Yesterday, I saw this very well made documentary on CNN called “The land of missing children“, part of their series “World’s untold stories“.

The documentary was about underage sex workers in the brothels of Kolkata and Mumbai, a dark side of our society which many of us simply keep themselves blissfully ignorant about. For the first time, I saw and heard things I had previously only knew in bits and pieces from newspapers. The episode ended with a raid on a brothel with the “help” of the local police, actually the police chief of the region himself. The raid ended with a farce, with the police letting all the apparently rescued girls run loose soon after discovering them.

Some of the parts of the episode were surreal:

1. The police chief explaining his personal view is that prostitution is a necessity in the society because otherwise “decent” women would be attacked by the people who frequent these brothels.
2. Groups of underage girls were found stuffed into small enclosures where just one of us would find it difficult to stay in. In one instance, some of the girls hidden in false ceiling were crying out of suffocation.
3. When this reporter and his accompanying staff were querying girls on the streets about their age, the local female goons(called madams) came over and asked them to clear off before they are hurt (It is common for these people to attack by throwing acid on your faces).
4. When the reporter came out of the house beaming after rescuing at least 10-12 girls, he discovered the police chief standing near gate of the house with an idiotic smile on his face saying that all these girls have simply “run off”! And this was supposed to be a police raid! When the reporter told the police that those girls could be in real danger, he confidently said that it was his “personal guarantee” that none would get hurt.

The raid could be held because of the terrific and untiring efforts on the NGO named Rescue Foundation, and its head the late Balkrishna Acharya. The odds that these good people face to do their laudable job was apparent when, at the end of raid the CNN reporter, Sam Kiley, tells Balkrishna “I see what you are up against”. Sam had just seen the complicity of the police(even the police chief) into letting such practices flourish in our cities when he found out to his horror that all the rescued children had vanished into the crowd outside, with the police just standing by.

A telling excerpt from the series blog:

An estimated 30,000 girls are trafficked into the sex industry every year. Some are sold by poverty-stricken parents hoping that their children will find employment as domestic servants. Others are simply snatched off the streets, drugged, raped, and sold to brothel “madams.”

Many of these children come from the far east of India — a region at the crossroads of trade routes with Nepal and Bhutan, which is now a hub of trade in young women. The story of one girl, Pratima, is rare. She was trafficked, rescued, was brought back into the embrace of her family, and is now happily married. Most women who escape the horrors of the business are shunned when they return home, their families refusing to take them in, much less help to heal their wounds.

But Pratima was keen to expose the trade. She told of how she was taken from her home in Siliguri, drugged, and forced onto a train to Calcutta. There she put to work as a prostitute, and then sold on to a brothel in Bombay (Mumbai) known as “Sheila’s.”

Pratima’s story was the reason behind the raid at Sheila’s covered in the episode.

A Bollywood actress caught saying

so-and-so is amazing as a director. He can make even a black African look pretty”.

A Bollywood actor saying:

(I knew) it was time to leave Shanghai and Hong Kong after six weeks of stunt training and go home when his eyes started “turning into little slits like the Chinese”.

Source: http://www.asiansinmedia.org/news/article.php/television/1404

As the BBC critic of Indian origin remarks, these are not unsurprising remarks. As most Indians know, we make these remarks all the time and either don’t realize these are offensive, or just don’t care. Why, we have names for such obscenities. We call our north-eastern country-men(and women), or just any person with mongoloid features “chinky”. We call any white-skinned person “firangi”. Any person of African origin is still called a “negro”, decades after this term has been replaced by “africans” or “african americans” in politer societies.

The fact is that we Indians have more ways to divide and discriminate humans than any society in the world, but few Indians would admit to this. We discriminate by race,skin color,caste, religion, regionality(“madrasis”) … if there are any other ways to divide people that I can’t remember now, we probably do that too.

However, nobody in India has the guts to address this problem. We let people openly advertise for “fair”, “brahmin” etc. brides and grooms in matrimonial listings in newspapers and online sites. There is still no government push for banning all temples from restricting who can enter by caste. There is no push to accommodate our north-eastern brothers and sisters into mainstream society. In fact, most of India would rather revel in “Gandhigiri” but blissfully ignore that Iron Sharmila , who has redefined Gandhian methods of struggle, even exists.

In the ongoing controvery of [President Bush authorising illegal surveillance of its citizens](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/18/AR2005121801446.html?nav=rss_print/asection), here is a [marvelous post](http://cryptome.org/small-call.htm) making the real issue much clearer.

> Ours is a government of laws, not of men. That means if the President disagrees with a law or feels that it is insufficient, he still must obey it. Ignoring the law is illegal, even for the President. The President may ask Congress to change the law, but meanwhile he must follow it.

> Our President has chosen to declare himself above the law, a dangerous precedent that could do great harm to our country. However, without substantial effort on the part of you, and I mean you, every person reading this, nothing much is going to happen. The rule of law will continue to decay in our country. Future Presidents will claim even greater extralegal authority, and our nation will fall into despotism. I mean that sincerely. For the sake of yourself, your children and your children’s children, you cannot allow this to stand.

For Indians, so ignorant of the need for privacy as a basic human right, there is an important lesson in this story.

(Via [BoingBoing](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/19/nsa_domestic_spying_.html) )

India has one of the most expensive Internet bandwidths the world over, even if Indian ISPs command a significant amount of undersea cabling world wide. But we all know this – how Indian ISPs, by forming some sort of a cartel, and with the connivance of even government Telcos are holding broadband users country wide to ransom.

Why I mention this is because of a number of recent articles that I have read on the incredibly popular VOIP software – Skype. Now I use Skype regularly as an IM – I have a Skypeout account, and I have virtually stopped using Yahoo messenger because of too many people popping up to say “hello” even when my status clearly shows that I am busy.

I had vaguely read about Skype earlier and didn’t bother about finding out how it works. But a recent post on the India-GII list prompted me to read about it. And to say the least, I am shocked.

I have four machines at home – two laptops and two desktops. I have configured the DSL router to forward Skype specific traffic to each of them.

Now Skype operates in two ways – in firewall mode and in “Public IP” mode.

In the former, your computer is behind a firewall, and the NAT is not configured to forward incoming Skype traffic to your computer (A typical scenario in many organizations or homes with a DSL *router* in a default configuration). Because incoming Skype traffic cannot come to your machine directly, your machine keeps a connection alive to a *supernode*. The supernode receives calls on your behalf and sends them down your existing connection. Your outgoing call data also goes through these supernode to the calling party. Obviously, this is not very efficient as compared to a direct connection to the calling party. And therefore the quality of the call is likely to be undesirable (unless of course, you live outside India in US, Europe or East Asia, where the standard broadband connection being so good, you wont notice the difference).

The computers running on “public IP” on the other hand dont need a supernode, as they can receive calls directly from the caller and route them to the correct computer. Users in this category include people on dialup, DSL modems or router bridges, or people behind specially configured firewalls which route an unique pair of public IP/port to machines behind the firewall. The call quality of these computers are comparatively better than the firewalled computers, and people using firewalls (like me) are tempted to put in rules for port forwarding for this very reason.

So it seems that every body should try to be in category two as I just described, right? But no, here is the catch.

Remember, the supernode I told you a short while back? The ones which are used by firewalled machines? What are these supernodes? Are they machines run by the Skype corporation? No, siree.

The machines of the second category (the ones on public IPs) are the supernodes! This is where the peer-to-peer nature of Skype comes in. The clients of skype are the resources of the skype network itself! That is why Skype can support 2 million online clients at any moment of time, with most of them making free calls, and not costing Skype Inc a fortune either.

So how does this affect us? Simple, those on expensive bandwidth capped Internet connections in India, connected to the Net using Dialups or DSL modems, watch out! Even if you are not using Skype at any moment of time, even leaving Skype running in your system tray, can make you the unaware conduit of the conversations of people you dont even know! every conversation which uses you as a supernode will rob your bandwidth – both upload and download. You might even have multiple parallel conversations happening using your computer. And Skype provides you with no options for you to keep a check on this! No bittorrent kind of option to put in a download/upload cap for others.

It is not the security angle I am talking about – Skype uses decent encryption to ensure that you do not eavesdrop on others conversations. I am talking about how Skype can cost you hundreds and thousands of rupees a month if you dont know about this!

And remember, I told you in the beginning that I have four machines at home, with each having a specific firewall rule to help it receive Skype calls directly? I cannot confirm this, but this *might* probably mean that I have four supernodes running on the same Internet connection! Just think of organizations, which use Skype extensively and have put in firewall rules for scores of their employees!

For me the moral of the story is very clear. I am going to start using regular IMs again. And plan my Skype calls. And startup Skype only when I need to call or receive a specific party. And in all other times, shut it down.
The tragedy of using closed source programs. It is a shame that Skype hasn’t done the right things by telling its users how their use of Skype can affect their resources even when they are not using Skype’s service, … or by telling their clients how they might be financially affected by their usage of Skype.