The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, also called the CSDS or informally, just the Centre, is a premier institute of India in the social sciences and humanities. The Centre provides a unique institutional space which seeks to nurture intellectual interests outside the entrenched boundaries of academic disciplines. This simultaneously gives the Centre a sense of intimacy with and distance from universities. Therefore, the Centre has deliberately chosen not...

-The Indian Express   Human capital inequality is what India needs to be most concerned about right now.   THOMAS PIKETTY's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has attracted a great deal of attention, especially (it seems) where I live, in Washington DC. Some people have said the city has caught a severe case of "Piketty fever". Everyone seems to be talking about the book - clearly many more people than have read its 700...

-The Indian Express Section 377 reeks of the anxieties of Victorian Britain and Puritan America. In 1982, Michael Hardwick, a gay man, was having consensual sex with a male partner in his bedroom in Atlanta, Georgia. Police officer Keith Torick entered the apartment with a warrant (for public drinking) that had been invalid for three weeks. Admitted by Hardwick's housemate, he went straight to the bedroom. Seeing the men, he announced that...

-The Hindu India's long-standing legacies of caste, gender and class antagonism replicate on campuses as well. As higher education moves forward, it does so on these social cleavages The brutal sexual attack on a young woman in Delhi, in 2012, and a savage attack on a girl student of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on its campus this year are just two examples of extreme violence that have shocked the nation. Acts of...

-The Business Standard A recent academic paper on probability theory shows how beliefs are influenced by interpretations of data rather than the data itself Ever since Indira Gandhi turned it into a closely-held family company - and even more so since Sonia Gandhi turned it into a brain-dead dinosaur - one of the hallmarks of the Congress party is that it often ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Whether...