Biographical

A series of accidents, mostly fortunate, made me the human being and economist that I am. It started with the accident of my birth, to a couple who were both economists. This, in my generation, was already a minor miracle – in the mid 1950s my mother somehow managed to persuade her parents, who were relatively conventional Maharashtrians of the time, to take the very unusual step of sending her to the London School of Eco­nomics. This is where she met my dad. My dad was really not meant to be there; he was a college drop-out who, bored with his clerical job in Kolk­ata, made his way to London with a goal of studying more. He took night classes at the Kensington Polytechnic while working various jobs as a manual laborer. With all that he did so well in his part 1 BSc exam that one of the examiners, Richard Lipsey, a professor at London School of Economics, went out of his way to seek him out and eventually secured for him a scholarship to go to LSE for his final year. But for this chance encounter with such extraordinary generosity, it is likely that he would have never gone to LSE and my parents would have never met.