rita banerji's photostream

Sloth. Incompetency. And corruption. This week the police in the city beat up a student leader so badly, he died. He was only 22 years old. Apparently he had hit his head on an electric pole. And bounced off the pole repeatedly and hit the both the front and back of his head, and other parts of his body??? People in Calcutta were expecting better once the Communist government fell here in 2011. But it doesn't seem that way! Here's my blog on that

I thought how nice to play as children in a gender free world. If that little girl didn't have her hair long in a blue ribbon, she could have been a boy. Or vice-versa if the boy had long hair tied up with a ribbon he could be a little girl. Or is that a little boy with the blue ribbon on his head? :)

I had to use my most favorite muse for my New Year's greetings! She's 2 years old now!

This is how thousands in the slums of Indian cities and towns collect their drinking water, every day. The municipal taps release water twice a day, and women (never men!) line up for hours with their containers to fill water and lug these back to their homes. And all the time, traffic passes by. Getting drinking water is not just labor-some for women, but dangerous too!

Discarded tea cups in the garbage bin of a tea-stall. The red clay cups were what Bengal was famous for. They are made locally in the city's potters' colonies (which was a big cottage industry in Bengal), and they are recyclable. A man comes around with a hand wagon distributing and later collecting these tea cups from the tea stalls to take back, crush and reshape into fresh cups. However, interspersed with the clay cups here are the new cups being used of clear plastic. India's moving from the recyclable to the "waste and fill landfills" economy!