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सच्चिदानंद हीरानंद वातस्यायन अज्ञेय. जितना भारी भरकम नाम, उतना ही भारी भरकम व्यक्तित्व. अज्ञेय का जिक्र आने पर एक मूर्धन्य कवि, शैलीकार, कथा साहित्य को एक महत्त्वपूर्ण मोड़ देने वाले कथाकार, निबन्धकार, दिग्गज सम्पादक की छवि हमारे सामने आती है. लेकिन अज्ञेय का व्यक्तित्व इससे भी विराट और बहुआयामी था. अज्ञेय की लेखकीय पहचान से अलग उनका विद्रोही अतीत, क्रांतिकारी झुकाव, उनका सैन्य अतीत, उनका राजनीतिक झुकाव, उनका निजी जीवन इतना परतदार और विशद हैं, जिसे समग्रता में आज तक समेटा नहीं गया है.  अज्ञेय के तमाम अनछुए पहलुओं को भारी-भरकम किताब की शकल में हमारे सामने लेकर आए हैं पत्रकार और लेखक अक्षय मुकुल. अक्षय की हालिया किताब ‘राइटर, रेबेल, सोल्ज़र, लवर- मेनी लाइव्स ऑफ अज्ञेय’, अज्ञेय की ज़िंदगी के तमाम अनदेखे पक्ष उजागर करती है.  लेट्स टॉक अबाउट के इस अंक में हम बात करेंगे अक्षय मुकुल और उनके साथ ओम थानवी से. अज्ञेय के बहुत करीब रहकर काम करने का सौभाग्य रहा है ओम थनवी को. चार दशकों तक पत्रकारिता का अनुभव, हिंदी पत्रकारिता में मील का पत्थर रही जनसत्ता अखबार के संपादक पद से पदमुक्त हुए ओम थानवी के नाम अज्ञेय की जन्मशती के मौके पर एक ग्रंथनुमा पुस्तक अपने-अपने अज्ञेय का संकलन-संपादन का श्रेय है.  तो अक्षय मुकुल और ओम थानवी के साथ लेट्स टॉक अबाउट अज्ञेय. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lets Talk About the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is our three-part deep-dive podcast into the RSS and how it became the formidable force that it is. This live session is in conversation with Abhinandan Sekhri, Shardool Katyayan, and Vijai Trivedi. Tune into Let's Talk About the RSS here: https://www.newslaundry.com/podcast/lets-talk-about/lets-talk-about-rss Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the third and final episode of this series, we pick up from where we left off – the blossoming of the RSS under its third chief, Balasaheb Deoras. Moving through the JP movement to the Emergency to the birth of the Janata Party, this episode tracks the role of the RSS across epochal moments in India’s history.  From Deoras to Rajendra Singh to KS Sudarshan to Mohan Bhagwat, the episode moves into the 21st century, spanning the consolidation of the Hindutva establishment and Babri Masjid demolition, the first BJP-led union government, and the ascent of Narendra Modi.  It also tries to answer a fundamental question: where will the RSS go from here? Download the Newslaundry app. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

In episode 1 of this three-part series, we left off in 1947. After the horrors of Partition, political leaders across the spectrum were battling disenchantment among their followers. The RSS was no exception, but its work during Partition stood it in good stead.  Then came the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and the goodwill generated by the RSS came crumbling down. How did the RSS pick itself up and what were its primary motivations at the time? What is the truth behind the conflicting narratives on Godse’s ties to the Sangh? And what changed between the Golwalkar years and the Deoras years that followed? To listen to the full episode, subscribe to Newslaundry. If you’re not a subscriber, use the discount code LTA20 and get 20 percent off our annual plans (and score some free merchandise too)! This coupon code is only valid if you buy the subscription on our website. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the fount of Hindutva, is arguably the most powerful and influential organisation in India. It's three years from turning 100 and its influence permeates all spheres, from politics to society. But how did this behemoth come to be, and where is it likely to go? Welcome to episode 1 of Let’s Talk About: RSS, hosted by Abhinandan Sekhri and Shardool Katyayan. In this episode, Shardool and guests talk about their personal journeys growing up in the Sangh. Parallelly, this episode also explores the birth of the RSS in British India and the life of Keshav Hedgewar, the man who was the seed to what would eventually be the RSS’s tree. Featuring guest panellists like Hartosh Singh Bal, Hitesh Shankar, and Walter K Andersen, the episode pieces together the early days of the RSS, including the many challenges it faced in newly independent India. Listen. To listen to the full episode, subscribe to Newslaundry. If you’re not a subscriber, use the discount code LTA20 and get 20 percent off our annual plans (and score some free merchandise too)! This coupon code is only valid if you buy the subscription on our website. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Check out Part 1 of the conversation here. In part two of this special edition of Let’s Talk About, the Newslaundry team of Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan, Shardool Katyayan, and Mehraj D Lone continue their conversation on religion, this time focusing on the intersection of religion and politics. Abhinandan asks the panel whether it thinks mixing religion and politics is inevitable or desirable. He says politics has merely “replaced” religion while still keeping aspects of it intact. Manisha thinks religion is an important part of people’s lives and, therefore, “politics is always going to be a feature of it”. Listen. Subscribe and avail our Independence Day offer: https://bit.ly/NewslaundryIDayOffer Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this special edition of Let’s Talk About, the Newslaundry crew of Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan, Shardool Katyayan, and Mehraj D Lone sit down for a freewheeling discussion about religion, its place and significance in our world. Primarily, the theme is whether religion has done more good or more harm.  Abhinandan and Mehraj both argue that religion has done more good than harm while the rest of the panel express mixed views. Subscribe and avail our Independence Day offer: https://bit.ly/NewslaundryIDayOffer Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Feminism as a social, political and historical phenomenon has assumed many shapes and forms through the ages. But what does feminism mean in the Indian context? Can we chart out a linear history of the movement in India?  India’s movement has its own complexities, varying in definition and scope across class, caste, and creed. Gender dynamics and power imbalances have been instrumental in the oppression of women, and suppression and punishment is a tool to curb “transgressions” and maintain the status quo. Women have not only challenged this forced subservience but have, in many instances, overturned these systems too. So, the goal of this podcast is not to define feminism, but to examine India’s social structures and the feminist resistance to them at specific moments in history. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

When a standard or classification is built on an idea of “normal”, then the decision-making system will fail those outside that idea. It will fail the extraordinary. It’s similar to what happened in the case of athlete Dutee Chand, who went on to win a landmark case that declared void the sporting standard of testosterone levels.  After all, nature is not neat. And it’s the outliers that push the species forward – something that automated decision-making systems, including algorithms, don’t really understand. In Dutee's case, understanding the decision making, and the transparency in it, was crucial to her right to redress. In the final episode of Let’s Talk About Big Data, we talk to Laura Reig, a PhD student at Denmark Technical University, on how AI makes mistakes in gender classification, and Chirag Agarwal, a research fellow at Harvard University, about what explainability in AI means. We also talk to Joy Lu, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, on what makes for a good explanation of what an algorithm is doing. Listen. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Being perfectly rational is not an evolutionarily viable form of reasoning. It’s slow and requires a lot of information that may not always be available. What helps is reasoning through bias: a cognitive shortcut that is quick, doesn’t require perfect information, gets the job done, and reduces the kind of errors that have existential consequences. Algorithms have biases too. But over time, biases have started reinforcing themselves, further disenfranchising the disenfranchised. So, what do we do about it? We talk to Osoba Osonde, a senior information scientist, co-director of the Center for Scalable Computing and Analysis, and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, to discuss how we can make algorithms fairer. We also talk to Benjamin Boudreaux, a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, about what it means to make algorithms fairer. Listen.  Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

The right to privacy is our right to identity. And as human experience has evolved over time, privacy has changed with it. In this episode, we discuss with Arvind Narrain, cofounder of the Alternative Law Forum, how our understanding of privacy has evolved over time. We talk to Rega Jha about how the internet subverts our privacy without even intending to. We also speak to Rishabh Poddar, who is building a privacy-preserving technology at the University of California, Berkeley. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

The genius of the metaphor is that it helps us understand complex models we can’t articulate. When the Hindu supremacists say “Bharat Mata”, for example, they are presenting a well understood cognitive model that explains nourishment and loyalty and using it to explain nationalism. When they say “Gau Mata”, the idea of nourishment and our loyalty to it is brought to the cow. In many ways the metaphor epitomises the kind of intelligence computers struggle with. Reasoning by metaphor is a form of reasoning that’s flexible and nimble, unfixed and still resilient. It uses ideas from outside systems to explain systems, maps a cognitive model from a familiar context to another. We, human beings, can do this because a number of things came together for us: we have very sophisticated abilities to speak, we recognise patterns, we understand the unspoken, we can imagine what isn’t in front of us, we have a pool of shared human experience (another metaphor!), we can see concepts and we can see relationships between concepts. So, what does human intelligence do that machine intelligence can’t? What can they both not do?  In this episode, we explore the limits of artificial intelligence. We speak to Shubham Bindlish who runs an AI firm that scrapes cricket data to help make predictions for fantasy cricket. We also speak to Joseph Paul Cohen who has built AI that can diagnose diseases from chest x-rays. They shed light on how both their AI infers data and the limitations that come with it. Listen. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

On July 12, 2020, a team from the National Investigation Agency and the Pune police landed at Sadiya Shaikh’s doorstep. Sadiya, 22, was arrested on suspicion of being in contact with “ISIS sympathisers” and helping to plan attacks in India. It wasn't her first interaction with the police; she had been “deradicalised” at the age of 17.  By 2017, ISIS had lost most, if not all, of its territory in the Middle East, but it survived and thrived in the dark corners of the internet, keeping itself on life support. Tune into this snippet of Let's Talk About: ISIS in India, where host Priyank Mathur tries to understand if and how the terror group’s influence has reached India, using Sadiya’s case as context, and how law enforcement agencies have reacted to it.  Subscribe to Newslaundry and listen to the full episode here. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I began researching for this, the pilot episode, it was immediately apparent to me that Big Data was fundamentally different from data as we have known it for hundreds of years. We could just do so much more with it. It was changing industries, governments, people, and relationships between these entities rapidly and permanently. But what I couldn’t get a finger on was why.  Why was Big Data different from data as we have known it for hundreds of years? If it’s something ancient, just bigger, why does it change the world? I didn’t have to wait too long to find the answer. In the very first chapter of Victor Meyer Schonberger’s Big Data, a book written about seven years ago, he gets to it pretty straight. When things change a lot in scale, they begin to change in essence also. If the rate of change is dramatic (double differential is out of whack), the thing itself begins to change. This is what makes Big Data essentially different from data ever before in human civilization. This is how he explains it: an image is an image is an image. But speed these images up so the brain sees them as a continuum, and what you have made is a movie. A change in speed led to a change in essence. Here’s another example: gravity acts on all of us, but if you’re really small, like an insect, it barely has any effect on you. Again, change scale dramatically, and the essence begins to change. A glass of water is fundamentally different from a tsunami. A drizzle is fundamentally different from a hurricane. Think about the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve had economic downturns before. We’ve had unemployment before. We’ve had urban-rural migrations before. We’ve all experienced sickness before. Viruses come and go every year. We’ve had natural disasters before. What makes this pandemic so destructive is the scale and speed of it. The coming together of mass unemployment, global economic collapse, mental health falling off a precipice, distorted patterns of living and migration and human behaviour. Together, at this scale and at this speed, the essence of life today is different from the essence of life at the beginning of 2020. The idea that after a point quantity and quality are inherently related is not a new one. It’s one of the three forgotten laws of Dialectical Materialism which inspired a lot of Karl Marx’s work. When quantity changes a lot, after a point, quality begins to change as well. This is the idea that explains why big changes in wealth distribution bring big changes in the essence of social structures. This law, in turn, comes from a  much older philosophical idea: Aristotle’s Heap Paradox. This is the Heap Paradox: if you have a heap of sand and you remove one grain from it, it’s still a heap. Remove one more, it’s still a heap. One more, it’s still a heap. But if you do this long enough, if you scale up the removal of grains, it’ll no longer be a heap. The essence of the sand heap will change. This is at the core of understanding what Big Data is. When the quantity of data changed, its essence changed as well. Listen. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

It is estimated that a child goes missing in India every eight minutes. That’s one full classroom of students disappearing every few hours. Almost 40% of these children are never found. Families are torn apart. Tune into this snippet of Let’s Talk About where Newslaundry’s Snigdha Sharma delves into the complexities of child trafficking in India: how and why is it so prevalent? What forms does it take? Who is most vulnerable? What is being done to prevent it? Through a series of sobering interviews, she speaks to victims, experts, and journalists on the frontlines to understand the many aspects of India’s child trafficking crisis. Subscribe to Newslaundry and listen to the full version here. https://www.newslaundry.com/subscription Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

In May 2017, a PIL in India’s Supreme Court kickstarted a hot debate on one of the most controversial practices in the 21st century—female genital mutilation (FGM). Described by activists as a "heinous crime" and "cruelty of the first order", the case stretched over several months and drew attention to a practice that has remained one of the most guarded secrets in the subcontinent and around the world. Tune into this snippet of Let’s Talk About: Female Genital Mutilation where Gaurav Sarkar explores the religious, legal, mythological and medical aspects of FGM. Subscribe to Newslaundry at bit.ly/paytokeepnewsfree to listen to the full version here: https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/02/06/lets-talk-about-female-genital-mutilation You can also listen to all our podcasts on iOS and Android. iOS: http://apple.co/2iZhEq1 Android: http://bit.ly/2jTtG3x Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brigadier BK Ponwar, the Director of the Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College in Chhattisgarh, compares the Naxal insurgency to fish in a pond. He explains this analogy by giving examples from insurgencies in other parts of India, particularly the Northeast. Amit Bhardwaj also questions him about the alleged incidents of sexual assault by security forces on civilians. Tune in to this snippet of Let's Talk About: Naxalism - Part 2 to listen to what he has to say. Subscribe to Newslaundry to listen to the full version here: https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/01/23/lets-talk-about-naxalism-part-2 Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1968, Narayan Singh Chauhan joined an uprising that was painting Indian jungles red. Joined by comrades from different parts of the country, he was there to fight feudal lords, emancipate the peasants and crush the state. In his three year-long involvement with the Naxalite insurgency, Chauhan was involved in multiple encounters and also admits to killing a revenue-collector. Tune in to this snippet of Let's Talk About: Naxalism - Part 1 to listen to his story. Listen to the full episode here: https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/01/02/lets-talk-about-naxalism-part-1 Subscribe to Newslaundry to listen to the full version. You can also listen to all our podcasts on iOS and Android. iOS: http://apple.co/2iZhEq1 Android: http://bit.ly/2jTtG3x Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

The word 'objectivity' has garnered increasing usage in the world of journalism in recent years. Yet, its meaning remains elusive to many. For some, it represents a method that must be followed by those who claim to present the truth to the wider world, while for others, it's a mental skill that allows for impartial and balanced judgment. Speaking to several prominent journalists and writers, Abhinandan Sekhri tries to grapple with the various definitions and facets of objectivity—has the term always had a fixed meaning? Is it better suited for science than for journalism? Using thought experiments, literary allusions and big philosophical words, he seeks an answer to the ultimate question: is objectivity even desirable? Subscribe to Newslaundry at http://bit.ly/paytokeepnewsfree to catch the full episode here: https://www.newslaundry.com/2018/10/15/lets-talk-about-objectivity-in-journalism Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Let's Talk About... has gone behind the paywall, but because we love our listeners, here's a sneak peak into the latest episode. Here's Let's Talk About: Privacy.  Privacy -- is it a personal or a policy issue? The dictionary defines privacy as a state in which one is free of attention and today, that state is harder and harder to achieve. Our privacy is often being invaded without us even realising it and many shrug at this fate. "What do I have to hide?" is the standard response to privacy being lost but the real question is "Why is your privacy so precious to others?" With the data collected by the Unique Identity project, aka Aadhaar, surfacing in unexpected, unauthorised places, you must know what your rights are and how the government helps you uphold them (or not). In this episode of Let's Talk About, Meghnad S, a public policy nerd and compulsive Lok Sabha TV watcher, speaks to lawyers, journalists, researchers, and businessmen to figure out what privacy is in the digital age and whether Aadhaar really is the way forward. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.