Democracy

Technological education in India has privileged the demands of the market and industry, while ignoring the demands of democracy to create an egalitarian society. The engineer is trained to "make" and "innovate" for a growing economy without understanding the social processes that produce certain "demands" in the first place, or considering how goods manufactured are to be distributed fairly in an unequal society. To make a successful journey from passive suppliers of technology to thought leaders on the question of India's development, the Indian Institutes of Technology must respond to the dominant discourse on development and articulate paradigmatic ideas on what development ought to be for India's democratic project.

Donald Trump epitomises deeper fault lines and contradictions that bedevil America's image of itself. It is symptomatic of a populism that travels for the most part across party lines and political affiliations. Democratic candidates have also resorted to a softer populism on the idea of the foreigner intruding into sacred national territory.

How does one understand WikiLeaks, which has not only redefined media ethics but has also redefined what we understand as media cultures?

The eerie early hours of May 19, 1993. Five intruders, Kalashnikovs already blazing, barge into a two-room bit in a house on the eastern fringes of Calcutta and, no questions asked, summarily shoot, several times over, a young Punjabi couple. The sequel of developments to this episode, 10 years ago, epitomises the current state of the democratic republic of India.

Traditional community/village level dispute resolution systems still coexist with formal processes of justice and administration. The `shalishi' is one such method of arbitration in West Bengal that has been used by NGOs to intervene effectively in settling domestic violence cases. Shalishi scores over the more formal legal avenues of dispute resolution because of its informal set up. But deriving its legitimacy as it does from the conventional norms and values of the community it works in favour of keeping the family intact, often compromising feminist notions of empowerment.