Vaad

Dr. Niraj Rai is a senior scientist at Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow. He did his PhD from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad.   Dr Niraj was one of authors of consequential paper published in 2019 in one of the world’s most prestigious publication (CELL). It was based on the DNA successfully extracted by Dr Niraj and his team from a 2500 year old woman’s skeletal found in Rakhigarhi, Haryana which was the largest site of Indus-Sarasvati Valley or Harappa Civilisation.

Priyank Kanoongo is Chairman of National Commission For Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR). In this conversation, he revealed some startling facts about India’s children homes and orphanages, the NGOs and missionaries that run some of them, their foreign funding and how they are being run - where children are being brainwashed, used for political propaganda, sexually abused and what not.  

NCPCR is a statutory body under the administrative control of the Ministry of Women & Child Development and its duty is to ensure that all Laws, Policies, Programmes, and Administrative Mechanisms are in consonance with the Child Rights perspective as enshrined in the Constitution of India and also the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (0 to 18 years age group).

Dr. V. Ramanathan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at IIT-BHU. His areas of interest are Laser Spectroscopy, Raman Spectroscopy and Imaging and Computational chemistry.

He holds a PhD in Chemistry from IIT Kanpur and two postdoctoral fellowships from the University of Basel, Switzerland and Seoul National University, South Korea.

Sanjeev Sanyal is the Principal Economic Advisor to the Government of India. He is not only an internationally acclaimed economist, best-selling author but also a well-known environmentalist and urban theorist.  

Sanyal’s best-selling books include Land of the Seven Rivers, The Indian Renaissance and The Ocean of Churn, all published by Penguin. In addition, he had published around 200 articles, columns and reports in leading national/international publications.  

In this conversation, we talked mainly about architecture of Union government’s Central Vista Project including the new Parliament of India, what the Smart Cities project really intends to achieve and the true history of India from ancient times to struggle for Independence from the British, especially those aspects which are not taught to children in school history textbooks.

Dr. Aditya Kuvalekar is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Economics at the Department of Economics at University of Essex. His broad area of interest is microeconomic theory. Primarily, he works in dynamic games, organizational economics and market design. He received his PhD in Economics from New York University in 2017.

J. Sai Deepak is an engineer-turned-litigator, practising as an arguing counsel primarily before the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Delhi. he has been part of several landmark matters, such as the ones relating to the Sabarimala Ayyappa Temple, the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple and Basmati Geographical Indications.

India, That Is Bharat, his first book in a comprehensive trilogy, explores the influence of European 'colonial consciousness' (or 'coloniality'), in particular its religious and racial roots, on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation and the origins of the Indian Constitution.

J. Sai Deepak is an engineer-turned-litigator, practising as an arguing counsel primarily before the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Delhi. he has been part of several landmark matters, such as the ones relating to the Sabarimala Ayyappa Temple, the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple and Basmati Geographical Indications.

India, That Is Bharat, his first book in a comprehensive trilogy, explores the influence of European 'colonial consciousness' (or 'coloniality'), in particular its religious and racial roots, on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation and the origins of the Indian Constitution.

Jonathan Selvaraj is a sports journalist at ESPN. Earlier, he worked at The Indian Express. With more than a decade of experience in covering non-cricketing sports, Selvaraj has a knack for providing perfect analysis of games and performance of athletes, some of whom he has been covering for years and who have won medals at the recently concluded Tokyo Olympics - Neeraj Chopra, Bajrang Punia, Ravi Dahiya and others.  

In this conversation, he explains why top class athletes like Vinesh Phogat, Manu Bhaker and Amit Panghal couldn’t deliver on expectations while Neeraj Chopra, Bajrang Punia and Ravi Dahiya proved themselves.  

He also informs how wrestlers go through hell to cut weight before their bouts which has a huge impact on not only their performance in big games but also devastating effect on their long term health.  

He explains in this video why Sushil Kumar’s two medals in 2008 and 2012 Olympics are more significant than PV Sindhu’s consecutive bagging of medals of same colour in 2016 and 2020 Olympics.

Shakti Sinha is an ex-IAS officer of 1979 batch who worked closely with former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee during 1996-1999. Now, he has written a memoir of that period titled Vajpayee: The Years That Changed India.

Sinha is currently involved in setting up two institutions, one a think tank (Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Policy Research and International Studies, at MS University, Vadodara) and another, an academic Institution of Excellence (Delhi School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Delhi). Before this, he served as Director, India Foundation and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

Abhijit Iyer Mitra is a senior research fellow at New Delhi based think tank ‘institute of Peace and Conflict Studies’ where he focuses on defence issues, specialising in defence economics, technology and procurement, nuclear dynamics, governance issues and non-traditional security threats.

He has been a Visiting Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Stimson Center, Washington, DC.