BIC TALKS

1948, Paris in winter. The UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, against the backdrop of two bloody wars. The first time nations across the world agreed, in writing, on the fundamental rights owed to every human being. Eighty years later, we have forgotten why the declaration was made in the first place. The rights enshrined in that document are no longer treated a...

She was stubborn, fearless before teachers and gods alike, and completely convinced she was right about everything. She usually was. Vasudhendra wrote these essays after losing his mother. What started as an expression of grief turned out to carry so much more: a son slowly realising that the woman he'd spent years misreading was, all along, just a person. Flawed, fierce, and holding everything to...

If he wasn't feted in his time, Ritwik Ghatak most certainly is today. Since his death in 1976, at just past fifty, Ghatak's stature has only grown. His humanist cinema, his uncompromising vision, his deep engagement with the history and culture of the land, have made him one of the most indelible figures in Indian film history. With Meghe Dhaka Tara, Subarnarekha, Komal Gandhar, Ajantrik, and Tit...

Idolised, worshipped, immortalised. A mother is asked to be everything while making it look effortless. Alas, a mother is also a daughter. In the face of her humanity, we know not what to do. Meyeder Mayera is a Bangla anthology of mothers written by their daughters. Not the idea of a mother, but the women themselves. Arundhati Ghosh joins four contributors to the book in a conversation about the...

Memory and identity. Personal and political. Mothers and daughters. Mother Mary Comes to Me is Arundhati Roy's most personal work yet. At its centre is Mary Roy, her mother: abusive, brilliant, impossible to understand, and impossible to forget. A woman who challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act before the Supreme Court and won. A woman who was, as Roy writes, both shelter and storm. I...

Geopolitical realignments. Technological disruptions. The mounting urgency of the climate crisis. As the world undergoes multiple, simultaneous transformations, India is faced with charting its own course. Rajiv Kumar, Kamal Bali, Manish Sabharwal, Nitin Pai, and Mohandas Pai bring together perspectives from policy, industry, and innovation to examine what it will take to navigate this era of unce...

The world changes, life is hard. That's not news. But are millennials uniquely misunderstood, or simply the first generation to document their own confusion so thoroughly? Deepika Arwind, author of  Good Arguments , and AM Gautam, author of  Indian Millennials , write from opposite ends of the same experience. One through fiction, the other through reportage. Both millennial. Both wrestling with p...

This session is in English and Kannada. Domestic work keeps the country running. But the women who make it possible, often after tending to their own homes first, have no contracts, no fixed hours, and no legal protection. The proposed Domestic Workers Bill in Karnataka aims to regulate the industry, bringing in protections enjoyed by employees in the formal sector. This panel examines what the Bi...

Opportunity is abundant. Outcomes, however, are strategic. The three women on this panel have navigated all of it. Venture capital and enterprise strategy. Global talent transformation. The slow, necessary work of making the technology industry legible to the women coming up behind them. Startups built from scratch and careers that kept becoming something new. They have done this inside institutio...

Good design is invisible. Bad design is something women navigate every day. In public spaces, designers have rarely looked closely enough at how women actually move through streets, neighbourhoods, and informal gathering spaces. In digital infrastructure, women's needs and safety are an afterthought, if considered at all. In healthcare, the gap is starker still. A space meant for healing leaves to...

Courage is not the beginning of self-knowledge. It is the constant condition of it. Courage to Be You  follows two people asking that question from very different lives. Amit and Najib are a gay couple navigating not only their relationship but the religious and social distance between them. Rajeshwari, Amit's childhood friend, is quietly working to reclaim an identity fractured by early trauma. T...

Two questions plagued her for five years, living between Delhi, Venice, and Istanbul: how do we lose what we lose, and why do we love whom we love? Drawing on her collection of essays  Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities  (2026), written across 25 years and 13 cities, Ananya Vajpeyi will explore what cities hold for us.  The memory and meaning held in street corners and corridors of light; the...

You've received the call. The scam artist trying to get your information. Perhaps you fell for it, perhaps you knew better. In either case, it becomes a story to tell over coffee. But who are the people on the other end of line? In her new book,  Scamlands,  journalist Snidha Poonam explores the vast fraud economies stretching from small-town India to global scam hubs.   Nuanced, detailed and abov...

What did the architects of the Republic want our symbols to represent? Acclaimed musician and public intellectual T M Krishna launches  We, the People of India: Decoding a Nation's Symbols , a rigorous exploration of the tricolour, the Preamble, the national anthem, and the symbols that define Indian democracy. In conversation with urban researcher Gautam Bhan and journalist Dhanya Rajendran, Kris...

A single family. A small village. An entire nation's story hiding inside. Tell Me A Story About Our World  brings together academic and translator Vanamala Viswanatha and novelist Kavery Nambisan for a conversation about the art of fiction and storytelling, based on Nambisan's latest novel,  Rising Sons. S et in a village in Karnataka, following one family from pre-independent India through to the...

A new dawn was breaking. And its light would reach far beyond its time. Rebellion in Verse  unfolds a journey that goes back to the sixth century CE; a time when many yearned for a reprieve from the constraints of Vedic orthodoxy and caste hierarchies. The Tamil Bhakti movement emerged as their clarion call, a grassroots surge of devotion that redefined spirituality and the social fabric itself. T...

In SheThePeople's signature style, this is a session of wit and grace. Bangalore Raani  is a vibrant celebration placing female voices precisely where they've always belonged: centerstage. Unapologetic and electric, this dialogue brings together women whose presence, choices, and courage bring Bengaluru to life. In this edition, Shaili Chopra is joined by mother and daughter, Yasmin and Kubbra Sai...

Once known as a garden city and a pensioner's paradise, Bengaluru has undergone extraordinary economic and demographic change over the past three decades. While growth has brought opportunity, it has also reshaped everyday life in ways that go far beyond traffic and waste. This second edition of  The Bengaluru Debates  turns a critical lens on our city to ask whether it still supports healthy live...

Dharma is difficult to translate, and even harder to understand. In this talk, scholar Frederick Smith draws on nearly five decades of study to illuminate how the concept of dharma moves, shifts, and comes alive across the subcontinent. By tracing regional retellings of the Mahabharata, he reveals how different communities have interpreted its moral tensions. Turning to modern literature such as U...

Overwhelmed? Disoriented? Exhausted? In this reflective session, Dr. Shyam Bhat draws on his expertise in psychiatry and integrative medicine to unpack the rising sense of disorientation shaped by hyperconnection, constant noise, and emotional overload. He explores how these forces fracture our inner clarity, and offers practical ways to rebuild a steadier sense of purpose. Drawing from both clini...

What does it take to shape a filmmaker? How do you 'make' a Jaya Bachchan or an Adoor Gopalakrishnan? Radha Chadha's new book  The Maker of Filmmakers: How Jagat Murari and FTII Changed Indian Cinema Forever  takes us through the life and legacy of her father Jagat Murari, and the iconic film school he built. With uncanny consistency, FTII produced top talent: Jaya Bachchan and Shabana Azmi, Adoor...

What is the Indian reader willing to pay for, and what do they expect for free? This panel moves past the familiar lament and into the mechanics of the business. They explore what it actually takes to run a news organisation outside the influence of advertisers, owners, and the state. Subscription models, donor funding, collaborative structures, and open access: each approach comes with its own co...

Madhav Gadgil (1942-2026) was the country's pre-eminent ecologist, whose work and writing had a profound influence in shaping environmental policy and action in India. Educated in Pune, Mumbai and Harvard, Professor Gadgil spent more than three decades at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, where he founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences. In the course of his rich and varied career P...

Narratives illuminate what often lies just out of sight. In this exciting conversation, Amitav Ghosh discusses his latest book,  Ghost-Eye , with writer Anjum Hasan, tracing the hidden histories and environmental undercurrents that shape human lives. Moving between folklore and the contemporary world, the discussion explores how landscapes remember, how ecological forces linger beneath the visible...

Just outside Madurai, beneath the scorching southern sun, the excavations at Keeladi have unsettled long-held ideas about India's ancient history. Since its discovery in 2014, the site has emerged as one of the country's most contested digs: celebrated by some as evidence of a thriving urban civilisation in South India, and questioned by others as political mythmaking. In her book  The Dig , journ...