Outside Looking In: Eyes on India
Alex Traveli, Alyssa Ayres, James Crabtree, Max Rodenbeck and Prasenjit Basu with Nitin Pai
Alex Travelli
Bio
Alex Travelli is The Economist’s news editor in Asia and an India correspondent based in Delhi. As an editor he works on the European edition of Espresso, commissions articles from across Asia and manages the home-page of the website. As a correspondent he writes stories from around India, concentrating on political issues in the states. Prior to his posting to South Asia he was The Economist’s bureau chief in Hong Kong, having joined the company in New York in 2005.
Alyssa Ayres
Bio
Alyssa Ayres is senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her book about India’s rise, Our Time Has Come: How India Is Making Its Place in the World, was published by Oxford University Press in January and was selected by the Financial Times for its “Summer 2018: Politics” list. Ayres served as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia from 2010 to 2013, and her more than twenty-five years of experience in India and South Asia crosses the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. She has served as project director for two bipartisan task forces on U.S.-India relations, coedited three books on India and Indian foreign policy, and written a book about nationalism in Pakistan, Speaking Like a State, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009. She holds an AB from Harvard College and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago.
James Crabtree
Bio
James Crabtree is a writer, journalist and author living in Singapore. He is currently an associate professor of practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and a senior fellow at the school’s Centre on Asia and Globalisation. His first book, The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, was published in July 2018. At the Lee Kuan Yew School, James teaches courses on leadership and political communication, and researches the future of globalisation, including new regional connectivity projects in Asia, and in particular China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Prior to moving into academia, James worked for the Financial Times, latterly leading the newspapers coverage of Indian business as Mumbai bureau chief between 2011 and 2016, having previously worked on the opinion page in London, as Comment Editor. Before joining the FT, James was first managing editor and then deputy editor at Prospect , Britain’s leading monthly magazine of politics and idea.
He has also written for a range of other global publications, including the New York Times, Economist, Wired, and Foreign Policy. Prior to journalism, James was a senior policy advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
He also worked for various think tanks in London and Washington DC, and spent a number of years living in the United States, initially as a Fulbright Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Max Rodenbeck
Bio
Max Rodenbeck began writing for The Economist in 1989. Previous to his current role he was Middle East Bureau Chief from 2000 to 2015, covering the region from Morocco to Iran, and topics ranging from wars and revolutions to radical Islam, Arabic pop culture and the ancient art of distilling arak. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, his own book “Cairo: The City Victorious” has been published in eight languages.
Prasenjit Basu
Bio
Prasenjit K. Basu is the author of “Asia Reborn: A continent rises from the ravages of colonialism and war to a new dynamism” (Aleph, 2017) and co-author (with Brahma Chellaney, Parag Khanna and Sunil Khilnani) of “India as a new global leader” (Foreign Policy Centre, London, 2005).
He was Chief Economist for South-east Asia & India at Credit Suisse First Boston (5 years), Chief Asia Economist for Daiwa Securities (5 years), and has had shorter stints as Chief Economist at Khazanah Nasional (Malaysia), Global research head at Maybank group, Chief ASEAN economist and head of Malaysia research at Macquarie Securities, and Director of Asian Macroeconomics at UBS. He began his career at Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates in 1990 (becoming Director of their Asia Service in 1994), after obtaining Dual Master’s degrees in Public Administration and International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained a BA (Hons) in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, having schooled at St. Paul’s Darjeeling. He now runs an economics consultancy based in Singapore, and is an adjunct professor at ESSEC Asia-Pacific Business School.
PK Basu is a regular commentator on Asia’s economies and political affairs on the BBC World Service, CNBC-Asia, Channel News Asia, Zee Business, NDTV-Profit, BTVi, etc., and has written Op-Ed and Comment articles for the Financial Times, International New York Times, India Today, Business Times (Singapore), The Statesman, Asian Age and New Straits Times, and has been a columnist for The Edge (the leading SE Asian financial weekly), The Star (Malaysia) and IndiaSe. He is the President of Singapore’s India Club and Tagore Society.
Nitin Pai
Bio
Nitin Pai is a co-founder of Takshashila and a graduate of Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (National University of Singapore), Nanyang Technological University and National College, Bangalore. Nitin spent over a decade working in the Singapore government in various capacities, including deregulation, broadband infrastructure development and strategic technology foresight.