Meltdown

The year was 2006-7 and twitter appeared on the tech horizon and through tech-savvy people, the news reached my ears. Users and audience for twitter was about to emerge. Gurcharan Das  extolled the virtues of brevity and instantaneous reach of twitter, in an unpaid promo in a mainstream newspaper column. This ‘liking’ and new found love for 140 characters was contagious. A pending invite was lying in my mail and one evening I clicked join. Before and a few years after Indian sports-star and celebrities joined( suspect they were paid to do so) there was not much to see on the timeline of twitter; one could scroll through all the content from India posted over weeks in less than 3 minutes. Facebook was growing in bursts and at times exponentially and yes WhatsApp came a few years after. To the young readers this may sound as tinged with nostalgia and less to do with how things were back then. Those were the days of SMS packs and Blackberry( Imported IPhone needed a fix to work). Pe...

Despite Marxist derision, in spite of liberal aversion and in forms communitarians would not extend any regard or accord respect, identity and forms of politics it can spawn is alive and, as it were, parading its casualties in Manipur. More than a month has passed since violence broke out in Manipur between Meiteis and Kukis. Before surprise could be expressed over its scale and spread, terror and shock shot up and shoot at sight orders were issued, Biren Singh’s elected government stands in suspension and a unified command is in charge. Both warring parties of conflict are expressing two views that are similar ;  first both are finding all actors, authorities, agencies, powers and opinions as partisan and secondly both are talking about massacre and genocide of ‘their people’ ,  and state level involvement in the planning and execution of the violent events. As is the wont of areas designated as disturbed and under the AFSPA, the death count, disappearances and accountability...

A herd is not a clan and surname recounts this aspect of human history along with our name. A herd can have owners and they may be shepherded but humans belong to a clan?  Surname indicates 'who are your own'( who owns you, if you are a women) among resemblances. Surname marks the long history of the leader of a clan. The metropolitan and cosmopolitan urges and rural and rustic moorings relish surnames. Stuff with which orders are built, negotiated, sustained and reproduced. Scott, Tehranian, Mathias relate permanent family surname to state-making and state-naming practices as a clear attempt to get past vernacular variety and ineligibility to introduce synoptic, aggregate and standardised orders. Surname is about lineage. Title, entitlements and estates were historically connected and materially fixed in land-holdings and continue to harvest the advantages that accrue with them. The distribution of power, prestige and honour are hinged with surnames. What a name can tell is al...

Ukraine's fate and future is tied to Europe's autonomy and independence. Everything rests on how we tie these interests and expand this bond. Autonomy and independence of European Union is possible under the aegis of NATO?  If cold war is a thing of past, shouldn't that yardstick also apply to NATO? US-led Nato has repeatedly failed to treat other members at par and take other nations in confidence while acting unilaterally on whatever it has identified in its interest. Can we talk about autonomy and independence for Europe without talking about United States of America and Russia(USSR)? Autonomy and independence is not only a feature of imagination reconstruction or exclusively belong to the normative domain, it can be attained with real conditions and limits. After, with and beyond the Russian invasion Ukraine's autonomy and independence should be sought within these parameters. Pledges of support and expressions of solidarity with Ukraine are welcome but now that war...