Between Hope and Despair

Rajeev Bhargava was born in 1954 and educated in Delhi and Oxford. He is currently an honorary fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi) and the director of its Parekh Institute of Indian Thought. He was also the centre's director from 27 to 214. He has taught at the University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi). Bhargava has lectured, taught and held visiting professorship at several universities. He has been a fellow at Harvard University (Massachusetts, US), University of Bristol (UK), Institute of Advanced Studies (Jerusalem), Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin) and the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna). He has also been a Distinguished Resident Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Columbia University (New York), and the Asia Chair of Sciences Po (Paris), and between 215 and 217, a Berggruen fellow at Stanford (California), Tsinghua (Beijing) and New York Universities. Between 214 and 218, he was a professorial fellow at the Institute of Social Justice, ACU (Sydney). In 222, he was a senior research fellow at the University of Leipzig (Germany). He is currently an honorary fellow at Balliol College, Oxford (UK). Bhargava's work on individualism and secularism is internationally acclaimed. His publications include Individualism in Social Science (1992), What Is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (21) and The Promise of India's Secular Democracy (21). His edited works include Secularism and Its Critics (1998), Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution (28) and Politics, Ethics and the Self: Re-reading Hind Swaraj (222). Bhargava comes into his own when he is in the classroom. Lately, by contributing regularly for The Hindu, he has also become more publicly engaged. He lives in Delhi with his wife, Tani, who will soon publish her first novel. They have two daughters: Aranyani, a Bharatnatyam dancer, and Vanya, an intellectual historian.