For the Indian Express (
@IndianExpress
),
@Anupam_Guha
and I write about the Karnataka government's draft bill for gig workers' welfare and what it could mean for the evolving legal landscape of gig work in India.
Recently, Karnataka released to the public a draft of a bill for platform based gig workers. This bill is a significant improvement over anything India has till now
So
@yxmeena
and I wrote a short piece for
@IndianExpress
examining this
1/n
Just heard that Delhi University has barred 2 students from taking exams for a whole year, and imposed "less strict" disciplinary action against 6 others, for screening the BBC documentary on Modi. We should all be more worried and angry about this.
Unionized workers standing side by side! Garrett Temple
@GTemp17
,
@TheNBPA
vice president and
@Raptors
member at the
@TSSU
picket line in downtown Vancouver today ✊
We are grateful to
@TheNBPA
and its members on the Toronto Raptors who have donated $10,000 to TSSU’s strike fund to stand in solidarity with us while they visit Vancouver.
This syllabus change made me realise how many people don't understand what history is. Like I promise none of us want the history of the Mughal Empire taught to students because we *like* the emperors, but because you can't understand the subcontinent's present without its past.
I personally think people should talk more about piracy. Ask your friends what websites they've been using lately, suggest new ones with better collections, teach each other how to upload, download and convert these books. Especially if you're in the 'global south.'
The confidence with which people talk about stealing ebooks on this very public website is wild. Piracy is theft. Theft is not victimless crime. You are stealing authors’ hard work and intellectual property. If authors can’t make a living, we can’t create the stories you enjoy.
In the 3 years that I was an undergrad in Delhi University, I was taught almost entirely by ad hoc professors. I saw their dedication and care, but I also saw their precarity. The culture of ad hoc jobs in Indian academia is outrageous and unsustainable.
8 of the 10 ad hoc professors of the English Department of Ramjas displaced at once. we've seen our professors suffer the injustices of this regime, helpless and powerless, a phenomenon that continues until the university is clad in but one colour.
A good day to remember this badass banner used by Indian communists to protest Kissinger's arrival in India in '74, just over a year after the coup in Chile.
I hope Indian progressives and leftists, in their righteous anger at the notification of the Citizenship Ammendment Act, don't forget that the real threat is not one posed by working class immigrants but by the fascist state embedding religious exceptions in the immigration law.
Writing my first thesis chapter, and my twitter bookmarks are proving to be more useful than Zotero. I don't know what that says about me, or my research skills.
TN announced 12 hr workday in factories. Now it looks like this was the result of lobbying by Apple + manufacturer Foxconn, which in Nov '22 was already working with TN gov to increase production and has successfully lobbied for a similar amendment in Karnataka.
This is a reminder to my friends in India and beyond that I have institutional access to academic publications (and some news archives) for maybe one more year. So please feel free to reach out if you hit a paywall you can't jump over.
This
@MovementYVR
sticker is giving me moral support as I wait patiently for a bus, literally ANY bus that goes down Hastings, to make its way through the weekend traffic and to the stop I've been at for 15 mins.
You can't talk about the Revolt of 1857 without talking about the Mughals. And you can't teach the history of India's independence without teaching students about the Revolt.
The misogynistic and reactionary targeting of Fatima following her important investigative reporting is absolutely reprehensible. Muslim women in India are subjected to more than enough gendered Islamophobia, solidarity from the community should not be such a difficult ask.
The report has explicitly, in so many words, detailed the slew of propaganda and hate targeting Muslim women/fetishising them/selling them online- including Sulli Deals and Bulli Bai (both of which I was targeted in). So maybe don’t tell me I “don’t know how Hindutva works”?
years ago, twitter offered Sandal a blue checkmark just for being so great.
He simply hissed at them.
"No, comrade," he said. "If none of us are 'notable,' all of us are notable. Chaos reigns."
words of wisdom? or the deranged high ravings of a boy lost to catnip? you decide.
I've been trying and failing to say something about the rapidly deteriorating communal situation across India in the past week. But every time I think of it, I have nothing sharp to say, merely a sense of helplessness and fear for my family and other Muslims in the country.
In his book Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu notes that the notion of Good Taste is nothing more than the preferences and habits of the ruling class. In American culture, this class is represented by the likes of William Buckley and George Plimpton.
Can't help but think that UGC-NET is another way to enforce disciplinary boundaries. My research and interests most closely align with Sociology. But I will have to give the Mass Comm and Journ. exam just because my (interdisciplinary) MA prog is called Communication.
All major Indian trade unions calling on the government to stop trade with Israel is huge! But as a side note, the Herald (incorrectly) calls the Hind Mazdoor Sabha "BJP-affiliated". Goes to show how little mainstream media seems to know about contemporary unions.
THIS IS HUGE! All major Indian trade unions, CITU, AITUC, INTUC and HMS representing over 100m workers, have called on Indian government to scrap agreements with Israel, appealing to workers to boycott Israeli products and to refuse to handle Israeli cargo
Watching these videos when they go viral is horrifying, but what is even more horrifying is the fact that most of us who were/are students in these colleges have been subjected to this for years and at this point, we associate fests with harassment, rather than any form of joy.
Today, IPCW's fest was going when drunk men climbed the walls, forcefully entered the campus and harrassed Gender minorities.
Men were chanting "Miranda IP dono hamara" ,"Miranda nahi chhoda to IP bhi nahi chhodenge"
1/n
The Barbie movie is truly a product of the times we live in. Empty, shallow and a poor pastiche of every movement that aims to critique the social and material conditions of our epoch.
Me, hearing all the anti-union discourse in Vancouver due to the stoppage of the west coast express: 🤬
Me, seeing an orange, labour researcher cat on the news : 🥹
This is what policing of working class people always comes down to - protection of private property. Domestic workers and drivers are only tolerated in these gated colonies for as long as they can be exploited, but as soon as they take a moment of leisure they become threats.
The bosses at Roger's Sugar need to stop pretending that they don't need their workers. Come back to the bargaining table and give your striking workers the contract they deserve!
@SugarStrike2023
BREAKING: Effective Immediately. The Water Transport Workers Federation of India representing workers at 11 major Indian ports will refuse to load or unload weapons to Israel. This is in solidarity with a call by Palestinian trade unions. India sends $7bn in arms to Israel a year
People are (rightfully) concerned about the AQI in the east coast, but all I can think about is how the rest of us in South and Southeast Asia have been subjected to extremely harmful levels of PM2.5 for years and have not received even quarter of this kind of attention + concern
In the bargaining room just now,
@SFU
's overpaid spokesperson who is flown in from Victoria just said he didn't know that they were in mediation with us tomorrow at 9 am. Can
@SFU
please get someone at the bargaining table who actually knows what's going on?
"BARGAINING" UPDATE: the employer [
@SFU
] came to bargaining this morning to tell us that they would not bargain today because they haven't done their homework, which they've had nearly a year to do. Members flocked to bargaining to make them say it to our faces again.
In solidarity with the Rogers Sugar workers (
@SugarStrike2023
) on strike for a fair contract! ✊ As
@TSSU
members who just reached a tentative agreement today after weeks of work stoppage and picketing in the rain we understand that strikes works and scabs suck!!
As of today graduate student workers at
@SFU
are on strike! We at
@TSSU
know that the Employer has been wasting everyone's time for over a year at the bargaining table. Now we also know about all the $$$ they have wasted dragging their feet and tabling disrespectful proposals 🧵
Strikes are about disruptive picket lines, but sometimes they are also about making cute union t-shirts with your comrades. Join a
@TSSU
picket line and grab one of these cool shirts made by our on-strike members.
Talking to
@Anupam_Guha
about this and realised that he didn't know about the mango soaking in water tradition. Did my family make it up or are other desis also soaking their mangoes???
My local Indian grocery store only had kesar in stock... or so I thought, until I saw these two uncles walking out from the back with full BOXES of Alphonso. I don't even like Alphonso but I want to be part of this elite clientele who get access to the nicer mangoes.
When
@TSSU
says that we do 50% of the teaching work at
@SFU
we mean that literally. In addition to working as TAs for almost every undergrad course, our members also instruct MANY courses. In fact the Employer did us a favour by listing all of them here:
Every
#IWD
, I can't help but think about how its cooption by bourgeois forces has delinked it from its radical demands. It reminds me of Kollontai's warnings in the The Social Basis of the Woman Question about seeking "equality in the framework of the existing class society"
As a TA, I now run my tutorials with the assumption that not even 1/3rd of the students have gone through the assigned readings for the week. It results in me often overworking but I'm also deeply sympathetic to my students who take on avg 5 courses a semester and have 2-3 jobs.
@pourfairelevide
@hadeejasouffle
With 3 other courses you end up having around 600 pages of reading to get through a week, plus weekly submissions and essays. You end up not even trying to read the material because there's no way to get through it. You end up just relying on summaries and external resources
My 12th grade history teacher, a former uni prof, forced us to learn Chicago Manual and made us write out our citations and bibliography by hand for our final project and after all these years I'm still not sure if that was the best or worst thing to happen to me academically.
If you're boycotting Indigo in Vancouver, I highly recommend going to
@MassyBooks
instead. It's an indigenous, woman-owned bookstore that vocally supports Palestinian liberation, always has an amazing collection AND the best staff!
So this is what lawyers and policy wonks at Vidhi tell themselves while trying to go to sleep at night? That they're "doing good" by collaborating with fascists writing the UCC and Muslims being victimized by the regime just have an impoverished idea of what good is?
I understand the wariness, given that outrage is determined by social factors, but it is very much about her being a doctor who was victimized at her workplace. She was in that room because the hospital did not provide a safe place to rest between shifts.
Internal documents prove what we already knew:
@SFU
hired private investigators to break the
@TSSU
strike; we were constantly surveilled, and the contract was only terminated when Indigenous faculty allies raised concerns about past harms done by Lions Gate.
Last year, SFU hired private investigators to secretly watch striking workers, most of them teaching assistants. We got hundreds of pages of documents showing why they did it, and revealing the extent of the surveillance.
Following my father's passing this summer, I have thought a lot about death, grief and the process of grieving. I can only find beauty and hope in the way Yechury alongside his family and comrades planned and executed what would happen to his body after his passing.
Comrade Sitaram Yechury's body was brought to Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he had been Students' Union President.
At JNU, his comrades in struggle, friends, academics, and student leaders, among others, turned out in large numbers to mourn his passing and honour his
A (shorter) version of the piece
@Anupam_Guha
and I wrote on the Karnataka government's new draft bill for gig workers has been published in print by
@IndianExpress
!
For the Indian Express (
@IndianExpress
),
@Anupam_Guha
and I write about the Karnataka government's draft bill for gig workers' welfare and what it could mean for the evolving legal landscape of gig work in India.
I meticulously ration my ghee because it's more expensive than it should be in Canada, but when I do use it, every once in a while, I'm reminded of what a wonderfully magical thing it is.
@SFU
pay me more, so I can afford more ghee!!
Completely unsurprised to hear that the owner of
@Olacabs
agrees with Narayana Murthy's 70-hour work week idea. The gig economy depends on levels of overwork which would otherwise be illegal in a "traditional" employment relationship.
So
@SFU
the "engaged" university is now engaging in heavy handed strike busting by cutting off healthcare benefits of
@TSSU
members, including international students. This is in retaliation to less than 3 days of striking which included an overtime ban and 10 min teach-ins.
As of today graduate student workers at
@SFU
are on strike! We at
@TSSU
know that the Employer has been wasting everyone's time for over a year at the bargaining table. Now we also know about all the $$$ they have wasted dragging their feet and tabling disrespectful proposals 🧵
Okay tbh, this was initially tweeted as a joke, but I think we in India need to realise the importance of accessible pedagogical content for mass consumption.
The issue shouldn't be with the fact that Ashoka has intl. faculty members. What we should probably be more concerned about is that private liberal arts colleges in India have application processes that are built to exclude Indian PhDs from public universities.
If you're in the lower mainland this holiday season, remember to show solidarity to striking hospitality workers (
@UniteHere40
) and sugar workers (
@SugarStrike2023
) who are bravely weathering the winter and their disgraceful employers.
Here's a story about a sugar refinery strike that involves Coca-Cola, your neighbourhood bakery, Costco, a guy who may be living in a factory and a semi-domesticated Canada goose named Reginald Striker.
Does
@dieworkwear
know about the ostentatious Ambani wedding? One can only hope he blesses us with a thread about the terrible fashion decisions of Asia's richest family.
In solidarity with all the ad-hoc professors displaced from IP college's sociology dept. The fascistic attack on public education in India continues and it disproportionately impacts precariously employed teachers.
If you are still expressing shock at what happened in IP College, you are really living under a rock. Just check out the profiles of the people who have been recruited. We had no chance. This was never about merit anyway.
This is horrifying and deeply angering. I watched that episode thinking it was created in consultation with
@YashicaDutt
since it very clearly adapts key aspects of her book but turns out her story was appropriated without consultation or even permission.
The past few days have been overwhelming. I continue to support
@ghaywan
’s excellent work, now with Made in Heaven and earlier with Geeli Pucchi on Netflix. But this needs to be said.
The path of airport privatization that the India is going down is not paved with good intentions. Joint public-private ventures like DIAL will always prioritise surveillance infrastructure over basic structural integrity of buildings.
Terminal 1 roof collapses at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport following rain. 3 learnt to be dead.
Departures at T1 suspended. Check in counters closed for safety measure.
The expanded departure section of T1 (where the images are from) was inaugurated by the PM in
I know this is coming from a good place, but there are a few important things to consider here: firstly, most newer hires don't have permanent jobs and benefits. Second, gov teachers are made to do a multitude of tasks beyond teaching, including election related work +
Daftar is such a nice word, we don't use it often enough anymore. Now every morning I shall announce to my empty house that I'm "going to the daftar with my attaché."
The biggest union at
@SFU
is on strike and has made national news multiple times but the Chancellor of the university still keeps stumbling over our union's name. But it's okay - Tamara Vrooman will learn our name when she encounters
@TSSU
picket lines every day next week.
Proud to be part of the 1000s of Research Assistants at SFU who have filed union cards to officially join
@TSSU
in the eyes of the BC LRB. SFU had "voluntarily recognised" the union in 2019 and has since violated the agreement. We are now one step closer to a fair contract!
🚨NEWS🚨
Nearly 1,200 SFU research assistants will file union cards with the BC Labour Relations Board today, after a successful
@TSSU
summer organizing blitz
Once again, we have proven SFU's union busting only strengthens our resolve.
#cdnpoli
#bcpoli
So does this mean the Jacobin will have to commission another obituary for Chomsky? Since they clearly published the one from Chibber that was sitting in their obituary vault.
The visuals of flooding across North India are extremely concerning, and it gets worse each monsoon. One of the best environmental journalism pieces I recently read is by
@gayathriv
who explains how excess rainfall is tied to the Indian Ocean warming + bad forecasting models.
Amazing things are happening in India right now. Second micro(?) celebrity has mysteriously resurrected 24 hrs after they "died." Jesus is envious, it took him a whole 3 days.
Wow, so
#PoonamPandey
is alive. A friend of mine told me in private last night that this is a campaign by a digital agency, but I was skeptical. Because could we really fall this low? Looks like we have.
So many things wrong with this.
#Thread
It's official:
@TSSU
members will go on full and indefinite work stoppage and picket lines starting Sep 28th (unless we reach a tentative agreement with
@SFU
by next Monday).
So
@SFU
which claims it doesn't have enough money to pay its
@TSSU
workers a living wage hired an infamous PI company known for working with Kinder Morgan and targeting indigenous land defenders to surveil us at the picket line.
Simon Fraser University Hires Controversial Private Investigation Firm to Film Striking Education Workers.
SFU hires Lions Gate Risk Management to surveil strike action across three university campuses
#bcpoli
#canlab
Picketing is hard and stressful but also surprisingly good for my sleep schedule. I'm waking up at 5 am, going to sleep at 11 pm, getting my steps in, smelling the crisp fall air and the beautiful trees changing colours on Burnaby mountain.
🚨IMPORTANT UPDATE🚨
There will be NO picket lines at SFU Burnaby or any campus tomorrow, Oct. 5.
TSSU's bargaining team fought hard on the eve of convocation to force SFU to withdraw major concessions.
We are STILL ON STRIKE. Pickets resume Friday.
Third, this is just a bad take for a leftist. We will never build solidarities between workers with hot takes about how some workers should be paid less. It's much more productive and pragmatic to ask for everyone else to receive similar pay, benefits and job security.
Interesting nugget. Have just been reliably informed that I am actually the FIRST Indian Rhodes Scholar to be a candidate to Parliament , as M.L. Sondhi, Jana Sangh MP, who received the Rhodes scholarship in 1956 did not actually take it, preferring to join the IFS. SUCH an
This vision of parks without people, existing solely for the beautification of a city which is the hub of neoliberalism in India really says something about the urban imaginaries of the State.
I am very curious to know what these people think parks are meant for.
'Couples can't get too close, food not allowed, photos/videos banned, can't play sport or climb tree' - what is left?
And here we see
@SFU
prompting students to cross the
@TSSU
picket line. Well jokes on them, undergrads at SFU not only respected our line but joined us!
If you're coming to
#SFU
's Burnaby campus this week, please be aware that food options may be limited. Mackenzie Cafe will likely be closed, and other cafes and restaurants may close earlier than usual. The SFU Dining Commons remains open 24/7.
Always wondered what others around India eat on Eid, other than the usual sevai and sheer, etc.? My family is big on dahi vada, kabuli chana and yakhni pulao (no biryani, very disappointingly).
So SFU is giving $5400 to "eligible" PhDs in the wake of a strike by
@TSSU
's teaching support staff, a unionisation drive of RAs, and the Graduate Student Society's COLA campaign. But we see this move for what it is: a transparent, divisive tactic which ignores structural issues.
So
@SFU
is really going through every effort to sidestep their actual problems. A one time $5400 payment IF: you're doing a PhD (who cares about masters) and you're not around longer than 4 years. Maybe they should just consider us employees and bargain in good faith with
@TSSU