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The article reports a year-long study to systematically understand ‘employability’ as a social psychological construct and its linkages with various person centred attributes and choice of career tracks. To that end, the article is divided into three sections. The first section analyses the Indian context of the demographic dividend and higher education and locates the construction of employability within it. The second section reports the rationale, the method and the results. Finally, the article concludes with the discussion of results and implications.  Employability has a duality associated with it. It is a construct that, on one hand, is sensitive to macro variables like the state of the economy, the access to education and finance and sector-wise trends. On the other hand, employability may also be related to the person-centred variables like effectiveness and hope. The recruitment process can be seen as a site of this interaction between structural trends and agentic competencies. Through understanding the duality of structure and agency can we centre the debate on employability, skewed away from economic and sociological factors to psychological ones. This article is an attempt in that direction.  In the present study, based on preliminary field research, six career tracks were identified. 643 students from final/pre-final semesters in colleges and employed cohort from Thanjavur and Chennai in Tamil Nadu, were administered psychological instruments regarding personal effectiveness and attribution to success and failure. Additionally, students were tested before and after the placement season to cross-validate whether they got employed or not.  The model was tested using binomial logistic regression analysis. Results indicate that the employed cohort both as students and recently employed displayed significantly different internal and external attribution to success and failure and personal effectiveness than the non-employed cohort. Implications, limitations and future research questions are discussed.

The emotion of vātsalyam is perceived as central to the construction of love in the Indian cultural context. Usually understood as the love of the parents for their children, it is not confined to parental love alone. The article examines the historicity of the concept of vātsalyam as well as its contemporary expression. It combines enquiry from three domains—Indian philosophical thought, literature and folk psychology. The first section of the article provides the theoretical framework within which the concept is situated in Indian psychology. Drawing from the rasa theory, we explicate how experiencing of worldly emotions can simultaneously be the means of transformation. In the second section, we attempt to bring out the centrality of the emotion of vātsalyam in Indian psyche and its pan-Indian expression by drawing from the literatures in Tamil, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi. The third section of the article uses a short qualitative enquiry to examine contemporary understanding of vātsalyam based on responses of lay persons and artists relating to nature of vātsalyam, their modes of expression of this emotion, its manifestation in various relationships, and their views on the uniqueness of this emotion, or otherwise, to the Indian cultural context

There are more than 150 (grand and micro) theories of emotion. Even as European phenomenological perspectives do mention self and agency, the mainstream discourse on emotion in psychology is quite limited in presenting a coherent theory of affective process. A key aspect of Euro-American theories of emotion is that, these theories are topographically flat, thus, unable to provide mechanisms of transformation of emotion relevant for well-being. In this paper, a theory-based framework for emotional transformation through understanding Indian concepts in āyurveda, yoga sutras and the nātya is discussed. Second, the paper proposes that it is Śānta (the Indian conceptualisation of peace) alone, that permits a substantive possibility to a radical re-emotion or experiencing and articulating well-being. The concept for a radical re-emotion is called Bhāvanā, indicating the possibility of conscious and radical re-creation and re-imagination of affective relationships with objects, concepts, processes and people in the world, re-orienting from the isolated ‘re-appraisal’, ‘self-regulation and control’ of emotion as discussed in the mainstream paradigm. The paper contends that these culturally relevant models educate and inform global psychology theory and applied practice.