Ignited identity has been extinguished

My anger erupted after George Bush claimed that war was necessary to avenge the killing of 3000 people in the  World Trade Center. His words didn’t make sense. I couldn’t understand the connection between bombing and occupying a poor country like Afghanistan. Was The USA not responsible for the mess in the region? hadn’t they joined forces with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to create Al Qaida and the Taliban? hadn’t the indoctrination of a whole nation not been a USA collaboration to counteract this so-called threat from the Soviet Union?

The more I read the more enraged I became.

I ordered more and more books from Amazon, using all my savings on books on post-colonialism, terrorism, books by among others Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and watching documentaries on Al Jazeera.

Years later I was still harping on about the WoT, Guantanamo and our collective conscience. On FB I was harassing everyone including Deepak Chopra who eventually stopped me from writing on his wall.

Once someone said to me “Do you ever talk about happy things? Do you ever take time to enjoy the here and now?”

I realised I hadn’t, and thus I started my journey to also enjoy the good things. Thus came also the realisation that by seeking positivity I am also able to find the beauty in people and have hope for the future and our common humanity.

Long time…..

Trying to keep Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, emails, Skype updated made me forget my duty to update my blog……

India has it’s first ever transsexual beauty pageant

This article caught my eye by chance.

Winner of the Miss India Transgender pageant Karina Shalini Photo: Laskshman/Getty

By BY Neil Nagraj DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER 21/12-2009

India has hosted its first transsexual beauty pageant, an event that allowed a demographic often relegated to the shadows to take center stage.
 
Some 120 hopefuls from across the country battled it out to become the first transsexual “Miss India,” the news agency Agence France-Presse reported. 
 
The pageant, which drew contestants ranging in age from 20 to 35 to the southern city of Chennai, was organized by the Indian Community Welfare Organization, a gay-rights advocacy group.
 
In addition to the grand prize, awards were handed out recognizing Miss Beautiful Hair, Miss Beautiful Eyes and Miss Beautiful Skin, the news agency reported.
 
Kareena, a 25-year-old model from Mumbai, snagged the contest’s top honor. Romi, a 23-year-old beautician from Manipur, came in second. Third place went to Padmini, 25, a dance instructor — and hometown favorite.
 
“We had a meeting of the transgender community some months ago where we discussed various events to bring community members into society,” A.J. Hariharan, a founding member of the advocacy group, told AFP.
 
Hariharan added, “Everyone unanimously supported the idea of a national-level beauty pageant” after debating, and punting, several other proposals, including a sporting event.
 
“We thought it would create an opportunity for the transgender community to showcase their skills [and] create a platform to address the problems they face — discrimination, marginalization and misconception,” Hariharan said.
 
The pageant is the latest in a series of steps forward for India’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, AFP reported.
 
Eunuchs won a long-fought fight to be identified as “other” on voter registration cards in November.
 
This past summer, gay sex between consenting adults was decriminalized when a colonial-era ban on homosexuality was ruled unconstitutional

Read more:  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2009/12/21/2009-12-21_india_hosts_first_.html#ixzz0aQmgS5VF

 

Heart-wrenching story of hope for acid victims

From the hands of beauty

Each year we see a growing number of women who become burn victims at the hands of their own husbands and families. However, there is a new attitude in the air and the survivors are no longer resigning to their fates. You! takes a look at these magnificent women…

By Luavut Zahid & Muniza Zahid

The concept of ‘honour’ in Pakistan is enough to send a chill down anyone’s spine. In order to protect that honour our society is willing to kill. Ironically, honour is only the responsibility of women in this country and the keepers of this honour, i.e. the men of society, do nothing but tarnish it further. Every year there are several cases where women are mercilessly thrown acid on or burned with kerosene. All one needs is around Rs. 30 to completely destroy a human being. Things have had a grim outlook for sometime now but times are changing. Victims are now realising that their lives are precious and many are now rising above their scars to face the world and their demons and start a new life.

Survivors are now learning to throw their scars to the dogs and give themselves a chance to be happy.

The Smile Again Foundation has been giving hope to burn victims for the past five years. Headed by Masarrat Misbah, the organisation has registered over 400 cases and facilitated successful surgeries with doctors from Italy. Many of the girls have been given training for their rehabilitation. The most recent lot of girls have now become certified beauticians. “We sent 10 girls to Italy and out of those 10, two were their coordinators and the other eight girls were trained as beauticians and once they finished those programs they came back to different branches of Depilex. At the moment, four of them are working in Depilex Lahore while two of them have opened up their own salons in their villages from where they came. These girls are so disfigured that even after all their surgeries people look at them and ask us why we haven’t tried to help them. Their scars aren’t stopping them, however, and they are treading on in life and now doing things on their own. They now have the courage not only to face their families but the people around them too. Can you imagine what it must be like to be that flawed and then work to make someone else beautiful?” says Masarrat.

Most of us can’t fathom what goes through the minds of these girls when they are beautifying people who have good eyes, hair and skin et cetera. Most of them have either lost one eye or are partially blind. They are working as beauticians, hairdressers, manicurist, pedicurists, and as body masseuse. But with that we need to take notice of the immense courage that these girls have within them. They did not give up on their lives but chose to fight back.

Masarrat is very optimistic about the future of these girls, “It’s beautiful to see that when they come in the morning the first thing they do is start putting on lipstick and anyone who knows them wants them to genuinely be happy. And now that they are earning they have won back their place and their respect. Their families now see them as the bread earners and call them their sons and give them love once more. The problem is that most of the victims come from very poor families. The families can’t help but shun these girls. Once they are married off the parents think their responsibility is over. And when their daughters come back to them burnt; the parents then have to think twice whether they would like to keep taking care of them or let them just rot like vegetables. What happens most of the time is that after a while even those who want to take care of their daughters eventually give up. This is because the surgeries and taking care of them itself is too expensive. On an average a girl will go through 30-35 surgeries and still not recover from her disfigurement. But these girls are not giving up. They are pushing through and now they have found some semblance of happiness and they have carved out a place for themselves in the world again,” she smiles.

Smile Again has been trying for the last five years to not just help them restore their figures and their faces but to rehabilitate them. “In Thailand there is a school where we are now trying to send some of our girls. It teaches massage therapy and that school is only for blind people. Some girls are currently undergoing training to become teleoperators. And that is the best job that anyone can offer them and I would like to urge telecommunications companies and private companies to please give these girls a job because there is no face required to do those jobs. They are the easiest people to hire and work with. These girls are so happy even with the minimum salaries. These girls are very talented with embroidery and stitching but except for Rizwan Beyg nobody has come forward to say, ‘Masarrat Apa, please tell us if we can give these girls any work’. They don’t have any attitude problems or demands and they sit for hours if you tell them to just sit for hours without complaining. They are the best workers and people should be hiring them,” she asserts.

The organisation was responsible for also training some of the girls to speak the Italian language. They came from far flung areas and are now fluent in Italian. “When we have our Italian doctors coming in we then hire them for a week as translators and it’s heart warming to see them interacting with the doctors and having arguments with them in Italian. How many people know Italian? These girls can’t speak proper Urdu but they know Italian like they know the back of their hand!” Masarrat smiles.

In order to help the burn victims the organisation does not wait for the victims to come to them but finds them itself. Automatically, all over Pakistan, the 30 branches of Depilex have become sub offices for Smile Again. If an incident has taken place in Peshawar then the girls from Peshawar salon will go to them and introduce themselves and if the family is willing then they take over there. “The problem is that most of the times the family or the girls are not very open with us; it’s only after they realise they are not getting proper aid from other hospitals they come back to us. There are times when I am called for a case in the Civil Hospital for instance for one girl and I know from experience that I will probably find seven more girls when I go there; I automatically let it be known that we are there to help and support them if they need us. Basically, it’s word of mouth and a lot of media projection has also helped. People are now becoming aware of this project. Even the government hospitals in Lahore and Multan have doctors that very silently call us when they come across these cases,” informs Masarrat.

The point is that no matter what has happened and why it has happened we need to move forward. Of course the perpetrator should be punished and his crime should be recognised but these girls need to get their lives back on track. “They’re still living and breathing and we have to give them hope and bring their smile back again. We have even changed the mindset of our clients who weren’t so happy with having these girls work as their beauticians in the start. And that was not because they had anything against the girls but because most of them had their own problems at home and could not deal with such a harsh reality. But if we turn these girls away then who will take care of them? If I don’t have the strength to take them on then no other parlour will either,” says Masarrat. At the moment the organisation doesn’t just pay for a victim’s physical treatment but also takes care of their psychological treatment.

Talking about the mentality of the people Masarrat says, “We need to educate our men and get them out of this sick mental psyche where they feel it is okay to go and burn a girl just because they are not getting their way. We need classes in our universities, colleges and schools to tell them that this is wrong. The southern belt of Punjab is notorious for having the most cases of this kind and they need to be taught that this is wrong. And when you see little girls who are raped and then thrown acid on you can’t help but wonder what kind of a world we are living in.”

At present the point of focus is not these victims’ injuries but the infinite amount of courage that they have to face the world around them. We live in a perpetual state of chaos and all of us can learn from these women who have quite literally lost everything but chose not to lament or cry about their fate, rather they chose to live.

Obama and the prize

Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. For what I wonder… For having hope?

Gaza: Goldstone’s report

by

Uri Avnery | avnery@actcom.co.il

Is there no limit to the wiles of those dastardly anti-Semites?

Now they have decided to slander the Jews with another blood libel. Not the old accusation of slaughtering Christian children to use their blood for baking Passover matzoth, as in the past, but of the mass slaughter of women and children in Gaza.

And who did they put at the head of the commission which was charged with this task? Neither a British Holocaust-denier nor a German neo-Nazi, nor even an Iranian fanatic, but of all people a Jewish judge who bears the very Jewish name of Goldstone (originally Goldstein, of course). And not just a Jew with a Jewish name, but a Zionist, whose daughter, Nicole, is an enthusiastic Zionist who once “made Aliyah” and speaks fluent Hebrew. All this in order to defame the most moral army in the world, fresh from waging the most just war in history!

The official Israeli reaction to the Goldstone report would have been amusing, if the matter had not been so grave.

Except for the “usual suspects” (Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and their ilk), the condemnation of the report was unanimous, total and extreme, from Shimon Peres, that advocate of every abomination, down to the last scribbler in the newspapers. Nobody, but nobody, dealt with the subject itself. Nobody examined the detailed conclusions.

The instinctive reaction in such a situation is denial. When a human being is faced with a situation which he cannot handle, denial is the first refuge. But with us it has been developed into an art form.

But a profound debate on the Goldstone report is going on. Not about its content, But about the one point that is really important: Was our government right in deciding to boycott the commission?

Why did the Israeli government boycott the commission? The real answer is quite simple: They knew full well that the commission, any commission, would have to reach the conclusions it did reach.

In fact, the commission did not say anything new. Almost all the facts were already known: The bombing of civilian neighborhoods, the use of flechette rounds and white phosphorus against civilian targets, the bombing of mosques and schools, the blocking of rescue parties from reaching the wounded, the killing of fleeing civilians carrying white flags, the use of human shields, and more. The Israeli Army did not allow journalists near the action, but the war was amply documented by the international media in all its details, the entire world saw it in real time on the TV screens. The testimonies are so many and so consistent, that any reasonable person can draw their own conclusions.

If the officers and soldiers of the Israeli Army had given testimony before the commission, it would perhaps have been impressed by their angle too, and the conclusions could have been somewhat less severe. But the main thrust would not have changed. After all, the whole operation was based on the assumption that it was possible to overthrow the Hamas government in Gaza by causing intolerable suffering to the civilian population. The damage to civilians was not “collateral”, whether avoidable or unavoidable, but a central feature of the operation itself.

Moreover, the rules of engagement were designed to achieve “zero losses” to our forces — avoiding losses at any price. That was the conclusion our army — led by Gabi Ashkenazi — drew from the Second Lebanon War. The results speak for themselves: 200 dead Palestinians for every Israeli soldier killed by the other side — 1400:6. Every real investigation must inevitably lead to the same conclusions as those of the Goldstone commission. Therefore, there was no Israeli wish for a real inquiry. The “investigations” that did take place in Israel were a farce.

So the worldwide Israeli propaganda machine will continue to defame the Jewish judge and the people who appointed him.

Not all the Israeli accusations against the UN are groundless. For example: why does the organization investigate the war crimes in Gaza (and in former Yugoslavia and Darfur, investigations in which Goldstone took part as chief prosecutor) and not the actions of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Russians in Chechnya?

Israel’s relations with the UN are very complex. The state was founded on the basis of a UN resolution. A year later, Israel was accepted as a UN member in spite of the fact that it had not allowed the (then) 750 thousand Palestinian refugees to return.

But this honeymoon soured quickly. David Ben-Gurion spoke with contempt about UM-Shmum (“Um” is the Hebrew for “UN”, the prefix “shm” signifies contempt). From then on to this very day, Israel has systematically violated almost every single UN resolution that concerned it, complaining that there was an “automatic majority” of Arab and communist countries stacked against it. This attitude was reinforced when, on the eve of the 1967 war, the UN troops in Sinai where precipitously withdrawn on the demand of Gamal Abdel Nasser. And, of course, by the UN resolution (later annulled) equating Zionism with racism.

Now this argument is raising its head again. The UN, it is being said, is anti-Israeli, which means (of course) anti-Semitic. Everyone who acts in the name of the UN is an Israel-hater. To hell with the UN. To hell with the Goldstone report.

That is, however, a woefully short-sighted policy. The general public throughout the world is hearing about the report and remembering the pictures they saw on their TV screens during the Gaza war. The UN enjoys much respect. In the wake of the “Molten Lead” operation, Israel’s standing in the world has been steadily going down, and this report will send it down even further.

This will have practical consequences — political, military, economic and cultural. Only a fool — or an Avigdor Lieberman — can ignore that. If there is no credible Israeli investigation, there will be demands for the UN Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Barack Obama would have to decide whether to veto such a resolution — a move that would cause grave harm to the US, and for which he would demand a high price from Israel.

Uri Avnery (Hebrew: אורי אבנרי‎, also transliterated Uri Avneri, born September 10, 1923) is an Israeli writer and founder of the Gush ShalomIrgun as a teenager, Avnery sat in the Knesset from 1965-74 and 1979-81.^[1] He was the owner of peace movement. A member of the HaOlam HaZeh, an Israeli news magazine, from 1950 until it closed in 1993. He is famous for crossing the lines during the Battle of Beirut to meet Yassir Arafat on July 3, 1982 — the first time the Palestinian leader ever met with an Israeli. Avnery is the author of several books about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including 1948: A Soldier’s Tale, the Bloody Road to Jerusalem (2008); Israel’s Vicious Circle (2008); and My Friend, the Enemy (1986).

Abu Ghraib? Kabul? Gitmo?