pass the roti on the left hand side

Nicholas Kristoff seems like a nice guy.  He has on-the-ground experience witnessing - albeit as a NYT journalist - some of the worst abuses that people- and particularly women- face in the poorer parts of the world.  He has brought attention to issues like trafficking, health, labour conditions, and poverty to a greater degree than most white male journalists working for a source as conservomainstream as the New York Times probably would have - and he has done it with a level of human detail that makes these issues moving, rather than eye-glazingly boring.

I. A few years ago, I was walking down the street near the East Village with some colleagues from various organizations when a woman came up to us and stopped us.  "Have you heard about Gujara?" she asked me.  She did this without saying hello, introducing herself, or saying her name--which all makes sense, because she was, in fact, a total stranger.  She just happened to want to talk to me about the emotionally loaded topic of the Hindutva pogroms in Gujarat without knowing me, where I come from, or what my views might be.