BIC TALKS

Fire safety engineer Sumit Khanna and Vasanthi Hariprakash talk about how each of us can play our role in reducing the risk of fire accidents as we lead our lives in cities. Both Sumit and Vasanthi are associated with the Beyond Carlton trust.  They discuss India’s fire safety codes and policies, discuss implementation challenges, and explore important questions about fire safety that every citizen can ask – about their homes, apartments, offices, malls, hotels and any places they visit.  Beyond Carlton is a citizen-led initiative that works to improve fire-safety awareness across India. It was started by Uday Vijayan, after he lost his young son in the preventable Carlton Towers fire tragedy that occurred on February 23, 2010.  Sumit Khanna is a trained fire protection engineer from the National Fire Service College, Nagpur. With over 12 years of experience in the fire protection industry, Sumit has worked with multiple companies in developing building codes, writing standards and promoting fire prevention. He has contributed to India’s National Building Code, helped amend Karnataka’s fire laws, and was one of the people inspecting the Carlton Towers Fire in 2011.  Vasanthi Hariprakash is a journalist, radio and podcast host, and storyteller. She has worked with the Indian Express, with Radio City 91 FM as the host of the primetime show Good Morning Bangalore, with NDTV, among others.  BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

Author and scholar Usha Iyer talks to dancer Poorna Swami about the rich history of women dancing in Hindi cinema. Usha and Poorna explore the agency and power dynamics that various Indian actors and dancers had over the decades, how dancing in cinema can be seen as a continuation of various dance traditions in India, and discuss the roles played by important women like Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Madhuri Dixit and Saroj Khan. Usha Iyer is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Indian Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2020).  Usha’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of cinema, performance, and gender and sexuality studies, with a specific focus on film and performance histories, body cultures, and Global South cultural traffic along the vectors of race, gender, caste, and religion. Poorna Swami is an independent writer, choreographer and dancer based in Bangalore. At the age of seven, she began training in the classical Indian dance form Bharatanatyam, before extending her training to contemporary dance and post-modern techniques.  Poorna has previously hosted two episodes of BIC Talks: #28 with Rahul Rao about the politics and morality of taking down problematic statues; and #35 with Annie Zaidi about home, belonging, displacement and identity.  BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

Author and business leader Hema Hattangady talks to editor Karthik Venkatesh and shares her personal and professional journey from when she took over as the CEO of a family-owned hardware electronics-based energy management company in 1996, and ethically grew the business manifold, and finally sold the business to a multi-national company in 2009. Along with Ashish Sen, Hema has recently written a book- Liftoff: The Story of Conzerv, which chronicles her experiences.  Karthik Venkatesh is a Senior Editor at Westland Books, and occasionally writes for the popular press on language, history and culture. BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

This podcast episode features a presentation by poet, cultural theorist, writer, translator and independent curator, Ranjit Hoskote, followed by a discussion with architect and writer, Prem Chandavarkar.  Ranjit Hoskote walks us through the engagement of an extraordinary set of people who used the mass media of their time to bring their passion, be it art, science or human endeavour to a larger audience. He draws attention to four television series that used the wide-reaching impact of the medium. By elaborating on each of the individual styles and political and philosophical positions of these four ‘popularisers’ whose ‘democratising projects’ attempted to build bridges between ‘expert cultures’ and ‘popular audiences’, Hoskote builds on what is in one sense, a journey of nostalgia through these series, in another, a personal journey, a tribute to a set of exposures that had excited him and influenced the range of his thinking as a young person, to investigate these ‘experiments in public reason’ in the context of understanding what it means to strive to be cosmopolitan, to be cognizant of and invested in the multiplicity of interconnections that define us.  In the discussion that follows, Prem Chandavarkar responds to the presentation through a set of statements, polemical, challenging and reinforcing, that stimulate us to think about the meaning of the public space, the truth of public reason, and the promise of the mass media. An examination of the impact of mass media on culture, pedagogy and reason, this presentation and conversation, with its many intellectual dimensions -- facilitated as it is by the internet, presented on today’s mass media and accessed through today’s methods of wide dissemination -- leaves us thinking about the meaning of public engagement, and demands of us, the listeners, that we contribute to the thinking about ways to craft public interactions as we move into a changing future. This is the first in the series, Passion and Plurality, arranged in a collaboration between the Literature platform of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai and the Bangalore International Centre.  BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

Padma Vibhushan & Atomic Energy Guru Dr MR Srinivasan and Science Historian Dr Jahnavi Phalkey discuss the rich story of India’s nuclear programme and its development over 70 years. India’s first research reactor, Apsara, went critical in 1956 and today, there is a network of nuclear power generating reactors across the country, forming a critical part of India’s power grid. Srinivasan and Phalkey discuss India’s journey from the early days under Homi Bhabha, through the Geopolitics of the Cold War, Sanctions, the 2005 Indo-US nuclear deal, all the way through till today. Dr MR Srinivasan is Former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and former Secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy, retiring in 1990 – and continue to contribute to nuclear energy policy in the country, including playing a key role in the Indo-US nuclear deal. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan for his services to the nation. He also received the first Homi Bhabha Gold Medal from the Indian Science Congress and of the Karnataka Rajyotsava Award. He is the author of the book From Fission to Fusion: The Story of India’s Atomic Energy Programme. Dr Jahnavi Phalkey is the Founding director of the Science Gallery Bengaluru. She is a historian of science and technology, and the author of the book Atomic State: Big Science in 20th Century India, and co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century. BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

Zaid Hassan and Sweta Daga discuss how systemic climate action is possible, and how significant climate change mitigation is possible by building thousands of teams to work on the challenge across the world. They discuss how the burden of climate action cannot be thrust onto individuals while the causes remain systemic, but argue for how cross-sectoral, local, action-oriented teams could lead the way. Sweta Daga is a storyteller and facilitator who has told stories across platforms, from television and film to theatre. As a freelance journalist, she has worked in India focusing on climate justice with intersections in gender and equity. She has also facilitated workshops with changemakers across the world on systemic change. Zaid Hassan is co-founder of Complexity University and 10 in 10. He has 20 years of experience tackling complex social challenges. He has worked all over the world. His experiences range from working in rural India on reducing acute child malnutrition to tackling racism, violence and youth unemployment in inner city Chicago. Zaid has helped pioneer a new approach to tackling complexity involving people learning how to tackle their own challenges in partnership with experts. Zaid has supported and advised many organisations over the years including the World Bank. the UN, the Climate Action Network, WWF, Oxfam, as well as several governments. He is the author of the bestselling book, The Social Labs Revolution: A new approach to solving our most complex challenges. BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

Columnist and Emerging Markets investor Narayan Ramachandran returns to BIC Talks to talk to host Pavan Srinath about the Government of India budget, from a larger perspective rarely seen in print or TV. Jyotsna Jha from the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies also shares her views on how the social sector has fared in this year’s budget.  Listen in as the speakers explore the storytelling, the inferred ideology and the details of the 2021-22 Union Budget. They examine what has changed and what has stayed the same, and how the Union Government has chosen to react to the biggest social and economic crisis India has seen in decades. Narayan Ramachandran is a columnist, emerging markets investor and polymath. Narayan writes a fortnightly column in Mint called A Visible Hand.  Jyotsna Jha is the Director of the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies, a Bangalore-based think tank focused on policy research and advocacy. Jyotsna has a PhD in Economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and her research primarily focuses on education and gender.  Here are the previous episodes with Narayan and Jyotsna on BIC Talks: #72. Girls Out of School: Pandemic Worsens the Gender Gap (with Jyotsna Jha) #5. Double Trouble: A Pandemic Meets India’s Banking Crisis (with Narayan Ramachandran) #46: The US Fed’s Great Shift: From Inflation to Employment #47: Can the Indian Economy Bounce Back? A Breather from the US Fed   BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

Ambassador Nirupama Menon Rao speaks to artists and scholars Ahmad Naser Sarmast, Neil Nongkynrih and Ravibandhu Vidyapathi about how a South Asian identity can be expressed through music. This is a follow-up to Episode 86 of BIC Talks, and an edited version a live online event hosted by the South Asian Symphony Foundation. The foundation’s co-founder Ambassador Menon Rao spoke to five artistes from across South Asia, and three of them are featured on this episode. The full event can be accessed on the SASF YouTube channel. Ahmad Naser Sarmast is an Afghan-Australian ethnomusicologist. He is the founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Neil Nongkynrih is a concert pianist and founder, mentor, and conductor of Shillong Chamber Choir. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2015. Ravibandhu Vidyapathy is a dancer, veteran choreographer and musician from Sri Lanka. An acclaimed classical Kandyan dancer, Kathakali actor-dancer, trained in Hindustani music, his work today spans through a wide range of styles such as traditional choreographies, full-length ballets of linear narrative style, contemporary dance pieces and short ballets of thematic & abstract styles.  BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.

India is yet to get over its giddy excitement with the recently completed cricket Test series that was truly one for the ages. After being written off by all experts post the Adelaide Test (where India recorded its lowest ever score of 36), India bounced back to win at Melbourne, draw at Sydney and pull off a miracle at the Gabba in Brisbane (where the last time a visiting team won was in 1988). To help us unpack what happened we have an Australian and Indian perspective from Gideon Haigh, senior cricket writer and Sharda Ugra, sports journalist. Gideon Haigh is one of the great cricket observers and writers of our times. He is an independent journalist, in the trade for nearly four decades. He was born in London, went to school in Geelong, and now lives in Melbourne. Sharda Ugra has spent more than three decades in sports journalism, working with Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day, national daily The Hindu, India Today magazine and ESPNcricinfo and ESPN India. During this time, she has written and spoken about issues around Indian sport at home and abroad in popular and academic publications. Visit BIC website for more details about the Bangalore International Centre.

Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Shruti Viswanathan unpack the enduring impact of the Indian Constitution’s Basic Structure doctrine on India’s socio-political and judicial landscape. India’s Basic Structure doctrine arose from Supreme Court’s Kesavananda Bharati judgment from 1973. It came about by a wafer-thin judgment with a margin of 7-6, and placed restrictions on the power of the Parliament to amend the Indian Constitution. In effect, this affirmed that the Constitution, not Parliament, was supreme in India. Sudhir and Shruti explore how this case came before the Supreme Court, the broad principles of the doctrine, and its evolution since 1973. The discussion will focus not just on the legal interpretation of the doctrine but also its impact on India’s political history. Professor Sudhir Krishnaswamy is the Vice-Chancellor of National Law School of India University, Bangalore. His research focus is on constitutional law and politics and the empirical analysis of the legal system. He is also a Founder and Trustee of the Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bangalore. Shruti Viswanathan is a graduate of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. She has a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School, Tufts University. Over the past ten years she has been working in law and policy; promoting effective design and delivery of social protection programmes. BIC Talks is brought to you by the Bangalore International Centre. Visit the BIC website for show notes, links and more information about the guests.