Social media and elections, english language, the right to beauty, end of academic disciplines, and climate debate
a curated list of exceptional articles for your weekly intellectual curiosity
Dear Reader,
This is the second edition of fuzzy notes, a weekly newsletter on politics, philosophy, society, culture, and international affairs.
This week’s newsletter consists of interesting essays on digital campaigns by the Hindu Nationalist BJP in Indian elections, Sumana Roy’s IIC School vs. JLF School, Ursula Lindsey’s right to beauty, end of academic disciplinary debates, and the terms related to climate change debates.
Along with the excerpts of these articles, some complementary readings are also linked in the newsletter.
Politics: Social Media, Election Campaigns and India’s Hindu-Nationalist BJP
In a recently published investigative journalistic (three-part) article, The Washington Post has revealed the significantly sophisticated digital campaign by Hindu nationalist party to inflame India.
The article highlights how campaigns around hatred largely drove the recently concluded elections in the Indian State of Karnataka. There was a machinery of WhatsApp forwards, spreading hatred against Muslims and other minorities, propelling the fears of communal unrest if the opposition is elected to power, and how India could be a Hindu Rashtra.
Some of the insights from the essay are as follows
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept into power nearly a decade ago. Since then, he has repeatedly rallied voters in this vast democracy and entrenched his party’s power by exploiting differences between the Hindu majority and Muslim minority.
Religious tensions have existed in India since independence in 1947, and Modi’s right-wing followers in his Bharatiya Janata Party and beyond turned to inflammatory rhetoric and violence against Muslims to secure support from Hindus.
Government censorship of critical views has been on the rise. Social media platforms and other Big Tech firms, protective of their position in one of the world’s largest markets, have often given Modi and his allies what they want.
Complement this essay with a recent set of articles published by the Journal of Democracy on “Is India Still a Democracy?” to engage further on these intricacies. Alternatively, read Pratinav Anil’s review of Joya Chatterji’s Shadows at Noon. (Buy the book here at Amazon India, Amazon Global.)
Society: English Language and Indian Society
Indian society has a certain fascination with the English language. That fascination is reflected in how much all that we speak, even in our vernaculars, is dominated by English words. At times, you may have to look through the dictionary to find the vernacular equivalent of the English term used in everyday conversations.
Here is a book review by Sumana Roy in the LA Review of Books on Akshya Saxena’s 2022 book Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India, which seeks to provincialize the standardised, sophisticated Victorian language of English. It is a refreshing read, intuitively titled: ‘The IIC School Versus the JLF School of Indian English’.
Its self-description gives us a sense of its difference from the IIC: the IIC is “international,” the JLF “global”; the IIC has “conference rooms,” the JLF is a “festival,” “spectacular,” a “sumptuous feast.” Anyone can come here, to these few days in Jaipur, for the “greatest literary show on Earth”; anyone can be a friend: “Become A Friend Of The Festival,” says its homepage; it’s the same relationship register as Modi’s “mitron,” friend. One comes here to run into writers—or, as I hear many on Twitter say from time to time, to “breathe the same air” as the objects of one’s admiration. “I can’t believe that I was breathing the same air as Mira Nair for the last 30 mins,” tweeted someone I have taught.
The former’s stock is a review in a “well-respected” forum, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the London Review of Books; for the latter, an author photograph accompanying an interview in a newspaper or on a website will do, or even an Instagram post. The constituency of the first reads English; the constituency of the second is happy to see English. The IIC brings prestige—books must be launched there to allow them this life—while the JLF confirms popularity: writers must get themselves invited there to feel the equivalent of a bestseller.
Despite the brilliant assessment of two Indian English, this essay is not very convincing in terms of the differences in IIC and JLF—both of which are largely spaces for people who read, and most of all, the description of what counts of two India’s is in how the common people and how the educated elite perceive the language of English.
There are two worlds. Paradoxically, while the author disparagingly writes about the former associated with The New Yorker and their ilk and disassociates herself from the IIC school, her essay is published in LA Review of Books – very JLF School-like.
Complement this reading with my essay on ‘Living the Mimetic Desires of Becoming a Civil Servant in India’.
Culture: The Right to Beauty
Is there beauty in cities? Is that kind of beauty a right? Are cities more beautiful when democratic rulers rule them than autocrats? These are the questions the following essay will ask—and answer.
Ursula Lindsey, in her essay in The Point, titled: “The Right to Beauty”, looks at the cities in the West Asian region and discusses how political events and actors shape cities—and in turn also ruin cities, making them commercial spaces, without allowing spaces to be for public engagements.
I find the search for beauty even more touching in places where it isn’t abundant, where it can’t be taken for granted, where it is in fact constantly endangered. These days I can’t help feeling that there is less beauty in the Arab cities I know than ever before, that it is being confiscated, willfully destroyed. People have been robbed of beauty by the ruthless devastation of 21st-century warfare, by extremist movements that find beauty (of the body, of arts, of historic sites that contradict their dogmatic histories) suspect, by market forces that sequester beauty into upper-class enclaves, and by autocratic regimes that refuse to see what is lovely about their lands and their people.
This part of the world is home to some of its most ancient and splendid cities. Their degradation is the result, the visible expression, of failed governance—of violence, autocracy, inequality and corruption. What is being built around and over them, meanwhile, is largely tasteless, unimaginative, unequal, disrespectful of heritage and unthinking of the environment.
It is quite interesting, given how we associate beauty with being the least of our concerns when there is a lack of many other things. She inverts this lens and seeks to connect all of the aspects of how beauty is related to how we are governed and what becomes of it.
Philosophy: The End of Academic Disciplines
We may have all wondered what it is like to think of research questions and puzzles that have not already been answered in a particular discipline. Some of us may even think everything is exhausted.
There are no new questions left for us to answer. There is nothing new really in what I am doing. That is all that is out there. And I cannot think of anything new. Why this may occur? Rachel Scarborough King and Seth Rudy, in their essay: “The ends of knowledge”, argue for scholars to think of ends in their knowledge disciplines.
We want to offer a new perspective by arguing that it is salutary – or even desirable – for knowledge projects to confront their ends. With humanities scholars, social scientists and natural scientists all forced to defend their work, from accusations of the ‘hoax’ of climate change to assumptions of the ‘uselessness’ of a humanities degree, knowledge producers within and without academia are challenged to articulate why they do what they do and, we suggest, when they might be done. The prospect of an artificially or externally imposed end can help clarify both the purpose and endpoint of our scholarship.
Our volume The Ends of Knowledge: Outcomes and Endpoints Across the Arts and Sciences (2023) asks how we should understand the ends of knowledge today. What is the relationship between an individual knowledge project – say, an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, or the creation of a Large Language Model – and the aim of a discipline or field? In areas ranging from physics to literary studies to activism to climate science, we asked practitioners to consider the ends of their work – its purpose – as well as its end: the point at which it might be complete.
These authors argue that thinking of ends in one’s disciplinary engagements may be good—and then refocus. Do check out the essay, and tell me in the comments if you agree. I, for one, was not entirely comfortable with the idea of thinking of an end in academic disciplines.
International Affairs: Terms Related to Climate Change Debate
In this final section, I add an essay I wrote this week on terminologies that pervade climate change debates. I have discussed several terminologies that are both used on an everyday basis and also are not very well known but are essential in terms of climate change debates.
Climate change is one of the most significant contemporary issues for human societies. Barely any issues are as significant as climate change in today’s world. Sure, there has been a COVID pandemic, there is also war in Ukraine, and then there is a global economic recession, along with all the communal upheaval across the globe, mediated by inequalities and poor living conditions. Some (like Adam Tooze) have referred to the accumulated condition of the present crises as polycrisis—a fancy term that still hasn’t gained significant consensus about its meaning since its coinage. The climate debates that often overshadow everyday discussions may seem intuitive. But there are interesting terms around climate change we all (over)hear or even use without really giving much thought to or without really dwelling deep into them.
Read the full essay: “Making Sense of Terms Around Climate Change Debate” here. At the same time, check out Jia Tolentino’s “What to do with Climate Emotions” published in The New Yorker.
It is the end of this newsletter. I hope this reading list will keep you busy for the next week as you straddle between family, work, and leisure.
See you next week! Until then, happy reading :)