The Time of Monsters

Join us for a lecture that begins from a moment of rupture—and asks whether disorder might hold more possibility than we are taught to believe.

About the Lecture

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

— Antonio Gramsci

Tariff wars. Presidential abductions. Ecological collapse. Ethnic cleansing. The language of crisis has become our everyday vocabulary. We are repeatedly told that the international liberal order is collapsing, and that the future lies somewhere between uncertainty and catastrophe. As we find ourselves struggling against these monsters, this lecture asks a simple question.Is order inherently good, and disorder bad? And can this chaos offer us a chance and a hope to construct a new, more just world?

Through an exploration of historical junctures like our current one, this session examines periods when the future did not emerge as a smooth extension of the present. It looks at what societies did, or failed to do, when confronted with uncertainty, and why the future may not be a linear extension of the present.

In other words, we will together try and see – is hope possible in a hopeless world?

About the Speaker

In 2010, Amit Julka decided to quit being a mediocre software engineer, and became a terrible political scientist instead. In his research, he looks at how the subconscious ideas of the masses impact foreign policy and international relations. Apart from international politics, his interests include Punjabi & Urdu poetry and forgetting the rules of Persian grammar.

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 ordinary evening into a conversation you’ll think about long after it ends.