A veteran's veteran

Former RBI official P P Ramachandran's third book is a labour of love comprising little tributes to the people with whom, or under whom, he had worked

A few months ago someone told me about a book called Veterans of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The author is P P Ramachandran (PPR), a former official of the RBI. He is famous throughout the RBI because he writes one book review a week, which he circulates privately every Sunday. He has also reviewed books by over 60 RBI people. It came as a surprise to me that so many of them have written books. Sadly, I have never had the opportunity to meet him.

Now PPR has written his third book. It’s a labour of love comprising little tributes to the people with, or under, whom he had worked. I got to know many of them.

The vignettes are not of uniform length. Many are just a paragraph long. But a few run to a couple of pages. So it is hard to tell what PPR had in mind when he selected the names. But one thing is for sure. The length has nothing to do with how he feels about them. The short para isn’t a disparagement. The important thing is that it’s there at all.

The book is what you might call a fashion parade of economists. It’s extraordinary how many well-known and highly respected economists were incubated in the 1950s at the research department of the RBI, which had been set up in 1949: B K Madan, K N Raj, Dharma Kumar, V K Ramaswami, S L N Simha, M Narasimham, Anand Chandavarkar, Deena Khatkhate, V V Bhatt, V G Pendharkar, S S Tarapore, A Seshan, Chandi Batliwala… and many more well-known names in the economics community.

We learn some interesting factoids such as Dharma Kumar used to drive up from Matunga in a long car and how Morarji Desai left a cabaret in the US just when the fun was about to start. Earlier he had refused a cigarette and a drink.

PPR tells many other stories such as how A Vasudevan, who retired as Executive Director, has written two novels and how S L Shetty started his working life as a tea boy in an Udupi hotel. We also find out about the antagonism between M Narasimham and K S Krishnaswamy who felt he had been denied governorship in 1977.

Then there was N Mujumdar. He was highly respected in the RBI and was one of the few who spoke out boldly in 2008 about the Raghuram Rajan committee’s report on financial sector reform, calling it amateurish and “marked by a sense of superciliousness”.

There’s also the terrible story of S D Deshmukh, brother of C D Deshmukh. The former was Director of the Balance of Payments Division. One evening he was writing something at home when the lights went off. He lit a candle, which toppled over and set the papers on fire. Trying to extinguish that his Terylene shirt caught fire. He rushed to the door to open it but it was jammed. He died of burns. His wife found him when she returned from wherever she had gone. She had had to break down the door with the help of neighbours.

He could have written a bit more about some of the people, such as Chandi Batliwala who was a walking encyclopaedia on international economic relations and institutions. She contributed the entire international section in Volume 3 of the RBI history. She was a major figure in the Red Cross as well.

S S Tarapore was the best known Parsi but PPR reminds us of a few others, not the least of whom was one Tehmi Mistry who was mistaken for Indira Gandhi during a train journey and had to face a mob shouting “Indira down down”.

I have two major complaints with the book. PPR has not done justice to the magnificent RBI library. It deserved far more than the two paras he has given it. Nor is there anything about the RBI’s archives in Pune, which is another superb institution. It runs the National Archives a close second in terms of what it has and, indeed, is far better in the way it is organised.

That said, the book has given me an idea. I think I will also write a book like this — short paras — about the people I have worked with in publications, think tanks and other places, not to mention those I have fleetingly met professionally. It will be fun to write.