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Silent
victims
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Child domestic workers
are often exploited and ill-treated in the absence of protective laws.
Aditi Tandon recounts some harrowing
tales and looks at the organisations helping to better their lot
Some
time ago, Mumbai woke up to the heartbreaking news of a 15-year-old
domestic worker being assaulted by her woman employer. The girl had a
fracture in the skull; her head had been brutally shaven; her body
frayed with knives and pens, and her back all blue and swollen from a
prolonged contact with a heated surface. Too bizarre as it was to
be buried under the rhetoric of employers’ intolerance of a worker’s
laziness, the case generated the required response.
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It is hard to partition
tradition
Mela Chiragan or the Urs
of Madho Lal Husain is a unique cultural and secular festival of
Lahore,
says Nirupama
Dutt
WHAT made Lahore the
legendary city was its multi-cultural and multi-religious heritage
having been the kingdom of Hindus, Mughals and the Sikhs as well as a
prized city of the British after the annexation of Punjab.
Blue marvel Down Under
P. Lal
recalls his visit to the Blue Mountains in Australia
A
two-hour drive to the west of Sydney took us to the region of the Blue
Mountains. The afternoon sun could hardly pierce the clouds covering
the ranges but wherever it did, the sight was spectacular; the
blueness of the mountains appeared to be dotted with sparkling
diamonds (as the light filtered through the dense foliage).
Doctored to act
Randeep Wadehra
HIS
is a familiar face to the aficionados of Punjabi and Hindi television
and cinema. As for his name, he started off as Ranjit Sharma, was
rechristened Ranjit Riaz when he starred in a Bollywood movie as hero
and finally became famous as Dr. Ranjit.
‘A part of me feels
Punjabi’
Paul Mayeda Berges,
husband of director Gurinder Chadha, admits in a chat with Subhash
K. Jha that he was initially sceptical about Aishwarya Rai
playing the main lead—Tilo— in his directorial debut Mistress
Of Spices.
The promise of Water
The absence of an
authentic locale is a handicap. The romance is rather one-dimensional
but the saving grace is the stunning climax, writes Ervell
E. Menezes
Deepa
Mehta’s Water, the last of the trilogy (the others are Fire
and Earth), made news for the wrong reasons when Hindu
extremists disrupted the shooting of the film in Varanasi. She later
shot it in Sri Lanka.
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