Neoclassical economics tells us that because both individuals are assumed rational, their regret levels ought to be identical since their economic consequences are identical. Behavioural economists, however, combine psychology with economics, and focus on how real people, with their cognitive biases, actually behave. The friend who just missed the flight does indeed experience greater disappointment than the one who missed the flight by a margin of four hours. Does that make one or the other irrational? In this episode of BIC Talks, academic, author and corporate executive V Raghunathan and Applied Behavioural Economist Nikhil Ravichandar navigate the journey of such rationality-irrationality arguments, showing why economics shorn of psychology may be incomplete. This conversation is situated around Raghunathan's book, Irrationally Rational that collates the works of ten Nobel Laureates largely responsible for the rise of behavioural economics, that makes understanding behavioural economics more fun and accessible. 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.  

Journalist Venkat Ananth talks to returning host Pavan Srinath on what it takes from good journalism to hold Big Tech accountable, in light of the retracted XCheck / Meta story by published by The Wire.  Tech platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and Twitter wield immense societal, economic and political power across the world today. Good tech journalism requires a deep knowledge of large multinational conglomerates, deep technical and business knowledge, as well as carefully cultivated access and immense persistence.  Venkat Ananth explains each aspect of sound tech journalism and the processes and the discipline needed for them, sharing his own experiences across stories, as well as analysing what may have gone wrong with the ambitious and now-retracted story by The Wire.  Venkat Ananth is a journalist with over 15 years of experience in leading Indian newspapers and business publications such as The Hindustan Times, Mint, The Ken, and, The Economic Times. He is also co-founder and CEO of The Signal, free-to-read, daily, curated newsletter that helps understand the latest developments in technology, business, finance, economy and policy. BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guest. 

The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, the definitive anthology of Indian poetry in English for the next decade and more edited by Jeet Thayil, returns the forgotten figures of Indian poetry to the centre where they belong.  Jeet compiled the work of 94 poets for this anthology, the oldest born in 1924 and the youngest in 2001. With the aim of giving readers a deeper understanding of a vast and fluid poetic tradition, this collection brings together writers from across the world, a wealth of voices that present an expansive, encompassing idea of what makes an ‘Indian’ poet. This anthology is the culmination of a project Jeet began twenty years ago with a special supplement for Fulcrum, a poetry annual out of Boston. That was followed by 60 Indian Poets (Penguin India) and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe UK). This anthology, the final iteration, encompasses 75 years of Indian poetry in English. At 908 pages, it is voluminous and exhaustive, with 94 poets from all over the world. The poets of the Indian canon include Ezekiel, Kolatkar, de Souza, Das, Mehrotra, Ramanujan, Jussawalla, but so are vital newer voices such as Vijay Seshadri, Vahni Capildeo, Bhanu Kapil, Daljit Nagra, Rajiv Mohabir and Raena Shirali, among many others. This episode of BIC Talks is adapted from a BIC Venue event that took place in late April 2022. 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.

Through the last two millennia, Indian poets and philosophers have addressed existential questions surrounding the individuals role in society, dealing with inequity, discrimination and oppression. Their answers have ranged from a philosophical acceptance to outright call for revolution. Yet others didn’t wait for a crisis to occur before calling for change, from the minor to a complete overhaul. Vivartana presents the work of such social revolutionaries —poets, politicians, rulers and sants in a musical tour across time and territory, from Kerala to Kashmir. The program is anchored by performance of songs by Musician Chitra Srikrishna accompanied by Adamya Ramanand on the Mridangam and Vaibhav Ramani on the violin in multiple languages, interspersed with a narration to provide the audience both context and a thread of continuity. This episode of BIC Talks is adapted from a live concert that took place in early June 2022 in the BIC premises. 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.

The recent proposal by the current government to reform agricultural markets through three controversial farm laws, the farmer protests that ensued, and the ultimate repeal of these laws has raised questions on what a desired policy on agricultural markets should be. Providing farmers access to agricultural markets in a mode that benefits both farmer and consumer has proven elusive. At one end is the mode adopted by the farm laws - a privatisation of agricultural markets by offering space and incentives for private corporate investment, creating a fear that this will lead to a take over by profit-grabbing corporates who exploit both farmers and consumers. The demand of the farmer protests for strong state intervention guaranteeing minimum-support-prices and purchase commitments has been criticised as creating market inefficiencies, that it overlooks structural problems and the presence of inconsistencies in the current mandi system, and that it will also create problems for India in abiding to commitments made to WTO rules. A middle ground of reform based on a structure of cooperatives, as was done for the dairy industry, has received insufficient attention. The debate also overlooks the fact that most agricultural holdings in India are termed as ‘marginal’, below five acres in size, leading to both inefficiencies and exploitation in agricultural markets under current conditions. In this episode of BIC Talks, which is an extract from a virtual BIC Streams a session that took place in early September 2022, Sudha Narayanan, Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute, New Delhi; T. Nandakumar, Former Secretary Food & Agriculture, Government of India and Prakash Kammardi, Former Chairman, Karnataka Agricultural Prices Commission engage in a discussion, moderated by Editor, The India Forum & Founder-Trustee, Vichar Trust C. Rammanohar Reddy, in which they will seek to identify and reflect on, the vision and structure of a sensible policy on agricultural markets in India. 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.

Today, Kalki R Krishnamurthy (1899-1954) is best known for his historical fiction—Sivakamiyin Sapatham, Ponniyin Selvan and Parthiban Kanavu—recreating the glorious eras of the Pallavas and the Cholas. The mighty conquests and magnificent art and culture of these two kingly dynasties are brought to bear on contemporary Tamil self-fashioning. In a comprehensive biography of the iconic writer, Sunda (the nom-de-plume of MRM Sundaram, writer and known for his stint in the Tamil service of BBC) shows how, for Kalki, writing was an act of protest as India’s part of freedom movement, assert India’s spiritual/cultural values, and commit to Gandhian ideologies. Not only does it reveal a writer’s central pre-occupations, the biography is a panoramic chronicle of the era in which Kalki lived. In sum, the biography turns the story of an individual into the saga of a nation struggling to individuate itself, the journey of a writer as he records its transformations, of a dreamer who believes that writing can charge the mind, change the world. This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from a BIC Venue event that took place in March 2022 which discussed the English translation of the Tamil biography by Dr. Gowri Ramnarayan who was in conversation with S Theodore Baskaran accompanied by readings by Akhila Ramnarayan and music by Aishwarya Vidya Raghunath. 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.

With India in its seventy-fifth year of independence, conventional policy is unlikely to combat the breadth of its economic challenges. Does India need the state to be big or small? Is growth to be manufacturing-led or services driven? Will India produce for the exports market or the home market? Do the young prefer government jobs to private sector employment? Across a range of areas - human capital, technology, agriculture, finance, trade, public service delivery and more - new ideas must now be on the table. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only cost India many lives and livelihoods, it has also exposed major structural weaknesses in the economy. A huge farm and jobs crisis, rising and massive inequalities, tepid investment growth, and chronic banking sector challenges have plagued the economy, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also exposed the limitations of the Indian state, which tries to control too much-and ends up stifling the economy and the inherent energies of its young population. Climate change is no longer a distant threat, while disruptive technology has huge implications for India's demographic dividend. In addition, the dangerous lurch towards majoritarianism will cast its shadow on India's pursuit of prosperity for all.  In this episode of BIC Talks, authors of Unshackling India, Ajay Chibber and Salman Soz in a conversation with Ashima Goyal acknowledge hard truths and examine the question: Can India use the next twenty-five years, when it will reach the hundredth year of independence, to restructure not only its economy but rejuvenate its democratic energy and unshackle its potential-to become a genuinely developed economy by 2047? This conversation is an extract from a session at Bangalore Literature festival 2021, which took place in collaboration with BIC last December.  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.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have exerted immense influence on the life and thought of Indians. If the Ramayana is a ‘unitary’ saga, the Mahabahrata is a ‘federal epic’.  Its impact has remained as deep now as it was two thousand years.  Who actually composed it?  Why did the epic allow people to weave in it? This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from the second of a series of four masterclass lectures by Prof. G N Devy, titled Memory, Culture and The Being of India that took place in the BIC premises in early February 2022. 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.

Has the artificial memory already taken a complete possession of the human memory? Have Indians altogether forgotten from where they arrived here? Where does one locate the beginning of India as a civilisation? Does it originate in the Vedas? Does it go back to the Indus civilisation? Was there a civilisation before the Indian mythos emerged? What was India when the Holocene began 12000 years before our time? Why is there politics being constructed around the question of India’s origin? This lecture will discuss the need for a People’s Report on Indian civilisation and the efforts being made towards preparing such a report. This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from the second of a series of four masterclass lectures by Prof. G N Devy, titled Memory, Culture and The Being of India that took place in the BIC premises in early February 2022. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app!

Indians belong either to castes or to tribes. What makes the tribal people tribal or adivasis? What have been there cultural traditions, their thought patterns and their philosophy of life? What led to some of them getting branded as ‘criminal tribes’? What is the future of the culture of the Adivasis in the 21st century world? This lecture will present views of the speaker based on his experience of creating the Adivasi academy at Tejgadh and a global network of the indigenous peoples. The lecture will offer a perspective on the rapidly disappearing continent of culture that the indigenous of the world inhabit. This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from the second of a series of four masterclass lectures by Prof. G N Devy, titled Memory, Culture and The Being of India that took place in the BIC premises in early February 2022. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app!