In Rule 3 titled ‘Hear the Atypicals’, the author highlights the importance of how activities and products are ‘Designed’, which in turn will decide for whom the ‘design’ is suitable and/or how inclusive it is. The author provides an interesting chart (spread over pages 120 to 124) that lists industries in one column, the externalities that are specific to that industry in the second column,
Based on this event, Kokas lays out her premise with clinical clarity. The global movement of data constitutes more than a privacy concern. American firms, driven by profit and often blind to the policy implications of their actions, have enabled Chinese regulators to assert digital sovereignty far beyond their borders. In the process, user data becomes not just a commercial asset, but a tool of statecraft.
Narayanan and Kapoor urge readers to resist the temptation to think of AI systems as fundamentally ‘unknowable’, as a priori hype obstructs accountability from people making billions by deploying AI tools to predict complex social phenomena. Prediction here also suffers from what is called ‘teaching to the test’ (p. 22), where the training occurs on the same data that is later used for evaluation to achieve high-performing results.
This approach is further developed in Sachin Ketkar’s piece (‘World Literature and Literary Historiography of Pre-colonial South Asian Vernaculars: Towards a Methodological Model’) on Marathi literary historiography, which interrogates the colonial portrayal of decline during the Islamic period by revisiting the intercultural richness of figures like Namdeo.
The introductory chapter traces the rise of Dalit consciousness in the Tamil literary world, exploring how Dalit writing moved away from a Marxist and Periyarist framework and carved its own space. The author marks the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the centenary celebrations of Dr BR Ambedkar’s birth in 1990 as significant events that impacted the Tamil literary discourse.
The collection also contains short stories written by women writers, and here the overarching theme is the dynamics between men and women and the patriarchal attitudes which impact such interactions. The story ‘I Felt Ashamed’ by Kalyanikutty, reputed to be the first ever story written by a Malayali woman, deals with a woman’s aspiration for marrying the man she wants to, but caste restrictions prevent her and thus in her dream state, she sees the future she cannot have in real life. In ‘Witless Woman’ by M Saraswatibhai,