“Before we have less of caste, we evidently must have more of it.”
Himal’s April issue on caste in modern India. Go read, folks.
While I grapple with term papers, assignments, question papers, evaluations and other such April delights…
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- Human Sentences are "for the Birds" 19 July, 2011Thunk would who have.Excerpts from The Week magazine, July 15 issue (page 17, newsstand version) :Humans aren’t the only animals capable of speaking in sentences ...... Birds also use specific grammar rules to structure their tweets. Scientists played jumbled birdsong to Bengal finches and found that almost all of the birds refused to respond to certain remi […]Laura Payne
- (CASTE)ING ‘THE INDIAN’ 24 June, 2010A context to argue for Caste Census by Ranjith Thankappan Bold and Beautiful ‘Indians’ : Barkha, Maniratnam and Amitabh Bachchan Of late, Amitabh Bachchan in his inimical style has blogged out to become the self-appointed member of the caste called ‘Indian’. In similar fashion, the popular academics of the ilk Vivek Dhareswar, Nandini Sundar et al. hav […]Ranjith
- Her violent abuse of prepositions 20 May, 2010Robin Lane Fox is the gardening correspondent for the Financial Times, as well as a lecturer in Ancient History at Exeter College, Oxford. A few days ago, he reviewed an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, Emily Dickinson's Garden: The Poetry of Flowers. He liked the exhibition (calling it "unmissable" and "an essential destinati […]Mark Liberman
- Literature and silence 5 May, 2010Howard Nemerov defines good writing as getting something right in language. And the only proper response to rightness, he adds, is silence. No other answer is required or even imaginable. On this showing, the first test is whether the text leaves the critic with anything to say. The immediate experience of literary greatness, then, would be akin to clarity […]D. G. Myers
- A response to “Is this empowerment'” 24 April, 2010For a very long time now, media watchers and analysts have berated the average viewer for her tastes, shuddered and averted their eyes from the gaudy colours, the campy vamps and the bizarre plotlines. In spite of the presentation, merely the fact that television serials deal with a long line of female protagonists is encouraging, says SHEETAL VYAS.(author unknown)
- Foucault is #1 21 April, 2010Michel Foucault was the authority most often cited in scholarship published in the humanities during the year 2007, according to Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Science. The French historian barely edged out his countryman Pierre Bourdieu, the radical sociologist, by fewer than a hundred citations. Jacques Derrida trailed badly in third place.You have to drop pr […]D. G. Myers
- Why Weren’t We Told? 13 April, 2010By Pardeep Singh Attri What isn’t told about Babasaheb Ambedkar? Freedom of mind is the real freedom. A person, whose mind is not free though he may not be in chains, is a slave, not a free man. One, whose mind is not free, though he may not be in prison, is a prisoner and not a free man. One whose mind is not free though alive, is no better than dead. Freed […]admin
- 12-day-late April Fool’s joke 12 April, 2010The Pulitzer Prize in fiction has been awarded, if that is the right word, to Paul Harding’s Tinkers (“a powerful celebration of life,” intones the prize citation, “in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality”). Harding was trained, you will not b […]D. G. Myers
- The cultural Left, the paper Left 4 April, 2010Although I have long held that professors in the humanities and social sciences are overwhelmingly Leftist because utopian visions mirror their idealized image of themselves, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom complicates things with a brilliant argument, which demands further reflection.Goldstein points out that, in the modern academy, politics is identified […]D. G. Myers
- Women's reservation Bill - the 2010 story 3 April, 2010Opposition to reservations for women in Parliament have centred on at least four points. Step by step, Vaijayanti Gupta rebuts the arguments and re-iterates the case for reservations.(author unknown)
- Human Sentences are "for the Birds" 19 July, 2011
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Anand Bala said
Thanks for that link. It is making a very interesting read
Anand
Is watching The First 48 Season 10 Episode 7 Smoke Screen; The Last Goodbye possible online ? said
[...] “Casteing about” « Smoke Screen [...]
gaddeswarup said
Seems to be a coincidence. Just yesterday I was reading an article in American Historical Review, April issue on caste. There are intriguing sentences there: ” Scholars have also noted how caste, whatever its underlying ascribed, hierarchical assumptions, has changed in interaction with the ‘alternative, nonhierarchical. social imaginaries” that have been embodied in electoral democracy, sometimes becoming as Frank Conlon has put it, a “vehicle for modernity”. Focussing on caste’s adoptations to the politics of modern India,many historians and social scientists have stressed its centrality to India’s electoral processes as a key to popular mobilizing”. The article is “Rule of Law, Rule of Life: Caste, Democracy, and the Courts in India ” by David Gilmartin. I do not normally read that journal but went there looking for a review of Lisa Mitchell’s ” Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue” which was recommended by Paruchuri Sreenivas in Racchabanda.