Indra Mohan Pandey, now reflecting on his childhood, recalls the moment he first encountered Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. This significant event took place in 1958 when Pandey was just 11 years old. He was among a group of children from various schools in Delhi who gathered at the Red Fort to witness the Independence Day celebrations. Growing up in Old Delhi as one of five siblings, this experience left a lasting impression on him.
Home in Delhi was Bhagirath Palace near Chandni Chowk, a neighbourhood that today is known for wholesale electronics and medical markets. “My father, however, was determined that I should receive a modern education and have opportunities beyond the village. His time at SRCC also taught him that learning did not happen only inside classrooms. As a society office-bearer, he helped invite some of the country’s most prominent political figures. “Ram Manohar Lohia, V K Krishna Menon, and Balraj Madhok came to our college. Funding his own education required some financial jugglery. “My father had other plans for me. He had started out as a teacher but then joined an Ayurvedic dawakhana. He didn’t want me to pursue teaching and insisted I become a chartered accountant.
Born on August 25, 1947, in Pant Gaon, a picturesque village near Devprayag Sangam in present-day Uttarakhand, Pandey’s family was rooted in a tradition of Sanskrit scholarship and stayed in the village for about nine years. During the Kamaraj Plan in 1963, when several senior Congress leaders resigned from ministerial positions, we took advantage of the unusual political churn to invite some of them, including Lal Bahadur Shastri,” he recalled. SRCC’s monthly fee was about ₹ 15, while his father’s salary was around ₹ 100, and so he secured a scholarship. His children, aged daughter Ruchika Pandey (50) and Abhishek Pandey (47), live in the US, and he also has two grandchildren.
So, we moved to Delhi,” he said. “Back then, Bhagirath Palace had many houses and even some offices of film distributors,” said Pandey. I resisted and for months, he didn’t speak to me… Having a fight with my father about becoming a teacher was worth it,” said Pandey, who lives in Delhi, with wife.
During the Emergency, his university colleagues gathered at a coffee house and decided to organise demonstrations and put up posters. The plan somehow reached the police. Policemen visited them and warned that they could be arrested. Some of his friends from left parties were arrested.
He said that despite all the tech advancements and AI, human ability to ask questions will always remain essential.
“We didn’t even have enough calculators. At the university’s computer division, near the vice-chancellor’s office, researchers punched cards and queued for access to an IBM machine. Shoes were not allowed inside. You submitted your calculations to a computer assistant, and were given a time slot in the evening and returned later to collect the output. Sometimes the result was simply a syntax error. I had barely encountered them and I was desperate to learn. Lotus was later replaced by excel spreadsheets, and then came personal computers.
He joined Delhi School of Economics (Department of Commerce) in 1966-1968 for a post graduate degree and completed his PhD from the same institute (1972-76) in finance. “New tools such as VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 were beginning to transform computing.
A comma where a full stop was expected could mean starting over again,” he said. Now it is an entirely different world altogether,” said Pandey.
