Saeeda Bano was the first woman in India to work as a radio newsreader, and she is still known as the doyenne of Urdu broadcasting. Over her unconventional and courageous life, Bano walked out of a suffocating marriage, witnessed the violence of Part...

On February 6, 2003, Anjum Zamarud Habib, a young political activist from Kashmir, was arrested in Delhi, convicted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and sentenced to five years in Delhi's notorious Tihar jail. Her crime? Being in the wrong plac...

Imelda Connor is a classic Irish lass – a fiery, red-headed beauty, quick to anger, and fiercely protective of her younger siblings. Growing up on a small farm in the rolling hills of County Cork, she thinks she has her life completely mapped out. He...

On July 15, 2004, twelve women, all in their sixties and seventies, positioned themselves in front of the gates of the Kangla Fort in Manipur, India – the headquarters of the Assam Rifles, a unit of the Indian army. One by one, the women stripped the...

A Czechoslovakian Jew who was imprisoned at Auschwitz, Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt (1923-2009) was saved by her artistic abilities. Gottliebova painted the walls of the children's barracks with images of the Disney film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves...

It's midnight and there are fists pounding on the door. Authoritative voices shouting, "We're coming in! Get on the floor!" A few terrorized minutes later a family member is dragged out by armed men, disappearing into the night. This scenario is the...

A. Revathi's memoir "The Truth about Me" became a sensation in India when it was published in 2011. The pathbreaking autobiography told the story of Revathi's childhood uneasiness with her male body, her exile to a house of "hijras" (the South Asian...

Born in 1945 in the Assamese town of Jorhat, Tesmula Ao lost both her parents in quick succession when she was young. Left to fend for themselves, she and her five siblings ran wild, skipping school and wandering the streets. But when the authorities...

In the early 1930s, Ayii Tendulkar, a young journalist from a small town in Maharashtra, traveled to Germany to pursue a doctorate in statistics. There, Ayii, eventually became well-known journalist in Berlin and he met and fell in love with the reno...