Man of many facets

Economist, central banker, Carnatic and Hindustani music rasika, dance critic, columnist, a passionate follower of tennis, and unquestioned head and chief counsel of a family of forty cousins who looked up to him. A Seshan, who passed away in Mumbai on January 7 at the ripe age of 83, was all of these and more.

After voluntarily retiring in 1993 from the RBI, where he worked in the Economic Analysis and Policy Division as Officer-in-charge and as advisor to the Governor on monetary policy, Seshan accepted assignments as IMF-appointed advisor to the central banks of Kyrgyzstan and Sierra Leone.

Talk to those who knew Seshan and the adjectives that they use to describe him are “meticulous”, “old-fashioned”, “thorough”, “scholarly”, to quote just a few. Former RBI governor YV Reddy calls Seshan his guru. “He was absolutely thorough, well-respected and one of my earliest gurus in the RBI,” Reddy said, adding, “He was a pillar of strength in work related to economic policy and rendered sound advice whenever he was asked. I have a lot of respect for him.”

Seshan and Reddy were together in the working group on external debt which was tasked in 1991 with the job of collecting statistics on the external debt of India and putting them in the public domain. The pathbreaking recommendations of the group were accepted in full and the system they suggested continues to date, says Reddy. The former governor, in his book, credits Seshan with coining the term Liberalised Exchange Rate Management System (LERMS), which was an important landmark in the transition to a market-based exchange rate system.

A senior journalist who has closely followed the RBI’s history says that Seshan was a classic RBI man, meticulous, conservative and an inflation warrior. Seshan’s columns over the years in Business Line bear these out clearly. A former colleague at the RBI recalled how the great Nani Palkhivala, in one of his famous post-budget lectures at the Brabourne stadium, once quoted Seshan’s article on government debt in the RBI Bulletin to buttress his point. Another colleague recalled how he was the first to write about the internal debt trap in the late 1980s in an RBI Occasional Paper. “Wherever he went, he took a deep dive into the procedures and streamlined them. He even brought out a style book while he was in the publications division setting out an uniform style for writing articles and presenting tables and footnotes,” says this colleague.

Seshan, a double MA, one in Economics from the Madras Christian College and another in Agricultural Economics from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, was as much at home writing on the arcane aspects of monetary policy in financial dailies as he was in delving into the nuances of ragas and swaras while writing in well-known music magazine Sruti , where he published under the alias of “Sankarabharanan”. According to his son, Ramaswami, a profile of the famous DK Pattammal written by Seshan once in Tamil magazine Kalaimagal prompted the legend to enquire who this Sankarabharanan was who knew so much about her!

He was a patron-member of the Shanmukhananda Sabha in Mumbai, advisor to their music and dance school and also on the editorial committee of their magazine Shanmukha . In addition to music, Seshan was also a critic for dance publications Narthanam and Attendance . His association with Business Line extended for over a decade when he used to be the go-to columnist on the days when the RBI announced its monetary policy. His articles reflected not just his experience in the RBI but also its school of thought when it came to inflation. Seshan was an editor’s delight — his pieces would land well before the deadline and they needed very little editing. Such was his command over the language. He leaves behind his wife Banumathi and two sons, Ananthanarayana Sharma and Ramaswami.

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