All’s well that ends well

Upon return to the state again I was looking around for something to keep me busy essentially to keep ennui at bay. Venu once advised me to cultivate a hobby to keep the mind active. D.V. Subba Rao, also a former Governor RBI, said it is necessary to take a different route to the office every day just in order to avoid falling into a rut.

I believe I have more or less succeeded in boredom at bay. Certainly my involvement with the Sri Chaitanya Institute helped in this regard. Apart from being an exhilarating had rewarding experience, the interaction with the youth kept me abreast of the current events and au fait with the rapidly changing environment.

I could not, after all, appear to the boys and girls as some Rip Van Winkle coming out of the woodwork. I immersed myself in renewing my contacts with several fields of mathematics and physics which had fascinated me in my college days.

I caught up with the latest thinking on the theory of chaos and absorbing concepts such as Mandelbrot’s set, Cantor’s set, the game of Life, Koch’s curve. I read and the like highly racy accounts on number theory and the theory of relativity such as “Gods Equation,” “Fermat’s Last Theorem” and “The Man who Knew Infinity” I followed developments like the discovery of the Higgs boson (God’s particel) and gravitational waves.

In 2011 Kiran Kumar Reddy, the then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, asked me to head a government Committee to investigate into the causes of the declaration, by some farmers of East Godavari district, of a “crop holiday,” following their continued disenchantment with the various departments of the state and central governments that were expected to support farming activities.

It proved to be an extremely interesting experience. The findings of the Committee served to fortify the conviction I had held for over fifteen years, regarding the need for structural reforms in the agricultural sector, especially in the field of centre state partnerships and the urgent imperative of repositioning of the roles of the centre and the states in response to the imperatives of an era of change.

That study, and the report the Committee submitted, more or less signal led the swansong of my direct involvement in the activities of my home state.

Soon after that I set about the task of giving shape to “Not by Others’ Hands’ - An Anthology of a Century of Credit Cooperatives in India,” a book on the history of the cooperative movement in India, something which I had for long wanted to do.

For sometime then I had been toying with the idea of writing a book on DM largely based on my experience in NDMA. I was able to give it final shape by the middle of 2016. I requested Dr. M.S. Swaminathan to release the book and, upon his agreeing to do so, approached the Governor of Tamil Nadu Rosaiah to preside over the function. Then I got hold of Kamal Kishore, Member NDMA (my successor in office) to attend the function as chief guest. Thus, production number four hit the market.

Towards the end of my tenure in NDMA some of my friends and close relatives suggested that I record my experiences with the persons I had met and the events I had witnessed during my lifetime - in the form of a book in Telugu. I contacted Bapu and Ramana and asked them whether they could help me with the idea.

Ramana put me on to M.B.S. Prasad. Prasad and I established a relationship, and began to work on the book, which ultimately took final shape a couple of years after my return to Hyderabad. Written in a lighthearted and self-deprecatory style, the book was received well in the market. After a gap of nearly fifteen years, I had once again established a rapport with the Telugu speaking people.

It was during this period that I felt the urge to teach in one of the premier institutes of the country. I thought that, with the experience I had just gained in NDMA, I should try my hand at teaching DM in one of the IITs. I got in touch with R.P. Agarwal who, after retirement from the IAS, had been appointed Chairman of IIT Delhi. He was good enough to introduce me to Dr. S.K. Dash of the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences in that Institute.

I took up an assignment to teach DM as a subject for one semester, to a vertically integrated group of students from the undergraduate to the Ph.D levels. It was a course comprising twelve lectures. It, however, turned out to be a somewhat disappointing experience. I had prepared diligently and gathered excellent material on various subjects relating to DM including the role of NDMA and related areas such as climate change.

Somehow I found the quality of the students was not quite up to my expectations. Neither they seemed to be enjoying my lectures nor I finding it as enjoyable an experience as I had expected. It was, of course, a “non-credit” optional paper. Still, for some reason or other, there were no vibes between the students and
I. Even the ambience, which I associated with an IIT, was missing. The consolation was in the process of conducting examinations, evaluating performances and awarding scores. After the completion of the course, and more or less by mutual agreement, the arrangement was terminated.

More than five years earlier, thanks to Aparna, I had established contact with Professor C.V.R. Murty who was among the first academicians to make a presentation to the members of NDMA. When I related my IIT Delhi experience to him, Murty introduced me to Professor Chella Rajan of IITM Chennai.

A proposal was then made to induct to me as an Adjunct Faculty at the Indo-German Centre for Sustainability in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences of that institute. I continued in that position for several years thereafter. That experience was much more to my liking. I enjoyed interacting with the professors of various disciplines.

The idea was that I would be a resource person, and an area coordinator, for Land Resource was one of the subjects IGCS engaged itself in in addition to water, waste and energy. Meetings of IGCS are held alternately in Germany and India, once every year, coinciding with the commencement of the summer and winter schools respectively. Students from both countries participate in the schools where courses are offered relating to one of the subjects the Centre deals with.

The first meeting in Germany after I joined IGCS was conducted in Aachen. To my chagrin I found that the German Consulate General of Chennai insisted upon my personal appearance in order to grant me a visa. I protested saying that it was at the invitation of one of their universities that I was going and would be quite happy not to go rather than appear in person. After all I was not applying for a scholarship or a job in Germany! Subsequently however the system underwent a change and personal appearance was no longer mandatory. I was therefore able to travel to Kiel for the next meeting.

Pallam Raju, the Minister of Human Resource Development in the government of India, called me one day and asked if I would be interested in serving on the Boards of Management of Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning at Puttaparthi and the Central University of Rajasthan at Ajmer. I also received another request to associate myself with the Centurion University of Technology and Management in Bhubaneswar – a private university set up by law of legislature of Orissa state at Bhubaneswar.