Time swiftly passes - and opportunity is lost

TIME SWIFTLY PASSES …..

In October 2008, I was invited to take morning coffee with the Vice President. But in this case, there was no need for circumspection or temerity. Twenty years had passed and both of us were older – and hopefully in my case also wiser.

The meeting took place at the dignified but quietly understated office of M. Narasimham, the Chairman of the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), in the lovely old palace that houses the College in the center of Hyderabad.

I was visiting India as a guest speaker on Finance and Risk issues at a seminar for High Level Officials from South Asia that had been organized by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management on ‘Innovations and Good Practices in New Public Management’.

In the previous month I had mentioned my impending visit to ASCI to my old ADB colleague Bruce Smith, as Bruce and I had been collaborating on some work on developing a National Investment Strategy for Jordan. Bruce was able to remind me of the important role that ASCI played in ADB’s affairs as the source of some very eminent senior managers – including Vice President M. Narasimham.

I was therefore delighted to see the V.P’s photo-image beaming down from one of the Bella Vista Palace corridors among the long line of previous ASCI directors – and to learn that he was still coming into ASCI regularly to contribute to its programs. It was then a short step to letting him know that Dr Keith Johnson, former Economist with the Economics and Development Resource Center, would like to pay his respects.

As it happens, I have a photograph in one of my home albums of a previous meeting with the V.P. dating to 1988. We were both engaged in welcoming participants to an ADB Regional Technical Assistance seminar on applying partial equilibrium modeling to estimate the economic costs associated with agricultural subsidies and trade protection. This led on to the publication of an ADB book entitled ‘Evaluating Rice Market Intervention Policies’. The photograph shows me with the V.P. (and Dr Mohammed Quibria of EDRC, at center).

Some twenty years later, we have both changed somewhat - though, I hasten to add, at least one of us is as smart as ever! Over coffee, the 79-year old V.P. soon launched into a fascinating assessment of the evolution of the relative Incremental Capital Output Ratios (ICORs) of India and China and I was given a rapid reprise of his superior intellect. But thankfully, I was able to shift the conversation laterally to less-demanding waters by raising my interest in Buddhism.