You know it is there. In the relations, in the absence, or the excess. A sensuous, intuitive kind of logic. You know the wrong too. At least for you, the not straightforward romantic (#TNSR). Ho.

#TNSR (The Not Straightforward Romantic)--- SynTalk Album

SynTalk thinks about the ontological (mind independent) aspects of Beauty and aesthetics in areas such as mathematics, arts, poetry, literature, music, sculpture, and photography, while constantly pondering whether Beauty is important. The historicity and present status of Beauty is discussed in contexts of intuition, justice, goodness, religion, and boredom. In a sense the conversation follows the opposite of phenomenological / epistemological conception of ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’. The concepts are derived off / from Advaita, Zen / Buddhism, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Ockham, Descartes, Kant, Gauss, Goethe, Schiller, Jane Austen, Weber, Coomaraswamy, Raja Rao, Tagore, Walter Benjamin, Einstein, Sri Aurobindo, Derrida, Cartier-Bresson, Nisargadatta, Warhol, and Eliot, among others. We also discuss if there are mathematical analogies to Beauty. How does the human spirit embody itself in art (say, ‘scraptures’)? What is the role of aesthetic training? When & why does boredom set in? What is an aesthetic emotion? What is the role of ‘surprise’? The SynTalkrs are: Yaron Barzilay (philosophy, New Acropolis, Mumbai), Arzan Khambatta (sculpture, Mumbai), Prof. Makarand Paranjape (literature, JNU, New Delhi), & Prof. Dipendra Prasad (mathematics, TIFR, Mumbai)

#TOOB (The Ontology Of Beauty) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about the deep historical and ongoing interrelationships between (the all pervasive & incessantly productive) images, and concepts & words. We make the widely sweeping journey from ancient rock art to the Coca-Cola logo to images on monitors in hospitals, to possible futures (say) a 1000 years out. The concepts are derived off / from ‘Lingo Dev’, Aristotle, Hippodamus of Miletus, Freud, Saussure, Peirce, Derrida, Foucault, Le Corbusier, McLuhan, Debord, & Baudrillard, among others. Can concepts or conceptual entities come to be without language? What are the links between rock art, and speech, script, words, entoptic phenomena, induced phosphene images, catenary curves, ‘scene of experience’, & language? Do 100,000+ years old rock arts provide a promising clue to how meaning gradually emerged from the pre-conceptual pre-representational ‘cauldron’? Are letters and pictures interchangeable, and have they always been so? How images come from very ancient times and how they thrust forward from without and from within? Do we dream in images? Is there any logo which is non iconic? How the core pursuit of advertising is to give form to an abstraction. How does advertising tackle different media, & how an advertisement in the print necessarily needs to be ‘processed in the mind’? How do you create the concept of ‘Friday dressing’? How Jarawas (from Andamans) have come to use words from English or Hindi. Does extinction of languages lead to death of concepts, & the attendant phenomena of amnesia and aphasia? We discuss Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Phoenician, Greek, & Chinese scripts. How icons (& further images, diagrams & metaphors), index & symbols are different from each other? How is a notion different from a concept? Is there conflict and cooperation always at play between images (of say, Batman, Hanuman, Manga, or Anime), & are images conquering the world? Where do specters and ghosts come from? Is there an incessant mass-ification of images (via ‘procession of the simulacra’) ongoing and ahead of us, & are images the long term future of language? Are images & meanings going to be increasingly crowd sourced in the future? Is a technology-driven ‘master narrative’ taking over the visual arts, cities, & forests, and is the ‘visual landscape’ shrinking? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. K. K. Chakravarty (art, public administration, Lalit Kala Akademi, Delhi), Santosh Desai (advertising, strategy, Futurebrands, ex-McCann-Erickson, Delhi), & Prof. Franson D. Manjali (semiotics, interdisciplinary, JNU, Delhi).

#TICAW (The Images Concepts And Words) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about the disenchantment of the world, & wonders if it is possible for there to be multiple metaphysics for the connection between human beings and nature. Is there always something in excess of what we know & experience? We discuss disenchantment and re-enchantment via contexts of boredom, capitalism, death, art, lullabies, adivasis, rag-picking, '​tuning of a tanpura​'​, pilgrimages, sparrows, ‘a tree growing’​, & more​. The concepts are derived off / from Kant, Marx, Weber, Adorno, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Dagar Brothers, & Bhimsen Joshi, among others. Is disenchantment necessarily morally pessimistic? ​How has the desire to create one's own reality and the 'cult of certainty' impacted the possibility of multiple realities & (sometimes) ‘non-epistemic’ routes? Is the disenchanted route almost always a ‘personal’ choice or is it an unequal battle? Is boredom a result of thinking about life in ‘just’ one way? Is one man’s enchantment another man’s bicycle? How disenchantment is an outcome (potentially) of the ascendancy of theory over observation? Is the process of re-enchantment also often compatible with the logic of capitalism, and how it is possible to live a partly liminal life? Can art still say something that truly surprises us? Is it even possible to interrogate the dominant logic of describing the world? Can an enchanted world be substituted, bought, or bracketed by something else? Is the digital world a source of enchantment? Why are we afraid of getting bored? How a ‘2-person system’ is the basic instrument for re-enchantment. Is it possible to imagine a world where every logic is not subservient to the logic of the economy? Is it possible to think of a life which is neither controlled by the State nor entirely vanquished by death? Do we have to take our death less seriously? The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Bishnu Mohapatra (social theory, poetry, Azim Premji University, Bangalore), & Prof. Milind Sohoni (computer science, technology & development, IITB, Mumbai).

#TREM (The (Re)Enchantment Machine) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about the (sometimes?) subterranean world of things, and wonders how the world might look from the standpoint of the Thing. We also tentatively wonder if things indeed have a social life, and if the composite affair of thingness is highly linked to the notion of permanence. The concepts are derived off / from Akka Mahadevi, Rumi, Marx, Coomaraswamy, Heidegger, Adorno, Thomsen, Derrida, Jane Bennett, Maturana, Varela, Bruno Latour, & Bill Brown, among others. What (if any) is the difference between an object and a thing, and can one think of it using the framework of phase transition (& change of property)? Is materiality the primary level of reality? What is it like to be a thing from the past (when one looks at an archaeological artifact)? How a thing cannot avoid being involved in history, & there being a ‘historical ontology’ of things. Can we even posit ‘thinghood’ to something that existed before we existed? Does a water bottle have a meaning in itself? What does it mean to be a solid? Is the pyramid (today) an object or a thing? Is the distinction between a thing and ‘the elemental’ more interesting? Does the object always need a subject (with language & semantics)? Is the integrity or singularity of a thing always porous? Is it highly likely that the self organizing tendency of matter serves a social function? Does this provide a clue that things may in fact have a social life? How (& why) did inanimate (inorganic) matter create human beings, and whether we are likely to be recreated (sooner) by things left behind were we to go extinct? Does every thing get to be objectified? The links between rubber, ~23% beta bronze, atoms, CD ROMs, stainless steel, crystals, Challenger disaster, birds, robots, lotus leaves, & nano materials. ‘Why we should weld but the welding should not be seen’? In what sense is a poem a thing? ‘I died as a mineral and became a plant…’. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Pushan Ayyub (material sciences, TIFR, Mumbai), Prof. Stathis Gourgouris (philosophy, literature, Columbia University, New York), & Prof. Sharada Srinivasan (archaeology, dance, NIAS, IISc, Bangalore).

#TROT (The Realm Of Things) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about different facets of music, including its ever changing relationship with ‘place’ and time. We explore how blocks of noise, sound, consonants, melody, & ‘intention’ come together to create music. How does music exploit the spatial dimension? How does the envelope of quality (timbre) emerge? The concepts are derived off / from Panini, Kant, Bakhtin, Chomsky, Kumar Gandharva, Bismillah Khan, Alladiya Khan, Aminuddin Dagar, & Ashok Ranade, among others. Are sounds (& music) merely vibrations? Are the underlying chronotopes of (say) Dhrupad, Khayal, or Thumri different in ‘a certain way’ (a la Epic and the Novel)? Do musical gharanas (styles) named after places have anything to do with them? Is it possible to tacitly learn music (including the ragas) from the environment? Does music have an internal grammar? How music is both instinctive and cultural. What is the role of imitation? Does music live in our experience, and what / where then is music for animals & plants? The varying priorities accorded to melody and lyrics in folk & classical music. Does folk music always have a performative function? Why are instruments closer to human voice (created by God himself(?)) considered superior (like sarangi over violin?)? Why instrumental music has rarely had a solo repertoire? Are we an instrument ourselves. Why (if at all) is art music special, & how is its aesthetic different from other genres? Why / how do different stringed instruments sound different? Is human voice also a medium (instrument)? The links between beating, mongoose, bowing, crows, plucking, peacocks, blowing, music, bird song, heavy metal, & Bhendi Bazaar. How / why is the place uprooted (say Sufi music from Tunisia) and brought to a performance space? Is music first for the musician? Is it possible to easily distinguish electronic sounds from the natural? Is there a certain quality (timbre) to EDM as well? The irony of tuning the tanpura electronically (shruti box). The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Milind Malshe (literature, aesthetics, IITB, Mumbai), Dr. Suvarnalata Rao (musicology, NCPA, Mumbai), & Dr. Subroto Mihir Roy (music (Dhrupad), Pune).

#TPOM (The Place Of Music) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about narratives & stories, while constantly wondering whether it is the stories that ‘make us up’ and give us our self-hood. We delve into the worlds of literature, film making, video games, philosophy, cognitive sciences, and linguistics to explore why & how we tell & understand stories. The concepts are derived off / from Aristotle, Coleridge, Diderot, Georges Polti, Hitchcock, Labov, E M Forster, Lumière brothers, de Beauvoir, Augusto Boal, Chomsky, Salim-Javed, David Lodge, & Dennett, among others. How identity, time, memory, & emotions are knotted together by fiction. Is story telling like a flight simulator, with most of the rewards but none of the risk? How narratives however, are not synonymous with fiction and, cover both fact & fiction. Do we remember narratively, & create causal links (with mnemonic durability) between the past, present and the possible futures? The difference of a story from a (film) script, & the importance of the dramatic centre? Is narrative experience a (playful) exploration of the space of possibilities – i.e., is all fiction a game? How incompleteness is also a valid possibility in narratives. Why are morals so critical in any satisfying story? How important is it to have a sense of the ending, & how can one return the narrative time to the present? And, in the face of the crisis of our death, is our life more like episodic TV serials, rather than a Greek tragedy? Is lying or cheating a related ability to telling stories? Are stories (video games) more about tying (dying) and untying (undying)? Are there cultures without stories? How there are real physiological reactions and a willing suspension of disbelief on seeing (say) a film in a dark theatre. How can a screenwriter be moved to tears by her own story? Why can’t there be stories without characters or emotions? Are there only a finite number of plots or narratives? What do you see when you look into the mirror in a first-person shooter game? Is there a serial killer inside you? The links between ‘queen died’, 36, spect-actor, chaos, Gilgamesh, Spiderman, Flower, Lagaan, Alzheimer’s, Max Payne, jumping over the chair, alienation, Psycho Mantis, & cheat codes. How are we able to create stories, but are not able to count the number of words in our head? Is social reality the most fictionalized, & is monologue always secondary to collaborative dialogue in story telling? Why aren’t video games laugh-out-aloud funny, & does it have anything to do with the fact that you can’t tickle yourself? Is the future of fiction likely to involve a range of affects & small scale emotions? Can the story strike back at the player (or the reader)? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (game studies, literature, Presidency University, Kolkata), Prof. Rukmini Bhaya Nair (linguistics, narrative theory, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), & Anjum Rajabali (screenwriting, Mumbai).

#TSOF (The Scope Of Fiction) --- SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about the provocative questions of spectres, spirits, & ghosts, as themselves and as signifiers, while constantly wondering if they are an unnecessary residue. Can we think of the repressed voices in places of violence and ruin, using ideas of ghosts and haunting? What is the thing that haunts? What is the big deal about the ghosts? The concepts are derived off / from Plutarch, Ludwig Lavater, Thomas Lodge, Shakespeare, Nicholas Rowe, Heidegger, Freud, Weber, Adorno, Levinas, Tagore, Amos Tutuola, Derrida, Kurosawa, Arjun Appadurai, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean-Michel Rabaté, & Avery F. Gordon, among others. How the juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar creates the uncanny? Would something entirely unfamiliar be uncanny or just plain strange? Can the spectral be defined at all? How hauntology potentially challenges ontology? Do ghosts represent a world order where things are not arbitrary, and where actions have repercussions? How Shakespeare added a sense of wonder and mystery to the figure of the ghost, & made it substantial. Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet a Protestant with a Roman Catholic father? Should Hamlet have followed what the Ghost said? Are ghosts almost always ethically haunting figures? How the Derridean ghost is a bodyless body, and not a spirit without a body? Is every sense of our Being always haunted (with Nothingness)? How time is ‘out of joint’ with the ghostly. Does the uncertainty of the future always unsettle the past? Does modernity render the unexplainable superfluous, & what then are the ghosts of modernity? Is the cinematic consciousness ultimately a very spectral consciousness? What has been the life of ghosts in (say) Indian, Japanese, & South East Asian cinema? Why do Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists always see more than the others? Can a hyper rational mind experience the spectral? The links between Ur-Hamlet, 49, temporal twist, Macbeth, trauma, Hiroshima, turning table, purgatory, Madhumati, goblin, witches, The Babadook, spectral housing in Mumbai, magic, white noise, & Bhooter Bhobishyot. How the ghost expresses the yearning to grasp the mystery of history. Can we get hold of the Levinasian ‘trace’? Are there cultures without ghosts? Would our (otherwise sterile) lives need the pollution or infection of other worldliness in the future? Is it almost impossible to live without ghosts? ‘Can we speak of ghosts, without transforming the whole world and ourselves, too, into phantoms’? ‘Even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet…’. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Shormishtha Panja (Shakespeare studies, literature, University of Delhi, New Delhi), & Dr. Suvadip Sinha (philosophy, cultural studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities).

#TGAP (The Ghosts And Poltergeists) --- SynTalk

Does Mowgli have fun? Why do we crack jokes? Why are spoofs enjoyable, & is having fun, fundamentally, an act of subversion? Does having fun require us to be innocent ‘fools’? Is fun the basic objective of human existence? What is it, then, not to have fun? Is it a fact of human existence that most of the time we are not having fun? Is pain the (obvious) obverse of pleasure? How can tragic spectacles be pleasure producing? How can an expression of sorrow, such as Blues, be enjoyable? Does the idea of fun primarily come to us in retrospect? Is having fun in the present often a contrived and laboured idea? Is the idea of fun intimately linked to the notions of spending, forgoing, & forgetting? Must fun be ethically driven? Why & how can (say) a musician sometimes refuse to entertain? Why do there exist self inflicting pain systems? How is the ‘crucified’ the model for human excellence? Why do musical concerts work, & can fun be manufactured formulaically? What is it to be an individual in a rock concert? Does one need the Other? Can ‘pure’ fun be utile and essential? Is the idea of life before marketplace the idea of innocence? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions under the metonym of fun using concepts from literary & cultural theory (Prof. Saugata Bhaduri, JNU, New Delhi), music (Vehrnon Ibrahim, FreeWillMusic, Mumbai), and poetry & film (Prabodh Parikh, ex-Mithibai College, Mumbai). Listen in...

#THOF (The Having Of Fun) --- SynTalk

Is your (everyday) life repetitive and mundane? Does squirming life lie just underneath the layer of banality? Is the everyday always laced with fantasy and/or skepticism? What is the place of mythology in this context? Can a polluted river be a sight to behold, & might it be crucial to hold such ambivalent feelings? What is an event? Can household events be dreadful? What is totally new? Can a fleeting moment sometimes come as a gift? Equally, can dormant stories suddenly come into being again? Can a word or a gesture embody different temporalities? Can the norm and its transgression be joined together in everyday aspirations? What is extraordinary? Do concepts have sharp boundaries? (How) can something ordinary be designated as art? What does & can an artist do? Can the city go from feeling indoors to becoming outdoors? Do language, gestures and words have the capacity to produce certain kinds of resonances? Can the ordinary gesture of washing the face (say) mean a lot more? Is there a way in which the mundane changes over time? Can human subjectivity ever be fully colonized? What might be the future of experiencing and representing life (and death)? How would you describe a piece of dry wood? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from anthropology & philosophy (Prof. Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA), & art (Sudhir Patwardhan, Mumbai). Listen in...

#TELR (The Everyday Life Revue) --- SynTalk

Are there happy poets? Can one write poetry without having suffered (some) exile? Why has there been deep pessimism about poets, & might poets cause wars and genocide? How is deeply personal poetry dangerous? Does poetry represent perfect, universal and eternal truth? How is a poet different from a philosopher? Does poetry find its foothold in a good society, when philosophical truth is understood as a process, & not a product? How might limitless (anarchic) emotions be expressed given the limits of language? Can one ‘suggest’ that which cannot be written? How do ‘word’ and ‘meaning’ come together in poetry? What is the relationship between form and content? Is poetry a very personal use of language for the poet (and the reader)? What is the link between the ethical and the aesthetic? How might bhava become rasa? What happens the moment you come in contact with yourself? Is poem something whose essence cannot be removed from it? How & when do poems get exhausted? Should poetry be history? How did the ‘first’ poetry come to be? Is an exile always asked for? Might an exile be a voyage? Will ‘mistakes of intellect’ continue to happen? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from political theory & poetry (Prof. Ashwani Kumar, TISS, Mumbai), literature (Udayan Vajpeyi, Bhopal), & literary theory and philosophy (Prof. Sitanshu Yashaschandra, ex-M.S. University, Vadodara). Listen in....

#TEOP (The Exile Of Poets) --- SynTalk

Why don’t we let the past be? What do we do when there is a crisis? What do we see when we look back? What is imitated? Is a renaissance a rebirth: but of something totally new (as a non identical repetition)? What is renaissance ‘about’? Is it celebratory of a past but not necessarily redemptive? Can something ontologically preexisting (& of value) be made into a ‘currency’ by naming? Is the word renaissance substantive or does it need a geographical (say, Italian/Islamic/Bengal) or other marker? Why do we sometimes see ‘new things’ within many different domains within a short period of time? Where does the discourse of newness come from? What is the self understanding during these periods of change? Might the separation of the object from its properties be the defining epistemic break? How does one understand the context of discovery? Did women have a renaissance? Why did Petrarch write letters to a (long dead) Cicero? Is a revolution a renaissance? Does a renaissance have strategic moments to separate Us from Them? Can there be a private renaissance? Can a renaissance be caused or predicted? SynTalk thinks about these and more questions using concepts from history & philosophy of science (Prof. Nagarjuna G., HBCSE, Mumbai), literature & renaissance studies (Prof. Amlan Das Gupta, Jadavpur University, Kolkata), & philosophy & literature (Prof. R. Radhakrishnan, UCI, Irvine). Listen in....

#TROAR (The Recipe Of A Renaissance) --- SynTalk

Is anything isolated? Is comparison essential? Does the entire cosmos consist of a structure of relationships? When comparing, must we think in terms of similarity rather than difference? Is comparison a fundamental way of dealing with complexity in the world? Do you write in a third language? Why is Persian metaphorical (& more so for the non-native speaker?)? Does one have to negotiate the terms of comparison before comparing? Does this depend on the ‘operation’ one is looking to carry out? Is a plane (say) an analytic as well as an algebraic as well as a geometric object, among others; How? Can everything be translated? What, then, is distinct? Do homogenized monadic structures interact in just two ways (war or dialogue)? What happens in the liminal spaces? How does one get to bārahmāsa in Persian poetry? Can one get from anywhere to anywhere using ‘atlas of charts’? Is it possible that objects in the same family do not share any property (but may share a context)? Is the emphasis on similarity likely to have a homogenizing tendency? Is the future in the past? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from topology/mathematics (Dr. Jayadev S. Athreya, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington), culture theory & philosophy (Prof. Anil Bhatti, JNU, New Delhi), & Persian/Indian literatures (Prof. Sunil Sharma, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts). Listen in....

#TSFC (The Strategies For Comparison) --- SynTalk

f(q) = Is soil a definitive sign of life? (#TCAFG)

SynTalk is a freewheeling interdisciplinary talk show with a philosophical approach to understanding the world from a long term perspective.