As @tariqthachil prepares to step down as Director of CASI on June 30th, please view his reflections on the past five years!

In "Facial Recognition Technologies: A Window into India’s Approach to AI Regulation," @ambersinha07 (@techpolicypres / EDRi) forecasts India's emerging approach to AI regulation based on its short history of governance of facial recognition technologies.

CASI Managing Editor @RohanV spoke to Nayudu about her motivations in tackling Nehru and non-alignment, the lack of a “Nehru studies,” the idea of non-alignment as a form of civil disobedience, and the former Indian prime minister’s blindness to race.

“The Nehru Years” enlarges our understanding of this concept by tracing its intellectual lineage & examines how non-aligned India responded to Cold War flashpoints, including the Korean War, the Suez Crisis/Tripartite Aggression, the Soviet invasion of Hungary & the Congo Crisis.

Commonly seen today as a Cold War-era attempt to avoid being drawn into rival geopolitical blocs, Nayudu shows that non-alignment had far deeper roots in Nehru’s anti-colonial worldview—long before the Cold War had begun.

In “The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment” (@CambPressAssess, 2025), Nayudu—a Lecturer in Social Sciences (Global Affairs) at Yale-NUS College—revisits one of the central ideas that shaped Nehru’s foreign policy: non-alignment.

Jawaharlal Nehru still looms large over India. The ideas & ideology of the country’s first prime minister continue to shape debates about its past &future. Yet, @KonaNayudu argues, Nehru remains under-studied, and his thinking is often flattened—both by admirers and critics.

In this CASI Deep Dive IiT Interview, Managing Editor @RohanV speaks to author @KonaNayudu (Yale-NUS College) about "Non-Alignment as Civil Disobedience and Nehru’s Blind Spots"

In this issue @MiniDarshana discusses how sweeping economic & cultural changes in the 1980s led to not only transnational media flows & globalization, but also a shadow economy of smuggling & piracy that generated public anxiety & debate about sexually explicit media in its wake.

TAMIL:

BANGLA:

HINDI:

Now available in HINDI, BANGLA, and TAMIL:."Media Ecologies of Transnationalism and Liberalization: NRIs, Piracy, and 'Blue Films' in 1980s’ India" by Darshana Sreedhar Mini @MiniDarshana (University of Wisconsin-Madison).Links below:

In this issue @MiniDarshana discusses how sweeping economic & cultural changes in the 1980s led to not only transnational media flows & globalization, but also a shadow economy of smuggling & piracy that generated public anxiety & debate about sexually explicit media in its wake.

"Media Ecologies of Transnationalism and Liberalization: NRIs, Piracy, and “Blue Films” in 1980s’ India" by Darshana Sreedhar Mini @MiniDarshana (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Meet Deepaboli Chatterjee (@DeepaboliC) & Advait Rajagopal Aiyer: the two brilliant Sobti Family Fellows we've had the good fortune of hosting this past year! (Video interviews below).

CASI Managing Editor @RohanV sat down with Thachil to discuss building research bridges between India and the US, why American political science can sometimes miss the mark on India, and how running a center like CASI has become a far more complex—and consequential—task.

Why is there such a disconnect between how India is studied in the U.S. and the questions that matter within India itself? And what lies ahead for future leaders of institutions like CASI?.