It is easy to see why Barun Mitra, President of the Liberty Institute in New Delhi, India, won ISIL's 2004 Freedom Torch Award. Barun has been ever-present in the media of Asia, regularly contributing articles to influential news outlets such as The Asian Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.

     In the past year, the Institute also launched a summer camp at Satoli – high in the Himalayas – to introduce youths to English, computers, and the ideas of liberty. Barun was unable to attend the ISIL convention in New Zealand when the award was announced, so I used the occasion of my visit to India to officially present the medal to him.

     While visiting the Institute, I met a member of Barun's staff and browsed their extensive library of freedom literature. I was also hosted at Barun's home and met his captivating, brilliant wife, Madu – a lawyer who conducts official investigations into police integrity.

     It was my good fortune that Barun decided to incorporate The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey (JG) as part of his outreach program on economics education.

     This January, he released the new India English Commentary edition. A Bengali edition is scheduled for release in February – to be followed shortly by a Hindi edition. Other editions throughout South Asia are in the works.

     Partly with this purpose in mind, Barun introduced me to Subodh Kumar, Executive Director of the Asia branch office of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, which is affiliated with the Free Democratic Party of Germany. Subodh is working closely with Barun in funding numerous free-market projects.

     For the publication ceremony, Barun invited me to attend the public release of the latest JG at a Julian L. Simon Memorial Lecture in New Delhi.

      There is no place on earth where Julian Simon, a great hero of humanity and free-market economics, is so revered. So it was only appropriate that I should deliver my talk entitled, "Courage, Fear, and Immigration: The Importance of Welcoming Newcomers in a Free Economy." The Institute published a monograph of the presentation.

     A panel discussion followed, chaired by Dr. P. S. Rana, CMD of the Housing and Urban Development Corporation, the largest public-sector housing company. Dr. Rana agreed that from his experience, the claim that India cannot sustain a growing urban population was false. There is no shortage of land, only misguided policies that have restricted the availability of land for housing and development - all of which causes widespread congestion and the spread of slums. Others in attendance were Dr. Shubhashis Gangopadhyay of the India Development Foundation; Dr. Abusaleh Sharif, chief economist at the National Council for Applied Economics Research in New Delhi; Prof. Binod Khadria of the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Dr. Chetan Ghate of the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi.

     The rest of the week was filled with appearances on behalf of The Centre for Civil Society(CCS), a dynamic institute that is staffed by an army of young libertarian intellectuals. The society, under the brilliant leadership team of Parth Shah and his beautiful and articulate wife, Mana, has instituted numerous Liberty and Society Seminars to introduce free market ideas to youth throughout the country.

     Parth is partially a product of the libertarian milieu of Auburn University and the Mises Institute in Alabama. He later taught economics at the University of Michigan until he became a key player in the rapid market transformations that are occurring in India.

     Another of the many exciting projects CCS sponsors is their rapidly-growing film-festival competition. Jeevika offers financial awards in a search of documentaries that focus on legal and regulatory restrictions or bureaucratic extortion and harassment that prevent people from earning an honest living in the vocation of their choice. It is a spectacular event which turns the media into an effective tool of promoting free markets.

     On three occasions I was invited to deliver my talk on immigration to three top universities in New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Delhi School of Economics, and the Indian Institute of Mass Communication. On each occasion, students and faculty engaged in a very l ively follow-up discussion, again focused largely on the influx of immigrants from Bangladesh. It is interesting that Bangladeshi's inspire many of the same fears in India that Indian immigrants inspire among Americans.

     A very lively discussion followed my talk, "Ethics of Liberty," at the home of Parth and Mana Shah, adjoining CCS. Their living room was packed with CCS staff, students from their liberty seminars, and other good friends whom I met at previous ISIL conventions, notably Ashish and Qiwi Gulhati and Stefan Metzeler. This was truly a libertarian heaven – roiling in the debate of the farthest reaches of free-market possibilities. It was the best intellectual fun a libertarian could imagine. My talks were published as monographs and are available through CCS.