K S Krishnaswamy

With over 40 years of acquaintance, some years very close, I feel a deep vacuum on the passing of K S Krishnaswamy. KSK, as many referred to him, was a role model for me in many ways, professional as well as personal.

Many thoughts rushed through my mind when I heard of his demise on 10 June 2013: similarities in personal health and some aspects of professional commitments; the sense of awe pervading the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) corridors about his professional eminence when he arrived as a principal advisor to the bank’s research department in 1972; KSK’s joining the research set-up to fill the gap created by the exodus of a galaxy of London-Oxford-Harvard-Manchester trained scholars to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the late 1960s; some lurking sense of inferiority in the four of us (R H Patil, M V Raghavachari, A Lahiri and me) who were all Indian trained and replaced the foreign-trained intellectuals in 1968 in the research set-up; my close association with him for a decade in the RBI (1971 to 1981); the unstinted support extended by him along with the late Krishna Raj, the then editor of Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), when I left the RBI prematurely to set up the EPW Research Foundation as well as in the subsequent period, particularly in the years when he was the chairman of the Sameeksha Trust; and many instances of cajoling and rescuing me from trouble.