| NEWS NOTES NOBELMAN COMES TO TOWN
 It was a week to remember in Calcutta. Nobel
laureate Amartya Sen came home and was received by tumultous crowds at the Dum Dum airport
on Tuesday, after which he went to Dhaka from where he returned only to go to Santiniketan
on Sunday. Dr Sen was visibly moved when he arrived on Tuesday and journalists covering
his arrival had a long tete-a-tete with him at the airport lounge itself. The Nobelman
said the he was ``tired’’ as he had given ``12 lectures in eight
days’’ and praised the West Bengal government for its work on land reforms,
particularly the panchayat activity.
In fact, time and again, while referring to Bengal, he said that poverty could be removed only through land reforms and optimum use of resources. ``I study and try to solve ecomic problems…I do not have a magic formula,’’ Dr Sen, speaking most of the time in his mothertongue of Bengali. However, he was at pains to point out, again and again, that though winning the Nobel Prize was a great honour, that did not make him the ``greatest son of Bengal.’’ He said,``Why, you have Satyajit Ray too…’’ The Nobel Laureate also said that he did not consider himself as the ``second ashramite after Tagore to have got the Nobel Prize…There can be no comparisons.’’ The Bengal government has made grand plans for Dr Sen with a state reception awaiting him in Calcutta on December 27. Meanwhile, Dr Sen is scheduled to address his first-ever public gathering in a decked –up Santiniketan on Monday where he will talk to hundreds of villagers of Kuchli and Sahajapur of Birbhum district, two places where he did a major part of his reasearch work in the early eighties. The local MP and veteran CPI(M) leader, Somnath Chatterjee, has organised this public meeting and the villagers will thus, for the first time in their lives, get a taste of what Dr Sen stands for and what he has meant to the nation and its economics. Excerpts will also be read out from the works of Tagore and Sen at the meeting to ``point out the vast similarities between the two giants, particularly on the gender issue.’’
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The popular cult that has already grown around Dr Sen was also evident when
he visited the Vidyasagar Mela grounds at the Maidan shortly after he touched down at the
Dum Dum Airport from Dhaka where he had stayed for two days. The Vidyasagar Mela, a
brainchild of the CPI(M) Politburo member, Biman Bose, focusses entirely on the literacy
drive of the state government and all proceeds go to that end. It was significant and a
pat on the back of the Front government that Dr Sen, taking time off from his busy and
hectic schedule, chose to visit the Mela which was in its own way yet another vindication
of the Bengal Government’s efforts to reach out to the people. The people at the Mela
, who had advance knowledge that Dr Sen would be coming, made a beeline for him and it was
apparent that Nobelman had found a place in the hearts of the people of Bengal though he
does not reside in his home state on a permanent basis. On Bose’s request, Dr Sen has
also said that if his schedule permits, then he would like to visit some of the poor
villages of Bengal to gain a first-hand knowledge of the state of matters. If he does do
so, then this state will be the final beneficiary of the suggestions that comes from a
great man’s philosophy.