On being reunited with Arrow Hahn after a dozen years

July 3, 2015 — drsubrotoroy

On being reunited with Arrow Hahn after a dozen years

 

 

Professor Kenneth J Arrow

 Stanford

 

 

Dear Professor Arrow,

 

I am delighted to say I am reunited today after a dozen years with your canonical book written with Frank Hahn, a collaboration of 17 years I think Frank told me once.

 

It is not my own annotated 1976 copy of the first 1971 edition. 

 

That was in my professorial office at IIT Kharagpur as of September 2003, when I was compelled as a senior professor to object to grave (and admitted) financial irregularities, a battle that continues to this day. In August 2011, the Hon’ble Calcutta High Court ordered the return of the contents of my professorial office and residence, books, papers, student theses, gown, teaching award, etc. The Institute refused, returning three mud-drenched pamphlets from my collection and a few items of damaged furniture from my campus residence, nothing else. A Contempt application was filed immediately. The Institute had in the meantime surreptitiously purchased both my senior counsel and my solicitors, which came to be accidentally exposed, so new counsel have had to be engaged.

 

My personal copy of *General Competitive Analysis* was primus inter pares in my office collection, along with Bliss, Takayama, RGD Allen, Sargent, AEA Surveys and a few dozen other volumes including the second volume of your collected works (the first volume I had at home fortunately).

 

The papers in the office included most importantly the original copy of the memorandum Milton Friedman had written for the Govt of India in 1955, which Milton had sent me in 1984 and which I published in Hawaii for the first time ever in 1989.

 

I have had to function since 2003 without any of these — until yesterday and today when a very kind Twitter friend in a far away Pacific land sent me first Takayama, and now Arrow-Hahn.  I am delighted by both, especially I have to say the latter.  Frank paid me £50 back in 1976 to proof-read the 1971 original for errors for its second edition which he’d said you were handling.   

 

 

With warm regards

 

Cordially yours

 

Suby Roy

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