Vikram Seth participated in this discussion as the 2012-2013 Una's Lecturer at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Seth is a poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, and memoirist. His acclaimed first novel, "The Golden Gate," is written entirely in Onegin stanzas after the style of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. His 1474-page novel "A Suitable Boy," an epic of Indian life set in the 1950s, won both the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Sponsored by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu

Meet the students who have helped make UC Berkeleys "Global Poverty & Practice" program the fastest-growing minor on campus. Chosen by about 300 students from a wide range of disciplines, the program teaches students about the problem of poverty and sends them out into the field to carry out their own projects to alleviate poverty somewhere in the world. Enrollment in the program's introductory course has shot up from 200 students when it was introduced in 2007, to a capacity enrollment of 724 this semester. Offered by the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Global Poverty and Practice minor now has students doing service projects in more than 30 different countries. (5:48 minute video produced by Roxanne Makasdjian, Media Relations) This video is broadcast on television on UCTV, as part of the "State of Minds" program: http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=17089# Links to more stories on the Blum Center and the Global Poverty and Practice program: Fighting global poverty is fastest-growing minor http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/03/10_poverty.shtml ...