Episodi
-
"All materials come with an environmental impact but plastics are worth singling out as they have turbocharged our desire to consume and our reliance on disposability. Consumer goods companies are the ones we should be looking at. They make decisions about what we see on supermarket shelves, what we see in our homes. I hope this book makes people feel that we do have the power to change things because these companies want us to like them. They are very sensitive to how their reputations play out among consumers. Scientists have been sharing concerns that endocrine disrupting chemicals found in plastics could be impacting everything from our ability to procreate to mental health. Ultimately, it also comes down to policy, to pressing companies to pay to manage the waste created by their packaging. If a big consumer goods company is choosing to use a sachet, they should be paying a commensurate amount to find a way for those sachets to all be picked up even if it costs billions of rupees, and if they are selling a product that is difficult to recycle, they should be paying an environmental tax that reflects the cost of what they are putting out there."
Saabira Chaudhuri, author, 'Consumed; How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic' talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from overconsumption, the harmful chemicals that leach out of packaging, and microplastics that are hazardous to all life to being a more mindful consumer and why there is still hope
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"I'd never attempted a memoir. For me, writing something so personal and putting it out there for the world to see was difficult because I was reliving those days. But that's when I realised, I don't want to forget those days. A lot of people want to move past grief. You want things to be normal. But there is no normal after this. This is the new normal and I have to learn to live with it. My husband and my mother in law became statistics of the COVID wave but they were so much more. Like love, grief is universal and everyone experiences it in some form or the other. I wanted to make the book a medium for me to put down my grief for myself and my children but also for those who want to be able to look at their own grief too. I felt that I could articulate my grief so I should. Those who cannot articulate their grief feel like they have found a voice through this book" - Andaleeb Wajid, author, 'Learning to Make Tea for One' talks to Manjula Narayan about survivor's guilt, family ties, the exhaustion that comes with writing a memoir about loss, and how different it is from writing fiction for young adults
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Episodi mancanti?
-
"Every part of India has shamans; you could say its part of folk culture. They call Himachal Dev Bhoomi because every village is home to several deities. Every village also has its main deity and a shaman, who is the medium of that deity. He can communicate with that deity when he goes into a divine possession trance that is ritually invoked. The villagers communicate with their devis and devtas for everything and in pooch sessions, the shaman or goor will answer questions as the deity. To a westernised mindset, this sounds like superstition. But you cannot ignore the lived experience of millions of people across centuries and say 'Yeh bakwas hai; this is nonsense!' Scholars like Sudhir Kakkar and Oliver Sacks accepted that the sacred healing rituals of shamans are far more effective than modern psychotherapy because they take the whole field of the person - family community mythology - into consideration" - Documentary film maker and author of 'Shamans of the Himalayas', Anu Malhotra talks to Manjula Narayan about the strong connection that villagers in Himachal have with their local deities, divination, altered states of consciousness of shamans, and how the belief system persists despite the onslaught of modernity and migration.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"Any place where a guru goes and spends time becomes a dera; it gets a sacred connotation. Deras are reflective of our larger tradition of argumentation, philosophy and contestation. In India, there is nothing singular about our world; everything is very plural. So, any sort of broad brushing or monolithic thinking about deras is unhelpful. All deras are not Dalit. But I was surprised to see Gail Omvedt's Seeking Begumpura at one. Some are doing very much for Ambedkarite thought. They have a lot of Ambedkar in their libraries and their sanctum sanctorums too have big portraits of Ambedkar alongside their religious iconography. Ravidassias constantly tell me that Sant Ravidas is their spiritual guru but Ambedkar is their political one. All this made me take deras very seriously. " - Santosh K Singh, author, The Deras; Culture, Diversity and Politics talks to Manjula Narayan about the varied character and caste and class affiliations of the deras of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal, the Ad-Dharmis, the Ravidassia deras of Punjab and the grand Ravidas temple in Banaras, the connections between the local and the global, and also the great need for sociologists to get their ideas out into the wider world beyond the Academy.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"To earlier academics, it seemed like Company Painting was not really to be taken seriously. The Modernists didn't look at it because it's too early and the Court Painting specialists didn't look at it because it was too late. It just sort of fell in the gap. Perhaps people were less inclined to rescue it from that gap because they had difficulty in coming to terms with its hybrid colonial status. You cannot get away from it being a product of Empire. But rather than telling the story of the patrons' perspective, you have to look at how Indian artists respond. This is a historical moment where artists trained in the Indian court ateliers realised that there is this alternative source of patronage with a completely different set of demands. And when they made the transition from Court to Company, they transformed themselves and they transformed Indian art. With artists like Sewak Ram, we've got a wholly new approach. It is exciting to see the artist as much an agent as the patron in creating the hybrid form. The book and the show at DAG attempts to cover the whole spectrum of Company Painting and its trajectory in the very brief period from the 1770s to its fizzling out by 1850" - Giles Tillotson, editor, 'A Treasury of Life; Indian Company Paintings c 1790-1835' talks to Manjula Narayan about the works of outstanding artists like Mihr Chand, Sita Ram and Ram Das, the depiction of different communities in work by Tanjore artists, Louisa Appleby's album commissioned in the vanished settlement of Maidapur, and his hope that more albums with named artists will soon come to light
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"South Korea is strategizing its soft power through K-Drama, K-Beauty, K-Pop and now K-Cuisine. There was a conscious strategy from the government of the country and the private sector. So the craze for Korea that we see today is no accident."
Vasudev Tumbe and Sudha Huzurbazar Tumbe, authors, 'Seoulmates; Korea Through Indian Eyes', talk to Manjula Narayan about their six-year stay in South Korea, its punishing work culture, beautiful public places, numerous fantastic public toilets, contradictions in terms of being safe for women but having very few women in senior positions in the work place, and how Koreans save very little money and as a result, often can't afford to retire.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"How to keep kids engaged through the book is the most important job of the illustrator. Every page was approached through that angle. That's why I've included as many dynamic poses of dogs as possible — running, jumping out of the page almost!" says Chandrima Chatterjee, illustrator, 'The Little Book of Indian Dogs'.
"I've always been aware of Indian dog breeds but I wanted to introduce my daughter to them and there was absolutely nothing out there that one could read out to a toddler. So I thought let's do it. I wrote it and then I found Chandrima," says Anusha Ramanathan, writer of the book that weaves wonderful factoids — did you know Indian dogs don't drool? - about a range of breeds like the Chippiparai, Rajapalayam, the Kombai and the ever popular Indian pariah around a simple story that both children and adults who read out this book to them will enjoy.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"I thought it would be interesting to write about early Americans in India because, at that time, there were no border controls, no surveillance, no way of monitoring people who crossed borders. The Americans were not conscious state actors unlike the British, French, Dutch or even the Danes, who were all supported by their respective governments. I was interested in these brave individuals from a faraway land who just marched into a new life. My curiosity about them got me going. And because these people were outsiders and did not come with institutional backing, apart from the missionaries, they were able to see the problems in Indian society, the divisions and the hierarchy, far more quickly"- Anuradha Kumar, author, 'Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries; Early Americans In India' talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about Ira Scudder who set up the Christian Medical College, Vellore, the Alters of Landour who have contributed in many ways to India, Satyanand Stokes who introduced apple cultivation to Himachal Pradesh, and Black soldier Herman Perry, who worked on the Stillwell Road, among many others.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
-
"The system of policing in India has so many constraints that unless the person has a special kind of inner motivation to pursue something, it's going to be very hard to get results. Inspector Prashant Kumar has that. He is an amalgamation of a real person and some fictional tropes. I've had the desire to write crime fiction for a very long time and as a journalist, I got to hang out with a lot of Delhi cops over a period of about two years. The police have miserable lives, most of them. Their work involves constantly seeing the worst side of humanity; they see the worst tragedies, death. There's also work pressure and the work load. It is extremely stressful and it leaves most officers with absolutely no time for family. All of this has its personal cost and I wanted to bring it all in. Now, I think twice before judging the police. A lot of them try very hard to make things work, to be fair, to complete investigations, to respond to emergencies, and some are very heroic too"
— Rudraneil Sengupta, author, 'The Beast Within', talks to Manjula Narayan about his police procedural set in Delhi that zooms into the mansions of the rich and the abject slums of the poor, looks at the workings of child traffickers, and examines the edge of violence amid the rapid change in the capital's ever-receding rural fringe
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"I've shot almost 10,000 pictures of dogs across the world over the last four years. But the pictures in this book were all shot on the beaches of Goa in the monsoon. I began shooting them during the pandemic. A deep grey sky is like a photographer's ideal studio. The atmosphere and the subdued palette came because of the season. The whole intent of this book was to create awareness about dogs in an oblique way. Somebody like me who's spent his life bullying people to do his bidding, whether it's the PM or Jeff Bezos, was now suddenly confronted by these stray dogs who don't listen to you for anything in the world! So these images are the result of serendipity; they are a happy accident. About the poems and short pieces in the book, I chose them because I wanted unpretentious voices" - Rohit Chawla, author, 'Rain Dogs', talks to Manjula Narayan about the magnificent Indian street dog, how the world has almost forgotten the pandemic, the need to alleviate the suffering of dogs, cattle, donkeys, camels and elephants on the streets of India, Ratan Tata's legacy, the return of the physical magazine, and AI in photography, among other things on the Books & Authors podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
-
There are stories in every nook and cranny of Delhi and rightly so because this is the 11th or 12th city built one on top of the other; sometimes cannibalizing one city to make the other. So, there are stories of the city's multiple pasts and of the people who have lived here. Heterogenous in every sense of the word, it is a melting pot. So many places in the city have witnessed history in the making. The title brings together multiple strands about the city': Basti' means 'habitation' and this has been a continuously inhabited city for centuries; 'Darbar' because Delhi remains a politically important city"- Rakhshanda Jalil, editor, 'Basti & Darbar, Delhi-New Delhi; A City in Stories' talks to Manjula Narayan about an anthology of short fiction about the capital that includes pieces about the old city, the early days of building New Delhi, its caste and class snobberies, student life, gay scene, political elite, the vast armies from the hinterland who built it and continue to expand it, its scavengers, and its sarkari workers too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
-
The span of the book is so wide that we had to leave out some great people. The book gives you a sampling of some of the best writing. My favourite is the first story, Rebati by Fakir Mohan Senapati, translated by KK Mohapatra. In the stories written in English, Ruskin Bond's The Prospect of Flowers is so poignant. It has been difficult to get good translations from languages like Nepali, Dogri, Bodo and Santhali. Also, in certain languages there are no real translators into English. When it comes to translations, any translator who is capable and confident is half the author of the story. We are fortunate to be able to use the English language. Even now, after 230 years, there are people who say it is a foreign language. Now, it's part of your life, country, ethos!"
AJ Thomas, editor, 100 Indian Stories, talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about short fiction in Indian languages, the key role of translation, Indian after-modernism, and the future literatures of emerging languages
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"When you look at history across the world and across centuries, there are some things that are well remembered and there are many things that are forgotten. In some way, it's interesting to ask, 'What is remembered and why?' and then maybe take that further and ask, 'by whom?' It's really interesting for me as a historian to ask why is it that this particular event, this particular escape and the camp itself and the thousands of Indians who were there... Why has it been pretty much forgotten until now? It's fascinating that these guys were so resourceful. They were looking after each other and some were helping the French too in that critical time. 100s of them got to Switzerland and that was a triumph of resilience, really!"
- Ghee Bowman, author, 'The Great Epinal Escape; Indian Prisoners of War in German Hands' talks to Manjula Narayan about the most successful escape of the Second World War, and the forgotten story of the hundreds of soldiers of the British Indian Army from all across the subcontinent, who broke out of the prison camp in the French town of Epinal and hid from the German army as they trudged across 100 km to freedom in Switzerland, with some like Jai Lall from Rohtak even joining and fighting alongside the French Resistance.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
In terms of photography, this is not a book about Banaras or the Himalayas or very specific things; a name-place-animal-thing kind of book. In terms of narrative, of visuals that follow the structure of a novel or something in that space, we are yet to broaden our reach and scope, especially in India" - Ritesh Uttamchandani, author, 'Where Are You', talks to Manjula Narayan about his photobook of pictures clicked in Manchester, UK, that touches on everything from ways of being in public to Partition, memory, othering, family and love.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"You find fasting in every culture, across the millennia. We carry within us the ability to hold back. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Judeaism vary in specifics about fasting but the idea is the same. You step back from something that you normally enjoy - it doesn't have to be a luxury - and then you hold off partaking of it. That holding back is, for me, at the heart of fasting. It is such a powerful realization that this power of absence is real, that we can shape our world by stepping back, by refraining from doing things. Then, in the 20th century and earlier too this manifested itself politically in the form of boycotts and hunger strikes. In many ways fasting is close to meditation. You pull yourself out of the daily stream of things, you step aside, you contemplate how you have been living, and then you go back into it"
- John Oakes, author, 'The Fast; The History, Science , Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without talks to Manjula Narayan about the spiritual aspects of fasting, its use as an effective form of protest by the disenfranchised, the great role it played in the independence struggles of Ireland and India, political prisoners fasting in imperial Russia, its darker side seen in anorexia nervosa, and how fasting can perhaps contribute to well-being and longevity in intensely consumerist societies.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"On the one hand we are proud of the fact that India has one of the lowest rates of divorce, globally. It's about 1.1 percent annually. However, UN reports indicate that the number of divorces has multiplied twofold since the advent of the millennium. Why is this happening? The answers are many and this was the premise for writing this book.
This book has taught me that education, class, financial independence and status are not necessarily protection against domination and toxic equations. I have tried not to demonise either of the sexes because men and women are not each other's enemies. As the saying goes, a generation was spent empowering women to lead their lives with as much independence and dignity as they could muster. Sadly, we forgot to teach men how to live with these empowered women. It's not as if these men did not wish to do better or did not wish to do right by the women. They did not know how; they did not have the role models. I do have some sympathy for that. Indian women's expectations and aspirations have changed and it's genuinely puzzling to quite a few men.
Some women do misuse the law but in percentage terms, they are very few. Atrocities against women, cases of violence and dowry continue to be far higher.
We need to have more conversations on marriage. It's a very private business which affects society at large. Abroad, the top reasons for divorce are finances and infidelity. Here, the top reasons are finances and parental expectations and interference. This book is meant to be a relationship guide with the law as the cornerstone" - Kalyani Sardesai, author, 'When Love is Lost' talks to Manjula Narayan about divorce in contemporary India.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On the one hand we are proud of the fact that India has one of the lowest rates of divorce, globally. It's about 1.1 percent annually. However, UN reports indicate that the number of divorces has multiplied twofold since the advent of the millennium. Why is this happening? The answers are many and this was the premise for writing this book.
This book has taught me that education, class, financial independence and status are not necessarily protection against domination and toxic equations. I have tried not to demonise either of the sexes because men and women are not each other's enemies. As the saying goes, a generation was spent empowering women to lead their lives with as much independence and dignity as they could muster. Sadly, we forgot to teach men how to live with these empowered women. It's not as if these men did not wish to do better or did not wish to do right by the women. They did not know how; they did not have the role models. I do have some sympathy for that. Indian women's expectations and aspirations have changed and it's genuinely puzzling to quite a few men.
Some women do misuse the law but in percentage terms, they are very few. Atrocities against women, cases of violence and dowry continue to be far higher.
We need to have more conversations on marriage. It's a very private business which affects society at large. Abroad, the top reasons for divorce are finances and infidelity. Here, the top reasons are finances and parental expectations and interference. This book is meant to be a relationship guide with the law as the cornerstone" - Kalyani Sardesai, author, 'When Love is Lost' talks to Manjula Narayan about divorce in contemporary India.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"Because of the wealth of inscriptions that they have left behind, it is really possible to understand the Cholas as political figures. Not only are they masters of media strategy, they are brilliantly charismatic. They are innovators capable of mobilising vaster armies than ever before . They are capable of thinking out of the box about bureaucracy, administration, diplomacy, and logistics in ways that had not been seen in medieval India. But the reason the Cholas were able to strike with such speed at such distance [as they did in their campaign to Bengal and in South East Asia] is because of the partnership they had with Tamil merchant corporations. The merchants of medieval Tamil Nadu were some of the most remarkable commercial minds of South Asia. There is mention of these merchants in Thailand around the 9th century. When the Chola state was emerging, these merchants were already trading at the other side of the Indian ocean."
- Anirudh Kanisetti, author, 'Lords of Earth and Sea' talks to Manjula Narayan about the vast Chola empire based in coastal south India that was the dominant power in the subcontinent in the early medieval period, about it's great monarchs like Rajaraja Chola, the dowager queen Sembian Mahadevi and the part she played in fashioning the dynasty as the foremost devotees of Shiva, the most popular of Tamil gods, and the many little people who played a part in the Chola story.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
"Savarkar was a great rationalist. The surprising thing is how such a rationalist went completely off the rails in regard to other matters. His writing is full of villains and among the villains are the Buddha, all Buddhists, whom he considered hereditary traitors, Ashoka, Akbar, Tipu Sultan, and then Gandhiji. On the question of Godse and Apte there was no doubt that they were his acolytes, they were his worshippers. Sardar Patel said the problem was that once you create an atmosphere then you don't have to tell anybody to go and assassinate; he reads your lips. You just have to see the publications Savarkar was patronizing... They were only penning hatred and it was all centered on one man -- Gandhiji. Savarkar felt that the Marathas were the real legatees of the Mughal empire and then the damn outsiders, the British, slyly took over. The same thing happens in his own life . He thinks he is the heir to Lokmanya Tilak and then this outsider Gujrati comes and takes the whole prize away. This great disappointment in his life gets centered on one man and becomes hatred. Today, Gandhiji is a great inconvenience because he embodies Hinduism, the collective memory of our people. If Savarkar's line is pursued, then India will become a dismembered nation like Pakistan; society will be riven by hate. This eternal search for purity always ends in that. The difference between Indic religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism from Semitic religions is that ours is an inner-directed search. Everything - pilgrimages, idol worship, mantras etc. is to aid this inner search. When you marry it to the State, religion becomes an instrument of the State. You only have to look at the Jewish religion when Gaza is to be bombed - it just becomes an instrument. Secularism is a way of keeping the purity of religion. It's not anti-religion. Keep religion and the State separate. That is why my book ends with this appeal - Save Hinduism from Hindutva" - Arun Shourie, author, 'The New Icon; Savarkar and the Facts' talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
-
"I do believe that literature is a very important source of knowledge complementary to history, epigraphy and archaeology. It is not easy to read drama at the best of times. It is even more difficult to read Sanskrit drama because it is quite out of the ordinary! But there is a lot of timelessness in these plays, however strange they may seem with their tigers, elephants and tantriks! The human elements are the ones we still completely recognize - love, jealousy and ambition. We haven't changed; we are laughing at the same things that people 2000 years ago were laughing at! One of the criteria for choosing the plays was that all the great playwrights had to be represented. And I didn't want to use plays based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata because we already know those stories. This is a book about introducing different narratives to a lay public. Also, I wanted people to be aware that the millennium of classical Sanskrit drama does not come out of a Hindu universe alone. It comes out of a universe of political diversity, cultural diversity, religious diversity. But it's true that it is also a common universe however much people might have different ideologies and different religions; there are social mores that hold them all together" - Arshia Sattar, author, Vasanta; Stories from Sanskrit Plays talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about ancient plays like Shudraka's Mricchakatika ( The Little Clay Cart), Mahendravarman's The Holy Man and the Courtesan, and Harsha's Nagananda, among others, that continue to appeal to us Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Mostra di più
