Nepal’s royal regime cracked down on protesters recently in an attempt to stifle further disruption after two weeks of demonstrations aimed at toppling the country’s monarch, King Gyanendra. Security forces shot dead at least two people in the south-east of the country and announced a shoot-on-sight 18-hour curfew in Kathmandu, in a clear attempt to scuttle opposition plans.
It is difficult not to notice 19-year-old Mumait Khan. Tattoos ride on her shoulders and her lower back and her sinuous dance routines have made her one of the most sought-after ”item girls” to roll out of Bollywood. ”Item” is Mumbai film-speak for a raunchy musical number slipped into mainstream Hindi films.
Daksha, a shy Gujarati woman in her early 30s, wants a child — but not for herself. The baby is for the ”Britishers”, the couple seated in the lobby of the Indian fertility clinic. It is the first time that the British Asian couple, Ajay and Saroj Shah, from Leicester in central England, have met Daksha. The 31-year-old is ”loaning” her womb to them for 150 000 rupees (about £2 000).
No image available
/ 29 November 2005
The HIV/Aids pandemic is continuing its deadly spread across the globe, infecting five million people last year and bringing the total living with the virus to more than 40-million, the United Nations said recently. UNAids tried to lighten the gloom by pointing to Kenya, Zimbabwe and some of the Caribbean countries, where there is some limited evidence that infection rates may be dropping slightly.
No image available
/ 19 October 2005
Tracing a route through the folds of the eastern Himalayas, Motilall Lakhotia is explaining how Indian trade caravans used to ply the scenic Chumbi valley into Tibet. ”It was a big trade even then. The Tibetans sold us Indians silver, raw wool and Chinese silk. We had manufactured goods and cotton,” says the dapper Lakhotia.
No image available
/ 30 September 2005
India has always had an embarrassment of riches for the traveller: marble Moghul tombs, grand palaces, palm-fringed beaches and Himalayan treks. Now the country has a new tourist attraction on offer: the village. To anyone who has spent time in India’s villages, paying to sun oneself while cattle loll and cowpats dry under the sky might seem a little far fetched.
United States President George W Bush has agreed to aid India’s civilian nuclear power programme, an unexpected decision that reverses three decades of American policies designed to deter nations from developing nuclear weapons. The agreement is the first exception to the international bar on nuclear assistance to any country that does not accept monitoring of all of its nuclear facilities.
It is a five-hour journey through beautiful scenery in the northern foothills of the Himalayas. But when 20 passengers boarded two coaches under the snow-capped peaks in Srinagar last week, India’s state capital in Jammu and Kashmir, they were embarking on the world’s most dangerous bus trip. But a suicide attack the day before failed to halt symbolic journey through the divided nation.
No image available
/ 3 September 2004
A curfew was imposed on Kathmandu this week, with orders to shoot people on sight, after thousands of demonstrators ransacked a mosque and fought pitched battles with police to protest against the killing of 12 Nepalese hostages by insurgents in Iraq. The rioters attacked the capital’s main mosque and set fire to offices of Arab airlines, among other acts of vandalism.
Monir Chaudan takes off his gumboots and wiggles two stumps at the end of his feet where his big toes should be. ”I went to work even when I lost these. If you don’t, you lose your job,” he says. Randeep Ramesh reports on India’s controversial ship-breaking business, where work is dirty, dangerous and ill-paid.