RIVER OF LIFE, RIVER OF DEATH

Victor Mallet, moderated by Simon Denyer

Sunday, March 18, 6 pm | 60 RMB 

India is killing the Ganges, and the Ganges in turn is killing India. The waterway that has nourished more people than any on earth for three millennia is now so polluted with sewage and toxic waste that it has become a menace to human and animal health. In River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India's Future Victor Mallet traces the holy river from source to mouth, and from ancient times to the present day, to find that the battle to rescue what is arguably the world's most important river is far from lost. Victor delves into the religious, historical, and biological mysteries of the Ganges, and explains how Hindus can simultaneously revere and abuse their national river. Can they succeed in saving the river from catastrophe — or is it too late? Join Victor, in conversation with Simon Denyer, Washington Post Beijing Bureau Chief and author of Rogue Elephant: Harnessing the Power of India’s Unruly Democracy.

Victor Mallet is an author and journalist who has reported for three decades from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, first for Reuters and then for the Financial Times. From 2012 to 2016 he was based in New Delhi as the FT South Asia bureau chief, and is currently in Hong Kong as the FT Asia news editor. River of Life, River of Death – his new book on the Ganges – was published by Oxford University Press in October 2017. The Trouble with Tigers, his highly praised book on the south-east Asian industrial revolution and the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, was first published in 1999. He twice won the Society of Publishers in Asia award for opinion writing. In India, he was twice awarded the Ramnath Goenka foreign correspondent’s award for excellence in journalism – in 2012 for a feature about the rise of Narendra Modi, and in 2015 for a magazine cover story on the Ganges.

Simon Denyer is the Washington Post's China bureau chief, where his reporting has won several awards. He lived in India for more than seven years as bureau chief for the Washington Post and before that for Reuters. He is the author of Rogue Elephant: Harnessing the Power of India's Democracy and co-editor of Foreign Correspondent - Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia. He also served as president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of South Asia for two years.