The audience is as much a part of the Indian movie-going experience as the film itself. Singing anthems, whooping and hollering, rooting for favorites, calling out fouls and simulations, and getting a halftime snack fix – few differences aside, it’s possible to forget you’re in a dark room with 3D glasses and imagine yourself in […]
CASI Student Programs Blog
Since 2007, the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania has supported 175 students! Welcome to the home base for CASI students and alumni to share their thoughts, reflections, and ongoing learnings about their internships, research projects, and travels in India and beyond.
Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights celebrating the triumph of good over evil, might be considered a less than fortuitous date to pilot a survey instrument for business owners in Mumbai. The crowds doing last minute shopping to puja-fy their homes, the local student body from which I pluck research assistants gone home, as have […]
As mainstream household microfinance has matured in India over the past thirty years, focus has turned to the country’s underserved Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). The MSME sector is a pinnacle of the Indian economy, made up of 48.8 million units that contribute 11% of India’s GDP (IFC, 2010). With India’s young working-age population […]
Hello! I arrived in India a couple of weeks ago as a recipient of the CASI Travel Funds for Research Award. As as third year PhD student in the department of City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania, I intend to carry out preliminary field work during my stay here. This will be critical in […]
Some of my most special memories in India are of times when communication barriers were at their highest… I was walking around a market and stopped to get henna. I took a seat on a crate on the sidewalk and as the artist got started, it suddenly started to pour. Since we were mostly under […]
The 24 hours I had to spend at Indira Gandhi international airport did not make me forget such an amazing summer I had in India. Interning at Aravind was certainly a big highlight of my life, and it was one of the greatest growth opportunities I have received from Penn, so far. That being said, […]
A few weeks back, I was sitting in a room with a job-candidate, Lana, who had come to the company I was partnered with in hopes of being selected for a job at an international call center in Gurgaon. For the past month, I had been working with One Direction Skill Solutions (ODSS), a research-oriented […]
