Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Universities as sites of learning play vital roles in the national imagination, as grounds for training thinkers and as spaces for contributing to knowledge. Across the globe, many nation states fund Universities as sites of learning, heavily subsidizing an University education. Universities in most of these instances are public sites, funded by taxpayers, meaning that taxpayer monies pay for the infrastructures, salaries, and functions carried out by them. As publicly funded sites, Universities are thus accountable to the public. At least, they should be in principle. Unfortunately, rather than turning toward these public commitments, many Universities have increasingly turned toward markets. The logic of the market has taken over University sites, treating students as commodities and evaluating knowledge generation in strictly utilitarian terms. The hegemony of the market logic at Universities has stifled imagination, turning education into metrics defined by mark...

In contemporary society, LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) issues have gained attention from both political and academic spheres. In few countries, such as few states in US and in UK, legal sanction of marriage between same-sex partners is hailed as a big turn in the fight for LGBT rights. Campaigners in UK who spent years battling for the legalization of gay marriage saw the historic law enacted at midnight on 28 th March, 2014, despite objections from the Church of England and some members of the Conservative party. On June 26, 2015, United States Supreme court declared the ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional and made it legal nationwide. In India too, in a significant step, the Supreme Court on 15 th April, 2014 recognized the transgender community as a third gender along with male and female, to be given reservation on par with Other Backward Castes in government jobs. But this was preceded by another Supreme Court bench judgment that rejected a progressive ...

More sad discoveries awaited me. During the course of that week, I chanced upon a group of sex workers from Cambodia. Carrying banners with the words "sex work is work", the small group of women appeared to be agitating for more respect for their work. However, as I talked at length with them, I learnt that they were protesting how they had been deprived of life-saving HIV drugs. After Cambodia joined the WTO, it had to observe rules such as only allowing the distribution of patented drugs in the name of protecting intellectual property and encouraging medical innovation. However, this also meant it could not allow the distribution of generic drugs from countries such as India and Thailand which could have been obtained at a mere fraction of the cost of their patent-protected cousins. And for a country such as Cambodia, it could ill afford to buy these very expensive patented HIV drugs for its patients. The woman I interviewed told me about how the qua...

While reading about neoliberalism in Mohan Dutta's Communicating Social Change, the following paragraph struck a chord with me: "The advent of the neoliberal logic on the global stage has been marked by the power and control of global organisations such as the international financial institutions: World Bank, and International Monetary Fund as well as the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, which later evolved into the World Trade Organisation, created with the goals of minimising the barriers to global trade, and maximizing trading opportunities for transnational corporations across national borders." In my time as a journalist, I have seen how these seemingly lofty ideals have translated on the ground. While I believe it to be generally true that trading opportunities are greatly enhanced for powerful western businesses under the auspices of global structures such as the WTO, do these same structures engender a level playing field for all? Do they really minimise...

Continuing with the discussion on the narrative of development, in this blog I discuss more reports to finally sum up the various kinds of inequalities created by the news reportage.  Suicides, considering their growing number, also enter parliamentary debates and thereby become news stories.  NDTV  reported on the controversial debate in the parliament where two Ministers had cited love affairs as one of the reasons of suicides by farmers (NDTV, 2015). In the report, the representatives of various political parties are cited as alleging the other for having made such a statement. While the news reports focus on ‘controversy’ generated by the debate in the parliament, issue of suicides becomes a game between the powerful officials, a tool to bring down the other party. A deceased farmer not only gets wrongly represented in the parliament, but his suicide too is not recognized as a ‘legitimate’ suicide – a farmer suicide.   The report in  The ...

In this blog, I want to question the idea of ‘legitimacy’ within the discourse of development – the legitimacy of certain people as citizens.  I want to ask, who are the people that a developing country considers to be important for continuing to chart a successful path towards development? And who are the people that a developing nation considers to be unimportant for its development? I want to show that the narrative of development has a large share in maintaining the ideas of legitimacy. I will explore the idea of ‘legitimacy’ in the context of the farmer population in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra in India.  On the basis of news results that appeared on the first page of Google News, for the keyword search of ‘farmers’ suicides Maharashtra’, the following observations and analysis was made. The articles relating to farmers’ suicides often spoke of the causes and solutions to the given situation where farmers in Maharashtra are committing suicides in lar...

Recently, a photograph showing a staff of a famous Singapore confectionary chain filling up plastic bottles with soya milk from another company went viral. Netizens were incensed because this publicly-listed confectionary BreadTalk had been selling soya bean milk for years, billing it as “freshly-prepared”. The company quickly pulled its product from its shelves and issued an apology that baffled more than it explained. “We've heard your concerns over our soya bean beverage sold in stores … We would like to apologise for any misaligned presentation or wrong impressions created, and clarify that it is never our intention to mislead,” according to its press release. I was gobsmacked. Here was a company that not only was using language hideously to get out of a tight spot, it had for years instructed its employees to deceive. And why did it take so long for this to emerge? Why wasn’t there any whistleblower? Surely this act cannot be perceived as honest any way you cut it. Ho...

I attended earlier this month a good friend and classmate’s wedding in Vietnam, but as usual, I did not do any research about the place I was going to, preferring to let serendipity take me wherever it pleased. My friend’s hometown, Bien Hoa city, is about a 45-minute car ride from Ho Chi Minh City airport. Her husband’s friends and I arrived at our hotel in the late afternoon, which didn’t leave us with much time before we were bussed off to dinner together. That evening, when I returned to the hotel, I searched on my phone for highlights in the city that I thought I might visit after the wedding lunch reception the next day. My google search yielded the following: Workshop highlights dioxin contamination at Bien Hoa Airport en.vietnamplus.vn/workshop- highlights -dioxin... bien - hoa .../67199.vnp o     Cached Oct 21, 2014 - Around 250000 cu.m of soil in Bien Hoa City , the southern province of Dong Nai, are contaminated with dioxin at levels ranging ...

Marginalization happens at various levels- sometimes it’s a community and sometimes it’s a land. The north eastern pat of India have generally failed to get much attention as any other part of India. For most of the mainlanders (as we like to call them), few words that come to their mind instantly are exotic, disturbed area, seven sisters, Assam etc. The land where I grew up also goes through the same crisis. I have always struggled to explain to people about the place from where I am. I belong to one of the tiniest states of north east, Tripura.  There could be possibly various reasons for the ignorance of people or the mainlanders. One of the reasons could be scanty representation of this place in media or our school text books. The severe under representation of the north east India is something worth thinking about. It diminishes the space for debates over serious issues and problems of north east. Lack of knowledge or it’s topography could possibly be one of...