aroonwithaview

  • Renegotiating the social contract

    Violent revolutions are a particularly stark way of renegotiating a strained social contract. Democracies seem to have done surprisingly well by providing less stark ways of renegotiation, but they seem to be fraying at the seams of late. To me, there are three broad aspects contributing to this trend: rising polarization in beliefs and priorities…

  • Democracy(?) in America

    With yet another election season of watching the United States stare into the abyss coming to a close, things seem more grim on the eve of the election than they were the last two times. The first time, you could have excused it as a risky gamble or protest. The second time, you may have…

  • The victor of the spoils

    Nothing riles up the populace like a good old royal wedding, and if the Ambanis are not the archetype of modern Indian royalty, the term might as well be meaningless. Of course, the vast majority of Indians, even the vast majority of Indians with any access to information on the spectacle, do not care. But…

  • May the (labour) force be with you

    In school, the majority of my friends’ moms had the same occupation as mine did – “housewife” – so it never occurred to me that this was anything but an acceptable norm. This did change over time later on, as my sense on gender equality developed, but there was relatively little active questioning of why…

  • Contextual humanity

    As a teen, I was used to seeing the Israel-Palestine conflict regularly going in and out of prominence. Being restricted to news from actual papers of news (and that too, early on, mostly ToI, which did not carry the “ToI-let” moniker lightly), and also being restricted to what can only be termed a teen’s worldview,…