Having lunch with a former professor is not something you normally look forward to, even though anyone who's graduated from the Delhi School of Economics will tell you Kaushik Basu was always considered really "cool", probably a combination of his boyish charm and Woody Allen looks.

Because, at the end of the day, the fact remains that Basu is someone who thinks abstract economic theory is fun — his current work centres on constructing models to integrate government behaviour (with a sort of "welfare function" that ministers/bureaucrats seek to maximise) into an overall economy model, and earlier books (he's written 11) have tried to look at complex issues like migration and even share-cropping in underdeveloped countries like India through a game-theoretic approach.

Lunch, though, turns out to be fun, and it is a pleasure to rediscover Basu's wry humour ("the longest review I've read of Joe Stiglitz's book is the one I've just written, about 20 pages, 17 pages to be exact"), and his somewhat quaint way with words ("I've been very successful at shirking my duty … I've always managed to escape being the head of department").

In India now for a couple of weeks as visiting professor at the Delhi School, and on an average of three to four times a year for the past nine years he's been at Cornell, Basu has a dig at India's top-selling newspapers… "You know I'm catching up with Jennifer Lo…you get all kinds of news of top US models and filmstars that I don't get to read in the US in the NYT or the Washington Post!"

We'd planned to meet at Daniell's Tavern at The Imperial (Basu said he'd heard the Imperial had good restaurants) for two reasons. First, it wasn't the Spice Route — seriously, Spice Route is a great place, but every second (or third) Lunch with BS is hosted there. The second reason was a bit to do with the setting.

The Daniells (uncle and nephew) were known for their sketches of the Raj, and Basu has just finished writing a play called Crossings at Banaras Junction, essentially the conversations during a train journey down the Gangetic plain between a group of academics and the foreign clients of Ganga Travels and Tours.

But that isn't to be. Daniell's isn't open for lunch, Spice Route it is. After a little bit of a song and dance over the menu (Basu wants to have fish but I don't since we're bang in the middle of the monsoon) we go in for Gado Gado as a starter (a salad with a peanut butter, jaggery and lime dressing), chicken stew, some Sri Lankan-style fried lamb and appams.

Basu is delighted, completely taken with the brilliance of the idea of clubbing a host of different cuisine from south India and south east Asia under the Spice Route umbrella.

Of course, he is sorry to have missed Daniell's because he's a great painting aficionado, indeed he takes classes in sketching and painting every now and then. He loves charcoal, and has taken two two-week courses at Boston and Atheca (the town where Cornell is situated) recently, and ends up painting/drawing a day every fortnight — on average, that is. He could be painting every afternoon for several months, and then not at all.

A favourite medium, though, is not canvas, but cloth, of the saree kind. Basu's painted five or six sarees, usually the pallus with big designs — his wife grabs them, he says, probably to make him feel good. He's even done a few shirts, though today he's wearing a regular store brand.

"Theoretically, I could paint the border as well, but I don't have the patience." His son, it appears, has taken after him as far as his varied tastes go, and took a year off from his PhD at MIT to help in Rituparno Ghosh's latest film starring Aishwarya Rai, Basu tells you with the hint of a smirk.

Right now, Basu's pretty excited about the play he began conceptualising in the ‘90s, but really wrote over two summers in India in 2000 and 2001 — the play has been read by Yatrik, and is being considered by a publisher for printing right now. The play, he thinks, is a lot like India, a lot is happening and yet nothing is happening!

There are long conversations, he says, very often even tangential, "but in a typical Indian chaotic manner, they don't really go anywhere…. Nothing very much happens…it reflects the follies and foibles of Indians…hopefully parts of it will be funny." Funny, that is, in a Basu-kind of understated way.

While making fun of the so-called common man's budgets presented by politicians every year in his column in the Indian Express in the ‘80s, if memory serves me well, this is what Basu had to say: "The most infuriating thing about the common man, is that despite so many years of common man budgets, his lot still manages to remain so common."

Though he doesn't say, there are bound to be lots of references to the characters of some of his colleagues at D-School since, as Basu himself admits, "I needed to write about a context of a class of people I'm familiar with, and I'm familiar with the foibles of academics!" (Foibles, you notice, is a favourite Basuism.)

And while the sentence-construction of the play has been done in a manner to depict people from different parts of the country, the loyal Bengali has dealt lightly with the peculiar Bengali manner of speaking English, you know, the way they say "him" for a woman and "her" for a man — "I didn't do the bit about getting the gender wrong…. I suppose it is very natural for a Bong…it's probably there in my notes….but finally I didn't do it."

Unlike most Indians living abroad, Basu is full of praise for the country's economic performance, especially the dramatic decline in poverty — he tends to go along more with Angus Deaton's 18 per cent poverty figure though, rather than Surjit Bhalla's 13 per cent.

(Perhaps because he spent a year at the World Bank, where he got paid "for doing whatever he wanted", Basu strongly disagrees with Bhalla's theory that the Bank exaggerates poverty figures as that's the only way it has any relevance).

The dramatic increases in health and education over the past decade (he's sounding more like Amartya Sen now) are equally impressive, though the worsening sex ratio ("here, technology has worked to our disadvantage", he says, referring to the high incidence of female foeticide following sex-determination tests) is a cause of concern.

The brilliant meal over, it's time to wind-down our discussion. The brilliant teacher, not surprisingly, has provided reasonably good insights to his one-time student on several contemporary issues.

Some samples: while George Soros is a successful businessman and Stiglitz an academic, in many ways they're remarkably similar (which is why Basu read Soros and Stiglitz back-to-back while writing "the longest review" he'd ever read on Stiglitz)…both think US politics is interfering in an undesirable way with the functioning of the global economy and attack US hegemony in different ways.

While he doesn't like the rise of Hindu fundamentalism — "anyone who gives a liberal view is denounced as a pseudo-secularist and a Marxist, as if the two are the same!" — he's sure India's far from becoming a fundamentalist society. And while India is getting a lot more pragmatic about WTO issues ("there's much less moral high ground and a lot more issue-specific bargaining"), the protectionism of the north is a threat to the global economy.

There's one thing that remains unresolved though. Twenty years ago, in the middle of a class, Basu told the batch of 1986 at the Delhi School about how his sister could never remember which was her left hand and which the right — so she puts a mark on one of the hands.

Why did he tell us the story? Basu can't for the life of him remember, though he's amazed that I still remember this from his classes. And little else!