The Argumentative Amartya?

Ref aisha_sarwari #8

[How could this guy get a prize for being within the parameters of being non-offensive?]

Amartya Sen came up with some theory in economics for which he got the Nobel Prize not for being inoffensive or non-offensive. I am sure his theory pissed off quite a few academics.

And no, Jinnah wasn`t denied a Nobel Prize just because he was the most offensive person on earth.

Dear Farzana,

``Can a politically correct individual ever be brilliant? Would he not be shackled by his own need to work within the circumference of logic and rationality and miss out on many original thoughts?``

Well said, I tend to agree. One may only live expressively and face the wrath of getting booted off various clicks, from people who would rather not rock the boat of fragile status quo statuses upon which they build their identities.

I am having trouble living because I speak...and I haven`t even spoken my complete mind yet. How could this guy get a prize for being within the parameters of being non-offensive?

I am jealous.

Aisha Sarwari

Just a month ago Foreign Policy asked for a list of top five public intellectuals out of a chosen hundred.
Sen and Sunita Narain were the only Indians on that list.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3249

Here is the final list.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3260

Interestingly the person most hated by the Indian rightist nutcases, Arundhati Roy made it in the top five write ins. My favorite Richard Dawkins was picked at No. 3.

Top Write-in Votes 1 Milton Friedman 2 Stephen Hawking 3 Arundhati Roy 4 Howard Zinn 5 Bill Clinton.
I know the nutcase Indian crowd (DM and Sadna types) would have loved to have Modi on the list at number one probably.

Forget that I am not surprised at Sen’s thesis “… famines have never afflicted any country that is independent, that goes to elections,”

Lets take an example from India itself.

“There is plenty of precedent in South Asia for natural catastrophes being the harbinger of wars and revolutions. The great Bengal famine of 1943 cost the lives of 2 million to 4 million people. Historians agree the main cause of the huge death toll was a combination of complacency, incompetence, and lack of compassion by British wartime officials who were criminally negligent in waking up to the scale of the disaster. But the immediate political result was to destroy Hindu-Muslim community relations in Bengal with many people in each community convinced the other one was hoarding food and deliberately increasing their suffering.

Within four years, Bengal was torn apart by ferocious Hindu-Muslim clashes at independence in 1947 that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Could such a thing have happened if India had a representative government in 1943? Did anyone ever try to analyze the impact of Bengal famine on Pre-partition Indian politics?”

Interestingly, just about 27 years later in 1970, a natural disaster in East Pakistan led to Bangladesh and you know what Pakistan had no democracy either.

http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041231-021606-3143r.htm

A write up on Amartya Sen needs a little more depth and a better discussion about his work instead of one liners and knee jerk reactions. I also believe that people can achieve these goals by improving the quality of critique on the write up itself instead of personal attacks on the writer.

In his book ‘The Argumentative Indian’, Sen raised some interesting points and brought up something that really hurts Indian intellectuals. Is Farzana echoing that frustration? But then Farzana is not a mere amanuensis. It takes little bit of patience to grasp and read between the lines in Farzana’s articles. Obviously, most of our friends from the wrong side of the border are mostly dogmatic and have no inclination to stomach opposite views.

Sen has opened up something that should have been vigorously debated in the India media. (It might have been-I don’t read India magazines that much). His book is truly an attack on the bête noir of modern day Indian politics. The rightwing Hindutva movement and that is the reason we see an attempt here to muzzle the debate.

Hindutva is an intolerant philosophy which is abhorrent to the majority of Hindus and is virulently anti-Muslim.

While agreeing with him on his thoughts on Hindutva, I disagree with him that the constant chatter and dissent in the Indian society actually is the bedrock of Indian progress and that Indians practiced democracy long before the west did. That is a cockamamie. Here Sen falls in to the regular jaunt that is common in all Indian writers today or in the Last century. The whole Indian middle class intellectuals from Sen to die hard Hindutva nutcases do their utmost to impress a Whiteman. A Whiteman to Indian is like God. The most practical example is the kind of reverence Sonia gets in Indian village because she almost or at least looks white.

The inferiority complex that runs pretty deep in the Indian middle classes is often found in English literature produced in India too. It also shows up when a large majority of otherwise educated middleclass or lower middleclass talk about the lasting impression of yoga and Indian cuisine on the Westerns societies. This basically is a bunch of croc.

The true style of Indian argument is not a reasoned attempt to convince the opposition but is a physical exercise in moving hands, heads, and yelling at each other to prove a point. The other way of discussion is either pulling rank or immediately dismissing the opposition with a show of anger.

Now does this description fit the democratic discourse that is part of the western democracy? No! Not at all. Sen follows exactly in the footsteps of his Hindutva opponents when he tries to take a false pride in something that is not there, at all. Indian chatter is not practicing democracy; it is practicing idle talk without any meaning or purposes.

There was always something Dr Strangelove like about Amartya Sen... does anyone else see it?

``And what do we celebrate about him, anyway? He may have rejected “voodoo economics”, but he paid his taxes to America. Cambridge glorified his work because it did not have to live with the reality he spoke and continues to speak about. So, what do we preen about? That he held on to his Indian passport? According to the good professor, “A single citizenship is important to me because there is no loyalty conflict. I don’t feel British, I don’t feel American. I feel Indian.”

What a piece of garbage. farzana bibi asking why should we celebrate a bengali hindu nobel laurate. is anyone surprised? She is mad at him because he is not mad. There is something wrong about our psyche that we pay so much attention to sick, stupid individuals like farzana than to the brilliant minds like amrtya. I guess we all want our entertainement reading morons like farzana, feeling superior:( well let me get my kicks. what a waste of flesh this farzans bibi is:)

some quotes about amartya:
He has a mind like a searchlight, yet he works at Mozartian speed. His output is staggering in its volume,`` comments Robert Cassen, an economist at the LSE.

``Sen has made fundamental contributions to at least four fields: social choice theory, welfare economics, economic measurement, and development economics,`` says Sudhir Anand. ``The pre-eminence that he has achieved in each of these different fields is remarkable for any scholar: that he has achieved pre-eminence in so many is utterly extraordinary. He is held in enormously high respect by theoretical, empirical and policy economists alike - to say nothing of philosophers and political theorists.``

Arguing that simple measures of GNP were not enough to assess the standard of living, he helped to create the United Nations` Human Development Index, which has become the most authoritative international source of welfare comparisons between countries.

=== Interact Filtered ===
view this users filtered interacts

Congratulations on your Chowk century! May you write more and more, and even better and better! All the best!

chowk-staff, godot, temporal (i`m not sure this should be addressed to)

why is this kind of juvenile writing being inflicted on us?

I APPEAL TO ALL READERS OF THIS ARTICLE TO DESIST FROM POSTING ANY COMMENTS TO DEMONSTRATE OUR DISPLEASURE WITH THE QUALITY OF THIS ARTICLE

THANK YOU