Dear Friends,
 
We have many exciting events planned for March 2016. 

Our first major lecture in March is the 2016 Chowdhury Center Distinguished Lecture, featuring Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in conversation with UCB Professor of Economics, Pranab Bardhan (Mar 13). Further details about the event may be found in the box on the right.  

We are delighted to share that our Indo-American Community Lecturer for 2016 is the noted political scientist and President of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Dr. Mehta will be in residence at the Institute in March 2016 and his public lecture, India's Trapped Transitions will be on March 11. 

On March 16, Bangalore-based legal researcher/lawyer and co founder of the Alternative Law Forum, Lawrence Liang will deliver the 5th Maharaj Kaul Memorial Lecture, It's all about loving your Nation: Sedition and the surplus of Affection. 

Lawrence Liang and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, whose lectures are noted above, will be joined by an extraordinary group of people--journalists and public intellectuals, economists, engineers, business leaders, lawyers and activists, and representatives of debate across the political spectrum in India today—to reflect on education, law and minority rights, business and technology, poverty and service distribution, religion and culture, and India under Narendra Modi as we near two years under the current government. Called simply India Under Modi, the conference will be held on March 11-12, 2016, and will bring together on an unprecedented scale a diverse and powerful set of key players and observers of the current moment. Click here to read more about this conference. 

Other lectures planned for March are:

• Tuesday, March 1, 2016 
  Swadeshi Bharati: Anthropologist and scholar of Tamil Studies, Prof. Bernard Bate on "Tamil Oratory and the Poetics of Political Modernity in South India." 
  5-7 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall
   
• Thursday, March 10, 2016 
  Multiple Temporalities: Axel Michaels, Professor for Classical Indology at Heidelberg University on "South Asian Historiography and Its Transcultural Implications."
  4-6 p.m. | The Townsend Center (220 Stephens Hall)
   
• Monday, March 14, 2016 
  Prejudice, Transphobia, and Homophobia in 21st Century India: Talk by Akkai Padmashali, a transgender activist who advocates for gender and sexual minorities
  5-7 p.m. | 10 Stephens Hall

On March 3, as part of our focus on South Asian Art, we are organizing a roundtable with renowned Delhi-based contemporary eco-artist. Atul Bhalla. The artist's talk titled, You Always Step into the Same River!, will be followed by an interdisciplinary conversation on the politics and aesthetics of water in a global field with Lauren Kroiz (Assistant Professor, History of Art Department), Robert Goldman (Professor of Sanskrit; Magistretti Distinguished Professor in South & Southeast Asian Studies), and Sugata Ray (Assistant Professor of South Asian Art). 

Finally, on March 7, as part of our mission to showcase films and documentaries from South Asia that deal with issues that matter the most, we invite you to join us for a screening of Assam: A Landscape of Neglect. 
The third and most recent in a trilogy of documentary films concerned with the consequences of violence in the embattled border regions of North and Northeast India, this particular documentary deals with the conflict in Assam and looks at the marginal voices, which call for an independent state in Assam.

In other news, ISAS faculty continue to win awards for path-breaking scholarship, teaching, and service.  Most recently, Professor Sayeef Salahuddin (Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences) was among three UC faculty who were awarded the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

Professor Isha Ray (Energy and Resources Group) gave a TEDxBerkeley talk titled, Gender Equality: A View from the Loo. Too often, we think of gender equality in terms of associated “hot button” words—education, pay, civil rights. But we neglect an essential part of the female experience—dignity in access to toilets, which has profound implications for achieving gender equality. In this talk, Isha Ray, Co-Director of the Berkeley Water Center, shares the experiences of women worldwide and why we need to revolutionize our understanding of women’s issues.

Our Viewpoint section includes three new articles:

• UC students must stand in solidarity with JNU activists, Professor of English, Poulomi Saha's op-ed for The Daily Cal
• The Second Coming of Sedition, a brief overview of the history of sedition in India by Bhairav Acharya
• Hymn for the Weekend, an essay by ISAS work study Jasleen Singh on the politics of Coldplay & Beyoncé's recently released music video.

For those of you who were not able to attend our February events, please know that all ISAS events are video recorded and made available for viewing on our website. Newly added are:

• Senior Public Sector Management Specialist, World Bank, Zubair Bhatti's talk, The Potential and Challenges of Customer Feedback in the Public Sector
• ISAS Visiting Scholar for 2015, Dr. Andrea Wright's talk, Making Indian Migrants: National Branding and Localized Disruptions in the Migration of Workers to the Persian Gulf
• A Place for Utopia, UC Davis Anthropologist, Smriti Srinivas' talk on urban designs from South Asia
• Subaltern Speak: An Indian Soldier's 'Travelogue' of China, 1900-1901, a talk by Anand A. Yang, Professor of History at the University of Washington. 

We look forward to seeing you at our events!