When Amartya bought a pirated copy of his own book

“I feel flattered when I see my book being pirated both in Kolkata and Dhaka”

When offered a pirated copy of his own book by a young vendor in Mumbai on a previous trip to the country, it was too tempting for Nobel laureate Amartya Sen not to accept it. He thus acquired a copy of his own book “very cheap,” something that flatters the renowned economist even now. But his publishers are not pleased.

This was among several anecdotes that Professor Sen shared recently at an event in Kolkata. “I feel flattered when I see my book being pirated both here and in Dhaka…In fact, in Mumbai, I have had people trying to sell me my own book twice. One time, when I said I do not want it, he told me ‘you know, it is a very good book. And from me, very cheap,' which seemed a very tempting offer and I did buy a copy,” he said earlier this week.

Professor Sen had the audience in splits of laughter with confessions such as “I don't even know right now where my medal [his Nobel medal] is.”

Asked whether he felt the West Bengal government should increase the efforts in locating the Nobel medal of Rabindranath Tagore that was stolen from the campus of Visva Bharati at Santiniketan in 2004, Professor Sen quipped: “You know, I am not a great believer in what Marx described as Commodity Fetishism.”

Interactive session

The question was posed at an interactive session that followed the screening of documentary film

Amartya Sen: A life Reexamined. The director of the film, Suman Ghosh, recently made a film, titled

Nobel Chor, a fictional account of the 2004 theft of Tagore's medal and a parallel was drawn between the two films as the two Nobel laureates were pivotal to both.

Professor Sen also recounted an experience in Heathrow when he was returning to India for the first time after winning the Nobel Prize.

“Along with the medal they give you a replica. We carried it in two briefcases and my briefcase got stolen in Heathrow. But happily that was the replica,” he said adding “I should have known Emma [his wife] would never have trusted me with it.”

Asked to comment on how teaching has influenced his research, he fondly remembered some of his brilliant students many of them now famous in their own right such as Prashant Patnaik and Kaushik Basu. “I have never published a book before teaching it in class first and I have never written a book that did not benefit from the critique of my students,” he said.