Commentary

The following article has been written by Chaste, who has contributed to this blog before. I will assume for the purposes of this piece that argument is the dominant form of writing in academia. This is also true of public discourse, but this piece will limit itself to academic writing,

The following article has been written by Chaste Note: The author has used the phrase, “illegal workers” only when the illegality is specifically implicated. Elsewhere, he has used the phrase “foreign workers.” Discussions about immigration reform have acquired a feverish intensity. Not only is there a pervasive sense of the

The questions that Ashok Sukumaran asks of us are, to say the least, unusual. The way he asks them is more unusual still. Yet these are questions that are uniquely applicable to India – especially an India that is in the throes of globalization and a technological revolution. Mr. Sukumaran,

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

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

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

Taiwanese playwright Stan Lai's Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land employs a metatheatrical framework to examine memory, displacement, and cultural identity. By staging two ostensibly incompatible plays simultaneously, Lai creates a sophisticated commentary on how contemporary societies negotiate their relationship with history. Structural Innovation The play's

"It is estimated that 70 million Indians in a population of about 1 billion now earn a salary of $18,000 a year, a figure that is set to rise to 140 million by 2011." BBC Reports Chaste weighs in on the facts. It says that 70m Indians