Commentary on the philosophical poems by Narayana Guru, 1856-1928, philosopher-saint; includes text.

The objective of this work is to demonstrate how cooperative sharers and uncooperative free riders can be placed in different groups of an electronic society in a decentralised manner. We have simulated an agent-based open and decentralised P2P system which self-organises itself into different groups to avoid cooperative sharers being exploited by uncooperative free riders. This approach encourages sharers to move to better groups and restricts free riders into those groups of sharers without needing centralised control. Our approach is suitable (...) for current P2P systems that are open and distributed. Gossip is used as a social mechanism for information sharing which facilitates the formation of groups. Using multi-agent based simulations we demonstrate how the adaptive behaviour of agents lead to self-organisation. We have tested with varying the gossip level and checked its impact in the system’s behaviour. We have also investigated the impact of false gossip in this system where gossip is the medium for information sharing which leads to self-organisation. (shrink)

What is your name, from where, of which caste, what job, how old? One who is free from such questions, his alone is beatitude. In the verdant countryside of south-west India, at the turn of the last century, lived the great poet-seer Narayana Guru. His message was very simple: 'Man is of one caste, one religion and one God / Of one same womb, one same form, with no difference at all.' Grounded in the mystical depths of life, he (...) wandered across the landscape, gently proclaiming justice and equality for all, interacting with the multitudes who came to meet him, electrifying them to be at their best, and galvanizing a peaceful movement to eliminate oppression in all its forms. Stalwarts like Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi sought his counsel. He inspired social reformers such as Sahodaran Ayyappan, Mahatma Ayyankali, Pandit Karuppan, V.T. Bhattathiripad, among others. Along the way, he composed a compact body of writing in prose and verse of exceptional potency. These are stimulating, deep and original explorations, entryways into a profound appreciation of the human condition. (shrink)

The author examines South Asian American women caregivers in two domestic violence organizations, namely Apna Ghar, the Chicago shelter for battered immigrant women, and Saheli, a support group for abuse survivors in Austin, Texas. Through informal interviews with Apna Ghar workers and Saheli volunteers and participant observation at Apna Ghar, she outlines the concept of “radical caring.” Radical caring emerges at the conjunction of individual and organizational motivations. However, radical caring is inherently contradictory; first, the caregivers’ traditional gender identities are (...) used to alter the very same gender ideologies in their racialized communities. Second, workers attempt to preserve the dignity of care receivers even as they engage in tasks that undermine their self-respect. Third, caseworkers exercise authority so that residents’ autonomy may be enhanced. The author argues that although organizations such as Apna Ghar hold the potential for social change, professionalization of shelter work along with the contradictions inherent in caregiving compromise radical caring. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper scrutinizes some of our most enduring assumptions about the genre of autobiography. More particularly, it examines the predicative links, the transitivities, which bind notions of self-life-and-writing. It comes to this exercise through a reading of Madhavikutty-Kamala Das’ Balyakala Smaranakal (Memories of a Childhood) (1987). This autobiography promises to trace the self from its incipience—only to side-step the self’s emergence and to hide this deferral in plain sight. The paper argues that Balyakala Smaranakal (BS) uses our expectations of the (...) genre and our presumptions about the writer—particularly her abiding preoccupation with self-production—as accomplices. It invites us to witness the textual densities which the child-protagonist gathers and then deploys these strategies to un-do the self’s emergence. By deferring the production of the self BS stages the autobiography as “intransitive”. This paper goes some way in examining the reasons why it becomes impossible for BS to produce a legible self; for the child-protagonist to step into the social category that it summons forth. It examines the formal as well as socio-historical conditions within which this autobiography becomes the place of self-postponement—rather than of self-presentation and self-actualization. (shrink)

Verse work on the Advaita philosophy, by a Hindu religious leader and social reformer from Kerala.

This article uses a feminist lens to examine Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and former United States President Donald Trump’s responses to COVID-19. It argues that both populist leaders mobilised masculinity as a resource in statecraft. Both initially responded to the pandemic with dismissiveness and denialism. For the rest of his term, Trump diminished the harms of COVID and emphasised ‘protecting the economy’. Duterte, however, eventually embraced the fear of COVID, imposed a strict lockdown, and secured emergency powers. This article first (...) analyses differences in the masculinities the two politicians performed. It then explores how this performance of masculinity contributed to structuring public discourses in relation to the pandemic and situates it in neoliberal governance more broadly. For example, the performance of invincibility constructed others’ vulnerability and illness as an individual weakness rather than socially and relationally produced. Trump’s co-optation of the language of freedom encouraged protests against health measures and positioned medical experts as the ‘real threat’. In contrast, Duterte’s securitised approach made it difficult for citizens to protest repressive laws enacted by his government. Duterte’s ‘war on COVID’ was marked by his demand for obedience and discipline, thereby constituting anyone who questioned the harmful effects of a police-led lockdown as a threat to national security. Finally, the article reflects on the ways China’s growing role in global politics affects notions and practices of populist masculinities. Both leaders flexed diplomatic masculinity differently in relation to China: Duterte touted his personal closeness to China as a path to securing resources for the Philippines, while Trump’s vilification of China constructed COVID as a ‘foreign enemy’ as opposed to a crisis he was responsible for. Ultimately, these masculine responses undermined dissent and centred muscularity, either in the form of individual resilience or securitisation and policing, as the solution to the pandemic. (shrink)

The Philippines is a global leader in deploying microcredit to address poverty. These programmes are usually directed at women. Research on these programmes focuses on traditional economic indicators such as loan repayment rates but neglects impacts on women’s agency and well-being, or their position in the household and relationships with their partners and children. It is taken for granted that access to microcredit leads to enhanced gender freedoms. In line with the growing body of work in feminist scholarship that critiques (...) the instrumentalist logic of microfinance institutions in relation to women, this research foregrounds stories from interviews with female borrowers in Zamboanga City in Southern Philippines to provide grounded illustrations of how microcredit is reshaping relationships between women and their families, women and poverty and women and the state. Borrowers used loans to meet their family’s needs even at the cost of harassment from creditors, indebtedness, increased workloads and conflict with partners. These narratives challenge the dominant neoliberal discourse of female empowerment through access to credit by exposing how microcredit is part of a complex set of regulations around ‘good motherhood’ and consumption, where women’s moral worth is based on their willingness and ability to lift their families out of poverty. (shrink)

Pt. 1. The lives and teachings of the three Ācāryas and Narayana Guru -- pt. 2. Ideas of the three Ācāryas unitively revisualised.

What makes a multimillion-dollar, transnational intimate industry possible when most people see it as exploitative? Using the newly emergent case of commercial surrogacy in India, this article extends the literature on stratified reproduction and intimate industries by examining how surrogacy persists and thrives despite its common portrayal as the “rent-a-womb industry” and “baby factory.” Using interview data with eight infertility specialists, 20 intended parents, and 70 Indian surrogate mothers, as well as blogs and media stories, we demonstrate how market actors (...) justify their pursuits through narrating moral frames of compassion and altruism that are not incidental but systematic to and constitutive of transnational surrogacy. We observed two predominant moral frames: surrogacy liberates and empowers Indian women from patriarchal control; and surrogacy furthers reproductive rights. Within these frames, the market exchange of money for babies is cast as compassion, which allows commissioning clients to sidestep accusations of racism, classism, and sexism. Yet, we reveal that the ability to navigate around these threats relies on racist, classist, and sexist tropes about Third World working-class women. Further, we find that surrogate mothers did not experience significant changes in economic status after surrogacy. (shrink)

Work on Advaita philosophy; text, translation, study with interpretation.

Original text with commentary on Ātmōpadēśaśtakam of Sri Narayana Guru, b. 1856-1928, work on philosophy of Ātman.

On the concept of Ātman in Hindu philosophy; text with Hindi translation and explanation.

Based on the q-deformed oscillator algebra, we study the behavior of the mean occupation number and its analogies with intermediate statistics and we obtain an expression in terms of an infinite continued fraction, thus clarifying successive approximations. In this framework, we study the thermostatistics of q-deformed bosons and fermions and show that thermodynamics can be built on the formalism of q-calculus. The entire structure of thermodynamics is preserved if ordinary derivatives are replaced by the use of an appropriate Jackson derivative (...) and q-integral. Moreover, we derive the most important thermodynamic functions and we study the q-boson and q-fermion ideal gas in the thermodynamic limit. (shrink)

Rett syndrome (RTT) is an X‐linked dominant neurodevelopmental disorder affecting almost exclusively girls. Although mutations in methyl‐CpG‐binding protein (MeCP2) are known to be associated with RTT, gene expression patterns are not significantly altered in MeCP2‐deficient cells. A recent study1 identified MeCP2‐mediated histone modification and formation of a higher‐order chromatin loop structure specifically associated with silent chromatin at the Dlx5–Dlx6 locus in normal cells, and its absence thereof in RTT patients. This altered expression of Dlx5 through loss of silent chromatin loop (...) formation provides a molecular mechanism underlying RTT and proposes a novel role for MeCP2 in chromatin organization and imprinting. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. BioEssays 27:676–680, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Comprehensive work on ancient and modern Indic philosophy; with some reference to religious movements and reforms of Marathi and other Indian saints.

The essay reflects in an elegiac mode on a now largely forgotten (or effaced) body of literature from precolonial India regarding the art and business of politics. This body, known as nīti, has classical roots in Sanskrit but came in particular to be popular in peninsular India between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries in vernacular languages such as Telugu, Kannada, and Marathi. Secular and this-worldly in orientation, it can be broadly contrasted to the far better known body of texts (...) on dharma, which are concerned to preserve a normative, ritually and religiously sanctioned, order based on strict adherence to caste and gender roles. We first trace the classical roots of the tension between dharma and nīti and then set out how these two bodies of texts came to play distinct and evolving roles in medieval and early modern south India. We argue further that under the early phase of colonial rule, East India Company officials misunderstood the nature of nīti texts and that this has led to a persistently erroneous view of their role and content. We conclude by noting, however, that some astute modern observers of and participants in Indian politics, such as B. R. Ambedkar, have understood the part that nīti might play for the development of a secular language of politics in modern India. (shrink)

In the years since its twin publication in 2001 and 2003 , Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as (...) well as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or sastric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule. (shrink)

In the years since its twin publication in 2001 and 2003, Textures of Time has attracted a great deal more attention outside the United States than in the American academy. This, we suggest, is because its ideas and approach are rather at odds with the dominant trends in the area of “postcolonial studies.” In this response to three critical essays that engage with the book—by Rama Mantena, Sheldon Pollock, and Christopher Chekuri—we begin by setting out our principal hypotheses as well (...) as the evidentiary structure of the book, which draws mostly on vernacular materials from South India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The former includes the claim that South India between roughly 1600 and 1800 possessed considerable and diverse historiographical traditions, though these histories came couched in a variety of genres, rendering them difficult for the uninitiated to recognize at first; the latter requires us to develop the significance of the concepts of “texture” as well as of “subgeneric markers” that help distinguish texts with a historical intention from those that are nonhistorical but have the same generic location. Our response then goes on to discuss why theoretical or sastric texts in India do not themselves explicitly theorize the distinctions we make. Here, we posit a contrast between “embedded” and “explicated” concepts in the “emic” sphere, suggesting that “texture” belongs to the first category. We explicitly distinguish our views from the poststructuralist language adopted by Pollock in his critique of Textures, and the more predictable postcolonial vision of Chekuri. We once more emphasize the need to take the vernacular historiography seriously, and to refine our reading practices, rather than overly depending on normative materials in Sanskrit, or on a prefabricated theoretical schema that derives from a stylized view of the nature of the transformations produced by colonial rule. (shrink)