Mohan J. Dutta: Critical Insights on Culture and Society

Mediocrity, you know it when you see it (or is it really so easy to detect?), couched in privilege and in the desire to not have this privilege ever be questioned by alternative values and viewpoints from elsewhere. Mediocrity is about keeping on doing what you have been doing for years, to keep repeating the already invented cycle, sitting amidst the comforts that come with privilege. Mediocrity is the mantra of the mainstream power structures in society that want to invent a wide variety of languages to justify their medicority, for not having to work for the things that one "should" naturally be entitled to. Knowledge structures and the games within these structures are essential to the logic of mediocrity; if you are mediocre, you don't raise any alarm bells and so you are "safe." Within my own discipline of Communication and within the social sciences, I see this mediocrity in the everyday practices of academics and in what they consider to be their entit

Critical Thoughts: A postcolonial reading of the casteism in everyday India

This post was prompted by my recent visit to India as well as my reflections on the continuous conversations with Indians (I use the broad framework of India to refer to a space that is rendered meaningful in my interactions with it, narrated through my memories and through experiences that I negotiate in my everyday interactions). So coming to the topic of my post today, the subject of casteism in India, I want to share a viewpoint that is mired in paradoxes. On one hand, a postcolonial reading of the portrayal of India within a frame of the caste system depicts the ways in which the framing of the case politics in India gets situated within the colonial gaze. On the other hand, a materialist reading of the case politics points squarely to the continuing problem of the caste system and the ways in which the system impacts the fate of those at the margins. Of particular importance here is the ways in which the narrative of casteism has been taken up by neoliberal India, adopted within