SAP Calendar of Events
Take in a lecture, seminar, foreign film or cultural event
|
|||||||||
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | Sa | |||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |||||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | |||
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | |||
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | |||
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||||
Go to todayFilm screening: "Amartya Sen: A Life Reexamined" presented by acclaimed film maker Suman Ghosh |
|
| Suman Ghosh's film sets out to examine Amartya Sen's work through a documentary of his life. For the film portrays important people and places in Sen's life: his mother Amita Sen; his teacher Dhiresh Bhattacharya; Shantiniketan; some of the schools he attended; and the Master's Lodge at Trinity College, Cambridge (which he now inhabits). Ghosh's movie is a celebration of Bengali contributions to the progress of human knowledge and reason. Sen is placed in the tradition of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray. As Bose says in the film, Tagore, Ray and Sen highlight the role of India, not as an alternative in a great "clash of civilizations" but rather as the source of another thread (perhaps competing with others, perhaps not) in the fabric of universal reason. To illustrate the back-and-forth movement from the universal to the particular, the film alternates Sen's contributions to universal reason with stories from his life and his contributions to India. Beginning with Sen lecturing at Cambridge on the axioms of social choice theory, the film then highlighting his contributions to economics and philosophy, interspersed with the story of his intellectual progress as he moved from India to Cambridge to Harvard and now back to Cambridge. Scenes and interviews from a West Bengal village literacy program provide the background for discussion of the UN Human Development Index and Sen's approach to development, which draws the movie to a close. The movie succeeds best at conveying the Indian fabric from which Sen's life has been made. Sen's early life and education in India are told to us by Sen himself and by his teacher Bhattacharya and his mother (also in interviews). The story is illustrated by family pictures and scenery from the places he lived. As the film moves to Sen's life outside India and to the story of his intellectual progress, the treatment is less consistent, but includes the film's most poignant moments: his early battle with cancer, his phone call to let his mother know he had won the Nobel Prize, and breaking in to his room at Trinity College in order to get the letter patent from the Queen that he needed to present at the gate when named Master of the College. Throughout, his humanity, in its brilliance and its fragility and fallibility, shines through. |
|
| Date | November 6, 2009 |
| Time | 12:00PM |
| Location | Asian Studies Lounge |
| Speakers |
Suman Ghosh
Suman Ghosh |
|
For more information on this event contact: Durga Bor 607-255-8910 nsj1@einaudi.cornell.edu |
|
We encourage you to check out upcoming events and specific event types by using the search tool immediately to your right. If you would like to receive e-mail notices regarding up-coming events click here to subscribe to our list-serve.