The India Fix: Does India need to rethink how it does welfare?

Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal, a newsletter on Indian politics. To get it in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Have feedback, interesting links or memes? Send them to shoaib@scroll.in.

Why do you hate the Kardashians?

I get a lot of raised eyebrows each time I share any Kardashian-related information. For the most part, people don’t associate a triple degree holder, one foot firmly in academia scholar with the KarJenners in seriousness. I get it as well, when I dropped the bomb on my advisor about writing a Ph.D. on Kim Kardashian in 2016, she flipped. She told me to take some time off and think, as though I had lost my mind (which, to be fair, graduate school and dissertation writing are notorious for anyway).  What started as a joke (to me), turned into a full-blown culture studies phenomenon. I recall a conference being centered around KarJenners, celebrity, and reality TV culture (I missed the deadline to submit a pitch) and this is just in academia. Outside of our tiny bubble, the world was fully engrossed in watching Kim, momager Kris and Ye, taking the world by storm (actually Kylie took the world by Stormi but that’s a conversation for my gay friends and me). The Kardashians emerged as the biggest celebrity brand in the world with a net worth together that can make Jeff and Elon unionize with other billionaires to compete against the femme power of the sisters. Math isn’t my strongest strength and truth be told, any number of zeroes I add to their total net worth will not be accurate. The Kardashians and the Jenners are bigger than most of us.

Uniformity is the endeavor of the Constitution but not its absolute mandate

Written by Hritam Saha'All men are created equal.' Today, when a critic reads this science, he/she will ask why men but not 'men and women', and a critic who is a bit more critical will ask why not 'human', however, a realist will ask 'what happens after the creation, do we all remain uniform after birth?' A resounding NO answers the question because, after birth, some become Muslims, some Christians, Hindus, Jews, Parsis, etc. and if we step a bit further then some also become animals but still look like a human. Therefore, in our post-birth scenario, we get automatically distinguished despite continuing to look like a human perhaps continuing to act like a human.

Self-Defeat!

Two of the biggest macro-stories last week were the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and expanded lockdown across more than 30 cities in China due to Covid-19.

Aparnawritesonart

All about South Asian architecture, art history and literature.

ANAND KUMAR

Witness

Just putting it in one place