marching from Bhopal to Delhi to publicize the health and environmental issues still stemming from the chemical accident in Bhopal more than 20 years ago. You can follow the marchers progress at this blog. There's a new focus and factsheet for each day as well as pictures and maps. More insights and pictures at this blog. Amnesty's part in this campaign and actions you can take to support the marchers are available here.

Arundhati Roy on Bush in India

Arundhati Roy (Rights Readers' selection: The Cost of Living) weighs in on Bush in India.

Kids with Cameras

Group 22 has a busy weekend with our annual appearance in the Doo-Dah Parade and our Rights Readers discussion Sunday evening. In anticipation of having photos to document some of our activities, I have added a Flickr badge to the website which will from time to time feature Group 22 pix. Right now though, we have a few selections from one of the children featured in the documentary film Born into Brothels-- there's also a book version-- about children in India documenting their own lives with the aid of photographer Zana Briski. Click the badge to see enlarged versions. For more information on the project visit the Kids with Cameras site. If the photos look vaguely familiar to some, they were once also featured in an Amnesty International Wall Calendar. (This year's calendar can be found here or here-- a great gift!)

November 20 is International Children's Day, so this post is our little celebration. Visit the Amnesty site for more ways to commemorate the occasion.