Xinran has written a moving story about female orphans in China. It is very shocking that as a result of China’s strict one-child policy, ancient gender biased traditional values and village land regulations female new born babies are either abandoned or killed in different villages in some provinces of China. Female orphans are a grim reality there and only recently foreigners have started adopting little ones.

The need of male-heir and extra plot of land that gets added in the new-born boy’s name is driving poor parents to abandon new born daughters or even drown them in pail of water.  This shocking reality also reflects the extreme poverty in rural China and also high level of ignorance which comes from lack of education.

Google’s conflict with China’s iron wall is making news for quite some time.  It is obvious that China desperately wants to uphold censorship and keep the iron curtain down. The stories of gross human rights abuse, injustice, government’s shocking policies are already trickling out. It will be difficult for China to keep its darkest of secrets in the modern days of internet and social networking.

Before raising a toast to communist China’s rapid progress and economic growth it is time to pause and calculate human cost of this development. Let us all wish and pray that Xinran finds her Little Snow who has a teardrop birthmark on her forehead some day!

Today one of the most elite and prestigious trains of India Rajdhani Express was held hostage for almost 5 hours. Some 200 people who surrounded the train and abducted the driver were no terrorists but yet they did manage to spread word of terror. The abducted driver was later released and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) rescued of 1200 stranded passengers. No one was seriously injured or killed and no one was arrested either

It is believed that these 200 local people belonging to the interiors of Jharkhand were part of Maoist group demanding release of their leaders who have been recently arrested during crackdown on Maoists operations in some states (mainly West Bengal).

Naxalite and Maoist movement has been gaining ground in the interiors of India mainly due to flawed development policies. Developmental projects like dams, mines, heavy industries have displaced thousands of people all over India who have been forced to live in slums in the cities. It is only activists and Maoists groups who have managed to reach out to farmers and poor tribals living in interiors of India and hence have found good haven and fertile ground for their revolutionary dreams.

If only administration and politicians had kept their promises of providing basic infrastructure like health, primary education and right to livelihood to millions living in far flung villages this Maoist menace would not have grown into a big tree which if uprooted now will certainly shake the whole country. Its better to cut the roots and let the tree to die out naturally to uproot this menace completely.

Via NDTV

With its 20 kilometers of pristine valley, Dresden owned the famous UNESCO label since 2004. It was a crowning reward of years of meticulous reconstruction work of its Baroque gems that were reduced to a pile of stones in 1945 by the Allied bombings. Now, the Dresden Elbe Valley has to take the bitter pill. UNESCO recently dropped the place from its list of UN World Heritage Sites.

The reason: the construction of ‘a four-lane bridge in the heart of the cultural landscape.’ According to UNESCO, the building of the Waldschlösschen Bridge meant that the property ‘failed to keep its outstanding universal value as inscribed.’ The bridge was meant to decongest inner city traffic. The new bridge, according to UNESCO, ruins the view.

This was only the second time that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had ever delisted a site. In 2007, the organization also delisted the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman. The country failed to ‘fulfill its conservation obligations with regard to the site.’

Some groups feel the brunt of the humiliation. Nobel Laureate for Medicine, Günter Blobel, says that of the hundreds of sites, many of them in poor countries, that try to save their heritages with limited resources, “In Germany, on the contrary, we spend 200 million euros to destroy one of our global heritages.”

The loss of the title is feared to have an impact on Dresden tourism.

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Via UN News Centre

If children are deprived and denied of their rights, their full potential will not be realized. This is Plan International’s definition of Child Poverty. For Plan, the common issues on children according to the 4 broad rights are survival, development, protection, and participation.

The challenge of education comes under the issue on Development. These challenges that Plan tackle under this human right are poor quality of basic education, limited access to educational services, inadequate financial resources for education, and inadequate facilities for education.

Plan’s ultimate goal to address these issues is social transformation by making its partner communities become Child-Friendly. A community is child-friendly when it is able to assure the rights and needs of the children on survival, development, protection, and participation. This desired result is also equal to addressing child poverty.

One of Plan’s major Country Program Outlines (CPOs) is Child-Learn. To address the issues confronting public elementary education, especially in the rural areas, Plan challenges itself to institutionalize and sustain programs and projects that are designed for quality and access to education.

To concretize this challenge, Plan has instituted the Child-Centered Community Development Approach (CCCDA), a rights-based approach in which children, families and communities are active and leading participants in their own development. This enhances their capacity and opportunity to work together with others to address structural causes and consequences of child poverty at all levels.

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Via Learn Without Fear

In Mary Oraon, protagonist in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘The Hunt,’ we find the concrete alternative to capably resist not only the injustice of gender politics but also the incursion upon tribal land and forests by feudalism, colonialism, and global capitalism.

There is a reason why Australia figures in the story. Mary and the trees planted on her tribal land are both products of Australian colonization in her region. The powerful land developer has not only transgressed into female dignity as a symbol of gender patriarchy, but also transgressed into tribal patrimony as a symbol of colonial patriarchy.

Mary’s act of killing her ardent suitor and sexual harasser, a wealthy developer from the city, is a clear statement of killing both patriarchies that are totally corrupt. Deforestation is no less different from the stripping away of human dignity and honor. Just as the wealthy developer has no right to cut down the trees in the forest for the sake of a sizable profit, so does he not have the right to cutting down the dignity of a woman. Both are social and ethical transgressions.

The writer Mahasweta Devi, as Mary Oraon, sends out a powerful statement that women are capable of actualizing the reversal of fortune in a colonial world. Devi empowers the woman who is a definitive marginalized minority in India. India is a painfully patriarchal society. It also comes complete with clear social divisions where women are a presumed inferior group to males. ‘The Hunt’ is Devi’s tool to tell the readers of the world that women do not take it sitting down when oppressed, as much as tribal societies do not tolerate the incursion of outsiders and landgrabbers into their territory.

Devi’s ‘The Hunt’ is an accurate perspective on the modernity that has been sweeping the entirety of India. Global multinational capitalism, aided by a corrupt national bureaucracy, is gaining ground in India. Devi comes from West Bengal whose remote areas have been attractive to foreign capitalists who wave the seemingly attractive flag of development.

Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal are two impoverished places that have been hotbeds of revolts. Farmers have been repelling the incursion of corporate mafias who are actually grabbing land from the peasants for the sake of establishing Special Economic Zones (SEZs), known locations of global capitalism and globalization. Violent attacks have been unleashed in the rural hinterlands of West Bengal, Devi’s provincial state, to neutralize the farmers. These attacks have been undertaken by the police and local hoodlums hired to kill the peasants. West Bengal is a showcase of the uglier facet of globalization. Devi knows this.

“Shining India” is shining no more. But if Devi the political activist would have her way, the evil giants of colonization, bureaucracy, corruption, capitalism, and globalization can very well be targets of revolution. These evils have continued to plague the Indian subcontinent for decades. It will take capable resistance to repel the tides of negative change. For Devi, that revolution is not only achievable, it is also possible to be undertaken by the females of society. Men and women alike can reverse their oppression.

The hunt is on.

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Via SINHAS

People believe what they see and feel themselves. Even if there are other mechanisms that issue opinions about leaders such as opinion-makers and media, it is still, ultimately, the perception of the people that make them gauge the leadership of the one who heads them.

This perception is personal and based on what people see for themselves. This perception is also emotional. Therefore, the evaluation of people regarding their leaders is a hugely emotional effort. In the long run, if the majority perceives and feels the leadership to be positive, then a collective positive evaluation is earned by the leader.

Group loyalty and action come only with the able leadership that is credible. A leader who has lost the trust and loyalty of members, and who manages to stay in leadership position, is already a product of corrupt practices and an environment of corruption.

The leader who has lost credibility and the confidence of followers would do well to step down from the position because his plans and propositions will not gain ground in the long run. He will only remain in power because he will resort to tactics that can make him perpetuate himself or herself in power. This is unprogressive in the long run and over the long haul. In this kind of set-up, the group remains stagnant. Development cannot be achieved through these means.

A distrusting organization due to untrustworthy leadership that has lost credibility spells doom. An organization is ultimately only as good as its leadership.

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There is something really cool about the ecological systems theory, but Lev Vygotsky and his socio-cultural theory are also very important. Vygotsky was a Russia developmental psychologist who died at the early of age of 38. He argued that cognitive growth occurs in a socio-cultural context and that it influences the form it takes. He also argued that a child’s noteworthy skills develop from social interactions with parents, teachers and peer groups.

He brought forward the idea that human development must be evaluated from four interrelated perspectives and they are: microgenetic, ontogenetic, phylogenetic and sociohistorical. Ontogentic development is the development that takes place in an individual over his/her lifetime. This is the major area of all developmental psychologists.

Microgenetic development includes changes that occur over brief periods of time like a child improving in his/her mathematical skills after solving same kind of problems for 2 weeks. Once these developments take place, a person grows up to be a fully functioning adult. Problems related to development must always be discussed with your psychologist. Never forget that!

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