Celebrity Spotting - 2

Shrub in Timbaktu with enormous thorns. Ain't no cow or goat going to try to get a bite off this one ..
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As I said in a previous post, I have a yen to meet interesting famous people. I find it quite amusing that my definition of 'interesting famous people' is genuinely intellectual. At the wax museum in Paris, the kind of statues I took photographs with were Jean Paul Sartre (philosopher) and Picasso (painter). And it was not snobbery either, it was spontaneous. Of course a question is, how intellectual it is to want to take photos with wax statues, but lets leave that aside :-).

Anyway. The Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan in Bangalore is organizing a discussion between Professors Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Upendra Baxi. Gayatri C.S. is quite well-known in literary and intellectual circles and I have come across her name several times, so I am planning to go to this event to get a dekho of her. The event promises to be ultimately abstruse (the topic is: Law, Social Movements and the Subaltern - Articulating Postcolonial Predicaments). Most of the times when I've tried to check out this kind of stuff, I've found it toally incomprehensible. But happy to give it one more try. Here's the formal writeup about the event:

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The Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan and the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University are happy to invite you to an exclusive event, featuring an intellectual exchange between two titans in their field: Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University and Professor Upendra Baxi, Professor in Law and Development, Warwick School of Law.

Date : Sunday June 25, 2006
Time : 5.00 to 7.00 p.m.
Venue : Max Mueller Bhavan
Doors open at 4.30; event starts on time

All are welcome!

As a prelude to the Workshop on Law and Social Movements supported by the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, this event features a conversation between two leading intellectuals of our times, Prof. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Prof. Upendra Baxi, who have profoundly shaped the fields of contemporary social theory and legal theory. Profs. Spivak and Baxi will engage with each other on the politics of representation, the possibilities for resistance and subaltern agency, the predicaments of contemporary social movements and finally, how the law figures in these conversations and what prospects it may hold for redistribution in the Indian context. This conversation between Prof. Spivak and Prof. Baxi presents a rare opportunity for inter-disciplinary engagement between postcolonial theorists and legal scholars. The audience will have an opportunity to pose questions to our distinguished speakers.
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Here are a couple of links about GCS: this and this