Mental Karta Hai

Nimmi Rangaswamy

Mental Karta Hai

5 October 2012

Nimmi Rangaswamy is a social anthropologist and works for Microsoft as a researcher. She has a PhD from the University of Mumbai and MPhil from the Delhi School of Economics. She has been part of the editorial team for the journal Economic and Political Weekly. The buzz words in her life include people, technology, ethnography and at this point in time, social media. Nimmi researches people and their social contexts and is currently obsessing over user generated content on Facebook, particularly from youth living in the urban slums of Chennai and Hyderabad.

In her Friday Funda talk, Nimmi specifically focused on this current research – Facebook usage at the lower socio-economic spectrum in India. Romance, inspired from Bollywood and pop culture, surrounds engagements with Facebook: in profile creation, in friending patterns, in status updates and photo/video uploads. Facebook, amongst these users, is transforming as a space to play, romance and subvert conventions of not only the global social media but also local social conventions. Nimmi’s talk offered ethnographic vignettes and insights about Facebook’s power to stage aspirational fantasies of romance and upward class mobility in the areas of education, skill building and employability.