Columns

If there is one thing that going to the Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia taught me, it was to take myself seriously. There was no choice. Everybody else did. To reach MCRC, one had to enter one of Delhi’s great Muslim ghettos. Yes, of course it is politically incorrect to call it that, but it is really ...

On the surface, life in Jamia is 75 percent compulsory class, lots of extended lectures and countless seminars. But if you looked in the right places, you would find that in Jamia, storylines of Hindi movies run parallel to classroom lectures. Ever wonder what it would be like if Jamia was a movie set? What would it be like if ...

The Bengali identity is a transnational identity. Bangladesh, or the eastern part of Bengal or East Bengal, has for most of its history been the natural neighbor of West Bengal, or the western part of Bengal. The whole notion of a united or divided Bengal had never sprung up until the developments of the first few years of the last ...

Waking up on the morning of Saturday, 9th February, a nightmare came true. A call from home made my smiling mood turn into one where I couldn’t hold back my tears. Afzal Guru had been hanged. It just didn’t seem right. My mind, my thoughts were a mess. I couldn’t think coherently. I repeatedly kept uttering, ‘how could they do ...

Jeet Narayan of Uttar Pradesh in 2008 pleaded for euthanasia for his four sons: Durgesh, Sarvesh, Sushil and Brijesh,  all aged between 13 and 22-years for they were crippled and paralyzed below the neck. Narayan wrote to the president of India, but his plea was rejected and his sons continue to live in their utterly hopeless and pitiful state. [Link] ...

In the Mahabharat, Vidur, at the time of declaring the Yuvraj, asked both Yudhisthir and Duryodhan to prove themselves worthy of being the next king by meting out justice on a case of murder that had four men accused of committing the crime. Duryodhan’s position was for the death sentence to be given to all the accused, without consideration of ...

It is rather unfortunate that the title of this piece may serve to remind readers of a certain series of novels and films centred on vampires and werewolves and their very intimate escapades. But wining the heart of an obdurately poker-faced woman was never easy now, was it? I am at the tail end of my academic programme here at ...

Every year most of us come to know about the Jaipur Literature Festival when a controversy arises. For instance, last year the Salman Rushdie issue was all over the news. This time, Ashish Nandy’s controversial comments on OBCs, SCs and STs  informed many of us that again a literature festival is going on in Jaipur. People are out on the ...

Our professors — some we love and some we hate, while a few we love to hate. The ones we like, we pay close attention to. We know how many times they say ‘um’, ‘okay’ and ‘right’ in their conversations. We try to speak like them. We google them and search for their facebook profiles. While the ones we hate, ...

Podcast Jamia has earned a unique place in academics and research not only because of regular in-class exercises but activities such as conferences, seminars, lectures, panel discussions, cultural programs etc. Each year, we come across several of these, but barring rare instances of appropriate media coverage, only we are the ones who know about it; only we are lucky to ...