A humanities evening

Okay here's the blog about the event I went to with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Upendra Baxi. Actually I'm finding it quite hard to say something concrete about the event. Its all quite nebulous and ambiguous. I can't say I didn't understand anything at all :-), but at the same time if you ask me what the talk was about, I wouldn't be able to say much. I think :-) they talked about 'subaltern' stuff, a specialty of GCS, which means (vaguely) those who don't have a voice. They touched on the law of course since that is Upendra Baxi's area, and I think they tried to pursue some points about how the law could be used to aid subalterns and so on.

Anyway. Having said the above, actually I came away with a good impression of both these people. The thing is, they are not random abstruse intellectuals (or atleast not *just* random abstruse intellus !), GCS does social work in Bengal, and Upendra Baxi is a cat on human rights (Ramaswamy Iyer, in his book I talked about earlier, speaks very highly of Baxi, says his book, The Future of Human Rights, 'blazes with a deep commitment to the idea of human rights'). So I think they are grounded people, but being college professors, they also get very deep into some specialization. They came across as very friendly and approachable and nice people. The discussion was hopelessly discursive and vague as one might expect from humanities people.

The other interesting thing about the event was the crowd which was obviously a different one from the software crowd and quite interesting to see.

Finally, re. celebrity spotting, it was a very productive evening. U.R. Ananathamurthy was there. He is a major local literary cat, prof of literature at Bangalore University and many other things. (there is a landmark Kannada movie called Samskara, that he is associated with in some way, probably wrote the book on which the movie is based). As a minor additional bonus, I think Ranjit Hoskote was also there, he is a 'cultural theorist' and writes occasionally for the Hindu. He wrote a book of poems recently that was thoroughly slammed.

Photos: 1.) GCS (on the left) talking to Anantamurthy. 2.) Baxi is the person in the white shirt 3.) audience shot

(The photos show people milling around and talking, but that was after the event, the event itself was conventionally done, the two speakers were in front and talking and the audience was seated).