AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories From India

After a series of harrowing days, the siege of Mumbai is over. Mumbai police released on Sunday what it hoped would be the final tally of dead and wounded in the city’s terror attacks: 188 dead and 313 wounded. The ramatic attacks sharpened international attention on a major hub of India's economy, a powerful engine that is pulling the country away from poverty, illiteracy, and brutal lives cut short.

On this December 1st, the 20th annual World AIDS Day, we’ll look at a much quieter force hobbling the country: the estimated 2 to 3.1 million people affected with HIV/AIDS. The human cost of the crisis there is complicated by a lack of understanding about how HIV is spread, and by the systematic poverty, discrimination and corruption that permeates Indian culture.

Negar Akhavi is a journalist and editor of AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories From India. It brings together 16 acclaimed writers who encounter the sex workers, truck drivers, transvestites, infected spouses, and others whose voices have largely been silent. The collection begins with a foreward by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who writes about conventional wisdom and "half-understanding," as he puts it, creating great gaps in our reasoning about why people get AIDS. The book is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Negar Akhavi joins us from The Christian Science Monitor studios in Washington, D.C. We're also joined by Aman Sethi, a Delhi-based reporter with the fortnightly newsmagazine Frontline. He traveled with some truckers along a lone east-west national highway, who play a big role as so-called "bridge populations" in the spread of HIV.

(Photo courtesy of World Bank Photo Collection)