| We wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!This is thanksgiving time for LILA. We thank each one of you for the generous support, time and engagement that you have given us through the last few months. It has been a very thrilling experience for our small team to discover the openness and warmth available in our world today. Our speakers and collaborators who supported us through this time confirmed to our nascent organisation that there is so much value in getting together for a cause. Each one of you has played a major role in thus creating a happy world at LILA, and we wish to continue our association. Our own greatest reward has been to watch, listen, and mull over… |  |
As we move towards the New Year, we bring you a lot of news from LILA in the last three months. And, so we have thought up a new dynamic format for the presentation of the newsletter. While the various event reports, photos and videos are now a click away, we also thought our newsletter, as a public text, must profoundly engage with our times and take on a commentator’s role in order to shape transformative discourses at LILA. It must cut new thought roads into the emerging worlds around us.
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October seemed to us a split of a month, indeed! From the news of the American shutdown to that of the Cabinet approval of the bifurcation of the State of Andhra Pradesh in India causing protests and strikes in the Seemandhra region. We found these new October revolutions prompting us to revisit some classics dealing with the allocation of resources in a world of infinite wants and needs. Despite the damages involved in these specific cases, the absurdity that human wants can yield strikes us hard, and we fondly remember good ol’ Adam Smith: |
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But what really shocked us was a Buddhist mob torching so many homes in Myanmar—what does this sangha mean? Against the atrocity that we saw in Burma, we have only our listening to offer in resistance. Here is Om Mani Padme Hum: | |
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The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) was successfully launched into earth orbit by the Indian Space Research Organisation on November 5, affirming our faith in the human genius for explorations beyond limited locations. And we indeed deserved our own Festival of Lights: |
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While Nelson Mandela left us this December, we saw the rise of another people’s movement in India’s capital. In the Delhi elections, Aam Admi Party won 28 seats, and with the external support of the Congress that lost the capital after 15 years, they are readying themselves to govern, and prepare for the forthcoming parliament elections. Would this prove to be a sustainable political movement? As conjectures amass, we invite you to read Shiv Vishvanathan, social scientist and a LILA guest, on the future of politics and politics of the future. |
Click on the images below to read our event reports:
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| The hand-to-hand of media and ecology. | Why the Adivasis must speak now. | Women in India today, after the promises and the dreams. | ||||
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| Authors must refuse to die! | The Arts, the State, and the Market. | Not your regular Maggi-sized report. | ||||
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| The politico-ethical dilemma of the Indian Press. | The youthful wave of innovations. | The middle class in two words: inequality and indifference. |
On the irreducibility of the Human Health Coverage. |
What did you think of the LILA PRISM Lecture Series? Please share your feedbacks with us. Click on the form below:
Have a look at our reports from the LILA Lumieres events:
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| Tamil poetry across languages. | A mesmerizing evening around Kathakali. | All in support of the great Indian athlete! |
LILA is in the news! Click below to read all our articles in the press:
Who is behind LILA? See our newly redesigned team page:
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Did you miss some of the LILA events? Stay tuned. We will upload all the videos of our activities very soon. |
We warmly thank all our collaborators: the India Habitat Centre, India International Centre and Alliance Française; The Caravan Magazine, our media partner, SWECHHA our Public Interface Partner, and the other media houses that supported us through this time. Each one of you has played a role in creating a happy world at LILA, and we wish to continue our association. We also hope to have contributed in the formation of a network of agents and institutions sharing the same goals.
| At LILA, we are delighted by our first phase activities, and the way these have quietly yet steadily begun a movement to create a public space for transformative ideations. We are encouraged by the support and encouragement we received from all directions. But there is much more to come! The next phase of our work shall start with a new project, Inter-actions, the LILA platform for public debates. Its online site will host exchanges between experts in a variety of fields, and respondents from universities and the civil society. In February, we will organize an Audience Meet to reflect with you upon all the projects past and to come. And, of course, we will continue organizing LILA Lumieres screening-debates, as well as our LILA Special Lectures. |  |
Images courtesy: Odisha Sun Times | Samuel Buchoul | University of Toronto Mississauga | Indian Express