Dr Reddy's Lab

The Delhi launch of former RBI Governor Y V Reddy’s book India and the Global Financial Crisis was, predictably, self-congratulatory. Reddy set the tone praising his predecessors Bimal Jalan and C Rangarajan and giving examples of the new concepts they’d come up with. Rangarajan was equally fulsome in his praise as was Jalan — Jalan said he was really the hyphen in the term Rangarajan-Reddy years, since he headed the RBI after the first and before the second. So, when it came to RBI Deputy Governor Rakesh Mohan’s turn, he decided to pepper his speech with humour. He began, “Apparently, there’s already a company called Dr Reddy’s Labs … otherwise we should have renamed the RBI as Dr Reddy’s Labs since this is about the experiments Dr Reddy conducted when he was in the RBI, as deputy governor and then as governor.” Apart from his work on setting the debt markets right and, essentially, ‘fixing the plumbing’ of the financial system, Mohan talked of the various working groups Reddy had chaired and the speeches he’d given — “in each case, you’ll notice, he missed his century … he needed better executive assistants who could have alerted him to this … you’ve got another 13 days to go, give another 13 speeches …”