Click to play videoNew Delhi: Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta is a man who wears many hats and juggles many roles. He has closely observed and written about Indian politics and education for more than twenty years now.
On Sunday, Mehta won the Infosys Prize 2011 for Political Science & International Relations.
Some time back, when CNN-IBN caught up with him, he had said he was going through some sort of a professional identity crisis.
Explaining, Mehta said, "Well, I'm trying to juggle three roles. The first as Director of a think tank called Centre for Policy Research. The second as a researcher whose work could pass muster among his academic colleagues. And the third, as an observer and analyst of India's political scene."
After studying Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford and completing a doctorate in political science at Princeton, Mehta became the director at the Centre for Policy Research New Delhi. It soon became a place where India's best academics would converge and work.
Centre for Policy Research is an internationally well-known think tank. However, a layperson may not know what a think tank does.
Explaining, the Infosys winner answered, "International relations and strategic studies have always been very big. We have some of India's best known names like Raja Mohan, Shyam Saran, Srinath Raghavan. We have a wonderful programme on urbanization which we think is one of the major challenges of the future… A top class programme in environmental law and climate change issues... A set of people working on constitutionalism, law and regulation."
However, Dr Mehta never gave up on political thought, his first love. His op-ed columns for Indian newspapers were sharp, incisive and ruthlessly critical of government policies. When that wasn't enough, he took to publishing books, all grappling with two basic issues - justice and fairness.
Said Dr Mehta, "Thinking about what justice and fairness means in a diverse society like India… And also thinking about how we can make our democratic practice approximate that ideal of justice... more closely..."
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