Nannygate Wasn’t An Isolated Incident: It’s been almost two weeks since Deputy Consul Devyani Khobragade was arrested for visa fraud and accused of underpaying her live-in nanny. As the ongoing saga of Nannygate continues, WNYC’s Arun Venugopal looks at the history of labor problems at New York’s Indian Consulate. In 2011, the then-Consul General was accused of labor violations and in another incident, a maid was rewarded over $1 million in damages. (WNYC)
Read the Nanny’s Side of the Story: Very little has been written about Sangeeta Richard, the nanny at the center of it all. Outlook India reports that Philip Richard, Sangeeta’s husband, filed a petition to Delhi’s High Court that reveals a bit of her side of the story. According to the petition, “The treatment of Sangeeta by Devyani Khobragade is tantamount to keeping a person in slavery-like conditions or keeping a person in bondage.” (Outlook India)
A New Job at the United Nations: Meanwhile, the Indian government announced on Saturday that Khobragade had been transferred to a new position a the UN. While the move was clearly an attempt to get the “lady diplomat” retroactive immunity, it doesn’t look like that will work. (The New York Times, Hindustan Times)
Walking India’s Borders: Writer Suchitra Vijayan will soon embark on the second leg of her Borderlands project, in which she will cover India’s entire 9,000 mile northern Indian border, driving through and trekking to to regions a bit inaccessible by road. “The world here changes every hundred feet,” Vijayan said in a recent interview with PRI The World. Her journey will eventually be documented in a multimedia project and book. (PRI The World, The Borderlands Project)
What’s in a Name? A lot. The New Yorker looks at a 1948 study of over 3,000 men that found that men with unusual names “were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names.” (The New Yorker)
Lakshmi Gandhi is an editor at The Aerogram. Follow her on Twitter at @LakshmiGandhi and follow The Aerogram at @theaerogram.
