Mathangi Krishnamurthy is a socio-cultural anthropologist by training and is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at The Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Her research has focuses on the nightly lives of transnational customer service workers in Pune, India and she is currently working on a book manuscript entitled "1-800 Worlds". Her new projects follow practices of outsourcing in relation to gestational surrogacy. Her areas of interest include the anthropology of work, globalization, and affective labor. She blogs on www.mathangikrishnamurthy.com. Email: [email protected]
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy The traffic jam has become a peculiar construction in relation to the Global South. As I began writing, I wasn't sure what to focus on when looking at the traffic jam. Where does one go to find it? To the city of course. Can one touch it, taste it, smell it? Yes…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy Scott Schuman is in India. On the 6th of November, he announced that he would be posting to his immensely popular fashion blog “The Sartorialist” from the cities of Mumbai, New Delhi, and Varanasi. I must confess that for a few minutes, I cursed my luck at being in the deep South…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy Long years ago, when I waddled around in pigtails, I said aloud the magic words that for many years characterized how I felt about the world, my world. “I will settle in America”, I said. Neither did I know how heavy “settling” can be nor was I clued into the power of…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy On July 15, 2013, after a hundred and sixty-three years of witnessing birth, death, revolution and marriage, the Indian telegraphic service sent out its last telegram. I felt a small sense of loss, but truth be told, the telegram was already a thing of the past to my communicative repertoire. In all…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy As a rule, I am wary of art installations. I am never sure if the form they take bear any relation to the political content they claim to espouse. Also, as a rule, I visit modern art exhibitions for their verbosity. The words speak to me of artistic intent that always races…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy In January of 2009, I was browsing through news networks when I came across a headline that read: “Indian call centre employee punished for harassing British woman”. Seeing that I was in the process of writing a dissertation on call centers around that time, my interest was piqued. The article reported that…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy Last week I ran into a faintly familiar face and looked at him quizzically as he said, “You asked a good question yesterday. At the talk.” I thanked him, we muttered names; I don't think I heard his name, and I don't think he caught mine. We exchanged a sentence in a…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy Bomblet (1937), Julian Tervelyan, 1910-1988; Tate Modern, Surrealism and Beyond. Display Caption: Trevelyan was living in Paris in the early 1930s when the Surrealists began to explore the idea of the Surrealist object, which appeared to embody hidden or repressed desires. Following the same tradition, Bomblet is at once disconcerting and vaguely…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy Mandi (1983) – The Marketplace Shyam Benegal's film Mandi or the The Marketplace has been largely understood as a black comedy satirizing middle-class morality. Set in a brothel,Mandi is a rollicking drama of excess. This establishment is faced with a sad decline as its patronage withers in the face of changing times.…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy All my life, I've been called a Madrasi. This is false, funny, and ironic. For those that live north of the Vindhyas in India, all four of the southern states connote a ubiquitous “Madras”, or in other words the land where people speak Madrasi (otherwise knows as four distinct languages Kannada, Telugu,…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy This is an excerpt from my book manuscript on call center worlds in India. For five months of my research career, I worked the night shift in a transnational call center and taught workers how to speak in an American accent. What follows are my field notes, summarily rearranged into a modicum…
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy Let's make one thing very clear. We do not do Valentine's. That would be horribly uncool. But we are not entirely cynical either. So in the interest of a critical, yet marginally hopeful view that can go beyond the intensely heteronormative annoyance of Hallmark madness, here is a post-Valentine post on the…
by Mathangi Krishamurthy Sometime this year of 2014, my father will retire, ending thirty odd years of service tending and minding a chemical factory. We will also concurrently end what I consider my foundational era, and will have to stop inhabiting a particular vision of the Indian nation-state. Rasayani, Circa 2013. For years, my answer…