The 3rd Bhattacharya Lecture on the “Future of India”
November 16, 2019
UC Berkeley
Speaker: Ravish Kumar, Writer, Journalist and Media Personality
Moderators: Pradeep Chhibber, Professor of Political Science and Indo-American Community Chair in India Studies, UC Berkeley; Abhishek Kaicker, Assistant Professor of History, UC Berkeley
The Institute for South Asia Studies is proud to announce the 3rd Bhattacharya Lectureship on the Future of India, a lecture series that asks leading thinkers—scholars, artists, activists, political, economic, and social leaders—to address the possibilities and challenges for India in the future. Our 3rd lecture in this series will be delivered by Indian Journalist and Ramon Magsaysay Award laureate, Ravish Kumar.
About the Speaker
Ravish Kumar is an Indian TV anchor, writer, journalist and media personality. He is the Managing Editor of NDTV India, the Hindi news channel of the NDTV news network, one of India’s leading TV networks. After NDTV launched its 24-hour Hindi-language news channel — NDTV India — targeting the country’s 422 million native speakers of Hindi, he was given his own daily show, “Prime Time.” As an anchor, Ravish is sober, incisive, and well-informed. He does not dominate his guests but affords them the chance to express themselves. He does not balk, however, at calling the highest officials to account or criticizing media and the state of public discourse in the country; for this reason, he has been harassed and threatened by rabid partisans of one kind or another.Ravish has been most vocal on insisting that the professional values of sober, balanced, fact-based reporting be upheld in practice.
In 2019, he was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award. In electing Ravish Kumar to receive the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognized, “his unfaltering commitment to a professional, ethical journalism of the highest standards; his moral courage in standing up for truth, integrity, and independence; and his principled belief that it is in giving full and respectful voice to the voiceless, in speaking truth bravely yet soberly to power, that journalism fulfills its noblest aims to advance democracy.”
Additionally, he has also received the prestigious Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Award for Hindi Journalism and Creative Literature for 2010 from the President of India (awarded in 2014), and has been twice conferred with the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for the Journalist of the Year in 2013 and 2017 for the broadcast category in Hindi language. He was included in the list of 100 most influential Indians 2016 by The Indian Express. He was named the best journalist of the year in 2016 by Mumbai Press Club. In March 2017, Kumar was honored with the first Kuldip Nayar journalism award for his contribution to the field of journalism.
Ravish Kumar is the author of The Free Voice – On Democracy, Culture and The Nation, A City Happens in Love (Ishq Mein Shahar Hona), Dekhate Rahiye, and Ravishpanti.
The Bhattacharya India Fund was established in Fall 2016 with a generous gift from Kimi and Shankar Bhattacharya, UC Berkeley alums and longtime supporters of Bangla Studies at Berkeley and of the ISAS. This new fund supports two critical programs, the annual Bhattacharya Lectureship on the Future of India, and the Bhattacharya Graduate Fellowship. The Lectureship asks leading thinkers—scholars, artists, activists, political, economic, and social leaders—to address the possibilities and challenges for India in the future. The competitive Fellowship enables us to support the best graduate student research in India by providing funding to UC Berkeley graduate students to undertake research travel to India (two awards of $1000 each) or domestic conference travel for presentations on topics related to contemporary India (four awards of $500 each).
