After IIMA, Subbu (S. Subramanian) and I went to work with Professor Ravi Mathai in Jawaja, Rajasthan. The goal was to make the dhurries and leather goods produced by the villagers more marketable and also to connect them to the banking system. I learnt a lot about my country during the 13 months we spent there, often without running water and electricity. 

 

Professor SK Bhattacharyya had started a management consulting company in 1977 and I moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) to work with him and Gautam Chakravarti. In 1979, I started a PhD in economics at the U of Pennsylvania. There, I met Nancy Orton and we got married in 1982. 

 

We have three children. Claire, a talented high soprano, sang in several operas in the children’s chorus with the Washington Opera at the Kennedy Center. She died in 2009. I wrote a book about my economic experiences at the World Bank dedicated to her. It was published by Oxford in 2014, and you can take a look at it here. 

 

Alex is a jazz guitarist. He studied Hindustani classical music in graduate school. Subsequently, he took a year off to study Carnatic music at Swarnabhoomi Academy near Chennai on a Nehru-Fulbright scholarship, accompanied by his intrepid wife, Camille Schmah, a skilled landscape and garden designer. Having been weaned on the Beatles and S&G myself, never did I dream that my son, born and bred in the USA, would claim his Indian roots! He and Camille got to know Subbu and Prabha well. 

 

He works for Amazon and you can find his music here. Alma studied public policy at the U of Washington, Seattle, and now works for the Seattle Department of Transportation. She has a strong social conscience and gave up a lucrative marketing job with a top-10 corporate law firm in San Francisco to go back to graduate school. She is married to James Weber, who works for T-Mobile, an amazing young man whom we call “Gentleman Jim”. 

 

And my better half, Nancy, is a retired archeologist with a PhD from Penn, who specialized in red polished ware (Roman contact in India around BC/AD) and boat building practices along the Gujarat coast. 

 

Nancy and I live in Ogden, Utah, about a mile high, surrounded by mountains and greenery. We’re close to Snowbasin, where they did the men’s downhill at the 2002 Winter Olympics and (don’t laugh) we have both signed up for the ski season. 

 

I was at the World Bank from 1984-2013. Sounds dreadfully monotonous, but I managed to do a few interesting things, including being the economist in Poland from 1990-93 (I have my own piece of the Berlin Wall directly from it) and then in Russia from 1998-2001 (had an apartment just behind the Bolshoi Theater, my after-dinner stroll consisted of a 44-minute walk to St Basil’s on Red Square and back). 

 

I also spent a few years in the financial complex of the Bank and worked at IFC (the private sector wing) for 5 years. I had the pleasure of overlapping with Sudhir Krishnamurthi and also with Jawed Usmani (when he came to work in the Indian Executive Director’s office). It was also wonderful to reconnect with Gaurav Bhalla and get to know his wife, Dilly. 

 

After the Bank, I went to London for two years to work as chief economist, emerging markets, for a hedge fund. There, I renewed contact with Chitra and Anand. Now, I’m doing interesting work on Africa and visit the continent often. I don’t understand this, but I find the poorest African country cleaner than India. And taxis actually stop to let you cross the street instead of mowing you down. (In case you’re wondering, I still carry an Indian passport.)

 

It’s been exhilarating reading what everyone’s been up to. What have I learnt? Life can be incredibly hard. We are the lucky ones. What ultimately counts is what we do for those less fortunate than ourselves. 

 

Family picture Oct 16, 2016 (L-R): Brian, Nancy, Alma (expecting March 2017), James, Camille (expecting December 2016), Alex. 

 

Bpinto1954@gmail.com +1 240 678 8572 (mobile) 1728 Whispering Oaks Drive, Ogden, UT 84403, USA.