Reforms don’t lack a human face
Published by Yazad Jal November 30th, 2004 in EconomicsInteresting interview of Jagdish Bhagwati on “Walk the Talk.” Shekhar Gupta gets him to talk about his Cambridge days with Manmohan Singh and Amartya Sen, and about his defence of globalisation. Bhagwati is gentle on his opponents but his quietly damning putdowns are superb.
On Arundhati Roy: Arundhati Roy is unfortunately…unfortunate because she’s our compatriot and she’s written one very fine novel as you know…but her conclusions are far more obvious than her arguments and that makes it impossible to function. You don’t know where to begin or where to end.
On Joseph Stiglitz: Stiglitz is my colleague at Columbia and he’s hard to pin down because when he talks with people like us he sounds very amiable and agreeable. But then he goes in front of a crowd of a hundred thousand in Bombay at the World Social Forum…suddenly all restraint and wisdom gets dropped, and then he’s sort of speaking to a large crowd. He actually told me that he faced a hundred thousand people at Bombay.
But I did tell him that he should not get too excited, because I grew up in Bombay and when I went for a walk to the beach, I normally saw about two hundred thousand people! So that doesn’t mean very much in Bombay.
Possibly the most interesting part of the interview was about his daughter being in the US Marines. A Gujjuben in the Marines. Go figure!
Thanks to Gaurav Sabnis for alerting me to the episode during the weekend.
Did he say “impossible to function” or “impossible to fathom” about the Verbal Terrorist? The latter makes more sense.
I didnt know that Jagdish Bhagwati, Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh were in Cambridge around the same time. Could be the premise of a movie…. three intellectuals, and the divergent choices they made..very filmy!!
:-)
Hi yazad,
I have been reading your blog for sometime and though most of your posts are well written, i don’t agree with some of them - like this one.
You seemed to have used the interview to discredit some chosen people, but in the same interview i found this-
“But Chomsky is the only serious person there because Chomsky is the world’s greatest linguist. He is a man who is known for his intelligence and ability and invariably you get arguments you can put your teeth into. Most of the time I do disagree but he’s really an intellectual”
Given that Chomsky’s views are usually against globalization (with which i may or may not agree with), you ought to have quoted this for completeness.
AR is often accused of selective quoting, but aren’t you doing the same ?
BTW, i have a “Fountainhead” review in my blog and some interesting observations on objectivists and libertarians - thought you may be interested.
Hi Nivas.
I provided the link to the complete interview for exactly the same reason — people who wished to, could check it out.
There are constraints of space and I wanted to selectively quote Bhagwati. His points on Arundhati Roy and Joseph Stiglitz are far more interesting. His take on Chomsky was the boring “I think he’s a great linguist, but I disagree with him on many topics”.
Advocates of “completeness,” I’m afraid, would be happy only when everything is quoted, which is not always possible.