Global News by Tag: India
BANGALORE, INDIA – Shreya Shresht, 22, moved to Bangalore, a city in southern India, to work as a software engineer trainee. She says it’s been challenging moving away from her family and home state of Jharkhand in northwestern India.
“When I was staying with my parents, I had lesser responsibilities,” she says. “It felt protective, as if living in a shell.”
GUWAHATI, ASSAM, INDIA – Pratima Kharsa, a young girl from the Dimasa tribe, became pregnant after falling in love with a local boy. But when the news spread throughout her village in Assam, a state in India’s Northeast region, he publicly rejected her and the child.
Per the local customary law – law based on custom instead of legislation – the village head called a meeting and forced Kharsa to publicly declare the name of the father of her baby in front of a priest and village elders.
BANGALORE, INDIA – Shelley Das, 32, is a well-educated and widely traveled woman who lives in Bangalore, a city in southern India. Dressed in neat business clothes, she has just finished another workday at a multinational corporation, where she holds a senior position.
She says that she is part of a recent quantum leap in the evolution of the urban Indian woman.
BANGALORE, INDIA – Siddhart Roy, from Bangalore, a city in southwestern India, says his son Dev, 4, is autistic. At first, he says the family assumed Dev was just late to start speaking.
“The pediatricians diagnosed that Dev was autistic at a very late stage, as there was a notion that male child speak late,” he says.
But he says that although diagnosis is strong here, care is lacking.
NEW DELHI, INDIA – Madan, 21, who declined to give his last name, journeys more than 500 miles from the small town of Jabalpur to New Delhi, India’s capital, every year to participate in the gay pride parade, which is held annually in November. The trip is 800 kilometers, but he says that this is a once-in-a-year occasion that allows him to be his true self and be open about his sexuality.
MUMBAI, INDIA – Jasjit Kaur, 40, who requested her name be changed, is a well-educated urban housewife. Fifteen years ago, she says her family pressured her to have two abortions, a decision she has long regretted.
Kaur says she was a happy mother of two daughters and didn’t want to have more children. But her husband and in-laws kept pressuring her to bear a male child, a preference she didn’t share.
MUMBAI, INDIA – For the past 37 years, Aruna Shanbaug, 62, has been lying in a vegetative state in Ward No. 4 of government-run King Edward Memorial Hospital, KEM, in Mumbai, India’s most populous city, according to court records recapping a petition by journalist Pinki Virani for Shanbaug’s euthanasia, which judges recently denied.