Multi-tasking Exposure: My Unfolding Voyage 064

Throughout 1971, I was busy working hard on my office assignments to establish my credentials and enhance my skills as a business economist. The speed with which I tried to complete my assignments and my willingness to handle more than one assignments at a time was amply rewarded by the bosses in exposing me to jobs of various nature, often to be handled simultaneously. By early 1972, I could return to work outside office along with increasing volume of work assigned to me the office. I set out on my next two years' goals: (a) continue to beat colleagues in getting and completing larger number of office assignments than others, (b) speed up my PhD dissertation-related reading and writing, (c) publish some technical paper in the research journal 'Prajnan' of the National Institute of Bank Management in India, and (d) search for a life partner.


With regard to (a), it was easy to achieve for anyone willing to become reliable, dependable in delivering outputs meeting short deadlines. For PhD dissertation, I had already identified the basic books and articles for reading and digesting: these included a Survey article on social cost benefit analysis, a book on collection of articles on the theory and applications of social cost benefit analysis, the OECD manual on project appraisal, the UNIDO Guidelines on Cost Benefit Analysis of projects, a particular issue of a journal published from the then Soviet Union on the cost benefit analysis and project selection in communist centrally planned economies using both mathematics and Marxian vocabulary, and a large number of other articles and books on the subject of cost benefit analysis, articles on trade-off between economic growth and employment growth - both theoretical models and empirical data analysis, articles on project choice criteria in various issues of the Engineering Economists and other books, and etc. Soon I would have charted out my PhD thesis chapter composition: the thesis would have to have an introduction chapter on the Choice problem to be addressed in the framework of Social Cost Benefit Analysis, followed by an extensive survey of literature and another chapter on the inter-relationships between various choice criteria (mathematical formula), and then a Macro economic model that would capture the relationship between employment growth and output (GDP) growth with varying time path of capital intensity and labor productivity, and then propose a weighted linear combination of output growth and employment growth and show how it could be derived from the Macro-economic model of the preceding chapter and workout the shadow wage rate implications in terms of the relative weights given to the national objectives of output growth and employment growth in an economy. The final chapter would deal with the prevailing Indian context of economic and employment growth and how the proposed weighted criterion could be used in the selection of projects for financing by banks with data on a sample of projects actually financed by banks, and then indicating scope for further research. Once the basic structure was available, it was easy even if time consuming to draft the Chapters. And, by the end of 1973, I was ready to deal with a reasonable draft of the entire dissertation for discussions and doing further work based on comments and suggestions by my guide Professor Dr. Deb Kumar Bose.


With regard to technical article on banking for publication, I tried out many topics including bank credit multiplier, but ultimately focused on the topic of Inter-branch Transfer Pricing in public sector banks and repayment scheduling for loans to small business enterprises in tune with the time profile of cash flows. During 1973-75, three of my papers would be published in Prajnan. When the first was published on Single and Dual Rate Transfer pricing policy, even before I could get my copy of the issue of Prajnan, Mr. PK Sen, Deputy General Manager, the third most senior in the top management of the Bank called me to his cabin, showed me the copy of the Prjnan, complimented me for the paper published, told me to continue writing such articles and said that he had already ordered for procurement of sufficient number of additional copies which he wanted to distribute to all directors of the Bank at the ensuing Board meeting. Next day, the Chief Accountant, Mr. Ranjit Dutta (who would later become the Chairman of the Bank) cam down from his office to meet me at my desk and gave the original letter addressed to him by a Chief Officer of the State Bank of India, who had worked with him on a Committee on Banking Costs: in the letter my article and its implications were appreciated. Soon thereafter the Bank itself changed the inter-branch transfer price for its branches: while discussing on the subject, Mr. Ranjit Dutta had argued that a change in the transfer price would improve inter-branch profit comparison but would distort comparison with the immediate past year's profits and Mr. PK Sen retorted to him saying that such an argument would never allow any change at any point of time. A remarkable comment that would guide me as a change agent in the course my career ahead. At the same time, the poor Personnel department officers would still try to explore if they can take me to task for not taking the Bank's permission before publishing an article. I knew that given the top management's favourable view they might to have the courage to complain against me. Still, I warned them that if they had read the relevant staff conduct rules of the Bank carefully, they should have noted that my article being of a purely technical, scientific nature and had not used any confidential information of the bank, I was not required to take the Bank's prior permission. I had started learning about the control phobia and jealous nature of Personnel departments of public sector firms.


My fourth task was to find a suitable life partner quickly. There were two criteria: (a) I would know her to be of the nature that best suits me and (b) that I would be most attracted by her appearance. But girls just do not fly in the sky to be shot at for capture. First, I tried if my Mom would find one quickly. She did not seem to be in a hurry. I identified some girl she knew and identified some peculiar criteria that would help my Mom to identify the same girl. She identified one such good looking girl but rejected her because the girl's mother had died of cancer. So, I had to take up the job and ultimately married one whose father died of cancer 11 years after my marriage, while the girl rejected by my mother ran away from home with her Romeo. I was saved on both counts: my father-in-law did not get inflicted by cancer before my marriage and my mother rejected a girl who would soon fly away.


But it was not that easy to get hold of a partner. It is just by mere chance in the spring of 1972 that I got formally introduced to her by a friend when we went together to enjoy the stage performance of a common friend who requested me to write a review of their play performance for publication in a daily newspaper. At the end of play, we walked along the street for about 15 minutes and then shook hands to part away. But I knew that she would have fallen for me. Next morning, she was there at the bus stop to travel together on my and her way to the office. Then it all began flying. I was getting to know her better, though I had seen this girl for the previous eight  years smartly roaming around our lanes in her bicycle with her braided-hair twin-tails dancing in the air.  She bothered less about my idiosyncrasies and abnormalities that she would have to bear with later. My spreading rumour that my marriage has already been fixed with someone else only helped intensify our relationships and after weeks of being together at movie halls, taxis, restaurants and her residence over the next six months, we agreed to marry on the understanding that covered the following three:
(a) that she would quit job for ever (actually, she did quit, then joined again in her job in the Mass Communications Division of the Govt. of West Bengal after a year handing over her salary cheques to me every month as my fees),
(b) that we would remain childless to enjoy our love (actually we didn't and so he decided on her own to finally quit job), and
(c) that she would dress in Saree's the way I prefered (actually she did but within a decade would start shifting away from Saree's to Salwar Kameez as her main attire). Given all these understanding and knowledge, it was worth taking the risk that I knew that I got the partner of my life. I would then advise her to play appropriate strategic threats to her father to agree to our proposal to get married and God had to advise her father during his meditation that she should readily agree. My mother would not agree till knew who was my chosen girl, I would not tell her about the girl before she gave her consent. After a few days of tussle, my father intervened saying that if I had already made the final choice of the bride, there was no point in wasting time. Her parents cam to our residence to make the proposal and dates were finalized. I would then take my mother along to their residence to meet my love.  We married in the Spring of 1973 and, I happily lived thereafter.