Abhijit Banerjee On What Is Success

Brut India

"We're in a time of extreme pain in India." Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee spoke at convocation ceremony, and told the students his recipe for success...

Transcript

00:00Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benekau, both had undergraduate degrees in economics.

00:06And then they didn't use it for one minute.

00:13So the thing I want to emphasize is that this is the moment to take stock of the fact that you've

00:19been successful, you can be successful. And you want to take on the biggest challenges,

00:25not to think about what society has dictated to you as the root of further success, but to imagine

00:35what life you would want. I remember, I had joined my undergraduate in economics,

00:41long story, but an interesting part of it wasn't that, the interesting part of it was

00:46my uncle, who was from Gujarat, and who I really adore, he was very softly trying to tell me,

00:55look, I know you're disappointed, you must be disappointed. Next year you apply and you can

00:59get into engineering. And I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had no desire to do engineering.

01:04But I think the great advantage I had in life, I would say, was I had no idea what I wanted to do.

01:11And I really didn't. I wanted to find out. Just as I was about to leave to JNU and go to Harvard,

01:19I was in a student demonstration, and we were taken to Tihar Jain, and kept there for 10 days.

01:27And when I came out, lots of my elders and brothers told me, well, now you have screwed up

01:34your career. Harvard will never let you in, America will never let you in, etc, etc. And I think they

01:41thought I should be regretful. And I realized at that point that I had no particular stake in going

01:47to Harvard. It was whatever. If you feel like you want to write a novel or make a movie or,

01:52or become a chef or fight for justice or, you know, fight poverty or run for government office,

02:01do it. I think we need all of those things in India. Don't worry about whether your

02:05commerce background prepares you well for, you know, making a movie. Satyajit Ray and Shyam

02:13Benegal, both had undergraduate degrees in economics. And then they didn't use it for one

02:21minute, but that was fine. They did fine in life. We're in a time of extreme pain in India. I just

02:30spent some time in rural West Bengal. And, you know, and the stories you hear about, you know,

02:36all the people who, all the aspirations that have been a little bit dashed are very real,

02:41because, you know, a lot of people who migrated had to come back and they had small aspirations,

02:47which became smaller now. So I think that we're in a moment of great pain.

02:54We are, you know, the economy is still well below where it was in 2019. We don't know how much below,

03:00but we're substantially below. So it's and I'm not, I'm not blaming anybody. I'm just saying,

03:05this is a moment where society demands your abilities, your talents, your

03:14commitment, and you will do it in different ways. You don't worry about whether you can be,

03:21you know, transform the world. You probably can't. But what we can do, each of us doing what we are

03:27best at doing, what we are passionate about doing, cumulatively changes the world.

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