March 28, 2024

Indian Prostitutes’ New Autonomy Imperils AIDS Fight

Indeed, the recent closings of hundreds of ancient brothels, while something of an economic victory for prostitutes, may one day cost them, and many others, their lives.

“The place where sex happens turns out to be an important H.I.V. prevention point,” said Saggurti Niranjan, program associate of the Population Council. “And when we don’t know where that is, we can’t help stop the transmission.”

Cellphones, those tiny gateways to modernity, have recently allowed prostitutes to shed the shackles of brothel madams and strike out on their own. But that independence has made prostitutes far harder for government and safe-sex counselors to trace. And without the advice and free condoms those counselors provide, prostitutes and their customers are returning to dangerous ways.

Studies show that prostitutes who rely on cellphones are more susceptible to H.I.V. because they are far less likely than their brothel-based peers to require their clients to wear condoms.

In interviews, prostitutes said they had surrendered some control in the bedroom in exchange for far more control over their incomes.

“Now, I get the full cash in my hand before we start,” said Neelan, a prostitute with four children whose side business in sex work is unknown to her husband and neighbors. (Neelan is a professional name, not her real one.)

“Earlier, if the customer got scared and didn’t go all the way, the madam might not charge the full amount,” she explained. “But if they back out now, I say that I have removed all my clothes and am going to keep the money.”

India has been the world’s most surprising AIDS success story. Though infections did not appear in India until 1986, many predicted the nation would soon become the epidemic’s focal point. In 2002, the C.I.A.’s National Intelligence Council predicted that India would have as many as 25 million AIDS cases by 2010. Instead, India now has about 1.5 million.

An important reason the disease never took extensive hold in India is that most women here have fewer sexual partners than in many other developing countries. Just as important was an intensive effort underwritten by the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to target high-risk groups like prostitutes, gay men and intravenous drug users.

But the Gates Foundation is now largely ending its oversight and support for AIDS prevention in India, just as efforts directed at prostitutes are becoming much more difficult. Experts say it is too early to identify how much H.I.V. infections might rise.

“Nowadays, the mobility of sex workers is huge, and contacting them is very difficult,” said Ashok Alexander, the former director in India of the Gates Foundation. “It’s a totally different challenge, and the strategies will also have to change.”

An example of the strategies that had been working can be found in Delhi’s red-light district on Garstin Bastion Road near the old Delhi railway station, where brothels have thrived since the 16th century. A walk through dark alleys, past blind beggars and up narrow, steep and deeply worn stone staircases brings customers into brightly lighted rooms teeming with scores of women brushing each other’s hair, trying on new dresses, eating snacks, performing the latest Bollywood dances, tending small children and disappearing into tiny bedrooms with nervous men who come out moments later buttoning their trousers.

A 2009 government survey found 2,000 prostitutes at Garstin Bastion (also known as G. B.) Road who served about 8,000 men a day. The government estimated that if it could deliver as many as 320,000 free condoms each month and train dozens of prostitutes to counsel safe-sex practices to their peers, AIDS infections could be significantly reduced. Instead of broadcasting safe-sex messages across the country — an expensive and inefficient strategy commonly employed in much of the world — it encircled Garstin Bastion with a firebreak of posters with messages like “Don’t take a risk, use a condom” and “When a condom is in, risk is out.”

Surprising many international AIDS experts, these and related tactics worked. Studies showed that condom use among clients of prostitutes soared.

“To the credit of the Indian strategists, their focus on these high-risk groups paid off,” said Dr. Peter Piot, the former executive director of U.N.AIDS and now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. A number of other countries, following India’s example, have achieved impressive results over the past decade as well, according to the latest United Nations report, which was released last week.

Sruthi Gottipati contributed reporting in Mumbai and New Delhi.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/world/asia/indian-prostitutes-new-autonomy-imperils-aids-fight.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

How Bernard Madoff Did It

Finally the man himself and his family. Within days it became known that it was Madoff’s own sons who had turned him in to the F.B.I. From the start, therefore, it was evident that we were witnessing an almost Sophoclean family tragedy. As for Bernie Madoff, what sort of man lay behind that sphinxlike smile, and how had he coped for so many years with the psychological pressure of living with such a gigantic falsehood? “The Wizard of Lies,” by Diana B. Henriques, a senior financial writer for The New York Times, makes for riveting reading because it covers all these dimensions. And although there is much that we can never know, this book comes closer than others have to answering at least some of our questions.

Madoff’s story has by now been told and retold many times, in newspapers and magazines, on television and in several books. After starting on Wall Street in the early 1960s, he built an apparently successful broker-dealer firm. As a side business he began managing money for other people, at first informally, for friends and family. His results were good but not spectacular. Most important, he never lost money (or so it seemed). How he generated these returns was always a mystery — he claimed to be offsetting the downside risks of his stock purchases by selectively using options to hedge the portfolio. But the very secrecy added to his mystique. Through word of mouth he soon began attracting outside investors, spawning a cottage industry of various types of feeder funds that channeled assets his way.

At some point (no one is quite certain when; Madoff claims it was not until the early ’90s, while Henriques believes it to have been earlier), after losing money, rather than come clean to his clients, he fudged the numbers, hoping to recoup the losses later and get back on track. Instead he ended up digging himself into an ever deeper hole. After a while, the chasm between what he claimed to investors and what was actually in their accounts became so deep that he stopped even bothering to invest the cash, relying on money from new clients to pay out fictitious returns to older clients — the classic Ponzi scheme.

Henriques has been reporting on Madoff since he was initially exposed and was the first reporter to be granted on-­the-­record interviews with him after his arrest and incarceration. She probably knows more than anyone outside the F.B.I. and the Securities and Exchange Commission about the mechanics of the fraud. As a consequence, in “The Wizard of Lies” she is able to add significant detail to the story.

To fool his investors and any regulators who happened to come sniffing around, Madoff built a Potemkin-­like investment operation complete with traders at fake terminals pretending to buy and sell stocks and a bogus paper trail of transactions and accounting reports.

Ponzi schemes can survive only by growing — in fact by growing exponentially. Even a leveling off or a slight slowdown in the pace of money coming in can threaten the viability of the entire scam. Henriques reveals how the operation came close to falling apart on several occasions, first after the stock market collapse of 1987, then again during the recession of the early 1990s, and yet again after the tech bubble burst in 2000. Each time, just as Madoff’s fraudulent enterprise seemed to be on the verge of breaking down, a new source of money was found.

Liaquat Ahamed is the author of “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World,” which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=af862de83802400522285ed042ef31f6

Bucks: Forget Frugality, Focus on Earning More

Ramit Sethi runs the Web site I Will Teach You to Be Rich.

Think of the last 10 pieces of personal finance advice you’ve read. Do any of these sound familiar?

  • Cut back on lattes!
  • The world’s top 10 coupons
  • Don’t go on vacation this year!

If you boil all the advice down, there are just two ways to improve your financial situation: earn more or cut costs. So why don’t more personal finance experts talk about earning more? Because most of them don’t know how.

And so we get lectures on frugality, giving us obscure advice like how to save on paper towels. With each tip, we get diminishing returns. And we start to believe that personal finance is about “No, No, No!” No, you can’t spend money on lattes. No, you can’t go on vacation. No, you can’t buy those jeans.

It’s no wonder that most Americans simply ignore their finances. We don’t want someone constantly lecturing us on what we can’t do.

I believe personal finance should be about saying “Yes.”

Yes, you can afford that extravagant coat, or iPhone or even a trip to the Bahamas. In fact, I believe in conscious spending, or spending extravagantly on the things you love — as long as you cut costs mercilessly on the things you don’t.

Once you’ve cut on the basics, the single best way to live a rich life is to earn more money.

The Myth of Frugality

Let’s take a look at a typical person who tries to cut back to save money.

Jack has to cut back on a lot of things in order to save significant amounts of money.

Not bad. $400 saved. But at what cost? Each morning, Jack has to decide if can buy that latte. He has to consciously cancel his cable. He has to decide if he can afford that dinner out. On and on — and he has to do this every month.

Jill can focus on one thing to get the same result:

Jill found something she was good at, turned it into a small side business, charged a reasonable amount and found a client willing to pay.

Cutting back may be easier for the first month. But it’s likely unsustainable. After all, there’s a limit to how much you can save. But there’s no limit to how much you can earn.

Earning More: The Numbers

Let’s consider three goals for your personal finances. If you could charge $25/hour for your services and work enough hours each month to generate an extra $500/month after taxes, what could that additional money do for you?

Let’s say you’re paying off a $10,000 credit card debt at 15 percent interest and want to add that $500 to your payment.

That’s over $10,000 in savings on interest alone.

Invest the Extra Money

When you earn more and invest the extra money, the results are incredibly powerful. Here’s what extra income can do for your investments.

Pay off a mortgage

Putting even $100 extra per month toward your mortgage can dramatically decrease the amount of time it will take you to pay it off.

*Based on a 5 percent, $300,000, 30-year fixed rate mortgage.

How to Earn More Money

The simplest way to earn money on the side is to turn your existing skills into side income. Nearly everyone has skills that others would pay for. Can you play an instrument? Consider being a music instructor. Are you obsessed with personal organizing? Hire your services out as a personal organizer. Do you have expertise in Excel, Web analytics or even free-lance writing? Many employers would love to hire you as a free-lancer.

This is a new way of thinking, and it makes many people uncomfortable. “That’s ridiculous,” they say. “Nobody would pay me $25 per hour.”

To them, I say two things:

1. You already pay service providers for things you could do yourself. Have you ever eaten at a restaurant? Changed oil? Gotten your hair cut? We all pay others for their services. Now, I want you to flip this around and charge for your own services. People will pay — as you already pay others.

2. You don’t know if your offer of services will work until you test it.

Twelve months ago, I declared it the year of earning more money and wrote a series of posts on the topic. I then launched an online course on earning money, in which I took hundreds of people from around the world and taught them how to turn their skills into side income.

Dean Soto was one of them. He has a wife, two children and a demanding full-time job. How could he find enough time to earn money on the side? Dean went through several exercises to determine which of his skills would be profitable. He realized that the information technology skills he used at his day job could also earn him money on the side — if he found the right clients. But his side income needed to be worth giving up his scarce time with his family.

Once he figured out a potential idea, he used his network to meet people and ask what their needs were. He found his first client by accident. When he heard Dean’s asking rate — $30/hour — he scoffed and insisted Dean charge more.

To account for his busy schedule, Dean used a clever retainer technique, which lets him work flexibly as long as he gets the work done. “I come home from work around 5 p.m.,” he said. “Then I spend time with my family until about 9 p.m. and spend about an hour a day on my side work.”

“I never thought I could do something like this,” he said. “Now I’m like a boxer, looking to take little jabs and see where there’s an opening.”

Last year, Dean earned $22,700 on the side. He raised his hourly rate from $30 to $60 and then $150 per hour. The best part? “My wife loves it,” he said. “She’s able to stay home, which is her dream, and my kids have their mother all day.”

There’s nothing unique about Dean. But he is remarkable for taking action instead of being blinded by the frugality brigade that so permeates personal finance.

Frugality is important — to a point. But after we cut back to a reasonable level, our biggest win will come from earning more money.

To hear an interview with Dean Soto on the techniques he used to earn thousands on the side, click here.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4ccef076925a8e40fb4e983f2de45874