Archive by Author
Families Stretch Across India-Pakistan Divide
Posted on July 31, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under International.
MUMBAI, India — Every time Tasleem, who lives in Mumbai, makes a call on her mobile to her mother in Karachi she receives a text message from her service provider urging her to be on alert. She should “exercise caution” when calling someone in Pakistan, the message tells her, as the information she shares “can be misused.”
“It doesn’t happen when I call London,” Tasleem said with a laugh.
The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan held talks earlier this month aimed at restoring relations, still floundering after the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai by Pakistani gunmen. The media has focused on the political jostling between the two countries, addressing sweeping issues related to Kashmir, terrorism and the sharing of water resources.
What often gets overlooked is how the tensions between the countries affect ordinary people every day.
Continue reading on GlobalPost.
No Comments
India Abroad Profile
Posted on July 15, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under International, Media.
India Abroad profiled me and other foreign correspondents based in Mumbai in their July 9, 2010 edition. Here it is.
No Comments
Maternal Mortality in India: Photo Montage
Posted on July 6, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
Hanna Ingber Win explains her Pulitzer Center reporting project in this photo montage:
Learn more about this reporting project.
No Comments
India’s Poor Cry Foul Over Fuel Prices
Posted on July 5, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Business, International.
MUMBAI, India — Kids played cricket on empty streets and motorbikes easily zoomed through normally congested intersections in Mumbai as opposition parties pulled off a nationwide strike Monday to protest a fuel price hike.
The strike, called by the main opposition Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the leftist bloc, closed businesses and schools and disrupted ground and air transportation. Police made thousands of arrests and sporadic acts of violence were reported in cities across the country.
The one-day strike represents a protest by the opposition parties and the nation’s lower and middle classes against the Congress-led government’s policies that have led to spiraling food and fuel prices.
While India’s economy, one of the fastest growing in the world, is expected to increase by more than 8 percent this year, much of the country’s poor are left out. India — where one in two children is malnourished — accounts for a third of the world’s 1.4 billion poor people, according to the World Bank.
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
No Comments
Divorce in India Just Got Easier — For Some
Posted on June 27, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under International, women.
MUMBAI, India — Irrespective of class or caste, a fundamental aspect of Indian society remains: marriage is a must. Children are seen as giving women value, and uniting with a husband in order to produce those children is still often seen as the only option, say gender specialists.
And yet, as more women become better educated, financially secure and independently minded, their ideas and expectations as to what marriage should look like are changing.
While it is hard to make generalizations about a country as vast as India, “there is definitely a churning and a change that is taking place in the realm of marriage,” said journalist and columnist Kalpana Sharma who covers developmental issues and gender. “Women are not willing to put up with stuff that their mothers were willing to put up with.”
Women’s ideas and expectations are changing, often faster than Indian society can keep up, and an inevitable clash has arisen. As a result, more Indian couples are deciding to divorce.
The Indian government has responded to a rise in marital breakups and a backlog in court cases by proposing an amendment this month to make it easier to get divorced. In the past, couples have had to prove mutual consent, adultery or abuse. If, as expected, parliament approves this amendment to what is known as the Hindu Marriage Act 1955 and Special Marriage Act 1954, couples must only show “irretrievable breakdown” of the marriage or “incompatibility.”
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
No Comments
For a Thirsty India, Rains a Mixed Blessing
Posted on June 23, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under International.
MUMBAI, India — Just a month back Mumbai had such a bad water shortage that some families went four or five days without a drop in their faucet. People broke open pipes to steal water. The local press covered fights between neighbors over access to a tap and water-related stress sending more people to psychologists’ offices.
The city was on edge, blistering hot and waiting for the skies to open. Finally, like it does every year, the monsoon arrived. Mumbaikars rejoiced in the streets last week as the city welcomed the First Rains, referred to in India like a proper noun.
But the monsoon is not all hot chai and onion bhajias. It also wreaks havoc, bringing with it the potential for floods, train disruptions, endless traffic, damaged buildings and an increase in diseases like malaria and dengue.
“I don’t know if I should be happy or sad when the monsoon comes,” said Nidhi Jamwal, a senior correspondent with “Down To Earth,” a magazine published by the New Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment. “It’s something like a paradox for all Mumbaikars.”
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
No Comments
Life Beyond Birth, India (Audio, Photos)
Posted on June 22, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
“If Sulekha Lohar had only had access to an ambulance instead of that handcart.
If the clinic just had a doctor, instead of just empty shelves.
If the hospital only had a bloodbank, as we hear from American journalist Hanna Ingber Win, Sulekha’s children might still have their mother.”
Listen to Hanna’s dispatch from a tea plantation in Assam plus an interview with her on maternal mortality in India. The story and interview aired on CBC Radio’s “Dispatches.”
Go to CBC Radio for Hanna’s slideshow from Assam.
This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Learn more about this reporting project.
No Comments
The Bhojpuri Boom (Video)
Posted on June 20, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Culture, International.
MUMBAI, India – Twenty-year-old Darbanga Lalit Yadav left his village in the north Indian state Bihar two years ago and moved to Mumbai in search of a job. He works as a cook in a family’s home and earns 4,000 rupees ($87) a month. When he gets a day off about once a month, he said he spends it by wandering around the city and then going to the movies.
But Yadav does not waste his time watching Bollywood films that typically show wealthy, jet-setting Indians in modern outfits living around the world. He can’t relate to those movies. Instead, he goes to the latest Bhojpuri film. In these movies, the characters speak the Hindi dialect Bhojpuri, which is spoken in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and among many of Mumbai’s migrants.
“They’re from my Bihar,” Yadav said of Bhojpuri films as he stood in line to buy a 30-rupee ticket at a single-screen theater in Andheri, a northern suburb of Mumbai. Men repairing the cinema stood above Yadav on bamboo scaffolding. “Bhojpuri films are more interesting,” he said, “because they belong to my own village and language.”
Regional cinemas like Bhojpuri have seen a surge in growth in India over the past decade as a result of Bollywood films increasingly catering to more modern, wealthy and cosmopolitan Indians, according to Kathryn Hardy, a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate in South Asia studies who is working on a dissertation on Bhojpuri cinema.
Continue reading and watch the video at GlobalPost.
No Comments
Looking for Hope in Child Brides
Posted on June 9, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under Health, International, women.
I had written about child marriage before. When I went to Ethiopia, I visited a program for girls who had fled early marriage in their villages and ended up in the capital Addis Ababa. I met a classroom full of such young girls. With their schoolbooks in hand, they looked like kids, not brides. I talked to some of the girls in depth about how their desire to continue their schooling had pushed them to leave their families and traditions behind and flee to what they hoped would be a better life. These girls had dreams, and the courage to pursue them.
This time, in a small village on a remote island on the Brahmaputra River in northeastern India, the story was still on child marriage, but everything was different.
This time, the girl, Hasina Khatun, did not want to continue her education. She had not been to school a day in her life. Hasina was 13 when her aunt had told her she would get married. Like the girls I met in Ethiopia, Hasina did not want to leave her family behind and start a new life with a husband. But unlike the others, she accepted her life. When I asked if she had goals or dreams, she couldn’t think of any.
Unlike the girls in Addis, Hasina hadn’t fled.
Whether in Ethiopia or India, girls who have a baby under the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as women in their 20s, according to the UN Population Fund. Girls 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die.
Wherever the girl lives, child marriage increases the likelihood of domestic violence. It generally lowers the age of a first birth and ends a girl’s opportunity to get an education, thereby decreasing her chances of employment and earning potential. Sent away from her family and village, the girl is likely to loose her support network and face social isolation.
In Ethiopia, this information served as a backdrop for what the girls I met had escaped. In India, as I chatted with Hasina inside a bamboo shack on the island, her life felt like a checklist.
Domestic violence? Three days after getting married, her 19-year-old husband told her they would have sex. She said no. He forced himself on her. Check.
Low age of first birth? She’s now 15 and five months pregnant. Check.
Education? She works in her in-laws home, helping cook and clean. She lives on an island with no secondary schools and couldn’t get an education if she wanted one. Check.
Isolation? Her family and friends live 25 kilometers away on the mainland. It takes a boat two to three hours to get there. Check.
Physical health? Hasina’s hemoglobin level, which should be at least 11 grams per deciliter, is 6.4. She’s severely anemic. Check.
As I interviewed Hasina, I had a million things on my mind: getting this timid young girl to open up, jotting down details on the chickens wandering around us, convincing the male translators to ask my questions on sex, shooing away the neighbors and husband who kept crowding around the door.
It wasn’t until I left Hasina and her village of 886 people, got back on the boat and checked into my humble hotel on the mainland that I began to process the girl’s story. I connected my camera to my laptop and began downloading photographs of Hasina. I sat alone in my room and stared into an image of her face. Hasina does not look like a woman or a wife or a mother. She looks like a sweet young thing.
The girls in Ethiopia will undoubtedly have difficult lives trying to survive as teen migrants in the capital. Many of them must work as domestic helpers while trying to continue their education. But those girls see potential in their lives, and they will strive to achieve it.
Hasina sees nothing.
She has decided that despite what the boat clinic nurses and doctors tell her, she will give birth at home. Her body might be too small and undeveloped to handle the burden of a pregnancy, her home might be hours away from medical help if there is a complication, but she says she does not care.
As a reporter, I kept trying to get Hasina to tell me something positive or uplifting about her life. I thought my story would be better if I could add a happy twist and show what gives Hasina – just like other teenage girls around the world – a sense of joy.
And yet, I couldn’t find anything. Perhaps I didn’t ask the right questions, perhaps I didn’t stay with her long enough. I am sure there must be something that makes this young girl roll over with laughter. But I didn’t find it.
At the time, I wanted that extra information for my story. It would be my ending. Now, as I look at the photographs of Hasina over and over, as I envision her holding her sari up to her face as she whispered one-word answers, I realize I was looking for a piece of joy for myself, too. Without it, I am left with the image of a young girl with a swollen belly and not a shimmer of hope.
Read more about Hasina here.
Follow Hanna on Twitter @Hanna_India.
This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Learn more about this reporting project.
This originally appeared on True/Slant.
No Comments
India: Streetwise Kama Sutra?
Posted on June 4, 2010, by Hanna Ingber Win, under International.
MUMBAI, India — Every weekday morning 23-year-old Muskaan gets ready for work in an apartment she shares with her mother in Chembur, a suburb in Mumbai. Muskaan’s mom thinks her daughter will catch a bus to her office in Powai.
Instead, she meets her boyfriend, 24-year-old Dilip, and he gives her a ride to work on his motorcycle. Muskaan and Dilip have been together for a year, but their families do not know. The young couple fear their parents would disapprove of them dating before marriage.
They both still live at home and since they are not allowed to bring a member of the opposite sex over, they see each other in secret. Whenever they have free time, Muskaan and Dilip leave their own neighborhood and ride Dilip’s motorcycle to one of the few public spaces available in Mumbai.
On a recent Saturday, they sat shoulder-to-shoulder on a promenade, admiring the sunset over the Arabian Sea in Bandra, another suburb. “We normally sit here because this is a very beautiful place,” said Muskaan, who wears thick black eyeliner, black hoop earrings, silver sparkling sandals and a traditional Indian outfit called a salwar kameez.
Asked if they take their intimacy a step further and kiss or do other personal acts while sitting on Carter Road, Muskaan says in a matter-of-fact tone: “Obviously. Why would people come here?”
Continue reading at GlobalPost.
Follow Hanna on Twitter @Hanna_India
