Psychoanalyst claims love tangle located the second IIM at Ahmedabad

Psychologists have sex on their brain, said Vikram Sarabhai’s daughter Mallika, dismissing psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakkar’s claim that the famed scientist manipulated the location of the second Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad so as to keep his lady love Kamla Chowdhry on its staff and, therefore, in his city. On the face of it, this story of extramarital love and dodgy manoeuvres to deprive Bombay of a business school using the influence of a powerful man suggests rather sordid behaviour. On the other hand, a love triangle and the strenuous efforts of a nation-building scientist to move heaven and earth to retain romantic proximity lends a certain panache to the red-brick business school that it otherwise would have lacked.

Of course, such amorous exertions would come to nought in these prosaic times. One RTI query on the criteria used to choose a particular woman for her job at the IIM or a PIL against an appointment as senior as Research Director made without a global search for talent would put paid to such high-handedness. Sarabhai was lucky that he did not have to contend with any indignant aam aadmi, but only with Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru, of course, understood what the gossamer tangles of love can do to a man’s heart, no matter how rational and full of the national his head.