Women have menstruated since time immemorial. Women menstruate through war and famine, in shantytowns and all other manner of scarcity.

Articles that make the type of claims that the Friedman article did and that Boradsheet faithfully reported are a very western way of looking at what is a universal human condition and what women have figured out ways to manage under all kinds of challenging circumstances.

In India women use pieces of old saris as sanitary pads. Despite the shortage of water, they manage to wash the cloths and dry them so that they can be reused.

Not having sanitary pads as the reason for not attending school seems like a very implausible reason to me.

More likely, girls who have come of age are expected to do more work in the home, or they are being groomed for marriage etc.. That is, more likely there are other cultural taboos that are too hard to explain/justify to a western reporter.

The arguments you have advanced against using grape harvestors are not convincing at all. Ask yourself this: if illegal immigration was removed from the mix, would you feel the same misgivings about the creation/adoption of a new technology? I think not.

To follow your anti-technological-change logic is to conclude that all technological innovations starting from the assembly line in auto plants to the Internet are undesirable because they would cause upheaval and displacement.

Income inequality occurs when corporations don't pay a) a living wage as with illegal immigration (which has an effect on the imported workers' standard of living as well as that of the domestic workers) or b) a wage that fairly compensates for the true contribution of the worker, as we are seeing in the fact that wages have barely risen in recent years even though there have been siginificant productivity gains -- ironically, precisely because of tech innovations like the Internet!

SRK, as he is called by his fans, fits the current self-image of Indian youth - brash and oh-so- self-congratulatory. The video you have shown is about as authentically Indian as Thriller or Brittney Spears is all-American.

The old Bollywood movies and the new ones are different in two important ways: one, the old movies were true to the Indian ethos - progressive about religion and women's roles, while also being authentic about Indian cultural mores - respect for the elderly, and concern for the less privileged for instance. In contrast the new movies are all about being as "western" as possible, but wrapped in Indian platitudes. The other difference is that the old movies did not pretend to be anything more than what they were. In contrast the new movies are simply pretentious.

The tragedy is that the purveyors of these movies and the viewers are not even aware that what they are all about is pure drivel. Bengali art house cinema may be boring, but the alternative does not have to be this! I say allow on-screen kissing if it will spare us the lewd thrusting sequences!

Andrew does a disservice - the word "pandering" comes to mind - when he presents this silly movie as some sort of high mark of globalization. The movie has higher US box office receipts only because more of its target audience lives in the U.S. thanks to another canard - "high-skill" visa-holders (and their low-skill spouses) filling a worker shortage that does not necessarily exist.

The real tragedy is that this so-called globalization is debasing/destroying the true culture in the rush to wannabe "global".

Not to blame the victim of course... but when I first read the Warner article, I thought that somewhere in there would be a mention of how parents are losing control BECAUSE of the internet.

Should a 13 year old girl have the independence and privacy needed to carry on an online relationship with a 16 year old boy? Shouldn't there be more contact, interaction, communication between the girl and her parents so that the parents know what's going on in their daughter's life? Shouldn't they be able to discuss things that are going on in their daughter's life and set limits, help her channel her passions and handle the challenges?

I am surprised that neither Warner, nor Broadsheet nor most of the commenters have touched on this issue.

There are all kinds of bad things in the world. As parents, we should be the first and last line of defense against those forces. If we don't, or cannot do that, then there is more wrong with our culture and our society than one psycho mother.