The name game

Sometimes it pays for fashion brands to avoid the designer’s name and pick one with a global appeal – or one that is not easily slotted Pero, Aekatri, SWGT. They may sound like Italian brands, but they belong to Indian designers who have cleverly steered clear of using their own names as brandnames. Pero, a […]

A chatbot fights taboos

The Hindi edutainment television show Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon becomes the first Indian soap to integrate Artificial Intelligence in its format Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon( (“I, a woman, can achieve anything”). The popular show on DD National, that has this name has become the country’s first television show to employ an […]

Unsmart mission

The ‘Smart Cities’ plan of futuristic cities which operate by themselves using Artificial Intelligence is not even mentioned in the BJP manifesto. has it gone kaput? In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party had promised to build 100 Smart Cities across India, all in an attempt to modernise urban infrastructure so that it can handle the […]

News or propaganda?

Is anyone watching The channel dedicated to narendra modi? turns out it has been around since 2012 The entry of a shiny new channel on our television sets has opened the proverbial Pandora’s Box. Out of this comes questions of ownership, licensing, TRAI regulations, the Model Code of Conduct, and whether the governing Bharatiya Janata […]

The Virtual State of Facebook

What does it mean to be a citizen of social media, and how does that affect our relationship with the country that we actually live in? This April Fool’s Day, Facebook announced that it had removed from its platform several accounts, pages and groups indulging in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour or spam” from India and Pakistan. […]

A quirky campaign

Bhojpuri songs are wooing women voters in Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh A little more than two years ago, in a prelude to a playful number, Bhojpuri popstar Anu Dubey teased the ubiquitous bhauji (sister-in-law) for supporting Narendra Modi in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. Dubey didn’t make it clear whether the otherwise apolitical song […]

The contrarians

How is public opinion shaping up in the three Delhi Assembly segments which did not vote for the Aam Aadmi Party in the 2015 poll? Patriot finds out The one-month countdown to Delhi’s Voting Day (May 12) for the Lok Sabha has begun. With a possible alliance between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the […]

Game of words

As we move from 2004 to 2019, ‘Indians’ trumps ‘India’, ‘government’ takes a back seat, and the Congress definitely played the ‘national’ card. Let’s take a look at the most-used words by political parties in their manifestos It’s another election year, and with it comes another round of heavily-loaded manifestos promising a pot of gold […]