Slave Trade in This Day and Age?

Read the following news in The Times of India recently. Sorry, I didn’t note the date, careless me. Has something to do with growing old, I guess. (-;hmmm;-)

“Mumbai: Seven persons, including a woman, who had come to push four girls into the flesh trade, were arrested by the Vile Parle police on Wednesday afternoon.

Acting on a tip-off, a police team discuised themselves as customers and invited the sellers – identified as Kutubdin Hussain, Mohammed Mistry, Mohammed Shaukat, Vijay Mandal, Ajit Gazi, Nizam Ali, Noorjahan Hussain and Namita Mistry – to the Bawa International hotel near the domestic airport at Santa Cruz. As soon as they arrived with the four girls in a private car, the police arrested them. The four girls who were to be sold have been sent to a rehabilitation center at Chembur.” – Times News Network.

Seems hard to believe, but trafficking in women is the world’s third biggest racket after gun running, and drugs. Sorry to note that a major center of such trafficking is India where girls are procured from villages with promises of marriage by handsome dudes and then sold to brothels.

This also forms the background theme of my novel “The Love Song of Luke Varkey.” This novel is the story of two loveless migrants who meet in a Mumbai pub on pure happenstance and, thereafter, the man is madly in love, with the woman, who else? Then, by a play of fate, they are sucked away into two types of still extend slave trading rackets that flourish in India. Id est, the slave trading of women to brothels (mentioned in the news story above) in Mumbai and the slave trading of men as cheap labor to the Persian Gulf countries (I worked there!).

Seems mankind will ever be haunted by the specter of slave trade and slavery despite holistic pontifications to the contrary.
Trafficking|India|Mumbai