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He had no passion for economics, yet poet and writer Vikram Seth who was dubbed as a latter-day Tolstoy with the publication of his debut novel A Suitable Boy actually studied for a Ph.D. in Economics.
Born in Calcutta in 1952, the year when the book featuring an epictale of India also begins, Seth is the eldest of two brothers and a sister. His father was in the leather business and his mother a judge, both of whom now live in New Delhi.
He had his early education at Doon and later left India to study in Oxford University. " I real liked reading, but it seemed pointless to study literature as a subject, so I began by studying pure maths, applied maths, physics etc.," Seth is quoted as saying in Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World, a book published by Toronto University.
Seth went to Stanford in 1975 to study for the Ph.D. in economics, but he never received it. "As an economist, I thought I could probably get a job at the World Bank or some place like that, but I never had any passion for economics, not what I felt for writing poetry," he once told the Washington Post.
Although Seth failed to get the Ph.D., the years he spent in California helped him write a wonderfully imaginative novel in verse, The Golden Gate. The book was published in 1986.
Seth also spent two years in China – from 1980 to 1982 0 gathering data for his doctoral thesis as to study classical Chinese poetry and languages.
A full-time writer, Seth told the Post: " My family is a close family. The whole family is together, our parents downstairs and my brother and myself upstairs. For me, it provides stability."
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