by Nora Wuttke 1st of July 2020 “Don’t take buses or taxis; it is better to walk” – and all of a sudden, my physical world became very small. At the same time, an infinite digital realm overlaid everything with its expansiveness. The tensions and discrepancies between experiences in “my” world and the digital discourses (mainly spun from Europe and the US where death rates where rising and mental health
Avinash Paliwal and Edward Simpson ‘You are on mute’ and ‘Once all this is over’, phrases of the pandemic. We learn to do business over the internet, and look to the future as if it were as innocent as the past. These words typify transformations – big and small – in the way we live our lives. Lockdowns, curfews and social distancing have been brought in to restrict the spread
SSAI Artistic Director, Sanjukta Ghosh delivered a statement on the occasion of UNESCO International Mother Language Day 2020 upon invitation by H.E. Saida Muna Tasneem, Bangladesh High Commissioner, at the commemoration of the ‘Bengali Language Martyrs Day’ on Friday, 21 February. Mother Language Day is part of a broader initiative “to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world” as adopted by the UN General Assembly on May
The article was originally published on DiscoverSociety.org on 7 August, 2019. The results of the 2019 Australian and Indian general elections, announced within days of one another on May 18th and 23rd respectively, were each in their own way a vote for crony capitalism and ‘development’ over environmental, sustainability and social justice concerns. The victory of the BJP in India and the Conservative Party in Australia lay bare how global capital
SOAS South Asia Institute Scholars on the Indian Elections 2019 The 17th Lok Sabha elections have aroused ‘the never before’ spate of analyses among academics and the media, by taking stock of limitless flow of data, fake news and visuals as distorting factors in free and fair elections. But most importantly, these also serve as triggers of a sweeping anti-incumbency vote. Bengal is the hotbed of such analyses given the
SOAS South Asia Institute Scholars on the Indian Elections 2019 The 2019 general elections are being described as one of the most significant along with the ones held after independence in 1951 and after the ‘Emergency’ in 1977. These elections are being seen as almost a referendum for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) aggressively populist, exclusionary and right-wing Hindutva politics. There is a lot at stake for the party
SOAS South Asia Institute Scholars on the Indian Elections 2019 In the summer of 2000, I was posted in West Bengal as a Correspondent for NDTV. Mr Buddhadev Bhattacharya, member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was the Chief Minister and he had just brought his party back to power after the resignation of Jyoti Basu, who, it seems had ruled West Bengal for decades. I knew Mr Bhattacharya
SOAS South Asia Institute Scholars on the Indian Elections 2019 The world’s largest-ever electoral exercise got underway on 11th April 2019 when millions of Indian voters turned out to cast their votes in the first phase of general elections. Polls are being held in seven phases spread over 39 days between April 11th and May 19th, 2019. This week, India enters the fourth phase of the polls. The body of
SOAS South Asia Institute Scholars on the Indian Elections 2019 Mumbai is often derided as a city uninterested in politics. “Maximum City, Minimum Voting” sneers a recent Economic Times analysis, pointing out that even Mumbai’s uncharacteristically high voter turnout in 2014 lagged behind Delhi’s by nearly 15%. Hard statistics notwithstanding, voter apathy is scarcely in evidence in Mumbai’s chawls, cramped tenement blocks constructed to house the city’s army of migrant
SOAS South Asia Institute Scholars on the Indian Elections 2019 Meghalaya is one of the small states of the North-East. It is also one of a handful of tribal-majority states. In this sense, it reflects particularly well the multiplicity of peoples, languages, religions and customs that make up the diverse country that is India. This is particularly important in the context of national elections marked at the national level by