Nat Yogachandra

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Reevaluating Gender Equality: Are Women Being Taken for Granted?"

Reevaluating Gender Equality: Are Women Being Taken for Granted? I was profoundly shocked and saddened to learn about the tragic incident involving a 31-year-old doctor who was raped and murdered in a seminar room at a hospital in Kolkata, West Bengal, India on August 9th. Compounding this tragedy, two additional cases of rape have also made headlines in India. On August 8th, in the northern state of Uttarakhand, a nurse was reportedly raped and killed while returning home from work. She had been missing since the end of July, and her body was discovered last week. Similarly, in the northern state of Bihar, six individuals have been arrested for the alleged gang-rape and murder of a teenage Dalit girl. Her mutilated body was found near a pond in a village in Muzaffarpur district during the same week. Violence against women is not only prevalent in India but also occurs in the United States. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women has experienced c

Rising Inequality during pandemic - A threat to World Peace and Economic Development

Just imagine during the early months of the pandemic, when local businesses across the country closed and millions of hungry Americans turned to food banks for the first time, over a period of seven-month America’s 614 billionaires grew their net worth by a collective $931 billion. And today, according to a Washington Post report the wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country’s wealth and the bottom 90 percent of families holding less than one-quarter of all wealth. This share is higher than it has been at any point since at least 1962. Before I go any further, I want to share a short passage from a book that I recently received. The book entitled “ For the Well-Being of All: Eliminating the Extremes of Wealth and Poverty ” was published by the Bahá’í Publishing Trust of USA. One page 9, it says, “ The inordinate disparity between rich and poor, a source of acute suffering, keeps the world in a state of instability, virtually on the brink of war. Few

Coronavirus outbreak anywhere can be a threat to people everywhere – especially in poor countries.

As this tiny virus, a ten-thousandth of a millimeter in diameter makes its way through different continents and countries, around the world many are concerned about the number of deaths or the devastation the virus can cause in poor countries. If Covid-19 pandemic can affect United States and other rich countries with the best healthcare system, still resulting in thousands of deaths, then one can imagine the high risk these poor people will take during this time. Even in the United States, according to a recent article in The Economist, "children have fallen behind in their lessons—and too often gone hungry. The suffering has been skewed by race. A 40-year-old Hispanic-American is 12 times more likely to die from covid-19 than a white American of the same age. In São Paulo black Brazilians under 20 are twice as likely to die as whites. As the world has adapted some of these iniquities have got worse. Studies suggest that about 60% of jobs in America paying over $

Ending Child Marriage: Educate a Girl Child

Ending Child Marriage: This photo shows 73-year old Rohaya Binti Muhammad (right) with her 15-year old husband in Southern Sumatra province, Indonesia Child marriage is one of the most painful subjects I have come across in my life. I cannot even begin to fathom what these innocent girls at a very young age have to go through this. I am very passionate about ending child marriage and informing the vast majority of the public and friends in the West who really have no clue. Just recently, after so many years of battle, the Indonesian government raised the minimum age at which girls can marry from 16 to 19. The country has the eighth-highest number of child brides in the world according to the UN, this phenomenon should soon be a thing of the past. According the UNICEF, United Nations’ children’s Fund, worldwide, more than 700 million women living today were married before the age of 18; of those, more than one in three women were wed before the age of 15. 125m a