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Amartya Sen keeps his cool

Having teased out democracy's paradoxes, Amartya Sen is keeping his calm as politics runs wild

By Sameer Rahim  
February 16, 2017
March 2017

Francois Hollande honours AMartya Sen with the Legion d'Honneur in New Delhi in 2013 ©Swarup/Rex/Shutterstock

Amartya Sen is an eminently reasonable man. Over six decades as an economist and political theorist—he won the Nobel Prize in 1998—the 83-year-old has kept faith with rational thinking. This is as much to do with personal experience as intellectual preference. As a boy growing up in Bengal, Sen saw a bleeding labourer stumble into his garden. He was a Muslim who had been stabbed by Hindus. “Aside from being a veritable nightmare,…

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Sameer Rahim

Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Managing Editor. His novel “Asghar and Zahra” (JM Originals) was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. He was a judge for the 2020 Booker Prize

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