I was born in a
University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one
campus or another. My family is from Dhaka - now the capital of
Bangladesh. My ancestral home in Wari in "old Dhaka" is not far
from the University campus in Ramna. My father Ashutosh Sen
taught chemistry at Dhaka University. I was, however, born in
Santiniketan, on the campus of
Rabindranath Tagore's
Visva-Bharati (both a school and a college), where my maternal
grandfather (Kshiti Mohan Sen) used to teach Sanskrit as well as
ancient and medieval Indian culture, and where my mother (Amita
Sen), like me later, had been a student. After Santiniketan, I
studied at Presidency College in Calcutta and then at Trinity College
in Cambridge, and I have taught at universities in both these
cities, and also at Delhi University, the London School of
Economics, Oxford
University, and Harvard University, and on a visiting basis, at
M.I.T.,
Stanford,
Berkeley, and Cornell. I have not had any serious non-academic
job.