The Project Varanasi seeks to undertake the study of the extra-ordinary city of Varanasi and its surroundings in all its aspects -- the living aspects as well as the dead, contemporary as well as the immortalized, its knowledge of the inner world as well as its indifference to the external conditions, its glory as well as its wretchedness. Show(+) It will address its communities as well as the individuals, its crafts as well as the industry and its relation with its traditions as well as with modernity. It would connect with the local surroundings ranging from the city of Varanasi to the larger eastern region of India. It can draw its topics from the city and the region, and their relation with the country and outside. It will require creative scholarship to be carried out through a critical enquiry, cutting across disciplines. It would promote synergistic studies connecting humanities with science and technology. Such studies undertaken for a city and the Eastern region would, hopefully, throw new light on existing issues and problems of the other region, the country and the contemporary human society. Such a study would also help create a new generation of people rooted in a new ethos. People with such an ethos would be better connected to society, and are likely to be better professionally. It would also serve as a platform for engineering students for creative combination of humanities with science and technology. Such a platform would create conditions for unearthing interdisciplinary insights and confluence of disciplines. Theory should help with practice, and practice should lead to theorizing.Hide(-)

A large project of this kind will naturally need inter-disciplinary inputs. It will require cross disciplinary insights. The project would look for niche areas of work, which would connect scholarship to society using different disciplines.
The research projects would collectively create a larger picture of times and society. Five example group projects which would be started immediately are outlined next.