Photo Credit: Mario Hagen, Pixabay The vaccine hesitancy in one of the most educated countries in the world is vexing, perplexing and downright dangerous in the current Covid-19 pandemic. Can a historical approach save lives? Vaccine hesitancy is not new — back in the 1950s nearly a third of Americans…

Consider this series of unfortunate incidents in India: In September 2020, the Government of India pushed through three farm laws in Parliament, triggering a massive farmers’ protest in the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and (parts of) Uttar Pradesh. In Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee stormed back to power in…

Over the recent holiday weekend, we went on a road trip like thousands of other inhabitants of the United States. We went to Washington Crossing State Park in New Jersey where there is a small museum and memorial to mark the spot where George Washington made his daring 1776 Christmas…

I am going to step into a minefield and state boldly that it’s not TRPS that dictates media behavior anymore — it is the extraction of affect that determines which stories will be pursued and how stories are written, broadcast, discussed. This is where the money is currently. While Internet…

Dress Codes: The Real Class War I picked a Twitter fight with a stranger last year about dress codes in Indian private clubs. Well, “fight” is too strong a word to describe the snarky remark I made before leaving the discussion. But, the man — your typical, thin-skinned Indian rightwinger — had a bone to pick…

“ I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us” . That was John Perry Barlow in 1997 when the Internet was a space of boundless possibilities and a beacon of limitless freedom. From those dizzying days…

Like Mahatma Gandhi, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was a Gujarati and a London-trained barrister and a member of the Indian National Congress. Rejecting Gandhi’s methods of mass mobilization as brinkmanship, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League and spearheaded the successful Pakistan movement as a parallel to Indian…

How To Disagree With a Mughal India Scholar When You are Not a Mughal India Scholar Before you start reading the book, Audrey Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), the one you’ve already decided to hate, do this: 1. Assess…

The Paean Poetry of High Imperialism: Jagattarini Dasi’s “Ode to King-Emperor George V and Queen-Empress Mary on the Occasion of Coronation” One of the joys of browsing the old Digital Library of India website before it disappeared was its highly eccentric and unpredictable search results. Bad cataloging practices coupled with…