Desi Academia Podcast

Megh is joined by Professor Rituparna Patgiri to talk about the challenges of creating an academic brand, the public scrutiny of marginalised faculty, the neoliberal university, and the tragedy of Professor Jason Arday.

Sources:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db3YLAlNpXw/?igsh=NWo4ZmI1M2Yzd2hr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdvnhmeMHBU
Original blog: https://ncofnas.com/p/dei-fraud-and-cover-up-at-cambridge
Retraction watch: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/books/review/jason-arday-memoir-takeaways.html
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/06/rise-and-fall-of-jason-arday
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/books/review/cambridge-jason-arday-resignation-investigation.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e146jw618o
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/jason-arday-cambridge-academic-memoir-resignation/688206/

Articles by Rituparna:
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/four-year-undergraduate-course-delhi-university-faculty-nep-2020-10146873/
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/social-sciences-sociology-relevance-of-social-sciences-iits-10279804/
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/tezpur-university-assam-accord-student-portest-public-university-10402123/

In this episode of DAP, Megh, Vatsal and Indranil are joined by Dr. Shakuntala Mahanta to continue our discussions around linguistics.

Dr. Mahanta is a professor at IIT Guwahati. An expert in phonology, her research interests involve documentation and phonetic/ phonological analysis of tone, intonation and other phonological and computational learnability phenomena in (mostly, but not restricted to) South Asian languages and the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Northeast India.

We talk about Dr. Mahanta’s academic journey, her research and how it evolved into phonology, what it takes to do field work for phonology and how she formulates her research hypothesis. We also discuss some basics of phonology like the importance of stress in languages, ambiguity, tonal languages, vowel harmony.

We also discuss careers in speech technology, field linguistics versus lab linguistics and the roles and responsibilities of language scientists in the North East.

Recommendations:
​Sound Patterns of English, by Noam Chomsky
The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony, edited by Harry van der Hulst and  Nancy A. Ritter.

  Indranil

How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention (confirm)

Shakuntala

The discovery of spoken language, by Peter W. Jusczyk

A Manual of Linguistic Field Work and Structures of Indian Languages by Anvita Abbi

 Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork by Shobhana L. Chelliah and Willem J. de Reuse

Megh

Haasil

Fractured Communities by Umar Khalid

The new Spiderman movie

“Divine Female”, standup comedy special Prashasti Singh 

Anirban Dasgupta

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-text-watermark

The Odyssey movie

“An Uncomplicated Man”, essay by Emily Wilson

Vatsal

Drishayam 3

In this episode, we continue our deep dive into language science. We are joined by a fantastic panel of linguists to unpack the foundational debates shaping modern linguistics and cognitive science.

We explore how studying human and animal communication helps define the boundaries of Language, why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis continues to spark debates over language as a universal human trait versus a product of culture, and how phenomena like the Bouba/Kiki effect fuel the controversy over whether language is innate or acquired. The conversation also tackles the socio-political aspects of defining of languages and dialects, the field's complex ties to colonialism, nationalism, and racism, and the founder effect on linguistics by controversial figures like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker.

Professor Indranil Dutta serves as the Dean of the School of Languages and Linguistics, Jadavpur University. He is a computational linguist by training with interests in speech acoustics, motor control, and automatic methods of grammar induction. His research spans areas within acoustic phonetics, computational phonology, and natural language processing.

Dr Remo Nitschke is A postdoctoral researcher in the Distributional Linguistics Lab at the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE), University of Zurich. His research interests include the intersection of machine learning and linguistic theory, animal communication, and emergent sign languages.

Dr. Charles Redmon is a Lecturer at the School of Language, Literature, and Media (SLLaM), University of Essex. He is a phonologist by training and his research aims to understand the structure and evolution of speech systems, linking the low-level articulatory, acoustic and auditory structures in speech with the higher-level word structures the system must encode.

Recommendations:
Remo

Linguistics Wars

Calvin and hobbs comics 

Soviet bus stops - book 

Charlie

Rana Dasgupta, "After nations"

Murder mystery novels 

Indranil

Ira Mukhoti

Orbital -samantha harvey

La conquête de la Terre par les chats by by Alberto Montt 

Vatsal 

“I No Longer Think GLP-1s Are the Answer” https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/114009

Megh

The Boys - Amazon Prime

The Awful German Language by Mark Twain

Biswa Kalyan Rath’s stand up clips

Indranil’s past podcast episodes:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/44KV59s9wlQhWIxDdoUvdb “S4E3- Mandal, Mandir and the 90s with Sunil Menon and Indranil Dutta”

https://open.spotify.com/episode/19VqPH5LbJdq9B2TOy9vsp “S10E2: "Dissertation Research is a Team Sport"- Megh's Defense Experience”

This is our Linguistics 101 episode, where we talk about what linguistics actually is, who a linguist is, and why linguistics research goes far beyond the textbook. Our guests play a big role in shaping linguistics education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and we sit down to discuss what shaping future linguists looks like.

This episode is co-hosted by Professor Indranil Dutta, Dean of the School of Languages and Linguistics at Jadavpur University. As a computational linguist and phonologist, Professor Dutta’s research focuses on sound patterns of speech across languages like Malayalam and Mongolian, as well as the development of computational datasets and models for human languages and bird songs.

We are joined by Professor Chandan Narayan, an Associate Professor and the Undergraduate Program Director of Linguistics at York University, Toronto, Canada, whose research focuses on the production and perception of human speech. He also shares how his background and training in Sanskrit help him apply linguistic principles to reconstructing ancient forms of Indic languages from archives and stone carvings.

Recommendations:
Vatsal

Movie: Obsession 

Show: Widow’s bay

Megh

Book: Course in phonetics, Peter Ladefocet

Book: Consonants and vowels Peter Ladefocet

Article: "What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?" https://www.newyorker.com/culture/progress-report/what-will-it-take-to-get-ai-out-of-schools 

Article: "The End of Reading Is Here" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/

 Chandan

Book: Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

Movie: My Fair Lady

Indranil

Book: Metaphors we live by, by  George Lakeoff

Battle in the Mind Fields by John A. Goldsmith & Bernard Laks

In this episode of DAP, Megh, Vatsal, Aditya, and friend of the pod Sumaira talk about their post-doctoral lives. In this rant session, we discuss the uniqueness of this title, why this job treats us like trainees, who trains and builds a postdoc, and what there is to build. We also talk about the problems in academia, our backup plans, and much more. Join us for a freewheeling conversation, and if you relate, DM us on our Twitter!

​Recommendations
◦Aditya
▪Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are' - Frans de Waal
▪Attenborough's 100th bday, the Netflix Documentary `Gorilla Story' (not to be confused with Kerala Story)
◦Sumaira
▪Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir's ConflictBook by Ipsita Chakravarty
▪Hari Sarkar Parsai
◦Vatsal
▪Cobalt Red- How the blood of Congo powers our lives
▪Your friends and neighbors
◦Megh
▪The Boys
▪Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw5518?__cf_chl_f_tk=Ss78lNpRMCYFYsv8.XyhEAhkUA5QvUtaw6RPDFRsN6c-1783283683-1.0.1.1-LqKFdHYN6foCerdZg5ipzkl6shAEPdxg.LAP6JAw6oo