Thursday, December 29, 2011

Dr. Amartya Sen on Reviving Nalanda University !!

As an Indian Nobel Prize winning economist, philosopher and humanitarian, Amartya Sen is an intellectual force who needs little introduction. As a young boy, he was influenced by the suffering he witnessed during the 1943 Bengal Famine and the India-Pakistan partition. Sen has influenced the creation of the United Nations' Human Development Index and he has deepened and expanded discourse in fields ranging from social choice and welfare economics to human rights and justice. Sen sounded the alarm about Asia’s more than 100 million missing women and his highly influential books, including Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, changed the way countries understand and prevent famine.

Now, Sen is spearheading the revival of the world's oldest university in Bihar, one of India's most impoverished states. Grounded in Buddhist teachings, Nalanda University offered subjects including astronomy, politics, medicine and fine arts. Nalanda housed more than 10,000 students from around the world before it was destroyed by Turkish Muslim invaders in 1197.

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What the ruins of the original Nalanda university tell us about an old civilization of India ?

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