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Non dobbiamo mai permettere che la nostra mente sia divisa in due da un orizzonte
Amartya Sen
We must never allow that our mind is divided in two by a horizon
Amartya Sen
The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, by Amartya Sen
Soumya Bhattacharya
The Observer, Saturday 2 July 2005
This needs saying at the outset. In itself, it might seem like an unremarkable fact, but it actually is not: Amartya Sen is a citizen of India. While most of his countrymen who have been able to leave India for a long time try their best to become citizens of the country they might have gone to (Britain, America, Canada, Australia), Sen, a man whom Cambridge and Harvard are said to have fought over for the privilege of offering an appointment, resolutely retains his blue Indian passport after half a century of towering intellectual achievement across the world.
Every year, the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics returns to Santiniketan, the tiny university town 100-odd miles from Calcutta. In Santiniketan, the former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, can be seen on a bicycle, friendly and unassuming, chatting with the locals and working for a trust he has set up with the money from his Nobel Prize. One of the most influential public thinkers of our times is strongly rooted in the country in which he grew up; he is deeply engaged with its concerns.
There can, then, be few people better equipped than this Lamont University Professor at Harvard to write about India and the Indian identity, especially at a time when the stereotype of India as a land of exoticism and mysticism is being supplanted with the stereotype of India as the back office of the world.
In this superb collection of essays, Sen smashes quite a few stereotypes and places the idea of India and Indianness in its rightful, deserved context. Central to his notion of India, as the title suggests, is the long tradition of argument and public debate, of intellectual pluralism and generosity that informs India's history.
One of the book's many triumphs is its tone. Sen does not indulge in triumphalism about his country's past; nor does he spare Western influences (like James Mill's History of British India) that have oversimplified and distorted the Indian reality.
While talking about Indian democracy, for instance, he cautions: 'It is important to avoid the twin pitfalls of 1) taking democracy to be just a gift of the Western world that India simply accepted when it became independent, and 2) assuming that there is something unique in Indian history that makes the country singularly suited to democracy.' The truth is far more complex and somewhere between these two views.
Sen refutes the facile Western description of India as a 'mainly Hindu country' with the same rigorous scholarship that he demolishes the isolationist, circumscribed view of Hindutva held dear by the Hindu right that ruled India between 1999 and 2004.
Illuminated with examples from the teachings and lives of emperors such as Akbar and Ashoka, with illustrations from the epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, and a staggering range of other references, he propounds a view of Hinduism as an inclusive philosophy rather than an exclusionist, divisive religion. This view of Hinduism is mature enough and magnanimous enough to accommodate dissenting views and 'even profound scepticism'. This is a 'capacious view of a broad and generous Hinduism, which contrasts sharply with the narrow and bellicose versions that are currently on offer, led particularly by parts of the Hindutva movement'.
. . . This is a book that needed to have been written. The perception of India in the West and, indeed, among Indians themselves has never been more amorphous as it is now. The Argumentative Indian will provide a new dimension and perspective to that perception. It would be no surprise if it were to become as defining and as influential a work as Edward Said's Orientalism.
On Monday 13 July 2009, Amartya Sen spoke to DFID staff as part of the DFID Speaker Series.
The author of Development as Freedom looked at the thinking behind his new book The Idea of Justice and the current challenges to development work today.
Listen to highlights from his talk at:
www.dfid.gov.uk/Media-Room/DFID-Speaker-Series/Amartya-Sen-Nobel-Laureate/
Find other world class speakers and thinkers from the DFID Speaker Series at:
www.dfid.gov.uk/Media-Room/DFID-Speaker-Series/
Credit: DFID / Simon Davis
14/09/2009 - (behind) : Jean-Philippe Cotis, Director of the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies of France (Insee); Coordinator of the Commission, Professor Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and President of the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Economiques (OFCE); Chair of the Commission, Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz, Columbia University; Chair Adviser, Professor Amartya Sen, Harvard University; and Angel Gurría, OECD Secretary-General.
>> The report is online at : www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr
>> Speech given by the OECD Secretary-General to the Commission (in French)
>> OECD statistics on measuring economic performance and social progress
Varghese Jacob with Professor Dr. Amartya Sen.
Amartya Sen is the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University and winner of Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998.
Week ago Saturday as I walked past the Borders Bookstore at Terminal C of Logan International Airport in Boston my eye caught the book cover "The End of Poverty" by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. Having heard him speak recently I couldn't resist stepping into the store to pick up a copy.
Very soon thereafter an unusually helpful store assistant, whom you see pictured above, came over to help me with the book purchase. She was obviously a very erudite woman.
"Have you read any books on MicroFinance by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank?" she asked me.
"No" I said embarrassed.
"Let me show you some" she said and walked me to the Social Sciences section where she proceeded to show me all the titles on Microfinance and started telling me about how Amartya Sen and his colleagues in this field had made a huge difference to the lives of very poor people in the developing world.
Borders has obviously implemented the online Amazon feature of "People who bought this book have also bought..." in their offline stores quite well, I thought.
As I proceeded to pay for the book, she asked: "Are you from India? What is your name?"
"Bhandarkar" I said.
"These days I'm settled here in Boston. In the 1930's my parents lived in Nasik, and they were very close friends with a Professor Vasudev Bhandarkar and his wife Sudha. They had two children, Asha and Anil. You know, he was later murdered, in 1954, in Mumbai. He was then the Coal Commissioner of the State of Mumbai (before it was split between Gujarat and Maharashtra)".
That was simply too much for me. Because that Professor Bhandarkar was my great grand uncle and I know his kids Anil and Asha, who currently reside in Mumbai, quite well. My father named me Vasudev in his memory.
Before taking her picture I asked her name, Sujata Kesarcodi-Whaley, she said, and off I rushed to board my flight.
Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen delivers the keynote address of the Opening Plenary: ´Investing for Growth´ at the 2013 Summit on “Funding Transport” of the International Transport Forum at the OECD in Leipzig, Germany on 22 May 2013.
Amartya Sen argues for an improved Food Security Bill
twocircles.net/2013feb17/amartya_sen_argues_improved_food...
Amartya Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University professor and professor of Economics and Philosophy in Harvard University. In 1998 Sen was awarded Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members.
After 4 days of work in the ForumPA I had the opportunity to meet and to take pictures to Mr. Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize in Economics).
Great man, great mind, great kidness and a big indian smile... :-)
Thank you Mr. Sen.
Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen delivers the keynote address at the Opening Plenary:´Investing for growth´ at the 2013 Summit on “Funding Transport” of the International Transport Forum at the OECD in Leipzig, Germany on 22 May 2013.
Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen at the Opening Plenary: ´Investing for Growth´ at the the International Transport Forum’s 2013 Summit on “Funding Transport” in Leipzig, Germany on 22 May 2013.
Amartya Sen argues for an improved Food Security Bill
twocircles.net/2013feb17/amartya_sen_argues_improved_food...
International conference “Ecosystems, Economy and Society: how large-scale restoration can stimulate sustainable development” - May 29 and 30, 2014, at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C., USA.
Keynote address by Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Larmont University Profesor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard University, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 1998.
An international conference organized by the Veolia Institute jointly with Agence Française de Développement, International Union for Conservation of Nature and US National Research Council Water Science and Technology Board, under the patronage of the National Academy of Sciences and in association with the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, Conservation International, UNCCD, WRI, and Civil Society Mission of the French Embassy.
Aditya is Dileep cousin's friend.... and of course my friend also.... till this time he is in orkut with his photography.... today after flickropdesham he started uploading pics into flickr.... :)
His blog - madityaa.blogspot.com/ (just started)
Few more pics from his stream in comments... :)
Picture from:
www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=24556961&size=m
Related article:
www.opendemocracy.net/terrorism/article/civil_society_pea...
A friend of mine once observed that no nation with a free press ever suffered a famine. He was obviously paraphrasing Amartya Sen's famous declaration that "no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy". However this powerful observation seems lost on our leaders and our people. We still blame Mother Nature's stinginess with rain for the starvation that stalks us with depressing regularity.
Fact is famine is not an act of nature. Famine is always caused by government. In his Democracy as a Universal Value Sen states:
Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort.
And further, in Development as Freedom, he argues that "a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have". And on both counts, Kenya fares extremely poorly.
Ever since the political class blackmailed us into accepting the coalition government as part of a ceasefire to end the carnage of early 2008, we have had no political opposition to speak of. The parties in government together have an overwhelming majority in Parliament and Cabinet ministers and their assistants actually outnumber backbenchers. And while the latter have been vocal in trying to keep the Executive on its toes, the recent reappointment of Amos Kimunya to Cabinet has shown just how little clout they actually have.
Government attacks on media freedom have also become a defining feature of the President Kibaki's tenure. No less the 4 Bills have been crafted and introduced in Parliament seeking to muzzle the Press. Two have passed and one has been signed into law. In addition, arrests of journalists and raids of media houses by hooded police and by the First Lady create an air of intimidation. So much so that even the largest media house in East Africa is afraid to broadcast its own footage of a Cabinet minister apparently confessing to orchestrating the murder of 600 people.
And when we starve we still blame God and the elements, flock to churches to beg for forgiveness for sins we neither admit nor comprehend. It is a sadly typically Kenyan reaction to avoidable disaster: when tens died in a fire less than 500m from the Fire Station, in a building full of combustible material where the fire exits were boarded up and which lacks any discernible automatic fire suppresson equipment; when over a hundred people perish while looting petrol and two days later the same thing is happening 30 km away; when 10 million go hungry because the very politicians proclaiming national emergencies have been busy looting the national granary.
Think about that next time you ask God why these things keep happening to us.
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen spoke to The Commonwealth Club of California February 25, 2010. Photo by Beth Byrne.
Many businesses in Orangi, Karachi's sprawling township, are boosted by microloans. These young boys work part-time after school, embroidering sequins into women's garments. Photo: David Lepeska
Call Auditorium, Kennedy Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Amartya Sen, Indian economist and Nobel laureate, poses for a photo with a Cornell graduate student after his talk to an overflowing Call Auditorium on Monday, April 13, 2009.
(L-R) Dr RA Mashelkar, Sir Richard Stagg, British High Commissioner to India, Filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and Pradeep Udhas of KPMG at the TiE Summit. Enterprising India – Changing the Nation, Leading the World was the theme of recently concluded summit organised by The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) New Delhi Chapter. The UK was the partner country for the three-day event, which was held from 21-23 December 2010. Follow us on www.twitter.com/ukinindia.