The press conference was jointly organised by the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin (GOPIO) and the Indian High Commission at Gaston Court, Chaguanas.

Nelson Island was the main entry point for over 147,000 labourers who came to this country from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar between 1845 and 1917 to work on the sugar plantations and to rescue the failing agricultural capacity.

Trinidad and Tobago also houses the Indo-Caribbean Museum, the only facility in the western world to preserve the instruments, religious texts, tools, jewellery, cooking utensils of the people who migrated from India.

Gays, lesbians, transgender and bisexuals put up plays and also took to streets to participate in the `Rainbow Pride Walk’ to make people aware about their plight.

“The reason for organising this rally is that people look down upon us in the society. There is a stigma attached to sexual minorities in our society. We want to live with respect,” said Tulu.

Members of the sexual minority community said they wanted the society to treat them with respect and wanted equal rights like any other citizen.

“The purpose is to make people aware that the society in India, in Orissa, in Bhubaneswar, – wherever lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender are, – every where, they have equal rights like any other citizen of this country. India is a democratic country. We have the right to express our problems, our concerns to larger society and we expect the civil society, the private sector and even the NGO sector to understand our problems better,” said Pawan Dhall, organiser of the march.

The `Rainbow Pride Walk’ held annually aims to draw sexual orientation, gender identity and associated sexual health issues into the larger human rights movement in the country.

Earlier studies have suggested that genes influencing sexual orientation in men also make women more likely to reproduce.

Andrea Camperio Ciani and colleagues at the University of Padua, Italy, showed that the female relatives of homosexual men tend to have more children, suggesting that genes on the X chromosome are responsible.

Now the team has shown that the same is true for bisexuality.

To reach the conclusion, the researchers asked 239 men to fill out questionnaires about their families and their past sexual experiences. On the basis of their answers, the men were classified as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual.

The results showed that the maternal aunts, grandmothers and mothers of both bisexual men and homosexuals had more children than those of heterosexual men.

“We notice that there is an increase in crime in our country and this can be attributed to foreigners and jobless Malaysians,” he said.

Malaysians working abroad too are facing problems.

Ismail said Singapore had indicated that it would retrench about 500,000 workers and some of them would be Malaysians.

As a proactive measure, the Malaysian government has asked these workers to get themselves registered with the nearest labour office.

As of November, about 28,000 jobless Malaysians had registered with the labour department, and so far, the government has managed to find jobs for about only 6,000.

A recent report in The Sun newspaper said between 2,000 to 3,000 jobless Malaysians get registered with the ministry every month. Given the global meltdown, the figures are expected to rise in the coming months.

But the government also warned that deteriorating labour conditions could deal a blow to recovery hopes.

The nation’s April industrial output rose 5.2 percent from the previous month, the best showing in over five decades, the report released Friday said.

The data showed signs of recovery in domestic and overseas demand for manufactured goods such as cars and semiconductors, the government’s preliminary report showed.

With the April figures, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry upgraded its assessment of industrial production for the first time in 20 months.

“In the government and private sectors, people in the age group of 55-65 had shelved their plans of voluntary retirement in order to cope with the economical stress,” said Prithvi Haldea of the Agewell Foundation.

“It was also found that 60 percent of the respondents owned stocks and mutual funds and over 80 percent lost money in them. Therefore, 60 percent of the elderly have changed their investment strategies to ones which involve less risk like the National Saving Certificate, fixed deposits and Kisan Vikas Patra,” he added.

The study also found that 52 percent of the elderly in the age group of 55-75 years have also postponed their pilgrimage plans, 60 percent have postponed any expensive purchase and 61 percent have given up any recreational activity.

Sean Anderson, a visiting professor in the University of Illinois College of Law, says that employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) are the biggest threat, with even heavier investment in company stock than the 401(k) plan that gobbled up workers’ savings when energy giant Enron Corp. collapsed amid scandal in 2001.

In an article, to be published in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Anderson points out that workers whose employers have ESOPs typically have no choice about whether to invest in company stock.

“ESOPs have a lot of intuitive appeal – the idea of having workers own a piece of the company they’re working for. But they’re Enron on steroids. At the end of the day, they put workers at terrible risk and more often than not work as a tool that benefits the company, not employees,” he said.

According to him, ESOPs are dicey even beyond the doomsday scenario of a company bankruptcy that strips away workers’ savings along with their jobs and benefits.

Anderson says ESOPs concentrate investments in a single firm rather than diversify across a wide range of companies, industries and even geographic areas to minimize risk.