This has been in the making for several years now – trying to identify the causal chain from ideas to action, especially since the first reading of Foucault. The ongoing trouble in colleges and universities of Delhi presents a case to reflect upon this causal chain. There comes a phase in student life when encounters […]
Category Archives: Philosophy & Law
Explorations in Marxist social theory & a book review
This one will be a longer post than usual, but delights me especially because I could manage to get a somewhat minimal sense of the range of thoughts and ideas in the Marxist lineage, which has been a long going effort. The post includes a discussion of a clutch of the thinkers in a rather […]
On the idea of ‘property’
From a few earlier projects that our firm has handled (in FRA, land acquisition and coastal regulation) and a couple of academic exercises, I began exploring the idea of property and how it has come to be its contemporary understanding. This meant that I begin with earliest conceptions or references to the word property and […]
Sexual Harassment & Appropriate Sexual Behaviour: An alternative view (Part 2/2)
Continuing from Sexual Harassment: An alternative view, the following post traces the trajectory of the movement against sexual harassment in India. The first major event that drew attention to this issue was FOWA’s action in the 1980s. A 1991 report from the same organization describes it as – (…) militant action by the Forum Against […]
Sexual Harassment & Appropriate Sexual Behaviour: An alternative view (Part 1/2)
his post is inspired from a paranoia-laced militant behaviour that I witnessed last week, of a Professor (in a law school) as she spoke about the law school’s sexual harassment code, repeatedly emphasizing how robust the school’s code is.
It traces genealogy of terms “sex”, “gender” and “sexual harassment” and their connotations in contemporary times.
State & Pace: Criminal Justice in India
Turns out that not just crash courses happen in four weeks, but policies too are made in India in four weeks. Some of them with policy goal as big as fast tracking of justice system in the country. The Supreme Court’s or Chief Justice of India’s words wouldn’t have probably made a visible impact in […]
Prison reforms in India: A quick history
In our work, we figured that a concise history of prison reforms is hard to find. So, in this post I have pieced together the events that led to improving prison conditions and what came of those efforts. Plus, a schematic on criminal justice system. This should be useful for those who’d like to know […]
Theorizing Rape and Potential Rapists
I have often felt that the urge to theorize does more disservice to the disciplines apart from the waste of time and resources that happens anyway. The discontent is about the sort of scholarship prevails that has no link to practice. Then that begets the question if one should even care for such scholarship. It […]
Return to Freud (via Lacan)
The “unconscious” isn’t a bathtub bubble emerging from a good theoretical lather in which the intellectual has been wallowing. I have been wrong about it. And being contemptuous of psychoanalysis as a discipline was too uninformed (didn’t people say psychoanalysis is dead?). In fact, a realization waylaid me this morning that the idea of unconscious […]
Foucault Redux
On Technologies of the Self Foucault is back! Here at the university, where people just don’t get tired of including a paper or two in every course, from the wide range of topics he has written or lectured on. And it turns out that he is also back in academia going by citation figures of […]
