| Dancing away the pain Women in Kolkata who suffer from the trauma of trafficking and mental health problems find solace in physical movement"Dancing changed my life. For the first time I felt that I was doing something I liked," recalls Shampa Roy. The 18-year-old from Kolkata lived in childrens' homes from the age of five after her parents died. "I was always angry, I didn't know why. I beat up other inmates at the slightest provocation; people used to avoid me. I didn't respect my teachers or my elders," she admits. And then she discovered dance. Roy realised she could express her inner turmoil through dancing. It was, she says, a discovery of joy.Roy is now an assistant dance instructor, sharing her discovery with other women.She was trained by Kolkata Sanved (which means sensitivity in Bengali), a local NGO that uses dance to help people cope with mental trauma.A main area of Sanved focus is working with trafficked girls and women. The fact that West Bengal borders on Bangladesh makes it an international trafficking route, with Kolkata a significant source and destination for trafficked women.Sanved was set up in 2002 by Sohini Chakraborty, a sociology graduate from Kolkata. Chakraborty first started to use dance as a form of therapy when she volunteered with another NGO, Sanlaap, which works with former prostitutes.Using her background in classical Indian dance, Chakraborty initially taught the girls a combination of classical and contemporary dance movements. However, they didn't respond to the classes. So instead she began to create a series of body movements based on everyday actions, such as making chai or sweeping the floor, and this clicked with the girls. She would ask a girl to imagine that she was a tree. How would she project it? Gradually the girls started to open up and learnt to express their emotions through their movements."Sometimes we were startled by the extreme emotions the girls articulated through their body language," Chakraborty says. She explains that for many of the girls the biggest hurdle to normal interactions comes from a sense of shame over body image.It was only later that Chakraborty realised that this form of movement is a recognised therapy, known as Dance Movement Therapy (DMT), which was devised in America in the 1940s.As Chakraborty explains, the women she works with often feel a deep inferiority and have extremely low self-esteem. "DMT encourages them to think, 'I am creating my own body through my own expression'." By taking control of their bodies, they are able to rebuild their confidence and begin to cope with mental trauma.Kolkata Sanved has since expanded its work to other groups. Today Chakraborty collaborates with NGOs working with street children, young people living in red-light areas, those living with HIV and also people with mental health issues. The NGO also helps elderly women living in staying in shelter homes. Workshops are held regularly in rural areas in collaboration with out-reach organisations.Sanved also runs projects with domestic workers. The women, who commute to the city by train, are usually poorly paid and work long hours, often in several houses.Kolkata Sanved has teamed up with Parichiti, which means identity in Bengali, to run a DMT programme on the platform at Dhakuria station in south Kolkata.Anchita Ghatak, Parichiti's secretary, explains: "These women are always running around, starting early from home and then working in three to four houses. We have a drop-in centre where they can rest for some time in between shifts, listen to music, watch TV or relax. DMT has given them a sense of liberation – something they can do for themselves, and not at anyone's behest."Ruma Naskar, a shy 18-year-old, is one such worker. She comes from Naraynagarh, a village in a region of West Bengal that borders the Sunderbans delta on the Bay of Bengal. The area is poor and densely populated. Each day hundreds of women take the train to work in Kolkata."I leave home at 5am and walk for one hour to catch the 6am train, which takes one hour to reach the Dhakuria station," Naskar explains. "My first job starts at 7am." She takes the train back at 3pm and arrives home at around 5pm where she has to help her mother with housework."I like coming to this drop-in centre because these Sanved didis [elder sisters] teach me to do byam [exercise] and dance movements. I feel relaxed," she says at the Parichiti drop-in centre. Naskar's ambition is to be financially independent and "not beg anyone for money, even from parents".Another regular is Sakuntala Baidya, who is in her 30s and married with two children. She comes from Bagha Jatin area in the south, not far from Dhakuria. "I find shanti [peace] here," she says. "The Sanved people show us how to relax – they even give me a massage when my legs hurt me."Ananya C Chakraborti, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who focuses on gender issues, watched some of the dance therapy workshops while making a film about trafficking."It seemed liberating for the women," she recalls. "Among Bengalis, especially among women, spontaneous dance – whether in a religious celebration or social function – is very rare, unlike in many other communities in India. It seems a lot of energy is dammed up artificially. DMT breaks that barrier."Indrani Sinha, director of Sanlaap, says: "A lot of pain and hurt haunts these women, but there's a lot of beauty too. We have to look for their wellspring of beauty, try to bring it to the surface and not treat them as only case studies. DMT helps them to rise above the brutalities they have gone through."From the initial DMT experiment, Chakraborty and her group have developed a regular curriculum to train instructors called Dance therapy Movement for Mental Health and Recovery, which they launched this year. The first batch of 16 students completed the 100-hour course, combining it with clinical practice in hospitals. Behala Shaw Public School for girls has also introduced DMT as part of its curriculum, a first for a school in Kolkata.Chakraborty has another milestone in mind. "We want to take it to the policy level and earn recognition that DMT can and should be a part of the national educational curriculum," she says.IndiaProstitutionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Inpex to Exit Iran Oil Project Inpex said it has agreed with National Iranian Oil to pull out from an oil project, in the face of U.S. sanctions against companies doing business in the country. online.wsj.com |
Silence of the dissenters: How south-east Asia keeps web users in line Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines are all moving towards Chinese-style internet censorship• Interactive guide: censorship in AsiaGovernments across south-east Asia are following China's authoritarian censorship of the digital world to keep political dissent in check, the Guardian can reveal.Vietnam, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines have all moved or are moving towards monitoring internet use, blocking international sites regarded as critical and ruthlessly silencing web dissidents.• In Vietnam, the Communist party wants to be your "friend" on the state-run version of Facebook, provided you are willing to share all personal details.• In Burma, political unrest can be silenced by cutting off the country from the internet.• In Thailand, website moderators can face decades in jail for a posted comment they did not even write, if the government deems it injurious tothe monarchy.While much is made of China's authoritarian attitudetowards internet access, a majority of south-east Asian governments have similar controls and , rather than relaxing restrictions on internet use, many are moving towards tighter regulation.The Guardian has spoken to five leading bloggers across the region about the present restrictions they face and future fears.Raymond Palatino, a Filipino MP and editor with Global Voices, says governments, in addition to crudely blocking websites, are starting to use arguments of morality and decency to censor access to information and quash criticism."There is direct censorship to block political dissent. You have repressive laws in Myanmar [Burma], in Vietnam, in Singapore. In fact I think Vietnam is catching up with China in terms of building strong firewalls to prevent dissidents from accessing critical content on the internet."But we also see governments using the excuse of protecting the public morality in order to censor internet content. Governments use the excuse of censoring pornography as a safe argument to make censorship acceptable to the public."More than a decade ago, George W Bush asked people to "imagine if the internet took hold in China. Imagine how freedom would spread". But rather than emerging as a catalyst for democracy, the internet has become another way to to stifle dissent.Palatino sees governments using the internet for their own selfish advantage. "They are learning how to prevent people for using the internet to criticise government. Instead of being a potent tool for empowering the people, the internet will be in the hands of an authoritative, repressive government."With a population of more than 600 million, south-east Asia has about 123 million internet users. But penetration ratesvary from 0.2% in Burma and Timor-Leste to more than 80% in Brunei Darussalam and 77% in Singapore. But south-east Asian use is still dwarfed by China's384 million users.In the Philippines, cybercrime legislation before the parliament would outlaw anything deemed obscene or indecent. Palatino says: "The laws are deliberately broad and vague so they can be used to shut down anything subversive."Cambodia's government is seeking to monitor all internet use inside the country, by appointing the state-owned telephone company to operate the sole internet exchange.Websites will be monitored to filter out pornography, officials say, but opponents say sites critical of the government are also likely to be blocked.In Thailand, century-old lese-majesty legislation is combined with new computer-related crime laws, to mute criticism on the web.Lese-majesty laws – defaming the monarchy - are imposed inconsistently in Thailand, but wielded often enough, and against defendants of sufficient profile, to stifle almost any discussion of the monarchy's role in a country riven by political factionalism. Chiranuch Premchiaporn, the editor of Thailand's English-language news website Prachatai.com, faces up to 70 years in jail for allowing the monarch to be insulted online.The charges relate to five of 200 comments posted about an interview with a Thai man who was charged for refusing to stand for the anthem in a theatre.Premchiaporn, known as Jiew, did not write the comments, and pulled them from the website but, according to police, allowed them to stay up ''longer than the appropriate period'', a period never defined by authorities before or since the charge.Now on bail, the prospect of jail weighs heavily on her. "And it isn't just about 'Oh, how long I will have to spend in the cell', my whole life is uncertain. I cannot plan my life because of this legal charge, it makes everything hard."Thailand's strict laws, and harsh punishments, have had a chilling effect on political discussion on webboards and blogs."I think the biggest problem in Thai media is self-censorship … but we started Prachatai for the ideals of believing in the rights of people to access information … from many sources and not be dominated by just one source," Jiew says.Prachatai is blocked in Thailand, under order of the emergency decree after the red-shirt uprising of May. It is one of more than 100,000 websites blocked in the country. "We want to promote the rights of the people to speak up about their issues, not just only people who have a big name, or who are important in government."In Vietnam, web-users can become "friends" with their communist government, joining the country's own version of Facebook. A trial version of go.vn was launched in May. A full version is expected online by the end of the year.The functions are familiar to those versed in social networking. Users can update their status, post photos and links, and send messages back and forth.There are news links, historical articles on founding father Ho Chi Minh and other revolutionary heroes, and members can also play state-approved network games (in one particularly violent example, players join a band of militants sworn to fight the spread of global capitalism).The site is closely monitored by the government's security services, and while, for many, the attraction of the internet lies in its anonymity, to join go.vn users must submit their full names and state-issued identity numbers to the government.The Vietnamese government says it expects to have 40 million members, half the country, in five years. Perhaps because web dissidents are dealt with so ruthlessly by the communist regime – four bloggers were recently jailed for 16 years for anti-government posts – five months on, take-up of go.vn is a bare few thousand.Burma has one of the poorest records on internet freedom in the region.All .mm sites and email addresses are closely monitored by the ruling military junta, and international sites banned, but the tiny internet cafes that dot the former capital, Yangon, are adept at bypassing the government's firewalls, using proxy servers to evade the censors and access banned sites.Outfoxed on technology, the junta responds during times of stress by simply unplugging the internet, especially to stop unwelcome news getting out of the country.At the height of the monk-led Saffron Revolution in 2007, the junta's generals shut down access completely, later claiming a break in an underwater cable had cut the country off.With Burma heading towards its first elections in a generation early next month, and the anticipated release of political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi a week later, there is an expectation the web blackout may be repeated.InternetCensorshipChinaVietnamThailandCambodiaBurmaPhilippinesSingaporeAung San Suu KyiBen Dohertyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
RI Dem: Obama can 'shove it' for not endorsing him By MICHELLE R. SMITH 2010-10-25T16:18:29ZPROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- The Democratic candidate for Rhode Island governor, widely seen as more conservative than the independent seeking to lead the heavily Democratic state, said Monday that President Barack Obama can "shove it" after learning Obama would not endorse him.... hosted.ap.org |
BabyCenter's 'Moms And The City' Get the Inside Scoop on Celebrity Halloween Costumes - Video SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- With only a few days left until October 31st, BabyCenter's "Moms And The City" turned to their celebrity friends for a little last-minute Halloween costume inspiration. Matt Damon, Selena Gomez, Tori Spelling and many other celebs give us the details on how they'll dress their kids and themselves this Halloween. To view the multimedia assets associated with this release, please click: http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/babycenter/46897/ TORI SPELLING: "Stella is going to be a Princess. And Liam wants to be Spiderman, Ironman, and Wolverine. Fig feedproxy.google.com |