The Prospect/Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s top 100 “public intellectuals” — “the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time” — has nine from this part of the world.
The criteria to make the list, says FP, could not be more simple: Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.
India:
1: Historian Ramachandra Guha
2: Political psychologist Ashis Nandy
3: Environmentalist Sunita Narain
4: Economist-Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen
5: Journalist author Fareed Zakaria
6: Novelist Salman Rushdie
7: San Diego-based neuroscientist VS Ramachandran
Pakistan: Lawyer-politician Aitzaz Ahsan
Bangladesh: Microfinance guru Mohammed Yunus
China has four.
Click here for the full list, to vote your selection or to add a candidate.
Newsweek International Editor Fareed Zakaria, who has written a new book, The Post-American World, on the future of the Muslim world, whether American kids are decadent, and what the United States can learn from the Swiss. From 02138 magazine:
Q:You are responsible for covering the entire globe. How do you prioritize?
A: The most important thing is the column. What subject should I choose? Do I have anything value-added to say about it? How do I report on it properly? Who do I call? What should I read?
All these things feed into each other. When we are deciding the cover for Newsweek International, it’s like having meetings with an intelligence agency. There are all these people around the world saying, ‘This is what’s interesting.’ So then we decide what the most interesting is.
But I also step back, every now and then, and consider: If I were to write a book, what are the broad themes here? Is there a big story people are missing?
More:
In the New York Times Book Review, Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International. reviews “Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West,” by Benazir Bhutto.
Picture the moment. It is Dec. 2, 1988. A beautiful woman, 35 years old, walks into the presidential palace in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, flanked by liveried and turbaned honor guards. She is wearing a green silk tunic and a white gauzy shawl that barely covers her hair. She speaks flawless Urdu and English, her English perfected as an undergraduate at Radcliffe and then as a student at Oxford, where she was president of the Oxford Union. She is intelligent, erudite and intensely charismatic. And she is about to take the oath of office to become the first woman in history to lead a modern Muslim country.
The idea of Benazir Bhutto has always been more powerful than the reality.
More:
Previously on AW:
