India speaks 780 languages, 200 lost in last 50 years. Ganesh Devy supervised the People’s Linguistic Survey of India, the first comprehensive survey of Indian languages conducted in the last 80 years. The 35,000-page survey is being released in 50 volumes, the first of which appeared earlier this month. Asked if English is a threat to Indian languages, Devy said “English is the sky. The sky will not harm the tree, but if you chop the roots, a mighty tree can fall.” [Reuters India]
The Ugly Politics of Beauty. R. Benedito Ferrao makes a case for how pageantry works politically. Noting the language and symbols of state used by pageants (crowns, queens, reigns), he also draws an interesting comparison between the brown Miss America and black Miss Israel. Like Indian American Nina Davuluri, Ethiopian Jew Yityish Aynaw made beauty pageant history. [Outlook]
How the Nairobi attack has shaken Kenya’s Indians. More than 90,000 South Asians live in Kenya, and those killed in the Westgate Nairobi attacks include persons of Indian origin or Indian citizenship. The BBC reports on how Kenya’s Indians were affected. Chetna Pathak, who lives near Westgate said, “I don’t believe that only Indians or any community was singled out by the attackers. And even if they were and even if they are shaken, we are as much a part of this society as any other Kenyan.” [BBC]
Women in India: Goddesses or Sluts? Shoma Chaudhury’s op-ed argues that traditional mindsets toward women in India, which both abuse and deify them, are slowly changing. In a nutshell, “a woman in India is likely to live as an inferior being,” but the young men marching in protests following last year’s New Delhi rape showed a shift in thinking, and for the first time, it became politically and socially embarrassing to blame the victim. Also, Chaudhury writes that no matter how imperfect the practice, the Indian Constitution recognized equal rights for women from the nation’s birth unlike the UK or US. [Al Jazeera English]
Pavani Yalamanchili is a co-founder and editor of The Aerogram. Email her at editors@theaerogram.com. Find The Aerogram on Twitter @theaerogram.
