Womentalk blogger Roma Rajpal visited Cyprus some days ago. Luckily she was back in Bonn before the cash vending machines in Nikosia stopped dispensing money. Back home, she tells us her first impressions of the country.

Abandoned Projects

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I was astounded by the poverty of the region. The drive from the airport to the hotel was definitely not scenic. All one saw was abandoned projects, buildings that lay bare in different stages of construction. My guide later told me that it was because a lot of companies who had initially invested were now backing out.

The festival venue in Herat

The international Afghan film festival was organized for the first time on the occasion of Women’s day in the Afghan city, Herat. Cinema is difficult in Afghanistan, where religious, cultural and political problems come in the way of freedom of expression.

Anjali: Managing her work and personal life with finesse

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided to revoke the work-from-home policy last month. Her decision provoked a lot of outrage all over the world. CEO of the internet portal Best Buy, Hubert Joly, took a similar decision, but the criticism this time was much lesser. This is primarily because all hoped that Mayer, a female CEO, who was hired when she was 37 and five months pregnant at that time would bring in some cool business ideas to balance work and life out of work.

What happened to 23-year-old Jyothi, Nirbhaya or Damini as people know her, was a snowballing of attitudes and hackneyed traditional modes of thinking. In her next blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet talks about how Indian society is having a tough time deciding whether to be modern or to be western. Indian women are also partly unwilling to give up the comforts of tradition- of having the security and protection of the Indian family.

Why does violence against women happen in the first place? Can one hold social and economic backwardness responsible? And what role does one’s upbringing play in creating the ‘Indian male?’ In her third blog in the series, Dr. Kanchana Lanzet speaks about how the male identity changes when a person migrates from his village to a big city like New Delhi.

Balochistan is one of the 5 provinces of Pakistan. It’s important for not only its geographical location but for its vast natural resources. Quetta is the capital city of Balochistan and is home to different communities including the Hazara.

For the last two to three years, Quetta has been under a severe security threat and thousands have lost their lives due to the significant level of terrorism. In the beginning of 2013, a suicide blast took the lives of hundreds of people in Quetta. Again, very recently another suicide attack killed more than 90 people.

Copyright: Clara Leone

Samar Minallah is a prominent human rights activist and documentary film maker from Pakistan. Her documentary “Swara: bridge over troubled waters” analyses the Swara tradition, according to which a family gives one of its girls as compensation to an aggrieved family instead of blood money. Minallah actively speaks out against what she calls “culturally sanctioned forms of violence against women”  and condemns the “patriarchal mindset” behind such violence.