“We have to take over spaces because we are not going to be invited in.”
Tag: India
Living with the Future in South Asia
For decades, South Asian architecture was impelled by the promise of a new society after empire. Now, such buildings are being demolished.
Borders Cast Long Shadows on Nations: Talking with Malini Sur
“Borders continue to gather life’s promises, even when walls and checkpoints brutally divide nations and societies.”
“Mississippi Masala” @30: Revisiting a Film Classic in Authoritarian Times
What might it mean to forge a politics explicitly based in the places we are, rather than a politics of the places from which we came?
Hindu Nationalism: A Movement, Not a Mandate
Most authoritarian populists in power across the world are politicians, at the helm of parties that have won elections. Modi is more than that.
Tolerance by Accident, Trust by Design
Today, trade and globalization often reinforce the incentives for coercion and violence. But what might the history of India reveal about the economic conditions of toleration?
Episode 4: Data & Infrastructure
Whose values get embedded into the algorithms that increasingly govern our lives? How are these data infrastructures complicating what it means to be human?
Hope and Capital: Talking India with Ravinder Kaur
“Anyone who comes in the way of the ‘good times’ becomes a threat to capital, and to the nation-state itself.”
Ethnographic Fictions: Talking with Megha Majumdar
Anthropology’s attention to the granular texture of someone’s life is a beautiful training for being a fiction writer.
Global Inequality and the Corona Shock
COVID-19 is the first truly comprehensive crisis of the Anthropocene era, affecting virtually everyone on the planet.
The Vulnerable Foundations of India’s Urbanism
In Delhi—a city of 17 million people—7.2 million residents already qualified for food aid before the pandemic. After, the numbers skyrocketed.
Merit Must Fall
What does “merit” mean in a context—like India—where caste pervades public life?
India in COVID-19: A Tragedy Foretold
The lockdown had terrible consequences on India’s informal economy, and will deepen the socioeconomic inequalities that divide the country.
Silicon Valley Is Not a Place
Silicon Valley has no mystical powers. It gets away with being thought of as apolitical simply because few have called its bluff.
India’s Fans and India’s Future
Obsession is one of the hallmarks of love in Indian cinema: specifically, a love that breaks down borders.
The Ruse of Fiction: An Interview with Amitava Kumar
Amitava Kumar’s recent novel, Immigrant, Montana, tells the story of Kailash, an Indian graduate student who ...
Fill the Halls: Space and Possibility in Lahore, Pakistan
Lahore today can feel like a city of security checks and gated passages, tall walls and ...
Risky Choices: Women and Cabs in Hyderabad, India
The arrival of app-based ride-hailing in Indian cities has made a significant difference in the way the middle class, especially young men and women ...
India’s Youth: Small Chances, Big Dreams
The first time someone recommended Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World to me, I rolled my eyes at the title. I wondered ...
The Banality of Empire
One of the basic paradoxes of British imperialism is that even as it relied so fundamentally on violence, it insisted on presenting itself as opposed to violence, indeed as dedicated to stamping it ...