Although Professor Nida Kirmani’s article, “Fear and the City: Negotiating Everyday Life as a Young Baloch Man in Karachi” was not assigned to my group this week, I decided to read it as an optional reading since we were expecting a visit from the professor during class too. The article provides an enlightening ethnographic perspective…

The process of attaining middle-class status represents a pivotal transition for households seeking upward mobility and economic progress. According to Maqsood, pinpointing exactly when this transition occurs can identify the old middle class from the new and reveal insightful shifts in access to opportunity and intergenerational mobility. In Pakistan, the “old middle class” draws continuity…

Gupta makes very interesting remarks about the role of paper in the everyday workings of the state and society in contemporary South Asia. Chapter 5 highlights writing as not just a recording of bureaucratic actions, but constitutive of state practice itself. It also critiques the use of writing to exhibit exclusionary politics towards the poor….

Indian journalist Snigdha Poonam’s book, Dreamers, examines the lives of young people in India who are trying to make a better life for themselves in an unforgiving economy and rigged system. One of these dreamers is Mohammad Azhar, described as “The Star” by Poonam. Mohammad Azhar is a young man from a Mulsim ghetto in…

  Chapter 2 of Lamia Karim’s book, Microfinance in Bangladesh, provides an insightful overview of the research process and key concepts that guided her 18-month-long ethnographic study on microfinance NGOs, gender dynamics, and rural indebtedness in Bangladesh. While in the rural area of Pirpur Thana, Karim collaborated with a research assistant (Rina) who helped her…

The readings assigned to my group were from Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen’s “An Uncertain Glory” where they highlight how deeply entrenched inequalities are in India and the failure of democracy to address them. Inequalities of various kinds exist all over the world, but India has extreme inequalities of many types including economic, health, education,…

Atul Kohli argues that democracy in India is not “inclusive”. Ever since the 1980s when government policies took a pro-business tilt, the economy has grown exponentially – 6% per annum for three decades. However, this economic growth is accompanied by widening economic inequality between states and within each state. Business groups in India can exercise…

Sharika Thiranagama’s book studies the impact of the Sri Lankan civil war between the Sinhalese majority-led state and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) on the everyday “mundane” life of civilians living through the horrors. In the introduction, Thiranagama states that this book is not just about Sri Lanka’s war but about “war itself as a social…

In the third chapter, Axel examines the profound interplay between the torture of Sikhs by Indian police and the dissemination of these harrowing images on the internet. From the 1980s onward, violence emerged as a common thread shaping and reshaping the relations constituting the Sikh diaspora. Keith traces the history of torture, particularly its peak…

To answer the first question, state institutions can be made more representative of the society they govern, but achieving this goal can be complex, especially when dealing with various grievances among different segments of the population. In the late 19th century in Jammu and Kashmir, there was a growing demand for representative rule. The British…