Vaad

Dr Prasanna Tantri is an Associate Professor in the Finance area and Executive Director of the Centre for Analytical Finance at ISB. His research areas include- banking, financial inclusion, financial contagion, regulation, and the relationship between politics and finance. He teaches a course on Indian financial systems.

For 50th episode of संवाद series, we visited the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) to talk to students and understand their idea of JNU, their views on various issues and the work they are doing.

0:00 Introduction

6:13 From Bihar to JNU

11:21 JNU - A place in decline?

16:27 The JNU Experience - Being a women

27:33 Discovering a conspiracy theory

29:36 American Studies at JNU

43:37 UPSC culture at JNU

45:49 The idea of JNU

56:10 How did JNU respond to its image problem

1:01:10 Change and continuity at JNU - A Baba view

1:06:47 The intellectual decline in Indian universities

1:08:16 The social science problem in India

1:12:42 Role of social sciences in India 

1:14:54 The infamous 2016 incidents at JNU 

1:18:19 'Kanhaiya Kumar effect' in JNU politics 

1:20:31 Why some JNU leaders love jails so much 

1:31:35 Seeding intellectual spaces in JNU 

1:34:42 - Scientists at JNU: A Professor's perspective 

1:46:10 - Scientists at JNU: Research Scholars speak

2:09:52 - Conclusions

B. Mahadevan is a professor of Operations Management at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, where he has been teaching since 1992. Professor Mahadevan has more than 27 years of wide-ranging experience in teaching, research, consulting, and academic administration at IIM Bangalore and other reputed institutions such as IIT Delhi and XLRI, Jamshedpur.  

Professor Mahadevan’s research interests include researching the possibility of using ancient Indian wisdom to address contemporary concerns, spirituality in the work place, and management paradigms from Bhagavad Gita.  

Professor Mahadevan was the founder Vice-chancellor of Chinmaya Vishwavidyapeeth, a University for applied Sanskrit and Indian Wisdom during 2016 – 2018.

Sudhanshu Mani is a former officer of the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers, where he served for 38 years. He retired as the general manager of the Integral Coach Factory, Chennai, where Train 18 was built from design to development in record 18 months under his leadership.

Kedar Phalke is a historian of medieval India who has written several books on the Maratha Empire.

Gopi Shankar Madurai is an equal rights and indigenous rights activist. He was one of the youngest, and the first openly intersex and genderqueer, candidates to contest in 2016 Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly election.   

Shankar’s work inspired the Madras High Court (Madurai Bench) to direct the Government of Tamil Nadu to order a ban on forced sex-selective surgeries on intersex infants.   

In August 2020 the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment appointed Shankar as the South Regional representative in the National Council for Transgender Persons.

Priyam Gandhi-Mody is a strategist specializing in political communication. She frequently writes political non-fiction and ‘A Nation To Protect’ is her third book. She’s an alumna of the University of Delaware and Florida State University. Having worked briefly at the Capitol in Tallahassee, she now lives in Mumbai with her husband, son and a golden retriever.

Vaibhav Singh is founder of Defensive Offence and Co-founder of DO Politics.

Sudhanshu Mani is a former officer of the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers, where he served for 38 years. He retired as the general manager of the Integral Coach Factory, Chennai, where Train 18 was built from design to development in record 18 months under his leadership.

Dr Tripurdaman Singh is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London and a Visiting Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Universiteit Leiden. 

He is the author of ’Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics: The Bhadauria Rajputs and the Transition from Mughal to British India, 1600-1900’ and ‘Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India’. His latest book is ‘Nehru: The Debates that defined India’.