Home » amartya sen
Friday, April 30, 2010 By

Lee Kuan Yew, Manmohan Singh, Amartya Sen, Sachin Tendulkar among world’s most influential people: Time

Lee_kuan_yew1 Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew is on the 2010 Time 100 List — not as a leader but as a thinker."There is no better strategic thinker in the world today," says former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Time  entry on him. Wow!

Asians who make the Time list as leaders are Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatayama, United Arab Emirates President and ruler of Dubai Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Baidu founder Robin Li, Acer Group chairman JT Wang and Bo Xilai, boss of the city of Chongqing in China.

On the Time list of thinkers are the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen and social worker Sanjit "Bunker" Roy, both from India.

Among other Indians on the list are cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, writer Chetan Bhagat, eye surgeon Perumalsamy Namperumalsamy and Dr Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. Here's the full list with links to Time entries on these movers and shakers.

Continue Reading

Filed Under: World Today Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Thursday, November 5, 2009 By

Tharman: Once upon a time in the West…

Tharman_N509 Singapore Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam knows his history.

While praising the "uniqueness" of Indian democracy, he defended the East Asian model by pointing out that democracy used to be limited in Britain and America too.

"It was not until 1930 that Britain got Universal Suffrage. The US did not get Universal Suffrage until 1965," he said.

He was referring to the 1965 Voting Rights Act which made it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote after the 1964 Civil Rights Act ended racial discrimination.

Britain gave the vote to women from the age of 21 only in 1928. Only older women, from the age of 30, had been allowed to vote in Britain since 1918. 

Mr Tharman recalled: "In Britain, before the Reform Act of 1832, only 1.8 per cent of the adults had the vote. After that Act, 2.7 per cent got the vote. After the Second Reform Act of 1884, 12.1 per cent got the vote."

But while democracy was limited, there was stability, economic growth and the middle class grew, he said.

Neatly, from there, he segued to the East Asian model. "A group of men (usually men) centralised power, planned in the long term interests of the country and executed those plans quite smoothly. Some of these countries did not hold elections…

"But, on the whole, the countries progressed. People received education, were empowered, the infrastructure developed, the economies grew steadily."

Continue Reading

Filed Under: India, Singapore Tagged With: , , , , ,
Monday, July 14, 2008 By

Online power of Muslims

The top 10 intellectuals in the world today are all Muslims, according to a poll conducted by Britain’s Prospect magazine and the US Foreign Policy magazine. Now Prospect has come out with the inside story. Muslims swamped the online poll which attracted more than half a million voters.

Prospect says the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and the Russian chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov were the early frontrunners before former US vice-president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore moved into pole position. But then about a week into the poll in May, Turkish Sufi cleric and religious leader Fethullah Gulen swept into the lead — and stayed there, emerging as the winner.

Prospect says Gulen forged into the lead after Turkey’s highest-selling newspaper Zaman (circulation 700,000 plus) carried a front-page report urging readers to vote for him. Votes also poured in for other Muslim intellectuals. Each voter could pick five names from the 100 intellectuals on the list who included Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. He ranked 74th in the poll.

What the poll showed, says Prospect, is:

The power of connectivity in the Muslim world, especially its more liberal parts.

It adds:

Turkey now boasts almost three million Facebook users, more than any country apart from the US, Britain and Canada.

Farsi, the most widely spoken language in Iran, is by some counts the fourth most popular language in the world for blogs.

Prospect says:

Press stories featuring specific candidates in Indonesia, Canada, India and Spain had little impact. (Indonesian political scientist Anies Baswedan was 60th.)

It adds:

The dog that didn’t bark this time was China—the five Chinese names on our list ended up mid-tablers at best.

Top 20

Here is the list of the top 20 intellectuals, according to the poll. I am publishing the top 20 because they include Indians. (Naturally.) The figures in brackets show how the same intellectuals ranked in the previous poll, in 2005.

1 Fethullah Gülen (*) Scholar, cleric, religious leader, Turkey
2 Muhammad Yunus (*) Economist, Bangladesh
3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (56) Scholar, preacher, Egypt
4 Orhan Pamuk (54) Writer, Turkey
5 Aitzaz Ahsan (*) Lawyer, Pakistan
6 Amr Khaled (*) Preacher, Egypt
7 Abdolkarim Soroush (15) Philosopher, Iran
8 Tariq Ramadan (58) Theologian, Switzerland
9 Mahmood Mamdani (*) Anthropologist, political scientist, Uganda
10 Shirin Ebadi (12) Lawyer, human rights activist, Iran
11 Noam Chomsky (1) Linguist, political activist, USA
12 Al Gore (*) Politician, environmentalist, USA
13 Bernard Lewis (34) Historian, Orientalist, political commentator, UK
14 Umberto Eco (2) Writer, Italy
15 Ayaan Hirsi Ali (* ) Feminist, Netherlands
16 Amartya Sen (8) Economist, India
17 Fareed Zakaria (35) Political commentator, USA
18 Garry Kasparov (*)  Chess grandmaster, Russia
19 Richard Dawkins (3) Scientist, writer, UK
20 Mario Vargas Llosa (29) Writer, Peru

Prospect has the full list here.

Other highlights

Salman Rushdie was the top writer among those writing in English. He ranked 23rd, down from 10th place in 2005.
Former Czech president and playwright Vaclav Havel was 25th, down from fourth.
British writer Christopher Hitchens was 27th, down from fifth.
American political scientist Samuel Huntington was 28th, same as last time.
American economist and New York Times columnist Paul Paul Krugman was 30th, down from sixth.
American scientist and writer Jared Diamond was 31st, down from ninth.
Pope Benedict XVI ranked 32nd, down from 17th.
Economist Fan Gang was the highest-ranking Chinese at 33rd, up from 82nd.
American political scientist Francis Fukuyama was 43rd, down from 21st.
Indian political commentator Ramachandra Guha was a newcomer at 44th.
American economist Steven Levitt was another newcomer at 46th.
American economist Jeffrey Sachs was 47th, down from 27th.
Indian scientist VS Ramachandran was a newcomer at 50th.
American blogger and law professor Lawrence Lessig was 52nd, down from 40th.
South African writer JM Coetzee was 53rd, down from 44th.
Indian environmentalist Sunita Narain and Indian political scientist Ashis Nandy were both newcomers in 59th and 64th position respectively.
British historian Niall Ferguson was 62nd, down from 45th.
American General David Petraeus was another newcomer at 65th.

Filed Under: World Today Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
Monday, May 5, 2008 By

Vote for Lee Kuan Yew the thinker

lee_kuan_yew_12-1 Is Lee Kuan Yew one of the foremost thinkers of our time? He is among the top 100 public intellectuals listed by Foreign Policy magazine. It is asking people to choose the world's five foremost thinkers.

So here's a chance to vote for Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore. Will he snort in derision at the words,"intellectual", "thinker"? Hurry, anything to make the old man harrumph! Voting closes on May 15.

I will be most surprised if he does not make the list of the top 20 public intellectuals, based on the people's votes, whose names will be published in the magazine's July-August issue. The only other Southeast Asian on the  top 100 list is the Indonesian political analyst Anies Baswedan.

On the other hand, India alone has five:

  • Economist Amartya Sen
  • Political psychologist Ashis Nandy
  • Historian Ramachandra Guha
  • Environmentalist Sunita Narain
  • Neuroscientist VS Ramachandran

And that's not counting writer Salman Rushdie, who is listed as a Briton, and journalist Fareed Zakaria, who is listed as an American.

Among other notables also on the list are

  • Al Gore (US)
  • Pope Benedict XVI (Germany/Vatican)
  • Writer Ian Buruma (Britain, Netherlands)
  • Linguist/radical Noam Chomsky (US)
  • Novelist JM Coetzee (South Africa)
  • Biologist and writer Richard Dawkins (Britain)
  • Biologist and historian Jared Diamond (US)
  • Economist William Easterly (US)
  • Writer Umberto Eco (Italy)
  • Historian Niall Ferguson (Britain)
  • Journalist Thomas Friedman (US)
  • Historian Francis Fukuyama (US)
  • Writer William Gladwell (US)
  • Novelist Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
  • Political scientist Robert Putman (US)
  • Statesman/playwright Vaclav Havel (Czech Republic)
  • Journalist Christopher Hitchens (US)
  • Political scientist Samuel Huntington (US)
  • Political commentator Robert Kagan
  • Economist and columnist Paul Krugman (US)
  • Legal scholar and blogger Lawrence Lessig
  • Economist and blogger Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame (US)
  • Military strategist David Petraeus
  • Linguist Steven Pinker (Canada/US)
  • Political scientist Robert Putnam (US)
  • Economist Michael Spence (US)
  • Writer Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
  • Economist Jeffrey Sachs (US)
  • Economist Lawrence Summers (US)
  • Writer Mario Vargos Llosa (Peru)
  • Journalist Martin Wolf (Britain)
  • Economist Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh)

This is an incomplete list. I have included only names familiar to me.

I bet Lee Kuan Yew is laughing at the fact that the list does not include some of his eminent contemporaries such as… William Safire! And where is Joseph Stiglitz? George Monbiot? And if Al Gore can make the list, it's dumb to leave out Bill Clinton.  

Filed Under: World Today Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
%d bloggers like this: