Survivors of Acid Violence Speak Out

Haseena Hussain at the CSAAAW protest in Bangalore

Last week a young woman from Mysore was doused with a bottle of hydrochloric acid and then forced to drink a mixture of acid and alcohol. No one was surprised. Her husband had abused her for years, she had even lodged a series of complaints with the police in the months before the final attack. Two days ago Hina Fathima died in a Mysore hospital.

Acid violence is increasingly common across South Asia and cases like Fathima's are common enough that they often don't even make the front page of local newspapers. The Campaign and Struggle Against Acid Attacks on Women, or CSAAAW, has recorded 61 acid attacks in Karnataka since 1999. While most of the women die from their injuries or from suicide some survivors have come out to try to change local laws that make acid cheap and easily available at any corner grocery store. The women who do survive often have to bear terrible medical costs and often lose their eyes, noses, ears and any semblance of facial expression.

Last week I traveled to Bangalore to meet with the founding members of CSAAAW and do a short story for NPR about the prevalence of acid violence and interviewed key people in the campaign. So far the government isn't really taking the problem seriously. They contend that only a handful of women who are victims of these attacks are not a pressing enough problem. The state sponsored fund meant to pay for the women's medical care is hardly enough to cover the costs of two or three patients, let along the scores of women in the state who desperately need treatment.

The real danger of acid violence isn't only the effects that it has on victims, but in the role that it plays in Indian society as a threat. The mainstream media often shows angry men threatening their lovers with acid. Many women I know live in fear that they could be targets of some acid wielding assailant. For 18 rupees anyone can buy a bottle of acid that is 32% concentrated--it's a weapon that just about anyone can afford and ruing someone's life is as easy as splashing it in their face.

Click here to listen to the NPR story


I have also posted a small gallery of photos that I took while at the protest that show the range of activists and survivors who have come out to support CSAAAW. I am thinking of taking another trip up to Bangalore to take more photos of these women.

If you want to get in touch directly with CSAAAW contact Sanjana at csaaaw@redifmail.com.

India's 60th Independence Day

Tomorrow is India's 60th birthday. This morning Padma and I a long conversation about how far the nation has come since booting the British out of the country. Economic gurus are heralding that India will be one of the world's next economic super-powers and the country still produces far more English language poetry than any other nation on earth. There are still huge challenges facing the country: chief among them equity for the hundreds of millions of people who live in abject poverty and caste oppression. However in for such a short span of time India has sloughed off much of its colonial baggage to become a world player. And in a colorful, if unfair, example of colonial chickens coming home to roost, The TATA group, an Indian company out bid every other major player in a successful take over of the one of the largest steel companys in the world--the Anglo-Dutch Corus Group in a $4.3 billion deal.

In other unfair comparisons I would like to point out that India's Gross Domestic Product is $4.165 trillion: more than twice England's $1.96 trillion.

Happy Birthday India.

Vannakkum You're on Rainbow

I love the radio in Chennai. When I'm driving around the city I always tune into FM rainbow and listen to a daily game show called Aantakshri. The game is really simple. One caller starts singing a few bars of a song. They stop and then repeat the last sound from the last line of the song. The second caller starts singing some other song that starts with that last sound. It's sort of like musical chairs, but with singing.

A few weeks ago I convinced the good people at NPR that it would be a good idea to let me play parts of the show on American national radio. I interviewed the show's host and a couple other people around the city about why a show like that would become so popular. I also dropped in on a sound studio in the Amirami Mega Mall in Purusawakkam that lets people come in off the street and get a a quarter of an hour of studio time to hear themselves sing. I took some photos of the sound booth, it's pretty professional, check it out.

The show aired today all across the United States. If you missed it you can download it off the NPR website here. One word of caution for the Tamil purists who read this blog: when I was setting up the sound for the piece I didn't have any popular Tamil music on my computer, so the background music is all Hindi.

Gekos: Pets or Pests?

Gordo the Geko: Baron of my Kitchen

When my wife and I moved into our apartment in Chennai no one ever said that we would be the only inhabitants. Besides the two of us there are an inordinate number of gekos who line the walls and keep us company. At first we were elated. The little green lizards are ferocious mosquito and ant predators and more or less leave us alone. We were happy to have a couple of them patrolling the apartments borders for pests. Sure they leave there little lizard dungs on the walls when nature calls, but shit happens it's part of the great cycle of life. We learned to live with it.

For almost a year we more or less peacefully co-existed. Sure there were a couple incidents where an over eager lizard tried to gobble up a giant cockroach and ended up choking on it and dying on our floor with bug half sticking out of its mouth. Or the time when a baby geko died mysteriously and a swarm of ants found it and bore it away up the wall like a hundred thousand pall bearers. But events like that were few and far between.

But things began to change in the spring when the gekos began to breed. I'm not sure where they keep their nests, or where they lay their eggs, but during season changes the apartment gets inundated with dozens of micro-lizards half the size of my pinky. They're much faster than the adult gekos and scatter like vermin when the lights go on. The baby lizards resemblance to insects make them much less lovable than their larger counterparts. I guess you could say that their children turned me against them.

However in time the geko kids get eaten by other lizards or grow up enough to take their place on the walls of my apartment. But as they breed more and more gekos have taken up residence in my house. There's Gordo, the extremely fat baron of my kitchen. Hank a lizard who freakishly has two tails, and a bevy of lesser known apartment denizens.

When we first moved in the lizards and I were on good standing, but their reputation is beginning to fall in my eyes. Some day soon I may have to evict them.