Under the conversation series by eminent speakers titled ‘Crafting Careers,’ our next interaction will feature Dr Jahnavi Phalkey, historian, filmmaker and Founding Director of the Science Gallery, Bengaluru.
About the series
Crafting Careers organised by the NLS BA (Hons) programme is designed to help students navigate the world of work. Each session in the series will bring leading professionals from fields such as media, government, public policy, business, finance, and the creative arts to campus for candid conversations about their journeys. These experts will share insights and advice from their professional experiences and offer reflections on how social science majors may relate to different career pathways. These dialogues will offer students a chance to learn from diverse experiences, gain practical insights, and reflect on how to build careers that align with their own interests, skills, and values.
About the speaker
Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey is the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru, a public space for research-based engagement across the human, social, and natural sciences. Previously, Jahnavi held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London. She started her academic career at the University of Heidelberg, following which she was based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, France, and Imperial College London. Jahnavi was Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin). She was also external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.
She is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India (Permanent Black, 2013) and has co-edited Science of Giants: China and India in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2016). She is the producer-director of the 2020 documentary Cyclotron and was awarded the 2023 Infosys Prize in Humanities for her work on the individual, institutional, and material histories of scientific research in modern India.
How did the Manusmriti bind Nietzsche and Ambedkar in a tangle? In the late 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and the greatest egalitarian thinker of inequality, termed Christianity a “Chandala religion”. In the 1940s, B.R. Ambedkar, the champion of civil rights in India and an unequalled thinker of equality, called Hinduism “the gospel of the superman”. The two world-historical figures became entangled in a unique interchange of terminology. What was the “Chandala”—a generic name that refers to the Untouchables of caste society—doing in Nietzsche’s writings? What was the “superman”—Nietzsche’s coinage for a human who exists beyond good and evil—doing in the writings of Ambedkar?
In The Ambedkar–Nietzsche Provocations, Ankit Kawade tells the story of the multiple and conflicting interpretations and misinterpretations that connect these two thinkers in a historical knot. At the center of this tangle is the Manusmriti, the ancient Brahmanic code that devised forbidding rules and sanctioned the most heinous forms of caste and gender oppression. This is the first book-length study of the provocative similarities and irreconcilable differences between Ambedkar and Nietzsche.
About the author
Ankit Kawade is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He works broadly in the field of comparative political theory, and he is mainly interested in modern Indian, European, and American political thought. He completed his MA and MPhil from the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is also a Graduate Associate at the Association for Global Political Thought, Harvard University. He was a recipient of the Navayana Dalit History Fellowship 2021 for The Ambedkar–Nietzsche Provocations.
The National Law School of India University will be organising Masterclasses during the academic year 2026-27. These sessions designed for high school students, will introduce to them our rigorous academic pedagogy across the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Public Policy. Students will engage deeply with diverse intellectual domains along with a range of interdisciplinary topics.
Applications for the first session in our series of Masterclasses can be found here.
Session I: ‘Introduction to Political Philosophy through Plato’s Republic’ with Dr. Nigam Nuggehalli, Professor of Law, NLSIU.
8 August 2026 | 10 AM to 1 PM | NLSIU Campus, Bengaluru
This is an in-person session.
About the session:
The session is designed for high school students in their Grade 11 and 12 to appreciate the importance of Philosophy as a discipline with a focus on Political Philosophy.
Prof. Nigam will use extracts from Plato’s Republic, one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Written around 380 BCE, it is a dialogue in which Socrates (Plato’s teacher and main speaker in the text) explores a fundamental question: “What is justice, and how should society be organized to achieve it?”
By the end of the session, participants will be able to:
Understand the nature and scope of political philosophy.
Explain the historical context of Plato and Classical Athens.
Identify the key themes of Plato’s Republic.
Analyze Plato’s conception of justice, governance, and the ideal state.
Critically evaluate the relevance of Platonic political thought today.
Eligibility:
This session is designed for students in Class 11 and Class 12.
Students pursuing Social Sciences, Humanities, Science, Commerce are eligible to apply.
Note: Students from Grade 10 and first-year undergraduate programmes are also welcome to apply. Subject to seat availability, eligible applicants may be accommodated in the masterclass session.
Registration on a first come first serve basis. Limited capacity.
On verification of the application, they will receive an email to pay the participation fee of Rs.2000/- to confirm their registration to attend the Masterclass. There will be no refund once the payment has been made.
All supporting materials will be provided by the University. Students have to arrange their own transport to attend the session. Outstation students must arrange their own accommodation.
Important Dates:
Applications Open : 09 July 2026
Last date to apply : 4 August 2026 (After applying, students will receive the payment link within 48-72 hours.)
Masterclass date : Saturday, 8th August | 10 AM to 1 PM with a break.
After the session, participants will also have the opportunity to see the NLSIU Campus through a guided campus tour. Lunch will be provided at no additional cost. Detailed session agenda will be shared with the participants closer to the session.
Masterclass Faculty
Dr. Nigam Nuggehalli | Professor of Law
Prof. Nigam was appointed as Chair Professor, Department of Revenue Chair in September 2025. Prior to this appointment, he served as the Registrar of NLSIU since August 2021, where he was responsible for the administration of the University. He brings with him nearly three decades of academic and professional experience as a taxation law specialist.
Prof. Nigam Nuggehalli has held the position of Dean, School of Law at the BML Munjal University, Gurugram. He has also taught as Associate Professor in the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University (2014-18), during which time he headed the University’s newly founded LL.M programme. Previously, he was a Principal Lecturer at BPP Law School, London where he taught tax law and commercial law. He also led a team of academics in delivering undergraduate programmes in jurisprudence and postgraduate programmes in commercial law and international tax law.
Before joining academia, he worked as a tax lawyer in New York and is a member of the New York Bar and the India Bar (Karnataka). As a lawyer and as a law academic, Prof. Nigam has practiced and taught a variety of legal subjects (contracts, commercial law, corporate law, taxation) with reference to the legal regimes in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India.
He has extensive research and publication experience in legal issues relating to international taxation, commercial law, and statutory interpretation. He is the author of a leading text on Indian international taxation. He is also a member of two government committees – the General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAAR), and the Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI).
Contact Us
For any queries, please write to masterclass@nls.ac.in.
The paper critically engages with the canonical works of Vivekanand Jha on the early history of untouchability. The frames used by Jha are limiting, and relegate the study of untouchability to silos of single caste. Jha fails to capture the dialectical-structural relationship of untouchability historically. This kind of scholarship has an effect in the present where untouchability remains a ‘problem’ of/for dalits and the top twice-born is free from the historical burden of caste. Contrary to that scholarship, Dr. Yadav argues for the presence of a ‘pair’ relationship in both brahmanical and non-brahmanical sources which needs to be highlighted and explored, to see experiences of caste and their counter-hegemonic articulations in the past.
The second Obaid Siddiqi Lecture of 2026 will be hosted at NLSIU, Bengaluru in collaboration with Archives at NCBS on 16th July 2026, 5:30 PM at the Conference Hall (Ground Floor), Training Centre.
Please carry a government-issued ID when you arrive at the NLS Main Gate.
Walking the Dotted Line: Mapping Borders Before the Nation
Dr. Samira Sheikh
Obaid Siddiqi Chair in the History and Culture of Science, 2025-26
Indian surveyors walked the territories they mapped, armed with precise strides and bamboo rods. Astronomers measured locations in the sky and on land. Seafarers plotted rhumb lines between ports and along coasts. But few marked political boundaries on their maps. This second lecture explores what it meant when such boundaries began to appear in Indian cartography. Do pioneering mapmaker Sadanand’s dotted lines in 1780 mark a moment when mapping became newly legal, administrative, and extractive?
About the Speaker
Dr. Samira Sheikh is a historian of South Asia and Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She is currently the Fifth Obaid Siddiqi Chair at the Archives at NCBS. Her research focuses on early modern and modern western India, with particular attention to Gujarat, riverine and coastal histories, mapping, and the social worlds of trade, labour, and governance. She is the author of Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders, and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200–1500 (Oxford University Press, 2010) and is currently working on two book projects on mapping and mapmaking in South Asia. Her work combines archival research with spatial and digital methods to rethink how Indian spaces were historically known and made.
The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru in collaboration with the University of California College of Law, San Francisco (UC Law SF) and CAMP Mediation, Bengaluru, is organising a Faculty Development Workshop on ‘Teaching Negotiation and Mediation.’ The two-day workshop will be held on July 11 & 12, 2026.
This invitation-only cohort workshop is designed for law teachers interested in shaping the future of alternative dispute resolution (ADR), mediation, and negotiation education in India.
Why this workshop?
India stands at an inflection point in dispute resolution. With increasing court backlogs and dissatisfaction with arbitration, mediation is emerging as a central pillar of civil justice reform. The demand for lawyers trained in effective mediation advocacy and counseling skills has become more important than ever. Yet across most law schools in India, training in these subjects remains theoretical, lecture-based, and disconnected from practice.
By contrast, leading law schools in the United States and elsewhere have for decades delivered ADR and negotiation courses in an “experiential” format using role-play simulations adapted from actual practice. These courses are popular with students and are widely regarded as the gold standard in skills-based legal education. The American Bar Association now requires all law students to complete at substantial number of experiential courses prior to graduation.
Over the past two years, faculty from UC Law SF, working closely with CAMP and NLSIU, have piloted and refined a model for bringing this pedagogy into Indian classrooms. They have developed teaching materials, including syllabi, role-plays adapted to the Indian context, and a video of a mediation conducted by Senior Advocate Sriram Panchu – all designed to introduce skills-based learning in lecture classes of 60 or more students. These efforts have received positive feedback from both students and faculty.
About the Workshop
This workshop is designed as a hands-on, immersive training experience to help faculty integrate experiential learning methods into the way they teach ADR courses. Participants will:
Experience role plays as a student
Receive coaching in how to structure, facilitate, and debrief role plays as a teacher
Learn how to design, facilitate, and debrief simulations
Learn how to adapt U.S. style experiential teaching methods to the Indian context
Receive access to curated teaching materials and other resources developed by UC Law SF and CAMP Mediation
Work directly with leading educators and practitioners from the U.S. and India
The workshop will also combine expert-led sessions on negotiation and mediation theory, simulations, collaborative exercises, and reflective discussions. The two-day in-person workshop will be preceded by 2–3 shorter, virtual sessions.
Participants who successfully complete the programme will receive a Certificate of Completion from NLSIU.
Resource Persons
Tara Olapally, International Lawyer and Mediator, CAMP Mediation
Tara Ollapally is an international lawyer and mediator with over 25 years of experience across the United States and India. She is the co-founder of CAMP Arbitration and Mediation Practice Pvt. Ltd., one of India’s pioneering private mediation institutions, and has been actively involved in advancing the mediation movement in India since 2015.
Tara regularly trains lawyers, mediators, and professionals in negotiation and mediation. She is part of the CAMP–Edwards Mediation Academy faculty, has taught at multiple law schools in India, and has served as Coordinator for the Mediating Disputes course at Harvard University.
Her mediation practice spans family, inheritance, commercial, construction, real estate, education, and consumer disputes. Her facilitative approach supports parties in reaching informed, collaborative outcomes grounded in mutual understanding.
Tara is licensed to practice law in New York and Bangalore, India, and holds an LL.M. from Columbia Law School.
You can learn more about Tara at www.taraollapally.com
Hiro N. Aragaki | Professor of Law and Faculty Director - Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution, UC Law SF
Hiro N. Aragaki is a tenured professor of law at University of California College of Law, San Francisco and the Faculty Director of its Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution. He is also a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS College of Law in London. His scholarship in ADR has won prestigious accolades and been published in top U.S. law journals, including flagship law reviews at NYU, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA. He has consulted on ADR reform projects around the world, including as an Advisor to the Supreme Court of India’s Expert Committee on Mediation (tasked with drafting the bill that would become the Mediation Act, 2023) and as a mediation expert for the World Bank’s Business Ready Project.
He has served as a mediator and arbitrator for over twenty years, most recently with JAMS, is a Chartered Arbitrator and Fellow of the Chartered Institute (U.K.), and a Fellow of the College of Commercial Arbitrators (U.S.).
Read more at: https://www.uclawsf.edu/people/hiro-aragaki
Corey Linehan | Associate Director, Center for Negotiation and Dispute Resolution, UC Law SF
Corey Linehan is Associate Director of the Center for Negotiation & Dispute Resolution at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. He holds faculty appointments at Bay Path University and Georgetown University Law Center, where his teaching focuses on negotiation, communication, and legal practice. As a consultant with Triad Consulting, he works with organizations and leaders to more effectively address conflict.
Outside his teaching and training, Corey’s career has focused on negotiating complex public policy and government matters. He previously served in roles at the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Senate navigating interbranch conflicts and advancing legislation from drafting through enactment.
Corey holds a JD from Harvard Law School, MEd from the University of Missouri—St. Louis, and BSFS from Georgetown University. He is barred in California.
Dwight Golann | Research Professor at Suffolk University and UC Law SF
Dwight Golann has been a mediator and teacher of dispute resolution for more than thirty years. A Research Professor of Law at the University of California Law—San Francisco and Suffolk University—Boston and, he has led trainings for U.S. government agencies, the European Union, and ADR organizations on five continents.
Professor Golann has resolved hundreds of legal disputes and is the author of the American Bar Association’s leading books on mediation, Mediating Legal Disputes and Sharing a Mediator’s Powers. He formerly served as Chief of the Trial Division for the Massachusetts Attorney General, litigating cases at every level of the American court system.
He is the only person to have received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American College of Civil Mediators and the ABA Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Dispute Resolution.
Read more at: https://www.suffolk.edu/academics/faculty/d/g/dgolann
Session Agenda
Teaching ADR with experiential pedagogies
This two-day faculty development workshop will focus on the experiential pedagogies most suited to courses in alternative dispute resolution, especially those focused on negotiation and/or mediation. The two-day in-person workshop will be preceded by two virtual sessions, both up to two hours in length, that will ensure all participants arrive for the workshop with a rich understanding of the dispute resolution theory to which the pedagogies explored at the workshop are aligned. The in-person sessions will provide participants an opportunity not just to study new teaching tools but to practice implementing them in an interactive, experiential context.
Day 1 | July 11, 2026
Day 1: Morning Sessions
The workshop will open with an exploration of the purposes of experiential education and how the pedagogies to be explored over the weekend relate to a model ADR curriculum to which participants will have access. Participants will study and practice active listening frameworks that strong negotiators, mediators, and advocates in ADR processes use. The session will then also teach tools for providing students feedback in an experiential context, including distinctions between coaching and evaluative assessment.
Day 1: Afternoon Sessions
The afternoon sessions will focus on best practices for using roleplays to teach negotiation—including their purposes, how to set them up, and how to debrief them so that students’ experiences are translated into robust theoretical and practical takeaways. Participants will have the opportunity to practice debriefing a negotiation roleplay and use the listening and feedback frameworks presented in the morning session.
Day 2 | July 12, 2026
Day 2: Morning Sessions
The second day will open with an opportunity to recap and interrogate anew key themes from the first day’s sessions. The focus will then shift to deploying experiential techniques to teach mediation. Participants will lean and practice an exercise to help students distinguish mediation from arbitration as common alternative resolution pathways. They will then also have an opportunity to practice using demonstration videos to tech key structural elements of the mediation process.
Day 2: Afternoon Sessions
The final afternoon will begin with an opportunity for participants to learn and practice several exercises from a model ADR curriculum, including exercises on active listening and mediator selection. There will then be an opportunity to explore roleplay and debrief differences for mediation cases. The day will conclude with an opportunity to identify and articulate key takeaways from the weekend.
Associate Professor of the History of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
This lecture is open to the public. Please register here.
Abstract
Historians have sometimes tended to present hand-wrought vessels as either the work of celebrated masters or of unknown craftsmen continuing age-old ways of making things. Such romantic notions have paid less attention to the political struggles that cooking utensils have been enmeshed in, discounted the qualities of materials that these objects are crafted from, and overlooked the role of other creative agents in their production. In this paper, Nachiket Chanchani, first melds the material record and textual evidence preserved in prison reports to reconstruct how brass utensils became emblems of indigenous sovereignty in Assam province in British India and shaped and reflect an anti-colonial struggle. Next, he draws attention to a trio: two hereditary Muslim braziers genealogically descended from prisoners who live and work with a heron at Poa Mecca, formerly an important sacred center and today an enterprising small town at the edge of Guwahati, an industrializing city. Even as there are differences of opinion among them, the bodies and behaviors of the two men and the heron that they brought to their home from a nearby wetland are periodically entangled as they work together to make brass utensils by hammering brass-sheets and smelting scrap metal. They also repair antique containers. Finally, he argues that the trio laboriously makes and mends utensils with their hands and beak (arguably obsolescent modes as state-of-the-art manufacturing technology exists) because these modes are advantageous to them. They are the means through which the trio are questioning state-supported discourses on indigeneity, modernity, and development and navigating new positionalities as geomorphologies change and as Assam continues to grapple with the effects of its failed partition in 1947. Thus, observing the trio’s entangled lives and work provides an opportunity to articulate filaments of a history of the enduring power of metalcraft in Assam and beyond.
About the Speaker
Nachiket Chanchani is Associate Professor of South Asian Art and Visual Culture in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan, with a joint appointment in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. His research explores the art, architecture, and visual cultures of South Asia across broad historical and geographical contexts, with particular interests in the Himalayas, temple architecture, heritage, material culture, and the relationships between art, religion, and the environment.
He is the author of Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains: Architecture, Religion, and Nature in the Central Himalayas (2019), The Amaruśataka and the Lives of Indian Love Poems (2022), and India’s Composite Heritage: A Workbook for Children and Parents (2022). His scholarship has appeared in leading journals including The Journal of Asian Studies, Ars Orientalis, Artibus Asiae, Archives of Asian Art, and History of Photography, and he has also written widely on cultural policy and heritage in Indian newspapers.
Alongside his academic work, Chanchani has curated and advised major museum exhibitions, including Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and has collaborated with institutions such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Assam State Museum. His research and curatorial projects have been supported by organisations including the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Getty Foundation.
The NLSIU Library Committee and Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSNet) are co-organising a Book Talk on the book A Jurisprudence of Conversations, authored by Dr Debolina Dutta and published by the Cambridge University Press in 2026.
Date and Time: Saturday, 11 July 2026, 12 noon (IST) [virtual event]
Link: Click here
About the book:
How do feminists, as lawyers and activists, think about, and do law, in a way that makes life more meaningful and just? How are law and feminism called into relation, given meaning, engaged with, used, refused, adapted and brought to life through collaborative action? Grounded in empirical studies, this book is both a history of the emergence of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India and a model of innovative legal research. The book inaugurates a creative practice of scholarly activism that engages a new way of thinking about law and feminist jurisprudence, one that is geared to acknowledge and take responsibility for the hierarchies in Indian academic practices. Its method of conversation and accountability continues the feminist tradition of taking reciprocity and the time and place of collaboration seriously. By bringing legal academics and sex worker activists into conversation, the book helps make visible the specific ties between post-colonial life and law and joins the work of refusing and reimagining the hierarchical formation of legal knowledge in a caste-based Indian society. A significant contribution to the history and practice of feminist jurisprudence in post-colonial India, A Jurisprudence of Conversations will appeal to both an academic and an activist readership.
About the author:
Dr Debolina Dutta is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Law School with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. She was previously an Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School and a Resident Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. She is the author of A Jurisprudence of Conversations: Life, Law and Feminism in Post-colonial India. Debolina has published widely in the areas of jurisprudence, feminist ethics and criminal legal regulation of sexuality, and most recently in the Edward Elgar Research Handbook in Law and Literature, the Australian Feminist Law Journal, the International Journal of Law in Context, and Global Public Health. For her academic and creative works on sex work and law, Debolina received the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights and the Jeevika Asia Documentary Film Prize. Her next book, Elements of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act 1956 In Context, is forthcoming from CUP in 2027.
About the discussants:
Prof Dianne Otto is a Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her scholarship explores how international legal discourse reinforces hierarchies of nation, race, gender and sexuality, and aims to understand how the reproduction of such legal knowledges can be resisted. Key publications include: the edited collection, Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks (Routledge 2018); with Emily Jones, ‘Queering International Law’ in Tony Carty (ed), Oxford Bibliographies Online: International Law (2023); and ‘The Third World and the Quest for Peace’ in Tony Anghie et al (eds), TWAIL Handbook/Reader (Edward Elgar, 2025).
Malini Chidambaram is a Law Academic Associate and a PhD Candidate at Melbourne Law School. Her doctoral research explores how law and visual culture work together to lend legal authority to the promise of a rights-based approach for the protection of children in international law. Her recent work includes ‘A pedagogy of play: on living and killing ‘serious’ Family Law’ (International Journal of Law in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2026, forthcoming) and ‘Daughters of Development: The Public-Private Partnership in Visualizing Girls’ Education in Postcolonial India’ (Global Studies of Childhood, Sage Journals, 2025).
Planetary Health and Relational Wellbeing, a collaborative project between the National Law School of India University, the University of Westminster, the University of Sussex, and Policy and Development Advisory Group, is organising a workshop and an exhibition on 25 and 26 June at the University of Westminster in London.
The project, funded by the British Academy, explored the impact of ecological changes on the health and wellbeing of Adivasi communities in Kerala and Jharkhand through a two-year ethnographic and archival research between 2024 and 2026. At NLSIU, the project is led by Dr Sudheesh R.C.
The workshop brings together leading and early-career social scientists working on the lived experiences of compromised ecologies, the interrogation of biomedical perspectives on wellbeing, the materialities of climate responses, and the flip sides of technocratic approaches to climate-induced health crises.
You are invited to attend the workshop through the Zoom links provided in the schedule. There is no registration fee.
The workshop opens with the launch of Teńgo Daram (ᱛᱮᱱᱜᱳ ᱫᱚᱨᱚᱢ) — To Stand Firm — a public exhibition foregrounding Adivasi perspectives on autonomy and wellbeing on a changing planet. Curated by Dr Boro Baski, the exhibition brings together visual artworks, aural artefacts, and narrative pieces by Adivasi contributors that together articulate the epistemic and ethical foundations on which our collective scholarly work rests.
The exhibition will feature the works of Indigenous artists Rahul Buski from Kerala and Manita Kumari Oraon, Saheb Ram Tudu, Sramika Barja, Mukesh Kumar Sinku, and Biswajit Bage from Jharkhand.
The exhibition will stay on for public viewings from 24th to 27th June at the Old Gymnasium, University of Westminster. If you are in London and can drop by, please register for free here.
A tour of major venues across India and Europe will follow this premiere. The project findings will then return to the Adivasi communities in India who contributed their stories through the exhibition’s permanent installation at our partner institutions, the Museum of Santhal Culture in Bishnubati and the Ho Museum in Pandrasali.
The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru and the Ahmadi Foundation are jointly organising the second lecture of the Justice Ahmadi Distinguished Lecture Series on 12 July 2026, at the Bangalore International Centre, Domlur. Shri Gopalkrishna Gandhi will be delivering the lecture titled, “Being Brutally Frank: Human Instincts and the Law.” The lecture will be moderated by Dr. Rinku Lamba, Associate Professor, Social Sciences at NLSIU.
The annual lecture series is a part of the Justice Ahmadi Initiative on Rule of Law, Democracy and Social Justice.
NLSIU and the Ahmadi Foundation entered into a MoU to set up the Justice Ahmadi Initiative on Rule of Law, Democracy, and Social Justice in honour of, and to preserve and promote the legacy of former Chief Justice of India, Justice Aziz Mushabber Ahmadi. The Initiative works to advance the ideas that Justice Ahmadi championed throughout his distinguished career, including but not restricted to human rights, education, inclusion and protection of vulnerable communities, judicial independence, alternate dispute resolution mechanisms, and strengthening of democratic institutions. Read more about the Initiative here.
What is brutal about frankness, or frank about brutality? Is being frank not the same thing as being honest? Are the two born of instinct or are they inculcated? And is that being frank and honest, an invitation to risk? The speaker will explore the status and prognoses in India for this faculty for frankness, with examples drawn from history, literature and the news of the day.
About the Speaker
Gopalkrishna Gandhi takes a course on India’s Civilisations at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. He is also Distinguished Professor at NALSAR, Hyderabad. He was in administrative positions for over twenty years as a member of the Tamil Nadu cadre of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), and later held diplomatic assignments for over ten years in the United Kingdom, South Africa with concurrent accreditation to Lesotho, Sri Lanka and Norway with concurrent accreditation to Iceland. He was Governor of West Bengal from 2004 to 2009, and was, additionally, Governor of Bihar for about a year during that period.
His recently published works include The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India (Aleph, 2025) and India’s Futures: A Collection of Essays (Bloomsbury India, 2025). Gopalkrishna Gandhi and his wife, Tara Gandhi, an ornithologist and nature conservationist, divide their time between Chennai, Bengaluru, Coonoor and no less on the road, railway-lines and skies travelling between those three places.
Dr. Jahnavi Phalkey is the Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru, a public space for research-based engagement across the human, social, and natural sciences. Previously, Jahnavi held a tenured faculty position at King’s College London. She started her academic career at the University of Heidelberg, following which she was based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine, France, and Imperial College London. Jahnavi was Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (the Institute of Advanced Study, Berlin). She was also external curator to the Science Museum London, and has been a Scholar-in-Residence at the Deutsches Museum, Munich.
The Library Committee is organising a book talk on Ankit Kawade’s 
The National Law School of India University will be organising Masterclasses during the academic year 2026-27. These sessions designed for high school students, 
The National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru in collaboration with the 
The NLSIU Library Committee and Law and Social Sciences Research Network (LASSNet) are co-organising a Book Talk on the book A Jurisprudence of Conversations, authored by Dr Debolina Dutta and published by the Cambridge University Press in 2026.
Planetary Health and Relational Wellbeing, a collaborative project between the National Law School of India University, the University of Westminster, the University of Sussex, and Policy and Development Advisory Group, is organising a workshop and an exhibition on 25 and 26 June at the University of Westminster in London.