The Country of First Boys

Amartya Sen is an extraordinary thinker, a Nobel laureate in economics who has an incredible 100 honorary degrees from universities around the world. Many of these essays were first published in an Indian literary magazine, and they examine through a lens of social justice many fundamental issues including deprivation, inequality, hunger, illiteracy, globalisation, freedom of speech, injustice and exclusion. I learned that Nalanda University was founded some 600 years before the oldest university in Europe, Bologna. Indeed, it had already been destroyed before the founding of Cambridge (where Sen was Master of Trinity) in 1209. There is now a project to revive it. On the theme of injustice, Sen takes a pragmatic rather than idealistic approach, preferring practical prevention rather than grand schemes.

Although he points out that democracy in India has prevented famine, he is critical of the Indian government approach of subsidising food prices and maintaining grain reserves rather than making more food available to the destitute. There is a very interesting essay on Tagore where Sen gives the reader a different picture of the man from the mystical image conveyed to the West by Yeats and illustrates his points by highlighting some of his differences with Gandhi. He also wonders why he has been relatively neglected in the West, although Dartington and others did mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. Apparently Tagore announced his Nobel to a meeting connected with school drains by remarking that 'there would probably be money to cover the expense.' Sen offers a humane and wise perspective on many global challenges.