The four-in-one don

Lunch With BS

Believe it or not, but Surjit Bhalla was working as an engineer in Fairchild Semi-Conductors when he got an offer to join a start-up firm in what wasn't yet Silicon Valley. Bhalla thought about it, decided that his first choice was returning to India to join politics, and turned down the offer.

The start-up was called Intel, and Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce and all the others who left Fairchild to start Intel and make their careers, reputations and fortunes, don't know what they missed. Bhalla probably does, but it seems unkind to ask.

The Chinese have that well-known curse: May you live in interesting times. The fact is that, if Bhalla had indeed joined Intel, he wouldn't have lived half as interesting a life as he in fact has.

For this midnight's child (he was born on August 15, 1948) has worked for both Rand and Brookings, covering the right and left of the political spectrum, been head currency trader for the emerging markets in New York for Deutsche Bank, and also at the World Bank (in both research and treasury).

For good measure, he wrote a book assessing the cricket greats, using novel statistical tools 15 years ago in a way that was ahead of its time (and which argued that Gavaskar wasn't as great as a billion people thought he was). And if even that isn't enough, he has dabbled in everything from election forecasting to television hosting.

Despite his many-splendoured career, I'd like to say that Bhalla is best known for his popular writings (he is, after all, a columnist with Business Standard!), but in Delhi circles he is equally well known for his pugnacity and in-your-face style of arguing a point, and for taking unpopular positions, on everything from (you guessed it) cricket to politics, and from the stock market to abstruse economic theory.

So Surjit Bhalla, unlike any Chinese that I know, is living four lives in one. The problem seems to be that the cricketers think he is a market pundit, the market-wallahs think he is an economist, and the economists think he is a frustrated politician who makes a living as a fund manager.

As for the politicians, they don't think of him at all. Yet, Surjit Bhalla, the perennial outsider, is often more right than the experts but who, in one of life's minor tragedies, doesn't get enough credit for his perspicacity. "I'm not good at marketing myself," he confesses.

But I'm getting ahead of my story "" as Bhalla himself does, more often than not, so it's obviously catching. He is ahead of time for lunch, waiting for me as I run in through the rain. Typically, he has not chosen a five-star joint but an unfrequented garden cafe nestling in the woods of the Lodi gardens.

The view all round is sylvan green, made all the more verdant by the glistening rain. The only other diners are foreigners, and the food and wine justify the choice. Bhalla opens with a gazpacho and then declares he is going to be politically incorrect and orders red meat ("because it tastes so much better"), and so we ask for red wine to keep company with his Moroccan lamb.

It's Californian, under the Gallo signature, and Bhalla has a word on that too: "They're one of the original Californian wine-makers." It's very good cabernet sauvignon, as is my sole. It seems a wise course to follow Bhalla's recommendations on restaurants.

"Did you know that John Arlott, the cricket commentator, wrote a book on wine?" Clearly, he knows his stuff. So should one take his advice on markets as well? May be, yes, if you listen to his statistics on how he has handsomely beaten the Sensex with the money that he manages, and how he has given a positive return in all years barring one (the year the internet bubble burst "" and Bhalla was an early Ice sector enthusiast).

And in case you haven't got his credentials right, Bhalla recalls with relish how he predicted the Mexican crisis before it happened, and the Asian crisis before that happened.

My obvious question is, if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? He's anticipated it and completes the question for me. For starters, he says, he has turned down plum jobs with fancy pay packets in the past, because he wants to live in India, not London or New York.

Then, he isn't badly off. And there follows his familiar crib: the government allows the white man to manage other people's money, but denies the same permission to the brown man. In other words, you can be a foreign institutional investor, not a domestic one. Which partly explains why he manages only a million dollars.

What makes him smarter than the others, I ask. "It's being an economist," he says. "I place the markets in a macro-economic context. Which is why I am so bullish on India." This was before the latest bull run had got under way.

Also, to his credit, he was one of the earliest people to start beating the drum on lowering interest rates, and he rightly points out that the current boom would have been impossible without that essential step.

The strange thing is that Bhalla is part of a very select tribe of physicists or engineers who have ended up as economists (two others are Kirit Parikh and Rakesh Mohan). The truth is that his heart was always in politics.

So, though he did electrical engineering on a scholarship at Purdue, he switched to public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, and then economics as a third love, before coming back to India in the 1980s with a singular mission: to join hands with Prannoy Roy (then still an economist) to start an Indian think-tank, styled ambitiously on Brookings.

It was called The Policy Group and had a small office in Greater Kailash. But they were quickly mired in controversy when they landed a fat contract on estimating poverty, and newspapers questioned their competence to do the job.

But more serious trouble followed when Bhalla and Roy fell out ("I still don't know why," Bhalla insists), and soon he was doing everything that Roy was doing: TV hosting, election forecasting (getting one famous one hopelessly wrong, as he ruefully recalls)... everything other than joining the government.

How does he really see himself, I ask as the gazpacho is dispatched and the lamb and sole mostly demolished. "I see myself as a nineteenth century liberal," he says. So it is no surprise that the economist he rates above all else is Friedrich von Hayek for his Road to Serfdom.

It's a choice that will find more takers today than in the heyday of socialism, which is when Hayek wrote it. But don't think for a moment that Bhalla is predictable right-wing.

Because one of his proud moments as an economist was when the venerable American Economic Review published a piece that Bhalla had banged out picking holes in a Milton Friedman theory. He has tilted at other holy cows too, debunking Arundhati Roy on dams, and the World Bank on its poverty numbers (which resulted in a second book).

More wine is ordered as the conversation slows down to something slightly slower than Bhalla's usual breakneck speed. And he is free with his opinions on other economists and which part of their work has impressed him.

There is Kenneth Arrow for his impossibility theorem (why you get second-best choices in election results), and Gary Ackerloff's theory of lemons "" why you're likely to get a lemon when you buy a second-hand car (the seller of the car knows more about it than you do!).

Both are Nobel laureates, of course, but Bhalla is also full of admiration for the economists who have lived in the world of policy-making: Larry Summers (World Bank, US Treasury and now Harvard), Stan Fischer (IMF and now investment banking) and Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

There remains politics to discuss, and I quiz him on his BJP sympathies. He counters that if the BJP has to account for the Mumbai and Gujarat riots, the Congress has to atone for the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi.

In other words, both are illiberal parties and don't get his vote. If the scales seem tilted the BJP's way, it's because Bhalla doesn't like Sonia Gandhi at the head of the Congress ("It's not that I love Caesar less, but Rome more..."). But the guys he will really vote for are the chaps who will do economic reform.

The thing about Bhalla, which many people may not see underneath his argumentative exterior, is that he is at heart a gentleman, as correct in his private dealings as he is obsessively concerned about public issues, and as keen to make money as he is to bang out his next research paper.

So, yes, a nineteenth century liberal in more ways than one, but a money-making don too.