Syntalk

Do you live with animals? Are your summers busy? Could a 1000 metres apart be several hours apart in the hills? How does that define culture? Could there be multiple places in one hill? Do you have a simple dream of having a kitchen with a granite sink? Are hill people traditionally more cohesive? What do hills do to States? How do/did sovereign Godlings rule their territories in the mountains? Have these Godlings (& their people) also been at war? What brought them together? Where did the clergy come from? Where did Raghunathji come to Kullu from? Did Shaivism and Vaishnavism have differing impacts on the Himalayan polity? Do change and continuity exist in tandem? How do the great traditions and the little traditions interact? Did the first British maps change us? Are the Himalayas the spine of the world? Did Radhanath Sikdar measure the Mount Everest? Did Maharaja Ranjit Singh Ji connive with the French and the Russians to fight the British? When/why did the British give up on Tibet? Why make hill stations?

Were there thoughts >80,000 years ago? Can you say what you feel? How is your Broca’s area? ‘Where’ is the mind? Is it individuated? &, insulated? When did our ancestors first create art? Are human beings incorrigibly abstract? Are social minds more emotional? Are single cell bacteria social? Who is accountable for a mob? How do social values get revised or (sometimes) resisted? Is the mapping between brain states and mental states (largely) mysterious? Does language change the brain? Is mentality a part of the universe? Are complex long term decisions also a series of micro decisions? How do you decide on a home loan? What can neuroscience (alone) explain? Can political leadership impact personal decisions of the masses? Are groups of strangers safer than individuals when crossing train tracks? Do behaviours differ across cultures? Why? Do you hold all the beliefs today from your childhood? Can you ‘decide’ without emotions? Do decisions precede interpretation? Do you trade on uncertainty? Are we currently i

Can you meta point? Do you celebrate objectivity? Is there a lot happening that is ‘undocumentable’? Are facts and values entangled? Are several valuable things tangible but not measurable? Are we ourselves instruments? Can ‘fact’ have variations? How is truth different from truism? Must Truth be recognizable? Does mathematics ‘change’ over time? Can experience invalidate mathematical statements? Is the metaphysical always mystical? Is the artistic metaphorical? Are the three (Penrose) worlds – platonic, mental & physical – distinct? Is there a ready-made world? Do you always look for ‘another way’ to experience the world? Does great architecture present the immeasurable? Can built spaces be conducive to certain values? Can one reflect while in action, such that use and contemplation co-exist? Where do concepts come from? Is analyticity an undefinable notion? Can you hear the voice of the table without existing in a ‘certain way’? When is threat visible? Is there normative desire in the world to both donate a

Can one become English? What does this have to do with the Suez Canal? Are you white? Are we free? Is it good to be obedient? Is the Other always an enemy? Or, could it be a reference group? Did everyday defiance (say, by the peasants) play a role in India’s struggle against the British Empire? Is nationalism necessarily anti colonial? How is Indianness linked to the Aryan Invasion Theory? Was the British conquest of India always partial? Are Gandhi, Gandhism, & Gandhi-ites the same thing? Had Tagore read Marx? Why does dissent take time? How do wild elephants live within the market economy? Do rivers have their own unruly ‘erratic’ lives? Are forest fires often an act of defiance? How/why do we defy Nature’s will? Does geography change the way we think? Is Assam Bengal? Can the seemingly peaceful bear a lot of conflicts within? Was Tibet seduced differently from the other colonies? Does assimilation/citizenship always follow acculturation/subjecthood? What happens to Sutlej in Nathpa Jhakri? Will there alway

Who are you? Would you like to have a new name? Were there many Kalidasas? Have you ever been with a mountain? Does your family have recorded history? Why are authors often anonymous in ancient Indian texts? Is the desire to be known akin to the desire for immortality? What is the name for India in Sanskrit? When do names of specific individuals begin to emerge in archaeological artefacts? Did the devadasis lead creative lives? Do (only) dominant elites name and judge the anonymous non-elites? Which communities are anonymous in the history books? Does language constrain our inner lives? Did the British hunt differently from the indigenous people? Can material fragments or memory be tangible sources for history? Are all collectives eventually a part of Nature or the Divine? Is there something beyond the Self and the Other? When do anthropology and history intersect? Why do we sometimes surrender to become anonymous? Is the contemporary idea of fame temporally short sighted? Is Bangalore Nagarathnamma here now?

Why do we reify? When are you able to read others' minds? Is this a pedestrian? Are sensation and perception tied together? How are new mental templates formed? Are priors 'necessary' for categorization? How do we know, in a badly lit place, if something is a wire or a snake? Are mental images ‘sharp’? Should stochastic processes (also) be understood via their higher-order moments? How are interiors of opaque objects (metal spheres to stars) pictured? Do you internally ‘model’ various parts of your own body? Does our mechanical body ‘produce’ words? Do virtual worlds also need a degree of veridicality? Do verbal and visual systems interact during encoding? How were gravitational waves detected? Is reification language dependent? Does brute force of computation help? When does (sub-symbolic) chairness become a (symbolic) chair? Is the notion of an ‘object’ generalizable across domains/languages? Can stars’ magnetic fields be plotted as precisely as the HR diagram? ‘Are sun-like stars like the Sun’? Do we need

Are you a romantic genius? Are artists incapable of understanding their own creations? Where does inspiration come from? Is Nature divine? Can art divide? When/why does a creation become property? Are you the owner of your own Self? When does one have the right to copy? Do you copy yourself? Did print technology create the individuated author? Do you know what an author is? Which language do you create in? Is listening/reading re-creating? Does repetition create difference? What is the difference between art and commodity? Is the process of creation a dance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian? Did ancient Greeks have a creator God? Does music need to be human? Could technology cause autoamputation of human organs? Is the relationship between the original and the copy always hierarchical? Is originality a necessary myth? Were you born with a purpose? Are books made up of other books? How do you whip yourself into a frenzy? Do you sense life in rocks? Could AI diminish, homogenize, and dominate us? Can the

Are you expected to reproduce? Where is hell? Should patriarchy be ‘smashed’? Are brains masculine or feminine? Are biological and social factors deeply enmeshed, & is the body also socialized? Is Nature mutable? Is sex different from gender? What does this distinction have to do with the colonial encounter? Is the personal realm both public and private? Can there be non-binaries without binaries? What can we be besides what we are? Can gender be merely agentive? Isn’t everything outside of cisgender ‘incorrect’? Is even biological sex only chromosomal? Are early (~6-8 weeks old) gonads bipotential? Do all (wo)men behave and feel the same way? What is innate; is innateness (if?) fixed? Has history progressed linearly from less- to more-? Does science look for truth or facts? How do homosexual penguins reproduce? Can attempts to bring order to polyphonic chaos often lead to unintended outcomes? Where does sexual desire come from? Are several domains (legal, medical, …) rightly binary? Are you prone to cardiac

Do you respect the bones of your forefathers? Are your hands free? Were the hunter gatherers happier? Are nomads now likely to be criminals? Are you a willful nomad? Why don’t we live on trees anymore? How did ‘I-ness’ emerge? What is ‘I’? Is our thinking capacity more unconstrained than our bodily capacities? Does the Mind have an upper hand over the Body? Is the Self always embodied? Or, can there be a Self without an ‘I’ or a body? Are biology and culture mutually dependent on each other? Did wealth accumulation come only with settled ‘storage’ economy? & with it rigid hierarchies, newer diseases/food, spatial organization, property, & norms? Is only the present real? Is Self endlessly layered? Can there be a core Self? Do freedom and constraint go hand in hand? Have you experienced absolute freedom? Is being mobile fundamental to being human? Are you free to travel anywhere (but only in a manner that is permissible)? Will cultural selection over-determine evolution going forward? Might we become racially

Is the past ‘all over the place’? Is it the stories that keep buildings and communities alive? Are stories mental artefacts of the past? Did H.M. have expectations? Is understanding the past a process of comparing the unknown and the known? Is the surprising, strange, & non-normative, therefore, informative? How do archaeological artefacts carry traces of human behaviour? Are there patterns in culture? What gets demolished? Can lost languages be revitalized? Is the past always changing? Is the brain always predicting? How old is professional History? How/when do our beliefs or emotions revise what we perceive from our other senses? Might two historians see two very different things? Does multilingualism delay dementia? Are all stories political? How are they so effective? How does the past guide our behaviour today? What leads to the ‘resting state’? Is understanding both diachronic and synchronic? When is the past invoked? How do stories sometimes go haywire? Who has blond hair and blue eyes? Is Self = Indiv

Are you a middle-roader? Is Jai Santoshi Maa a mainstream film? Are you exposed to world cinema? ‘What’ is popular? Are dialects non-standard? Does writing / scripting / printing legitimize the process of standardization? Are scripts discrete, but language continuous? Can sociopolitics ever be subtracted from language? How is time tapped? Are film scenes cut ‘in’ time (i.e., temporally, rather than visually)? Is the notion of mainstream always market driven? Where does power emerge from? Do the best art films take the maximum (personal) risk? Don’t all films crave commercial success? Are all films dependent? How has English become the language of the world? Is Gujarati one language? Who speaks Hindi? Do languages need a script? Do scripts become the identity of language, just as languages become the identity of people? Is identity dynamic? Why did the early scholarship on Sholay come from the west? Who makes / finances / exhibits films? Why do we divide Spaces? Why do we know merely the name of Panini, but no

Many sorts of things don't happen. Plans are made and deferred. Films are left undeveloped. Subjects are avoided. Dreams are un-dreamt. Planes take off empty. Priests are marked absent. Building floors get skipped, and boats go missing. Turn Seven is just one of them. And #TATS (The Absent Turn Seven) pretends like nothing ever happened. You hear the voices, in order of disappearance. But order does not matter. Birds and brooks sing in no order. The middle never ends for those that remain.

The Antakshari Scene: The antakshari scene located mid-film is a prime example of the intertextuality found in MPK and the originality that comes in part from the film’s recontextualization of various fragments from pop culture. Even though the song sequence does not contain original music but rather a medley of songs from previous Hindi films, it still functions as an important vehicle for plot development and the articulation of feelings that cannot easily be expressed through dialogue (see Ganti 2004, 178-179). Antakshari, as played in the film, requires two opposing teams that alternate singing popular song lyrics, with the first word of each song starting with the same syllable that ended the previous song. These rules are embedded on the name of the game itself, as antakshari combines ant (end) and akshar (a letter of the Hindi alphabet). The competition continues until one team cannot continue the back-and-forth. Given the centrality of lyrics in Hindi film songs, and the hegemonic popularity of cinema

The intensity of celestial sources passing over the fixed field of radio receivers was recorded on strip charts and had to be analyzed by visual inspection. This task fell naturally to the graduate student of the group, Jocelyn Bell. On August 6, 1967, she first noticed a peculiar train of radio signals when the sky at right ascension 19h19min passed through the field of view. What could have caused such a transient periodic signal? The first suspicion was of course interference from some electric equipment, like the ignition of a passing car or a satellite. But to the surprise of Bell the signal appeared again at about the same time of day. After a few months it was obvious that the regular pulses were coming from a celestial source beyond our solar system. Furthermore a recording of the source with sub-second time resolution on November 28, 1967, revealed pulses repeating at a regular period of 1.33 s. At that point - the discovery of the phenomenon was still kept secret - the thought that radio signals fro

One of the central theses underlying the phenomenology of body is that of bodily subjectivity. It might appear as though by speaking of “bodily subjectivity” one is in effect assimilating “body” into “consciousness,” so that instead of the real body one is talking about thought or the idea of the body. Nothing could be farther removed from our intentions. Body is neither a modality of consciousness, nor is subjectivity coextensive with consciousness. In fact, one of the implications of the concept of bodily subjectivity is that the concept of subjectivity is wider than the concept of consciousness. It also entails that intentionality is a distinguishing feature, not of the domain of consciousness, but of the larger domain of subjectivity. The concept of subjectivity should also be dissociated from the epistemological concept of “subject.” Nor do the concepts of subjectivity and consciousness necessarily hang together with the concept of “representation” (of reality) and/or the priority of the temporal dimensi

Frankfurt, 1797: at twenty-seven, Hegel plunged into a profound crisis. He no longer knew what he thought; he no longer knew what to think. The republic and the revolution had collapsed under the repeated blows of German history. Several years later, Hegel would speak of this episode as an attack of “hypochondria”. Hypochondria: literally, under the cartilage of the ribs, with one’s heart cramped. When the perception of the world is too closely concerned with chaos, the heart suddenly, without reason, sinks. Without any reason: one might say that reason gets muddled. Look closely at the letter in which Hegel, at forty, describes the crisis that overcame him in Frankfurt: ‘I suffered from this hypochondria for a number of years to the point of total exhaustion; no doubt every man experiences such a turning point in his life, the nocturnal point where his whole being contracts and he must force himself through the narrows until he becomes secure and certain of himself, secure in ordinary daily life, and if he h

Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice: “Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all. Speak, Jacques Five!” The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy forehead with it, and said, “Where shall I commence, monsieur?” “Commence,” was Monsieur Defarge's not unreasonable reply, “at the commencement.” “I saw him then, messieurs,” began the mender of roads, “a year ago this running summer, underneath the carriage of the Marquis, hanging by the chain. Behold the manner of it. I leaving my work on the road, the sun going to bed, the carriage of the Marquis slowly ascending the hill, he hanging by the chain—like this.” Again the mender of roads went through the whole performance; in which he ought to have been perfect by that time, seeing that it had been the infallible resource and indispensable entertainment of his village during a whole year. Jacques One struck in, and asked if he had ever s

“What do you do at his place? What do you and he talk about?” asked Stolz. “You know, it’s so proper and cozy at his place. The rooms are small and the sofas are so deep, you sink so far down no one can see you. The windows are quite covered with ivy and cactus, and he has more than a dozen canaries and three dogs, such good ones! He always has something to eat on the table. The engravings all depict family scenes. You come and you never want to leave. You sit there without a care or thought in the world, and you know there’s someone nearby. Naturally, he’s not smart, and there’s no exchanging ideas with him or thinking, but on the other hand he’s not crafty but good and kind, and he has no pretensions and won’t stab you in the back!”. “But what do you do?” “Do? Well, I arrive and we sit opposite each other on sofas with our feet up, and he smokes.” “What about you?” ”I smoke, too, and listen to the canary trilling. Then Marfa brings in the samovar.”(An excerpt from 'Oblomov' (1859), by Ivan Goncharov. Transl

Are you able to realize your potential? Is your country under-developed? Is development a kind of gradual unfurling? Could it then be an infinite, deliberate, process? Is urbanization industrialization? Is industrialization development? Is development, only, economic growth? Does urbanization ‘cause’ development? Did the moral values of ‘improvement’ come from religion? Does Science help make progress material by unlocking the mind of God? How did Development take off post WW2 as a new ontology? Is a society getting richer the same as people becoming less poor? Does development have an urban bias? Does the countryside, also, need urbanization? Do cities & nations compete in the global marketplace? Why did several early theorists of development come from Eastern Europe? Why is some of the most expensive real estate in developing countries? Does development need (say) education, health, environment, and morals, & not just money? Do you expect to eat asparagus in every month of the year? How might the meaning of

How do you like your Matcha? Why do fine and coarse materials behave very differently? Is surface texture usually a sign of sub-structures? How does rock become clay? Is dry clay enough to understand wet clay? Could tea be smoked? Is it simple to keep every spoonful of your morning cereal mix similar? Do pure dry solids ‘flow’ in layers and parts? Is soil a definitive sign of life? How are dust and coarse-leaf teas different? Does mechanical agitation organize matter differently from Brownian motion? How/why does swelling happen? Can mechanical grinding lead to fine structural (chemistry) changes? Does fineness evolve life ‘around’ it by offering its ample ‘surface area’? What is a tea bag? Would you be able to easily tell (moving) life & non-life apart under a microscope? Could microbes induce life into fine matter? How does refinement happen? Why do water drops jump to contact when brought close together? What flocks? What ‘flocs’? What lies ahead? Would we deploy small active rotors & ‘swimmers’ to change