2008 Program Tracks

Sponsored by July 3 - July 6

With its rapidly growing and diverse population, dazzling entrepreneurship, enhanced geopolitical influence, and vigorous democracy, India is a country - indeed, a civilization - to be reckoned with as never before.  It also faces huge challenges, including widespread extreme poverty and illiteracy, tense relations with Pakistan, emerging internal threats to its democracy, dramatic social and economic inequities, energy shortages, corruption, and more.  This track will explore the Indian mosaic in all of its paradoxes, mysteries, obstacles, and possibilities, with discussions of politics, economics, foreign policy, art and culture, and domestic challenges ranging from maintaining a secular democracy amidst such religious diversity to poverty eradication and the presistence of caste.