Hello there !
It is almost a month since I wrote a blog post. The gap occurred because of pressure on time as I had shifted my place of work (clinic) to a new building and lot of things had to be set up from scratch.
Hope to be more consistent in writing from now on, even if it is not great writing.
Happy reading.
It is true that more and more girls are studying in schools in even the poorest of countries.
But are they all really becoming literate ?
Unfortunately the answer is no.
In a new study on female literacy and years of schooling in 53 low-income countries the authors reported some startling findings.
In half of the countries with comparable data, the majority of adult women who completed four to six years of primary school remain illiterate, in the sense of not being able to read a single sentence. They went to school for several years and learned approximately nothing.
In just a handful of countries, going to schools for at least four or five years is essentially a perfect guarantee of basic literacy.
They also detected big differences between countries in quality of education.
The gaps between countries are also eye-popping. To pick two examples, In Tanzania 57% of women between 25 and 34 years old who reported fifth-grade as their highest educational attainment could read a sentence. In Ghana, that same number was 3%. Essentially, a year of schooling in Tanzania seems to raise your chances of literacy by nearly twenty-times as much as a year of schooling in Ghana. Should we believe that, and if so, what does it mean for Ghanaian education ?
The death toll in the latest terror attack on a Police recruitment facility in Quetta, Pakistan currently stands at 59. Three gunmen stormed a Police training college on Monday night, started firing randomly and detonating bombs.
Talking to the media, Balochistan Home Minister Sarfraz Bugti said that the operation against the terrorists has been completed and the affected area has been cleared by security forces who fought valiantly against the terrorists.
Bugti said that 700 police recruits were present at the time of the attack.
IG FC Major General Sher Afghan informed the press that the attackers were getting directions from Afghanistan and the initial investigation suggests that the terrorists were affiliated with Lashkar-e- Jhangvi Al Almi.
Hospital sources said that at least 57 dead bodies have been shifted to different hospitals while 116 people including police recruits and several Frontier Corps (FC) personnel have also been injured in the terrorist attack.
According to sources, three terrorists have been killed and 250 police recruits freed after the attack.
Unknown assailants stormed the hostel of the police training centre and opened fire on recruits.
Image from BBC – Credit EPA
Two years ago, amid protests from hardline Islamic groups, he was sworn in as only the second Christian Governor of Jakarta, the capital territory of world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia.
Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, better known by his nickname “Ahok”, is not only Christian by faith but also ethnically Chinese. He was not directly elected then. He was the deputy to the then Governor Joko Widodo. When Widodo was elected national President he automatically became Jakarta’s Governor.
Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)
Her colleagues were brutally murdered by Islamic terrorists in January last year. She escaped because she just happened to be outside the office of Charlie Hebdo on that day. She is under very specific death threat now. But that is not stopping her from speaking out. Meet Zineb El Rhazoui, the most protected French woman.
Shaken but undeterred by the fatwas and relentless, precise death threats issued via social media to “kill the bitch” since she helped produce the publication’s first survivors’ issue following the attack — and spoke about it in Arabic for the Arab press — the Moroccan-French writer refuses to assume an anonymous identity. Fleeing Paris or abandoning her human rights activism, and her unforgiving critiques of the religion she grew up with, are also out of the question.
Zineb El Rhazoui, nylive – nytimes
When you hear some one saying ” I am a big fan of Hindu” , most Indians especially in the south may think the person was talking about the 138 year old Indian English language newspaper with Left liberal leanings, “The Hindu”.
Mr Trump in his final attempt to consolidate as much votes as possible was praising Hinduism, a religion with thousands of gods, followed by a sizeable number of Asian Indian voters in USA.
From Buzzfeed
Asian Indians in USA mostly vote for Democrats. But Donald Trump, the Republican Presidential candidate has found a place in the hearts of a section of them , the right wing Hindu nationalists.
First there was the ritual Hindu fire, a yagna, which burned in his honor. Then there were the posters, standard Donald J. Trump head shots except for a touch of artistic interpretation: a tilak, the red dot symbolic of the spiritual third eye in Hindu culture, smudged on his forehead.
This celebration of Mr. Trump in New Delhi in May, and others like it in India this year, are the work of a small, devoted and increasingly visible faction of Hindu nationalists in India and the United States who see Mr. Trump as the embodiment of the cocksure, politically incorrect, strongman brand of politics they admire.
Credit- Rajat Gupta/European Pressphoto Agency
The Hindutva brigade in India has used violence and intimidation to cancel a Nastik Sammelan (get together of Atheists) in Mathura, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Not surprisingly, they got support from their supposed to be enemies, the Islamic clerics. This happened to a meeting called by Swami Balendu at his ashram. Balendu was a Hindu spiritual guru, but has turned into an atheist few years ago.
“Over 50 activists of the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and local Hindutva groups reached the Bindu Seva Sansathan Ashram at about 10 in the morning and started shouting slogans and attacking the ashram property. Armed with sticks, the Hindutva activists broke the glass panels of the ashram,” Swami Balendu told The Hindu on phone from Mathura.
“Immediately after the attack, the Hindutva activists, accompanied by senior police officials, told us that the protest was a mere start and if we went ahead with the meeting then much bigger things could happen in the city,” he said.
“Even though it was a private event we had taken official permission. The Constitution permits us to be non-believers. But this seems like an all-out attack on the freedom of expression and the freedom to be a non-believer,” added Swami Balendu.
Saints from Vrindavan at collectorate in Mathura to lodge protest against Nastik Sammelan on Friday. (HT Photo).
The organization of most regressive patriarchs of India, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) is vigorously protesting the Central Goverment’s affidavit to the Supreme Court which supported a ban on triple Talaq. They are also boycotting the questionnaire circulated by the Law Commission inviting opinion on Uniform Civil Code.
At the same time women activists, both inside and outside Muslim community, has come out with a strong statement condemning the AIMPLB last month. Here is the complete text of the statement.
We, as part of women’s movement and practising feminists working with Muslim community and the women of the community for years in India, take the liberty to write this statement condemning the recent affidavit posed by All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB). The claims of this affidavit are:
First, abolition of triple talaq is (un) Quranic;
Second, since women lack decision making abilities, it is only men of the community who should have this right;
Third, polygamy is Islamic, though not promoted by Islam, and this practice ensures marital rights for Muslim women, banning of which will result in promiscuous sexual practices or murder of women at the hands of their husbands;
Fourth, the honorable Supreme Court of India has no right to intervene in the religious law of the community.
This statement has been issued by the AIMPLB in the context of the growing number of Muslim women’s petitions challenging the constitutionality of triple talaq in the apex court.
Image credit – DNA
I remember saying to my mum, ‘I don’t think I believe in God any more,’ And her saying, ‘You can’t tell anybody else because they’ll kill you, we are obliged to kill ex-Muslims,’ and that it would put me at extreme risk if anybody else was to find out, so that conversation ended there.” – Sadia, a former Muslim
Getting out of religion is extremely difficult and dangerous for those born in Muslim families. This is true not only in Muslim majority countries but also in most places in the world. Now, perhaps for the first time, a documentary film titled “Islam’s Non-Believers” depicting the difficult path followed by those who left Islam has been produced. The one hour documentary will be premiered in ITV in United Kingdom at 10 40 PM local time on 13th of October, 2016.
Image credit – deeyah.com