BIC TALKS

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...

For more than a decade, from the villages of Uttar Pradesh to the night clubs of Delhi, Shrayana Bhattacharya followed the economic and personal lives of a diverse group of Indian women. Divided by class and community, these women are united in their quest for economic independence, love, fun and actor Shah Rukh Khan. The result is the dazzling book of non-fiction— Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: I...

In his book Leadership Shastra , Pradeep Chakravarthy asks the question - What if history could be made to work for us in very real ways? And he answers it in a substantial research backed manner. He studies the lives of well-known historical figures like Shivaji, Babur, Ahilyabai Holkar, Sankaradeva and many others with a view to understanding their motivations, actions and legacies. The book exa...

Former Doubles No.1, Sania Mirza became an instant sensation when she won the Wimbledon Championships girls' doubles title at the age of sixteen. From 2003 until her retirement from the singles circuit in 2012, she was ranked by the Women's Tennis Association as India's top player, both in singles and doubles. A six-time Grand Slam champion, she notched up an incredible forty-one consecutive wins...

The Scrolls & Leaves podcast is a labour of love for Mary Rose and Gayathri as they meander through little known tales from history, science and cultures and look for alternative ways of knowing and contextualising our present. Season 1 of Scrolls & Leaves titled Trade Winds came out in October 2021. It's set in the Indian Ocean world and the narrative over seven episodes weave interviews with his...

With an increasing number of urban, city dwellers finding their way back to agriculture, there's a small but definite movement towards natural, organic, alternative methods of sustainable farming. While the stress has been on constant productivity to make economic sense, we are now becoming aware of how much damage the land, food culture and native knowledge systems have experienced. As they wait...

Historically the country's annual budget exercise has been a major event and spectacle in the annual economic calendar. There was a time when the post budget analysis by people like Nani Palkiwala used to draw audiences in droves. Off late with the dropping of the railway budget, and the introduction of the GST, the annual budget is increasingly becoming just another important day in the announcem...

In this conversation with Vaibhav Vats, Dr. Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History at St. Anthony's College, University of Oxford,  provides a glimpse into the range and spectrum of his research and writing - touching on history of Indian diaspora and identity drawn from personal history, enquiring into Gandhi and decoding his continually evolving understanding of sacrifice, violence and non-vi...

Centring the narrative around a lively, erudite and thoroughly enjoyable history of one family from Malwa in Central India which held substantial land and various administrative offices in the Mughal empire and negotiated over several generations with three regimes - the Mughals, the Marathas and the British, Dr Chatterjee assembles a living, breathing world through her book, Negotiating Mughal La...

On 28 May 1940, in the early days of the Second World War, Major Akbar Khan marched at the head of 299 soldiers along a beach in northern France. They were the only Indians in the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk.  What journey had brought these men to Europe? What became of them and their comrades captured by the Germans? In this episode of BIC Talks, author and historian Ghee Bowman talks...

In recent times, with the proliferation of Over the Top Entertainment platforms and increased access to content from all over the world in various languages, If there's has been a clear and visible front runner in popularity, fandoms, fan fiction and all round good old hysteria - it's all things K! South Korean Pop music, Korean Soap Operas, Live action and animated Films, food and Culture are tak...

In mid December, 2021, Dramaturg, Writer, Director & Cultural Critic Rustom Bharucha facilitated a week-long workshop for a cohort of 12 participants on Dramaturgy at Bangalore International Centre with inputs from several artists and practitioners, including philosopher and educator, Sundar Sarukkai. We caught up with the two at the height of churning during the workshop for a tête-à-tête on what...

This episode of BIC Talks features Srikrishna Ramamoorthy in conversation with founder and chairman of Marico, Harsh Mariwala. While there's a small chance his name may not ring a bell, most of us would have encountered the iconic blue and white Parachute coconut oil bottle at some point in life - one of several FMCG brands from the Marico stable. Harsh has played a key role in converting a tradit...

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In her book Strangers Drowning , Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. In this provocative conversation writer Samanth Su...

Perhaps no other issue today is as confronting as our warming earth. What we need are thousands - millions - of everyday conversations about the climate to enlarge the ranks of the concerned, engage the disengaged and persuade the cautious of the need for action. While companies and governments are hugely responsible for the mess we're in, can individuals effect real, significant, and lasting chan...

India has been one of the biggest contributors towards global efforts at reconstructing Afghanistan. Over the last two decades, India's development partnership with Afghanistan has had four fundamental elements: a) humanitarian assistance; b) infrastructural projects; c) small and community-based development projects; and d) capacity-building programmes. (Source: Observer Research Foundation) In t...

Art historian, writer and educator Alice Procter embarks on everything that a historian in mainstream establishment shuns. She speaks about colonial loot, whiteness, historical trauma, myths of national identity besides excavating the colonial story of art in museums. Her unofficial and unauthorised Uncomfortable Art Tours initiative has been unpacking colonial narrative since 2017 across some of...