SynTalk

Are only boring people bored? How standard are your windows? How did the trivial, marginal, & everyday come to the foreground in literature, architecture, language, & ‘living’? Does space emerge ‘from’ living? Has your built environment been handed down to you? Must tragedy only be about high-born individuals? Are you ‘free’ to be bored? Has modernity produced a certain kind of boredom? How have we come to expect agency over the world? Can ‘having tea’ be the point of a novel? Can one extract the banal speech of-the-day from, say, the Rig Vedas? Is art always a dialectic between the alien and the familiar? Is boring, both, necessary & inevitable? Is ennui a privilege masquerading as an affliction? Do languages have a tight fit with their environment? Can grammar be felt as inadequate? What can you not do in Bhojpuri? How can buildings stay alive? Do we project boredom onto the world? Do you assign a value of ’nothing’ to boring gestational time outside of your control? How high would the bar of boredom go in the future? Will novels die? Will all, but one, languages die? Will we return to pre-Enlightenment performative forms? &, what would remain boring? SynTalk thinks about these & more questions using concepts from architecture (Dr. Himanshu Burte, TISS, Mumbai), literary studies (Prof. Saikat Majumdar, Ashoka University, Delhi (NCR)), & linguistics (Dr. Peggy Mohan, Vasant Valley School, New Delhi). Listen in...