Manmohan Singh was the face of India’s transformation. As finance minister in the early 1990s, and from 2004 as its prime minister for a decade, his reforms loosened excessive state controls, opened up the economy, pulled millions out of poverty, and made the West accept the nuclear-armed nation as an ally.

Or at least, that’s how his legacy will be remembered globally. But to my generation of Indians, Singh, who died at 92 Thursday night in a New Delhi hospital, was above everything else the embodiment of hope. He instilled in us a strong belief that a market economy would work. Not just for a tiny elite in New Delhi and Mumbai, but for a majority scattered across smaller towns and villages, battling against overwhelming odds of economic and educational poverty and social discrimination.