A life in full bloom: Economist extraordinaire NK Singh talks about his new memoir, Endeavours | Hindustan Times

(HT Photo: Sanchit Khanna) He has played key roles in the telecom revolution, in liberalisation. His first memoir, Portraits of Power, explored this. His new one, Endeavours, traces all that he has learnt from the other half of his life: a place of ragas, roses, photography, art.It says something about the life a man has led when his memoir fills not one but two books.

In 85-year-old Nand Kishore Singh’s case, this is more than just proof of a life well-lived.

The first book is an up-close-and-personal glimpse of a newly independent country finding its feet, seeking to leave its mark on geopolitics.

Singh, who retired as the chairperson of the 15th Finance Commission in 2023, remains integral to the worlds of economic policy, with a deep-seated institutional knowledge of Indian systems.

His first memoir, Portraits of Power: Half a Century of Being at Ringside (2020), offered a riveting account of more than 50 years of work in public policy-making. Singh served in multiple roles in the Bihar and union governments. He travelled extensively, including to Japan, where he served as the minister for economic and commercial affairs at the Indian embassy in Tokyo, a post specially created for him, between 1981 and ’85.

NK, as he is known, was a key player at crucial junctures in India’s economic journey.

He helped facilitate Suzuki’s entry into the market in the 1980s. He was joint secretary in the ministry of finance during the balance-of-payments crisis in the early 1990s. He was member secretary of the task force for telecommunications, and served as secretary to the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee; that task force came up with a new telecommunications policy in 1999, effectively kicking off India’s mobile revolution. He also served as member of the Rajya Sabha between 2008 and 2014, following which he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

But all that was just one side of the man.

Singh’s new memoir, Endeavours: An Ensemble of My Life (Juggernaut Books), looks at his life from a different vantage point. Chapters are dedicated to ragas and roses. Singh’s musings focus on what gardening and photography have taught him. From the right way for roses to die to the true meaning of Raga Nand — the search for the divine-beloved, as explained to NK by legendary Hindustani vocalist Kishori Amonkar — Endeavours highlights the passion and eye for detail that people who are hugely successful in one domain often carry into other domains.

Singh sums this up in his introduction: “A life acquires its shape from more than the offices held, responsibilities discharged and events witnessed. Vocation may occupy much of one’s time, yet the interests pursued alongside it often reveal how one observes the world, where one seeks repose, what one chooses to preserve, and how curiosity survives the demands of work and age.”

The book is also a compendium of recordings. QR codes that lead to digital copies of recital recordings, not publicly available, accompany the chapter on Hindustani classical music and include recitals by Pandit Jasraj, Kishori Amonkar, and Pandit Nikhil Banerjee. Singh’s relationship with Hindustani classical singers went beyond that of a patron’s. He recounts an incident from May 1998 when Pandit Jasraj performed at his home at 11 Teen Murti Lane. It was a summer evening, but soon after the maestro began to sing Raga Dhulia Malhar (dhulia refers to the swirling dust that precedes a thunderstorm), the clouds gathered and it began to rain.

How did Singh — who grew up in Bihar, studied economics at St Stephen’s College and the Delhi School of Economics, and joined the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in 1964 — come to these pursuits whilst engaging in bureaucratic roles key to a developing India?

Sitting in his office in a blue suit, red silk tie and pocket handkerchief, he begins, as it were, at the beginning.

His paternal family came “from a poor village in remote Bhagalpur and my grandfather was headmaster of a school,” he says. “So it was a tough life, but he believed greatly in the power of education and that’s what enabled my father to pursue it. So we were familiar with pastoral life: cultivation of rice, wheat, pulses, sugarcane, which was for me, a big attraction in the winter vacations. I still remember the smell of the earth as I walked those fields.”

His father, Tribhuvan Prasad Singh, went on to study at the London School of Economics and join the civil services. He held posts in Bihar and at the Centre and was, for instance, the first secretary of the Planning Commission. At his demise in 1975, it was his large garden of roses that became his son’s inheritance too.

“My mother said that I should look for him in the roses, in the garden. He must be somewhere there. I realised that I needed to nurture [the garden],” Singh says.

He dove headfirst into this pursuit. He learnt the names and temperaments of the varieties, and how to help them adapt to the heat and humidity of the Indian plains. He worked with gardeners, nurserymen and engineers, and became member of different societies of rosarians.

“The classical hybrid tea, with its formal shape and disciplined bloom, dominated much of my earlier imagination. But newer roses brought a more varied aesthetic. Striped, variegated, blended and unusually coloured roses began to interest me. George Burns, Maurice Utrillo, Abracadabra and Modi Rose are examples of this more contemporary palette. Their appeal lies not always in uniformity but in the surprise,” Singh writes.

He learnt that roses are graded on their capacity to die.

“Do the blooms shatter themselves or do they hang like an ugly clump which then needs to be cut? Which is to say, do they have the capacity to die gracefully?” he notes.

Tending to his father’s rose garden pushed Singh towards photography, to capture the rose at the exact moment “when form, colour and light came together”. But it was in Japan that he took to the camera in a big way. Together with his wife, Prem Kumari, he travelled the length and breadth of the country to capture its seasons. He recounted an incident in 1984 when he stopped the traffic on a winding mountain road to Lake Chuzenji to capture the colour of the autumn foliage.

“Not a single horn was sounded. For several minutes, the road remained still while I took my photographs,” he notes. This taught him that a society can exercise discipline and patience while rewarding attentiveness, all qualities he brought to bear in his own personal endeavours.

Singh’s third book is already underway.

If Endeavours explores the pursuits of gardening, Hindustani classical music, homeopathy and photography, the new one will zoom out and apply a finely cultivated perspective to the country’s growth story.

Its working title is Opportunities, Missed and Grasped: The India Story, he says.

“At independence, there were reasons why we selected a particular path of development. What was that path? An excessive obsession of Fabian socialism, great suspicion of private capital, great detesting of private innovation, an overarching theme of public ownership, resulted in an overregulated economy, which stifled innovation and productivity,” he says. “We have long decades where… per capita income was rising at a minuscule rate. Right? We had sterling balances which we ran down. Then, opportunities lost. The first balance-of-payments crisis came to us in 1957.”

The enigma he is trying to solve in this new book, he adds, is why the Asian Tigers, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, began their economic reforms programmes so much earlier. “Why did we even not follow what China did when they began their economic liberalisation in the early 1970s? We remained trapped in an ideology which had already become obscurantist until 1991, when we could not brush aside the opportunity, because we were virtually on the edge of default.”

Singh’s central argument — that crises were opportunities to turn towards inviting in more private capital, as we did through the 1990s — will certainly be the subject of much debate. What is certain is that for this octogenarian, the India story is one that is still unfolding. His perspective, crafted over decades of engagement, remains central to it.

Dhamini Ratnam is the National Culture Editor of Hindustan Times, and writes on society and the arts with a particular emphasis on the politics of gender, sexuality, and queer feminism. She won the SOPA for Human Rights reporting in 2015 and a Global Investigative Journalists' Conference fellowship in 2017. She is co-editor of Queer India Now, a non-fiction anthology published in 2026.Read More