BIC TALKS

Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting and United Artists foundations. Gander has most recently published Twice Alive: An Ecology of Intimacies (with an essay by N. Manu Chakravarthy). Gander, who taught at Harvard and Brown University, translates books by poets from Spain, Latin America, and Japan. Pulitzer winning poet Forrest Gander reads from his collection, Twice Alive: An Ecology of Intimacies, followed by the screening of a film on poetry and interaction with the audience. This episode of BIC Talks is an adaptation of a live event that took place in 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.

Until recently, classical music around the world has loved to project itself as being beyond the grasp of the masses. Carnatic music has been no exception to this self-created aura of inscrutability. Mangala Karthik, a Carnatic musician and teacher and co-founder of Anandi Centre of Music believes it is the duty of every teacher and learner to cut through the jargon and spread the joy of this magnificent art form. Her training under legends in the field and a constant connect with young minds at Anandi make her ideally placed to offer a session on the basics of appreciating Carnatic music at multiple levels. Accompanying Mangala in this episode of BIC Talks is a small cohort of talented young singers from Anandi. This session is adapted from a live venue event that took place in May 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.

Samanth Subramanian is a senior writer for Quartz, covering the future of capitalism, and a contributing writer for the Guardian Long Read. He is also the author of three books: “Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast,” “This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War,” and his latest, “A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane.” His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, WIRED, Granta, Harper’s, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, 1843-Intelligent Life, Aeon, Mint, Travel + Leisure, and Caravan. For years, he also co-hosted The Intersection, a fortnightly science and culture podcast from Audiomatic. In this episode of BIC Talks, Samanth responds to a wide variety of questions on his work, process, books and experiences in an open forum that was a part of the Bangalore Literature Festival 2021. 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.

Urban Design is a discipline that forms a bridge between architecture and urban planning. Architecture examines three-dimensional form, culture, aesthetics and experience, but does not examine the urban scale, focusing primarily on individual land parcels. Urban Planning examines wider questions of the city, but tends to cast a two-dimensional gaze of policy abstractions. Urban Design seeks to combine the two, concerned about urban scale while also concerned about three-dimensional form and aesthetic/cultural experience. Urban Design works within the frame of Urban Planning, defining the quality, history and specificity of neighbourhoods. The three disciplines of Urban Planning, Urban Design and Architecture are meant to work in tandem, each affecting and informing the other, to lay down an ethical, social and cultural ideal of urban life. Urban Design is a discipline unrecognised and unimplemented in India, where officialdom views the city through a two-dimensional lens that imagines it as a techno-economic entity rather than a cultural or ecological entity. This episode of BIC Talks will reflect on what good urban design should be and examine key questions in this respect. What are the constituents of good urban form? What have we lost in our cities because of this shortcoming? Given that the discipline’s protocols derive from the Western city, how should we view Urban Design in India so that we do not destroy the vibrance of informal urbanism? What steps should we take toward mainstreaming Urban Design in the Indian city? The panel consists of architects Brinda Somaya, Rahul Mehrotra, Neelkanth Chhaya and Prem Chandavarkar. This episode is adapted from a virtual discussion that took place in January 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.  

India’s colonial experience was a complex phenomenon, which often took different shapes in different places, through layers of caste, religious identity, and much else. In this episode of BIC Talks, Manu S Pillai will explore how India’s princely states and their rulers negotiated their political identities and ideas of kingship, both while facing pressures from the British Raj, as well as while resisting it. Looking beyond the stereotypes in which princely rulers have been trapped, he will investigate their experiments with transforming kingly identities, balancing relationships as much with the British as with their subjects, in constructing political visions for their states–sometimes of great ambition–and their ultimate disappearance from India’s political map, even if not public imagination. This lecture is an extract from the 3rd Prof Satish Chandra Memorial lecture that took place in October 2021. 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.

osy Joseph is an award winning journalist based in New Delhi and was the National Security Editor of The Hindu newspaper until 2018. Josy’s stories have fostered greater public debate and have contributed to significant policy and systemic changes. His reporting has resulted in several high-profile officials being forced out of office, triggering the arrest of many others as well as federal criminal and military investigations. Particularly high-profile investigations have included, for example, the Mumbai Adarsh Housing scam and the many misdeeds in the run-up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, both of which contributed significantly to the anti-corruption movement of recent times. The Prem Bhatia Trust elected him India’s best political reporter of 2010 “for his scoops and revelations, which include a list of scams that have become familiar names in the political lexicon.” He shared the award with Jyotirmoy Dey, a Mumbai crime reporter who had been shot dead a few weeks earlier. In July 2013, the Ramnath Goenka Foundation run by the Indian Express newspaper group awarded him the “Journalist of the Year” in print media. In this episode of BIC Talks, Josy addresses a wide range of questions in a public forum that was a part of the Bangalore Literature Festival 2021. 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.  

This talk by lawyer Gautam Bhatia considers the Indian Constitution as a terrain of contestation between different visions of power. It will ask how the Constitution creates power, who wields power – and upon whom – and how power is constrained. Using the example of federalism, it argues that even as the Constitution is contested terrain, its history has been marked by a centralising drift: an incremental shift towards a homogenous and centralised vision of power, at the expense of other, more plural visions. 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.

Over the last decade the world has seen the politicisation of interstate relations, a rekindling of great power rivalries, pushback against globalisation, and an increasingly ineffective global order in terms of dealing with major challenges such as pandemics, economic slowdowns, and wars. The world seems adrift, between orders, and faces a real prospect of economic recession and a debt crisis in the global south. The discussion with former diplomats Shivshankar Menon and Latha Reddy along with Nitin Pai, co-founder of Takshashila Institution, will focus not on a diagnosis of the issues and problems, which are many, but on prescriptions for how countries, nations, and firms might cope with rising uncertainty and higher geopolitical risk in the international system. It will also cover where the multiple revolutions in technology, energy and military affairs may be taking us. 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.

From being the preserve of a handful of American and British authors in the late-20th century, science fiction (SF) today is a global phenomenon. From Afrofuturism to the popular Chinese Science Fiction of Cixxin Liu, Hao Jingfeng and others, writers, editors, and readers around the world are turning to the genre to make sense of our world and our futures. The global character of contemporary SF is matched by the profusion of sub-genres that have come to inhabit it: climate fiction (or “cli-fi”) and “hopepunk” are just two of the many approaches to science fiction that respond to our present-day conditions. Where and how does English-language Indian SF fit into this world? A look at some of recent works suggests that climate change, political extremism, the legacies of colonialism, and the overwhelming role of technology are some of the themes that have exercised the imagination of Indian SF writers. Do these themes run together to create something that is identifiably Indian SF? Should there be? And how are Indian SF writers and readers engaging with contemporary global SF? These are some of the questions this panel of authors and science fiction enthusiasts, Gautam Bhatia, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, TG Shenoy and Shrabonti Bagchi discusses. 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, the world’s largest democracy, the land of yoga, spirituality and a rich civilizational past, has one of the youngest demographics and is without a doubt an exciting place to be in the twenty-first century. Our nation, at the same time, struggles with the rising gap between the rich and the poor, ignorance, social unrest and strained communal harmony. One is always overwhelmed and bewildered by its contradictions, wondering at the many Indias that coexist as an effervescent mix despite such unique diversity. As the country navigates its way into the new millennium, a question often asked is, ‘Are we moving in the right direction?’ Even more important is the question of who is qualified to comment? In Our India, the eclectic range of Captain Gopinath’s views on business, politics, governance, aviation and society portrays a comprehensive picture of an India which is reshaping every minute. 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.