Shenaz Treasurywala’s open letter to Modi, Bachchan, SRK, Salman and Aamir!

Dear Narendra Modi, Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan and Anil Ambani,

I am writing to YOU specifically because you are the most powerful and influential MEN in our country.

I am writing to you as a woman who grew up in a middle class family in Mumbai.

I am writing to YOU for HELP!

My parents may not like me saying this. I apologize to them if they are reading but this is NOT MY SHAME. It’s THIER SHAME.

My first experience with the opposite sex, was when I was just 13 and groped by a man (never saw his face but will never forget his hand) while walking in the vegetable market with my mom. She had just given me the worst haircut and as an angry teenager I was upset at her and was lagging behind as she walked ahead. I still remember what I was wearing. It was her dress, mustard with flowers and little bow in the front. How I hate that dress! As if, it was the dress’s fault.

I was shocked at first. Speechless. He disappeared. I just stood there. Tears started pouring out of my innocent eyes. I told my mom who went mad screaming in the market but who knew where that man disappeared to. I still remember the dirty feeling I had and the number of times I showered in my grand-mom’s bathroom after. That feeling never went away.

Since then it was non-stop. I would try to articulate this to my parents and while my mom understood, my dad and uncles told me I was imagining it. Maybe they just couldn’t deal with it. CAN YOU?

When I was 15, I started going by train and bus to St. Xaviers’ College. I was groped and touched and from all angles and this was just how I grew up. Not Just Me but MOST INDIAN WOMEN who don’t have the luxury of cars and drivers.

As a teenager I would dream of and still sometimes dream that I had a machine gun and could kill all the men who tried to grope me. A very disturbing dream for a kid, don’t you think?

I got my first assignment as a model in the FYJC and I had to go to screen-tests straight from college. So I had to dress nice, didn’t make it any easier. I specifically remember the time I went for an audition in a red body suit and a black long skirt with slits. It was HELL! I never wore that again. As if it was the dress’s fault.

I developed ways to defend myself, I always carried a bag in front of me, my fist was always clenched, I always turned around every 20 seconds to check who was behind me and a few times I slapped men who touched me, I got slapped back many times too. Sometimes saved by the public, MOST TIMES NOT.

My mom begged me not to pick fights with men who touched me, she was afraid of acid being thrown at me or that somebody someday would hurt me badly. She is STILL AFRAID and today she told me not to take an UBER to my meeting tomorrow. Hell ya. BAN UBER! Make everyone take responsibility for this.

My sister got into Sophia’s college, we were all excited. She went by bus but the first day she came home, she sobbed traumatized. A man had put his hand in her tee-shirt through her sleeve, the entire bus ride. She just froze. She was a kid too and wasn’t equipped to even understand this. I was LIVID. I’m sorry sis for telling the world this, please don’t stop speaking to me. IT’S NOT Our Shame. It’s THEIRS!

One of my friends in college was RAPED on the train on her way home in the ladies compartment. She was sick and was going home in the 11:15 break. There was nobody in the first class compartment going back to Bandra at that time, it was a superfast meaning it didn’t stop at most stations. He raped her and then jumped off after using her scrunchy (hair tie) to wipe himself. She was the only one on the train and had to limp her way back to her home in Bandra, bleeding profusely. She was just 16. This she felt was her shame so she did not say anything to anyone.

BUT IT ISN’T HER SHAME, it’s THEIR SHAME.

My mom accompanied me to Hyderabad on a shoot once. In churi bazaar, a cyclist groped My MOM. My dear respected and lovely MOM.

Sorry Mom, IT’S NOT Our Shame, It’s THEIR SHAME.

Why am I telling you my personal story?

Well first I want all women to Speak Up.

Let’s make this our MOTTO-

It’s not OUR SHAME, it’s THEIR SHAME.

Who are “THEY”?

“THEY” ARE THE MEN IN OUR COUNTRY.

Not just the rapists and the sexual offenders and gropers but also our Fathers (sorry dad) and Uncles and Brothers and MOVIE STARS AND CRICKETERS AND POLITICIANS for not SAVING US or PROTECTING US by insisting and protesting for the LAWS TO CHANGE and Rapists and Gropers to BE PUNISHED SEVERELY!

Why do we as women have to feel so threatened? WHY has there been no severe action taken? This has gone on for years now. Not just in Delhi but all over our country and yes even in BOMBAY OR MUMBAI OR Whatever the hell you want to call it! It’s NOT SAFE. NO!

My biggest fear ever since I was kid and even today when I walk back home at night from yoga or when I take a rickshaw from a friend’s home is being RAPED. I still feel that fear. I am still am on guard. I still fantasize of having that MACHINE GUN.

In the past 4 years I have been living and working half in India and half in New York and let me tell you I have walked the streets of Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn (perceived as the most dangerous in NYC) at3am after parties in short skirts and felt safer than I feel in Bandra at 10 pm on a quiet road fully covered. WHY??

Let’s talk about Delhi our Capital. I was there 2 days ago and the day of the rape. I wanted to go out and walk by India Gate and admire our great monuments but could I?! Why??

What good are all your speeches in the US or Japan or AUSTRALIA- NAMO, if no woman can walk freely in the streets even in broad daylight by herself in the CAPITAL OF OUR COUNTRY. Isn’t this a SHAME? SHAME ON YOU SIR.

This is our NO1 issue. FIX THIS before anything else.

This is a SHAME. And it’s YOUR SHAME. You are now RESPONSIBLE FOR US.

I beg all of you fine gentlemen that I have addressed to help change the LAW.

You are powerful men. I say, SHAME and PUNISH THE Gropers and Sexual offenders severely. KILL THE RAPISTS.

I won’t ask for public castration which is what I want and all the women want because I know this is unrealistic and things move SO DAMN SLOW in our FINE NATION.

All I ask for is the -Death Penalty Please. NOW! QUICK!

If that’s too hard or will take too long then at least LIFE IMPRISONMENT.

Put them away forever.

Why was this man who had raped twice before out on bail?

And then given a drivers license? YES, BAN UBER TOO. Make everyone responsible.

I’m ready to do anything. I’m not a big enough celeb but you Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Sharukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Anil Ambani SIRS- need to speak up as MEN ( you are the men with the power)

SAVE US!

Please demand the Death Sentence for the Rapists.

NO BAIL. Just Death.

Superstars I beg you, please take a stand. Use your Superstardom and Power and MONEY and save the women of our country. SAVE US!

I urge you to protest or go on a fast or do something DRASTIC so people take notice, the government wakes up and CHANGES the LAW so these men are terrified to touch us.

Death to rapists. No bail. Just death.

Imagine Amitabh Bachchan Sir, Aamir Khan, Salmaan Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Ambani- if you went on a fast or walked to the Rashrtrapati In Delhi. If you, took this stand and made this YOUR NO 1 issue, how much change there would be?!

Why should we as women feel so unsafe in our motherland?!

Why should we as women be terrified and on guard all the time.

Why was this man out on bail after committed two rapes already ?

Make an Example Of Him.

Any man who even touches a woman should be imprisoned for life.

Be strict, make examples of these men, scare those who dare to touch us.

SCARE THEM BY MAKING AN EXAMPLE OUT OF THEM.

SAVE US, Save your mother, daughter, sister please!

This is NOT OUR SHAME.

THIS IS YOURS.

SHAME ON YOU.

Don’t sleep till you – SAVE YOUR WOMEN!

With all respect,
Shenaz Treasurywala

(Source: Indicine)

A brief history of ‘Khan,’ the name that rules Bollywood and stalls airport security lines

Bollywood’s three biggest stars are all Khans, though they are not related. Together, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan rule even mundane aspects of Indian life. Shah Rukh is said to endorse more goods than any other Indian, dead or alive. His face is everywhere, looming over roads and in the pages of magazines, hawking the stuff that makes a life — from the luxe (Apple toys and motorbikes) to the dull (AC units and pens).

Aamir, the good guy, hosts a national talk show, avoids tabloids, and is often cited as a dream political candidate. Salman is the brute — the Crowe to Shah Rukh’s Clooney and Aamir’s Damon. He’s forever in the news for some sin that won’t hurt his box-office clout, whether it’s joking about rape, or killing a rare animal for sport.

The “Khandom,” to quote director Karan Johar, is real. Nothing can take down a Bollywood Khan. Of the country’s ten top-earning movies ever, the Khan triumvirate star, separately, in eight. One of the others is narrated by a Khan: Irrfan — of Life of Pi, Slumdog Millionaire, and other blockbusters.

Excepting Salman (whose movies draw smaller audiences stateside), the above Khans have all been detained multiple times in Western airports since 9/11, long before the travel ban came to pass. So has the boxer Amir Khan, causing a notable enough Heathrow event that David Cameron stepped in (a U.S. immigration officer stopped him, en route to Vegas, on the anniversary of 9/11); the actress Zareen Khan, in JFK; acclaimed directors Sajid Khan and Kabir Khan, the latter reportedly in three different U.S. airports the same year; and Imran Khan, one of the most globally famous Pakistanis, who was forced to opine on drones.

Readying for a transatlantic media trip in 2008, the television star Iqbal Khan says he turned up earlier than anyone else in his group to the embassy office, yet was the only one denied a visa because, he surmised, “my name is Mohammed Iqbal Khan.” Irrfan Khan nearly quit Hollywood after being made to sit for hours in back rooms with no explanation, in both LAX and JFK. “When I tried to ask why I was being treated this way, I was told to keep quiet,” he told a reporter, calling the experience “humiliating.” “I wasn’t allowed to use my phone. They said, ‘No, you just sit down.’ All because my name was Irrfan Khan.”

Compared to recent airport drama, these injustices pale. Families weren’t split indefinitely, no young children kept from their mothers. But Donald Trump’s travel ban didn’t come from nowhere, though the sudden sensitivity for Muslim travelers can seem to suggest it did. For years, Muslims have surrendered all power inside American airports — even those with great power outside them. Arguably, no case proves the absurdity of modern profiling more than Khan. On one side of the world, the surname signifies godlike greatness. On the other, it convicts its holder of crimes uncommitted.

In 2015, the U.S. government introduced a measure to excuse VIPs, VVIPs, and VVVIPs — to use the lingo of India, a country obsessed with hierarchy — from airport questioning. India was to enter the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Global Entry program, bumping Indian elite out of security lines. The measure seems to have stalled. India is not yet listed online as an official member; and last summer, one of the VVVIPs to be protected by the pre-check system was again detained: Shah Rukh, in LAX, where he gamely caught Pokémon during the hours spent waiting. (The TSA did not respond to requests for comment on India’s Global Entry status.)

It was SRK’s fourth detainment in the U.S. (the only country to ever stop him), and was as memorable as the rest. His third detainment tracked with the 2012 global tour of My Name Is Khan, a blockbuster about a Muslim family man in America, fighting for equal treatment. The irony did not escape fans, who wondered if the airport hassle was a setup.

From Khan, it produced a legendary quote, on the twisted art of profiling. Speaking at the podium at Yale University — hours late, having been detained — he quipped: “Whenever I start feeling too arrogant, I take a trip to America.” The next year, writing for the magazine Outlook, he grew serious. The name Khan — once evocative of “a strapping man riding a horse, his reckless hair flowing from beneath a turban tied firm around his head” — had warped in our new age to describe a new sort of man: “shoved into a backroom of a vast American airport named after an American president.”

The nobler sense of Khan goes back centuries. The name is derived from a title, adapted from the Turkish word for “king.” Demand for it spread, through mountain tribes, into Central Asia (thanks Genghis), morphing as it went. In China, it became Xan, and was handed out by Ming-dynasty emperors. Hindu courtiers of 16th-century India could become Khans, if Emperor Akbar took a liking to them. There are Hindu Khans, and Buddhist Khans, though it is largely a Muslim surname. Nowadays, it’s one of the most common last names in the world: As of 2014, more doctors in the U.K. were named Khan than anything else.

In Bollywood, thanks to the successes of its bearers, the name retains that first, regal, sheen. Some years ago, the renowned Harvard professor Shahab Ahmed spoke to a reporter hoping to crack why India’s biggest movie stars were Khans. Ahmed was the authority on the matter, at work on a book on the history of Khans in Bollywood. He died before its completion, and his insights paint a half-formed picture of how the name came to the screen: via a tribe of Pashtun warriors — Khans — who left Afghanistan for India, and young Bollywood.

These early Khans were skilled, but not, to use Ahmed’s word, “influential.” It was an Afghan Khan who wrote the first-ever Bollywood song, for example, for the industry’s first talkie. By the 1950s, at least two Khans were stars — Madhubala and Dilip Kumar — though they’d adopted faux Hindu names. (India holds as confused a relationship with Muslims as any nation.)

Khandom theories exist. Most are conspiracies, about a Muslim underworld controlling Bollywood; some credit the Khans’s Afghan blood for the fair skin that seduces Indian audiences. Perhaps the simplest answer is best, though. Salman and Aamir each claim parents in the industry. Their ancestors were those early Khans, working in the dark, so their descendants could stand in the spotlight. (As for Shah Rukh, son of an activist and homemaker, he’s keeping the Khan mystery alive.)*

Any travelling Muslim today might view faith as a malleable force, to be downplayed or celebrated with care, depending on context. It’s therefore a boon, in a sense, when VVVIPs are held to the same standards. A person used to special treatment calls out injustices others swallow. What separates a Bollywood Khan from the rest, after all, is he still sees himself as a hero.

(Source: Vulture)

Sonam Wangchuk wins global award

Viewers would remember having been left awe-struck by Aamir Khan‘s many science experiments in the 2009 blockbuster ‘3 Idiots’ – now Sonam Wangchuk, the inspiration behind Aamir Khan’s Phunsukh Wangdu character in the film, has gained further global recognition bagging the prestigious Rolex Awards for Enterprise 2016. The awards were presented on Tuesday in Los Angeles to those “who have reshaped the world with their innovative thinking and dynamism”.

Sonam Wangchuk’s “Ice Stupas” project is among the five winners this year at the Rolex Awards for Enterprise 2016.

Sonam Wangchuk, a 50-year-old Ladakhi engineer, has been attempting to solve the problem of lack of water for agriculture in the desert landscapes of the western Himalayas by building “Ice Stupas”.

The Ladakh region, at roughly 3,500-metre altitude between the Kunlun and Great Himalayan mountain ranges, faces acute water shortage during the April-May early crop-growing period. Wangchuk was certain that access to water in the desert landscapes around many high altitude towns and villages of Ladakh could be improved if the huge seasonal outflow of glacial water could be frozen.

Sonam Wangchuk, inspiration behind Aamir Khan's 3 Idiots' character Phunsukh Wangdu, wins global award

Inspired by the experimental work of a fellow Ladakhi engineer, Chewang Norphel, Wangchuk developed a simple and effective system, creating what he calls “Ice Stupas” – conical ice mounds that behave like mini-glaciers, slowly releasing water for the growing season. “The Rolex Award funds will support the project and promote ice stupas as a climate-change adaptation and desert-greening technique,” Wangchuk said in a statement released by Rolex.

Wangchuk intends to build up to 20 such ice stupas, each 30 metres high and capable of supplying millions of litres of water. The long-term aim is to build an alternative university and engage youth in the environment. Wangchuk is currently working on establishing an alternative university on the 65-hectare land donated by the village that will engage youth from Ladakh, the Himalayas and other mountain regions of the world in finding their own solutions to the challenges facing them.

“The Rolex Awards were designed to support those whose own spirit of enterprise mirrored the enterprising spirit on which the company was founded,” Rebecca Irvin, Head of Philanthropy at Rolex, said in the release.

(Source: India)

Something wrong? Cinemas hardly full, yet Aamir Khan's 'Dangal' earnings skyrocketing!

Dangal box office collections: Aamir Khan is currently grabbing headlines for breaking a new record with each new day since the film’s release. As of Tuesday evening, the film’s earnings reached a staggering Rs 155 crore, knocking MS Dhoni: The Untold Story off from the second spot on the highest grossing films of the year. With such figures, you’d expect theatres to be packed – even on weekdays, since the earnings on both Monday and Tuesday have been over the Rs 20 crore mark. Yet, Sucheta Dalal recently raised the issue of Dangal not seeing the expected occupancy in theatres.

In a tweet today, she posted, “How come this happens with #aamirKhan movies? Cannot be a co-incidence. Last time, half of Regal was empty for PK on Christmas Day colaba.” Her statement came in response to a Dangal viewer’s observations, “@suchetadalal available.Still booked 2 tickets.When entered theater,around 15% seats still empty. Same strategy for promotion like #Pk 2/2.”

At the end of the day, figures/stats can maniplated at will, sans a credible watchdog – there is no stock market-type SEBI to keep people honest. And considering the hundreds of crores and huge reputations at stake, a lot of fixing is always alleged  – it is all a part of the larger Bollywood game in which the industry looks to keep its hierarchy in place. Dangal is not an exception, but we should remember this is all alleged, there are interested parties who want to bring  the high flyers to ground, and no proof is ever presented or even asked for.

It would hardly been the first time a story that made amazing headlines had next to no basis on true facts. And according to the tweet, PK already seems guilty of this. Is Aamir guilty of fudging numbers of his film’s performance at the box office? The idea awes and shocks fans. The performance records also adversely impact the work of all the other filmmakers and actors that come in second, third, fourth and so on to Dangal or for that matter Sultan, or Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. Because for all we know, these films aren’t playing second fiddle to the movie after all. They may well be the real gems of 2016 box office. Maybe.

(Source: The Financial Express)