The Pink Petal of the Saffron Flower: On Shobhaa De's "Closet Bhakt" Confession So Shobhaa De is "a bhakt of her own beliefs." How charming. How original. How utterly, depressingly familiar. Reading her latest column in The Print — that breezy little victory dance over Mamata Banerjee's defeat in Bengal, complete with the obligatory ellipses and the obligatory Yay and the obligatory martyr-pose about being trolled — I felt something I have not felt in a while. Not anger, exactly. Not even disappointment, because to be disappointed you must first have expected something. What I felt was a kind of weary recognition. Because we have read this column before. We have read it for forty years. Only the political object of affection keeps changing. In the eighties, it was the glamour of Bombay's high society. In the nineties, it was the giddy promise of liberalisation. In the noughties, it was the page-three carousel of designers and starlets and royals. And ...
This blog offers Mohan Dutta's reflections on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach, examining the interplays among culture, communication and marginalisation. It also explores resistance, the ways in which communities at the margins challenge structures. Writings on the blog are updated to reflect the organic analysis of structure and agency. These analyses are offered on a personal capacity and do not reflect the views of Prof. Dutta's employer.