Keep on Keeping on, the Academic Way

Waking on a long flight, Pranab Bardhan found a note on his lap, from the captain congratulating him for passing 3 million miles flying on his mileage plan. He chanted to himself, a word from a familiar Sanskrit hymn: Charaiveti — keep moving. He certainly has.

Growing up in the mean streets of Kolkata, taught at home by a polymath father, Bardhan rose from the city’s premier college to leading world universities, ending at the University of California, Berkeley. In this light-hearted book, a world-class development economist recalls snippets of his journey with

touching simplicity, selfdeprecating humor and candor. A college mate in

Kolkata told him to wait for his phone call before asking

the driver to bring him;

Bardhan, alas, had no phone and no car. At Oxford’s All

Souls College dining room he committed the sin of picking up a cloth napkin, to be politely told that as a visiting fellow he merited only a paper one. A college senior, Amartya Sen, confided that he’d stopped going: “There are ‘scorpions’ out there at the dinner table.”

Anecdotes about the great and the famous he encountered offer a tantalizing peek into their personalities. But the book is not a bragging list. His reminiscences reveal a renaissance mind sprinkled with literary allusions and perceptive comments about films he has watched over the years and that found resonance in the situation he was in.

A world-class development economist recalls snippets of his journey with touching simplicity.

Charaiveti: An Academic’s Global Journey By Pranab Bardhan

Harpercollins India, 2023, 415 pages, $17.99 (Kindle)