India: Links for 16th September, 2019

  1. India’s fourth party system.
    Here’s the context:
    “There is broad consensus that India’s electoral history—from the inaugural postindependence general election in 1952 until the sixteenth Lok Sabha elections in 2014—can be roughly divided into three electoral orders. Yogendra Yadav, one of India’s leading political scientists, was among the first to provide this organizational rubric. Yadav has also argued that a new electoral system commences whenever an observer can “detect a destabilisation of [an old system] and its replacement by a new pattern of electoral outcomes as well as its determinants.””
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  2. “Between ‘comb’, ‘kanghi’ and ‘kakahi’; ‘plate’, ‘thaali’ and ‘tharia,’ and ‘here’, ‘yehaan’ and ‘hene’ my mother introduced us to the grammar and syntax of all three languages in everyday conversation. I think her own regret of not knowing English drove her to this inventiveness.”
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    On the delights of knowing multiple, interrelated languages.
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  3. On the history of the rupee.
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  4. Indian airport police have been asked to smile less.
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  5. Have you heard of Israil Ansari? I hadn’t. Would you pay 400 rupees to meet him?