Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

  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 ...

  The difficult conversation we need now: Anti-Māori racism in the upper-caste, upwardly mobile Indian community The same Indian community organisations that mobilised quickly around a haka performed at the Tainui regional kapa haka competition have been almost entirely silent on the sustained anti-Māori political project advanced by ACT MP Parmjeet Parmar. Mohan Dutta argues that this asymmetry is not accidental — it is what the model minority script trains us to perform, and it is time for our community to have a much harder conversation. There is a particular asymmetry in how anti-racism is being performed in Aotearoa right now, and the haka–apology cycle around Che Wilson and Parmjeet Parmar throws it into sharp relief. The same Indian community organisations, lobby groups, and outlets that have mobilised quickly and articulately around the haka performed at the Tainui regional kapa haka competition — securing an emailed apology from Wilson, a follow-up apology from Te Pae K...

The invitation arrives in polished, reasonable tones: Dr. Peter Boghossian, philosopher, former Portland State University professor, and host of "Conversations with Peter Boghossian," extends an offer for dialogue. "No dogma. Just dialogue." The podcast promises candid, intellectually rigorous exchanges with dissidents and public figures on divisive issues—free speech, institutional decay, cultural conflict, radical Islam, migration, and the excesses of "wokeness." Guests range from evolutionary biologists to French lawyers discussing whether "truth" itself has been branded "far-right." The format appears open: questions, rapport-building, Socratic probing via "street epistemology" techniques adapted from Boghossian's earlier work challenging faith. It frames itself as a bulwark against polarization, a return to Enlightenment values of reason, evidence, and mutual understanding in a world fractured by identity politics. Ye...