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While India Debates Alphabets, Its Youth Learn the Language of Unemployment
Get PDFFor a country as vast, diverse, and complex as India, unity has never meant uniformity. The very idea of India rests not on a single language, culture, or tradition, but on the coexistence of many. Yet today, there is an unsettling push towards homogenisation, a narrowing of what it means to be “truly Indian.” This drive is evident not only in governance but also in the deeper shaping of society, language, education, culture and collective memory
SubscriberWrites: Caste to Gender–New battlefield of Indian politics
No full textKarnataka’s newly released caste census has re-ignited old debates with fresh urgency. The report not only quantifies decades of political intuition but recommends a bold recalibration of raising backward class reservations from 32% to 51%. Yet, even as caste resurfaces at the centre of policy discourse, electoral strategies on the ground are quietly shifting elsewhere
Volatility Spillover among Fintech, AI, Green Funds and Emerging Markets- A Step Wise Approach to Gauge Diversification
No full textThis study adopts a systematic approach to examine diversification opportunities among non-conventional assets and emerging stock markets, addressing a gap in existing literature that rarely considers technology-oriented and sustainability-led funds together in a unified framework. It explores the dynamics of volatility spillovers and causal linkages between technology-focused funds, sustainability-led investments, and emerging market equities. Specifically, the analysis considers FinTech and robotics (ROBT) as representatives of technology-driven funds, QGREEN as a sustainable investment fund, and the MSCI Emerging Markets Index as a proxy for emerging market equities. A sequential econometric methodology is employed: Granger causality tests identify the direction of interlinkages among the selected assets, followed by a time-varying Dynamic Conditional Correlation Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (DCC-GARCH (1,1)) model to assess co-movements and diversification potential over time. The findings reveal that sustainable assets (QGREEN) consistently provide superior diversification benefits, particularly during periods of heightened market volatility, offering novel empirical evidence on their comparative advantage over technology-driven funds. This contribution enhances understanding of green finance dynamics in mixed-asset portfolios and supports investors and policymakers in developing resilient, sustainability-oriented investment strategies. The study also opens avenues for future research on ESG-focused assets across broader market settings
Consumers’ Nostalgic Re-Engagement with Media in Emerging Markets: Emotional Needs, Content Overload, and Exposure
Get PDFGrounded in uses-and-gratifications (U&G) theory, this research examines how millennials (Gen Y) nostalgically re-engage with media content and its outcomes in the emerging market context of India. The authors posit that nostalgia serves as both an emotional driver and a coping mechanism for digital overload, extending U&G theory by incorporating socially moderated gratifications beyond individual motives. Drawing on survey data (n=510) and using structural equation modeling to analyze the data, the authors find that while emotional needs and time of exposure boost nostalgic media engagement, perceived content overload reduces it. This engagement, in turn, enhances social sharing and emotional content attachment, with social connectedness moderating this effect. By showing that gratifications are not just individual (but also socially moderated) and by theorizing nostalgia as a coping mechanism against digital overload, the findings underscore that nostalgic re-engagement fulfils dual personal/social roles. Overall, the results detail the pathways and moderating factors influencing nostalgic media re-engagement, offering novel insight into the effect of individual motivations and social interactions on content consumption. Finally, the results reveal pertinent managerial implications, e.g., by suggesting the importance of reducing content overload (e.g., through curated recommendations), fostering social bonding via user-generated content, and incorporating nostalgic features like “memory lanes” and throwback content
Association between peripheral inflammation and body mass index on white matter integrity and free water in bipolar II depression
Get PDFImmuno-metabolic dysregulation is implicated in mood disorders and elucidating non-invasive brain correlates may aid clinical translation of pathomechanism. This study aims to investigate the interrelationship between peripheral inflammation and body mass index (BMI) and their effects on white matter (WM) microstructure and free water (FW) in bipolar II depression (BDII-D). Voxel-wise FW and FW-corrected fractional anisotropy (FAt) were compared between 146 BDII-D and 151 healthy controls (HCs) using FSL Randomise. Partial correlations were used to explore associations between BMI, peripheral inflammation, FW measures, and psychiatric symptoms. Moderation analysis examined the interrelationships among BMI, peripheral inflammation, and FW measures. BDII-D showed lower FAt in the genu of the corpus callosum (CC) and bilateral anterior corona radiata, and higher FW in the body of the CC compared with HCs. Higher BMI was linked to lower global FAt (q < 0.001), while higher peripheral inflammation was associated with higher global FW (q ≤ 0.01) in BDII-D. Lower FAt in the genu of the CC and higher FW in the body of CC were significantly related to higher BMI, inflammation, and greater depressive symptoms (q < 0.05). Low-grade Inflammation moderated the relationship between higher BMI and lower FAt in the genu of the CC in BDII-D (B = −3.094e−05, p < 0.001). We found evidence for a mechanistic link between immune-metabolic dysregulation and altered connection in BDII-D. Next to mediating BMI effects on WM integrity, there seems to exist specific relationships between inflammation and BMI with different MR-based tract markers that need further investigation
Alternative technologies: a different road to development
No full textThis chapter presents an alternative analysis of the environmental movements in the late twentieth century, where the lens of technological use was reposited to appropriate the self-assertion of the different dissident voices. Since the late 1980s, this chapter argues, an alternative discourse on development was formulated by capitalizing on the rising tide of democratic/participative movement. The prominence of such movement lay in their prioritization of people as stakeholders of the natural resources and shaping up of the “mass-based” movement which opened up an unprecedented collaboration between “think tanks” and grassroot activism. Such activism, as illustrated through the example of Anil Agarwal, banked primarily on the local-knowledge-based technologies and crusaded against the hegemonic march of “modern” development marked by exclusion and non-egalitarian ideas
The hydra and the sword: Constitutional amendments, political process, and the BBI case in Kenya
Get PDFThis study examines the landmark rulings in the “BBI Case”, adjudicated successively by the High Court, Court of Appeal, and Supreme Court of Kenya, from the perspective of comparative political process theory [“CPPT”]. The BBI case involved a constitutional challenge to a set of seventy-four proposed constitutional amendments to the Constitution of Kenya, 2010. It raised a host of issues, ranging from the applicability of the basic structure doctrine, the role of the President in initiating constitutional change, Presidential immunity, and Fourth Branch institutions, among others. This paper analyses two crucial issues in the case: the articulation – for the first time in its history – of a process-oriented basic structure doctrine, by the High Court and the Court of Appeal; and the concurrent holding of the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court prohibiting the President of Kenya from initiating a constitutional amendment through the “popular initiative” route. It argues that on these issues, the Kenyan courts’ reasoning constitutes a creative, unique, and valuable contribution to CPPT, in the context of constitutional change. When faced with the possibility of abusive amendments within the framework of a two-tiered amendment process, the Kenyan courts responded by setting out rigorous procedural constraints upon the amendment power. As a corollary, the role of the judiciary under this approach is not to invalidate or veto abusive constitutional amendments, but to ensure that they pass through a substantive, rich, and deep process of public participation
Consumer ADR in India
No full textThe introduction of India’s first consumer protection law in 1986 marked a significant step towards enhancing consumers’ social and economic welfare. This pioneering legislation was crafted to shield consumers from potential exploitation by large sellers and conglomerates. The subsequent enactment of the 2019 Act fortified consumer protection, emphasising expeditious and effective dispute resolution. Despite these legal advancements, the increasing number of pending cases and the escalating wave of new disputes in the wake of increased consumerism present new challenges. This chapter underscores the pressing need to incorporate alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and online dispute resolution (ODR) mechanisms to streamline and enhance the adjudication of consumer disputes. ADR and ODR can offer efficient and accessible solutions to address the complexities of modern consumer grievances. Recognising the evolving landscape of consumer rights and the dynamic market, the chapter recommends privatisation of justice in the consumer sector as the way forward
India: The cci warns that the Disney-reliance media merger could harm competition!
Get PDFAlmost every corner and street of the country has seen the magic of cricket, be it through playing the sport by the people or watching international and domestic matches. This joy that many Indians get comes mainly from the broadcasting of matches by Reliance or Disney.
There has always been competition between many companies to acquire broadcasting rights for cricket; however, recently, there has been a merger between Reliance and Disney and apprehensions regarding the same have been brought to light by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) on the US$8.5 billion merger deal. Unveiled in February 2024, this merger promises to assemble the largest entertainment conglomerate in India, a shift that will be profoundly felt in the media and broadcasting industries
On-going Shaheen Bagh: collective creation, newness and solidarity
No full textIn his work Now It’s Come to Distances: Notes on Shaheen Bagh, Coronavirus, Association and Isolation (2020), Soumyabrata Choudhury argues that the historical sit-in protest of Shaheen Bagh 2019 was a project of ‘collective creation’ that went beyond the interests of one section of society and made something universally imaginable to anyone. In its ability to form associations across the lines of religion, sex, age, caste, economic activities, and language, Shaheen Bagh inaugurated a project of new avenues of solidarity, especially through the overwhelming participation of women. ‘New’ in Choudhary’s formulation is a threshold that transforms the possibilities of our living histories. ‘New’, then, is historically contextual in the passage of time as all historical situations are. By building on Choudhury’s thesis on the same, this viewpoint article advocates reimagining this solidarity built across disparate lines as something temporal. This is in opposition to governmental practices of containing popular protests into spatial grids. A reimagined solidarity would ensure that Shaheen Bagh’s newness continues to live by channeling itself into new issues. People’s movements in India must be an ongoing Shaheen Bagh