“My writing is like the case diary of an advocate which is aimed at winning a case.”

This is what Arun Shourie, one of the most outspoken and intelligent writers/economists in India, had to say about his writing and journalism. Admirers of the man, speak about his intellectual dynamism, versatility and tenacious intensity. Critics, say that he goes too far more often than not. What all agree upon, is that Arun Shourie has spurred examination by Indians of their polity and conduct as much as anyone else after Independence.

Shourie is a gifted man in both academics and extracurricular activities. He captained the hockey team and graduated with a B.A. in Economics (Honors) in one of the best scholastic colleges in the country—St. Stephen’s College of Delhi University—in 1961. He later finished his M.A. and doctorate in Economics from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University.

He has claimed that his life has been a series of “good accidents”. One such accident is how he managed to land a job at the World Bank as an economist, straight after his Ph.D. In 1965 he returned to India to collect information for his doctoral dissertation, entitled “Allocation of Foreign Exchange in India,”. Indirectly through his thesis professor, he was referred to the World Bank, where one of his interviewers was working on the same subject as his dissertation but had been unable to obtain information that Shourie had gotten:”So he thought I was well informed; all these things happened by accident,” Shourie remarks.

He later began writing articles criticising economic policy and wrote about the attacks on liberty during the Emergency in 1975. With this, he entered the field of journalism and went on to be an editor at the Indian Express and The TImes of India. His writing won him the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982, in the Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts category as “a concerned citizen employing his pen as an effective adversary of corruption, inequality and injustice.” He also won the Padma Bhushan in 1990 and was the Minister of Communications and Information Technology in the Vajpayee Government. Students in the Biosciences and Bioengineering Department at IIT Kanpur can also credit their education to him, as he set up in 2000 with the entire 12 crore rupees available to him as discretionary spending for being a Member of the Parliament.

This APOGEE, do not miss a chance to see Arun Shourie as speaker #3 of Papyrus Trails, the Literature Fest of BITS-Pilani..