Spikes in the SED and Ripples in the Outskirts of Galaxies

We describe a new method that allows us to quantitatively characterize galactic satellites from analysis of disturbances in outer gas disks, without requiring knowledge of their optical light. We have demonstrated the validity of this method, which we call Tidal Analysis, by applying it to local spirals with known optical companions, including M51 and NGC 1512. These galaxies span the range from having a low mass companion (~ one-hundredth the mass of the primary galaxy) to a fairly massive companion (~ one-third the mass of the primary galaxy). This approach has broad implications for many areas of astrophysics - for the indirect detection of dark matter (or dark-matter dominated dwarf galaxies), and for galaxy evolution in its use as a decipher of the dynamical impact of satellites on galactic disks. Here, we present some preliminary results on the emergent SEDs and images, calculated along the time sequence of these dynamical simulations using the 3-D self-consistent Monte Carlo radiative transfer code RADISHE. We explore star formation prescriptions and how they affect the emergent SEDs and images. Our goal is to identify SED colors that are primarily affected by the galaxy's interaction history, and not significantly affected by the choice of star formation prescription. If successful, we may be able to utilize the emergent UV-IR SED of the primary galaxy to understand its recent interaction history.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, proceedings of invited talk at IAU Symposium No. 284, The Spectral Energy Distribution of Galaxie

Simulating the “city of joy”: state choreography and the re-appropriation of public spaces in Kolkata

Videos of what seems like enforced and orchestrated solidarity, performed by celebrities from the film industry in Kolkata, each scene blending into another, each upper-class urban home-space resembling the other, each envisioning a brighter future, rendering the same song in multiple voices, with metaphors of cities smiling again, circulated through social media are problematic in the erasures of particularities, “of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work”. While the nature of public spaces and performances of the public gathering is evolving amidst a pandemic, this paper, probing primarily into the state-sponsored strategic public performances in COVID-affected Kolkata, argues that the simulation and performance of state-envisioned “joy” by a postcolonial neoliberal city to mimic the imagined global city, to embody “the ageographia, the surveillance and control, the simulation without end” has frightfully familiar echoes of coloniality and hegemonic control

The Plays of Kalidasa: Treading the Line between Constraint and Freedom

The world of Kalidasa is defined by transgression at many levels. The possibilities of his dramatic world are vast and each level interacts with the other only because of the transgressive power of love and memory, and sometimes,even of forgetfulness. I argue that Kalidasa’s plays transcend, rather than establish, the conflicts between love and duty. I establish that the diverse and, often disjunctive, worlds seem to be in conversation in Kalidasa’s unifying dramatic realm –in this realm, while everything seems possible, everything possible can be made impossible because of the disruptive power of memory or forgetfulness