SynTalk

How do you look at women? Do Goddesses follow Gods? Is the ultimate Reality an ‘It'? What's the relationship between matter and energy? Are dualities necessarily conflictual? Is Eve inferior to Adam? Where do the Cosmos and the Body intersect? How did the sacred geography of the subcontinent evolve? Do Goddesses have an influence on the lives of men (& kings) & women? Where/how did patriarchy exist? How did Ramabai become Pandita Ramabai? What did the colonial encounter do to the archetypes of Goddesses? How did the early literary women appropriate the Goddesses? Is (only) education responsible for empowerment? Is Vishnu's primal inner energy essentially female? Who is capable of hedonistic bloodlust? What invoked the wrath of Nanda Devi? Are male and female in a union like speech and meaning? What is evil? Or, dirty? Did women have a voice in pre-Colonial ‘India'? What are your models for feminism? How do courtesans become poet saints and Goddesses? How did the tribal women of India ‘transform a priest'? What might indigenous feminism look like? &, what is the future of the several goddesses & the little (folk) traditions? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from cultural studies (Prof. Sachidananda Mohanty, IIAS, Shimla), Dr. M.D. Muthukumaraswamy (folklore studies, Chennai) & Sanskrit studies (Dr. Bihani Sarkar, Lancaster University, Lancaster). Listen in...

Do you have neanderthal DNA? Is your body your identity? What makes the knowledge of death possible when no one alive has experienced it first hand? How does dying feel? What are your schemas for understanding death? Is death the default, & it is life that happens occasionally? Does a cell know when it ought to die? When is an organism dead? When can we not dream? Can (certain) tissues and organs regenerate? What are the biochemical reactions a response to? What does oxygen do? Does the concept of death make control over others possible? Can we reverse death itself? What is the 'location' of a person? Do all cells come from other living cells? Or, can cells be created artificially from scratch? Is the body inferior to atman? Intrinsically, is everything conscious? Why do we see matter around if it's all one consciousness? Is Higg's boson dead? Do the cells need to divide to avoid death? Is dying like falling in deep sleep, & do we therefore die everyday? How does structure and order reproduce? What did you inherit from your mother at birth? Can dead mammoths be resurrected? &, will we have the power to create varied artificial life in the future with genome writing? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from philosophy of science (Prof. G. Nagarjuna, IISER, Pune), theology (Swami Narasimhananda, Ramakrishna Mission Sevashrama, Kozhikode), & genomic sciences (Prof. Binay Panda, JNU, New Delhi).

Are you a lobby strategist? Do you negotiate with yourself? Which taste group do you belong to? What are you allowed to see? Do you pay to publish? Do the algorithms that serve you change with you? How are counterpublics generated? Is society constantly transforming itself? What role does capital play? Does media influence human rationality? Are you able to tell real discourse and propaganda apart? Was there ‘public opinion' (say) a 1000 years ago? Does public sphere have capitalistic roots? What happens to niche ideas in an information supermarket? Are newspapers opinion ‘takers'? Have most modern societies moved from being axiomatic to algorithmic? Can one have societies without a moral discourse? What happens to our base instincts? Do you have the ability of have your own individual opinion? However, are niche morals undesirable? Do ads serve a symbolic norm-making function as well? ‘How' do you go after your ‘target' audience? Is it alright if mass media becomes ‘hyper personal'? Is the public just a sum of the all the individual echo chambers? &, what is the kind of public that we want? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from philosophy (Dr. Muzaffar Ali Malla, Islamic University of Science and Technology (IUST), Avantipura (J&K)), social sciences (Prof. Narendar Pani, NIAS, Bangalore), & media studies (Dr. Vibodh Parthasarathi, Jami Millia Islamia, Delhi). Listen in...

What do you expect to see on windy islands? Can you soar? Are there a finite number of ways of flying? Did we glide before flying? Do birds & insects fly like planes, & vice versa? How are the lift-off forces and moments generated? Was the Wright Flyer I (which made the first sustained manned flight in 1903) actually a very bad design? Do flies fly merely by seeing? Are wings thermo-regulatory devices? Why has flying evolved several times across different species? How many times of its own weight can flying structures take? How should flying carpets be made? Does it matter to the moth what the value of ‘g' is? How might dragonfly wingspan change with atmospheric oxygen content? Can airplanes fly like sharks swim? Why shiver? How are/would the helicopters that fly on Mars (be) different? How will a balloon inflate on Venus? Are biological flyers far more efficient than the human engineered ones – how? Are the birds and insects of the same size fly similarly? How are unmanned and manned systems different? Why don't we have faster commercial flights (given they are possible)? Can one expect to see new ways and manners of flying? Will we ‘fly' to Mars at some point? &, is there still a lot of ground to cover? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from aeronautical engineering (Prof. Rajkumar Pant, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & neurobiology & physiology (Prof. Sanjay Sane, NCBS, Bangalore). Listen in...

How do the disposable get marked out? Which institutions have cognitive control over you? How do you develop railways in Argentina? Who changes institutions? Is it always from ‘within'? Do institutions help us with the ‘higher order' decisions? Are military, markets, prisons, families, religions, borders, languages, & villages coercive in the same way? Are prisons (in reality) chaotic? What's the price of joining an institution? Is there conformity of opinion around you? Do religions evolve? How do you think of the family? Do institutionalization and socialization go hand in hand? ‘When' do markets need to be regulated? Are cryptocurrencies really a counter-current? Does our continuous search for meaning gives Religion its power? Do universities live longer than political organizations? What are universities from the perspective of the dropout? Does the world need one anchor currency? Can algorithms be inclusive of local issues? Have institutions, thus far, been spatially bound? What would planetary scale institutions look like in the future? ‘How' are the marginal voices to be heard? &, are nation states the best institutional form for the modern world? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from sociology (Prof. Mahuya Bandyopadhyay, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), economics (Prof. A. Damodaran, IIM Bangalore, Bangalore), & history (Prof. Srinath Raghavan, Ashoka University, Delhi (NCR)). Listen in...

How ‘deep' would a 1,000 years be? Is all space place? How do use, identity, value, law, power, or (‘imaginative') memory hold them together? Do we live in layers? Are all human beings historical? Are all places relational? How do ‘material' cultures of the past enable excavation sites to be dated? Where do ghosts and Gods live? Do all humans think of a place the same way? Can power structures lead to discursive spaces becoming material ‘reality'? What is the wilderness for you? Do you follow official maps? Do you know the seating configuration of the people you are hearing just now? What was below the Mosque? Is land a fictitious commodity? Is it possible to have an affective relationship with a property without having a legal claim? When is a place abandoned? How does a community disintegrate? Could long standing customary rights co-exist with legal rights? Is Law fiction? Are most relational boundaries always in a state of flux? Do leopards also want to take it easy? & How will we interpret our linkages and places in the future – would all space be propertied, financialized & commodified? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from anthropology & film-making (Prof. Ashish Avikunthak, The University of Rhode Island, Kingston), human ecology (Prof. Asmita Kabra, Ambedkar University, New Delhi), & history (Prof. Anindita Mukhopadhyay, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Listen in...

What happened in the 6th century BCE? Can a non-human (robot? dog?) have a soul? Does God's time move from the past to the future? Is the present, in a sense, always avant-garde? How are bureaucratic orders made to perpetuate in time? How does a common person today understand the yugas? Who has the ‘need' to think about the future? How are different time periods squeezed into a single register in art? Why do we invoke ramrajya? Do ideal types constrain how far (& ‘how') one can think of the future? What did women joining the Buddhist sanghas (not) cause? Could science fiction become a historical artefact? Is a ‘genius' science fiction writer akin to a ‘genius' scientist? Is religion all about survival? Are religion, art and politics interwoven in the pharaoh? Are the pyramids, megaliths, Stonehenge, & the Chinese burial pits for the immediate afterlife of the dead or the future of those later alive? Are genealogies often invented? Is there a part of us that ‘needs' to believe? Do we wish that the future were pre-ordained? Do we inhabit multiple temporalities? &, when is the messiah coming (back)? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from art history (Dr. Shailka Mishra, Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, Hyderabad), theology (Prof. Ori Z. Soltes, Georgetown University, Washington DC), & ancient history (Dr. Meera Viswanathan, Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida). Listen in...

Who does the kidnapping and raping? Are you a parasite? Is your politics in the service of capital? Do the lumpen form one group/class, or is it a general disposition? Are the punk ‘anti-social' disruptors? Was Namdeo Dhasal punk? Was Kabir? Why write obscene poetry? How (& by whom) are the boundaries policed? What leads to the various underground anti-aesthetic movements (such as punk music, & anti-poetry) across cultures? How was Sex Pistols born? Does the notion of (unemployed, & all other) waste come only with modernity and capitalism? Is the oppositional market for shit, trash, & filth, then, created by a certain death drive in us? Can suffering be enjoyed? Where do you seek solidarity? Did late industrialization lead to fascism in Europe? How do political and aesthetic imaginations influence each other? Do the poor need aesthetic tools to agitate? What happens when industries rust? Are we now passing through a phase of barbarism? Is culture necessarily a good thing? Are you (truly) interested in abolishing inequality? Can the proletariat be precariat proletariat? &, are the lumpen forces (the ‘surplus population') now here to stay forever? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from literary studies (Dr. Nandini Chandra, University of Hawai'i, Honolulu), music production (Kunal Dole, Punk On Toast, Mumbai), & political science/poetry (Prof. Ashwani Kumar, TISS, Mumbai). Listen in...

Is pencil complex? Is computationally hard complex? Is ‘i' a weird number? Why wasn't Hamilton able to multiply triples? Are we just a bunch of neurons and connections? Is our ability to think (& do mathematics) an emergent phenomenon? Is mathematical thinking core to understanding the world? Is complexity always a subjective feature? Do opinions spread in complex random graph-like patterns? How is alternating current complex? How do quaternions help with (3D rotations) in computer graphics? Are there (irreducible) prime complex numbers? Can real prime numbers be understood via functions of complex variables? How is the idea of ‘limit' (& continuity, & differentiability) different on a complex plane? Is something more complex the more you can talk about it? Can there be a general theory for conditions leading to complexity? Are all complex systems many bodied? Will several emergent phenomena & biological systems see invention of a new kind of math to understand them? Will computational models (& ever more complex machines) likely precede such mathematics? &, will more branches of sciences / knowledge keep getting more integrated? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from electrical engineering (Prof. D. Manjunath, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), non-linear science (Prof. Ram Ramaswamy, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), & mathematics (Dr. Kaneenika Sinha, IISER, Pune). Listen in...

Are you a master of your emotions? How do banks learn to loan better? Is king less queen = boy less girl in the word2vec world? Does your ‘body' sometimes feel inferior even when you do not think so? Do humans learn only cognitively? How do you learn to have self respect? Are models a result of learning? What can be learnt by trial and error? Can mere prompts sometimes be enough to learn vast new things? Are there unthought knowns? Can you have the thought of going to dinner without thinking in a language? What is the nature of internal representations in between the multiple layers of neural networks? Do we acquire languages sub-consciously? How does one account for integrated multilingualism? How do you speak with your Gods? Is grammar social? Did sociality (& then spoken language, & then writing systems) evolve (or exapt) from tool making? What is hunger for LLMs if it has never itself gone hungry? Why does the familiar feel safer? Can machines learn behaviorally (without modeling/cerebration)? Why do couples sometimes fight over the same issues after several years? What are your default neural pathways? &, what can AI do in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from psychotherapy (Aruna Gopakumar, Navgati, Bangalore), computer science (Dr. Shivaram Kalyanakrishnan, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & linguistics (Prof. Pramod Pandey, Deccan College, Pune). Listen in...

Do you have the courage of a Spartan? Are we all partly anarchists? What are we truly? What do we value? Are Reason and Nature entangled? Is there a hierarchy of beings above/below human beings? What do Gods have that humans don't have? Does Nature offer us moral guidance? How do plants imitate Gods? How much does human nature vary with (say) geography, culture, language, & time? Are we more (or, less?) diverse at birth? Do you want to transcend your body? Is matter evil? Does social evolution change (the psychological) human nature? Does one need to have a theory of human nature to think about political forms? What is it to be a flourishing human? Do literature and art have the function of ‘making' human? Do stories around the world share something? Why do classics endure? Do each one of us need to realize our human-ness? Where does this normativity come from? Does (only) force keep us together? Is the construct of human nature both useful and dangerous? Are (most) determinisms dangerous? &, will any new kind of world in the future (off a new structure) have a new kind of human nature? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from literary studies (Dr. Milind Brahme, IIT Madras, Chennai), philosophy (Dr. Aditi Chaturvedi, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), & political studies (Prof. Chandran Kukathas, Singapore Management University (SMU), Singapore). Listen in...

#TAOTA (The Audition Of The Audible) - - - SynTalk by SynTalk

Does randomness lie in the eye of the beholder? ‘What' is music? Why is ordering often a consequence of scaling? Is there such a thing as non-repetitive music? Do there need to be ‘types' for there to be repetitions? Are there patterns out there independent of us? What would a Kantian say? Are fundamental algorithms at the heart of Nature? Does this conflict with fundamental laws of physics? Why can't finite state machines count? Are Turing machines able to recognize repetitions? How? Why isn't any combination of notes a raga? Why is ‘Sa' the fixed point in Hindustani classical music? Can the link between moods and musical keys / notes / ragas be understood via the pigeonhole principle? Is there a deep link between repetition and consonance (or dissonance)? Do we tend to classify things that are not ‘not different'? Is the ability to have knowledge of similarity a distinct faculty? How are multiple renditions ‘in' a raga same yet different? Can repetitions help charge our musical consciousness? Do ever-fresh accents make repetitions rhythms? Is there asymmetric dependence of error on truth? &, do hallucinations ‘repeat' Reality? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from theoretical computer science (Dr. Arkadev Chattopadhyay, TIFR, Mumbai), music studies/history (Prof. Partho Datta, JNU, New Delhi), & philosophy (Dr. Anand Vaidya, San José State University, San José). Listen in...

Are your attachments secure? Are you disabled? Have you ever lost your mind? Is there a link between Being, becoming, experience, & location? Are all spaces places? Could one be at ‘home', & yet ‘out of place'? Does your place give you too much identity? Must actors be models? Is your help a part of your family? Are you able to put yourself in another's shoes? How do actors / writers / psychotherapists do this? Are you comfortable as yourself in an artificial situation – i.e., can you play yourself? Is lived experience the only vantage point? Are experiences ever pre-discursive? Is there an intactness within you? How do constructivists think of psychopaths? How can an actor prepare to play a dictator? Can entire societies get authoritarian? Have you experienced evil parts of yourself? Is a person on a mechanized wheelchair (necessarily) looking for empathy? Could migrant domestic workers seek privacy in public spaces? Why might imagining another on our own terms be dangerous? Does cattle grid also keep certain humans out? &, might the conception of the human itself (from only able-bodied, & in-reason) change in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from psychology (Prof. Rachana Johri, ex-Ambedkar University, New Delhi), film-making (Prof. Mazhar Kamran, IIT Bombay, Bombay), & disability studies (Dr. Bindhulakshmi Pattadath, TISS, Mumbai). Listen in...

Are humans statistical systems with random biases? Is the world fundamentally discrete, & the continuum an emergent property? Or, is the quantum world foamy? Should black holes be a part of the Standard Model? Does the Standard Model (surely) undergird the periodic table? Is space-time merely a causal ordering of events? Where does physics end, and chemistry begin? Can the shape of water molecule be inferred from macroscopic water? How is the whole different from the sum of its parts? Can having a very old universe help with these questions? What may have led to structures in the early universe? Are the various scales interconnected? Are molecular geometries & properties better understood via electron density functions rather than wave functions? ‘How' are n-electron systems confined? Can you ‘visualize' the (network-like) posets? When/which systems self organize? Are there different collective behaviours at different scales? Can we synthesize a complete living system? Can the spectra of any newly synthesized molecule be predicted – & how? Can earthquakes be predicted precisely? &, what are a few open questions? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from statistical physics (Prof. Deepak Dhar, IISER, Pune), quantum chemistry (Prof. Kalidas Sen, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), & quantum physics (Prof. Sumati Surya, Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bangalore). Listen in...

#TOAH (The Organism Artefact Hybrids) - - - SynTalk by SynTalk

Do you live with animals? Are your summers busy? Could a 1000 metres apart be several hours apart in the hills? How does that define culture? Could there be multiple places in one hill? Do you have a simple dream of having a kitchen with a granite sink? Are hill people traditionally more cohesive? What do hills do to States? How do/did sovereign Godlings rule their territories in the mountains? Have these Godlings (& their people) also been at war? What brought them together? Where did the clergy come from? Where did Raghunathji come to Kullu from? Did Shaivism and Vaishnavism have differing impacts on the Himalayan polity? Do change and continuity exist in tandem? How do the great traditions and the little traditions interact? Did the first British maps change us? Are the Himalayas the spine of the world? Did Radhanath Sikdar measure the Mount Everest? Did Maharaja Ranjit Singh Ji connive with the French and the Russians to fight the British? When/why did the British give up on Tibet? Why make hill stations? Do shepherds have ‘places' of worship? Why do sacred groves exist? Why do the hills evoke a spiritual response in us? Can hills and rivers vanish? &, is everything already lost? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from history & South Asia Studies (Prof. Sudipta Sen, UC Davis, Davis), and history & anthropology (Prof. Mahesh Sharma, Panjab University, Chandigarh). Listen in...

Were there thoughts >80,000 years ago? Can you say what you feel? How is your Broca's area? ‘Where' is the mind? Is it individuated? &, insulated? When did our ancestors first create art? Are human beings incorrigibly abstract? Are social minds more emotional? Are single cell bacteria social? Who is accountable for a mob? How do social values get revised or (sometimes) resisted? Is the mapping between brain states and mental states (largely) mysterious? Does language change the brain? Is mentality a part of the universe? Are complex long term decisions also a series of micro decisions? How do you decide on a home loan? What can neuroscience (alone) explain? Can political leadership impact personal decisions of the masses? Are groups of strangers safer than individuals when crossing train tracks? Do behaviours differ across cultures? Why? Do you hold all the beliefs today from your childhood? Can you ‘decide' without emotions? Do decisions precede interpretation? Do you trade on uncertainty? Are we currently in the infancy of a cognitive revolution? &, must cognitive sciences and public policy work together in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas and concepts from behaviour architecture (Biju Dominic, Fractal Analytics, Mumbai), cognitive sciences (Prof. Ramesh Kumar Mishra, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), & philosophy (Prof. Smita Sirker, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in...

Can you meta point? Do you celebrate objectivity? Is there a lot happening that is ‘undocumentable'? Are facts and values entangled? Are several valuable things tangible but not measurable? Are we ourselves instruments? Can ‘fact' have variations? How is truth different from truism? Must Truth be recognizable? Does mathematics ‘change' over time? Can experience invalidate mathematical statements? Is the metaphysical always mystical? Is the artistic metaphorical? Are the three (Penrose) worlds – platonic, mental & physical – distinct? Is there a ready-made world? Do you always look for ‘another way' to experience the world? Does great architecture present the immeasurable? Can built spaces be conducive to certain values? Can one reflect while in action, such that use and contemplation co-exist? Where do concepts come from? Is analyticity an undefinable notion? Can you hear the voice of the table without existing in a ‘certain way'? When is threat visible? Is there normative desire in the world to both donate and take blood? Could one be at peace when one loses voice? &, would our consciousness, in the future, be both vibrant and participatory? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas and concepts from architecture (Prem Chandavarkar, CnT Architects, Bangalore), philosophy (Prof. Amitabha Das Gupta, ex-University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), & art/film-making (Amar Kanwar, New Delhi). Listen in...

Can one become English? What does this have to do with the Suez Canal? Are you white? Are we free? Is it good to be obedient? Is the Other always an enemy? Or, could it be a reference group? Did everyday defiance (say, by the peasants) play a role in India's struggle against the British Empire? Is nationalism necessarily anti colonial? How is Indianness linked to the Aryan Invasion Theory? Was the British conquest of India always partial? Are Gandhi, Gandhism, & Gandhi-ites the same thing? Had Tagore read Marx? Why does dissent take time? How do wild elephants live within the market economy? Do rivers have their own unruly ‘erratic' lives? Are forest fires often an act of defiance? How/why do we defy Nature's will? Does geography change the way we think? Is Assam Bengal? Can the seemingly peaceful bear a lot of conflicts within? Was Tibet seduced differently from the other colonies? Does assimilation/citizenship always follow acculturation/subjecthood? What happens to Sutlej in Nathpa Jhakri? Will there always be defiance? How can one learn from dissent/friction? &, might modern democracy survive because of defiance? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas and concepts from literary/post-colonial studies (Dr. Sayan Chattopadhyay, IIT Kanpur, Kanpur), philosophy (Dr. Bharati Puri, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), & history (Prof. Arupjyoti Saikia, IIT Guwahati, Guwahati). Listen in...

Who are you? Would you like to have a new name? Were there many Kalidasas? Have you ever been with a mountain? Does your family have recorded history? Why are authors often anonymous in ancient Indian texts? Is the desire to be known akin to the desire for immortality? What is the name for India in Sanskrit? When do names of specific individuals begin to emerge in archaeological artefacts? Did the devadasis lead creative lives? Do (only) dominant elites name and judge the anonymous non-elites? Which communities are anonymous in the history books? Does language constrain our inner lives? Did the British hunt differently from the indigenous people? Can material fragments or memory be tangible sources for history? Are all collectives eventually a part of Nature or the Divine? Is there something beyond the Self and the Other? When do anthropology and history intersect? Why do we sometimes surrender to become anonymous? Is the contemporary idea of fame temporally short sighted? Is Bangalore Nagarathnamma here now? Is it time to de-anonymize animals and other non-humans? &, can there be an archaeology of life where both ordinary and the extraordinary meet? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas and concepts from anthropology & philosophy (Prof. Ananta Kumar Giri, MIDS, Chennai), & history (Prof. Aloka Parasher-Sen, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Listen in...

Why do we reify? When are you able to read others' minds? Is this a pedestrian? Are sensation and perception tied together? How are new mental templates formed? Are priors 'necessary' for categorization? How do we know, in a badly lit place, if something is a wire or a snake? Are mental images ‘sharp'? Should stochastic processes (also) be understood via their higher-order moments? How are interiors of opaque objects (metal spheres to stars) pictured? Do you internally ‘model' various parts of your own body? Does our mechanical body ‘produce' words? Do virtual worlds also need a degree of veridicality? Do verbal and visual systems interact during encoding? How were gravitational waves detected? Is reification language dependent? Does brute force of computation help? When does (sub-symbolic) chairness become a (symbolic) chair? Is the notion of an ‘object' generalizable across domains/languages? Can stars' magnetic fields be plotted as precisely as the HR diagram? ‘Are sun-like stars like the Sun'? Do we need the body to conceptualize? Will computer systems need bodies? Are eyes like cameras? How do shrooms work? &, will 'everything' tie up? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from astrophysics & machine learning (Dr. Shravan Hanasoge, TIFR, Mumbai), computational linguistics (Dr. Inderjeet Mani, Hua Hin) & cognitive psychology (Dr. Varsha Singh, IIT Delhi). Listen in...

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...

Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice: “Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all. Speak, Jacques Five!” The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy forehead with it, and said, “Where shall I commence, monsieur?” “Commence,” was Monsieur Defarge's not unreasonable reply, “at the commencement.” “I saw him then, messieurs,” began the mender of roads, “a year ago this running summer, underneath the carriage of the Marquis, hanging by the chain. Behold the manner of it. I leaving my work on the road, the sun going to bed, the carriage of the Marquis slowly ascending the hill, he hanging by the chain—like this.” Again the mender of roads went through the whole performance; in which he ought to have been perfect by that time, seeing that it had been the infallible resource and indispensable entertainment of his village during a whole year. Jacques One struck in, and asked if he had ever seen the man before? “Never,” answered the mender of roads, recovering his perpendicular. (An excerpt from ‘A Tale of Two Cities (1859), by Charles Dickens). Listen in...

“What do you do at his place? What do you and he talk about?” asked Stolz. “You know, it’s so proper and cozy at his place. The rooms are small and the sofas are so deep, you sink so far down no one can see you. The windows are quite covered with ivy and cactus, and he has more than a dozen canaries and three dogs, such good ones! He always has something to eat on the table. The engravings all depict family scenes. You come and you never want to leave. You sit there without a care or thought in the world, and you know there’s someone nearby. Naturally, he’s not smart, and there’s no exchanging ideas with him or thinking, but on the other hand he’s not crafty but good and kind, and he has no pretensions and won’t stab you in the back!”. “But what do you do?” “Do? Well, I arrive and we sit opposite each other on sofas with our feet up, and he smokes.” “What about you?” ”I smoke, too, and listen to the canary trilling. Then Marfa brings in the samovar.”(An excerpt from 'Oblomov' (1859), by Ivan Goncharov. Translation by Marian Schwartz (2008)). Listen in...

Are you able to realize your potential? Is your country under-developed? Is development a kind of gradual unfurling? Could it then be an infinite, deliberate, process? Is urbanization industrialization? Is industrialization development? Is development, only, economic growth? Does urbanization ‘cause’ development? Did the moral values of ‘improvement’ come from religion? Does Science help make progress material by unlocking the mind of God? How did Development take off post WW2 as a new ontology? Is a society getting richer the same as people becoming less poor? Does development have an urban bias? Does the countryside, also, need urbanization? Do cities & nations compete in the global marketplace? Why did several early theorists of development come from Eastern Europe? Why is some of the most expensive real estate in developing countries? Does development need (say) education, health, environment, and morals, & not just money? Do you expect to eat asparagus in every month of the year? How might the meaning of development change in the years to come? Would it become more cosmological? &, for it, would we have to go back to the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from urban studies (Prof. Tridib Banerjee, USC, Los Angeles), development studies (Prof. John Harriss, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver), & science studies (Prof. Kapil Raj, EHESS, Paris). Listen in...

How do you like your Matcha? Why do fine and coarse materials behave very differently? Is surface texture usually a sign of sub-structures? How does rock become clay? Is dry clay enough to understand wet clay? Could tea be smoked? Is it simple to keep every spoonful of your morning cereal mix similar? Do pure dry solids ‘flow’ in layers and parts? Is soil a definitive sign of life? How are dust and coarse-leaf teas different? Does mechanical agitation organize matter differently from Brownian motion? How/why does swelling happen? Can mechanical grinding lead to fine structural (chemistry) changes? Does fineness evolve life ‘around’ it by offering its ample ‘surface area’? What is a tea bag? Would you be able to easily tell (moving) life & non-life apart under a microscope? Could microbes induce life into fine matter? How does refinement happen? Why do water drops jump to contact when brought close together? What flocks? What ‘flocs’? What lies ahead? Would we deploy small active rotors & ‘swimmers’ to change materials? &, will we one day understand the fundamental physics of all open pattern-forming systems? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from active matter physics (Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy, IISc, Bangalore), geotechnical engineering (Prof. D. N. Singh, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & chemical engineering (Prof. Gurmeet Singh, Trans-Disciplinary University, Bangalore). Listen in...

How old are passports? Are you a resident citizen? Are nations primeval or modern? Were the colonizers, such as England, the first nations? Are all countries multi-ethnic/multi-religious? Are there phases, then, in the process of the abstract negotiating with ground realities? How do nations reproduce, as some are born, some emerge, some mimic, & some are just put together? When are borders drawn? Why did Czechoslovakia split? Must nations be unitary? How central is ethnicity to national identity? What kinds of countries make patriotic films? Is there too much of suffering in Russian war movies? Do you know of French film ‘stars’? Do psychology and pedagogy together create a citizenry? Why do nations sometimes lose out to (say) regions and religions as the object of loyalty? Is your nationality merely an administrative reality? What moves you? What happened to classical ‘Hindustani’ music after Indian partition? What can nations share (& not share)? Is most of politics economics? Will economic globalization redefine the abstract notion of nations (& nationalism)? Or, will nations – with multiple converging rationale – keep going strong…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from social anthropology (Prof. John Clammer, O. P. Jindal Global University, Delhi NCR), film criticism (M. K. Raghavendra, Bangalore), & history (Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, BITS Pilani, Goa). Listen in...

Should Aristotle have also cooked? Would you eat dog meat? What does your food say about your conception of Reality? How is our gut first colonized? What are you allergic to? How/why do cultures select what to eat? Where are taboos found? Are you a non-believer? Who does your cooking? What are the techniques? How is identity produced? Does culture uniquely meet nature in food? Can anything be purified via rituals? Why do, both, fasting and feasting exist? Does fasting modify the idea of Self? Do we store fat ‘for’ the brain? Do you follow dietary restrictions? Do you bother about Vitamin B12? How does a newly born baby know what is not-food? How were you born? Are you like your maternal grandmother? Is taste a cultural matter? Are our jaws becoming smaller? Do we need the body (even) to be spiritual? Is Mind also Matter? Is food medicine? Would you rather die than break your fast? Can food regulate certain gene expressions? Are food preferences, therefore, somewhat genetically determined? Will we eat lab-grown food? Where would micro-nutrients come from? &, would there be ‘more’ vegetables in the future…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from biochemistry & genetics (Dr. Giriraj R. Chandak, CCMB, Hyderabad), religious studies & theology (Swami Narasimhananda, Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati), & food studies (Dr. Krishnendu Ray, NYU, New York). Listen in...

How quiet is the sea? Do you want to mine manganese? What makes certain interactions reactions? Are there reactions happening in your room? How is heat different from light? What does new Law come from? Can oceans ‘retain’ certain information for centuries? When do we say that a bond has broken? Can radio frequencies ionize molecules? Is your water from Greenland? Might an equatorial event in1982 have impacted Japan in ~1992? Can physical pressure (alone) cause reactions? Does the deep seabed interact with the atmosphere? What does law say about ‘what’ the ocean is? Is carving up oceans very different from carving up the lithosphere? Do corals and crustaceans belong to countries? How much of the oceans is ‘deep sea’? What hinders highly site-specific reactions? Is the rate of energy dissipation usually much faster than rate of chemical reactions? Can sea storms be caused? Why are deep sea species likely to be highly tribal? Can we just drill to the centre of the earth? Are most drugs chiral? What lies ahead? Will we be able to make reactions optically pure? &, would/should we mine the deep seas in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from chemistry (Prof. Vaidhyanathan Ramamurthy, University of Miami, Coral Gables), international law (Dr. Surabhi Ranganathan, University of Cambridge, Cambridge), & oceanography (Dr. D. Shankar, NIO, Goa). Listen in...

Have we over-adapted? How fit are you? Are our adaptive responses often too private? Is any fitness measure also always about the environment? How efficiently do you communicate with the changing environment? Are cultures always born on the boundaries? Can the First World, alone, help the world adapt? Are languages naturally selected? Are more frequent words shorter, & why? Similarly, do smaller organisms adapt, or perish, faster? Why are virus harder to control? Are the adaptive constraints eventually genetic? Or, can entire complex systems sometimes adapt while overcoming the constraints of parts? What is grammar constrained by? Is ideal efficiency often not achieved because of constraints? How are SOVs more prevalent if SVO languages are more ‘efficient’? Is adaptation chance-dependent? Was USA ‘not very far’ from India around 1965? Is human cash a kind of energy-unit? How are ecological and economic models dissimilar? Are most mutations neutral or detrimental? Are elephants at the greatest risk of extinction? What does not adapt? Might the future human beings be shorter and smaller? &, will we ‘radiate’ out of Earth? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from linguistics (Dr. Samar Husain, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), political science (Prof. Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawai’i, Honolulu), & theoretical ecology (Dr. Samraat Pawar, Imperial College, London). Listen in...

Do you aspire to write good English? What was Ranjit Singh’s official language? Where do your narratives come from? Is it possible to think rationally while living in a village and practicing caste? Was India (only) a land of static isolated villages? What does colonialism do to social and political formations? Are tribes expected to evolve into castes, & then into class? What has been the epistemic relationship between caste and class? Is caste truly a religious notion? Is colonialism the central fact of ‘your’ history? Did the Church and the Crown think similarly about the colonies? How do Anglicists follow Orientalists? Is the West Europe? How do we forget? Who founded the Mexican Communist Party? What do the middle class think is good? Is it possible to become modern differently? Could Christian values be taught via English literature? Did England have dissenting mini colonies even within her? Did the several nationalist de-colonising movements share common imaginations? Who drew the lines between nations? Would the World remain hierarchical and territorial? Or, would there be newer ways of coming together and making sense…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from sociology (Prof. Surinder Singh Jodhka, JNU, New Delhi), history (Prof. Dilip Menon, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), & literary studies (Prof. Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University, New York). Listen in...

Are you a part of the underworld? Would you like the society to applaud you? Do you gamble? Or, consume illicit liquor? Is the disorderly the underbelly? Will you inherit property? How has dowry existed in many societies for centuries? What changes the valuation of grooms? Are the values of criminals and police often very similar? Is there something fundamentally criminal about sex-selective abortion? Why do (some) women prefer to have a son? Are there power hierarchies inside prisons? What is the State really? When is it important? However, are people also always undoing the State? Might ‘planning’ create disorder? How should people move? Don’t you find Paris lovely? Do bus stops increase land value? Does law always interact with norms & technologies? Do we understand how norms change? Are people rational agents? How are their preferences aggregated? Where must beggars live? Do you need the working class? Do slum dwellers prefer free houses? Can the State flout its own laws? Are the illegal/legal interfaces often economic? What is unauthorized about unauthorized colonies? &, what is the future of order, planning, State, and evasion? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from economics (Dr. S. Anukriti, Boston College, Boston), political science (Dr. Sushmita Pati, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), & social work (Prof. Vijay Raghavan, TISS, Mumbai). Listen in...

Are words valuable things? When did you last search for a word? Is the seed of language also the seed of the world? How does art work? Is direct (unmediated) observation possible? Does language have a (biological) organ that works with other cognitive faculties? What is a ‘word’? Does it have an internal structure? Do speakers find various affixes psychologically real? Why is there such a thing as grammar? Are words beginning-less? Does grammar change more slowly than words and phrases? Why? Where do art’s boundaries lie? Does art have a ‘universal grammar’? Does the (real) world determine the grammatical nature of languages? What propels the artistic in us? What does the word Saturn represent? Is the world described by words dissimilar from the world we inhabit? How are ungrammatical sentences sometimes meaningful? What is the link between truth and language? Might truth sometimes be observer dependent? Are there features in natural languages that are tied to our very Being? Is the Tunisian ants’ world discrete? What gives gestures meaning? &, what will Martians understand if/when they land on Earth with their own language? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from Sanskrit studies (Prof. Ashok Aklujkar, The University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver), art (Jeebesh Bagchi, Raqs Media Collective, New Delhi), & linguistics (Prof. Pritha Chandra, IIT Delhi, New Delhi). Listen in...

How difficult is it to pick berries from a tree? Do green flowers exist? Is blue still blue if it is not being known? ‘Where’ are your eyes? ‘Who’ needs colour vision? Is colour an elemental, physical, measure of the world? Is colour also mind- (or, sensor-) dependent? Do name-ability and know-ability go together? Is lustre similar to colour? Why is there a ‘three-ness’ to colours? How is it even possible to mix colours to get new ones? Are certain colours harder to make than others? Does every quality reside in a substratum? Do you confuse intensity and colour? Do you find B&W films compelling? Why do we see colour illusions? Are dreams colourful? What is the role of colour ‘in’ imagination? Where is the Self (& colour perception) located in wakeful, dream, & deep-sleep states? How does one establish this? Are visual imagination and perception different only in degree (& not in kind)? Why are ibogaine induced hallucinations invariably described in colour? Do we ever see true colours? Why do we differentiate red and green so clearly? Do colours cause things (including evolution)? Can we imagine colours we have never seen? &, would there be a perfect black in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from neuroscience (Dr. S. P. Arun, IISc, Bangalore), philosophy (Dr. Mrinal Kaul, Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal), & chemistry (Prof. Nalin Pant, IIT Delhi, New Delhi). Listen in...

Are wars entertaining? Who is responsible for your security? What is the role of military force in life? Is history violent? Do all cultures have a historical consciousness? Are all orders political orders? Are in-group solidarity and out-group hostility built into human civilizations? However, are we neither violent nor non-violent? Are human nature and international order related? Is the propensity to use violence higher in ‘central’ geographies? Are there structured steps between peace and war? Why are slivers of violence embedded in peace? Is a subject in an empire different from a citizen in a democracy? Is the nation state the apex of the international order? Whose interests do supranational institutions serve? Do economic gains transform into military assets? Is it possible to operate without the shadow of violence? Is coercion an escalatory step of deterrence? Have we lost the balance between passions and rationality? Are both Gandhi and Fanon needed as we build newer structures? How will we compete and collaborate for resources in the future? Can war be abolished? Or, will we continue to ‘create’ war? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from journalism & philosophy (Rajni Bakshi, Mumbai), international relations (Prof. Shibashis Chatterjee, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), & military history ((Retd.) Air Vice Marshal (Dr.) Arjun Subramaniam, ex-Indian Air Force, Delhi). Listen in...

Do ‘birds that fly instinctively swim’? Are self-evident truths easy to prove? When is ‘want to’ not ‘wanna’? Is verification easier than proof? Are proofs explanations? Is that why proofs are supposed to be elegant? Is reasoning algorithmic? Is there one Method to all reasoning? Are all ungrammatical sentences also unacceptable? When do sentences have ambiguous meanings? Can statements with long proofs be obvious? Does economy play a significant role in language constructions? Can human beings extract insights from verbose arguments? Are young kids born with some innate inductive principles? Is obviousness purely syntax dependent? Is the measure of (theory) simplicity language-dependent? What constitutes a valid proof system? Are all mathematical proof systems automatable? Why are certain mistakes never made? ‘Can’ we hit upon scientific Truth by chance? Has Language evolved? Can ‘explanation’ be given without ‘understanding’, but not vice versa? Why is proving absence (=falseness) often harder than proving presence (=truth)? &, how might intuition, syntax, and proof systems change in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from linguistics (Dr. Tanmoy Bhattacharya, University of Delhi, New Delhi), theoretical computer science (Prof. Meena Mahajan, IMSc, HBNI, Chennai), & philosophy (Dr. Kit Patrick, Azim Premji University, Bangalore). Listen in...

Do cheaters survive? Do you find joy in competing (& cooperating)? Are teams mechanisms or organisms? How do teams coordinate layers of emotions, energies, and purposes to acquire a coherent ‘personality’? What, then, keeps teams together? Is there scarcity of common purposes in the world? Is teaming essential for bacteria? Might teams, across scales, be both emergent as well as designed systems? How are cost-benefit analyses performed when group and individual goals diverge? Is your life on the spot market? Might individual liberties be compromised when teams form? In what way are all team members equal; & not? Is it better to lose playing beautifully, than to win an ugly game? Why are only certain parts of economic supply chains formalized? Conversely, why are certain ’formal’ rules just ignored? Does unemployment rate fall with increasing education? Are ‘practice’ and ‘rehearsal’ games different? How is ‘arms-race’ style evolution different? Do all teams need models? When is governance necessary? Would problem solving depend more and more upon complex teams in the future? &, how would individuals remain important? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Prof. Daniel G. Campos, Brooklyn College (CUNY), New York), economic sociology (Prof. Bino Paul, TISS, Mumbai), & evolutionary biology (Prof. Milind Watve, Dinanath Mangeshkar Hospital, Pune). Listen in...

Is counting just a special case of measuring? Is any kind of measuring, & scaling, dimension dependent? Do lungs ‘have’ a non-integer dimension between 2 and 3? Can you list all the numbers between 0 and 1? Do both the size and number of cells/organelles change with biological growth? Is Euclidean geometry sufficient to describe things in nature? What does thickness ‘mean’? Is size a good indicator of ‘the outer world’? How many times can one cell become another cell? ‘How’ do cells count? How determinate is that? Are evolved systems always robust? Do all dynamical systems, typically, have finite partitions? Where does end-state variety, then, come from? Why is the presence of mitochondria inside neurons spatially periodic? Are all noses proportionately similar? Must counting be happening at very small scales given the manifest proportions at the macro level? Is the link between cell type and its longevity understood? Do molecular motors walk in three dimensions? Might one, sometimes, see different statistics (say proportion of heads to tails) for different amounts of time? Will mathematics continue to take us beyond our intuitions? &, would we need to change our definition (& conception) of ordinary dimensions in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from cell biology (Dr. Sandhya Koushika, TIFR, Mumbai), & mathematics (Prof. Stefano Luzzatto, ICTP, Trieste). Listen in...

Is there a rhinoceros in the room? Is the quantum world aesthetically weird? Are quantum systems only small? What is macroscopicness? Is there quantum behavior, but no quantum objects? Why is (?) there randomness, but not superposition (say), in the manifest world? Is the World one unified physical system? Are there local hidden variables? Can reality/realism be local? Can detectors detect determinate outcomes while themselves not being in a determinate state? Is interaction free measurement possible? Why does context or history play a role? Is inference observation? Is (even) a single atom, when inside vacuum, truly isolated? Why is quantum-ness lost as systems/environments become complex/stronger? How ‘large’ can qubits be? Do causal and informational isolation coincide in the ‘real’ world? Why don’t we ever observe Tartaric Acid switch its handedness? Is common sense a good guide to how the physical world functions? Would we widely mine quantum entanglement as a ‘resource’? How much weirder will it get? &, would ‘…Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?’ in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from quantum physics (Prof. Anupam Garg, Northwestern University, Evanston (IL)), philosophy (Dr. Tarun Menon, TISS, Mumbai), & quantum computing (Dr. Rajamani Vijayaraghavan, TIFR, Mumbai). Listen in...

Are only boring people bored? How standard are your windows? How did the trivial, marginal, & everyday come to the foreground in literature, architecture, language, & ‘living’? Does space emerge ‘from’ living? Has your built environment been handed down to you? Must tragedy only be about high-born individuals? Are you ‘free’ to be bored? Has modernity produced a certain kind of boredom? How have we come to expect agency over the world? Can ‘having tea’ be the point of a novel? Can one extract the banal speech of-the-day from, say, the Rig Vedas? Is art always a dialectic between the alien and the familiar? Is boring, both, necessary & inevitable? Is ennui a privilege masquerading as an affliction? Do languages have a tight fit with their environment? Can grammar be felt as inadequate? What can you not do in Bhojpuri? How can buildings stay alive? Do we project boredom onto the world? Do you assign a value of ’nothing’ to boring gestational time outside of your control? How high would the bar of boredom go in the future? Will novels die? Will all, but one, languages die? Will we return to pre-Enlightenment performative forms? &, what would remain boring? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from architecture (Dr. Himanshu Burte, TISS, Mumbai), literary studies (Prof. Saikat Majumdar, Ashoka University, Delhi (NCR)), & linguistics (Dr. Peggy Mohan, Vasant Valley School, New Delhi). Listen in...

Do you talk to the Divine? Are feelings facts? Do you accept things as they are? What are you feeling at the moment? Are you agitated? Is sound the earliest primordial? However, do (say) colours, gestures, & silence also speak? Do emotions, fundamentally, emerge in cinema with the arrival of sound? How do we learn to say that we are not feeling well? Can emotions be thought of as objects? Which is the most ‘emotional’ part of the brain? Do words (& emotions) fall from heaven? How social or cultural are they? Is empathy (also) mediated by signs/words? Is the world consisting of words? Isn’t hook swinging barbaric? Are all saints, ?, schizophrenic? ‘How’ do you experience the death of a close person? When do you experience the deepest word-less emotions? Could you be unproductive? How do we become (or ‘avoid’ becoming) divine? Are we condemned to be self conscious? Do you experience fake emotions, & why? What is the ‘problem’ with acting? Can superheroes be melodramatic? Would there be more emotion-words in the future? &, will emotions continue to push us into the unknown world? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from anthropology & film-making (Dr. Ashish Avikunthak, The University of Rhode Island, Kingston), psychiatry (Dr. Amit Ranjan Basu, Shaheed Hospital, Dalli-Rajhara (Balod)), & philosophy (Prabodh Parikh, ex-Mithibai College, Mumbai). Listen in...