Jonathan S Anjaria

Bicycling is promoted in low- and middle-income countries to reduce emissions and improve public health. However, transportation policies often replicate built infrastructure logics from high-income countries, with limited attention to local bicyclists' experiences and contextual realities. Here, drawing on intercept surveys, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations in cities of four low- and middle-income countries, we examine the current state of bicycling and user-perceived barriers. We find that bicycling is largely undertaken by low-income adult men, while women and children cycle mainly within neighborhood enclaves. We identify impediments beyond physical infrastructure, including financial systems, maintenance networks, manufacturing and design capacities, and social supports that shape everyday cycling. Using a mobility justice lens, we examine how these bicycling cultures have persisted within automobile-centric urban geographies. We highlight the importance of addressing these evidence, policy and implementation gaps through an 'ethics of care' approach, supported by regional health and environmental agencies and grounded in context-sensitive research.

The goal of this special section of South Asia is to generate new ways to describe and theorise mazaa, a Hindi-Urdu word that can mean fun, pleasure and play. Scholarly writing often treats fun and pleasure as either frivolous, and therefore irrelevant, or as symbols of a more important social phenomenon. At times, this is motivated by political critique; researchers often believe that entertainment necessarily supports the status quo. At other times, researchers avoid mazaa because we are sceptical of things that have an embodied pull on us. Indeed, mazaa is sensuous; it draws us in with its viscerality. Rather than see these qualities as obstacles, we argue that mazaa's embodied, unwieldly and seductive properties can generate new ways of knowing, analysing, critiquing and writing. Contributors to this section write on a wide range of topics-including, but not limited to, dance, fashion, food and flirting. Together, the essays demonstrate a methodology for making mazaa an optic. This methodology includes keeping mazaa centre stage, allowing oneself to be moved, maintaining an open-ended reading practice that allows for indeterminacy, and writing with an abundance of detail. Dwelling in mazaa does not mean ignoring inequalities, violence or power, but finding new ways of writing about the forms of life that thrive even in times of crisis. It also means illuminating how pleasure can generate new communities and political possibilities as well as new understandings of the role of the critic in social analysis.

There has been a resurgence of recreational cycling in Mumbai, as elsewhere in India, since the early 2010s. A significant reason for the new popularity of cycling has to do with the immersion in the urban landscape that it offers; people are attracted by the pleasures of the embodied experiences of cycling as well as interactions with the varied communities of cyclists with whom they share the road. This paper shows how surfaces matter both materially and metaphorically in opening new possibilities for understanding fun, recreation and pleasure. Whereas in critical urban studies and related fields, surface often connotes superficiality or a cover over the real, I argue that attention to surfaces and its pleasures is what enables people to emphasise the productive possibilities of 'convivial alliances' across differences and to promote an agenda for sustainable transportation politics that goes beyond infrastructure building.

In this article we propose a different approach to the study of neoliberalism. We shift away from institutionally focused accounts of neoliberalism as a strategy of rule, to examine the way citizens engage with neoliberal reform. While there is a burgeoning body of literature on the expansion of civil society, new entrepreneurship and novel governmentalities, not enough is known about the ways the state is restructured by the social processes that follow on from neoliberal reform. How does the to‐and‐fro between policy makers, state agents and citizens shape emerging projects and what consequences do citizens' actions have for state structure? The article uses two case studies from India: a local governance reform and a new health insurance. Unpacking their multiple unexpected outcomes, we argue that neoliberalism does not represent a discrete set of state practices or ideologies but a set of ideals operating in a political field that is far in excess of it and creates new contestations about how to structure and improve the relations among the state, markets and citizens.

Much of the critical and popular controversy surrounding the 2009 film Slumdog Millionaire is derived from misconceptions over the representational possibilities of popular film, as well as the overwhelming national framework of film criticism. By locating the ways in which the dystopic aesthetic of Danny Boyle's earlier film, Trainspotting, is energised when it meets the Mumbai slum, this essay argues that Slumdog explores the role of informal knowledge in the navigation of changing urban landscapes. In this way, it is not despite, but through, the film's refusal of realist generic conventions that it offers its interpretation of the city.

This paper proposes a renewed, interdisciplinary approach to the study of popular Hindi film, which uses the notion of genre to understand the relationship between individual films and social questions in contemporary India at large. We argue that 'text', 'genre', and 'society' are three crucial nodes that allow us to access the many levels at which individual films and groups of texts make meaning. The first half of the paper outlines three reading strategies, which we feel are crucial to understanding popular film as a genre. The second half proceeds to demonstrate the use of these strategies by enacting a dialectic and intertextual reading of three popular youth films of the early 2000s: Dil Chahta Hai, Kyon?, and Yuva, for what they reveal about change and postcolonial desire in contemporary urban India.

One month prior to Hurricane Katrina, the city of Mumbai, India, experienced similar unprecedented and disastrous flooding. In contrast to New Orleans, however, the Mumbai floods were not marked by social disorder and violence but by widespread acts of generosity and altruism. The author argues that, paradoxically, it was the very “Third World-ness” of Mumbai that prevented the city from experiencing the chaos witnessed in New Orleans.