The Social Lens: Insights on Institutions, Inequality, and Innovation

We live in a country that grants us various rights classified into fundamental, legal, and statutory rights. These rights embody absolute values, reinforcing the idea of the "Kantian Man." They provide individuals with the motivation to believe in political and social constructs such as the nation-state, territory, and citizenship. Every human being is deemed equal and enjoys the freedom to practice religion, access information, express opinions, and exercise other fundamental liberties. Additionally, the legal system promises justice in cases of discrimination or crime. In essence, this framework aligns with the "Social Contract" theory, wherein individuals are free to manage their personal affairs while the state ensures broader governance and order. However, when one examines daily news and social events, this idealistic vision of rights and justice appears far from reality. Society is not a binary of black and white but a complex puzzle. The more one attempts ...

Debyani Khobragade was charged by U.S. authorities with visa fraud and providing false information, leading to her arrest and strip search. The Indian government reacted furiously, framing the incident as a matter of national identity. Public protests erupted across India, straining India-U.S. relations. Some media analysts linked the controversy to broader geopolitical issues, including the civil-nuclear deal and other ongoing diplomatic tensions. For many Indians, this episode was perceived as a humiliation inflicted by a militarily and economically dominant nation. However, India’s historical and civilizational pride, rooted in its ancient traditions and spiritual ethos, shaped the collective outrage. In contrast, little attention was given to the other side of the story—the Indian domestic worker, a poor and marginalized woman, who was allegedly a victim of exploitation. Her narrative remained largely overlooked, as it lacked the glamour and political significance of the diplomat’...

The discourses surrounding colonialism have been actively examined by historians and social scientists. Some, such as the Cambridge School, have adopted an orthodox approach, viewing colonial history primarily from a European perspective. In contrast, historians of the colonized have sought to move away from a Eurocentric narrative, often neglecting the discursive and non-discursive dimensions of colonialism. Foucault, through his concept of “governmentality,” demonstrated how political rationalities of power facilitated the acceptance of colonial transformations by the subjects themselves. A significant focus of recent discussions on colonialism has been its exclusionary practices, including the racial exclusion of the colonized from humanity and their political marginalization through false liberalism. On one hand, critiques have revealed how colonial textuality operated at the level of images and narratives, distorting representations of the colonized and denying them autonomy, v...

“[Sociology is]   ... the science whose object is to interpret   the meaning of social action   and thereby give a   causal explanation   of the way in which the   action proceeds   and the   effects which it produces . By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as   subjectively meaningful   ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the 'meaning' to be thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of   priori ...