The Luckies
The Labelled, Urban, Chilled, Kicked-with-life Indians are here. The most fortunate ever if only for the choices before it, this generation is glib, global, cocky and informed-and chases success with an awesome spending power.

Wages Of Peace
The Centre's decision to extend its cease-fire with the NSCN(I-M)
to three other north-east states leads to large-scale violence
in Manipur.

Man Of Letters
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik's skill with the quill has the PMO busy acknowledging his missives. And on occasion agreeing to his demands.

Civil Lines
Pervez Musharraf's assuming the office of President is being seen as a bid to legitimise his position. A look at what this means in the context of his India visit.

Peace In Pipeline
India wants to put on Iran the onus of ensuring safe transit of gas.

BOOKS

Sex And No Sensation

The new Asian slavery stretching from brothels to bars.

By Gillian Wright

Increasingly academics aspire to be journalists. Louise Brown is a university lecturer, but this is no academic work. Under a dramatic title she describes the sex trade across Asia, from the procurement of trusting children in poor villages, through markets which grade them in terms of youth, colour and inexperience, to their lives in brothels, bars and hotels. It's a tough task and Brown rightly says that the reality is so shocking that it doesn't need to be sensationalised. If she'd acted on her own statement, she could have jettisoned a lot of horrified adjectives and toned down her tirade. I doubt that it helps in any way, except in selling the book, to vilify the entire male sex, or societies, or religions.

SEX SLAVES: TRAFFICKING OF WOMEN By Louise Brown Virago Press Price: £12.99 Pages: 276

Hinduism is dismissed in a couple of paragraphs, while Islam's treatment of women is predictably called "abysmal". By all means expose the iniquities of Pakistan's Hudood Ordinances but while doing so why call the Muslim legal code "an exercise in misogyny"? This kind of confrontationalism detracts from the main issue. When she is more restrained she is more effective, and she has collected an impressive amount of material, including interviews with sex workers and information from social workers who try to help them. She reveals little new, but most of us are not familiar with the realities of the sex trade across Pakistan and India to Japan and the Philippines.

If anything is ever going to change we need to be aware of how children are tricked into the sex trade by people who look trustworthy, many of them matronly women. Many girls are smuggled across borders, or removed far from home, making them even more vulnerable. We should know that these young girls are imprisoned and raped. That they are told they are in debt and have to pay off that debt by servicing men. That they are mainly from the poorest and most backward communities. That they do not know that no one had the right to sell them, and that the money the brothels paid is not their debt. We should understand why they feel that they have no choice but to continue, and realise that the youngest bodies are most susceptible to AIDS. We should be aware that every time the law moves in, the industry mutates, adapts and grows. That economic prosperity and liberalisation in South-East Asia have turned trafficking and prostitution into an IT savvy, burgeoning expression of free enterprise.

The book would have been strengthened by more details of law enforcement as Brown, along with crores of us, has worked out that the problem lies not so much with laws as with their implementation. There are insufficient direct quotes from NGO workers, even from Sanlaap, an excellent organisation working in Kolkata which will receive a quarter of the profits of this book. No senior government officials or politicians are tackled, not even a Nepali politician whom Brown castigates for failing to take any steps to stop the trafficking of women in his constituency. Brown regrets that her book will change nothing in the lives of the sex workers she met, and is pessimistic about the future. But I remember the founder of a Kathmandu-based NGO telling me of the courage of one former sex worker. This girl, despite the social stigma and disgrace she faced, went back and campaigned in her home region of Nepal, telling villagers the real nature of the employment she had been recruited for. The result was that procurers had to move out of the area. This surely shows that if only some of the information in this book reaches villages where girls are at risk the trade will suffer.

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