We are ringing in another promising month with this weekly wrap of updates, scattered across the spectrum of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, held together by the thread that’s Krea’s innate ability to create spaces for conversations, critical to the ever changing world, an attempt to view the future in the now. 

This week at the Comms Desk, a term that caught our interest was osmosis, the art of traditional learning by assimilating ideas, knowledge, and skills, one-on-one from the mentors. One of the many interesting elements that broke through the panel discussion at Imprints: Arts Past Forward, where an eminent panel steered us through observations on borrowing from the traditional and yet innovating for the contemporary, observations that make us sit up and think. While the discourse was in full swing, the academics at Krea continued to construct the building blocks of learning through diverse actions, from advancing the research mission to initiating talks and sessions that open up the minds of our students, encouraging them to participate, observe, and question. From Chandrayaan-3 to the upcoming General Elections 2024, preparing graduates for the future of the workplace to decoding the phenomenon of Love Jihad, the talks are as diverse as they get. Not to forget the Onam spirit that pumped up the campus over the weekend and brought the entire Krea community together, with camaraderie in full swing. We also took a break and moon-gazed, viewing the super blue moon in all its glory, sifting through the clouds with persistence. And while you catch a pause, do go through our Wednesdays for Wellness series, curated especially for you to cut through the everyday noise.

The week, like all others cements our attempt to break through the chaos, to find methods that go beyond the myopic view of the present and serve the needs of a future that’s challenging, yes, but also brimming with possibilities. So here’s to raising a toast to the Krea community and its constant efforts to shift away from the lens of business as usual, with the firm belief that what we do today, will determine our future. Here’s to ushering in a September, with gumption.

This week in Committees in Centrestage, we bring to you FuturePreneurs, the Entrepreneurship Cell at IFMR Graduate School of Business (GSB). This Committee was formed after merging the Women in Business (WIB -Club) and Entrepreneurship Committee (E-Cell - Committee). The vision statement of the Committee is an attempt to unleash entrepreneurial potential and nurture equal opportunities for future leaders. The mission of FuturePreneurs is to develop a startup culture at IFMR GSB, provide a platform and opportunity for young entrepreneurs to grow and move forward, and make all necessary resources and funding opportunities readily available for their entrepreneurial journey.

On Krea’s social media platforms, in the coming week, we will give you a glimpse of the significant work done by FuturePreneurs over the recent months.

On 29 August 2023, the Global Arts at the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences (SIAS) in collaboration with Team Communications organised a panel discussion titled Imprints: Arts Past Forward at the Krea University City Office. The panelists included Alarmel Valli, Padma Bhushan awardee and Bharatanatyam artiste, Anthony Bowne, Principal and CEO, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Dr Sumitra Ranganathan and Dr Swarnamalya Ganesh, Faculty, Global Arts Division at Krea University. The talk was moderated by Akhila Krishnamurthy, Director, Communications at Krea University. 

The panelists discussed how the arts enable pathways to reflect on and respond to nature, culture, and the self in an ever-changing world. The discourse touched on pivotal elements across traditions of learning the arts, contemporary systems of education, and the sentiment of collaboration and the collective, criss-crossing arts and academics.

Watch the full conversation here

This nanocrystal structure is responsible for the shimmering colors within the iridescent scales of the long-horned beetle, Glenea celestis. These findings offer important clues to understand the development of natural photonic crystals as well as how to biomimic them for technological applications.

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Dr Govindapuram Suresh, Assistant Professor of Economics, IFMR GSB presented  a paper on, Cultural Empowerment of the Corrupted Bank Middleman for the Poor in Rural India, at the European Regional Science Association (ESRA 2023) Congress on August 28 2023, under the theme Culture Based Development (CBD): Cultural Context and Social Psychology in Confronting Urban and Rural Challenges. The aim of this paper is to identify the caste that most often takes the role of a Bank Middlemen, between the poor and the loan giving institutions in rural India. 

It helped understand what is the relative socio-economic positioning of this caste that empowers it to undertake this role and how strong this power holds. The paper seeks to increase our understanding of the socio-economic empowerment of certain cultural ‘clubs’.

Dr Smitana Saikia from the School of Development in Azim Premji University delivered a talk named Autonomy, Indigeneity and Conflict in India’s Northeast Region on 30 August 2023. Located in the ‘peripheral’ region of India, the Northeast has been home to many separatist movements that underscore the region’s historically fraught relations with the Indian union. The talk aimed to briefly trace the historical trajectories of the region and connect these with the contemporary fault lines that dominate the political landscape today. 

The region itself is internally very diverse and the talk did not attempt to in any way generalise about the entire region, rather it focussed on two contemporary flashpoints: citizenship issues in Assam or Meiti- Kuki conflict in Manipur.

Because of the diversity of those parties and contestants, every General Election has far greater colour and controversy than elections held in other countries. While these aspects of Indian democracy are worth celebrating, Indian society is marked by deep divisions and fractures. In this lecture, Prof Guha will analyse the major challenges confronting the Republic on the eve of its next General Elections. As he will argue, these challenges are political, social, economic, institutional, and environmental.

In the backdrop of the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3, Chemistry Club organised a session on 29 August 2023 by Dr K S Viswanathan, Visiting Professor of Chemistry, SIAS on Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS): The Analytical Technique Employed by Chandrayaan-3 to Obtain Element Composition of the Lunar Surface. The mission has many objectives, one of which is to obtain elemental composition of the lunar surface. 

Quite naturally, the analytical method adopted for such an exercise must have the following characteristics – accurate, capable of handling a wide variety of samples and involve no sample preparation for the analytical method to be adopted. Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy fulfills all these requirements and is therefore a technique of choice in many space missions.

Drawing on populationism and white supremacist ideas from other contexts, such as Western Europe, he will trace how these ideas have profound political consequences.

The Department of Politics and Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences Talks is organising the last in the series on 6 September 2023 between 4.00 to 5.30 pm IST. The session titled Picturing Bombay's Many Publics: Photography and the City will have speaker Ayesha Matthan, PhD Candidate, History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University. The talk will study how Bombay was culturally configured through the medium of photography in post-independence India. 

It will examine how photography represented some of the city's public spaces during religious festivities and the growing assertion of the Shiv Sena between the 1970s and 1990s. The talk will analyse how photojournalism captured some of the city’s many publics through English-language magazines such as Bombay and The Illustrated Weekly of India. In doing so, it will also place these images in discourse with documentaries and films of the time to understand the different ways in which the city has been projected culturally and politically.

TEDx KREA University 2023 is coming soon, on 17 September 2023. It’s scheduled to be held at Seminar Hall 1 from 3 pm onwards. (Please note that the timings are subject to change). TEDx Krea University is the first independently organised TEDx event being hosted by Krea University and entails talks by experts, discussions, sale of merchandise and more. 

Led by students, the theme of the event is denting the universe, which serves as a metaphorical representation of the  collective ability to create significant, lasting change. The speakers’ line-up include Rajan R Navani, Chairman & Managing Director, Jetline Group of Companies, JetSynthesys; Raghavan Subramanian,  Associate Vice- President, Infosys, Head of Infosys Tennis Platform; Akshat Bansal, Creative Director & Founder, Bloni + Shehar; Ramesh Chandran, Founder, Bio Basics and Aishwarya Krish, Principal Architect, Roaish Architecture + Design.

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Dr Anannya Dasgupta, Director, Krea Centre for Writing and Pedagogy (Krea - CWP)  was invited by GNITS, Hyderabad - an Engineering and Technology college for women for a session titled, Personal, Professional & Purposeful: Writing a Statement of Purpose, held today on 1 September 2023.  Universities often require a Statement of Purpose (SOP) as a part of graduate school applications. In this workshop, the participants understood the different elements that add up to make a winning SOP. They learned to ground the professional in the personal to craft the clarity of purpose necessary for someone intending to pursue higher studies.

If you have time this weekend, please do check these productions and publications from the recent past, give them a listen, watch or read.