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From Caste to ‘Taste’ - The Unfinished Story of Kerala’s Clothing Protests

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Kerala loves its Renaissance. Navodhanam rolls off the tongue in cultural festivals, political speeches, and school textbooks like a badge of collective pride. It is the word that animates our sense of being modern, secular and progressive. A convenient shorthand for a heroic leap from caste darkness into the light of equality. But what if this Renaissance is not the neat, linear saga we’ve been told? What if its symbols - upper cloths, nose-rings and fine cotton saris - tell a more tangled story, one woven not just with reform but with resistance, repression, and erasure? This blog invites you to read Kerala Renaissance not as a procession of noble reformers but as a contested terrain of bodies, fabrics, and forbidden desires. Through the lens of Foucault’s political technology of the body and Bourdieu’s aesthetics of taste, we peel back the glossy narrative to expose its seams - those stitched together by ezhava women and forgotten rebels like Arattupuzha Velayudha Panickar, with t...
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Power, Politics, and Paranoia: The Toxic Triangle Plaguing Academia Today

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Walk down the hallowed halls of any academic institution, and you might expect to find the hum of open minds in lively debate—places where knowledge grows and new ideas flourish. But peer beneath the polished veneer, and a very different reality often emerges: one where invisible power games, whispered politics, and creeping paranoia cloud the pursuit of truth. The modern academic world, for all its promise of enlightenment and progress, is increasingly shaped by an uneasy trio that threatens to erode its very foundations. Why is it that those who most passionately declare their love for freedom and irreverence so often fear genuine dissent? How has the classroom turned into a subtle battleground, where suspicion and self-preservation sometimes matter more than curiosity and courage? Join me as we unravel how power, politics, and paranoia have come to define the intellectual landscape of our times, and what this means for the future of knowledge itself. Step onto any academic campus in...
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Derrida, Discomfort, and the Real Magic of Learning: What Academics Get Wrong!

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Do We Still Need Derrida? Why "Critical Theory" Is the Most Dangerous — and Essential — Subject in Humanities Today Walk into any humanities classroom and you’ll likely hear it whispered — if not declared outright: “Why do we need all this Derrida nonsense?” From seasoned professors to eye-rolling undergrads, the skepticism is everywhere: Isn’t Critical theory just an endless maze of jargon, a parade of difficult names like Derrida, Kristeva, or Butler, each more cryptic than the last? Isn’t the world complicated enough without deconstructing every poem, play, or piece of history? But here’s the twist: What if this suspicion — the urge to dismiss, to shake our heads at the so-called irrelevance of “theory” — is exactly why we need it now, more than ever? What if all that discomfort and confusion isn’t a bug, but the feature? Critical theory wasn’t invented to coddle us in the comfort of “common sense” or to pad our essays with intimidating citations. It was born from irrevere...
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Debating the relevance of Humanities in the Digital Age

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“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.” - Steve Jobs The necessity of the Humanities in the digital age has become a topic of intense debate among policymakers and academicians worldwide. Regrettably, many of these discussions have found more reasons to sideline Humanities and favour STEM subjects. This trend has led to a decline in the disciplines' popularity in higher education institutions, leading to significant cut in the financial support for Humanities programmes.  The social perception that mostly celebrates rather than laments the decline of Humanities is a reflection of a distorted idea of knowledge. Seen through the neoliberal lens, it is the market economy that analyse the (ir)relevance of any episteme in the contemporary world. Neoliberalism adopts a "technical rationalist approach" towards education leading to its c...
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Set Mundu, Sadya, Kathakali: Who Gets to Define Kerala?

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On every November 1 st and especially during the celebrations of Onam, Kerala stages itself - not through festivities, but through an image regime. A woman in white-gold kasavu sari, a sumptuous sadya spread on a banana leaf and a stylised green face of a  Kathakali actor -  these are not mere festive markers but curated symbols. They adorn government hoardings, tourism ads, school walls and Instagram feeds. But as cultural theorists remind us, no symbol is apolitical. These images are not merely celebratory icons; they function as mechanisms of cultural selection, circulating within an affective economy that assigns emotional value and legitimacy to particular representations. Rather than reflecting Kerala, they actively regulate who is allowed to represent as authentically Keralite. Through this process, some bodies and identities are folded into the dominant cultural imagination, while others are excluded from its glowing frame, rendered invisible or inauthentic.  T...
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