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.