There is something about him that is endearing, almost appealing. I first thought it was the simplicity of the man – it is almost a vulnerability. Then I looked at his eyes. When I do that, he reminds me of R K Laxman's legendary cartoon creation, the 'Common Man'. Manmohan Singh is the Common Man wearing a turban, with the same intelligent, patient eyes, watching the world gently; his wife, Gursharan Kaur, is a far gentler version of the Common Man's harridan wife in Laxman's cartoons. Often, Singh seems to forget he is an historic actor, the prime minister in Parliament. He watches silently, almost distantly.
He is a good man, whose goodness is almost like his identity card, his emblem. His honesty is taken for granted; one begins with it. Yet, of late, one senses that goodness is not quite good enough. Something has changed. Even his silence seems questionable. One begins to ask, can a clean man live among so many dubious people? As evil spreads its tentacles, is simple honesty, the rectitude of a good life, enough? Or must goodness, rather than being content with itself, challenge the inventiveness of evil? Does Laxman's Common Man in the guise of a prime minister have to become an uncommon one?
Admittedly, these are strange questions to ask of a man to whom one has looked up. This is a man who has defined and embodied the competence and integrity of a generation of professionals, whose career was held up as an example of what talent, hard work, idealism and commitment can achieve. Suddenly, however, one confronts a vision of before-versus-after: the transition is not a gestalt switch, but a slow transformation into griminess. It is as if the simplicity of the original picture has turned coarse. There is a feeling of doubt. It is almost as if one needs a story, an explanation, a narrative that begins, 'Once there was a man named Manmohan…'
An act of hygiene
The legend of the man began for me in the mid-1970s at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). Other legends of that time were Amartya Sen and Sukhamoy Chakravarty, but Sen had already become a distant creature, someone who belonged to Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Harvard – a diasporic, global creature. Our local hero was Chakravarty, who swung happily between the Planning Commission and DSE. He would walk in to class reading, absorbed in his Economic and Political Weekly, a magazine as legendary as he was. As one of my professors put it, he was 'obscenely well read' – he knew his Lukacs, his Kalecki, his Kant and his Tinbergen. He was textbook-perfect, a classical scholar.