In Spring 2020, Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee will host sharp-witted artist Sarnath Banerjee at MIT, Americas’s most hallowed academic ground, for a lecture on the economics of water. Sarnath, whose works created a strong sense of place and atmosphere, says the 18th and 19th centuries were the golden age of public lectures where one witnessed talks by Charles Darwin, Luigi Galvani, JC Bose, Alexander Humboldt, and Sir Jadunath Sarker. “These lectures were the delivered with great theatrical flourish to packed theatres. They created what might be called an informed civil body. Knowledge wasn’t just outraged WhatsApp groups hurling opinions as we see today,” he says from Berlin where he lives. “Banerjee and Banerjee want to take this old form and use imagination, humour and theatre to create a new language for public discourse,” he adds.
Many shades of a star
Editors, Mumbai Mirror, December 12, 2019
