Message in a Bottle: The Lessons of SARS-CoV-2

Speaker: Mr. David Quammen, American author and journalist who has written sixteen books including The Song of the Dodo (1996); The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006), and The Tangled Tree (2018). His 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, described the dynamics of viral spillover from wildlife into humans and predicted a coming pandemic, possibly caused by a coronavirus

Chair: Prof. K. Srinath Reddy, President, Public Health Foundation of India

There are three important questions about SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic: 10 Where did it come from? 2) Where is it going? 3) What does it tell us about the way we humans live – and the way we should live – on this planet. Quammen will address these questions, while placing these virus in its broader historical and scientific context
 

People. Place. Practice

A talk by Compartment S4, a multidisciplinary and collaborative design practice co-founded by 8 partners, with studios based in Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Their presentation will highlight participatory and people-centric approaches towards architectural practice -- and how this impacts design thinking across various types and scales of projects.

Followed by a dialogue with Anisha Shekhar Mukherji, Conservation Architect, Author and Visiting Faculty at S.P.A. Delhi. 

The ninth in the bi-monthly series structured around dialogues that endeavour to present the role of architecture in contributing positively to society and to culture. Conceptualised by Anisha Shekhar Mukherji, the series, through interactions with practitioners and scholars, intends to engage with a wide variety of people - professionals and lay-persons alike.  

Registration link
 

Coordinated by Prof. Rajiv Ranjan, Shanghai University, China

Sāma/Syama Jataka in China

Speaker: Prof. Li Ling, Institute of Taoism and Religious Culture, Sichuan University, China

Introduction: Prof. Rajiv Ranjan

Chair: Prof. Y.S. Alone, Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University

The story of Sāma/Shyama/Shravan has been known to the Chinese people since about the third century A.D. through the spread of Buddhism. Sāma images appear in China, starting from the far west of China: Xinjiang, where Buddhism first came to China, and heading east to Dunhuang, from the 4th and 5th centuries to the 7th century. The images are very typical and highly recognizable, inheriting a type that has been fixed since Sanchi stupa in the first century B.C. However, around the 7th and 8th centuries, another kind of filial son image appeared in Dunhuang and Sichuan: the image of a son carrying his parents on his shoulders, which was considered to a pagan image and which appeared in the “Spurious scriptures” Bao En Jing. Why is the second type of Sāma considered an image of paganism – the opposite of Buddhism since the eighth century or so?

Registration link
 

Intermezzo (USA) | Click here to watch
(84 min; 1939; b/w; English)
Director: Gregory Ratoff

With Ingrid Bergman, Leslie Howard, Edna Best

Holger Brandt (Leslie Howard), a famous violinist, returns home from a concert tour and meets Anita (Ingrid Bergman), the woman who teaches his daughter Ann Marie (Ann Todd) piano. Attracted by Anita's youth, Holger asks her to be the accompanist on his next tour, and the two embark on an affair, despite Anita's feelings of guilt. Holger reveals his infidelity to his wife, resolving to spend his life with Anita, but the couple is forced to re-examine their relationship when tragedy strikes.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x20wtry

(95 min; 2011; Hebrew/Arabic and with English subtitles)
Directors: Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi

Multiple award winner including World Cinema Documentary Directing Award, Sundance 2012; Audience Award and Special Jury Award, Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival 2011; Cinema Eye Honors Award, USA 2013 for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking; Louis Marcorelles Award, Cinéma du Réel 2012; Emmy Award for Documentary, International Emmy Awards 2013; Busan Cinephile Award, Pusan International Film Festival 2012; among others

For the birth of his fourth son, Gibreel, Emad bought a camera to film his family. Soon he found another use for the camera, recording the increasingly chaotic scenes taking place around his house. Emad is a Palestinian farmer and his house is in the village of Bil'in where Israeli settlers, backed by the army, are gradually taking the land.

Emad was already well known in the area for putting himself at risk day after day in order to record the actions of the soldiers, when Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi visited the village to make his documentary Interrupted Streams. Davidi stayed in the village for three months while he was filming and during this time came to know Emad and realised that there was a film to be made from his footage. 

A deeply personal account of life in Palestine.
 

Secrets of the Spanish Armada (UK) Click here to watch
(47 min; 2019; English)
Director: Richard Max

Draining the ocean near Newfoundland reveals a preserved Basque galleon trading in lucrative whale oil. The failed invasion of Tudor England by the Philip II's Great Armada left shipwrecks all over the Northern Atlantic. The Spanish empire relied on powerful ships like this to bring back valuable cargo, like silver and tobacco, from the New World. But when emerging rival England wanted a share of this wealth, the Spanish attacked. Draining an Armada wreck off the coast of Ireland reveals an extraordinary battle for control.

https://vimeo.com/390163240/b237004f93

(90 min; 1997; English)
Director: Peter Rosen

Beginning as a commercial architect in New York City after emigrating from China in the 50s, I.M. Pei gained attention when his proposal for the John F. Kennedy Memorial was selected over others from high-profile peers of the 60s. Construction never happened when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, but in the intervening years, Pei has designed some of the most beautiful, striking buildings around the world.

Peter Rosen's excellent documentary on the quintessential 20th Century architect – inspired by the systems of order from the family rock garden in China, to modern construction techniques – Pei's designs are catered to the needs of each client, and the building's functionality, but Rosen's film is more than a graceful journey through some of Pei's best-known buildings.

A six part BBC series with Michael Mosley who takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path.

Episode 3: How Did We Get Here? (60 min) | Click here to watch
Director: Peter Oxely

The question of our human origins is one of the most controversial science has wrestled with. This is the story of how scientists came to explain the beauty and diversity of life on earth, and reveal how its evolution is connected to the long and violent history of our planet. Featuring ocean adventurers, eccentric French aristocrats, mountain climbers, a secret Victorian publisher with 12 fingers, a ridiculed German meteorologist, and only a brief hint of Charles Darwin.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x66cjbg
 

(58 min; 2013; English)
Director: Time Niell
A BBC Production

Novelist Jay McInerney explores the life and writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose masterwork The Great Gatsby has just been filmed for the fifth time.

Fitzgerald captured the reckless spirit of New York life in the roaring twenties - the flappers, the parties, the bootleg liquor, the inevitable reckoning, and the hangover to come. In Gatsby, he created a character who reinvented himself for love - just as Fitzgerald would, not once, but twice. Fitzgerald never wrote an autobiography. He left us something better - letters. Romantic, arrogant, humble letters; letters to editors, publishers, lovers, or friends.

These letters reveal the inner thoughts of a man whose real life was never far from the fiction he wrote.