The Age of the Fusionista, The New Geography of Bright Ideas and Rise of Gandhian Engineering

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

(Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts)

BIO

Anand Giridharadas is a columnist for the New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune. Their first Bombay-based correspondent in the modern era, beginning in 2005, he reported for four years on India’s transformation, Bollywood, corporate takeovers, terrorism, outsourcing, poverty and democracy. Giridharadas was appointed a columnist in 2008, writing the “Letter from India” series, and now pens the twice-monthly column, “Currents,” on new ideas, global culture and the social implications of technology. He is among the newspaper’s youngest columnists to date.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to parents from Bombay, Giridharadas has also lived in Paris and outside Washington, DC. He studied the history of political thought at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. He first interned for The New York Times at age 17, writing two articles on money and politics. After college, in 2003, Giridharadas moved to Bombay to work as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company, where he advised the local government on urban development; a pharmaceutical company on organizational redesign and leadership development; and Indian and Chinese businesses on their internationalization strategies.

Giridharadas has appeared regularly on television and radio in the US and internationally, including CNN and NPR, and has lectured at Harvard, Brown, the University of Michigan, Google and the Young Presidents Organization, as well as been a panelist and moderator at several conferences. He has won awards for his opinion writing from the Society of Publishers in Asia; for business reporting from the South Asian Journalists Association; and for promoting cross-cultural understanding from the Indo-American Society.

Giridharadas’s first book, entitled India Calling, a work of narrative nonfiction about his return to the India his parents left, is due out in early 2011.