Writing

Metamorphosising City: Bengaluru’s Public Sector in Cinema

A cursory online search of ‘Bangalore’ would immediately invite a plague of epithets such as ‘Silicon Valley’ and ‘IT Hub,’ or more prosaic ones like ‘Pensioner’s Paradise’ and ‘Garden City’. In the stupor of what social scientist Narendar Pani describes as a “culture of amnesia,” it would strike most people as unusual that Bengaluru, or Bangalore, as it was called until 2014, was the largest unionised public sector city in India until economic liberalisation in 1991. If the city was to be labelled after its organised public sector history—which is unlikely, given how unfashionable it sounds—it would still retain a certain vacuous character that the others possess, confusing the steady march of capital and post-colonial developments for assorted essentialising shorthand.

Worker-Led Alternatives: A Line of Hope for New Platform Futures

During the pandemic, as dominant platforms captured vital data infrastructure and strengthened their market hegemony, platform workers around the world continued to confront an increasingly precarious future of work. However, workers are conceiving new solidarities and imaginaries to challenge and mitigate against the logic of the platform economy. This article explores one such notable movement within the digital economy – that of ‘platform cooperativism’, with examples of novel initiatives from across the Global South. Despite being a genuine force seeking to reclaim digital technologies for the people’s interests, cooperatives face an uphill battle to viability, particularly due to the data disadvantage of most Global South nations. Therefore, to tap into the radical potential of platform cooperatives, the legal and economic terrain must allow them to flourish. Some concrete steps in this direction can include establishing an enabling policy environment, facilitating access to new and sustainable sources of finance for cooperatives, instituting regulatory frameworks for the protection of data rights, creating consumer awareness, and incentivizing participation in these enterprises.

In Bengaluru, reading groups (some of them underground) are using books to live outside the machi...

If you happen to live and work in Bengaluru's Indiranagar, as I do, the multisensory cacophony of a tech conference is bound to creep up on you at some point. A few years ago, I was invited to one, a prospect that inspired little enthusiasm in me until I learnt of an open bar.

'It's not just Church Street': In Bengaluru, these three Kannada bookshops have their own identit...

"I went to England to see daffodils celebrated by Wordsworth 'tossing their heads in sprightly dance'. And I have a dream. I dream of a time when people who visit Karnataka want to smell the fragrant Mysore jasmines, eat the bananas of Nanjangud and read the great vachanas of Basaveshwara and Allama Prabhu.

Why 'Ghachar Ghochar' is the one novel that (presciently) sums up the state of the world today

At the risk of being lynched by the hordes who are terminally Angry Online, I would say that 2016 was something of a logical conclusion to an extended period of a certain luxuriant passivity.

It's easy to see why the Right wanted this book about Indians' beef-eating history to be banned

Right next to my school in Chennai, there used to be a hole-in-the-wall eatery that served as a rite of passage for most of us who'd hit high school. It resembled more a shotgun shack rather than a respectable dining establishment, the kitchen walls seemed covered in soot, so that you could hardly see what was going on in there.

Time to lift the ban on what Nehru's aide wrote about him and his contemporaries?

The Nehruvian age only had tales, rumours and conjecture. Had there existed the technological scope for the leaks that we are privy to these days, neither Jawaharlal Nehru or any of his global contemporaries (JFK or Winston Churchill, for instance) would come out looking particularly saintly. At a time like this, MO Mathai, “private secretary” to Nehru, could be considered an extremely important man, a concierge in the private quarters of the corridors of power.

What three second-hand bookshops on the same street say about Bengaluru's reading culture

"'What's left here? Everyone dresses like the foreigners. We have learnt all their bad ways. Do you think the number of drinkers here is small?' 'I haven't seen such people. Maybe only you come across them. Since education is widespread, people have fine thoughts.