Rakesh K. Kaul Talks & Lectures

Talks

Speaking Topics

The Nine Talks

Each of these puts a question the audience already has beside an answer from somewhere they haven’t looked. All run 45–60 minutes with questions, in person or online.

1. Day Zero Is Not a Prediction

Cape Town came within weeks of it in 2018. Chennai declared it in 2019. Bengaluru nearly reached it in 2024. A talk on what actually happens when a city runs out of water — and why every case so far has been a failure of distribution and legitimacy long before it was a failure of rainfall.

Closer to home

Lake Mead has a bathtub ring you can see from space. The rules governing the Colorado River expired this year with the seven states unable to agree, so Washington is imposing the cuts instead. Phoenix has approved subdivisions without a hundred-year water supply. England spent this summer under nine hosepipe bans. Cape Town, Chennai and Bengaluru are in this talk because they have already run the experiment the rest of us are still arguing about.

For

general audiences · libraries · campuses · water-sector convenings

2. The Broken Water Compact

Every civilisation that lasted made an arrangement with its water: how it was shared, who guarded it, what it was owed. India’s were unwritten and local — johads, ahar-pyne, the eri tank cascades. Britain’s was a public trust. America’s was a treaty. A talk about what those agreements were and what it costs to have forgotten them.

Closer to home

The 1922 Colorado River Compact divided a river using measurements taken during what tree rings later showed to be among its wettest decades in five hundred years. Seven states have been arguing about the shortfall ever since. Meanwhile the four-hundred-year-old acequia associations of New Mexico still allocate water by rules their communities police themselves — and Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for explaining why arrangements like that work. The question is the same everywhere: who guards the water, and what is it owed?

For

campuses · museums · cultural centres · policy audiences

3. All Roads Lead to the Same Water

Western philosophy opens with water: Thales of Miletus held that everything is water, and Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice — that identity is a flow, not a thing. Two thousand miles away the Kashmir Shaiva tradition of Pratyabhijñā, recognition, held that self and world are not separate things needing to be joined but one thing needing to be recognised. A talk on holism, and on why traditions that never met kept arriving at the same place.

Closer to home

Emerson’s Over-Soul came out of his reading of the Upanishads. Whitman read the Bhagavad Gita and wrote Passage to India — and this talk was first given at his birthplace on Long Island. Thoreau kept the Gita at Walden. The American transcendentalists were already having this conversation a hundred and seventy years ago; the talk picks it up where they left it.

For

philosophy and religious studies departments · temples · cultural centres · general audiences

4. Tolerance and Its Limits

Kota Rani ruled a Kashmir where Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim communities had lived alongside one another for generations. In 1339 she was deposed by Shah Mir, who had arrived at court a generation earlier from outside the valley. It is the hinge on which Kashmir’s history turns — and it poses a question no society has settled: how does an open society absorb newcomers without dissolving what made it worth arriving at?

Closer to home

Every country in the room is currently having this argument. Rome and the foederati. Convivencia in Al-Andalus, and how it ended. The Ottoman millet system. Each of these has been claimed by every side of the modern debate, which is itself worth examining. Kashmir’s version is seven hundred years old and unusually well documented — which makes it a useful place to think from, precisely because nobody in the audience has a stake in the outcome. Comparative, not prescriptive.

For

universities · history and South Asian studies departments · museums · festivals

5. Artificial Intelligence and Life Intelligence

Dawn is set in AD 3000, where a troika — a leader, an AI war machine, and an overlord who is above all a manipulator of stories, minds and histories — rules a world heading toward the Great Apocalypse. The novel’s answer to that machine is not a better machine. It is Niti, a two-thousand-year-old Kashmiri story form that transmits practical wisdom. The argument: the useful distinction is not artificial versus human intelligence, but artificial versus living.

Closer to home

The Greeks built Talos, a bronze automaton that guarded Crete, and Pandora, manufactured and released — machine anxiety two and a half thousand years before the machines. Frankenstein is two hundred years old. Norbert Wiener warned about the human use of human beings in 1950. The question is not new. What is new is that the machines now work — and that the most dangerous thing in the novel is not the war machine but the one who controls the stories.

For

universities · technology audiences · philosophy departments · general audiences

6. The Kashmir and Athens Connection

A valley smaller than Belgium produced Panini, whose grammar of Sanskrit anticipated formal linguistics by two millennia; Patanjali, whose yoga is now practised by forty-four million Americans; and Abhinavagupta, whose account of aesthetic experience remains among the most sophisticated ever written. A talk on what conditions produce a place like that, and what happens when they end.

Closer to home

Chomsky has acknowledged his debt to Panini. Your yoga class descends from Patanjali. And the comparison that keeps suggesting itself is Athens — a small place, a short window, an inheritance out of all proportion to its size, and the same unanswered question about what caused it and what ended it.

For

universities · museums · cultural centres · general audiences

7. The Saraswati and the Scattering

Five thousand years ago a river was charged with carrying the world-ending fire to the sea, and was consumed by it. The Saraswati sank into the sands; her people scattered, and many came at last to Kashmir, where they held springs sacred ever after and made the guarding of source water a holy duty. A talk on inherited memory, exile, and what a family’s water story became when it met the twenty-first century.

Closer to home

Britain has a drowned country of its own — Doggerland, under the North Sea, forgotten for eight thousand years until trawlers started bringing up the bones. America drained the Owens Valley to build Los Angeles and made a film about it forty years later. The Aral Sea is a desert with ships in it. Every civilisation that lost water kept the loss as story, and the stories outlast the records.

For

temples · community and cultural centres · diaspora organisations · museums

8. The Sound of Vanishing Water

A participatory session built around a crowdsourced archive of water recordings from around the world — a tanker delivery in Bengaluru, a sprinkler running at two in the afternoon in Phoenix, monsoon on a tin roof, a borewell that gives only air. Audiences contribute their own and hear it placed beside the others.

Closer to home

Bring a recording of your own water. What a place sounds like turns out to be a record of how it has been treated — which is what the acoustic ecologists have been arguing since the 1970s.

For

libraries · museums · schools · festivals · community events. All ages. 30–60 minutes

9. Writing the Climate Novel

Why fiction reaches where reports do not, and what it costs to write about a subject that keeps overtaking you. Research, structure, and the particular problem of building a novel around an idea without turning it into a lecture.

Closer to home

Campbell’s monomyth beside the Niti tradition — two accounts of what stories are for, one framed as psychology, the other as instruction. Workshop format available.

For

creative writing programmes · festivals · libraries

Supporting Blocks

Virtual talk or reading	30–60 minutes, any time zone. Zoom, Teams, or your platform. Recording by arrangement.
Virtual panel	As panellist, or in conversation with one or two others.
In-person panel	Festivals, conferences, convenings. Happy to be programmed alongside scientists and policy specialists.
Talk and reading	Reading, talk, questions, signing.
Campus visit	Talk plus a classroom session or seminar in a single visit.
Common Reads	Full-day or multi-session programming for campus-wide and One Book community adoptions. Discussion guide and curriculum module provided free.
Workshop	Craft and research workshops, 90 minutes to half a day.
Temples & cultural centres	Heritage and philosophy talks with readings, for intergenerational audiences.
Book club	Virtual drop-in, 30 minutes, for groups reading the novel.

Practical

Travel	Based in the New York metropolitan area, and travels regularly to India and the United Kingdom. If your date falls near a scheduled trip, costs are considerably lower — please ask.
Technical	For virtual events: headset, wired connection, quiet room. Slides available where wanted, and the talks work without them.
Books	Available on Amazon. Happy to sign stock at events.
Fees and travel	Discussed on enquiry and scaled to the organisation. Public libraries, schools and community groups — please ask rather than assume.