To understand Spivak
It is quite bizarre to read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and be able to understand anything. It is even more bizarre to agree with her views about mundane things like the news or being a little anxious…
Culture
164 posts
A religious environmentalism
June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled 'Hindu roots of modern 'ecology'' was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016.…
The worm and the world
Alanna Mitchell reports in the New York Times that boreal forests in the world's north are being invaded by worms of the species Dendrobaena octaedra. They're decomposing the leaf litter and r…
A tale of two horrors: poop and aliens
I saw this tweet yesterday: Information like this always reminds me of one fact that awakened me to the behind-the-scenes role that the natural universe plays in our cultural lives. The organic com…
Notes on 'Avengers: Endgame' (spoiler alert)
At the outset, I had a great time watching the film. It ticked all the boxes of an all-round entertainer. What follows are some specific thoughts I had of the film that shouldn't be construed as…
The fiction of men
After you find out that a male writer has been a lesser person than you thought he was, have you found it harder to read and appreciate his work? I bet you have. I'm sure it's the case with…
Fantasy and pseudoscience in Rajinikanth's '2.0'
Rajinikanth's film 2.0, which released last year, was recently uploaded on Amazon Prime and I finally watched it in its entirety. It is a dumpster-fire of masculinity, sexism and misogyny, which i…
Poisoned trees bear poisonous fruits
Of late, there has been a clutch of Tamil films that have endeavoured to show the Hindu right-wing in poor light, associating its rituals with violence and oppression. The two most notable examples ar…
Star Wars and the dynastic principle
Late last week, I picked up Ram Guha's Patriots and Partisans. I know shamefully little about India's modern political history – before and after Independence – certainly beyond the virtual bo…
Lord of the Rings Day
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you! March 25 is celebrated as such around the world (though not by too many people, I imagine) to commemorate what still endures as an excellent work of epic fantasy…
Singin' in the rain, Vadivelu version
Stanley Donen, who co-directed the famous 1952 Hollywood film Singin' in the Rain with Gene Kelly, passed away on February 21. Though it released to moderate success at first, the film went on to…
Are we obsessed with nominal identities?
In an interview to The Wire Science last month, Venki Ramakrishnan, the molecular biologist, acknowledged that Indians had a bizarre relationship with the fact that he was a Nobel laureate: I’d left…