Congo paraplegic band rocks around the world
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- Documentary about disabled Congolese music group wins acclaim at Cannes Film Festival
- Three members of Staff Benda Bilili use a wheelchair and one uses crutches
- They used to earn a living on the streets of Kinshasa in DR Congo
- Debut album led to tour of Europe and they are now set to tour Japan
Cannes, France (CNN) — A group of disabled Congolese musicians could soon become a global sensation after an acclaimed documentary about the group was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
The core members of Staff Benda Bilili are four musicians who suffered from polio as children. Three use wheelchairs, one is on crutches, and together they make heartfelt music that is winning fans far beyond their homeland.
With their soulful harmonies and hypnotic Congolese rumba beat, their music has been likened to Buena Vista Social Club. And like the Cuban group, Staff Benda Bilili is crossing over into the international mainstream.
They are about to embark on a grueling tour that will see them perform at venues and festivals all over Europe this summer, before touring Japan.
But their new-found fame is a far cry from years spent making a living on the streets of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It was in Kinshasa in 2004 that they met French filmmakers Florent de La Tullaye and Renaud Barret, who were in the city documenting its music scene.
The filmmakers fell in love with Staff Benda Bilili’s music and offered to pay for their recording sessions, before making a film about the group.
–Ricky Likadu, Staff Benda Bilili band leader
Barret told CNN, “The idea was to record an album, because they were like virtuosos [who were] completely ignored, and we had the feeling that they could die very easily, because everybody dies very easily in Kinshasa — which is not funny.
“We had to do the album first. We didn’t intend to do the movie, but we were filming them on a daily basis while doing the rehearsals, the ups and downs, and in 2006 we realized we had shot the inside story of complete outsiders trying to emerge in one of the most complicated and brutal cities in the world.”
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In return for their financial support the band offered the directors rare access to areas otherwise off-limits to foreigners, and became their protectors throughout the five years spent working on the project.
After a number of setbacks, including a fire that destroyed the shelter where they lived, Staff Benda Bilili’s first album “Tres Tres Fort” (“Very Very Strong”) was completed in 2009, to international acclaim.
The release was coupled with a European tour — the first time the members of the band had traveled abroad — that saw the group play to sellout venues across the continent.
Beyond its core members the group is made up of an acoustic rhythm section and the unique soloing talents of Roger Landu, who plays a one-string “electric lute” he designed and built himself from a tin can and a guitar string.
Roger was a 12-year-old living on the street when he was introduced to the band. His homemade instrument immediately left an impression on band-leader Ricky Likabu, who took the boy under his wing.
“He [Roger] was a street kid because he was sleeping on cardboard and begging for money with his instrument in the city market, being brutalized by older bad boys from the street or cops” said Barret.
“He was very fragile and he could have died very easily. So getting in touch with Benda Bilili he found a family. And he just stuck to them all the time, and we saw him grow and improve his instrument.
“You see him play and he’s like Hendrix with one string … it’s amazing.”
Now Barret and de La Tullaye’s movie, “Benda Bilili,” looks set to introduce the group to an even wider audience.
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“It has changed a great deal because now all of them have a house, and all their kids go to school,” said Barret. “They’re able to pay school fees for all their kids, which is a good thing.
“And they’re here, no pressure — to them it’s just normal. They warned us in 2004: ‘We’re going to be the most famous band in the world,’ and here they are. To them it couldn’t have been different.”
They may not be the most famous band in the world — yet — but they might be the most inspiring. And their inspirational message is now being heard by a global audience.
Likabu told CNN: “Our message to the world is: we want all handicapped people in the world to work.
“Don’t stay at home, don’t beg, no! I don’t look at the handicap, I look at what’s inside the head. And if the head works fine, they should work too.”
Reference Link
http://us.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/05/27/congo.group.benda.bilili.cannes/index.html
Courtesy
Cable News Network
Vocational training in Uganda
UBC’s Bart Kakooza visits a vocational training center for orphans and ex-combatants in Uganda.
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Reference Link
http://us.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2010/05/31/wv.training.uganda.bk.b.cnn
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Cable News Network
Recycling waste isn't a waste of time for surfboard form maker
//
- Joey Santley and Steve Cox sweep up polyurethene dust, make surfboard blanks
- Blanks are board-shaped foam cutouts that are finished at surfboard manufacturers
- About 40 percent of each surfboard blank winds up in the dump, Santley estimates
- Professional surfer says boards made with Green Foam just as good as others
One Simple Thing features people who through small yet innovative ways are making a difference in education, energy, the environment, and the use of the planet’s resources.
San Clemente, California (CNN) — Joey Santley’s flip-flops rhythmically clap as he strolls through San Clemente’s surf ghetto, a cluster of boxy surfboard-making businesses.
This chatterbox entrepreneur spouts out ideas like big waves churn up foam.
Surfing is a sport with a black spot on its eco-friendly soul, and Santley thinks he found a way to cleanse it.
“We’re going to take the biggest pile of trash that our industry makes and we are going to figure out a home for it,” Santley explains.
The shaping and making of surfboards for decades has produced a chemical residue, a toxic white dust that can be found all over the surf ghetto.
Santley grabs a plastic bag inside the major surfboard manufacturer Lost, and points down at a pile of polyurethane powder, excess foam that sprinkled from a surfboard-shaping machine.
“I’ll come in here and clean up all this stuff,” explains Santley, using a broom and dustpan to put the polyurethane dust into a plastic garbage bag. “They can keep cranking [producing surfboards] because it gets too full in here.
“They love it because they don’t have to clean up. And I love it because I come and get material for my boards. And if I wasn’t doing this, the dust would be going into the landfill over the hill.”
Santley estimates that 40 percent or more of each surfboard blank winds up in the dump.
The flaky foam waste collects and swirls like light snow throughout the surf ghetto shops. The board makers use high-pressure air hoses to blow off the itchy powder.
Santley and his partner, Steve Cox, have now recycled enough foam dust to provide the raw material for 2,000 surfboards.
“It saves room for tomorrow,” says Mike Giancola, the director of Orange County, California, Waste & Recycling. “We’re glad that they [Santley and Cox] took the initiative and found alternatives to the waste at the Prima landfill. That’s the kind of sustainability we like to see.”
Surfboards are made from blanks — board-shaped foam cutouts that are finished at manufacturers such as Lost, where legendary shapers such as Matt “Mayhem” Biolos sculpt the final product.
Biolos says the average cost of a surfboard is $650 and each board is custom made to the buyer’s specifications in flexibility, length, width, thickness and more, down to 1/16 of an inch.
“There is really no other example of it in the sporting world, so we are really spoiled about our equipment,” says Biolos. “We can go and get them made in almost any surfing country in the world, to fit our exact specs. It’s not like buying a tennis racket or a baseball glove with another athlete’s name on it.”
So the question hanging ten out there is: Will surfers with spiritual connections to their beloved custom-made boards be willing to ride on recycled material?
Professional superstar Cory Lopez says among the many boards he rides are some of Biolos’ Lost boards, crafted from Green Foam Blanks.
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Video: Surfing’s dirty little secret//
// “Green foam, it works just the same as the other boards but it’s just a little more environmentally friendly,” Lopez told CNN. “So it’s a win-win situation. You have to enjoy the fact that it is good for the environment and the fact that you can go out there and ride it just the same as any other board.”
The earliest generation of Green Foam Blanks suffered from a slight flaw that does not affect the ride, but could turn off surfers with their notoriously picky tastes.
The surfboards made from recycled foam blanks were dotted with little specs, giving the boards just a slightly dirty or murky finish.
But the buzz in San Clemente’s surf businesses is newest batches of Green Foam Blanks are less murky and Santley showed off some visibly cleaner next-generation boards.
But surfers are the last people who should worry about looks, Santley says.
“I don’t know many surfers that wear lipstick and makeup when they surf,” he says. “I don’t wear lipstick and make up, so what does it matter what it looks like if it [the surfboard] is light and strong and has the right flex and does the job under your feet?”
Green Foam Blanks may have never gone from one of Santley’s ideas into the water, if not for a major shake-up in what the Surf Industry Manufacturing Association calls a $190-million-a-year business (about 300,000 surfboards).
The dominant supplier of surfboard blanks, Clark Foam, shut down in 2006, opening the market to new firms, including one created by some of its former employees, U.S. Blanks.
Santley saw an opportunity to “green up” surfing by recycling all that blanks’ dust and is now teamed with U.S. blanks.
“Everyone kept saying, ‘Don’t waste your time, don’t waste your time,'” Santley recalls. “Finally we got the opportunity to, and a blank manufacturer to do a test. After 50 years of rigid polyurethane production on Earth, we successfully proved our concept in one hour.”
Reference Link
http://us.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/wayoflife/05/27/ost.eco.surfboards/index.html
Courtesy
Cable News Network
Inexpensive solution to make villages shine
| Can Vishnu Jayaprakash’s indigenous and inexpensive cow dung based microbial fuel cell be used to light up villages? |
Vishnu Jayaprakash
For five months now, the lights and fan in Vishnu Jayaprakash’s room are running on cow dung-based microbial fuel cell — a device that converts the chemical energy in cow dung into electrical energy with the help of bacteria. The design is result of an innovation Vishnu has been working for the last two years, which recently got him a bronze medal at ISWEEEP 2010 (The International Sustainable World Energy Engineering and Environment Project Olympiad), held in Texas, U.S.
The young innovator replaced the key components of the microbial fuel cell with cow dung, local electrodes and protonic exchange membrane to make it functional in various applications.
“I wouldn’t say the cow dung bio cell is high yielding but it is enough to satisfy one’s basic needs, where I have successfully tried and tested,” says the Class XII student of Chettinad Vidyashram, Chennai.
The 5x4x5 cm cell needs to be recharged every two days with two grams of animal dung and two ml of water. “The cost of one cell is Rs. 125, when the average cost of a microbial fuel cell is Rs. 2,100. Also, its efficiency has been increased by 90 per cent and it has a lifespan of 70 years,” he says.
Patent rights
Vishnu is next working to get the product patented, both in the U.S. and India. “I have applied for both the nations. Getting patent rights from the U.S. would be more useful as it is qualifies for 70 countries,” says Vishnu, after which he would start looking for potential investors.
After Class XII, Vishnu wants to join the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to pursue research in energy technologies or biotechnology.
The international competition is one of the largest international science fairs focusing on engineering, environment and energy, where five participants from India competed. From the two million initial applications, around 1,000 students were short-listed to present their work in areas of energy, engineering and environment. In May 2009, Vishnu also won the second place at the International Science and Engineering Fair, held in Nevada, U.S.
Vishnu is thankful to his guide T.S. Natarajan, professor in Physics at IIT-Madras, and school teachers who are motivating and helping him juggle his interests.
Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/edu/2010/05/31/stories/2010053150880400.htm
Courtesy
The Hindu
G8 seeks new drive to meet 2015 aid goals for poor
Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes part in the G8/G20 National Youth Caucus on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, May 17, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Chris Wattie
Reuters) – The Group of Eight industrialized nations plan to invest in better health for mothers and young children in poor nations to meet faltering goals for slashing world poverty by 2015, a draft text for a G8 summit said.
The five-page draft for the June 25-26 summit in Canada, dated March 12, said the “greatest economic crisis in generations” had “jeopardized our ability to meet the 2015 targets” for aiding developing nations set in 2000.
It was unclear how far the text, obtained by Reuters on Monday and including references to progress toward world economic recovery, had changed in recent weeks with shockwaves from a debt crisis in Greece.
“We undertake to champion a new initiative on maternal, newborn and under-five child health,” according to the draft. It left a blank for how much money the eight nations would provide.
“Urgent collective action must be taken to regain lost ground and quicken the pace of progress” toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it said. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sought focus on women and children.
In 2000, world leaders agreed 2015 goals for slashing poverty, hunger, disease, maternal and child deaths, and for improving the environment, education and gender equality.
Among the goals lagging most, more than 500,000 women die every year from causes linked to pregnancy and nearly nine million children die before they reach the age of five, the G8 said.
CLIMATE
The draft also said G8 nations would seek a new legal framework for a U.N.-led deal to combat climate change after a U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December fell short of a treaty.
But the G8 nations — the United States, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada — set no new dates for reaching an accord after Copenhagen overran a 2009 deadline.
In 2010 “we will strive to achieve a fair, effective and comprehensive post-2012 agreement that includes a robust system of emissions reductions monitoring, reporting and verification,” it said.
The G8 reaffirmed a goal set in a non-binding Copenhagen Accord of limiting a rise in temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times.
“Achieving this global climate challenge requires global mitigation action,” it said, but omitted vital details of how the curbs on greenhouse gas emissions would be shared out.
It gave new support to a goal set at a G8 summit in 2008 of launching 20 large-scale demonstration projects for carbon capture and storage — trapping greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants, for instance, and burying them underground.
“G8 leaders commit to take concrete actions to accelerate worldwide implementation of these projects and set a new goal to achieve this by 2015,” the statement said.
For Reuters latest environment blogs, click on: blogs.reuters.com/environment/
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64U2KB20100531?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
Experts find compound to fight bird, seasonal flu
A health worker prepares a H1N1 flu vaccine during a health operation for victims of the February 27 earthquake, at a camp in Penco town April 13, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Jose Luis Saavedra
(Reuters) – Scientists have identified a chemical compound that can stop the H5N1 bird flu virus as well as seasonal human flu viruses from replicating.
Finding new flu drugs is essential as flu viruses mutate and are adept at evading the limited array of antiviral drugs.
In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology, scientists from Hong Kong and Canada said they had found a chemical “nucleozin,” which fought off both seasonal flu viruses and the H5N1 in mice as well as in cell culture.
“We have now brand-new weapons to combat influenza virus resistant to … (antiviral drugs like) oseltamivir and zanamivir,” said microbiologist Richard Yao at the University of Hong Kong, who led the study.
Nearly all of the seasonal H1N1 viruses circulating in the United States in the 2008-2009 flu season were resistant to Roche AG and Gilead Sciences Inc’s Tamiflu, known generically as oseltamivir, according to the paper.
Adamantanes, an older class of drugs, was also powerless against seasonal H3N2 flu viruses in the United States during that same period.
Zanamivir is the generic name for Relenza, GlaxoSmithKline and Biota Inc’s flu drug
Nucleozin targeted a protein in flu viruses, called nucleoprotein, that was responsible for virus replication, Yao said in reply to questions from Reuters.
Yao said they selected nucleozin from a chemical library with more than 50,000 compounds, the same library which experts here used to study the SARS virus.
“Nucleozin is highly potent in cell culture and also in mice infected with the highly pathogenic influenza virus H5N1 … (it can) stop the virus from replicating,” Yao said.
The compound was effective against H1N1, H3N2, and H5N1 viruses and researchers can now target nucleoprotein to fight flu, Yao said.
“Scientists could now use nucleoprotein as a target to develop antiviral therapeutics for the treatment of influenza infection,” he said.
A cousin of the new H1N1 swine flu virus, the seasonal H1N1, has been circulating widely for a long time. SARS surfaced in southern China in 2003, killing about 800 people world-wide.
The H5N1, although mainly a disease in birds, has a mortality rate of 60 percent on the rare occasions when it infects people. It was first discovered in people in 1997.
Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64U05J20100531?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
Courtesy
Thomson Reuters
Hopes for breast cancer vaccine
American scientists say they have developed a vaccine which has prevented breast cancer from developing in mice.
The researchers – whose findings are published in the journal, Nature Medicine – are now planning to conduct trials of the drug in humans.
But they warn that it could be some years before the vaccine is widely available.
The immunologist who led the research says the vaccine targets a protein found in most breast tumours.
Vincent Tuohy, from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, said: “We believe that this vaccine will someday be used to prevent breast cancer in adult women in the same way that vaccines have prevented many childhood diseases.
Unique challenge
“If it works in humans the way it works in mice, this will be monumental. We could eliminate breast cancer.”
In the study, genetically cancer-prone mice were vaccinated – half with a vaccine containing á-lactalbumin and half with a vaccine that did not contain the antigen.
None of the mice vaccinated with á-lactalbumin developed breast cancer, while all of the other mice did.
The US has approved two cancer-prevention vaccines, one against cervical cancer and one against liver cancer.
However, these vaccines target viruses – the human papillomavirus (HPV) and the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) – not cancer formation itself.
“We look forward to seeing the results of large-scale clinical trials to find out if this vaccine would be safe” – Caitlin Palframan, Breakthrough Breast Cancer
In terms of developing a preventive vaccine, cancer presents problems not posed by viruses – while viruses are recognised as foreign invaders by the immune system, cancer is not.
Cancer is an over-development of the body’s own cells. Trying to vaccinate against this cell over-growth would effectively be vaccinating against the recipient’s own body, destroying healthy tissue.
Caitlin Palframan, of charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: “This research could have important implications for how we might prevent breast cancer in the future.
“However, this is an early stage study, and we look forward to seeing the results of large-scale clinical trials to find out if this vaccine would be safe and effective in humans.”
She added there were already steps women could take to reduce the risk of breast cancer, including reducing alcohol consumption, maintaining a healthy weight and taking regular exercise.
Cancer Research UK’s professor of oncology, Robert Hawkins, said: “This very early study describes an interesting approach to the prevention of breast cancer.
“It will be several years before this vaccine can be tested fully to assess its safety and effectiveness as a way to stop the disease developing in women.”
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in the UK, affecting more than 45,500 women every year.
Reference Link : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8714085.stm
Courtesy : BBC News
A question of life
RAMYA SARMA
| Jitish Kallat’s sculpture ‘When Will You Be Happy’ makes art an almost tactile experience. It is part of the Skulptur i Pilane show that opens in Sweden on June 12…. |
Echoing subterranean realities:Jitish Kallat with his installation at Pilane.
‘When Will You Be Happy’ is not a real-life question, but a kind of existential musing hidden deep within “a simple line that you can even scribble on a piece of paper”. It is the name that Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat has given his latest work, a 100-feet (30-metre) long installation that is on its way to Pilane, Sweden, for the annual sculpture show, “Skulptur i Pilane”. As the artist himself says, the line “does make you think”. And the location of the site, an ancient burial ground, “makes it a little more urgent. Happiness is often here now and we end up postponing that moment.” And the urgency becomes almost mnemonic when “you inscribe it in a burial site — it reminds you that you cannot postpone life”.
The Pilane show, curated by Peter Lennby and opening on June 12, also includes Belgian Wim Delvoye, Icelandic artist Steinunn Thorarinsdottir, British artists Laura Ford and Tony Cragg, Nils Ramhøj from Gothenburg, Sweden, Ursula Von Ryding from the US, and Swedish artists Leo Pettersson and Jonas Holmquist. The site itself is home to about 90 judgement circles, raised stones and other such relics, some still visible, that date back to the Iron Age. The landscape, with cultural artefacts that have been dated back to the Stone Age, has been extensively restored and, with its gentle hills and verdant pastureland, is the perfect setting for large sculptures that have an almost organic form, rooted in times long past and seeming to rise out of the earth into present reality. The works are completely in concordance with the Pilane terrain and ethos. As Kallat put it, the show is “all very dramatic and wonderful. Some really interesting pieces have been shown.”
Appreciated
His work has been lauded by critics and audiences alike ever since his debut show in Mumbai in1997, when Kallat was all of 23 years old. Over the years, his creativity has managed to provoke not just comment, but wonder, with its scale and vision. And the articulate, expressive, thoughtful, introspective, occasionally philosophical artist never fails to come up with something new, combining painting with sculpture with photography with technology and, in his last works, with food. A prestigious and successful show at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London earlier this year had a quirky twist as art was created with scans of edible objects, from rotisto samosas. And now he returns to a recurrent motif: bones. This time, in the perfect setting.
Kallat’s work is known for its “humungous” scale and vision. While ‘Anger at the Speed of Fright’ was merely 50 feet ‘short’, ‘365 Lives’ stretched to 200 feet and had a life-sized car parked in the middle of an installation composed of 365 photographs. He has said that some of his works “rely on scale to generate meaning; it’s only when you walk past that it all slowly changes tenor”. Some pieces, like the gigantic ‘Public Notice II’, which has 4,500 bones made of resin, shaped into alphabets spelling our Mahatma Gandhi’s speech just before the non-cooperation movement was launched, need time and space to be even partially appreciated. Others, like the ‘Dawn Chorus’ paintings, require cerebral overtime, showing street urchins at traffic junctions selling books — their hair is made of traffic and pedestrians tangled in archetypical Mumbai style.
Fresh vision
For “Skulptur i Pilane”, Lennby’s original choice of Kallat’s work was ‘Eruda’, the figure of a boy selling books. But “Somehow I was not convinced that it was right,” Kallat says. After all, “The place is quite loaded in meaning. I wanted to conceive something ground up, so to speak.” It took a while to think up what he considered to fit the site and its historical importance and significance. “I receded from the project for a few months without committing, until I came up with something that I felt was closely connecting to the site and to my work.” It had to fit not just the atmosphere, but the scale and terrain as well. Kallat explains, “I found that the landscape is very beautiful, but the subterranean reality is that of burial and the notion of death, somewhere hidden underneath.”
He started working with the thought of “beauty and happiness and all that in the way the landscape appeared”. And came up with “this simple line that gets embedded into the landscape: When Will You Be Happy. We will actually be digging, it will seem as if it is being excavated, part of it still in the earth.” And with the size of the installation, “When you are close to it you feel like it is fairly large scale bones, but from different vantage points could make it seem as if the words are emerging from within the grass and you can touch it, make art a tactile experience.” It was not easy; in fact, it was “somewhat challenging to deal with both experiences — great distance and closeness at the same time”.
Bones are a recurring theme in Kallat’s work. ‘Public Notice II’, the Gandhi speech, Aquasaurus, a seven-metre long water-tanker and Autosaurus Tripous, an autorickshaw, all made of resin bones, are just a few examples of his forensic passion. According to him, “I am interested in what is not visible, what is there but you don’t see it. Bones don’t reveal themselves until way after a person’s death. They form the innermost element in the human body. In some ways it connects to concrete or haptic poetry, where essentially the way the alphabets are modelled adds a layer of meaning.” This is the story of Kallat’s need to know more. “I am interested in using text, where the alphabet itself is sculpture. The act of inscription itself has immense meaning.” For Pilane, “Given the spread-out prehistoric landscape of the site, I wanted to work with the primeval and corporal image of the bone. It is at once evocative of one’s physicality as a living being and a reminder of one’s mortality.”
Kallat has said, “As long as the work is self-rejuvenating, across time and people and retinas and cerebrums, it will be able to regenerate itself.” Sort of like the earth within which his bones will be held.
Reference Link : http://www.hindu.com/mag/2010/05/30/stories/2010053050170500.htm
Courtesy : The Hindu
Eliminate untouchability first: Karat
— Photo: M. Moorthy
CALL FOR SOCIAL REFORM:CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat addressing the first State conference of the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front at Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu on Saturday.
PUDUKOTTAI: Annihilation of the caste system should be the goal and the first step in that direction is to eliminate untouchability, Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Prakash Karat has said.
Untouchability was the worst feature of the caste system in the country, Mr. Karat said here on Saturday at the first State conference of the Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front. “Even after 62 years of Independence what we find in our society is that caste transcended all classes. Though the Constitution proclaimed equality, we still find it did not go with the ground reality,” Mr. Karat said.
Struggle against the caste system should go along with struggle against socio-economic and class exploitation, he said. What was needed was a social revolution which could not come without fighting and abolishing the caste system.
The Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front has been engaged in path-breaking activity over the last three years fighting all forms of caste discrimination and untouchability. Even people outside Tamil Nadu were looking up to the Front as an inspiration in their struggle against oppression. The Front should bring under its fold all those who were against caste discrimination and untouchability and it would become a genuine instrument in bringing about social change in Tamil Nadu, he said.
Earlier, Mr. Karat released a collection of short stories authored by Aadhavan Dheetchanya on atrocities committed against Dalits.
In his address, Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front convenor P. Sampath called for starting branches of the front at all levels within the State. The front had created confidence among the oppressed communities.
General secretary of the All-India Vivasayigal Sangam K. Varadharajan, CPI (M) State secretary G. Ramakrishnan, party MLA S.K. Mahendran and All-India Democratic Women’s Association general secretary U. Vasuki and others took part in the conference.
Reference Link : http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/30/stories/2010053056571000.htm
Courtesy : The Hindu
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