Speaker: Smt Chitrita Banerji, well known food writer who has written extensively on Bengali cuisine

 

Chair: Professor Pushpesh Pant

 

The talk  examines how food permeates Bengali consciousness and makes its presence felt in literature, songs ,  idiom, religious and secular rituals

 

 

On a Express Highway (30 mins; dvd; 2003; English)

Directed by Reena Mohan

 

The film traces the journey of a 33-year old woman who gave up the material world for the austere life of a Jain Sadhvi 

 

Autumn in the Himalayas (56 min; dvd; 2008; English)

Directed by Malgorzata Skiba

 

The film brings to light the story of a group of elderly Buddhist nuns from Ladakh, the last generation of unordained and uneducated women in robes who lead isolated lives as domestic help and construction workers.  Neglected by religious and social systems for centuries, the new Nyerma Nunnery is their last call for dignity and enhancement and purification of their religious status

Speakers: Seema Kohli, eminent artist; Chitra Mudgal, MP, poet  and journalist and others

 

Shri Arun Shourie; Shri Bharat Gupta; and Shri Rajiv Vora will discuss, Gandhi: A Spiritual Biography by Arvind Sharma (Gurgaon: Hachette, 2013) 

 

 Chair: Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, Chairperson,  IIC-Asia Project

 

Introduction: Ms Renana Jhabvala followed by a short film interview with Ruth Jhabvala

 

Readings from Ruth Jhabvala’s work by Averee Chaurey and Minoti Chatterjee

Introduction to Ruth Jhabvala’s fiction writing by Smt Aruna Chakravarty

 

An Interpretation of the last two works – My Nine Lives and Love Song for India

Speaker: Shri Ramesh Chandra Shah, well-known Hindi writer

 

Gesture, Voice, and Ethics in Hindustani Music

Presentation by Matt Rahaim, Assistant Professor of Music, Religious Studies, and Cultural Studies, University of Minnesota, USA.  His book Musicking Bodies (2012) focuses on the transmission of bodily disciplines in khayal lineages, and especially the gestural performance of melody   

 

This talk will first demonstrate a few cases of the inheritance of gestural dispositions in teaching lineages, and then propose a new way to think about the interwoven traditions of embodied melody, aesthetics, and ethics that link generations of teachers and students  

 

An Alternative View on the Rationale of the Nehruvian Economic Strategy 

Speaker: Prof. Prabhat Patnaik, leading economist and political commentator who taught at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, from 1974 until his retirement in 2010. He was the Vice-Chairman of the Planning Board of the Indian state of Kerala from June 2006 to May 2011

 

Chair: Shri Nirupam Sen

 

 

By Amrita Bewoor Sen from Delhi, disciple of Guru Smt Mythili Kalyanasundaram

An exhibition of sculptures, paintings, recorded videos of installations/performances and reproductions of different phases of Ratnabali Kant’s artistic journey from the academic period to the present

 

Inauguration by Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, Chairperson IIC- Asia Project on Friday, 5 December at 18:30