For Durkheim, a ritual is a symbolic practise marked off both temporally and spatially from everyday life, involving several rites.

Women in Western liberal democracies have recently started to undergo bereavement of their miscarriages through mourning rituals, to acknowledge the grief of the unexpected ending of a life that was cut too short, as a semi-public, social demonstration of grief that has historically and medically been invisibilized. This typically happens within religious spaces using religious liturgy.

For example -the Buddhist way of mourning miscarriages involves a red baby bib, a Buddha
statue that stands as a metonymic figure for the unborn foetus, taking place in a bathtub to mimic the maternal waters of the uterus. Anglican Cathedrals too have started conducting mourning rituals for miscarriages, in ceremonies that involve ringing bells, lighting incense and candles, and naming the miscarried foetus out of the list of potential names that the mother had chosen for her babe-to-be-born.

The new natalism is most pronounced in eastern Europe, where toddler-production statistics are the new tractor-production statistics. At one event, Croatia’s prime minister boasted that his countrywomen had generated 900 more baby Croats than the year before. Politicians compete to offer wildly generous schemes to new parents. Estonia offers 18 months of paid parental leave. Poland dishes out 500 zloty (about €120) per month for each child after the first, meaning a parent with three would reap the equivalent of nearly half the minimum wage. In Hungary mothers of four are exempt from income taxes for life, and the government is considering extending the benefit to mothers of three.

Germany is a more recent convert, boosting spending on welfare for parents and statesponsored child care over the past two decades. The minister who oversaw that transformation was Ursula von der Leyen, now president of the European Commission (and a mother of seven, as her Twitter page proudly notes).

In some ways, the baby-policy bonanza is nothing new. Natalism has a long history in Europe, but not a happy one. The Romans banned childless women over the age of 24 from wearing precious metals, while single men paid a bachelor tax. In 17th-century France, anyone who married before the age of 20 was exempt from taxes until they were 25.

1:
"In pregnancy, your body becomes inhabited by a stranger, by a guest who is stranger than any other guest you’ve ever hosted, insofar as you have never even met; and yet also closer and more intimate than any other, insofar as they are, really, a part of yourself.In pregnancy, you become strange to yourself, estranged from who you once were, from what your body used to be or mean or contain, so that your body turns into something that you no longer fully understand.In pregnancy, the distinction you once knew between self and other comes undone. So does the gap between how you protect yourself and how you care for others." - Lily Gurton-Wachter

2:
Experiences of pregnancy, maternity, and child-rearing have historically been absent from literature.In fact, Rivka Galchen quips in Little Labors, ""literature has more dogs than babies""

3:
If motherhood is an obliteration or disintegration of the self, then how can that erased mother write?

"Here’s the catch:I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write." - Maggie Nelson

4:
Don't extreme experiences radically alter the self, and in that alteration creates the possibility of narrativisation by producing new languages, metaphors, knowledges, experiences and hitherto unknown ways of thinking? "[A] baby literally makes space where there wasn’t space before." - Maggie Nelson

Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s son got married on February 1. It was an inter-caste love marriage between a Gounder groom and a Brahmin bride. Along with the congratulations that poured in for the young couple, many concerns were also raised by social media users over the Brahminical rituals followed during the wedding ceremony.
Anti-caste Scholars have pointed out how Hindu Rituals embody and perpetuate casteist value systems. For instance, most Hindu rituals are structured around the Brahmin male figure and place him at the centre etc.This brahmin religious authority often governs, dictates and controls basic aspects of people’s lives — from naming newborn babies to approving life partners and performing last rites.
In response to this criticism, Murugan published a piece titled 'Jaadhiyai Thavirpadhu Eppodhu Saathiyam?' (‘When is it possible to avoid caste?’) on the Tamil website Arunchol.  His write-up lays down the compromises that are sought when two families belonging to different caste groups try to reach a consensus on the wedding rituals to be performed. It also emphasises how difficult it is to make anti-caste choices in general, given how caste informs every sphere of life and every action we perform. 
Ambedkar talks about  the “infection of imitation”, Brahminical practices have become common among many other castes as well. Ambedkar also talks about how important it is to break caste endogamy through inter-caste marriages.

A notable feature of the exploitation of dalits has been the humiliation of dalit men: in the course of the power that upper caste men exert over their labour, they also taunt them about their masculinity in an attempt to foreground their powerlessness, for example how Dalit men have not been allowed to have facial hair, and if they have attempted to keep facial hair, it has been publicly shaved off. They claim that dalit men can never hope to protect their women, who are considered ‘easy prey’ by upper caste men. Such [historic and] symbolic
‘emasculation’ of dalit men results in their feeling beleaguered in specifically gendered ways.

In response to this, Dalit men have started to perform exaggerated masculinities, for example growing lengthy beards, cultivating aggressive personalities, forming guy gangs with friends

You are a college student who lives in a dysfunctional family, which affects your mental space. Sometimes you wish to leave this family & live alone when you start working. Other times you feel your family is emotionally dependent on you & would like you to stay with them.

As you’re nearing the end of your college degree, you get two job offers, job A & job B-job A is a job in a different city, has better pay to the extent that it compensates for your extra expenses
in a new city like rent (i.e., the money left with you in both jobs after bearing expenses is to be assumed similar). Job B is a job in your current city, which means that if you accept it, you'd be staying with your family.

Special Marriage Act is a secular legislation relating to marriage which was enacted in the
context of inter-caste and inter-religious marriages.

The legal regime governing religion-based marriages is in the domain of religion specific personal law that govern for both the rituals and ceremonies as well as the rights and obligations of the spouses in the marriage.

A new approach that has come up to deal with juvenile crimes has been the Juvenile Detention
Alternatives Initiative, which involves placing youthful offenders in alternative programs rather than secure detention facilities. The JDAI offers multiple programs under its banner
which allow offenders to stay in their own homes and schools where they must follow severe
restrictions which limit their freedom and choices. The JDAI program includes - a.) home
confinement which is a common community based program that allows offenders to live at
home while attending school or work or both. They follow a strict schedule and are closely
monitored electronically by wearing ankle bracelets that send local information back to the
juvenile probation staff (b) community service activities such as mowing a lawn, working within a library, etc c) day treatment programs, which serve delinquent youth in nonresidential settings d) group homes and specialized foster care. All of them aim to help
improve academic and vocational job based achievement and school based attendance while also reducing problem behaviors.
In contrast to this, prison systems that truly aim at rehabilitating prisoners have instituted reconciliation and restorative justice programs that are based on the simple idea that rather than the state punishing a criminal, the offender restores, or repairs the harm that person has done to the community. This type of interpersonal communication, facilitated by the state, between offender and victim is often the most critical piece of healing for both parties.In restorative justice models, people who have been harmed by a criminal act come together to determine the best methods to fix the damage. This may be by repaying a victim or by meeting the victim, which can happen when the victim and offender meet face to face in a conference session.

Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, which produces it's products under Amul, is India’s largest dairy cooperative. The basic business idea behind this was cooperation.If farmers want good price for their produce, they should not just produce it, but also aggregate, add value and market it themselves under their own brand, and own the entire supply-chain of
“cow/buffalo-to-consumers” so as to bring efficiencies, affordability and maintain profitability. This holds true for Amul even today.
The entry of Amul in Karnataka has caused a huge uproar, with Karnataka's opposition parties seeing it as a threat to the local brand Nandini (managed by the Karnataka Milk Federation) as
well as the livelihood of the state farmers. Pro-Kannada groups have launched “#SaveNandini” and “#GoBackAmul”trends on social media. The Bruhat Bengaluru Hotels
Association has announced that it will use only Nandini milk to support the state’s farmers.

"You said,
‘Ilove you. ’ Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear?‘Ilove you’ is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.
"—Jeannette Winterson, Writing on the Body

"All lovers believe they are inventing love.
"— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
"Do all lovers feel they're inventing something?I know the gestures.Iimagined it all, waiting for you. Marianne : You dreamt of me?"
— Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire

In the Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida foregrounds the reciprocity of friendship such that it makes possible the condition of recognizing oneself in the eyes of the friend, such that
we continue to share intimacy with our friends even in the absence of physical proximity. He writes, "Ilive in the present speaking of myself in the mouths of my friends...I already hear them speaking on the edge of my tomb… Already, yet when I will no longer be. As though pretending to say to me, in my very own voice: rise again.
" Because friendship is so much
about reciprocity for Derrida, it survives the present into the future through the survival of one friend, and hence distances cease to matter. The friend survives (and haunts) through
memory.
On the other hand, Maurice Blanchot in "Friendship" talks about how the friend is singularly and irreducibly the other, such that even in the closest moments there remains a separation between two friends that cannot be bridged. For him, the presence of the friend and a constant
communication with them is
indispensable for a relationality of friendship.In the absence of
the friend, there is no friendship to speak of, because there is no openness to the friend's thought. This is why Blanchot refuses to speak of his friend Bataille's death, (reductively put) because there is no more Bataille, but only Blanchot's memories of him, which is not the same
as Bataille.

Johanna Hedva's Sick Woman Theory underscores the vulnerabilities that pervade women's lives. They suggest that the dominant discourse on political action is too narrow a definition of how we engage the political. Hedva disagrees with the belief that only those bodies that are able to enter the street are acting politically. They disagree with this belief because it privileges those for whom this is a possibility and reduces other actions to the nonpolitical. These other actions revolve around what Hedva calls "the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring". For them, "the most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself... To protect each other... [and practise] a politics of care."
You are a woman, who identifies as a feminist, attending a liberal university. Your campus brims with feminists occupying university spaces to protest curfew timings, dress codes, rampant sexual violence etc through sloganeering, chanting, singing and confronting the administration through sit-ups, candle-light marches etc.

Clinically Dead: For someone to be clinically dead, the two conditions to be met are the cessation of the heartbeat and breathing. It is irreversible.

Collective Security refers to the concept that underlines that concerns of
security move away from self help (nations engaging in their own security
strategy) to collective concern. This is based on the principle of "All for one and
one for all"
.It is based on the theory of Balance of Power, under which
whenever any state tries to gain preponderance on other states, all other states
will come together to balance it so as to prevent it from establishing a
hegemony. On the other hand, Collective Defence is a regional concept under
which military alliance is preferred: the enemy is already identified and
membership is narrow.It is based on a disbelief and distrust in collective
security as a reliable strategy for self-defence

The demographics of Iraq are broadly constituted by the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish groups. The Shia
sect is in a majority, forming almost 65% of the population, with the Sunni sect forming a
significant minority comprising as much as 30% of the population. However, under the Sunni
leader Saddam Hussein's rule, the Sunni minority became the politically powerful class, with
Hussein being responsible for the sectarian oppression of the Shia majority.
Post the American Occupation ofIraq in 2003 that deposed Hussein,Iraq's political order has
functioned through the Muhasasa system in an attempt to provide proportional representation to
Iraq’s various ethno-sectarian groups in cabinet positions. Under the Muhasasa system,Iraq's
political system functions on "spoils basis" for the distribution of governemnet jobs, offices and
perks. A spoils system is a practise in which a political party — after winning an election — rewards
its supporters, friends and family for its victory with these perks to further incentivise them to
work for the party.
Critics have pointed out how the Muhasasa system led to the recentering of power within a tight
coalition of Shia parties, with residual influence being shared with Sunni and Kurdish groups.
Over the years, this arrangement has made Iran, another Shia majority state, the central
presence in Iraq's politics as the sponsor of Shia parties and militants. Popular uprisings against
this system have also been observed in Iraq since October 2019, with citizens demanding a more
equitable political system. There has been no conclusive answer to what can be the alternative
form of representative system in Iraq, with nationalists demanding that the right incentives be
created to promote a common national identity which challenges the sectarian and ethnic divide
in Iraq.
Defenders of the Muhasasa system have drawn the focus back to the fragile state of democracy
that Iraq finds itself in, as a post-conflict, post-occupation society, and have further argued that
the system is the only barrier stopping the nation from falling into the chaos of majoritarianism
and authoritative leadership as seen in nearby Syria

Supranationalism is the existence of authority which is higher than that of
nation-state. After nation-states have consented to becoming a part of the
supranational body, it has the capability of imposing its will on its constituent
nation states, for example, one way is through laws that, if passed through the
supranational legislature, are binding on the constituent nation-states. Under
this, sovereignity and decision-making authority is transferred from the
constituent bodies to the international or regional organisation.
Intergovernmentalism refers to the interaction amongst nation-states which
takes place on the basis of sovereign independence.In such bodies, state
sovereignity is preserved through the process of unanimous decision making
where each entity has a veto.

Gifting is a form of an exchange between a giver and a receiver. It is an act of care, a symbolic ritual that not only affirms love but also a demonstrates a knowledge about the other person, about what they like, thereby facilitating joy. However, it also generates a debt on the receiver, and is confined within an economic relationality, such that it is no more about the emotion itself, thereby generating a cycle of gifting and counter-(or return-) gifting.

For most people, there are certain objects that they are so emotionally attached to that they become a part of themselves. These objects come to define who one is, such that their absence would resut in a transformation at some level of who the individual is. Examples include objects like wedding rings, family heirlooms, and family homes. Margaret Radin writes that, "One may gauge the strength or significance of someone's relationship with an object by the kind of pain that would be occasioned by its loss. On this view, an object is closely related to one's personhood if its loss causes pain that cannot be relieved by the object's replacement. If so, that particular object is bound up with the holder. For instance, if a wedding ring is stole from a jeweler, insurance proceeds can reimburse the jeweler, but if a wedding ring is stolen from a loving wearer, the price of a replacement will not restore the status quo--perhaps no amount of money can do so." Therefore, such objects that become bound with personhood become special because they lose their exchange value and fungibility. A meaningful problem however arises when people who have such constitutive connections with objects do not have legal rights of ownership.

Picture 1: Spray Paints of "I Love You" on Lal Quila, Lodhi Monuments

Picture 2: "The Unconditional Surrender Statue" in Sarasota, Florida — depicting the iconic image of a sailor kissing a woman in a nurse's uniform in Times Square after the end of World War II ---spray-painted with #MeToo

The red hammer and sickle has formed the spectacularly inspiring iconography of international communism. Marxist parties across the world use some variation of it as their party symbol, and hence is a symbol that cuts through linguistic differences to foster a spirit of international comradeship, embodying the marxist rallying cry: "Workers of the world unite! ".
However, the symbol has come to be associated with violence, because of its usage also by radically violent movements like the Naxalbari movement. The Communist Party of
India (Maoist), founded by Charu Majumdar, also uses the same symbol. The CPI(M), which is now a banned party, is a violent militant faction that wants to overthrow what
they call "the semi-feudal Indian state".
Clarification: There are other several Marxist parties like CPI (Marxist) and CPI
(Marxist-Leninist) Liberation that have faith in the electoral machinery.

The personal life of Ana Mendieta, a renowned Cuban artist who worked with abstract and performance art forms, was plagued with issues like failed relationships, bad health, alcoholism, and self-image issues. Her work dealt with disturbing themes of death, nihilism and horror, all tinged with feminist undercurrents. This resulted in her being troped as embodying the figure of the tortured genius, such that her sad death added to her artistic legacy. For Coco Fusco, this “post-mortem canonization” of artists like Mendieta is problematic because it negates the work of art and the creativity of the artist in favour of their personal life which is often dramatically tragic. The world has started to grow an overdue interest in the works of female artists like Mendieta, owing to what August Uribe terms the "globalization and internationalization” of art. After a long absence from representation in the art world, Mendieta’s work continues to grow, with private collectors and museums showcasing her documented performances, and using it to construct a narrative of Mendieta as a person and a female artist.