Dr Purnima Purohit
Published: 5 September 2017
Dr Purnima Purohit, researcher in the Adam Smith Business School.
It was with the most enormous shock and sadness that her colleagues in the Adam Smith Business School learned of the illness and then death of Purnima Purohit on 14 August, writes Jeanette Findlay, ASBS.
Purnima joined the University of Glasgow in October 2014 to work on an ESRC-funded research project on information, market creation and agricultural growth.
This project was due to end in late August and she was planning to return to her beloved family in Jaipur in India. Notwithstanding this, as her close friend and colleague Parul Tyagi mentions here in her own personal testimony, she loved Scotland and would happily have stayed here if the opportunity had arisen.
Her research interests reflected her own ethical and moral values in that she was interested in equality, fairness and the eradication of poverty. She had hoped to apply her expertise in development and agricultural economics to the pursuit of these objectives and she undoubtedly would have, had her promising young life not been so cruelly cut short. Her academic career was marked with distinction.
She had published from the PhD thesis obtained from the University of Manchester in 2013, where she was a Commonwealth Research Scholar. Her Ph.D. research won the best research project award at the European School of New Institutional Economics, France, 2010. She conducted multidisciplinary & international field-based economic research and she published journal articles on the regulation of agricultural markets in developing countries and had addressed international conferences on related topics. She was also an acclaimed teacher, receiving awards for her teaching skills from the University of Manchester.
Colleagues who worked and socialised with Purnima found her to be a most engaging and warm colleague with a lively and passionate interest in a variety of artistic and cultural pursuits. As Geetha Selvaretnam, Senior Lecturer in Economics, outlines here, her friendships crossed all boundaries of race, age and religion. Her close friend, Philip Liefield of the School of Social and Political Sciences tells of how happy she was the night before she so suddenly took ill and was taken to hospital: "On the Thursday evening before she was hospitalised, we went out and forgot the time. After dinner in an Indian restaurant, we ended up at Oran Mor and only realised at 2am that it was so late. We shared part of the way home, and she was literally singing and dancing and laughing on the pavement. That's what I will remember most."
All of her friends and colleagues paint the same picture of a happy, loving and bright woman who used her considerable intellectual talents for the good of humankind. Lovleen Kushwah, Lecturer in Economics remembers Purnima.
Her deep humanity inspired great love and affection and her tragic loss has inspired enormous grief. Her very dear friend, Rebeca Echavarri, Lecturer in Economics, conveys this in her tribute which begins with the words: "Sometimes it happens that a colleague, a co-author, a friend comes to be embodied in the same person. This was Purnima for me, and then she started to say that we were sisters in the world of the ideas. I agreed."
Another colleague, Dania Thomas, Lecturer in Business Law, was inspired to write a verse in her memory, 'Full Moon', based on the meaning of Purnima’s name in Sanskrit.
However painful her loss is to all her friends and colleagues in Glasgow and Manchester, our pain is as nothing compared to that of her family. We send our deepest condolences to her family in India on the loss of their daughter and sister. We assure them that Purnima will live on in our memories as a shining example of how to be an academic, a colleague and a friend.
First published: 5 September 2017