7th H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture Introduction (15.4.2018)

Welcome to the Welcome to the 7th H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture being held on what would have been his 94th Birthday. I thank all of you for being here.

For the family, today is also a day of remembrance not just of Sharada Prasad, but also his brother Dr H Y Rajagopal, whom we lost 2 weeks ago. (And his sister Papu who passed away 5 years ago on the 14th).

Most people here would probably remember Sharada Prasad as the press advisor to three Prime Ministers, particularly Indira Gandhi, with whom he worked throughout her tenure, starting in January 1966 to that last fateful day in 1984. He however had a rich and productive career before (and after) that period: as a student leader and freedom fighter in the Quit India movement, as one of the youngest news editors of a national daily at age 24, and as the first Indian Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1955-56 — I can almost hear his self-deprecating chuckle: “Little known facts about little known people’’. All this was before 1957, when he entered the labyrinths of Indian bureaucracy at the instance of US Mohan Rao, who stumped him with the poser: ‘if you could have worked for Goenka, why can’t you work for Nehru?”

The Memorial Lecture, which we have tried to hold annually, celebrates the diverse engagements of Sharada Prasad – from the freedom movement to media and journalism, from language and literature, to design, music, and culture. We have been fortunate to have had a very distinguished sequence of speakers:

• Mukul Kesavan on “India and Republican Virtue”; 
• Sanjaya Baru on “Media, Business and Government”. 
• Sugata Srinivasaraju on “Negotiating Two Worlds: Bilingualism as a Cultural Idea’’;
• Ullas Karanth, on “Recovering Nature in a Crowded Subcontinent”. 
• Ram Guha on “The Art and Craft of Historical Biography”.
• Sriram Ramaswamy on “Mass Movements: A physicist looks at Living Matter.”

Today we have Jairam Ramesh, who will talk on , who will talk on Wise Counsel:Reflections on the Planning Era.

I had a personal reason to nudge Jairam into speaking on what currently seems to be a rather unpopular idea at the moment— Planning — and an institution that has been dismantled and may soon be forgotten — the Planning Commission. I am particularly thankful to him for indulging me.

The short decade of 1957-1966 was a period of extraordinary productivity and fulfilment for Sharada Prasad. This is the period he moved to Delhi, and married Kamalamma. This is when Ravi and I were born. And this was a period when he and Kamalamma made some lifelong friends who formed our world and shaped our lives. There was a reconnection with some old friends such as the sociologist MN Srinivas, and the trio of brilliant photojournalists from Mysore: T Kasinath, TS Nagarajan and TS Satyan. There were new friends and colleagues such as Sheila Dhar and PND. 

From 1959-1966, Sharada Prasad was the Chief Editor of Yojana, the magazine of the Planning Commission. Some of my parents’ closest friendships were with the people he worked with there and their families:

• A Vaidyanathan and Shanta who were also neighbours in Patel Nagar, and whose daughters Rama and Radhika were our first friends and continue to be close;
• TN Srinivasan, whose son Sridhar was my best friend in school and still is; 
• Pitambar Pant and BhanuPant, whose sons Chandrashekhar and Dipankar were like older brothers to us when we were growing up.
• ManuShroff and Rashmi, whose son Gautam and I have played, studied, worked together almost continuously over the past 50 years…
• K S Krishnaswamy and Madura Krishnaswamy;
• and from a few years earlier, Padma Desai (and Jagdish Bhagwati).

I can also recall some others whose families we got to know:

• Arun Ghosh
• Ramdas Honavar
• Sukhomoy Chakravarty, whose daughter Charu was perhaps my most brilliant colleague at IIT.

There were other friendships, perhaps not as intimate, such as KN Raj and Sarsamma, S. Guhanand Shanta, IG and Bibi Patel, Amartya Sen, Mrinal Datta Chaudhury, Dharma and Lovraj Kumar, BS Minhas.

This was a time where we acquired a larger family. The doctors who delivered Ravi and me at St. Stephen’s Hospital, Dr Savitri Kavan and Dr Lucy Oommen became sisters to my mother and father respectively. Another neighbour was the psychoanalyst Lillian Fisher, family to us in New York and witness at my wedding to Nivedita. It was a period when Sharada Prasad was still “Shouri” to everyone close to him. It was also when the Gandhian became a Nehruvian too.

The end of this period saw Shouri’s first major venture into the world of design. In 1964-65, he worked with Charles and Ray Eames on the Nehru exhibition as the editorial consultant (the photo by Charles Eames is from that period). This assignment brought to us a new set of friends, of which I will mention only some: 

• the diplomat Nirmaljit Singh and Premalya Singh, 
• Ashoke Chatterjee, who later headed NID,
• and Mansinh Rana, the architect, and Yashwant Rana, whose sons Kshitij and Bharatwere our closest friends through the 60s and 70s.

I am not going to attempt a formal introduction of today’s speaker Jairam Ramesh. Wikipedia today doesn’t seem to leave as ``little known’’ any fact about well-known people (such as whether he was born in Chikmaglur on April 9, 1954 or 1955). Jairam did stellar work for our ecological heritage as the Union minister for Environment and Forests, a responsibility which he undertook with his customary passion, intelligence, rigorous analysis and energy. He continued in this vein when he became minister for Rural Development. How often does one see a cabinet minister drive himself to a NGO and engage for hours with those working in the field to understand the challenges of the sector? (May we have more such people in government.)

Jairam is a brilliant and meticulous writer. Last year saw two biographies of Indira Gandhi, and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that Jairam’s “A Life in Nature” was the more insightful, better written and painstakingly researched. Indeed, of all the attempts on her life, his is perhaps the one she would have most identified with. 

With reference to the subject of today’s talk, Jairam is perhaps the best qualified person to talk about Planning. He has had a long involvement with India’s planning process and economic reforms, and spent several years in the Planning Commission in various capacities. And he has the breadth of vision and historical sweep to review the institution and its impact. 

In the last year or so, he has been poring over archives in particular the PN Haksar and Pitambar Pant papers for his forthcoming book on Haksar — and these would have given him unique insights into the functioning of the Planning Commission and the people who propelled the early development of India. 

Please welcome Jairam Ramesh.