With Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars. The accidental mix-up of four identical plaid overnight bags leads to a series of increasingly wild. The girl whose rape changed a country. Desaiganj, India (CNN) - - She was 1. It was 1. 97. 2, and I was 9. The India of her youth was the India of mine - - except she lived in utter poverty. She was an orphaned adivasi, a tribal girl, and she performed the most menial of jobs to put bread in her belly. She collected cow dung with her bare hands, shaped it into patties, slapped them on walls to dry and then sold them as fuel. It's a sight and smell familiar to me. I used to watch women in my Kolkata neighborhood do the same thing, using the back wall of my grandfather's house. I couldn't imagine plunging my hand into piles of animal waste. Women march in New Delhi in 1. Indian Supreme Court reconsider the case of Mathura, who accused two policemen of raping her when she was a teenager. The high court overturned the convictions of the two constables. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images/File. But rape knows no boundaries of class or culture. After it happened, she might as well have worn a scarlet letter on her chest. Such was the stigma of rape in India then. She was brave to speak out and did what few women back then did. She took her case to court. But the highest court of the land did not believe she was telling the truth. Watergate was a major political scandal that occurred in the United States in the 1970s, following a break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters. Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist, Piscine Molitor 'Pi' Patel, a Tamil boy from Pondicherry, explores issues. The justices overturned the convictions of her attackers, two police constables who maintained their innocence, and set them free. Her case was monumental, both from a social and legal perspective. It sparked public protest for the first time about rape in India and led to the reform of sexual assault laws. It gave rise to a women's movement in India, sprouting a host of groups dedicated to empowering women. At last, people here began to see gender- based violence for what it really is: a brutal act of power. I first read about the case after I began working as a journalist in the United States and developed a curiosity about women's rights around the world. Though the courts ultimately refused to believe Mathura was raped, history has come down on her side. Below is a complete listing of all broadcasts of the Saturday Night Theatre title. This is not necessarily a definitive list for example Agatha Christie's 'Ordeal by. The Historia Brittonum is the single most important source for Vortigern. It describes for the first time the full background of the invitation to. Feng Shui (pronounced Fung Shway) is the ancient Chinese art of placement to enhance the flow of 'vital life energy' known as Qi. Practitioners believe. The Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), also known as the Amur tiger, is a tiger subspecies inhabiting mainly the Sikhote Alin mountain region with a small. In 1972, an eight-game hockey series took place between Canada and the Soviet Union. Intended to improve relations between the two rivals, it ended up as the closest. She is uniformly depicted as a rape victim - - not a woman who cried rape. For me, her case became a prism through which I could see my homeland and measure its progress over the past four decades. Then, in December, another rape galvanized India. Thousands marched on the streets after a young New Delhi woman was viciously gang- raped on a bus, an act so horrific that she later died. A headline in The Hindustan Times newspaper caught my eye. The accompanying column lamented that the attitudes of men had changed little since the landmark 1. Some said the outcry in Delhi could be traced to the rape 4. Numerous other stories, opinion pieces and timelines on rape legislation mentioned the case. But no one seemed to know what had happened to the victim, the teenage girl whose court- given name now popped up everywhere: Mathura. Was she still alive? So began my quest to find the woman who had innocently walked to a village police station to settle a domestic dispute and returned home a rape victim. I wanted to find her for many reasons. In profound ways, I related to her. Sweeping generalizations about my country in news coverage on sexual assault both embarrassed and angered me. I wanted to learn for myself how India, as a society, dealt with rape. And how Mathura had fared. In some ways, life has not changed much for women in rural India since Mathura’s rape in 1. At this chili processing plant in the town of Bhiwapur, workers make 8. I knew how devastating rape could be, and I wondered how she had coped given her hardscrabble life, the crush of poverty, illiteracy and patriarchy. Did she manage to love, have children, find happiness? Had she heard about the New Delhi gang rape that pulled her name back into the news? The answers to these questions would not come easily. Myriad phone calls - - mainly to lawyers, journalists and activists - - led nowhere. It was 4. 0 years ago, they told me. She was a poor, uneducated girl who lived in a remote village.? Share your thoughts around rape, sexual violence and moving on. Seeing outrage for the first time. My journey begins outside a district court in south Delhi's Saket neighborhood, where hundreds have gathered on a sweltering September afternoon for what feels like judgment day for all of India. The four men convicted in December's gang rape are about to be sentenced. From the main road outside the courthouse complex, I can see Select Citywalk, the luxe shopping mall where the 2. This six- acre retail heaven stands as an emblem of the new India, bursting with American and European commercial ventures such as Forever 2. Body Shop and T. G. I. Fridays. But social attitudes here lag far behind material gains. Men and women mingle but rarely touch - - and never kiss in public. More than 8. 0% will agree to marriages arranged by the parents, according to a poll this year. On the night of December 1. Dwarka. The driver and five other men were drunk that night and looking for a joy ride. They dragged the woman to the back of the bus and beat up her friend; then they took turns raping her, using an iron rod to violate her as the bus circled the city for almost an hour. When they finished, they dumped their victims on the side of the road. The woman's internal injuries were so severe that almost all her intestines had to be removed. She developed sepsis and two weeks later, in a hospital in Singapore, she died. The chilling nature of the crime haunted people. It was like a bomb exploded inside the collective Indian psyche. A 1. 0- year- old girl goes to school in Desaiganj, the town where Mathura was raped. Many people here still hold traditional views about the roles of girls and women in society. There was raw anger over the failure of the nation to check this sort of extreme violence. Indian law prohibits the identification of rape victims, and two of the pseudonyms the media gave the Delhi woman spoke both of her impact on the country and her courage: Damini, which means lightning, and Nirbhaya, without fear. Outside the court, I see those names swirling about me on crudely crafted cardboard posters. The crowd is clamoring for death sentences for the rapists. Inside, people crowd the balconies overlooking a courtyard, all the way to the seventh floor. They stand on chairs, stretch their necks to get a glimpse of Courtroom 3. Judge Yogesh Khanna is about to proclaim his sentence. Never before have I witnessed outrage in my homeland over the assault and killing of a woman. Could this be the same place where I am afraid to get on a public bus or the metro at rush hour because inevitably I will feel a man's hands on my breasts? I used to complain to my mother about the stares I got on the streets. She told me not to wear sleeveless blouses or show my legs. India, she said, was conservative that way. But it was more than that. No matter what I wore, some men felt they could look at me with abandon - - as if I were an object, as if they could overpower me at any moment and no one would care. It was visual rape. Here is the sad truth about India: A woman is raped every 2. This case, Nirbhaya's, was exceptional. Most of the time, violence against women - - in the form of rape, bride burnings, wife battering - - occurs out of the public eye and remains that way. Often the victim is too frightened to report the crime. She may fault herself for what happened or fear bringing shame to herself and her family. Or she lacks faith that the police - - notorious in India for poor treatment of rape survivors - - will investigate, or that the courts will prosecute. Rape is an act forgotten with silence. That is not the case here at the sentencing of Nirbhaya's rapists. Just five minutes after court convenes, the decision is read aloud: the gallows for all four men. There's something medieval about their demand for death. Nothing less will satisfy. Nothing less is justice for Nirbhaya. In the midst of this madding crowd, I think of Mathura. Her case also was exceptional: She was just a girl, a minor attacked by two policemen at a police station. I wonder what the reaction would be if those events occurred today? Is this public condemnation I am witnessing truly a culmination of the women's movement spawned by Mathura's case, as one women's rights activist suggested to me? An entire generation of urban, educated Indians has grown to adulthood in the years since. But would there be similar indignation over a poor girl in a village? About 7. 5% of India's 1. Mathura lived, hundreds of miles south of Delhi in the central state of Maharashtra. Has the mindset of men - - including those in positions of authority - - changed in those places? Or are people still blaming victims for their rapes? I am about to find out. Watch Moni Basu discuss her journey. On the road to the scene of the crime. National Highway 9, known in these parts as Umred Road, snakes through verdant rice paddies and orange groves under unpolluted skies. This part of eastern Maharashtra is largely rural and so far unscathed by India's monstrous rush to modernity. National Highway 9 leads from the city of Nagpur to Desaiganj, a town in central India where many people are sympathetic to the anti- government rebels known as Naxals. The unmarked road is no different than any other in India, laden with potholes as big as bomb craters. Cars screech to a halt for meandering water buffaloes and women balancing aluminum vessels filled with laundry on their heads. In their rainbow shades of saris they trek to the banks of the Wainganga River to wash clothes. Prabha Ram Take, a worker at the chili processing plant, is from the same generation as Mathura. Here, centuries- old traditions still rule, especially among tribal people known as the Gond, their troubles in life masked by the serenity of the landscape. More than half survive on 5. Maoist anti- government insurgents known as the Naxals, who have long had a stronghold in this area. As recently as July, six Naxals were killed after they allegedly attacked a police station.
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