 It is in part my intuitive preference for research that addresses the big picture that paints with bold strokes on a wide canvas, which is what I have done in catch up. It is not the first time I have done that. I did similar work on China and India, or what you now call the bricks, but it is more adventurous than I had attempted before. Now, I think there are two things I should mention which have been kind of important factors underlying my intellectual journey in which the stopovers and detours have been almost as important as the destination. I have spent much of my professional life in the classroom as an academic in the ivory tower perhaps, but I have also engaged with the hurly-burly of the public domain and the real world. At different points in my life, the first time around in the Indian administrative service working at the district level in a province, largely on rural development on local government, which made me recognize the poverty, the inequality, the deprivation, the exploitation. For someone who began his professional life entirely with economic theory, first social choice and welfare economics, and then trade theory, orthodox trade theory in the context of international economics, it was a learning experience. It changed my perspective in terms of resisting the authority of conventional wisdom, in terms of asking heterodox questions, in terms of pursuing questions that were not always asked by orthodox economics, and as my kind of disillusionment with the capacity of economic theory to explain the real world grew, I found that the economics I did changed. So in macroeconomics, I worked at the intersection of theory and policy. In international economics, I worked at the intersection of theory and institutions, but looking at global issues, whether transnational corporations or the multilateral trading system, and this was reinforced by my second innings as it were in government, when I was chief economic adviser to the government of India and permanent secretary in the Ministry of Finance from 1989 to 1991, that was a period of crisis reform and change. For someone who did macroeconomics for a lifetime, those three years I have always said were an experience of three lifetimes, and I learned from that process and in many ways my work at the intersection of theory and policy, and my work at the intersection of disciplines in the social sciences, economics and politics, economics and history, economics and law, or even economics and philosophy are attributable to my life in these two different worlds. Most of my friends in academia have never understood why I occasionally go away to this mad world of the public domain, just as my friends in the public domain have never understood why I returned to the classroom, which has always been my natural home. But I have left these two worlds every time, one for the other, richer for the experience, because there are feedbacks, effects, and there's cumulative causation. I have learned from my experience in the world of policy and practice that has fed back into my research, just as I have used my understanding of economics as a discipline or social sciences as a set of disciplines in my world of policy formulation. And in many ways that might make me somewhat different from most economists in the usual academic mode. It is not for me to say, it is for others to judge whether this makes for more interesting analyses of development, but my concerns with the macroeconomics of development, when what is in fashion is the microeconomics of development, my concerns about economics, but engaging with other disciplines in the social sciences. My propensity to ask different questions, even where I cannot provide all the answers, has really come from this experience of two rather different worlds.