Chowraha

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/A_tale_of_two_murdered_women.html A tale of two murdered women By Walid El Hourican Neda and Marwa: One becomes an icon, the other is unmentioned On June 20th 2009, Neda Agha Soltan was shot dead during the post-election protests in Iran. The protests occupied the largest news segments around the world, with analysts and commentators predicting the fall of the Iranian regime and the dawn of freedom breaking in “the axis of evil.” Neda’s death became an icon of the Iranian opposition and a symbol for millions of people of the injustice of the Iranian regime and the defiance of the protesters. Neda’s death was put in context. It was taken from the personal realm of the death of an individual to the public realm of the just cause of a whole society. On July 1st Marwa El Sherbini, an Egyptian researcher living in Germany, was stabbed to death 18 times inside a courtroom in the city of Dresden, in front of her 3-year-old son. She had wo...

This year marks a strange reminder or rather a strong nudge for me pointing out at the calamities of our ignorance and weakness. When the floods hit my homeland Pakistan, I couldn't stop crying sitting far away and thinking why it is the helpless and the poor that always suffer from the lack of planning, lack of concern from the end of the educated, the somewhat elite, and the ones that can influence change.  In a country where people pray for rains to come down and bring water that helps in harvesting new crops, the only resource of living for many, it was tragic that these rains actually became a menace. It was as though the waves would not stop - every day local news channels covered stories of barriers, roads and wells that broke in innumerable villages and small towns. Now that the floods have stopped, due to the stagnant waters, and displacement of millions of people there are diseases like malaria, dengue, diarrhea, stomach flus and eye infections that are affecting those w...