Please convey my gratitude to Prof M S Sriram for taking the effort to read and review my book, Quest for Restoring Financial Stability, under the headline, “A theory of everything”, dated August 25, 2020. I wished to clarify two things.

1. The review ends with the suggestion that I might harbour a gender bias as my speech for FICCI Ladies Organization (FLO) was considered not only “dumbed down” but suggestive that “speeches addressed to women have to be ‘simple’ and almost condescending”. I am a bit surprised to see a book review in Business Standard to try to read such into my inner psychology. At any rate, I take all criticism seriously, and have the following to say about that speech:

My FLO speech, “A bank should be something one can bank upon”, was based on a TedX talk which is on YouTube, given at GSMedical college; being for medical practitioners and students, I had sought to explain banking in simple terms, and my parents attended that TedX talk as my Dad is from GSMedical by training (he is an oncologist). I wanted my parents to follow the speech too. They did! I then evolved it into a bigger talk. I thought people should understand a bank’s intermediation functions and its fragility to “runs” as simply as possible. The speech does take off into more complex things about half way into a different space, ending with options to resolve the stress of India’s public sector banks, and that dramatic transition was the idea behind the speech. I had also delivered this speech in part as a Deputy Governor to high school students, to non-business students, etc, and I am rather proud of dumbing down my 25 years of banking models into a language that the common person can understand. It is not easy to do and it required several iterations to get it right (if at all I did get it right!). It was hardly an effort in being condescending to anyone. That it was delivered to FICCI Ladies Organization was just a coincidence as it followed the closest in time as an opportunity to deliver a speech following my TedX talk at GSMedical.

2. Prof Sriram rightly raises the issue of why I put my MPC minutes in the book. I put them there as for me this was about democratic accountability. I did not want to cherry pick in the book what I said publicly. That’s why I did not edit speeches or write a new “binder” for each chapter around speech themes other than the Preface chapter as that would have reflected a hindsight bias and given a different “hue” to each speech. It is my entire record as a public servant’s recorded public speaking and I valued it all being there in one place for posterity to assess and evaluate, and hopefully, benefit in some small way.

I should have perhaps clarified the second point in the book Preface and also referred to the TedX talk in the FLO speech. However, I do find it not just awkward but out of line for a fellow Business School Professor to discuss my gender biases in a book review. At a minimum, he could have checked with me the context of the speech casually without any revelation of his intentions before making such a big stretch in public.

As such, it does not bother me as I will switch to listening to the Kishore Kumar song, Kuchh to log kahenge, logon ka kaam hai kehana.

Viral V Acharya

C V Starr Professor of Economics,

Department of Finance, New York University Stern School of Business