Foreign affairs expert and award-winning author Mira Kamdar spoke on India-United States relations to a crowd of about 100 people at the Karl Anatol Center Thursday night.
Her lecture, entitled “Planet India: America’s Stake in India’s Future,” addressed the growing industrial, technological and economic power of India and the corresponding need to develop a profitable relationship with the U.S.
India is a “microcosm of our planet,” Kamdar said. “[Its problems] are not exclusive to India; they’re global.”
In her latest book, “Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World,” Kamdar discusses the span of India’s influence throughout the world today.
Kamdar said India contains all ethnicities, religions and people in all walks of life.
“[In India,] life takes place at every millennium,” Kamdar said.
She said India is experiencing three revolutions similar to what developed nations have gone through: the industrial, information technology and services revolutions. While the rest of the world was in a financial crisis last year, India doubled its amount of billionaires from 27 to 54.
According to Kamdar, the wealthy elite class represents 25 percent of India’s total gross domestic product. However, India also maintains 40 percent of the world’s malnourished children and 27 percent of the world’s poor.
Kamdar said the U.S. media has only approached India’s problems from a “one-dimensional economic view.” She also said that she seeks the “human perspective” in her studies.
“We know we have this problem — we want to be part of the solution,” Kamdar said of India.
Kamdar also said that to fix the world’s environmental problems, the U.S. needs to accept responsibility for the consequences of its own industrial revolution. India is “willing to cap pollution to three metric tons per person per year, but it is not going to sacrifice economic development,” she said.
The goal is to think of how we can build a world that is “both environmentally sustainable and socially equitable,” Kamdar said.
When one audience member asked what people can do to improve the situation now, Kamdar answered with a quote from Gandhi: “Earth has enough for every man’s need, not for every man’s greed.”
Kamdar also quoted a recent Bollywood movie: “No country is perfect; we must make it so.”
Kamdar also said Cal State Long Beach’s Yadunandan Center for India Studies is “very much evolving.”
“I’m happy to see things happening with the center and where it can go,” Kamdar said.
The new Beach Bollywood dance team preceded Kamdar’s lecture with a surprise performance to several songs from recent Bollywood movies.
Also, the interim director of the Yadunandan Center for India Studies, Bipasha Baruah, announced the D.R. SarDesai essay competition winner, Zackary Talbert.
This was the eighth lecture in the annual Uka and Nalini Solanki Foundation Lecture Series.
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