Four months after Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed on the moon, Newslaundry dives into the tricky questions that lie behind it. What are the benefits of a moon mission? Do we need a space programme at all? What does it take to run the Indian Space Research Organisation?

Welcome to Let’s Talk About: ISRO and Chandrayaan, where host Abhinandan Sekhri sits down with EK Kutty, former director (project planning program management) at ISRO, and Jayaram Kolangara, former deputy director at ISRO. They’re joined by subscribers too who got to ask questions during a live Zoom session.

Tune in for a free-wheeling chat on ISRO’s role in development communication, the future of space travel, the efforts of people behind the scenes at ISRO, and a lot more.

Produced by Chanchal Gupta, edited by Chanchal Gupta and Samarendra K Dash.

References

India in Space: Between Utility and Geopolitics by Marco Aliberti

Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar

Robert Zemeckis’s Contact

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity

Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up

Why Civil Rights Activists Protested the Moon Landing

The Moon Landing was Opposed by Majority of US 

List of 6 manned moon missions: People who stepped on the moon after Neil Armstrong 

How Many Times Has the US Landed on the Moon?

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यह सिर्फ इरफान के परिजनों, दोस्तों, रिश्तेदारों या उनके प्रशंसकों के लिए दिल तोड़ने वाली खबर नहीं थी बल्कि फिल्मों से जुड़े, फिल्मों में दिलचस्पी रखने वाले हर शख्स के लिए एक बड़ा झटका थी. इरफान तिरपन की कच्ची उम्र में हमारे बीच से चले गए. 

इरफान न्यूरोएंडोक्राइन नाम की एक असाध्य बीमारी से घिर गए थे. यह बीमारी दुर्लभ किस्म का कैंसर है, जिस पर दुनिया में बहुत कम खोजें और रीसर्च उपलब्ध हैं. लेकिन इस कच्ची उम्र में इरफान ने बहुत ही पकी उम्र वाले मुकाम हासिल किए. इरफान ने लगभग हर तरह का किरदार निभाया. न सिर्फ निभाया बल्कि उसे जीया भी. मार्च 2020 में आई फिल्म 'अंग्रेजी मीडियम' इरफान की आखिरी फिल्म थी.  

न्यूरोएंडोक्राइन ट्यूमर की बीमारी के बारे में खुद इरफान खान ने साल 2018 में ट्विटर के जरिए  जानकारी दी थी. उनका ट्वीट कुछ इस प्रकार था- "जीवन में अनपेक्षित बदलाव आपको आगे बढ़ना सिखाते हैं. पता चला है कि मुझे न्यूरोएंडोक्राइन ट्यूमर है. इसे स्वीकार कर पाना मुश्किल है. लेकिन मेरे आसपास जो लोग हैं, उनका प्यार और उनकी दुआओं ने मुझे ताकत दी है. कुछ उम्मीद भी बंधी है. फिलहाल बीमारी के इलाज के लिए मुझे देश से दूर जाना पड़ रहा है. लेकिन मैं चाहूंगा कि आप अपने संदेश भेजते रहें.”

इरफान की मौत के बाद उनके बेटे बाबिल ने उनकी आखिरी याद को कुछ इन शब्दों में साझा किया था- 'उनकी मौत से दो तीन दिन पहले मैं अस्पताल में था. वो होश खोते जा रहे थे. अंतिम पलों में उन्होंने मेरी ओर देखा, मुस्कुराए और कहा- मैं मरने वाला हूं, मैंने उन्हें कहा ऐसा नहीं होगा, वो फिर मुस्कुराए और सो गए.' इरफान ने मौत को भी हंसते हंसते ही गले लगाया. 

लेट्स टॉक अबाउट में न्यूज़लॉन्ड्री के कार्यकारी संपादक अतुल चौरसिया ने फिल्म समीक्षक शुभ्रा गुप्ता और अजय ब्रह्मात्मज के साथ इरफान के सफर, शख्सियत, अदायगी, कला, फन और जीवन के अन्य पहलुओं पर लंबी बातचीत की है. तो आनंद लीजिए.. 

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Welcome to the final episode of Let’s Talk About: BJP, which focuses on the ascendance of Modi, and his journey from a Sangh pracharak to Raisina Hill. With subsequent image makeovers, he managed to recast himself as a “saviour” of the Indian security state and win a landmark mandate for his party in the 2019 polls.

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Welcome to the third episode of Let’s Talk About: BJP, which takes us through NDA governments, disagreements within the BJP in the wake of the Gujarat riots, the UPA’s scam taint, the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption protests, and the emergence of Modi.

To listen to the full podcast, subscribe to Newslaundry.

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Welcome to the second episode of Let’s Talk About: BJP, which looks at events that helped the party recast itself within the Indian polity, from Indira Gandhi’s assassination, to the Mandal Commission, the Shah Bano case, Advani’s Rath Yatra and the Babri demolition.

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But what’s the backstory behind the BJP’s enduring rise, and who are the faces who cemented its formidable organisation?

Welcome to the first episode of Let’s Talk About: BJP, a series tracing the BJP’s origins, and the antecedents of its ecosystem, from the pre-independence era to the Jana Sangh and the birth of the party in 1980.

This is a sneak peek into the first episode. To listen to the full podcast, subscribe to Newslaundry. Pay To Keep News Free.

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अज्ञेय के तमाम अनछुए पहलुओं को भारी-भरकम किताब की शकल में हमारे सामने लेकर आए हैं पत्रकार और लेखक अक्षय मुकुल. अक्षय की हालिया किताब ‘राइटर, रेबेल, सोल्ज़र, लवर- मेनी लाइव्स ऑफ अज्ञेय’, अज्ञेय की ज़िंदगी के तमाम अनदेखे पक्ष उजागर करती है. 

लेट्स टॉक अबाउट के इस अंक में हम बात करेंगे अक्षय मुकुल और उनके साथ ओम थानवी से. अज्ञेय के बहुत करीब रहकर काम करने का सौभाग्य रहा है ओम थनवी को. चार दशकों तक पत्रकारिता का अनुभव, हिंदी पत्रकारिता में मील का पत्थर रही जनसत्ता अखबार के संपादक पद से पदमुक्त हुए ओम थानवी के नाम अज्ञेय की जन्मशती के मौके पर एक ग्रंथनुमा पुस्तक अपने-अपने अज्ञेय का संकलन-संपादन का श्रेय है. 

तो अक्षय मुकुल और ओम थानवी के साथ लेट्स टॉक अबाउट अज्ञेय.

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This live session is in conversation with Abhinandan Sekhri, Shardool Katyayan, and Vijai Trivedi.

Tune into Let's Talk About the RSS here: https://www.newslaundry.com/podcast/lets-talk-about/lets-talk-about-rss

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From Deoras to Rajendra Singh to KS Sudarshan to Mohan Bhagwat, the episode moves into the 21st century, spanning the consolidation of the Hindutva establishment and Babri Masjid demolition, the first BJP-led union government, and the ascent of Narendra Modi. 

It also tries to answer a fundamental question: where will the RSS go from here?

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Then came the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, and the goodwill generated by the RSS came crumbling down.

How did the RSS pick itself up and what were its primary motivations at the time? What is the truth behind the conflicting narratives on Godse’s ties to the Sangh? And what changed between the Golwalkar years and the Deoras years that followed?

To listen to the full episode, subscribe to Newslaundry. If you’re not a subscriber, use the discount code LTA20 and get 20 percent off our annual plans (and score some free merchandise too)! This coupon code is only valid if you buy the subscription on our website.

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But how did this behemoth come to be, and where is it likely to go?

Welcome to episode 1 of Let’s Talk About: RSS, hosted by Abhinandan Sekhri and Shardool Katyayan. In this episode, Shardool and guests talk about their personal journeys growing up in the Sangh. Parallelly, this episode also explores the birth of the RSS in British India and the life of Keshav Hedgewar, the man who was the seed to what would eventually be the RSS’s tree. Featuring guest panellists like Hartosh Singh Bal, Hitesh Shankar, and Walter K Andersen, the episode pieces together the early days of the RSS, including the many challenges it faced in newly independent India.

Listen.

To listen to the full episode, subscribe to Newslaundry. If you’re not a subscriber, use the discount code LTA20 and get 20 percent off our annual plans (and score some free merchandise too)! This coupon code is only valid if you buy the subscription on our website.

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In part two of this special edition of Let’s Talk About, the Newslaundry team of Abhinandan Sekhri, Raman Kirpal, Manisha Pande, Anand Vardhan, Shardool Katyayan, and Mehraj D Lone continue their conversation on religion, this time focusing on the intersection of religion and politics.

Abhinandan asks the panel whether it thinks mixing religion and politics is inevitable or desirable. He says politics has merely “replaced” religion while still keeping aspects of it intact. Manisha thinks religion is an important part of people’s lives and, therefore, “politics is always going to be a feature of it”.

Listen.

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Primarily, the theme is whether religion has done more good or more harm. 

Abhinandan and Mehraj both argue that religion has done more good than harm while the rest of the panel express mixed views.

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India’s movement has its own complexities, varying in definition and scope across class, caste, and creed. Gender dynamics and power imbalances have been instrumental in the oppression of women, and suppression and punishment is a tool to curb “transgressions” and maintain the status quo. Women have not only challenged this forced subservience but have, in many instances, overturned these systems too.

So, the goal of this podcast is not to define feminism, but to examine India’s social structures and the feminist resistance to them at specific moments in history.

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After all, nature is not neat. And it’s the outliers that push the species forward – something that automated decision-making systems, including algorithms, don’t really understand. In Dutee's case, understanding the decision making, and the transparency in it, was crucial to her right to redress.

In the final episode of Let’s Talk About Big Data, we talk to Laura Reig, a PhD student at Denmark Technical University, on how AI makes mistakes in gender classification, and Chirag Agarwal, a research fellow at Harvard University, about what explainability in AI means. We also talk to Joy Lu, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, on what makes for a good explanation of what an algorithm is doing.

Listen.

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What helps is reasoning through bias: a cognitive shortcut that is quick, doesn’t require perfect information, gets the job done, and reduces the kind of errors that have existential consequences.

Algorithms have biases too. But over time, biases have started reinforcing themselves, further disenfranchising the disenfranchised. So, what do we do about it?

We talk to Osoba Osonde, a senior information scientist, co-director of the Center for Scalable Computing and Analysis, and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, to discuss how we can make algorithms fairer. We also talk to Benjamin Boudreaux, a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, about what it means to make algorithms fairer.

Listen. 

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In this episode, we discuss with Arvind Narrain, cofounder of the Alternative Law Forum, how our understanding of privacy has evolved over time. We talk to Rega Jha about how the internet subverts our privacy without even intending to. We also speak to Rishabh Poddar, who is building a privacy-preserving technology at the University of California, Berkeley.

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In many ways the metaphor epitomises the kind of intelligence computers struggle with. Reasoning by metaphor is a form of reasoning that’s flexible and nimble, unfixed and still resilient. It uses ideas from outside systems to explain systems, maps a cognitive model from a familiar context to another. We, human beings, can do this because a number of things came together for us: we have very sophisticated abilities to speak, we recognise patterns, we understand the unspoken, we can imagine what isn’t in front of us, we have a pool of shared human experience (another metaphor!), we can see concepts and we can see relationships between concepts.

So, what does human intelligence do that machine intelligence can’t? What can they both not do? 

In this episode, we explore the limits of artificial intelligence. We speak to Shubham Bindlish who runs an AI firm that scrapes cricket data to help make predictions for fantasy cricket. We also speak to Joseph Paul Cohen who has built AI that can diagnose diseases from chest x-rays. They shed light on how both their AI infers data and the limitations that come with it.

Listen.

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By 2017, ISIS had lost most, if not all, of its territory in the Middle East, but it survived and thrived in the dark corners of the internet, keeping itself on life support.

Tune into this snippet of Let's Talk About: ISIS in India, where host Priyank Mathur tries to understand if and how the terror group’s influence has reached India, using Sadiya’s case as context, and how law enforcement agencies have reacted to it. 

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I didn’t have to wait too long to find the answer. In the very first chapter of Victor Meyer Schonberger’s Big Data, a book written about seven years ago, he gets to it pretty straight. When things change a lot in scale, they begin to change in essence also. If the rate of change is dramatic (double differential is out of whack), the thing itself begins to change. This is what makes Big Data essentially different from data ever before in human civilization.

This is how he explains it: an image is an image is an image. But speed these images up so the brain sees them as a continuum, and what you have made is a movie. A change in speed led to a change in essence. Here’s another example: gravity acts on all of us, but if you’re really small, like an insect, it barely has any effect on you. Again, change scale dramatically, and the essence begins to change.

A glass of water is fundamentally different from a tsunami. A drizzle is fundamentally different from a hurricane.

Think about the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve had economic downturns before. We’ve had unemployment before. We’ve had urban-rural migrations before. We’ve all experienced sickness before. Viruses come and go every year. We’ve had natural disasters before. What makes this pandemic so destructive is the scale and speed of it. The coming together of mass unemployment, global economic collapse, mental health falling off a precipice, distorted patterns of living and migration and human behaviour. Together, at this scale and at this speed, the essence of life today is different from the essence of life at the beginning of 2020.

The idea that after a point quantity and quality are inherently related is not a new one. It’s one of the three forgotten laws of Dialectical Materialism which inspired a lot of Karl Marx’s work. When quantity changes a lot, after a point, quality begins to change as well. This is the idea that explains why big changes in wealth distribution bring big changes in the essence of social structures.

This law, in turn, comes from a  much older philosophical idea: Aristotle’s Heap Paradox.

This is the Heap Paradox: if you have a heap of sand and you remove one grain from it, it’s still a heap. Remove one more, it’s still a heap. One more, it’s still a heap. But if you do this long enough, if you scale up the removal of grains, it’ll no longer be a heap. The essence of the sand heap will change.

This is at the core of understanding what Big Data is. When the quantity of data changed, its essence changed as well.

Listen.

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Tune into this snippet of Let’s Talk About where Newslaundry’s Snigdha Sharma delves into the complexities of child trafficking in India: how and why is it so prevalent? What forms does it take? Who is most vulnerable? What is being done to prevent it? Through a series of sobering interviews, she speaks to victims, experts, and journalists on the frontlines to understand the many aspects of India’s child trafficking crisis.

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Tune into this snippet of Let’s Talk About: Female Genital Mutilation where Gaurav Sarkar explores the religious, legal, mythological and medical aspects of FGM.

Subscribe to Newslaundry at bit.ly/paytokeepnewsfree to listen to the full version here: https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/02/06/lets-talk-about-female-genital-mutilation

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Subscribe to Newslaundry to listen to the full version here: https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/01/23/lets-talk-about-naxalism-part-2

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Tune in to this snippet of Let's Talk About: Naxalism - Part 1 to listen to his story. Listen to the full episode here: https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/01/02/lets-talk-about-naxalism-part-1

Subscribe to Newslaundry to listen to the full version.

You can also listen to all our podcasts on iOS and Android.

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Speaking to several prominent journalists and writers, Abhinandan Sekhri tries to grapple with the various definitions and facets of objectivity—has the term always had a fixed meaning? Is it better suited for science than for journalism? Using thought experiments, literary allusions and big philosophical words, he seeks an answer to the ultimate question: is objectivity even desirable?

Subscribe to Newslaundry at http://bit.ly/paytokeepnewsfree to catch the full episode here: https://www.newslaundry.com/2018/10/15/lets-talk-about-objectivity-in-journalism

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Privacy -- is it a personal or a policy issue? The dictionary defines privacy as a state in which one is free of attention and today, that state is harder and harder to achieve. Our privacy is often being invaded without us even realising it and many shrug at this fate. "What do I have to hide?" is the standard response to privacy being lost but the real question is "Why is your privacy so precious to others?" With the data collected by the Unique Identity project, aka Aadhaar, surfacing in unexpected, unauthorised places, you must know what your rights are and how the government helps you uphold them (or not). In this episode of Let's Talk About, Meghnad S, a public policy nerd and compulsive Lok Sabha TV watcher, speaks to lawyers, journalists, researchers, and businessmen to figure out what privacy is in the digital age and whether Aadhaar really is the way forward.

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In the second part of Let’s Talk About… Kashmir, we speak to historians, military men who have served in Kashmir, Kashmiri refugees, journalists who have covered the insurgency, and activists who have raised their voices against human rights violations. With the benefit of their insights, we try to understand what azadi means for Kashmiris, the pellet gun problem, and if there actually can be a solution to the Kashmir conundrum.

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Since it's the first in the series, we've got two episodes on Kashmir and the first one is available to all our listeners. The second part of Let's Talk About: Kashmir will only be available to subscribers. 

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In Let’s Talk About … Kashmir, we speak to military men who served there, young Kashmiri stone pelters, journalists who have covered the insurgency, and activists who have raised their voices against human rights excesses. Through their insights, we piece together what troubles Kashmir.

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