ABHIJIT AS I KNEW HIM
The problem of writing about Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee for me is finding a suitable starting point. I know him as long as I can remember, and much before that also, because of the closeness of our families. His is a family of academics. Abhijit’s — like his father's — forte was mathematics. I remember, in 1979, he gave me a problem in geometry to solve: Prove this — if the bisectors of two angles in a triangle are equal in length, the triangle is isosceles. He said it had taken him a few days to crack the problem.
It is by chance that we went to the same school, South Point, and the same college, Presidency. In September 1983, when I joined college, he was moving to Harvard for his PHD and had become a legend as a student. It did not overwhelm me much then because the number of legendary students in our college was overwhelmingly large.
I did not feel I was much close to Abhijit, or Jhima, as he was called by many, in his early days. Not that he had a stern exterior. In fact, far from it. My elder brother was (and is) his friend, and my friend was ( and is) Abhijit’s younger brother. He wouldn’t open up much except with his friends. This changed after he came to Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in 1981 to do his MA. I met him in JNU the next year and found a much transformed person. He was taking an interest in student politics, something, if I am not wrong, he was averse to.
He did not have much fondness for Marxism in his early days (I do not know if he has much fondness for it now). But in JNU I found him an angry man — angry at the state, the ruling classes, the Establishment. And, full of compassion for the poor and how they are “left to die”. All this did not make him a hard-boiled Communist. Maybe these were latent in his personality earlier. But they certainly became manifest in his JNU years.
I asked him, “Presidency College or JNU, which do you like more?” He instinctively replied, “JNU.” Then, changed his reply: “Both, in different ways.” That JNU had a lot of impact on him is evident also from the fact that he took a plunge in student politics in 1983, when there was a famous movement in the university.
He was not a nose-to-thegrindstone student in school. A mathematics teacher once said about him: “Brilliant, but a shirker.” He had a slick sense of humour, too. A physics teacher, Anjan Dasgupta, advised him to begin to start writing answers to questions because the class 12 board exams were approaching. “Sir, I have written many,” Abhijit said. Anjan babu asked: “Why don’t you show them to me?” The reply was: “Let it be, sir. I will have to hire a truck.”
It is a matter of regret that many who would have literally jumped at the news of his getting the Nobel prize have departed.
And I am left here still struggling with his geometry problem.