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Amartya Sen, Home in the World
August 11, 2021
Amartyada, says Omkar Goswami, thank you for being the humane, caring and socially concerned economist that you are.
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The Amartya Sen Lecture
'It is high time to jettison Amartya Sen'
Born in 1933, Amartya Sen is over 87 years old. At that age, most people of letters tend to relax and ruminate. Not Sen.
With COVID-19 having taken away his incessant travels and lecturing and battened him down at his house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sen has written his memoir -- which is either his 30th or 31st book, a list that began with his PhD thesis, Choice of Techniques, published by Basil Blackwell in 1960.
This book consists of five parts -- comprising a combination of pure memoir with chapters on fundamental philosophical, political or economic issues.
Part One deals with Sen's early life, from childhood to his schooling at Santiniketan.
It is interspersed with three excellent non-memoir-like chapters on the rivers of undivided Bengal, on Tagore and his arguments especially with Gandhi, and on Sen's long association with Sanskrit that started under his grandfather's tutelage in Santiniketan.
I found his chapter on the company of grandparents particularly interesting, especially his close relationship with his maternal grandfather, the Sanskrit scholar, Kshiti Mohan Sen, whose classic, Hinduism, Sen translated from Bengali to English in 1961.
Part Two is thematic. It deals with the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943, the idea of Bangladesh, nationalist political resistance to British colonialism up to the division of India and Britain in India under the Raj.
Part Three returns to the autobiographical framework.
This is after Sen finished school at Santiniketan and moved on to do his BA at Presidency College, Calcutta in 1951.
Living at the YMCA hostel at Mechua Bazar, Sen came into his own -- not just in academics but in enjoying a sense of freedom and making many friends in the course of long addas at the Coffee House and elsewhere, covering every topic under the sun.
There is a great story in Chapter 12 that involves Sen, his college friend Sukhamoy Chakravarty, and Dasgupta's Bookshop which was the bibliophile's haunt.
Sukhamoy had borrowed Kenneth Arrow's classic, Social Choice and Individual Values and passed it on to Sen to read.
In it, Arrow set out his stunning 'Impossibility Theorem'. The question was this: Can individual choices of people be translated into a consistent social choice?
Arrow proved that with four extremely basic conditions that needed to be satisfied, one could not map individual preferences through any non-dictatorial social choice mechanism to yield consistent social decisions. Thus, the 'Impossibility Theorem'.
This discovery led to what I consider to be the greatest period of Sen's formal theoretical work which resulted in his masterpiece, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, published in 1970.
Part Three also deals with Sen's early battle with oral cancer.
In the summer of 1952, when he was not even 19 years old, Sen was treated at the Chittaranjan Cancer Hospital with seven days of gruelling, old-fashioned radium radiation and suffered incredible post-radiation pain; thankfully, the malignant tumour disappeared.
Thereafter, he underwent numerous treatments at the Radio Therapy Centre in Cambridge between 1953 and 1963.
Part Four, consisting of nine chapters, mostly deals with Sen's first ten years at Trinity College, Cambridge, first doing his second BA degree and then as a Prize Fellow and eventually as a lecturer and staff fellow.
After suffering some introductory sherry parties -- a drink he hates with a passion -- Sen went to meet his Gods, Piero Sraffa and Maurice Dobb.
Sraffa taught Sen various aspects of economics and the merits of ristretto.
'What was intended to be a two-year stay at Trinity for a rapidly earned BA degree... ended up being my first period of ten years there, from 1953 to 1963.'
Sen returned to Cambridge in 1998 as the Master of Trinity College, where he served for six years, and where he was when he received the Nobel Prize for economics.
Much of this section is about the deep friendships made -- such as Mahbub ul Haq of Pakistan, Lal Jayawardena from Sri Lanka, Michael Nicholson -- and Sen's interactions with Sraffa, Dobb and Joan Robinson; of Sen being elected as an Apostle, an exclusively “small intellectual aristocracy of Cambridge”; and his two-year stint in between as a professor at Jadavpur University so that he could complete the minimum number of years needed to submit his PhD thesis.
Part Five is short, consisting of two chapters: A philosophical one called 'Persuasion and Cooperation' and the other 'Near and Far', which deals with Sen's days as a professor at the Delhi School of Economics from 1963 to 1971.
After that he left to take up a professorship at the London School of Economics. The book abruptly ends there.
Which is a pity. Because between 1971 and now, he was at the LSE for six years; at Oxford for eleven; as the Master of Trinity for six; and at Harvard from 1987-88 and then from 2004 till date.
It was also when Sen's social, ethical and political conscience spoke out like never before. He had much to share about this highly productive period.
Let me end with a personal anecdote. Sen was my D Phil examiner at Oxford in 1982, and we communicated off and on in the pre-Internet days.
In 1989, while at Rutgers, I was re-reading his Poverty and Famines, which demonstrated that the Bengal Famine of 1943 was not on account of any food availability decline (FAD) but solely due to failure in exchange entitlements (FEE).
Looking at the same data that Sen had used, but treating these somewhat differently, I found that there was significant FAD and, hence, FEE.
So, I typed a draft and sent it to him for his critical comments.
Five days later he called back and said, 'I've gone through your paper carefully and checked all your calculations. You are right. Go ahead and publish it.' Such was, and is, the academic grace of the man.
Amartyada, thank you for being the humane, caring and socially concerned economist that you are. The profession is blessed for that.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
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: A Memoir Audible Audiobook – Unabridged
Amartya Sen (Author), & 2 more
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 684 ratings
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The extraordinary early life in India and England of one of the world's leading public intellectuals.
Where is 'home'? For Amartya Sen home has been many places - Dhaka in modern Bangladesh, where he grew up; the village of Santiniketan, where he was raised by his grandparents as much as by his parents; Calcutta, where he first studied economics and was active in student movements and Trinity College, Cambridge, to which he came aged 19.
Sen brilliantly recreates the atmosphere in each of these. Central to his formation was the intellectually liberating school in Santiniketan founded by Rabindranath Tagore (who gave him his name Amartya) and enticing conversations in the famous Coffee House on College Street in Calcutta. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he engaged with many of the leading figures of the day. This is a book of ideas - especially Marx, Keynes and Arrow - as much as of people and places.
In one memorable chapter, Sen evokes 'the rivers of Bengal' along which he travelled with his parents between Dhaka and their ancestral villages. The historic culture of Bengal is wonderfully explored, as is the political inflaming of Hindu-Muslim hostility and the resistance to it. In 1943, Sen witnessed the Bengal famine and its disastrous development. Some of Sen's family were imprisoned for their opposition to British rule: not surprisingly, the relationship between Britain and India is another main theme of the book.
©2022 Amartya Sen (P)2022 Penguin Audio
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Author Amartya Sen
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From the Publisher
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Review
Sen is so engaging, so full of charm and has such a clear gift for the graceful sentence. It's a wonderful book, the portrait of a citizen of the world ... full of its author's beguiling personality, elegance and wit of presentation, and joyous in its celebration of the life of the mind. -- Philip Hensher ― Spectator
Sen's sensibility still seems Tagorean. There is the same affinity for freedom and imagination, a similar commitment to the vulnerable and the downtrodden, but most of all a shared sense that we don't yet know all there is to know about the world. -- Abhrajyoti Chakraborty ― Guardian
The clarity of Sen's thought and the lucidity of his prose are delightful and entertaining but the lightness of his touch can often be deceptive because it sometimes conceals the depth and range of Sen's erudition, the intensity and the passion of his commitment to certain values and ideas and his relentless quest to bring together the home and the world. -- Rudrangshu Mukherjee ― The Wire India
a charming, immensely readable, and very enjoyable voyage through the making of a great mind ... we are just led with rare good humour and gentle wit through the formative years of his life ... This is a very accessible book, "fun" to use one of Sen's favourite words, written in beautifully constructed short sentences that explain the most profound observations with commendable brevity ... It is Sen's capacity to maintain a simple style while telling amusing stories or explaining complex issues (as he does occasionally) that is both unique and captivating ... This memoir is an unforgettable story of the evolution of a thinking and enquiring and all too human a mind, as also a tribute to one who has harnessed his abundant academic talent to the needs of the humblest and poorest -- Mani Shankar Aiyar ― Open the Magazine
Amartya Sen's Home in the World is really three books in one.
hypnotic ... Amartya Sen's exemplary life is a lesson in engagement with the world in which he is so at home; he is a real advertisement for someone who is happy being "a citizen of nowhere", or everywhere. -- Ferdinand Mount ― Prospect
it strikes me that Sen is more than an economist, a moral philosopher or even an academic. He is a life-long campaigner, through scholarship and activism, via friendships and the occasional enemy, for a more noble idea of home - and therefore of the world. -- Edward Luce ― Financial Times
This charming and absorbing book ... has the flavour of a relaxed conversation with a gifted raconteur ... Sen's memoir traces the experiences, encounters, and relationships that determined his conceptual concerns and intellectual evolution. It is also a deeply humane appreciation of what life can offer, filled with respect and empathy for other humans. -- Jayati Ghosh ― The Lancet
captivating ... This is not, though, just a book of ideas. Home in the World can't help but be the work of an intellectual. But, as its title implies, it is the work of an intellectual who acknowledges that ideas grow out of - are imbricated with - phenomena external to the self. -- Christopher Bray ― Tablet
[full of] raconteurial energy ... Sen writes with an elegance and wit ... His accounts of his own work are characteristically succinct and fluent ... His evocation of post-war Cambridge and the towering figures of 20th-century economics are affectionate but just. Even more vivid is the picture of his undergraduate days in Calcutta, with its student revolutionaries and generous booksellers. ... It is striking just how much of Sen's own large-hearted liberalism turn out to have been prefigured in the freedoms of his unusual childhood.-- Nikhil Krishnan ― Daily Telegraph
Home in the World is the chronicle of an early life well lived and well considered. -- David Gilmour ― Literary Review
Amartya Sen's memoir Home in the World beautifully conveys the immense, curious charm of his unapologetic high intelligence. -- Philip Hensher ― Spectator Books of the Year
graceful and hopeful ... Home in the World focuses on Sen's formative years, revealing the roots of his academic interests in his early experiences ... Sen is such a charming and engaging narrator -- Barbara Spindel ― Christian Science Monitor
A charming, lively account of Sen's remarkable adolescence -- Zareer Masani ― History Today
Sen's gentle memoir shed[s] light on the distant nooks of a long life of distinction. ... There is something of Tagore in the judicious Mr. Sen. He is an un?inching man of science but also insistently humane. -- Tunku Varadarajan ― Wall Street Journal
warmhearted, clear-eyed account of the formative years of his life, a book that reaches from Myanmar to Berkeley ... a testament to just how far, in one life, one man might go into that vast world ... Sen's writing style is even-keeled and gently humorous. -- Mythili G. Rao ― Washington Post
PRAISE FOR AMARTYA SEN― -
With his masterly prose, ease of erudition and ironic humour, Sen is one of the few great world intellectuals on whom we may rely to make sense out of our existential confusion -- Nadine Gordimer
Amartya Sen is one of the most distinguished minds of our time [who] enjoyably mixes moments of profundity with flashes of mischievous provocation -- William Dalrymple ― New York Review of Books
The world's poor and dispossessed could have no more articulate or insightful a champion -- Kofi Annan
An accessible and exceptional humanitarian -- Jon Snow ― New Statesman
Sen is one of the great minds of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We owe him a huge debt -- Nicholas Stern
A distinguished inheritor of the tradition of public philosophy and reasoning - Roy, Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru ... if ever there was a global intellectual, it is Sen -- Sunil Khilnani ― Financial Times
Product details
Publisher : Allen Lane; 1st edition (21 October 2021)
Language : English
Hardcover : 480 pages
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Sophie Baker - contemporary of Carly Simon
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the world's most brilliant men writing fascinatingly about his childhood and early years.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 April 2023
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Great book, to reread and reread.
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Alp
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for everyone-Reviewed in Spain on 2 August 2021
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This is a beautiful book not just about the author's memoir, but about how we are all connected as humanity, the beautiful history of India, and the wealth of knowledge they have. The forward-thinking of the Indians and the fact that the earth is not something that needs to be divided up into countries and separate us by borders.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars It's a treat to readReviewed in the United States on 29 March 2022
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It's a must read for any native Bengali speaker and anyone who resided in the state of West Bengal for a considerable period of time. It's captivating read on the thought processes of some of the intellectuals of the 40's and 50's who shaped India into what it is today. It also gives one a nuanced glimpse into the great mind of Sen and how vast his knowledge is on a great range of subjects. It's shameful that the current Indian government and its supporters humiliated him in such a gross and unprovoked manner
6 people found this helpfulReport
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