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Working alongside Esther and Abhijit for more than a decade has given me immense appreciation for the brilliant yet unpretentious people they are, especially with the staff they work with.

Abhijit Banerjee, one of the three winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, October 14, 2019. (Reuters Photo: Brian Snyder)

As a young research associate, I stopped at a roadside dhaba with my boss, me armed with hand-sanitiser and a spoon, while my boss dug in to a plate of fish with her hands, devoured it down to the bones, washed her hands at the public sink, and proceeded to the car. My boss was Esther Duflo, the director and co-founder of J-PAL, and we were on a field visit in a remote village in Odisha in 2008. J-PAL was in its early years then, set up globally at MIT in 2003 and in India by 2007. Despite the expansion and recognition of J-PAL’s work worldwide, Esther remains the same person I knew back then, down to earth, no frills or fuss, who says exactly what she means in a precise five words or less. And much can be written about Abhijit’s Banerjee’s fantastic cooking skills, which his research associates will attest to. Abhijit’s visits to the Patna office to work on research design usually ended with the team accompanying him to the local butcher to pick up meat for the evening’s dinner.