Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Engineering has long positioned itself as a neutral, objective discipline—one of elegant equations, efficient systems, and technical mastery. Yet in practice, it has too often served as an unwitting accomplice to inequity: dams that displace Indigenous communities without consent, algorithms that embed racial bias, infrastructure that ignores the lived realities of the poor, or “smart cities” designed from boardrooms half a world away. These are not anomalies; they are symptoms of an engineering culture that privileges universalist solutions over contextual justice. True just engineering —engineering that actively advances equity, dismantles oppression, and centers human dignity—demands more than good intentions or ethics checklists. It requires a theoretical reorientation. The culture-centered approach (CCA) offers precisely such a framework. By foregrounding the dynamic interplay of culture, structure, and agency, CCA transforms engineering from a top-down imposition into a dialogic,...

  The Ideology That Killed Fifty-One People Still Walks Among Us Seven years after the Christchurch massacre, the networks that made it possible remain intact. A communication scholar reflects on what we owe the dead. By Mohan J. Dutta March 15, 2026   This morning, in the early hours before dawn, I conversed with my Muslim brother Ishmail praying in the quiet of his home, miles away in India while I sat down to write here in Aotearoa. We had been talking for some time — about the holy month, about fasting and surrender, about the moral clarity that Ramadan asks of those who observe it. Ishmail spoke of the duty to speak truth even when it costs you something. Especially then. Outside, Palmerston North was still dark. The light in the kitchen was the only light on the street. And I thought: today is March 15. Seven years ago, on this date, fifty-one Muslim worshippers were murdered as they gathered for Friday prayers at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Isla...

  The Colonial Roots of India’s Strategic Paralysis How Hindutva’s Mimicry of White Supremacist Hierarchies Undermines New Delhi’s Global Ambitions Mohan Jyoti Dutta THE STAGE AND ITS SCRIPTURE The scene deserves close reading. At the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi last week—India’s flagship geopolitical forum, co-organized by the Ministry of External Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation—U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau sat on stage before a large screen bearing the conference’s Sanskrit theme: Saṁskāra. Beneath it, three English words arranged like a catechism: Assertion, Accommodation, Advancement. The organizers’ framing was aspirational. Saṁskāra, they explained, is a civilizational inheritance of identity that enables societies to assert who they are, accommodate difference, and advance through refinement. The language gestured toward sovereignty, toward a post-Western order in which India’s civilizational depth would finally be recognized as a form of ...

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...