Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

THE GARLAND AND THE GROVEL On the Invitation of Laura Loomer to the India Today Conclave, and What It Reveals About the Ideology That Made It Possible   by Mohan Dutta •  •  • There is a particular kind of humiliation that announces itself as hospitality. It arrives with garlands. It comes with five-star hotel suites, red-carpet arrivals, and the warm, practiced smiles of media executives trained since childhood in the arts of deference. It speaks in the language of robust debate and diversity of thought , those phrases that function, in contemporary Indian public life, as the velvet glove over the fist of self-abasement. In March 2026, the India Today Conclave—that annual convocation of the Indian establishment, where Bollywood stars commune with defense analysts and billionaires applaud one another’s banalities—offered a case study in the form so pristine it could have been designed in a laboratory. The guest: Laura Loomer, the Florida-based far-right provocateur whose...

  On erasure, posturing, and the seductions of the singular voice There is a moment — and if you have inhabited the margins, you will recognise it — when the invitation arrives. The literature festival. The arts panel. The culture symposium. Your name, extracted from the mess and fury of collective struggle, is printed in a programme between a wine sponsor and a keynote by someone who once wrote a book about mindfulness. You are asked to speak. You are asked to represent. You are asked, though no one will say it this plainly, to perform your radicalism in a format that will not disturb anyone's lunch. This is the seduction. And it is worth naming as such, because seduction works precisely by making surrender feel like agency. I have been thinking about this for some time now — about what happens to the politics of resistance when it is filtered through the individualising machinery of neoliberal culture. About the distance between a body on the line and a name on a programme. A...

  Beneath the rhetoric of liberation and security lies the violent logic of far-right ideology, now mainstreamed into the architecture of American and Israeli statecraft.   March 9, 2026 When the first bombs fell on Tehran in the early hours of February 28, the language from Washington and Tel Aviv was grimly familiar. Iran was an existential threat. Its nuclear ambitions imperiled civilization. The Iranian people yearned for liberation. The strikes, we were assured, were precise, intelligence-driven, surgical. Within hours, over 165 schoolgirls lay dead in the rubble of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab. Their textbooks were pulled from the wreckage alongside severed limbs. The liberators had arrived. What is unfolding across the Middle East is not, as its architects insist, a defensive operation or a humanitarian intervention. It is an act of violent extremism — white supremacist in its civilizational logic, far-right Zionist in its territorial ambitions, and catastrop...

At the glittering India AI Impact Summit 2026 held in New Delhi, what was pitched as an ode to India's rapid technological advancements turned into a memefied fiasco . A private institution from Greater Noida, Galgotias University, seen in the public sphere as closely aligned with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) , displayed "Orion", a robotic dog that they claimed had been created by their Centre of Excellence.  Professor Neha Singh told the state-run broadcaster DD News during a viral interview about the robot as an exemplar of indigenous innovation, claiming, "You ⁠need to meet Orion. This has been developed by the Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University. She went on to share that it is "mischievous" and has the ability to transform itself. However, social media detectives quickly revealed the truth - Orion is the Unitree Go2, which is a commercially available robotic dog made in China that can be purchased for approximately $2,800. It is...