Over the last two decades, roughly coinciding with the period of economic liberalization, there has been a dramatic transformation of India’s ‘mediascape’ – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the US, to
One wonders what Gordon Gekko would have thought about the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement. A minor distraction perhaps, as it is indeed true that despite many a boom and bust, the great wheels of capitalism have continued turning with ever
Never before in the history of independent India have so many once-influential politicians, businesspersons and bureaucrats spent – in certain cases, still spending – time behind bars on corruption charges. Yet the current United Progressive Alliance government is widely perceived as
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, The ten thick worms his fingers,his words like measures of weight, The
What does one say about a woman who transcends regional barriers, overcomes colonial hangups, challenges dominant nationalist ethos, skews gender imbalances to her favour, prominently uses her privileges to empower the oppressed, and becomes a rebel with a cause; without
If she chose to, she could have led a life of luxury. Born to a deputy magistrate and married at the age of 15 to a deputy collector, Rama Devi instead decided to sacrifice every bit of her comfort
“No amount of popular, sanctioned media is anti-colonial. They are all consciously racist products that operate as systemic defense mechanisms. Decolonization can only come with unsanctioned media.” – Jared A. Ball “I Mix What I Like” (AK Press, 2011, $14.95)
The fact that Stalin needs to be defended at all is reason enough to analyze the dominant intellectual climate pervading today. He was the chief architect of the first socialist state in the world, he was the bravest general who
The space of a city is the emblematic theatre of modernity. Somewhere amid the solidity of the buildings and the monuments, the mobility of the construction scaffoldings and the jostling vehicles, the interstitiality of the park benches and the work
Marx displayed great disdain towards philosophers and intense optimism towards philosophy. Unlike the materialists before him, he treated philosophy as the practical, revolutionary knowledge which needed to be acted upon, in order to change the world, and in the process,