It is also very engaging – and a delight – to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work.
Empowering women is key to building a future we want.
The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.
I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.
I was told Indian women don’t think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don’t think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that.
I have not had any serious non-academic job.
When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.
But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.
People’s identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way – quite suddenly – to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.
While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.
Nor let us be resentful when others differ from us. For all men have hearts, and each heart has its own leanings. Their right is our wrong, and our right is their wrong.
Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency. The removal of substantial unfreedoms, it is argued here, is constitutive of development.
The purely rational economic man is, indeed, close to being a social moron.
Prolixity is not alien to us in India. We are able to talk at some length.
He wrote extensively on how schools should be made more attractive to boys and girls and thus more productive. His own co-educational school at Santiniketan had many progressive features. The emphasis here was on self-motivation rather than on discipline, and on fostering intellectual curiosity rather than competitive excellence.
Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back.
So the much criticized food subsidy and employment guarantee for the poor and the unemployed cost about 1.14 per cent of GDP, whereas the cost of subsidizing electricity, fuel and fertilizers for the relatively better off is minimally 2.63 per cent, more than twice what is allocated to feed the poor and provide employment to the unemployed.
Ashoka supplemented this general moral and political principle by a dialectical argument based on enlightened self-interest: ‘For he who does reverence to his own sect while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own sect, in reality inflicts, by such conduct, the severest injury on his own sect.
The case for doing what one sees as one’s duty must be strong, but how can we be indifferent to the consequences that may follow from our doing what we take to be our just duty?
Important as history is, reasoning has to go beyond the past.
Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice.