The Rediff US Special/Suleman Din and Nirshan Perera

"Why don't you elaborate on the question, so I can finish my snack," Amartya Sen says to a flustered young man.

The young man laughs, along with 14 other graduate students, and suddenly, the tension drops. You can almost hear them thinking: "So, he may be a Nobel Prize-winning economist, but he's got a sense of humour."

The bespectacled, disconcerted student is red as a stop sign, due to a mixture of embarrassment, zeal and gladness. Meanwhile, he has another minute to pose his question. He lowers his eyes, and with a smile continues.

It is a tradition that stretches back to Plato and Aristotle -- a philosophical discourse, where the pedagogue humbles the earnest student. But today, the teacher is from Bengal and speaks in the tongue of a British academic. And the setting is not Athens, but under the arched alleys of Stanford campus.

Sen munches on his hors d'oeuvres. His hair, thin and greyish-white, lends him the look of the quintessential scholar. A grey houndstooth blazer, with a pen in the breast pocket, a red-and-grey-striped button-down shirt, and black leather Velcro slips complete his attire. He sees the world through thick brown plastic frames, and his eyes, enlarged by the lenses, remain calmly focused on the student, as he listens and analyzes.

The students have been specially invited to meet the distinguished professor and scholar. It is a near equal mix of men and women, with six from South Asia. Most stay silent, probably too scared to raise a question -- who wants to challenge a Nobel prize winner, after all?

rediff.com had a chance to sit down with Sen, during his stay in Palo Alto, to talk to him about his Nobel prize, economics, famines and morality.

Since winning the Nobel prize, has there been a tremendous change as far as your audience is concerned? Has it given you a much better platform and podium, and a much bigger audience for your ideas?

I think there are two things here. If one is articulate in public affairs, one does get a reasonable amount of audience anyway, so I can't say I was particularly neglected before winning the Nobel.

Whenever I've given talks in Delhi or Calcutta, there have been a lot of people. I think that's a reflection of people's interest in the kind of topic that I'm concerned with, rather than in particular with what I have to say. And, I think, given the nature of those topics, which have not shifted a lot since the Nobel, I don't think there's any fundamental discontinuity there.

I think it is one of the glories of a democratic country like India -- that even when the records on other things are quite mixed and may even be dismal -- there is a great willingness on the part of the population to discuss these issues and to debate on them. I was given the opportunity to discuss things that interested me well before the Nobel. I mean, I talked about the neglect of women's interests, I talked about the neglect of literacy, of basic health care, and on the whole always got sympathetic press reports and wide audiences.

Now it's certainly true that getting the Nobel has added interest, but I think the driving force has been the general concern in a democratic country with these issues. India is not tremendously successful in some respects, even in its economic and social progress, but it is successful in other respects -- creating a community of concerned scholars and journalists, as well as having public discussions on subjects of great importance. I think India has a lot to be proud of, and I've been able to fit into that general interest the public has.

Were you at all surprised, for instance, by the TiE invitation to speak here in Silicon Valley?

I think in general we are an interactive culture. People like inviting people to talk, and listen, and give them a good hearing. I don't think, in terms of getting a forum for speeches, that the Nobel has made much of a difference.

I didn't know about TiE, and TiE is clearly a very special organization, one that is impressive, in a remarkable way. As far as public occasions and speaking are concerned, I think the 'sub-continentals' could not be blamed for not wanting to hear each other.

Some people describe you as a philosopher. Do you view yourself that way?

Well, a philosopher is someone who does philosophy. I was a professor of philosophy at Harvard.

I had three professorships there -- one a university professorship (without any subject restriction) and two others in economics and philosophy.

So philosophy was one of the subjects in which I taught regularly, in fact I'd teach a couple of courses in philosophy every year. I started publishing articles on philosophy 40 years ago. So, you know, to describe oneself as a philosopher seems like a pompous way of saying something that is rather mundane, namely I've written articles on philosophy,

I've talked about philosophical issues, and taught courses in philosophy (in Harvard, Oxford, Delhi, and elsewhere). So if you sort of take off the rhetorical hyperbole to just the description of what one does, yes indeed philosophy is one of the subjects I do.

Did you ever want the Nobel prize in the first place?

Well, it wasn't a terribly important thing for me. I obviously was very pleased it came.

Oddly enough, the young economists, assistant professors and graduate students, every year in America, hold a bet as to who would get the Nobel Prize, and for three successive years, I think people were losing more money on me than on anyone else (laughs). So I felt really guilty that I wasn't performing as expected.

From that point of view, I remember at five o'clock in the morning, when I was woken up in New York, among other thoughts, I thought, "Gosh, at least these people will be happy at last." So yes, there are all kinds of social connections with that, but it was not a make-or-break issue for me? No, it never was.

Does it ever worry you that people think of you as an inspirational figure?

If they really thought that seriously, then that would worry me very much. I think people don't particularly see me as an inspirational figure. We get inspiration from all kinds of objects, and all kinds of human beings, events. Every human being is unique in some way.

The combination of economics and philosophy and concern about some questions, sort of defines me in a certain way. And if people find it interesting and are likely to interact with it, I feel honored and flattered by it. That doesn't bother me. If people went on saying, "I am really inspired by you", that would worry me. But happily, nobody has told me that yet (laughs)!

People certainly feel that you are one of the people in the world who may have some of the answers to the world's problems. Do you ever feel anxious that you may not have the words to say or that you may not have the answers?

I think that if people really thought that I had ready-made answers to these questions that would worry me very much.

I don't think people feel that way. I think they recognize that initiating discussions, and feeding discussions are ways of getting solutions, in which I try to play a role. I'm not that proud of that. But I am happy that there are a number of issues that I have played a part in putting into discussion that hadn't been much discussed before.

Issues, such as gender inequality -- especially the lack of interest in young girls, compared with boys in South Asia, for example, (also in China, and many other countries in the world) leading to, what I described in the British Medical Journal as, the phenomenon of '"missing women' -- I was instrumental in getting that subject to public attention.

Similarly, the lack of literacy and lack of school opportunities have been among my preoccupations. Also, I'm very concerned with school management, because aside from the neglect of funds, there is a real issue of bad running of schools especially for the underdogs of society. I try to put these issues in the social agenda of discussion.

I think that's the way to see it; it's an interactive process in which one plays a part. If I were to think that I have answers to questions, or I have reasons to have answers, whether or not I have them, that would worry me, but that's not the way I look at the progress of human thought.

Right from my childhood I have been a strong believer in democracy, even though it was quite standard until very recently to rubbish democracy in India. I believe the interactive process is an extremely important one. We don't really know what our values are on any question until we have chatted with lots of others on the subject, have argued with them, have understood what things look like from other perspectives.

It's certainly true that some of the descriptions, that I've seen people apply to me, I cannot say that I particularly like. I am told that my wonderful colleague and friend, Robert Solow (a Nobel prize winner himself in 1987), described me as the 'conscience of the economic profession'. That is quoted again and again, and that actually is quite misleading for two quite different reasons.

One is, that it suggests that most economists don't have a conscience, and that's just not true. The subject is just chock full of people with involvement and concern. It doesn't matter if they're left wing, right wing, centrist, they are concerned with finding out what would be a good way of dealing with humanity. So that phrase sort of separates me out, in a way which I think is just wrong, and very unfair to the profession.

Secondly, it also puts too much focus on morals. Morals are very important in asking the right questions, but you don't seek answers with morality, you seek answers with critical scrutiny, scientific inquiry and the pursuit of doubts. Mere conscience won't get you anywhere. You have to be a scientific economist, there's no question.

The other point I ought to make is that I often see the wrong description of the work for which I was given the Nobel. I got it for work in welfare economics, social choice theory, including technical works connected to social choice theory. That is what the Nobel committee cited in giving me the award. They mentioned, in passing, that I had also worked on other subjects, including development and famines. But the Nobel was not awarded for those works. The newspapers often missed that point, and linked the award to my other interests, such as development, famines, education, etc.

Many of the particular contributions, that the Nobel committee cited, belong to the mathematical discipline of the social choice theory. The greatest guru on the subject is here at Stanford, Kenneth Arrow. I would say, since you used the word 'inspiration' earlier, I think that his work was inspiring for me. As it happened, I controverted some of the standardly understood interpretations of his mathematical results, derived some new results, extended others. Quite a lot of the works had nothing much to do with these issues on which the newspapers tended to focus.

What about reports that you were an eyewitness to the suffering in the Bengal Famine and, on another occasion later, your interaction with a dying Muslim laborer was a pivotal moment in your life?

There are two very different things that you are talking about here.

First, the famine that I saw in 1943 was certainly a strong experience for me. I won't say it was a pivotal moment, because while it did make me ask questions, to which I wanted to know the answers, it did not change my life immediately -- I still wanted to be a physicist. I did not change my career plan at that moment.

I wanted to go into maths and physics, and I was also very involved in Sanskrit, and the real debate for me was between maths and Sanskrit, which one was I going to do.

I did think these famines were totally scandalous, and that I would like to know what the answers to these questions were. I didn't particularly think I wanted to work on those questions myself. I wanted to know what caused famines, and why did they suddenly happen. And, was there any truth in the fact (as many people in Bengal believed) that the rice output wasn't that bad at all that year, so how could a famine occur?

I hoped that others would work on these issues. Eventually -- 30 years later -- I decided to try to answer those questions myself. Looking back later, I could see that the Bengal Famine was a very big moment in my life. But I did not see its full implications immediately.

Similarly, the other event you're referring to, this was during the communal riots in the 1940s. A Muslim laborer was knifed just outside my home. He came for help into my home in Dhaka, which was in a largely Hindu area, and I had to give him water, and had to shout to get the adults, who took him to the hospital, where alas, later he died. That was again an experience that raised disturbing questions for me.

Why was it that suddenly people who were quite friendly just a few months ago, were killing each other? What is so peculiar about Hindu identity, or Muslim identity, which could suddenly become so hostile to other groups? It came suddenly, and it also went away suddenly in Bengal. By the 1950s, East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh, was involved in a Bengali nationalist agitation. The Hindu and Muslim identity had become very minor then.

The same is to some extent true of West Bengal. Neither of these parts of the world, unlike the rest of the sub-continent, had seen the sort of communal violence that occurred for example in Bombay in the 1990s.

The events of the 1940s raised questions in my mind about why people reasoned the way they did, really, about their identity. What was wrong with their Indian identity, their sub-continental identity, and their identity as human beings, and so forth. When I think about identity, my experience in the riots comes back to me, certainly. And one of the reasons why I'm so skeptical of communitarianism is because I've seen the nastiest face of it in my life.

Lots of people think communitarianism is a great benign attitude, where you look after members of your own community. They overlook the fact that this fondness and affection for your community often go hand in hand with aniha -- the Sanskrit word meaning lack of desire, in this case -- for other communities. So the violent events of the 1940s did affect my thoughts, and they are still part of me. But those events did not make me change my track or profession. It just became a part of my life.

So at the time you didn't see the answers -- of the questions that bothered you about the famine and the riots -- lying on the path of economics and math. So later it happened that they did?

Well, it was of course clear to me that economics had something to do with famines. So if somebody had asked me, "Amartya, if you want to study and answer your question, as to what caused these famines, what subjects should you study?", I would say "Economics."

But I wasn't particularly committed to doing economics for that reason, because again I believe the world is full of great scholars, and I was hoping somebody else would do it. In fact, even after I moved to economics, famine wasn't my Ph D subject. I chose 'choice of techniques' as my Ph D subject.

For nearly a decade, that I spent in Delhi in the 1960s, I worked mostly on mathematical social choice theory. That subject engaged me very much. In society we have many different points of view, how come they could nevertheless live together, and how come there could be such a thing as a social point of view, which was a question raised by the eighteenth-century French mathematician, Condorcet (Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat), among others.

I thought these questions were very interesting, and ways of tackling them, which involved mathematical logic, were very engaging too.

By the time the 70s had come, it turned out that people hadn't answered the questions that had worried me about famines, so in a sense I went into famines by default. I felt I might as well try to answer my own questions, since nobody else seems to be answering them. But then one thing led to another, and the Bengal Famine was the first of four famines I studied.

As I looked at it, and went on my bicycle looking for the contemporary price records, and contemporary wage records from the 1940s, it hit me in the eye that the famine wasn't at all like the one the Famine Inquiry Commission described it to be. Then I was trapped into it, and I spent a couple of years on that. When that came to an end, I wanted to study other famines, which I proceeded to do. It wasn't a lifetime ambition that at some stage, I'll do it. Certainly, wanting to know why this happened had been a strong thing in me.

I wasn't particularly keen on finding the answer myself. In fact, I would have been quite happy if somebody had given me these answers in the 50s or the 60s, and I could continue doing something else.

Do you see a resurgence of liberal activism on campuses, in America and around the world?

I think the students in India have been active all the time and in America activism fluctuates. I have seen student activism in America -- I was a visiting professor at Berkeley during 1964-65, a visiting professor at Harvard in 1968-69, and while working for the United Nations in the spring of 1968, I lived near Columbia University -- so I had the opportunity of witnessing the activism then, and I was lucky, because it was a very important thing.

In the 70s and the 80s there was a dip in the interest in these things, and perhaps there is much more interest in some of these issues now. I still don't sense that groundswell of interest, that I saw in Berkeley. On the other hand, I believe, yes there is a move in that direction. In India the interest has remained, but has become polarized.

There is concern for such issues as poverty and gender inequality, but at the same time there has been a revival of communalist agitation, for a distinctly Hindu interpretation of identity, and of course it's been very strong in Pakistan with Islamic identity. I think the only exception is probably Bangladesh, where this has not happened. I am very skeptical of communal identities, and the recent developments have, I believe, many regressive features. Gandhi and Tagore offered a view of India that transcended communal identities, and I do get concerned when I see agitations that take such a divisive view of humanity.

What are your thoughts on the WTO protests?

Well, I thought the themes that they drew attention to are extremely important. The theses they presented, though, were often quite naïve. But on balance, I think that it is important that they raised these questions, because questions about global equity had to be raised. The fact that they had simplistic answers did not erase the importance of asking those questions.

For the keynote address I have to give at the Melbourne Festival in Australia in May 2001, I have chosen as my title Global Doubts as Global Solutions. The title is supposed to express something. I believe that raising doubts is part of the solution, because you don't really address a question until you identify it, until you feel upset by it.

I think that's where the agitation in Seattle, Washington and London played a positive part. Quite often the slogans they used were far too simple-minded, but they did raise important questions.

You've written quite a bit about values and morals. What central beliefs do you live by?

You know, one of the things I'm very afraid of is pomposity, and there's no way I can answer that question without sounding pompous. I have, of course, many beliefs (as does everyone), but I don't know that I've lived, in any grand sense, by any great truths in my life. While I have thought, advocated, contradicted, argued, as everyone tends to do, I don't really think I have any special claim to having lived by some central beliefs.

I was always impressed, when I used to read in school books, that such-and-such a person said that they lived by this truth or that truth. I'm afraid I'm not one of the great and the good to be able to join their ranks in that respect. Mine is not a grand life, but it is an engaging one. I am happy enough about that.

Design: Dominic Xavier

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