 "Raghuram Rajan, RBI")
Raghuram Rajan wrote to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) staff on June 18 that he would not seek a second term as the central bank’s governor and would go back to the world of academics.
“I am an academic and I have always made it clear that my ultimate home is in the realm of ideas,” Rajan wrote to his staff. People who worked with him and reporters who shadowed Rajan’s every move were not surprised.
“I am an academic and I have always made it clear that my ultimate home is in the realm of ideas,” Rajan wrote to his staff. People who worked with him and reporters who shadowed Rajan’s every move were not surprised.
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Every statement of Rajan is loaded with academic rigour — from the questions he asks his staff or the answers he gives to even innocuous questions, the academician in him lies beneath.
Every statement of Rajan is loaded with academic rigour — from the questions he asks his staff or the answers he gives to even innocuous questions, the academician in him lies beneath.
His answers are always well rounded. While not a long monologue, surely the answers are not brief, unless of course the questions are personal, which he doesn’t respond. Rajan himself is found joking about his inability to give brief answers.
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Rajan is a patient listener and his answers have an air of a person who is easily approachable. But, he is also quite a private person.
Rajan is a patient listener and his answers have an air of a person who is easily approachable. But, he is also quite a private person.
He was miffed at reporters for reaching out to family members to get reaction on his exit. He was also brief while discussing about his Indian citizenship, which cropped up at the start of his regime. But, he never wanted to react to his critics when the criticism was not related to work but ad hominem.
When Rajan chooses to respond to a query, which is the norm rather than the exception, the responses are sprinkled with interesting anecdotes to drive home the point.
For example, his take on ‘dosa economics’ at the C D Deshmukh lecture at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in New Delhi, which he used to explain how inflation kills the value of money, or, his equally patient answer to a Mumbai school kid’s question why the Indian rupee was not strong enough for the world to take note — the teacher in him shone through.
While addressing the younger generation, Rajan is at his brilliant best. Be it with schoolgoing kids, or at a graduation ceremony, Rajan’s interacts with the participants as an equal, no matter the age gap.
When a 10-year old kid offered to donate her $20 towards India’s foreign exchange reserve to stabilise the currency, Rajan assured her that the country had adequate reserves ($300 billion in 2013) and she could afford to relax. Rajan later met the kid and thanked her again for her gesture.
While addressing a bunch of young graduates in IGIDR, Mumbai, Rajan pleaded them to be kind-hearted and do something for people who were not as fortunate as the students sitting at the convocation.
Meeting bright young researchers at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, Rajan joked that he expected to meet students with enormous heads.
People, who work with Rajan, say that he is ‘collegial’, but a hard task master nevertheless. Rajan’s biting new-year address to
RBI staff, in which he criticised them for not being well-informed about rules and not having the desire to learn and improve perhaps did not go down well with some. In fact, it was an extension of how Rajan metes out frank opinions about people who work with him, but without malice and with a strong sense of fairness as a good boss.
Businesslike, but Rajan is also cordial, polite and always gentlemanly in his approach towards people he meets. He gives a patient hearing to everyone and is not a believer in hierarchy based system, say RBI staffers.
He is often found having his lunch at the officers’ lounge at RBI, along with junior staff and until sometime back used to walk down to anyone he wanted to interact. But he cut down on this later after realising that in an old-world institution like Reserve Bank, seeing the governor walking down the corridor is a hair-raising experience for the entire floor, not to mention the staff in question.
After assuming office, Rajan opened the executive facilities for all staff, but understandably, they were not utilised by the common staff of RBI. Rajan says his tenure at RBI was the best ever. But, his other engagements are something to marvel about. At 40, Rajan was the youngest to be appointed as the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund in 2003, a position he held till 2007. What catapulted him to a celebrity status was his bold prediction in 2005 how the world was headed for an unprecedented global credit crisis, led by an asset price bubble in the US housing market.
Rajan is known to be health conscious and frequently plays table tennis and squash. He also participated in the Mumbai Marathon.
What keeps him so young? Perhaps playing video games with his son, he once said.
But what his kids say about his movie-like dialogues, such as “My name is Raghuram Rajan and I do what I do.”?
‘Yuck! Dad, you can do better.”
| RAJANSPEAK |
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“I think we have still to get to a place where we feel satisfied. We have this saying - ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’. We are a little bit that way.” “His (Hitler’s) was a strong government, but Hitler took Germany efficiently and determinedly on a path to ruin, overriding the rule of law and dispensing with elections. It is not sufficient that the trains run on time, they have to go in the right direction at the desired time” “We should improve the environment for ideas through tolerance, mutual respect. Excessive political correctness stifles progress and a quick resort to bans will chill all debate “ |
