Turning diplomatic experience into chronicles

Diplomat Venu Rajamony will deliver the keynote address of the Mysuru Literature Festival 2020, hosted by Mysuru Literary Forum and Charitable Trust and Mysuru Book Clubs - 2015, on the seventh day on Friday.

He will speak online, on ‘Turning Diplomatic Experience into Chronicles’, from the Netherlands, while co-founder and director of Takshashila Institution Nitin Pai will be the moderator.

The festival, virtual due to the Covid-19 crisis, the fourth edition since 2017, is being held on weekends from August 14 to September 5.

Venu Rajamony, a topper of the 1986 batch of Indian Foreign Service, served as a journalist for a couple of years earlier, for a national daily from Kochi in Kerala. With a MA (International Studies) degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (1983), he went on to do Bachelor of Law (LLB), from Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala (1986).

With a 34-year career in diplomacy and international affairs, Venu Rajamony has extensive experience in government relations, advocacy, communication, media relations, and outreach to corporates, civil society and the public. He has lived and worked in India, the US, Europe, China and UAE.

Venu Rajamony is currently the Ambassador of India to the Kingdom of The Netherlands (since June 8, 2017). He is the Permanent Representative of India to the Organisation for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and is also responsible for India’s relations with the International Court of Justice, the Permanent Court of Arbitration and other legal institutions in The Hague.

He has authored three books — ‘India and the Netherlands – Past, Present and Future’; ‘What We Can Learn From The Dutch -- Rebuilding Kerala Post Floods of 2018’; and ‘India and the UAE – In celebration of a legendary friendship’.

Venu Rajamony monograph ‘India-China-US: A Soft Balance of Power System in the Making’ is widely cited. He is passionate about social impact and is eager to contribute to make the world a better place for the disadvantaged and underprivileged.

Nitin Pai is the co-founder and director of Takshashila Institution, a centre for research and education in public policy. His current research includes geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific; defence economics and the politics of radically networked societies.

Nitin Pai teaches international relations and public policy for Takshashila’s graduate programmes. His columns appear regularly in various national daily newspapers and portals. He is the co-editor of ‘India’s Marathon – Reshaping the Post-Pandemic World Order’, a collection of essays by some of India’s next generation scholars.

He is a gold medalist from the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, an undergraduate scholar at Nanyang Technological University, and an alum of National College, Bengaluru.

Before founding Takshashila, he spent over a decade with the Singapore government, as a policymaker in the technology sector.

Register at: http://www.mysuruliteraturefestival.com/registration/

Watch on YouTube at: www.youtube.com/c/MysuruLiteratureFestival