Getting to know Gautam was really quite by chance. My wife and Denise and I have the habit of having an after dinner constitutional walk. We used to see a couple slowly walking with their dog, a corgi, in our street and in the parallel one, King Henry’s.
They were an elderly pair, she white, clearly British, he possibly Indian, or so I thought. He was of medium height, slim and bald.
One day back in 2010, while attending a talk for graduates of LSE, I noticed my Indian neighbour sitting there. So at the end of the lecture which was given by the late American professor J K Galbraith, I approached Gautam and said I recognized him as a neighbour. He was interested when I said a little about my career and experience.
Gautam was quiet, soft spoken, very bright and gentle in character. He told me in retirement he started a “think tank” and what its aims were. That they were in line with those of the Fabian Society.
Soon after we became great friends. He said he had originally come to England from Bengal to study at LSE, where he obtained his bachelors economics degree. He met Anne who was born in Wolverhampton, then worked at the BBC and they got married.
They were childless but they had a pet dog and cat. Gautam never returned to India to live there. Following a stint as a secondary school teacher, which he did not enjoy at all, he set up his own market research consultancy called NBES. it had major multinationals as clients, including Kodak and Toshiba. Over time, at meetings in his comfortable house he began to relate his life story to me.
Growing up in Chittabong, he was the oldest of three children, all boys. The father was a an official in British India. One of his brothers became a high court judge. Gautam had principles, especially ethical ones. Brought up as a Buddhist, all forms of life were precious to him, including small insects. Rather than kill them, he would catch and let them out of the door or window. And like Indians in general, he put specific instructions in his will to be cremated. I failed utterly to dissuade him from this, saying it would be impossible to visit his grave.
After establishing Social Vision as a nonprofit organization, Gautam had three people helping to run it. Tony Attoe was a former client and longstanding friend, Zakir Khan, a young man from Bangladesh with a masters from the LSE With my experience as collaborator at the EIU, myself, likewise an alumnus of the LSE, he suggested I join the team, which I did as a volunteer. Although childless, there were always young people in the Barua’s house. Gautam became a tremendous inspiration to the young interns at Social Vision who were undergraduates or graduate students at the LSE. Later, some landed jobs in prestige places, such as Amnesty International, a ministry in New Delhi and the European Commission. Interns helped organize seminars and conferences on topics dear to Gautam’s concerns for the future of the world; such as social inequality, climate change, gender discrimination and foreign investment in Bangladesh.
Gautam Barua helped many interns with their dissertations and theses, guiding them with patience, wisdom and affection - and occasionally helping with finance. One of my roles was to supervise them and edit texts the interns drafted for publication on the Social Vision website and those presented at seminars. Gautam’s principal desire was to help less privileged in society and to this end he set up scholarships in Bangladesh. But, most unfortunately, his ambition to publish a quarterly bulletin online never came to anything. He was sadly a fatal victim of the pandemic
Edward Pincheson
BA Geography 1961
London, October 2023