Politics & Society
Sayan Bhattacharya

The Cool Queers

It seems everybody with a liberal worldview on social media has an opinion on all things LGBT. How else does one explain Anouk’s “lesbian ad” going viral, inspiring commentary of all stripes, with every news portal carrying at least two

Politics & Society
Pratiti Ganatra

Hashtag Hashtag

Let us go back in time a little. It is early 2009 and the world has just woken up to social media. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are still in the nascent stages of growth, each a few years old. And

Politics & Society
Sayan Bhattacharya

Je Suis Partha

3 Robinson Street has become a Disneyland of horror. The cash-strapped state government should immediately install a ticketing counter there. If the urban citizen can shell out hundreds of rupees to experience the chills in designer caves filled with plastic

Politics & Society
Soumabrata Chatterjee

The ‘Un-Human’ Internet

While researching for this article, I remembered one of the episodes in Marvel’s Avengers Assemble series that hadn’t struck me as relevant at the time. Captain America bars the rest of the gang from using the Internet during some team-building

Politics & Society
Shirsho Dasgupta

Ce n’est pas football

  “At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953, when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the

Politics & Society
Thomas Crowley

The Torrid, Horrid (and Sordid) Days of Summer

The summer is here in Delhi, which can only mean one thing: a marked increase in senseless violence. An article in The Times of India, published on May 11, reported that there have been ten recent incidents of road rage ending in

Politics & Society
Stuti Pachisia

The Internet Iceberg

When Freud segregated the areas of the mind into the conscious, unconscious and subconscious, he compared the unconscious mind to the bulk of the iceberg, submerged beneath the water. The metaphor exceeds beyond mere size when it is applied to

Politics & Society
Amit Sengupta

The Narcissism of the Selfie

  “And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” —Friedrich Nietzsche   “Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female, For me those that have been boys and that love women, For me the man that is

Politics & Society
Koli Mitra

The New Normal

There is an ancient technology called “text”: a visual representation of an idea or object, often by way of an intermediate set of symbols called “words”, which are phonetic representations of a thought or object. Humans built up this technology,

Politics & Society
Sayan Bhattacharya

Piercing the Silence

Let us begin by questioning some purported facts pertaining to the Internet. One such so-called fact is that the Internet is accessible to only the upper and middle classes. That this is far from the truth is easily discernible from