Ashis Nandy is a political psychologist and sociologist of science who has worked on cultures of knowledge, visions, and dialogue of civilizations. Professor Nandy was born in Bhagalpur, Bihar in 1937. When he was 10, British India was partitioned into two separate nations of India and Pakistan. He witnessed the succession of conflicts and atrocities that followed. This experience became the foundation on which his identity was formed. At university, he read sociology, but after joining the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, his interest tended increasingly towards clinical psychology. While working there, he developed his own unique methodology by integrating clinical psychology and sociology. Nandy has co-authored a number of human rights reports and is active in movements for peace, alternative sciences and technologies, and cultural survival.

He is a member of the Executive Councils of the World Future Studies Federation, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the International Network for Cultural Alternatives to Development, and the People's Union for Civil Liberties. Nandy has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at the Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., a Charles Wallace Fellow at the University of Hull, and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh. He held the first UNESCO Chair at the Center for European Studies, University of Trier, in 1994. At present he is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies and Chairperson of the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, both located in Delhi. He received the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2007.

Day and hour of the speech