India Gazette London

The Conservatives Friends of India have come up with a video asking Indians to thank Theresa May for all the help she had done for Indians, and support her party in the general elections.

For which artists the well-heeled raise their paddles (or, in most cases, barely nod their heads) while bidding on great works out of art-history textbooks for thousands of pounds

When I was awaiting my first round of student evaluations, a female colleague warned me, “To students, you’re either a mother or a bitch.” That is, you’re either nice, nurturing, and helpful, or arrogant, dismissive, and unavailable. Although I ended up receiving many substantive comments from students, there was no doubt that my personality (for good or ill) was often a central matter of discussion.

There are two things you prepare yourself for while stepping out of a railway station in India, especially north India. One is, of course, the horde of autorickshaw drivers and rickshaw pullers who almost grab you by the arm in their eagerness to take you to your destination. 

The Laws of Manu is one of the most exemplary texts of ideology in the entire history of humanity. The first reason is that while its ideology encompasses the entire universe, inclusive of its mythic origins, it focuses on everyday practices as the immediate materiality of ideology: how (what, where, with whom, when…) we eat, defecate, have sex, walk, enter a building, work, make war, etc. The second reason is that the book stages a radical shift with regard to its starting point (presupposition): the ancient code of Veda. What we find in Veda is the brutal cosmology based on killing and eating: higher things kill and eat/consume lower ones, stronger eat weaker, i.e., life is a zero-sum game where one’s victory is another’s defeat.

Sixteen-year-old Rudyard Kipling returned to India after a miserable childhood, and slightly less miserable adolescence in England, to take up the perfect job for a precociously gifted but possibly unemployable son of empire. He was to be 50% of the editorial staff – as he describes in his memoir Something of Myself – of the Civil and Military Gazette, the newspaper for Anglo-Indian Lahore society.

Nattikafirka, a small fishing town in Kerala, once witnessed battle runs of Tiippu Sultan in one of the fiercest episodes in his head-on clash with mighty East India Company in 18th century. Later days saw the British colonial enterprise asserting its ascendancy in South Indian coast. Old timers still attach the British-era description for the revenue sub-division, firka, whenever they mention Nattika.Early this year, MA Yusuffali, an Indian businessman with a quick smile, hailing from Nattika, bought a bulk of the company shares in a historic twist. Call this revenge of the empire, if you like.

For years, style bibles such as Vogue and Elle have found their exclusivity undermined by bloggers, who – with huge numbers of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram followers – have won over the designer brands that would normally only deal with major publications. Inevitably, this tension occasionally breaks the surface, as when Vogue editors recently lashed out at fashion bloggers in their Milan fashion week round-up column.

Race and Ethnicity Undergraduate Reading List

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life By Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

“Barbara Fields’s Racecraft runs all through [Between the World and Me].” – Ta-Nehisi Coates

No one has better articulated why race cannot serve as the starting point for discussions about inequality in the United States — and what we miss when they are — than Barbara and Karen Fields, authors of the 2012 book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. – Jason Farbham, Jacobin

The Letter Home (For Gieve Patel)

By Ruth Padel

You painted the Saturday queue for a Letter Writer cross-legged on a shawl in shadow of the unfinished flyover. I have health, again and again. I am sending the money home. But what is home? Where you began – where a sister with a husband whose salary is regular but he resents you anyway, this indigent who sees more of the world than he, has turned

When India and Pakistan embarked upon the first of many wars in the immediate aftermath of their independence, Gandhi, in a number of speeches from 1947 and 1948, was against taking their dispute over Kashmir to the United Nations. This was because he thought that international mediation would not only prolong the conflict by preventing any direct dealing between the two countries, but also attract bigger powers to their shared homeland, which would in the end become the site of proxy wars and might even pass into the hands of others.

The arcane world of inward investment promotion in London has a regular visitor from Flanders, a region with its picturesque towns of narrow streets nestled among the rolling hills of Belgium. Arriving at the riverside financial capital, Filippe De Potter, the Director of Inward Investment at Flanders Investment and Trade (FIT), nicks the show from under the noses of trade promotion elite.

Ever heard of motion sensors detecting dangerous situations like robberies, or dynamic traffic management based on sound sensors? What about windows functioning as solar panels or smart T-shirts monitoring your heart rate and blood pressure? Leuven, a vibrant university city near Belgium’s capital Brussels, has a cluster of high-tech companies and research institutes that are turning these ideas into reality. “Our knowledge can contribute to India’s healthcare and help the Indian cities develop into the smart cities they want to be”, says Deputy Mayor Mohamed Ridouani.

    There is a long history in Hindi cinema of stories of Indians returned from abroad, from Bilat pherat/England Returned (dir. D. N. Ganguly, 1921) in the silent era to today. Overseas locations, mostly used to show the glamour of travel, became popular with colour film in the 1960s, and this wallpaper still continues as an attraction of the Hindi film which adds spectacle, gloss and an air of cosmopolitanism – but is not a space inhabited or explored by the characters. Another group of films shows Indians who have gone to live overseas – that is, the Indian diaspora – but at this early stage these films were about bringing the family home to escape the material West and return to the spiritual East.

Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear will display more than 200 examples of underwear for men and women, highlighting the enduring themes of innovation and luxury, from the custom-made, such as a rare example of home-made ‘stays’ worn by a working woman in England in the 18th century to pieces by designers including Stella McCartney, La Perla, Rigby & Peller and Paul Smith.

The Knowledge, London’s legendary taxi-driver test, puts up a fight in the age of GPS.