Open discussions

B. S. Chimni’s International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making argues that institutions such as the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and the UN have evolved into a network that functions as a nascent global state. According to Chimni, this system primarily advances the interests of transnational capital and powerful states while reducing the autonomy of developing countries.

The article examines how international economic institutions, human rights organizations, environmental regimes, and global governance mechanisms increasingly shape national policies. Chimni also highlights concerns about democratic deficits within these institutions, arguing that developing countries often have limited influence over decisions that significantly affect them.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is a striking exploration of alienation, identity, and the fragility of human relationships. Gregor Samsa’s transformation into an insect serves less as a fantastical event than as a lens through which Kafka examines isolation, the loss of individuality, and the way a person’s value can become tied to their usefulness.

Despite its surreal premise, the novella raises enduring questions about family, responsibility, and what it means to be human. Its ambiguity is part of what has made it one of the most widely discussed works of modern literature.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

It’s remarkable how a story written nearly three thousand years ago still feels so alive. On the surface, The Odyssey is an epic of monsters, gods, storms, and impossible journeys. Beneath all of that, though, is a deeply human story about longing for home, enduring loss, and how people are transformed by the journeys they never intended to take.

With Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film adaptation bringing renewed attention to the epic, this feels like a fitting time to return to Homer’s original. It’ll be interesting to see how a story that has shaped literature for centuries is reimagined for a modern audience while retaining the themes that have made it timeless.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

This week, we’re reading Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang—a Hugo Award-winning science fiction novella that imagines a city literally divided by time.

In this version of Beijing, the city folds into different physical spaces, allowing three social classes to inhabit the same land at different hours of the day. It is a speculative premise, but one that feels surprisingly familiar. Beneath its futuristic setting lies a meditation on inequality, labor, opportunity, and the invisible structures that determine whose lives are valued and whose are merely sustained.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

Power, morality, fear, virtue, appearance; few political texts have shaped conversation as enduringly as The Prince. Whether read as a practical handbook, a satire, or a mirror of political reality, Niccolò Machiavelli’s work continues to unsettle because it refuses comforting ideals in favor of asking what power actually looks like in practice.

This week’s reading invites us into a text that has been admired, criticized, and debated for centuries, not because it offers easy answers, but because it compels us to examine the uneasy relationship between ethics and leadership.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper traces a woman’s gradual psychological unraveling within the confines of a prescribed “rest cure.” What begins as a quiet account of isolation slowly transforms into an unsettling exploration of control, autonomy, and the consequences of denying one’s voice.

The wallpaper itself shifts from an ordinary object into a powerful symbol, reflecting the narrator’s growing fixation and the invisible structures that confine her. Rather than presenting madness as an isolated condition, Gilman invites us to consider how social expectations, medical authority, and enforced silence shape the narrator’s descent.

The story remains striking for the way it blurs the line between reality and perception, leaving readers to question where psychological suffering ends and societal oppression begins.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov portrays a deeply fractured family as a way to explore questions of faith, doubt, guilt, and moral responsibility. The Karamazov household becomes a space of constant tension, where emotional chaos and ethical uncertainty shape every interaction.

Each brother embodies a distinct way of confronting life; belief, skepticism, and impulse, yet none offers a complete or stable answer. Even the father’s presence amplifies the moral instability rather than resolving it.

The novel ultimately resists clear moral resolution, presenting a world where conflicting truths coexist and no single perspective fully dominates.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

This week’s reading is David N. Lorenzen’s The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas: Two Lost Śaivite Sects, which explores two Śaiva traditions from medieval India that are largely known today through fragmentary and indirect sources: The Kāpālikas and Kālāmukhas.

The work highlights how much of what we “know” about these groups comes from inscriptions, scattered references, and outsider narratives, and how historical reconstruction depends on reading these sources carefully and critically.

Kindly head over to the Kuhiro Class Reading Circle Google Classroom to access the text. Looking forward to hearing different perspectives on the text here in Chautara.

A strong research project depends as much on asking the right question as it does on analyzing the data. Good methodology helps ensure that findings are reliable, replicable, and meaningful.