Posts tagged ‘Aamir Khan’

25/11/2014

Priyanka Chopra in Pink Rubber Gloves Joins Modi’s Clean India Campaign – India Real Time – WSJ

In pink rubber gloves and a surgical mask, former Miss World and Bollywood movie star Priyanka Chopra is the latest celebrity to be enlisted to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Clean India Campaign.

In an 11-minute-film posted on YouTube, Ms. Chopra can be seen beginning a cleanup of an area where she filmed part of the movie “Agneepath.”

“I remember that there are people who live here and children who play on mounds of garbage and that is their life,” Ms. Chopra says in the short film as she directs a group picking up garbage in Versova in Mumbai. “The idea of doing this is to create something that is long-lasting,” Ms. Chopra adds during the video. “ I wanted to do something a little more than just cleaning a few piles of garbage.”


Embed from Getty Images

The film ends with shots of the area spruced up with murals and flower pots.

The Clean India campaign is Mr. Modi’s plan to create a sanitized India by 2019 in honor of the 150th anniversary of independence leader Mahatma Gandhi’s birth. Ms. Chopra is the latest Bollywood star to get involved after Salman Khan and Amitabh Bachchan who have both been pictured with brooms in hand pledging support at the prime minister’s request.

via Priyanka Chopra in Pink Rubber Gloves Joins Modi’s Clean India Campaign – India Real Time – WSJ.

19/06/2014

New Women’s Helpline Widens Efforts to Stop Sexual Violence in India – India Real Time – WSJ

Some of the first calls to a new women’s crisis center in central India were from six women who said they were being hunted in their villages after being branded as witches.

In response, the center sent an emergency team of social workers to the district of Hoshangabad in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh to investigate the claims and rescue the women, who have gone into hiding, said Sarika Sinha, regional manager of the non-profit Action Aid India, which helps run the center called Gauravi.

Among the minefield of issues that women in India navigate, including abuse, violence and torture, single women in rural India who inherit property are sometimes branded witches so that male members of their community can seize the land, said Ms. Sinha.

If these women agreed to be rescued, the first priority would be to get them out of danger and bring them to the center in Bhopal, Ms. Sinha said.

The Gauravi center, which was inaugurated Monday by India’s Health Minister Harsh Vardhan and Bollywood actor Aamir Khan is the latest in a string of initiatives to protect women that have started to operate since New Delhi created its own 24-hour helpline for women a week after a 23-year-old student was gang-raped and murdered in December 2012.

Sexual violence has since been widely discussed in India, and the law has been changed to protect women.

The Gauravi center shines a spotlight on women’s issues that seems to be filtering from the capital to other parts of the country. The Delhi helpline is being expanded nationally, including most recently to the central state of Chhatisgarh, according to a news report in the Times of India.

via New Women’s Helpline Widens Efforts to Stop Sexual Violence in India – India Real Time – WSJ.

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