Guess who inspired Raghuram Rajan to become an economist?

Raghuram Rajan stepped down as the Reserve Bank of India's governor in September last year and since then he has been silent and has allowed the new governor time and space to give voice to his ideas. He maintained his distance from the press since then.

However, recently, he made an exception recently for the media team at Chicago Booth, where he is currently teaching. In an interview, Rajan talked about the financial crisis of 2008 as well as his recent stint as one of India's top policy makers.

When asked about what led him to choose the life of an economist? His answer: Isaac Asimov and John Keynes.

"I was reasonably interested in math, and a friend told me about econometrics. I had read Isaac Asimov's Foundation series [science fiction novels in which a mathematician develops a formula for predicting the future course of human history] and I thought well, that's a nice thing,” Rajan said.

Also, British economist John Maynard Keynes has been his major inspiration. He is one of the major economists in the world history. In fact, an entire school of modern thought in economics is named after him: Keynesian economics.

Rajan started reading Keynes's work and found it "extraordinary”. "The quick take on John Maynard Keynes was he took the world out of depression. Now, that's not quite correct, but certainly his ideas were very inf luential in post -war economics - both in creating the Bretton Woods system [of monetary management] and the Keynesian approach to dealing with business cycles. It seemed to me that here was a person who, through the strength of his ideas, is changing the way we think. That's extraordinary, and I wanted to be like him,” he said.