Mehnoor Nisar

In December 2025, Ashoka University designated  a dining space for its outsourced workers in the basement of an academic block. The space has four tables for a workforce of over five hundred people. Workers report  that it is cold, poorly lit, rarely cleaned, and largely unused. Many continue to eat where they are posted instead of entering this ostensibly inclusive space. This dining facility did not emerge spontaneously. It followed months of meetings, inspections, and written proposals by...

When governments choose to treat their youth as expendable, they unwittingly create the opposition they fear the most. In Sri Lanka , it was the young protestors who camped outside the president’s office for months, forcing a government to resign. In Pakistan , the decades-old ban on student unions is being challenged, breathing new life into the country’s political discourse. Over the past decade, a pattern has emerged across South Asia: policies and practices that shut youth out of economic...

On 9th October 2024, at around 23:30, Ratan Tata breathed his last. Just as the news spread, the world stirred to a striking dichotomy