Rockstar Rajan pins hopes on India’s enterprising youth

From blips to bitcoins, Chinese whispers, demonetisation, digitisation, inflation and more, the professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business gave macro, micro insights, picking up sections from his book I do what I do , that got released here on Tuesday. 

His speech followed by a Q&A session had the audience raising some valid queries, and the academician-turned-bureaucrat opened up on the impetus for writing his book, and his hopes for young India. He tells us, “One of the immediate questions that always comes up is what’s the pressing hurry for me to write a book. This book came in the wake of one year of reflection, post leaving the public office of the RBI and letting my successor have a sense of what the RBI was all about and what it has achieved. I believe one of the greatest joys of my term at RBI has been talking to young people. I was amazed at how excited and enthusiastic they were – both people inside and outside the RBI. The young officers start out without knowing what to do and weeks later they come back so much more informed and with so many queries. Whenever I visited colleges and universities I could gauge the enthusiasm of the youngsters. I wanted to tell people that the RBI is probably one of the most exciting positions for an economist to be in. I also realised that I had spent all my time delivering lectures at the RBI. And I realised if I could cut and paste some of those lectures in the format of a book, people could get an idea of what we did at the RBI and why we did it. We also initiated a lot of reforms and we wanted people to be aware of the work that had gone into it.” 

He goes on to add, “The title of the book can be attributed to my wife. We were initially planning a title on the lines of a James Bond catchphrase, like My name is Rajan, Raghuram Rajan. But then, we decided to settle for a line that was used in one of my speeches.”