Meghnad Desai, Baron Desai
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Meghnad Jagdishchandra Desai, Baron Desai (born 10 July 1940) is a British economist and Labour politician.
Born in Vadodara, Desai grew up with two brothers and two sisters. He is said to have gone to secondary school at age five and matriculated at 14. He secured a master's degree from Bombay University, after which he won a scholarship to University of Pennsylvania in August 1960. After Pennsylvania, where he completed his PhD in 1963, he served as an intern at the London School of Economics and got a job there in 1965.
In the early 1970s he taught an idiosyncratic version of economic principles to freshers at the LSE (starting with Sraffa)and was a proclaimed leftist who wrote a book titled "Marxian Economic Theory".
His transformation to a market-economist today is in contrast with his rabid attitude toward Thatcherism throughout the 1980s. He was himself a knee-jerk leftist for decades of the kind he criticises others of being now. He often declared he would not cross a picket-line. His transformation from the ideological left is apparently something he does not acknowledge today, either to himself or in public.
In 1989 he married fellow-economist Gail Wilson, his first wife.
Desai has written extensively on a wide range of subjects. From 1984-1991, he was co-editor of the Journal of Applied Economics.
He has been both Chair and President of Islington South and Finsbury Constituency Labour Party in London and was made a life peer as Baron Desai, of St Clement Danes in the City of Westminster, in April 1991.
In 2002 Desai wrote a book Marx's Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism which states that globalization would tend toward the revival of socialism.
He published a biography of Indian film star Dilip Kumar titled, "Nehru's Hero: Dilip Kumar in the life of India" (Roli, 2004). He has described the book as his 'greatest achievement'. Examining Kumar's films – some of which Desai has seen more than 15 times – he discovers parallels between the socio-political arena in India and its reflection on screen. He discusses issues as varied as censorship, the iconic values of Indian machismo, cultural identity and secularism, and analyses how the films portrayed a changing India at that time.
During the course of writing this book he met Kishwar Ahluwalia, his second wife who worked as an editor for this book. On July 20, 2004 he married Ahluwalia. Desai and 47-year-old Ahluwalia, were both divorcees and married at a registrar's office in London.
In 2005 he retired as Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, which he founded in 1992 at LSE, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is Chairman of the Trustee's Board for Training for Life, Chairman of the Management Board of City Roads and on the Board of Tribune magazine. He is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
[edit] References
- ^ "Lord Desai: Like my noble friend Lord Dormand I am an atheist and therefore should not speak too much about religion, but I am glad that the C[hurch] of E[ngland], having lost money in real estate, is now interested in sex and making money. That is always welcome." Lords Hansard, 4 Jun 1998: Column 481 (accessed 24 April 2008).
[edit] Bibliography
- 1994, "Equilibrium, Expectations and Knowledge", in J. Birner & R. van Zijp, Hayek, Co-ordination and Evolution; His Legacy in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas, Routledge 1994.
[edit] External links
- Interview with PBS
- LSE Biography
- Centre for the study of Global Governance
- Next Steps in the ride to the top Article in Mint
- The Times of India: The 'I' of Meghnad Desai (autobiographic article)
- Indian Express - columns
