An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself, said French-Algerian writer-philosopher Albert Camus; turns out that someone is keeping track of intellectuals too.

The latest issue of the influential Foreign Policy magazine has identified the world’s Top 100 “public intellectuals”, in its second such exercise, awarding America – and the United States – with more cerebral heft than any other continent or country.

India comes out shining too. Besides familiar names such as Al Gore, Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Umberto Eco, Lee Kuan Yew, the list has some half-dozen Indians: historian Ramachandra Guha, political psychologist Ashis Nandy, and environmentalist Sunita Narain, all of whom live in India, among them.

Four other Indians based outside India also make the list:

Economist-Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, journalist author Fareed Zakaria, novelist Salman Rushdie, and San Diego-based neuroscientist V S Ramachandran.

Neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh have one name each in the Top 100 – lawyer-politician Aitzaz Ahsan and microfinance guru Mohammed Yunus, while China has four.

Unmindful of the gibe by a former US vice-president Sprio Agnew that an intellectual is a man who doesn’t know how to park a bike, Foreign Policy has parked for more than a third (36) of the worlds Top 100 eggheads in North America, most of them in the US.

Among them are two New York Times columnists, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. For the record, Agnew, who coined several alliterative excesses such as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history,” resigned from the vice-presidency following charges of tax evasion and money laundering.