Letter from the Director
This has been a year of firsts for the Harvard South Asia Institute.
This has been a year of firsts for the Harvard South Asia Institute.
SAI welcomes submissions for its summer blog from Harvard students, faculty, alumni, and affiliates on an array of topics pertaining to South Asia.
At SAI’s Annual Symposium on May 6, a panel discussion moderated by Homi Bhabha, with Deepa Mehta, Adil Najam, and Michael Sandel addressed questions of democracy across the world.
SAI spoke to several graduating students who have been involved with SAI during their time at Harvard.
On May 15, poets from around New England interpreted the idea of “environment” through poems in Hindi, Bengali, Kashmiri, Urdu, Koshali, Gujarati, Nepali, and more South Asian languages.
How have liberal freedoms (such as freedom of expression, religious practice, and association) been managed in democracies across the world? At SAI’s Symposium on May 6, a panel facilitated by Ashutosh Varshney, Brown University, addressed this question and more.
What should a school of education in Pakistan look like? On May 6, SAI hosted a roundtable discussion at Harvard to address this question with scholars, administrators, and leaders in the field of education from across the US and Pakistan.
“Nepal’s constitution is a milestone, and it’s a living document that should be taken to the people for broader engagement,” said Alaina B. Teplitz, US Ambassador to Nepal, at a recent meeting in Kathmandu of the Harvard Alumni Group in Nepal.
The student venture, which provides low-cost refrigerated transport to food producers in India, have won the grand prize of $40,000.
On March 24, SAI hosted a panel discussion in collaboration with the “Megacities Asia” exhibition on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
On March 15, SAI hosted a meeting of the Boston Water Group. The discussion focused on the Delhi water crisis and how similar infrastructure vulnerabilities exist across many cities, including Boston.
At the recent meeting of the Harvard Alumni Group of Nepal, Bhojraj Pokharel, the former Chief Election Commissioner of Nepal, discussed lessons from Myanmar’s democratic evolution.