On 4 February, Professor Aniruddh Lal
(A.L.) Nagar passed away in Pune. Nagar Sahab, as he
was called by students and colleagues alike, was one
of India’s finest academic econometricians and a
legendary expositor of statistics and econometrics
at the Delhi School of Economics (D.School) where he
taught for decades. As long as I can remember as an
M.A. student and later as a faculty member of the
D.School, the first lecture of Monday, Tuesday and
Wednesday were Nagar Sahab’s for teaching statistics
to first year students; and an additional three
lectures a week were for those who specialised in
‘six-trics’, the D.School short form for the final
year M.A. option involving six papers in statistics
and econometrics.
Nagar Sahab was such a superb teacher that very few
students could ever think of bunking his lectures. A
standard, and often heard, reason for ending an
evening of bridge or post-dinner adda at the
university post-graduate hostels such as Gwyer and
Jubilee Halls was “Tomorrow is Nagar Sahab’s
lecture” which meant that you wanted to get up early
and clear headed enough to get to D.School well in
time to attend the 9.20 am class. Nagar Sahab’s
lectures were too brilliant to give it a miss and,
in many ways, it was great to start a day with
someone giving such a clear-headed exposition of the
subject. I could bore you with a bibliography some
of the seminal work that Nagar Sahab did in
theoretical econometrics, especially in the area of
regressions and simultaneous equation models, but I
shan’t. This is about remembering great teachers.
Nagar Sahab was an internationally acknowledged
econometrician; but above all, he was a truly great
teacher, one of the giants of D.School. When I
joined the faculty, he also taught me, as he did
Ashok Lahiri before me, how to enjoy a post-lunch
paan with 120-number zarda — a habit that Ashok and
I have now forsaken.
Then there was Professor K.L. Krishna. Universally
called KLK or KL was another truly great teacher,
whose lectures in applied econometrics and
industrial economics were truly outstanding. Like
Nagar Sahab, KLK would walk in without a scrap of
paper, teach fundamentally profound stuff, fill the
blackboard with a series of equations and complete
precisely what he had planned for the lecture a
minute or two before the end of class — doing so day
in and out. From both these D.School stalwarts I
learnt the lesson of how to plan a lecture and, most
importantly, how to use a large blackboard so that,
at the end of a class, you could take away the key
elements of an hour long discourse just by looking
at what was left on the board. KLK was also a master
of understanding, using and interpreting large data
sets. Several times in my professional life, I
approached him with queries on data produced in
various rounds of the National Sample Surveys. KLK
always provided exactly the correct answer.
Then there was Professor Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri, or
MDC, a larger than life hero of D.School, the object
of gushing admiration of almost all women students,
who taught the theory of growth, planning and
transport economics. Far from being a conventional
lecturer, MDC showed you how to think of the
fundamental ideas behind a subject and, in that way,
opened up economics in ways that you could not dream
of as an M.A. student.
And then there was the triad of economic historians:
Om Prakash (OP), J. Krishnamurthy (Kicchu) and
Dharma Kumar. OP took you through Mughal India and
the Portuguese and Dutch East India companies like
none other; Kicchu explained various aspects of
colonial economic history, labour markets and
employment; and Dharma, alas no more, made you think
differently and creatively about economic history
without really bothering to ‘teach’ in the
officially understood sense of the word.
These were great teachers. They taught me and many
generations how to think. To learn. And to love
economic theory, econometrics and economic history.
This is my tiny tribute to them.
Published: Business World, March 2014
