Issue 19: Relief in a Time of Crisis

Features
The Case Against Unjust Laws and Social Customs in Pakistan
Mukhtar Mai was gang-raped on orders of a tribal court and then paraded naked in town. Rather than suffering in silence, she’s taking her rapists to court, challenging Pakistan’s laws, patriarchal norms, cultural practices and social taboos.
by Leena Khan

Editorial
Becoming in Diaspora
Are we Rushdie’s "bastard children" of history, hybridity, and violence, from which transformation and tomorrows can generate? What kind of diaspora are we becoming?
by Angana Chatterji

Features
Gujarat Butcher Modi (Not) in the US
The U.S. slams its doors in the face of one of the architects of the 2002 Gujarat pogroms—and activists from the South Asian diaspora helped set the stage. Sapna Gupta outlines the strategies and victories of the Campaign Against Genocide.
by Sapna Gupta

Features
Wake-Up Call: South Asians Stand in Solidarity with Hotel Workers
Young South Asians protest outside of a Los Angeles hotel when the South Asian Students Association refused to move their conference and dismissed calls for solidarity with boycotting hotel workers advocating for equitable working conditions.
by Sejal Patel and Siddharth Desai

Features
Seeing the Disappeared
Two visual artists seek out new ways of engaging with the post-9/11 disappearances in the US
by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani

Features
Corporate Responsibility Twenty Years On
In Bhopal, the struggle to seek justice goes on, not as compensation, for the loss is too great to be compensated, but rather as a founding virtue of human society.
by Somnath Mukherji

Fiction
The Toy Makers
Multinational executives from a toy company and their elite Indian counterparts pass time on a train platform.
by Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal

Editorial
Good Mutants, Bad Mutants
The good mutants work in spaces servicing the global economy. The bad ones want to destroy freedom, democracy, free markets. New mutations are arising in the politics of fear and the War on Terror.
by Ali Mir

Features
Lessons on Island Living
Indigenous knowledge saves the native Andamanese from the tsunami, but can it save them from settlers and rapacious development?
by Madhusree Mukerjee

Features
Political Conflict in Relief
Before this year's refugee camps, there were those from last year, and the year before. A legacy of civil strife complicates any tsunami relief efforts in Sri Lanka.
by Nimmi Gowrinathan

Features
The Tsunami of Aid
A recent World Bank report on the tsunami gives us reason to be vigilant to the forces of corporate globalization using aid as a pretext to advance their agenda.
by Sriram Ananthanarayanan and Shalini Nataraj

Features
And Medicine For All
We must mourn the capitulation embodied in the Indian Patents Amendment Bill passed in March 2005, but we must celebrate the concessions won by people's movements and left activists.
by Raza Mir

Photoessay
The Survivors at Thikana Rehabilitation Home
A resilient five-year-old survivor named Babli personifies the hope that acid violence against girls and women in Bangladesh can end.
by Fariba S. Alam

Film
Born Into Saving Brothel Children
Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels ignores local organizing efforts and instead gives us more images of white saviors.
by Svati P. Shah

Theater
A Matter of Words
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's Bhezti causes an uproar in the Sikh community, pitting free speech against religious tolerance. But are blasphemy laws the answer?
by Anjali Wason

Poetry
This Special Occasion
by Purvi Patel

Editorial
Relief in a Time of Crisis
An introduction to Issue 19
by SAMAR Collective