What was your experience with Amartya Sen?

I have not been in Amartya Sen’s classes anywhere, , but have heard him in person once way back in the late sixties/early 70s when he visited the Indian Statistical Institute and Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta where I was a graduate student and Calcutta and Sen had many classmates, friends, admirers, and I am sure some detractors. My then advisor, Professor Jati Sengupta, was a classmate of Sen. These days it is fashionable in India to caricature Professor Sen. It may be his stature in the west, his refusal to budge from his principles, his refusal to be a right-wing monster that most of his detractors would like him to be, but I suspect it is mostly jealousy because he has achieved what, in my opinion, no Indian has at least in the social sciences. It does no justice to put him in a straitjacket of Economics. He is an economist who shuns neither philosophy nor politics. His writings are unusually broad and yet rigorous, and enlightening to read. It is not generally known that at the ripe old a ge of 18 he self-diagnosed his own oral cancer after the doctors pooh-poohed the idea. So he seemed to have a slight speech impediment which I can see creating some difficulties in undergraduate classes. I found his lectures fascinating and in fact made me take some economics courses which I would not have otherwise. I wish I could go back to my younger days only to take his classes. November 3 later this year Professor Sen will turn 90. I hope Harvard is organizing some event, and his students will honour him with a Festschrift.