New India Foundation Fellows, Dinesh Sharma and Harish Damodaran, at Yale

The distinguished Indian journalists Dinesh C. Sharma and Harish Damodaran will be at Yale to deliver public lectures in the months of February and April respectively. Sharma�s lecture, entitled Indian Outsourcing Industry: Exploring Early Origins and Growth, will take place at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the 25th of February, and Damodaran�s lecture, Cast(e) in Capital: The Changing Ethnic Profile of India�s Business Class, on Wednesday, the 1st of April 2009. In addition to their public lecture, both Sharma and Damodaran will also participate in editorial workshops with student journalists from the Yale Globalist, and visit a South Asian Studies course being taught this term in Yale College on Elections and Indian Democracy.

Dinesh C. Sharma currently holds the post of Science Editor at Mail Today, a joint venture of the India Today Groupand the Daily Mail of the United Kingdom. Prior to that, he reported on science, technology and environment related issues for national and international media outlets for over two decades. His articles have been published in the Times of India, Hindustan Times, Bangkok Post, The Lancet, The Telegraph, Environmental Health Perspectives and online editions of The New York Times and Business Week. Sharma has had extensive experience with the television media, having worked with Television Eighteen and Asia Business News (ABNi), the business news channel of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. He also produced news capsules for �India Business Report�, the first Indian television show to be picked up by an international channel, in this case BBC World. In addition to his work in the print and television media, Sharma has also worked with a number of Internet news portals. He worked with the US based online news network Cnet News.com for two years, focusing particularly on the outsourcing of information technology services from the US and the backlash this provoked. He was also the founder of ConserveMedia.com, an online e-zine devoted to reporting the latest in developments within the fields of science, technology and environment in India. Sharma has won a number of awards in the course of his journalistic career. In 2006, he was presented the National Award for Outstanding Effort in Science and Technology Communication, instituted by the National Council for Science and Technology Communications for individuals who have made significant contributions to science and technology communication in India. In 2004, a feature article published in Grassroots, a journal on development issues, won him the PII-Hunger Project Award for Best Development Feature.

Harish Damodaran is currently Senior Assistant Editor at The Hindu Business Line, where he specializes in writing articles and op-ed pieces on agri-business and commodity exchange - a job which, besides involving tracking of price movements and harvest sizes of grains, oilseeds, pulses, sugar and dairy products, has given him ample opportunities to travel, observe, study and learn from people and things on the ground. Before joining The Hindu Business Line, he worked for more than 16 years as a reporter and editorial analyst with the Press Trust of India and The Hindu Business Line. Insights from field-level reportage over a sustained period have, in turn, helped in complementing his wider interest in macroeconomic policy, business and development issues, and also provide a more nuanced understanding of Indian society, history and politics. In 2000, Damodaran received the World Food Day Award, instituted by the United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization and the Indian Association for the Advancement of Science, in recognition of his work as a farm reporter.

Both Damodaran and Sharma have in the past been recipients of a twelve-month book-writing fellowship from the New India Foundation awarded to scholars and writers working on different aspects of the history of India after 1947. Damodaran was amongst the first cohort of fellows selected for the Fellowship in 2004. The resultant book, India�s New Capitalists: Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation-State, published in 2008 by Permanent Black and Palgrave MacMillan, is a work of economic history and contemporary sociology that traces the modern-day evolution of business communities in India and, for the first time, systematically documents the rise of new entrepreneurial groups with no established caste pedigree of trading or banking. Dinesh Sharma, who was awarded a New India Fellowship in 2005, is the author of The Long Revolution: The Birth and Growth of India�s IT Industry, a detailed and meticulously researched account of the computing and information technology industry spanning half-a-century. The book discusses the genesis of computers in India; how the initial IMB monopoly was broken; how the innovative use of communication technologies turned pigmy software of firms into billion dollar companies; the role of liberalization in the IT revolution; and finally, whether this miracle can be sustained in the future.

The New India Fellowships, that made both these works possible, are administered by the New India Foundation, Bangalore, and aim at addressing a serious lacuna in Indian social science scholarship � the near-absence of any significant original research on the history of Independent India, ignored by historians and other social scientists alike. The trustees of the New India Foundation are Ramachandra Guha, a historian and columnist based in Bangalore, and Nandan Nilekani, co-Chairman of Infosys Technologies Limited, and co-founder of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM). The trustees are assisted by a Board of Advisors, comprised of the sociologist Andre Beteille; Niraja Gopal Jayal, Professor of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi; Vijay Kelkar, who currently serves as the Chairman of the Finance Commission, with the rank of a Cabinet Minister in the Government of India; and N.Ravi, Editor of The Hindu, one of India�s largest national news dailies. The Foundation has awarded between four and six book-writing fellowships every year, since its inception in 2004, the duration of each being twelve months.