Travels with Montek

An absorbing account of India's economic policies over the last 40 years

Last month, Montek Singh Ahluwalia’s much-awaited book, Backstage, was published. In his first sentences Montek writes, “This book is not a memoir” but rather a “travelogue of India’s journey of economic reforms”. With approximately the same degree of accuracy, let me say that this is not a book review, but just a few thoughts on an important and highly readable book.
 
By way of disclosure, Montek is a valued friend of 55 years, with our life trajectories overlapping for three years as students at Oxford in the 1960s, eight years as young professionals in McNamara’s World Bank in the