Culture
-
Pints, professors, and packed houses: How Pint of View is turning bars into classrooms
On a typical evening at a bar, people gather to unwind. At a Pint of View (PoV) event, they gather to learn. The Bengaluru-based startup has built a growing community around an unusual proposition: academic lectures delivered in neighbourhood bars. From bat ecology and neuroscience to history, literature, and art, its events attract hundreds of…
-
‘This book has been living in my mind for 25 years’: Ramachandra Guha
In the first half of the 20th century, British-born Indian anthropologist Verrier Elwin became the voice for the tribals of India. In those years — the 1940s — his life underwent multiple changes in succession. He denounced the clergy to work with Mahatma Gandhi, then parted ways to champion tribal communities, and became the first…
-
‘You can’t write poetry with dishonesty’: Javed Akhtar
“In a free society, you should be allowed to offend people to some extent,” remarked notable screenwriter, lyricist and poet Javed Akhtar to the audience at the Bengaluru Poetry Festival on Sunday. Akhtar engaged in a session with Delhi-based writer Humra Quraishi, where they discussed Akhtar’s early influences and Jadunama (the book on him), among other…
-
‘Everything I’m saying is hiding in plain sight’: William Dalrymple
One, two buckle my shoe, three, four shut the door…We all know how it goes. But what are these one and two and three and four? As students, we learned that they are Arabic numerals. But we had learned wrong. If you rewind the chronicler’s tape a couple of centuries before the Islamic Golden Age…
-
‘There’s no romance in modern restaurants’: Marco Pierre White
In one of the more grandiose rooms of the JW Marriott on Vittal Mallya Road on Saturday afternoon, sat a white gentleman not in his Sunday best. But maybe in his most relaxed outfit. Blue jeans, a white tee and a white handkerchief fashioned into a headgear. The man could be mistaken for a sailor…
-
‘Strange that Indians have no recollection of Opium Wars’: Amitav Ghosh
Over the past two decades, one of the subjects that has managed to grip author Amitav Ghosh’s psyche on almost jacked-up levels has been opium. But not as a consumer, as an academic. He has been on a scholarly voyage to understand the opium trade and the Opium Wars of the 19th century, and to…
-
Poetry & the Big Gloom
For acclaimed author and poet Jerry Pinto, one of the key experiences that shaped his literary life was the discourses he undertook in his twenties in meetings of like-minded bards and thinkers known as the Poetry Circle in Mumbai. “This was many years ago. But when Menka Shivdasani, R Raj Rao, Akil Contractor and Nitin…
-
Exploring cells to the T: An interview with Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee
On one of the many visits of eminent cancer physician and celebrated author Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee to India, he was informed of a case of a little boy battling cancer. When he went to the hospital to meet the child, the latter confided in him that his father worked as a security guard at a…
-
Assassins of discourse
Remember, remember the fifth of September’ might have been the opening line to that iconic Guy Fawkes rhyme (it starts as ‘Remember, remember the fifth of November’) if it was based on events that unfolded in Bengaluru in the new millennium. Unlike the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, a failed assassination attempt of British King James…
