Report

The Cathartic Potion of Living Together

Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Jonardon Ganeri report on a convivium in Delhi.

The Convivium series began in 1987 and was conceived by Probal Das Gupta, Michael McGhee, and Prabodh Parikh in the attempt to create genuine inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary dialogue between Indian and European thinkers. There have been meetings in Mahabaleshwar, in West Sussex, at the Sanskriti Kendra in Delhi, in Panchgani and in Lampeter, Wales. The Convivia are resolutely small-scale: the intention has been to generate an intimate atmosphere that facilitates the individual conversations and exchanges, thus marking a significant difference with the conferences, symposia, or colloquia with which we are mostly familiar. The core issue for the series has been the exploration of ideas across the traditional boundaries of culture and custom, resisting a merely comparative approach. We have tried instead to awaken ourselves to the many-sidedness of ideas and their different cultural expressions in a common venture.

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