They were engaging his services because they wanted to work. They lived 10 miles away, in a small settlement where, for generations, begging had been the main source of income. A few weeks earlier, the male elders of their caste had decreed that village women working at nearby meat-processing factories should leave their jobs. The reason they gave was that women at home would be better protected from the sexual advances of outside men. A bigger issue lay beneath the surface: The women’s earnings had begun to undermine the old order.
.. In the tradition of their caste, the Nats, a person challenging a community punishment could offer a defense at trial by picking up a red-hot piece of iron and walking five steps toward the temple. If her hands burned, she was guilty, and would be placed in a hole in the ground until she confessed.
.. She tended to alienate women — maybe it was the way she called them fat buffaloes — but Premwati calmly allowed Geeta’s insults to bubble over her. Geeta repaid this kindness by stomping over and intervening whenever Premwati’s husband beat her.
.. The women of their community live by rules: If an older man approaches, they cannot sit on any surface above the ground, so it is not unusual to see them suddenly slither down off cots and chairs. They are forbidden to have physical contact with men from outside the community, with the exception of physicians or bangle sellers.
.. A hollow-eyed woman named Pooja announced, with some surprise, that her husband and mother-in-law had stopped beating her. “When you earn money,” she said, “you are of some use to them.” As for Geeta, it became clear to her that the men swarming around the factory grounds were not making sexual advances.
“When you start working, your heart opens up,” she said. “Then you’re not scared anymore.”
.. He forbade the women in his own family to work at the factories, but watched with distaste as his neighbors left in the morning. He looked back with nostalgia at the time when the Nats supported themselves by begging.
“Life was much better 20 years back,” he said. “It was a nice society. Now women are going out and meeting strange men.”
.. Their work, he said, had a whiff of immorality.
“They have everything: Clothes to wear. Enough to eat,” he said. “Why would they need to work? They still have husbands. It’s not just insulting to them, it’s insulting to the whole village.”
.. The old, patriarchal order was dying in rural India, dying slowly, and releasing toxic bursts as it did.
“That may be the cause of this whole trouble, that they are losing control,” he shrugged. “These old practices are going away.”
.. The women, too, were in uncharted territory. Every two weeks, they made a trip to the magistrate’s court in Meerut to renew a restraining order that the police had recommended, which would impose a 50,000-rupee fine on anyone who resorted to violence.
.. “They know nothing about court procedure,” he said. “They never ask me questions. They just say one thing: ‘We are not wrong. We are not wrong. We are not wrong.’”
.. Roshan had followed the sequence of events with satisfaction. These women, he said, were trying to show that they could exist without the community. When he heard that the girl was gone, he smiled.
“Slowly, slowly, they will understand our power,” he said.
.. Mr. Mewati assembled the villagers and informed them that the Indian Constitution guaranteed equality under the law. Women could not be prevented from working, and Geeta and her friends should be forgiven. Then he withdrew 3,000 rupees in folded bills from his pocket, enough to cover the fine for Geeta’s disobedience, and handed it to Roshan.
“Take care of this mess,” he said.
The machinery of compromise cranked into motion.
.. Mr. Siddiqui, their defense lawyer, saw no need to report the incident to the magistrate who had issued the restraining order.
.. “Anyone who has beaten you in the night can do it again,” he said.
Geeta, too, had lost her swagger. When people asked about Sanjay, she told them that he had fallen off the roof. She denied that she had been trapped in the house with the other women.
.. All told, it had been an expensive night, Roshan said. To avoid criminal charges, he had had to pay 3,000 rupees for Sanjay’s medical care and an additional 4,000 to ensure there would be no investigation. But it was worth it, they all agreed.
Time to Face the Hard Truth: The Sky Isn’t Falling on America
Only in a truly demoralized conservative movement could the crass materialism of Donald Trump find a foothold. That kind of nihilistic energy reflects more than just economic anxiety. It evidences a deeper sense of despair about the moral and cultural trajectory of our society.
.. They loved Manchester United but seemed to have little interest in Uzbek soccer. Midway through my service I got an idea of why that might be. Some soccer-loving American friends started going to local games. As longtime fans of the sport, they were strongly under the impression that at least some of the games were fixed. A match would proceed normally for awhile, but in the last few minutes the leading team might start making obvious, clownish mistakes that would ultimately lead to a loss. My friends found it hard to believe that this phenomenon was natural.
.. On the other hand, a society that demands fair football games is positioned to navigate these other problems. We still have a strong sense of fair play, a zeal for excellence, and the kind of political foundation that can sustain a free society.
Chairman of Fosun Group of China Is Said to Be Missing
It has been a hazardous week for Chinese moguls. Last Friday, in Wuhan in central China, another Chinese executive, the 44-year-old Xu Ming, ranked by Forbes in 2005 as China’s eighth-richest person, was found dead in his prison cell, with Chinese news reports saying he died of a heart attack. His body was cremated the next day. It isn’t known whether an autopsy was performed.
America’s poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs
The 1960 census records that one in five adults in the region could neither read nor write.
Half a century later, while poverty levels have fallen dramatically in some other parts of the country in good part thanks to Johnson, the economic gap between the region and much of the rest of America is as wide. And its deprivation is once again largely invisible to most of the country.
.. Beattyville’s median household income is just $12,361 (about £8,000) a year, placing it as the third lowest income town in the US, according to that Census Bureau 2008-12 survey.
.. Half of its families live below the poverty line. That includes three-quarters of those with children, with the attendant consequences. More than one-third of teenagers drop out of high school or leave without graduating.
.. Over time, the focus of that effort shifted to inner-city poverty and many of the programmes Johnson launched came to be seen as aimed at minorities, even though to this day white people make up the largest number of beneficiaries.
.. The War on Poverty did relieve many of the symptoms. Food stamps and housing grants, healthcare for the poor and older people and improved access to a decent education have kept millions from struggling with the deprivations Johnson encountered in Inez. There are few homes in eastern Kentucky without electricity and indoor toilets these days. But the promised cure for poverty never materialised.
.. The more cautious critics say Obama is anti-coal because of his environment policies. But a no less popular view in the region is that it is part of president Obama’s war on white people.
.. Their only running water is the stream. But people just keep staying there. They don’t want to leave. It’s the pride. The heritage of that land.”
.. “Utility bills are outrageous in a trailer because they lack insulation. I have a little lady I’ve been helping with, Miss Nelly. She’s in her late 70s. Her electric bill in the wintertime here runs about $400 a month. She can’t afford that. Trailers don’t heat good,” she said. “Some people choose not to connect to utilities to save money. A lot of people here, their income is like between $500 and $700 a month. That’s all they get.
.. Through much of the 19th century, this part of the Bluegrass State was romanticised in stories of rugged frontiersmen and courageous hunters as the epitome of American self-reliance. None more so than Daniel Boone, a hunter and surveyor at the forefront of settling Kentucky.
.. Getting the drugs isn’t difficult. Elderly people sell their prescription drugs to supplement some of the lowest incomes in the US. The national average retirement income is about $21,500. In Beattyville it is $6,500.
.. Prosecutors alleged that for years a single pain clinic nearly 1,000 miles away in south Florida had provided the prescriptions for a quarter of the OxyContin sold in eastern Kentucky. The bus service to Florida is known to police and addicts alike as the “Oxy Express”.
.. Davis said the drug companies aggressively pushed OxyContin and similar drugs in a region where, because of a mixture of the mining, the rigours of the outdoors and the weather, there was a higher demand for painkillers.
.. Close to 57% of Beattyville residents claim food stamps. They are paid by electronic transfer on the first of the month. That same day, cases of Pepsi and Coca-Cola are marked down sharply in supermarkets and disappear off the shelves, often paid for with food stamps.
They are then sold on to smaller stores at a lower price than they would pay a distributor, in effect turning several hundred dollars of food stamps into cash at about 50 cents on the dollar.
.. But she has little time for younger people she regards as unwilling to work. “If you’re not picky about what you do, there’s always something. A job that pays $6 an hour is better than zero.
.. “From the beginning, the coal and timber companies insisted on keeping all, or nearly all, the wealth they produced,” wrote Caudill. “They were unwilling to plough more than a tiny part of the money they earned back into schools, libraries, health facilities and other institutions essential to a balanced, pleasant, productive and civilised society. The knowledge and guile of their managers enabled them to corrupt and cozen all too many of the region’s elected public officials and to thwart the legitimate aspirations of the people.”
.. “We’re in a place right now where a tonne of coal costs about $68 to mine in eastern Kentucky and about $12 to mine in Wyoming. They’re importing more Wyoming coal here than they’re using east Kentucky coal. But if you ask people why this is, it’s Obama. They won’t blame the market, they blame the policy. It’s been very convenient to shift it to the black guy.”