AN INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR BANDI KAMAIAH

[...]he won the heart of the headmaster and joined the composite mathematics stream, which he considers as the turning point in his life. Imbibing the value system of his father, who preferred his son to live in self-respect as a peasant rather than as a clerk, Dr Kamaiah, shunning all his financial compulsions, finally began his career as a Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Social Studies (CESS), Hyderabad, in 1981 and worked on a project, "Agricultural Growth and Potential in Andhra Pradesh". Prof Arun Kumar Giri, BITS (Pilani), an old student of Dr Kamaiah, opines that his "unique way of nurturing students-the style of looking at a research problem, the depth that he enters to understand and analyze the gravity of the problem and come up with scientific solutions-has created many national and internationally acclaimed researchers." Prof Dilip M Nachane, Professor Emeritus, IGIDR, who enjoyed "intellectual discussions ... [with Dr Kamaiah] on multivariate statistics, spectral analysis, Kalman filters, financial mathematics, chaos theory, etc.", opines that Dr Kamaiah "believed that whatever intellectual contribution . [he] made should be of potential benefit to the country", and that is what this interview explores in the following pages.