The experience of writing about Abhijit Banerjee

I have been reading the papers and scanning social media commentary in this country closely in connection with the subject since the day I posted my little note on Abhijit Banerjee winning the Nobel Prize for Economics this year. An already deeply tired and cynical man, I have been horribly chagrined by what I have seen. I am coming to that, after clarifying a few things about my position.

Unlike most people in this country, I do NOT set much store by awards and other forms of public recognition. I know how prizes are given in our schools these days: I have been a judge at all kinds of contests for years before I gave up participating in disgust. At a vastly higher level, the Bharat Ratna, for example, has been so sullied and degraded over the years that many honest, decent and wise people would politely decline it in public and grimace with distaste in private. Book awards like the Pulitzer and the Booker, likewise: these days, it sometimes seems to me, you have to be essentially a failure with readers at large to even figure on their shortlists! As for the Nobel, most prizes in the sciences are given very late in the lives of the achievers, and many great achievers are never recognized at all. The prizes for literature and peace have always been heavily biased by politics one way or the other (Gandhi never got the peace prize, nor Tolstoy the literature!), so much so that a great French philosopher once rejected it as ‘a sack of potatoes’, and I guess Barack Obama got it just because he, a Black, had won the US presidency without triggering off a civil war. The economics prize has usually gone to those who have done theoretical work as apologia for the capitalist system, though lately the Nobel Committee seems to be trying to pose as more liberal and humane by recognizing scholars who remind us that for the vast majority of humankind, capitalism does not make life very liveable, let alone enjoyable. Hence Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee.

In this country, we suffer from a strange admixture of violent contradictory emotions whenever Nobels are declared – those of us who have at all heard about it, and care at all. We suffer from a huge inferiority complex: a nation of 1.35 billion which wins so few of them, just as it is with Olympic golds. We go wild with joy and self-congratulation, as though we have won the Prize personally. We very, very quickly forget those who have won it before: how many can even remember what Venky Ramakrishnan did, leave alone C. V. Raman? We are sometimes ashamed, as when Kailash Satyarthi won the prize, because he has worked lifelong for the upliftment of our poorest, most underprivileged and exploited children, and he reminded us painfully, insultingly, of how badly off we are socio-economically, for all our vaunted ‘progress’ since independence, of how little we care, how little we have done to make life better for the worst-off among our fellow citizens.

This time round, the reaction is far more ignorant, savage, and unabashedly political, using that word in the most pejorative sense. They are bickering in the most vulgar language about whether Abhijit Banerjee is really a Bengali, whether settling in America is what has been most conducive to his winning the prize, whether it helps to have a white-skinned wife… my God, from ministers to cybercoolies, housewives to frustrated NRIs, the level of the argument is the gutter, and the level of awareness even lower, if that is conceivable. The utterly idiotic, irrelevant and vulgar comments on my blogpost I shall ignore, of course, but the award for ‘moronic’ goes to the comment writer who said that ‘if you have lots of money and suck up to a lot of white people you can get a Nobel Prize too’. First off, this troll is not even aware that no professor anywhere has ‘a lot of money’, secondly, if that were true then the likes of Bill Gates and Ambani and many of our godmen would have won the prize long ago, and thirdly, for some reason this cretin is absolutely furious about the lifework of a man who has been recognized for something s/he neither understands nor wants to!

In my own review of the book, incidentally, if anyone literate has observantly read it, I have not praised Dr. Banerjee much, and have even pointed out where the real problem with poverty lies – using statements quoted from his own book. Obviously no one I have heard of or read about lately has bothered to actually read the book, or study carefully what he does, what he has been rewarded for (randomized control trials, by the way, are not a new and brilliant invention: they have been routinely used in drug testing by pharma companies for a long time; Banerjee and Duflo’s credit lies in imaginatively and extensively applying them to practical economic research from which useful advice can be designed for governments to implement, regardless of which party is in power and in which country). Some of those comment writers are as ignorant as my maidservant, and far less civilized. Their ‘comments’ are, of course, ignored after I have read the first line, and then they are summarily blocked or filtered off. But it makes me sad, and I shall tell every serious pupil of mine, except maybe those who merely want to become this or that kind of technician rather than educated folks, to flee to more civilized countries, where true scholarship, just like sport, is given far more respect regardless of your age, sex, colour or nation of origin.  India neither wants nor deserves the likes of Abhijit Banerjee and those who talk about them with knowledgeable and sober admiration. I can see what lies ahead. This is how the Dark Ages descend.

Abhijit Banerjee honoured

I read in today's newspaper that Dr. Abhijit Banerjee, professor of Economics at MIT, ex-Presidency College, JNU and Harvard, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. 

Those who are curious might want to look up my review of his seminal book on this blog, written two years ago.

I smiled quietly to myself, recalling that nearly a decade and a half before Professor Md. Yunus won the Nobel, I had told my pupils about his prospects too, when few people in India - leave alone this town I live in - had even heard about him.

P.S., October 20: I was intrigued to learn from Banerjee's interview to my newspaper today that during the Eisenhower era in the USA marginal income taxes were as high (on the super-rich, that is)  as 95%, a time when America and indeed all western nations were nevertheless growing very fast, mind you, and even under Nixon's conservative administration, 70%. Dr. Banerjee was laughing cynically that somehow the populace at large, rich and poor alike, seems to have forgotten this historical fact, and convinced themselves that marginal tax rates above 40% are sure to spell disaster for any economy! Something I didn't know, and something which very strongly bolsters my arguments on behalf of socialism, though Abhijit underscores the fact that no communist made those laws in the US! At the same time, I strongly agree with Dr. Banerjee that a new-era socialism must focus strongly on pragmatic, efficiently-achievable goals rather than any kind of woolly idealism, which invariably breeds both incompetence and tyranny.

Knowledge, science, governance - and minds

Suppose one has learnt quite a bit of high-school/junior college physics, meaning he knows all about things like Newton’s laws and equations of motion, Archimedes’ principle and Pascal’s law and equations that govern the behaviour of mirrors and lenses, and the propagation of sound, and the basics of thermodynamics and electromagnetism and even the way atoms are supposed to be built and to behave – is that knowledge enough to understand all there is to chemistry? Any modern chemist would say no, while acknowledging that much of his domain overlaps with the physicist’s territory: still, you cannot pronounce on the way acids and bases interact to form an enormous variety of salts on the basis of the laws of physics alone, nor how organic compounds transmute from one category to another under the influence of specific chemicals, temperatures, pressures and catalysts, nor how very large compounds, such as amino acids and proteins, can be synthesized and modified. That is why a separate subject called chemistry still exists, and shows no imminent signs of dying out.

When you move on to the study of life – from the composition, structure and organization of individual cells to the specific study of the character and behaviour of tissues and organs and complex organ systems, meaning particular living species, and given that there are uncounted millions of incredibly different living species on earth from bacteria and diatoms to giant trees and whales and homo sapiens itself, it goes without saying that, though physics is still believed to be the most rigorous, determinate, fundamental Queen of the Sciences, and the study of modern biology is sought to be grounded in a good understanding of physics and chemistry, no biologist or medical researcher will dream of asserting that a good grasp of physics or even chemistry alone will equip you to understand life and its infinite variety and complexity: however unsatisfactorily descriptive, non-rigorous, non-mathematical the biological sciences are, they still exist in their own right, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A ‘Theory of Everything’, that elusive Holy Grail of physics, even if attained someday, will not take you very far in becoming a good student of evolution or a competent doctor. It is wise to keep this in mind, despite the fact that most physicists sneer at the ‘lesser sciences’.

Our doctors, though they are (for most of the time) dealing with only our bodies – the material part of ourselves, hence most accessible to science as we understand it – are most of the time acutely aware, moreover, that we have something called minds (many biologists would claim that so do many other animals, like elephants, dolphins, chimps, pigs and horses, though admittedly of a far less complex and less multitalented sort), and the mind, though centred in the brain but spread throughout the body via the senses and an unthinkably complicated network of neuro-chemical connections, is so inextricably intertwined with everything the body does and feels that it is almost impossible to treat any really serious malaise, from accident-related trauma to heart disease, without involving the mind in the process. And the mind (as Yudhishthir averred two millennia ago and Asimov concurred a few decades ago, the single most complex piece of organized matter in the universe), still for the most part defies comprehension and conscious, rational control, though the cleverest of men having been trying to understand it for thousands of years. Psychology studies it most directly (alongwith, lately, neuroscience, using fMRI brain scanners), but so have all religions (and their insights are not to be ignorantly scoffed at). From what I have read of history, sociology, economics and politics, they are all diverse ways of studying the same thing, and after millennia of effort, no expert in any one of these fields can claim to have anything more than a partial picture, each often having special techniques of distorting and caricaturing the reality in its effort ot make it manageable and comprehensible (economics, especially of the mathematical variety, would fall flat unless it assumes the pathetic hyper-simplification that Man is nothing but a machine coldly calculating pleasure, pain, profit and loss all the time). That should give us some idea of how complicated the subject matter is. Literature (including, very importantly, biographies) and cinema, moreover, are very powerful ways of not only trying to understand the human mind but to explore its seemingly limitless creative powers. As the Bard said, ‘What a piece of work is Man!’, he himself being a prime exemplar.

It is with this mind that we compose Thus Spake Zarathustra, and sculpt Madonnas, and write Hamlet, and work out e equals m times c squared, and love and hate and laugh and learn and dream. It is with this mind that I long for God (who is this ‘I’? Is it an illusion? Does it mean anything? Where is it located? Is it coterminous with the body and bodily life? Why are some few minds so immeasurably more powerful than the rest? Do collective minds exist?...). It is this I which is reflecting while writing this essay…

The long and short of it is, even a fairly good grasp of the fundamental sciences, physics and chemistry, gives you little or no understanding of what is, or should be, the most important thing of interest to all of us, that which, individually as well as collectively, shapes and guides our destiny.

If this is accepted to be true, isn’t it a frightening thing that of late those who are guiding the fates of nations, heads of governments and CEOs of giant corporations, have very little education outside of one or the other of the sciences?

Don’t we need much more broadly educated people at the helm of affairs than we have right now? And doesn’t that beg the question, what does being ‘educated’ mean?

Just thinking. Swarnava, it is budding physicists like you who give me the courage to wonder publicly like this, those who, despite loving their own subjects, already know that ‘this is not all there is’. Who know and respect and wonder over the fact that some of the greatest insights in science, too, come in dreams…

Travelling, on holiday

Ever since the heady days of childhood silliness ended, I have always been quite sure that if you want to really enjoy a cricket match (as distinct from the primitive tribal intoxication of participating in artificially stirred-up crowd madness), you should watch it in your drawing room - or, better still, bedroom - on TV. You will get closeups, and multiple angles, and expert commentary (with the added blessing of being able to turn that off anytime they get on your nerves), without ever stirring yourself, or having to jostle with hordes of noisy and sweaty people, getting your feet trodden upon, your shirt torn or your pocket picked or your bottom pinched if you are female. If you are watching a pre-recorded video, that is better still, for you can pause it when you are bored or have something urgent to attend to, then come back and resume where you left off when it suits you again.

Visiting the Taj Mahal for the fourth and, I hope, the last time, I had exactly the same feeling. The crowds are getting more insufferable by the decade; videos on YouTube give you the same tour without the expense and the hassle, and any good coffee table book (there are hundreds available) will offer you a treasury of beautiful photographs most of which you will never be able to see with your own eyes, and certainly not in one visit - such as from the air and from the river, at dawn, afternoon and on moonlit nights. Likewise, thanks to some old boys, I have been seeing lovely photos of several different countries, including, most recently, Serbia and Austria, and while I am thankful to them, I am quite sure that I'd not like to spend several lakhs to visit the same. For me, pictures and videos are good enough: one who can see sees with his mind. It's like people telling me that you can't really enjoy watching TV unless you have a jumbo flatscreen. Just because they can't doesn't mean that I can't either. As for the 'been there done that' crowd on Instagram, they can keep on entertaining their own little captive audiences: I know for a fact that that usually means only family and a handful of office colleagues, unless you are a serious celebrity. And visiting someplace like the Vatican City (see this video) is worth it - for me, at least - only if I were some VVIP or super-billionaire, for whom they would make exclusive arrangements, no ordinary tourists allowed while I am taking in the sights... if I simply want to stare hungrily and worshipfully at Michelangelo's Pieta, to my mind the greatest sculpture ever made bar none, I can do it here well enough.

At Itimad-ud-Daula's tomb, the real attraction was the tiny museum, where they have set up lovely videos that show you everything much better than walking around the campus can. In fact, the mausoleum looks much better on the screen than in reality: evidently all the renovation and refurbishing has been done only digitally! What made me sad was that all the squirrels have vanished.

Sikandra made me sigh, as always. That fellow Akbar speaks to something truly deep in me: it's like reading In Search of England. Never fails to bring to mind Kipling's magnificent poem. That one, and Gunga Din. And the novel Kim, and the incredible short story titled The Miracle of Puran Bhagat. But I must live in an age when asses with PhDs know that Kipling did not respect India, and Dickens was such a pathetic misogynist....

It would be remiss of me if I did not mention Sandip Solanki, young owner of Indian Homestay and garrulous biker. Though ma and Shilpi rolled their eyes when he claimed that he too has been a teacher of English in his time, I loved the way he and his wife Asha hosted us. God bless. If Durgapur had been a hot tourist destination, I certainly would have run a similar facility on the side.

Pujo has been wonderful. Because I didn't have to see or even hear any of it. Pupu, who is just back from Kolkata, has said দূর থেকে কল্পনা করতে ভারি ভালো লাগে !

P.S., Oct. 09: Another of my dreams fulfilled. I had a wonderful time today, hosting lunch for Pupu and her lovely young colleagues at their office. Ma and Shilpi were there too. My cup runneth over...

Oh, and do look up what my daughter wrote recently about 'Adulting'. I have written about lots of things in my time, but never about this. I somehow became adult without ever finding time to think about it :(

Gandhi, 150 years

Albert Einstein said 'Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.'

In Lage Raho Munnabhai, he says at the end 'Soch lo... do you want to listen to what I am telling you to do, or prefer to sit below my hallowed portrait on the wall and do the most despicable things?'

And this time round, all the political parties are vying frantically with one another to claim him as their exclusive inheritance.

Remember, Tagore first called him 'Mahatma', and Subhas Bose habitually addressed him as 'Father of the Nation'.

Meanwhile, senior journalist Sankarshan Thakur wrote this article in today's edition of The Telegraph of Kolkata. He is the one with whose my own views concur, most darkly. You won't remember me, Sankarshan-da, but we sort of rubbed shoulders once. Thank you.