This is gonna be my online notebook. When am at work and I find something interesting in the web that I want to jot down I paste it here...I would be putting up the reports and excerpts relevant for my Police and Judges Training Research. Also, I'd flash my sudden thoughts while at work here.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2216/stories/20050812002209100.htm
posted by Sanjukta @ 11:56 AM
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Cyber crimes
India plans to toughen existing laws dealing with cyber crime. The plans were announced after reports that a call center employee in India sold the personal data of British bank customers.
The Indian Prime Minister's office recently announced that it will tighten laws to prevent cyber crime such as the illegal transfer of commercial information.
The announcement came on the heels of a report by a British newspaper, The Sun, that an Indian call center employee allegedly sold details such as bank accounts and credit card numbers of a thousand British customers to an undercover reporter for about $5,000.
The report got wide publicity, and raised a question mark over the security of data of overseas clients in India.
In recent years, many U.S. and British-based companies have moved work such as customer support to India in order to cut costs, resulting in a booming back-office outsourcing industry for the country.
Both the Indian government and the information technology industry played down the data theft scandal, dismissing the case as a "freak incident". They pointed out that client information has been leaked or sold from companies all over the world. The man who allegedly sold the information to the newspaper has been fired, and a criminal investigation is underway.
Sujoy Chohan, a consultant at IT research specialists the Gartner Company says there is no evidence that the danger of data privacy being breached in India is greater than in Western countries.
"If there is any industry which is investing in security tremendously, it is the offshore industry, whether it is India or elsewhere," he said. "So this particular incident, where you are trying to apply to the whole industry probably is incorrect. This could really happen anywhere."
Nonetheless, the report rattled the Indian outsourcing industry, and led to strident assertions that the industry and the government would cooperate to ensure the highest standards in protecting data.
Experts say India might consider a new data protection law to deal with crimes such as leakage of information from call centers.
Mr. Chohan says rules will emerge gradually to cope with an industry that is relatively new to the business world.
"Pretty much these companies were doing these services internally first, and now they are beginning to get it done from a third-party supplier," he added. "So there will be an inherent evolutionary curve around that where companies learn how to deal with this… And as they learn they will put into place more robust processes."
Some industry experts say the data theft case received particular attention because the booming outsourcing industry is an emotive issue in Western countries, where it is perceived as taking away local jobs.
The outsourcing services industry is growing at a scorching rate in India. Revenues topped $5 billion last year, and are expected to grow by 40 per cent this year. The work force has grown nearly tenfold in the last four years -- from 40,000 in 2000 to nearly 400,000 at present.
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Interesting Blog
http://sarbajit-roy.blogspot.com/
posted by Sanjukta @ 12:03 AM
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WOW...BEWARE guys!!!! Cheaters around. These things won't happen if you legalise sex trade in India like in Australia. Australia has brothels & escort services which were given license, and customers are treated well, with clean and sophisticated environment. They have a PNA# for every brothel/escort agency & you can lodge complaints with police if something like this happens, quoting the number. Those who work there will undergo a blood test every week or so.
posted by Sanjukta @ 3:40 AM
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I was doing a Research on the lives of the Commercial
Sex Workers and their children in the GB Road.
Found this link from a google search...
orginal link http://www.worldsexguide.org/new-delhi.txt.html
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1998
Subject: Shardanand Marg (G.B.Road), Delhi
Driven by my inner hunger that refuses to go away, I went to
Shardanand Marg, also called by its old British name G.B. Road
(actually it used to be "Gun Baction Road" in the old days) - Delhi's
most notorious prostitution street. It starts at Ajmeri Gate,
two-three kilometers from Connaught Place, right east of New Delhi
Railway Station.
Prostitution here is not easily spotted to the foreigner's eye. You
can walk through this street and never notice anything but shops for
electrical machinery and motors. This apparently is one of the least
interesting streets in Delhi. But do step out from the semi-roofed
pavement, walk out in the road beyond the clutter of parked cars,
carts, battered scooters and waiting bicycle rickshaws - and look up!
From first floor level and upwards the buildings have the appearance a
slum of wooden sheds and corrugated iron. On balconies and in windows
groups of women wearing brightly colored saris and dramatic ornaments
and crimson lipstick gesticulate and beckon you to come up to them. It
is difficult to see their faces due to the distance. Their shouts are
barely discernible through the noice of the mad traffic.
In fact you have a better view at them from the other side of the
street. Here a considerable number of Indian men stand transfixed with
their faces turned towards the women on the balconies, consumed in a
silent and passive staring at them.
The greatest number of women are in the part of Shardanand Road which
is closest to Ajmeri Gate, a historical ruin. But you will find them
at intervals all the way down to the high water tower, very visible at
the far end of the road.
The male who decides to give in to the siren's song from above moves
across the street whenever the stream of dusty, worn-down vehicles
permits. He finds the entrance leading up to the group of whores he
wants to visit. The stairway is old style Indian: narrow, steep, and
with high steps marked by the wear of thousands of feet. It is soothy
and grimy and dark as the falling night.
Many levels in the house seem occupied by shouting women grabbing for
his arms and clothes. At the top floor the screaming voices rise to a
hysterical crescendo because two brothels, one on each side, are
competing for his attention. The voices make an infernal howling
concert, the groping hands become almost violent.
The darkness up here makes it difficult to see the woman you would
like to be with. I took one the closest, the one I immediately found
most attractive. She took me with an iron grip by the wrist and lead
me in an overly eager way out on the very balcony where I had seen the
women a few minutes before. I did not feel at ease by becoming visible
to the glaring men down there.
She made way through the group of colleagues and opened two doors to
closet-like room, just big enough for a double size bed. At the moment
I first saw it it was without any mattress or linen, just bare, smooth
planks. A very young Indian guy stood on it, buttoning his
pants. Wooden walls, a fan in the ceiling, no light. "My" woman
resolutely started spreading a quilt on the bed, smacking it with
brown, bangled hands so dust came off in big clouds. Then she covered
it with a worn bed sheet. Then she arranged a dirty pillow at one end
of the bed.
As soon as my shoes had come off and I was settled in this love nest
an old hag appeared, demanding 250 rupees for half an hour and 500
for one. I paid 500, and the doors were closed and darkness fell on
the woman and me.
She started by cuddling in a half loving, half over-active way. Long,
intensely pleasant moments passed. Then she started what I soon found
out was "second round" of the payment: demanding baksheesh. At first I
refused to give her anything at all before after, but her stubborn
insisting persuaded me into finding from my bag the 400 ekstra rupees
she kept demanding. Immediately her demands rose to 500. She got them.
The next 20-25 minutes were spent with her repeated attempts at
extracting 400 MORE rupees from me. I refused categorically and
actually began to prepare myself to leave without having got what I
had come for. But she changed her attitude, exchanged words with a
colleague on the other side of the wall - part of a board was missing
and let in a sharp ray of light every time a bulb was lit in the
staircase. Condoms were handed in by a girl's hand.
She began masturbating me with movements that were a little too groce
and hard. She kept most of her clothes on. But she nevertheless hit a
note of music in my nerve system, and my prick started growing inside
the condom. Seemingly she took for granted that we were going to do it
in the missionary position, me on top of her - something I find
difficult under any circumstances. After all that talk of money and
the repeated interruptions I wasn't in the mood anyways and ended up
masturbating myself with my own hand on the rubber. She was quite
loyal in holding me with firm, friendly arms until I had an
orgasm. She made a merry giggle while the electricity crackled in my
nerve fibers.
It seemed to be a point of importance to her that no seed was spilled
on the linen, but neither cloth nor kleenex was available. After all
that: silence, peaceful (or almost peaceful) resting in each other's
arms, until time was up.
At the very end of it all she became eager for me to stay the night
for an extra 1000 rupees. Men I declined.
General impressions: If this woman is very unhappy for being were she
is, she certainly does not show it. She gave me the impression of
being a lively, rude girl, a high energy hustler for baksheesh. - The
name of the game with her (and the brothel) was rip off. She was not
generous with caresses. But you can get along with her. I went away
happier than I came, releaved by a strong orgasm and her touch. -
Language problems are used as a tool to confuse the customer. A stream
of Hindi words are aimed at un-balancing you while you struggle to
understand what she is saying to you in the darkness.
One good advice: Go there around five in the afternoon, see the women
and where they are in the last light of day. Then return after dark
when the electrical lights are on inside the staircase, giving you a
clear view of whom to choose.
More to tell? The woman's name was Shanti and she was from Puttaparthi
in Andra Pradesh, and she was an adherent of famed guru Sathya Sai
Baba. I actually liked her even if she went out of her way to get my
money.
posted by Sanjukta @ 3:15 AM
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My grand pa used to tell us...common public is like the 3rd baby of a goat (what do we call it in english, lamb?) apparently the goat has two breast to feed the kids and if there's three kids one will always be jumping around the other two who are being breast feed....
posted by Sanjukta @ 1:09 AM
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The United States today accused the European Union of deadlocking the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong with its position on farm subsidies.
As South Korean farmers clashed for a second day with police protecting the summit venue, the US trade representative, Rob Portman, told reporters that if the EU did not allow the developing world greater access to its markets, "I don't see anyone else moving".
The Hong Kong meeting was intended to wrap up the WTO's Doha round of talks on increasing developing countries' trade with richer nations. Without a deal from the US and EU to cut subsidies to their farmers, a global free trade agreement to conclude the round is now not expected until the end of 2006
The EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, today maintained that Europe had made an ambitious offer on cutting its agricultural import tariffs and farm subsidies. He said the 149 WTO members also needed to address manufacturing and services to bring the Doha round to a successful conclusion.
"We will not succeed, in Hong Kong or after, if we continue to focus on only one part of the round," he told delegates at a morning session. "We cannot afford to wait again. When the finishing line is in sight, it is the time to quicken our pace."
With a breakthrough unlikely during the six-day summit, Mr Portman pressed delegates not to leave Hong Kong without setting a date for another meeting early next year to nail down a clear outline for a final treaty.
"Although we may not achieve all we had hoped for this week, let us set another deadline to keep the pressure on," he said.
The South Korean farmers, the most prominent anti-WTO protesters in Hong Kong, today staged a second day of demonstrations against the Doha round. They claim that an agreement cutting import barriers will flood their domestic market with cheap imports and wipe out their livelihoods.
"The WTO will make all poor farmers in the world starve to death and in that case we'd rather be beaten to death," said South Korean farmer Seo Jung-eui, who promised that the protests would run through to Sunday.
In another dose of bad news for the meeting, Mr Mandelson said a proposal to promote trade among the world's least-developed nations - one of the few areas ministers seemed to be able to agree on - appeared to run into trouble.
He told reporters that some WTO members had reservations about the proposal to grant 32 countries with a per capita income of $750 (£424), most of which were African, duty-free and quota-free access to their markets. He was not more specific.
Deepak Patel, Zambia's trade minister, said the measure would be a boost to his country's economy, but that the US and Japan had raised objections.
"We are full of good intentions, but incapable of implementation," Mr Patel said.
The US trade representative's office denied the US was opposed to the package.
Shoichi Nakagawa, the Japanese agriculture minister, said that, while Japan was not rejecting the overall package, it did draw the line at rice.
"In agriculture, there are things we must protect and those are sensitive products," he said. "Rice is of course included among sensitive products for Japan."
Amid the stalemate and protests, the WTO director general, Pascal Lamy, said the WTO had a credibility problem.
"The international trading system which we all know has a problem of credibility," he said. "We have also a problem of credibility."
The US today announced it would give $2.7bn (£1.53bn) in "aid-for-trade" grants to developing countries by 2010 to help them build trade infrastructure and other services to better compete in world markets. The deal is dependent on cutting trade barriers
posted by Sanjukta @ 4:59 PM
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When sex got boring
'Let's talk about sex,' is the slogan for the new film about Alfred Kinsey, and in his time that was a pretty heroic thing to do. The man who helped to convince the western world that masturbation is not unnatural and homosexuality not a sin had to struggle against forces of conservatism and intolerance every day of his life; his determination to take them on was what made him something of a hero. But the film also reminds us that his times are not our times.
Because Kinsey lived in an age that could be straightforwardly optimistic about the rewards offered by sexual frankness. He believed that there was no sexual problem that could not be solved by more and more and more information. His mammoth work, resting on interviews with thousands of individuals, epitomised the idea that frank talk is infinitely valuable when it comes to sex. And not just talk - his vast archive of information also contained explicit pictures and film of people having sex and masturbating. Pictures and film that his friends and colleagues were sometimes bullied into providing, for the sake of breaking through the intolerance and prudishness of his era by showing, for instance, whether men squirted or dribbled when they ejaculated.What Kinsey could not have foreseen is how, once society had changed, the joyful urgency of that movement towards greater explicitness would dissipate. The recent shift in the way that people feel about the pure value of sexual display is not just evidence of a new moral conservatism. In a culture where every kind of sexual behav iour is on view all the time - if not in your newspaper or on your television channel, then a click of a mouse button away - even liberals of the sort who would once have flocked to give their testimony to Kinsey and listen to the testimony of others are tired of feeling like voyeurs.
This is not because we want any return to the old ways of shame and intolerance, but because explicitness has become such a dead end. Every kind of sexual behaviour is so excessively documented and, rather than opening out the possibility of new worlds, that reduces the excitement of discovery. We live in a completely changed world from the 1940s, and now the decision to spend one's life documenting other people's sex histories would not be heroic but utterly banal. For the first time in human history, it is easy for people to watch strangers having sex, to hear strangers talking about sex, to discuss their own sexual behaviour with strangers.
When artists today put their faith in the power of pure explicitness to convey the flavour of desire, they end up with something altogether underwhelming. Nine Songs, which is released this Friday, is the most explicit British film ever to be shown in mainstream cinema. It is Kinsey-esque in its unsmiling celebration of "sex reduced to its physiological functions" (as Liam Neeson puts it in the Kinsey movie).
The director of Nine Songs, Michael Winterbottom, seems to believe that he is making a moral point by allowing us to watch people engaged in real sex on screen. As Winterbottom has said: "Part of the point of making the film was to say, 'What's wrong with showing sex?'"
He laments the coyness of other cinematic treatments of sex. "Cinema has been extremely conservative and prudish," he says. Perhaps Winterbottom has never noticed the growth of the internet and the porn video. The reality is that Nine Songs, with its terribly serious desire to show us everything and turn away from nothing, is not going to usher in an era of more explicit treatment of sexuality in mainstream cinema. Although there is this small genre of film-making - Nine Songs belongs to a category inhabited by a few other films, such as Intimacy, Romance and Baise-Moi - whose unique selling point is showing real sex, it has become a collection of curiosities rather than part of a mainstream movement.
Now that we live in a time where display is so inescapable and everything is out there, artists who really want to get the viewer to taste and feel the power of fictional desire are usually choosing to show very little. Rather than falling into the blandness of a purely physical take on sex - and for all its explicitness Nine Songs is infinitely forgettable and under-characterised - the unexpected truth about the art of this new century is that the cinematic depictions of sexual desire that are most intriguing and memorable are not at all explicit.
Although intimate sex scenes still pop up in mainstream cinema, they are usually there for comic rather than sensual effect: in Sideways, for example, it is the creep's relationship that gets pictured with heaving buttocks and groans, and the hero's one where the camera only goes as far as the bedroom door. In recent years films as different as Closer, Before Sunset, Lost in Translation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have powerfully explored desire through conversation, reminiscence and suggestion rather than thrust and counterthrust. When everything has been said and everything has been shown, being explicit is simply too easy; being sexy is the difficult thing.
posted by Sanjukta @ 4:01 PM
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As I read more about the Chagos/Diego Garcia displacement issue I realise there is so little that I know about so much. Such a short life and so much to do, read, write, understand, propogate.....
The article emphasizes the need of Judges Training on Gender Issues. The article highlights the importance of training the judges and prosecutors on Gender issues particularly those related to better handling of Rape Cases. The age old myth that a women is to be partly blamed for being Raped is still prevalent amongst the Judges in
There is always bad news for women, but rarely so bad as in the past few weeks. If you ever dreamed that in the modern world you could avail yourself of freedoms unknown to women in previous generations, the warnings are now being posted on every door. You meddle with nature at your peril, girl.What, did you think that you could go play with the boys and not get hurt? Recent research has shown that women who drink are far more vulnerable to assault and rape than you would imagine. More than one in three young women say that they have been sexually assaulted after getting drunk. In a report on the research in the Guardian, Professor Robin Touquet, a consultant in accident and emergency medicine, said: "Women must not put themselves in vulnerable positions."
Or did you think you could be like the men in another way, beavering away in an office instead of concentrating on your ovaries? Recent research has shown that women in their 30s are being overconfident about their fertility, so dooming themselves to probable disappointment. The authors of that report, Melanie Davies and Susan Bewley, said that women were "defying nature and risking heartbreak".
And if you have managed to get pregnant, did you think you could be like the child's father, and still keep a foothold in the workplace? New research purports to show that mothers who leave their babies to go out to work are doing their children a disservice. Penelope Leach said that if children are cared for by people other than their mothers, their development is "definitely less good".
Listening to these voices of doom, women may feel that despite all the attempts at changing society made by women, we have now come up against the biological imperatives that will always lock us out of the freedom and equality we desire. We cannot just wish away women's vulnerability to attack by men, women's shorter fertility span or the neediness of young children.
"The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy ... the fiercer will be her struggle with nature - that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: 'Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.' " So spoke Camille Paglia 15 years ago, so speak all the media now. More and more, when feminists talk about change, the voices of the backlash talk about the impossibility of going against nature. Biology, in the western world, acts almost like the Qur'an in the eastern world - it is the ultimate excuse for why things for women cannot and will not change. In a secular world you are told that inequality rests on nature; and in a religious world you are told that it rests on God's word.
I'm not saying that these researchers have dark intentions towards women. But if we were not living in such a fatalistic age, their studies would never have been reported and received as they have been. In the reception given to all of them there has been a marked interest in the punishment of women - they will be raped, they will be infertile, they must give up the pursuit of autonomy - and a marked lack of interest in how those situations could be changed.
Because whatever kernel of biological truth lies at the heart of these findings, the truth is that biology is not some immutable reality for women or for men. We live in complicated societies in which women need not succumb to the darkest rhythms of nature. Take the finding that women are assaulted more than men when they get drunk. As well as saying that young women should take account of male violence, and curtail their own lives because of the danger around them, we must go on demanding that men take responsibility for this violent society.
Earlier feminists made this point repeatedly, but recently the impetus has gone out of this demand (despite a laudable campaign started by Glamour magazine). Those real, concrete reforms that women have for decades been asking for, such as specially trained prosecutors in rape cases, are still being ignored. Is it really time to give up and impress upon young women only the risks that they are taking? Or should we say that it is really time for men to take responsibility for the violence that they commit?
In the debate about child-bearing and child-rearing a similar deafening silence on the role of men is being observed. If women are facing miserable disappointment because they do not take the time out of work early enough in their lives to have children, the reason does not just lie with their own misguided attempts to defy nature. There are real reasons why young, middle-class women are holding back from child-bearing - and one is that they know that having children penalises them in the workplace far more than it penalises men.
This debate is not, then, just about the cruelty of nature, but about the cruel expectations of workplaces that are built around the working practices of men who sidestep their family responsibilities. When you are seen as slacking because you're not available to the boss 18 hours a day, how can you find the time to listen to your ovaries rather than to your BlackBerry?
This deafening silence on the responsibilities of men is all the more true for the final piece of bludgeoning research that women have had to deal with in the past few weeks. No one yet knows how accurate or compelling the Families, Children and Childcare study really is, since all that we have to go on are the remarks of Penelope Leach to journalists and conference-goers. When I managed to talk to one of her coauthors, Professor Alan Stein, he said that it was still an "ongoing analysis" and that the "results have not yet been published". Yet this unpublished, ongoing study has already been seized on as conclusive evidence for the biological truth that children need their mothers. Absolutely no account has been taken of the possibility that fathers could and should fill the parenting role just as well as mothers, and that children looked after equally by both parents would develop just as well as, if not better than, children who rely only on their hard-pressed mother for attention.
It's time to move beyond these neanderthal posturings that pass for debate on the battle of the sexes. Or do we really want women to feel that they have no choice but to live a circumscribed life decided by red-toothed nature, while men are free to roam, and rule, the world?
posted by Sanjukta @ 3:07 PM
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The following article shows how human rights of innocent people having no relation whatsoever with US or UK politics are being violated for the cause of US 's war against terrorism. In order to use it as a military base to bomb Iraq an entire Island evacuated and now the an islanders her homeless refugees fighting legal batter to get back some land in the vicinity of their previous home.
Residents of Diego Garcia in the Chagos archipelago were moved to Mauritius in 1971, when Britain leased the island to the US to use as a military base.
A court in 2000 ruled the expulsions were illegal, but last year their return was stopped by government order.
Lawyers for the islanders say their human rights were violated.
The lawyers have asked the High Court to declare the government order "invalid and of no effect".
The legal action has been brought by Louis Bancoult, who was evacuated from the islands as a boy.
UK passports
Most of the islanders went to Mauritius, but over the years families found it hard to settle and became impoverished - so much so that a number of individuals have committed suicide. The refugees have been campaigning to return ever since their expulsion.
The Chagosians are UK passport holders who are entitled to reside in Britain and, over the years, about 800 of them have taken up that option in search of a better life.
| | I've no doubt it is quite inconvenient to provide for the return of a population to their homeland, but that really doesn't square with concepts of morality Richard Gifford |
However, many islanders want the government to fulfil a promise they say was made by Robin Cook, while foreign secretary, that they would be allowed to return to outlying islands in the Chagos group.
They claim the promise was made after the treatment they received was condemned in a High Court judgement five years ago.
On Tuesday, Sir Sydney Kentridge QC told the High Court how in November 2000 the Chagosians were jubilant when Mr Bancoult won a High Court victory quashing earlier government orders excluding them from the islands.
Sir Sydney, acting for Mr Bancoult, said: "They thought they had finally succeeded in establishing their right to return - but that was not to be."
He told the court that on 10 June 2004, "the right they thought they had, and believed they had, was removed from them".
He said it was removed: "not by Parliament, but by Her Majesty the Queen acting through Orders in Council on advice from the Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office."
The Orders, which were issued through the Privy Council, restored the government ban quashed by the High Court.
The islanders have accepted that they cannot live on Diego Garcia because of its use as a military base.
Its facilities were used in the bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And the base was recently at the centre of allegations that it is one of the locations being used to house secret detainees in the US' so-called war on terror.
'Concepts of morality'
Richard Gifford, one of the lawyers who is representing the islanders, has said the government has a moral duty to return them to their homeland.
He said: "I've no doubt it is quite inconvenient to provide for the return of a population to their homeland, but that really doesn't square with concepts of morality, justice or anything else in this day and age.
"It's the sort of thing they might have done in the 17th or 18th Century."
Of the 2,000 people moved off the hundreds of tiny coral atolls, 1,500 were taken to Mauritius and the remainder to the Seychelles.
posted by Sanjukta @ 11:31 AM
1 comments
A corporate lawyer with a Multiple personality syndrome but not disorder yet. The lawyer is a go-getter, rebel, loves freedom more than anything else, an aquarian by the book, believes in path breaking and rules bending, follows no trend, likes to stay in crowd right under the spotlight. The above attributes being quite strong, there's this other personality which is a deep thinker and a writer, weak at heart, hyper-sensitive, believes in fairy tale love. Both being great at friendship bad at intimacy and one heck of a smooth talker. All said and done my poor soul mostly remains confused trying to figure out who exactly should she be.
