Aging & Wisdom Quote by Amartya Sen

Nostalgia can be a blunt instrument, but Sen wields it like a scalpel: warm, precise, and quietly political. The line opens with affective understatement - "very engaging", "a delight" - language that feels almost deliberately untheoretical coming from a philosopher famous for big frameworks. That choice matters. Sen isn’t making a grand claim about identity; he’s normalizing attachment as something practical, repeatable, almost routine. He goes back "as often as I can" not as pilgrimage, but as a habit of mind.

The subtext is a refusal of clean national narratives. Bangladesh is "my old home", not a frozen origin story. It’s also a present-tense infrastructure of relationships: friends, collaborators, people who "live and work". Home here is less soil than a network. That framing pushes against the idea that intellectual authority is validated by distance from the places one studies. Sen, who has written extensively about famine, poverty, and development in South Asia, subtly signals methodological humility: the work is not just about Bangladesh, it is with Bangladesh, and with specific people.

Context sharpens the stakes. Sen was born in what is now Bangladesh and lived through Partition-era upheaval; he also built his career largely in elite Western institutions. The sentence quietly reconciles those trajectories. It’s a declaration that cosmopolitanism doesn’t have to mean severance - and that "going back" can be less about reclaiming the past than staying accountable to the present.