by Mridu Khullar
- India -

- In a country where men mostly dominate society and the workplace, it can be difficult or even unsafe for a woman to negotiate her way through life and livelihood. Mridu Khullar travels across India to find inspiring women-only ventures that prove that all it takes to make a difference is the belief that you can. This is the first article in her series. - Ed.

5:49 pm: The local Western Railway train pulls up at the Churchgate station in Mumbai. People on various platforms rush from one corner to the other, preoccupied with getting to their next destination on time. I'm possibly the only person who's taken a moment to stand and look around at the swarm of fleeting bodies around me. I board the train.

5:52 pm: The train is an assault on the senses. Bodies bump into each other as sweat mingles with perfume, and the rush to enter increases. Chatter fills the compartment and women who study together, work together or know each other through this common commute share stories of the day. A young girl in dark blue jeans and a pale blue kurta walks through the open door and smiles. She takes note of her surroundings, occupies the seat opposite mine, nods and looks out the window.

by Mridu Khullar
- India -

According to the National Coalition of Health Care in America, in 2007, total national health expenditures were expected to rise 6.9 percent—twice the rate of inflation. Healthcare spending is 4.3 times the amount spent on national defense. And although 47 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on healthcare than other industrialized nations.

It is no wonder then that scores of American citizens are heading off to foreign shores for their healthcare needs.

by Mridu Khullar
- India -

Couples in India are finally figuring out that hours of horoscope-matching sessions followed by measures to correct planetary positions make not a good marriage. Urban educated twenty-somethings of today are ditching the priest's grass mat and heading to the counselor's leather couch.

Pre-marital counseling, a concept that has so far been alien to Indians, is making an entry into the psyche of the young middle-class. Counseling of any sort has traditionally been seen as a "western idea," and something that is not part of the Indian culture. Formal and professional pre-marital counseling is looked upon even more skeptically by a generation of parents who met each other no more than once or twice before their own arranged marriages.

by Mridu Khullar
- India -

• Tibetan writers are using literature and new languages, Chinese and English, to share information about Tibet's struggle for freedom with a wider audience.
Photograph by Sirensongs. •

Their language of choice—Tibetan, English, and surprisingly, now even Mandarin.

“Although the exile Tibetan community [in India] has been very effective in providing a high level of cultural production in religious areas, it is inside Tibet that Tibetan intellectuals and artists have been able to make achievements in secular culture, such as poetry, literature, music, painting, and some forms of scholarship, despite the difficulties they face,” says Dr. Robert Barnett, Director of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and author of Lhasa: Streets with Memories.

The writings of these poets and essayists have transformed over the past decade from musings about an exotic culture and history, to more real issues of human rights, political policies, and memoirs of people loved and lost. The Tibetan writers of today, regardless of their genre, seem to write with an agenda: to spread the word about the declining situation of the Tibetan freedom movement to readers both inside and out of China.