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

'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'

'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

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!

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The Other India VI: Child Labor's Fashionable Face

"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'

'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

"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.

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The Other India, III: Where are the Children?

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

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

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The Other India, II: Mangalaji's Tamasha Party

'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.

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The Other India, I: The Weavers of Varanasi

'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

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'

'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

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Vishal Come Home

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.

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'Dreams of Mumbai'

'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

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.

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Parents Abandon Baby, Dogs Eat Baby

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?

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