Amartya Sen
Yesterday I met Amartya Sen, the Nobel Laureate.
He gave a distinguished lecture at Berkeley. I was undecided about going to the event till the last moment. When a friend driving up offered me a ride I had 5 minutes to decide and get ready. I packed my laptop, rain boots and the ‘borrowed’ umbrella and got in the car. I had a backup plan if I had to wait long hours or didn’t get any seats. It’s called “work”.
We reached quite early. They hadn’t opened the gates yet. People were still in the hall from the sunday events at the church. We were asked to wait in a small room in the lobby. There was a family waiting in there, too. The fierce lady who told me to wait there was introducing them. It was the Chowdhury family of the Subir & Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The first center of its kind. As I was still absorbing that fact and frantically looking for a business card, an elderly gentleman entered and everybody went on pause for a fraction of a second.
If I did not know who it could be I wouldn’t be able to guess. He had a hunched back and it was hard to understand him at times. But with his fast speech and sharp sense of humor, there was no doubt that he was an academic from New England. The Bangali in there was not evident. Then he said few Bangla words. That’s when I realized that everybody in that room understood Bangla. Even the big burly white guy. They were all there for the new center for Bangladesh. They had been there and grown the Bangla Language Studies program.
Dr. Sen shared anecdotes. Anecdotes about Steve Jobs and not letting his kids use an iPad. He told about his colleague betting for 10 years straight that he would win and giving up the year he got it. I shared a video about the early morning call. The one he thought was about children being in an accident or something. It occurred to him when the call had things like “The will by, Sir Alfred Nobel in 1901 …”. But it went on and on for minutes. He wanted to tell them, “Can you cut it out and tell me what this is?”. He was a charmer. The kid in the third grade and the octogenarians like him in the room all were equally in a fan within minutes.
The lecture started with introductions as usual. But what was unexpected to me were the introductions about Bangladesh and how Amartya Sen’s commentary always puts Bangladesh ahead of India in economic indices. I was traumatized. I was scared this was going to be another lecture about how poor we are and how sick. I sat with all my muscles tense.
But as it went on I was pleasantly surprised. Subir and Malini Chowdhury are not alumnus of Berkeley. None of the faculty their are from Bangladesh. Yet everybody there had a genuine interest in research of Bangladesh. Yes, I know what you are thinking — the cynic in me doubts it, too. Yet, I was there listening to Dr. Sen describe the history of Bangladesh as passionately and correctly as I would. For post-1971 or may be even post-1947 generation, people like Dr. Sen who spent first twelve years of his life in Wari, Dhaka, are not Bangladeshi. I think I understood yesterday why they would feel otherwise. He might have felt as cynical as I did about the interest of the crowd. He spent good thirty minutes of his distinguished lecture to distinguish Bangladesh. He painted it with potential I see with and with love I would. Yes, we have problems, but who doesn’t. And we are much nicer than you guys out there know about.
Later that night, somebody told me about his personal writings. I am unfamiliar of those. But I understood when I heard it is like “Namesake”. Many immigrant grad student families share that struggle. And I suddenly realized how, he too struggled to assimilate in this culture. May be, his then-wife, too, walked in her awkward outfit in the cold winter to the laundromat. How lonely and depressing those early years were. And how one never truly assimilates.
Brilliant academic sightings of the day:
Lawrence Cohen, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Puneeta Kala, Raka Ray, Sanchita Banerjee Saxena.
A shout out to the two Bangladeshi grad students, Sheikh Waheed Baksh at Development Practice and Shabhanaz Rashid Diya at Public Policy. Make us proud.
Glossary:
New England: What we in USA, call Massachusetts and few other neighboring states. That is where Boston is. Boston is where Harvard and MIT is at.
Namesake: First novel by the Pulitzer winning author Jhumpa Lahiri. A Bangali, too. The Namesake depicts the struggles of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli (Irrfan Khan and Tabu), two first-generation immigrants from West Bengal, India to the United States.
