Delhi enters the 21st century

For those who haven’t been following recent (not so recent anymore) news from Delhi - the High Court decriminalized homosexuality this month by ruling down the famed Section 377 of the penal code. Very exciting. Very about time. Very controversial.

Original breaking news: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/India/India-decriminalises-gay-sex/articleshow/4726608.cms

Now Baba Ramdev, a very famous acclaimed yoga guru with millions of followers, is shooting his mouth off and trying to get the ruling overturned. Below is the (albeit very biased) summary of a (somewhat more, but still outdated) recent interview on Hindi TV from an LGBT listserv I get:

Just saw Baba Ramdev's Interview on :Seedhi Baat" at Aaj Tak. 

Prabhu Chawla, the interviewer tried to bring in some objectivity and reason to the rhetoric, but the baba went on and on with his tirade against

homsexuals. The gist of his arguments:

1] Its harmful to the character of the nations and therefore should be criminalised.

2] Only criminalisation will ensure that these people are brought in for 'rehabilitation'

3] That he will organise rehabilitation camps and change people using yoga.

4] That it is all about national interest and that irrespective of the court, the people of India who are opposed will win, because theirs is the

path of truth.

5] That his stand is constitutional because the exceptions to fundamental rights includes grounds like national sexurity and morality and

homosexuality is against both.

6] That WHO, UN etc are wrong in describing that homoseexuality is not a disease, and that he is right in describing it as such

AND FINALLY THE CHERRY ON THE CAKE: 

7] That because homosexuality is a disease, homosexuals should be barred from donating blood, since anyone who receives this blood by transfusion

will also be infected with homosexuality.

I think the WTF is self-explanatory. I did like this response comment on India Today though:

Baba Ramdev said on Seedhi Baat that receiving blood from gay people makes the recipients gay. Why don't the people follow Ramdev's advice and donate blood to gay people and make them normal?

In better news, the mood here in Tamil Nadu is a bit more optimistic. Chennai, a particularly conservative part of India, does have one advantage in that transsexuals have traditionally been respected members of society – the community may not mingle with them, but few tamper with fate by failing to give money and get their newborns blessed by the hijras. More in the mainstream, one of the many sexuality rights organizations in the state is organizing a workshop to sensitize the Tamil media on LGBT issues, as well as undertaking the ambitious goal of coining new terms in Tamil to better define LGBT communities. Good luck to them.

Prop 8, Karnataka and gay Nepal MPs

Like any good mainstream Californian, I’ve always felt strongly about sexual rights, but recently I’ve felt a lot more passionate about the issue as a basic human right. Maybe it’s the passing of Prop 8, maybe it’s the rampant homophobia I hadn’t been exposed to before. It was one thing in my predominantly Christian village in Kenya, where I expected people to be less educated or open-minded. It’s another in an urban center in India, a nation exploding with diaspora and Western influence. To see young people scoff at traditions like arranged marriage like they’re arcane vestiges of their parents’ generation, but hold tight to their anti-gay prejudices without questioning their origins, is something I can’t get used to despite knowing full well that this is not a phenomenon of the east.

This came to be even more front and center this morning when I read a press release about some recent events in Karnataka, the next state over. This brought back to mind so many images of the issues we worked against in the HIV fight in Kenya – stigmatization, misrepresentation of facts, deliberate deception… but for all my whining about corruption in Kenya, I never saw these types of actions carried out by the police. They were carried out by non-state players, churches, Western-backed NGOs, but never by the very government agency working to prevent misinformation and promote awareness. This reaches a whole new level of atrocity.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel. Recently a panel was held here (in Chennai, capital of the country’s most conservative state) featuring Sunil Pant, a member of Nepal’s parliament who is Asia’s first openly gay MP. Milk is coming out this week, although sadly not in India. The No on 8 campaign is finally waking up and taking some legal action, albeit a month late. And the realization that this is a battle that’s far from over, not just a “matter of time” as I had previously thought, has pushed me into a far higher level of awareness and incited my inclinations towards activism. As much as the comparison offends some communities, I do think of this as our generation’s version of the 1960s civil rights movement, and am starting to consider getting more proactively involved (hmm, next career move? stay tuned). If a few events like these can spur a straight, middle class white girl who’s experienced relatively negligible discrimination in her life to action, imagine what they can do for the rest of the population.

Mumbai

Decent local coverage and streaming video of the terror attacks here.

To me this one is particularly scary not just because of the scale of the attacks (as opposed to Delhi in September) or the targeting of foreigners. It's the indiscriminate shooting in train stations, the ambiguity of motive, and the impact it's actually having. The Delhi, Bangalore, and Ahmedabad blasts didn't receive this kind of coverage from the international press. There weren't hostages. The markets didn't close. They certainly didn't cause the death of the chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad, which may be the most scary so far.

I do sincerely hope, though, that this isn't considered a crisis just because of the involvement of foreigners, the threats against US and UK passport holders. The latest counts say 101 people have died, 6 of them foreigners. Let's remember that the other 95 deaths are just as tragic and despicable.

VOTE!

And also, watch this hilarity and customize it and send it to your friends. If you already got it from me, you're someone special (or maybe one of the 5 remaining people who still reads this blog).

http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/index.html?nid=JPJdcJK7ggXWWH8aRQJ77DI3OTc2NDE-&id=-13100268-kTneemx

For further entertainment, here is the story of my experience voting absentee from India.

In Chennai there's this wonderful group called Democrats Abroad that organizes events to help people register to vote, keep up to date about American politics, etc etc. They offer personalized advice on how to fill out your ballot and make sure you sign in all the right places and all that. (For the record they run nonpartisan events, but you run into very few people living in developing countries who are not Democrats.)

You'd think with a great organization like this, voting would be easy, right? Right.

So I registered to vote with Dems Abroad way in advance. And typically, my absentee ballot did not arrive. And did not arrive. And did not arrive. Fortunately, as it turns out, some dude in the 1970s came up with a great solution to this absentee ballot mailing problem and got Congress to institute the "Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot". The FWAB, as we absentee junkies like to call it, allows people who have registered to vote but haven't received their ballot to download a generic one off the web, fill it out, and send it in. So I did that. Yay, job done right?

But, there are all these weird county rules and it's very unclear whether you're allowed to vote for local issues on the FWAB. Apparently there's actually a danger that if your county doesn't allow you to vote on local issues and you write in your votes for them anyway, your federal vote could be discounted. Since California is such a swing state, I didn't want to risk that, so I only voted federal. However this precluded me from having my say on things where my vote might actually make a difference, like Prop 8. Not so good.

By some stroke of miracle, a week or so later my absentee ballot showed up. I was positively floored. But it arrived on a Friday afternoon, and about 30 minutes later I received an email from my trusty Democrats Abroad group informing me that the next Monday was the last day to turn in absentee ballots to the Consulate to get them sent home. Unfortunately that Monday was Diwali, arguably the largest Indian holiday of the year, and our hardworking friends at the Consulate get both American and Indian holidays off. Plus, the Consulate website told me that citizen services were only open 9-12:30, so I was too late to submit my ballot that Friday. Sweet.

Fortunately, a call to the Consulate informed me that I could in fact submit the ballot on Tuesday and get it sent in time. So like the good informed voter I am, I called up my mom Tuesday morning and had her tell me what to vote for on all the local issues. (Kidding. Mostly. In CA you can vote for everything from animal rights to your high school superintendent, so there were a few things mom had to advise me on.) I then went to put my ballot in the envelope, seal sign and submit. You'd think the story would end there...

Gotta love India. My ballot envelope had glued itself together without the ballot inside, because the adhesive melted in the heat. I had to force it open to get the ballot in, which obviously made it look like it had been tampered with.

Another call to the Consulate. Apparently the way to get around this is to tape the envelope shut and sign over it, put it inside another envelope, and include a little note explaining that the ballot has not been tampered with. I didn't feel ridiculous at all typing up a professional business letter to my county registrar, explaining how the adhesive had melted my ballot shut in the south Indian heat.



As the icing on the cake, I finally went to the Consulate to submit my ballot. You can't take it inside the building because they don't allow sealed envelopes, and of course the people who work security at the entrance to the Consulate aren't experts in US voting procedures. You're supposed to personally put it in one of those fancy ballot boxes without anyone touching it or influencing you, right? Nope - they took it from me, shoved it through the metal detector, and dumped it in some generic box. I'm just hoping it was the US mail box, not the trash bin.

However, the point is I voted. So now everyone else better vote too.

More bad news

I'm on vacation in Rajasthan, north India right now. It's great. Full update and pictures to come, but...

Horribly sad news. Every time there is a celebration here there seems to be a risk. We were in Jodhpur three days ago, visiting this massive old fort on a hill there - really fantastic site. This morning, on the first day of the annual Navaratri Festival (also called Durga Puja), the crowd waiting to enter one of the temples in the fort turned into a stampede as the gates were opened. Over 140 people died of suffocation, according to official reports. This follows another stampede on a hillside temple in Maharashtra a month ago, when 160 people died. The tragedy is that much more in our faces because we were JUST there.

Slightly fuller story here: http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/000200809301502.htm

I don't mean to keep posting upsetting news on my blog, but I'm guessing that news from the east rarely makes it into the western papers.

A bit of environmental conservationism

As you might know, the human race has been remarkable in its ability to rapidly and effectively work together to destroy the Earth. Maybe there's something we could learn here about the proliferation of activities and habits among the masses, but I digress...

In India, of course, environmental sustainability is a major concern in every development effort. In an effort to take it seriously, I am conceding to a rare promotion of a word of mouth grassroots project.

Check out http://www.onehundredmonths.org/, and sign up if you are so inclined. I think it's an interesting opportunity to raise awareness among our collective social consciousness, and find ways to reduce our personal carbon footprints. We all know climate change is "bad" and conservation is "good", but how often do we actually do something about it in our daily routines?

Ok, enough preaching from me.

Just another global tragedy

Sometimes it takes moving across the world to make you think about what's going on in other places. I guess that's why we do it.

We all know about the conflict in Afghanistan. Few of us, myself included, pay much attention to it.

Yesterday there was a suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. No one has taken responsibility for it yet. It targeted a couple Indian diplomats, who have been the main subject of the news here, but also killed almost 40 civilian Afghans, most of whom were there waiting for Indian visas.

My counterpart for this job will arrive in August. He is Afghan. He just got back from spending some time at home, and we just got word from him yesterday that he's arrived in Tehran. He was probably at the Indian embassy in Kabul within the last couple weeks.

It never ceases to amaze me how little things that go on around the world matter until we have a personal connection to them. But what can we do? The burden of all the world's miseries is too much to bear on a daily basis.