COVER STORY
Binaries present a complex grid. Popular culture has always trapped us in the binary political, social and cultural grids. It is a matrix of this and that, us and them. Forever opposed in a morality battle, forever choosing sides.
Outlook Magazine - 01 March 2025
The Grid
Autocratic and fascist regimes consolidate power by reducing complex socio-political realities into rigid binary oppositions. Instead of addressing systemic economic inequalities, they redirect public anger toward scapegoats—immigrants, minorities and dissenting voices.
Trump’s executive order to recognise only two sexes—male and female—has triggered a tragic dilemma of revealing less and concealing more
As spaces expand under debinarised imaginations, finding the ground beneath will become all the more difficult
Donald Trump’s return as US President has directly resulted in Indians detained as illegal immigrants being herded into military airplanes in inhuman conditions and deposited back to where they came from. Some of them recounted their experiences to Outlook.
The Gujaratis among the illegal immigrants deported in shackles from the US are left to pick up tragic pieces of the life they thought they had escaped.
We need to move past false binaries amplifying the message of coexistence
Binaries are presented through the biological division of reproduction. Yet, the choices of bodies to claim a specific category remain open-ended.
BJP’s ultranationalism is a strategy to make up for its absence during the freedom struggle, but the binary discourse on nationalism is being weaponised to make detractors fall in line
Women are slotted into two categories: beautiful or ugly. Who defines beauty and who does this binary actually serve?
Autocratic and fascist regimes consolidate power by reducing complex socio-political realities into rigid binary oppositions. Instead of addressing systemic economic inequalities, they redirect public anger toward scapegoats—immigrants, minorities and dissenting voices.
Trump’s executive order to recognise only two sexes—male and female—has triggered a tragic dilemma of revealing less and concealing more
As spaces expand under debinarised imaginations, finding the ground beneath will become all the more difficult
Donald Trump’s return as US President has directly resulted in Indians detained as illegal immigrants being herded into military airplanes in inhuman conditions and deposited back to where they came from. Some of them recounted their experiences to Outlook.
The Gujaratis among the illegal immigrants deported in shackles from the US are left to pick up tragic pieces of the life they thought they had escaped.
We need to move past false binaries amplifying the message of coexistence
Binaries are presented through the biological division of reproduction. Yet, the choices of bodies to claim a specific category remain open-ended.
BJP’s ultranationalism is a strategy to make up for its absence during the freedom struggle, but the binary discourse on nationalism is being weaponised to make detractors fall in line
Women are slotted into two categories: beautiful or ugly. Who defines beauty and who does this binary actually serve?
OTHER STORIES
The Western notion of geoculturally looking at the world through the prism of the Oriental-Occidental binary is flawed but continues nonetheless
In the call for ‘nation first’, we are witnessing a sort of ‘pathological homogenisation’ by the State-building elites in India.
Hundreds of apple farmers living in villages in Pulwama and Anantnag are angry and upset as proposed railway lines are going to cut through their orchards
The exhibition ‘Dalí Comes to India’ , held from February 7 to 13 at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, showcased nearly 200 of his artworks of the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí from the Argillet Collection
The second edition of Patna's Festival of Literature on Music is set to be held at the Bihar Museum on March 1 and 2, 2025.
George Orwell’s first wife Eileen was a writer herself and an Oxford graduate whose creative input and support to her husband were barely acknowledged. Australian Writer Anna Funder used newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend to resurrect Eileen’s life.
Zanzibar makes no demands on the visitor, and that is a major attraction. You are free to do what you came to do–laze by the sea.
