Category: Essays
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Kant – Aesthetic Judgements of Taste and the Arts
In 2023, artisans from the Chanakya School of Craft turned paintings by Manu and Madhavi Parekh into floor-to-ceiling embroidered textiles that were displayed in an exhibition. The original paintings dealt with themes of mythology, femininity, and divinity, which were recontextualised through ancient Indian stitching techniques into new artworks. For Kant, the original paintings would be…
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Hate Speech in Institutions
Stanley Fish claims that “there is no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing, too” (104). I show that his assertion that absolute free speech does not exist in principle is not a relevant justification for banning hate speech in institutions. Fish recommends that because of the ‘emptiness’ of free speech as…
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Hutcheson’s Unity Amidst Variety
Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss depicts a pair of lovers engaged in an aureate embrace. Klimt’s artwork is adorned with different patterns, each intricate and dazzling, but certainly dissimilar – there are flowers, geometrical shapes, and human figures together constellating the work. The painting seems to capture Francis Hutcheson’s description of beauty as “unity amidst…
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Everyday Aesthetics and the Sublime
Reading Saito, Dowling, and Kant A person sits down in front of a woman in the MoMA’s atrium. The woman stares at the person intensely, scarcely blinking or moving. She gazes into a stranger’s eyes. Then, when their time is up, the person gets up, and another stranger sits before the woman, and the exercise…
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Education, Ease, and the Elites
Ease, Cultural Capital, And How The World Stays The Same In a classroom discussion at St Paul’s, an elite boarding school in the US, a student “almost erupts out of his seat, blurting, “Kinda like Dostoyevsky!””, a comparison that is clearly unfounded and irrelevant to the text under study. Both the teacher and researcher find…
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Beauvoir and Independence
Autonomy and Femininity in The Second Sex It has been 70 years since Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published.[1] Today, women continue to wrestle with the same questions she did – in modified language – for instance: why do so many women choose to wear makeup, corsets, and high-heels, or engage in sexual…
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The Inside Joke
Theorising Improvisation and Cultural Humour in Online India In an episode of the American TV show Succession, the character of Shiv (short for Siobhan) Roy made skilled tactical moves and delivered biting one-liners. Responding on Twitter, user @GordonRamashray (a play on the famed chef Mr Ramsey and the South Indian restauraunt ‘Ramashray’), wrote: “siobhan roy…
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Platform Capitalism and Selfhood
Miasmas of Silicon Valley doom hang around Twitter’s cyberspace since ownership of the famously unprofitable platform has been forcibly passed onto a foundering Elon Musk (Huang 2022). Twitter has seen weeks of unmitigated chaos with mass firings, tendentious (and sometimes quickly repealed) changes to application architecture, and rampant misinformation prior to American midterm elections (Conger…
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Historical Materialism and the Communist State
When History Has a Head and a Heart In the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes: “[w]hat else does the history of ideas demonstrate than that the products of the intellect are refashioned along with material ones? The ruling ideas of an age were always but the ideas of the ruling class.”[1] Well, no more. Marx…
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The Blackening of Bombay
Loose Narratives and Institutionalised Riot Systems Salman Rushdie is invariably invoked in conversations about the sprawling, fecund imaginary of old Bombay as a site of dreams and syncretism, where fanatical Hindu militant violence was but the stuff of magical realism. He described how, “[t]he Bombay that I grew up in, in the ’50s, ’60s and…
sanjana sheth 