Bangalore has everything: fair male strippers for hen nights, shopping arcades with Hugo Boss and Montblanc, apartments that are rising at a ferocious rate. In the heart of the city, I noticed a large area of land had been fenced off for a development calling itself “Brigade Gateway — Bangalore’s first lifestyle enclave”.

The perimeter road was surrounded by billboards promising a future paradise on Earth, where every need would be met.

Once complete, the lifestyle enclave would have private security, a hospital, its own school, a health spa, a hotel, a food court and restaurants, all sealed from the masses.

One billboard showed a man in jeans walking his dog beside a lake in what looked like North America, with the caption in English and the bouncy Kannada script: “Stroll alongside a serene lake.” Adverts promised a helipad, sculpture courts, a bamboo grove, patrolled private roads, fountains and “a better quality of life”. You could buy a luxury apartment in Brigade Gateway with a fitted German kitchen. “Each wing will have two high-speed passenger lifts. Uninterrupted power supply (we have back-up generators to generators!) will ensure that you need to take the stairs only if you want the exercise.” The wisdom of the Finnish modernist architect Alvar Aalto was quoted in evidence: “True architecture exists only where man stands in the centre.”

It was quite a promise. I wondered how it was being put into effect, and joined a line of labourers as they advanced glumly onto the 40-acre site for the morning shift. They wore yellow hard hats, and some carried tiffin boxes. Although there were bright signs promoting the need to have boots with metal toecaps, most of the men were wearing plastic sandals. The place was a mess of mud and gravel. The labourers had to work on buildings that rose to 30 storeys, and safety nets had been slung around the higher reaches, though in a random way that offered no anticipation of capture.

I asked a security guard from Madhya Pradesh — we’ll call him Dhruv — how many people had died there that year (this was in October 2008). His answer was, seven or eight. He stressed he was only talking about his own section of the site. He was unsure how many people had been injured — casualties were usually sent straight back to their home villages.

At the heart of the site I entered one of the apartment blocks. The staircase was half-built, and I was able to climb nearly to the top. All around, across the skyline, grey shells were rising. These were two- and three-bedroom apartments, and workers from West Bengal were running pipes between them. They said they were paid Rs150 (£2.17) a day, but that the contractor or gang master who employed them took one quarter of their salary illegally.

I watched as these men dragged and winched and hammered and drilled. The quality of the construction was fairly good, but I was puzzled by a boxroom on the outside of each apartment, less than two metres square, accessible only from the common staircase. Was it a storage or wiring closet? No, it was the servant’s room. Each apartment would need a servant, and this was where he or she would be living, without windows or fresh air.

Back at the main gate I asked Dhruv where the hundreds of labourers lived, and he offered to take me to a “housing colony”, as he was nearing the end of his shift. Three big companies were responsible for the main construction project. We went to see the accommodation that was used by the workers of one of these, Simplex Infrastructures. It was off a road about 15 minutes’ walk from the construction site. Indian cities are full of slums and bad housing, but this was in a special category of its own.

It was reasonably easy to get inside. Dhruv had assumed that, because I was white and quite smartly dressed, I must be on official business, while the guard at the colony let me in because I was with Dhruv. The place stank of rotting food and latrines, and amounted to little more than a network of paths awash with dirty water, which led to sheds made of wood and corrugated iron. This was where the labourers lived for months or even years at a time. They came originally from Bihar, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, and had been recruited in their villages to come south as workers. They told me a contractor was holding their wages and taking a large cut. But, as a listless teenage boy from Buxar named Prem said: “What can we do? We can do nothing. My family don’t even know where I am.”

Prem showed me inside the sheds. There was no electricity, so I used the light on my mobile phone to look around (the cheaper Indian mobiles usefully contain a flashlight). The concrete floor was lined with thin plastic mats, like beach mats, each one about the size of a single mattress, and at the head of each mat were some folded blankets and washing utensils. “Is this where you sleep?” I asked Prem, who was wrapped in a blanket and shivering with fever.

“Two persons sleep on each mat,” said Dhruv.

Two? At the same time?

“Yes,” said Dhruv. “We sleep close together.”

Above the mats were lines of rough string hanging across the shed. Little pictures of deities and religious places were propped in the webs of string. Each man had a length on which to hang his clothes and possessions. This was his sacred thread, the nearest thing he had to privacy. It was not difficult to imagine the atmosphere in the colony each evening when the workers returned: the hunger, the exhaustion, the arguments, the fights, the stink of sewage, the trips to cheap drinking dens and the brothels by the nearby garment factory, and the nightly return to the shared plastic mat. I was outraged by the conditions here, because they were so easily avoidable. This was not an embedded social problem where any solution might throw up a host of new complaints. It was not a case of intractable poverty, or of bosses who were unable to pay their workers more. The cheapest apartments in Brigade Gateway were selling at just under Rs10m (£145,000), and for the cost of few square metres, for the cost of a servant’s closet, these migrant labourers could have been built proper accommodation. When I asked Dhruv if all the workers at Brigade Gateway had to live in such conditions, he said this colony was probably the worst. Some other housing colonies had bunks with mattresses.

I contacted Simplex and asked some basic questions about arrangements for their workers. Nobody wanted to be interviewed. Eventually they responded through a third party: “Mr French’s letter is a little embarrassing for us, and I don’t think we’ll be making any kind of response. He says he has visited our site, and yet the only thing he would like to know is how much we pay our labourers. He has no interest in the structure, or how it is being built… He is writing about India and I do not understand why he needs to know how much we pay our labourers. How is it related to his subject matter? So, we would not like to respond.”

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Thus, we have people defending the opposition to Hussain saying he “hurt Hindu sentiments” by painting Hindu goddesses in the nude, without outrightly condemning the threats he faces or the violence he has had to face at his exhibitions.

Then you have those opposed to Taslima Nasrin saying that what she said about Islam and the Prophet is factually incorrect when discussing the violence her article provoked.

Others object to comparing Hussain and Nasrin because they think the calibre of the work is so different, one cannot compare them.

I may think Hussain’s paintings are superior to Nasrin’s writings, but that is neither here nor there as far as this debate is concerned. On the debate aired on NDTV today, only Javed Anand seems to have understood this and kept forecefully reiterating this point.

Everyone has their own opinion on the quality of the work. But that is not the point. The point is that they (Hussain and Nasrin) should be free to express through their paintings and writings what they want to and we should be free to criticise their expression, without resorting to violence and threating a person’s safety or destroying their work.

As for our “sentiments” (what an awful word) these days, whether Hindu or Muslim, they seem to be remarkably weak, wishy washy creatures. Time to start working on these easily outraged emotions perhaps, before we start attacking people for what they write and paint.

On Hussain’s being granted Qatari citizenship Umm, who lives in Doha, has said it best.

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Uganda’s parliament is preparing to pass a brutal new law that would punish gay people with prison — even death.

Initial international criticism drove the President to call for a review. But after a well-funded and vicious lobbying effort by extremists, the bill looks set to be passed — threatening widespread persecution and bloodshed.

Opposition to the bill is rising, including from the Anglican church. Ugandan gay rights advocate Frank Mugisha writes, “This law will put us in serious danger. Please, sign the petition and tell others to stand with us – if there’s a huge global response, our government will see that Uganda will be internationally isolated by the proposed law, and strike it down.”

With the decision expected in days, only an irresistible wave of worldwide pressure will be enough to save Frank’s life and many others. Let’s build a huge petition to stop the gay death law — click here to take action, then forward this email:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_rights_4/?vl

The petition will be delivered to President Museveni and the parliament at the end of this week by top Ugandan civil society and Church leaders. Pro-death penalty advocates have also planned a march this week, so our voices need to be louder than theirs!

The bill proposes life imprisonment for anyone convicted of having same-sex relations and imposes the death penalty for “serial offenders”. NGOs working to prevent the spread of HIV could be imprisoned for up to 7 years for “promoting homosexuality”. Even members of the public face up to three years in jail if they fail to report homosexual activity to the police within 24 hours!

The bill’s advocates claim that it defends national culture, but its strongest critics come from within Uganda. The Reverend Canon Gideon Byamugisha is one of many who’s written to us – he says,

“It is violating our cultures, traditions and religious values that teach against intolerance, injustice, hatred and violence. We need laws to protect people — not ones that will humiliate, ridicule, persecute and kill them en masse.”

By rejecting this dangerous bill and supporting the breadth of opposition to it, we can help set a crucial precedent. Let’s build massive support for Uganda’s human rights defenders, and save lives by stopping this bill — sign now here, then tell friends and family:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_rights_4/?vl

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When Rupert Dickinson, the chief executive of one of Britain’s biggest property firms, left his BlackBerry behind in London while on a business trip to Ireland, he simply ordered one of his staff to get on a plane and deliver the device to him.

For Dickinson’s then head of sustainability, Tim Nicholson, the errand was much more than an executive indulgence: it embodied the contempt with which his boss treated his deep philosophical beliefs about climate change.

In a significant decisiontoday , a judge found Nicholson’s views on the environment were so deeply held that they were entitled to the same protection as religious convictions, and ruled that an employment tribunal should hear his claim that he was sacked because of his beliefs.

The judgment could open the door for people to take their employers to tribunals over their stance on a range of issues, from animal rights to feminism.

Link

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