secondHantiniketan is a small town in the Indian state of West Bengal. The poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindranath Tagore) gave this place a name. The literal translation means “House of Peace”. Tagore founded the Wisła-Bharati University here in 1901. Lectures and seminars are held outdoors under the mango tree.Later winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics studied here in the 1940s Amartya SenHe was born in Shantiniketan, where he grew up with his grandparents, both of whom were admirers of Tagore. Even before the boy spoke English, he learned Sanskrit.
In the spring of 1943, the idyllic scenery of Santiniktan was suddenly interrupted. The hungry people showed up, begged for something to eat, and then moved to Kolkata, where they hoped to be free from pain. In vain. What Sen saw when he was ten years old was the beginning of the so-called “Bangladesh Famine.” There are 2 to 3 million people, not sure for sure, to be its victims. This experience never let Sen’s life go. Thirty years later, he researched the causes of the famine, which would make him famous.
Everyone thinks that people starve to death because there is not enough food. Sen denies this. I read Mori’s recent autobiography “The House of the World”. The title is another bow to Tagore, referring to the tension between Eastern and Western ideas and the possibility of their reconciliation. Nothing disturbs the 87-year-old Sen more than Samuel Huntington’s argument about permanent cultural conflict. The multicultural Bengali and Tagore teachings of his childhood provide senators with an exciting but reconciled cultural coexistence experience. The worship of Tagore continues to this day. His name also comes from the poet: Amartya means “immortal” or “heavenly” in Bengali.
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Back to the Great Famine. Since 1942, food prices in Bangladesh have risen. Why this is happening is still unclear at first. The British who ruled this country ignored humanitarian disasters because they believed there was enough food and drink. They are not wrong. However, according to Sen, they have the wrong theory to justify their ignorance and the destruction of the Bengalis. If you only look at the food provided, you will find that there is no shortage of food. More goods enter the market.
Full or hungry
But what about the demand? There is prosperity there. How can a terrible famine occur while the economy is booming? We are in the middle of World War II in East Asia. The Japanese army stands on the border with India. In addition, there were anti-British Indian soldiers, and later Americans. There are armaments everywhere, people need to eat a lot-and they get money from the country. It is demand shocks that cause prices to soar. There has been panic buying. Speculators later appeared, and they made money out of necessity.
