With David Barsamian and Saroj Giri

Free and Open to the Public

What's really going on in South Asia? Why is the United States's involvement rapidly escalating? Though the Obama administration uses different rhetoric, it seems to be continuing the Bush strategies on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, doubling troop strength and greatly expanding attacks on Pakistan that increasingly destabilize that impoverished country. Potentially far more reaching than the US-Afghan-Pakistan conflict, the entire sub-continent is undergoing radical ecological, economic, social and religious transformation. Revolutionary and resistence movements are growing in a region inhabited by one-quarter of the world's population and the impact of these upheavals is likely to run deep into the fabric of the neighboring societies of the Middle East and create tremors in the world at large.

David Barsamian is the award-winning founder and director of Alternative Radio, the independent weekly series based in Boulder, Colorado. His books include Targeting Iran, and What We Say Goes with Noam Chomsky; Speaking of Empire & Resistance with Tariq Ali; and Original Zinn with Howard Zinn. His earlier books include The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile with Arundhati Roy; Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire and The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting. Barsamian lectures around the world. He is winner of numerous awards including the ACLU's Upton Sinclair Award for Independent Journalism and the Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. In December 2007 he delivered the prestigious Eqbal Ahmad lectures in Pakistan in Karachi, Islamabad, and Lahore.

Saroj Giri is lecturer in the department of political science at the University of Delhi. He has written on the Maoist movement in India and Nepal, the anti-globalisation movement, radical theory, ecological marxism, and the question of religious identity in India. He has been associated with the Naxalite movement in India since his student days.

Last updated: 2009-05-30 04:54:16