About 7 and a half years ago, Shamnad had gone to Iran, as a guest lecturer in a workshop organised by their National IP Training Centre in collaboration with WIPO. There, he would also give what may have been his last recorded interview. And perhaps because the website was not in English, nor was the video uploaded directly to youtube, it appears very few people have had the pleasure of listening to it! Candid and free-flowing, (including, of course, discussions about which tea he would prefer), it’s full of precious insights and anecdotes – such as how SpicyIP started, how IDIA started, how his own interest in law developed, and much much more. Unfortunately, as of the last few months, their website seems to no longer be working. However, thanks to the wonderful WayBack Machine (that keeps snapshots of pages all across the internet!), even though the audio is no longer available, you can still view the edited transcripts! (In case that link stops working, you can manually go to the WayBack Machine, and paste this url into the link and search there).
There’s one part of this interview in particular that we wanted to highlight today – which relates to how encouraging he was of students to go out there and do more. This was seen in both IDIA and SpicyIP. And I’ve taking the liberty of reproducing a small portion of the above mentioned interview (interspersed with some photos from Shamnad.com) here below. (If you’re viewing this in your email, you may have to open this on the blog to watch the video)
Shamnad, of course, was not a man with just ‘one’ talent, main or otherwise! Nonetheless, this direction of his towards encouraging others, towards supporting others, this is something whose ripple effects continue to be seen, through the many he inspired, and inspires. As I described this in my recent chapter on his life and work:
“Another aspect of Basheer […] is the constant encouragement he would freely give to others, in whatever context he saw as fit. This is […] something that is seen as frequently repeated in personal notes by those who have written about him after his death. In Basheer’s own words, ‘identifying talent in others, is my biggest talent’. And he would constantly search for the spark in others, and regularly ensure he communicated it to them. […] In many ways, this large focus on ‘accessibility’ combined with ‘empowerment’ also helped furthered the ‘politics of care’, and in turn strengthened inter-relationships that not only helped mobilize others towards causes he was interested in, but also encouraged others to take forward their own causes”
And in this spirit of carrying forward his legacy of encouraging and building interest and capacity, especially amongst younger law students, we’ve been moving trying to not only continue the blog’s work but also build activities around it. In the last one year, (after celebrating 20 years of blogging!) our SpicyIP Podcast Channel, the SpicyIP-DPIIT National Policy Brief Competition, and the occasional online live sessions. In what is fast becoming a flagship event, we also now have our SpicyIP Summer School Programme – 9 days of (completely offline) learning from some of the most insightful IP minds of the country, while being part of a carefully selected cohort who are all as interested in IP as the next student!
In commemoration of Shamnad’s 50th, today, we’d like to announce 3 new initiatives that we hope will continue our work in this direction! (I should also mention – all three are non-funded activities, running on people’s interest and passion! Any help on this end is greatly appreciated!)
- SpicyIP’s Regional Language Podcast Series
In perhaps our most ambitious project so far, we’ve started working with a group of brilliant IDIA scholars (“SpicyIP-IDIA Fellows”) who will be taking IP discussions outside of the English speaking elite, and into the lives of the everyday Indian. We all know how various aspects of IP are intertwined in our day-to-day lives, so, why should the discourse on it be limited to the few? This podcast series will aim to take a look at every day lives and how they’re impacted by IP considerations. Our initial set of SpicyIP IDIA Fellows will cover three languages – Malayalam, Bengali, and Hindi. The hope is, as we gain momentum, we’ll be able to keep adding more languages to this list! Hear it from the team directly!
(If you’re on a desktop and it’s too large, you may find it better viewed directly on youtube here).
2. SpicyIP Academy Research Clinic (SPARC)
Launched just 2 weeks ago, with the selection period of the inaugural cohort open till May 31st, SPARC is the recognition of the gap in guidance, resources, mentorship and community that young Indian IP scholars face. Combined with the relatively limited amount of rigorous Indian IP scholarship, it is an uphill battle for anyone who wants to contribute towards this landscape! In short: No charge, sincere, peer review building on each other’s experiences and networks.
While we can’t make any promises on outcome, what we can ensure is that our peer-review board will seriously engage with your research, provide detailed feedback, and work towards answering any questions you have. The overall goal is to work towards more collaborative research community that is serious about Indian IP. More details here.
3. The Shamnad Basheer Essay Competition 2026
And last, but certainly not least, we’ll be opening submissions for the 2026 edition of the Shamnad Basheer Essay Competition shortly. Celebrating Prof. Basheer’s 50th birth anniversary, this edition of the competition is particularly special for us. Over the years, the Shamnad Basheer Essay Competition has become one of the many ways in which we seek to carry forward his vision of making intellectual property law more accessible, inclusive, and socially engaged by creating thoughtful and rigorous spaces for engagement with IP law.
What began in 2020 as a small initiative in his memory and to celebrate his masterful penmanship, the competition has now grown into a vibrant platform that has seen participation from students across the country with some of the previous winning and shortlisted essays having gone on to spark wider conversations and inspire further scholarship! We’ll be announcing the details of this year’s edition of the competition soon, so keep an eye on the blog for more information.
And with that, let me close this post. To the next 50 years – of his reverberations and ripples continuing to make their presence felt!