Today is Dussehra and, in simpler times, the Mother Goddess would have known that Enemy Number Ek was Mahishasura, and would have made short work of him with her long spear. If the Ramayana was your inspiration, you would have known as clearly whose effigy to send up in flames and fireworks. This is because that 10-headed fellow still went by his given name, and hadn’t emerged as some silly, box-office version called Ra One. Really, what has the world and iconography come to in this Kaliyug?
The pandals will wind up, sadly sending off Durga to Kailash Parbat. This is the celestial housing complex, and not some Punjabi chaat chain as the mythologically challenged in Mumbai might believe.
These are strange times, and we can do nothing about them till the end of the Dark Age. Some Hindu scholars have calculated that this could be as early as 2012. But i’m sceptical. None of the scams or scoundrels of the present Kaliyug look as if they are ready, willing or able to wind up their act by the end of this financial year. All accounts and enquiries settled.
Yes, Durga has been having a hard time, and it has reached rock density at this most inappropriate moment. When she should have been vanquishing Mahishasura, there’s utter confusion over who is evil and who is good. The answer seems to depend entirely on whose side you are listening to. In other words, on who can outshout his or her rival on the 24-hour news cycle
Eight out of 10 men would bed an attractive stranger if she offered them no-strings sex, butwomen are much pickier if they are propositioned by blokes, scientists have claimed.
In an experiment, the scientists found that when men were approached by gorgeous female strangers in the street, 97 per cent agreed to go back to their apartments while 83 per cent said yes to instant sex, the Daily Star reported.
However, when average-looking girls asked the question, 80 per cent of blokes agreed to go back for a drink while 60 per cent immediately agreed to a romp.But when men propositioned women only one of the 120 girls agreed to sex.
In an experiment, the scientists found that when men were approached by gorgeous female strangers in the street, 97 per cent agreed to go back to their apartments while 83 per cent said yes to instant sex, the Daily Star reported.
However, when average-looking girls asked the question, 80 per cent of blokes agreed to go back for a drink while 60 per cent immediately agreed to a romp.But when men propositioned women only one of the 120 girls agreed to sex.
Scientists say the findings are more proof of the difference between the sexes.
“Men are apparently more eager for sexual activity than women are,” the Daily Star quoted French psychologist Nicolas Gueguen as saying.
“Men were more willing to go to an unfamiliar female’s apartment and to sleep in an unfamiliar female’s bed than females were in response to the same two propositions,” he stated. The results of Dr Gueguen’s study have been published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour .
WHILE she was begging her lover to call off his upcoming wedding in India, Tharmalingam Puwaneswary, 33, was sleeping with two other men behind his back.
And just six days after she allegedly killed Mr Murugaiyan Selvam, 32, a project supervisor, she had sex with one of the two men.
Details of the Sri Lankan maid’s complicated love life emerged in court yesterday when the two men, both Indian nationals, took the stand.
Puwaneswary is now on trial facing a manslaughter charge.
She is accused of killing Mr Murugaiyan, an Indian national and a Singapore permanent resident, by bashing him twice on the head with a 5.6kg improvised dumb-bell in the makeshift bedroom at his company’s workshop at Kaki Bukit Crescent.
The incident allegedly took place between 10.57pm on Dec 3, 2009, and 9.17am on Dec 4, 2009. (see report below)
Mr Ramasamy Thiyagarajan, a senior project supervisor, testified that he had sex with Puwaneswary on the night of Dec 9 and did not notice anything unusual about her behaviour.
He said he first met her when he drove his workers to her employer’s house in Serangoon Gardens sometime in October 2009. They were there to do renovation work on the corner terrace unit.
She approached him while he was giving instructions to his workers and asked if he was from India.
She told him that she was from Sri Lanka and working here as a maid.
When he picked up his workers from the house in the evening, she asked him for his phone number.
He gave it to her.
When she called him a few days later, they spoke about their families. He learnt that she was married with two children and that her husband was in Saudi Arabia.
She also said that she had a boyfriend here, whom she addressed as Selvam.
The man had borrowed $10,000 from her and they had broken up three months ago.
“She told me that she had given him jewellery as well as herself,” said Mr Ramasamy through a Tamil interpreter.
“She told me: ‘He took my money and cheated me and he’s going to get married to someone else’.”
The man had earlier promised to marry her, she had said. They spoke about him only twice during the brief period they knew each other.
Mr Ramasamy said his relationship with Puwaneswary turned intimate at the end of October, when he asked her out during one of their phone conversations. She said she could see him the next day.
He picked her up at around 10pm that night in his lorry. She was waiting for him about five houses away from her employer’s residence.
SEX IN HOTEL
They went to a hotel in Paya Lebar where they had sex. They had sex on two other occasions at the same hotel and he would send her back to her employer’s home each time.
On the second occasion, they arranged to have sex a third time on Dec 9, the first day of her employer’s holiday to India.
The court heard that Puwaneswary also hooked up with Mr Muthaiah Palaniselvam, 43, a driver, the same month she met Mr Ramasamy.
Mr Muthaiah, who is married to a Singaporean, said he got to know her through Ms Lakshmi, a maid who was working for the brother of Puwaneswary’s employer. He had sex with Ms Lakshmi, whom he knew through his wife, in 2008, and they remained friends after that.
In October 2009, Puwaneswary went to his Chai Chee flat to pass him money for a mobile phone and SIM card he had bought on behalf of Ms Lakshmi. They had sex there that night.
They had sex at his home on two other occasions. His wife was in India on all three occasions.
He also said that Puwaneswary had asked him to buy her a SIM card, which she collected from him the third time they had sex.
Asked by Deputy Public Prosecutor Geraldine Tan if he noticed anything different about Puwaneswary after that, he said through a Tamil interpreter: “Before receiving the SIM card from me, she used to call me once every two to three days.
“After getting the SIM card from me, she did not call me that much. Even if I did call her, she would just say, ‘I’m busy.’”
But Puwaneswary’s lawyer Abraham Vergis said his client denied that she had a sexual relationship with Mr Muthaiah. She also said she had met him only twice.
Mr Muthaiah disagreed.
While she was carrying on with these three men, she had a fourth man back in Sri Lanka – her husband whom she married when she was 16.
He was her first boyfriend, she had told Dr Leong Jern-Yi, a psychiatrist from the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) who examined her. Dr Leong took the stand yesterday.
In his psychiatric report, which was tendered to the court, he said that her failure to conceive led to marital problems in the first five years of their marriage.
Her husband also turned out to be an alcoholic who would hit her whenever he was drunk.
As he was unable to hold down a job, she had to go to Jordan to work as a maid for a year when she was 17.
When she returned home the following year, she stabbed herself in the belly button after her husband hit her.
She spent three months in hospital. Her husband and in-laws treated her better after that.
The trial continues today. If convicted, she could be jailed 20 years or for life, and fined.
Wherever the Mother Goddess turned, she would have found her shakti depleted by the same person being shown with an angelic halo or painted as the demon incarnate
what’s being called one of the largest cases of human trafficking in U.S. history. The project was eye-opening because, before starting, I thought of the crime of human trafficking as inherently violent — women snatched off the street at gunpoint and forced to sell their bodies; foreign workers indentured and exploited by the violent criminals who snuck them into the U.S. But our report, “American Nightmare”, which aired on HDNet, tells a very different story. The alleged victims we found never faced violence or physical threats, but claim they were victims of a modern form of slavery nonetheless.
When hundreds of skilled pipe fitters and welders left their homes in India to work in the United States, they weren’t running from war or poverty or repression — but towards opportunity. Their lives were good. They were young men with new families, living in modest but comfortable homes paid for with hard work.
But there was a high demand — and potential fortune — for skilled welders to help with the massive rebuilding effort in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast. The storm had scattered the population of the Gulf Coast and thinned the ranks of Mobile, Alabama-based shipbuilder, Signal International. When the company began getting lucrative contracts to repair and build oil rigs and barges, it looked to India for new workers. The company found scores of men there who were eager to earn better wages in the U.S. — even if it meant leaving behind family and friends, and moving to shipyards thousands of miles away in Mississippi and Texas.
The pay was good, but even better was the promise made by their new employer: Green Cards for the workers and their families. One of the workers, Aby Raju, was about to get married when he signed on with Signal.
“If I’m going to get married, financially I need to be secure,” he told us. “So I think it’s a good opportunity to take care of my new family.”
Like generations of foreign born workers before them, these 500 men were chasing the American dream. But it wasn’t until they arrived to the United States that they realized they had been lured into an American nightmare. The men claim they were victims of human trafficking — that Signal lured them to the U.S. with false hopes and kept them bound in forced labor with the threat of financial ruin.
Before coming to the United States, Signal’s recruiters forced the workers to pay up to $20,000 in recruiting fees, a fortune for a middle-class Indian. They mortgaged homes and sold family jewelry, expecting that they would make the money back and then some. But even with Signal’s competitive wages, the workers were unable to climb out of the deep hole of debt. And the workers say this allowed Signal to keep them in a perpetual state of indentured servitude.
“Servitude doesn’t require chains and iron,” said Alan Howard, the lead attorney representing workers in their class action lawsuit against Signal. “It’s economic coercion, psychological coercion, the debts that are incurred to pay recruiting fees to come to the country. They can be just as effective instruments of exploitation.”
Signal refused to speak to us on camera, citing ongoing litigation –the company not only faces a class action lawsuit by the workers, but another that supports the workers’ allegations that was recently filed by the federal government. But in writing, the company denied wrongdoing.
That’s hard to square with what our investigation found. The workers were housed in so-called mancamps — trailers a few yards from the noisy shipyards. Secretly-recorded videos show squalid and overcrowded conditions. And the private journal of a Signal supervisor — discovered on a company computer that was subpoenaed in the case — described a filth and disease. The supervisor wrote: “Our Indians have been dropping with sickness like flies.”
And on top of all this, the workers were forced to pay more than $1,000-a-month in rent, or about a third of their monthly salary — whether they lived in the camps or chose to rent an apartment elsewhere. The company says the housing was provided as a service to workers, since Katrina had destroyed so many local apartment buildings. But the workers said there was no shortage of nearby housing that was much cheaper and cleaner than what Signal was providing.
And then there were the promised Green Cards: they never came. The workers were brought to the U.S. using special visas for seasonal guest workers. As temporary workers, the Indians were ineligible for permanent residency. Signal has previously said it was unaware its recruiters had promised permanent residence in the U.S. for the Indian workers. But the company’s lawyer told us that it didn’t know until much later that U.S. immigration law precluded the guest workers from getting Green Cards.
Many of the workers were eventually granted special visas for victims of human trafficking, and are working legally in the U.S. Neither their lawsuit nor the federal case have gone to trial yet. But the workers we spoke to say they already have found some degree of justice by having their voices heard. And they recognize that there are few places outside of the United States where this would be possible
resdmore
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