433. The Long Game: Opportunity, Excellence and Institutional Power
BIC TALKS
Opportunity is abundant. Outcomes, however, are strategic. The three women on this panel have navigated all of it. Venture capital and enterprise strategy. Global talent transformation. The slow, necessary work of making the technology industry legible to the women coming up behind them. Startups built from scratch and careers that kept becoming something new. They have done this inside institutions that weren’t built for them, in markets that moved before they were ready, in moments that required a decision before the picture was clear. Together they examine how signals and opportunities...
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432. Left Off the Blueprint
BIC TALKS
Good design is invisible. Bad design is something women navigate every day. In public spaces, designers have rarely looked closely enough at how women actually move through streets, neighbourhoods, and informal gathering spaces. In digital infrastructure, women’s needs and safety are an afterthought, if considered at all. In healthcare, the gap is starker still. A space meant for healing leaves too many women negotiating their right to be there, be it fair inclusion in clinical trials or access to safe examinations. This panel examines what it would take to change these systems to include...
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430. Living Authentically
BIC TALKS
Courage is not the beginning of self-knowledge. It is the constant condition of it. Courage to Be You follows two people asking that question from very different lives. Amit and Najib are a gay couple navigating not only their relationship but the religious and social distance between them. Rajeshwari, Amit’s childhood friend, is quietly working to reclaim an identity fractured by early trauma. Their stories run parallel, but their questions are the same: what does it take to choose yourself, and what do you risk when you do? Rashna Imhasly-Gandhy draws on Jungian psychology and...
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431. Cities We Carry
BIC TALKS
Two questions plagued her for five years, living between Delhi, Venice, and Istanbul: how do we lose what we lose, and why do we love whom we love? Drawing on her collection of essays Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities (2026), written across 25 years and 13 cities, Ananya Vajpeyi will explore what cities hold for us. The memory and meaning held in street corners and corridors of light; the way personal loss and political trouble have of finding each other in the very same spaces. Architect Prem Chandavarkar brings his own lifelong reckoning with cities to the table....
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429. Invisible Empire
BIC TALKS
You’ve received the call. The scam artist trying to get your information. Perhaps you fell for it, perhaps you knew better. In either case, it becomes a story to tell over coffee. But who are the people on the other end of line? In her new book, Scamlands, journalist Snidha Poonam explores the vast fraud economies stretching from small-town India to global scam hubs. Nuanced, detailed and above all, personal, Poonam reports on the many lives that run parallel to our own. Tracing the supply chains of fraud, she reveals an economy that’s both ruthlessly...
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428. Citizen, Republic, Conscience
BIC TALKS
What did the architects of the Republic want our symbols to represent? Acclaimed musician and public intellectual T M Krishna launches We, the People of India: Decoding a Nation’s Symbols, a rigorous exploration of the tricolour, the Preamble, the national anthem, and the symbols that define Indian democracy. In conversation with urban researcher Gautam Bhan and journalist Dhanya Rajendran, Krishna traces the historical and philosophical origins of these symbols. Together they will unpack how these symbols were born, what they were meant to represent, and how their meanings have...
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427. Tell Me a Story about Our World
BIC TALKS
A single family. A small village. An entire nation’s story hiding inside. Tell Me A Story About Our World brings together academic and translator Vanamala Viswanatha and novelist Kavery Nambisan for a conversation about the art of fiction and storytelling, based on Nambisan’s latest novel, Rising Sons. Set in a village in Karnataka, following one family from pre-independent India through to the 1970s, threading through the complexities of caste and colonialism while painting vivid landscapes of rural and urban life in a bygone era. What makes Rising Sons sing is how...
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426. When Poetry Refused to Obey
BIC TALKS
A new dawn was breaking. And its light would reach far beyond its time. Rebellion in Verse unfolds a journey that goes back to the sixth century CE; a time when many yearned for a reprieve from the constraints of Vedic orthodoxy and caste hierarchies. The Tamil Bhakti movement emerged as their clarion call, a grassroots surge of devotion that redefined spirituality and the social fabric itself. The saints of this movement were poets of the people, composing their hymns in Tamil and their verses, brimming with simplicity and profundity, wrestled divine wisdom from the elite grip of...
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425. Bangalore Raani
BIC TALKS
In SheThePeople’s signature style, this is a session of wit and grace. Bangalore Raani is a vibrant celebration placing female voices precisely where they’ve always belonged: centerstage. Unapologetic and electric, this dialogue brings together women whose presence, choices, and courage bring Bengaluru to life. In this edition, Shaili Chopra is joined by mother and daughter, Yasmin and Kubbra Sait. Through candid storytelling that moves from ambition to reinvention, relationships to those small everyday rebellions that shift culture, the conversation flows freely: sometimes...
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424. Does Bangalore Offer a Healthy Life to us Citizens
BIC TALKS
Once known as a garden city and a pensioner’s paradise, Bengaluru has undergone extraordinary economic and demographic change over the past three decades. While growth has brought opportunity, it has also reshaped everyday life in ways that go far beyond traffic and waste. This second edition of The Bengaluru Debates turns a critical lens on our city to ask whether it still supports healthy lives for its citizens. Public health research increasingly shows that the roots of urban ill-health lie not only in hospitals or clinics, but in planning, infrastructure, and governance....
info_outlineOnce known as a garden city and a pensioner’s paradise, Bengaluru has undergone extraordinary economic and demographic change over the past three decades. While growth has brought opportunity, it has also reshaped everyday life in ways that go far beyond traffic and waste. This second edition of The Bengaluru Debates turns a critical lens on our city to ask whether it still supports healthy lives for its citizens.
Public health research increasingly shows that the roots of urban ill-health lie not only in hospitals or clinics, but in planning, infrastructure, and governance. Air quality, water and sanitation, food systems, mobility, housing design, open spaces, and access to light and ventilation all shape how healthy a city allows its people to be. Yet these questions rarely enter public debate in Bengaluru.
Opening with a short context setting, the session will move into a panel discussion between Dinesh Gundu Rao, Hon’ble Minister of Health & Family Welfare, Government of Karnataka; Dr. C N Ashwath Narayan, Former Deputy Chief Minister of Karnataka and Member of the Legislative Assembly for Malleshwaram; Dr. Shreelata Rao Seshadri, Professor and Director, Ramalingaswami Centre for Equity and Social Determinants of Health, Public Health Foundation of India(PHFI). Moderated by Srikanth Viswanathan, CEO, Janaagraha, the panel will reflect on the relationship between the health of a city and the that of its citizens: what Bengaluru must rethink to secure a healthier future. The session will also include a talk by Nachiket Mor, Economist & Health Systems Researcher.
The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A.
The Bengaluru Debates: A BIC–Janaagraha Dialogue Series on Urban Governance in Bengaluru and Beyond aims to expand civic space in the city by fostering conversations through a civic lens. The series is designed to be informative, constructive, and entertaining, while also serving as a trigger for local community action. Its objective is to bridge the gap between policy, practice, and public discourse on urban governance challenges, and to catalyse citizen and policymaker engagement towards systemic solutions.
In collaboration with:
Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, founded in 2001 in Bengaluru, is dedicated to transforming the quality of life in India’s cities and towns. Their mission is to strengthen the systems of urban governance so that cities can deliver clean, green, safe, and liveable environments for all citizens. For them, “quality of life” is not only about infrastructure and services, but equally about responsive institutions, citizen engagement, and transparent, data-driven governance.
In this episode of BIC Talks, Dinesh Gundu Rao, C N Ashwath Narayan, Shreelata Rao Seshadri and Nachiket Mor will be in conversation with Srikanth Viswanathan. This is an excerpt from a conversation that took place in the BIC premises in Jan 2026.
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