GPD Under50 Talks
After eminent playwright and intellectual G.P. Deshpande’s passing last year, Sudhanva Deshpande of Jana Natya Manch was struck by the realisation that most of his late father’s friends were not the same age as him. He connected best with people much younger to him, perhaps on account of a shared spirit of intellectual exploration and seeking.
“I think he just remained a very curious person, who never became set in his ways…He had his firm beliefs, but it didn’t mean that he didn’t interrogate things. He remained intellectually alive and was a very nimble thinker,” Sudhanva explains, adding that the fact that he “was comfortable in his own skin…never aggressive or threatening towards someone else” endeared him to younger people alike.
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To honour his memory and spirit, Jana Natya Manch has instituted the GPD Under50 Talks, where 10 mid-career artists, intellectuals and activists will talk about the what and wherefore of their practice, and the impulse for change in it.
The speakers are poet, actor and dastango Danish Husain, historian Smita Vats, singer Vidya Shah, economist Ashwini Deshpande, journalist Vineet Kumar, puppeteer Anurupa Roy, trade unionist Anurag Saxena, artist Amar Kanwar, theatreperson Sanjana Kapoor and playwright Ramu Ramanathan. The speakers, some of them known to GPD, also reflect the broad range of his interests.
The talks will be self-examining rather than autobiographical in nature. This, says Sudhanva, was always important to GPD, who “in his own gentle way asked us to articulate what we were doing and why we were doing what we were doing...”
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A talk this Friday by Danish Husain inaugurates the series, which concludes on September 5. All the talks will be held at Studio Safdar, Shadi Khampur.
(For details, visit > the Facebook page )
Lila Prism Lecture Series
Last year, the cultural think tank Lila sought to bring about a holistic and interdisciplinary understanding of development through its PRISM lecture series. A number of speakers problematised ‘development’ from their own unique vantage points — cultural, economic and linguistic — and identified how it had created ruptures in all these areas.
In its second outing, the lecture series looks towards solutions and actionable ideas. Through 14 ‘practice oriented’ lectures, the series will underscore cultural continuities in various fields.
The speakers, who include a singer (Vidya Rao), an architect (Tapan Chakravarty), a poet (Cheran), a sculptor (K. S. Radhakrishnan) and a cartoonist (E.P. Unny) among others, are all cultural conservationists in their own right, says Rizio Yohanan Raj, writer and executive director, Lila. In their lectures, the speakers will reflect on how each of their fields is a practice that has been followed over time, coping with challenges heaped by a variety of forces.
The series begins with a lecture by Eddin Khoo, journalist, conservationist and founder of the cultural organisation Pusaka, on August 5 at India Habitat Centre on “Puppetry as a Paradigm of Continuity”. The lecture will trace the historical roots of puppetry in Malaysia, and illuminate how it has continually reinvented itself in the face of opposition from fundamentalist quarters.
The next lectures, to be delivered by environmentalist Vandana Shiva and publisher Ritu Menon, on August 13 and 20, will look at food and the biography as forms of cultural memory respectively.
The lecture series takes place at the India Habitat Centre and the India International Centre, during the months of August through December.
(For details, visit > Lila's schedule here )