Details of the Chevening Gurukul Programme public lectures are listed below:
2010 lecture
Superpower? The Amazing Race Between China's Hare and India's Tortoise
Speaker: Raghav Bahl
Chair: Dr Howard Machin
Date: Monday 15 November 2010, 6.30pm
Location: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
After decades working with foreign investors, multinationals, and his own native government, Raghav Bahl knows that most of the world underestimates and largely misunderstands India and its potential in the global economy, particularly when set against its neighbor and economic powerhouse China. In his new book Superpower? he takes a close look at who is likely to dominate the world over the next decade - India or China - and provides an incisive and in-depth analysis about the race to superpower status between the two Asian giants. Bahl argues that it might come down to just one deciding factor: can India fix its governance before China repairs its politics? The key question is whether China so far ahead that India can never catch up?
Known as "the Rupert Murdoch of India," Raghav Bahl is the founder, controlling shareholder and managing director of Network 18, India's largest television news and business network, which broadcasts content from CNN and CNBC, and publishes Forbes India.
A podcast of this event is available to download from the LSE public lectures and events podcasts channel|.
2009 lecture
India and the US in the age of global warming
Speaker: Edward Luce
Chair: Creon Butler
Date: Tuesday 3 November 2009, 6.30pm
Location: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Looking back at the elections in India and the USA over the last twelve months, Edward Luce will explore the shared challenges and opportunities facing these two countries in an age of globalisation.
Edward Luce is Washington Bureau Chief of the Financial Times and author of In Spite of the Gods: the strange rise of modern India.
Creon Butler works for HM Treasury as Senior Adviser in the International and Finance Directorate. He was the British Deputy High Commissioner in Delhi from 2006 to 2009.
The audio podcast and video recording of this lecture are now available online|.
2008 lecture
The Last Mughal
Speaker: William Dalrymple
Date: Thursday 23 October 2008, 6.30pm
Location: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
William Dalrymple explores the lessons for leadership in Britain and India to be drawn from brutal upheaval and repression of 1857.
William Dalrymple, born in Scotland, wrote the highly acclaimed bestseller In Xanadu when he was twenty-two. In 1989, Dalrymple moved to Delhi where he lived for six years researching his second book, City of Djinns, which won the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year award. From the Holy Mountain, his acclaimed study of the demise of Christianity in its Middle Eastern homeland, was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award for 1997. A collection of his writings about India, The Age of Kali, won the French Prix D'Astrolabe in 2005.
White Mughals was published in 2003. The book won the Wolfson Prize for History 2003 and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize. William Dalrymple is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society, and is the founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
2007 lecture
Global Welfare Economics and the World Distribution of Income
Speaker: Professor Sir Tony Atkinson
Chair: Professor Lord Meghnad Desai
Date: Tuesday 30 October 2007, 6.30pm
Location: Hong Kong Theatre, Clement House
Global justice is a widely held political aim, but much economic policy advice remains rooted in a largely national welfare economics. The first part of the lecture explores some of the implications of adopting (or returning to) a global approach to welfare economics. It argues specifically that consideration of world inequality should cause us to re-examine the key concepts underlying the welfare approach to the measurement of income inequality and the inter-relation between the measurement of inequality and the measurement of poverty. The extent of global income differences means that we cannot simply carry over the methods used at a national level, and we need to take account of absolute and not just relative differences.
The second part of the lecture examines the long-run evolution of the world distribution of income, highlighting the conceptual issues evoked in the first part and the statistical issues of measuring inequality and poverty. The latter obscure the picture, but we can still draw conclusions. In particular, we can throw light on the role of the rich - whether the aristocrats or wealthy settlers of the past, or the global entrepreneurs of today.
Changes in today's income distribution, within and across countries, raise many policy questions. Notably, we have to consider the global redistribution necessary to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The third part of the lecture investigates the roles of global taxation and of private philanthropy - and their inter-relation.
Professor Sir Tony Atkinson is one of the world's most influential political economists. He was previously Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge and Chairman of the Suntory Toyota International Centre at the London School of Economics. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has served on the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, the Pension Law Review Committee, and the Commission on Social Justice. He is the author of numerous books on the economics poverty, income inequalities and the welfare state.
2006 lecture
The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change
Speaker: Sir Nicholas Stern
Chair: Lord Meghnad Desai
Date: Tuesday 7 November 2006, 6.30pm
Location: Old Theatre, Old Building
There is now clear scientific evidence that emissions from human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels for energy, are causing changes to the earth's climate. A sound understanding of the economics of climate change is a crucial underpinning to an effective global response to this challenge.
Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the UK Government Economic Service and former World Bank Chief Economist, recently published his Review of the Economics of Climate Change following its commissioning by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in July 2005.