BIC TALKS

This episode of BIC Talks with author and historian Tripurdaman Singh and lawyer Siddharth Raja contextualises and discusses the lead up to the first ever amendment to the Constitution of India in the year 1951, only a year after the Constitution was brought into effect, the subject of Tripurdaman's new book Sixteen Stormy Days - The Story of the First Amendment of the Constitution of India.  The conversation traces this momentous event and the various personalities and agendas, at odds with the original hopes and dreams of building a liberal democratic system at the heart of it. The controversial amendment termed an “obscenity by willful resolve” by some is a crucial moment characterised by some of the fiercest parliamentary debates and  in the country’s political, judicial and constitutional history which set us on a path of ambiguity as a nation.  Tripurdaman Singh is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. Tripurdaman is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and has been the recipient of a fellowship award from the Indian Council of Historical Research.  Siddharth Raja is a seasoned corporate lawyer now in his 23rd year of practice. He focuses on private equity and venture capital transactions, and on cross-border and domestic mergers and acquisitions.

In this episode renowned lawyer Sriram Panchu, pioneer of Mediation in India speaks with Kamala Naganand on the evolution of Mediation as a successful dispute resolution mechanism. We explore how mediation fosters mindfulness and healing with non judgemental justice; and the myriad applications of the process to public, private, domestic and international conflict resolution. Sriram Panchu has been in the forefront of the mediation movement in India, and is an internationally recognised Indian mediator. Kamala Naganand is the managing partner at Aarna Law. Her principal practice areas are corporate advisory, intellectual property law, insolvency and bankruptcy and private client practice.

Is India obsessed with IT & engineering studies and are we ignoring investment in pure science education? With the limited resources we have shouldn’t we be focused on finding answers to the immediate issues of today’s  society or should we invest in pursuing long-term scientific breakthroughs as well as well? What are the big questions in Science that impact Indian society and what should be our priorities? What are the paths to innovation? Are patents necessary or will we be restricting access from beneficiaries?   A panel of leading minds debated these challenges- Nobel Laureate Professor Venkataraman ‘Venki’ ‘Ramakrishnan, Professor Jyotsna Dhawan, Professor S ‘Rams’ Ramaswamy and  Professor Pankaj Chandra at a live event at Bangalore International Centre in collaboration with Ignite Life Sciences Foundation and Cytecare. This enthralling session is an opportunity to learn what these scientific experts have to say about these vexed questions, and is bound to offer meaningful insights to the audience. 

After five years of trying to spot the elusive black panther – Karia – of the Kabini forest, author and philanthropist Rohini Nilekani completes her story after finally sighting the black panther she was searching for. But where? And what happens next? Will the end of one quest mark the beginning of another? In Part 2 of the talk ‘Romancing the Black Panther’ Rohini Nilekani completes her story about her quest for the black panther, and how it brings her deeper into the heart of Kabini. A forest that is home to much biodiversity – it is part man-made and part natural, teeming with wildlife beside the gleaming backwaters of the Kabini reservoir. This paradise calls for eternal vigilance. The global pandemic has taught us just how interconnected we are to the wild world. What better time for us to reflect on how—and how quickly—we can renew our broken relationship with the natural world? Can we go into the forest with curiosity and humility, and can we emerge embracing its grace? This podcast has been adapted from an collaborative event with Bangalore Literature Festival. The original video can be watched here.

While stating that Hinduism is not a religion but a collection of practices associated with the space now called India, MK Raghavendra, critic, film scholar and writer, in this conversation with former diplomat Chiranjiv Singh examines what being a Hindu means and asks whether its practices are reconcilable with global modernity and compatible with justice and egalitarianism. He has recently authored a book 'The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity'. The speakers discuss the various lenses through which Indian religions - especially Hinduism are perceived and experienced across the country and global academia. The conversation spans philosophical, political and social perspectives while presenting arguments that challenge current popular understanding of the Hindu Nation.   MK Raghavendra is a film, literary and cultural critic who writes on politics as well. He won the Swarna Kamal for Best Film Critic in 1997 and was awarded a Homi Bhabha Fellowship in 2000-2001 to study narration in Hindi films. He has authored 8 books on film though Oxford University Press, HarperCollins and Bloomsbury. Chiranjiv Singh is a former Ambassador of India to UNESCO in Paris. An Indian Administrative Service officer of the 1969 batch, he retired in 2005 as the Development Commissioner of Karnataka and Additional Chief Secretary to the Government of Karnataka. 

In this episode Vivek Wadhwa author, academic, entrepreneur explores the ideas in his book 'From Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink Innovation' in a conversation with Dr. Srivatsa Krishna, IAS and Secretary CEO of Coffee Board of India.  Ray Kurzweil of Singularity University has predicted that for the first time in human history, we are entering the “Exponential Era”. We are going to experience 20,000 years of technological change in the next 100 years- from the birth of agriculture to the birth of the Internet, twice, in the next century. We are living in the times when flying taxis, autonomous vehicles, robots as personal valets, reusable rockets are all happening in front of our eyes, most of them ready for prime time. For the first time there is not only Moore’s Law like acceleration in several technologies but also convergence among them. How will these impact governments? Can they remain immune to change or will this lead to more innovating governments? How must governments in India and elsewhere leverage these technologies to serve better? How do we move from 'Incremental to Exponential' in governance? The original live event was in collaboration with the IAS Officers Association. 

Rahul Rao, scholar and author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality, in conversation with writer Kavya Murthy talks about the inheritance that the former colonies are living with and how they have managed to warp and expand the imperialist biases and criminalisation of the Queer community. Primarily examining three locations - India, Uganda and Britain - the relationship between the state and interaction with the international position, Culpability of colonial powers, current trans lives conditions in India and the responses of the UN and other international bodies, Out of Time ties together the aspects of Race, caste, class and human rights in the struggle for queer identity rights across centuries in the past and the future. Rahul Rao has research interests in international relations theory, the international relations of South Asia, comparative political thought, and gender and sexuality.  Kavya Murthy is a writer, editor and content strategist for digital platforms and curates books and events for Champaca Bookstores.

Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, talks about what propelled her to travel 9,000 miles along India’s borderlands. In conversation with Vaibhav Vats, Vijayan recounts her reportage along India’s tenuous boundaries with Bangladesh, Myanmar, China and - most contentious of all – Pakistan. The conversation delves into the nature of borders, the peculiar origins of India’s demarcations and the fractured, founding history that underpins the Indian nation-state. Vijayan and Vats also muse on how the violence on the peripheries slowly permeates inwards, as raging conflicts over citizenship and identity - once an issue confined largely to the borderlands - have moved to the centre of the Indian body politic.  Suchitra Vijayan is an award-winning photographer, the founder and executive director of the Polis Project, a hybrid research and journalism organisation. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, GQ, The Boston Review, The Hindu, and Foreign Policy, and she has appeared on NBC news. A Barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. Vaibhav Vats is an independent writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the New York Times and Al Jazeera, among other publications. He is working on a book on Hindu nationalism and the making of India’s Second Republic.

Manu V Devadevan interviews HS Shivaprakash on the beginning of his life as a poet, his influences and his evolution - personal and literary - over half a century. The conversation traces the timeline of contemporary Kannada Literature in parallel with that of world literature through a personal lens. The speakers delve into what makes the experience of a poem or a play different from that of a novel.  Touching upon his childhood in Bangalore of the 60s to his life as a traveller, this session is a glimpse into the making of one of the most present and influential voices in Kannada literature. Apart from the physical and technical aspects of his existence as a poet, HS Shivaprakash also speaks of the personal, the political and the spiritual. Poet and playwright HS Shivaprakash is considered one of the most influential voices in Kannada literature today. The recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, he has also received the highest awards in Karnataka for literature and drama. His literary works have been translated into most Indian languages, as well as into English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. A significant scholarly contribution is the rediscovery of the aesthetic facets of Indian Bhakti traditions. Manu V Devadevan teaches History at the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, and received the Infosys Prize in Humanities for the year 2019.

In this spirited lecture, which was originally a LISA distinguished lecture delivered in March 2021, the historian Ramachandra Guha recalls some memorable experiences from a lifetime of working in libraries and archives in India and abroad. He introduces us to some great repositories of printed books, such as the National Library in Kolkata and the Sterling Memorial Museum Library of Yale University, and to some great repositories of unpublished archival material, such as the Manuscripts Division of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. And he speaks also of the joyous days and months he has spent in the greatest library-cum-archive in the world, the British Library in London. The lecture was followed by a riveting Q & A session as well.