This is a long post. Microsoft Word puts it at 4,542 words! Possibly the longest I have written. It explores a diversity of ideas and themes: a moniker called MERIT colleges to replace the inelegant IIT / IIM we use to earmark an elite college in India, the emergence of two parallel tracks of merit, a national consciousness that elite Indians share, and finally their privilege blindness. I hope you …
Indo-Anglians
What’s in a first name? Your social status
I wrote this for The Times of India in July 2019, about how first names convey social status and even class capital amongst middle castes in India today. Link to the Times of India post.
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A few years ago, in a Facebook post that is now offline, poet and activist Meena Kandasamy encouraged upper caste Indians to drop their surnames. These surnames, she said, had considerable caste capital …
We are all appizens now, not citizens
This was originally published in The New Indian Express.
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Around 20 years ago, my father, a South Indian working in a South Indian bank, received his obligatory North India posting to Delhi, something he and my mother had been dreading. Those first days in Delhi were incredibly trying, as my parents negotiated with plumbers, electricians, maids, milkmen and every person you interface to set up a home. Each of …
Defining merit in ways it suits us
This was originally published in The New Indian Express on 18 November 2018.
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In Indo-Anglian circles, no topic gets as much importance as education or specifically higher education. For it is education that creates and defines us Indo-Anglians and remains a key marker of identity. In my (Indo-Anglian) circles, with our kids now reaching teenagehood, talk quickly veers these days to career and college options. Increasingly these days …
Gender faultlines and the granularity of consent
(From September to December 2018, I wrote 3 posts for the New Indian Express. It was to be a monthly column giving a glimpse into the Indo-Anglian hive mind, or the world of the elite English-speaking Indian. I couldn’t sustain it – there were multiple reasons. For one, no feedback at all from anyone. Not sure how many were reading it! Then the fact that i had to fit …
Say Hello to India’s Newest and Fastest-Growing Caste
Sometime around 2012 or ’13, my daughters stopped speaking in Konkani, our mother tongue. It isn’t entirely clear what provoked it; perhaps it was a teacher at their Mumbai school encouraging students to speak more English at home. Or perhaps it was something else. It doesn’t matter.
What did matter was that our home became an almost exclusively English-speaking household, with the occasional sporadic Konkani conversation. We were not alone. …