In episode 1 of this three-part series, we left off in 1947. After the horrors of Partition, political leaders across the spectrum were battling disenchantment among their followers. The RSS was no exception, but its work during Partition stood it in good stead. 

Then came the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and the goodwill generated by the RSS came crumbling down.

How did the RSS pick itself up and what were its primary motivations at the time? What is the truth behind the conflicting narratives on Godse’s ties to the Sangh? And what changed between the Golwalkar years and the Deoras years that followed?

To listen to the full episode, subscribe to Newslaundry. If you’re not a subscriber, use the discount code LTA20 and get 20 percent off our annual plans (and score some free merchandise too)! This coupon code is only valid if you buy the subscription on our website.

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The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fount of Hindutva, is arguably the most powerful and influential organisation in India. It's three years from turning 100 and its influence permeates all spheres, from politics to society.

But how did this behemoth come to be, and where is it likely to go?

Welcome to episode 1 of Let’s Talk About: RSS, hosted by Abhinandan Sekhri and Shardool Katyayan. 

In this episode, guests Rajshekhar and Indraneel join Shardool in talking about their personal journeys growing up in the Sangh – the camps they attended, the training over the years, and how their opinions have evolved over the years.

“I grew up inside a system where, from waking up till the end of the day, almost every single decision was centred around the daily activities of the shakha,” says Shardool. 

Rajshekhar says his realisation of the world outside led to his eventual disconnect with the RSS. Indraneel says, “The biggest shock was upon reading Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. It was then I realised that you don’t have to worship the identity you come from."

Parallelly, this episode also explores the birth of the RSS in British India and the life of Keshav Hedgewar, the man who was the seed to what would eventually be the RSS’s tree. Featuring guest panellists like Hartosh Singh Bal, Hitesh Shankar, and Walter K Andersen, the episode pieces together the early days of the RSS, including the many challenges it faced in newly independent India.

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The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fount of Hindutva, is arguably the most powerful and influential organisation in India. It's three years from turning 100 and its influence permeates all spheres, from politics to society.

But how did this behemoth come to be, and where is it likely to go?

Welcome to episode 1 of Let’s Talk About: RSS, hosted by Abhinandan Sekhri and Shardool Katyayan. In this episode, Shardool and guests talk about their personal journeys growing up in the Sangh. Parallelly, this episode also explores the birth of the RSS in British India and the life of Keshav Hedgewar, the man who was the seed to what would eventually be the RSS’s tree. Featuring guest panellists like Hartosh Singh Bal, Hitesh Shankar, and Walter K Andersen, the episode pieces together the early days of the RSS, including the many challenges it faced in newly independent India.

Listen.

To listen to the full episode, subscribe to Newslaundry. If you’re not a subscriber, use the discount code LTA20 and get 20 percent off our annual plans (and score some free merchandise too)! This coupon code is only valid if you buy the subscription on our website.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Check out Part 1 of the conversation here.

In part two of this special edition of Let’s Talk About, the Newslaundry team of Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan, Shardool Katyayan, and Mehraj D Lone continue their conversation on religion, this time focusing on the intersection of religion and politics.

Abhinandan asks the panel whether it thinks mixing religion and politics is inevitable or desirable. He says politics has merely “replaced” religion while still keeping aspects of it intact. Manisha thinks religion is an important part of people’s lives and, therefore, “politics is always going to be a feature of it”.

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In this special edition of Let’s Talk About, the Newslaundry crew of Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan, Shardool Katyayan, and Mehraj D Lone sit down for a freewheeling discussion about religion, its place and significance in our world.

Primarily, the theme is whether religion has done more good or more harm. 

Abhinandan and Mehraj both argue that religion has done more good than harm while the rest of the panel express mixed views.

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Feminism as a social, political and historical phenomenon has assumed many shapes and forms through the ages. But what does feminism mean in the Indian context? Can we chart out a linear history of the movement in India? 

India’s movement has its own complexities, varying in definition and scope across class, caste, and creed. Gender dynamics and power imbalances have been instrumental in the oppression of women, and suppression and punishment is a tool to curb “transgressions” and maintain the status quo. Women have not only challenged this forced subservience but have, in many instances, overturned these systems too.

So, the goal of this podcast is not to define feminism, but to examine India’s social structures and the feminist resistance to them at specific moments in history.

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When a standard or classification is built on an idea of “normal”, then the decision-making system will fail those outside that idea. It will fail the extraordinary. It’s similar to what happened in the case of athlete Dutee Chand, who went on to win a landmark case that declared void the sporting standard of testosterone levels. 

After all, nature is not neat. And it’s the outliers that push the species forward – something that automated decision-making systems, including algorithms, don’t really understand. In Dutee's case, understanding the decision making, and the transparency in it, was crucial to her right to redress.

In the final episode of Let’s Talk About Big Data, we talk to Laura Reig, a PhD student at Denmark Technical University, on how AI makes mistakes in gender classification, and Chirag Agarwal, a research fellow at Harvard University, about what explainability in AI means. We also talk to Joy Lu, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, on what makes for a good explanation of what an algorithm is doing.

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Being perfectly rational is not an evolutionarily viable form of reasoning. It’s slow and requires a lot of information that may not always be available.

What helps is reasoning through bias: a cognitive shortcut that is quick, doesn’t require perfect information, gets the job done, and reduces the kind of errors that have existential consequences.

Algorithms have biases too. But over time, biases have started reinforcing themselves, further disenfranchising the disenfranchised. So, what do we do about it?

We talk to Osoba Osonde, a senior information scientist, co-director of the Center for Scalable Computing and Analysis, and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, to discuss how we can make algorithms fairer. We also talk to Benjamin Boudreaux, a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, about what it means to make algorithms fairer.

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The right to privacy is our right to identity. And as human experience has evolved over time, privacy has changed with it.

In this episode, we discuss with Arvind Narrain, cofounder of the Alternative Law Forum, how our understanding of privacy has evolved over time. We talk to Rega Jha about how the internet subverts our privacy without even intending to. We also speak to Rishabh Poddar, who is building a privacy-preserving technology at the University of California, Berkeley.

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The genius of the metaphor is that it helps us understand complex models we can’t articulate. When the Hindu supremacists say “Bharat Mata”, for example, they are presenting a well understood cognitive model that explains nourishment and loyalty and using it to explain nationalism. When they say “Gau Mata”, the idea of nourishment and our loyalty to it is brought to the cow.

In many ways the metaphor epitomises the kind of intelligence computers struggle with. Reasoning by metaphor is a form of reasoning that’s flexible and nimble, unfixed and still resilient. It uses ideas from outside systems to explain systems, maps a cognitive model from a familiar context to another. We, human beings, can do this because a number of things came together for us: we have very sophisticated abilities to speak, we recognise patterns, we understand the unspoken, we can imagine what isn’t in front of us, we have a pool of shared human experience (another metaphor!), we can see concepts and we can see relationships between concepts.

So, what does human intelligence do that machine intelligence can’t? What can they both not do? 

In this episode, we explore the limits of artificial intelligence. We speak to Shubham Bindlish who runs an AI firm that scrapes cricket data to help make predictions for fantasy cricket. We also speak to Joseph Paul Cohen who has built AI that can diagnose diseases from chest x-rays. They shed light on how both their AI infers data and the limitations that come with it.

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