Open Minds 2016: Soft Power

Rohan Narayana Murty: Classic Cool

He promotes scholarship and wears his privilege with a deep sense of responsibility

Open | 10 May, 2016

He wears his privilege with a deep sense of responsibility. An Ivy League polymath, NR Narayana Murthy’s son— and for a short while, his executive assistant at Infosys—is a passionate patron of scholarship. His dream of producing quality translations of India’s greatest classical works ran into rough weather earlier this year with the so-called custodians of our cultural heritage opposed to American Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock’s helming of the Murty Classical Library of India. Murty, however, stood like a rock by his editor, arguing against the politicisation of the ambitious project spanning two millennia of India’s multilingual literary history. That is the young Murty for you, upholding the values he believes in.

“Education is incomplete without knowledge of the humanities which inform us about the human condition. And contemplating the human condition gives our work a deeper, contextual and purposeful meaning”

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