Lucky to be a student of Professor A. Vaidyanathan
by Ignatius Chithelen, author Passage from India to America*
Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans, is an old British saying included by John Lennon in his song “Beautiful Boy,” written for his son Sean. I was reminded of this quote today, after getting emails about Professor A. Vaidyanathan’s demise.
In August 2018, during my last visit to India from New York, I was keen to meet Vaidi, as his students called him. I phoned him from Mumbai to say that I would travel to Chennai and meet him. Though speaking softly and slowly, he was sharp and said the best time to meet was around 11 am, between the morning dialysis treatment for his kidney problems and his afternoon rest.
I booked a 6 am flight from Mumbai to Chennai, for the following Tuesday, and a 5.30 pm flight the same day from Chennai to Kochi. I planned to spend a couple of days in Kochi, to meet P.K. Michael Tharakan, my M.Phil. thesis adviser at the Centre For Development Studies (CDS,) Thiruvananthapuram, where Vaidi was also one of my teachers. And I would see Cherian Punnathra, a CDS classmate.
But dengue and malaria infections were rising in Kochi and other areas of Kerala due to stagnant pools of flood water remaining after recent heavy rainfall. So, a few days later I cancelled my trip to Kerala as well as to Chennai. I called Vaidhi and said I would see him on my next visit to India.
I knew he was 86 and that his health was declining, yet assumed I would see him in a year or two. A few months later, I heard from Jagdish Bose, a fellow student at CDS, that Vaidi was moved to a nursing home in Coimbatore, where one of his daughters lived. Jagdish and I planned to visit Vaidi together, when I next traveled to India.
Now that Vaidi is no more, I realize it was dumb not to visit him in Chennai two years ago, and that too because of rising infections in Kochi, 430 miles away. Yes, indeed, life is what happens when busy making other plans.
Since his passing, economists are pointing out Vaidi’s major contributions to economic studies in India. I remember him almost every week since I still struggle to apply an intellectual tool he taught. Also, in a leading academic institution, with its share of big egos and domineering personalities, he served as a good example of how to pursue an academic career.
I first met Vaidi in September 1981 during the welcome party for the new batch of fifteen M.Phil. students. It was held on the terrace of the main student residence building, inside CDS’ ten acre suburban campus. While songs by The Beatles played on a cassette recorder, we chatted with each other and the senior students and faculty. When we talked, the first thing Vaidi said was that I must be a Goan. I did not take offence, and told him my dad Verghese Maliakal was from Thrissur district, Kerala, which is about 160 miles north of the campus.
Vaidi was one of the founding professors of CDS and earlier worked at the Planning Commission in India, the World Bank and was on the board of the Reserve Bank of India, the nation’s central bank. He got a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
In his introductory class, a course on Indian economics, Vaidi pointed out there was an acute lack of reliable data on the Indian economy. He said most of the data from census and surveys conducted by government departments, for instance, were three or more years old and often the sample sizes were too small to provide reliable conclusions. I asked him if the data has so many flaws why use the data at all. He said that, though inadequate, the data offered useful insights, and it was better than having no data at all.
All through his course, Vaidi stressed the importance of finding relevant data and analyzing it to arrive at conclusions and policy measures, instead of trying to find or manipulate data to support a pre-conceived hypothesis. Since leaving CDS, in my earlier work as a journalist and now as an investment analyst, I always try and ask: Is the data relevant and from a reliable source? if so, what does it show? I continue to find this tough to do, especially when it means abandoning an analytical insight which no longer works given new data and information.
Vaidi was curious and encouraging about a student’s work. You could walk into his office anytime, or chat with him during lunch or over chai at the campus canteen, and he would patiently answer questions and suggest articles and books to read. He was humble and blunt, evident during our first meeting, avoiding the superficial nice things academics say to each other in person. Though there was the usual internal politics of the academic world at CDS, he never said anything about these petty issues; instead he focused entirely on his teaching, research and writing.
I learned a second intellectual tool at CDS, which I also continue to use today, from the late I.S. Gulati. Another founding professor, Gulati got his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, was an adviser to the Kerala government and worked on a project with Nicholas Kaldor, a Nobel Prize-winning economist.
For a term paper I chose to write for Gulati, I spent most of the allotted time penciling in ten years of India’s balance-of-payments data, filling five large graph sheets. Gulati said, while I had done a good job of collecting the data, there was little analysis and no new insights in my paper. I was disappointed with his B grade, but learned a valuable lesson: a mass of data and information compiled means little without identifying key elements and analyzing them to uncover patterns and offer new perspectives. Also, after finishing my M.Phil., I got a job at the Economic & Political Weekly only after Krishna Raj, its then editor, spoke to Gulati about me. Gulati passed away in 2002.
The M.Phil. program at CDS, though only 16 months in duration, was my best education. This was due to teachers like Vaidi and Gulati as well as Michael, who gave me the freedom to work on my own for a 150-page thesis on the sugar industry in Maharashtra, Chiranjib Sen, who was also my thesis adviser, G.N.Rao, Chandan Mukherjee, Rajaram Dasgputa, K.P. Kannan and others. It was also very useful that the focus at CDS was on analyzing real-world economic problems, rather than learning abstract economic theories.
I learned much about the economics of agricultural and commodity products, the impact of politics on agricultural businesses and the relevance of economic history. The method of grading students, through papers and a thesis, was a superior way to learn compared to exams. You have to understand an issue in order to be able to write about it, while the process of writing simultaneously helps deepen your knowledge.
Leaving CDS after my M.Phil., I sent Vaidi an annual update, earlier through New Year’s greeting cards and then via email. I often got a reply, especially after he began using email. In 2018, I was honored that he wrote a blurb for the cover of my book Passage from India to America: Billionaire Engineers, Extremist Politics and Advantage to Canada & China. He also passed along e-copies to those who may have an interest in reviewing and writing about it.
I last met Vaidi in 1991, on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, while he was a visiting fellow at the university. Our conversation about his work and mine, over a few glasses of beer and dinner, was frank as usual. At one point he said that the big weakness in my M.Phil. thesis according to some - he did not mention who - was that I failed to create a theoretical framework. I did not tell him that I was too influenced by his teaching and so only focused on finding good data and figuring out what it showed.
