A River Runs Through Upturned Lives
Thousands of Mumbai slum-dwellers have been rendered homeless
after their houses were demolished as part of the Mithi river
clean-up project. Sonia Faleiro reports on a depressingly
familiar saga: many who are legally entitled to full and proper
rehabilitation have been left without a roof over their heads.
(June, 2006)
The Other Half:
Age of Innocence, Burdened Lives
Cook, scrape, clean, serve. Two young girls and a poignant blueprint of
despair. But everywhere too, signs of what could so easily be:
education, laughter, a future. Just the bare necessities of
life.
One of a series of six profiles on the
lives of India's domestic workers. Read the entire series:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6
(March - April, 2006)
Inside Mumbai's Madarsas
"Please Leave Us To Our Devices. They Work Fine."
The Maharashtra government’s plan to modernise madarsas leaves
them unenthused. Sonia Faleiro visits the madarsas of Mumbai and
finds that they are wary of creeping State control. (March,
2006)
Death Along the Famished Road
The government hasn't reached Vidarbha's farmlands, but its poison has. Sonia Faleiro ventures into the hinterland to discover cataclysmic tales of deprivation and despair wreaked by BT Cotton cultivation.
(December, 2005)
Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!
As a boy, Pankaj Sharma realised he preferred being a woman. He paid for his 'deviance' when his father disowned him. Giving up was not in his script. So he ran away to Mumbai to reinvent himself. Today, he is Bobby Darling, the actor who redefines gender anew in a conservative industry, writes Sonia Faleiro.
(December, 2005) Bar Girls, Two Suicides and Many Untruths
The lives, and now apparently, the deaths of Mumbai's bar girls are never quite as they seem.
(September, 2005)
The Dying of the Evening Stars: Lata Raghavan Nair
The first in a series of six profiles of former dance bar girls.
(September, 2005)
The Myth of the Melting Pot
Drug peddlers. Thieves. Sex workers. Cheap labour. Isolationists. These are the dominant stereotypes of many immigrant communities in India; only a few escape censure. An intimate look at the cultural ghettos that dot India, asking the question, why are we so afraid of the 'other'?
(September, 2005)
|
