SynTalk

Are you a romantic genius? Are artists incapable of understanding their own creations? Where does inspiration come from? Is Nature divine? Can art divide? When/why does a creation become property? Are you the owner of your own Self? When does one have the right to copy? Do you copy yourself? Did print technology create the individuated author? Do you know what an author is? Which language do you create in? Is listening/reading re-creating? Does repetition create difference? What is the difference between art and commodity? Is the process of creation a dance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Did ancient Greeks have a creator God? Does music need to be human? Could technology cause autoamputation of human organs? Is the relationship between the original and the copy always hierarchical? Is originality a necessary myth? Were you born with a purpose? Are books made up of other books? How do you whip yourself into a frenzy? Do you sense life in rocks? Could AI diminish, homogenize, and dominate us? Can the inanimate (dolls, puppets) help us think about machines (& ourselves)? &, will/should there be artificially intelligent non-human creative geniuses in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Dr. Arun Iyer, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), law (Prof. Lawrence Liang, Ambedkar University, New Delhi) & music (Rabbi Shergill, Delhi NCR). Listen in...

Are you expected to reproduce? Where is hell? Should patriarchy be ‘smashed’? Are brains masculine or feminine? Are biological and social factors deeply enmeshed, & is the body also socialized? Is Nature mutable? Is sex different from gender? What does this distinction have to do with the colonial encounter? Is the personal realm both public and private? Can there be non-binaries without binaries? What can we be besides what we are? Can gender be merely agentive? Isn’t everything outside of cisgender ‘incorrect’? Is even biological sex only chromosomal? Are early (~6-8 weeks old) gonads bipotential? Do all (wo)men behave and feel the same way? What is innate; is innateness (if?) fixed? Has history progressed linearly from less- to more-? Does science look for truth or facts? How do homosexual penguins reproduce? Can attempts to bring order to polyphonic chaos often lead to unintended outcomes? Where does sexual desire come from? Are several domains (legal, medical, …) rightly binary? Are you prone to cardiac arrest? Are all human diseases sex-neutral? What does XX and XY chromosomes folding differently cause? &, is everything entangled? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from developmental biology & genetics (Dr. Deepak Modi, ICMR-NIRRCH), gender studies & anthropology (Dr. Svati Shah, UMass, Amherst) & film-making (Paromita Vohra, Mumbai). Listen in...

Do you respect the bones of your forefathers? Are your hands free? Were the hunter gatherers happier? Are nomads now likely to be criminals? Are you a willful nomad? Why don’t we live on trees anymore? How did ‘I-ness’ emerge? What is ‘I’? Is our thinking capacity more unconstrained than our bodily capacities? Does the Mind have an upper hand over the Body? Is the Self always embodied? Or, can there be a Self without an ‘I’ or a body? Are biology and culture mutually dependent on each other? Did wealth accumulation come only with settled ‘storage’ economy? & with it rigid hierarchies, newer diseases/food, spatial organization, property, & norms? Is only the present real? Is Self endlessly layered? Can there be a core Self? Do freedom and constraint go hand in hand? Have you experienced absolute freedom? Is being mobile fundamental to being human? Are you free to travel anywhere (but only in a manner that is permissible)? Will cultural selection over-determine evolution going forward? Might we become racially uniform in the future? Would that also imply uniformity in identity/thinking/action? &, what would happen to people who no one wants? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from literary studies (Dr. Avishek Ray, NIT Silchar, Silchar), philosophy (Dr. Manidipa Sen, JNU, New Delhi) & paleoanthropology (Dr. Subhash Walimbe, ex-Deccan College, Pune). Listen in...

Is the past ‘all over the place’? Is it the stories that keep buildings and communities alive? Are stories mental artefacts of the past? Did H.M. have expectations? Is understanding the past a process of comparing the unknown and the known? Is the surprising, strange, & non-normative, therefore, informative? How do archaeological artefacts carry traces of human behaviour? Are there patterns in culture? What gets demolished? Can lost languages be revitalized? Is the past always changing? Is the brain always predicting? How old is professional History? How/when do our beliefs or emotions revise what we perceive from our other senses? Might two historians see two very different things? Does multilingualism delay dementia? Are all stories political? How are they so effective? How does the past guide our behaviour today? What leads to the ‘resting state’? Is understanding both diachronic and synchronic? When is the past invoked? How do stories sometimes go haywire? Who has blond hair and blue eyes? Is Self = Individual? Are the pasts (& not the present) the gateways to the futures? How would we judge the current present? &, will we go to formal schools to master disciplines and seek Truth? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from neuroscience (Dr. Arpan Banerjee, NBRC, Manesar), anthropology (Dr. Abhijeet Paul, UC Berkeley, Berkeley) & history (Dr. Pushkar Sohoni, IISER, Pune). Listen in...

Are you a middle-roader? Is Jai Santoshi Maa a mainstream film? Are you exposed to world cinema? ‘What’ is popular? Are dialects non-standard? Does writing / scripting / printing legitimize the process of standardization? Are scripts discrete, but language continuous? Can sociopolitics ever be subtracted from language? How is time tapped? Are film scenes cut ‘in’ time (i.e., temporally, rather than visually)? Is the notion of mainstream always market driven? Where does power emerge from? Do the best art films take the maximum (personal) risk? Don’t all films crave commercial success? Are all films dependent? How has English become the language of the world? Is Gujarati one language? Who speaks Hindi? Do languages need a script? Do scripts become the identity of language, just as languages become the identity of people? Is identity dynamic? Why did the early scholarship on Sholay come from the west? Who makes / finances / exhibits films? Why do we divide Spaces? Why do we know merely the name of Panini, but not his frameworks? Is Uski Roti inaccessible? How does ‘realistic’ cinema achieve abstraction? Do binaries always remain? &, what is the long term future of visuality, materialism, time, use cases & ‘the unknown’ in cinema (& the world)? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from film studies (Amrit Gangar, Mumbai), & linguistics (Prof. Rajesh Kumar, IIT Madras, Chennai). Listen in...

Many sorts of things don't happen. Plans are made and deferred. Films are left undeveloped. Subjects are avoided. Dreams are un-dreamt. Planes take off empty. Priests are marked absent. Building floors get skipped, and boats go missing. Turn Seven is just one of them. And #TATS (The Absent Turn Seven) pretends like nothing ever happened. You hear the voices, in order of disappearance. But order does not matter. Birds and brooks sing in no order. The middle never ends for those that remain.

The Antakshari Scene: The antakshari scene located mid-film is a prime example of the intertextuality found in MPK and the originality that comes in part from the film’s recontextualization of various fragments from pop culture. Even though the song sequence does not contain original music but rather a medley of songs from previous Hindi films, it still functions as an important vehicle for plot development and the articulation of feelings that cannot easily be expressed through dialogue (see Ganti 2004, 178-179). Antakshari, as played in the film, requires two opposing teams that alternate singing popular song lyrics, with the first word of each song starting with the same syllable that ended the previous song. These rules are embedded on the name of the game itself, as antakshari combines ant (end) and akshar (a letter of the Hindi alphabet). The competition continues until one team cannot continue the back-and-forth. Given the centrality of lyrics in Hindi film songs, and the hegemonic popularity of cinema in India, antakshari is a pleasurable mode of “timepass” during long train rides, parties, or wedding celebrations. (An excerpt from ‘Antakshari in Maine Pyar Kiya’ by Peter Kvetko, ch. 2 in ‘Music in Contemporary Hindi Film: Memory, Voice, Identity’, edited by Jayson Beaster-Jones, Natalie Sarrazin). Listen in...

The intensity of celestial sources passing over the fixed field of radio receivers was recorded on strip charts and had to be analyzed by visual inspection. This task fell naturally to the graduate student of the group, Jocelyn Bell. On August 6, 1967, she first noticed a peculiar train of radio signals when the sky at right ascension 19h19min passed through the field of view. What could have caused such a transient periodic signal? The first suspicion was of course interference from some electric equipment, like the ignition of a passing car or a satellite. But to the surprise of Bell the signal appeared again at about the same time of day. After a few months it was obvious that the regular pulses were coming from a celestial source beyond our solar system. Furthermore a recording of the source with sub-second time resolution on November 28, 1967, revealed pulses repeating at a regular period of 1.33 s. At that point - the discovery of the phenomenon was still kept secret - the thought that radio signals from an extraterrestrial civilization had been recorded was seriously considered, under the code "LGM" (little green men). (An excerpt from ‘Gamma-Ray Pulsars’ by Gottfried Kanbach, chapter 6 in ‘The Universe in Gamma Rays’ (2001), edited by Volker Schönfelder)). Listen in...

One of the central theses underlying the phenomenology of body is that of bodily subjectivity. It might appear as though by speaking of “bodily subjectivity” one is in effect assimilating “body” into “consciousness,” so that instead of the real body one is talking about thought or the idea of the body. Nothing could be farther removed from our intentions. Body is neither a modality of consciousness, nor is subjectivity coextensive with consciousness. In fact, one of the implications of the concept of bodily subjectivity is that the concept of subjectivity is wider than the concept of consciousness. It also entails that intentionality is a distinguishing feature, not of the domain of consciousness, but of the larger domain of subjectivity. The concept of subjectivity should also be dissociated from the epistemological concept of “subject.” Nor do the concepts of subjectivity and consciousness necessarily hang together with the concept of “representation” (of reality) and/or the priority of the temporal dimension of presence over the modalities of time as Heidegger would have us believe. (An excerpt from ‘Intentionality and the Mind/Body Problem’, essay 9 in ‘The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy’ (1985), by J. N. Mohanty). Listen in...

Frankfurt, 1797: at twenty-seven, Hegel plunged into a profound crisis. He no longer knew what he thought; he no longer knew what to think. The republic and the revolution had collapsed under the repeated blows of German history. Several years later, Hegel would speak of this episode as an attack of “hypochondria”. Hypochondria: literally, under the cartilage of the ribs, with one’s heart cramped. When the perception of the world is too closely concerned with chaos, the heart suddenly, without reason, sinks. Without any reason: one might say that reason gets muddled. Look closely at the letter in which Hegel, at forty, describes the crisis that overcame him in Frankfurt: ‘I suffered from this hypochondria for a number of years to the point of total exhaustion; no doubt every man experiences such a turning point in his life, the nocturnal point where his whole being contracts and he must force himself through the narrows until he becomes secure and certain of himself, secure in ordinary daily life, and if he has already made himself incapable of being fulfilled by that, then secure in a more inward, more noble existence. (emphasis added)’ (An excerpt from ‘Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture’ (1994), by Catherine Clément). Listen in...