In the autobiography that accompanies his 1998 Nobel Prize lecture, Amartya K. Sen recounts the story of how a fellow passenger on a plane once him told of an "apparently interesting" course being taught at Harvard by "Kenneth Arrow, John Rawls and some unknown guy."

The year was 1969. Kenneth Arrow was the proponent of a radical new theory of social choice, about to win a Nobel Prize in economics; John Rawls, Conant University professor emeritus, was an established philosophy professor about to publish his monumental work A Theory of Justice and the third professor--Amartya Kumar Sen--was, well, "some unknown."

Not anymore.

Today, he speaks at Harvard's 349th Commencement ceremonies.

"Amartya Sen is a superb choice as Commencement speaker," wrote Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel in an e-mail message. "Rare among economists, Professor Sen keeps moral considerations at the center of his work. Rare among scholars, he brings his academic insights to bear on real world issues of poverty and human development."

From the small Bengal village where he was born and raised to the larger academic communities of Trinity College and Harvard, Sen has maintained his ties to India while becoming one of the world's top economists.

But Sen, as opposed to last year's Commencement speaker, Alan Greenspan, practices an economics based less on abstract theory than on empirical studies of underdeveloped--and understudied--countries.

"[Sen's] life and work are a model that Harvard students should have before them as they go out into the world," Sandel concluded.

From India to the 'Other' Cambridge

Sen was born in Santiniketan, India, in 1933. His mother, Amita Sen, was a top student with Rabindranath Tagore, the great educator and cultural leader. His father, Ashutosh Sen, taught chemistry at Dahak University, in what is now the capital of Bangladesh.

Through his mother--who has come from India to Harvard at the age of 87 to hear Sen speak--and also through his own studies, Sen became acquainted to the interconnected cultural and academic mission in Santiniketan.

"I remember being quite struck by Rabindranath Tagore's approach to cultural diversity," Sen has written.

"I think what marks him as a man as opposed to a scholar is that he grew up... surrounded, on the immediate stage, by Bengali poets, Sanskrit scholars and classical Indian dancers and, on the wider stage, by poverty and famine," wrote Martha Chen, a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government and a close personal friend of Sen.

Sen has described not only seeing the impact of poverty in what was becoming India and Bangladesh in the 1940s and 1950s but also "the divisiveness...of communitarian politics."

After receiving a bachelors degree in economics at Calcutta University, Sen studied at Trinity College at Cambridge--where he now serves as a Master, a role which gives him both academic and student life responsibilities.

Before making this "homecoming," as he calls it, in 1998, Sen studied and taught for an extended period at Delhi University, the London School of Economics, Oxford University and at Harvard, where he accepted a joint appointment in economics and philosophy in 1987 and became Lamont University Professor in 1988.