Abhijit Banerjee

We might think we are very different from Pakistan but we are not; we are the same people, with the same capacity for warmth and passion and intolerance and violence. ”

If you happen to be mostly depressed about the state of your life, I don't know whether you feel like doing impulse control. ”

I think it is a very important point for India to create a bureaucracy that lives on the ground and gets its stimulus from how life is on the ground. ”

We will remember UPA 2, if at all, it seems, as that period when things went mysteriously wrong - for the bribe-taking, buck-passing, foot-dragging, and general sense of paralysis. ”

Here is an entirely banal idea that I think has the potential to change the world: Take evidence seriously. Taking evidence seriously does not mean privileging numbers over all other forms of knowledge - theories, narratives, images. Nor does it mean the kind of radical skepticism that questions everything to the point where no action is possible. ”

In the development business doing something for both women and the environment is the equivalent of holding a royal flush in poker. ”

Gujarat is a pro-business state, where civil society organisations are comfortable with working to make sure that business does not suffer. Large parts of the rest of India, for better or worse, are very different. ”

There is no doubt that in the last years of the UPA's rule, a certain lethargy had set into the way the central government went about its business. ”

Our democratic culture does not prioritise protecting an individual's right to live life her way, especially if that is not our way or the way of the community. ”

One problem with globalisation is that bad ideas seem to travel faster than good ones; first there was smearing tomato ketchup on everything; then drinking sugar-soaked cocktails ('Cosmo'-politanism) instead of our traditional whisky soda, and now this idea that we should abandon the poor to their fate in order to protect their dignity. ”