Friendship must for intellectual progress: Amartya Sen

Bengaluru: Division and violence within groups and sects that political separatists promote act as a barrier to intellectual progress within a nation as well as across nations, said Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen at the Infosys Prize ceremony here on Tuesday.

Sen said there should be friendship within the country and outside in a bid to build the intellectual progress of a nation.

“The role of friendship applies not only across the national boundary but also within the borders of a country. Division and violence within groups and sects that political separatists promote even within a nation act as a barrier to intellectual progress within a nation as well as across nations. Friendship has a critically important role from its political and social implications. This, I think, is an important thing to remember today in my country, in India,” he said.


He said it would not be right to encourage progress of knowledge in isolation.

“In India, isolation is viewed as the progress of knowledge and this is fundamentally defective, no matter how appealing it may be to the nationalist and the sectarian. We learn from each other and our intellectual horizons are expanded by being in touch with what others know. Once acquired, our newly-learnt knowledge expands and then we can then give to the outside world much more than we received from them,” said the Nobel laureate.

The winners of the Infosys Prize 2019 for excellence in the field of science include Sunita Sarawagi in Engineering and Computer Science, Manu V Devadevan in Humanities, Manjula Reddy in Life Sciences, Siddhartha Mishra in Mathematical Sciences, G Mugesh in Physical Sciences and Anand Pandian in Social Sciences.