On September 18, Bharat Venkat, a UC Berkeley doctoral Anthropology student will come to class to speak on the topic of "AIDS Politics." Below are some introductory readings on AIDS in South Asia. Please read them and come up with some questions for class:
1) "On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger"
"NELAMANGALA, India - Hot water: 10 rupees. Cold water: 8 rupees. Toilet: 5 rupees. Sex: no price specified on the bathhouse wall, but, as the condom painted there suggests, safe. Sangeetha Hamam, a bathhouse, sits on the national highway near this gritty truck stop about nine miles north of Bangalore. Its mistress is Ranjeetha, a 28-year-old eunuch who lives as a woman. Her lipstick and black dress provide a touch of glamour in the small dark shack.
Her clients are not only truckers, but also Bangalore college students and other city residents. They know to look for sex at highway establishments geared toward truckers. Her customers - as many as 100 on Sundays for her and five other eunuchs - come for a "massage" and the anal sex that follows, but also for the anonymity the location confers."
From The New York Times. Click here for full text. This article comes from a series on India's booming highway construction that you should all look at.
2) "When Silence Kills"
"India's AIDS crisis is huge and growing, but both its government and wider society have yet to acknowledge the scale of the problem. The first step: get honest about sex..."
From Time Asia. For full text, click here
3) Link to United Nations Development Programme Website, which has a wealth of information regarding AIDS in India. If any reports or articles on the site interest you, feel free to bring them up in class for discussion.
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