Amartya Sen

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection.

I have not had any serious non-academic job.

People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.

I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.

It is also very engaging - and a delight - to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work.

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

The curriculum of the school did not neglect India's cultural, analytical and scientific heritage, but was very involved also with the rest of the world.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.