'So Many Mistakes Were Made'

A parent's loss changed how America protects its children and hunts down predators.

'Adam's death, and his father's activism on his behalf, helped put faces on milk cartons, shopping bags and mailbox fliers, started fingerprinting programs and increased security at schools and stores. It spurred the creation of missing persons units at every large police department."In 1981, when a child disappeared, you couldn't enter information about a child into the FBI database. You could enter information about stolen cars, stolen guns, but not stolen children," said Ernie Allen, president of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, co-founded by John Walsh. "Those things have all changed." The case also prompted national legislation to create a national database and toll-free line devoted to missing children and led to the start of America's Most Wanted, which brought those cases into millions of homes.

What it also did, said Mount Holyoke College sociologist and criminologist Richard Moran, is make children and adults alike exponentially more afraid."He ended up really producing a generation of cautious and afraid kids who view all adults and strangers as a threat to them, and it made parents extremely paranoid about the safety of their children," Moran said.'

Grace on the Catwalk Lost In Defeat

'India's Parvathy Omanakuttan, who emerged the first runner-up in the Miss World contest, feels the jury's decision to push her in the second position was "unfair." "I have performed better than others in the personality and question-answer round. This is not just. All those who watched it yesterday felt like that. I feel the jury's decision was unfair", Parvathy told India Vision channel on Sunday. 

Beauty queens respond here.

Home

When you've been away from home long, you no longer search for new things-museums and parks, and Zagat's recommendations for places to shop and eat-but familiar things, things which remind you of home. Right now I'm sitting at my hotel room in Seattle doing things I normally do in Bombay. I'm warm (I turned the heat up to 25 degrees Celsius). I'm listening to MSNBC ('The Place for Politics'!) I'm writing this. And I'm by the window watching the apartment building opposite. In one of those apartments lives a dog white and seriously fluffy, and his favourite game is throwing a rubber ball from one corner of the balcony to the other. He throws, scoots, grabs, throws, scoots, grabs. He's captivated by the game, he wants it to go on forever. 

Reminds me of another dog I know. 

Neighbour from Hell

They wouldn't give us Dawood, and now they won't hand over the terrorists who attempted to rip apart the heart of Bombay. 

Wouldn't it be great to wake up one morning to discover that instead of Pakistan we neighboured Canada instead? (Whether Canada would like to share a border with us is another matter altogether).

And as always let me point out that my dislike and despair stands towards the Government, and not the people of Pakistan. I imagine they're as fed up of their heads of state dictators, puppets, and now Zardari the would-be groper, as is the rest of the world. 

Postcards from Boston

Onward Boston

On the second leg of the AIDS Sutra book tour, editor Negar Akhavi, writer Nikita Lalwani and I hit Harvard with talks at the School of Public Health and the South Asian Forum. The highlight of the day though was lunch at Casablanca in Harvard Square with Dr Amartya Sen who wrote the forward to the book. That someone as distinguished and busy and with about a hundred better things to do on any given day, would take time out for us, only made us appreciate him more.

En route to Boston I spent an hour at Atlanta airport chatting with Jean Feraca, host of Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders, on Wisconsin Public Radio. The show was about the Bombay blasts, and you can listen to it here. 

And before Boston, we enjoyed the incredible hospitality of the students and faculty of Emory University's School of Public Health. I found the graduates engaged and curious, and since many had worked in South America and Africa with the Peace Corps, they were able to contribute to a discussion that informed everyone present. On our last day, a dear friend invited the three of us to a preview of the documentary 'The People Speak' followed by a discussion around it with the film's producer--actor Danny Glover and historian Howard Zinn (on whose book 'A People's History of the United States' the film was based), among others. Backstage, I was impressed by Danny's humility and his great commitment to human rights. Nikita had a copy of AIDS Sutra and though it was slightly battered and severely lined, we were delighted to be able to give him a copy.

Changes

On our way from Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport, my driver Sam said to me, 'I watched Martin Luther King speak. I came back from the Vietnam war and they made me drink water from a fountain that said 'Coloureds.' Growing up down south my cousins wouldn't look at white people. They'd cross the road when one of them passed.'

Outside, the trees of Atlanta are holding leaves big as palms and bright red. The houses we pass are out of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A car drives by with soaped windows: 'Change is Coming. You'd Better Believe it.' 

Sam said, 'We haven't stopped celebrating.'

Last evening on our way to the Woodruff Arts Centre, our cab driver Kamal said to me: 'Life in Atlanta, it's good. No one cares what you are, where you come from.'

And where do you come from? I asked.

'Nigeria,' he said. 'Then I went to London to study mechanical engineering in Manchester. Then New York. But that was tough, oh, the money you make is never enough you go to bed hungry and worry till you wake up.'

'Don't go to the Southside,' he said. 'They shoot people.'

'Don't hire a cab off the street.'

'Stick together.'