There are still a few of my holiday reads I’ve not yet posted about. One was Amit Chaudhuri’s [amazon_link id=”1908526181″ target=”_blank” ]Calcutta: Two Years in the City[/amazon_link], the author’s reflections on moving back to a city he had known well as a child, his conversations with people he met in the streets and in other ways, on Bengali culture (virtually unknown to me save for a couple of Satyajit Ray films and what bits I’ve picked up from reading Amartya Sen, for example in [amazon_link id=”0141012110″ target=”_blank” ]The Argumentative Indian[/amazon_link]). There is little about the economy in it, although plenty of observation. Chaudhuri writes:

“Will someone in the social sciences write a dissertation on how the rise of individualism in Bengal (in contrast to the West) destroyed rather than energised entrepreneurship, at least on home ground; how, in India, caste and community drive capital and the free market?”

I presume somebody has but don’t know – maybe a reader can give some pointers?

[amazon_image id=”1908526181″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Calcutta: Two Years in the City[/amazon_image]

I read, too, Orhan Pamuk’s early novel [amazon_link id=”0571275958″ target=”_blank” ]Silent House[/amazon_link] – out in a new English paperback, although it was his 2nd novel, written in 1983. I’m a huge fan of his work. This one is set at a time 30 years ago of political and social tension between modern, affluent, urban young people and their poor, rural, unsuccessful counterparts – so well worth reading now. Like [amazon_link id=”0571218318″ target=”_blank” ]Snow[/amazon_link], it achieves the great imaginative accomplishment of helping the reader completely understand how some people come to hold such different, and unappealing, views.

[amazon_image id=”0571275958″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Silent House[/amazon_image]

I thought both books were great – good reads and able to give the reader a real sense of another world, where people think and behave differently. A reminder of the importance of culture to social science, and an antidote to the (sometimes useful) assumption of homo economicus.