DR. C.D. DESHMUKH MEMORIAL LECTURE 2025

Time of Monsters, Time of Possibilities: Reflections on an Interstitial Era

Speaker: Dr. Amitav Ghosh, well-known writer, recipient of the Jnanpith Award in 2018, the Erasmus Prize in 2024 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Chair: Shri Shyam Saran, President, IIC

Ours is an era of multiple intersecting crises and transitions - of geopolitics, financial structures, and, perhaps most importantly, of environmental and ecological regimes that are slowly but surely pushing the planet towards catastrophe. And yet, the paradox of this interstitial era is that it has also made it possible to contemplate, and even embrace, possibilities that were denied or rejected during the age of high modernity. This lecture explores some of these paradoxes and possibilities.