Feature essay: literary work and contemporary crisis: on two novels concerning india

In this feature essay, Atreyee Majumder reflects on literature’s relationship with contemporary crises through reading two recent novels, Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits and Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, which share a concern for the challenges facing India today

Introduction. Selves and Society in Postcolonial India

On 16 December 2012, a twenty-three year old physiotherapist was gangraped in Munirka, New Delhi by six men in a bus. Thirteen days later, she passed away in Singapore, having suffered serious brain and gastrointestinal injuries. This case snowballed into a nationwide wave of protests on not only the heinousness of this particular incident, but the widespread public patriarchy that afflicts the right of Indian women to freely access public domains. On the days following her death, angry mobs ..

Calling out to the Faraway: Accessing History through Public Gestures in Howrah, West Bengal

This article narrates events, performances and gestures from public life on the rural-urban corridors of Howrah District, on the west bank of the river Hooghly, in southern West Bengal. Howrah is a place of decadent industrial activity, owing much of its spatial organization to colonial manufacture and trade on the edges of the colonial capital of Calcutta. Public figures in Howrah attempt to lift a place and an associated public out of its current political and historical anonymity. Each uses public gesture to appropriate distant phenomena, quite far-fetched and tenuously linked to their immediate existence. Such public gesture emerges as a key tool for gaining historical luminosity. Their words, gestures and stances are used to access history and historical significance, linking the historical charge of distant entities to immediate worlds, and aiding access to larger scale in space and time

Do treatment patterns alter beliefs cancer patients hold regarding oral oncolytic agents?

ObjectiveCancer patients, particularly those prescribed with oral oncolytic medications, face treatment side effects and temporary and permanent stoppages of treatment. This research examines how events during treatment affect patients’ beliefs regarding oral oncolytic medications.MethodsA total of 272 cancer patients initiating 1 of 28 oral oncolytic agents were followed for 12 weeks. Assessments of Beliefs About Medications Questionnaire, symptoms, physical function, and depression measures were performed during telephone interviews at intake (medication start) and 4, 8, and 12 weeks. Electronic medical record audits identified dates of temporary and permanent medication stoppages. Linear mixed‐effects models were used for longitudinal analyses of the Beliefs About Medications Questionnaire scores in relation to patient characteristics, symptom severity, and medication stoppages.ResultsOver the initial 12 weeks, beliefs about the necessity of oral medications have increased, concerns have decreased, and interference of medications with daily lives has increased. Permanent stoppage of a medication predicted significant declines in beliefs about its necessity over time. Male patients, those less educated, those reporting higher symptom severity, and those experiencing temporary stoppages had greater concerns. Interference of medications with daily life was higher for males, increased with higher symptom severity, and differed by drug category.ConclusionsPatients’ beliefs in the necessity of their oral medication were affected only by a permanent drug stoppage. Symptom severity, education, and patient sex affected patients’ beliefs about their concerns with their medications and the interference medications posed for their daily lives. Interventions may need to target the distinct dimensions of beliefs during treatment with oral oncolytic agents.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142470/1/pon4606.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142470/2/pon4606_am.pd

A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Feasibility and Preliminary Efficacy of a Texting Intervention on Medication Adherence in Adults Prescribed Oral Anti-Cancer Agents: Study Protocol

Aim: The aim of this study was to report a study protocol that examines feasibility, preliminary efficacy and satisfaction of a text message intervention on the outcome of medication adherence in adult patients prescribed oral anti-cancer agents. Background: Administration of oral anti-cancer agents occurs in the home setting, requiring patients to self-manage the regimen as prescribed. However, many barriers to medication adherence exist: regimens are often complex, with cycling of two or more medications; side effects of treatment; most cancer patients are older with comorbid conditions and competing demands; and cognitive decline and forgetfulness may occur. Research indicates patients miss nearly one-third of the prescribed oral anti-cancer agent dosages. Text message interventions have been shown to improve medication adherence in chronic conditions other than cancer. However, a majority of those patients were less than 50 years of age and most cancer patients are diagnosed later in life. Design: A two-group randomized controlled trial with repeated measures. Methods: Seventy-five adult patients newly prescribed an oral anti-cancer agent will be recruited (project funded in April 2013) from community cancer centres and a specialty pharmacy. Participants will be randomized to either a control group (n = 25; usual care) or an intervention group (n = 50; usual care plus text messages timed to medication regimen). Outcome measures include: medication adherence, feasibility and satisfaction with the intervention. Data will be collected over 8 weeks: baseline, weekly and exit. Discussion: Standardized text message intervention protocol and detailed study procedures have been developed in this study to improve medication adherence

Proof of Concept of a Mobile Health Short Message Service Text Message Intervention That Promotes Adherence to Oral Anticancer Agent Medications: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Introduction: This multisite, randomized controlled trial assigned 75 adult cancer patients prescribed an oral anticancer agent to either an experimental group that received daily text messages for adherence for 21 days plus usual care or a control group that received usual care. Materials and Methods: Measures were administered at baseline, weekly (Weeks 1–8), and at exit (Week 9). A satisfaction survey was conducted following the intervention. Acceptability, feasibility, and satisfaction were examined. Primary outcomes were adherence and symptoms. Secondary outcomes were depressive symptoms, self-efficacy, cognition, physical function, and social support. Mixed or general linear models were used for the analyses comparing trial groups. Effect sizes (ES) were estimated to gauge clinical significance. Results: Regarding acceptability, 57.2% (83 of 145) of eligible patients consented, 88% (n = 37 of 42) receiving text messages read them most or all of the time, and 90% (n  = 38) were satisfied. The differences between experimental and control groups\u27 ES were 0.29 for adherence, 0.21 for symptom severity, and 0.21 for symptom interference, and differences were not statistically significant. Furthermore, perceived social support was higher (p = 0.04; ES = 0.54) in the experimental group. Conclusions: Proof of concept and preliminary efficacy of a mobile health intervention using text messages to promote adherence for patients prescribed oral anticancer agents were demonstrated. Patients accepted and had high satisfaction with the intervention, and adherence improved after the intervention. Text messages show promise. Additional research is needed prior to use in practice

On Decolonization: Scattered Speculations on the Indian University

Universities are like good headphones, the noise-cancelling ones that consistently drown out the turbulent world outside its boundary walls. Universities have taught me to read, think, argue, imagine, and most importantly, write. Universities have also been sites of disappointment, disillusionment, and agony. Universities have also consistently generated employment, horizons of aspiration, a growing collection of books and bookshelves, varied range of intellectual friends and collaborators and nemeses among the dead and the living, and finally, an entry point to a cosmopolitan, bourgeois life for me. The university is now a space that I consider home. In this essay, I will address the university as a site of knowledge production and dissemination, especially the university that grows out of the Indian context. Relatedly, I will address my remarks on the decolonization question and the agenda of resurrecting the knowledge project afresh, this time outside of Euro-America. I ask in this talk: What kind of life of the mind does the university engender in the current Indian milieu? In keeping with the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe’s coinage “Thinking the world from Africa”, I further ask: How may we think the world from the Indian university

Locating a Shadowy State in Queer, Feminist Politics

In this commentary, part of a book forum on Srila Roy’s (2022) book ”Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India”, I argue that the feminist and queer movement, in response to the neoliberal turn in India, is not totally separate from the Indian state formations. In fact, a shadowy state emerges in the affective life of citizens as an expression of what Timothy Mitchell would have called “state effect”

Biraha

Excerpt: \u27The followers of Swami Shri Haridasji live in the sand-laden compound of Tatiasthan and assemble in song with devotees from the general public every evening. This musical tradition is called samaaj gaayan. They first sing facing the deity and then turn to their teacher, who arrives at the assembly a little later. Mobile phones and other technology are strictly forbidden. This poem is an out-take from my ongoing ethnographic research in Vrindavan—the sacred geography of Krishna worship in the Bhakti tradition in northern India. This poem came from the evenings spent in the Tatiasthan shrine watching evening musical performances, trying to access the somber musical moment through active listening, in a sensory ethnographic move.\u2

Song of the Sweet Lord

A personal epiphany led me to start researching Krishna, devotion traditions in northern India, which often go under the term Bhakti. The Bhagavad Gita speaks of three elements of the union with god—sat, cit, ananda—truth, consciousness, bliss. In Mathura/Vrindavan, the sacred geography of Krishna worship in northern India, I started to learn to experience joy (some version of ananda) at intuiting Krishna’s presence. This was an act of intellectual capacity as well as a bodily intuition. The concomitant act of conducting research, therefore, was complicated by this individual experience of extreme joy or ananda in the presence of the Godhead. I am, now, simultaneously trying to find a way to practice bhakti in my inner life while conducting ethnography about the everyday life of Bhakti. This poem travels through the split subjectivity of the ethnographer as they try to gather “data” on the lives of worship while consuming the presence of the Godhead as a devotee. I become split between a mystic and a scholar, even as I meet mystics while being a scholar. What does ethnographic research look like when one is simultaneously engaging in doing what one is mandated to watch others doing? What happens when the doing and watching diverge in consequence? In its actual, literal doing, “participant observation” then hits upon a real conundrum: whether to immerse in the doing or the watching, and the inevitable conclusion that the two can’t happen simultaneously. If the two must diverge, I suspect they will deliver two very different ethnographies. This conundrum is mapped onto the simultaneous habitation of the selves of research and devotion. This poem grows out of such simultaneous habitation. The contradictions of this semi-autoethnographic journey force themselves out in poetic form. The Lord speaks, I believe, in verse, on the rare occasions when he chooses to step out of silence