Nusrat Durrani is General Manager/SVP of MTV World, a division of MTV created in 2004 to launch new MTV-branded channels that super-serve emerging bi-cultural audiences in the U.S.: MTV Desi for South Asian-Americans, launched in July 2005; MTV Chi for Chinese-Americans launched in December 2005; and MTV K for Korean-Americans planned for 2006.
Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore, who is currently a visiting professor at Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Guha's first book was The Unquiet Woods, jointly published by Oxford University Press an the University of California Press in 1989. This is a social history of the Himalayan forests, from the nineteenth century down to the celebrated Chipko movement. In 1999 the OUP and the University of Chicago Press published Guha's Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India.
Arun Shourie is among India's best known commentators on current and political affairs. Born in Jalandhar, Punjab (1941), he studied at St. Stephen's College in Delhi and then obtained his doctorate in Economics from Syracuse University, USA.
Dr. Sridharan (PhD Political Science, Penn '89) joined UPIASI (University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India) as Academic Director in 1997. From September 2005 forward, he has assumed the role of Acting Secretary-General as well.
Ambassador Mahbubani has enjoyed a remarkable career in government, while at the same time writing prolifically on public issues. As a diplomat in the Singapore Foreign Service from 1971 to 2004, he was posted to Cambodia (where he served during the war in 1973-74), Malaysia, Washington, and New York, where he served two stints as Singapore's ambassador to the United Nations, and as president of the UN Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002. He was permanent secretary at the Foreign Ministry from 1993 to 1998.
Mr. R. Gopalakrishnan is executive director of Tata Sons, chairman of Rallis India and vice-chairman of Tata Chemicals. He is a director of several Tata Group companies such as Tata Motors, Tata Power and Tata Internet Services. He also serves on the board of two non-Tata companies, ICI and Castrol India. A key member of the Tata Group Executive Office, Mr. Gopalakrishnan plays a vital role in providing direction and impetus to the Group's forays into potentially viable areas of the new economy. A graduate in physics from Calcutta University, Mr.
The talk will draw from Sevanti Ninan's forthcoming book that is based on her fieldwork in eight Hindi-speaking states in central and northern India. In the 1990s, a newspaper revolution began blowing across India. When literacy levels rose, communications expanded, and purchasing power climbed in these Hindi-speaking states, newspapers followed, picking up readers in small towns and villages. Even while these new media surged to the top of national readership charts, they localized furiously in the race for readers.
Shantayanan Devarajan is the chief economist of the World Bank’s South Asia region, and editor of the World Bank Research Observer.
Arvind Subramanian is a division chief in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.
Dr. Basant served as the chief economist of the Prime Minister's Committee on the Social, Economic, and Educational Status of the Muslim Community in India (Sachar Committee.) In his remarks at CASI, he will share a unique perspective on the many factors that went into the Report's production. For anyone interested in seeing the document, you can download a PDF version of the file from the website of the National Council of Applied Economic Research: http://www.ncaer.org/whatsnew.html#N4
