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Reading the snapshots

They point to the systematic attempts by those in power to unwrite or rewrite our history, undo our syncretic culture and upend our secular values and the voices rising against these moves.

Spiritual revolutionaries of the South

Basavanna. His vachanas (prose-lyrics) are replete with caustic comments on the insitution of caste. Here, a statue of him in Bangalore.

Bhakti as social critique: lessons from Tamil and Kannada.

The defamation saga

The first page of

When truth became a valid defence against libel.

C.P. Chandrasekhar

Wicked loans & bad banks

A trail of defaults is ensuring that the high NPA ratio of banks is not stabilising as the RBI expected it would once assets misclassified as restructured and standard are recognised as non-performing.

UDAY fails to rise

More C.P. Chandrasekhar »

Unmediated

The media language game 2

In television debates there is the context of a game resembling, as Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, a wrestling match with its own set of rules and gestural and body language. Bourdieu’s profile of the “interventionist” moderator will strike an instant chord with anyone who has had to suffer him on the show, whether on it or viewing it.

Preoccupations

How poor is poor? 1

The exclusion criteria adopted to determine the poor are too expansive and exclude many households that are likely to be poor, while the inclusion criteria are too limited and may not have captured many such households and individuals, especially vagrants and homeless people. Here, a slum clearance board tenement in Salem.

The strategy of creating binaries of “poor” and “non-poor” from the household listings in the Socio Economic and Caste Census, 2011, is beset with problems of unfair exclusion and unjustified inclusion and is best avoided.

Sashi Kumar

Post-Trump press-pective

Donald Trump at the February 16 news conference at the White House.

What direction the current standoff between President Donald Trump and the press in the United States will take is important for the future of democracy.

New Age gurudom

The tyranny of populism

More Sashi Kumar »

Jayati Ghosh

Music in the Romantic imagination

The book deals with the quintessential Romantic composer Robert Schumann.

The music of the Romantic era was characterised by the unbridling of passion, the suppression of melody, an emphasis on spontaneity and a forgiving approach to asymmetry, but its most striking feature was its close and explicit relationship with literary trends of the time.

A universal basic income in India?

More Jayati Ghosh »

Pages: 1 « 1 2 3 4 5 › »

New Age gurudom 9

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev.

Jet-set gurus and godmen (and women) with their pretence of rarefied thinking push religion into regressive identity politics and into a means of mass mobilisation for political purposes.

The tyranny of populism

The way the jallikkattu imbroglio has been handled may lead to different, perhaps undesirable, outcomes in similar situations where the judiciary, the people and the government are involved in a face-off.

Column

Trump’s protectionist charade

At the Ford Motor Company's assembly plant in Cuautitlan Izcalli, Mexico, in October 2009. A third of all exports from Mexico to the U.S. are cars or automobile components.

An economic team that is adept at pro-worker and protectionist rhetoric will provide Trump the lever to go ahead with his pro-business populism.

Economic Perspectives

Digital mirage

In the absence of a digital base in India, the road to a near-cashless economy seems fairly long and the journey is likely to be slow and tedious. But that has not stopped the Prime Minister from giving the “Digital India” mission a whole new dimension.

Anecdotal recaps 1

Chief Minister Jayalalithaa addressing the media in Bengaluru on November 29, 2012, after a meeting on the Cauvery water issue with Karnataka Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar.

Recalling three brushes with Jayalalithaa, each of which, in different ways, gives one a sense of the formidable and sparkling person behind the image, and remembering Cho Ramaswamy, the enfant terrible of Tamil Nadu and national politics.

Preoccupations

A universal basic income in India? 1

In Gumla, Jharkhand, tribal people attending the public hearing on the Food Security Act on June 14, 2016. The highly gendered access to food in most poor Indian families makes a targeted cash transfer system especially troubling.

Globally, the concept of a universal basic income, or UBI, is seen as a non-targeted provision in addition to existing services in health, nutrition, education and so on, but in India much of the talk around it is also directed at attacking “wasteful subsidies” and even the food security programme and the employment guarantee programme.

Economic Perspectives

UDAY fails to rise

Caught in a peculiar web of debt, Jharkhand defaults on payments for power purchased from DVC and this comes as a blow to the Central government’s Ujwal Discom Assurance Yojana.

Buckling under pressure

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley with RBI Governor Urjit Patel (left) at the Financial Stability and Development Council meeting in New Delhi on January 5. The RBI has allowed itself to become a subservient political tool in the hands of the government.

There is a depressing erosion in the credibility of the major institutions that are vital for the functioning of Indian democracy as they are bent to the will of the ruling dispensation.

Preoccupations

Digital dreams

A queue outside a bank at Melappalayam in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu on Decemner 12..

The government’s new goalpost of a cashless economy ignores the presence of the large unbanked population that will not gain from incentives being offered for digital transactions.

Economic Perspectives

Budget after demonetisation

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley coming out of North Block before the presentation of the Budget in New Delhi on February 29.

If the government adheres to deficit targets, it could imply a cut in capital or social expenditure, which will only worsen the contraction set off by the recall of high-value currencies.

Pages: 1 « 1 2 3 4 5 › »

Columns
Recent Articles

Wicked loans & bad banks

Music in the Romantic imagination

Post-Trump press-pective

New Age gurudom

A universal basic income in India?

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