ENGINEERS AND THE SOCIETY 

 

Interlinking of Rivers and Management of Water Resources

Presentations by Shri A.B. Pandya, Secretary General, ICID & former Chairman, Central Water Commission; and 

Shri S. Masood Husain, Chairman, Central Water Commission, Govt. of India

 

Chair: Dr. S.K. Sarkar, former Secretary, Ministry of Water Resources and Distinguished Professor, TERI

 

(Collaboration: Consulting Engineers Association of India (CEAI)

METAMORPHOSES: TALKING TECHNOLOGY

 

Automation, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Jobs

Speakers: Ms Anna Roy, Advisor, NITI Aayog; Shri Rajat Gupta, Senior Director, McKinsey & Company; Shri Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and Executive Vice-Chairman, Info Edge (India) Limited – Naukri.com; and Dr. Didar Singh, Senior Fellow, Delhi Policy Group and Member, ILO Global Commission on the Future of Work

 

Chair: Dr. R. Chidambaram, former Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India

 

Current and anticipated developments in technology, such as advances in automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, are leading to concerns about their impact on jobs. Many employment streams we are familiar with today may be rendered redundant in the next few decades. There may be new jobs guaranteed by the technologies of the future, but they require different skill sets and educational curricula. Are our societies prepared to adapt these changes? What will be the likely impact on a country like India, where for several years into the future, millions of jobs will have to be found for a young and expanding demography? This session on ‘Automation and the Future of Jobs’ will debate these issues

 

(Collaboration: NITI Aayog; and Centre for Policy Research)

CREEDS OF OUR TIMES

Curated by Rajiv Mehrotra

 

Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies: Part I/III

(90 min; 2015; dvd; English)

A film by Barak Goodman

 

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Siddhartha Mukherjee, this three-part series tells the complete story of cancer, from its first description in an ancient Egyptian scroll to the gleaming laboratories of modern research institutions. The film interweaves a sweeping historical narrative; with intimate stories about contemporary patients; and an investigation into the latest scientific breakthroughs that may have brought us, at long last, to the brink of lasting cures

 

(Collaboration: The Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama)

 

Lotika Varadarajan and Maritime Traditions of India

A multi disciplinary scholar and polymath, Dr. Lotika Varadarajan’s varied academic insights and scholarship, and her work on maritime traditions of India, stands out for its detailed observations on community heritage and practices held within littoral communities. 

 

The exhibition presents photographs taken by her from Gujarat to Bengal, and Andaman and Nicobar islands and Lakshadweep from 1979 to 2010. They provide a glimpse of the seagoing lives of Indian coastal communities from the pre-2004 tsunami era. The exhibition covers traditions, practices and cultures of boatbuilding and navigation from littoral India and the islands that is yet to recover itself in a substantial manner

 

(Collaboration: Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University, Delhi)

First Lotika Varadarajan Memorial Lecture 2018 and Exhibition

 

Anchoring the Indian Ocean Studies

Speaker: Dr. Samuel Berthet, Associate Professor, International Relations and Governance, Shiv Nadar University. Samuel Berthet has been coordinator of two successive European projects on South Asia-Europe Maritime History. He is currently working on Chittagong, circulations and shipbuilding in the Northern Bay of Bengal

 

 

MAHATMA GANDHI: 150 YEARS

 

Gandhi As a Dissenter

Inaugural lecture by Prof. Ashis Nandy

 

Chair: Shri Ashok Vajpeyi

 

First in a new series of programmes organised from October 2018 to October 2019 to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Organised in collaboration with The Raza Foundation

 

FILMS ON WILDLIFE AND ENVIRONMENT

 

A Second Life (30 min; 2004; dvd; English)

Director: Nutan Manmohan

 

Recipient of the Delhi Chief Minister’s Special Award, CMS Vatavaran Film Festival

 

Through the experiences of two children, the film investigates the murky side of information technology, whereby tonnes of hazardous e-waste is seeping into developing countries like India

 

Ambi Jiji’s Retirement (30 min; 2006; dvd; English & with subtitles)

Director: Nandini Bedi

 

Recipient of the First Prize, Jeevika South Asia Right Livelihood Award; and Zee News Livelihood Award, CMS Vatavaran

 

Ambi Jiji always planted her crops on soil where forests have been burnt. This jhum field would then be abandoned and left to regenerate into a forest and a new one burnt. However, increasingly, jhum fields are being turned into orchards which provide cash and food security. Through Ambi Jiji and her daughters, we witness the passing of a way of life in a remote village in Meghalaya

 

(Collaboration: World Wide Fund for Nature-India)

 

Discussion  ¦ Conference Room I at 18:30

Book Discussion Group

 

Equity and Access: Health Care Studies in India

Edited by Purendra Prasad and Amar Jesani (New Delhi: OUP, 2018)

 

Discussants: Ms Shailaja Chandra, former Secretary in the Ministry of Health; Prof. Ravinder Kaur, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi; and Prof. Jean Dreze, development economist and activist, Visiting Professor, Department of Economics, University of Ranchi

 

Chair: Prof. Ramila Bisht, Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

 

To Mark the 100th Anniversary of Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary

 

Lu Xun’s or the World’s Madman

Speakers: Roman Shapiro (Russia); Emily Mae Graft (Germany); Taku Kurashige (Japan); Raman Sinha (JNU); Senno Takumasa (Japan); and H.L. Kim (Korea)

 

Moderator: Hemant Adlakha, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

Lu Xun, who wrote under the pen name of Zhou Shuren, was the most influential fiction writer in modern Chinese history. Lu Xun was part of the New Culture Movement of the 1910s, which essentially tried to pull China out of imperial times and into the modern age. He studied in Japan to become a doctor, but then famously decided that it was the minds, not the bodies, of the Chinese people that needed to be cured – through literature. Mao Zedong called him the sage of modern China. A Madman’s Diary is one of Lu Xun’s best-known short stories, written in 1918 about the inability to see reason

 

(Collaboration: Centre for Chinese & Southeast Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University; and Institute of Chinese Studies)

 

FRONTIERS OF HISTORY

 

Coming of Age: Aging and its Global and Local Politics

Speaker: Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Associate Professor, Sociomedical Sciences and History, Interim co-Director, Robert N. Butler, Columbia Aging Center, Columbia University, New York

 

Discussant: Rama Baru, Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

Chair: Mathew Cherian, Chief Executive Officer, Helpage India

 

The talk is based on Kavita Sivaramakrishnan’s new book As the World Ages: The Making of a Demographic Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2018). The aging of populations worldwide is being projected as a new, ‘grey Tsunami’ and crisis for economies and societies. Just as fears of a ‘population explosion’ in the 1980s were a concern about too many dependent children on the planet to feed; population aging is made out to be a crisis of too many dependent, aged persons to care for that will burden economies and societies