Shiv Vishvanathan: Thank you Dr.Balasubramanian. In fact he taught me my first lesson of the day. To err is human to chair is divine. He reversed the order in a beautiful way because I wanted to speak first and I want to begin by explaining why.

Every travelling circus like this – and be assured this is a travelling circus of intellectual performers – clowns, acrobats, the more difficult strong men and back stage of intellectual performers of extraordinary quality. Every travelling circus has one man who performs the role of a town crier. He is also the scapegoat when things go wrong. He conceptualizes the performance for ordinary people, translates esoteric languages into common-sense dialects. He introduces the performance. He also happens to be the common man in the group of experts. That is my work.

What I will do today is explain why we are here, why we should be here, and why you in the audience should quarrel with us here - because this is an invitation to a conversation of democracies and it’s an invitation to conversation of democracies about science. The challenge here is fundamental. Can we recreate the idea for knowledge society?  And more particularly, in a both selfish and altruistically global sense redefine India’s role in this debate of knowledge societies. This is the critical challenge and it’s a challenge which has its roots in the national movement.

Let us remember when the first Association for the Cultivation of Science was established, its first goal was to rescue science from western civilization. The Indian National Movement was a very strange movement. It was always busy rescuing the white man from himself. Hind Swaraj in fact was written as a tract not so much to liberate India but to rescue the British from modernity. That is, it had a deep and fundamental idea that the theory of liberation has to rescue both the oppressor and oppressed by altering an alternative way of considering the world.

I think we are well through a period when we were too caught to the ideas of import substitution – one of the dullest ways of thinking of the industry. The theme has come back to a reciprocal, equal, plural, playful way of conceptualizing the battle of the democratic imagination. We face two questions today. What can science add to the democratic imagination? What can democracy do to sciences? And here comes the third question (because democracy is not an innocent word) – how can democracy become problematic in the understanding of sciences? I think we have to consider all these questions.

What I would like to invite you to is an experiment, a conversation, a performance, and to a panchayat of knowledge which will look at science, look at policy, look at democracy and look at all the externalities of science and democracy in a new and fundamental way. I want to emphasize that we are not experts – that we are a travelling circus of participants which demands that the audience engages in the nature of dialogue, challenges us, demands controversies, demands public resolution of controversies and demands a transparency about our confusions. In fact if we can articulate our confusion dramatically I think the performance is worth it.

What are the conditions for this performance? I think three things have happened which have made it fundamental. One, I think is the quarrel of the enlightenment. The USA and Europe are basically at war engaging in a quarrel of intellectual differences about the nature of science and technology. If you look at any draft on Bio-technology, IT, Nano technology produced by the National Science Foundation and the EU you will see the radical nature of the difference. It is a battle of how to look at the anthropology of enlightenment in the 21st century. Now that Europe and America are competing they are forced to look to alternative imaginations to answer many of their confusions.
 
And here comes the second point. India and China are being offered as systematic alternatives but the way in which India and China have constructed the alternatives is mechanical. India is offered as a democracy but with all the limitations of one and China is presented as a behemoth which will be eternally successful. I think it is a time for redefinitions of India vs. China. There is a politics to it and there is a politics whereby we can strategically locate ourselves back in this global world feud.

I think the third and important point is that the word “democracy” is no longer official and is no longer devoted to one kind of definition. There is a variety of democracies, and there are a variety of democracies which are competing imaginations. I think what we need to do today is to look at the debate of democracies around science. We are going to use the document “Taking Science Seriously” as the beginning of this debate. Can India offer a world view which is not Indian but global about the way science and democracy are related? Can India take the conversation of science and democracy to a different kind of imagination where we become not just imitators but pioneers of a new democratic and scientific imagination?
 
Thirdly, I want to emphasize that the democracy we are demanding is something new, something different. We are not looking for popularization. We are not looking for mere participation in the sense of customer responses. We are not looking for the citizen as voter. We are looking at new forms of citizenship. We are looking for new kinds of engagement with science. We are looking for new public spaces where the definitions of science and democracy are reworked. That is the challenge for us. It demands new rituals, new myths, new critiques, new forms of innovation, new kinds of performances, new kinds of eccentrics, dissenters, popularizers, performers. And unless we have this we lose the critical nature of this challenge.
So, what we have today is an opportunity for a comparative sociology, a reciprocal sociology where the Indian experience becomes relevant for the world; not in the narrow way of constructing an IT imagination – I think that is the most boring part of us – but in terms of a wider idea of what democracy, citizenship, marginality, plurality, and civilization can mean for a new world where science and democracy have to be in conversation.

I think there are separate challenges here. If you look at the West, it had a linear view of development. It had a theory of progress where you assume that the tribal became the industrial man. I think the challenge for us is that the tribal is not our ancestor he is our contemporary. We have a challenge of preventing India from being a genocidal society in the way the West was in many ways. How do you sustain a civilization – the tribal, the craft, the industrial and the post industrial views can exist simultaneously in conversation. How do you prevent the museumization of half our population? How do you create a civilizational space which breaks the standard dualisms that the West has to offer? How do we in turn learn to read the West and teach the West to read the other West’s within itself? I think these are our fundamental challenges.
 
It can be playful and I think it can also have a level of seriousness that we couldn’t achieve so far. But what we want to do is to present it not just philosophically but create a dialogue of civil society, create a dialogue of the professionals to bring this imagination back to a level where we can talk not just about the imagination of science but the imagination of democracy. You can see these as precursors to the debate. You can see them also as the first potential victims of what an angry state can do to a new generation of eccentrics – whether they are heroes, unsuccessful martyrs to the new idea of democracy and science is to be seen. But if we can rearticulate the vision of the knowledge society I think something critical and crucial will have happened to the democracy that has become stale in India.

That is our challenge. I will stop now because an announcer is not supposed to replace the performance. Thank you.