In the last of these looking back columns, let me start with an anecdote. Around the turn of the millennium, I was invited, by Jeffrey Sachs, to a conference in Harvard. There was a dinner and there, I found myself seated next to John Kenneth Galbraith. I was completely overawed. His intellectual and physical height are sufficient to dwarf anyone. At the time, Galbraith was 90+ and his memory wasn’t what it used to be. Galbraith asked me where I was from. Hearing India, he retorted, “I knew a young man from India once.” When I said India is a large country and this wasn’t sufficient information to identify anyone, he turned pensive. I told him I knew he had been an Ambassador to India and that I had read “Ambassador’s Journal”. He was puzzled at this and remarked, “Did I write that book?” This reminded me of the time I had dropped in to meet Piero Sraffa, to get his signature on a copy of “Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities”. Sraffa was 80+ then, not 90+. He looked suspiciously at the book, refusing to believe he had written it. Eventually, something jogged Galbraith’s memory and he said, “I remember the young man’s name now, Jawaharlal Nehru.”
This story is from the October 16, 2021 edition of The Morning Standard.
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This story is from the October 16, 2021 edition of The Morning Standard.
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