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Girish Karnad was Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. He has served as Director of the Film and Television Institute of India, Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (the National Academy of the Performing Arts) and Director of the Nehru Centre, London (the cultural wing of the High Commission of India). He was Visiting Professor and Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. He has been elected Fellow of the Sangeet natak Akademi, and has received the Sahitya Akademi, and has received the Sahitya Akademi award as well as the Jnanpith, India's highest distinctions for lifetime contribution to literature and the arts. He has been decorated with the Padma Bhushan. His career as a dramatist has been paralleled by an equally celebrated career as actor, screenwriter and diretor of film and television, through which he played a pivotal role in the Indian Parallel Cinema movement from the 1970s to 1990s.