As a teacher to high school children, whenever we discussed social justice in the worlds of books we read, one question that would repeatedly come up was, “How do we understand privilege, if you say it is all around us—how can we work with the 'lowest' common denominator if there will always be more walls and more marginalization?”; and I remember not being to answer that question most of the time. By the end of the year, as a class, what we could loftily conclude was where our own privileges and marginalizations lay; given that we did all that we could to “not speak for others.” Of course, we should have realized that growing up in Bombay meant we were speaking for others; coming of age in the decades of neoliberal economic policies in the cultural capital of the country does that to a generation of people—by being the very people who later India Shining addresses, we yield that kind of power. The privilege to voice someone else’s story, and to use our particular frame to view their lives.

Dear HBO,

I've been watching your miniseries, Weight of the Nation, and though you have some good information, I am largely disappointed. Not that I’m all that surprised—the title alone employs the same old fat-shaming rhetoric. "Look at these fat people!" your show says. Yeah yeah, health problems, diabetes, etc., blah blah. LOOK THEY’RE FAT.