Amartya Sen

Empowering women is key to building a future we want.

It is also very engaging - and a delight - to go back to Bangladesh as often as I can, which is not only my old home, but also where some of my closest friends and collaborators live and work.

When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.

I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.

People's identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way - quite suddenly - to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.

I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.

A defeated argument that refuses to be obliterated can remain very alive.

While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection.

The curriculum of the school did not neglect India's cultural, analytical and scientific heritage, but was very involved also with the rest of the world.

I have not had any serious non-academic job.

The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.

Gender inequality is not one problem, it's a collection of problems.

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.