GFT: Bangalore Lectures

Grounds for Thought: October 2026 (Koramangala)A Blue Tokai × unLecture SeriesGrounds for Thought is a monthly series where Blue Tokai and unLecture bring researchers, scientists, and thinkers out of their institutions and into a coffee shop. The format is simple: an expert, a room full of curious people, and a conversation that goes somewhere a classroom rarely does. October runs across Delhi and Bangalore, moving from temple sculpture to constitutional pedagogy, from parenting in the AI age to the politics of a Bollywood item number.10th October: Pritha ChakrabartiBollywood's song-and-dance numbers get read as spectacle, or dismissed outright as objectification — rarely as historical documents. Pritha Chakrabarti, who heads the School of Film and Media Studies at Alliance University, Bengaluru, argues that Hindi cinema's item numbers and love ballads alike chart the making of a modern, and later neoliberal, India — desire, economy, gendered codes, and national imagination all playing out on screen. Drawing on a career spanning journalism, advertising, and screenwriting alongside her PhD in Cultural Studies, she asks what today's "swag" shares with yesterday's aada, and what our most exported songs reveal about who we became.24th October: Ritash (they/zey)A first-person account of being in New York on 9/11, and of the years that followed working inside the institutions whose language and instincts that day seemed only to confirm. Ritash, NeuroQueer and gender-fluid writer and co-founder of RANG Foundation, traces the tangle of capitalism, casteism, Islamophobia, queerphobia, and ableism as lived experience rather than theory — and asks what it means to keep working inside a system while never fully making peace with it.