My favourite Malayalam movies

This is a list I made for a North Indian friend who has started enjoying Malayalam movies. Mostly movies made post-2000.

1. Oru Indian Pranayakatha (An Indian Love story) - Fahd Fazil plays a grassroots party worker, who helps a Canadian citizen find her biological parents in India, and how the heroine played by Amala Paul helps him "grow up" personally and professionally.
2. Njan Prakashan (Me Prakashan) - Another Sathyan Anthikad movie with Fahd and two heroines. A nursing graduate after initial attempts to follow his girlfriend to Germany, finds his true calling in India itself.
3. Pranayam (love) - Mohanlal, Anupam Kher and Jayaprada. A woman meets her first husband in old age, and the friendship that develops between her first and second husbands.
4. Luca - Tovino Thomas and Ahana Krishna as a star-crossed couple, whose death is being investigated by a police officer. Poignant love story set in the backdrop of the Kochi biennale and the life of an artist named Luca.
5. Pranchiyettan & the Saint - An upstart middle-aged businessman, played by Mammooty, meets Priyamani as Padmashri following his efforts to win a Padmashree award from the Indian govt. His conversations with St Francis and the dead are interesting. Good entertainer.
6. Jomonte Suvisheshangal (Jomon’s gospels) - A young rake by name Jomon becomes a responsible son taking care of his businessman father who has fallen on bad times when his siblings desert them. Two heroines in the two halves of Dulquer Salman’s screen life.
7. Joseph - The personal tragedies in the life of an astute yet tipsy police officer Joseph, played by Joju, who unearths an organ trade racket in a hospital. In part it feels like a documentary but very haunting.
8. Android Kunjappan Ver. 5.25 - A grumpy old man’s relationship with a robot home nurse is very endearing despite the movie not having any actor with great star value. Suraj and Saubin excel in this father-son tale.
9. Manjadikuru (a red seed) - The first of director Anjali Menon’s movies, it explores a family saga from the perspective of a young NRI boy. Prithviraj and Padmapriya appear as the adult versions of two of the kids in the story.
Her later movies, Ustad Hotel, Koode and Bangalore Days are a great watch too.
10. There are many more that can fit this bill but not exactly favourites - Salt Mangotree (Biju Menon, on school admissions), Vellimoonga (Biju Menon, political cum love satire), Madhura naranga (Kunchako & Biju, Indian-Sri Lankan love set in the UAE), June (Rajisha enacts the coming of age of a Kerala teenager), Drishyam (Lal), Premam (Nivin Pauly), Black (Mmty), Pulimurugan (Mohanlal), How old are you (Manju Warrier), Kazhcha (Mmty & Padma priya), ABCD & CIA (both DQ), Kadha parayumbol (Srinivasan, Meena); Love 24x7, My Boss, 2 countries, Meesha Madhavan (all Dileep entertainers), Kettyol aanente malakha (my wife is my angel, starring Asif Ali), Trivandrum Lodge (Honey Rose as the pretty woman who comes to live in a dilapidated men's lodge).
North 24 kaatham - An IT guy with OCD on a road trip on a hartal day in Kerala. Fahd won the state best actor award.
Diamond Necklace: Fahd again, as a spendthrift and cunning young dr and his life in Dubai. His other best ones are 22 Female Kottayam, Annayum Rasoolum, Immanuel, Iyobinte Pustakam, Trance, Thondimuthalum driksakshiyum, Kumbalangi Nights. (The last two are not the usual entertainers for laymen.)
Many of them may not available with English subtitles.

Beirut, the Phoenix city

"The righteous flourish like the palm tree and grow like the cedar in Lebanon ". The Bible is replete with numerous references to the cedars of Lebanon and even my occasional reading of the Bible couldn’t miss such verses.

But my more journalistic interest in Lebanon stemmed from the stories and pictures Frontline carried on the civil war in the country at the end of the 20th century. Lebanon in our minds has a "Visit at your own risk" tag, so it was natural for V to ask me whether it was safe to do so when I got this offer to visit Beirut as part of a week's assignment in July.
Signs of the strife was visible on the older buildings in Beirut, ridden with bullets, as we were transported from the Rafik Hariri airport to Antelias where we stayed at the Armenian Orthodox Catholicosate (the headquarters as well as where the patriarch of the Church resides). But looking at the swank new buildings dotting the city, one gets the impression that Beirut is a city that is trying hard to wipe out memories of the war.
Lebanon has an interesting landscape - the sea on one side and mountains on the other. And the mountains are dotted with buildings, their numbers having gone up with the refugee influx. No wonder the staff at the visa processing center at the Lebanese consulate in Dubai and the immigration counters at the Beirut airport are equally suspicious of your intentions on arriving with a business visa. The situation is not much different for those in our group who took the tourist visa - Lebanon just can’t afford to have people overstaying. My entry is sanctioned for 15 days only though the visa can be procured for 3 months according to rules. And until you cross the immigration counter, you are fervently hoping and praying that they won’t forbid your entry. My visa application had in the first place been facilitated by Vinod’s stable income in the UAE, and secondly by my written assurance that I will return to where I came from.
Beirut airport sits on the coast and our aircraft taxied on a runway not far from the sea waters. In the distance, the mountains with the famed cedars beckoned to us.
Our accommodation was 5 km away, at the Armenian Catholicosate in Antelias. Originally the site of an orphanage for children who had escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Catholicosate has a spacious campus that is neat and serene, as opposed to the narrow roads and traffic congestion outside. Apart from the residence of the Catholicos, HH Aram I, there is a monastery for celibate monks, a guest house, a museum cum conference hall and the genocide memorial. The genocide memorial is relatively new, erected in 2015 to commemorate 100 years of the genocide - the extermination of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman empire quite like the Nazi -authored genocide of Jews during World War II. I learn that much of today's Turkey belong to Armenia and if ever Turkey were to acknowledge its atrocities it would have to return Armenian land and be left with just 10% of its present day territory.
History is replete with incidents of man's atrocities against each other for money, power and land. Religion often plays a role in the targeting of communities.

The genocide memorial at Antelias has a powerful symbol - of skulls encased in a glass case which were recovered from the Syrian desert. These belong to Armenians who were led like lambs to the slaughter; many died of starvation while many others were shot dead by the Turkish soldiers. A recorded audio message plays while we bow our heads in sorrow inside the memorial.

Beirut to Byblos
The horrors of the Armenian Holocaust became very evident to us in the ensuing days - unlike the Jewish Holocaust this had attracted less international coverage and attention. And when I looked at the Armenians around me, it gave me a deep sense of pain at what their forefathers went through - a collective sense of their suffering seems to be infused in their bodies.
It was carefully portrayed at the Birds Nest orphanage in the coastal old town of Byblos, 40 km away, and which preserves all the photographs of the genocide events - of Armenians living in prosperity before the holocaust, the shaping of the persecution and the massacre over a four-year period. Birds' Nest was run by a Dutch lady who called it so because the children gathered around her like birds at feed time.
Byblos, like the Bible, means book in Greek, and refers to the main item of trade - papyrus - from its port during the Phoenician/Canaanite civilisation. It apparently is one of the oldest inhabited cities of the world and has seen continuous human settlements for 7000 years. The original alphabet also came from there. Byblos is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has ruins from the Pheonician, Egyptian, Greek and Roman periods. Unfortunately I had no time to visit them.
In the evening before my departure, I roped in a couple of my team members for a short sight-seeing tour of Beirut city, once the Paris of the Middle East. Roman ruins like the Bath are preserved in the middle of downtown Beirut - they blend seamlessly with the sleek office spaces, restaurants and outdoor lounges. Huge TV screens were kept everywhere for the football fans; it was the World Cup season and Lebanon seemed to be in a football frenzy going by the flags on cars and buildings and those for sale on the wayside. Downtown Beirut has the Parliament, a modest slim structure in yellow that has very little of the grandeur and inaccessibility of the Indian Parliament. One reminder of the 15-year civil war is the presence of gun-toting soldiers in central Beirut, standing unobtrusively under any available shade in the summer heat.
Just as the sharing of power in Parliament between Lebanon's Christian and Muslim population (the Prime Minister is elected from the Muslim community and the President from the Christian), there is a sharing of space between churches and mosques in downtown Beirut. After visiting the Greek cathedral, we hesitated in front of the Blue Mosque next door. A mosque official ushered us in, once we had enrobed ourselves in the abaya rented out to female visitors. For the first time I bowed my head in prayer in a mosque - my previous trips to mosques like the Big Mosque in Abu Dhabi or the Jama Masjid in Delhi had been touristy and photo-op.

Our last stop was the corniche along the sea, from where we could see the Pigeon’s Rock – a natural rock formation in the sea that resembled the Gateway of India. We made the arduous walk down to the sea through an unkempt path, rocky and bushy in parts, along with our portly Armenian driver Aram. Aram seemed a very common name among Armenians; the first Aram I knew of was a character in my Grade 9 textbook – a young humorous boy in William Saroyan’s My name is Aram. Aram our chauffeur enlightens us that every Armenian surname ends with a -ian or –yan.

After buying some customary Lebanese sweets (I conveniently forget that Lebanese bakeries dot every corner of the UAE landscape), we head home. By night, we bid goodbye to the Catholicosate and its beautiful church. It had been soothing for me to wake to the sound of church bells ringing every morning for a week. And the bed in the modest guesthouse rooms had been the most comfortable and heavenly I had slept on – maybe I am overreacting, and it is just the nostalgia of a relaxing week cocooned in the Catholicosate.  J

Food culture in the UAE

Asian and North African communities are renowned for community living and dining. Meals are often taken in large groups sitting around a table or on the floor, sometimes shared from one large plate or two. It speaks a lot about the people and their large-heartedness and kinship.

Since the formation of the UAE in 1971 and the exploration of oil, its visionary and ambitious leaders have ensured that its people had an infrastructure and lifestyle that is world-class. The Bedouin lifestyle of Emirati forefathers has today seamlessly blended with the continental appetite for good life and good food. The modern diet of the Emirati people is cosmopolitan, with the emirates of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah in particular having a cosmopolitan crowd and culture.

For Arabs, gathering around the dining table is an occasion for celebration and fellowship. Food is a means for strengthening family bonds. In winter in the UAE, especially in Dubai and Sharjah, Arab women and children can be seen picnicking in parks and corniche lawns, sharing tea or bread while men chat over a cup of coffee at signature cafes. The coffee club culture is there in all seasons with malls hosting numerous internationally acclaimed coffee shops. Barbecues are also common among those who love an outdoorsy life.

Traditional cuisine: Emirati cuisine is a delectable mix of Middle Eastern and Asian cuisine; being much milder than south Asian cuisine, it is easy on the palate and the tummy. The Arabic cuisine consists heavily of dry breads like kuboos and pita, and fish and meat like mutton and beef, often grilled. Fish like hammour is the local popular for grilling but imported ones like the Norwegian salmon is also a hot favorite. Frying does not seem a preferred option except while preparing snacks like falafel (which reminds one of the Indian parippuvada) and luqaimat (which looks like the desi gulab jamun though the texture and ingredients are different).

When one thinks of Arabic food, the first images are of the strong Arabic coffee and dates. The Arabica beans is lightly roasted and ground with cardamom and saffron to brew that perfect small cup of coffee in an ibrik/ coffee pot. Dates offer an immense variety -- Saudi Arabian, Palestinian, Iranian etc. since date palms are a familiar sight in the entire Arabian peninsula and North African (MENA) region. Its prime importance in Arabic life can be gauged from the fact that it is your breaking-the-fast prescription along with water during the Ramadan season.

Harees is a one-pot dish made from wheat and meat and popular during special occasions like Ramadan and Eid.

Shawarma is synonymous with Arab food but is actually not a traditional Emirati offering. Its popularity stems from the fact that it is a quick and tasty option, and is your food on the go. This could easily pass off as the UAE's favourite food. Here again, the taste and filling can vary depending on where you are -- a Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian or Kerala restaurant. Combine it with a plate of falafel fritters for as low as AED 1 a plate, and your supper is truly filling.

The tabbouleh is a nutritional salad made of chopped parsley, tomatoes, and bulgur wheat. Vegetarian visitors to the UAE, keen on trying local dishes, can bank on this one dish to keep themselves afloat. Then there is hummus, a delectable dip, and fattoush, a bread salad made using fried pita bread.

The mandi biriyani may not be everyone's favourite but it is value for money. It probably needs an acquired taste, but going by the number of mandi restaurants in the emirates it must be very popular.

An exotic dish that is reserved for special occasions is the stuffed camel, which has a world record as the largest dish in the world.

But then, there is option for everyone. Vegetarian, vegan, non-vegetarian. The UAE especially Dubai keeps everyone happy with a surfeit of choices. Indian restaurants, in particular Kerala ones, are dime a dozen. Of course, a customer may not visit a restaurant a second time unless the food and service is good. One can be assured of quality and hygiene because the laws are strict.

Fast Food: The well-heeled and worldly wise Emirati doesn't shy away from trying the cuisine of other nations. One can see them in an Indian Nawabi restaurant like Gazebo or a Japanese joint like Manga Sushi. The mall food courts attract people from all walks of life with somewhat longer queues in front of McDonalds, Pizza Hut and KFC. The junk food bug has bitten the Emirati and the expat alike, and no amount of awareness spreading through newspapers and school classrooms is cutting the modern man's fascination for a cheesy burger or pizza or a bucket of chicken popcorn/drumstick.

Malls also provide the casual dining experience. A PF Chang or a Bosporus may be packed on weekends but is a break from the monotony of the fast food culture.

Friday Brunch: Nothing celebrates the hard-earned holiday on Friday as the Friday brunch on offer at the big/luxury hotels. Wake up late on Friday (or Saturday for those lucky to have a two-day weekend) and head to your favourite restaurant for a royal meal. Brunches come for as low as AED 50 and as high as AED 600 or thereabouts.

Food Fests: The country is in a festival mood throughout the year, be it shopping, sports or food. The Liwa Dates festival in the western region of Abu Dhabi is a celebration of the desert fruit in July every year. There is a competition for the best variety of dates to enthuse farmers. Then there is the Abu Dhabi Food Festival in December and the Dubai Food Festival in February-March offering mouth-watering possibilities for food buffs.

All in all, the UAE is a foodie paradise. Life never ceases to be exciting here.

* the unedited version of a post I wrote for http://blog.mysearchuae.com/

New Year's Eve fireworks

Watch New Year's Eve fireworks from Dubai's Festival Bay this year!

Dubai Festival City Mall and Al Marjan Island in Ras Al Khaimah will treat you to spectacular firework displays on December 31 night to ring in the New Year. So decide on your venue now and be there well in advance!

For those of you who will miss the annual fireworks at the iconic Burj Khalifa - the world's tallest tower is going to have a brilliant light show instead - cheer up and head towards Dubai Festival City Mall. Be ready to be wowed by four free fireworks shows at 9 p.m., 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. and a grand finale at midnight to welcome the New Year!
The mall has announced a spectacular schedule that will include live musical performances and exciting shows from IMAGINE apart from the fireworks. The entertainment will kick off at 7 p.m.
Visitors can dine and view in style from any of the popular waterfront restaurants - Eataly, Serendipity 3, Nando's, Cheesecake Factory, Turkish Village, Joe's Crab Shack, Sugar Factory, Al Fanar, Peppermill, Texas Roadhouse, Motomachi, California Pizza Kitchen, Bucca di Beppo and the brand new Lebanese joint Semsom. Book your preferred restaurant well in advance to get the best view.

If you'd rather not spend on dining, settle down on the steps or around the Bay to watch the event absolutely free of charge. Ample parking is available, and enjoy some great shopping deals too.

Al Marjan Island RAK to host a glittering fireworks show
Nearby Ras al Khaimah beckons revellers with a spectacular show at Al Marjan Island, which has powered the emirate's tourism, hospitality and property sectors.
A team of 30 engineers, pyrotechnicians, fabricators and others are working on the project led by Phil Grucci, Creative Director of Fireworks by Grucci. Environmental-friendly, organic material such as wood, sulphur, charcoal from trees, and metals from the ground will be used for the actual shells of the fireworks.
Be there, and have a memorable start to 2018!

Test assignment for a portal.

Downtown Dubai Area Guide

Dubai loves to bask in superlatives - the world's tallest building, the world's largest mall or the world's largest suspended aquarium. Since last year, it has another attraction - the 2000-seat Dubai Opera for concert lovers. All this in an area of 2 square kilometres on Sheikh Zayed Road called Downtown Dubai. Not surprisingly, it is the crown of the emirate, with the Burj Khalifa standing tall as the jewel in that crown.

Tourists flock to this dynamic hub, developed by Emaar Properties, to marvel at the Burj. It is considered a wonderful locality to work or live in. If you find the glitz and glamour too heady, take a break and visit the Old Town nearby to get a feel of Dubai's culture and history.

What to see: The Dubai Mall is a one-stop destination for tourists and residents alike. If shopping doesn't interest you, you can watch sharks and rays and small fish glide past in the Aquarium and Underwater Zoo. Take a snap at the signature fountain inside the mall.

In the evenings, find a vantage point to enjoy the Dubai Fountain, where waters dance to the music against the background of the majestic Burj. Forget the milling crowd around you and lose yourself in its soulful music.

Access The Dubai Metro has a station inside the Dubai Mall, making it easy for the occasional shopper or the regular commuter. Several bus routes also serve the area.

The airport is only 10 km away. Taxis are also readily available outside the mall.

Parking is available at the mall but can be a problem on weekends.

Eateries: From swanky hotels to chic restaurants, the area offers the best for foodies.

Dubai Mall has numerous specialty restaurants apart from the food court.

Not to miss is At.mosphere in Level 122 of Burj Khalifa, if your wallet allows it.

Rents in the area remain at a premium but having an address in the Burj in particular is a matter of pride for the well-heeled. Annual rents for a two-bed apartment are in the range of AED 170,000 to 190,000.

* a test assignment for bayut.com

Shwedagon's splendour

In a  land of pagodas in glittering gold, the Shwedagon pagoda in Yangon is a must-visit attraction. And with Tripadvisor's Travellors' Choice Awards of 2018 listing it as one of the top 10 landmarks of Asia, it should be on the bucket list of every footloose traveller.

Mingalabar, said our local host in Yangon, welcoming us to his country, which has been in the news for the wrong reasons – the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine state of Myanmar. Mingalabar means "auspiciousness to you" and is the traditional Burmese greeting, one that can earn you a warm welcome anywhere in the country, he told us. To many of us pre-millenials, Myanmar may be better known as Burma and its former capital Yangon as Rangoon, once the eastern limit of the British empire in the Indian subcontinent.

Myanmar, one of the South-east Asian nations practising Theravada Buddhism, is renowned for its pagodas in glittering gold. And the crowning glory of Myanmar's rich tapestry of pagodas is the Shwedagon, the gold-plated pagoda on a hilltop that has benevolently watched over Yangon for 2600 years.

Legend has it that two men from Okkalapa land (present-day Yangon) visited Gautama Buddha shortly after he received enlightenment in 588 BC.  They gave him alms and in return he gave them eight strands of his hair as blessing. When they returned to their land, they were received with much fanfare by King Okkalapa and his people.  The King had the Buddha's hair enshrined along with the relics of three other Buddhas before him - the staff of Kakusanda Buddha, the water filter of Kawnagamana Buddha and a piece of the robe of Kassapa Buddha. Since the stupa contained the relics of four, it was called Shwedagon (Shwe-dag-on, as they call it) or the Reliquary of the Four.

Standing on Sanguttara Hill in Yangon, the gold-plated Shwedagon pagoda today commands a height of 326 feet, up from its original height of 66 feet thanks to its careful nurturing and maintenance by successive kings. It is the bejewelled crown of Yangon, lighting up the night sky with its golden brilliance. Be it against the dark clouds with the sun playing peeping Tom or the calm night sky, the pagoda dazzles in its golden splendour. It is also the last visual to leave your gaze as your aircraft soars away from the city and into the clouds.

Sprawled on 114 acres of land, the pagoda has entrances on all four sides, each facilitated with escalators, elevators and stairways. Foreign nationals pay an entrance fee of $8 or 8000 kyats (pronounced chyats). One has to be barefooted inside the pagoda complex; I opt to carry my footwear in a bag provided free of cost instead of leaving them at a counter near the entrance.

The crowning glory of the pagoda is a diamond-studded orb at its zenith - it has 4,351 diamonds in all and the apex diamond weighs 76 carats. Just below the orb is the vane studded with assorted gems, and then comes the umbrella or hti in gold with over 4000 gold bells. The umbrella is a distinctive and auspicious feature of Burmese pagodas - which also explained why devotees carried little golden paper umbrellas along with flowers and candles to place around the main pagoda.

Open from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m., the pagoda is a rallying point for the tourist and the pilgrim alike. While the tourist is advised to wear modest clothing, the local pilgrims could be seen in their colourful longyis (one piece cloth wrapped around the waist and reaching the feet)  and tanakha (a cosmetic paste made from ground bark) smeared on their faces. For many Burmese, the pilgrimage is also a picnic - some of them could be seen resting or having a packed breakfast in the pavilions around the pagoda. The scene was reminiscent of that in a huge Hindu temple complex in south India. Interestingly, Yangon also has Hindu temples for its remnant Tamil and Bengali population, who had made it their home during the British Raj of Burma and India.

Bodhi trees -- the first of them reportedly brought from Bodhgaya in Bihar  -- at the peripheries of the sprawling complex shelter the weary-footed for a while. There are two smaller pagodas - the Naundawgi and Htidaw pagodas - apart from a replica of the Shwedagon in gold, as many as 16 images of the Buddha,  two humongous bells commissioned by King Singu and King Tharyawady in 1778 and 1841 respectively, and a museum.

One could spend half a day studying the whole place but looming rain clouds and the prospect of shopping bargains at Scott market make me wind up my circumambulation of the pagoda.

Driving us to Scott market, our loquacious taxi driver informs us that it would take four hours by road to reach Naypitaw, the capital since 2005. Unlike Yangon, bustling with life, taxis and an old-world charm, Naypitaw is believed to be an empty city, devoid of people and a soul. "Naypitaw means palace," the driver tells me, "but ironically [the junta chief] Than Shwe, just as Aung San, came from the village. Only Suu Kyi grew up in Yangon."  Mia-maa, he sings out his country's name. Most of the taxi drivers in Yangon, which seems to have more taxis than private vehicles, use a smattering of English.

There is a curious discrepancy in Yangon's road traffic system that makes it look chaotic and dangerous. While the taxis, mostly imported Japanese cars, have steering wheels on the right, the buses have steering wheels on the left and all chaotically try to follow a right-hand drive. The country, which followed a left-hand drive just as most former British colonies, had shifted to right-hand drive in 1970 on the whim of General Ne Win.

The traffic snarl makes the short distance to the tranquil Kandagwyi Lake painfully long. Just as at the pagoda, an entry sticker ticket is stuck on my sleeve leaving me free to wander around the souvenir shops and the boardwalk. The lake, which was originally a reservoir built by the British, had a teakwood boutique hotel that once housed the British rowing club.  On October 19 last year, it was gutted in an early morning fire reducing it to a mere memory. The Karaweik Palace, a huge barge-shaped restaurant, is an eye-catching piece of Burmese architecture on the lake. Two mythical karaweik birds appear to float in the lake as they support the golden structure.

A few kilometres away is the covered and cobblestoned Scott market _ built in 1926 by the British _ now known as the Bogyoke Aung San market (after General Aung San, the architect of Burmese independence), and is your one-stop destination for clothes, paintings, handicrafts, lacquerware as well as semi-precious stones especially jade in hues from dark green to yellow. There are eateries and also carts selling jackfruit or durian by the wayside.

China Town is another must-visit place for those who enjoy gastronomic adventures. It is famous for its street food, but it definitely is not for the faint-hearted. The cuisine on offer includes barbequed squid, chicken and pork offal like the pig's tongue on skewers.

Traditional Burmese food can be spicy and oily; rice is the staple with side dishes involving fish and meat, often fermented. At breakfast, the hotel often served the national food mohinga, a broth of rice noodles in fish sauce and topped with fried lentils and other condiments.

Myanmar has a tropical monsoon climate, quite like Kerala's. The rains come between May and November, following a short winter and summer, and explain why the whole country is so verdant.

I left Yangon on a rain-drenched night, glad that I would not be caught in a traffic snarl the next day when an inter-faith rally to promote peace and religious harmony was scheduled. The Shwedagon, glowing in the dark, watched us go.

Voice of the marginalised

Story on Sr Sudha Varghese, an award-winning Indian social activist, who I met during an ecumenical conference in Myanmar. This was published in the CCA newsletter.

One woman's voice has become the collective voice of an entire community's women force. "Nari Gunjan" or Women's Voice, the brainchild of "Padma Shri" Sr Sudha Varghese, has emancipated  a whole community of girl children and women from Bihar's Musahar community, facing the worst forms of sexual exploitation and oppression.

The Musahars, who subsist on rats, are the most downtrodden among India's downtrodden or dalits – and they would have remained so if it had not been for the efforts of this earnest and unassuming lady who made it her life's mission 20 years ago to uplift them. The Musahar people are landless agricultural labourers who were never paid adequately for their work; their other occupations  include cleaning toilets or brewing liquor for the dominant castes. Their women and children worked in the upper caste homes and were often sexually exploited. Schools were out of bounds for them; the ones who dared to go dropped out owing to the ridicule and neglect they faced from upper caste classmates and teachers.

Child marriage was rampant. Girls were married off at 10 and had 3-4 children by the time they were 20 and barely old enough to look after one child. And that was the first issue that Sr Sudha had to surmount when she wanted to start a school for girls – the mothers said that at 10 the girls got married, not began schooling.

She started with 20 girls at first – they not only learnt from the books but learnt to draw, colour, and sew. And in a year and half when UNICEF heard about her programme for adolescent girls, it supported her team in 50 centres. The girls went on to join mainstream government schools after Class 6; tutions were arranged to help them pass Class 10 Board examinations.

After the two "Prerna" (Inspiration) boarding schools for girls in Danapur and Bodhgaya, she started "Joyful Learning Centres" for small children. The elderly received clothes and health care.

There was no stopping her. Her next focus was the Musahar boys who spent their time drinking and gambling. She found they were interested in cricket and got them bat, ball and cricket gear. Soon they became proficient enough to win tournaments with other teams.

The Musahar men, for their part, ran out of business when the Bihar government banned liquor. Alcohol brought the upper caste men to their hamlet, and rape of the women often followed drinking. Untouchability ironically did not extend to the liquor they consumed or the women they raped.

The Musahar women took it as their fate until Sr Sudha came to the scene in 1986. She persuaded them to file a case at the police station and taught them to recognise their dignity.

In return they gave her food, love and loyalty – she was their "Cycle Didi" who travelled as far as 50 km in a day. She lived in a mudhouse in their midst until it became unsafe for her on account of death threats.

"I have lived a thousand lives and died a thousand deaths." She learnt not to show fear. "If you kill me, there will be hundreds to take my place," she told her detractors. 

From a young girl  who wanted to dedicate her life in service of the poor, Sr Sudha has become a colossal figure of love and hope for India's marginalised sections. Leaving her native Kerala after Class 10 against her family's wishes to becme a teacher at a school run  by Roman Catholic nuns in far-away Bihar, she searched out the poorest of the poor to dedicate her life to.

Thanks to the Indian government honouring her with the Padma Shri, she gets ample support from the State government and the State Police. The Police even bring trafficked girls they rescue from bus stops  and elsewhere to the centre for trafficked girls she started last year.

For now, she will leave the Asia Mission Conference a couple of days early because her girls need her. Some have fallen sick. Their welfare takes precedence over any accolades and publicity she and her organisation gets. A truly great soul who practises the selfless life that Christians are expected to take up!