SynTalk: Recent Episodes
SynTalk
f(q) = Is everything moving? (#TSAM)
SynTalk is a freewheeling interdisciplinary talk show with a philosophical approach to understanding the world from a long term perspective.
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...
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 right? 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 archaeology & 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 Visvanathan, 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? 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? &, 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 theory/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 German language & literature (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...
‘How’ are you hearing what you are hearing? Is hearing decoding? Do you already know what’s next? Would it have helped to have an accompanying video? Do we ’need’ to be able to differentiate at the level of sound to be able to ascribe different meanings? Why do a few hear Yanni, & a few Laurel? Do frogs need to see each other when croaking? When does the ear begin to form? Is the ear also a vestibular organ? Are you aware of the coordinated movement of your articulators? Are these articulators highly inefficient? Is there a link between hearing and higher cognitive functions? Is there a critical period for articulation? Did Neanderthals have vocalization? Are speech production and perception multi-sensory? Do gestures accompanying speech indicate that they may have been all integrated in the past? Did we get eyes before ears? How do sound vibrations become electrical signals? Have you experienced auditory hallucinations? Is the process of hearing confirmatory? Is silent reading (almost like) speaking ? Do we know how we think in language? Do several animals catch musical beats? Could the deaf hear in the future? How do dolphins hear? &, would we communicate via telepathy in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from phonetics & linguistics (Prof. Indranil Dutta, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), & developmental biology (Dr. Raj Ladher, NCBS, Bangalore). Listen in...
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 (Prof. 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...
Do you talk to your toaster? Do you think of ‘your’ bacteria as yourself? What self-replicates? Do organisms age during hibernation? Does the hybrid presuppose the pure? Can artefacts be made without thinking about their environments? Are our bodies at least somewhat mechanistic? Will we always live with the categories of the 1600s? Which deviations are aberrational? Do life and non-life lie on a continuum? Are only the animate living? Should doctors be haunted by the realization that their whole paradigm might change someday? Does psychology need physics? Could interactions between matter produce something of a different kind? How do a bunch of non living things come together to create living things? Is there a unit of life? Is the mitochondria living? Do robots ‘need’ ergonomic designing? Is there affordance between the non-living? Do stents & implants change us? Are robots akin to virus? Can Egyptian mummies be revived? Is objectivity context specific? Are processes involving the living fundamentally different? Can artefacts learn? Can environment change make enzymes evolve? What will organisms of the future be like? &, will we categorize differently? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using ideas from cultural studies (Dr. Anirban Das, CSSSC, Kolkata), systems design (Dr. Vivek Kant, IIT Kanpur, Kanpur), & cell biology (Dr. Sunil Laxman, DBT-inStem, Bangalore). Listen in...
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 in 1982 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...
Are you neutral? Is neutral inert? Do you practice hypocrisy? What does it mean to be (an) opposite? Are capitalism and socialism always incompatible? Do opposites always attract (even in natural systems) – why not? How might opposites be brought together? Are (certain) paradoxes culturally contingent? Can the cultural be told apart from the religious? Where did the very notion of religion emerge from? Does every enzyme always have a precise lock-key relationship with its specific substrate? How do proteins take their shapes, & what role do opposite charges/shapes play? Can certain mechanisms prevent extreme socio/political outcomes? Can democracy and authoritarianism co-habit? Is State the march of God on Earth? Might democracy be practised (merely) ritualistically? Why is social memory so poor? Is ‘balance’ fundamental to (only?) biological life? Can/must industries/we produce as efficiently as trees do? Does cosmopolitanism (truly) celebrate difference? Is living with true difference impossible? Do enzymes also vanish like how scripts do? What are we silent about? Is equilibrium worth searching for? What does the future hold…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from chemistry (Prof. Kankan Bhattacharyya, IISER, Bhopal), history (Dr. Ananya Chakravarti, Georgetown University, Washington DC), & political science (Prof. Niraja Gopal Jayal, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in...
Do you (only) like people like you? Is belonging ‘necessary’? Are communities homogeneous? How do communities become political actors from being social entities? Are community identities a way of becoming legible for the State? Does the idea of nations pre-suppose the idea of communities? Conversely, how do countries or communities fall apart? Are societies modern, & communities pre-modern? Can communities self-determine themselves as such? How much can communities scale? How is the community enacted, & what keeps it going? Are they all kept together by (filial) feelings? What is the interplay between blood, language, religion, ‘culture’, trade, and subsequent social formations? ‘Where’ are self-interested strangers civil to each other? Is the State natural to human beings? Does language make us human? Are (all) individuals, therefore, social? Are all women a community? &, call centre employees? Do you want to be on the winning side? Are utopias scary? What happens when we turn within? Will communities persist in the future? Or, is the future unhomely and infinitely lonely? Would there be new modalities of drawing connections? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from political theory (Prof. Neera Chandhoke, ex-University of Delhi, Delhi), anthropology (Dr. Mathangi Krishnamurthy, IIT Madras, Chennai), & history (Prof. Gyan Prakash, Princeton University, Princeton). Listen in...
What would you have bought – an air pump, or a printing machine? What can you read? Does the idea of ‘writing’ automatically lead to the idea of ‘book’? Do you worship books? But, also immerse them in rivers? ‘Who’ has written the divine texts, & why? Do you (still) read aloud? Does the nature of support (say, clay tablet…) determine the writing style (…cuneiform)? Are media effects deterministic? What made paper cheap? What made/makes it to books? Why did the printing press not take off in Goa in the 16th century? Can there be complex societies without writing systems? Did print revolutionize both the Word and the Image? Why are full old books now often dismembered? Do ur-objects exist? Do books ‘want’ to be edited and ‘re-read’? Was copy always an antonym of original? Does writing have to be read to be effective? Can you play Bach just by reading an early 18th century music sheet? Are machines making impossible books possible again? Will physical books always remain a highly political object? Will we be able to read against the grain in the future? &, will writing/reading always be there (even if books disappear)? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from book history & literary studies (Prof. Swapan Chakravorty, Presidency University, Kolkata), art history (Dr. Yael R. Rice, Amherst College, Amherst), & heritage conservation (Anupam Sah, CSMVS Museum, Mumbai). Listen in...
Have you ever touched the feet of a dead body? Who will you die in the company of? Where do dogs go to die? Do they grieve others’ death? Is fear of death universal? What causes delirium? What role does religion play in dying? When do children first begin to understand that death is permanent, & that even they would die someday? Is every dying person also a living person? Could grieving turn into a disease? How ‘complicated’ can grief be? Do people who deny death often have horrible ends? Does suffering cease to be suffering when it has meaning? Are you good at saying ‘final’ goodbyes? Do the dying (humans, dogs, cats, …) know that they are going to die? Is it (so) difficult to say whether a person is dying? Do people sometimes almost come back from the dead? What are ICU ‘Rules’ for? How does Oscar the Cat know who is going to die next? Do freshly dead people smell different? Can heart continue to beat in a dead person? Do you feel ‘connected’? Are you looking to attain salvation? Will we die good deaths in the future? How ‘distributed’ or centralized would dying be? Can death make one understand Life? &, would death remain a stranger? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from animal care (Abodh Aras, The Welfare of Stray Dogs, Mumbai), psychiatry (Prof. Santosh Chaturvedi, NIMHANS, Bangalore), & palliative care (Dr. M. R. Rajagopal, Pallium India, Thiruvananthapuram). Listen in…
What came first – the nuclear power plant or the nuclear bomb? Do you fear nuclear power(s)? What was our experience of encountering coal? What is the relationship between energy consumption and well-being? What drives demand? Is more (always) better? Why did human population grow steeply from c. 1698? Where did the muscular Uncle Sam come from? Does pollution kill more people than wars? Is nuclearization value-neutral? How are human beings a part of nuclear power systems? How does (any) technology become a political or cultural artefact? What was the first official publicity like? Can ‘something’ be an instrument of peace ‘and’ an absolute weapon of destruction? Is nuclear energy ‘sublime’? Is it democratic? Is it green? Why aren’t nuclear power plants located within cities if they are not risky? Do more plants risk more weapons? Where does spent fuel go? Can the political economy of a nuclear power plant be separated from its engineering? Why the ‘secrecy’ (?)? What is the future of nuclearity? Is industrialization necessary? Will we beam energy down from satellites? &, will we have to continue to live with (military) radioactivity? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from nuclear engineering (Prof. R. B. Grover, HBNI, Mumbai), development studies (Dr. Manu V. Mathai, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), & cultural studies (Dr. Dibyadyuti Roy, IIM Indore, Indore). Listen in...
Are ‘things’ (truly) suppressed? What does it mean to act? (How?) is the fan in your computer doing something to you? Are there many kinds of intentionalities in the world? Do animals and machines also act? Are language, metaphysics, politics, agency – all – reserved only for us? Could politicization of the material world be thought of as depoliticization of the human society? What cannot interact? Is mediation a sub-species of action? Are definitions also actions? Is a detailed description identical to an explanation? Is there a depth dimension to Reality? Are things contained in space, or does space exist ‘because’ things exist? Does the form of ‘spacing out’, then, lead to the possibilities of voluntary or involuntary actions? Does the subject always contain the predicate? Is your worldview dualistic? What is hidden within ourselves? Might action be caused by disembodied intention? What makes crowds mobs? Does the material non-human world permeate our social lives via (say) language and behaviour? Is social change, therefore, not so easy? Is capital the real actor? &, are the possibilities of the future a given, or can the world be acted upon (endlessly)? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from anthropology (Prof. Arjun Appadurai, NYU, New York), philosophy (Dr. Enakshi Ray Mitra, University of Delhi, New Delhi), & East Asian studies (Dr. Christian Uhl, Ghent University, Ghent). Listen in...
Are nomads free? Are nations stable? Do you take the ground for granted? Where are your ancestors from? Why did modern humans leave Africa? Are empires and nations products of circulatory processes? What circulates, & how? Have you heard of nomadic empires? Do nomads make good citizens? Is their relationship with the settled often symbiotic? Are the nomads not settled because the animals (that they live off) are not settled? Does culture reproduce the spaces of circulation via (say) music, houses, culinary practices, & marriages? Is anything static dead? Do different entities (from earth to individuals) and phenomena (from droughts to mutations) have different criss crossing temporalities? What does endogamy result from/in? Do genes flow like rivers or oceans, & when? How are the Andamanese unique? How might certain diseases ‘hide’ within isolated communities? What circuits does capital need to circulate freely? What does it replace? Is history a planetary thing, & not exclusive to a sovereign sub-part? What is the future of marriages? What is the future of vagabonds? Can human life ever be fully de-territorialized? &, would the nomadic ethos ever fully go away? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from history (Prof. Prasenjit Duara, Duke University, Durham), sociology (Dr. Subir Rana, Bangalore), & genetics (Dr. K. Thangaraj, CCMB, Hyderabad). Listen in...
Why is that body heading the other way? Do different objects fall differently? Is it a mystery why bodies attract each other? What is the ontology of gravity? Did Newton find his own idea of universal gravitation absurd? When was Space first believed to be unlimited? Do belief systems and knowledge systems always influence each other? Does experience form intuition? Is a simultaneous process of falling in and falling out always ongoing in the Universe? What is it like to fall into black holes? Are they empty inside? Are their horizons smooth? Are black holes fuzzballs (or ‘string stars’)? How do they then ‘emit’ entangled radiation? Is floating a ‘kind’ of falling? Is gravity a matter related phenomenon, & not a force at all? Or, are all forces aspects of (geometric) space? How limited is our own experience of the physical world? Does reality sometimes mask itself in other ‘dimensions’? ‘How’ will you take a free kick from 30 metres outside the goal post? How much of gravity is cognizable? Can (dual) objects that appear identical in form be very different in substance? Do we also need the things we cannot explain for our existence? What is the future of our Universe? &, will we find the ‘angels’…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from black hole physics and string theory (Prof. Samir Mathur, The Ohio State University (OSU), Columbus), & philosophy (Prof. Babu Thaliath, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in...
Can you do whatever you want at home? Do you own private property? Do you hold (private) opinions? ‘What’ do you care for? Why & how do boundaries shift between the private and public realms? Do you have a right to health (& to smoke?)? Does economic development influence how public-private distinction is thought of? Is the process of drawing lines always political? Does increasing GDP always work automatically for publicly desired outcomes? Must private property also (eventually) be seen as enhancing publicness? Do cities get made by plans? Are urban realms continuums of spaces and energies? How do practices create temporary private spaces? Is ownership necessary? Do you often cross into others’ private spaces? Why not? Is the modern State the only public mode? Are individuals at a technical disadvantage against the collectives? How might social and individual goals be aligned? Will we remain more hung up on our differences? Will we continue to become more cellularized? How will public norms (& Laws) change? &, is the future likely to be both highly cellularized and regulated (by public norms)? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from law (Prof. Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), urban planning (Prasad Shetty, School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), Mumbai), & economics (Prof. Sebastian Vollmer, The University of Göttingen, Göttingen). Listen in...
Of what womb are you born? Are there good & bad animals? ‘Where’ is there no Law? Are the outlawed animal-like? Who gets to be a citizen of the polis? Are Pandavas princes in the forest? Are the freer nobler? Does the wolf look down upon the dog? Are animals truly in the open? Are humans, in a sense, the most abandoned? Is the jungle still within us? Did our ability to exchange (& imagine) enable us to curb our animal instincts and establish ‘humanity’? Where do Gods and demons come from? Is divinity empathy? What exactly is tiger-man? Does hunger lead to evil? Is empathy required in the jungle? Did peasantry play a role in reconfiguring human-animal relationships? Can (all) animals be sacrificed for humans? Do animals have to be attributed with a Being? What do they have in common with us? How do we turn Other humans into animals? Why are inter-species social relationships possible? Do you understand how insects suffer (or, how larvae wait to be captured)? Are we overwhelmingly anthropomorphic? Must species barriers be blurred? Would we, in the future, have everything we desire? Are the werewolves here to stay? &, would the repressed always return? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from comparative literature (Prof. Peter Arnds, Trinity College, Dublin), philosophy (Dr. Prasenjit Biswas, NEHU, Shillong), & mythology (Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik, Mumbai). Listen in...
Are you in (deep) passionate love? Or, have passions calmed down? Do revolutions happen spontaneously, & what maintains them? How do we keep various commitments? Do you imagine yourself as an object? What bores you? Could we, sometimes, experience boredom in a deep kind of way? Can human relationships be authentically mediated by objects? Is consumerism itself a revolution? Do most of us not have a systematic view of the world? Do (only) individuals fall in love? Do we become more revolutionary merely if we suffer more? What role do narratives play? What is the future of – the idea of – pure love? ‘Should’ a sense of moral duty be invoked to keep marriages together? Would anything be lost if we are found to be superficial beings? Is the appeal for individualized consumption less in societies that have collective social aims? Does consumerism work because it taps into our ability to love? Do consumer culture and religiosity go together? Do we need both theory and memory? Would the sites of boredom keep changing? &, would the notion of commitment become more flexible in the future, even as we continue to fall in love? But why? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from cultural theory & intellectual history (Prof. Craig Brandist, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield), philosophy (Prof. Raja Halwani, SAIC, Chicago), & sociology (Prof. Sanjay Srivastava, IEG, New Delhi). Listen in...
Could traits trend? What do you want to detect? Are there many more rare species than common species? When is the past representative of the future? Are all models wrong and precarious? What, then, is evidence? Can surprises be modeled? Do unlikely events often happen in very likely ways? Are correlations higher on extremes? Are rare species more redundant? How might one find proxies for rarities? Is likelihood a comparative measure of ‘distance’ from the truth to the model? Is it trivial to select the most ‘likely’ model when given the data? Are inferences always highly model-dependent (especially for rare events)? What leads to thin or thick tails? Do rare events need sensitive (&, not robust) models? When does simulation help? Is extinction often followed by speciation? Why did a tree go extinct with the dodos? Do all elk have a certain (statistically significant) ‘elkness’? Do hyper-connected markets or systems increase the overall ruin risk? Would certain blackouts, shutdowns, collapses, and perfect storms be designed away in the future? &, will we continue to adapt and, somehow, escape our inevitable fate? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from applied probability (Prof. Sandeep Juneja, TIFR, Mumbai), statistics (Prof. Subhash Lele, University of Alberta, Edmonton), & conservation biology (Dr. Karthikeyan Vasudevan, CCMB, Hyderabad). Listen in...
Is repair a form of creation? When can the new and the old coexist? Is the idea of ‘new’ itself, human and, new? Is this understanding always subject/context dependent? Why don’t we sometimes notice the new? What’s new for the deer in the savannah? Is memory history? When is the old also obsolete? Do events have both a past and a future? How is the past unlike an object? Did capitalism ‘create’ time? Did modernity change both the object and the subject? How do certain societies break away from the past more easily? How can the erased be recovered? Does language often carry traces of the past? When are myths essential? Why was the old found to be necessary for the Meiji Restoration? Is Viśhwákarma Brahmā? Why do Nations want to be timeless? Is the grammar of the evolutionary past neuro-anatomically encoded in us? Similarly, are some vestiges of older social forms always present in the present? What cannot be repaired? Do we really need a ‘new’ future? Is old/new an either/or choice? Must we think of new and old as different ways of being? How might one find (realistic) choices to radically new problems? &, will we disappear again? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from cognitive sciences (Dr. Rajesh Kasturirangan, ClimateX, Boston), history & philosophy (Dr. Viren Murthy, UW-Madison, Madison), & anthropology (Dr. Abhijeet Paul, UC Berkeley, Berkeley). Listen in...
Is Earth one system? How stable is New York? What sort of a person are you? How does the structure of your networks change the way you behave? How do you find out if something is good? Are societies with (Royal Family-like) strong hubs bad for social learning? Can atmosphere be thought of in terms of networks? Are unstable solutions more likely to become strong? Is it coincidental that strong El Niño and weak Monsoon often go together? Why/when did Krishna have to show his large magnificent form? Is strength always a transient (contingent) ‘solution’? Is democracy the rule of the weak (the ruled…)? Could weak ties produce solidarity? Are States and Markets substitutes? Do both of these, however, needs ‘lots of’ Society (i.e. social ties)? Do you need to have friends to succeed in a competitive market? How are couplings made stronger? Can synchronization be lost after strengthening? How do dynamics and structure of networks influence each other? Can a tornado destroy the whole earth? Could seeking extreme efficiency be risky? Would there be no trade-offs in the future? &, would the world keep becoming more ‘superfluid’ (and superfluous)? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from dynamical systems (Dr. Amit Apte, ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore), political theory & poetry (Prof. Ashwani Kumar, TISS, Mumbai), & economics (Prof. Sanjeev Goyal, University of Cambridge, Cambridge). Listen in...
Is it nonsensical to think that suffering is a part of the ‘human condition’? Are you a passive victim? Can you easily be more or less of yourself? Who suffers? Do we suffer because we are highly (self) conscious creatures? Are you forced to engage with the everyday? Does suffering have a duration, and can we live purely (& independently) in the present? Is violence inevitable in all lives? Can one voluntarily incur suffering? Does being a victim have any moral consequences? Can sacrifice be practised narcissistically? Is sacrifice a way of taking violence, and turning it inwards? Does everyone have something to sacrifice? Do those who do not suffer lead shallow lives? Do human beings differ in the amounts they suffer? Do you decide generically? Can the underprivileged be moral heroes, & when? Why does fasting-unto-death sometimes work? Are language and suffering very closely connected? How can one suffer better? Is vulnerability (or the performance of it) potentially a political force? Is a moral life fearless? Why do people with no hope of survival fight and die for everyone else? &, must one learn to die ‘appropriately’? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from history (Prof. Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, Oxford), sociology (Prof. Pushpesh Kumar, University of Hyderabad (UoH), Hyderabad), & philosophy (Prof. David Weberman, Central European University (CEU), Budapest). Listen in...
Are we neighbours? Do ghost authors write probabilistically? Could one build a house between your and your neighbour’s house? Can we draw a graph of the universe with colours of all the points in it? Do languages have distances from each other? How do sounds create neighbours linguistically? When/how can process states or words or sentences be said to be neighbours? Can A be a neighbour of B, when B is not a neighbour of A? Why can’t there be adjacent ‘points’? Are neighbours geometry dependent? Does the idea of neighbours change if time and/or space is continuous? Are scripts a technology to transmit (natural) language? Is Latin evolving? What role do texts play in language transactions and for context? How is pursuit of chess different from the pursuit of science? Can chess games be said to progress like sentences? Are humans language-using-machines? Is thinking of ‘only’ adjacencies as neighbours limited in most contexts? Are meanings neighbours? Are both humans (also randomly) and machines always changing the idea of neighbours? &, how did Hamilton Bridge become Barber’s Bridge? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from computational psycholinguistics (Dr. Emmanuel Keuleers, Tilburg University, Tilburg), discrete mathematics (Prof. Navin Singhi, ex-TIFR, Mumbai), & control theory (Prof. M. Vidyasagar, IIT Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Listen in...
What makes Ujjain searchable? When did you last use a thesaurus? Does all search presuppose a structure, & can this structure be implicit? Is labeling necessary; when? How can one say if a text is structured? Are we all unique; but are we all also searchable because we belong to ‘groups’? Are all search problems matching problems? Is all search correlational? Can we search in different ways and find the same thing? Can different documents/texts/languages be coherent vis-à-vis each other? Is the final arbiter eventually the (human) searcher? Are you able to walk into any ‘library’ and use it with ease straightaway? To what extent can one determine (or estimate?) the identity of an unknown decomposed dead body? Does everything revolve around bones? Could our footprint give our face away? Are fingerprints gendered? How do we identify bird species? Why is image (or, even, sound) search difficult? How much can one disguise oneself? Could one search ambiguously and without, precisely, knowing what one is looking for? &, what kinds of searches are likely to remain very difficult in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from forensic anthropology (Dr. Kewal Krishan, Panjab University, Chandigarh), computational linguistics (Prof. Amba Kulkarni, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), & information sciences (Prof. Stephen Robertson, City University of London, London). Listen in…
How are you experiencing time now? Is everything moving? Is the Still merely an ‘extract’ from the flux? Do images constitute both matter and memory? Can a 3D representation be created from several 2D images? How is motion detected? Is the interrelationship between the cameras themselves crucial to figuring out the structure of space? Is the moving image (truly?) a composite of still images? What lies between the moving and the still – GIFs? Is the perceptual world constituted by our senses? Is sensory stimulus itself always ambiguous? Can moments be appended if they are not already there? What exactly does exposure do to a photograph? Can you make stories out of whatever images you see? If Word is Photograph, then what is Articulation? Is cinema an art of time? Why do we have two eyes? Why is sports photography also physical? Do you bother lizards? Are dreams a field of action? Are still pictures ‘deeper’; why do they hold our gaze? Can only interesting things be perceived? Is high-level, purposive, & affective robotic vision possible in the future? What is our future like? &, will we belong, think, remember, & act differently in the world? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from photography (Arko Datto, Kolkata), computer vision (Dr. Venu Madhav Govindu, IISc, Bangalore), & critical theory (Dr. Rajan Kurai Krishnan, Ambedkar University, New Delhi). Listen in...
Can we avoid fractals if we want to? Are our fingers irregular? Is there thumb cancer? Or, toe cancer? Are all regular objects ‘algebraically’ representable? Are cones manifolds? Do cubes have an algebraic description? Can algebraic equations catch everything (?) that topology cannot? Might two visually indistinguishable manifolds vary dramatically? Can circles have a ‘complex’ structure? Do biological objects (including virus) have edges or points? Do multi scale interactions make hearts or kidneys regular? Do biological objects always (always) live in time? Can the open Euclidean space be put ‘inside’ another space? Can shape, volume, and size (say) tell us whether a biological organ is regular? Might there even be regularity across species? When/is cancer growth predictable? Can fractals only be approximated (algebraically)? Why can’t biological objects be thought of only computationally? Is it easy to tell irregularity and complexity apart? Is ‘too complex’ as good as irregular? Can irregularity be no-where-dense? Why is 3-dimensional space much more complicated than spaces with both higher and lower dimensions? Will biology have to take the material properties (hardness, etc.) into account in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from cell biology (Dr. Ramray Bhat, IISc, Bangalore), & algebraic geometry (Dr. Amalendu Krishna, TIFR, Mumbai). Listen in...
Are you thinking of going back to paradise? Does technology exist, autonomously, without us? Is it the new vector ruling the world? Where did the idea of newness come from? Does technology come (more) from arts & crafts than science? Do both socialism and capitalism go together with technology? Was Industrial Revolution science driven? Might religious change drive technology? Similarly, do new technologies change social relations? How is organic evolution different from the technological? Are hybridization and differentiation possibilities much greater in technology? What does not change? Do we need a ‘Darwin of machines’? Is there always a gap between the users’ tactics and the engineers’ strategy? Can technology make us ‘stupid’? However, is technology neither good, nor bad, nor neutral? How did acoustics go from the paradigm of music to engineering? Are wars the mother of all inventions? Can technology be forgotten? Must there be more social actors? What is the future – Will we still have hammers? Would we blow ourselves up? Will the digital and genetic come together? &, would we have a new ‘model’ of dog every week? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from economics (Prof. Praveen Jha, JNU, New Delhi), media studies & semiotics (Dr. Carlos Alberto Scolari, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona), & history of science (Dr. Roland Wittje, IIT Madras, Chennai). Listen in...
Are bones dry? Is blood sticky? Are cells ‘rough’? Do dead cells dry up? Are stiffer (cancer) tumours more dangerous? Would stickiness on another planet be a tell-tale sign of the presence of Life? Does the act of adding and/or removing parts make things imperfect. Therefore, are all engineered artifacts rough? Does wettability depend upon both materials? Why do cells jiggle inside the matrix? Are all living environments aqueous? Can the architecture of blood vessels or cells be mathematically modeled? Is context everything? Why do some materials refuse to stick to another? How does one make something slippery or sticky? Do dryness and roughness go together? How does a wound heal itself, & how ‘heterogeneous’ is the seal? Is surface tension a competition between cohesion and adhesion? Do cells have ‘feet’ to crawl and feel? Are there many ways of sticking? How do cancer cells survive elsewhere? Does the rigidity or fluidity of membranes impact the signaling processes themselves? Can there be a master glue that sticks everything? Do all bio-molecules multitask? Might all interfacial interactions (such as adhesion) be understood via electrical impulses? Will cyborgs of the future get cancer? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from cell biology (Dr. Nagaraj Balasubramanian, IISER, Pune), & mechanical engineering (Prof. Suman Chakraborty, IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur). Listen in…
Are younger systems faster? Do elephants mate slowly? Is a plastic ruler always ageing? Is only glass glassy? Why are processes slow or fast, & how do they speed up or slow down? Do all systems have an internal clock? Is water fast because it acts like a large correlated spring? Is there such a thing as fully-dissolved? Are certain social systems stable because they remain ‘useful’? How does fashion change fast? Is slowness a sign of highly connected groups? ‘How’ does inter-caste marriage happen? Is the past more important only for systems that are undergoing change? Do external disruptions lead to a revival in interest in the past? What is the opposite of revolution? What changes predictably – science or technology? How do languages die? Does protein misfolding tell us about its past? Are the biasing forces blind? Is friction a memory function? Is swapping like catalyzing? Is speed synonymous with forgetting? How do the ‘same’ human beings exist in different states? Could an umbrella theory uncover secrets of all slow dynamics? Will we remain addicted to speed? &, what will not change much in the long run? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from physical chemistry (Prof. Biman Bagchi, IISc, Bangalore), literary theory (Prof. Sachin Ketkar, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara), & glass physics (Prof. Jorge Kurchan, École Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris). Listen in...
Was the Earth ever flat? Do we live in a ‘flattish’ Universe? What did we first notice in the starry sky; & was anything fixed? How did the notion of the atom come to be? Have you heard accounts of maps/globes that do not exist anymore? Was the ‘World’ once – just – Asia, Europe and Africa? Do maps always orient us spiritually within the larger (ever-changing) Cosmos? Is the Universe static? Are maps a theory? What comes first – theory or observation? How can we map something we don’t see or is largely empty? Is all Dark Matter of one kind, & how do we know that it exists? Are all stars of one kind? Could stars be cubes? Is it easy to add a newly discovered continent to an existing map? Why did the idea of Antarctica come to be? What did we first establish to be ‘real’ – the atom or the Americas? What is the shape of the Universe, & is every point on it unique? Are we bounded in time (& Space?)? Is mapping (always) observer dependent? Can everything be understood in terms of pictures? Would maps (even if sometimes incorrect) continue to offer new possibilities? &, will we keep going beyond what we already know? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from quantum mechanics (Prof. Partha Ghose, ex-S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata), astronomy (Prof. Ajit. K. Kembhavi, IUCAA, Pune), & comparative literature (Dr. Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University, Connecticut). Listen in...
What paints the scene for you? Do you often get carried away? How do we recall the mutable past? Is all implicitness context, time, politics, language, and subject dependent? Is our freest choice also controlled by culture? What makes something visible, sayable, perceivable, or (even) intuitive? Can the visual be more implicit than the textual? Is sound most implicit? Is our implicit explicit for ‘God’? Is architecture, being both symbolic and real, the language of the given? Is architecture mythical? How does the built form (say, the stage) reflect the natural world or the cosmology? Are airports non-places? How do the givens change (either dramatically or slightly)? How might tea be advertised? Does modernity reference only itself? Do you sell things off you do not use? Why can’t a performance be fully reproduced or archived or described? Do each one of us have our own implicit? Do we always create more implicit? Can Reason make everything explicit? Will we keep pursuing the promise of presence as we attempt to ‘leap’ forward? What do we want to be? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from performance studies (Dr. Trina Nileena Banerjee, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Kolkata), semiotics & linguistics (Dr. Seema Khanwalkar, CEPT University, Ahmedabad), & art history / architecture (Dr. Venugopal Maddipati, Ambedkar University, New Delhi). Listen in...
Do you consume Garcinia? What does it mean to (not) own land or the forests? Do farms and forests lie on a continuum? Can forests themselves be farmed? Does wildlife conservation impact people for whom forests are a source of livelihood? Do we eat what some animals would not eat? Do you primarily eat (volatile) fresh produce? How are agricultural markets different from, and similar to, other markets? Is the Market an alien imposition atop the subsistence ‘economy’? Why are farmers often price takers? Where does market power emanate from, & what leads to interlocking and/or intermediation? Does ‘exchange’ capture more value than production? How is rice different from wheat? Have agrarian worlds always been rich exchange environments? Can agriculture generate sufficient surplus to support empires (or families)? Are small-farm farmers always more productive? Why isn’t there economies of scale in production? What makes agriculture so, so, complex? Are farmers becoming workers? Does Nature need to be protected from agriculture? Should seeds be preserved in seed banks, or plates, or Half-Earth? Are all consumers a member of the agrarian community? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from anthropology (Dr. Mekhala Krishnamurthy, Ashoka University, Delhi (NCR)), ecology (Dr. Nitin D. Rai, ATREE, Bangalore), & economics (Dr. Vamsi Vakulabharanam, UMass, Amherst). Listen in...
How far are you? ‘What’ is a place? Are they a moment of ‘realized’ relationships? Are (say) air pollution, hospitals, hydraulic systems, temperature, diseases, real estate prices, and species distributed similarly spatially? Does it take a lot of work to make a place? What does it mean for places to be similar? Have we always been placed the same way? Why aren’t there tigers in Sri Lanka? Are habitats and species always strongly correlated? Might India be closer to Madagascar than Africa in some respects? Can geological history be inferred from phylogeny? Can noise have a spatial structure? Is all data spatiotemporal, & does proximity (often) strongly imply relatedness? Are real estate prices continuous? Are context and history key to understanding spatiality? Are interactions and relations primary, & location or identity secondary? Do cities emerge to manage (or control?) exchanges at scale? When are places hybrids? Why do Gaussian processes work for multidimensional interpolation? Can we understand spatial dependences better? Would there be fewer places in the future? Would places remain tied to the notion of permanence, and the ‘pretence’ continue? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from anthropology (Dr. Nikhil Anand, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), statistics (Prof. Sudipto Banerjee, UCLA, Los Angeles), & biogeography (Dr. K. Praveen Karanth, IISc, Bangalore). Listen in...
Do you forget names and words? Are you going to get Alzheimer’s soon? Is any experience fundamentally conditioned by time? What cannot be anticipated? Can murmurs function like (unprocessed?) signs? Why are multi-parameter signals very difficult to ‘observe’ ahead of time? Is knowing all the initial conditions the primary source of difficulty? How are social systems different? Can beauty be ‘a’ number? Are nucleation events always stochastic? Does growth of protein aggregates ‘fit’ the equations more easily in a test tube than in the human body? Is change of phase akin to change of model equations? Do magnets, markets, fluids, or (even) society display some signals (say, susceptibility or compressibility) before a transition? Is it possible for a laser pulse to exit before it has entered? Does the stimulus to transform always come from the outside? Are all misfolded proteins similar the way all chairs are similar? Does recognizing new patterns need languages (& neologisms), & what happens when forms dissolve? Are repetitions (always) copies? How can we be ‘otherwise’? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from statistical physics & econophysics (Prof. Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata), philosophy (Prof. Leonard Lawlor, The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania), & biophysics (Prof. Sudipta Maiti, TIFR, Mumbai). Listen in...
What’s your kill count? Do cats and dogs play to win? Do you like running and racing? Does play express freedom while pushing at the boundaries of reality, materials, & rules? Does normal life lend solidity to games, even though they may be interrupted by reality? Are literature and games both forms of cultural simulation? Would a Martian visiting Earth be able to distinguish work from play? Why can games only be enacted (& not narrated) in real time by the player? Must players be aware of their effects on each other for a situation to be a game? How does nature make its moves? Are the rules of a game arbitrary though not irrational? Can legal moves be illogical and/or unethical? How ‘large’ games can be, & must they be conclusive? Can several mathematical proofs be thought of as (systemic and/or narrative) turn-based games? Are all perfect information games winnable? How are games with imperfect or incomplete information different? Can anything be learnt via play? Why doesn’t game-play develop as fast as the simulation of spaces? Could games be used for ‘serious’ purposes in the future? Would leisure stay free? Or, might games cease to be play even as we bet everything on it? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from literature (Prof. Supriya Chaudhuri, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), logic (Dr. Sujata Ghosh, ISI, Chennai), & game design (Dhruv Jani, Studio Oleomingus, Vapi). Listen in...
Are you unique, even though you are of a certain type? What kind of a tree is the tree of life? Are all organisms, languages, and substances in the world distinct? 'Can' languages be genetically interpreted? How do we know if we have an origin common with (say) bacteria? Are types always fuzzy, and tokens always particular? Do types exist, & are they like classes? Does our craving for understanding lead us to structures, or does the World 'have' a structure? Are all languages tokens of a meta-language? Is Japanese (language) an isolate and therefore both a type and a token? Are all facts structural facts? Can there be tokens that do not belong to any type? How do new types come to be? What is language itself a type of? Is the Chomskyian Universal Grammar evolving? Did (inner) language precede speech? Is our thinking overlapping, and speech ordered? Do animals think? What is inherited? Can it be said, for a certain function (or a disease), how many types we are? Would we all have precision medicine available for each one of us in the near future? &, from the standpoint of eternity is there only one type – sub specie aeternitatis…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from linguistics (Dr. Tanmoy Bhattacharya, University of Delhi, New Delhi), genomics (Dr. Rakesh Mishra, CSIR-CCMB, Hyderabad), & philosophy (Prof. Priyambada Sarkar, University of Calcutta, Kolkata). Listen in...
Which side of the separatrix are you? Does self-interaction make systems chaotic? Have you ever experienced turbulence? Do you have an intuition for chaotic behaviour in various realms? Is chaos always fecund? However, can chaos also be ‘produced’? Is noise the same as chaos? Can very simple systems be chaotic? Can solids, circuits, and solar systems be chaotic? How do laminar (periodic) systems transition to aperiodic chaos, & vice versa, when (say) flow happens inside a pipe? Did chaos come first, & is everything thereafter a result of its coming together with Gaia and Eros? Is it possible for the future to determine the present (or the past) – is this provable (bit.ly/2xCZdPF)? Can events be a part of a process, & what causes it? Is history chaotic? Do chaotic systems’ sensitive dependence to initial conditions prove that the World is non deterministic? Are all deterministic systems necessarily predictable? Can a very ‘small’ cause lead to a very ‘large’ effect? However, do some things just happen spontaneously? Does weather in one part depend on the rest of the world? Can we create large scale robust chaos? &, what is the long term future of our understanding of chaos? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from electrical engineering (Prof. Soumitro Banerjee, IISER, Kolkata), fluid dynamics (Prof. Rama Govindrajan, ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore), & philosophy (Dr. Arun Iyer, IIT Bombay, Mumbai). Listen in...
Do we die ‘because’ we stop breathing? Is it possible to say how ‘a’ cancer is caused? Do causes exist? Are they (always) universal, uniform, & a priori? Are all phenomena eventually multi-causal and probabilistic? Might cause be a feature of the mind? Is the ‘concept’ of cause essential? What explains changes in the world? What role do (say) our senses, culture, technology, institutions, & chance play? Why do grasshoppers jump randomly once in a while? Can randomness also have causes? Is the effect invalid without the (correct) cause? Does technology (the ‘how’) often precede science (the ‘why’)? Is understanding of causality, however, both beneficial and satisfying? Can certain pockets of genome or organisms be more mutation prone? Do hotspots of innovation emerge in a similar fashion? What is the ultimate cause of risk taking? Might heightened resilience lead to lesser disruption? Why do certain honey bees go to certain flowers? Are ultimate causes eventually evolutionary? Was the world always as it is today? Can we live without ultimate causes? Must we keep looking for causality even in a playful world? &, what is it that ultimately survives everything else…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from innovation studies (Prof. Anil K. Gupta, IIM Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad), philosophy (Prof. T. S. Rukmani, Concordia University, Montreal), & biology (Prof. L. S. Shashidhara, IISER, Pune). Listen in...
Can the ocean be boiled? Is the aquarium a closed system? Is the Universe an open system? Are all systems conceptual (& arbitrary?)? Do systems always have components? Can an individual body have a temperature? Why does the temperature not change ‘during’ the process of freezing? What describes volume? Might we have closed (idealized) theories to understand otherwise open systems? How do bodies ‘turn’ inactive? Is openness always a question of degree given (say) the strength of interactions and/or the dimensional scale? Is classical theory an approximation of quantum theory? What would your little protest do? Can closed societies stay closed forever? Do dynamics of interactions matter? Can phase transitions happen in closed systems? Can living cells become inert (yet viable) spores? Does atom-ness exist? Are we, as human beings, components of systems? How do political systems take shape? Is it possible for ideas to be closed? Does our changing knowledge keep even the past unclosed? Is anything closed at all? Are closed models necessary and helpful? &, will we continue to open the world up this way? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Dr. Anirban Mukherjee, University of North Bengal, Siliguri), electrical engineering & systems biology (Dr. Shaunak Sen, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), & mathematics (Prof. K. B. Sinha, JNCASR, Bangalore). Listen in...
What’s posterity ever done for you? What survives in the long run? How did (public) museums come to be from private collections? Who owns the past? Do we transact with the invisible sacral world via these accumulations? How is the integrity of (say) sounds preserved and meanings imbued in them? What makes chants memorable? Can objects be looked at as mere postulations? Are ‘art’ objects pointers to a certain moment in time in the artist’s life? How stable are museums – do objects sometimes end up in a bonfire there? Can art survive only by including the possibility of its own change (& even death)? Does making something also allow one to move forward? What is not heritage? Do narratives precede collection? What do we look past? How does a proverb work? Why do non-Brahmins chant? How are histories localized? What happens outside museums and galleries, & how is that taken ‘in’? Are devotion and detachment different? Does the present need the past; & is the past always ‘here’? Are we worried about forgetting? Will we keep traveling from the particular to the universal? How can you postpone somebody else’s death? What is the future of the past? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from folklore studies (Dr. M. D. Muthukumaraswamy, National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai), art (Sudarshan Shetty, Mumbai), & art history (Prof. Kavita Singh, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in...
Does your neck hurt? Do you allow yourself to be moved? What is your relationship with gravity? Are ‘bodies moving in space’ the fundamental units of meaning? Do we shape the space around us geometrically? Is dance a way of generating numbers from the metaphysical space (…from the stars?)? Is our body, also, linear and planar? Is your body interconnected? Can you feel your fascia? Could gestures ‘disturb’ language? Is a static body always lifeless? Is movement (intention?) life, & is only displacement movement? Do notions of stability and movement go hand in hand? Do our thoughts change when we change our posture? How articulate is your torso? How universal are gestures and what they ‘signify’? How do factors such as climate, culture, technology, art, & division-of-labour enter our movements? How much of the space around you is yours? Do you like being touched? How does language enter us, & are gestures a language of some sort? ‘Where’ do you put your accents? Is it difficult to move slowly? What is the future of social awkwardness? &, will we find ways to be more 3-dimensional in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from literary studies (Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay, IIT Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar), dance (Debra McCall, Ross Institute, New York), & physiotherapy (Dr. Snigdha Mehta, Dr. Snigdha Mehta’s Physiotherapy Centre, Mumbai). Listen in…
Can inequality kill you? Are poorer brains smaller? Is poverty (= inequality + deprivation) the mother of all diseases? Do the rich lead shorter lives in unequal countries? (Why) does Law, with its attempted neutrality, often criminalize poverty? How is theft by a rich person different? Can/should the State demand actions off the poor for them to access ‘benefits’? Is providing opportunity enough, or must inequality of agency also always be addressed? Would you drink water from any well? Are there economic benefits of having a socially cohesive society? Does our brain respond to the environment more than any other body part? Why are the poor kids in schools often not learning? Should poverty be defined within the context of communities (& not externally)? What do all the poor have in common? How can policy account for the heterogeneity of responses by different people to any given situation? However, can the poor be thought of as mere individuals? Can deprivation be eradicated in the future? Can striving for short term equality lead to long term efficiency? Must all children be fed and loved? Must every story be heard…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from psychiatry (Prof. Vikram Patel, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts), economics (Dr. Vijayendra Rao, The World Bank, Washington DC), & law (Dr. Anup Surendranath, National Law University (NLU), Delhi). Listen in…
Do pilots experience jet lag? Why are there different types of rhythms? What does your heart beat ‘to’? Is all of life periodic (because of the sun)? Is there a master clock to everything, & are all clocks analogous? Does each cell have its own (genetic) clock? Do clocks help us stay in phase with each other? Do ‘autonomous’ (hardware) clocks always drift? How do clocks correct themselves? Are computer network clocks eventually physically anchored (in, say, Caesium clocks)? How are atomic clocks made to keep solar time? How is time served on networks? Is temporal constancy of fundamental constants, even, possible to measure? What makes a clock more accurate and/or robust? Does digital hardware ‘need’ a pulse trigger? Is time an artefact, & less ‘fundamental’ than frequency? Do clocks primarily help manage transitions, & is time keeping, therefore, state keeping? Why do the blind have shorter lifespans? Can causality exist without the notion of time? Will we do more things in the same amount of time in the future? Would our body clocks change – will we sleep well? Will all planes autoland? Is a clock-free paradigm possible? Are we too synchronized…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from atomic physics (Dr. Subhadeep De, CSIR-NPL, New Delhi), computer science (Prof. S. Arun-Kumar, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), & chronobiology (Prof. Vinod Kumar, University of Delhi, New Delhi). Listen in...
Do villages grow up to be cities? Do you have piped water? Is your city your home? Do you feel free? Or, abandoned? Or, anonymous? Why do people come together and cohabit in large numbers? Does this itself create new possibilities (& externalities)? How ‘natural’ is a city? Can there be villages within a city unit? What is called urban? Are cities heterogeneous and diverse, but also internally hierarchical? Why do ghettoes, slums, & suburbs emerge and persist? Do cities mirror the modern nation state or the medieval empires? Can cities transform agricultural practices? Can a city sustain itself even as it destroys the river (say) on which it was set up? Are homeless poor people capable of looking after themselves? Can cities ever be taken over by slums? How large can they get? Is a lot of urban planning (paradoxically) ‘anti-urban’? Can the Market or the State fulfill peoples’ dreams? Are urban (efficiency-driven) and rural (productivity-driven) properties very differently organized? Is the future of agriculture going to drive the future of cities? Is the ‘soft’ city as real as the concrete city? Would several cities get regionally disembedded? Must the urban imagination also include the hills and the seas…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from urban geography (Dr. Anant Maringanti, Hyderabad Urban Lab, Hyderabad), & urban history (Dr. Awadhendra Sharan, CSDS, New Delhi). Listen in...
What’s a thought? Could that chair have been water? Does perception precede production? What does it mean to know a language? How & why did humans end up acquiring the very complex (& ‘discontinuous’) linguistic capacity? How do we carry meaning detached from the real physical world? Do we reason axiomatically or algorithmically? Is semantics logical? Do non-human animals care about reasons? How different is our brain from the primates ‘right behind us’? Do the ‘number’ of brain areas matter; why? Does language have a tendency to structure itself? What is one innate with when one is born? Is the linguistic faculty inferential? Do languages, thoughts, artefacts and organisms co-evolve? How can’t language be? Do birdsongs carry information without grammatical structures? Can culture cause genetic changes? Is artificial language reflexive? How does a language talk about itself? Are non-human animals very serious? Can all languages express all thoughts? Are there thoughts that language cannot express? Can crows (say) evolve a ‘language’ in the distant future, or do we have an unassailable lead? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from linguistics (Prof. Veneeta Dayal, Rutgers University, New Brunswick), logic & philosophy (Dr. Nirmalya Guha, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal), & cognitive neuroscience (Prof. Atsushi Iriki, RIKEN, Wakō, Japan). Listen in....
Are you looking at a small screen now? Do you like following news ‘stories’ and soap operas? Why are the processes of media production always getting homogenized? Is the content often ‘more of the same’ – why? Is media a creature of the market? Are humans innately in the narrative mode both for communicating and sense-making? ‘Or’, do we now increasingly take in the world impressionistically? What does individuation of choices lead to? When do individuals make ‘good’ choices? Isn’t wholesome entertainment great? Can media be used to consciously produce social change and potentialities? Must social messages be entertaining? Is free press possible, & where? Is information truly an equalizer? What circulates, & what is excluded? ‘What’ & how does/might digital media disrupt? Does media innovation always change social order? Does digitization have revolutionary ‘potential’? What is the future of meta narratives and narrators (authors)? Is the media of the future likely to be more real? What is the ultimate constraint? Is the future robust? Will it allow us to sequester ourselves (if one does not want to belong to the mainstream)? Now, what happens next? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from journalism (Shashi Kumar, Asian College of Journalism, Chennai), & communication (Prof. Arvind Singhal, The University of Texas at El Paso, Texas). Listen in...
Is grey ‘real’? Is all discretization perspectival? Can there be absolute notions of discreteness and continuity? Is time eternal? Is the world continuous but we perceive it as discrete? Are micro and macro objects continuous, but the meso discrete? Can real numbers be ‘made’ from integers? Are real numbers continuous (analog), & integers discrete (digital)? Do we don’t have access to ‘most’ of the real numbers? Did God make integers – or only 1 (& 0?)? What does Fourier Transform imply? What is the most fundamental signal? When does sampling not lead to loss of information? Can the sense of touch be discretized? Can surgeries be performed remotely? Does discretization happen in Nature? Is noise always continuous? Is speech predictable even if the underlying phonemes seem discrete? Do all manifolds lie on a continuum? Is making linear (analog) circuits difficult? Are higher order infinities deeper forms of ‘silence’? Does mathematics understand the ‘ambiguous’ ways in which things are (sometimes…) equal? Would a world without continuity (& community) be doomed? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from logic & philosophy (Prof. Mihir K. Chakraborty, ex-University of Calcutta, Kolkata), mathematics (Prof. Kiran S. Kedlaya, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California), & electrical engineering (Prof. D. Manjunath, IIT Bombay, Mumbai). Listen in...
Imagine taking a step forward, then a step to the right, & then a step back – where are you now? Do you have to reason for this, & how ‘far’ can you go? How are diagrammatic reasoning and representation different? Are diagrams for domains that can be represented spatially? Are mental images an internal perceptual representation shared by both internal and external inputs? Do (explicit) symbols make cognition possible? Is our cognitive architecture multi-modal? Can the blind use diagrams? How do we know what is extraneous in diagrams? Are diagrams often socially constructed? Do shapes lie somewhere between speech and scripts? Can a child learn to ‘read’ spontaneously? Are scripts arbitrary? However, are diagrams always homomorphic with ‘reality’? Are there links between the evolutions of geometry, logic, & diagrams? Can we make a diagram of ‘yesterday’? Or ‘not raining’? Can the absence of non-existent objects be represented? What if diagrams didn’t ‘exist’? Does language mimic diagrams? Would diagrams be significantly more used for proofs in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from artificial intelligence & cognitive science (Prof. B. Chandrasekaran, ex-The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio), philosophy of logic (Prof. Lopamudra Choudhury, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), & psychology (Prof. Prakash Padakannaya, University of Mysore, Mysore). Listen in...
Are you free if thoughts just occur to you? Is alienation – as loss of a sense of belonging and subjectivity – a phenomenon of modernity? Is freedom contra-causal and spontaneous? Is it truly in human nature to be free? Are people ‘already’ free? Do you exercise your freedom in the Market? Is all of production voluntary? Is production a form of fulfillment? Is leisure (without work), then, a threat to freedom? Are you overworked and overspent? Are your desires yours? Are we accumulating ‘garbage’? Why don’t consumers go on strike? Are we biologically and socially constrained? Is there a connection between language and freedom? Are you able to put together disjoint concepts out of a context? Does language create possibilities? Can notions of freedom also be propagandized? Do you think of the mountains as Gods? Is freedom (along with the ability to act) essential for survival of the human species? Is it sufficient to think that one is free to be free? Is it necessary (?) to end Capital, as we know it, to save ourselves? Can you conceive of the end of the world? Is the future just like the past? Will we exercise our angelhood? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Prof. Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University, New York), economics (Dr. Arjun Jayadev, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), & linguistics & philosophy (Prof. Nirmalangshu Mukherji, ex-University of Delhi, New Delhi). Listen in....
Do you trust your translator? How can ‘worlds’ be translated? Where is Tamil when a novelist writes in English about Tamil speaking characters? Are all translations interpretations (judgment?)? Can one ‘read’ Nature? Can mathematics be translated into (natural language) prose? Is translation prior to language, & (therefore) is it in the nature of languages to be translatable? How then are languages different from one another? Can the forces of translation be located within one language itself? How are scientific texts different? Is symbolization a form of translation? Is science a form of storytelling? Are both equations and poetry essential & point-like? Do you read poetry with footnotes? Must the translated text do all the work on its own? Could a 20-page commentary on a 2-line sutra be considered a faithful translation? Does the specific history of interpretative communities always matter? Can Quran be translated and read as Ovi Marathi poetry? Did colonization happen via translation? But, is all translation violent? Will the ideas of interpretation, translation, & language always exist in the future? Will language die (?), but translation live? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from poetry (Prof. Mustansir Dalvi, Sir JJ School of Architecture, Mumbai), philosophy (Prof. Sundar Sarukkai, NIAS, Bangalore), & translation studies (Prof. S. Shankar, University of Hawai’i, Honolulu). Listen in....
Can you be a revolutionary? Might concrete events have causes, but not history? What drives the world? Does history develop (or progress?) in stages? Is the end there at the beginning? Are we moving from ‘less free’ to ‘more free’? Are eras and epochs merely intellectual constructs, & always retrospective? Does human mind create different visions of the same era? How did human wants increase for the formulaic economic human to emerge? What role did trade play? Is creative technology an in-born element of life? Why isn’t there progress for ever? Is each epoch about an understanding of Being? Is future an embryo in the womb of the past? Are we merely articulators of what is emerging? Are humans themselves a resource now? What separates eras? Are there ‘natural’ breaks; or universal periods? Are there gaps in memory or history? Can personal whims and thoughts create history? Do epochs always grow, mature and then fade away? Are transitions driven by a distress or might it result from aleatory play? Are great civilizations always great economies? Is the creator also the destroyer? Is the technology era only beginning? When will the Owl of Minerva fly again? Can ‘only a god’ save us? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Dr. Siby K. George, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & economics (Prof. Soumitra Sharma, Juraj Dobila University of Pula, Pula, Croatia). Listen in...
Are more than a third of you crooks; could you arrive at a consensus? When do we need to work together? Can introducing uncertainty (or randomness?) get rid of certain equilibria? Is coordination necessary for resource access by multiple agents? Is building synchronous hardware difficult? Is it even possible to say whether motor proteins are coordinating? Are systems with heterogeneous agents more likely to coordinate; & when? Can you move your lips; how? Can all problems be decoupled into ‘n’ pieces? Do process ‘geometries’ and communication systems matter? How does the central bank help firms coordinate? When is central planning essential? How is the brain different from the central bank? Is more information always better? Is being precise good? Can plasticity be built? How do proteins decide which ‘track’ to choose? How do (non-intelligent?) machines coordinate? Is the dynein of the yeast better than ours? Does the ‘size’ of payoffs determine whether coordination happens? Might we be able to think of coordination as a ‘field phenomena’ using the physical notions of order parameter, thresholds, and phase transition? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from computer science (Prof. K. Narayan Kumar, Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), Chennai), biology (Prof. Roop Mallik, TIFR, Mumbai), & economics and game theory (Prof. Debasis Mishra, ISI, New Delhi). Listen in....
What is on that side? Where does identity crisis happen? Is interface a neighborhood concept? Can there be interfaces without fences? Are there non-membrane bound life forms? How do we connect computers or networks? How does the human brain communicate with the CPU? What is the dimensionality of interfaces? Can intelligence be encoded into materials? Where is a cell controlled from? Is Wi-Fi physical? Is autonomy difficult? Do different kinds of interactions lead to different kinds of interfaces? Can a physically imposed political boundary create different spaces? Are the number of interfaces in HCI systems increasing? Is all logic language based? Does more feedback make systems more stable? Can supervision be complicated? Can there be (non-physical) interfaces between faster and slower moving parts of a system? Are biological systems optimal? Are cars more complex than planes? Will highly automated systems have more rare events? Will biological systems assimilate the logic of computing interfaces in the distant future? Can cars truly self drive in the future? What can be undone? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from physics (Dr. Shankar Ghosh, TIFR, Mumbai), computer science (Prof. Philippe Palanque, University Toulouse III Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France), & immunology (Dr. Satyajit Rath, ex-National Immunological Institute (NII), New Delhi). Listen in....
Do you have a pain of 9? Do you malinger? 'Where' does it hurt, & when? Do you want to be admitted to a hospital? Do you want attention? Are you suffering from loneliness? Do you need morphine? Is pain subjective, & always multidimensional? Is the brain always a part of any pain experience? Is pain a disease? How can it be assessed? Can there be patients without diseases, and diseases without patients? Can groups experience pain? Is treating the pain different from treating the disease? Do only pain killers relieve pain? How does pain reinforce itself? Can social or economic or political problems be redressed at hospitals? How does torture work? Why do we suffer? Is our body socially constructed? Do you go to the gym? Can pain be addictive? Are inequality and pain really connected? Could changing the nature of work reduce pain in the world? Can self hypnosis work for unrelenting chronic pain? Might a woman’s endometrial pain (say) (sometimes) be called illegitimate, & why? What is the purpose of pain? Can one understand one’s own and others' pain via art or religion? Can pain be blocked off permanently? &, should one desire a pain free world as a right? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from palliative care (Prof. Mary Ann Muckaden, Tata Memorial Centre, Mumbai), sociology (Prof. Harish Naraindas, JNU, New Delhi), & history (Dr. Benjamin R. Siegel, Boston University, Massachusetts). Listen in....
Are you very well known? Do you live in a ‘small world’? Can connectedness be measured? How did/do books, knowledge, money, voice, & commodities circulate? What is the topological structure of the internet? Is everything connected a network? Do we try to stabilize networks via protocols? Does internet have more ‘filters’ than ‘doors’? What are the effects of media? Is most economic value created via affective infrastructures by measuring & tapping the senses? Are there limits to how large networks can be? Are all large networks hierarchical? Is your memory layered? Does the human brain have hubs? Must local rules always be simple? Why can networks be made to crash (only?) by overloading? Do networks always depend on how they have grown? Do different kinds of networks transform different kinds of information? Is energy management at the heart of network management? What causes climate change? Does everything influence everything? What if the sensational is ‘valuable’ but harmful? How would an ethic of network participation emerge? What is human life supposed to be? Will all our (redundant) bodies be networked? Will the networks become intelligent? How? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from mathematics(Prof. Frank den Hollander, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands), & media studies (Prof. Ravi Sundaram, CSDS, New Delhi). Listen in....
How does your tongue taste? What do you take for granted? Can you create randomness? Do you act in the continuum? Can you then reason about racing a tortoise ahead of you? Is there something common to most paradoxes? Can all paradoxes be ‘stated’? Do paradoxes owe something to the nature of Reality? Are dilemma, doubt, disbelief, paradoxes, & contradictions in the same class? Do we necessarily need faith before reasoning? Is there a reasoning process that does not lead to paradoxes? Why isn't Gödel's Theorem a Law? Are all paradoxes connected to language? Can a logic be complete but undecidable? Is uncomputability a consequence of self reference? Can discrete cardinality be higher than real numbers’? How did quantum probability uncover the hidden assumptions behind the quantum paradoxes? Is the quantum collapse (still) a physical phenomenon? What is computing? Are paradoxes pictures? Is a paradox free conception of the world possible? What is common knowledge? Are all paradoxes counterintuitive, & will we always keep running into them? Is there likely to be a ‘Law of Reasoning’ in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from mathematics (Prof. Luigi Accardi, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy), computer science (Prof. Supratik Chakraborty, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & philosophy (Prof. Navjyoti Singh, IIIT, Hyderabad). Listen in....
Do people bet on horses when they bet on horses? What does money 'do'? Does money fundamentally deal with the future? Why don't we have a market in people anymore? Isn’t Market an elaborate barter system? How do different things commensurate with each other? Does price make value observable? Is the world created by labour? Can labour be the scale for pricing? Can Market solve ‘all’ problems? Is price always embedded in a broader system of values? Why is Copenhagen's racing different from Delhi’s? Is capitalism also gambling? Does risk, as such, 'produce' profit? Does only the capitalist speculate? Can production itself be speculative? Why is bajra inexpensive? Are mortgages human capital derivatives? Is value objective in a sociological (emergent) kind of way? However, are all of us equal price takers? Could/do price theories incorporate the notion of 'moving' time? How (relatively) large can the non-basic goods economy be? Is a world without speculation likely? Are we always going to misprice? Would everything be free in a super-abundant future? Will we stay inside the machine? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from political economics (Dr. Anush Kapadia, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), anthropology (Dr. Stine Simonsen Puri, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark), & economic history (Prof. Ajit Sinha, Azim Premji University, Bangalore). Listen in…
Do you tip in restaurants you are unlikely to revisit? Why (not)? Have you violated a norm or a 'rule' lately? Do norms (for collective action) and conventions (for coordination) solve different kinds of social problems? Are norms constraints? Are conventions self enforcing? Is the capacity to develop and enforce norms central to being human? Would we have societies without norms? Is it important for societies to 'informally' punish opportunistic behaviour in a decentralized way? What does 'breaking the rule' mean in (say) classical music? Is there, however, also a convention of breaking the norm? Do some conventions become norms in the long run; how? Can tragedy of the commons be averted via norms? Are norms fragile structures and nearly impossible to recover? How is culture sustained and reproduced? What function do the extra musical conventions serve? Why are we willing to punish? Are norms often enmeshed with the idea of self image? How are common property and open access different? Can codifying norms into Laws sometimes obliterate them? Is 'wrong' often worse than 'costly'? When do norms don't help? What might be the nature of new norms? Would the convention of deviating continue in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from classical music (Dr. Aneesh Pradhan, Mumbai), & economics (Prof. Rajiv Sethi, Barnard College, Columbia University, New York). Listen in....
]] __begin__ [[ Welcome to SynToy ]] [[ Context. Concepts. Categories. Conversations. Chance ]] Eternity in 180 seconds. Bird songs. #SynToy_World. Shuffle. Chatter. Incoherente. Questions. Ideas. SynTalkrs. Organic. Many many. Talk. An object is. Episodes. Sense. Images. Tiles. Clouds. Culture. Session. Finite. Because they have done it. Experience. Patterns. As strange. Notes. Subjective. Verifiable. Space. Other. Process. Boundaries. Circuitry. People. One appearing as many. Thinking. Alone ]] [[ SynToy is (a kind) of living semi-autonomous toy ]] [[ SynToy (http://www.syntoy.com) being created as a technology enabled and algorithm-driven personal resource for thinking, & playing with ideas and concepts. Available soon in your app stores ]] [[ (( dream )) ]]
Are you civil? When do you put your self interest aside? Does it depend on the ‘evolutionary game’ you are playing? Is justice fairness? Is a fair world impossible? What do markets promote? Is 'price' the magic wand? Can price take all the externalities into account? Do initial endowments always matter? Can social order emerge in a group of only self interested individuals? When can natural selection be said to be occurring? Why aren’t all groups societies? Is there fairness (or even efficiency) in the animal world? Is despotism or nepotism the price that we pay for having a civilization? Would reciprocity be built into any just society? Why don’t all efficient markets (or equilibria) exist? Can order and disorder appear in cycles? Does enlightened self interest lead to common good outcomes? Do we get exactly what we select for? Is there often a disconnect between the individual, sub-group, & group levels? Are larger groups likely to be less fair? Would an 'equal' world (even if) be stable? Can there be a Theorem for Fairness? How much of private property must we respect to have a prosperous society? What (besides poetry) is worth striving for…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from evolutionary biology (Prof. Amitabh Joshi, JNCASR, Bangalore), political philosophy (Prof. Bindu Puri, JNU, New Delhi), & economics (Prof. Debraj Ray, New York University (NYU), New York). Listen in....
Why don’t we misunderstand the number 3? Do you have a private photograph? Is most of perception ineffable? Do propositions capture reality? What cannot be shown? Or, said? How does one describe touch? Or disgust? What/how do you understand if you watch a foreign language film without subtitles? How is it even possible for our thought to be about the world? Does the logical form of a fact and its (corresponding) sentence match each other? Does language 'depict' the world? How does this picturing take place? Is saying helpless without showing? Is seeing believing? Are films merely audiovisual? Is there a limit to what can be said in filmic narration? Can tautologies or contradictions only be shown? How do you show? Can a shot of an ocean have a narrative arc? Are films more compatible with the way we form memories? Which shots stay in your mind? Is cinema closer to immediate perception? Are propositions always abstract? Can we speak about just about anything? When do descriptions fail? What would a world of only blind people be like? What might be the future of saying and showing? Should one be silent when the situation is of great importance? What else can one say…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Dr. Nilanjan Bhowmick, University of Delhi, New Delhi), & documentary film making & film theory (Dr. Aparna Sharma, UCLA, Los Angeles). Listen in...
Does the Indonesian (?) in you love idlis? Are we all (universal) human beings? But, does society narrow our experience of the world? Must we then be spatiotemporally-bound? But, do universal ideas also come from situatedness? Is local, however, also always hybrid? How is a universal regionalized in architecture or literature? What is decidedly local – a consciousness? Does local see itself as hybrid? Is the self-image of your community locally constructed? Does connected mean homogenized? Can the local be fully evacuated? What is your style of experiencing the world? How can you experience darshana? Does being attuned to the local memories potentially make the new more recognizable? How do we resolve disputes? Does Sartre have a Kannada version? Do we need history to live in the world? Is the eye always more patient with an alien image than the ear is with an alien sound? Are buildings a part of the linguistic culture? Can buildings then be thought of a la language? Are buildings always glocal? How can a city be conceived? Is globalization generic? Is the future less generic? How will we produce ourselves? Would Being continue shifting…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from sociology & Kannada literature (Prof. Chandan Gowda, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), & architecture (Prof. Vikramāditya Prakāsh, University of Washington, Seattle). Listen in....
Why don’t you help all your relatives? Why do people marry? Do you know your pedigree? Can relatedness be measured or recognized with precision? Are close relatives the best organ donors? Who guarantees your loans? Who can the closest relative be? Do four first cousins equal one sibling? Would altruism evolve in the absence of kinship? Does the environment impact the benefit/cost of helping? Can organisms self reproduce? Is it possible for males to have neither a father nor a son? Do all off-springs have mothers? Do plants have relatives? Is incest prohibition the Universal Law of Kinship? Is there an elementary unit of kinship? Is outbreeding a ‘superior’ natural selection method? Does a certain kind of exchange economy and an idea of ‘difference’ emerge with marriage? Do phases of a-/sexual reproduction (equivalent to in-/outbreeding?) alternate in certain cultures and species? What is a joint family? Are identical twins clones? C/would we clone ourselves in the future? Does marriage have a great future? Would kinship stay relevant in the long run? If yes, where would it begin? In the petri dish…? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from sociobiology & ecology (Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar, IISc, Bangalore), statistical genetics (Prof. Partha Pratim Majumder, ISI, Kolkata), & social anthropology (Prof. Deepak Mehta, Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida). Listen in....
Did H. M. lead an eventless life? How was your last beach holiday? How do languages make events granular? Can events in texts be ‘inferred’ computationally? Do events always occur in the past? Is evental time modal? Are events objects? Are places facts? Is a decaying apple evental? Are all events spatiotemporal? How do recent events become long term episodic memories or facts? Are events and facts stored in the same region? Are space and time encoded differently? What is the role of relevance? Is the amount of encoding directly proportional to the amount of surprise? How accurately do we remember (or even annotate) orders and intervals? How do we relate to events in stories? Could certain events be like knots in time? What renders an event impossible? Do some surprises (trauma?) get encoded 'elsewhere’? Do our brains work in reverse gear in a dream (generating images 'from' thoughts)? What would the new kinds of events in the future be? Will we get nothing from everything? How would we tend to the right signal? Will we en/de-code or summarize differently? Would a new ‘form’ find us? Is it already here? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from psychoanalysis & philosophy (Prof. Anup Kumar Dhar, Ambedkar University, New Delhi), neuroscience (Dr. Balaji Jayaprakash, CNS, IISc, Bangalore), & computational linguistics (Dr. Inderjeet Mani, Chiang Mai, Thailand). Listen in....
Do chimpanzees play politics? Why do we act spitefully or ‘altruistically’? Is one human being equal to another? Is power without hegemony possible? Is there always an established social order? Is competition for resources scrambles or contests? Is nature a good guide to explain human behaviour? Is culture a result of adaptation? Are orders of dominance always subject to change? When are leaders and subordinates coupled? Does equilibrium selection depend upon whether a game is sequential or simultaneous? Why is it difficult to give a non-patterned response to the leader? Are there compensations for being subordinated? Do subjects contribute to their domination? Are some equilibrium stable even if the initial conditions (e.g. scarcity) change? Does strategy mutate? Are dominance systems (from egalitarian to despotic) species-specific? How does bloody or bloodless rebellion occur? What makes threats credible? Is it rational to be selectively irrational? Can social systems change suddenly? Is hierarchy overturned without creating a new one? Is it possible for one person to control the whole world? Would there always be the powerful and the powerless? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from sociology (Prof. Satish Deshpande, University of Delhi, New Delhi), game theory (Dr. Ankur A. Kulkarni, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & biopsychology (Prof. Mewa Singh, University of Mysore, Mysore). Listen in....
Have you ever received a partly garbled email? Might mixtures be made of mixtures? Are you a separate being? Do you stand ‘in’ history? How is coming-together different from mixing? Is it possible to separate out the constituents from a mixture without knowing what they are? Why does the chiral environment of the body matter? How difficult is pure separation, & why? Can separation or decoding be done in real time? Is separation trivial after mixing? Do different groups constrain individual identities differently? Can partitions be constructions? Why is vote-to-seat conversion so difficult in elections? Does noise have statistical properties? How are filters designed? Do signals always have a continuity property? Why is it so difficult to factorize into two large prime numbers? Can individuality be dissolved (in, say, a mob)? What is the opposite of a mob? Can certain systems be made nearly impossible to partition? What is the future of separations and partitions: Will quantum computing force change in encryption? How would enantiomers be separated? Would entry and exit barriers be lower in several contexts? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from chemistry (Prof. Ravi Bhushan, IIT Roorkee, Roorkee), mathematics & statistics (Prof. Rajeeva L. Karandikar, Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), Chennai), & social sciences (Prof. Gurpreet Mahajan, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in…
Do you despise your body? Can the body be a source of transcendence? Can one, however, have nothing but only the body? Are we embedded in this world as bodies with other objects, texts, rituals, spectators, and bodies? Is everybody also a biological, physical, social, & political object? Do you see yourself through the eyes of others? Can there be The (disembodied) View from Nowhere? Is it possible to experience the body as the object and subject fused together? Why do we watch dance? Why do dancers dance, & is any movement dance? Why get into tough postures? Why touch? Can the body be ‘nationalised’? What makes martial arts, yoga and dance similar? Does the body ‘do’ the thinking, & can it (though perishable) think about the eternal (soul)? Is there a homologous relationship between the body (pinde) and the cosmos (brahmand)? If we imprison the body long enough do we also end up imprisoning the mind? Is it possible to leave a manual for dance and martial arts? Is life information? What is the very long term future of (dis)embodiment, ‘presence’, and impermanence? Is the body ready? Might it be bypassed? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts and experiences from philosophy (Dr. Kim Diaz, US Department of Justice, Texas), political theory & poetry (Prof. Bishnu M. Mohapatra, Forum on Contemporary Theory, Vadodara), & dance (Aparna Uppaluri, NCBS, Bangalore). Listen in....
Do we often misunderstand ourselves? Can we be aware of everything? Is introspective knowledge reliable? Can we be mistaken about being hungry? Might the gap between successive thoughts be increased until there is complete thoughtlessness; can this be measured? Is introspection voluntary or involuntary? Is awareness a general relational state (& not a 'happening’)? How does global consciousness emerge in the ensemble state of neurons? Do animals develop conceptual self understanding? Why do we have the introspective faculty? Do introverts and extroverts introspect differently? Is introspection culture-bound? Do you feel your body during silent speech? Is inner speech unstructured or does it have linguistic features such as pronunciation and syntax? Can introspection sometimes get to concepts parallel to those reached via scientific empiricism? Does awareness necessarily involve directed representations of reality? Does introspection need distance? What is the structure of inner awareness? Would there be more accurate ways to understand which types of introspection are more reliable? Is the future of understanding introspection very bright? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Prof. Christopher Hill, Brown University, Providence), linguistics (Prof. Pramod Pandey, JNU, New Delhi), & physics (Prof. Sisir Roy, NIAS, IISc, Bangalore). Listen in....
Observe. Which colour do you see? Is blueness in there? Which languages do you speak? Does experience tell us anything by itself? Would language make any sense without it? What is it to be grounded in experience? Does some of our reasoning depend upon it? What makes a concept legitimate? How does science try to make itself less subjective, & more observationally verifiable? Do experiments expand our experience? Do ordinary habits of languages sometimes perpetuate misconceptions? Is it important to distinguish between the reality, the appearance, and the ‘tag’? Why is learning a new language difficult? What is the logical process by which naive concepts become sharper – & does experience play a role in this? When might eye witnesses at a crime scene see different things? Must we defy intuition? Does experience both constrain and free us: how are/were we able to say that simultaneity is not absolute? Is experience really undifferentiated? Will experience remain a logical problem in the future? Would we need to understand both the metaphysics of the Self and the physicality of phenomenology to this end? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from psycholinguistics & coaching (Ravi Bhoothalingam, Manas Advisory, New Delhi), philosophy (Prof. Anil Gupta, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), & physics (Prof. Arvind Kumar, ex-HBCSE-TIFR, Mumbai). Listen in....
Do you live without regrets? Do you spontaneously follow rules? How did we first know if something is right or wrong? Does moral reasoning always progress in stages? Is this process always culture-relative? Can ethics, then, ever be universal? Must all ethical dualities be collapsed? Does bad become good when slaves become masters? Does our resentment for those with power give us satisfaction? Can we buy goodness? Does morality need faith? Must we behave decently even if existence is absurd? Is the individual always subordinated to the social? If human beings are self centred, then how do empathy, compassion or ‘commitment’ arise? Does self interest precede conventional morality? Can we sacrifice for the (contemporaneous) Other just as we do for our ‘own’ future other? Can moral law be like a law of nature? Is efficiency the principal ethic? Can the requirement of minimal liberty be Pareto inferior? Does ethicality primarily comprise in taking into account the spontaneity and the resistance of the Other? Who/what is the Other? Will everything be perfect in the end? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from social psychology (Prof. Janak Pandey, ex-University of Allahabad, Allahabad), philosophy (Prof. Jules Simon, The University of Texas at El Paso, Texas), & economics (Prof. Sreenivasan Subramanian, ex-Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai). Listen in....
How unpredictable are we? Do our desires and constraints make us more detectable? Is data collection (somehow) always human? What’s not predictable? Can terrorist behaviour be predicted with consistency? Must data be balanced? Are cheats (terrorists, hackers, spiders, bots) more easily detected only if they are in the minority? Must predictions necessarily have explanatory power and granularity? Would tsunamis become completely predictable in the long run, as solar eclipses now are? Are predictions, like for gravitational waves, sometimes very difficult to confirm? Must we sometimes capture 'all' the data (say via sky surveys) even before deciding on all the analyses? Would natural history be more predictable if there were no astronomical events or human beings? Do very rare events (like 'zero day attacks’) often go undetected? Can we even predict if (and where) life might be elsewhere in the universe? Why is it so difficult? Will we know if/when aliens invade the earth? Could we be gone in the blink of an eye? Is it comforting to know (…precisely) how the night sky would look on 14th September 2400 AD? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from statistics (Prof. G. Jogesh Babu, The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania), natural history (Dr. John Mathew, IISER, Pune), & computer science (Prof. V. S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland, Maryland). Listen in....
Do you have difficulty sleeping? Can one dream while sleep walking? What/when/how do we express to ourselves via our dreams? Can painting be dream-like? Do we understand the mechanisms underlying imagination, dreams, and fantasy? Are (conscious) signals below a threshold deactivated when one is asleep, so that the (un/sub-conscious) ‘noise’ becomes signal? Are dreams always replays of thought processes? How graded is sleep? Do cats or platypus or hunting dogs dream? Do we dream every time we sleep? Are memories ever lost? Do dreams have a duration, & can we narrate them sequentially? Are dreams solely pictorial and necessarily haphazard, with no sound or word presentation? Why don't we snap from the wakeful state into sleep? Are all the different states of consciousness fluid? Does non-REM sleep always precede REM sleep, & can we sleep directly into a dream? Would we dream if didn't have any desires or memories? Can the dreamy state be induced? Can dreams be fiddled with? Do we always dream in (timeless) fragments? Is dreaming itself an emotional (affective) process? Is it possible to feel super alive? Is it possible to die mid-way while dreaming (when asleep)? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts and experiences from psychoanalysis (Sarala Kapoor, Kolkata), neurobiology (Prof. Birendra Nath Mallick, JNU, New Delhi), & art (Tara Sabharwal, New York). Listen in...
Is anything isolated? Is comparison essential? Does the entire cosmos consist of a structure of relationships? When comparing, must we think in terms of similarity rather than difference? Is comparison a fundamental way of dealing with complexity in the world? Do you write in a third language? Why is Persian metaphorical (& more so for the non-native speaker?)? Does one have to negotiate the terms of comparison before comparing? Does this depend on the ‘operation’ one is looking to carry out? Is a plane (say) an analytic as well as an algebraic as well as a geometric object, among others; How? Can everything be translated? What, then, is distinct? Do homogenized monadic structures interact in just two ways (war or dialogue)? What happens in the liminal spaces? How does one get to bārahmāsa in Persian poetry? Can one get from anywhere to anywhere using ‘atlas of charts’? Is it possible that objects in the same family do not share any property (but may share a context)? Is the emphasis on similarity likely to have a homogenizing tendency? Is the future in the past? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from topology/mathematics (Dr. Jayadev S. Athreya, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington), culture theory & philosophy (Prof. Anil Bhatti, JNU, New Delhi), & Persian/Indian literatures (Prof. Sunil Sharma, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts). Listen in....
Is life precious? Whose property is it? Is the final act of suicide narratable? Can you tolerate frustration? Rage? Shame? Could one commit suicide without any conscious reason? Is suicide alluring? Do we instinctively long to unite with some deep inanimate part of nature? Are we ‘beings towards death’? Does a suicide bring together both the radical uniqueness and the similarity of death? Why do men commit suicide more than women? Do you identify with your mother? Is suicide a cowardly act? How coherent is the Self? Can the killer and the killed be one? Is suicide a breakdown of the capacity to mentalize or symbolize? When is (say) fasting unto death ‘permitted’? What is the underlying promise? How does the changing body-soul relationship influence our attitude towards suicide? Do you live in a culture of honour? Is attempting suicide a crime (or a sin)? Do we have a right to be 'alive'? When (must) might we have the right to die? Why not just 'run away'? Will cyborgs commit suicide in the (perfect) future? Will there be ‘demand’ for suicide as long as there is humanity? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from religion studies & philosophy (Prof. Purushottama Bilimoria, Graduate Theological Union (GTU), Berkeley, California), cultural studies (Prof. Manas Ray, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), Kolkata), & psychoanalysis (Dr. Madhu Sarin, New Delhi). Listen in....
Can you be creative consciously? Can verification of an idea be fully worked out in the unconscious state itself? Does P equal NP; & is proving computationally more intensive than verifying? Can a system be called creative if it explores all possibilities (with brute force) before selecting one? What, then, is creativity for machines? Might daydreaming have underlying processes akin to stochastic optimization or simulated annealing? Are there different types of creativity? Can it be defined? Is a non-obvious step essential? Can a software program be granted a patent? Is Transfigured Night still surprising? Can one be technically incompetent, and yet have a flow experience? Do we search for answers differently in the arts from the sciences? Is creativity domain specific? Are heuristics always 'directional'? Is the topography of the unknown solution space often rugged? Do neural networks run algorithms? Is evolution creative? What does culture do? What is the simplest creativity problem that we do not understand? Is artificial creativity possible? Would such a system classify differently? What do you expect? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from theoretical computer science (Dr. Deeparnab Chakrabarty, Microsoft Research, Bangalore), cognitive neuroscience (Prof. Arne Dietrich, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebabon), & theoretical physics (Dr. Anita Mehta, Kolkata). Listen in…
Why is your shape what it is? Are shadows 2D? Is matter potentiality, and form actuality? What do shapes mean at different scales? Do shapes evolve? Are only regular 3D shapes stable? Is (the shape of, say) quartz stable, & can equilibrium shapes be derived? Is all matter porous? Why isn't everything spherical? Does nature (topologically speaking) make toruses from spheres? Do forms depend upon whether a system is isotropic or anisotropic? Why are biological shapes always fluctuating? Is life always out of equilibrium? Are kinetic (growing or moving) shapes different? Do swarms, liquid crystals, & bacteria colonies act like magnetized systems? Are murmurations 'thick'? Why aren't larger entities necessarily more complex in shape? Is our shape emergent or encoded? Why is it difficult to know how shapes mediate self assemblies or evolution? Would non-carbon life (if) certainly have a different form? Can one peel graphene layers from graphite? Is the core shape question essentially an attempt to understand the interplay of all forces at all length scales? Can small particles constantly change form, and be quasi-molten? &, what is the very long term future of shapes in the universe? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from biophysics (Dr. Shashi Thutupalli, NCBS & ICTS, Bangalore), & nanotechnology (Prof. Pulickel Ajayan, Rice University, Houston, Texas). Listen in…
Are you proud of your buckets and combs? Is a cup culture-specific? What's typical? Are objects a part of your identity? Can empathy be created? Can buildings foster (multidimensional) equity? What is bad design? Do the best designs (try to) do many things simultaneously? Does a challenging design problem always involve trade-offs and incentive conflicts? How do evolving needs, preferences, and available resources lead to new categories? Why do non information intensive products (such as debt) catering to perennial needs stay central for a very long time? How sharp or fuzzy are the boundaries between different products? Why don't we have labels for everything? Do we reduce the complexity of the world by creating affordances and categories? Is design always particular to a context? Are the best designs aware of the context of the context? What makes designs robust? Are income tax systems also influenced by norms of culture and identity? Are markets culturally neutral? Can designs enable transitions? Will we (even) be designing for particular needs in the future? How can self-regulating non-manipulative infrastructure be created; would community formation play a key role? Is the future of design ecological? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from design (Prof. Uday Athavankar, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), mechanism design (Prof. Praveen Kumar, University of Houston, Texas), & architecture (Prof. Rahul Mehrotra, Harvard University, Massachusetts). Listen in…
Is 29 absolutely prime? Are the 26 letters of the English alphabet arbitrary? Can you learn a word in isolation? How are children able to learn languages without being taught? Why are there patterns at all, & which are more likely? Do objects with more symmetries occur more often? Can patterns be understood via distributions? (How) are constellations in the sky invariant? Are relations more fundamental than entities? Are prime numbers randomly distributed? Is transformation possible only in invariant systems? Which patterns are transitory? How is the multiplicative (rotation?) operation different from the additive (translation)? Do we know which computer program is most likely to produce a certain binary string? Are all languages equally complex? Do numbers (or, numerals) emerge from a language? Why is decimal number system efficient? How are vowels and consonants distributed? Can human language be 'random'? Can there be patterns of change too? Is there a likely master program creating the Universe around us? How do we see beauty in (grammatically incorrect) poetry? Are nuances (really) rules? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from mathematics (Prof. Krishnaswami Alladi, University of Florida, Gainesville), computer science (Dr. Manoj Gopalkrishnan, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), & linguistics (Dr. Avinash Pandey, University of Mumbai, Mumbai). Listen in....
Is all making curating? Is the location of a maker a fiction? Are there always rules to making? Is any expression preceded by an act of repression? How, then, is black magic different from magic? Is alchemy possible? Why can’t every molecule be made? How are some isomers easier to make? Can experience be created without materials? Does architecture help us carve an address in this vast universe by housing rituals in space? Are films different because it is a temporal medium and does not ‘exist’ in nature? How was Vitamin B12 synthesized? Are chemical reactions (always?) rhythmic and minimalistic? Why did Mies want to take his architecture to almost nothing? Can time (& making) be controlled? In documentary (unlike in feature) films, is God the director? How does one experience life? Does any language constantly surprise the user? Can one be provoked by a building to make a choice between virtue and vice? When everyone makes, then what makes some making special? Might all making be co-making? Can chemical materials be made for any desired property in the future? Would it be possible to predict what can be made? Do you know how to swim? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from architecture (Prof. Kazi K. Ashraf, Bengal Institute, Dhaka), film-making (Prof. K. P. Jayasankar, TISS, Mumbai), & chemistry (Prof. Eluvathingal D. Jemmis, IISc, Bangalore). Listen in....
What does a bee see? Do we see light? What are we blind to? Is the universe dark? Does darkness have a physical basis? Is light a wave or a particle or both or something else? Does this depend on the nature of the detector? Is light (like a) photon for living systems? Are photons wave packets? Why haven’t all the contradictory theories of light been permanently overthrown? Is the discipline reorganized differently when we revisit it after several centuries? How is heat different from light? Is it probable that there is life somewhere vis-à-vis another (non overlapping) wavelength band of electromagnetic radiation? Do gamma rays almost don’t diffract, & why? Does light interact with 'each other'? How do a combination of optical, chemical, electrical, vibrational, and ‘dark’ processes produce visual perception? Can we simulate what the other animals see without simulating the brain? Are there other light dependent biological functions besides vision? Are we ‘stuck’ with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? Can the nature of light be known? &, would ‘shelved’ theories continue to be picked up and reinterpreted? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from history & philosophy of science (Prof. Dhruv Raina, JNU, New Delhi), optics (Prof. Chandrasekhar Roychoudhuri, University of Connecticut, Connecticut), & chemistry (Prof. Anil Kumar Singh, IIT Bombay, Mumbai). Listen in....
Do you have a default tendency to say: ‘Yes’? When do you abandon your own information and follow the herd? Can herds form because of individual selfish interests? How do bee colonies decide? Are all social animals herd animals? Is there no good way to ‘independently’ aggregate group preferences without a ‘dictator’? How does aggregation of preferences and information differ from each other? Must a jury consider everyone’s opinions? Does the nature of the problem (whether cognition, coordination, or cooperation) influence group decision making? Can majority decision making be completely chaotic? Do group sizes and social hierarchies matter? When can small groups outperform both experts as well as crowds (say, prediction markets)? Are diversity and independence (always?) crucial for a group to work effectively? How are situations with fixed and evolving preferences different? Are graded choices often better than binary? Are there powerful arguments for not being truthful in a group? Must free riders and liars be punished? How do inter & intra-group competition influence groups? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from economics & game theory (Prof. Arunava Sen, Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi), cognitive sciences (Prof. Narayanan Srinivasan, CBCS, University of Allahabad, Allahabad), & animal behaviour (Dr. T. N. C. Vidya, JNCASR, Bangalore). Listen in....
Is Nature logical? Is uncertainty hardwired into Nature? Where do the paradoxes or aporia lie? Might paradoxes exist in the object (& not in the thinking)? What is the ontological status of mathematical objects? Are laws of Nature really written in the language of mathematics? Is mathematics a form of philosophical speculation? Did mechanization precede mathematization? Are axioms more pragmatic than theoretical? Can all mathematics be reduced to (but not derived from) logic? 'How' is mathematics able to explain reality? Can the quantum or the cosmological scales be visualized using Euclidean geometry? Does theoretical physics sometimes invent its own mathematics to make progress? Can (sub/un-conscious) thoughts or dreams be concretized? Is pure mathematics an extension of deductive logic, & always incomplete? Can mathematics be semi empirical (as: axioms + data)? Is a causal explanation always necessary? Is it possible to have a theory of everything for anything? What is the future of the limits (& uncertainties) of mathematics? Would large scale collaboration and computation help push the limits? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from theoretical physics & mathematics (Prof. Rajesh Gopakumar, ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore), statistics (Prof. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, ex-University of Calcutta, Kolkata), & philosophy (Prof. Babu Thaliath, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in....
How is an entity able to copy itself? How do the four DNA base (A, T, C, G) molecules function like ‘symbols’ leading to the entire genetic code? Why can’t a neuron be treated as a symbol? Are genetic and linguistic codes analogous to each other, with common notions of letters, words, sentences, grammar, and (even) punctuation marks? Is all DNA ‘useful’? How do proteins derive their meaning (function?), & how are they regulated? Does a sentence derive its value from the non linguistic realm? What is the interplay of syntax and semantics for transmission? Is the genetic language highly similar across different species? Can nearly similar structures have identical functions? Are genes the only mode of storing and transmitting biological information? How is information represented in the brain different? Is it likely that the grammar of language is similar across species? Is language constrained by biology (particularly neural systems)? Why don't all memories get transmitted biologically? Does evolution depend upon replication errors? How are artificial intelligence systems different? Why are we (yet) unable to create an artificial cell in a test tube? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from machine learning & systems biology (Dr. Sumeet Agarwal, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), genetics (Prof. Subhash C. Lakhotia, BHU, Varanasi), & philosophy (Dr. Geeta Ramana, University of Mumbai, Mumbai). Listen in....
Are we trustworthy? Are you being watched; by whom? How is punishment in the personal sphere different from that imposed by Law? Does Law reason, & permit discretion? Is re-offence rampant? Is punishment a necessity (& a utility?) in a social ordered system? Does society punish for its own sake? Must punishment be just and proportionate, and not merely efficient? Does it need to be accompanied by a moral event in the perpetrator? Can one buy one’s way out of capital punishment? Must causation be separated from correlation to understand if deterrence works? Are moral systems to be kept out of legal systems? Must justice be retributive or ‘forward looking’? Are fines better than imprisonment, & when? Why is punishment graded? Why isn’t there death penalty for bank robbery? Must policing be minimized and punishment maximized? Do criminals calculate; is there a link between notions of autonomy, foreseeability, and rationality? Did we always think that children should not be caned? Are we likely to be aghast in the future that we once caged fellow human beings? Is a punishment free society more likely than a crime free society; why? Can we self regulate? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from law (Dr. Yug Mohit Chaudhry, Mumbai), economics (Dr. Parikshit Ghosh, Delhi School of Economics, New Delhi), & philosophy (Dr. Pravesh Jung Golay, IIT Bombay, Mumbai). Listen in…
Is dingo in danger? What are forests and gardens 'for'? Is the wilderness a place where humans are absent? What is the history of the conception of wilderness? Can nature be sculpted? Are gardens a space on a continuum between the city and the jungle? Why do we build gardens? What do you introduce into gardens? Are visually remarkable species preferred in this process? Why are only certain trees planted? Are there 'local' plants and animals? Are starlings American? Are potatoes Indian? Why aren't all alien species invasive? Are we an invasive species? When does adaptation succeed, & why are animals more constrained than plants in this context? Is Subabul the same as Kubabul? Must and can (some) plant species be eradicated? How do plants and seeds spread? What are the uses of trees in an urban landscape? Can gardens (or even jungles) collapse? Can gardens become forests (as stable networks)? (How & when) can rewilding be done? Why are planted forests sometimes sterile? What is the future of pulsating ecological forests? Do forests need forest departments? Can we just let the jungles be? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from ‘ecological gardening’ (Pradip Krishen, New Delhi), environmental history (Prof. Mahesh Rangarajan, Ashoka University, Delhi), and crop physiology & bioprospecting (Prof. R. Uma Shaanker, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore). Listen in....
Are you using a QWERTY keyboard? Why do all clocks go clockwise? Can some systems get locked into sub-optimal states? Why are some processes path dependent and some not? Does the number of variables or the ‘direction’ of change matter? Can future be memory-less, & depend only on the present and not on the past? Can one ‘ensure’ that systems escape unstable equilibria? What role do initial conditions and noise play in arriving at one of multiple possible equilibria? When do systems have unique point convergence or an invariant probability distribution curve? Given enough time, do all systems visit all possible states; why or why not? ‘Why’ does time influence outcomes? Are large complex systems invariably irreversible? How do single/multiple agent/objective systems differ from each other? When does learning take place? Do biological evolutionary 'equations' have identifiable optimization function(s) and/or equilibria? Can complex systems be directed to specific (or one of a few) end states? Is persistent socioeconomic inequality also a state of equilibrium, & why might (not) affirmative action work in this context? Is stable equilibrium ‘better’ equilibrium? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from game theory & mathematics (Prof. Vivek S. Borkar, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), and statistical mechanics & soft matter physics (Prof. Srikanth Sastry, JNCASR, Bangalore). Listen in....
'What' gives rise to conscious experience? How can we know if consciousness is fundamental, and if can we model it? Why aren't sticks and stones, & tables and chairs, manifestly 'conscious'? Do we really know? Is consciousness the capacity of a system to integrate information? Why is information processing by us (often) accompanied by conscious experience? Why is consciousness generated only by certain parts of the brain? How does one measure consciousness? 'How' does pain exist? Is reality singular or plural? What are the different modes of experiencing? Are only conscious things intentional? Can consciousness be subdivided into different modes? When we are aware, what are we aware of? Can awareness be a felt experience, having nothing to do with knowledge? Can consciousness be content-less or does it always need an object? Can everything be a knower and/or have an experience, & why not? Can we speed up our awareness; why or why not? Is it likely that the nature of matter and consciousness are deeply interlinked? Will the third person and the first person concepts of consciousness converge in the long term future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from cognitive science & philosophy (Prof. Amita Chatterjee, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), Indian philosophy (Prof. V. N. Jha, ex-University of Pune, Pune), and information theory (Dr. Nithin Nagaraj, NIAS, Bangalore). Listen in....
Do you have others working for you? Is the need to work a curse? Or, is work life? Does work establish the relationship between the ‘body’ and nature, economy & society? Do we realize and socialize ourselves via work? Are work and leisure complementary (but only when work is socially configured)? What is leisure for the self employed? How & why is much of production ancillarized? Why are most jobs made idiot-proof? Is a life with only short-term flexible jobs meaningless? Can we, then, have an automatic society (where there is no need to work)? Was the labour in the 19th century more specialized than now? Also, is labour today recruited in a manner very different from (say) in the 19th century? Is much of work always defined by the demands of (mutable) capital? However, is capital neutral to how work is organized? What impact does this then have on personhood and morality? Should survival be contingent on the ability to work? Why is there a collapse globally of the working class? What is the future of jobs, and does this depend on the interrelationship between society and economy? How might (the non-economic) social labour be configured? &, might society be conceptualized as a factory? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from critical theory (Prof. Ranabir Samaddar, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata), & social anthropology (Prof. A. R. Vasavi, ex-NIAS, Bangalore). Listen in....
Is your disease human? Are you infected? Do you have an orphan or a rare disease? Has (the) polio (virus) been eradicated? ‘Can’ vaccines be made for all infectious diseases, & is eradication for ever? Why was there an epidemic of measles after the collapse of Soviet Union? Can anything be done about the strong genetic predisposition to (say) Huntington’s Chorea? Is diabetes non-communicable? Does society create different kinds of disabilities? Is all blindness treatable? Why aren’t radical interventions possible on the brain? Do infection, disease and mortality rates always follow a pattern across time? How does childhood variously influence diseases later in life? Will there always be new diseases, & why? Why don’t plants infect humans, when animals do? Can mosquitoes transmit HIV? How did we get dengue? Are vectors also hosts? Can cures cause diseases? Are all (including ‘lifestyle’?) diseases systemic? How do young landless labourers get diabetes? Is inequality a significant determinant of diseases? Is a disease free (sub) world possible? Or, can diseases eradicate entire species (including the human race)? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from neuroscience (Dr. Garga Chatterjee, ISI, Kolkata), virology (Dr. Shahid Jameel, The Wellcome Trust/ DBT India Alliance, New Delhi), & political economy/history of health (Prof. Mohan Rao, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in....
Can one stay in a hole through one's entire life? Is a system always embedded in another? How large can (or should) the smaller system be? Is the market a free floating entity? Is it difficult to understand when a system has been monopolized? Do almost all communities have skewed abundance patterns? Are niches always n-dimensional hypervolumes? Can there be a qualitative difference between two forests with the same amount of timber generated and harvested? Is niche fundamentally a ‘fund’ (& not a ‘stock’) concept? Are niches inherited? Can inheritance also happen mimetically? How are niches constructed: what role do key innovations play? Can niches also diverge over a period of time? Has there been a progressive loss of diversity of (efficiency) norms, & does this inevitably lead to an increase in systemic risk and centralization? Did thermodynamics and economics coevolve during industrial revolution, & is the transition from charcoal to coal a pivotal turn? Are humans the only species that modify the ecosystem to their own detriment? Is the 'tree of life' a clumpy, gappy, crooked, jagged line? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from ecological economics, chemical engineering (Dr. Deepak Malghan, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore), & ecology (Dr. Kartik Shanker, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore). Listen in....
Is your name on the top of your mind? Are the preconscious or the unconscious merely the regions far away from the centre of the field of attention? Why are memories transient? Can there be a memory molecule, or are all memories synthesized? Are memories localized in the brain? Can (collective) memories be formless? How are traumatic events remembered? What role does emotional significance, meaning, and stress play in the recording and retrieval of a memory? Can memories be inherited genetically? What is the difference between repression and suppression? Is suppression impossible? Can memories be planted? Can there be a kind of wisdom in forgetting? Is it easy to forget? Why don’t we often remember the details? Are episodic, declarative, and motor memories stored in different neural structures? Can you hold the theoretical memory capacity of your brain in your hand? Is our memory capacity changing? Why does chunking work? What are the sites of memory? How do memory practices change? Can tradition be invented? How do we remember forgetting? Can we create memories that do not exist? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from neuroscience (Prof. Upinder S. Bhalla, NCBS, Bangalore), media & cultural studies (Dr. Rohit Chopra, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara), & psychoanalysis (Dr. Pushpa Misra, ex-Bethune College, Kolkata). Listen in....
Why don’t we let the past be? What do we do when there is a crisis? What do we see when we look back? What is imitated? Is a renaissance a rebirth: but of something totally new (as a non identical repetition)? What is renaissance ‘about’? Is it celebratory of a past but not necessarily redemptive? Can something ontologically preexisting (& of value) be made into a ‘currency’ by naming? Is the word renaissance substantive or does it need a geographical (say, Italian/Islamic/Bengal) or other marker? Why do we sometimes see ‘new things’ within many different domains within a short period of time? Where does the discourse of newness come from? What is the self understanding during these periods of change? Might the separation of the object from its properties be the defining epistemic break? How does one understand the context of discovery? Did women have a renaissance? Why did Petrarch write letters to a (long dead) Cicero? Is a revolution a renaissance? Does a renaissance have strategic moments to separate Us from Them? Can there be a private renaissance? Can a renaissance be caused or predicted? SynTalk thinks about these and more questions using concepts from history & philosophy of science (Prof. Nagarjuna G., HBCSE, Mumbai), literature & renaissance studies (Prof. Amlan Das Gupta, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), & philosophy & literature (Prof. R. Radhakrishnan, UCI, Irvine). Listen in....
Did Buddha have friends? Did Gandhi have enemies? Can you renounce friends? Is friendship universal? Do we ‘need’ enemies? Is competition ever with enemies? Why is there ‘narcissism of small differences’? Can rivals be friends? How are enemies, adversaries, and opponents conceptually distinct from each other? Are democratic structures meant for pacification of politics: can enemies be turned into adversaries? Does self interest contaminate friendship or does mutual self interest bind it together? Can power be shared? Does allegiance to a world view come along with enemies that need to be fought? Did competitive sports (Olympics) come to be as a substitute for combat and battles? How is the sense of the self developed? Can there be friendship between collectivities (such as countries)? Would the European Union have come to be without the preceding World Wars? Why and ‘how’ did Panchtantra come to be? Would a highly transactional world make friendships redundant? Are there friendships in competitive sports? Is mono-modal friendship possible? Will there ever be a world where there are no friends (or enemies)? Can affection be manufactured by law? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from sports psychology (Bhishmaraj P. Bam, Purushottam Academy, Nashik), political theory (Prof. Rajeev Bhargava, CSDS, New Delhi), & philosophy and history (Prof. Vinay Lal, UCLA, Los Angeles). Listen in....
Can suicide bombers be farmed? Who is a terrorist? How are terrorists recruited, trained and incentivized? Do terrorists run out of weapons? What role does leadership play in the success of terrorist groups? What happens when a terrorist group is decapitated? Is it possible to dabble in terrorism? Is a terrorist attack always a mixture of violence and theatre, and always a part of a communication strategy? How are terrorist groups organised? Can terrorist groups maintain armies, and military like organization structure? Is (perceived) grievance a necessary condition for terrorism? Is a failed State and chaos always an opportunity for terrorists? Is warlordism usually the first stage in state formation? Is the State usually complicit in allowing a terrorist group to form? Is war politics by other means? Is terrorism often a result of the orthodoxy asserting itself against a reformation(?)? Are terrorist groups willing to engage in dialogues or surrender when they are in ascendancy? Is the use of force always counterproductive? Can there be just terrorism? Is terrorism inevitable? Will terrorism end as an ideological option in the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from political science (Prof. Dipak Gupta, San Diego State University, San Diego), & terrorism studies (Dr. Ajai Sahni, Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi). Listen in....
Do you know that you are ignorant? How do you understand clouds? What would total knowledge do; could you create the entire universe then? Is the process of acquiring knowledge an iterative tussle with ignorance? Does every new knowledge also produce new ignorance? Are all descriptions answers? How is a discipline made possible? Is it possible to classify ignorance a priori? Is science primarily a representational endeavour? What is painter’s knowledge? How does biology understand nature? How do objects form? How does the connection between theory and the phenomena differ across disciplines? Do all disciplines operate at the level of (formal?) language? What is common between the sciences? And the arts? Is there a unitary underlying method? Can we understand tides as a mystery? Is nature ideal? Can we, in principle, make a zebra from fundamental particles? What is imagination constrained by? How is biology different from physics? Do disciplinary boundaries have more to do with knowledge transfer than knowledge creation? Would 21st century be the century of materials? What would be the legitimacy of the portrait in the 22nd century? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts & experiences from philosophy (Prof. Prajit K. Basu, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), physics (Prof. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, TIFR, Mumbai), & art (Dr. Gieve Patel, Mumbai). Listen in....
What cannot be abstracted? What was Grothendieck up to? Does abstraction exist all around us; as notions of (say) numbers, distance, money, & more? Further, is there a way of abstracting the notion of distance across different kinds of geometries? Is labour (power) abstract? Is it surprising that we are able to think of 2 apples and 2 oranges as just 2? Does cinema & art usually give a concrete body to abstract things like emotions? What is the method of abstraction across realms, & does it involve turning ‘inputs’ into ‘commodities’? How does the orange-seller know how to efficiently pack the oranges? How is abstractness embodied, and what role do materials play? Is the concrete an instance of the abstract? Does the word ‘room’ (say) signify a concept in our heads? Can cinema (a la ‘absolute films’) be concrete without (the artifice (?) of) actors, sets and dialogues? What role do aesthetic & philosophical principles play in the process of abstraction? Can there be/is there a method of ‘rising from the abstract to the concrete’? Why did art turn abstract? Is all art, in a sense, abstract? However, is the making of all art very concrete? Might a sculptor ‘know’ a result before a topologist does? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from film studies (Prof. Moinak Biswas, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), mathematics (Prof. Gadadhar Misra, IISc, Bangalore), & art (Pushpamala N., Bangalore). Listen in....
Do kids understand adults? Does foetus feel pain and pleasure? What does the world look like from the crib? Is the new born infant alert, aware & awake, & not confused? What are kids pre-wired for, & is pre-wiring largely genetic? Do we learn fear? Do new-borns get bored? How do children learn, and (what) do they need to be taught? How is grammar learnt? When do kids start becoming autonomous? Have you experienced the Terrible Twos? When does a child stop being a child? Is the concept of late childhood a product of modernity? Must adolescence be a ‘productive’ period? Do children have rights? What exactly is childhood ‘innocence’, & must childhood be valourized? Can some kids be unusually cruel? Is parenthood naturally anxiety inducing? Might the absence of disclosure of love for the child be a problem? What might indiscriminate ‘limit setting’ by parents lead to? Is it hard, however, to always be a calm carefree parent? How different and similar are kids from each other, & is it alright to compare them? What is the long term future of childhood? Should kids be free? Would the basis of innateness be established in the long term? Would such a world be dystopian? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from psychology (Prof. Malavika Kapur, NIAS, Bangalore), sociology (Dr. Shilpa Phadke, TISS, Mumbai), & developmental paediatrics (Dr. Koyeli Sengupta, Ummeed, Mumbai). Listen in…
Is Colin McKenzie for real? What cannot be faked? Are fakes lies? Can copies be more valuable than the original? What is the test of something being original? Is originality a fact? Is it culturally determined? What are the ethics and aesthetics of fakes? How and at what point do we know when an experience is not real? What about reality that cannot be experienced? Is seeing believing, or is believing seeing? Is ‘seeing’ always ‘seeing-as’? Why do some of us prefer artificial flowers over fresh flowers? Does the idea of the original always imply its opposite? What kind of objects can (cannot) have copies (originals)? Can there be fake words? Or chairs? Is the copy of a copy the copy of the same original? Can there be a fake documentary film? Are there false images for astronomers? How does science ‘handle’ reality? What are the (dis)similarities between archaeology, astronomy and film-making? Is most of reality constructed, and do we really know what reality is? Does reality always depend on the technology available? Do we ‘need’ reality? Can we live (largely) with hyperreal simulacra, & will reality be dispensed with in the long run? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Prof. Sharad Deshpande, ex-University of Pune, Pune), film-making (Nilita Vachani, Tisch School of the Arts (NYU), New York), & astronomy & archaeology (Prof. Mayank Vahia, TIFR, Mumbai). Listen in....
Are there happy poets? Can one write poetry without having suffered (some) exile? Why has there been deep pessimism about poets, & might poets cause wars and genocide? How is deeply personal poetry dangerous? Does poetry represent perfect, universal and eternal truth? How is a poet different from a philosopher? Does poetry find its foothold in a good society, when philosophical truth is understood as a process, & not a product? How might limitless (anarchic) emotions be expressed given the limits of language? Can one ‘suggest’ that which cannot be written? How do ‘word’ and ‘meaning’ come together in poetry? What is the relationship between form and content? Is poetry a very personal use of language for the poet (and the reader)? What is the link between the ethical and the aesthetic? How might bhava become rasa? What happens the moment you come in contact with yourself? Is poem something whose essence cannot be removed from it? How & when do poems get exhausted? Should poetry be history? How did the ‘first’ poetry come to be? Is an exile always asked for? Might an exile be a voyage? Will ‘mistakes of intellect’ continue to happen? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from political theory & poetry (Prof. Ashwani Kumar, TISS, Mumbai), literature (Udayan Vajpeyi, Bhopal), & literary theory and philosophy (Prof. Sitanshu Yashaschandra, ex-M.S. University, Vadodara). Listen in....
How does rate of change change? Is equilibrium balance, & what happens when there is no balance? Is equilibrium attained when fast processes have done their job, and the slow processes have not started? Do all systems tend towards equilibrium? How are biological, physical, and economic systems different in this context? What would happen inside a closed box of Hydrogen atoms in (say) a billion years? Is equilibrium scale and time dependent? Is stability desirable? Is daily temperature stable on an average? Is graphite more stable than diamond? Is it possible to have stability far from equilibrium, & can equilibrium be unstable? Can prices be chaotic, & how does market achieve equilibrium? Can stability be thought of as, among others, constancy, persistence and resilience? Can ‘only’ one sub-market (or species) be out of equilibrium in a market (or an ecosystem)? What is the role of credit in creating (dis)equilibrium? Do predator-prey population sizes fluctuate naturally? Are buildings in local stable equilibrium? Will the world notice if all the human beings were to die? Is the ‘balance of nature’ strong or fragile or neither? Are there only local equilibria and ‘no’ singular global equilibrium? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from biology & ecology (Dr. Sutirth Dey, IISER, Pune), physics (Prof. Deepak Dhar, TIFR, Mumbai), & economics (Prof. Anjan Mukherji, JNU, New Delhi). Listen in....
Is babble the beginning? Are languages pure, or were they originally mixed? Was Shakespeare writing in English? Are languages negotiated like in a bazaar, & where then does the power lie? Are there areas & languages where mixing is flaunted, & some where it is not? Do you communicate in a mixed language (Hinglish?)? Does the label of language operate in a retrospective manner? What does it mean to have a first language? What does it mean to loan and borrow words? Do you pun? Do words travel more easily than syntax; why? Do scripts mix? Is it possible to legislate languages? Is the French of French Canada ‘purer’ than of France? Why aren’t other languages not completely incomprehensible? Is everything translatable? What might be the impact on languages of the disembodied global marketplace or the digital? Is it likely that the standardized language (of literature) in the future would (again) be poly-genealogical, & something that we would not recognize today? Can media or political spaces possibly be pluri-lingual? Can a totally artificial language be created? Do languages need custodians? Aapko space chahiye? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from linguistics (Prof. Probal Dasgupta, ISI, Kolkata), English literature (Prof. Jonathan Gil Harris, Ashoka University, Delhi), & translation and cultural studies (Prof. Rita Kothari, IIT Gandhinagar, Gandhinagar). Listen in....
What is a (hard) problem? Can we know which problems do not have solutions? Is scheduling flights a hard problem? Is assembling cars an easy problem? Theoretically, are there more problems (uncountable) than solutions (countably many)? Are algorithms well defined? Are they a finite description for infinitely many possible inputs & processes? What is not an algorithm? Can processes be algorithmic and not computational? Does it matter how algorithms are embodied? Is every algorithm a Turing Machine? Is there a difference between equations and algorithms? Can algorithms be approximate? Where do heuristics come from? Are comparisons the easiest measurement? Do physical symbols always underlie any computation? Are the best algorithms exponential? Is there infinite richness of algorithms, & are computers infinitely reconfigurable machines? How is the real world abstracted (& discretized)? Do problems need analog computing, since (real life) variables are usually (?) continuous and not discrete? Is a recipe, then, an algorithm? Is the brain a computer? Is the world analog or digital? Do algorithms have an ontology? Are algorithms abstractions? Are they here to stay? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from logic & theoretical computer science (Prof. Anuj Dawar, Cambridge University, Cambridge), & operations research & industrial engineering (Prof. Ashok K. Mittal, ex-IIT Kanpur, New Delhi). Listen in....
Is your (everyday) life repetitive and mundane? Does squirming life lie just underneath the layer of banality? Is the everyday always laced with fantasy and/or skepticism? What is the place of mythology in this context? Can a polluted river be a sight to behold, & might it be crucial to hold such ambivalent feelings? What is an event? Can household events be dreadful? What is totally new? Can a fleeting moment sometimes come as a gift? Equally, can dormant stories suddenly come into being again? Can a word or a gesture embody different temporalities? Can the norm and its transgression be joined together in everyday aspirations? What is extraordinary? Do concepts have sharp boundaries? (How) can something ordinary be designated as art? What does & can an artist do? Can the city go from feeling indoors to becoming outdoors? Do language, gestures and words have the capacity to produce certain kinds of resonances? Can the ordinary gesture of washing the face (say) mean a lot more? Is there a way in which the mundane changes over time? Can human subjectivity ever be fully colonized? What might be the future of experiencing and representing life (and death)? How would you describe a piece of dry wood? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from anthropology & philosophy (Prof. Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), & art (Sudhir Patwardhan, Mumbai). Listen in...
What do you believe ‘in’? Do you hold irrational beliefs? Why is it difficult to revise beliefs? Can it be beneficial to have false beliefs? Do you (objectively) believe that there is Heaven? Can beliefs be like axioms, or are they all (iteratively) based on facts? Are absurd beliefs particularly beneficial in forming a community? Does belief always imply an affect? Do you believe that voting is a foolish thing to do? Is belief an instrument of power? Can one infer beliefs of animals or children? Why is there suspension of disbelief or testing (of the truth criterion) in cinema or theatre? How are ritual spaces different? Does cinema tap into the collective (un)conscious (belief)? Is it profitable to believe that God exists? Will there be belief as long as there are skeptics? Can beliefs become redundant? Is the problem of deciding what a new belief should be NP-complete? How do we automatically change our (practical?) beliefs all the time, when it is technically extremely difficult? Would there be a pristine (messianic?) theory of belief revision in the future? How could belief revision be: a variation, a change, a decision, a monstration, or an event? Would you look through Galileo’s telescope? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from performance theory and philosophy (Dr. Soumyabrata Choudhury, JNU, New Delhi) & logic, philosophy and computer science (Prof. Rohit Parikh, CUNY, New York). Listen in....
Have you been stuck in a traffic jam? Is it ‘difficult’ to wear helmets? Can one conceive of one’s own death? Can traffic self organize? Is the ability to reverse, as in certain molecular motors, fundamental to the design of all efficient transportation systems? Are there lanes (microtubules), porters, & ‘bypass roads’ within our cells? Why does the tendency towards order increase as the traffic density increases? How are traffic shockwaves created? What are the interrelationships between density, speed, & flow? Why can’t traffic always be directionless? When does planning need to step in? Is speed to be feared or embraced? Why are there speed limits at all? Are there interpenetrating movements of matter within our bodies? Is flow of people different from flow of goods? Are we (as people) turned into goods when we are within airports? Would all constituents in an ‘ideal’ transportation system be ‘moved’? Are roads a Public Sphere? What is the role of the State? Can States become ‘traffic police States’? Is there a conflict between logic and ethics in traffic? Is the way up the way down? Might slow vehicles be the future? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from biophysics (Prof. Gautam Menon, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai), transport planning (Prof. P. K. Sarkar, School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi), & philosophy (Prof. Vijay Tankha, St. Stephen's College, New Delhi). Listen in....
Why aren’t there ant sized elephants? Or, why aren’t there elephant sized ants? What is small, large or infinite? Are there theoretical limits to size for living & physical bodies? Was the Universe infinite in size even at Big Bang, & how? Is there a center of the Universe? Are there different kinds of infinity? Do different infinities have different cardinalities? What is countably or uncountably infinite? Can there be an infinity ‘smaller’ than Aleph-naught? How is infinitely small (infinitesimal) different from infinitely large? Would the smallest interesting living bodies be about 3,000 Angstroms in size, & why is this dependent on the size of DNA? Is there a reason why whales are larger than elephants? What is the reciprocal of infinity? How can point-like elementary particles be massy? How large is the (yet unknown) elementary particle comprising dark matter likely to be? For natural evolution, over very long time scales, does it pay to be small? Are we equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which we emerge and the infinity by which we are engulfed? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from evolutionary & developmental biology (Prof. Vidyanand Nanjundiah, Center for Genetic Studies, Bangalore), mathematics (Prof. Sujatha Ramdorai, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada), & cosmology and particle physics (Prof. Raghavan Rangarajan, PRL, Ahmedabad). Listen in....
What are tigers worth? Why is diamond more valuable than water? What is Nature’s role in economic value? Is non-use value also a part of total value? Is valuation always the same as measurement in terms of money? Is value fundamentally a (human) welfare concept? What is the implication of Nature not being ‘in the market’? Does Nature include the moon? How did water and land come to be commoditized? Would it be a mistake to give a value to (say) Sundarbans? What is Nature, & how have our interrelationships changed historically? What does conservation involve? Is nature conservation just a small part of environmentalism? Are both preservation as well as resource management a possibility? Can bringing in the future continuously into our conception help correct the use of resources? Might a time return when water might not have a market? Do we (always) ‘Bring out number, weight, & measure in a year of dearth’? Must the economy (once again) become a subset of society? Is ‘man the measure of all things’? Are we capable of something much greater than anthropocentrism? Should we be optimistic? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from economics (Prof. A. K. Enamul Haque, East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh), conservation studies (Dr. Ullas Karanth, Wildlife Conservation Society, Bangalore), & philosophy and economics (Dr. Aseem Shrivastava, New Delhi). Listen in....
Are you here by chance? Does probability exist? Can we decide if the world is deterministic? Is probability an outcome of our ignorance, & are we ‘forced’ to model using probabilities? Is there a trade-off between hardness and randomness? How did statistical modeling & probabilistic reasoning help establish irrefutably that smoking causes cancer? Why is Law of Large Numbers true? What does sampling mean in a world with Big Data? Is Brownian motion invariance principles manifesting themselves in a different space? Is probability theory merely a mathematical model which fits the world ‘very often’? In what sense is quantum mechanical uncertainty different? Can probability help gather knowledge about the world without intervention? Can randomness be generated? Is the best estimate of tomorrow’s (Markovian) weather today’s weather? Is the (need for the) probability of missing the train going to be different in the future? Is DNA sequence random? Would understanding biological systems using probability be a key endeavour for the future? Is it also important to regain a sophisticated understanding of probability besides just calculating? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from computer science (Prof. Jaikumar Radhakrishnan, TIFR, Mumbai), mathematics (Prof. Rahul Roy, ISI, New Delhi), & philosophy (Dr. Federica Russo, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Listen in....
Are you addicted to snake poison? Or gambling? Are you an alcoholic? Have you quit smoking? Why are cigarettes so popular? Why are slot machines more addictive than games of skill? Why are we addicted to anything? Is there a threshold? Are some of us (genetically) more vulnerable than others? Is an addict always aware that she is an addict? Does addiction always have both ‘loss of control’ as well as ‘potential to harm’ components? Can we be mistaken about the (subjective) experience of our own bodily sensations? Is addiction always a desire for certain kinds of sensations? What precedes the craving? Are addicts price sensitive, & do they respond to financial rewards? Does tobacco tax work? What if the substance is not available? Is it always irrational to be an addict? Can one avoid severe depression via addiction? Are hardcore addicts different? Is their ethical vision deeply skewed? Might brown sugar and alcohol addicts look down upon each other? Why does relapse happen? Is it tough being an addict? Is our concept of addiction going to expand in the future? Will addiction always be there, or does it depend largely on the environment? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from behavioral economics & philosophy (Prof. Harold Kincaid, University of Cape Town, South Africa), psychiatry (Prof. Shubhangi Parkar, Seth G.S.M.C & KEM Hospital, Mumbai), & philosophy (Dr. Kranti Saran, Ashoka University, Delhi). Listen in....
Is 100% memory loss possible? Is the past ‘preserved by itself, automatically’? Is the notion of decay linked intimately to the concepts of order and memory? Does life grow towards order, even as physical systems go towards disorder? Does maintenance of order require a significant amount of energy? Is there a fundamental unit of order? Are rituals (say) the work required to reproduce social order? Is anomie or agonism the opposite of order? Is too much cohesion also a symptom of decay? Do systems decay when they go ‘out of context’ vis-à-vis the neighbours? Is memory the sense-organ to perceive time? Why does a fly develop a complex memory for a life of ‘just’ 1-2 (human) days? Do life-forces wax & wane? Are there different forms of decaying? Can some systems self heal or (erroneously) self destruct? Are perpetual systems possible? Do automata (or, human beings) always display highly rule bound behaviour? Is physical immortality (with selfhood) technically possible? Can machines introspect? How do you prove that you are not a machine? Why is it that some trees do not seem to ever die? Are myths ‘more’ futuristic? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from neurosciences & psychiatry (Prof. Sanjeev Jain, NIMHANS, Bangalore), computer science (Prof. Madhavan Mukund, CMI, Chennai), and anthropology & philosophy (Dr. Bhrigupati Singh, Brown University, Providence, USA). Listen in...
Does Mowgli have fun? Why do we crack jokes? Why are spoofs enjoyable, & is having fun, fundamentally, an act of subversion? Does having fun require us to be innocent ‘fools’? Is fun the basic objective of human existence? What is it, then, not to have fun? Is it a fact of human existence that most of the time we are not having fun? Is pain the (obvious) obverse of pleasure? How can tragic spectacles be pleasure producing? How can an expression of sorrow, such as Blues, be enjoyable? Does the idea of fun primarily come to us in retrospect? Is having fun in the present often a contrived and laboured idea? Is the idea of fun intimately linked to the notions of spending, forgoing, & forgetting? Must fun be ethically driven? Why & how can (say) a musician sometimes refuse to entertain? Why do there exist self inflicting pain systems? How is the ‘crucified’ the model for human excellence? Why do musical concerts work, & can fun be manufactured formulaically? What is it to be an individual in a rock concert? Does one need the Other? Can ‘pure’ fun be utile and essential? Is the idea of life before marketplace the idea of innocence? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions under the metonym of fun using concepts from literary & cultural theory (Prof. Saugata Bhaduri, JNU, New Delhi), music (Vehrnon Ibrahim, FreeWillMusic, Mumbai), and poetry & film (Prabodh Parikh, ex-Mithibai College, Mumbai). Listen in...
How do chicks fly back to Africa on their own? Is recognition merely re-cognition? What are the different mechanisms for differentiation? How do (say) most new-born insects recognize objects without any social support? How, besides sight and sound, odour-mediated recognition plays a special role in several species? How there is a lot of consistency with smell. We journey into the world of both precocial and altricial species and wonder if the ability to recognize may be both innate and learned. How do unhatched chicks communicate with each other and their mother? Does a life form have the option to not know? Can animals identify that which their nervous system does not allow them to identify? Do brains process information from the environment in a non-linear way? Can one recognize that which has not been experienced before? How the North American apple flies were set up to love apples even before apples were there? How do starlings recognize each other in a murmuration of almost a million? Does time need to be continuous (& finite?) for recognition to make sense? Does knowledge consist in knowing what a thing is not? Is identity always ecological? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from chemical ecology (Dr. Shannon Olsson, NCBS, Bangalore), philosophy (Prof. A. Raghuramaraju, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), and ornithology (Dr. Asad Rahmani, BNHS, Mumbai). Listen in....
Is 2+2 inevitably 4? Is it grue? Is it true? Is it true that facts do not live on their own? What is The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages? How logic chases truth up the tree of grammar? Is truth the same across languages? If we used different languages would the facts be different? What comes first: truth or meaning? Is every sentence true or false? Does truth always have the IF-THEN structure? What can computers not prove, & why? What the nature of logic and probabilities does to the notion of truth, & how there need not be one logic? Can there be heuristics of ‘interestingness’ when forward chaining for a proof? Might all mathematics be done by proof checkers and Automated Theorem Provers (ATPs)? What is a candidate for a conjecture? Why is logical contradiction the ultimate no-no? Why is stock market news more difficult to write than Shakespeare, for a ‘Bayesian-monkey’? ‘Tell me what you are interested in, and I will tell you what the truth consists in’. Do (?) counterfactuals change the world by a very small amount of information? Or, does nature provide the regularities, and we provide the causal theories? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from philosophy (Prof. Simon Blackburn, ex-University of Cambridge, Cambridge), computer science (Prof. Paritosh K. Pandya, TIFR, Mumbai), and mathematics (Prof. Rajat Tandon, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad). Listen in....
Do you feel at home? What is the other of home – the world? We think of home variously as culture, a memory, an identity, a language, a terrain of materiality, a landscape, the zone of affect, an idea, a gharana, & a family? How the sense of belonging (to, say, a gharana) has nothing to do with place? Have all homes been founded on the basis of some principles? How is the notion of home different for the refugees and the diaspora? Can you carry your home with you? Why do we need a home, & can one make multiple homes? How ideas, often, have multiple homes. What happens, however, when a certain musical tradition (a home for some) is appropriated by the market economy? What is the home of Hakuna matata? What is the significance of land, & where our ancestors might be ‘buried’? We also explore, using the Israel/Palestine case & other instances of settler colonialism, whether it is possible to have a home without a homeland. Is home where we can debate, converse and have access to new ideas? What is the future of gharanas? Does the future of home lie in creating an equilibrium between difference and similarity? Finally, are we all merely nomads? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions, about the past, present & the possible futures of homes, using concepts from literature (Githa Hariharan, New Delhi), social sciences & philosophy (Prof. Shail Mayaram, CSDS, New Delhi), and music (Vidya Rao, New Delhi). Listen in....
Do you hate beggars? Can one think of the above-below topography using both perspective as well as relationality? Is there an invisibilisation and dispersal of the hegemons? What does it mean to be at the very bottom? Is there a social responsibility of capital? Why does the below always have a hidden character, & why is there no giving of dignity to a full corporeal person? Why does a musahar woman own a broken-up dis-assembled bicycle? Are we as a society actively at war against the destitute – why? Are we actively creating destitution (& dispossession)? Is there always a dialectic unity between prosperity and misery? Who is the primary client of the state? How do you view taxes? Do we need to identify with the below? Is it possible to lose the above below through a new imaginary? What are the limits of solidarity? Is solidarity expensive? Why do moral arguments have so little traction? What is the universe of those with whom we are willing to share? Why are there The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas? It’s all the same people, right? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions, about destitution in a general sense, using concepts from human rights (Harsh Mander, New Delhi), social anthropology (Prof. Shalini Randeria, The Graduate Institute, Geneva), and social theory & literature (Prof. Kumkum Sangari, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee). Listen in....
Are you angry? Do we have a terrible love of war? Is it possible to think of violence without the teleological means-end schema? Why don’t we have a phenomenology for it? Is it because violence is the ground shared by enemies? Why don’t we manage to look inside ourselves for the source of violence, and often project it on to the Other? Why do even the worst of perpetrators represent themselves as being the victim? Does violence lie at the end of speech? Is today’s victim tomorrow’s offender? Do shame and humiliation turn us towards violence? What then is the agenda of punishment? How can we open up the victim’s silence? How can we access the scene of violence? Is the aggressive drive essential to human survival? Why do the under-trials expect the Judge to at least hear them out? Is hatred a revolutionary sentiment? Does militarism (love for war?) run across modes of production? Is crime (merely) an act by which one runs the ‘risk’ of taking punishment? What is the future of the act of policing? What is the distinction between violence and brutality? If violence becomes increasingly non profitable in the future, might society then need to invent violence for ethical reasons? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions, about the nature of violence, using concepts from criminology & justice (Prof. Vijay Raghavan, TISS, Mumbai), philosophy (Prof. Sanil V., IIT Delhi, New Delhi), and history (Dr. Dilip Simeon, ex-University of Delhi, New Delhi). Listen in....
What comes first - matter or space or time? What is the structure of space? Why did Paul Cezanne go 'flat'? How did Picasso turn the artistic conception of space on its head with cubism? Is there a link between colour and space? What is it like to be in Matisse's The Red Studio? What happens when you walk into a room that you have not been in before? Are there specific neurons in your brain for every space that you have ever been to? How do place cells within the hippocampus represent the physical space as a cognitive map? Is space the same everywhere in the universe? Is it possible to represent empty space? How does an artist create the pictorial space on a 2-dimensional canvas? Is the perception of space always relative to matter (& objects)? Is episodic memory anchored in space (the 'where')? What is space like at sub atomic scales? Does nature really have more than 3 dimensions? Has theoretical physics completely missed incorporating gravity of all the matter in the universe? Is matter essentially primary, time derived, and space essentially relational? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions, about the manifested space around and within us, using concepts from physics (Prof. C.S. Unnikrishnan, TIFR, Mumbai), art (Atul Dodiya, Mumbai), and neuroscience (Dr. Sachin Deshmukh, IISc, Bangalore).
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SynTalk thinks about the provocative questions of spectres, spirits, & ghosts, as themselves and as signifiers, while constantly wondering if they are an unnecessary residue. Can we think of the repressed voices in places of violence and ruin, using ideas of ghosts and haunting? What is the thing that haunts? What is the big deal about the ghosts? The concepts are derived off / from Plutarch, Ludwig Lavater, Thomas Lodge, Shakespeare, Nicholas Rowe, Heidegger, Freud, Weber, Adorno, Levinas, Tagore, Amos Tutuola, Derrida, Kurosawa, Arjun Appadurai, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean-Michel Rabaté, & Avery F. Gordon, among others. How the juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar creates the uncanny? Would something entirely unfamiliar be uncanny or just plain strange? Can the spectral be defined at all? How hauntology potentially challenges ontology? Do ghosts represent a world order where things are not arbitrary, and where actions have repercussions? How Shakespeare added a sense of wonder and mystery to the figure of the ghost, & made it substantial. Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet a Protestant with a Roman Catholic father? Should Hamlet have followed what the Ghost said? Are ghosts almost always ethically haunting figures? How the Derridean ghost is a bodyless body, and not a spirit without a body? Is every sense of our Being always haunted (with Nothingness)? How time is ‘out of joint’ with the ghostly. Does the uncertainty of the future always unsettle the past? Does modernity render the unexplainable superfluous, & what then are the ghosts of modernity? Is the cinematic consciousness ultimately a very spectral consciousness? What has been the life of ghosts in (say) Indian, Japanese, & South East Asian cinema? Why do Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists always see more than the others? Can a hyper rational mind experience the spectral? The links between Ur-Hamlet, 49, temporal twist, Macbeth, trauma, Hiroshima, turning table, purgatory, Madhumati, goblin, witches, The Babadook, spectral housing in Mumbai, magic, white noise, & Bhooter Bhobishyot. How the ghost expresses the yearning to grasp the mystery of history. Can we get hold of the Levinasian ‘trace’? Are there cultures without ghosts? Would our (otherwise sterile) lives need the pollution or infection of other worldliness in the future? Is it almost impossible to live without ghosts? ‘Can we speak of ghosts, without transforming the whole world and ourselves, too, into phantoms’? ‘Even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet…’. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Shormishtha Panja (Shakespeare studies, literature, University of Delhi, New Delhi), & Dr. Suvadip Sinha (philosophy, cultural studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities).
SynTalk thinks about insanity, madness, and mental illness, & its links with questions of medicine, physiology, freedom, control, knowledge and power. We weave together both theoretical explication as well as purely personal reflections to try and understand madness, and journey in and out of mental asylums a few times. Can we understand madness ‘itself’ as a truth beyond any discussion? The concepts are derived off / from Descartes, Auguste Comte, Philippe Pinel, Owen A. R. Berkeley Hill, Jal Dhunjibhoy, Durkheim, Amartya Sen, & Jeffrey Masson, among others. What makes a (happy, purposeful, & successful) human being go mad, & can there be a master narrative? Would you prefer to be called mad rather than mentally ill? Is the core question the need (or not?) for defining the ‘abnormal’? Why & how are the mental disorders categorically or syndromally diagnosed across multiple axes? Is the DSM atheoretical, and might it be linked to our, often only partially organized, deeply held beliefs? Is the naming and formulation of the problem intimately linked with the philosophical perspective that one adopts? Can one understand the birth of the concept of the (lunatic) asylum and private madhouses? Do people ever leave the asylum after retrieving their personhood? The trends and concepts of (de-,re-, & trans-)institutionalization? How the space of madness may be a space of resistance, and then a stepping stone to growth? Has mental illness always been and will be present with human cultures? Is all madness manifested in the inter personal spaces and ‘beside the mind’? The gigantic task of capturing the inter personal and the social domain (outside physiology) when it is not an objective given. We also explore the reflexive relationship between theory, experience, and power (equations), & how we articulate the position for ‘them’. Is our understanding of some conditions, at the same time, not biological enough? Is mental disorder localized in the head? Is psychiatry very far from perfect? The links between workhouses, chains, moral treatment, neurodiversity, pagans, delusional depression, When Elephants Weep, welfare state, diabetes, Governor General of Bengal, ‘care of the soul’,~3000 BC, Serotonin, Psychiatria Democratica, Victorian era, Lahore, & the rock bottom. Do animals get depressed? Is it necessary to articulate the experience of madness? Is the hunger for this understanding a form of anxiety in us? Have the mentally ill been criminalized over centuries, & is there a deep need to not cut ‘them’ off? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Bhargavi V. Davar (mental health advocacy, The Bapu Trust, Pune), Prof. Parthasarathi Mondal (social theory, TISS, Mumbai), & Dr. Alok Sarin (psychiatry, Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science & Research, New Delhi).
SynTalk thinks about information, while constantly wondering about its physical nature and computability. Is there information in the universe irrespective of human beings or life? Does all the meaning come from a protocol, and what if there is no shared language? Does a protocol or a context need to pre exist? The concepts are derived off / from Laplace, Carnot, Boltzmann, Shannon, Ronald Fisher, Kolmogorov, T S Eliot, Warren Weaver, & Nørretranders, among others. We retrace the journey of the notion of information within (say) thermodynamics, electrical engineering, neurolinguistics, mathematics, and computational systems, & notice how the core departure was to think of it as measurable? Does the universe speak in one language? Does ignorance go down when information is received, and is ignorance analogous to disorder? Is entropy an anthropomorphic principle, as it assumes an underlying notion of order? How, in language, the norm (order) can be identified directly from a close study of the deviation from the norm (disorder). How the brain or any system may learn how to learn and negotiate meaning via ‘bootstrapping’? Is the nature of ‘input’ processing different from information processing as the neural networks are formed in a child’s brain? What makes data information for the receiver? Why does an internal combustion engine ‘have’ to dump out the disorder via the exhaust to direct order to the wheels? Can one think of information content as an objective ‘event cone’ with past and future imprinted in it? Is all time eternally present? Is there a fundamental unit (say, bit or qubit) of information, & is it discrete or continuous or both? How & why are the first and second language signals stored differently in the brain? What is the role played by shared context (exformation) and commonality in communication? Are there different mathematical theories of communication, information content and complexity? The links between wax, steam engines, Voyager, heads or tails, ‘motive power of fire’, critical period hypothesis, It from Bit, falling stones, the case of Chelsea’s misdiagnosis, Four Quartets, ‘I do’, heat death, & Schrodinger’s cat. Can we forget something if we explicitly want to? Does nature forget (information)? Will we drown in the crazy amount of information in the future, or will we develop new tools to handle complexity? Do we need to understand human mind & cognition better? Can we communicate with animals and (may be) aliens in the future? ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Vaishna Narang (biolinguistics, JNU, New Delhi), Prof. Rajaram Nityananda (astrophysics, Azim Premji University, ex NCRA-TIFR, Bangalore), & Prof. R. Ramanujam (computer science, IMSc, Chennai).
SynTalk thinks about the past, present and the future of water, and its dialectical relationship with Earth and life. We enter the worlds of rain, snow, ocean, monsoon, subterranean & surface rivers, dams, volcanoes, canals, lakes, estuaries, mountains, polar regions, and drains. What exactly is a river? Is water the same everywhere? The concepts are derived off / from Thales, Anaximander, Pierre Perrault, & Edme Mariotte, among others. We think of water both as an element and a compound. What would water be as a ‘ground’ of design and thinking, given that we are so wedded to the fixed dimensions of terra firma? How water is open, fluid (in space & time), and relative, and always retains its identity (?). Why are maps blue only somewhere, when water is everywhere? Do we privilege one moment in time (as rivers) in the hydrological cycle? Can we challenge ourselves to live in moments of (say) the rain or evaporation? Is there a need to include soil moisture in our imagination? How the sun is the essential driver of the water cycle, even though sunlight penetrates only till about ~100 metres in the sea. Do rivers also need water? How water is a lot more than H2O, with dissolved & suspended loads, nutrients, isotopic content, and microbial life. How & why rivers keep changing their dendritic courses? Are rivers fundamentally a series of holding & overflow systems, rather than systems with a source and a destination? How the ‘main stream’ of certain rivers may have been fallaciously justified historically by the surveyors? How stagnant water can be anti life. Have we (contextually) subjugated and privileged water, and told it: ‘be there, don’t come here’? Are floods a problem? Why do we channelize rivers, when water finds its own level? Is the earth losing water? When did it first rain on earth, and did rains come much before the rivers? The links between ~11 days, Cameroon’s Lake Nyos disaster, Catcher in the Rye, stream orders, The Big Muddy, photolysis, fair weather, Nile floods, run-offs, Sun, ecological cycles, electricity, Avogadro’s number, gravity, & independence. How water acts as Earth’s thermostat, & also helps the planet self sustain. Why doesn’t water vapour heat the earth up despite being a powerful greenhouse gas? Are there some water molecules that have never left the deep oceans or the atmosphere? How variation (a feature, & not a bug) is the life of water flow. What would happen if 100% of the rivers were dammed; could nature strike back? Can/should we simulate nature? Should dams be undone? Can future be a place of liberated water, with dissolved lines between land and water? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Dilip da Cunha (architecture, design, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Shripad Dharmadhikary (social & environmental activism, Manthan Adhyayan Kendra, Pune), & Prof. Ramesh Rengaswamy (paleoclimatology, oceanography, PRL, Ahmedabad).
SynTalk thinks about narratives & stories, while constantly wondering whether it is the stories that ‘make us up’ and give us our self-hood. We delve into the worlds of literature, film making, video games, philosophy, cognitive sciences, and linguistics to explore why & how we tell & understand stories. The concepts are derived off / from Aristotle, Coleridge, Diderot, Georges Polti, Hitchcock, Labov, E M Forster, Lumière brothers, de Beauvoir, Augusto Boal, Chomsky, Salim-Javed, David Lodge, & Dennett, among others. How identity, time, memory, & emotions are knotted together by fiction. Is story telling like a flight simulator, with most of the rewards but none of the risk? How narratives however, are not synonymous with fiction and, cover both fact & fiction. Do we remember narratively, & create causal links (with mnemonic durability) between the past, present and the possible futures? The difference of a story from a (film) script, & the importance of the dramatic centre? Is narrative experience a (playful) exploration of the space of possibilities – i.e., is all fiction a game? How incompleteness is also a valid possibility in narratives. Why are morals so critical in any satisfying story? How important is it to have a sense of the ending, & how can one return the narrative time to the present? And, in the face of the crisis of our death, is our life more like episodic TV serials, rather than a Greek tragedy? Is lying or cheating a related ability to telling stories? Are stories (video games) more about tying (dying) and untying (undying)? Are there cultures without stories? How there are real physiological reactions and a willing suspension of disbelief on seeing (say) a film in a dark theatre. How can a screenwriter be moved to tears by her own story? Why can’t there be stories without characters or emotions? Are there only a finite number of plots or narratives? What do you see when you look into the mirror in a first-person shooter game? Is there a serial killer inside you? The links between ‘queen died’, 36, spect-actor, chaos, Gilgamesh, Spiderman, Flower, Lagaan, Alzheimer’s, Max Payne, jumping over the chair, alienation, Psycho Mantis, & cheat codes. How are we able to create stories, but are not able to count the number of words in our head? Is social reality the most fictionalized, & is monologue always secondary to collaborative dialogue in story telling? Why aren’t video games laugh-out-aloud funny, & does it have anything to do with the fact that you can’t tickle yourself? Is the future of fiction likely to involve a range of affects & small scale emotions? Can the story strike back at the player (or the reader)? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (game studies, literature, Presidency University, Kolkata), Prof. Rukmini Bhaya Nair (linguistics, narrative theory, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), & Anjum Rajabali (screenwriting, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about errors, while constantly wondering if they are innately hardwired into nature. Are error free domains possible or desirable? Would we stop making history if there were to be an error free world? The concepts are derived off / from Gnosticism, Aristotle, Alhazen, Galileo, Kepler, Thomas More, Lord Kelvin, Heidegger, Cioran, Gödel, Piaget, John Bell, & Tony Hoare, among others. Is all truth temporal? The difference between systematic (in one direction) and random (in both directions) errors with respect to the true value. Do things fail in the (non-human) natural world or they just ‘happen’? Is failure about an unfolding process while errors are more punctual? How (measurement) errors are inextricably linked to the notion of standard conception and expectation. Is there a trade-off between safety (not making mistakes) and liveness (making progress) for reactive systems (that interact with the environment)? How did a perfect Being create an imperfect world, and is it possible to have a ‘theology of failure’ (via, say, the demiurge)? How we pose the existence of a creator via notions of making, design or performance of the world (as an object). Is it likely that (software) modules that are individually correct give an error when put together? How in languages that are self referential & expressive it is impossible to prove if a program is correct. How some flawed universal notions can be much more intuitive. The (deeply counterintuitive) equivalence of uniform motion and rest. How there is often a striking similarity between students’ flawed conceptions and the history of ideas. Is limited experience the main source of errors? How computer programs non monotonically learn from experience, and the accompanying process of belief revision? Is consistency the virtue of an ass? What is the opposite of failure? Does one experience profound existential nothingness when one encounters failure? How (fortunately?) utopias – the perfect social & political models of the world – fail, and links with expectations and game theory? The links between ‘the world going to the dogs’, violent movement, bugs, chess, God, invariants, flight controllers, voting, winners & losers, exponential blow up, theory of vision, clocks, the original sin, bicycle, & the verifying compiler. Is it possible that there are ‘hidden variables’ in the physical world that makes even the quantum world completely certain? Would becoming perfect be the end of everything, & should we stay imperfect? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Costica Bradatan (philosophy, Honors College, TTU, Texas), Prof. Arvind Kumar (physics, Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, ex-HBCSE TIFR, Mumbai), & Prof G. Sivakumar (computer science, IIT Bombay, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about quarrels (in a general sense), while constantly wondering whether there is a civilizational ‘need’ for it. Is it possible to have a sustainable theory for interactions (and by extension, quarrels)? What are the links with language structure and language usage? The concepts are derived off / from Upanishads, Bhagwad Gita, Sarala Das, Oliver Goldsmith, Locke, Bertrand Russell, Grice, Nozick, & Chomsky, among others. Can we think of an idealized quarrel? How do we understand sentences & discourses that have non literal (suggestive) meanings? How only the non-obvious counts as information. The maxims of quantity, quality, relation, & manner for ideal conversations, and how these cooperative principles break down in quarrels. How in a legal context the adversarial system is used to resolve difference of views. Are spoken quarrels different from the written, and whether norms, conventions and several para lingual aspects are lost (& sanitized) when written? What is the difference between interests and positions? What are the set of things that are not allowed to be used as bargaining tools in a conversational context? Are quarrels structured and institutionalized in many areas of life, where it may be possible to separate the person’s views from the person? Why are there so many lawyer jokes? How deeply should one hold one’s ideas? How a lawyer (an agent) sometime morphs into the principal. Why do some societies have so many (out of court) settlements? Is it possible to have an argument without investing certain aspects of one’s self? Why should some words not be used in ‘parliamentary’ language? Is the Supreme Court always right because it is final, and not final because it is right? Where do swear words come from, and why do they linger? Who decides what is polite or impolite language? How norms of political correctness start out as public acknowledgement of past rights or wrongs. Can one apply the Theory of Implicature to understand how swear words can come to be used as an endearment? What are the dynamics of multilateral conflicts, even if they are handled by two individuals? Why many societies do not accept the pardon by the victim? The links between ego, Judgment of Solomon, Mona Lisa, ‘devastating counter example’, debates, horse trading, Ataturk, tyranny of language, & ‘matters of taste’. Would a society without quarrels be dead? Can quarrels be replaced by some playful ways of inhabiting conflicts? ‘For e'en though vanquish'd he could argue still…’. The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Arudra Burra (philosophy, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), Prof. B. N. Patnaik (linguistics, ex-IIT Kanpur, Bangalore), & Somasekhar Sundaresan (law, J. Sagar Associates, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about theories & theorizing, while constantly wondering whether theories are explanatory as well as speculative (‘what-if’). Are all theories, in a sense, artistic creations and inventions (rather than discoveries)? Can we take the human out of the equation? The concepts are derived off / from Euclid, Newton, Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Robert Hooke, Boole, Faraday, Maxwell, Gauss, Hilbert, Godel, Bourbaki, Abraham Robinson, Weinberg, Stanley Fish, Lawvere, & Stephen Wolfram, among others. How all physical theories have a desire to predict & look into the future. How mathematical theories, however, do not need to predict and have no role for evidence. Further, how theories in literature are an attempt to explain the process of interpretation? Are there theories that are finished pieces of work (test: when all true statements are provable)? Are some theories destined to be incomplete? Will we ever have a complete theory for poetry? Is all of mathematics just a theory? Do all theories (real numbers, classical mechanics) have limits? Is everything that is there to be known about a triangle now known? How a theory comes to be conceived in areas far far removed from available knowledge, via a leap of imagination or (even) an act of faith. How ‘non-logical axioms’ when put into the magical black box of ‘logic’ churns out a list of ‘provable statements’. How crystalline & elegant axioms are often identified after years of calculations. Can we, for instance, axiomatize the notion of space or theorize about some currently ill understood domains of gravitation at the largest scale? How logic specifies a grammar for construction. How double negation may not work in some systems (what is not true is not necessarily false). May the idea of the observable or the ways of seeing itself be theoretical constructions? Can finished theories have parallel ways of thinking (say, lines of force, fields of force, or electromagnetic potential)? The links between theoreticity and abstraction, & is (even) man a theory (‘the proper study of mankind is man’?). Are (electrical) circuit laws completely autonomous of the fundamental Maxwell equations? Are Laws the robe and Theory the wardrobe? The links between dog star, functor, earthquake, QCD, ‘mortal grossness’, Nile floods, fluxions, video games, chariot, White Males, synthetic differential geometry, love-dove-&-shove, & the salt doll. How theories wax & wane with the consensus and dissensus of interpretive communities. Are there universal truths? Can we simulate the answer to any question with extremely efficient computation without theories? Will theory itself come to an end in the long run? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Partha Pratim Ghosh (mathematics, ISI, Tezpur), Prof. Pramod K. Nayar (literature, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), & Prof. Urjit A. Yajnik (physics, IIT Bombay, Mumbai).
]] __begin__ [[ Welcome to SynTalk ]] 13.8 billion years in 150 seconds. All sound, no music. Hypnopompic. A little weird. Sometimes noisy. Bittersweet. Disorienting, & meekly harmonic. Incessant. Drone. Dawn. The Big Bang, after all. CMBR. 4.5 billion years ago. Earth. Earthquakes. Murmurs (of volcanoes). Pulsation. 3.5 billion years ago. & then life. Heart beat(s). Organic. Thud. Bird songs. Many many. Green grass & trees; swaying. Lawns. Bright sunshine. Oh, cars. Highways. Asphalt. That’s us. Human beings. Bird songs. People. Poised. Alone ]]
]] __end__ [[ The __begin__ soundtrack ‘back masked‘. Rewind in 150 seconds, & replay. Bird songs. Speeding cars. People. Mynahs. Less weird. May be. Hypnagogic, & drowsy. Life to non life. Crescendo. Inorganic. Infinite loop. Swirling whirlpool. Singularity. The Big Crunch ]]
]] __begin__ [[ Welcome to SynTalk ]] 13.8 billion years in 150 seconds. All sound, no music. Hypnopompic. A little weird. Sometimes noisy. Bittersweet. Disorienting, & meekly harmonic. Incessant. Drone. Dawn. The Big Bang, after all. CMBR. 4.5 billion years ago. Earth. Earthquakes. Murmurs (of volcanoes). Pulsation. 3.5 billion years ago. & then life. Heart beat(s). Organic. Thud. Bird songs. Many many. Green grass & trees; swaying. Lawns. Bright sunshine. Oh, cars. Highways. Asphalt. That’s us. Human beings. Bird songs. People. Poised. Alone ]]
]] __end__ [[ The __begin__ soundtrack ‘back masked‘. Rewind in 150 seconds, & replay. Bird songs. Speeding cars. People. Mynahs. Less weird. May be. Hypnagogic, & drowsy. Life to non life. Crescendo. Inorganic. Infinite loop. Swirling whirlpool. Singularity. The Big Crunch ]]
SynTalk thinks about interpretation and understanding of the self & the other, while constantly wondering why & if it is difficult to truly understand another culture. What more do we need besides translation and interpretation? The concepts are derived off / from Aristotle, Homer, Aquinas, Omar Khayyam, Descartes, Akbar, Marx, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Gandhi, Edward Said, Huntington, Derrida, Donald Davidson, Fredrik Barth, Stanislaw Lem, Tarkovsky, Janet Abu-Lughod, Bernard Williams, Immanuel Wallerstein, Aitmatov, & S. N. Balagangadhara, among others. Has one culture interpreted and described all others, & are all cultures cognitively understandable? Is a meta theory of cultural understanding possible? Are cultures ‘configurations of learning’, with both teachable and learnable components? Is ‘cultural-difference’ (& not culture or difference) the a priori (somewhat) like space-time, & how does the process of saliencing some domains (such as morality) work? Can pristine nature be scary? The long historical process of nomads gradually moving to cities? How a civilization (with writing, language, technology, & polity) makes its cultures robust? How the way identities are individuated may be very different across cultures, & how some modes of relationality may be inherited? Is it possible for a culture to have a private language? When do people begin to be cultured (links with city-life)? Should we try to break up culture into diverse units to see the robustness in them? The puzzle of the knitted-together-ness (inter-textuality) of descriptions (from priests’ to traders’) completely distinct from each other? How Silk Road (from China to the Mediterranean) is an indication of pre modern globalization? Does a culture need (say) territory, ethnicity, religion, or sovereignty to thrive, and is descent a vital part of any thriving culture? Why are some cultures dominant, and what is the need to bring in other kinds of narratives? The difference between the nation and the ethnie. Why did multiculturalism come up in the 1970s in Australia? The fascinating possible historical (1250-1350 AD) connections between Europe, Middle East and the Far East. Is it commonsensical to think that every culture would have a religion? Why? What then was the religion of the early Greeks or Romans? Is it only through others that we can know ourselves – the internally familiar world, and the need for the other (mirror, border, foreigner). Is monologue death? The links between theory of radical interpretation, 1480 BC, Babylon, brain matter, pottery, shamanism, lion, conquests, cutting wood, marriage, Kannada, slave trade, Nagaland, Sulh-i—kul, & the Asian Renaissance. What would be the nature of the multi-cultural moment if we come in contact with aliens? The deep need for hospitality without thematization. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Vivek Dhareshwar (philosophy, Srishti Institute of Design, Bangalore), Prof. Rashmi Doraiswamy (international studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi), & Prof. Shereen Ratnagar (archaeology, ex-JNU, Delhi).
SynTalk thinks about the interrelationships between wholes and parts in natural and conceptual systems, and wonders whether the part is inferred from the whole. Does a part (somehow) imply or expect the whole? The concepts are derived off / from Abhinavagupta, Newton, Kepler, Boltzmann, Boyle, Saussure, Turing, Manfred Eigen, P. W. Anderson, Chomsky, & Morris Halle, among others. In interactions between words, fundamental particles, molecules, cells, & phonemes, why are most combinations void? How do a finite number of parts create a dizzying array of wholes, and links with concepts such as historical contingency, surplus, entropy, sequencing, emergentism, & auto-catalysis? Why are transitions in biological, physical, ecological, social, and linguistic systems so tentative and statistical? Has the physics of the material world achieved a special kind of climax in the biological unit of life, & how the cell is not simply a bagful of chemicals. How the cell is both a part and a whole, & the context of cell division. Which is the most fundamental living part? How entropy comes about ‘only’ in systems of ‘many’ interacting particles. At what point can we start defining concepts such as pressure, volume, & temperature? Why certain molecular complexes self-emerge into functioning self sustaining evolving systems? Why literature does not simply describe the world, and how the non-existent also often make sense? In our daily linguistic behaviour, do we (fundamentally) use phonemes or words or sentences? How a word is a meaningful sequence of phonemes, and the similarities with gene sequencing; the difference between: ‘John killed the tiger’, & ‘the tiger killed John’. The sound patterns of language, & how any sound cannot come after one sound. Can one syllable be a whole in itself (bijakshara)? How a large chunk of the genome performs mundane functions, & discrimination results only from a handful of genes. Are carbon atoms in graphite and diamond identical in every single way, or do the atoms become something different? The links between rabbit’s horn, bureaucracy, multiverses, Lego toys, universal physical constants, Mesopotamian civilization, zebra, sky flower, existence, and time. The implications of an animal (whole) repeatedly developing into an animal (whole). How non linearity (in both deterministic and stochastic systems) is crucial for any emergent phenomena. Is the long term future of existence non local (a la ‘the ant colony as an organism’) and (potentially) altruistic? The intriguing prospect of new emergence as a result of the unprecedented ongoing meta-interactions, where parts (human beings) increasingly understand the emergent design of the whole? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Rajnish K. Mishra (linguistics, philosophy, JNU, Delhi), Prof. B.J. Rao (biology, TIFR, Mumbai), & Prof. Sitabhra Sinha (physics, IMSc, Chennai).
SynTalk thinks about health & healing, while constantly wondering whether health has a fixed meaning. Is health an anxiety? The concepts are derived off / from Hippocrates, Charaka, Patanjali, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Foucault, William Osler, BKS Iyengar, Dean Ornish, & Atul Gawande, among others. When & why did the health of the population become a concern for the state, and why was this a significant historical turn? How, when & why did health enter national budgets, and create an industrial force? What is the difference between healing (subjective?) and cure (objective?)? Is healing largely phenomenological, & subjectively realized? Is ‘cure sometimes, relief often, and comfort always’ a possible underlying ethical principle? How the ‘breath’ (prana), as the universal entity within us, unifies the body and the mind when both have a history (situated in time), and are ‘ours’? Is the body a river of energy, & is it possible to understand this energy more specifically & at the molecular level? Does the medical system address the ‘whole self’ and not just the body, & what is the journey from yama to samadhi? Does every part of our body have an expression? How can we make effective therapy safer? Is the doctor a facilitator for nature to cure the person, & is Placebo Effect the most significant healer? How then is the physician the king (& not the consumer), unlike in other transactions? The distinction between the legal & the ethical responsibilities of the doctor? Is it a part of the modern condition to be perennially anxious, & the scope is then extended to treat the ‘risk’? Are the alternatives such as ayurveda & yoga also being recycled under the framework of ‘healthism’? Is it important for the alternatives to have their own systemicity, and not be read solely in terms of the dominant system? Is the crisis of medicine external to a ‘good central core’? Why is cure more important than healing for the modern medical system, and is the underlying logic solely commercial? Is the iatrogenicity (in some ways) a part of the design of the healthcare system, and does this design have to change? Is internal intervention as (if not more) important than the external intervention? The links between witches, apothecaries, acupuncture, Nitric Oxide, endorphins, 21600 breaths, 2 pegs of whisky, statins, ether, and laughter. In the journey of healing, is comfort the starting point or the ending point? Does healthcare need to integrate the notion of ‘space’ into its metaphysic? Is health a personal challenge or (largely) a technical issue? Does the system currently have our complete faith, and does the equivalent of the ‘God is dead’ need to happen? Is it possible to be a non believer of the current dominant industrial medical system? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. R.D. Lele (nuclear medicine, Lilavati Hospital, Mumbai), Prof. Susie Tharu (cultural studies, philosophy, EFLU, Hyderabad), & Zubin Zarthoshtimanesh (yoga, Iyengar Yogabhyasa, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about dying & death from medical, ethical, existential, legal, & sociocultural perspectives, while constantly wondering how & why death is important. Is death ‘master-able’? The concepts are derived off / from Socrates, Glaucon, Epicurus, Jesus Christ, Hobbes, Stalin, Sydney Brenner, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Woody Allen, & Aruna Shanbaug, among others. How the hope for immortality is conceptually similar to the hope for justice? Can we avoid death before old age? How difficult is it to call someone dead, & is death an objective event? How life has changed from being ‘brutish, nasty and short’ a few centuries ago, & how the 20th century was in many ways the century of life. How is mortality different across age groups, and the role played by sanitation, vaccination, and oral rehydration over the years? Is death becoming more medicalized and protracted? Are more people now dying in hospitals? Why is it important to fight child mortality, and why is it likely that this global battle might be won or lost in the districts of India? Why the first month after birth is the most important to prevent avoidable death? Why the inevitability of death need (& should) not prevent appropriate public policy actions. How there is an opposition between life & death. What do we write on the death certificate, and why the cardio-respiratory arrest (for example) as a cause is not sufficient? How ‘extreme old age’ caused the death of Queen Mother? The difference and links between between physician assisted suicide, gradual withdrawal of care, (passive & active) euthanasia, medical care system, oral opiates, life support, & brain death. Why is the brain (stem) death becoming more popular, & possible links with organ transplant. Can there be a technology for death? How differently do people die? Can one prepare oneself to die (via philosophizing?)? What would leading oncologists do when they themselves face a terminal case of cancer? How suicide is the opposite of capital punishment. Do only human beings commit suicide; Why? Is death available to the ‘self’, in a moment when the self knows that it is no longer? How is the post-operative death different? Is the living cell programmed to die? Do we know what life is only through the occurrence of death, & is death a summation of life in some way? Is it important to not allow Market to take over death, just as it has taken over life? The importance of care for the dying? The role of the state in minimizing ‘bad luck’ deaths. How death is increasingly becoming banal and matter-of-fact, but is still (somehow) repressed culturally. Is it alright to have a cemetery in the middle of a university? How to die beautifully? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Saitya Brata Das (philosophy, JNU, Delhi), Prof. Prabhat Jha (epidemiology, CGHR, St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto), & Dr. Sanjay Nagral (surgery, Jaslok Hospital, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about the phenomenology of getting an idea, and wonders about the fine ‘thinness’ of an idea’s form. We discuss lively, apt, inapt, frustrated, injurious, abstract, failed, & wrong ideas, and understand how an idea can sometimes (but only rarely) run away with reality. The concepts are derived off / from Plato, Guru Nanak, Kabir, Leibniz, Hume, William Blake, Peirce, Dalton, Mendeleev, Allama Iqbal, Tartakower, & Kasparov, among others. Are ideas always driven by a sense of necessity, and how necessity fundamentally deals with form (& not content)? Is the world of the sensible (matter) and the sensitive (mind) different from the (autonomous) world of ideas? Is the material world a corruption, then, of the realm of ideas? In what sense is the idea of (say) justice or table-ness enworlded? The modes of recollection, doubt, introspection, induction, deduction, or abduction. Why a solution or an idea sometimes hits one as a bolt out of the blue? Are problems also ideas? Why an epiphany can (& should) never last long? Does every idea start with an anxiety, and what is the (creative &) schizophrenic journey into the field of uncertainty? What is the granularity at which the mind operates? How blunders and combinations are all waiting to happen. Are bad ideas as rare as good ideas? What is the margin of lost memories (between remembrance and forgetfulness)? The interpretive act of rendering a poetry using melody. Can we formalize introspective rationality? Chess chunks and how expert level games are driven by pattern & experience recognition? What is the darkness of the infinite like, where one may be without an idea? The links between rabab, homeless king, Dervish dance, smothered checkmate, stylization, alaap, dreams, indrajaal, & fMRI. How the greatest empowerment (in any field) via any idea is being or momentarily becoming as large as the universe. How the likely long term change in the global political order might change the idea of an idea into one more experiential and less propositional. Does idea need to be liberated from underneath language? Is it fair to anticipate that much of human affairs in the future is going to driven by the new form of the ‘point’? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Madan Gopal Singh (sufi music, Delhi), Prof. Navjyoti Singh (philosophy, IIIT, Hyderabad), & Pravin Thipsay (chess, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about different facets of music, including its ever changing relationship with ‘place’ and time. We explore how blocks of noise, sound, consonants, melody, & ‘intention’ come together to create music. How does music exploit the spatial dimension? How does the envelope of quality (timbre) emerge? The concepts are derived off / from Panini, Kant, Bakhtin, Chomsky, Kumar Gandharva, Bismillah Khan, Alladiya Khan, Aminuddin Dagar, & Ashok Ranade, among others. Are sounds (& music) merely vibrations? Are the underlying chronotopes of (say) Dhrupad, Khayal, or Thumri different in ‘a certain way’ (a la Epic and the Novel)? Do musical gharanas (styles) named after places have anything to do with them? Is it possible to tacitly learn music (including the ragas) from the environment? Does music have an internal grammar? How music is both instinctive and cultural. What is the role of imitation? Does music live in our experience, and what / where then is music for animals & plants? The varying priorities accorded to melody and lyrics in folk & classical music. Does folk music always have a performative function? Why are instruments closer to human voice (created by God himself(?)) considered superior (like sarangi over violin?)? Why instrumental music has rarely had a solo repertoire? Are we an instrument ourselves. Why (if at all) is art music special, & how is its aesthetic different from other genres? Why / how do different stringed instruments sound different? Is human voice also a medium (instrument)? The links between beating, mongoose, bowing, crows, plucking, peacocks, blowing, music, bird song, heavy metal, & Bhendi Bazaar. How / why is the place uprooted (say Sufi music from Tunisia) and brought to a performance space? Is music first for the musician? Is it possible to easily distinguish electronic sounds from the natural? Is there a certain quality (timbre) to EDM as well? The irony of tuning the tanpura electronically (shruti box). The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Milind Malshe (literature, aesthetics, IITB, Mumbai), Dr. Suvarnalata Rao (musicology, NCPA, Mumbai), & Dr. Subroto Mihir Roy (music (Dhrupad), Pune).
SynTalk thinks about the (sometimes?) subterranean world of things, and wonders how the world might look from the standpoint of the Thing. We also tentatively wonder if things indeed have a social life, and if the composite affair of thingness is highly linked to the notion of permanence. The concepts are derived off / from Akka Mahadevi, Rumi, Marx, Coomaraswamy, Heidegger, Adorno, Thomsen, Derrida, Jane Bennett, Maturana, Varela, Bruno Latour, & Bill Brown, among others. What (if any) is the difference between an object and a thing, and can one think of it using the framework of phase transition (& change of property)? Is materiality the primary level of reality? What is it like to be a thing from the past (when one looks at an archaeological artifact)? How a thing cannot avoid being involved in history, & there being a ‘historical ontology’ of things. Can we even posit ‘thinghood’ to something that existed before we existed? Does a water bottle have a meaning in itself? What does it mean to be a solid? Is the pyramid (today) an object or a thing? Is the distinction between a thing and ‘the elemental’ more interesting? Does the object always need a subject (with language & semantics)? Is the integrity or singularity of a thing always porous? Is it highly likely that the self organizing tendency of matter serves a social function? Does this provide a clue that things may in fact have a social life? How (& why) did inanimate (inorganic) matter create human beings, and whether we are likely to be recreated (sooner) by things left behind were we to go extinct? Does every thing get to be objectified? The links between rubber, ~23% beta bronze, atoms, CD ROMs, stainless steel, crystals, Challenger disaster, birds, robots, lotus leaves, & nano materials. ‘Why we should weld but the welding should not be seen’? In what sense is a poem a thing? ‘I died as a mineral and became a plant…’. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Pushan Ayyub (material sciences, TIFR, Mumbai), Prof. Stathis Gourgouris (philosophy, literature, Columbia University, New York), & Prof. Sharada Srinivasan (archaeology, dance, NIAS, IISc, Bangalore).
SynTalk thinks about the tantalizing cocktail of poisons, toxins & venoms, and wonders if ‘what does not kill us makes us stronger’. We also constantly explore the striking similarity (in many ways) between medicine and poison (a la the vagueness of the word pharmakon). The concepts are derived off / from Sant Eknath, Parikshit, Derrida, & RG Macfarlane, among others. We peek into the world of snakes, scorpions, bacteria, rats, SNARE proteins, Botox, & bioterror. Why are there poisons in nature at all, and is there a link to the natural tendency towards ecological diversity? Is nothing poison in the world? How ‘the dose is the poison’. We (illustratively) explore the origins, structure, molecular & cellular actions, transmission, and dynamics of the Botulinum Neurotoxin (BoNT). How the Botulinum bacteria can survive for many months inside us (unlike any other bacteria). Do we have to have crime to have a stable society, and do poisonous plants & animals serve a parallel purpose in nature? How scorpion poison can be used to (potentially) treat Brugada Syndrome, and its links with cardiac sodium channel. How it is very difficult to use vaccines to permanently protect against venoms given the speed with which toxins act. We also borrow concepts such as padarth and dravya from vaiseshika philosophy to understand the (beautiful) metaphysical link of poison with the concept of ‘space’. How ‘substance’ is something that has different quality and action. Is venom a highly prestigious molecule for the snake itself for finding prey? How, then, do the non venomous snakes make a living? Why a child is (often) not afraid of a cobra? Is it possible to look at (molecular) structure and predict its (poisonous) action? Is it possible to identify the exact molecule (& not the cocktail) responsible for blocking the pre synaptic receptors? Is a more advanced society more vulnerable to poisons? What does poison look like? Should our nature ‘be’ to understand poisons? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. H.S. Bawaskar (medicine, Bawaskar Hospital & Research Centre, Mahad), & Prof. Bal Ram Singh (biophysical chemistry, indic studies, UMass, Dartmouth).
SynTalk thinks about the meanings, implications and the future of coexistence between & amongst the several biological species on earth. The interaction space between species is explored via known strategies such as symbiosis, predation, parasitism, antagonism, mutualism, commensalism, & competition, while constantly wondering if ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of ‘selfishness’’. The concepts are derived off / from Sushruta, Charak, Hegel, Malthus, Darwin, Hamilton, Kropotkin, Gandhi, Dobzhansky, Hawking, & Dawkins, among others. Is there often selfishness in nature without the ‘self’. Why does the host change its genetic makeup to coexist with the parasite? Why do most species exist in communitarian groups? Why does a predator never run out of prey in nature (in stable equilibrium)? How it may be unavoidable to ‘tolerate the most intolerable’. How sickle cell anaemia developed as a response to malaria. What is the difference between the antibiotic and aseptic conditions, in the context of the coexistence of different species? The links between human beings, mosquitoes, Chernobyl disaster, raptor birds, Ayurveda, dinosaurs, consciousness, natural selection, Tom & Jerry, oranges, sibling rivalry, wolves, & tribes. How do dominant & exploitative social structures result from the ensemble of unevenly evolved groups (in terms of techno economic capacity). How autonomy of certain groups (the weakest doing menial jobs, say) that had their pristine existence can be annihilated, incorporated, subordinated, subjected, or even destroyed institutionally. How cooperation amongst the uneven develop? Does consciousness promote cooperation? Is culture (merely) a survival strategy? How (bacterial) mitochondria and chloroplasts (green alga) getting incorporated into eukaryotic cells was a significant evolutionary event. Are plants and animals also cruel? How Toxoplasma gondii insidiously finds its way back into the cat (the definitive host) from the rodents (the dead end). Can there be sacrifice in the Darwinian world? How culture is a complex mix up of both material & ideological practices. Can we truly understand the concept of queen bee (without the metonymy)? Is resource abundance always temporary in the biological world? Why kids don’t always agree with their mothers? Why does each orange segment often have one dominant seed? Does the critical self reflexive faculty of human beings make them fundamentally different? Is techno capitalism likely to be a key actor? Will human beings go out and colonize other celestial bodies, even as we coexist on Earth with other species? How human consciousness, survival instinct and (the bacterial) gut instinct could be the ultimate assets for the future? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. K.N. Ganeshaiah (agricultural sciences, writing, UAS, Bangalore), Prof. Rajan Gurukkal (history, social theory, IISc, Bangalore), & Prof. Swati Patankar (molecular microbiology, IITB, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about collective sentiments and its antipode, Reason, and constantly wonders if this historically naturalised dichotomy is perhaps at the root of the phenomenon of ‘hurt sentiments’. We simultaneously wonder if the realm of sentiments and affect have somehow been pathologised. The concepts are derived off / from Abhinavagupta, Plato, Descartes, Hume, Dayanand Saraswati, Marx, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Samuel Huntington, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, & Woody Allen (off Emily Dickinson), among others. Is it possible to create spaces for dialogue and ‘ruthless criticism of everything existing’? Is sentiment ever hurt spontaneously, or is it always constructed, and how do sentiments get their collective force? Where do sentiments and cultural common sense begin to develop, and what are the linkages with childhood, neighborhood, family, religion, media, vigilantism, capitalism, & the State. Which is a better path: tolerance, or dialogical curiosity? Why is reason never hurt? How there are many ways of describing everything. The special status of religious sentiments, given the claim of sanctity from a transcendental source (beyond rationality & argumentation), and their ability to articulate aggressive sentiments. Is every religion also a social and political power structure? Why (paradoxically) the UK Government could not prosecute Salman Rushdie (for Satanic Verses) for blasphemy. How the sanctity of the human life is above any hurt sentiment. Is offence for offence fine, and is offence a part of the right of expression? Is the realm of creative expression characteristically different? How the pogroms, riots, & ‘women being pulled by their hair out of a pub’ become mediatized events, & the sometimes-cynical-sometimes-critical-sometimes-partial role played by the media. Can / should the State act as a buffer zone between opposing sentiments? The need to listen fearlessly. Should diversity be seen as a universal human value? Is there a need for renegotiated and renewed sense of universal human values. The need for laws which can be critiqued and rejected or accepted in the public sphere. Is the future bleak for the spirit of negation and questioning? Is a different future dependent on a different political order? What is the future of nationalistic sentiments. The need for “Hope” (the thing with feathers), which needs no reason. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Purushottam Agrawal (cultural history, literature, ex-JNU, Delhi), Prof. Anjali Monteiro (media studies, documentary film making, TISS, Mumbai), & Geeta Seshu (journalism, The Hoot, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about the disenchantment of the world, & wonders if it is possible for there to be multiple metaphysics for the connection between human beings and nature. Is there always something in excess of what we know & experience? We discuss disenchantment and re-enchantment via contexts of boredom, capitalism, death, art, lullabies, adivasis, rag-picking, 'tuning of a tanpura', pilgrimages, sparrows, ‘a tree growing’, & more. The concepts are derived off / from Kant, Marx, Weber, Adorno, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Dagar Brothers, & Bhimsen Joshi, among others. Is disenchantment necessarily morally pessimistic? How has the desire to create one's own reality and the 'cult of certainty' impacted the possibility of multiple realities & (sometimes) ‘non-epistemic’ routes? Is the disenchanted route almost always a ‘personal’ choice or is it an unequal battle? Is boredom a result of thinking about life in ‘just’ one way? Is one man’s enchantment another man’s bicycle? How disenchantment is an outcome (potentially) of the ascendancy of theory over observation? Is the process of re-enchantment also often compatible with the logic of capitalism, and how it is possible to live a partly liminal life? Can art still say something that truly surprises us? Is it even possible to interrogate the dominant logic of describing the world? Can an enchanted world be substituted, bought, or bracketed by something else? Is the digital world a source of enchantment? Why are we afraid of getting bored? How a ‘2-person system’ is the basic instrument for re-enchantment. Is it possible to imagine a world where every logic is not subservient to the logic of the economy? Is it possible to think of a life which is neither controlled by the State nor entirely vanquished by death? Do we have to take our death less seriously? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Bishnu Mohapatra (social theory, poetry, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), & Prof. Milind Sohoni (computer science, technology & development, IITB, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about the deep historical and ongoing interrelationships between (the all pervasive & incessantly productive) images, and concepts & words. We make the widely sweeping journey from ancient rock art to the Coca-Cola logo to images on monitors in hospitals, to possible futures (say) a 1000 years out. The concepts are derived off / from ‘Lingo Dev’, Aristotle, Hippodamus of Miletus, Freud, Saussure, Peirce, Derrida, Foucault, Le Corbusier, McLuhan, Debord, & Baudrillard, among others. Can concepts or conceptual entities come to be without language? What are the links between rock art, and speech, script, words, entoptic phenomena, induced phosphene images, catenary curves, ‘scene of experience’, & language? Do 100,000+ years old rock arts provide a promising clue to how meaning gradually emerged from the pre-conceptual pre-representational ‘cauldron’? Are letters and pictures interchangeable, and have they always been so? How images come from very ancient times and how they thrust forward from without and from within? Do we dream in images? Is there any logo which is non iconic? How the core pursuit of advertising is to give form to an abstraction. How does advertising tackle different media, & how an advertisement in the print necessarily needs to be ‘processed in the mind’? How do you create the concept of ‘Friday dressing’? How Jarawas (from Andamans) have come to use words from English or Hindi. Does extinction of languages lead to death of concepts, & the attendant phenomena of amnesia and aphasia? We discuss Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Phoenician, Greek, & Chinese scripts. How icons (& further images, diagrams & metaphors), index & symbols are different from each other? How is a notion different from a concept? Is there conflict and cooperation always at play between images (of say, Batman, Hanuman, Manga, or Anime), & are images conquering the world? Where do specters and ghosts come from? Is there an incessant mass-ification of images (via ‘procession of the simulacra’) ongoing and ahead of us, & are images the long term future of language? Are images & meanings going to be increasingly crowd sourced in the future? Is a technology-driven ‘master narrative’ taking over the visual arts, cities, & forests, and is the ‘visual landscape’ shrinking? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. K. K. Chakravarty (art, public administration, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi), Santosh Desai (advertising, strategy, Futurebrands, ex-McCann-Erickson, Delhi), & Prof. Franson D. Manjali (semiotics, interdisciplinary, JNU, Delhi).
SynTalk thinks about the unidirectional nature of time and wonders if time is a separate ‘category’ at all. We dip into cosmology, computer science, neuroscience, quantum physics, & philosophy. We wonder whether time is essentially a (background) variable. Is time nature’s way of preventing everything from happening at the same time (a la Wheeler)? The concepts are derived off / from Newton, Fred Hoyle, Maxwell, Dirac, Planck, Godel, Bohr, Einstein, H G Wells, Wheeler, Feynman, Prigogine, Landauer, Roy Kerr, Everett, Novikov, & Zeldovich, among others. How has the notion of time changed with digital watches? What is ‘logical time’, & the importance of multiple systems synchronizing with each other? What would happen if we hit an electron with a hammer? Do we get ‘it from bit’, and what is the possible link of time with (quantized) information? Can neurons be thought of as being probabilistically synchronized oscillators? We also discuss the concept of Planck’s time as the fundamental unit, & the resultant notion of whether time is discrete or continuous. What is the link between causality and time? We discuss the fascinating links of time with thermodynamics, entropy, ‘action at a distance’, & closed / open systems. What would happen, surprisingly, if a hot star were to be connected with a cold star via a conducting wire? The nature of neurological time, and its links with octopuses, crabs, speeding cars, a ‘cache of situations’, & reflex actions. How do (memory) space & time tradeoffs impact computer algorithms? Can time be lost? How ‘branching time’ creates possible worlds that are not known a priori? Is time travel possible (via a worm holes), and does it need a conception different from ‘state-based’ time? Do animals ‘have’ time? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Jayant V. Narlikar (astrophysics, IUCAA, Pune), Prof. Krithi Ramamritham (computer science, IITB, Mumbai), & Prof. Sisir Roy (theoretical physics, NIAS, IISc, Bangalore).
SynTalk thinks about (real, virtual & abstract) boundaries and wonders why some boundaries are crisp while others are fuzzy (fixed centers but no boundaries). We discuss boundaries and borders using concepts from computer science, geopolitics, defence studies, philosophy, mythology, linguistics, statistics, biology, & mathematics. The concepts are derived off / from Zeno, Darwin, Turing, Chebyshev, Korzybski, Saadat Hasan Manto, & Feynman, among others. Is the cell membrane (say) a boundary, and how does it help the organ know about the world? How does a (physical) boundary of pebbles operate ‘within’ the river Ganges? How there is a robust (crisp) line separating the solvable and the unsolvable. How is the notion of the border different from the real border (in the Gaza ‘brown strip’)? We explore the fascinating journey of ‘empires with frontiers’ to ‘nation states with militarized borders’ over the last several centuries. Is there ultimately a certain ‘life force’ behind creation of real & virtual boundaries? How does one trust a neighbor? What is the nature of boundaries around ‘languages’ & ‘species’? How do statistical systems have upper and lower bounds, and how is it possible to predict the reliability of a system with a ‘confidence interval’? Is a statistical mean similar to the center of a set? Is there a gradual inevitable dissolution of the definitiveness of borders, even if borders have been paid for in blood? How an emergent or an imposed hierarchy introduces the vertical and distorts the lateral? What is no man’s land? Is there a convexity (with inside and an outside) for a malware? How is the notion of the border, mediated by the colonial experience of certain countries? We invoke themes illustrated by, among others, Israeli-Palestinian, Indo-Pakistan, Dutch-German, Indo-Myanmar, Chinese-North Asian borders. How are the maritime borders different? What is the long term future of the borders in context of the universal human condition? The SynTalkrs are: Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar (defence studies, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi), Prof. K.P. Mohanan (linguistics, critical thinking, IISER, Pune), Prof. Sanjeev V. Sabnis (probability, IITB, Mumbai), & Prof. R.K. Shyamasundar (computer science, TIFR, Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about the dynamic nature & origins (since the big bang) of fundamental & emergent forces in the universe. Was there only one force at the time of big bang? How did human beings first recognize & understand both the forces of nature (shamanism, magic, storms, lightning) and the forces more in their control (combat, weapons, hunting, push & pull)? The concepts are derived off / from Aristotle, Galileo, Laplace, Newton, Halley, Oersted, Faraday, Maxwell, Mach, Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Higgs, Max Jammer, & Karplus / Levitt / Warshel (2013 Chemistry Nobel Prize winners), among others. How is the world held together by the various forces? What exactly is a force field? Can there be force without matter (Yes)? Does matter create its field, or can a field be its own source? How to think of Maxwell’s equations in ‘free space’, and why we need matter (as sources for (say) microphones & radio)? How do forces act at a distance? Why do we try to create early universe conditions in large colliders, and study strong & weak forces? How did the forces separate (gravitation, electromagnetism, weak & strong forces, in that order) as the universe cooled down? Why don’t bodies simply move in a straight line, and links with the concept of ‘natural motion’? Is it (even) possible to know why forces exist? Is Big Bang the new ‘prima mobilia’, and how much more do we conceptually know about forces now? How do strongly interacting (uncertain) electrons / atoms get confined in a classical body, and links with concepts of multiscaling (QM/MM; Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics) and the mesoscopic world? Why an electrical circuit is difficult to understand in terms of electromagnetic field theory. How forces bind parts together and why / how a different whole sometimes emerges? How the degrees of freedom get frozen as the number of bodies increase. Why did Bohr’s premise of simply quantizing angular momentum did not work for many-electron atoms (beyond hydrogen-like atoms)? Link of the grey zone (‘interface region’) between quantum mechanics & classical mechanics with drugs, proteins, buildings, brain, cricket ball, polymers, spark plug, steering wheel, effective theory, & wave-particle duality. How does a magnet defeat the earth and pull a piece of iron, and its links with gauge theory (with all three forces, except gravity) and the possibility of gravity as an entropic or emergent force? Are market, political, or life forces similar entropic forces? Why is gravity difficult to unify with the other forces? Has ‘force’ replaced ‘energy’ since mid 19th century (after the energy-ists)? Are a different set of forces likely to govern dark matter and dark energy? Is force just a defined concept and not purely fundamental? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. S. D. Agashe (electrical engineering, history & philosophy of science, IITB, Mumbai), Dr. Sourav Pal (quantum chemistry, NCL, Pune), Prof. Sreerup Raychaudhuri (particle physics, TIFR, Mumbai).
SynTalk thinks about the key conditions that characterize and create ‘biological’ life while constantly wondering whether life is a random accident, and if we are alone in the universe (because of a singularity?). What is the future of life? How aliens (if any) are also likely to be carbon and water based, but could be completely different morphologically and functionally. How was the first cell formed, and is this one of the biggest open questions today? The continuing journey after the big bang from the physical to astrophysical to chemical to biological to social evolution (across all species via, say, pollination) way into the distant future. The concepts are derived off / from Darwin, Crick, Watson, Hoyle, Prigogine, Manfred Eigen, Delbruck, Maturana, & Stuart Kauffman, among others. Is it possible to create synthetic life in a laboratory, and does the clue to this possibility lie in the (chemical?) nature of a virus? How does speciation happen? The core significance of the cell being a ‘phase separated structure’ with organizational closure. Is the cell the unity of life? How we do ‘not’ really know where biology ends and chemistry begins. Is life a physical state (just as liquid is a state of water)? The definition of life via replication (DNA, tRNA), metabolism (metabolic charts, glucose) and energy transduction. We discuss the role of glucose as a key molecule for all life, and wonder what it is like for glucose (& other bio molecules) to be ‘outside’ life. How does self organization arise in both physical and biological systems, and how (for example) phospholipids (with hydrophobic tails and hydrophilic heads) organize itself in water? How affinities can emerge between two DNA strands. How life is a dialogical state, and neither the physical equilibrium (oxidized state like carbon dioxide) nor the state of chemical death (‘petroleum state’). How virus ‘lives’ on the border of life and non-life. How all living stems can be characterized using unique chemistry, biochemistry, structure, & function. Why life originated from water? What is the role of weak bonds (in, say, the colloidal state of protoplasm)? How does ‘conscious cognition’ arise in living systems, & what are the links with ‘emancipated reflexive motor actions’, microtubules, dance, lizard, play, & consciousness (Mind from Matter). How does a living system talk to itself (why does a child suck its thumb)? How the feeling of ‘free will’ gives an (illusory) advantage. How life has multiple answers, and an inherent capability to change. How life is an expression of abundance. How a bio molecule is not like a sphere. The future with artificial life, cognitive robotics, & ‘languages in nature’ (of animals & languages). Why we can’t wear a full body armour anymore? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Pushpa M. Bhargava (molecular biology, CCMB, Hyderabad), Prof. Nagarjuna G. (philosophy of science, HBCSE, Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about the act and the modality of naming ourselves and the (undifferentiated flux of the) world around us, & constantly wonders whether the world gets created when we name it. The concepts are derived off / from Panini, Frege, Russell, Premchand, Zipf, Searle, Kripke, & Probal Dasgupta, among others. Are variables or pronouns (‘this’ & ‘that’) or verbs born before the names? What cannot be named (what is between green and blue?), and is the process of naming ever complete? How a massive chunk of the world cannot be named. How is the process of naming different for a computer compared to a human being? Is naming or un-naming a neutral process? Why it is essential to name a musical note (why Re, Komal Re, & Ati-Komal Re?). How the cognitive significance of a name tells us something about frequency of occurrence. Is it possible to experience the musical notes without knowing the names of the notes? Does the object or the new born child suggest its own name, and how does baptism (or naming samskara) happen? How arbitrary is naming, and what do conventions, programming aesthetics, gestures, & culture have to do with it? What role does a neither-accepted-nor-rejected legacy play in the process of naming? How names transfer during language contact? How names represent the world from a trans-historical perspective? Can names be equated to a cluster of descriptions or are their modal profiles different? How we can name by not naming (say in taboo, euphemisms, ellipsis). Are names links between two or more face to face ‘pointing’ interactions? How does one discretize a (variably grained) conceptual world? How all Proper Names need not be proper nouns (what is water?). How Named Entity Recognition (NER) is central to the process of machine translation or transliteration, & how does one (generally speaking) shift from ‘low gaze’ to ‘high gaze’ to interpret the world? How names are not nouns but noun-phrases? Does sign language need to have names? Are names independent of language? Can you guess someone’s name by looking at her? The links between names, horses, feminist movement, caste system, homonymy, & globalization. How short will names get in the future? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya (computer science & engineering, IITB, Mumbai), Dr. Girish Nath Jha (computational linguistics, JNU, Delhi), & Dr. Avinash Pandey (linguistics, Mumbai University, Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about the characteristics of the State, and explores its ontological claims, contradictions, & morals both normatively and positively? The link between bandit kings, violence, sovereign, private property, law, justice, hot water bath, modern production methods, corporations, religion, Darwinian evolution, and the general will. The concepts are derived off / from Kant, Locke, Hume, J.S. Mill, Hobbes, Burke, Wendell Holmes, Hannah Arendt, Nozick, Fukuyama, Chomsky, James C. Scott, Douglass North, & Snowden, among others. How have we reached a state where (for most parts) the citizen is the principal and the State is the agent? What is the rule of law, & does the State have an absolute or comparative advantage over violence? How does (sacred) constitutionalism emerge out of nowhere? What is the ideal tax/GDP ratio, and do different models of statehood just compete for greater populations and GDP? Have States formed more easily in fertile plains with surplus? Does a State have a need for legitimacy, and where does it derive its morality from? How the consciousness about the concept of a nation inform the development of the Modern State. How authoritarian States run out of people, and why civilizations can’t climb hills. What is the difference between ‘doing justice’ and ‘applying the law’. What is minority, and how minority is not a person but a position? How did UK rule the world, and is modern terrorism a counter to the violence of the State? What happens when a perfectly legitimate State commits immoral acts? Are all at war with all (a la Leviathan)? Is statelessness or a Minimal State possible or desirable? Who wins a democratic contest? Should / does a State create feedback loops and structures of accountability? Does an individual really think for the others, and what is general will and public good? Will the construct of the State change in the long term to have other agglomerations come between the State and its citizens? Does the State withdraw only to (often) reappear? What is the likely impact of globalization and technology. Is the future DIY? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Saroj Giri (political science, Delhi University, Delhi), Prof. Ajay Shah (economics, National Institute of Public Finance And Policy, Delhi), & Dr. Harsh Vardhan (strategy consulting, Bain & Company, Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about the power-ecology-knowledge triad with a certain anticipatory emphasis on ecology & modernity and their crises in a broad sense. The discussion attempts to understand each of the three concepts from the vantage points of the other two. The concepts are derived off / from Nietzsche (will to power), Mahatma Gandhi (swaraj, oceanic circles), Schumacher (‘small is beautiful’), Lovelock (Gaia hypothesis) & Isabelle Stengers (‘ecology of practices’), among others. What is soil to a farmer, and can soil be male or female? How / when did nature become natural resource? How a certain non-modern conception of ‘owning’ (of, say, land) go together with ‘owing’, and not remain linked to the concept of property. How the power (thought of as work done per unit of time) of modern & traditional industries differ? How is the non-natural linked to a certain power-led deviation away from equilibrium & ambient conditions? Power as the nature and manner of valuing & validation, and an ecology of practices. Does a certain Will to Power underwrite both natural and human forms? Is ‘symbiosis’ a possible thematic countertrend to the Will to Power? Are the paradigmatic logics of ‘social being’ and ‘dominant knowledge’ separable from each other? How the modern panchayat systems are different from the traditional panchayat system in its political structure? What is Radical Ecological Democracy (or swaraj, or sumak causay, or el buen vivir, or Solidarity)? The significance of endogenous modeling over (seemingly) indigenous ones. How some communities conceive of themselves as earth citizens (sharing the planet with ~50 million other floral & faunal species). Do we need a certain ecological reconceptualization to include the inanimate as well. How do we all fly planes in a sustainable world? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Sasheej Hegde (sociology, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), Ashish Kothari (ecology & conservation, Kalpavriksh, Pune), & Sunil Sahasrabudhey (philosophy, science, Vidya Ashram, Varanasi)
SynTalk thinks about the concept and process of ‘knowing’ and tries to understand ‘how we know what we know’. What is common knowledge (lokavidya), and is it largely phenomenologically acquired? If science is born out of common knowledge, then how do counterintuitive concepts come to be known? The concepts are derived off / from Kant, Marx, Pramatha Nath Bose, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Poincare, Zilsel, Conan Doyle, Popper, Polanyi, D’Ambrosio, McLuhan, Gettier, Febvre, Needham, Ellul, Monge, Vance Packard, Chomsky, Said, and Kancha Ilaiah, among others. How do we really know today that the sun is in the centre of the solar system, & links with Sherlock Holmes, realism, & positivism. How keeping earth in the centre became mathematically unwieldy. What is knowledge, reason, belief, and Justified True Belief (JTB)? How did hierarchy set in between (say) pottery and weaving? Is cognitive differentiation produced via social differentiation of labour? What is the impact of loss of agriculture as a form of life? Does / how artisanal knowledge lead to abstract knowledge, and what is the interplay between theory and praxis? How does media decide what is worth knowing (agenda setting), and is the internet selfish with a will of its own? How technologies produce skepticism. Does something exist if it is not on internet and big databases (why grant patent for neem)? What is ‘generalized calculus of all curves’ a product of, and is mathematics also embedded within social norms? The new modes of production of knowledge. Does more information on candidates change voter behaviour? Will knowing remain ‘centered’? Will all knowledge become some kind of folk epistemology (with limited ethnocentrism?)? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Amit Basole (economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston), Prof. Dhruv Raina (history & philosophy of science, JNU, Delhi), & Dr. N. Bhaskara Rao (social sciences, media studies, Center for Media Studies, Delhi)
SynTalk thinks about illusions from an all encompassing (cosmological) perspective. In a sense the conversation ventures into the outer (sun, galaxies, quasars, black holes, WIMPs) and the inner worlds (Brahman, consciousness), while constantly wondering what separates the ‘real’ from the ‘illusory’. The concepts are derived off / from Vedas, Bhagwad Gita, Marconi, Mach, Einstein, Sri Aurobindo, S Chandrasekhar, Brandon Carter, and Susskind, among others. Do camels see mirages in the desert? How does dark matter and galaxies lead to formation of virtual images? Does a rainbow exist? Why does a sun appear oblate sometimes? How are electrons and humans aware of the rest of the universe (Mach’s principle, anthropic principle), and how does it get its information, habit or lawfulness? Is Maya related to the concept of measurement? Are (say) Maxwell’s and Newton’s laws ‘an extremely well worked out myth’? Is there an Absolute Truth? Is time an illusion, and its possible links with ‘trikal drishti’ (triple time vision) and steady state theory? How Lord Indra created vowels, consonants, and grammar from eternal sound. Is fear like dark matter? How the ‘concept of truth’ (model making) is different from the truth. The difference between ‘the truth’ and ‘my truth’. How can I experience you? Is there a link between empathy and telepathy, and is telepathy possible? How Truth has an asymptotic character. What is Knowledge by Identity? The parable of the larvae and dragonflies (“Not lost but gone before”) and the rumour attributed to a frog. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. S. M. Chitre (astrophysics, Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, ex-TIFR, Mumbai), Dr. Matthjis Cornelissen (psychology, Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry), & Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik (mythology, writing, Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about the mystery of 'existence' and 'consciousness’. In a sense the conversation alternates between perspectives vis-a-vis human beings (meditative, wakeful, dreamy, comatose, paralysed, anaesthetised, unconscious, unarousable, dying, vegetative, & dead), a zygote, fictional characters, amoeba, bats, dust particles, tables, the sky, plants, and rocks. The concepts are derived off / from Descartes, William James, Heidegger, Freud, Sartre, Turing, Gödel, SN Bose, Chisholm, Libet, and Nagel, among others. What is the difference between ‘thing in itself’ and ‘thing for itself’? The difference between "I" and "me”, & a form of internal duality. Is there a hierarchy of consciousness (& how does it become aware of itself)? What is 'being dead’? How does one measure consciousness? We try to understand the difference between the living and the non-living. The degree of certainty, and its link with concepts of possibility, probability, & necessity. The necessity of a nervous system? Is death the loss of intelligence and adaptability? How is it possible to have non-conscious, semantic systems like machines? Does consciousness have any content? The links between Sodium Pentothal, neurotheology, precuneus, subjective certainty, apoptosis, and cogito ergo sum? The difference between consciousness and awareness, and the autonomy of thought from consciousness. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Bijoy Boruah (philosophy, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), Dr. Priyedarshi Jetli (philosophy, (ex) Delhi University, Mumbai), and Dr. Deepak Ranade (neurosurgery, Pune)
SynTalk thinks about the ‘sciences’ and the ‘humanities’, and speculates on the genesis, present and the future of this dichotomy. Is the 1959 Rede lecture of CP Snow still relevant, or have changes of knowledge systems & technology made the concern banal? The concepts are derived off / from Copernicus, Donne, Bacon, Newton, Gulliver’s Travels (in Laputa), Alexander Pope, Riemann, Einstein, Marconi, Heisenberg, Heidegger, life-world (Husserl, Habermas), Hardy, Korzybski, CP Snow, Leavis, Feynman, Deleuze, Wilson, Levi-Strauss, & Buffett, among others. Were there ever any polymaths? We look at the possible link between the establishment of the Royal Society (like a trade union), Newtonian physics, colonialism, and Hitler? Is there consilience & bricolage in knowledge (a la ingredients in a salad bowl)? Do ideas have a rhizomatic structure? Is Mathematics closer to art than to science? Has man’s desire to understand nature led to the ‘anthropocene life-world’ (with disciplines such as digital humanities and cybernetics)? Does ‘episteme’ have to become an easy-to-use ‘API’ to spread? Does a platform (created by designers & engineers) have to be so easy that it is beautiful (a la Angry Birds, Airbnb, Square)? The importance of ‘groundedness’; is “T-shaped” interdisciplinarity the only possible form? The importance of a ‘gifted person’ to make connections. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Prafulla C. Kar (literature, philosophy, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Vadodara), Prof. M. S. Raghunathan (mathematics, IIT Bombay, ex-TIFR, Mumbai), & Kunal Shah (computer sciences, philosophy, Freecharge, Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about the role of geography, ecology, biology & human behaviour behind history (both facts & principles). Did environmentally destructed land (like grasslands) lead to invasions? We discuss diverse phenomena such as invasions, climactic changes, agriculture, and burial rituals. Is genetics shaping and changing our collective perception of the past, and is there synchronicity in evolution? The concepts are derived off / from biology (Founder Effect, human genome sequence, single locus polymorphism, dispersal), history (Aryanisation), archaeology (Acheulean, Quaternary, Harappa, Chinese oracle bones), mythology (Vishnu Puranas, Kartikeya), geology (tectonic shift, Lonar Lake, ice-age) & ecology (Tundra, co-adaption), among others. Could the burial of a dead body have changed history and lead to the birth of art? What happened ~200,000 years ago, & how did modern humans evolve ~40,000 years ago? Why does mythology posit something impossible and then we try and make sense of it? We marvel at the link between cows, mango leaves, vitamin B, Indian yellow, ‘Pitambara’, frescoes, & heritage. How does some tribal marriage ritual involve ‘sunglasses’? Why don’t all modern humans produce art? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Sheila Mishra (archaeology, Deccan College, Pune), Aman Nath (history, architecture, restoration, art, Neemrana Hotels, New Delhi), Anupam Sah (heritage conservation, CSMVS Museum Art Conservation Centre, Mumbai) & Prof. Milind Watve (evolutionary biology, IISER, Pune)
SynTalk thinks about Vacuum and asks why is there something rather than nothing? Is empty space really empty? Does vacuum exist in the natural universe or is it merely a theoretical abstract conception? Is absolute vacuum possible? The concepts are derived off / from Hindu thought (eternal recurrence), Bible (genesis, void), Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Copenhagen interpretation, Sommerfeld (fine structure constant), Maxwell, Heidegger (PEQ), Casimir (pair production), Biermann (solar wind) and Parker (solar wind model), among others. We marvel at the beauty of nature via CMBR, pole wandering (did dinosaurs die because of this?), magnetic reconnection, cosmological constant, dark matter / energy, dipoles, plasma (a la fire?), and absolute zero. How virtual particles come into ‘being’. What is happening in upper atmosphere (~70,000 kms above earth)? What does an ‘agitated’ sun do to earth’s atmosphere? Whether the laws of causation break down with quantum mechanics and sub-micron distance scales. How do neutrinos / muons reach us via empty space? Has Quantum Field Theory (QFT) left us in a state of limbo, and do we need to reformulate our conception of God? How empty space is bubbling. How would a ride to the sun be? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Sunil Mukhi (particle physics, IISER, Pune), Prof. Kuruvilla Pandikattu (philosophy & theology, Jnana-Deep Vidyapeeth (JDV), Pune), & Prof. R.V. Reddy (plasma physics, Indian Institute of Geomagnetism, Navi Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about Silence, and speculates whether it is fundamentally an ‘aspiration’. Is Silence ‘a permanent flow of meaning’? The concept of Silence manifests itself in physiological / neurological (auditory feedback loop, aphasia, dementia), linguistic (syntax, binary language), cultural, engineering (constraint layer damping, non-stationary sound), spiritual (higher consciousness), cybernetic and philosophical (‘Being’ and ‘Becoming’) terrains. The concepts are derived off / from Plato, Bhartrihari, Freud, Sri Aurobindo, Piaget, Lacan, Skinner and Chomsky, among others. We also discuss if it is possible to ‘get out of language’. How languages die like mountains and not buffaloes. Why is ‘what is not heard’ conceived as Silence, and what is the link with whales, bees & dogs? How different are the characteristics of machine sound? Is there a link between translation, ‘interpretation’, natural & artificial languages, and ‘meaning’? How does easeful acquisition of language work during infancy? Is there a universal grammar of spoken, written and ‘sign language’? What is the future of (abstract) thought, language and Silence? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Ganesh Devy (linguistics, Bhasha Trust / Adivasi Academy, Vadodara), Alka Sapru-Joshi (psychology, Ali Yavar Jung Institute, Mumbai), & Prof. Dhanesh Manik (engineering / vibro-acoustics, IIT Bombay, Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about the Cellphone (the object & the metaphor). The links between multiple human identities (avatars) & social spaces, (terrestrial) fantasy, boredom and ‘shape-shifting’ performative aspects of life are explored from the lens of the Cellphone. SynTalk also examines if there is an addiction-like neurological (pathological) phenomenon afoot as we interact with our phones almost continually, and whether it is possible to understand the rise of ‘Selfie’. The concepts are derived off / from Rizzolatti (mirror neurons), Dunbar (Dunbar’s number), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI; ‘HHI’, UX, Usability), Granovetter (social networks, weak ties-strong ties), neuroscience (labile memory, somatosensory cortex, PFC, Dopamine, Oxytocin), McLuhan (medium & the message), Proteus Effect, and ‘technology appropriation’, among others. We also discuss if there is an epigenetic change happening in our memory. Is it possible for our brains to trust the computer? Does a Cellphone reduce or accentuate alienation in the society, and with one self? Has the Cellphone become a fetishistic object? Where and why is texting popular? Is not forgetting okay? What is the future? Will a new grammar evolve of dealing with Cellphones and other people? The SynTalkrs are: Biju Dominic (cognitive neuroscience, Final Mile Consulting, Mumbai), Prof. Anirudha Joshi (human computer interaction, IIT Bombay, Mumbai), Dr. Vidita Vaidya (neurobiology, TIFR, Mumbai), & Paromita Vohra (film making, Mumbai)
SynTalk thinks about the ontological (mind independent) aspects of Beauty and aesthetics in areas such as mathematics, arts, poetry, literature, music, sculpture, and photography, while constantly pondering whether Beauty is important. The historicity and present status of Beauty is discussed in contexts of intuition, justice, goodness, religion, and boredom. In a sense the conversation follows the opposite of phenomenological / epistemological conception of ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’. The concepts are derived off / from Advaita, Zen / Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Ockham, Descartes, Kant, Gauss, Goethe, Schiller, Jane Austen, Weber, Coomaraswamy, Raja Rao, Tagore, Walter Benjamin, Einstein, Sri Aurobindo, Derrida, Cartier-Bresson, Nisargadatta, Warhol, and Eliot, among others. We also discuss if there are mathematical analogies to Beauty. How does the human spirit embody itself in art (say, ‘scraptures’)? What is the role of aesthetic training? When & why does boredom set in? What is an aesthetic emotion? What is the role of ‘surprise’? The SynTalkrs are: Yaron Barzilay (philosophy, New Acropolis, Mumbai), Arzan Khambatta (sculpture, Mumbai), Prof. Makarand Paranjape (literature, JNU, New Delhi), & Prof. Dipendra Prasad (mathematics, TIFR, Mumbai)