BIC TALKS

The ongoing crises in Ukraine and Gaza highlight the pressing need for a revamped international approach that recognizes the increasing autonomy of middle and smaller powers globally. This necessitates a rejection of attempts to revive a failed unilateral U.S. dominance or force diverse conflicts into an outdated "great power competition" model akin to the Cold War. In both Ukraine and the Middle East, the United States has faced challenges in imposing its will, both militarily and diplomatically. Smaller nations have successfully resisted American-backed military efforts, and a substantial part of the global community diverges from endorsing U.S. diplomatic perspectives on international norms. Importantly, this opposition does not align with the Cold War paradigm, lacking the support of a superpower peer competitor. The emerging world order is characterized by "regionalization," where middle and small powers worldwide feel empowered to bypass or defy U.S. interpretations of global norms based on localized interests and regional security considerations. The roots of this situation trace back to the U.S. pursuit of unilateral power during the War on Terror, diminishing the legitimacy of the post–World War Two international order. This has led the international community to seek alternatives to a system perceived as granting unchecked power to the United States. The U.S. foreign policy establishment must grapple with this newly deglobalized and regionalized world order, as failure to do so poses a significant threat to U.S. power and influence. Relationships with key emerging powers like India and traditional U.S. allies in Europe and Asia are susceptible to the de–globalizing and regionalizing forces observed in Ukraine and the Middle East. In this episode of BIC Talks, renowned scholar, Dr. Faisal Devji makes sense of the enduring bewilderment that global history was and continues to be, offering a vantage point that is objective in understanding the enigmatic creature that is globalisation. This episode is an extract from an in-person session that took place in December 2023 at the BIC premises, as part of Alliance’s Public Lecture Series. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.    

Contemporary India is witness to a huge change in which, space for serious conversations on all aspects of culture, is receding. The advocacy of religious-cultural nationalism has come to replace all forms of culture. It has also come to take many forms. For instance, the murder of rationalists – Kalburgi, Pansare, and Gauri Lankesh – underlines the contested nature of secularism, and the fragile space for freedom of thought in religion, media and culture in India. There has been a determined attempt to rewrite the cultural history of India, a project that has fed into the writing of school textbooks. The rise of online archival projects offering alternative accounts of Indian history, the popular cultures of televised Hinduism, curbs on art and cinema, the huge nexus of religion and market, rise of hate speech are signals to a certain kind of revivalism. Writings that celebrate plurality and tolerance are being decried, systematically countered and a monolithic agenda of culture is gradually being established. In the absence of a real space for cultural conversations, politics dominates all kinds of discourses. In this episode of BIC Talks Aruna Roy, Activist & Former Civil Servant, sheds light on these receding spaces. This lecture took place at the BIC premises in early January 2024 as the U R Ananthamurthy Memorial Lecture. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.

That the 20th century shapes our present and will influence our future is common point of debate in India. Clearly, politics and economics, culture and society clearly were deeply influenced, if not fundamentally shaped, by choices made at key points of time. Yet this applies equally, so with even greater long-term consequences, to the environment in its widest sense. In a more focussed way, this is how human actions, via technological choices or the ways land or water are governed, influence the non-human entities we share spaces with. Rather than view ecology and society as two distinct entities, the overlaps and interfaces can shed fresh light on where we stand today. knowing how we got to where we stand matters. India’s recent environmental pasts have bearing not only on this country, but Asia and the world at large. In this episode of BIC Talks,  Professor of History and Environmental Studies, Ashoka University Prof. Mahesh Rangarajan delivers the first annual Vijay Thrivuvady memorial lecture that took place at the big premises in early January 2024. Vijay Thiruvady was a naturalist, environmental historian and a true blue Bangalore who will be terribly missed by all who knew him and all who have walked Lal Bagh with him. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.

Kumaravyasa’s Bharata is a crown jewel of Kannada literature, beloved by scholars and common people alike. In this 15th-century classic, Kumaravyasa reimagines Vyasa’s epic, making it more compact, dramatic, closer to everyday life and language. He dispenses with most didactic material, cuts out subsidiary tales, and concludes with the end of the war. Here, Krishna, who is cool, clever, charming, and charismatic, is the central character, but many others, such as Draupadi, Karna, and Duryodhana leave an indelible mark. He narrates the story through fast-moving, deftly crafted situations, where characters confront grand conflicts and articulate subtle and complex emotions in brilliant metaphorical language. In this series of masterclasses, Professors SN Sridhar and Krishnamurthy Hanuru will introduce the audience to several aspects of Kumaravyasa’s poetic genius, illustrating them with the modern English translations the first volume of which has just been published as The Kannada Mahabharata by Harvard University Press in the Murty Classical Library of India series. The first episode places the poet in relation to his life and times, discusses his unique poetic manifesto, outlines the work, and highlights his originality in the way he creatively transforms Vyasa’s prototype of the Mahabharata and Pampa’s version. In this episode of BIC Talks Professors Sridhar and Hanuru illustrate Kumaravyasa’s genius and versatility while analysing what accounts for the enduring popularity of his work for over half a millennium. This is an excerpt from an in-person masterclass series that took place in January 2024. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.

Kumaravyasa’s Bharata is a crown jewel of Kannada literature, beloved by scholars and common people alike. In this 15th-century classic, Kumaravyasa reimagines Vyasa’s epic, making it more compact, dramatic, closer to everyday life and language. He dispenses with most didactic material, cuts out subsidiary tales, and concludes with the end of the war. Here, Krishna, who is cool, clever, charming, and charismatic, is the central character, but many others, such as Draupadi, Karna, and Duryodhana leave an indelible mark. He narrates the story through fast-moving, deftly crafted situations, where characters confront grand conflicts and articulate subtle and complex emotions in brilliant metaphorical language. In this series of masterclasses, Professors SN Sridhar and Krishnamurthy Hanuru will introduce the audience to several aspects of Kumaravyasa’s poetic genius, illustrating them with the modern English translations the first volume of which has just been published as The Kannada Mahabharata by Harvard University Press in the Murty Classical Library of India series. The second session discusses some of the themes, characters and episodes in Kumaravyasa’s Bharata, such as the sexual harassment of Draupadi, the diplomacy of Krishna, the manipulative, determined Duryodhana, the tragedies of Abhimanyu and Karna, the killing of Shishupala, the tragic death of Pandu, and Arjuna’s confrontations with Shiva and Urvashi. In this episode of BIC Talks Professors Sridhar and Hanuru explore the contemporaneity and universality of Kumaravyasa’s ideas about class, caste, war, power, human relations, patriarchy, women’s status, and so forth. This is an excerpt from an in-person masterclass series that took place in January 2024. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.

Kumaravyasa’s Bharata is a crown jewel of Kannada literature, beloved by scholars and common people alike. In this 15th-century classic, Kumaravyasa reimagines Vyasa’s epic, making it more compact, dramatic, closer to everyday life and language. He dispenses with most didactic material, cuts out subsidiary tales, and concludes with the end of the war. Here, Krishna, who is cool, clever, charming, and charismatic, is the central character, but many others, such as Draupadi, Karna, and Duryodhana leave an indelible mark. He narrates the story through fast-moving, deftly crafted situations, where characters confront grand conflicts and articulate subtle and complex emotions in brilliant metaphorical language. In this series of masterclasses, Professors SN Sridhar and Krishnamurthy Hanuru will introduce the audience to several aspects of Kumaravyasa’s poetic genius, illustrating them with the modern English translations the first volume of which has just been published as The Kannada Mahabharata by Harvard University Press in the Murty Classical Library of India series. The first episode places the poet in relation to his life and times, discusses his unique poetic manifesto, outlines the work, and highlights his originality in the way he creatively transforms Vyasa’s prototype of the Mahabharata and Pampa’s version. In this episode of BIC Talks Professors Sridhar and Hanuru illustrate Kumaravyasa’s genius and versatility while analysing what accounts for the enduring popularity of his work for over half a millennium. This is an excerpt from an in-person masterclass series that took place in January 2024. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.

How do people, who are often at the receiving end of legal violence, engage with the law? Amidst the grinding terror trials – which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges – this presentation will discuss how the terror-accused schooled themselves in legal language and came to understand how paperwork’s certificatory procedures produce legal truth. Though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: legal language becomes a question of a form of life. The file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, and the petition is a way of imagining a future. In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work – through legal language and through files – we are offered a way of understanding how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law. In this episode of BIC Talks, author and senior lecturer in law at SOAS, University of London, Mayur Suresh talks about his research in the area, followed by a conversation with research manager at Daksh, Leah Verghese. This episode is an extract from an in-person event that took place at the BIC premises in mid-December 2023. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.  

Pranay Kotasthane, Co-author of "Missing in Action," and Devashish Dhar, Author of "India’s Blind Spot," come together for a unique duet in the realm of policy. Drawing inspiration from the classical music approach of jugalbandi that allows artists to showcase their mastery of instruments, Pranay and Devashish leverage their experiences at Takshashila Institution and NITI Aayog, respectively, to weave a harmonious narrative on public policymaking. Having both spent time at the Takshashila Institution, they bring a rich understanding of the intricate world of policy. As they collaborate and build upon each other's work, this policy jugalbandi aims to unravel the complexities of policymaking for our audience. In this episode of BIC Talks, our speakers, Pranay Kotasthane and Devashish Dhar, delve into the core of public policy, offering fresh insights and perspectives. Pranay, with his co-authorship on "Missing in Action," challenges the prevalent perceptions about the Indian State, urging us to reflect on its workings. Meanwhile, Devashish, the author of "India’s Blind Spot," sheds light on the challenges and opportunities that define India's experiment with urbanization, emphasizing how cities have become the country's blind spot. In this exploration of policy, our participants dissect fundamental concepts and propose innovative solutions to the complex issues. This episode was adapted from a live event at the BIC premises. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.  

Gandhiji gave expression to his dreams for Swaraj or Independent India on many occasions in many ways. “The Swaraj of my…our…dream recognizes no race or religious destinations. Nor is it to be the monopoly of the lettered persons nor yet of moneyed men. Swaraj is to be for all, including the farmer, but emphatically including the maimed, the blind, the starving toiling millions.” Young India, 26-3-1931 “It has been said that Indian Swaraj will be the rule of the majority community, i. e. the Hindus. There could not be a greater mistake than that. If it were to be true, I for one would refuse to call it Swaraj and would fight it with all the strength at my command, for to me Hind Swaraj is the rule of all people, is the rule of justice.” Young India, 16-4-1931 This talk by Prof. Mridula Mukherjee explores the multiple facts of the Mahatma’s vision for India, especially his ideas and practice on religion and secularism, democracy and dissent, violence and non-violence. It will also pose the question: to what extent have we been faithful to Gandhiji’s dreams? Where have we failed him? Does the India of his dreams remain an ideal for Indians today? This episode of BIC Talks is an excerpt from an in-person event that took place in October 2023 as the Prof. Satish Chandra Memorial Lecture. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.

This episode of BIC Talks is an excerpt from a live discussion at the BIC premises presented by DAKSH in late October 2023. The panelists in this discussion were Justice Suraj Govindraj, Judge, Karnataka High Court; Sarayu Natarajan, Founder, Aapti Institute; Prof. Nomesh Boliya, Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Delhi and moderated by Surya Prakash BS, Programme Director at DAKSH. The panel discusses Daksh’s newest publication - Technology and Analytics for Law and Justice - a unique volume that examines the evolution of technology in the law and justice system in India. It delves into the challenges and opportunities presented by technology, current thinking on the subject, and what the future may hold for this rapidly developing field. From tracing the historical journey of law and technology in India to the rise of ‘justice makers,’ the impact of cutting-edge forensic technology, the world of smart contracts, and the realm of surveillance, this book offers a comprehensive and thought-provoking look at the ever -changing landscape of law and technology. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast, Audible and Amazon Music.