Sonia Faleiro

The Other India X: 'A Woman Leader for the Isolated Jungle Village of Jharki Bisalpur'

2012-05-17T03:12:00.000+05:30

'When Sheila Devi was growing up in the village of Jharki Bisalpur, wild animals would frequently wander through, searching for water and food. She saw deer and wild boar, foxes, even a python. There were rumored tiger sightings. But in the last few years “even the animals have had the sense to move elsewhere” Mrs. Devi, now a Panchayat leader in her late thirties, says dryly.'

Read the tenth installment of my series (once again with a slide show of exclusive photographs), The Other India, on The New York Times' India site, here.

Photo: Sheila Devi, Jharkhand. Copyright, Sonia Faleiro, 2012.

The Other India IX: 'For Some Adolescent Girls in India, a Struggle to Stay in School'

2012-04-05T18:45:00.001+05:30

'When 11-year-old Durga Jadav awoke to find that she’d begun to menstruate, she wondered if she’d return to school.'

Read the ninth installment of my series (once again with a slide show of exclusive photographs), The Other India, on The New York Times' India site, here. If you'd like to help Durga and girls like her stay in school, click here.

Photo: Durga Jadav, Mumbai. Copyright, Sonia Faleiro, 2012.

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The Other India VIII: 'Child Politicians Bring Change to Rural India'

2012-03-02T01:33:00.000+05:30

'After Pooja decided to run for Panchayat she had to choose an electoral symbol, draw up a list of campaign promises, and give speeches. She promised to bring more children into school. “Children should study,” she told her peers. “Not graze sheep.”

Read the eight installment of my series (this time with a great slideshow of photographs), The Other India, on The New York Times' India site, here.

Photo: Pooja Gujjar, Deputy Sarpanch, Bal Panchayat, Government Upper Primary Sanskrit School, Chaudhula village, Rajasthan. Copyright Sonia Faleiro.

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The Other India VII: 'A Mumbai Builder Reshapes a Neighborhood'

2011-12-14T23:01:00.002+05:30

'One of Mr. Gupta’s clients belongs to a caste that has traditionally grazed animals for a living. The man offloads hundreds of goats from trucks and herds them toward the slaughterhouse for 150 rupees (about $3) a day. Doing this over many years, he has saved 150,000 rupees. Of the many contractors in Shivaji Nagar, it was Mr. Gupta he entrusted with building what he knows will be his most precious possession: his first home.'

Read the seventh installment of my series, The Other India, on The New York Times' India site, here.
Photo: Pankaj Gupta, courtesy Priyanka at Urbz.
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Beautiful Thing: Update

2011-12-09T10:12:00.002+05:30

Lots of year-end good news! Beautiful Thing is a Guardian Book of the Year, Economist Book of the Year, and the Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year 2011.

It was an Observer Book of the Year, Time Out Subcontinental Book of the Year, and CNN Mumbai Book of the Year in 2010.

It is currently available in the Indian Subcontinent (hardback and paperback), Australia and New Zealand, the UK, and the Netherlands, with editions forthcoming elsewhere in Europe, the United States (March, 2012) and in three Indian languages.

If you want a pretty awesome stocking stuffer this Christmas head on over to Amazon UK, Amazon US, or Flipkart!

The Other India VI: Child Labor's Fashionable Face

2011-12-09T09:49:00.000+05:30

"Whenever we need money for clothes we ask our mothers,” he says. “Even though they wish we wouldn’t wear such low pants! But we like to stay in fashion. Before this, the style was for “half-pant” (three-quarter length pants) and white running sneakers. We wore those too!”

Children below the age of eighteen make up an estimated 40 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion people. Of this number, 35 million, or around 7 percent, are children in name only. They work an average of eight hours to twelve hours a day, performing adult jobs in sectors from agriculture to manufacturing. They are always paid below the market rate.'

Read the sixth installment of my series, The Other India, on the NYT's India Ink site here.
Photo: Chetan Raj Gond and Sarju Raj Gond, 17. Copyright: Sonia Faleiro, 2011
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The Other India, V: 'A Teacher's Most Important Lesson'

2011-11-17T10:05:00.000+05:30

'The house her employers lived in was three stories high. But all they could spare her was a corridor so snug even turning was impossible.
They owned five ‘hi-fi’ cars. But she was never paid a salary.
And one of the two daughters of the house was a flight attendant with film star beauty. Such a pity then, Nagma muses, that her “heart was full of filth.”'
Read the fifth installment of my series, The Other India, on the NYT's India Ink site here.
Photo: Nagma Ali, 19. Copyright: Sonia Faleiro, 2011

The Other India, IV: The 'Entertainer' Caste Hangs on to What it Knows

2011-11-04T22:29:00.004+05:30

"The children work for the community,” Barsati’s brother, Manish, tells me. “We did the same thing when we were their age. But once we grew big, around 13, 14, we had to stop. Who gives big children money? So what could we do? We stopped working, we married, we had children, and our children started to perform. Now we move with them, protect them. When they come of age they’ll stop and be like us. This is our tradition.” Read the fourth installment of my series, The Other India, on the NYT's India Ink site here.

Photo: Ram, age 7, performs for an audience in Bombay's Colaba Causeway. Copyright Sonia Faleiro, 2011.

The Other India, III: Where are the Children?

2011-10-14T03:47:00.003+05:30

Rajkumar Mahto of Kirari village in West Delhi lives in a single room by an open gutter with his wife, Hema Devi, and two daughters. Contact with the sewage appears to be the cause of the sores on the children’s faces and bodies. But Mahto says they have broken out because they are worried. The children, he explains, haven’t seen their 8-year-old sister, Kajal, since April 21, 2010.
“She wanted ice cream,” said Mr. Mahto, who is tall and bucktoothed, and sells secondhand clothes from a cart. “My wife told her to wait a minute, she’d come along. But Kajal was too eager. We never saw her again.'
Continue reading the third installment of my series, The Other India, on the NYT's India Ink site, here.
Photo: The Mahtos with their two youngest children in their home in West Delhi.

UK Book Tour, October 14-29

2011-10-10T09:49:00.003+05:30

Photo: Srinivas Kuruganti

I'll be in the UK next week for a publicity tour for Beautiful Thing. I'll be appearing at book festivals, libraries, and at several great spaces for readers and writers, such as Asia House and 5x15. Details about timings and tickets linked to the event.

October 14

Cheltenham Literary Festival

Celebrating Indian Women: Sonia Faleiro and Dipika Rai

5.15 pm

October 15

Birmingham Book Festival

Birmingham Central Library

2pm

October 17

5x15

With Raymond Tallis, Simon Garfield, Luke Johnson and Diana Athill

October 18

Asia House

Sonia Faleiro in conversation with Patrick French

6.45 pm

October 19

South Asian Literature Festival

Women’s Library

Sonia Faleiro in conversation with Anita Sethi

Dancing Girls of Bombay:The True Price of Women’s Rights in India

6.30 pm

October 20

Black History Month

Earlsfield Library

6.30 pm

October 21

Willesden Green Library

Sonia Faleiro with Sathnam Sanghera and Moni Mohsin

October 26

King's India Institute

Sonia Faleiro in discussion with Ian Jack and Dr Kriti Kapila

6pm

October 27

Liverpool Library

7pm

October 29
Gravesend Library, Gravesend

Kent

The Other India, II: Mangalaji's Tamasha Party

2011-10-01T09:57:00.002+05:30

'Tamasha artist Mangala Bhansode is all curves and ample bosom and when she hollers in English “I know you want it, but you’re never going to get it,” lyrics from the hit Bollywood song Sheila ki Jawani, the audience responds with frenzy. Flinging in the air their homespun Gandhi caps, woolen scarves and gloves, even the blankets they’d brought along, they yell back in English: “Once More! Once More! Once More!”

None of this would be surprising if Bhansode wasn’t a 60-year-old grandmother. Or if her audience of 3,000 wasn’t comprised entirely of men. Or if most of the men weren’t Marathi-speaking farmers in a conservative Maharashtrian village far removed from the world of urban India.'

Read the rest of my second installment of The Other India for The NYT's India Ink site, here.

The Other India, I: The Weavers of Varanasi

2011-09-21T21:33:00.002+05:30

'In Nakhighat, as in other conservative areas in Varanasi, girls are married off as young as 15 and quickly become pregnant. When an undernourished girl gets pregnant, she may lose her child, or even die in childbirth. When she does give birth, it is to an undernourished, underweight child with a low level of immunity.'

My first piece for The Other India on The New York Times' India site, continues here.

Photo: Ganta Devi, whose son Krishna died of Grade 4 malnutrition – the most severe classification. He was a year old.
Credit: Sonia Faleiro

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India Ink

2011-09-13T05:02:00.003+05:30

I'm so pleased to be part of The New York Times' latest, exciting venture.

India Ink: Notes from the World's Largest Democracy is its first country specific blog and is dedicated to understanding contemporary India's politics, economy, culture and everyday life.
The blog will feature reportage from the newspaper's incredibly talented staff, including NYT South Asia Bureau Chief Jim Yardley and correspondents Lydia Polgreen and Vikas Bajaj. And it will feature a handful of Indian writers including literary critic Nilanjana Roy, author of Following Fish Samanth Subramanian, and Time Out Consulting Editor and author of the forthcoming book, Taj Mahal Foxtrot Naresh Fernandes.

As for me, I'll be writing 'The Other Half', which will concentrate on India's many fascinating sub cultures. I hope you enjoy the blog, and I look forward to your feedback.

'Children Who Sell Themselves'

2011-09-07T07:56:00.004+05:30

'While investigating child labor in India last month for a book, I found myself in the northern state of Bihar, an established source of children for trafficking networks.

Here, alongside the expected stories of abduction, I heard of another unexpected and heartbreaking path to servitude. Children as young as 10 had begun to directly offer themselves to traffickers because they could no longer go hungry.'

Do read my new Op-Ed in The IHT, September 6, 2011

Photo: Arun Kumar, 14 (left) with a friend in Khagaria, Munger, Bihar. Names have been changed. Credit: Sonia Faleiro

Vishal Come Home

2011-08-05T23:58:00.000+05:30

I've been travelling around India these past few weeks for a project investigating the impact of poverty on India's children. Just one of the dozens of stories I recorded involved the disappearance of a 10-year-old boy from Rajasthan called Vishal. After he ran away Vishal was recruited by a criminal gang and became a drug mule. You can read about his adventures on writer and historian Patrick French's all encompassing The India Site.

'Dreams of Mumbai'

2011-07-20T21:41:00.003+05:30

'In Delhi where I grew up I knew a girl who carried a meat knife. Tired of daily molestations, she used to say that the next stranger who fondled her, in the bus, or on the street as he brushed past, would feel it.'

My op-ed in the IHT on one of my favourite cities.

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Break ke Baad

2011-04-07T06:03:00.006+05:30

I'm taking a break from the blog to concentrate on a new project. I'll return for occasional posts, but if you'd like to stay in touch (yes, please!) you might want to consider a detour:

Visit my website www.soniafaleiro.com and click on the frequently updated News page. Current updates include information on my events at the 2011 Sydney Writers' Festival, a book tour in Australia in support of the Australian edition of the book, and appearances at the 2011 Hay Festival, Wales to talk about Beautiful Thing as well as Ox Travels, an anthology to which I've contributed an essay.
Join my Facebook page for updates on Beautiful Thing including festival appearances, foreign publications, as well as links to my new writing.
Or, if all you really want is to follow Zoey's adventures in San Francisco including updates on her primary interest (ball chasing), secondary interest (ball grabbing) and all others interests (I'll stop now), the best place to do so would be on Twitter.

Thank you for reading my blog, for leaving comments, for blogrolling it and for stopping by. Do please stay in touch.

Parents Abandon Baby, Dogs Eat Baby

2011-03-12T09:11:00.004+05:30

So who killed the baby?

Was it (presumably) the parents who first stuck the infant in a polythene bag and threw it in the storm water drain? Or, the dog who fed the baby to her puppies?

In India, babies disposed of in such a manner (in drains and garbage dumps, thrown out of hospital windows or buried alive), are almost without exception female. Girls in India are still considered a burden. Their value, socially and economically, is far less than that of a boy. An abandoned male baby almost always has an obvious physical deformity.

Since 1992, Jayalalitha's Cradle Baby Scheme, which attempts to ensure that (primarily female) infants that might otherwise have been killed are given for adoption, is estimated to have saved over 3,000 infants in Tamil Nadu. Cradles are placed outside hospitals, primary health care centres, police stations and childrens' homes for parents to place unwanted babies in. These babies are then given up to an adoption agency.

Since then several Indian states have adopted the scheme.

Activists argue that the scheme isn't without its failings. It isn't possible to trace an infant once it enters the system, and so there's no way of knowing when and, in fact, if the child is adopted.

Once the child is given up for adoption the agency isn't required to keep tabs on its welfare.

But this is true of all children who enter the adoption system and isn't an indictment of the scheme as much as it is an indictment of the scheme of things.

It has also been argued that the scheme legitimizes the abandonment of female infants.

If the parents mentioned in the story above had had access to a cradle, would they have chosen to place their baby in it? And would that option, given however little or much we know of the Cradle Baby Scheme, prove to be the better one for the baby?

Beautiful Thing in Bangalore

2011-03-05T11:28:00.005+05:30

If you're in Bangalore this week do join me for a reading from Beautiful Thing on Tuesday, March 8 at 6.30 p.m. The reading is being hosted by the Bangalore International Centre at TERI Complex. For directions, SMS your location to 'BIC' at 90088-90088. To read reviews of the book go here and here, and to buy Beautiful Thing head over to Flipkart (or come on over to the BIC!)

Refreshments will be served at 6 p.m.

Photo credit: Sanjiv Valsan

Saving Aruna

2011-03-03T10:51:00.007+05:30

In 1973, 25-year-old nurse Aruna Shanbaug was strangulated and sodomised by a ward boy/sweeper in the basement of Mumbai's KEM hospital. Shanbaug was in the prime of her life, due to go on leave the following day to prepare for her marriage to a doctor.

The attack left Aruna in a 'persistent vegetative state'.
Journalist Pinky Virani's interviewes with hospital staff and friends offered insight into why the ward boy, Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki, targeted Shanbaugh. A friend recalls Aruna telling her, '"That horrible sweeper Sohanlal ... steals the dogs' mutton, like a vulture ... I am just waiting for some proof. The next time ... I will report him immediately." Aruna had been assigned to the dog surgery research laboratory, where Sohanlal was a "tempoorwari" cleaner. (He was) rough with the animals, and dragged them along with their chains. When (Aruna) upbraided him (with "ice in her voice"), he said: "Sister, you worry so much about dog hunger and dogs getting strangled. What difference does it make ... when doctors kill them here?" Shanbaug had been warned by her cousin of the consequences of repeatedly finding fault with Walmiki. He asked her to consider the fact that Walmiki was poor and "therefore hungry all the time." ... Walmiki's fellow cleaners reported to the police that Walmiki had said he would "take revenge on Shabaug by molesting her" and that he would "spend one month's salary to sleep with her."'

'Walmiki was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for stealing, and another seven years for having tried to harm Aruna fatally. Both sentences were to run concurrently. As he had already spent a year behind bars, he was, six years later, a free man. He was rumored to have become a ward boy in a Delhi hospital.'
Within a few years the doctor to whom Aruna had been engaged moved on. Her family abandoned her.
Thirty three years later, Aruna Shanbaug is once more in the news. The Supreme Court reserved its verdict on a plea by Virani to euthanize Aruna on the grounds that doing so would be 'cruel, inhuman and intolerable”. In her petition Virani had written, 'Aruna has become "featherweight" and her bones are brittle. She is prone to bed sores. Her wrists are twisted inwards, her teeth are decayed and she can only be given mashed food.'
Euthanasia is illegal in India. But why should Aruna, believed to be the only patient in the country to have lived like this for such a long period of time, be forced to soldier on? According to Attorney General G E Vahanvati, who was invited by the Court as the government’s top law officer to express his opinion, because it would set a bad precedent in a society that is still 'backward' and 'emotional'.
Since the time of her assault Aruna hasn't been able to see or speak or use her muscles or limbs.
I believe it is time Aruna should be allowed to die a dignified death. I would have wanted that if she was a friend or family member.
What do you believe?

To buy Pinky Virani's book on Aruna, go here.
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From the Department of 'You Can't Make This **** Up'

2011-02-24T10:59:00.001+05:30

A dog that got its head stuck in a biscuit jar while at the police station (!), an elderly woman imprisoned in her apartment by her brother over a property dispute, a man accused of having sex with his daughter, another man who chose to live on the street rather than in his apartment for reasons he kept to himself, a Dalit set on fire because his son eloped with a Muslim girl, a septuagenerian murdered by a 'teen gigolo mafia' for what turned out to be a stack of two rupee notes.

Dear Bombay: Take a break. Take some Xanax.

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More Beautiful Thing ...

2011-02-24T10:06:00.002+05:30

For those of you who haven't joined the book's FB page, I thought I'd share some of the latest reviews of my new book. The earlier ones, published around the launch in late October last year, and primarily from the mainstream media, are collected in this incredibly long post:

In Biblio: A Review of Books, Kalpana Sharma, author of the marvellous Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia's Largest Slum, calls the book 'remarkable' and describes it as 'journalism with empathy.'

In The Gomantak Times, the great Goan writer Mario Cabral e Sa writes, 'Sonia, a superb documentarist of the underworld, stunned me with her daring, compassion and empathy.'

On Epic India, Vinod Joseph, author of The Hitchhiker, is kind enough to point out that I've done something 'few reporters ever have'.

On Helter Skelter, critic Bronwyn McBride says Beautiful Thing displays 'the intimacy of a best friend.'

On his eponymous blog, critic Soni Somarajan says Beautiful Thing demonstrates an 'endearing empathy'. He calls it 'chillingly accurate.'

And more from the mainstream media: In The Sunday Guardian, poet Sharanya Manivannan writes, 'Faleiro's triumph: to have seared into our consciousnesses – and more importantly, our consciences – a Leela so forcefully alluring that we are dismayed to have to let her go.'

And in The Sunday Pioneer, author Lata Jagtiani writes that Beautiful Thing is 'riveting', 'painfully honest' and 'dares to go where angels fear to tread.'

If you've reviewed Beautiful Thing on your blog, do mention the link in the comments section. And if you'd like to write a review on Goodreads, you can do so here.

To order your copy of Beautiful Thing in India visit Flipkart, to order it outside India stop by NBC India

Photos: The India edition of Beautiful Thing created by the super-talented Nitesh Mohanty and the gorgeous Australia/New Zealand edition of the book, out in May this year. Other editions (UK and US) and translations will appear through 2012.

If she can see Russia from Alaska ...

2011-02-24T07:08:00.002+05:30

What will she see from India?

(Perhaps some sense?)

Of course, Mark Zuckerberg's Stalker is

2011-02-08T23:21:00.003+05:30

Indian.

You nab all the good techies, you get the crazy techie for free.

(Update: My friend just pointed out the 'maa' angle asking, 'what's with Indian men and their maa?' Good question. Answers?)

Image courtesy, TMZ.

How Technology has Transformed the Sex Trade

2011-02-06T10:39:00.000+05:30

Sudhir Venkatesh (author of Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets) has a new study out on Wired in which he talks of how the gentrification of NYC has impacted prostitution. He concludes that while it has made sex more expensive, it has also made it respectable. Technology like the internet and cell phones has helped prostitutes 'professionalize their trade', and, as a result, 'control their image, set their prices, and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who once took a share of the revenue.' As the trade has grown less risky and more lucrative,' writes Venkatesh, 'it has attracted some middle-class women seeking quick tax-free income.'

Read the rest