Tag: India

  • Reporting the Covid Pandemic from the Global South

    This piece in The Open Notebook delves into the experiences of “journalists in India and throughout the Global South” who were covering the Covid pandemic and the challenges they faced (and overcame) “as they sought to tailor coverage of a global pandemic to their unique, regional audiences.” 

    This is how the authors of the piece frame the commonalities in these experiences: 

    “There was the language issue, of course: The world’s 8 billion people speak over 7,000 languages, yet English is the lingua franca of science and scientific research, and many other languages lack even the terminology to convey science’s more complicated technical concepts. But newsrooms also had to bridge the social and cultural divides that often separate the science world from the communities they serve. Meanwhile, they were battling an infodemic of false and misleading claims, which spread across borders, continents, countries, and into even the most remote communities almost as quickly as the virus itself.”

    The authors spoke to journalists from India, Nigeria, China, Peru, Colombia, Philipines, and Kenya for the report. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Similarities Between India and China

    This piece in the Asian Labour Review compares the economic histories and current economic policies of India and China, arguing that the two countries are very much mirror images of each other. 

    Historically speaking, the author argues, the two countries have “more similarities than often acknowledged.” For instance: 

    “From inheriting largely rural, agrarian societies, to seeking similar goals for their population in terms of development and industrial modernisation or adoption of command planning strategies, there are striking patterns of convergence between India and China. 

    One prominent aspect in this comparison is the global neoliberal turn from the latter half of the 1980s and the restructuring of labour. 

    The advent of market reforms, along with the state’s retreat from an interventionist role, is predominant in labour relations for both India and China. Despite minor variations, the changing nature of the state-labour relations and the declining power of labour as a political subject is conspicuous across the spectrum.”

    The competition between the two countries is related to the larger global economic system: 

    “As transnational corporations outsourced their production, there has been tremendous competition among countries in the Global South to attract these investments. Governments in the Global South provide companies with infrastructure, resources and incentives to embed their production facilities in their territorial jurisdiction.”

    This is why we see (sometimes failed) “attempts to weaken labour protections for the sake of attracting transnational corporations” like trying “to extend working hours per day from 8 to 12.”

    The author makes this interesting observation about China: “‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ may continue to hold ground as a political-ideological euphemism, but capitalism is living reality in China’s economic transformation.” Recently, “[i]n response to rising labour costs, supply chain disruption and labour unrest, Apple and Foxconn have tried to diversify their manufacturing facilities to other geographies away from heavy dependency on China.” India is very much “in the race to parallel China, if not completely eclipse it,” with Indian policymakers “increasingly looking to copy the China playbook to shape the country’s growth and development.”

    The following lines perfectly sum up the central argument of the piece:

    “The nation-state narratives about India and China, centering on their geopolitical competition and itinerant border tensions, tend to emphasize differences and divergences more than convergences and parallels. There are admittedly vast differences in their political and social systems. But recognising points of convergence allows us to more fully explore their trajectories in all their complexities.”

    Read the full article here.

  • The Failure of the East India Company's Efforts to Pedestalise Robert Clive

    In this article for Scroll, art historian Jennifer Howes shows “how the East India Company tried to cultivate a strong, positive reputation in London by commissioning artworks” through two portraits of the colonist Robert Clive that the company commissioned, “showing him as a hero.” One of these was a neo-classical statue that depicted Clive “in Roman military costume” and the other was a painting that depicted him as a philanthropist in an effort “to heal his toxifying reputation.” The latter was commissioned after the reputation built by the former had collapsed: 

    “In the late 1760s he returned to Britain, bringing with him a staggering personal fortune that he had amassed in Bengal. Regarded as one of the richest men in Europe, he conspicuously bought properties in England and Wales, and spared no expense on rebuilding and furnishing these new residences. Clive’s spending spree coincided with reports of the Bengal Famine, a catastrophe that killed about 10 million people. The source of Clive’s fortune came under scrutiny and his character was aggressively criticised by the British public.”

    Of the failure of the East India Company’s attempts at spreading propaganda, the author says: “such manoeuvring, particularly in Georgian London’s critical atmosphere, could also backfire.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Illusion of The Self: From Eastern Philosophy to Neuroscience

    This piece for Big Think by a neuropsychologist discusses how experimental science may be coming to the same conclusion that Eastern philosophy has provided for more than 2,500 years: “that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing.” 

    The author points out that in Western thought ““I” represents the idea of our individual self” and “[t]his I/ego is what we think of as our true selves, and this individual self is the experiencer and the controller of things like thoughts, feelings, and actions.” However, the author challenges us, “The next time there is an intrusive thought, consider the very fact that your being unable to stop it proves that there is no inner self that controls it.” 

    Eastern schools of thought like Buddhism, Taoism, and the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, on the other hand, say “that this idea of “me” is a fiction, although a very convincing one” and that “the concept of the self is seen as the result of the thinking mind”: 

    “The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.” 

    The author points out that several studies over the years “have shown that the left side of the brain excels at creating an explanation for what’s going on, even if it isn’t correct, even in people with normal brain functioning”:

    “The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.”

     Importantly, despite the progress in the field of brain mapping, the self has never been mapped as a function of the mind. The author argues: 

    “While various neuroscientists have made the claim that the self resides in this or that neural location, there is no real agreement among the scientific community about where to find it — not even whether it might be in the left or the right side of the brain. Perhaps the reason we can’t find the self in the brain is because it isn’t there.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Scam Involving International Missed Calls on WhatsApp

    As this report in The Indian Express explains, “many WhatsApp users in India have reported receiving a spate of missed calls from international numbers” and “[t]he scam has caught the government’s attention.”

    This is how the scam works: 

    “The scam typically involves defrauding unsuspecting people on platforms such as WhatsApp, where the victim, who responds to a missed call, is promised money for YouTube video likes or a positive Google review. The scammer makes initial payments to the victim, who is invited to join a group, typically on Telegram app. The victim is encouraged to “invest” small amounts for bigger payouts, but after a considerable sum has been invested, they are blocked from the group.” 

    Further investigation by The Indian Express revealed that “the fraudster who intends to target multiple people doesn’t even need to manually call each of them” as “automatic dialer software” can make multiple calls to an entire database of numbers “in one go.” 

    Reportedly, experts have “pointed to holes in WhatsApp’s security systems” but “[a] detailed questionnaire sent to WhatsApp on whether it was aware that its platform was being used by an ecosystem that created fake accounts to scam people and if it was working to strengthen its firewall remained unanswered till the time of publication of” the report. 

    Read the full report here.

  • South Asia Open Archives Now Contain More Than 1 Million Pages

    As this piece in JSTOR Daily reports, the South Asia Open Archives “now offers more than one million pages of digitized primary source material.” 

    The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) website describes the archive as:

    “… a collaborative, open-access resource for research, teaching, and learning about South Asia. The member-driven collection includes historical and contemporary sources from and about the region in arts, humanities, social sciences, history of science, and other fields in English and other South Asian languages.”

    As the JSTOR Daily article points out, the archive was “launched in 2019 by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)” and since then “[m]ore than two dozen institutions have contributed to this ever-growing archive.” 

    The Centerfor Research Libraries “is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries” based in Chicago, Illinois. 

    Read the JSTOR Daily report on SAOA here. Browse the open-access South Asia Open Archives here.

  • The Conflict in Myanmar

    According to this report in The Diplomat, “a group of Myanmar’s neighbors, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Laos, seem adamant about treating the junta like a single sovereign entity and nursing it back to strength.” This is the same “military junta that attempted to seize control of Myanmar in February 2021.” 

    While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which had “been placed by the United Nations and the wider international community in the driving seat of international Myanmar policy,” had been “inching towards a more moderate and critical position on Myanmar,” Thailand is reported to have “launched a separate track of talks aimed at undermining this approach.” 

    According to the author, an obvious flaw in this approach is that the “junta is just not able to implement its political or economic decisions across most of the country’s territory.” Some maps are said to “demonstrate just how limited the Myanmar army’s movement has become since the coup, as a result of the widespread nationwide uprising.” Having been on the ground, the author reports: “The situation varies greatly on the ground, but the maps provide an accurate bird’s eye picture.” 

    Meanwhile, the army has resorted to all sorts of violence including rape and terror attacks. “Millions of people in resistance areas live under constant remote surveillance by drones, knowing that at any moment this could be followed by a devastating air force sortie.”

    Read the full report here.

  • The Ranajit Guha Entry in The Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism

    In the wake of the death of Subaltern Studies pioneer Ranajit Guha, scholar Alf Gunvald Nilsen has shared an open-access version of the entry he wrote on Guha for TheRoutledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism.

    Read the full entry here.

  • Excavated Buddha Statue Seen as Proof of Trade Between Ancient Egypt and India

    As this report by English-language Egyptian news portal Ahram Online states, archaeologists from a joint “Polish-American archaeological mission” have found a statue depicting the Buddha at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Berenike while excavating in a temple complex “dedicated to the Goddess Isis.”

    The find, along with other excavations on the site, like “an inscription in Sanskrit” and “two second-century CE coins” from a central Indian kingdom, is said to show “a connection between Egypt and India during the Roman Empire.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Irresponsible Nuclear Posturing by Politicians in India and Pakistan

    This piece in South Asian Voices, “an online policy platform for strategic analysis on South Asia” published by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., argues that “irresponsible statements” about the use of nuclear weapons by politicians in Pakistan and India over the last few years “contribute to cultivating nuclear war psychology” instead of promoting a responsible “stigmatize the bomb” strategy. 

    Politicians from Pakistan and India making irresponsible remarks about nuclear weapons is said to “reinforce South Asian atomic culture”: 

    “This atomic culture has facilitated the acquisition of nuclear technology with chauvinistic pride and a symbol of supreme power for political independence. It has limited space for negotiating potential threats of nuclear exchanges and shared responsibilities of hostile SNW [strategic nuclear weapon]. For instance, New Delhi and Islamabad have not been able to build robust institutional arrangements for Nuclear Confidence Building Measures (NCBMs).” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Avoiding Deliberations in Policy-making in the Name of Efficiency

    In this editorial for the Deccan Herald, policy researcher Yamini Aiyar warns against the tendency to problematise the bureaucracy only as a means to undermine democratic processes. 

    As she writes: 

    “Too often, debates on State capacity veer in the direction of setting up a false dichotomy between democracy and efficiency (conflated with State capacity). “Too much democracy”, the argument goes, with its attendant chaos caused by necessary rules of deliberation-negotiation and consensus-building, can become an impediment to State capacity. Indeed, this is the ruse that has been used to legitimise strongman leadership across the globe.” 

    Such demonising of bureaucracy in the name of “efficiency” is often used as a way to circumvent institutional mechanisms for deliberations on matters of policy, the author argues. As she concludes: “The expectation that a less democratic, low-capacity State can endow itself with the capacity to do what the State ought to do in a complex and unequal social setting is a falsity spurred by a deep desire to legitimise undemocratic political regimes.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Backlash Against Campaigns to Ban Caste Discrimination in North America

    In this report, Time covers the backlash to the attempt to explicitly ban caste discrimination in California, part of a growing number of such efforts across North America. As the report points out:

    “Caste is a system of social hierarchy that has been especially pervasive in South Asia. It dates back more than 3,000 years but even today is the basis of discrimination for those considered to be lower caste or falling outside the system, including Dalits, who have been ostracized as “untouchables.”

    Caste discrimination has made its way overseas to the U.S., too. A 2018 survey by Equality Labs—a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits—found that one in four Dalits in the U.S. say they faced verbal or physical assault and two out of every three reported facing discrimination at work.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Nalanda: An Ancient Indian University

    The BBC recently published a succinct introduction to Nalanda, “[f]ounded in 427 CE,” and “considered the world’s first residential university, a sort of medieval Ivy League institution home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era’s most revered scholars.”

    Read the full profile here.