Table Talk with Krish Ashok

 

Table Talk with Krish Ashok
Date: Jul 25, 2021
Time: 21:00 IST

I've known Ashok as a popular personality on Twitter, and as a musician, regularly putting out his compositions (he plays multiple instruments) for his followers. Along the way, I discovered he's also an artist, and last year we found out he is also an author (his book, Masala Lab, came out late last year, to popular acclaim). All this, mind you, while holding down a very demanding day job and cooking for his family.

We'll talk about these multiple facets of him, with an attempt every little while to stay on topic (I am easily sidetracked, and so, with Table Talk, I cannily call this a feature, not a bug) and chat about food and science and the book.  We'll chat for around a couple of hours, which includes time for questions from the audience.

You can buy Masala Lab here, and read Ashok's column at Mint here.

Giving back

Table Talk will stay free to attend and free to listen to or watch later, for as long as I can afford to keep it that way. But we would like to use our privilege to help others, so we’re asking our guests to choose a cause. Ashok has chosen Railway Children, a non-profit organisation under Section 8 of The Companies Act, which works to ‘create and enable sustainable changes in the lives of children living on the streets.’ If you would like to say thank you for this session, and if you can afford to, please donate at their donation page.

Attending

You will need to go to the Zoom link and register with a valid email address, after which you will get the link to join the event.

To get notifications of new episodes and links to past episodes, please subscribe to:
- this Google Group: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ttandfps
- and / or this Telegram Channel: https://t.me/TTandFPS

Poetry & me

Poetry & me is an online talk show, a web series, if you will. It is deep, thoughtful conversations with practising poets about their relationship with poetry, interspersed with readings from their work and time set aside for audience questions. These conversations will later be archived online as a free public resource.

This is part of a longer project I’ve been planning towards for years — life kept getting in the way — which seeks to create a large archive of poetry in India. I can do a substantial chunk of it now via Zoom, because generous friends who wish to remain anonymous paid for a Zoom webinar package, which lets me do these as events with audiences.

I plan to start this with poets writing in English, for no other reason that that it’s the only language I’m competent in. Once I have a body of work to show, I hope to raise some funds to bring in other people who can join me and conduct interviews in other Indian languages.

Poetry & me will not be on a fixed schedule (i.e., not a fixed day of the week or time of day) because the people I want to talk to have different time tables and schedules. If you’d like to attend the recordings, I’ll be posting updates on my social media (links alongside), and, easier for you, via this Google Group and this Telegram Channel. Please subscribe to one of both of them. These will be one-way, i.e., only I can post to them, and I will only post to let subscribers know when a session is happening — you’ll get at least a couple of days notice — and when recordings are available online.

Folks who have agreed to be interviewed (so far) include: Aditi Rao, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Aruni Kashyap, Ayesha Chatterjee, Bina Ellias, Jerry Pinto, Keki Daruwalla, Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, Michael Creighton, Monica Mody, Mustansir Dalvi, Ranjit Hoskote, Rochelle D’silva, Rochelle Potkar, Sampurna Chattarji, Sharanya Manivannan, Shikha Malaviya, Srilata K, Suhit Kelkar, Vinita Agrawal.

How you can help

• Come to the shows, of course. 

• Bring friends. Help spread the word, if you can, of the show, of the recordings when they’re up.

• Tell me which poets you would like the series to cover. Across languages, but in India or with an India connection only (for now).

• If you, or folks you know, would like to support this effort financially, get in touch.

Table Talk with Vikram Doctor

Table Talk with Vikram Doctor
Date: Jul 11, 2021
Time: 20:00* IST

Vikram, vikdoc to many who know him on the very few online forums he inhabits (he has, over the years, firmly resisted any efforts to persuade him to get on to social media — I was shocked, shocked, I tell you, to find out he was on Instagram — is always Doccy for me.

We started our advertising careers together us trainees, he in client servicing, me in creative, in Lintas in the 90s. We shared laughs and music, books and woes, and many late nights in Express Towers before we went our different professional ways, and eventually out of advertising. We've kept in touch over the years, talking and meeting infrequently, but when we do, we are able to pick up the threads easily. As he put it once, "one of those semi-work friendships, when you can get close but don't really keep in touch after your workplaces diverge, and yet that basic connection isn't lost and you can always catch up every couple of years or so."

The world, of course, knows him as the food columnist with a cult following, the writer and podcaster who finds fascinating connections that help us understand our world and where it came from.

To steal another sentence from Doccy, it's time we had one of those once-in-two-years coffees.

We will chat mainly about the history of food writing, how to go about food research, stuff like that. You do know, of course, that when old friends meet and chat, the conversation can go all over the place. That's a feature, not a bug. :)

We'll chat for at least an hour, and have questions and discussion for 15 to 30 minutes, though I suspect we'll go on longer.

Giving back

Table Talk will stay free to attend and free to listen to or watch later, for as long as I can afford to keep it that way. But we would like to use our privilege to help others, so we’re asking our guests to choose a cause. Doc has chosen All Creatures Great and Small Sanctuary, which is a registered charitable trust. If you would like to say thank you for this session, and if you can afford to, please donate on their donation page, or via their campaign on Milaap.

Attending

You will need to go to the Zoom link and register with a valid email address, after which you will get the link to join the event.

To get notifications of new episodes and links to past episodes, please subscribe to:
- this Google Group: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/ttandfps
- and / or this Telegram Channel: https://t.me/TTandFPS

* If you've attended a Table Talk session before, please note the change in timing. This one will be at 8 p.m., not 9, since Sheru, the canine member of Doc's household, demands an early morning start to his day.