Remembering CTK

Kurien, or ‘CTK’ to all those who knew him, is no more. A rare exposure to top-flight academic economics gave him a visible confidence, though Kurien was conspicuously devoid of intellectual arrogance. Detaching himself from the seductions of a life lived in California, a move difficult to imagine for Indians of the present generation, Kurien returned to teach at his alma mater, the Madras Christian College. Apart from his early work, which was a critique of what in the economics literature is referred to as neo-classical general equilibrium analysis, he engaged with empirical work in diverse fields. There was macroeconomic analysis in his work, ‘Indian Economic Crisis’, published in the late 1960s and microeconomic analysis in his book ‘The dynamics of rural transformation in Tamilnadu’, which appeared in the 1980s.