Joseph Stiglitz with wife Anya Schiffrin at Taj Bengal on Monday evening. Picture by Rashbehari Das

He’s spent time at the Coffee House and the Marble Palace. He’s been to the flower market and on a river cruise. Just another tourist’s itinerary in Calcutta? Only, the ‘he’ in question is not just another tourist.

On this trip to Calcutta though, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has chosen to be just that — a tourist in town.

That’s what the celebrated economist could easily have passed off as when he strolled into the lobby of the Taj Bengal on Monday evening in a casual forest-green tee and beige pants clutching a camera, wife Anya Schiffrin by his side.

“Actually, I am accompanying my wife, who is accompanying her father who has been invited for a lecture at the National Library,” Stiglitz told Metro about this three-day trip with a difference.

“I had a bit more time for plain tourism and I loved seeing the city,” added the man who won the Nobel in 2001 for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information.

If wife Anya is with the school of international and public affairs at Columbia University, Stiglitz’s father-in-law Andre Schiffrin is a publishing expert and author who spoke on The Future of Print at the National Library on Tuesday (See Page 24).

While this was Andre Schiffrin’s first visit to Calcutta, both Stiglitz and his wife have been here “several” times before. “I have seen many of the places we went to before, like the Coffee House, but I really enjoyed this trip,” stressed Stiglitz, 68, who first came to Calcutta in 1967.

The standout moment of his Coffee House trip this time? Spying a poster that read “Occupy Wall Street. Occupy All Streets. It is not crisis in capitalism, capitalism is the crisis”!

“It was interesting coming to Calcutta and seeing the echo of Occupy Wall Street here. It is quite a global movement,” said the university professor at the Columbia Business School.

After visiting the flower market, the Marble Palace and going on a river cruise, Stiglitz managed to slip into a formal jacket for a closed-door interaction with the Calcutta chapter of the Columbia Alumni Association at Taj Bengal.

“Things aren’t going very well [in the US]. It’s been four years since the bubble broke and I don’t think anyone thinks that the economy is anywhere near recovery,” he said.

Stiglitz is already looking forward to his next trip in January. But not as a tourist. “I will be speaking at the convocation in ISI and at Presidency.”