Economical with his words, but gentle in his phrasing, the conversations he struck up were with the times. And he persuaded the times to change.That was Dr Manmohan Singh, the self-effacing savant who rose to perform two big roles for an India in transition — that of Prime Minister and finance minister. In both roles, he is likely to win a contest with history for having been the most clean of spirit and genuinely courteous, the most knowledgeable and, arguably, the most transformational.Perhaps only India’s first Prime Minister could run him close. If Jawaharlal Nehru was the founder-statesman of independent India, the guardian spirit of our formative decades, it was Manmohan who fathered the India we see around us today. Its architect, its engineer, its reticent philosopher.When another gnomic Prime Minister, Narasimha Rao, picked a safari suit-clad ex-RBI governor as his second choice FM in 1991, it was in a country not yet out of a long famine of new ideas and fresh energy, also one wracked by a decade of militancy, riots and assassinations.
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