Algorithms of Exclusion

Reporters Collective A I series Haryana used the state’s Family ID database and algorithms to identify genuine beneficiaries of welfare schemes. The database wrongly listed thousands of citizens as dead. Result: They lost their pensions. The Collective’s Tapasya travelled to Haryana to understand how states are using artificial intelligence in an unintelligent way, at a… Read More Algorithms of Exclusion

Conversations with a textile worker in Surat / सूरत में एक कपड़ा मजदूर से बातचीत

Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu and Surat in Gujarat are the preeminent textile clusters in India. In Surat there are two million workers in fifty thousand textile manufacturing units. Surat is a hub for synthetic fibres, especially sarees. At ease conversations on 27 and 28 December 2023 with a printing & dyeing factory worker in an… Read More Conversations with a textile worker in Surat / सूरत में एक कपड़ा मजदूर से बातचीत

What the West gets wrong on Stalin and Putin

The Western tendency to reduce mass-scale crime to an omnipotent leader has always been a misleading one. Even Stalinism was not the work of one man, but of the security services and individuals willing to denounce their fellow neighbors for housing rights or petty grievances, as the Kyiv-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov so mercilessly satires in… Read More What the West gets wrong on Stalin and Putin

What Happens in Ayodhya Doesn’t Stay in Ayodhya

Mrinal Pande A cluster of photos printed in a major English daily, the day after the week long rituals began in Ayodhya’s new Ram temple, confirms that our ‘Beti Padhao‘ and ‘Stree Sashkteekaran’ and various ‘Matru Kalyan Yojanas’ notwithstanding, the traditional gendered hierarchies remain firmly in place both on the streets and in the temple in Ayodhya. In… Read More What Happens in Ayodhya Doesn’t Stay in Ayodhya

The west’s complete contempt for the lives of Palestinians will not be forgotten

Our political and media elites are complicit in Gaza’s nightmare. Any vestige of moral authority has been lost for ever. Surely 10,000 children suffering violent deaths, or the 10 kids having one or both legs amputated each day, often without anaesthetic, would stir powerful emotions. Surely 5,500 pregnant women giving birth each month – many having caesareans without anaesthetic –… Read More The west’s complete contempt for the lives of Palestinians will not be forgotten

Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt / South Africa is testing the west’s claim to moral superiority

From Heidegger’s Nazism to Habermas’s Zionism, the suffering of the ‘Other’ is of little consequence. GAZA casualties live statistics We must be forgiven if we thought what Germany had today was not Holocaust guilt, but genocide nostalgia, as it has vicariously indulged in Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians over the past century Hamid Dabashi Imagine if Iran, Syria, Lebanon,… Read More Thanks to Gaza, European philosophy has been exposed as ethically bankrupt / South Africa is testing the west’s claim to moral superiority