Calcutta, Jan. 5: The old boy reacted with an " Orey baba" when Harvard professor Sugata Bose drew his attention to a wall in the main building of Presidency University.

Amartya Sen looked at "Amartya Sen" written on the wall along with the names of 180-odd illustrious former students and teachers. His name was next to Michael Madhusudan Dutt's, Bose pointed out. That's when the Nobel laureate exclaimed: " Orey baba!"

An education summit on Thursday formally kicked off Presidency's 200-year celebrations. Sen chaired the first session where French economist Jean Tirole delivered the Dipak Banerjee Memorial Lecture. During the session, Sen touched on various things Presidency. Excerpts:

Presidency@200: A great moment to celebrate the past, present and future of the wonderful Presidency College. Presidency College can celebrate the fact that it is not only a very old institution now in terms of modern India but it reflects a lot of changes that were taking place in society at that time.

Not a govt initiative: It is very important to recognise that Presidency College was not a government institution to start with. It was the result of civil society initiative in which the local intelligentsia as well as the local established leaders of the community, businessmen as well as people from abroad, including the chief justice as well as some members of the Church, participated.

Hindoo College: It was called Hindoo College, but Hindoo, of course, was a term being used for Indian in general.... It was never an institution with a religious foundation. In fact, it can possibly be claimed, (economist) Abhijit (Vinayak) Banerjee was telling me yesterday, that it is probably the oldest educational institution in the world which had no religious connection. It had started as a civil society initiative, as a non-religious foundation.

The person in whose memory this hall is named, Derozio, who was a Eurasian - a mixture of Indian and Portuguese parentage - was staunchly a non-believer and he presented classes here in this institution, still called the Hindoo College, which is now of course the Presidency College, in which he disputed the general beliefs of all religions.... In many ways, these are the great elements of heritage that the college carries.

Illustrious alumni: So many famous alumni here that I can go on reciting their names for hours, the greatest like Jagadish Chandra Bose or Satyendranath Bose.... Meghnad Saha in sciences, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the physicist who played a major part in the founding of the modern discipline of statistics, Satyajit Ray, the greatest film director ever produced, and political leaders like Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.... I can go on naming them, on and on and on.

Conversation: As a student when I arrived at this college in 1951, I remember being thrilled about a culture of conversation on the issues the world faced. It could be academic, non-academic, political and, most often, social.

And I remember particularly my classmate Sukhamoy Chakravarty as being companion to some of the finest arguments that engage me and will continue to engage me for the rest of my life.

In that culture, there was a kind of easy transition from what was happening in the classes to what was happening in discussion in the Coffee House across the street.