India has always had its issues with urban mobility. However, the financial, behavioral and commercial trends triggered by the pandemic threaten to complicate these issues in an unprecedented manner. In the first of a series of essays on urban mobility in India, Sudarshan and Mukundan trace some of these complications to unravel the biggest challenges faced by the government.
The genesis of the ‘Third World’ categorization lies in the nature of modernity exported by the First World. Asish Singh explains this with the example of eighteenth-century famines in India.
The meteoric rise of K-Pop stars as celebrity diplomats has exported various aspects of South Korean society to the rest of the world. This article explores how some of the nation’s more damaging characteristics, such as its highly unequal gender perceptions are being amplified by the growth of the K-Pop industry.
With the rise of K-pop, K-dramas and Korean Cinema, this article seeks to analyze Hallyu, or the South Korean Cultural Wave as a soft power tactic by the country to rebrand itself as a rising eastern power in the world stage. It looks at the role this wave plays in political diplomacy, especially with countries like the US, China, Japan, and North Korea to maintain a position in the East Asian region.
Religion as we used to know has ceased to exist. Today, temples have gained enough power to influence key economic decisions in our country. The rise of the temple economy has thrown a dark shadow over the rest of our economy- why and how has this happened? And what are the consequences of this intermingling?
What do China’s domestic efforts in mass surveillance and use of data-dependent technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) mean for the world? And what role have social and political developments played in the development of the Chinese surveillance state? This essay will evaluate China’s surveillance system, the Chinese government’s pursuit of AI supremacy and its impact on the world through two major theoretical paradigms: Realism and Constructivism.
This article talks about the use of algorithms by social media platforms and the ways in which they, oftentimes without the user’s knowledge, collect personally identifiable data to generate specific content for them. The article also touches upon the impact of the same on children and adolescents and the future of behavioural science to mitigate these risks.
This article talks about how BCCI became the richest cricketing board in the world and assesses how the board earns its money and what factors helped it in becoming the economic giant that we know today.
Gender is a complicated and widely debated subject. This article explores what construes gender, its stability, its role in feminism and the seemingly normal distinctions that can be potential forms of gender normativity.
Several state governments in India have invoked provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 to tackle the coronavirus pandemic that began in the March of 2020. Activists, journalists as well as public health experts and medical scholars have termed this colonial-era legislation as draconian and obsolete since it enables state excesses and does not outline a clear framework to tackle an epidemic outbreak. This essay explores the shortcomings of the existing act.
This article aims to show that shutdowns, suspensions or blocking of internet services are unconstitutional and go against the fabric of democracy when used frequently to silence the voices of the citizens.
For centuries, the burden of unpaid household work (UHW) has unequally been borne by our women. Kamal Hassan’s recently proposed to pay women for their domestic work. The idea originally comes from proposals by Western feminists to monetise household work but the cost of such labour is high in the west, unlike India. In this essay, I discuss the pre-existing economic value of unpaid household work and its seemingly inevitable incorporation into our national accounts in the near future.
NICKELED AND DIMED 