Living out of ideas rather than being a bureaucrat is so wonderful

Meghnad Desai gave an interview in 2008 to the Indian Express where he talks about his professional life in economics:

• “Caste and superstition have been strengthened and politicized and the rest of the world admires India precisely for the things that keep it backwards. Spirituality is a weapon for the exploitation of dalits, women and so on. There is no such thing as secularism anymore. Even the communist party is totally mired into religion, lost in a mish-mash of petty nationalism claiming to be anti-American, while believing it can peddle into some secular Hinduism, which is total nonsense. There is a tolerance of religions which can be so damaging, such as people dogmatically saying "let us be nice to Muslims": in doing so, a lot has been conceded to Muslim religious prejudices and no attempt has been made to modernize Muslim society, in particular for Muslim women who suffer from religious superstition and backwardness.
• When you live in the West and work in academic circles, by and large, you meet very decent people. Had I been here, I would surely have had to compromise myself with some politician or professor. It is a rare academic in India who can claim not to have been corrupted by the system. Also, I was lucky not to have an unequal professor-student relationship such as the guru-shisha relationship can be, and which I abhor. On the overall, living there means being in a system with no status inequality. The British society is hierarchical but there is social equality. The fact that I am a Lord means nothing, no one treats me differently. The feudal habits that still prevail in India, the way people behave towards their servants, people constantly being humiliated because they are so called inferior and so on --- all those things are not there and I am so grateful for that.
• Some friends of mine are still waiting for the great thing to happen, for instance at least a dozen are worried about not having yet received the Nobel Prize. I do not reason that way. I look back at what my ambitions when I was 18 --- to read and write --- and I am so much past that. I never thought I would be a professional economist, teaching in one of the best places in the world, having fantastic colleagues, having this adventure of ideas. The fact that I could make a living out of ideas rather than being a bureaucrat is so wonderful. Being an academic in the Western context is the freest you can be, because you have a salary and no boss, and you can do whatever you want. So I have had a fantastic life and I am going to go on having a fantastic life, because as long as the mind keeps functioning, ideas will come and I will develop ideas.”