Inspiration- 
One morning Chuang Tzu awoke from his sleep. Coming before his students, he said, "Last night I dreamt that I was a beautiful butterfly fluttering through the fields. Now I awaken. My question is this; how do I know if I am Chuang Tzu, who dreamt himself a butterfly, or if I am a butterfly, now dreaming itself Chuang Tzu?" 
A humble effort in  a similar dilemma...

Meri Aankhon Mein Dekh
Dost Mere,
Dekh Ek Raat,
Jo Dhali Hi Nahi,
Saajishen Sapno Ki,
Naakam Kiye,
Aisi Jaagi Hain Bhor Tak Jaise,
Band Ho Jaati To Phir Khwab Mera,
Toot Jaata Uski Neend Mein Yun,
Jaise Jhatke Se Koi,
Tumko Jaga Deta Hai...

The Monsoon Musing of the RBI Governor. Another one from the Wall Street Journal Blogs.

RBI’s Subbarao Chases the Monsoon

A late monsoon saved former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi an election, quipped journalist Pritish Nandy to author Alexander Frater in his delightful travelogue “Chasing the Monsoon,” in which the author journeyed through India along with the monsoon clouds in the late 1980s.

AFP/Getty Images

Reserve Bank of India Governor, D. Subbarao.

Reserve Bank of India Governor Duvvuri Subbarao probably knows how Mr. Gandhi felt.

In his role as the country’s central banker in chief, Mr. Subbarao is responsible for adjusting interest rates as necessary to stimulate economic growth but subdue inflation. That’s a tough job at the best of times but it’s made a lot easier when there are good monsoon rains, which make agriculture bountiful, suppressing food prices and benefitting the majority of Indians who still depend on the land for a living. When the monsoon is bad, the opposite happens.

Some 60% of farmlands in India are rain-fed. India’s output of summer-sown crops fell in 2009 after the country received its lowest rainfall in 37 years. By December, food prices were up more than 20% from the year before, hurting the economy.

All RBI governors face this problem. But it has a special resonance for Mr. Subbarao, as he discussed with reporters last week during a trip to the southern city of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala to attend a central bank board meeting.

Mr. Subbarao, who topped his civil service exams in 1972, had his first posting as a sub-collector in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, which is also his home.

District collector and sub-collectors play an important role when it comes to rains and water. They assess the ground situation to declare whether to declare a drought and they decide when to declare a flood – two events often generated by the monsoon rains, or lack of them.

It was during that time that Mr. Subbarao realized “my emotional well-being, my career prospects depended on rains,” he said at the RBI function.

Nearly four decades later, he remains hostage to the monsoon.

“Now at the end of my career as the Governor of Reserve Bank, I realize that (my) entire performance will depend on rains and not what I do about interest rates,” Mr. Subbarao said. “If there is good monsoon, it is ok. Otherwise the Governor of the Reserve Bank is to be blamed.”

Fortunately, this year the signs are good. The monsoon has further advanced into more parts of the Bay of Bengal, the weather department said in its latest update last week. Rains are expected to reach the southern state of Kerala on May 30, India’s weather bureau chief Ajit Tyagi said Thursday.

ANOTHER BLOG FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AUTHORED BY ME. 

The Reserve Bank of India Files

Nupur Acharya/Dow Jones NewsWires

Reserve Bank of India Governor Duvvuri Subbarao at the bank’s new museum in Pune on Tuesday.

“Can we ever forget about remembering?” said Reserve Bank of India governor Duvvuri Subbarao, quoting Nobel laureate Saul Bellowfor a change as he threw open a museum that documents 75 years of central bank history on Tuesday in the western city of Pune.

The archive’s documents, some of which predate the bank’s founding in 1935, are a treasure trove of stories of spats over bank independence, foreign exchange and in some cases, petty change, at least by today’s standards.

In 1957, Benegal Rama Rau, the fourth and longest serving Reserve Bank of India governor resigned from his post accusing the then Finance Minister T. T. Krishnamachari of interference. It’s quite common for Indian prime ministers to reject such moves from loyal stalwarts, which are often symbolic, but Mr. Rau must have been rather surprised by the response he got.

“On a previous occasion I asked you not to resign. I did not think that any need for such a resignation had arisen but since you feel now that it is absolutely impossible for you to continue in office, I don’t know what further advice I can give you. If you so wish you can submit your formal resignation to the finance minister,” a testy-sounding Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the first leader of independent India, wrote back.

Occasional tension between the finance minister and the RBI governor is almost guaranteed given the respective roles of each office — one a political role to boost growth and manage the nation’s finances, the other a financial role aimed at subduing inflation. These disputes rarely if ever break out in the open, as above.

The most recent chatter of seriously different points of view was in 2007 when Finance Minister P. Chidambaram was said to be opposed to then-Gov. Yaga Venugopal Reddy’s desire to sharply raise interest rates in 2007. In that case too, the finance ministry might have come out ahead. The day he retired in September 2008 Mr. Reddy said he would have preferred a tighter monetary policy during his tenure.

“Nobody can have his or her way in public policy or family life,” he said, when asked about differences with Mr. Chidambaram, now home minister. (Mr. Chidambaram could not immediately be reached for comment.)

Nupur Acharya/Dow Jones NewsWires

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wrote a letter in 1948 expressing concern about the economy.

Some of the correspondence may have shaped what has now become bank routine. In 1948, Mr. Nehru wrote to the first Indian bank governor, Chintaman Deshmukh, asking for a brief note on the deteriorating economic situation of the country. These days, the prime minister doesn’t have to ask. The central bank does a regular economic assessment just ahead of its quarterly monetary policy statements, and also sends a weekly report to the prime minister’s office.

Reserve Bank employees have occasionally been less than helpful. The archives contain a letter that Indira Gandhi, daughter of then Prime Minister Nehru and later at the helm of the nation herself, wrote in 1961 to the bank governor requesting foreign exchange of 600 pounds (about 8,000 rupees in those days) to pay for her son Rajiv Gandhi to attend Cambridge University, where he met the young Italian woman who became his wife, Sonia Gandhi, now the chief of the ruling Congress Party.

Those were the days were foreign exchange was scarce and there were strict limits on the amount Indians could take out. Today reserves bulge close to $300 billion and the bank now allows Indians to take out up to $200,000 of foreign exchange a year.

In response, someone, presumably a central bank clerk, shelved the request after jotting on it, “No action on our part looks necessary. May be filed.”

The archives were compiled in 1981 and total 23,000 files and 18,000 registers, which are still in the process of being microfilmed, Ashok Kapoor, the bank’s chief archivist, told India Real Time.

Post-script: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself a bank governor from 1982-1985, was the subject of a board meeting to settle his pay the year of his appointment. It was suggested his salary be fixed at 4,500 rupees per month with a total additional allowance of 1,575 rupees. If he wanted to use his official car for a personal purpose, he was to pay the bank 100 rupees per month if the car was below 16 horsepower and 150 rupees if it was above. We hope both Mr. Singh and Mr. Subbarao aren’t being nickel-and-dimed quite as much these days.