lmost nine years after Y.V. Reddy demitted office as Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor, his autobiography Advice & Dissent: My Life in Public Service was released last week. He is not the first RBI governor to write his memoir. Reddy’s successor D. Subbarao wrote a tell-all book, Who Moved My Interest Rate? in less than three years after leaving the central bank. However, there are differences between the two—both in the narrative as well as the structure. Reddy’s book is an account of his life and his career, from a young IAS officer to India’s chief money man and the chairman of the 14th Finance Commission while Subbarao’s book starts with his appointment as RBI governor and ends with the end of his five-year tenure. Even before Subbarao, at least three RBI governors have written their memoirs. The first Indian governor at RBI, who later became the finance minister, C.D. Deshmukh, has written The Course of My Life; 13th governor M. Narasimham’s book is called From Reserve Bank to Finance Ministry and Beyond and I.G. Patel, Narasimham’s successor, has written Glimpses of Indian Economic Policy: An Insider’s View. Narasimham’s book is the slimmest of the three autobiographical accounts. Reddy’s book is different from them too as unlike these three RBI governors, he has spent more time at the central bank—first as a deputy governor and then as a governor and, naturally, his book tells much more about the policy making at RBI than others. Globally, many central bankers have written autobiographies. US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World and his successor Ben S. Bernanke’s The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath come to mind instantly. But Reddy’s book is very different from these two as well as Bank of England governor Mervyn King’s The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy and Bank of Indonesia governor Soedradjad Djiwandono’s Bank Indonesia and the Crisis: An Insider’s View. These books have dealt with different crises in global finance and emerging markets but Reddy’s book is a story of his own life and experience as a policymaker, wading through bad (balance of payment crises, mortgaging gold), good (low inflation and high growth) and indifferent (“creative tensions” with the finance ministry) times. Indeed, Advice & Dissent is an insider account of India’s policy making but there is no pulsating drama or revelations. It’s a remarkably restrained account as Reddy does not believe in gossip and hearsay, but it’s gripping because of his storytelling ability. His sense of humour is fairly well known—remember his quote on RBI’s autonomy: “I am very independent. The RBI has full autonomy. I have the permission of my finance minister to tell you that”—but I was not aware that he is such a great raconteur. This 480-pagebook, to use a cliche, is unputdownable. Less than a year after leaving RBI, a compilation of Reddy’s 23 speeches given in India and overseas during his tenure as governor was published—India and the Global Financial Crisis: Managing Money and Finance. Those speeches had been in public domain but what that book added was a 30-page epilogue which speaks about the global financial crisis and India and a 34-page introduction explaining the context of these speeches and Reddy’s compulsions. In some sense, this book, at least the part that deals with his tenure at RBI, is an extension of that introduction