The long wait for another India-born winner of the coveted prize ends with a westernised economist.

Before this year, the only two India-born Indians to be awarded the Nobel Prize were Rabindranath Tagore, in 1913, and C.V. Raman, in 1930. Put so long on a starvation diet of the most coveted award in the world, India had developed a Nobel fixation. It would greedily appropriate the laureates among India-born US citizens, like Hargobind Khurana and Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, and would rather forget that Mother Teresa was born in Albania.

The jinx ended last October when the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences selected Amartya Sen for the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. True that Sen, except for retaining his Indian nationality, is not an inch less "western" than Khurana or Chandrasekhar, having spent 35 of his 65 years in the best of Anglo-American faculties.

But Sen has equally impeccable Indian credentials, having been christened by the poet Tagore at Santiniketan and keeping alive his Indian contacts through regular visits. The prize, therefore, became a cause for India to celebrate.

Sen's native state, West Bengal, did it with gusto when many Diwali pandals were decorated with two-storey high profiles of the economist, the contours drawn against the night-sky with tiny electric bulbs connected through an alternating circuit. In this Sen finished a close second to Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, but he could well have beaten the Hollywood heartthrob if Diwali had not come so close on the heels of the announcement from Stockholm.

Last week, when Sen visited his mother at Santiniketan, he rode a special saloon car from Howrah, organised by the West Bengal Government. The state's Marxist ministers did not pass up a single photo-op with him.

Ironically, the doyen of development economics tilted neither to the left nor to the right. "I've read both leftist and rightist economics but I'm not inclined in either way." And to the eager embrace of Calcuttans, he said a pointed no thanks because "I have lived in Calcutta, Delhi, Boston and England and have found home everywhere".