Eros Of The Wasteland

Join us for a lecture that begins with a headline and opens into a meditation on waste, desire, and the changing meaning of the sublime.

About the Lecture

In 2019, a newspaper headline declared: “The Gazipur landfill will be taller than the Taj Mahal.”

This comparison unsettles. The monument and the landfill, beauty and discard, are placed in the same frame. What does it mean that our waste now rivals our most cherished symbols?

This lecture explores how the modern wasteland has become a defining landscape of our time. Landfills, mines, extraction zones, war zones, these are often treated as voids, as damaged or empty terrain. Yet they are dense with ecological processes, histories of displacement, and layered human memory.

Drawing from literature, landscape, and critical theory, the session asks whether the sublime can still be understood as pure or immaculate. Increasingly, the sublime emerges through barrenness, through sites produced by violent capture and industrial excess. Rather than treating these hauntings as contamination, this lecture reads them as sites of responsibility, spaces where meaning emerges through echoes, residues, and what remains.

About the Speakers

Sonali Prasad is a journalist and novelist from New Delhi. Her reporting has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Washington Post, Hakai, Quartz, and Esquire Singapore. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Travelling Fellowship, Global TED Fellowship, MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, Logan Science Journalism Fellowship, and a Jan Michalski Writing Residency, among others. Her debut novel, Glass Bottom (Picador India, 2024), was named a literary debut of the year and shortlisted for multiple awards. She has reported from several Olympic and Paralympic Games and served on the International Olympic Committee Press Committee from 2012 to 2021.

Sonakshi Srivastava is a Senior Writing Fellow (ELT) at Ashoka University. A graduate of the University of Delhi, her research examines biopolitics, ability and debility, translation, and posthumanism. She serves as Translation Editor for Usawa Literary Review and as an educational arm assistant at Asymptote. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Scroll, The Locavore, Moveable Type, and other platforms, and has been supported by fellowships including the ASLE Translation Grant and the Diverse Voices Fellowship.

About unLecture

unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from St. Stephen’s, Delhi who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive. unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.