BIC TALKS

Urban Design is a discipline that forms a bridge between architecture and urban planning. Architecture examines three-dimensional form, culture, aesthetics and experience, but does not examine the urban scale, focusing primarily on individual land parcels. Urban Planning examines wider questions of the city, but tends to cast a two-dimensional gaze of policy abstractions. Urban Design seeks to com...

India's colonial experience was a complex phenomenon, which often took different shapes in different places, through layers of caste, religious identity, and much else. In this episode of BIC Talks, Manu S Pillai will explore how India's princely states and their rulers negotiated their political identities and ideas of kingship, both while facing pressures from the British Raj, as well as while r...

osy Joseph is an award winning journalist based in New Delhi and was the National Security Editor of The Hindu newspaper until 2018. Josy's stories have fostered greater public debate and have contributed to significant policy and systemic changes. His reporting has resulted in several high-profile officials being forced out of office, triggering the arrest of many others as well as federal crimin...

This talk by lawyer Gautam Bhatia considers the Indian Constitution as a terrain of contestation between different visions of power. It will ask how the Constitution creates power, who wields power – and upon whom – and how power is constrained. Using the example of federalism, it argues that even as the Constitution is contested terrain, its history has been marked by a centralising drift: an inc...

Over the last decade the world has seen the politicisation of interstate relations, a rekindling of great power rivalries, pushback against globalisation, and an increasingly ineffective global order in terms of dealing with major challenges such as pandemics, economic slowdowns, and wars. The world seems adrift, between orders, and faces a real prospect of economic recession and a debt crisis in...

From being the preserve of a handful of American and British authors in the late-20th century, science fiction (SF) today is a global phenomenon. From Afrofuturism to the popular Chinese Science Fiction of Cixxin Liu, Hao Jingfeng and others, writers, editors, and readers around the world are turning to the genre to make sense of our world and our futures. The global character of contemporary SF i...

India, the world's largest democracy, the land of yoga, spirituality and a rich civilizational past, has one of the youngest demographics and is without a doubt an exciting place to be in the twenty-first century. Our nation, at the same time, struggles with the rising gap between the rich and the poor, ignorance, social unrest and strained communal harmony. One is always overwhelmed and bewildere...

Rebels Against the Raj  tells the little-known story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who, from the late nineteenth century, arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence. Of the seven, four were British, two American and one Irish: four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported, they did remarkable and...

Our diverse culture has something for everyone. Our young population is thirsty for education and achievement. And a strong private sector is our engine of growth. We can lead the world in the future yet, we struggle to create a business-friendly environment. We lag in innovation. Education, public health and quality of jobs demand attention. Our governments control some things too much and neglec...

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...