It Starts With the RBI. It Does Not Stay There.
The Reserve Bank of India is a serious institution. Its history is full of serious people doing serious things with serious economic consequences.
So naturally, Veterans of the Reserve Bank has a chapter called “Morarji in a Night Club.” And another called “Meenakshy’s Ghost.” There is also “The Gang of Four” and, mercifully, “A Few Light Moments.”
You begin to suspect that P. P. Ramachandran had no intention of writing the sort of institutional history that puts you to sleep somewhere around the third paragraph on monetary policy.
On October 5, Venture Center’s Book Club welcomed Mr. P.P. Ramachandran to talk about Veterans of the Reserve Bank. What makes the book unusual is not simply who appears in it, but how Mr. Ramachandran chooses to remember them.
Forget the Designations. Meet the People
The book takes us through generations of economists and RBI veterans: B. K. Madan, K. N. Raj, Dharma Kumar, P. S. N. Prasad, M. Narasimham, V. V. Bhatt, Deena Khatkhate, S. S. Tarapore and many others.
These are people who contributed significantly to the intellectual life of the Reserve Bank, particularly its Economic Department. But Mr. Ramachandran does not leave them frozen in their professional biographies.
And then there are the Economic Assistants. Because apparently, four decades at the RBI taught Ramachandran that the organisational chart is a rather poor way of deciding who gets remembered. Governors and eminent economists make an appearance, but so do the people who were nowhere near the top of the pyramid. Good stories, it seems, are remarkably democratic.
He gives us colleagues, personalities, friendships and, occasionally, rather good stories. One of the pleasures of the book is precisely this movement between the weighty and the wonderfully ordinary. A person can be an eminent economist and still end up being remembered for something funny that happened on a train.
Take Tehmi Mistry, for instance, whose story includes being mistaken for Indira Gandhi during a train journey, complete with an unfortunate encounter with people shouting political slogans. It is the sort of anecdote that would almost certainly disappear from an official institutional record.
Ramachandran saves it.
Because Apparently, the RBI Had Characters
That may be the real achievement of Veterans of the Reserve Bank. Institutions tend to preserve their achievements. People preserve their stories. And stories are rarely as well behaved.
Hence “The Gang of Four.” Hence “Morarji in a Night Club.” Hence “Meenakshy’s Ghost.”
Even the chapter titles tell us that the people inside this very serious institution were not spending forty years being serious every minute of the day.
There are also sections on the “Cultural Ambassadors” of the Economic Department and “Experts in the Economic Department,” reminding us that the intellectual life of an institution is never just about job descriptions. It is shaped by the interests, eccentricities and relationships of the people who inhabit it.
Then Came the Man Who Remembered It All
Meeting Mr. Ramachandran made the book's approach easier to understand.
He was warm, funny and remarkably self-aware. After four decades at the RBI, he could have been forgiven for taking the institution—and perhaps himself—a little too seriously.
He clearly does neither.
Instead, he has written a book that seems to say: yes, these people mattered. Their work mattered. But they were also people. They laughed, travelled, argued, had peculiarities, made memories and occasionally found themselves in situations that were considerably more interesting than their official designations suggest.
There is something rather charming about that.
And there was an accidental little postscript to our afternoon.
The day after the Book Club, on October 6, P. P. Ramachandran turned 90.
We did not know it when he was sitting with us at four o’clock.
Perhaps that is fitting. The man who spent years remembering other people gave us one more story to remember.
Happy 90th Sir !
And thank you for reminding us that behind every very serious institution are, inevitably, some very interesting people.
For more serious books, questionable chapter titles, and people worth remembering, join the VC Library WhatsApp group and browse our KOHA catalogue. You never know what characters you might find on the shelves.