I’m surprised that anything gets done in this country,” Indian-born British economist and politician Meghnad Lord Desai is shaking his head with its trademark mop of curly white hair. He and his wife, Kishwar, have just finished an hour-long meeting about some paperwork for a house they’re buying in Goa.

The couple will now shuttle between India and Britain working on their respective books. “We like it here,” says 67-year-old Desai, as he settles down for what turns out to be a ninety-minute conversation in their south Delhi apartment, crammed with tasteful bric-a-brac. This from a man who admits to an overwhelming sense of relief when the boat taking him (then 20 years old) to the United States left the shores of Mumbai in 1960. “It wasn’t that I was unhappy. But the first thought that day was, ‘okay, that’s done now. I’m not getting back here’.”

He didn’t, despite several good offers. “I realised that whatever job I did would be within the framework of political patronage. There was no way of doing independent economic work in India.” He also flinched from the sycophantic culture. “I have a constitutional incapacity of flattering anybody. Britain has none of the feudal relations that exist here.”

Four years after retirement from an illustrious academic career at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2003, Desai has his political career — as member of the Labour Party and the House of Lords — and his writing to keep him busy. He’s had enough of economic tomes, though, and has planned other things he never had the time for.

One is a book on why people believe in God. “I’m not a believer. But I’m fascinated that 99 per cent of the world believes in religion. What is it that belief in some form of God is grounded in?” Not for him the usual rationalist explanations about an Oedipal complex or anatomical or psychological reasons. “If you feel threatened by it then you want to explain it away. I don’t feel threatened by it. I am fascinated.”

Then there’s a book on Indian history starting from 1500 when Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama landed here. “Though there was a cultural idea of India, like there was a cultural idea of Europe, India as a national entity is a creation of foreign rule. The Bharatvarsha that we once talked about didn’t even get as far as Bengal and there’s no south in it whatsoever.” Not accepting this, he argues, is the reason for many of India’s current problems.

The third project, First Day First Show, is about Indian cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. “It will be a nostalgic look at the films we saw when we were growing up, how I reacted, what they did to us.” That will make it a tad different from his first film-related book on Dilip Kumar, Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India. That was part nostalgia and part social science, relating Kumar’s films to the social and political milieu of that time. It was, Desai admits, a dry book without any gossipy bits, but Kumar liked it a lot. “It was as if I took him and his films seriously.”

There are some unplanned things as well. The Desai couple have bought the film rights to Shrabani Basu’s The Spy Princess. “Kishwar spotted the book and the idea came that we had to do something with it. So we asked for film rights.”

Films were an intrinsic part of Desai’s growing up years in Vadodara and Mumbai. The youngest of six children of a government official, Desai’s favourite Hindi film hero was Dilip Kumar and he used to sing film songs to woo the girls in Mumbai’s Ruia College and later the economics department of Bombay University (“it was the only way to communicate with the opposite sex”). The fascination with film songs continues. Through the interview, the radio is playing old Hindi film songs. He also got familiar with European avant garde cinema through a magazine called Sight and Sound that he read in the British Council library. “I always had the idea that films were an exciting thing to do.”

But in the 1950s India, there was no way a middle class boy could aspire to a career in films. But he indulged in amateur theatre, first in Mumbai (he translated Ibsen’s A Doll’s House into Gujarati) and later in the United States and Britain. Desai came from a family of education-conscious professional people. “It was never enough to pass an exam. My mother always expected me to be first. And I never was. That caused a lot of distress.” Never mind that he completed matriculation at 14, B.A. before 18 and M.A. before 20.

His family never thought he would amount to very much till he won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania in 1960 even as he was waiting to turn 21 and take the IAS examination. Sadly, his parents were not alive to see him being made Lord Desai of St Clement Danes in 1991.

He got “completely immersed in economics”, finishing his PhD at Pennsylvania and working for a while at Berkeley before setting off for Britain in 1965 and joining the LSE. It was only towards the end of his career that he started thinking of other things to do.

He doesn’t get time to watch too many films but has seen both Chak De! India (“I was disappointed”) and Guru (“it was good”). The only actor who can measure up to Kumar is Amitabh Bachchan, though he feels the Big B should have rationed himself the way Kumar did. He’s impressed by Big B’s range; “but he was hamming in Eklavya.” Yet it is only Bachchan who, he feels, can play him if ever a film was made on how he wooed Kishwar, 17 years younger to him.

They met in Delhi while he was working on the Kumar book — Kishwar was his editor. “I knew immediately that we were meant for each other. She didn’t.” So he went about convincing her over six to seven-hour daily calls from London, running up a £400 telephone bill in one month. It was a second marriage for both.

Ideologically, he’s come full circle. As a student in Mumbai, he was very right wing, being present when the pro-free market Swatantra Party was launched at the Indian Merchants Chamber. He turned a socialist in the United States, against the backdrop of the social and political turmoil of the 1960s. But he never joined any communist party. “They are basically non-democratic.”

The rethinking came in the late 1970s when he saw evidence all around that socialism was failing. He was among those playing a key role in moving the Labour Party thinking away from state domination towards a market economy and globalisation.

Indian politics always fascinated him and his biggest regret is that the Congress and the BJP haven’t come together in a grand coalition. “That moment has passed. The time for it was in 2004.” The Indian economy, he is confident, can grow at 12-13 per cent. But the kind of economic policy that it needs will not come if the government is a mélange of regional parties. “Regional parties are anti-capitalist and are populist. They are money spenders, not money growers.” As for the Left, “they don’t have a national perspective. They are basically anti-capitalist. I don’t know if they are nationalists. Now that they have no country to be loyal to, they are probably nationalists.” The Congress and the BJP, he insists, are the only two serious parties.

He’s hopeful that the fracas over the nuclear deal will lead to the Congress dumping the Left and a mid-term elections either with or soon after the Gujarat elections. “Why are these people still fighting a cold war which their side lost in total ignominy? How can they pretend that even an iota of people’s well being is being advanced by demonstrating against a naval exercise in the Bay of Bengal?”

The tape runs out and he’s still in full flow. But it is time to stop. “I’m going to deny everything you write,” he laughs as I negotiate my way down the stairs. I immediately check the recording. After all he does speak very softly. Whew, his voice is loud and clear.