Posted by on Dec 5, 2013 in Miscellaneous Translations | 0 comments

Some time later leaving London for good, Jean Drèze began to live in Delhi. Then he became an Indian citizen and started teaching at the Delhi School of Economics while living in a slum with the poor. Clad in a punjabi, in summer winter or rain, he would travel over long distances riding his bicycle with his notebooks and a laptop in a shoulder-bag (when I had to familiarize him with someone else, I’d say that he was the laptop-carrying Jesus Christ). He would avoid riding in a car, if he had to travel afar, he loved to disappear in a crowded, second-class railway compartment. He did his research work with Amartya Sen, but when he had been invited quite a few times at the conferences in Calcutta’s Taj Bengal Hotel, Jean would refuse to put up in a hotel room reserved for him and would find accommodation in a friend’s place instead. If I happened to be there in Calcutta at that time, he would stay with me. Even when he was offered hot water for his bath in winter, Jean would bathe in ice-cold water. Once he said to me, “I am habituated to see poverty in your city, but what appears unbearable to me, what makes me feel as if I’d have to throw up, is when I see the arrangements of a pompous feast for a marriage ceremony and then, after a while, the menial workers carry the offals in baskets to the dustbin and the beggars, who had assembled there, would all rush to it and fall over it.”

Jean Drèze

Jean Drèze


Jean would, from time to time, set out on his walk tours to various places. He discusses with me many a matter over email. Once Jean wrote to me an email about his visit to Orissa’s Kalahandi on coming to know about the famine there. When he was roaming in the villages there, one day he saw an emaciated man on a village road carrying fruits and vegetables and other items in a big basket. Jean began to talk with him and came to know that the man has been starving for two days. The market was ten miles away and if he could sell the items in his basket on that day on reaching it, he would be able to have a meal. Jean said to the man, “Let’s go together. We could then talk and I could share the burden with you. You’ve carried the basket for long, now let me carry it for some time.” But the man wouldn’t readily agree to this proposal and yet Jean was adamant and went on repeating his request and the man relented at last. “Then,” Jean writes to me, “Pranab, you won’t believe but as soon as I lifted his basket and held it on my head, I found it so heavy that I had to sit down on the road! Yet, that fragile-looking man, who had been starving for two days, had to carry it over such a long distance!”……

First part of this post can be found here.

[Translated from srĩtikōnḍuan (স্মৃতিকণ্ডূয়ন), Pranab Bardhan‘s memoirs in Bengali which is being serialized in the Bengali magazine dēś (দেশ)]