Baatcheet Around the Bay is a year-long collaborative program with the Asian Art Museum San Francisco, San Jose Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and Stanford University, designed to increase public understanding in the Bay Area about South Asian art and visual culture. Loosely based on the Japanese design-presentation model Pecha Kucha (pe-chak-cha) and short format TED talks, Baatcheet Around the Bay brings scholars, curators, students, visual and performance artists, collectors, art enthusiasts, and members of the Bay Area community together for a series of multimedia conversations over the course of one year. Each Baatcheet consists of several short (5-7 minute) presentations that can incorporate visual, audio, performative, and textual components. Each program shares the common goal of inciting dynamic, public conversations about art and visual culture of South Asia.  More >>

The 21st century will be an Asian century. But it will also be an urban century with much of this urbanization taking place in Asian cities, especially in India and China. Such urbanization carries with it tremendous potential for economic prosperity, the consolidation of middle-class aspirational lifestyles, growth of civil society and experiments with local democracy. But such urbanization also presents significant challenges including the degradation of urban poverty and inequality, the inadequacy of infrastructure, and the ecological impact of stifling pollution and increasing carbon footprints. India’s rapid urban growth thus presents a call to scholars, policy-makers, planners, and civil society activists to engage with these various potentialities and challenges. More>>

India is unique in history in having a sustained democracy in a poor country with a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society. Today, its economic strength is also widely recognized and celebrated. The role democratic processes play in the sustenance and diffusion of this economic strength into the wider reaches of Indian society is a central question that must be engaged. In order to create an environment in which such crucial questions can be discussed and alternative solutions offered by politicians, policy makers, thought leaders, NGO activists, and scholars, the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, together with the Foundation for Democratic Reforms in India (FDRI), organized two a high-level annual seminars, the first in May 2007 and the second in September 2008,  hosted on the Berkeley campus. The primary objective of these seminars was to provide direction and reflection on key issues that may challenge the democratic institutions of India in the 21st century. The aim was to generate ideas that would not only spur greater understanding of complex issues, but could also be implemented in terms of policy.  More >>