SALEM: A national-level coordination forum of men has called for protection from wives and live-in partners whom they charged with exploiting women’s welfare legislation that arm them with ‘unbridled’ power to act against men.

The men, who claim to be ‘victims’ of such legislation from all over the country, spent three days in a resort at the hill station of Yercaud near here to deliberate on how to protect themselves and their kith and kin from harassment and to kick-start a campaign to impress upon policy-makers to think about their plight before enacting such lop-sided laws.

The forum said that many women were abusing these laws for nefarious gains by filing charges against their husbands and partners.

The provisions in these statutes, they called, were ‘anti-men’ leading to suicide of nearly 60,000 men as against 32,000 women annually.

Between 2004 and 2008, seven lakh men and family members were arrested including 500 minors and 5000 aged people, they claimed.

They pointed out that, for instance, laws such as the Dowry Prohibition Act, Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, Sec 125 of Cr. PC and above all Section 498A of Indian Penal Code were too stringent and non-bailable.

Women’s lobbies

“Though a debate is going on in legal circles on whether to amend or not especially Sec 498A to prevent its abuse, a few powerful women’s lobbies are blocking it,” said Suresh Ram, National Collegium member, All India Men’s Welfare Association, which organised the 3rd Men’s Rights Conference of the Delhi-based Save Indian Family Foundation at Yercaud in Salem district.

Delegates from Maharashtra, Assam, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and from the U.S. attended the deliberations.

A majority of them were from Karnataka, mainly young Information Technology professionals. They said that they would urge the government to replace the words ‘Husband and Wife’ with ‘Person’ in the said acts. They said that cases before Family Courts should be expedited and settled within two years.

The government would be approached to form National Commission for Men, they add.

Thanks: The Hindu

AS women clamour for equality, some men are also gearing up to fight for their rights. And what they too want , is equality.

“There are 24 laws that are women-centric in our system,” says Frances Anthony, convenor of the Tamil Nadu Chapter of the All India Men’s Welfare Association (AIMWA).

“Women misuse the law and use their children to threaten the father. The laws are making ours a fatherless society,” he adds.
Just a week ahead of Father’s Day, this group of men proclaimed a national boycott of the Family Courts and submitted a memorandum and a petition to the Principal Judge of the Family Court, with an appeal to make the law gender-neutral.

Leading the group on Friday was Kalaiselvan, who has not seen his son for the last 12 years. “I got married in 1997 and filed for divorce in 2002.

Our son was born in 1999.

Though I have been given rights to visit and see my son by the court, I’ve not set eyes on my son since he was born
it’s been 12 years now,” he says. Kalaiselvan alleged that he lost his job as a civil engineer in Kuwait because his wife complained about him to the company . “She misused the judicial system, filed a dowry harassment case against me and I spent 25 days in jail without bail. Even now, she refuses to obey the courts. I have appealed to the court many times saying she must be booked for contempt for not allowing me to see my son, but the courts remain silent. The dowry harassment case is still on and I have no job and no hope of seeing my boy anytime soon,” he grieves. The men in this organisation say they were not against women or trying to deprive the fairer sex of their rights. “Women are not victims in all cases. In the 21st century, women are equal in their families. They have an equal voice.

But they’re misusing these laws and turning their husband into ATMs to withdraw money when they feel like it,” says Frances.

S Hariharan, an employee of a telecom firm, agrees and says, “I have not been given visitation and customary rights of my two children by the courts. It has been three
years since I last saw them.”

The solution, he says, is to play it carefully. “When we gave him the petition, the principal judge of the Family Court, Ramalingam, told us that the society needs to change. He agreed that laws are misused by women in many cases. He suggested that couples should go in for judicial separation until the child turns 18 after which they can file for divorce.
Judicial separation allows visitation rights for the father as well. Fathers too feel the pain when they’re separated from their children,” Hariharan says.

Link to the newspaper view

Press Release

All India Men’s Welfare Association (AIMWA) is an organization formed to protect the Constitutional and Human Rights of men and boys. We fight against gender discrimination, legal terrorism and every other form of abuse suffered by men and boys.

AIMWA is organizing a Nationwide Boycott of the Family Courts on 18 June 2010 – the Friday before Fathers’ Day – as a sign of protest against the Family Court system which blatantly discriminates against fathers, heartlessly separates them from and prevents their access to their own biological children.

We concur with the recent observation of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India that “the Hindu Marriage Act is breaking more families than uniting”. We would like to add that the worst sufferers of the Indian Family Court system are fathers and children.

Indian Family Courts have declared a war against fathers and are adopting every possible means to create a “Fatherless Society”. The modus operandi of the Family Courts includes:

• Depriving fathers of the right to love and care for their biological children.
• Forcing fathers to pay huge sums of money to support children they are not allowed to see.
• Encouraging false allegations of abuse to paint fathers as unfit parents.
• Permitting multiple legal battles by mothers to eliminate biological fathers from their children’s lives.
• Passing ex-parte orders based solely on the allegations made by a child’s mother.
• Allowing mothers to brazenly disobey visitation orders without legal repercussions to her.
• Allowing biological fathers to be labelled “kidnappers” for trying to make contact with their own children.
• Prolonging custody/visitation matters for years, thereby driving fathers into financial and emotional bankruptcy and forcing them to give up the desire to see their children.

It is time everyone recognizes that:

• denying access to one’s own biological children is abuse of human rights.
• depriving children of the love and care of their biological father is abuse of children’s rights.

AIMWA hereby registers its vehement protest against the separation of fathers from their biological children, and the concomitant violation of Human Rights perpetrated by the Family Court system against fathers and children.

AIMWA shall continue to agitate against the Family Court system until the following demands are met:

1. Special fast-track courts should be set up at the earliest to deal with custody issues.
2. Exclusive, fully functioning Divisional Bench should be set up in all High Courts and Supreme Court to hear appeals in matters of child custody.
3. When a person or couple approaches court for divorce, counseling of the parents by professional counselors should be given first priority.
4. Except in extreme cases of violence or unhealthy behavior by either partner, children should be given equal and meaningful access to both parents and grandparents on both sides.
5. Both parents should be given financial responsibility of the child proportionate to their earnings and not based on demands made by either partner.
6. If a partner prevents a child from having equal and meaningful contact with the other partner, they should be counseled first to understand the importance of equal parenting and the best interest of a child.
7. If either partner repeatedly disobeys orders of equal access and meaningful contact with children, then the children should be placed in the full custody of the partner who will allow equal access to the other parent.

Boycott Family Courts!

AIMWA hereby calls upon all fathers to:

• Join our Nationwide Boycott of Family Courts on 18 June 2010 as a symbol of protest against the creation of a fatherless society!
• Sign our Petition listing out the changes we demand from the Family Court system in child custody matters!
• Refuse to pay maintenance and child support unless the aforementioned demands are met!
• Settle for nothing less than free and fair access to their children and an equal opportunity to build a meaningful relationship with their children!

Male Disposability is a psychological behavioral and attitudinal syndrome that considers Men as “Disposable and Expendable” and invests very low emotional resources with males which ultimately leads to an environment insensitive to the problems of the male world or one that automatically eliminates weak men (or men finished off with their utility) viewing them as liability.

Since time immemorial, be it the life-endangering activity of hunting or saving the country-land or guarding the parameters of geographical boundary or maintaining law and order situation in the society – the latter two correlate to hunting human life – this role has always been attributed to men who have donned the same willingly boosted by their testosterone and chivalry. In a nutshell men have been hunters primarily and that is a defunct role in today’s era of pacification and intellectual progress.

However, the traits of history are hard to remove and the hunter’s traits have continued into today’s men as well who are actually a misfit in the society with their hunting background and their genetic and evolutionary affiliation to a hunting tribe. No wonders problems of men have skyrocketed and courtesy the Male Disposability Syndrome, no one is bothered about it.

Before talking more on Male Disposability, I would talk a bit on its genesis, taking cue from the article, Paradigm Shift in Male Identity: Freedom from Being a Hunter. During the hunting days, when men used to go on long hunting expeditions, any hunter talking of a minor leg pain or a slight backache was detrimental to the morale of the hunters and was silenced, trivializing his pain.

Even today the society has been pretty much the same for men. Earlier it was hunting, in today’s world its taking huge risks – financial, intellectual, emotional, physical, political – to name a few, that men are expected of and in such a situation, talking of small problems like an emotional turmoil in a relationship or facing lack of freedom of choices will bring down the morale of other risk-taking hunters and thus men are discouraged from expressing their pain.

This leads to a lot of psycho-emotional suffocation within men which has a direct bearing on their lifestyle, life-expectancy, health and suicide rate as visible from the following data collected from various sources of the Government.

Interestingly, in this so called MALE DOMINATED WORLD, the DOMINATED MALES never get a voice as corroborated by the following figures.

Life Expectancy Data:

Plotted as a Graph looks something like,

The data about suicides is also not very welcoming but a true and sad reality to which currently the society is insensitive and cold.

Plotted as a Graph, looks something like

The above data clearly points to the stress in men’s lives due to which they not only commit suicide in large numbers (approaching double that of women) but who survive the turmoil, live shorter. That being the reality, there is also another grim reality and that is

NO SOCIAL / LEGAL / PSYCHOLOGICAL SUPPORT STRUCTURE AVAILABLE FOR MEN.

Quintessentially the problems of the male world are oblivious to the society and as long as men are discharging their duties no one really needs to bother about them and can readily dispose them off, after all even Mother Nature produces them in abundance; what with the normal gender birth ratio being 950 females : 1000 males.

Choice is left with readers to decide whether Male Disposability is a Myth or a Reality?

Parthasarathy “Partha” Raghuram joins Katherine Albrecht to discuss his campaign against Gillette’s efforts to label Indian men with facial hair as “lazy” in a deleterious bid to sell more razors. Callers weigh in.

Many men dream of being financially free. Many dream of quitting their jobs to travel around the world, spend time with friends and family and start new ventures and do what they would love to do. Most people have read the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Some young men in 20s declare, “I want to take a retirement or break from work when I turn 35. Maybe, I will set up a company at that time.” I was one such guy. Sometime in 1999, I declared that I want to be financially free in a couple of years, when I had almost no literacy in personal finance or financial instruments.

So, how does one go about creating financial freedom and personal wealth? Being a miser is not the right way.

The process starts with introspection and getting in touch with reality. One has to start with a clear idea about one’s expenses in a month called cash outflow. Cash outflow can include the house rent, the bills, the travel expenses, cost of food and household items, medical expenses, children school fees, donations to charities etc. Most people meet these expenses by working in a full time job. A man is considered financially free, if he is capable of earning his monthly expenses (cash outflow) via his passive income. Passive income is the money a person makes without working, say by investments or being a non-working partner in a business etc.

In some families both spouses work, however we keep those situations aside for the sake of simplicity and focus only on an unmarried working men or a married men with wife playing the role of home maker.

Having good passive income and having financial freedom is inspiring to men. However, most do not know how to reach there. Many assume it is a function of their salary in the current job and start working harder to get a promotion, a bigger salary hike or an opportunity to work in US or Europe. They get stuck. Some go aggressively into stock markets and buy stocks recommended by friends without doing research on their own. They end up with bad experiences.

The first key to increasing passive income is to be financially literate. That is, one must get educated with financial instruments and learn the long term trends and patterns of real estate or stock markets etc. This literacy is a must before one gets into action. One can also start experimenting with small amounts of money in order to learn.

Financial freedom depends on a person’s net worth. If a person has a high net worth compared to his monthly income and also expenses, then his chance of being financially free is high. So, the first step towards financial freedom is to increase one’s net worth by shifting one’s attitudes towards life, expenses, money and investments.

If you had invested Rs.100,000/- in a simple index mutual fund in year 2003, instead of taking a honeymoon trip to Mauritius, you would have 6 lacs more net worth today. Just ten such decisions would have made your family sit on top of 60 lacs today, earning passive income of about Rs.60,000/- per month for your family.

I did not buy a car in 2003.

The moods, feelings and emotional highs and lows are the biggest enemies of financial freedom. Unless you are ready to take it as a game without high degree of detachment, you can forget about financial freedom. Well, good things in life come with some discomforts and sacrifices. So, have patience and enjoy.

Recently, many young guys are asking me, “Should I buy an apartment? I am getting married after 6 months and my parents are pestering me to settle down and buy a house. My friend bought a house costing 40 lacs rupees. Well, I also see that I can save Rs.50,000/- tax on interest that I pay for my home loan.”
Now, these guys save hardly 2 or 3 lacs in a year from their salary and they are getting ready for a house loan of Rs.30 lacs apart from completely emptying their bank accounts for paying rupees 10 lacs to the bank as down payment. The loan EMI itself is more than 3 lac rupees in a year.

It’s most often a bad decision. To pay the 3 lacs EMI, these guys literally starve themselves. They live on curd rice, when they go onsite (to US or Europe) for an assignment so that they can clear off this loan as early as possible. Buying a house to stay is the first mistake and the next big mistake is to attempt to pay up the entire loan early by putting more hours at work sacrificing other important things in life.

A house gives about 5% returns on investment in India. A house is not an asset, it is a liability. Buying a house costing Rs.40 lacs is as good as staying in a house worth about Rs.40,000/ per month, while great apartments, better than that dream house, are available for rent for as low as Rs.18,000/- and one also get tax breaks on the rent that one pays.

A man can dump his dreams of financial freedom to dustbin, if he buys a house. A house can wait till one is financially free. It’s all about being strong against wishes of parents and peer pressure and tell them straight, “You will not take away choices in my life; I work hard for my well being”. The other way to get them off your back is to ask them to contribute half of the cost of the house for a joint registration. Most parents will back off with this counter offer. Forget about the tax breaks you get from interest on loan. That’s a trap set up by government to push you into lifelong slavery and insecurity.

However, one can always invest in real estate as an individual or together with friends. Here, the male bonding really helps. Buying real estate involves research, legal verifications and price negotiations. This works when it is done as a team.

However, here is a ground rule regarding buying real estate as an investment. Never buy real estate (say land/sites/plots) thinking that it will appreciate in future. Buy real estate, if you find it cheap and if you are fine even if it does not appreciate. In India, people who bought real estate taking small loans in 2002-2005 did make good money out of it. This pattern has now shifted to tier II and tier III cities. Real estate can make one boost one’s net worth. If you had purchased a site worth rupees 10 lacs in Bangalore in 2003 by taking a loan of rupees 7 lacs, then today you may have increased your net worth by about 40 lacs.

If one lives in US, it makes great sense to buy a house at USD 300,000 during recession rather than succumbing to pressure from wife and ending up buying a house at USD 600,000 during a boom. In 2009, the prices of houses in many places in US have dropped to almost 50% of their peak price in 2007. However, this situation and trend has not yet come to house prices in India.

I have seen Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) guys speaking about passive income. However, MLMs seem dirty and tiring, when Indians are involved.

If you have patents or have written books which generate royalties, those also add to your passive income.

Once a person has high net worth compared to his monthly expenses, all he has to do to create passive income, is to shift a portion of that wealth to create some rental income (say commercial rentals) or get returns from investments into businesses and stock markets. If you have a net worth of Rupees one crore (about quarter million USD), then one can have an annual passive income of rupees 8 to 10 lacs easily.

Having financial freedom can help one get into a fast track towards capitalising on one’s ideas and opportunities. If you still work, then you will do it as a choice and not as a compulsion. You can switch to careers, which may not be high paying, but more fulfilling. You can take breaks from work to go on a long holiday with family or take on studying for another degree in a different field. All this will add years to your happy life and will create prosperity and happiness for your family.

It requires an internal paradigm shift to achieve financial freedom. The keys to financial freedom do not exist in outside world, for example one’s salary. The keys lie in one’s internal belief system and the way a person is hardwired to his relationship with money. When a person shifts this paradigm of thinking and attitudes, he slowly starts journey towards financial freedom. Robert Kiyosaki has a game called cashflow101, which makes ones overcome some of these internal barriers and decision making habits that stop us from being financially free.

For many people, investment in markets or real estate is risky business. Well, not taking risks in life is the most risky way to live life.

So, the keys to financial freedom are:

1. Declare your intentions about your future net worth, when you are financially free. Be clear about the time frame. For example, declare, if 1 crore (USD quarter million) created in next 5 years makes you financially free.
2. Stick to your intention even if it appears impossible. Declarations are powerful and they open new possibilities and opportunities.
3. Reduce wasteful expenditure. Do not listen to moods, feelings and emotions.
4. Do not buy a house to stay.
5. Invest in stock markets and/or real estate for long term after sound research.
6. Play Cashflow game (board or software) by Robert Kiyosaki with friends or family.(link)
7. Spend some time learning fundamental and technical analysis, if you are investing in stock markets.
8. Develop contrarian skills and be independent in thinking.

Warnings:

Do not get into buying futures or options looking for quick bucks, if you are a beginner. You will get enough time to experiment with all these beautiful instruments as you grow up. Have patience.

Do not listen to your broker or investment banker. Most of them are incompetent losers, with bad finances of their own. Dictate terms to them and avoid being nice and considerate to their persistent requests.

Realise that Market news channels like CNBC and NDTV profit are basically a kind of entertainment channels even if they get best fund managers to give opinions. I often do opposite of what these news channels recommend. My investment banker and stock brokers hate me