Sex and the poor

摘要

One of India's leading aids doctors, Alka Deshpande, did not choose her specialisation. Working as a hospital doctor in Bombay (now called Mumbai) in the late 1980s when AIDS was discovered in the city, she merely decided that she was prepared to touch the infected. Her colleagues would not do so-and perhaps still will not. According to a recent UN study, over half of Indian health-care workers thought AIDS was transmitted by touch.rnIn a mostly-Hindu society, which for thousands of years considered one-fifth of its members "untouchable", discrimination and ignorance of this kind have a particularly unpleasant significance. Indeed, the ways in which AIDS and India's traditions interact are a striking feature of these essays about the disease in India, commissioned by the Gates Foundation. On a tour through the south-eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, which has a fifth of India's estimated 2.5m HIV cases, Kiran Desai meets women of several hereditary prostitute castes, including relatively affluent beauties who are apparently not unhappy with their lot, as well as wretched sex slaves, pimped by their neighbours, AIDS haunts them all.