Impossible Hosting: D’lo Sets an Undomesticated Stage for South Asian Youth Artists

At the center of this article is D'Lo, a Sri Lankan American hip hop performance artist, as the host of YouthWallah, a performance in Los Angeles, which features the work of South Asian youth artists. The focus of the article is on the possibility of an undomesticated stage that D'Lo creates for community youth artists as a female, yet unmistakably masculine host who translates female masculinity to a primarily straight South Asian audience as herself and, in drag, embodying her mother. D'Lo's performance includes autobiographical narratives of being gay and South Asian, which she uses to ground her politics in her experience. D'Lo does not perform the “exclusion” of a queer subject from a diasporic home. On the contrary D'Lo, as the host of this article home of YouthWallah 2004, provides an important undomesticated stage for the emergence of South Asian diasporic youth artists' voices and their alternative imaginations of diaspora. Therefore it becomes necessary to rethink the common conflation of notions of home and notions of domesticity, as a colonially inflected version of the home, which reproduces a colonial and gendered relation of power and thereby precludes the imagination of a decolonized community.     

Automation in firearms identification: DCM microsystem 1121 as a caliber finder

The development is reported of a computerized system for determining the possible caliber designation(s) of the parent cartridge from the diameter/weight of a fired bullet. The proposed system has an in-built flexibility for future expansion by way of addition of data relating to new cartridges. It is also found to be amenable to easy, fast and automated search. The practicability of the entire project has been demonstrated with the help of the handgun projectile data compiled by Munhall using the DCM Microsystem 1121 facility available in the Central Forensic Science Laboratory, Calcutta.     

Parenting Behavior and Juvenile Delinquency Among Low-Income Families

It is widely known that parenting behavior has an impact on the development of delinquent behavior among adolescents. However, there is paucity of studies focusing on parenting behavior and its relation to juvenile delinquency among low-income families from India. The authors examined a wide range of parenting behavior and its relationship to juvenile delinquency in low-income families among Indians. Data were collected from 27 juvenile delinquent boys who were residing temporarily in an observation home in Kolkata (West Bengal, India) and 100 matched control (with respect to their socioeconomic status) juvenile boys, 11–18 years old, also from the same city. The overall findings revealed that there were higher levels of permissive parenting in the families of delinquent adolescents. It may be because low-income families have many family members that initiated the adolescents to take up some jobs to increase the family income, and this in turn affected their parents’ parenting behavior.     

Geographic Neighbourhood and Cluster Formation: Evidence from Indian Agriculture

We study an empirical occurrence largely overlooked in studies on income clusters: (i) most clusters include geographic neighbours and non-neighbours; and (ii) not all geographic neighbours are cluster-co-members. Using agricultural income across Indian states, we find a similar pattern in income-clusters over the last 45 years. Logistic regressions that consider state-pairs as the unit of analysis show that cluster membership is not driven by geographic variables but rather by non-geographic factors like weather shock, resource constraints, technology/input usage, extent of crop diversification, infrastructure, policy and institutions     

Cyberpornography,Cyberidentities and Law

In this research, I take the established trilogy of pornography, identity and law and explore the question of what happens when 'cyber' is added to the equation. Informed by cyberpunk writings, cybertheorists and academic sources, and using such theoretical frameworks as queer theory, post-feminism and cyberfeminism, I look at how the (inter)relationship between pornography, identity and law can be understood and analysed in a cyber age: what new cyberpornographies and cyberidentities will evolve before the law, and what forms might law take in relation to them?