Manusmriti was supposedly buried decades ago. India keeps digging it back up A DALIT speaker of a state legislature is insulted. Public outrage, rightly, follows. Then, almost reflexively, comes a second wave of commentary — not about the insult itself, but about the caste of the man who delivered the rebuke. Was he Dalit enough? Should the retaliation have come from a fellow Dalit, an upper-caste ally, a woman, a Brahmin, a Backward Class leader? The question is absurd on its face. An insult against dignity does not require a caste-matched avenger. Yet in modern India, even movements built to dismantle caste hierarchy find themselves, again and again, reaching for caste as the measuring stick of legitimacy. That reflex is worth examining, because it says less about the insult than about how deeply the logic of an ancient text has lodged itself in the modern mind. That text is the Manusmriti, a Sanskrit law code compiled roughly two millennia ago, and its intellectual scaffolding p...
By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan Every summer, a fresh cohort of Foreign Service officers packs up one posting and reports to another—Kathmandu to Cairo, Washington to Wellington—typically after three or four years, sometimes less. They arrive with briefing books, cable archives and a predecessor's parting notes. What they rarely inherit is the thing that mattered most: why the last round of talks stalled, which counterpart could be trusted and which could not, what a foreign ministry's polite "under consideration" actually meant the last three times it was said. That knowledge leaves with the officer who leaves the post. In a profession built on relationships, timing and the reading of intention, this is a strange thing to keep losing. WHAT IS INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY Institutional memory is the collective knowledge, operational context, past experiences, historical insight, and unwritten administrative wisdom stored within an organization. While formal record-keeping s...