Blog@GraceJunction

Anju Musafir. Not a name that would make many people in Ahmedabad to turn their heads, even just an year ago. However, recently, when a workshop was announced in a school where Anju was to speak, there was an unprecedented rush of lawyers, doctors, teachers and even psychologists to hear Anju! Very often it is the subject of the workshop that draws the crowd. But in this case, people were flooding in just to see and meet Anju. Anju had become someone who had certainly impacted their lives. (more…)

Every morning I approach the news papers with the fear of getting de-sensitized. Today for instance, The Times of India, Ahmedabad Edition carried news about an act of unnatural proportions – Man having sex with a calf! The matter was brought in to light due to the animal protection activists you may read the entire article here.

Thank God, there are at least some people in the society (People for Animal) who think that there is something called as evil / wrong and the matter was brought to light. A voiceless animal found some one who could fight for its cause; unfortunately our big mouthed society has none! (more…)

The train chugged powerfully thru the drizzle as I kept waiving. This was the beginning of a journey; a journey which just like the train was powerfully pulling the load attached, moving against all odds, piercing thru darkness, thru the cold wind and the rain – unstoppable.

It was not the pull of the train that powered the journey, rather it was something else more powerful, that was moving forward – It was the journey of Truth. My mind couldn’t forget the young child’s smiling face, less than a year old. The journey reflected innocence, trust and childlike faith. This friend of mine was traveling out to a very remote jungle to meet an unknown tribe, a tribe which still is centuries behind the normal world, cutoff from the rest of the world this tribe still lives in prehistoric stone age era. (more…)

Three weeks before Christmas 1993, Wolfgang Dircks died while watching television. Neighbors in his Berlin apartment complex hardly noticed the absence of the 43-year-old. His rent continued to be paid automatically out of his bank account.

Five years later, 1998 the money ran out, and the landlord entered Dircks’ apartment to inquire. He found Dircks’s remains still in front of the tube. The TV guide on his lap was open to December 3, the presumed day of his death. Although the television set had burned out, the lights on Dircks’s Christmas tree were still twinkling away.

It’s a bizarre story, but it shouldn’t surprise us. Each year thousands of people are found accidentally days or weeks after their solitary deaths in the affluent cities and suburbs of the world. If a person can die in such isolation that his neighbors never notice, how lonely was he when alive? (more…)

Becoming a rage is small towns and cities across India, is a new surgical correction procedure called Hymenorrhaphy.

Hymenorrhaphy or hymen reconstruction surgery is the surgical restoration of the hymen. The term comes from the Greek words hymen meaning ‘membrane’, and raphe meaning ’suture’. It is also known as Hymenoplasty, although strictly this term would also include hymenotomy.

Such procedures are not generally regarded as part of mainstream gynecology, but are available from some plastic surgery centres, particularly in the USA, Japan and Western Europe, and now India, generally as ‘day surgery’. The normal aim is to cause bleeding during post-nuptual intercourse, which in some cultures, like India, is a required (well almost) proof of virginity.

In Ahmedabad, it takes just Rs.10000/- to restore the hymen and thus a woman’s virginity! (more…)

The Patan gang rape did really wake up most of the news weary minds across the state. Shocked, everyone eagerly awaited the next day’s newspaper to get a deeper glimpse in to what transpired. However, the matter, unusually covered by the media, in a land where between 1971 and 2006 rape cases increased by a whooping 678%, died the death as the voice of the victims. 

It was interesting to note that when the issue came to light everyone was found discussing on, how so much of marks, and in turn power, was bestowed in to the hands of the autonomous teachers ? Every ‘Woman’s Commission’ and group in India along with the local media, politicians and the public started to blame the particular system for internal marks. While every one was busy in the blame game, no one ever cared to ask, what made these autonomous teachers do this act prima facie? Surprisingly and unanimously every one was ready with solutions to curb these heinous acts - reduce the amount of internal marks held in the hands of teachers!!  (more…)

A 15 year old girl, studying in Class XI, went to the toilet. Plunk!! Now this looks gross? Read on!! When she was through, she realised, she had plunked a 3kg healthy baby boy in the toilet bowl!!! Now what is that!!? That is Gross.

Neither the girl nor her parents nor any of her pokey neighbours nor even her over-advising relatives could detect that the bulge was not because she was becoming plump but because there was a little human being developing inside her. (more…)