BIC TALKS

Climate change and the Anthropocene: both terms are commonplace, but their consequences are contested as their origins continue to be studied. Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen's idea that humans came to exert a force for change in the earth's ecology from the late 18th century neatly conflated the onset of the Industrial Revolution in England with the start of the Anthropocene. Other dates have been pr...

Democracy does not begin or end at the polling booth. It takes a committed government and an alert society to make it work. Our passive belief that we are helpless is a self-imposed delusion, for there are ways in which we can engage positively with what we see happening around us. Protests and dissent, if carried out in the right manner, will nourish and strengthen our democracy which has been fr...

Anuk Arudpragasam's first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage was called an unflinching debut - a feat of extraordinary sensitivity and imagination, a meditation on the fundamental elements of human existence His writing has been variously described as 'absolutely devastating, unbearable reading, incredibly introspective and a portrait of the universe that zooms out from planet Earth and then bac...

When JBS Haldane died in 1964 in Bhubhaneswar, he was an Indian scientist. He had the passport, but he also had a deep and abiding love for the country. His move to India was the final act in the boisterous life of Haldane - a geneticist, a staunch Communist and an all-round rabble-rouser. This story of a man who wrote his first scientific paper in the trenches of the First World War; who was a ca...

Karnataka will be holding Assembly elections in the middle of 2023. This BIC series - Karnataka Votes 2023 – highlights the various elements of state politics, its culture and history that are often unique to this state, and affect the voting pattern. The first in this lecture series is a talk by long-time observer of Karnataka politics, Prof. James Manor, who will discuss the political history of...

The Heirs of Vijayanagara: Court Politics in Early Modern South India  by Lennart Bes is a comparative study investigating court politics in four kingdoms that succeeded the south Indian Vijayanagara empire during the 16th to 18th centuries: Ikkeri, Tanjavur, Madurai, and Ramnad. Building on a combination of unexplored Indian texts and Dutch archival records, this research offers a new analysis of...

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet...

Dr. Palanivel Thiaga Rajan or PTR as he is more commonly known, has had a interesting journey thus far. He comes from a family with strong political roots in Tamilnadu – his Grandfather, PT Rajan, was Chief Minister of the Madras Presidency in 1936 and his father, PTR Palanivel Rajan, was Assembly speaker and Minister in TN. PTR initially chose to go overseas and be part of the Wall Street brigade...

Ela Ramesh Bhatt, affectionately called Elaben, was one of India's most impactful daughters. She was a tireless activist for women's livelihood and rights and passed away in November 2022 at the age of 89. She matched her clarity of thought with powerful action, impacting millions of women. Founder of SEWA, she was one of the pioneers of financial inclusion for women. This conversation between Mir...

This series of lectures attempts to critique the more popular and currently accepted accounts of Vachana expression. First of all, Shivaprakash's approach problematizes the relationship between Vachanas and Lingayatism. It also seeks to demonstrate that Bhakti traditions cannot be seen independently of Natha/Siddha traditions. Though Basavanna's role in the formation of Vachana focus cannot be den...

The composition of a rich and huge body of V achanas is one of the most impressive expression of Indian spiritual heritage. Both the quantity and quality of this corpus is unparalleled elsewhere. This enormous output consists of impassioned socio-spiritual prose poems composed by approximately four hundred seeker poets hailing from all sections of society – the whole gamut, from Brahmin to the unt...

Vachana expression has till now been identified with a sect of Shaivism called Virashaivism/Lingayatism. Its historical framework is considered to be 12th century, in Kalyana, the imperial capital of the Chalukyas and later, of Kalachuryas. The main progenitor of Lingayatism, say scholars, was Basavanna, Finance Minister of emperor Bijjala. The literature also further assumes that  Basavanna set-u...

The composition of a large and rich body of vachanas is one of the most impressive expressions of Indian spiritual heritage. Both the quantity and quality of this corpus is unparalleled elsewhere. This enormous output consists of impassioned socio-spiritual prose poems composed by approximately four hundred seeker poets hailing from all sections of society – the whole gamut, from Brahmin to the un...

Neoclassical economics tells us that because both individuals are assumed rational, their regret levels ought to be identical since their economic consequences are identical. Behavioural economists, however, combine psychology with economics, and focus on how real people, with their cognitive biases, actually behave. The friend who just missed the flight does indeed experience greater disappointme...

Journalist Venkat Ananth talks to returning host Pavan Srinath on what it takes from good journalism to hold Big Tech accountable, in light of the retracted XCheck / Meta story by published by The Wire.  Tech platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and Twitter wield immense societal, economic and political power across the world today. Good tech journalism requires a deep knowledge of large mul...

The Penguin Book of Indian Poets , the definitive anthology of Indian poetry in English for the next decade and more edited by Jeet Thayil, returns the forgotten figures of Indian poetry to the centre where they belong.  Jeet compiled the work of 94 poets for this anthology, the oldest born in 1924 and the youngest in 2001. With the aim of giving readers a deeper understanding of a vast and fluid...

Through the last two millennia, Indian poets and philosophers have addressed existential questions surrounding the individuals role in society, dealing with inequity, discrimination and oppression. Their answers have ranged from a philosophical acceptance to outright call for revolution. Yet others didn't wait for a crisis to occur before calling for change, from the minor to a complete overhaul....

The recent proposal by the current government to reform agricultural markets through three controversial farm laws, the farmer protests that ensued, and the ultimate repeal of these laws has raised questions on what a desired policy on agricultural markets should be. Providing farmers access to agricultural markets in a mode that benefits both farmer and consumer has proven elusive. At one end is...

Today, Kalki R Krishnamurthy (1899-1954) is best known for his historical fiction— Sivakamiyin Sapatham, Ponniyin Selvan and Parthiban Kanavu —recreating the glorious eras of the Pallavas and the Cholas. The mighty conquests and magnificent art and culture of these two kingly dynasties are brought to bear on contemporary Tamil self-fashioning. In a comprehensive biography of the iconic writer, Sun...

With India in its seventy-fifth year of independence, conventional policy is unlikely to combat the breadth of its economic challenges. Does India need the state to be big or small? Is growth to be manufacturing-led or services driven? Will India produce for the exports market or the home market? Do the young prefer government jobs to private sector employment? Across a range of areas - human capi...

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata have exerted immense influence on the life and thought of Indians. If the Ramayana is a 'unitary' saga, the Mahabahrata is a 'federal epic'.  Its impact has remained as deep now as it was two thousand years.  Who actually composed it?  Why did the epic allow people to weave in it? This episode of BIC Talks is an extract from the second of a series of four mastercla...

Has the artificial memory already taken a complete possession of the human memory? Have Indians altogether forgotten from where they arrived here? Where does one locate the beginning of India as a civilisation? Does it originate in the Vedas? Does it go back to the Indus civilisation? Was there a civilisation before the Indian mythos emerged? What was India when the Holocene began 12000 years befo...

Indians belong either to castes or to tribes. What makes the tribal people tribal or adivasis? What have been there cultural traditions, their thought patterns and their philosophy of life? What led to some of them getting branded as 'criminal tribes'? What is the future of the culture of the Adivasis in the 21st century world? This lecture will present views of the speaker based on his experience...

The Census of India had listed 1652 'Mother Tongues' in its 1961 language report. In 1971, this number was brought down to just 108. Where did the remaining 1455 mother tongues disappear? This lecture will present the story of the epic search for those 'silence' languages and the people's movement which emerged out of the search. It will present the changing profile of India's language diversity a...

Marriages in India are a universal phenomenon that continue to be characterized by  rigid social and cultural norms. 90% of marriages in India are family-arranged. Individuals have a strong preference for caste homogamy, women tend to marry more  educated men (educational hypergamy). Dowry payments are still quite common at the  time of marriage. Given these sticky norms, how would an unexpected d...