A few weeks ago The Financial Times published a blog post by one of India’s favorite sons, Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen.  Click the image to the right to go to the original.  The start is promising:

Like many board games that were developed in India, of which chess is perhaps the most important and famous, the game of “snakes and ladders” too emerged in this country a long time ago.

The piece is long, as blog posts go, and yet the second sentence gives a sense of why Sen is so loved, in spite of being a leader of the dismal science.

With its balancing of snakes that pull you down and ladders that take you up, this game has been used again and again as a metaphor for life, telling us about our fortunes and misfortunes, and going further, about the consequences of good deeds and bad actions.