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Sunita Narain with Sen, Bhagwati among top intellectual nominees
Indo-Asian News Service

London, Oct 3 (IANS) An opinion poll to select five names from a list of the world's leading 100 contemporary public intellectuals has Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati along with Salman Rushdie and Sunita Narain among the nominees.

The readers' opinion poll, published by British magazine Prospect and American journal Foreign Policy, closes Oct 10 and results will be declared in November.

The list has been offered as indicative and readers are invited to nominate their own candidates as well.

Indians or people of Indian origin on the list include US-based economist Jagdish Bhagwati, Singapore-based diplomat and author Kishore Mahbubani, New Delhi-based environmentalist Sunita Narain, novelist Salman Rushdie, Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen and Newsweek international editor Fareed Zakaria.

Prospect and Foreign Policy define a public intellectual as "someone who has shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it".

"This list is about public influence, not intrinsic achievement. And that is where things get really tricky. Judging influence is hard enough inside one's own culture, but when you are peering across cultures and languages, the problem becomes far harder. Obviously our list of 100 has been influenced by where most of us sit, in the English-speaking West," their announcement notes.

The list is dominated by litterateurs, academics, scientists and experts on global affairs.

Two intellectuals who provided theoretical underpinning to US President George W. Bush' politics -- Samuel Huntington, author of "The Clash of Civilisations", and Francis Fukuyama of "End of History" - figure in the list.

So does sociologist Anthony Giddens, known to be close to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz competes with economists Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman and columnist Thomas Friedman.

The eclectic list also includes American linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky, Iran's human right activist Shirin Ibadi, feminist author Germaine Greer, biologists Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson, physicist Steven Weinberg, cognitive scientists Daniel C. Dennett and Steven Pinker and historian Eric Hobsbaum.

The world of letters is represented by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, Italian scholar-novelist Umberto Eco, US-based Chinese novelist Ha Jin, Czech playwright Václav Havel, Israeli novelist Amos Oz, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, Indonesian dissident and writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Nigerian activist and playwright Wole Soyinka, Peruvian novelist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa and Chinese Nobel winner Gao Xingjian.