London, Nov. 13: Manmohan Singh learnt how to reconcile conflicting economic philosophies when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge ? much as he has to do now five decades later as Prime Minister with the Right in his coalition government demanding one thing and the Left wanting something completely different.

In an interview published in Cam, Cambridge Alumni Magazine, Singh discloses how as an undergraduate at St John’s (picture on right) from 1955-57, he was “exposed to two alternative schools of thought” from his celebrity dons, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor.

“I was very close to both teachers, so the clash of thinking sometimes got me into trouble,” he admits. “But that made me think independently.”

He did well enough to get a First in his prelims as well as in his Finals.

After Cambridge, he went back to India, but after three years returned to Britain for two years to do his DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Although Singh made a gracious speech at Oxford this summer when he was being awarded an honorary degree by the university, the interview in Cam makes it clear that it is Cambridge ? and not Oxford ? which he considers his real alma mater (that is, after Punjab University in Chandigarh, where he took his first degree).

There is a nostalgic touch about Singh’s interview, which is headlined “Architect of the New India”.

At Cambridge, he joined the Majlis (now the India Society) and the Labour Club. “My years in Cambridge were in some ways the happiest time of my life,” he says.

The interview for Cam was done by the BBC’s Mark Tully, who compares Singh’s time in Oxford with the period in Cambridge and remarks: “As an intellectual adventure it didn’t match Cambridge, he says, perhaps because ‘research students are rather a lonely lot; it’s only as an undergraduate that you mix with a large number of people’.”

There is a revelation of a personal nature as well. At Cambridge, he would get up at a very early hour, often at 4 am. This was because he wanted the privacy of the bathroom to enable him to wash his long hair in cold water.

He tells Tully that when he first came to Cambridge, he caught a lot of colds, “until a friend of mine told me that if you really want to fight colds you had better take cold baths. And it worked”.

Discussing the two economists who influenced him most, he says: “Joan Robinson was a brilliant teacher, but she also sought to awaken the inner conscience of her students in a manner few others were able to achieve. She questioned me a great deal, and made me think the unthinkable. She propounded the Left-wing interpretation of Keynes, maintaining the state has to play more of a role if you really want to combine development and social equity.”

But Singh adds: “Kaldor influenced me even more; I found him pragmatic, scintillating, stimulating. Joan Robinson was a great admirer of what was going on in China, but Kaldor used the Keynesian analysis to demonstrate that capitalism could be made to work.”

From the point of view of one billion Indians, the crucial question is to find out how Singh’s economic thinking has evolved.

When he first returned to India in 1957, he felt entirely in tune with India’s centralised, “command economy”.

“However, by the mid-1960s, it became obvious that being an undeveloped country with underdeveloped administrative capability, we had taken on too many things and overestimated what the government could deliver,” concedes Singh.

He adds that the economic crisis of 1991 (when he became finance minister) was a blessing in disguise because “it helped us to liberalise the economy”.

Tully says: “He still describes himself as a socialist, but is anything but doctrinaire. Many commentators believe he would like to take his economic reforms further than the reality of the current political situation, with an uneasy alliance with the communists, would allow.”

He quotes Singh as saying: “You cannot sustain a democratic polity unless those on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder feel they are partners in the processes of change.”

Tully concludes: “There speaks the politically engaged student, still skilfully juggling Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson’s alternative versions of Keynesian economics so enthusiastically, and creatively, absorbed in 1950s Cambridge.”

The general tenor of the Prime Minister’s interview suggests he would like to move rather faster in reforming the Indian economy than the Left will allow him to do.