BIC TALKS

After is a collection of poems inspired by Valmiki’s Ramayana, one of Asia’s foundational epic poems and a story cycle of incalculable historical importance. But After does not just come after the Ramayana. On each successive page, Vivek Narayanan brings the resources of contemporary English poetry to bear on the Sanskrit epic. In a work that warrants comparison with Christopher Logue’s and Alice Oswald’s reshapings of Homer, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Narayanan allows the ancient voice of the poem to engage with modern experience, initiating a transformative conversation across time. In this episode of BIC Talks, Vivek Narayanan is in conversation with Mani Rao and Arshia Sattar, peppered with readings and conversation. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.

India has ambitiously tasked itself to leap to the next level on the development ladder to a “developed India” tag by 2047. The country is categorised as an “Aspirational Society,” aiming to seize the opportunities provided by an economy that maintains steady and high economic growth. This society aspires for better living standards, including the bare necessities, better health care, education, clean water, sanitation facilities, affordable housing, electricity and the internet. The big tent of India’s social infrastructure must reach a diverse and expansive populace, transcending cultures, languages, and geographies, after all! The Government is thus making all efforts to live up to this challenge and demands of society, as economic growth without shared prosperity and well-being is devoid of meaning. A vast ground has been covered to ensure sustainable and equitable economic growth. However, the journey continues with fresh challenges and innovative solutions. In this episode of BIC Talks, Chief Economic Adviser, V Anantha Nageswaran takes us through the journey that the country has made in the recent past and details the steps forward. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.

In an illustrious career spanning over forty years in public service and culminating in the highest office in Indian bureaucracy – Union Cabinet Secretary – KM Chandrasekhar has seen, and done, it all. He is one of those rare IAS officers who has held a wide range of senior positions in State government, the Centre, and public sector undertakings. In this episode of BIC Talks, Chandrasekhar talks about his autobiography, As Good as My Word, wherehe paints an intimate picture of the UPA government during one of its toughest phases and his own, crucial, role in steering India through some of her most severe crises – the Great Recession of 2008, the oilmen’s strike in 2009 and the 26/11 Mumbai attacks – and scams – the 2G Spectrum case and the 2010 Commonwealth Games corruption scandal. The book describes Chandrasekhar’s experiments in public administration, cutting his teeth in trade diplomacy as the Indian ambassador to the World Trade Organization, his excellent working equation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, his run-ins with some prominent ministers of the time, and his reflections on Indian democracy, economy and defence. The author will be in conversation with ACS, Panchayat Raj, Government of Karnataka, Uma Mahadevan and Sudhir Krishnaswamy Vice-Chancellor of NLSIU, Bengaluru. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.

UR Ananthamurthy (1932–2014), writer, teacher, literary critic, and public intellectual, was born in Shivamogga district in Karnataka. In 1965, his debut novel, Samskara, took the literary world by storm with its unflinching portrayal of the rigid orthodoxy in Brahmin society. Since then, it has become a landmark novel of the modernist, or Navya, movement of the 1950s and 1960s in Kannada literature. He received the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, in 1994, and was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. The Essential UR Ananthamurthy is a five-part compendium of select fictional and non-fictional works, poetry, and autobiographical writings from one of India’s most illustrious and outspoken writers. The section ‘Novels’ portrays characters in conflict with tradition, idealism, and modernity in a rapidly changing independent India through excerpts from powerful novels such as Samskara, Bharathipura, Avasthe, and Bhava. ‘Poetry’ presents five evocative poems on the themes of power and politics. ‘Short Stories’ highlights the chief themes that preoccupied Ananthamurthy—the constraints of the traditional order, the cultural dominance of the West, the sinister workings of power, and the creativity of political dissent. ‘Essays and Speeches’ captures the range and depth of Ananthamurthy’s democratic imagination through his writings on cultural identity and literature, community and creativity, linguistic and nationalist politics, and on figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Ram Manohar Lohia. And, the final section, ‘Memoirs’, gathers Ananthamurthy’s memories of family, friendships, work, and travel from the different phases of his life. The Essential UR Ananthamurthy offers a rich glimpse into the mind of one of modern India’s most profound writers and thinkers and demonstrates why Ananthamurthy’s works will endure for generations to come. The book has been edited by Manu Chakravarthy and Chandan Gowda. This episode of BIC Talks features NS Gundur, Anjum Hasan, HS Raghavendra Rao, Nithyananda Shetty and the editors of the book. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.

India’s mythmaker and Jnanpith awardee, Chandrashekhar Kambar, has not only enriched Kannada literature but has also placed the country on the global literary map. The recent translation of his collection of folk tales and the charming play Pushparani, titled When the Wind God Fell Sick and Other Folk Tales, opens up new and exciting vistas in children’s literature. The book also highlights urgent environmental concerns, such as saving trees, conserving forests, and preserving our planet's green and clean environment. It leads young readers, as well as those young at heart, into fantastical worlds where gods, demons, princesses, sorcerers, and common people coexist. Moreover, it makes them feel intimately connected with all the animate and inanimate realms of Nature. Krishna Manavalli’s English translation (Rupa, 2023) brings the folk sensibility and vibrant Kannada idiom to young adults from diverse cultures worldwide. This episode of BIC Talks features the writer, Dr. Chandrashekhar Kambar, the translator, Dr. Krishna Malavalli, and the critic, Dr. C. Naganna, on a collective journey of exploration in this folk wonderland. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.

Divorce has been typically framed in Indian popular culture as available mainly to upper-class urban and Anglicised people with the financial means to pursue long-winded remedies in courts. In addition, Hindus have had specific obstacles to accessing divorce; among the various religion-based personal law systems, Hindu personal law was the last to legalise divorce. Critics have long framed divorce as anti-Hindu and a practice promoted by frivolous Westernised women. Escaping unwanted or abusive marriages has therefore been an uphill battle. What arguments did early proponents of divorce in the mid-twentieth century use to legalise divorce? How did they seek to show its acceptance in shastras? Author & Professor, George Washington University, Ashwini Tambe pursues these questions in this talk by looking closely at Marathi public culture, and specifically the longest running Marathi women’s magazine, Stree. She shares translated content from Stree— excerpts of letters to the editor, legal advice, and opinion pieces— to describe the arguments that facilitated the stronger social acceptance of divorce. Looking at Marathi public culture is important because a significant number of reformists and legislators who helped formalise Hindu women’s legal right to divorce at a national level (such as Chimnabai Gaekwad, Dr. Gopalrao Deshmukh and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar) were Marathi. Bombay Presidency and Baroda (ruled by Marathas) legalised divorce for Hindu women before the country as a whole did so. In effect, this episode of BIC Talks traces the itinerary of reformist ideas about divorce that gained prominence in the 1940s and then led to the national-level legalisation of divorce in the 1950s. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.  

Amitav Ghosh’s new book, Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey Through Opium’s Hidden Histories is the story of how, under the aegis of the British Empire, India became the world’s largest producer of opium. It also traces the transformative impact that the opium trade had on India, China, Britain and the United States, with profound long-term consequences for the birth of the modern world, and of contemporary globalism. Many of the world’s  biggest corporations got their start in the colonial opium trade. But the opium economy also had significant effects influencing migration and settlement patterns, and touching upon millions of lives, including those of his own forefathers. Smoke and Ashes tells the story of how this common and deceptively humble plant has shaped the modern world, and the key part it is now playing in the unmaking of that world. It is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an excursion into history, both economic and cultural. In this episode of BIC Talks, the author Amitav Ghosh, speaks about the making and execution of his exciting book and, engages in a conversation with Ramachandra Guha, which took place in the BIC premises in July 23 2023. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.

In 2015, students of the Film & Television Institute of India took the cinema to the streets with a strike. One of the first of the agitations that raged across India’s universities at that time, it defined the right to make and show films as central to freedom on the campus. The names of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, John Abraham, Tarkovsky and Ghatak, recited in slogans and displayed on banners, evoked a history of political cinema that had set itself against the might of India’s political establishment. This podcast series, commemorates that historic struggle, in these three episodes of John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky The third and final episode, A Hacker Cinema, looks at the recent histories of censorship, alongside the morphing of the moving image into streaming media, emphasising circulation, using memes, encouraging a new interactivity with its spectators, with significant aesthetic consequences on both filmmaking and the self-definition of a filmmaker. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher. Archival (in their own voices) Ritwik Ghatak, Mani Kaul, Kamal Swaroop, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Gurvinder Singh, Vinod Khanna, Prateek Vats, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Amol Palekar, Prakash Jha, Alankrita Srivastava, Vijay Tendulkar, Nakul Singh Sawhney, Paul Mason, Manuel Castells, Rohith Vemula Performances (using voice cloning) Miss Ida Dickinson (1928), Mahatma Gandhi (1946), S.K. Patil (1951), Justice Mukul Mudgal (2013), Additional Solicitor General, Government of India (2015) In discussion: Lawrence Liang, Sudhanva Deshpande, Abhijit Gupta, G. Arunima, Ravi Sundaram, Sahana Manjesh, Shilpi Gulati, Nandini Sundar Texts cited: Shreya Singhal and Ors. v. Union of India, 2015 Report of the Film Inquiry Committee (1951): S.K. Patil, Chairman Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (1928) K. A. Abbas vs The Union Of India & Anr on 24 September, 1970 K.M. Sankarappa vs The Union of India, Karnataka High Court, April, 1990 Public comments sought on the Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill 2021, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting The Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, 2023 Report of the Committee of Experts to Examine Issues of Certification Under the Cinematograph Act 1952, 2013 (Justice Mukul Mudgal Chair) Film soundtracks: Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (Ritwik Ghatak, 1974) Calcutta 71 (Mrinal Sen, 1972) Agraharathil Kazhuthai (John Abraham, 1977) Amma Ariyan (John Abraham, 1986) Open Cafe v2.5 (Naveen Padmanabha, 2012) Trimurti (Subhash Ghai, 1995) Kavita Gherao (Bombay Film Republic, Ben Friedman/Ashish Avikuntak, 1998) Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Prakash Mehra, 1978) Chello Show (Pan Nalin, 2021) Om Dar-b-dar (Kamal Swaroop, 1988) Celluloid Man (Shiverndra Singh Dungarpur, 2012)

In 2015, students of the Film & Television Institute of India took the cinema to the streets with a strike. One of the first of the agitations that raged across India’s universities at that time, it defined the right to make and show films as central to freedom on the campus. The names of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, John Abraham, Tarkovsky and Ghatak, recited in slogans and displayed on banners, evoked a history of political cinema that had set itself against the might of India’s political establishment. This podcast series, commemorates that historic struggle, in these three episodes of John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky Episode 2, A Satyajit Ray Plastic Bangle, explores the consequences of a cinema that has turned increasingly elusive to regulation. With lightweight equipment for both making and showing films allowing filmmaking an unprecedented mobility, new possibilities emerged along with new challenges for regulatory authority. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher. Archival (in their own voices) Ritwik Ghatak, Mani Kaul, Kamal Swaroop, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Gurvinder Singh, Vinod Khanna, Prateek Vats, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Amol Palekar, Prakash Jha, Alankrita Srivastava, Vijay Tendulkar, Nakul Singh Sawhney, Paul Mason, Manuel Castells, Rohith Vemula Performances (using voice cloning) Miss Ida Dickinson (1928), Mahatma Gandhi (1946), S.K. Patil (1951), Justice Mukul Mudgal (2013), Additional Solicitor General, Government of India (2015) In discussion: Lawrence Liang, Sudhanva Deshpande, Abhijit Gupta, G. Arunima, Ravi Sundaram, Sahana Manjesh, Shilpi Gulati, Nandini Sundar Texts cited: Shreya Singhal and Ors. v. Union of India, 2015 Report of the Film Inquiry Committee (1951): S.K. Patil, Chairman Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (1928) K. A. Abbas vs The Union Of India & Anr on 24 September, 1970 K.M. Sankarappa vs The Union of India, Karnataka High Court, April, 1990 Public comments sought on the Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill 2021, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting The Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, 2023 Report of the Committee of Experts to Examine Issues of Certification Under the Cinematograph Act 1952, 2013 (Justice Mukul Mudgal Chair) Film soundtracks: Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (Ritwik Ghatak, 1974) Calcutta 71 (Mrinal Sen, 1972) Agraharathil Kazhuthai (John Abraham, 1977) Amma Ariyan (John Abraham, 1986) Open Cafe v2.5 (Naveen Padmanabha, 2012) Trimurti (Subhash Ghai, 1995) Kavita Gherao (Bombay Film Republic, Ben Friedman/Ashish Avikuntak, 1998) Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Prakash Mehra, 1978) Chello Show (Pan Nalin, 2021) Om Dar-b-dar (Kamal Swaroop, 1988) Celluloid Man (Shiverndra Singh Dungarpur, 2012)

In 2015, students of the Film & Television Institute of India took the cinema to the streets with a strike. One of the first of the agitations that raged across India’s universities at that time, it defined the right to make and show films as central to freedom on the campus. The names of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, John Abraham, Tarkovsky and Ghatak, recited in slogans and displayed on banners, evoked a history of political cinema that had set itself against the might of India’s political establishment. This podcast series, commemorates that historic struggle, in these three episodes of John-Ghatak-Tarkovsky Episode 1, The Cinema’s Expanded Afterlife, tells a longer cinematic history of a technological and political transformation. The age of film was born more or less after the First World War, signalling a new age of mass democracy. Ever since then, filmmakers have been in the line of fire as the cinema, standing in for a new public domain, has seen battles take place on the street, in courtrooms, and of course in movie theatres. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher. Archival (in their own voices) Ritwik Ghatak, Mani Kaul, Kamal Swaroop, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Gurvinder Singh, Vinod Khanna, Prateek Vats, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Amol Palekar, Prakash Jha, Alankrita Srivastava, Vijay Tendulkar, Nakul Singh Sawhney, Paul Mason, Manuel Castells, Rohith Vemula Performances (using voice cloning) Miss Ida Dickinson (1928), Mahatma Gandhi (1946), S.K. Patil (1951), Justice Mukul Mudgal (2013), Additional Solicitor General, Government of India (2015) In discussion: Lawrence Liang, Sudhanva Deshpande, Abhijit Gupta, G. Arunima, Ravi Sundaram, Sahana Manjesh, Shilpi Gulati, Nandini Sundar Texts cited: Shreya Singhal and Ors. v. Union of India, 2015 Report of the Film Inquiry Committee (1951): S.K. Patil, Chairman Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (1928) K. A. Abbas vs The Union Of India & Anr on 24 September, 1970 K.M. Sankarappa vs The Union of India, Karnataka High Court, April, 1990 Public comments sought on the Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill 2021, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting The Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill, 2023 Report of the Committee of Experts to Examine Issues of Certification Under the Cinematograph Act 1952, 2013 (Justice Mukul Mudgal Chair) Film soundtracks: Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (Ritwik Ghatak, 1974) Calcutta 71 (Mrinal Sen, 1972) Agraharathil Kazhuthai (John Abraham, 1977) Amma Ariyan (John Abraham, 1986) Open Cafe v2.5 (Naveen Padmanabha, 2012) Trimurti (Subhash Ghai, 1995) Kavita Gherao (Bombay Film Republic, Ben Friedman/Ashish Avikuntak, 1998) Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Prakash Mehra, 1978) Chello Show (Pan Nalin, 2021) Om Dar-b-dar (Kamal Swaroop, 1988) Celluloid Man (Shiverndra Singh Dungarpur, 2012)