BIC TALKS

So who really spearheaded India's Freedom Struggle? Millions of ordinary people-farmers, labourers, homemakers, forest produce gatherers, artisans and others-stood up to the British. People who never went on to be ministers, governors, presidents, or hold other high public office.

They had this in common: their opposition to Empire was uncompromising.

In The Last Heroes, these footsoldiers of Indian freedom tell us their stories. The men, women and children featured in this book are Adivasis, Dalits, OBCs, Brahmins, Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. They hail from different regions, speak different languages and include atheists and believers, Leftists, Gandhians and Ambedkarites.

The people featured pose the intriguing question: What is freedom? They saw that as going beyond Independence. And almost all of them continued their fight for freedoms long after 1947.

The post-1947 generations need their stories.

To learn what they understood. That freedom and independence are not the same thing. And to learn to make those come together. This episode of BIC Talks is adapted from a conversation between P Sainath and Indu Prasad at Bangalore Literature Festival 2022.

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Since 1962 World Theatre Day has been celebrated by International Theatre Institute Centres, ITI Cooperating Members, theatre professionals, theatre organizations, theatre universities and theatre lovers all over the world on the 27th of March. This day is a celebration for those who can see the value and importance of the art form "theatre", and acts as a wake-up-call for governments, politicians and institutions which have not yet recognised its value to the people and to the individual and have not yet realised its potential for economic growth. Says the World Theatre Day website.

In this episode of BIC talks, we invited a cast of Bangalore theatre makers to speak to us about what they considered essential to their practice, to describe a toolbox, as it were, for a theatre artist highlighting what they felt necessary for mindful involvement in theatre.

A second prompt was to pick a piece of text that has had an influence on their work.

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With the coming of age of independent cinema and stories portraying lives across the spectrum in India, the focus has shifted from the protagonist to the writers and makers.

In this episode of BIC Talks, filmmaker Alankrita Srivastava speaks to radio presenter and film critic Stutee Ghosh about the business of filmaking while being a woman. This session was originally part of the Bangalore Literature Festival 2022.

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The reading down of Section 377 by the Supreme Court in 2018 has led to a fundamental shift in the rights of India's LGBTQ citizens and necessitated policy changes across the board—not least in the conservative world of Indian business.

In his path-breaking and genre-defying book, Parmesh Shahani—Vice President at Godrej Industries Ltd—draws from his decade-long journey in the corporate world as an out and proud gay man, to make a cogent case for LGBTQ inclusion and lay down a step-by-step guide to reshaping office culture in India. He talks to inclusion champions and business leaders about how they worked towards change; traces the benefits reaped by industry giants like Godrej, Tata Steel, IBM, Wipro, the Lalit group of hotels and many others who have tapped into the power of diversity; and shares the stories of employees whose lives were revolutionised by LGBTQ-friendly workspaces.

In this episode of BIC Talks Parmesh is in conversation with journalist Shrabonti Bagchi. This session was originally part of Bangalore Literature Festival 2022.

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Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting and United Artists foundations.

Gander has most recently published Twice Alive: An Ecology of Intimacies (with an essay by N. Manu Chakravarthy).

Gander, who taught at Harvard and Brown University, translates books by poets from Spain, Latin America, and Japan. Pulitzer winning poet Forrest Gander reads from his collection, Twice Alive: An Ecology of Intimacies, followed by the screening of a film on poetry and interaction with the audience.

This episode of BIC Talks is an adaptation of a live event that took place in February 2022.

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Until recently, classical music around the world has loved to project itself as being beyond the grasp of the masses. Carnatic music has been no exception to this self-created aura of inscrutability. Mangala Karthik, a Carnatic musician and teacher and co-founder of Anandi Centre of Music believes it is the duty of every teacher and learner to cut through the jargon and spread the joy of this magnificent art form. Her training under legends in the field and a constant connect with young minds at Anandi make her ideally placed to offer a session on the basics of appreciating Carnatic music at multiple levels.

Accompanying Mangala in this episode of BIC Talks is a small cohort of talented young singers from Anandi. This session is adapted from a live venue event that took place in May 2022.

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Samanth Subramanian is a senior writer for Quartz, covering the future of capitalism, and a contributing writer for the Guardian Long Read. He is also the author of three books: "Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast," "This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War," and his latest, "A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane."

His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, WIRED, Granta, Harper's, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, 1843-Intelligent Life, Aeon, Mint, Travel + Leisure, and Caravan. For years, he also co-hosted The Intersection, a fortnightly science and culture podcast from Audiomatic.

In this episode of BIC Talks, Samanth responds to a wide variety of questions on his work, process, books and experiences in an open forum that was a part of the Bangalore Literature Festival 2021.

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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 combine the two, concerned about urban scale while also concerned about three-dimensional form and aesthetic/cultural experience.

Urban Design works within the frame of Urban Planning, defining the quality, history and specificity of neighbourhoods. The three disciplines of Urban Planning, Urban Design and Architecture are meant to work in tandem, each affecting and informing the other, to lay down an ethical, social and cultural ideal of urban life.

Urban Design is a discipline unrecognised and unimplemented in India, where officialdom views the city through a two-dimensional lens that imagines it as a techno-economic entity rather than a cultural or ecological entity.

This episode of BIC Talks will reflect on what good urban design should be and examine key questions in this respect. What are the constituents of good urban form? What have we lost in our cities because of this shortcoming? Given that the discipline's protocols derive from the Western city, how should we view Urban Design in India so that we do not destroy the vibrance of informal urbanism? What steps should we take toward mainstreaming Urban Design in the Indian city?

The panel consists of architects Brinda Somaya, Rahul Mehrotra, Neelkanth Chhaya and Prem Chandavarkar. This episode is adapted from a virtual discussion that took place in January 2022.

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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 resisting it. Looking beyond the stereotypes in which princely rulers have been trapped, he will investigate their experiments with transforming kingly identities, balancing relationships as much with the British as with their subjects, in constructing political visions for their states–sometimes of great ambition–and their ultimate disappearance from India's political map, even if not public imagination. This lecture is an extract from the 3rd Prof Satish Chandra Memorial lecture that took place in October 2021. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.

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 criminal and military investigations.

Particularly high-profile investigations have included, for example, the Mumbai Adarsh Housing scam and the many misdeeds in the run-up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, both of which contributed significantly to the anti-corruption movement of recent times.

The Prem Bhatia Trust elected him India's best political reporter of 2010 "for his scoops and revelations, which include a list of scams that have become familiar names in the political lexicon." He shared the award with Jyotirmoy Dey, a Mumbai crime reporter who had been shot dead a few weeks earlier.

In July 2013, the Ramnath Goenka Foundation run by the Indian Express newspaper group awarded him the "Journalist of the Year" in print media.

In this episode of BIC Talks, Josy addresses a wide range of questions in a public forum that was a part of the Bangalore Literature Festival 2021.

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