Bangladesh is way ahead of India: Amartya Sen

[Gonjo]

Salute to Amartya Sir. A true Bengali will always feel for another Bengali of any nations citizen.

 

[LaBong]

Salute to Amartya Sir. A true Bengali will always feel for another Bengali of any nations citizen.

While I appreciate your sentiment, but it has nothing do with him being a Bengali. He is concerned for all Indians and there's always scope to learn from your neighbours.

 

[haywards]

criticism is your best friend....

 

[Joe Shearer]

While I appreciate your sentiment, but it has nothing do with him being a Bengali. He is concerned for all Indians and there's always scope to learn from your neighbours.

At the same time, he makes no attempt at suppressing his Bengali - his east Bengali - antecedents. No east Bengali can consciously do that, not for long.

 

[LaBong]

At the same time, he makes no attempt at suppressing his Bengali - his east Bengali - antecedents. No east Bengali can consciously do that, not for long.

Yes that is true specially for those who were born in east Bengal, although the distinctive east Bengali hue is no more there for good or bad. Now it's only relevant in derby match between EB & MB!

 

[RollingStones]

It is a myth that higher GDP per capita brings better services. That myth is getting busted every day here in the US in so many areas. Yes, a certain level of per capita income is required, that will support a fair access to services (meanings service providers should get fairly paid) but beyond that things get into the gray area. With current per capita levels, India should still be able to achieve a lot better HDI than it currently has. The reason it has not is because of poor social organization and lack of community level activities (things you see in perhaps Kerala but absent in the rest of India). That's my take on it.

 

[integra]

Salute to Amartya Sir. A true Bengali will always feel for another Bengali of any nations citizen.

Amrtya sens family is from Wari(dhaka). He had his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka. I think I've visited their community in manikgonj.
Anyways congrats to him.

 

[Veritas]

I will not be an apologist for India. But the Indo-Gangetic plains have failed India, if you google top 10 cities of India, here is the following list based on Development Index for 2009 (source: EconomicTimes)

1. New Delhi
2. Mumbai
3. Chennai
4. Bengaluru
5. Hyderabad
6. Kolkata
7.Pune
8. Ahmedabad
9. Chandigarh
10. Surat

Of the list only New Delhi can be said to be in the Hindi heartland. Supposedly the anchor group is miserably failing. The Human/Social indices of South India are comparable to Thailand and Malaysia. So the India over all picture is a fractured image, predominantly of political & social failing of Hindi-Heartland.

 

[justanobserver]

I will not be an apologist for India. But the Indo-Gangetic plains have failed India, if you google top 10 cities of India, here is the following list based on Development Index for 2009 (source: EconomicTimes)

1. New Delhi
2. Mumbai
3. Chennai
4. Bengaluru
5. Hyderabad
6. Kolkata
7.Pune
8. Ahmedabad
9. Chandigarh
10. Surat

Of the list only New Delhi can be said to be in the Hindi heartland. Supposedly the anchor group is miserably failing. The Human/Social indices of South India are comparable to Thailand and Malaysia. So the India over all picture is a fractured image, predominantly of political & social failing of Hindi-Heartland.

Because the Indo-Gangetic plains were the worst affected during the colonial period ?

South India was sheltered (relatively) both during the British and Central Asian invasions

 

[Veritas]

Because the Indo-Gangetic plains were the worst affected during the colonial period ?

South India was sheltered (relatively) both during the British and Central Asian invasions

No one will buy that crap. The British exploited Madras as much as any other province. I might say even more because they conquered these regions by 1800. Central Asian invasions, the Qutubshahs of Golconda are turks, so south had its fair share. There is no good explanation for underperformance of Hindi-heartland. Complete lack of leadership on the political and social front since Independence is the real reason, please do not blame Shahjahan or Timur the Lame.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Yes that is true specially for those who were born in east Bengal, although the distinctive east Bengali hue is no more there for good or bad. Now it's only relevant in derby match between EB & MB!

Amrtya sens family is from Wari(dhaka). He had his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka. I think I've visited their community in manikgonj.
Anyways congrats to him.

I am not sure that I am in total agreement with you, Abir, although in general terms, it is true that the hostility to east Bengalis in Calcutta society is dying down gradually. When my father was interviewed by a TV channel on the occasion of Siddhartha Ray's death, and asked about a personal insight, the thought that came to his mind and that he spoke about spontaneously was the teasing about his Bangal accent that he got in his college days in Presidency College, fresh from home in Ganderia in Dhaka, and the instinctive aversion of Siddhartha to this kind of mean-spirited teasing.

I accept that the temperature has gone out of it, as the refugees settled down gradually, but can't help pointing out that Mamata Bannerji is in some ways representative of that refugee culture, her angst in some way closely linked with the angst of the dispossessed of the east, her rising in some ways symbolic of the rising of the underprivileged against the settled aristocracy and the people-in-occupation of the west. The CPM is no longer the party of the left, of the underprivileged: Opore bhara, niche bhara, majh-khanete sorbo-hara, if you remember the slogan painted on the outside of Jyoti Basu's three-story house in Hindustan Park (he occupied the middle, the first floor, the other two being given out on rent, as the doggerel rhyme wryly reminds us).

Integra, you are right in every particular. The family was related, as you probably know, that community is so small that every member is related to every other member. In the 60s, when he allowed his friends in the extreme left movement from our college to use his bungalow in Shantiniketan freely, orders came from Delhi to detain and arrest him. An anxious conference with his father resulted, and the great man, then a junior lecturer, was advised to seek a meeting. During that meeting, the consequences of staying in Calcutta were pointed out to him very candidly, and he decided to take an offer he had and went off to teach in the Delhi School of Economics. A few years later, he wrote to say that he had a prestigious foreign appointment, and how would it be if he accepted it? He was told that there would be no police interference, and he should take it immediately and get the hell out. And that is the story of Solomon Grundy.

He still has his house in Shantiniketan, that notorious bungalow that started the whole trouble. Without that trouble, of course, he would probably have retired as a senior and well-beloved Calcutta University economist, with a great reputation in a small band of devoted students, and nothing much else. His wife would have outshone him easily; as it is, so many years later, she still manages to dominate any group that is conversing around her. Their ancestral house was Wari, and his grandfather was a prominent practitioner of indigenous medicine, as his caste suggests. Other St Gregory's people in India included N. P. Sen, who became Chairman of Indian Airlines, then of Food Corporation of India, then director of the Administrative Staff College of India. There were many others, but this thread is about Bangladesh, not about the Bangal diaspora, so let it go at that.

 

[Joe Shearer]

It is a myth that higher GDP per capita brings better services. That myth is getting busted every day here in the US in so many areas. Yes, a certain level of per capita income is required, that will support a fair access to services (meanings service providers should get fairly paid) but beyond that things get into the gray area. With current per capita levels, India should still be able to achieve a lot better HDI than it currently has. The reason it has not is because of poor social organization and lack of community level activities (things you see in perhaps Kerala but absent in the rest of India). That's my take on it.

Your take is pretty good, but you're using too broad a brush. The rest of India isn't a homogenous mass; Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are far closer to Kerala than you might imagine, and even Andhra doesn't compare badly. Traditionally, it was considered to be the BIMARU states (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh) that were holding back the rest of the country. Now, with growth in all four of these, attention has shifted to the east, which is in abysmally bad shape.

Think region, and you'll get a better picture.

 

[Joe Shearer]

No one will buy that crap. The British exploited Madras as much as any other province. I might say even more because they conquered these regions by 1800. Central Asian invasions, the Qutubshahs of Golconda are turks, so south had its fair share. There is no good explanation for underperformance of Hindi-heartland. Complete lack of leadership on the political and social front since Independence is the real reason, please do not blame Shahjahan or Timur the Lame.

I'm not sure where Shah Jahan and Timur the Lame come into this economics-oriented thread, except possibly to warn us that history is at a discount here, as it always seems to be in matters relating to economics.

Taking south India as a whole, itself a mistake, most of Kerala and most of modern day Karnataka were under princely rule and there was not much British oppression going on there. On independence, when Patel pushed for integration, he inherited a number of territories which were very well run, and which had seen nurturing and investment take place.

Having said that, it is undeniably the failure of the leadership that led to the crumbling of political and social progress in the north. That itself is a function of the degree of underdevelopment, incidentally; Catch 22 applies.

 

[integra]

@joe shearer well I have a word or two to add. Even if you mind, this isn't East Bengal anymore this is banglar desh Bangladesh!
On a side note yes their are some sens in Manikgonj, probably at Senabari beside Gupta residences, I'm not sure though. Went their for some architectural studies on Panch thubi Buddha-vihar.

 

[Joe Shearer]

@joe shearer well I have a word or two to add. Even if you mind, this isn't East Bengal anymore this is banglar desh Bangladesh!
On a side note yes their are some sens in Manikgonj, probably at Senabari beside Gupta residences, I'm not sure though. Went their for some architectural studies on Panch thubi Buddha-vihar.

Heh.

Of course I don't mind; why should I? I never used the expression East Bengal; please do me a favour and go back through my posts carefully! I did, however, use east Bengali, which is perfectly valid, as we were not ever Bangladeshi; you are Bangladeshi, we are not. We came out of east Bengal, so we were - and remain - east Bengali.

I don't blame you; this is a subtle error, fairly easy to make, and falls in the category of anachronism. There was no Bangladesh in those days.

Our Pakistani friends, on another thread, are making monkeys of themselves for the nth time, and talking about Porus the Punjabi king, or king of a people that did not exist at that time. Their point - there is one ignorant youngster leading the charge - is probably that this was the Punjab even then. It wasn't; Punjab, if one analyses the word, is a post-Islamic word, a synthesis of two Persian words, which were never used until the time of the Sultanate. The language Punjabi also started only in the 12th to 13th centuries, so what they are thinking of is not clear. Actually, they aren't thinking.

I am sure you will object strongly if I call myself Bangladeshi, so east Bengali remains the correct expression for us folks. Hope this clears things up ;-)