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, Jamia 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? Do 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...