At Dalaut Ram College in Delhi, I engaged a young girl named Kritija in conversation. Tired of the monotonous questions about boys and American dating that were being constantly hurled at me from some of the other students, I decided to ask her point-blank about the one thing I had really come to India to learn more about: “When you study psychology here, what is it, exactly, that you’re studying?” Kritija blinked a few times, taken aback at the pointedness of my probing, but

Growing up, I was fortunate to have an uncle who owned a plastic surgery clinic in Florida. Though his practice had the usual patients - boob jobs, rhinoplastys, tummy tucks, the works - one particular case has stood out to me my entire life. The patient in question was named Bilkis Khatun, a Bangladeshi girl whom my uncle took in and supplied reconstructive surgery for following a brutal acid attack she suffered in her sleep at the hand of an angered and rejected suitor. Whi

"The Psychology of Globalization" by Jeffrey Arnett is quick to highlight the growing role youth have in the development of cross-cultural communication and world development. In Bangalore, we attended a lecture on the nature of technology and communications on the role of positive psychology. While the lecture itself was hard to understand, the conversations I witnessed afterward were especially poignant and relevant to this movement toward youth-oriented understanding of gl

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