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Gaurav

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Articles of Interest

I have too much to do… “American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as â€œunproductive,â€ according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days

Waxing poetic

“India has a growing middle class estimated at 300 million people.” Emily Wax 300 million is an astounding figure and just a shade below the US population. If indeed India has a “growing” middle class that is 300 million strong, then the US and the rest of the world better

Sidhwa's Lahore, A Lovingly Embroidered Family Heirloom

Every great city deserves a worthy admirer. Lahore has just found one. Bapsi Sidhwa’s edited volume is a tribute to the city, a celebration of its landmarks, its cuisine, its gourmets, its brutalizing summers, its people, and its stories. The book strikes an immediate rapport. It is akin to

Movie Review: The Namesake

The Film The Namesake is a mediocre film based on an equally middling eponymous novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer Prize-winning London born author of Indian descent. It is a coming of age story of an ABCD by “another badly confused Deshi” (ABCD – Lahiri) [Washington Post] The novel traces the

Interpretive Approaches in Art History

If social sciences have been sprinting breathlessly towards positivism, art history has been running, equally fast, away from it. Art history’s subjectivist turn can be traced back to postmodernism, and particularly hermeneutics and phenomenology, which pretty much gave immunity to virtually all kinds of interpretations–as long as they

Social Science and the Theory of All

Social phenomenon, unlike natural phenomenon, is bound and morphed not only by nature (evolution, etc.) but also history, institutions (religious, governance, etc.), and technology, among others. Before I go any further, I would like to issue a caveat: the categories that I mention above are not orthogonal and in fact,

The Economy of Everyday Conversation

Communication comes from the Latin word communicare, which means “to make common.” We communicate not only to transfer information, but also to establish and reaffirm identities, mores, and meanings. The two major localities of communication are the consumption of mass media and everyday conversation. While both inform how we view

Selected Ethnography of Marketing in India

Biscuits (cookies) in India are marketed for their glucose shakti (power), bathing soaps for their ability to get rid of germs, hair oil for its efficaciousness in keeping the lice away, and a “fair and lovely” cream for its eponymous abilities (fair=lovely). We have popular biscuits made by Britannia,