BIC TALKS

Listen to the young changemakers who have weathered incredible adversities and pioneered programs that are changing the world. Bringing awareness to the plight of disadvantaged children and youth was important to Rishi, a young teenager who was passionate about the happiness of the world. His sudden departure at the age of 17 years brought people together, bonded with grief and love, and the fire...

The project of Indian art cinema began in the years following independence in 1947, at once evoking the global reach of the term "art film" and speaking to the aspirations of the new nation-state. This episode is a conversation between an author and a historian who are both invested in the histories of cinema and the city, Kolkata in particular. Using ideas in the book Art Cinema and India's Forgo...

India and Bangladesh achieved a historic victory in the 1971 war. Yet fifty years later, important questions remain about India's aims and policy in the war. Did India have a prior plan to break up Pakistan? When and why did it involve itself with the Bangladesh freedom struggle? When did India decide to prepare for military action? Why was no other country prepared to support the cause of an inde...

All of Mumbai's memories and castaway possessions come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. And among these vast, teetering piles of discarded things – medical waste, rotten food, old clothes, broken glass and twisted metal – a small, forgotten community lives and works. Scouring the dump for whatever can be resold or recycled, waste pickers also mark the familiar milestones of babies born, lov...

In the 1990s, Girish's work and his public persona took a distinctly political turn as he began to respond overtly to what was happening around him. Here, Girish talks about how he created strong women characters in his plays, how he saw Islam and Muslims as an integral part of our nation's fabric, how he became a secular humanist.  He also talks for the first time about two short stories that he...

Does god exist? What is the source of morality? Girish's plays often take on big moral and philosophical questions, questions that he asked himself about how to live in the world and how to be a good human being. Here Girish talks about what he learnt from the Mahabharata and explores what he took from European Existentialism. About the Series: In June 2019, a few days before his death, Girish Kar...

What was Girish's impact on the national theatre scene? Did his plays influence or inspire other playwrights and theatre makers? In Part 2 of this episode, Shanta Gokhale and Sunil Shanbag talk about how the 60s and 70s were such a critical moment for theatre in different parts of India. They talk about the unique sensibilities that Girish brought to the stage and how Girish set himself apart from...

What was Girish's impact on the national theatre scene? Did his plays influence or inspire other playwrights and theatre makers? Part 1 of this 2-part episode features Shanta Gokhale and Sunil Shanbag remembering the exhilaration of watching Hayavadana for the first time. They talk more about Girish's major collaborators and what that meant as a newly independent nation developed its own norms of...

Girish talks more about his dramatic and literary influences which range from classical Sanskrit plays like Mricchakatika to such avant garde practitioners as Jerzy Grotowski. About the Series: In June 2019, a few days before his death, Girish Karnad and Arshia Sattar had extensive conversations about his work, his life, and the concerns that had occupied him over almost sixty years as a writer an...

Girish was a Kannada playwright, but his knowledge of theatre came from all over the world and from many languages. We explore his relationship with English and other languages and literatures. Girish talks about his plays that he believes do not work, what he learned from them, and how he responded to their failure. About the Series: In June 2019, a few days before his death, Girish Karnad and Ar...

The conversation with Vivek Shanbhag continues, touching upon the literary groups and movements that animated Kannada literature in the 1950s and 1960s. Girish talks about some of the people and institutions that shaped him as a writer, the many Jnanpith awardees in Kannada, and who he considered to be his rivals, while we hear Vivek talk about the importance of Girish's work. About the Series: In...

Girish had a long friendship with the Kannada writer, Vivek Shanbhag, our special guest for this episode. Vivek prods Girish to talk about his challenges with writing contemporary plays. They also talk about his complex relationship with Kannada and finding the right language for what a writer wants to say. Besides readings from Wedding Album and Tughlaq, we also get to listen to short scene from ...

In June 2019, a few days before his death, Girish Karnad and Arshia Sattar had extensive conversations about his work, his life, and the concerns that had occupied him over almost sixty years as a writer and a public intellectual. This podcast is a distillation of those freewheeling conversations, a short intellectual biography to celebrate the life and work of one of India's finest playwrights an...

Are you sitting down? Have you thought of what you are sitting on? What your favourite chair's history is? Why do certain seats make us feels a certain way and make us gravitate towards them in a room? A whole spectrum of history, design, culture, discipline, identities, object study and geographical context are often located in the various kinds of seating that we now may not necessarily be aware...

War Minus the Shooting, talks about the 1996 Cricket World Cup and was published in 1998. Combining personal reflection and social observation, this work paints a complex portrait of a sub-continent in ferment, set against the backdrop of the 1996 cricket World Cup, the most extravagant and controversial event in the long history of the game. The book delves into the dilemmas that dog modern crick...

Vivaan Marwaha talks about his learning in the process of writing his book, What Millennials Want , in a conversation with writer, poet and executive director of India Foundation for the Arts, Arundhati Ghosh. India is one of the youngest countries in the world and the generation of millennials make up for over 400 million people. This is the largest generation of people in the world. That means t...

Author & Founder of Ahimsa Conversations Rajni Bakshi engages Author, Poet & Entrepreneur Jaithirth Rao in a conversation based on his book Economist Gandhi – the first book on Gandhi to claim that he was not against business and capitalists; providing insights into a hidden facet of Gandhi's personality—his thoughts on economics and capitalism while throwing light on some of Gandhi's views on rel...

What is data? And why is it important that citizen have a right to privacy over their data? As it turns out, We are data.  Digital rights activist, journalist and founder of Medianama, Nikhil Pahwa in this conversation with financial journalist Mitali Mukherjee gives us a 101 on the concept of Data Privacy. Can one look at data from the perspective of it being a right and how is it  connected to t...

South Africa has imposed transformation targets (quotas) in sports for over a decade. These aim to correct the under-representation of people of colour due to historical discriminatory segregation during the apartheid era. In light of the Black Lives Matter movemnet, several South African cricketers came forward with their stories of having suffered due to the institutionally racist nature of the...

At Tokyo 2020, the Indian women's hockey team made history by reaching their maiden Olympic semifinals. There was heart break in the semi finals. However, irrespective of the result, these players had won the hearts of millions of followers in the country. The back stories of these gritty women make for compelling theatre – who they are, where they come from, how hockey has changed them – and, per...

Examining the challenges posed by the present-day global order—-including political instability, the rise of authoritarianism, the epidemic of fake news and subversion of democracy through the weaponization of social media, the backlash against the rights of caste, ethnic, or racial minorities, and climate change—the dialogue in this episode between Author & Associate Professor of Communication, S...

How do you see India? Fuelled by a surge of migration to cities, the country's growth appears to be defined by urbanisation and by its growing, prosperous middle class. It is also defined by progressive and liberal young Indians, who vote beyond the constraints of identity, and paradoxically, by an unchecked population explosion and rising crimes against women. Is it, though? In this conversation...