Red Carpet Excesses

Bengali pride is a sensitive matter—civic peace has been known to be disturbed if it is offended—so I better be careful as I tread on dangerous terrain. Nevertheless the coveted international award for Amartya Sen does re-confirm Bengali conviction that they and they alone constitute the intellectual elite of the country. Bertie Wooster maintained that Jeeves’ genius came from a partiality to fish, which may be true in the case of our east coast brethren too. (We have the apocryphal story of the police constable discussing Brecht with Louis Malle when the latter was shooting a documentary onthe streets of Calcutta.) Be that as it may, and with apologies to Prof. Sen’s stomach, India was so short of heroes in 1998 that the harassed scholar will surely forgive some of the red carpet excesses committed in his honour.