For over 200 years, America has been interested in South Asia across three separate axes: power, ideology and culture. Historian Srinath Raghavan joins Amit Varma in episode 93 of The Seen and the Unseen to provide a guided tour of this fascinating history.
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The Seen and the Unseen releases every Monday. Thalé-Haraté releases every Wednesday. The Pragati Podcast releases every Thursday. PuliyaBaazi releases every alternate Thursday.
How do you report on India for a global audience? What do you choose to write about? And how should we understand cronyism in Indian policy-making?
Will the #MeToo movement change behaviour by changing incentives? Economist Shruti Rajagopalan joins Amit Varma in episode 92 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about Criminal Economics in the context of crimes on women in India.
मुंशी प्रेमचंद की कहानी ‘नमक का दरोगा’ एक ईमानदार टैक्स इंस्पेक्टर के सामने आने वाली चुनौतियों की अमर दास्ताँ है | तो इस बार हमने पुलियाबाज़ी में हमने समझना चाहा कि एक युवा सरकारी अफ़सर की ज़िन्दगी आख़िर कैसी होती है ? क्यों आज भी कुछ इंजीनियर और डॉक्टर सरकारी अफ़सर बनना पसंद करते है ?
Does China really have a grand strategy to take over the world? Is Chinese media nothing more than a mouthpiece of the Chinese government? And has China side-stepped an overpopulation problem with good public policy?
The crisis at IL&FS reveals just how rotten India's financial system is. Vivek Kaul and Ashutosh Datar join Amit Varma in episode 91 of The Seen and the Unseen to demystify the problem.
Most Indians know more about USA and Europe than our northern neighbour China. This two-part series on The Pragati Podcast will bust myths about China and the Chinese government.
#MeToo is the most important cultural moment of our lifetimes. Supriya Nair and Nikita Saxena join Amit Varma in episode 90 of The Seen and the Unseen to share their insights.
इस साल के शुरू होते ही अमरीकी राष्ट्रपति ट्रम्प ने एक ट्वीट में उत्तर कोरिया को चेताया था कि अमरीका के परमाणु हथियार उत्तर कोरिया के मुक़ाबले कई ज़्यादा प्रभावशाली है | इस एक ट्वीट से ही सारी दुनिया काँप गयी थी |
How do you do good journalism online? How do you keep opinion and reportage separate? How do you report live on active humanitarian disasters like the Kerala Floods of 2018?
Are journalists redundant in a world where no one cares about facts any more? Are we to cater to people's imagined realities? And when money and power come together, how are Independent journalists to resist? Sidharth Bhatia of The Wire and Peter Griffin of The Hindu join Amit Varma in episode 89 of The Seen and the Unseen.
Rahul Matthan and Manasa Venkataraman unpack the Supreme Court's judgements on Aadhaar. In Episode 64, The Pragati Podcast delves deep into the 1448-page, 6.5-lakh-word set of judgments.
The lives of women in India must be gradually getting better, right? How do we measure this? Devika Kher, Nidhi Gupta and Hamsini Hariharan join Amit Varma in episode 88 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss a range of possible metrics.
भारतीय लोकतंत्र में एक सांसद का रोल क्या है? हमारी पार्लिमेंट और राज्य विधान सभाओं को और प्रभावशाली कैसे बनाया जाए? हमें सांसदों के बढ़ते वेतनभत्ते से कितना चिंतित होना चाहिए?
There are restaurants at every corner in a city like Bangalore, but they are never easy to run. Chef extraordinaire Manu Chandra and Pragati's own Madhu Menon join host Pavan Srinath to discuss the government's arcane laws around restaurants.
India has entered a massive jobs crisis, with more than a million people coming into the workforce every month -- and not enough jobs. Will our Demographic Dividend be a Demographic Disaster? Yazad Jal of the 20 Million Jobs project joins Amit Varma in episode 87 of The Seen and the Unseen to give insight on the scale of the problem.
How did a peaceful protest turn into a multi-sided war that has killed half a million people and displaced more than 10 million Syrians?
India's agricultural crisis has been caused by the state. Farmer leader Gunvant Patil of the Shetkari Sanghatana joins Amit Varma in episode 86 of The Seen and the Unseen to explain the many ways in which Big Government has created our agricultural crisis.
टर्की और अमरीका के बीच शुरू हुई यह आंधी भारत तक पहुँची कैसे? भारतीय सरकार और रिज़र्व बैंक रुपये में आयी गिरावट से उभरने के लिए कितने सक्षम है ?
Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj joins Pavan Srinath and guest host Dr Shambhavi Naik on Episode 61 of the Pragati Podcast to talk about all things India, genes, history and health challenges.
Episode 85 of The Seen and the Unseen is about Demonetisation -- and a lot else. First, host Amit Varma launches into an angry monologue about how economic benefits can never justify moral costs. Then he is joined by economist Shruti Rajagopalan, who elaborates on all the things wrong with DeMon. They discuss the predatory Indian state, how Indians are forced into jugaad to cope with it, and that...
How do actions by President Erdoğan in Turkey affect the Indian rupee? What is the emerging market crisis that business channels keep talking about?
What is it like to grow up gay in a deeply homophobic country? Writer and stand-up comedian Navin Noronha joins Amit Varma in ep 84 of The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his experience growing up gay in Bhayandar, and his insights from his podcast, Keeping it Queer.
नवजोत सिंह सिद्धू की झप्पी ने बड़ा बवाल उठा दिया भारत में | तो इस बार की पुलियाबाज़ी पाकिस्तान के मिलिट्री-जिहादी कॉम्प्लेक्स पर | ऐसा क्यों कि भारत-पाकिस्तान के रिश्ते सुधारने की कोई कोशिश के शुरू होते ही आतंकवादी हमले उस प्रक्रिया को विफल कर देते हैं?
It's been almost two years since Donald Trump was elected the President of the United States of America. What has happened to the Washington DC ecosystem since then? In Episode 59 of The Pragati Podcast, Soren Dayton joins hosts Hamsini Hariharan and Pavan Srinath.
India is a young country, and young Indians today are entitled and angry. Snigdha Poonam joins Amit Varma in episode 83 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss the turmoil in small-town India.
If Swaraj is your birthright, do you have it? What does Swaraj even mean? Do we have different concepts of self-rule? And how do we even spell the word -- sva or swa?
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is short-sighted, and does not achieve its purpose. Why? What can we do? Economist Shruti Rajagopalan joins Amit Varma in episode 82 of The Seen and the Unseen to break it all down.
पुलियाबाज़ी के इस Independence Day Special अंक में प्रस्तुत है हमारे दृष्टिकोण से आज़ादी का लेखा-जोखा | कौनसी चुनौतियों को हमने हराया है और कौनसी मुश्किलों से हम आज भी जूझ रहे है, इन प्रश्नों पर सुनिए एक चर्चा |
What does nationalism mean? How far has India come since 1947? What about the Indian nation gives you hope and despair?
How does China see its place in the world? What are its foreign policy objectives? Should India be worried? China expert Manoj Kewalramani joins Amit Varma in episode 81 of The Seen and the Unseen.
Everyone from Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump to Solomon Lane in the new Mission Impossible movie cares about the the end of the old world order. What is a world order? How is it changing? Most importantly, what should India be doing about it?
India as a nuclear power is a different force from what it was before we went nuclear. Lt Gen Prakash Menon joins Amit Varma in episode 80 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe how War and Statecraft have been redefined by nuclear weapons.
What is the data protection bill about? Will it safeguard our privacy or create a monstrous government apparatus?
भारत में हर 1668 लोगों के लिए सिर्फ एक डॉक्टर है । इस अभाव के बावजूद मेडिकल कॉलेजों में सीटें इस साल घटा देने का कारण क्या है? राज्य और केंद्र सरकार क्या कर सकती हैं अच्छे डॉक्टरों की संख्या में इज़ाफ़ा करने के लिए, जानिए इस एपिसोड में।
Did Pakistan get a privacy law before India? What's a data protection law, and how is that different from a privacy law? Rahul Matthan, author of Privacy 3.0, is a guest in this two-episode special on privacy and data protection on the Pragati podcast.
Did walls create privacy, and is the internet going to destroy it? Is Privacy a western idea, being imported to India? Rahul Matthan, author of Privacy 3.0, is a guest in this two-episode special on privacy and data protection on the Pragati podcast.
Is there really democracy in Pakistan? What were these elections all about? Pranay Kotasthane and Hamsini Hariharan join Amit Varma in episode 79 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss the two Pakistans, and what lies ahead.
If Donald Trump wants to denuclearise the Korean peninsula, how come he met with the 'Little Rocket Man' in June? Why does it seem like the world has forgotten the nuclear non-proliferation treaty? In the second of a two-part series, Ameya Naik joins Pavan Srinath and Hamsini Hariharan to discuss what’s happening with negotiations between North Korea and America and the current debates on...
More and more, across this country, violent crowds are taking the law into their own hands. What's going on? Legal experts Madhav Chandavarkar and Alok Prasanna Kumar share their insights with Amit Varma in episode 78 of The Seen and the Unseen.
हमारे न्यायतंत्र की ढ़िलाई से शायद हर इंसान वाक़िफ़ है | तो पुलियाबाज़ी के इस अंक में हमने ग़ोता लगाया इस ढ़िलाई के कारणों को समझने में, सूर्य प्रकाश के साथ|
Why did Trump sign a nuclear deal with North Korea, while bailing out of a deal with Iran? Is it just Trump being Trump? Or is there more to the story?
According to education scholar and activist Amit Chandra, education in India is a fraud committed on the people of this country by the state. He joins Amit Varma in episode 77 of The Seen and the Unseen to explain why.
Jio Institute. Eminence tags for only IITs Bombay and Delhi, not Chennai and Kanpur. Elections in Pakistan, after Nawaz Sharif failed to become the first ever Prime Minister to have served a full term in office.
Misogyny is ubiquitous. Women begin life with the odds stacked against them. Aditi Mittal joins Amit Varma in episode 76 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss how hard it was for her to claim her space.
Property Rights का भारत में एक पेचीदा इतिहास है | यह एक ऐसा अधिकार है जिसके बिना बाकी सारे संवैधानिक अधिकार बेअसर हो जाते है | इसके बावजूद हमने बार-बार प्रॉपर्टी पर अधिकार को बलि पर चढ़ाया है, जिसका खामियाज़ा हम आज तक भुगत रहे है | तो इस बार की पुलियाबाज़ी प्रॉपर्टी के अधिकार पर | इस विषय को सुलझाने के लिए हमने बात की श्रुति राजगोपालन से, जो स्टेट यूनिवर्सिटी न्यूयॉर्क में अर्थशास्त्र पढ़ाती है और...
Is a negative right a positive idea? Why is a Right to Education problematic, but a Right to Information perfectly alright? Yazad Jal joins hosts Hamsini Hariharan and Pavan Srinath to discuss negative and positive rights.
"Comedy is tragedy plus time." Aditi Mittal joins Amit Varma to elaborate on this in Episode 75 of The Seen and the Unseen. Abbas Momin sits in as well, as the conversation spins from the evolution of stand-up in India to the challenges it faces.
GST was supposed to be a Good and Simple Tax, but has ended up as just the opposite. This is hurting the poor the most. Economist Shruti Rajagopalan joins Amit Varma in episode 74 of The Seen and the Unseen to suggest a way out.
कहने के लिए तो चीन हमारा पडोसी देश है पर वास्तव में हम चीन के बारे में बहुत कम जानते है | इस जानकारी के अभाव के कारण लोग या तो चीन की तरक्की से मंत्रमुग्ध हो जाते है या फिर उसे एक जानी दुश्मन का दर्जा दे देते है | यह दोनों दृष्टिकोण हमें चीन की असलियत से और दूर ले जाते है | तो चीन को कुछ गहराई से समझने के लिए हमने बात की मनोज केवलरमानी से |