 My whole career and most of my research work have been influenced by the book. I held that book in my hand and you know all life valves went on. This book permeated into our thinking. We're standing on the shoulders of giants. We are able to see so far ahead because of people who have already done a lot of work. I've often asked myself how did this book come into being? The persistence of widespread hunger is one of the most appalling features of the modern world. It does not seem to engender the kind of shock and disquiet that might be reasonable to expect, given the enormity of the tragedy. Indeed, the subject often generates either cynicism, not a lot can be done about it, or complacent irresponsibility. Don't blame me, it is not a problem for which I am answerable. This is one of the passages I quote most often in teaching. It's lots of good quotes but that one I use every year. In 1979 when I came to India there was a big drought and one thing that struck me is that famine was averted basically through massive relief works and that was in sharp contrast with what was happening at the time in Africa where there was famine after famine in the absence of a relief system. I wrote to Amrotho and I pointed out that something should also be written about the prevention of famines and that letter actually was the beginning of this collaboration which has now lasted more than 30 years. I said well why didn't you come to Waida? We would work together and do a work. I knew the Bengal famine because I grew up amidst it in 1943. So I was studying famine elsewhere including in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1986 I was 34 years old. Waida had a conference which Amartya Sen was the chief organizer. That had an impact on me, the impact on my research got me excited. The introduction to the proceedings took a life of its own and it became a separate book which became hunger and public action. This was the decade of Thatcher and Reagan when the dominant view was that states should actually withdraw and things should be deregulated and left to the market. We made the case for the importance of public action in development. This book is picking up on Amartya Sen's earlier work on famines where he pointed to the fact that you can have famines in times of plenty and he gave evidence from historic famines where the distribution suddenly got lopsided. The people who needed the food could not get to it. They were being priced out of the market. Public action, the state action can do a lot. You don't have to wait for the next 40 years to become a rich country in order to reach out to the poor in order to improve the standard of living. You're opening up fields of inquiry and from the front of your research we were pleased that the hunger and public action generated a huge amount of work by others who pursued the question often rather better than we did. Hunger and public action put you anywhere on the map. It changed the way we thought about poverty, famines, hunger, food security and then ultimately the capabilities approach. The capabilities approach had been around for a while but with this book for the first time we could see in very concrete and practical terms how we could yield concrete policy action and policy recognition. The timing of the book was also linked to a shift in thinking and development that moved from the entitlement dimension really to this capabilities dimension and human capacity. We needed to understand how we could bring that human dimension far more into the center of development. The capabilities approach is about what people want to be or do. People want to be educated, to be politically active. They want to do specific things. So these beings and doings think of a bicycle and you can see it just as a good. But what really matters is not the access to the bicycle. What matters is the fact that the bicycle allows you to perhaps have a job to transport yourself and try to socialize. But it could be that I don't have permission to ride a bike and so having a resource like a bike doesn't mean I have the capability to move around. The capability approach broadens our lens just to make us see much more of people's lives and how they interact with the economy rather than narrowly focusing in this case on income. The thinking about human development and the work that Andries and Sen had then done began to find a new form of expression and the human development report I think was one articulation of that with the largest development agency in the world at the time. The human development reports use the index as a tool to send the main message which is let us think beyond income. But actually the human development reports are important because of the process that allows you to think about different issues in a different way. We're in London at the Institute of Education UCL at the 15th Human Development and Capability Association Conference. It is very much a community of people for whom Amartya Sen's work has had deep and meaningful impact on their lives, on their intellectual journeys. So my research is looking at how university influenced the capabilities of women in my country in Indonesia. In the beginning I was just looking at the surface level. That's everything is considered in terms of numbers, income and salary. But then with the capability approach it actually really looked what's beneath under those numbers. When doing research you have to have a particular kind of glasses like the ones I'm wearing. So I'm using capabilities approach at the frame and I'm using African feminisms as the lenses. I am marrying them together to look at a problem properly so I can see different things. Currently I'm doing research in terms of poverty inequality and also policy making. You need to go beyond necessarily things that perhaps are material. You need to understand that people value other things that are very subjective and they have the right to value. Data is only a partial manifestation of human life. Many students of economics learn mainstream economics and they are not able to connect it with real life. And I think that this is the situation in which I found myself. So I am hoping that it is easier for many of them today because of that earlier history including this book and many other books that have been published since. If you focus on asking the right question you're opening up fields of inquiry as well as encouraging people to pursue more complicated research. I joined the World Bank in 2012. I find it's much easier to make this case for direct action, public action, state action because of books like this. It was Univider's first book. This book is essentially what is really Univider's DNA. It's ability to change thinking and be this thought leader that can have a huge impact. So I see this book as an example of what Univider has done and can do in the future.