“Why do we want to fit everyone in our narrative of what is civilized?…’
Tag: india
-Essay- MUMBAI — In my memories of my grandmother, one image of her comes to my mind: that of a widow with a tonsured head, wrapped in a dull brown cotton sari worn in traditional style, a blank forehead without the usual vermilion powder or kumkum, bare neck, empty ears and hands unadorned and shorn off all jewelry. Her ankles and feet were bare too — without the traditional anklets or silver rings worn on the toes of both feet — the symbol of married women. I also have a very vivid story of my grandmother etched in my memory. […]
The digital relationship between the Asian neighbors has rapidly evolved over the past decade, and India must now think strategically about China’s ambitions in the way Western countries have been forced to do.
Somewhere in between confusion and wonder is not a bad place to be at all.
The normalization of sexual harassment and inequality in the workplace is keeping women from going to work, and holding back the rise of India’s economy.
Trump’s trade war with China could be a golden opportunity for India. But first, it’ll need to revisit its trade policies and regulatory framework.
In the West, the era of grand, strategic pacts between nation-states seems to have come and gone. But in Asia, the trend may just be catching on.
NEW DELHI — In an article in The Atlantic, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen express their concerns about the perceived slowdown of scientific progress. With “more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before,” they ask whether the rising investment in scientific research is yielding proportionately rising dividends, or whether we are “investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?” Yet, as they concede, it’s unclear how to measure the rate of scientific progress. Much ink has been spilled on the misplaced reification of the Nobel […]
MUMBAI — They say that human memory tends to shut out trauma. But the pain caused by the attack 10 years ago on Mumbai will always be difficult to forget. What happened on November 26, 2008 was an act of pure terrorism: Defenseless civilians sought out and gunned down over three days in the glare of national television. For this reason, the “26/11” incident has been a watershed in India’s attitudes towards terrorism. It hardened the country’s attitude towards terrorists and militants of all stripes. Further, it has made any kind of a dialogue process with Islamabad difficult, given how […]
NEW DELHI — When Shehla Rashid, a student leader in India, tweeted to welcome Irish singer Sinead O’Connor into the Islamic fold, she could not have expected much of a controversy. Islam, like Christianity, is open to new converts, and it’s not unusual to welcome new members. The attacks were led not by the usual right-wing, however, but by liberals. Rashid was accused not just of being a hypocrite, but of being the “other side of the coin of ghar-wapsi , activities of converting followers to Hinduism. This charge was reiterated by Pawan Khera, a spokesman for the Congress Party: […]
Unlike countries like the US or even China, India doesn’t have a national repository to store fossil finds.
The expanding movement to denounce sexual assault is a symptom of the problem, not the cure.
In his series Will My Mannequin be Home When I Return, Indian photographer Arko Datto explores “what it means to be in direct confrontation with the night.” [youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/O5EreW_gDHo expand=1] Untitled — © Arko Datto / OneShot By experimenting with flashing light and saturated color schemes, Arko Datto reveals how cultural and political tensions are reflected in the darkness of his native country’s nighttime. The project — shot over the span of four years — was recently displayed at the seventh edition of UNSEEN Amsterdam. UNSEEN has now expanded into an all-year-round platform for contemporary photography. OneShot is a […]
Residents of Sadhan village have a different story to tell
DANTEWADA — Three times a day, Bharthi fetches grain and water in clean aluminum buckets to feed her black chickens. She unlocks the grilled doors of the rectangular cage, which at around 20ft (6m) long is occupied by 260 noisy young birds. After filling a dozen bowls scattered across the cage floor or placed on the waist-high cement pillars that double as perching spots, she checks the chicks, counting them and gauging their well-being. She pays special attention to the ones whose behavior has been out of character in the previous few weeks. Together with 10 other local women, Bharthi […]
Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists gathered in Gangtok, India earlier this month for an unlikely meeting of the minds.
NEW DELHI — A year after the Harvey Weinstein story first broke, India’s own #MeToo movement is finally taking off. Working women are coming forward on social media with stories and details of various forms of sexual harassment and misconduct. These stories, painful as they are to process, are necessary to read so as to engage with some important questions that they raise: What is it that keeps the perpetrators of sexual harassment and misconduct continually in positions of power? What keeps victims silent? And above all else, what steps need to be taken to remedy this? One often overlooked […]
Saying that we believe survivors doesn’t cost us much, but it gives a lot of women the validation they need to believe in themselves and their version of what happened.
The number of children studying in English in India increased 273% between 2003 and 2011. But there is also a push for Hindi over regional dialects. Child development should be the guide, not politics or status.
Blame for the failure to take legislative responsibility for LGBT rights must be squarely divided among political parties across the spectrum.
Indian authorities are prepared to spruce up the world famous monument and restore its ancient hue — provided they can figure out just which shade of pale it really was.
A right not to starve is as basic a fundamental human right as there can be.
Since June 23, the Indian state of Maharashtra has been verbalizing distributors and users of non-reusable plastic. In Mumbai, more than two hundred inspectors are on the hunt.
The world’s biggest mobile phone factory is slated to open in India, but the country still buys its best electronics from abroad.
Nathuram Godse, author of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, is the object of a quasi-religious cult among Hindu extremists. In the Maharashtra state, his great-nephew is spreading his message.
It’s not just Donald Trump’s wall. Around the world, people are erecting new and increasingly strict lines of division.
A case study of Angul in Odisha highlights just how much urban centers rely on lower castes when it comes to sanitation.
The Uttarakhand floods reflected the damage we had dealt to the fragile Himalayan ecosystem. Five years later, we may are even closer to an irreversible catastrophe.
NEW DELHI — The ban on highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs) currently being debated in India will not only protect the environment and improve the public health but will also achieve another rarely acknowledged goal: a rapid and major reduction in the number of Indians dying from suicide. The Supreme Court, which is currently deliberating the case challenging the government’s delay in banning HHPs identified by the Anupam Verma Committee, has a major role to play. The case emerged following a public interest litigation by Kavitha Kuruganti and others filed in 2017. Statistics on suicide are notoriously unreliable due to stigma […]
Indians are wild for the World Cup, even if their men’s team has yet to participate. And they’ve got no qualms about going all out for other country’s team.
MUMBAI — As far as Indian cities go, Mumbai is probably the most free-spirited of them all. The streets are bustling till the wee hours, the people are generally more friendly (believe me — I’m from New Delhi) and, as a woman, I feel safe when I go out to restaurants and bars. Provided they let me in, that is. On what was a normal Thursday evening in Lower Parel, a colleague and I decided to go for a walk after work before we headed home. Passing a resto-bar, we decided to duck in for a quick drink. The establishment, […]
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Musical Family Portrait
This family was looking at musicians playing outside the beautiful Jain temple of Ranakpur, in western India. Only after pressing the shutter did I realize the kid had noticed me, and was smiling at my camera.
The industrial enclave of Narol is a beehive of activity and a major source of employment for low-skilled female workers. Yet finding a job is one thing, surviving it is another.
Bright ideas to limit ways that motherhood so often leads to gender pay gaps and blocked careers for female scientists.
NEW DELHI — Despite India’s recent progress, its international influence is not commensurate with its size, might and tradition. India is often criticized for being unable to punch above its weight, or even according to its weight. Time and again, we have noticed that economic strength and military might have their limitations. The potential for Indian soft power, however, is enormous, but has remained underutilized. On the occasion of Gautama Buddha’s birth anniversary, I posit that India should reclaim Buddha and his philosophy, including his practice of Vipassana, as an Indian ideological, philosophical and lifestyle export to the world at […]
Women’s bodies have become proxy battlegrounds for prejudice and intolerance, a brutal means of imposing power over a community or caste.
NEW DELHI — In the uproar over the southwestern state of Karnataka“s decision to have a separate flag for the state, New Delhi-based television channels warned that the move was a threat to national unity in India. Meanwhile, Bengaluru-based Kannada-language channels largely hailed the move, as simply a worthy symbol of Kannada pride. This latest example of the cocoons that hinder both journalism and India as a whole, depending on where people are looking from. This is not about patriotism or about being Indian, but about a disconnect in understanding India between the capital of New Delhi and a southern […]
Stephanie Schrader, curator of a new Getty Museum exhibition, says the Dutch master was inspired by Indian imagery of empire, trade and luxury.
NEW DELHI — A recent photo posted on Facebook by the Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology, Ashutosh Sharma, featured 41 heads of Indian educational and research institutions. It didn’t take long for Shobana Narasimhan, a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, to point out that not a single one was a woman. Only 20% of tenured faculty positions in Indian educational and research institutions are held by women. Other numbers are even more skewed: only 12 women are Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences (there are 197 men); only 3 women […]
The power of love, or the celebration of a future society that values spiritual oneness rather than patriarchal divisions, is the ultimate source of resistance.