For the last four years, I have met Bibek Debroy every weekday at 10 am. It is a ritual that defined my mornings — the start of countless hours of learning more than I could ever capture in words. Last month, while he was at AIIMS, that meeting shifted to 4 pm. Still, the lessons flowed, undiminished, from his bed.
Bibek Debroy was more than a mentor — he was my guru. Each day, he showed me the depth of his intellect. Mornings often started with a WhatsApp message around 6:30 am of something that caught his eye in the papers: “Worth a note for the PM” or “This could be a column.” By office hours, he’d dive into the issue, unravelling it with clarity, directing me on what questions to ask, whom to reach out to, and which corners of the truth to probe.
In my early drafts, his critiques were sharp, often laced with a quip that cut through with clarity and wit: “Where’s the masala in this?” or simply, “It’s junk.” He never softened the edges.
I remember my first internal note — it was on decoupling from a neighbouring country during peak Covid, with a section on drones. He looked at me, surprised, and said, “I didn’t know that. Why don’t you turn this into a column? Indrajit Hazra would like it.” That moment was when our journey began. Over the years, we co-authored more than 250 columns, the last one appearing in NDTV on the day he passed. Many ideas he inspired remain unfinished: Poverty’s seasonality for HT, missing MGNREGA workers for ET, Indo-Korea relations for Herald Insight Collection and many more. Without him, I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to write them. We were also co-authoring a book for Rupa on the reform agenda — it is nearly complete, but now feels painfully unfinished.
Few people realise this, but with Bibek Debroy at the helm of EAC-PM, our job was to criticise constructively from within. Most internal notes were about what we were doing wrong and what needed to be done. This criticism was mostly done internally, but sometimes in public. I did it in my independent columns, too, knowing that he stood firmly behind me, urging me to speak, no matter the discomfort.
On October 30, I called him and asked, “Sir, I am applying for a fellowship. If it is not too much of a hassle, would you be kind enough to recommend me?” People of his stature generally do not write reference letters. Most of the time, they will ask you to send a draft and make changes. And this is what he used to do in a lot of cases. But within 20 minutes, he sent me his last email. He wrote, “In my entire professional career of close to 50 years, Aditya Sinha is the best research associate I have come across… In my entire professional career, this is the first time I am writing an unqualified and unhesitating recommendation.” That was Bibek Debroy for you. If he loved you and your work, he would go all out.
When Bibek Debroy suffered a heart attack in January, he emerged with a sense of being born into a new reality, almost like a stranger to his former life. He shared this with me one morning, his voice unusually distant, as though he were speaking from another realm. “I feel… disconnected,” he said, a hesitation lingering on the line. “From everyone I knew before this. It’s like a new janma.” He spoke as if he were seeing the world through a veil, a filter that made everything faintly unfamiliar, even as it remained physically the same. His world had shifted, a line had been crossed, and he seemed to be walking a different path — one lined with quiet questions rather than his usual wit. “Why am I still here?” he wondered, his voice laced with humility and introspection. He didn’t say it with the weight of expectation or entitlement but with genuine, open curiosity, almost as if he were asking the universe to reveal a purpose he could not yet see.
Perhaps, he mused, it was for his translations — the one enduring work that kept his mind tied to something eternal, something larger than himself. He spoke of them as if they were a bridge between worlds, a reason to linger in this life a little longer. “Perhaps this,” he said, more to himself than to me, “perhaps this is why I’m still here.” But in that moment, I could sense that he already felt himself slipping away, tethered only by his work, as if that thin thread was all that bound him to the life he had lived so fully.
Then, months later, he sent his last IE & FE column. He mailed the column to me also on October 28, as he often did. “Aditya, you should read it,” he said on the phone. “You will find it interesting.” When I read it, a sense of foreboding washed over me. His words were stark, raw, stripped of any pretence, as if he had pulled back the curtain on the world and shown us the emptiness that lies beyond. “What if I am not there?” he asked, his voice reaching out from the page, hauntingly alive yet receding, preparing himself — and us — for his absence. “This is your most moving column,” I told him, trying to mask the fear I felt, the sense that he was slipping through my fingers even as he spoke.
As I sign our columns under my name alone, I feel an unbearable silence, an absence that chills me to my core. Bibek Debroy’s final words haunt me, filling the empty spaces with echoes of that conversation — Why am I still here? — and the unsettling thought that he may have known all along that he wasn’t meant to stay. In his words, he left behind memories, a haunting presence, a lingering question that resonates with me. It feels as though he has become a part of the work he left unfinished, bound forever to the translations he hoped would outlive him. And now, his absence feels like the deepest, coldest truth of all: Bibek Debroy is gone, yet his shadow remains, an indelible reminder that even the brightest lives fade, leaving only whispers in the silence that follows.
The writer is OSD, Research, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister
