In our MA, the guest speakers were truly impressive. Later in the Wharton School, in an advanced course in Mathematical Economics, Edwin Burmeister had just joined the faculty. He was to use the Transformation Problem, Marx’s famous example of going from production labour cost prices to market prices, given a wage mark up rate of exploitation, as an interesting way to teach the maths. Being a good American, he kept on saying it is great fun and cool algebra, but irrelevant in real life. Back home, Indira Gandhi was in full command and IIM, Calcutta, one of the finest Marxist Schools of Economics those days East of Suez, was being enchanted by the French trained Marxist economist, Paresh Chattopadhyay. Paresh used Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to liken it to the re-emergence of Nehruite ideologies by the emergence of Indira Gandhi. Marx in this document had said that history repeats itself but the second time as a farce. This was popular stuff in Kolkata in the mid and late Sixties of the last century. Pran Chopra editorialised on it in a critique in The Statesman of the Governor. I was a few years later to join a delegation which started contact with China after 17 years. P N Haksar had sat with a Chinese counterpart, a wise man, and they had written a well known non-paper which said that cultural contacts can precede as the border negotiations continue. This carries on today. This delegation was led by G Parthasarathy and I was the vice leader. In a bookstore we visited, the Eighteenth Brumaire was available for the equivalent of three Indian rupees. Being a pathological book buyer, my eyes gleamed and I wanted to lap it up. But I could not escape the hawk eyes of GP. He looked sternly at me and said we will leave that alone and go home, and if need be, buy it. I was Member of the Planning Commission and we had implemented Panchayati Raj. Kerala was one of the first states to do so and introduced Block Level Planning. E M S Namboodiripad called me to Kerala for the inaugural bash. He gave me a lovely meal of red related to his own upbringing .AJITBANDGAR