Welcome Address and Opening Remarks
Lt. Gen. V.R. Raghavan (Retd.), President, Centre for Security
Analysis
On behalf of the Centre for Security Analysis, I welcome
our two distinguished speakers of the day, Mr. Akram Elias
from the United States and Dr. Rowena Robinson, Indian Institute
of Technology, Mumbai. I also welcome Mr. David Hopper,
Consul General of the United States in Chennai. I also wish
to extend a warm welcome to our guests.
We
have chosen the subject Religion, Civil Society and Governance
- Mr. Akram Elias speaks on the American experience and
Dr. Rowena Robinson speaks on the Indian experience - and
we hope to cover the convergences and the challenges which
these two great nations face, sharing as they do, a huge
corpus of interests such as liberal societies, law courts
and fair elections.
Let
me quickly introduce our principal speakers. Mr. Akram Elias
has a great deal of professional experience in the particular
areas of cross cultural communication. That is a fascinating
arena and we really look forward to finding out how the
US society is dealing with it and what are the challenges
it faces. A man of many talents, he is fluent in Arabic
and French and is also into film making. His effort with
Richard Dreyfus, the Academy Award winning actor on the
film called Mr. Dreyfus Goes to Washington has won a number
of prestigious awards. He has been extensively speaking
on the subject of building civil society. In the Centre
for Security Analysis, as very kindly mentioned and emphasized
by the Consul General, we look at security as more than
merely the military dimension - there are societal, economic,
political and environmental dimensions of security. Indeed
we have produced a document called Public Perceptions of
Security which is based on a survey that we did at considerable
cost in four metropolitan cities and eight smaller metros
and it is a remarkable insight as to how the Indian citizen
- at least the urban citizen - looks at what is meant by
security. It has received tremendous appreciation all the
way from the top of the government to different levels.
Dr.
Rowena Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department
of Humanities and Social Sciences at the IIT Bombay. She
has a Doctoral degree in Social Anthropology from Trinity
College, Cambridge. She was also a Ford Foundation Fellow
at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and worked at Prince
University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author
of five books and it is remarkable that she won the first
M.N. Srinivas Memorial Prize for the best article by a young
sociologist published in an English language journal in
India in the preceding two years.
Before
we continue with the lectures of the day, I invite Mr. David
Hopper, Consul General of the United States in Chennai to
say a few words.
