The Hindu Business Line : Remembering Ramu

RAMASWAMI P. Aiyar (Ramu to all), formerly Director of Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, and of the Chennai-based Institute of Financial Management and Research, who passed away on Friday at Hyderabad, was intimately connected with management education in India throughout its four-decade history.

Educated in engineering at Benares, and Loughborough, UK, where he received his Ph.D., in information systems, a forerunner of the sunrise field of IT, Ramu stayed in Kolkata right up to 1991. He led the institute through a particularly difficult turnaround in the 70s and 80s, beset with knotty faculty problems and the general turbulent situation in the region. More than once he was chosen as the acting director most acceptable to all sections, during phases of short tenures of the permanent incumbents. Starting as a very popular young bachelor teacher of what was then information sciences in the late 1960s, he captured the hearts of his students immediately, despite teaching a usually difficult subject.

Ramu served on many committees of the Government and the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), including the most recent one on a complete review of the system. His participation at meetings seemed on the surface quiet and self-effacing, but as another of his very senior students Mr P.V.R. Murthy says, he knew how to be `quietly powerful'.

He was a great listener, recalls Mr G. Shanker, a management consultant and graduate of the pioneering class of 1966. His gift was the ability to bring even the firebrands and difficult ones to calm down and agree to work together. His unflappable temperament, easy way with people and patience were great administrative assets. His entirely approachable way endeared him to all.

In those days, he was always one among the students after hours, playing stylish table tennis with his freshly minted sandwich bat. He drew appreciative oohs and aahs from the girls and obviously envied by all of us, recalls Mr R. Narayanan, another early IIMC graduate and an entrepreneur.

Every person who knew Ramu must remember him for some personal and undemonstrative act of kindness. He loved to meet and keep in touch with old students even three decades after their graduation. He was always most courteous and helpful to students who came to him for advice. He enthusiastically offered them ideas as well as intellectual support in breaking out as entrepreneurs. One version has it that the concept of the NIIT was born over the bridge table with his long-time friend Mr Shiv Nadar, decades ago.

In the status-conscious and ego-ridden world of academia, Ramu was a great example of how one can carry great responsibility and still be completely without pretension, approachable, and humane - without losing any of respect due to the chair, indeed adding to it.

Students of course loved him. They felt comfortable talking over their personal, everyday difficulties, usually to do with relationships. I knew him well for over a decade and found this human side to him the most heart-warming. We worked together right from the start, when he was attracted to the South by the prospect of starting Academy for Management Excellence (ACME), an offshoot of IFMR in general management.

He was probably the most popular and well-remembered director in the frenetic world of MBAs, as was obvious when he visited several US universities during 1992 in connection with setting up the ACME fulltime programme. At every airport he was met with one or more of his old students, who had gone on to distinction in academia or elsewhere. That the ACME plan was not realised in its entirety was a disappointment to him, but he seldom showed his true feelings in such matters in public.

In fact, if there were one word to describe him it would be "non-controversial." I, for one, felt he taught me, yet again, the value of balance a sense of proportion and, above all, not taking oneself too seriously.

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