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.

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.