#
Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
#
Do check out Pullia Baazi, hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kutaswane, two really good
#
Kick-ass podcast in Hindi.
#
I was at a crowded cafe the other day, sitting alone at a table.
#
And at one point I realized that I was behaving very strangely.
#
Every single person at that cafe, young or old, alone or otherwise, was looking into
#
Some of them were looking into their laptop screens, but most were looking at their mobile
#
Indeed, looking out of the window of the cafe, I realized that everyone outside who was not
#
actually moving and going somewhere was staring into a mobile phone.
#
The only person in that place who was not doing this was me.
#
I was sitting idle, no phone or book in front of me, just waiting for my coffee.
#
Suddenly, I noticed a person at the next table look in my direction.
#
He still had a phone in his hand, but he was staring at me.
#
And the expression on his face said, what a weirdo, he's alone with himself.
#
I considered giving him a smile, but many men of my age in India have social insecurities
#
that prevent them from smiling at strangers, so I just looked at him with glassy eyes and
#
To find another person on a table far away, staring at me.
#
And then one by one, in an epidemic of curiosity, everybody stared at me to see what everyone
#
We were all imprisoned in a trance of my own contemplation.
#
When someone's phone rang, another person's notification beeped and they all snapped themselves
#
out of it and looked away.
#
And then I was alone again.
#
And they were not, or were they?
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is Santosh Desai, whose columns I have loved for years because of the amount
#
of insight they carry, not just into Indian society, but also into myself.
#
I grew up in the 1980s and I suspect Santosh is a little older than me, though it's not
#
polite to ask people their age.
#
And the world has changed in bewildering ways in the last three decades.
#
A lot of this change takes over our lives so smoothly that it's normalized.
#
We take it for granted.
#
We don't reflect on how much the world has changed, what we have lost, what we have gained.
#
Santosh's columns force me to consider things I would normally not think about.
#
And they also remind me of the sentimental value of a past I thought I had forgotten,
#
When I planned a trip to Delhi recently, I decided that I absolutely must get Santosh
#
on the show and I'm really glad he could make it here.
#
But before you listen into our conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
This episode of The Scene in the Unseen is brought to you by Storytel.
#
Storytel is an audiobook platform which you can listen to on your Android or iOS app.
#
They have thousands of audiobooks that you can listen to on your mobile, including hundreds
#
in local languages like Hindi and Marathi.
#
An unlimited monthly subscription costs only Rs. 2.99 per month.
#
And you can also get a 30-day free trial if you hop on over to Storyteltenny.com slash
#
I actually use Storytel myself regularly, so as long as they sponsor the show, I'm going
#
to recommend one book a week that I love.
#
The book I want to recommend today is an old classic, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
#
The version that you'll hear on Storytel is read by the remarkable actress Sissy Spacek.
#
And remember, you get a 30-day free trial only at Storytel.com slash IBM.
#
Santosh, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
Santosh, you know, before we sort of get to the subject at hand, tell me a little bit
#
What are you professionally trained in and what were sort of your interests and formative
#
influences and how did you get into writing columns?
#
So I've graduated with a degree in economics and then done an MBA.
#
And then I spent a long time in advertising.
#
And around the time that you had economic reforms and liberalization, and therefore
#
you had this particular vantage point in time perhaps when you had a whole bunch of interest
#
in international brands that came flooding into India, all trying to make sense of India.
#
In the early days, they thought they knew.
#
Then they knew pretty much very quickly that they didn't.
#
And it was interesting to be in advertising at that time because you were kind of between
#
these two worlds, in a sense, interpreting India for them and interpreting their brands
#
So it was an interesting two-way kind of a conversation.
#
And it compelled one to kind of ask questions that were otherwise perhaps not that salient
#
in one's mind, which is to try and wrap your head around this idea of India and the whole
#
Indian behavior and what does it mean.
#
And it became a kind of a project that has simply not stopped growing because I mean,
#
in a certain sense, it's a doomed project.
#
The idea that to make sense of India is doomed to failure, inglorious failure.
#
There is no question about it.
#
And yet because of its size and complexity, it is something that has sort of pulled me
#
in over the years and it's a ceaseless kind of a bit by bit to try and understand, to
#
try and dismantle some things that you understand and to try and build a coherent picture of
#
So I think the interests have come from there.
#
I mean, my own background, growing up, my father was in the public sector and we lived
#
that typical kind of township to township kind of a life, so different schools.
#
And so there is a sense of having grown up in a cocoon at one level because you're in
#
a township and you are always in some senses sheltered, but also across the country you've
#
And so there is a sort of a firsthand sense of India and a lot of my time I spent actually
#
in Delhi and that too in West Delhi, which I think in some ways is about as grounded
#
a location as it can get for the middle class.
#
And I think that has just a lot of the memories and a lot of what I've written about in some
#
senses between my sort of holidays in Baroda and my sense of life in a middle-class Gujarati
#
family and this very sort of Punjabi stroke, South Indian kind of the neighborhood that
#
I spent my adolescence in Delhi.
#
I think they have been I think quite powerful influences in terms of giving me a sense of
#
And who were the kind of writers that you read and especially when you started writing
#
yourself, were there any columnists that you looked at as models for the kind of writing
#
you wanted to do and just in terms of reading, I mean beyond reading for work, who were the
#
writers you enjoyed the books reading?
#
So I stumbled into writing, it was never planned and I was in advertising and I got asked to
#
write, I was speaking somewhere about culture and trying to make sense of culture and I
#
think I got asked to write the off and on kind of occasional column for economic times
#
for their marketing and advertising supplement.
#
I think the person who asked you, Vikram doctor, he's been a guest on the show.
#
So Vikram asked me and so it was that, I mean I started off just kind of it was meant to
#
be this and it was actually it was a five, six part kind of a column over several months.
#
Then Times of India asked me again to do what was meant to be a column for a short period
#
of time and they wanted to actually talk about changing city life.
#
I mean so that was the brief and which is the reason why the column is called what it
#
is City-City Bang-Bang, not my favorite name but...
#
I mean I had no clue and it was suggested to me and I think Bachchi suggested it and
#
for the purpose for which it was conceived it seemed functional enough, but it's one
#
of those things that kind of didn't stop.
#
So I mean it was meant to be some six, seven, eight part kind of a series, it just kind
#
of just continued and nobody and because I'm not in the edit page, I don't think anybody
#
noticed the fact that it hadn't stopped.
#
In terms of influences, I think while I grew up reading the regular kind of mix of fiction
#
and non-fiction that I think was typical of someone of my background, once I was interested
#
in the subject I think some of the early influences were things like Sudhir Kakkar, Ashish Nandi.
#
So reading some of the sort of the Srinivas, I mean Srinivas and some of the most foundational
#
kind of works that just to try and make sense of this Naipaul in another sense, just to
#
try and get a sense and I read a lot of travel accounts because it just particularly when
#
you had the sort of the Western gaze in India, just the interesting kind of a combination
#
of these two kind of realities coming together I think was I think influential.
#
And in another context, the writings of someone like Baths, which is this whole mythologies
#
which is pretty much in some senses has a book which is a collection of essays looking
#
at trying to decode objects in everyday life and ideas of everyday life has been extremely
#
influential as a text simply because it kind of naturally this idea of which is the implicit
#
kind of an idea behind a lot of one kind of my writing, which is to try and favor the
#
trivial and everyday with some meaning and to try and locate that and then to read into
#
it and try and sort of go beyond what the apparent naturalists of things as someone
#
has put it and to try and sort of look beyond that.
#
I think that has been a, I think one of the patterns that I could, that I think is probably
#
fair to say that animates some of my writing and I think it came largely from the sort
#
of semioticians, they're not too many people who have written, you know, they're not too
#
many people who have written, you know, in this vein, but I think they were quite influential.
#
And your day job and again, I'm inferring here, so correct me if I'm wrong, but you
#
were basically a planner, you were in planning and advertising and did that sort of shape
#
the way you looked at the world because part of planning I'm assuming again as a now outside
#
is that is figuring out what is the market, what does the market want, what are its motivations
#
and how is it changing, figuring out the culture in a sense, did that inform your later writing?
#
I think the fact that, you know, in that sense, my writing, the pursuit that, you know, and
#
the questions that were raised in my writing were actually coming out of very much my work
#
So in a sense, these were not divorced.
#
Otherwise you tend to have two different lives and whereas I think a lot of the sort of the
#
fundamental questions about, you know, India and what are the axes of change and what is
#
changing and what is not and those kinds of questions were actually central to the work
#
Also, I must say that, you know, in planning in India was not necessarily, in fact, some
#
of those questions I don't think were normally asked in planning because the frame that you
#
use is a limited business and marketing frame, but the question starts from the market.
#
It doesn't start from culture, but given the point in time that in which, you know, I came
#
into that function, it seemed to me that that was a very limited view and so therefore this
#
whole question of actually broadening up the sort of the landscape and looking at the starting
#
point being, you know, a much larger starting point, A and B, also this ambition of saying
#
that if you want to make sense of one part of India, so if you're trying to sell A or
#
B or C and if you want to understand motivations, you have to understand it all, which is in
#
a sense a hell of a kind of a task to kind of take on, but I really do believe that there
#
is no way that you can understand a culture like India piecemeal.
#
So unless you have an ambition to sort of locate culture in its historical context,
#
in its political context, unless you kind of open up out the canvas, you know, comprehensively
#
and look for interrelationships between its constituent parts, you end up taking a very
#
So in a sense, while the inquiry in a sense started with questions that came arose out
#
of work, their ambit actually became much wider, partly because it was my interest,
#
I mean, in sort of asking those larger questions and partly simply because I do feel that you
#
cannot make sense, I mean, you cannot understand fashion, for instance, without understanding
#
identity and gender, I mean, you cannot, you know, in that sense, you cannot mobility,
#
you cannot understand just a narrow part of any kind of reality.
#
And the interesting thing about advertising is that at one level, it can be practiced
#
in a very superficial sense, the questions that it asks, you know, because the questions
#
that it asks are about, you know, groups of people behaving in a certain way, whose behavior
#
And so if you really want to make sense of what is moving and how much is it moving,
#
they become actually fairly significant and potentially deep questions.
#
And I think so that was of what was actually of interest.
#
And I'm really interested by what you said there about you can't understand a culture
#
piecemeal, you have to sort of look at all aspects of it.
#
And in a sense, I have sort of, and maybe this is another separate orthogonal aspect,
#
but what I have always believed is that in India to make a generalization about Indian
#
culture is necessarily false and simplistic, because all these local cultures, these pieces,
#
so to say, are also different from each other.
#
I mean, just to talk of fashion, for example, the way a young girl in Chennai looks at fashion
#
is so completely different from the way someone in Delhi might look at fashion.
#
And perhaps sometimes it's not necessary to find a common thread between those differences
#
and just look at them separately.
#
Is that kind of what you meant that you have to consider all the different pieces or are
#
you also trying to find common threads?
#
Are they common threads?
#
There are common threads.
#
I think, I think, and certainly what you try and do in, in, in, you know, brand marketing
#
is to find common threads simply because it's economically it is, it, it, you know, because
#
then there is a scale, you know, you have to find scale.
#
So I mean, you look for aggregate kind of patterns.
#
And there are patterns.
#
And it's not as if there aren't, but it's both are true.
#
I mean, in the sense that there are patterns and yet the moment you look at anything in
#
with any degree of granularity, I mean, I mean, you look up, you know, if your attire
#
systems are different, the notions of fashions, you know, really nearly have to be different.
#
So I mean, there is no question about the fact that, you know, the differences in some
#
ways are paramount, but I think there are, there are ways of, you know, there are some
#
common sort of unifying threads that you will find.
#
And I think it's, it is important, perhaps particularly in the context of, of kind of
#
work that I was doing to identify those.
#
And as a sort of planner doing research on, you know, how Indian society is changing,
#
was there anything that ever took you by surprise or that was an aha moment for you?
#
You encounter lots of, you know, behaviors, you encounter lots of changes that are, I
#
think that are surprising and you're constantly, you know, and I think, for instance, you know,
#
in general, you, you find that, you know, women, I think in a sense, when you travel
#
across the country, particularly you talk to, you find lots of things that are happening
#
in that space that are really surprising, for instance, you know, or some new kind of
#
ideas, which I, you know, which I, for instance, we came across this notion of, of a curious
#
kind of a formulation called the by friend, which is, which I thought was very cool.
#
I mean, the idea of, of, so, you know, not the boyfriend, nor the Mubola Bhai of the
#
Rakhie brother of an earlier time, right?
#
Where you're still bound in the idea of the brother primarily, and there's a Rakhie to
#
The by friend on the other hand is delightfully open because it sounds like boyfriend, which
#
I think is the most interesting part about it.
#
And yet it, it kind of, you know, it removes that charge, the sort of the implicit or erotic
#
or romantic charge of that idea by sort of obviously giving it the Bhai.
#
And the way it was used was that, you know, you had these couples pretty much behaving
#
like a couple, except that it, you know, as far as the parents and the rest of society
#
was concerned or whatever the other people who were, were stakeholders were assured that,
#
you know, there was, you know, there was nothing more to this relationship than that.
#
So I mean, it's interesting as to how you find a device like that to navigate and win
#
some space for yourself.
#
So it's, it's this constant need for individuals to find space for themselves while echoing
#
a certain sort of, you know, and, and, and in some ways, swearing allegiance to a cultural
#
system that they are embedded inside.
#
So I mean, it's interesting how, how you navigate and find individual room, you know, in that
#
kind of an environment.
#
No, it's incredibly fascinating.
#
And I wonder how the guys felt about being by friended or by zone.
#
So I think they were just grateful to have, you know, you know, some girl who will talk
#
to them and they were on a bike together with the girls.
#
So I mean, that was, as far as they were concerned, you know, I mean, they could still, I guess,
#
get to kind of boast to their friends.
#
So I, I mean, and in another column you wrote, I think a few months back, you wrote about
#
how you did the survey in small town India.
#
And one of the interesting things you found was that while all the girls and the boys
#
pretty much assumed that they'd have arranged marriages and it was all fixed for them, the
#
girls were more open than they would have been in the past to speaking about their crushes
#
So the, you know, so this is the kind of change that you are seeing today that, and you see
#
There's a, this great sense of finality and almost a sense of doom as to, as given the
#
fact that there is no hope of that crush ever being realized.
#
And at the same time, there is the pleasure that is explored and experienced of having
#
And the, it's not as if, you know, young girls did not have crushes, but the openness with
#
which they were confessed to or spoken about and the glee with which, and I'm talking about
#
places, you know, which are heartland kind of where, where really the gender segregation
#
is something that would surprise, you know, us because I mean, there are, you know, colleges
#
with a wall in between.
#
And so there are men and women who kind of sit on different sides of the wall that you,
#
I mean, you come across instances like that in, you know, parts of UP and Bihar in particular.
#
And, and yet, you know, there was this ability in those places for young girls with shining
#
eyes to talk about, you know, who they are, you know, I have a crush on somebody else
#
kind of butts in and very animated and very alive conversation at the same time, nothing
#
I mean, absolutely nothing will come of it.
#
There is no question of anything coming off it, which is what in some senses allows them
#
to the freedom to express, you know, this desire.
#
So you know, you find this kind of ambivalent picture also quite often.
#
I was chatting with a friend of mine, Kumar, who's from Bihar.
#
And he told me this interesting dynamic in small town Bihar, where he says that, you
#
know, again, a similar situation, you'll have co-ed colleges and boys and girls studying
#
together and then a boy will decide that one girl is his and he's got a crush on her.
#
And if another boy also decides that he's interested in the girl, then they will basically
#
be something like a fight to the death between these two guys and the girl will never know.
#
And neither of the boys even has an intention of ever professing their love to the girl.
#
And yet they will fight over this notion of the girl as a romantic partner with this other
#
So, I mean, this is, I mean, this actually was, I remember even in the eighties, I mean,
#
this is the same, it's a, it's a same pattern Mary Wally or Terry Wally type of thing, which
#
is entirely, entirely in, in their heads.
#
And it caused, because it's, it's purely about, I mean, it's only about territory and trespassing.
#
I mean, whether the territory is real or it is entirely imaginary is, is a matter of detail.
#
No, I was, I was commenting to a friend the other day that a lot of Urdu poetry, and I
#
don't want to generalize, so fans of Urdu poetry, please don't get pissed off at me,
#
but a lot of Urdu poetry to me seems a lamenting of incels because it's like unrequited love
#
and oh, she turned me down and all of that.
#
And it now strikes me as, as we're speaking that it may not be because it's written by
#
It may be that just because it is not the social norm to express it at all.
#
So all love is bound to be unrequited.
#
I mean, this, you know, this thing, you know, somewhere long back, I think I've written
#
about this, the girl at the window kind of a thing, which is the fact that, you know,
#
this is elusive figure that you have, which you pursue and which you are kind of, you
#
fantasize about and, but there is pleasure.
#
So the fact of the matter that, you know, the, the pleasure of that feeling is undimmed
#
by the reality of whether, whether that is, you know, in any way going to materialize
#
In fact, I'll quote those lines because I underlined them in the book because I really
#
And you're talking essentially here about neighborhoods and how you experience a neighborhood
#
and through the window and all that.
#
And you write quote, as exciting as watching the world from a window was to look inside
#
The girl at the window, occasionally visible and rarely accessible, represented a tantalizing
#
glimpse of the possible in a world where reality was almost always drabber than imagination.
#
The window became a conduit to an alternative altogether richer life, stop quote.
#
I mean, I was going to get to the subject a little later, but now that we are in the
#
subject of neighborhoods, in my experience, neighborhoods have changed a lot in the last
#
30 years, how we live and all that.
#
Like right now I don't honestly, I've stayed in the same housing society for seven years.
#
I don't know who my neighbors are.
#
What's your sort of sense of how that has evolved?
#
I mean, I think, you know, from a time when the idea of a neighborhood was actually was
#
about a community and it came sort of, it was full of everything.
#
It was full of, you know, there was connection, there was jealousy and there was a great amount
#
of common kind of an interest and an idea, if you like, of a shared kind of a sort of
#
almost a current of a certain kind of a, you know, and they were held together in a sense
#
by this mutual gaze locked into each other's gaze.
#
And therefore anything that happened was kind of fodder for everybody.
#
And so, you know, you kind of feasted on the, on, on, and you converted everything into
#
a shared experience and kind of collectively feasted on it.
#
And I think that whole idea of a neighborhood, which is the fact that you make, because I
#
think in a sense, I think activity itself had a value, which I mean, when you think
#
about the window and the fact that, I mean, in so many neighborhoods, what you did in
#
an evening was you either stood by a window or sat on a porch and watched other people
#
either sitting on porches or at windows or some people walking on the street.
#
And you absorb the energy from other people.
#
And the fact that a neighborhood was actually in this sense, sort of a drawing of and feeding
#
of each other's energy, I think is something that, that idea as, as, you know, our lives
#
have changed and as, as neighborhoods and their definitions have changed, I think today
#
you happen to be geographically located and you're bound much more by class, for instance.
#
So there is a, you know, you can afford the same kind of places.
#
And so your children probably go to similar kind of schools and colleges or, or there
#
are, you know, you would, there are markers that unite you perhaps, rather than this kind
#
of a shared, the ability to kind of feed off a shared collective energy.
#
And obviously there are parts of India where this is, you know, you know, not much has
#
But I think what you see clearly in, in, in the Mumbai and Adelaide, it's true for me.
#
I mean, I mean, I stayed in Delhi in this colony for years and I have no clue what my
#
I mean, let alone knowing who they are.
#
So I, I mean, it's a, that is a common, I think, experience of today's urban life.
#
You know, when I was in college in the early nineties, I remember, you know, I remember
#
when we'd have free periods or when we'd bunk or whatever, we'd go and sit in, sit on what
#
was typically called a katta by the roadside and drink tea and just kind of look around.
#
And now you'll just have people perhaps looking into the screens.
#
And you know, so the, the, the little intro that I did was really inspired by a column
#
And I'll quote from that where you write, there was a small video snippet that had gone
#
It showed an infant looking at a magazine and jabbing it with his finger, trying to
#
And later in the same piece about screens in this new interface, you write, quote, the
#
screen has become the wallpaper of our lives.
#
It serves as a new kind of visual layer that the physical world dawns, creating alternative
#
Screens can bring us a simulation of everything else the world has to offer, but lack any
#
structure or architecture of their own.
#
The screen is a new skin of our lives.
#
By digitizing the abstract, the real and the human, it has carved out the last share of
#
our time and attention.
#
And you know, and obviously you've seen this through the decades, both as a user and as
#
someone looking from the outside.
#
How does this interface with the world through screens?
#
How does it change the way we look at the world?
#
How does it change the way we look at each other and communicate with each other?
#
I think, I mean, as you would expect profoundly, I mean, it, you know, and I think I would
#
just, you know, just, just probably, you know, pull back a little and I think, you know,
#
I mean, it's clear that technology, for instance, has had a huge role, I mean, in terms of bringing
#
about changes of several kinds, but I think sometimes I do feel that to recognize the
#
fact that at its most basic level, you know, the idea of a mobile phone is by itself profoundly
#
kind of, you know, it is transformational and the fact that, you know, the idea that
#
you have a device with you, that you carry, which is outside of yourself and which has
#
so many different ways of, you know, so many different functions that it provides you.
#
One is, you know, I mean, if I was to look at just the fact that how it individualizes
#
a person in the sense that if you were to look at, you know, decision-making and if
#
you were to say that, you know, there's a vast, vast bunch of people who would be making
#
a very few decisions in any given day, you know, how many decisions do you make?
#
Now you look at the mobile phone and you look at how this multiplies the number of decisions
#
that you make on a day-to-day basis.
#
You know, and in all of those decisions, you are driving and you are making the choice
#
and you are determining this is good, this is bad, I can expand something, I can flip
#
it, I can decide just to move on to something else entirely and I'm doing this with dizzying
#
I'm continuing to exercise my kind of, you know, this sovereign domain called the mobile
#
phone on which I am absolute kind of despot.
#
I'm continuing to kind of, you know, exercise my right in so many different ways.
#
And to me, this is such a deeply empowering experience and through gesture, not otherwise
#
to see the movement into experiencing yourself as an individual in India is so difficult
#
even our social context because there are so many ways in which you are kind of hamstrung
#
and you are kind of located inside a social matrix.
#
So many, you know, sources of authority that you have to kowtow to and here you are on
#
your own, you know, with that freedom, which I think is a remarkable experience, right?
#
So I think just that and then therefore you see it with the kind of the, I just find it,
#
if you really think about how we stop in the middle of anywhere and take a selfie with
#
ourselves, you know, we are the ability to anoint yourself virtually, you know, as the
#
center of the universe and anywhere in an airport, you know, thing you stop and you
#
kind of, you know, you sort of just, you know, feast your own eyes on yourself.
#
And then, you know, it's a, I think it's quite a remarkable ability.
#
And the fact that we have moved into that and which is the other thing, you know, the
#
idea that in a decade's time, I mean, you imagine if this, if you did not have the mobile
#
phone, how long would it have taken for this sense of an individuality to be experienced?
#
How long would it have taken for instance, the kind of stuff that you see on Twitter
#
where, you know, you can abuse anybody and so, you know, people who are celebrities or
#
authority figures, if society had to evolve to that stage by itself, if you just think
#
about how much time, if at all that was possible without the intervention of this device.
#
So I think in that sense, there is a, there is such a big discontinuous shift that has
#
The other thing that has happened, I think is the fact that the, just the idea that at
#
any given point in time, it's almost like the affordances that, that are, that sit with
#
you through technology, which means you're always in a sense, you know, if you go back
#
in time, I would say that for a lot of people in India, there was no gap between themselves
#
and their lives and the circumstances of their lives.
#
Their life circumstances determined, you know, so your script was written pretty much by
#
So you, there was very little room between the two, where you could exercise agency and
#
say, these are, these are my choices because in most cases you, you were led into things
#
because, because those were the constraints.
#
So you are, it is a constraint led kind of a view of the world.
#
What, what the mobile phone does is, is create this decisive gap between your context, you
#
know, and, and, and the choices that you exercise might be small.
#
They may not be profound.
#
They may not, you may not still be able to marry whoever you want.
#
But in terms of just feeling a sense of freedom or a sense of space and a sense of room, I
#
think there is an enormous kind of a shift that has happened there in just, just always
#
believing that there is something that you can do, even if it is to watch a pornographic
#
movie or even if it is, but there's always something else that you can do.
#
And I think that's, that is a, that is a actually quite a transformative experience.
#
No, I want to explore different aspects of what you just said.
#
And one thing that has resonance with me certainly is empowering power of the gesture, you know,
#
in the sense that like only the kind of, for example, you know, in the feudal world in
#
which we once lived, it was only the very rich, powerful guy who could just wave his
#
finger and things would happen.
#
I've seen arguments where one guy will point at another guy and the guy will say, and here
#
just with a wave of the only, you're basically the master of the universe, which is in your
#
One of the things which also struck me was obviously there's a sense of autonomy that
#
you're taking all of these decisions, but the issue, what I find with mobile phones
#
and social media especially is that we become to some extent slaves of that because you're
#
always chasing the next dopamine rush, which will, you know, come from your notifications
#
And there's something called decision fatigue, you know, with every decision we get more
#
This was, for example, you know, why Steve Jobs and later Mark Zuckerberg that, you know,
#
where the same black turtleneck every morning.
#
So they don't have to choose.
#
You have 10 of those, you just pick one and you choose that.
#
And you weigh that in reducing decision fatigue is sort of a very big thing.
#
And this is excellent book written by a guy called Cal Newport a couple of years ago called
#
And Newport's thesis was that for anyone to do any kind of meaningful productive work,
#
you need to enter a deep state of concentration, whether you're writing or painting or whatever.
#
And what happens is that every time you are disturbed, whatever the disturbance is for
#
you to get back to that state of deep work takes between 15 to 23 minutes, according
#
Now given that we are constantly we have our phones with us and we're looking at it many
#
times an hour, the problem then becomes is that we can never get into deep work because
#
we will never have those 15 or 23 minutes.
#
And even if by chance we do some other notification will pop up.
#
And therefore we are in a constant state of shallow work.
#
And in his book, of course, he talks about some of the prevalent ways by which people
#
tend to defeat that and defeat the shallowness.
#
So it's empowering, but it's also extremely restricting in certain ways.
#
In your own experience, have you found this?
#
How do you deal with this?
#
I mean, there's no question about the fact that this whole kind of fragmenting of attention
#
and this permanent sense of distraction, I think is something that is a consequence
#
of the fact that you have so many options.
#
I mean, for instance, I also just to the decision fatigue that you spoke of, I now listen to
#
music on shuffle mode because it's too difficult to figure out what to listen to.
#
So if you don't like it, you just skip to the next track and therefore you move from
#
all kinds of genres to others and you listen to music in a completely different way, which
#
is entirely a function of exactly what you said.
#
And the sense of finding reading more difficult, I mean, this is an experience that so many
#
people talk about, the fact that particularly because I largely read non-fiction and I find
#
that it's so much harder work.
#
Things that I used to just kind of zip through and I find that I struggle.
#
The fact is that we process the world differently and every time, I mean, certainly I'm sympathetic
#
to the idea that every time technology or media changes, the way that we process the
#
world kind of changes the whole on the whole kind of an argument that has been made.
#
But in so many ways, I mean, that's true.
#
You see that around you, the fact that we are being rewired and we are seeing the world
#
in completely processing the world in new ways and that has challenges of all kinds,
#
just as it has a very empowering and very freeing kind of experience.
#
Along with that come all other kinds of consequences also.
#
And even if you were to look at a much larger kind of a swath of audiences and look at their
#
lives, you will find the same sort of a pattern.
#
At one level, you will find the ability to do and experience things that are so important
#
The fact that, for instance, vaulting over hierarchies in its most basic sense, having
#
identity significant enough for somebody to call you, having an individual number.
#
So you are marked out in a crowd as being significant enough to warrant that is at its
#
most fundamental level and empowering idea.
#
So I do find that when you look at technology and you look at it through the lens of a lot
#
of people who have not had access to technology and not had access to many mobility devices,
#
not just in terms of social mobility devices also, I think there is a different experience
#
And when you look at it in another group, you may find that the kind of questions and
#
challenges and both the advantages and the challenges look very different.
#
You know, when I was in college in the early 90s, I remember one of my friends one day
#
He had a part-time job somewhere and he got a pager and his employer would page him whenever
#
and all of us were so jealous.
#
Like it's a big status symbol.
#
And actually looking back on it, like it's horrible to be on call like that.
#
But at that time it's significance, right?
#
You decode it differently.
#
And another way in which sort of like one of my friends made a great comment about how
#
empowered we are and don't even realize it.
#
He said that, you know, the next generation of kids, the kids who are growing up today
#
will never know what it is like to be lost, you know, which kind of blows my mind.
#
You wrote a great piece also, one of your columns on the changing nature of ownership.
#
And this is something we were discussing the other night about how, you know, we are so
#
privileged to, you know, back in the 80s, I remember if I had to make a mixtape of songs
#
that I liked and which weren't otherwise available, it was, you know, such a challenge and such
#
a joy when it finally happened.
#
And today we just press play and everything is there.
#
There are multiple apps, Google Play, Spotify, Amazon Prime Music, which give you all that.
#
And in this context, you've written quote, conceptually, this is a fundamental shift.
#
We are in effect trading off longitudinal ownership of a little for latitudinal usership
#
By limiting our claim over a film or a piece of music, by forgoing any permanent right
#
to it, we are able to in effect get access to it without restrictions.
#
And later in the same piece, you write quote, our mental models are moving from being rooted
#
in the idea of accumulation, that is stock, to that of continuous experience, that is
#
We are able to live much more in the present continuous tense, stop quote.
#
What does this mean for the future of ownership, the future of property, even how we look at
#
music and books and so on?
#
I mean, I think, you know, the idea of getting access to something when I want it, you know,
#
and having A that and B having a very large kind of a set of options to choose from.
#
I think if I, so the meaning of affluence or the meaning of even wealth, I think it's
#
interesting as to say, you know, why should wealth mean having so much of stuff that I'm
#
never going to use, which is what wealth is today.
#
The fact that I have X number of houses and I have, which I can be, you know, any one
#
place at one time, I can be enjoying one thing at one time, or maybe, you know, a few things
#
at the same time, certainly not everything that I have amassed.
#
And, you know, the idea that as you move from the stock orientation of the world, because
#
of the fact that you, the stock orientation of the world comes from a context where because
#
of the fact that, you know, the only way to claim a right on something and to be able
#
to use something when you want it is to be able to own it.
#
Unless you own it, you don't have the right to exercise that as to, I felt like it because
#
I had it, I pulled it out and I used it.
#
Today, when you have the ability to sort of structure, you know, economic circumstances
#
in a way that you, you know, you can simply end up using things when you need to.
#
To me, it's a very radical kind of a, you know, possibility, the fact that why do you
#
I mean, if tomorrow, in theory, if you, if technology works fast, well enough, why do
#
you need to own, have a wardrobe?
#
I mean, why can't you not decide, you know, what you want to wear and why can it not be
#
delivered to you in 20 minutes?
#
You know, why should, and more profoundly, I think, what the idea of wealth and the idea
#
of, and there were so many of the questions that follow as a consequence.
#
Would it feel wasteful tomorrow to have so much that you cannot use?
#
I mean, would you feel foolish for having things that you cannot possibly use when the
#
whole currency becomes the currency of use and the currency of flow rather than the currency
#
of ownership and stock?
#
It's just an interesting question to ponder.
#
And let's talk a bit about wealth also and how we relate to wealth.
#
Like in another of your columns, you once said, quote, extreme wealth can often reveal
#
a poverty of imagination, stop quote.
#
And just yesterday, a friend of mine was telling me the story about a certain very wealthy
#
business family in India, which will go unnamed, who have this really funky, unusual building
#
to themselves in Bombay.
#
And he told me that there is an entire floor in that building, which is devoted to dogs.
#
It has 72 dogs in 72 kennels because one of the sons likes dogs.
#
And you know, this, of course, is perhaps an extreme example of, you know, a display
#
And this is interesting to me across many different sort of, on many different margins.
#
Like one is how the nouveau riche express, and these guys aren't exactly nouveau riche,
#
but how people who are not really old, how they express their wealth, how they signal
#
their wealth and what they do with it and how we relate to it and all that.
#
I mean, I, you know, certainly, I mean, I think the fact of the matter is that, that,
#
you know, I mean, there is always the 73rd dog, right?
#
I mean, you know, and, but also just to acknowledge that, you know, wealth has other signifying
#
kind of, you know, it signifies other things, right?
#
So the idea of being able to match something is also for use, but just, there is just pure
#
ownership value and there is display value and there is therefore, you know, so, and
#
the ability to waste is such a, has always been through the ages, a marker of wealth.
#
So at a certain level, I think, you know, there is a reason why I guess, you know, these
#
markers work, but I think equally, I think as, as I think our ideas of, you know, as
#
to what it, see, eventually it's a question of saying, what makes somebody better than
#
And you're looking at markers for that.
#
So if wealth is one marker increasingly, you know, when other markers start, start becoming
#
more significant, then what seemed to be, you know, a very powerful sign ends up looking
#
And I think that's the kind of a transition and again, that has always existed, but I
#
think that is also a kind of transition that we are seeing where you have a new generation
#
that is coming up that regards other markers.
#
And some of them may to yet another person feel foolish again, the whole, you know, there
#
is this whole, the millennial, you know, kind of quest for, for the pure and the authentic
#
and the politically sort of, you know, untainted may equally, you know, feel foolish to some
#
So I, I guess, you know, it, you know, I mean, they're different contexts, I guess.
#
I once told a millennial friend of mine that he should do authentic organic signaling and
#
not use Twitter for it, he should just say things.
#
You also wrote a great piece, which kind of touches on the effects of wealth, I guess,
#
but also raises a question I want to ask.
#
Can you piece was about waiting versus instant gratification.
#
And you had a very nice description of cues here, which I will again quote from quote,
#
in some government hospitals, waiting is never idle in places that do not have a formal system
#
Even in places that do one is always at war with other patients, either trying to break
#
the queue through acts of artifice and even bribery or to prevent others from doing so.
#
Waiting here is a stressful event for one can never let one's guard down.
#
In India, this kind of waiting is quite normal, given that there are always ways of cutting
#
the queue, whether at an airport ration shop or railway reservation counter.
#
And one toggles freely between trying to do so oneself and hating anyone else who tries
#
And my sort of larger question here, and I wonder if you have any insights on it, is
#
that, you know, cultures change, right?
#
So back in the day, I can imagine that, you know, you're living in a time of scarcity
#
and you have to queue up for stuff and there is chaos and there aren't enough authority
#
figures to sort of, it's just not in the culture to wait.
#
Now what has happened over the years since then is that the outward signs of modernity
#
When you go to a store, you know where to queue, everything is set in place and yet
#
I see Indians everywhere, at least in India, when I go abroad, they never do this.
#
But at least in India, especially at airports, they just don't queue properly.
#
They're always trying to be, and I find myself sometimes behaving like that because I'm like,
#
this is a local culture, it's dog eat dog, I got to do what I got to do to survive.
#
Why are some cultural practices so resistant to change?
#
Because I think culture, because it becomes a way that, you know, it's a lens through
#
which we've seen the world and it's also got embedded.
#
And therefore there are responses that become very difficult to change simply because the
#
outside context changes, you know, particularly in a short timeframe.
#
I know that in, for instance, Europe, we were traveling by train and where there are like
#
about, you know, in an entire kind of a, you know, whatever bogey, you have about eight
#
And yet I remember sitting there and always looking out at the station that stopped to
#
say, how many people have come, meaning I heard that, you know, I'm telling myself,
#
so I'm having this dialogue with myself saying I'm being absurd, I mean, this is ridiculous,
#
you know, and yet you, you, that's an instinct that you cannot help.
#
And I think it's just that it's, I think the, it's about things like, you know, say a roundabout
#
in India traffic circle is always a mess because it's, you know, the idea that for some insane
#
reason, the fact that you have to cut in or you have to sort of, you know, edge and, and
#
you have to find a little edge there is just so kind of, you know, ingrained that the idea
#
of order or for instance, I've, you know, in some other contexts, I've written about
#
this, the railway crossing, which always is, you know, is classical where, you know, you
#
have people going and occupying the other side.
#
And then the frustrating part about it is that in terms of individual rationality, they
#
win because unless they get cleared, nobody else can move.
#
So it's the people who transgress the law and actually break the rule are the people
#
And this is the same thing that happens that you kind of, you know, you resent them like
#
crazy and then you end up doing that yourself because that's the, you know, the rules of
#
And it's also interesting how we were adapted to scarcity in the sense that, right, we grew
#
up in times when there was scarcity and that led to some cultural values, which one can
#
For example, you've got this really lovely essay called the dhania factor, where you
#
write about extending the life of things and I'll quote from that quote, extending the
#
life of things meant acting proactively.
#
Most of us have grown up wearing clothes, two sizes too large till we grew into them.
#
And of course, all trousers had quote unquote margins that could accommodate the unreasonable
#
growth young children were capable of examine the notion of scarcity.
#
In another essay called sharing scarcity, you write a quote at one level, the focus
#
on inheritance reveals an implicit belief that wealth could have been generated only
#
in the past and hence the desperation to hold on to it.
#
And you know, I see this even when, for example, I took an elderly member of my family once
#
to a buffet at the Marriott, a breakfast buffet, and he ate everything.
#
He literally ate everything, while I'm just ordering an omelet and having some bacon and
#
And it's also poignant in a sense, isn't it?
#
That, you know, when times have changed, but we've held on to this mindset.
#
I mean, it is, it is certainly.
#
And I think because of the fact that, you know, you have a, I mean, so many of our formative
#
influences and the way that we grow up are so difficult to shake off because, you know,
#
we, we have, you know, we see, and the idea of scarcity or the world is zero sum game
#
or the fact that, you know, I mean, these are such fundamental kind of ideas and, you
#
So, and so that, you know, however much you may recognize and you may kind of, and that's
#
why I'm saying it's possible to have a concurrent dialogue, which is kind of simultaneously
#
kind of, you know, at the same time, you're recognizing the fact that this is, you know,
#
this doesn't make sense.
#
And yet you find yourself reacting in a certain way.
#
And I think that's the, the, the power of those formative, I think deeply held and it's,
#
they've been reinforced over the years in so many invisible ways.
#
So there is this, it's an ecological system and, and, and, you know, and therefore any
#
ecological change, you know, I think is, is really, really slow in coming.
#
So I want to ask you a question related to that.
#
And this is something I've thought about for a while.
#
And it's actually, you know, so Jagdish Bhagwati once, I think in the year 2000 said that people
#
in China have a profit oriented mindset while a profit seeking and people in India are rent
#
seeking and an observation that various businessmen have made for me, especially people who come
#
from outside are surprised by it, that people in India seem to think in the zero sum ways
#
that even if they're exploring a business relationship, it's how can I exploit this
#
How can I get something for myself at the expense of the other person?
#
And even in the popular imagination, the mindset towards business, towards work, towards all
#
of that seems to be of a rent seeking type.
#
And I've often kind of speculated on why this may be the case.
#
One theory that a friend of mine and I had, and we were wondering if you should write
#
about it is that it's partly determined by the institutions because in the fifties and
#
sixties you had a really powerful state which controlled everything.
#
Your aspiration became to be part of the state or to similarly exploit others like the state
#
and its associated rent seekers exploits you, which might also sort of to some extent just
#
one facet of why people might be so attracted to government jobs.
#
What are your views on this?
#
I certainly think that if you don't have trust and faith in systems and in institutions that
#
work then the consequence of that is also in a sense your mental model of time and what
#
And so time can look like a linear placid stable space or time can look like an uneven
#
volatile kind of a full of potholes kind of a space in your head.
#
So how you imagine time, if you don't imagine time with a certain stable continuity, but
#
you don't think of time in those terms, then the idea of whenever you project outwards
#
and when you take a chance, the anxieties that surround you are so much greater.
#
And also if you look at even a notion of money, say if you were to look at the mental model
#
of money in India, I mean, traditionally it has been for most people, the idea of money
#
has been vapor, the idea of that will disappear.
#
So for instance, I have so many elderly relatives who go to their bank vaults every two weeks
#
to check if everything is still there, I'll say, where can it go?
#
I mean, it's a solid vault, you lock it, you know, et cetera.
#
But there is this anxiety, right?
#
And so barring the trading community that understood the velocity of money, most of
#
us, that's why we have traditionally put our money in fixed deposits.
#
Even now, I mean, after so many years, you still find that to move people into something
#
like mutual funds is such a massive mammoth task because there's a sense that the idea
#
that you trust time, you trust institutions is, I think, difficult to accept.
#
So I think it's interesting.
#
I think it points to the fact that there is, you know, time itself, I think, is perhaps
#
not looked at in the same way.
#
So do you think in that sense, a changing view of time could best be represented by
#
the decline of test ticket?
#
Because once upon a time, you had five days to watch a test match and not much opportunity
#
But then in today's globalized world, when there's so much you can do with your time,
#
it's like, who's got five days or even one day?
#
Yeah, I mean, I think that that is, of course, part, I think of a larger, you know, a lot
#
of your columns, many of your columns are actually quite moving to me.
#
And intrinsically, there was nothing in those specific columns that should have moved me.
#
But it was moving to me because I kind of grew up in a similar sort of era and just
#
the evocation of the same kind of forgotten objects and institutions like STD boots.
#
And suddenly memories come flooding back when you sort of see that phrase.
#
And one entire section in your book, your collection of essays, Mother Pious Lady, which
#
I don't think I mentioned earlier in this episode, which is a travesty.
#
A lot of Santosh's essays are collected in the superb collection called Mother Pious
#
So please check that out.
#
And that has a section called Vehicles of Escape, where you talk, you know, about some
#
of the things which when we are young and we don't have smartphones and this is the
#
1980s, what were your vehicles of escape and also how many times did you watch Chupke
#
I forget now, but must be 18.
#
I mean, I know every, I think I know every dialogue, everything by, you know, I know
#
it sort of inside out and gave me enormous amount of pleasure, still does.
#
I mean, if I still I managed to catch a glimpse of it on television, I sort of find myself
#
watching it till the end.
#
So I think obviously, I mean, you know, we've talked about Chitrahar and the whole, I think
#
which is common currency.
#
I mean, I think the fact that you had such little by way of possible diversion so that
#
you pretty much, and we didn't have televisions and the fact that shamelessly we used to march
#
to, you know, entire troop of us used to march to neighbors or friends, you know, and friends
#
was probably, you know, in some cases friends, in some cases that's a very strong word to
#
use because you were kind of completely opportunistic, we would go to pretty much anybody who didn't
#
And so, I mean, you know, I think there was a time when then any little scrap of entertainment
#
stroke diversion was, I think, greedily consumed.
#
Also another sort of, no, and I remember when, you know, our entertainment options were so
#
limited that we used to watch Doordarshan avidly.
#
And it's a sort of a famous story that when the Pradeep Kishan film which Arundhati Roy
#
wrote in which Annie gives it those ones, it aired only once on Doordarshan.
#
And the thing is, not only did I watch it, I actually remembered a part of the film where
#
the Beatles Here Comes the Sun starts playing and that's a memorable cinematic memory for
#
me and so many years back because we had so little to occupy our time and now we are buffeted
#
in various directions and shallow focus on all of them.
#
And is that sort of a nostalgic lament without any, you know, like that it's more of a feature
#
A young person today would say I have so many options open in front of me, whereas I can
#
say that, yeah, but your attention is so divided and we could.
#
I mean, I say what is a measure of that?
#
I mean, you know, because clearly there are different contexts and there are, you know,
#
different kinds of experiences and young people will have enough to be, you know, nostalgic
#
about people today are nostalgic about, say, Pac-Man, for instance, even I'm the Pac-Man.
#
And so they will find, you know, things to be, I mean, nostalgic about.
#
So, but I think, for instance, I certainly, you know, feel that, for instance, just the
#
idea of consumption, the looking forward.
#
If I look at things that give me the kind of joy or give, you know, my children, the
#
kind of joy that I got in getting things or consuming things.
#
And I find that consumption itself, you know, I see that it lacks the joy that it did once,
#
which is because it becomes routine.
#
It becomes commonplace.
#
You get a phone that you want and you get the gadget that you want and you get it pretty
#
quickly and that longing for it and waiting for it.
#
And then finally, you know, the first glimmer of hope that you might get it and then actually
#
being able to sort of prospect it and get it and savor it, that whole elaborate foreplay
#
and then the pleasure of it, just the joy and the ability to squeeze pleasure out of
#
I think, so if you measure this, the two contexts in terms of units of pleasure, so which make
#
them to a degree comparable, otherwise, you know, it's just saying that every generation
#
has its own reasons to be nostalgic, I do think that there is much less pleasure today
#
Just in, you may call today society consumerist, but the irony is that actually there is much
#
less pleasure in any individual act of consumption and there is much more compulsion in an act
#
of consumption than there is pleasure.
#
So I do think there is something that has been lost.
#
And then what follows from there is the post-scarcity utopia, which some people imagine is actually
#
dystopia because you're so jaded that you don't get pleasure in anything.
#
So where does the joy come from?
#
I mean, I said that therefore you're then the idea of the next big thing or the idea
#
of movement, you know, and the idea of discovery, therefore the idea then of symbolic sources
#
of pleasure that I, you know, so which is the reason why the kind of meaning starts
#
moving to other places, to the idea of things rather than things themselves, to the politics
#
of things rather than things themselves.
#
So I mean, which is the reason why, and it may not quite resemble pleasure as we knew
#
it, but at least there is meaning, if not quite pleasure.
#
And one of the things you've written about, which used to give us pleasure once upon a
#
time and is now utterly routine is just communicating with each other.
#
Like you've written an essay on postcards where you write, quote, it is interesting
#
how a sense of being close knit was achieved with such little actual communication.
#
A letter of a hundred words took two weeks to reach.
#
The reply took a correspondingly long time.
#
The period when the letter was in transit was when most of the communication actually
#
took place, not in reality, but in the conversations we had in our minds.
#
And you know, this takes me back to, you know, when I was wooing my then girlfriend, now
#
wife, and we were in different cities, we used to send letters and we still have all
#
those letters stored up somewhere and they're a source of great pleasure.
#
But in the last 20 years, there's no pleasure in the communication in that sense.
#
You send a couple of lines, you get a couple of lines back.
#
It's quotidian, mundane.
#
There's nothing special in it.
#
Is that also a loss that has no flip side to it?
#
Yeah, I guess the flip side is the fact that a lot of anxieties that came out of the two
#
weeks that it took or maybe more than six weeks that it took if you had somebody studying
#
abroad or relatives abroad, somebody not well.
#
So I mean, obviously, I mean, there are obvious advantages to the kind of glut of communication
#
But I think, yes, I mean, I think the fact that I mean, I do remember the kind of longing
#
and the kind of, you know, the feeling of being connected and the desire to experience
#
that feeling in such intense terms, the fact that communication was always public property.
#
I mean, unless it was, it was, you know, your communication that you spoke of, which is
#
Otherwise, any letter that came, it was promptly read out to everybody in the family and not
#
just once, but every time somebody else came, you reread that letter and you kind of derived
#
pleasure from it all over again.
#
And they were most often they were full of banalities.
#
I mean, there was nothing actually being said there.
#
And there was, in fact, letters had this very turgid kind of, you know, formal introductions,
#
which most different cultures had their own kind of versions of.
#
So there was not really very much communication that letter, it was just the sense of being
#
connected. And because of the intractability or the actual tangibleness of distance, I
#
think that that need to reach out across the distance was that much greater.
#
So I think it was much more the desire that animated it than actually the communication.
#
And I think what happens here is the stealing of desire.
#
So it's the, that's the fundamental shift that has happened because you know, you are
#
forever connected, that intense desire to reach out and to experience that the feeling
#
of being connected is not as valuable anymore.
#
You just are connected.
#
And also earlier you said that, you know, one of the ways in which a mobile phone empowers
#
you is that every time you get a call, it's like, oh, someone considers me important enough
#
But that is so much more magnified by actually getting a physical letter or a postcard because
#
like, oh my God, you are actually for that period of time that the person was writing
#
and sending the letter, making the physical effort, you were the center of somebody's
#
So you know, that, that feeling, the two way feeling, I think, I think was valuable.
#
Let's kind of also then talk about families, like how families have evolved in this time.
#
And obviously I'll put the caveat here that, you know, when I say evolved in this time,
#
I mean sort of evolved for the kind of circles that we are in, because a lot of India, like
#
I say, is still in the 20th century or even the 19th century.
#
So what we speak of with nostalgia is something in the past is perhaps true of somebody somewhere
#
and we are all evolving.
#
But how have families evolved in this time, especially joint families, which almost have
#
Some people demonize it and some people hold it up as, oh, family values and this is what
#
Well, I think, I think it's interesting that, you know, I mean, one I think is that, you
#
know, the nuclearization of families has, is not a new phenomenon in that sense.
#
I mean, I'm part of a kind of a nuclear family unit, you know, I grew up, you know, my, my
#
father, for instance, you know, my parents stayed apart from, you know, you know,
#
So, I mean, and then several people that I, one knows, you know, came up like that, but
#
I think there was still a difference in the fact that, that emotional headquarters still
#
decided at the family kind of home.
#
So, and, you know, so you were, you may have your branch, we were branch outposts, you
#
know, of a family firm, right?
#
And so every summer holiday, we went back to head office and kind of, you know, plugged
#
And then, so very clearly that was the kind of a functioning system.
#
And I think today what you find is a more kind of genuine nuclearization also began
#
to happen is one pattern.
#
The other is the joint family, which again, within the structure of the joint family,
#
or even if people are living together, have different degrees of independent kind of,
#
you know, little independent operations that are being run.
#
So in some cases, there is a common kitchen.
#
In some cases, there are pantries that are individual.
#
So you have this, the logic of the floor by floor kind of a joint family.
#
So every, you know, the floor has a slightly different level of affluence, so the children
#
have perhaps a different set of toys and a different set of clothes.
#
They may in some cases even go to different kinds of schools, but it's a joint family.
#
So one of the things is, of course, is that the family structure evolves.
#
But I think the other interesting thing about families, I think, is that particularly in
#
the kind of social class that you referred to, families in some senses have come closer
#
because there is a much greater acknowledgement of individuals.
#
Otherwise, you know, families in India, while offering a great amount of comfort and a great
#
amount of emotional support, was in an undifferentiated and a, you know, not necessarily acknowledging
#
individual needs as much as creating a collective ethos.
#
Hamari family ki values in a sense, what led the way was the sense of what the family stood
#
for and the individual had to fit in.
#
And so the relationship was that there was a family way of doing things and people kind
#
of, you know, belong to that or reflected that.
#
I think with time, what you are beginning to see is the family as a facility.
#
It's a, you know, I have a piece there called joint stock family, but the idea of a more
#
collaborative kind of a structure where the individual needs are accommodated.
#
And the role of the family is for different parts of the family to come together and support
#
In time, I think one of the things that have happened is that the power distance between
#
generations has reduced.
#
The fact that as there is genuine nuclearization, I think the role of the mother, the woman
#
of the, you know, has changed and has become, you know, even more significant.
#
It was earlier a nurturing kind of a significance.
#
It's also, there are several roles, which has its own set of complexities, but there
#
are, so I think there is a change there.
#
And I think there is an acknowledgement of, and also because with technology, particularly
#
the young are the agents of the new in families.
#
So there is suddenly the sense that, you know, actually the young understand some parts of
#
this world better than the old.
#
And so the presumptive feeling that authority flows downwards in one direction is no longer,
#
you know, accepted wisdom.
#
So what you are beginning to see, you know, you also have, of course, families that are
#
riven apart and the rest of it, but one pattern that you're beginning to see is this idea
#
of a more collaborative family unit where individuals count for a little more than they
#
And I used to have, you know, one of the sort of two binary views of family as something
#
And you know, my vision of the mother-in-law was typical, and so on.
#
And girls were told that you don't marry your husband, you marry your family.
#
I did an interesting episode recently with Namitha Bhandare on women working in India
#
and women in the workplace.
#
And she made an interesting observation.
#
She said that she has found that in many families, the person who empowers and encourages the
#
woman to go out and work as a mother-in-law, which, you know, blew my mind and which speaks
#
to what you're speaking to.
#
You do see that you see.
#
So just as you see, I mean, it's interesting that that space is fairly, you will see different
#
strands at one level, you see this family coming together.
#
You see the husband and wife as a unit much more in a sense than, you know, there is a
#
mutual acknowledgement of the kind of interdependence and the fact that, you know, each has to play
#
And there is the sense of being a unit, I think, which is, which is a, it's not just
#
a role-based kind of acknowledgement of each other, but it's actually both role-based as
#
well as of people that reside within those roles.
#
So I think at one level, you see that similarly, you see this, you know, what I think Namita
#
spoke to this idea of the mother-in-law being actually a supporter and being an ally.
#
You also see that pattern.
#
You also see it's opposite, you know, you do see also as I think the role of the woman
#
and the fact that, you know, this is a generation of much more educated women, right?
#
If you were to really look at in the middle-class generation by generation, there's been a step
#
change over the last three generations of the education of the woman in the family.
#
So, you know, which unleashes so many different kinds of changes.
#
So you have the male anxiety that evokes and you see a lot of evidence even of that, of
#
the fact that you have women who are resurgent and you have men who either sort of recede
#
or they resent it and there is, you know, there is a desire and you see that in so many
#
different ways to kind of, you know, assert themselves again in a variety of ways.
#
We'll go in for a quick commercial break, but before we do that, I'll just quote the
#
last paragraph of your essay which you refer to, The Joint Stock Family.
#
Quote, the nostalgia that surrounds families comes from a strong need to protect the idea
#
of continuity even as we alter its meaning.
#
The idea of family is stronger than ever, but what it means to be part of one has changed
#
We want to experience our own individuality, but do not want to be alone.
#
We need to perform as a unit of one, but need the appreciation of others.
#
As we move into a better time, we need an audience to root for us.
#
After all, who else will clap for us?
#
Stop code and we'll be back after a quick commercial break.
#
Welcome to another awesome week on the IBM Podcast Network.
#
If you're not following us on social media, please make sure you do.
#
We're IBM Podcasts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
#
Also just a reminder, please do make sure that if you're listening to something that
#
you enjoy, take a screenshot of that, tag us on one of our social media handles, and
#
we'll retweet you or share you or I don't know, whatever works in the different handles,
#
On Cyrus's this week, Cyrus is joined by Srishti Arya, Director of International Originals
#
They talk about the upcoming slate of original Indian movies on Netflix and also touch upon
#
the online streaming wars.
#
On Agla Station adulthood, hosts Ayushi and Rathasa are joined by the cast of DICE media
#
show Adulting and they share some stories about growing up.
#
On the Filter Coffee podcast, Karthik is joined by Pradeep Narayan, Research Director at Praxis
#
Institute of Participatory Practices.
#
Pradeep breaks down the prevalence and evils of caste in India today.
#
On a simplified shorty, Chuck and Srikhar talk about Pablo Escobar, hippos and cocaine
#
and the bizarre legacy that connects the three.
#
You don't want to miss this.
#
You can also listen to Chuck on his short solo podcast, The Origin of Things, where
#
he narrates the story about a Hungarian immigrant and yellow journalism, which led to one of
#
the most prestigious accolades of modern history.
#
It's a crossover episode on the empowering series as Irina is joined by the host of the
#
Habit Coach, Ashton Doctor and his dad, Wispy Doctor to talk about the idea of starting
#
And on Ashton's own show, The Habit Coach, he shares six foundational habits for an awesome
#
On Football Shootball, hosts Gaurav, Karthik and Suva bring to you a special episode where
#
they talk about the greatest brawls in football.
#
On Varta Lab, hosts Akash and Naveen are joined by rapper Onkar Pujari, who goes by the stage
#
The three of them talk about Onkar's journey in the Indian rap scene.
#
On Geek Fruit, Tejas and Jinker take a look at actors who moonlight as musicians and draw
#
the distinction between vanity projects and music that endures.
#
On Golgappa, Tripti is joined by Deepika Matre, who shares the story of her rollercoaster
#
ride from being a house help to a Julie Srela to doing stand-up comedy.
#
Also, if you are in control of a brand and you want your brand to have their promos read
#
on our podcast network, do get in touch with us.
#
You can write to us on advertisers at indusvox.com.
#
And with that, let's get you onto your show.
#
Welcome back to the Seed in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Santosh Desai.
#
Santosh, before we went into the break, we were talking about the value that families
#
can often bring in empowering individuals, recognizing them, the sense of comfort you
#
And it's also interesting to see the flip side of that in terms of like, for example,
#
when I was chatting with Amita Bhandari about women in India, and both she and I were pretty
#
vociferous about the malign role of family and how it can sort of restrict women.
#
And I'd once written a column about how one of the best metrics for women's empowerment
#
was the divorce rate, the rising divorce rate, because more and more women are being empowered
#
to sort of step outside the confines of family.
#
And you've written a very interesting chapter, and I'll ask you about the title of your essay
#
rather, called The Fear of Women.
#
And I'll quote from that, where you say, quote, her view of herself is no longer contained
#
in and by how others see her.
#
She is no longer a sum total of the roles she plays.
#
She may choose not to underline this fact by tacitly continuing to play these roles
#
without too much apparent change, but she is increasingly, quote unquote, playing at
#
Her pleasure now comes not only from that of others.
#
She is herself a seeker, stop quote.
#
And obviously, it's not true for most of India, but it's true for a significant enough part
#
Tell me a bit about the changes you've observed in how women see themselves in the world.
#
I think this is perhaps, do a lot of work traveling across the country and therefore
#
talking to a whole cross-section of people.
#
And one thing that we keep coming across is this pattern and across, in fact, a wide swath
#
I mean, it's not just limited to a small group anymore.
#
I mean, it's not universally true, certainly, but it is true for a large part of India,
#
which is the fact that you see there is a confidence in women's own self and how they
#
talk about themselves and they talk about their immediate environment.
#
There is a very clear set of ambitions that they have.
#
I mean, you come across young girls and there's this burning desire to make something of their
#
You also come across very heartbreaking kind of also situations where you have these points.
#
I had also written about this, the fact that there's a whole came across a lot of girls
#
who their biggest fear was that of marriage.
#
Because in an arranged marriage world, the sense that the biggest lottery in their lives
#
was this big question mark of who you get married to, what kind of family, what kind
#
of person, and something that they had such little control over.
#
And the fact that they say that even if our parents are well-meaning, they have no idea
#
because their metrics or how they evaluate a prospective room is based on yardsticks
#
that don't have value for us.
#
So you had, for instance, in Haryana, you came across this strange college where there
#
were a whole lot of young women studying for their PhDs.
#
And it was animated by, among other things, a desire just because they got social sort
#
of approval of the fact that as long as they were studying, they were fine.
#
And they kept studying to delay marriage.
#
I mean, to say that because I really dread where I will end up.
#
So I think you have that kind of a pattern also.
#
But on the flip side, it shows the degree to which there is desire and ambition to actually
#
to do something with their lives.
#
And so I think you find that you find even women who would traditionally be called housewives,
#
the number of times we've heard women say that, I'm a housewife, but I'm not just a
#
Or the fact that you start seeing, which is as yet small in number, but you see it across
#
the country and it's a new pattern that we've been seeing only in the last two, three years,
#
is this idea of the female entrepreneur.
#
And you're beginning, because the interesting thing about a woman being an entrepreneur
#
is the fact that apart from the other advantages, the fact that she has relative control over
#
her time is the fact that because it does not carry a designation and it is not located
#
in a sort of a way, you don't have a fixed salary or a fixed position.
#
You don't compete with the men.
#
And therefore you may end up making more money, but it's less of a threat.
#
And therefore there are women who spoke about the fact that, actually I was working and
#
in a job it was always a problem.
#
Now actually I'm making more money, but because it's A, not very clear how much money I make,
#
B, I don't have a title.
#
So I mean, it's interesting that in this phenomenon, you see both sides of it simultaneously.
#
The fact that there are more degrees of freedom and there is this great desire and enterprise
#
that you see at the same time, you still need to navigate your way past the current kind
#
of social structures that you try and bypass in some form.
#
So I think this is a pattern that you see very often, which is this desire to do, again
#
young men and young women you find, again, this is generalizing and so of course there'll
#
be big differences, but one pattern one does see is the fact that young women are more
#
confident, more ambitious, have many more things to say.
#
Young men, in fact in India currently are quite diffident.
#
You find there is a certain diffidence, there is a certain anxiety, there is a set of expectations
#
that others have of them and they have of themselves that they worry that they will
#
not be able to quite live up to.
#
So you do have this, so when you compare reactions to the two, often you find that the young
#
girls seem to have more to say for themselves.
#
So you are seeing I think big changes on this front and I mean it's the small kind of signs
#
that actually that are I think quite eloquent and I think for instance I find this the thing
#
that you know where so many parts of small town India you will find these young girls
#
in a two-wheeler with that dupatta or something that raps to not get tanned.
#
So I think that's a very interesting sign because I know you can read it in so many
#
different ways and we kind of looked at that in some detail and you found that of course
#
at one level it is about preserving yourself and sort of you know and the fact that you
#
know your skin is important, valuing yourself in a certain sense, but it's also like the
#
other thing is anonymity and like you know the fact that you can pretty much do what
#
you want in a sense and you know you're not recognized.
#
But there's a third kind of a facet to it which is perhaps less apparent where you know
#
they talk about it in terms of saying but you know it doesn't matter whether anybody
#
This is not where I really want to be, this is not my arena eventually.
#
Even if I take myself out of the game here, even if I'm in that sense a non-entity on
#
the streets, I mean you know you're erasing your existence in some form, it doesn't matter
#
because this is not you know what I'm kind of meant for, which is I just find that that
#
note that you find occasionally is an interesting kind of an idea in terms of the mental model
#
that you have of your own future.
#
I mean I have many questions arising out of this but what I find really poignant is this
#
fear of marriage that you speak of.
#
I mean I don't think men get this, we think of arranged marriages as this nice romantic
#
thing where families come together but for many women it must be this elaborate event
#
which ends in rape and you know that's a different way of sort of looking at it.
#
So you know one of the questions that arises from this is that for these new women with
#
these new aspirations who are their sort of role models because you know back in the day
#
when I look at our role models, we lived in a male dominated society so our role models
#
tended to be male and they would be the cricketers or Bollywood people and Bollywood was and
#
is to a lesser extent incredibly toxic as far as gender relations are concerned.
#
So who are the role models of these women who are sort of the kind of role models that
#
It's interesting that actually you know now that with everybody having a mobile phone
#
and having access to the internet, so this is I mean in an earlier time you would have
#
a small fixed list of role models, today actually you have a much wider kind of set up.
#
So you will have your you know what you would expect sort of either they are leaders or
#
there are you know even people like film stars or sports athletes you will find names of
#
that kind but you'll find also a lot of people in there from who are kind of more in there
#
from their neighborhood, their community, their kind of immediate space which also becomes
#
kind of you know they also become role models.
#
The interesting thing is that it's not a small set of people, it's not you don't come across
#
the same set of people you know over and over again and I think there is a lot of it is
#
organic and it comes from within and so it's being propelled inside out rather than it's
#
not emulation as much as it is just this in a kind of a sense of there is also just the
#
physical reality around them you know that has changed and they can see certainly that
#
the younger girls kind of world versus her mother's world and they see a very big sort
#
of a difference there and I think the thing that I've you know also talked about in a
#
piece is the fact that they have to distinguish between they have much more freedom but they
#
don't quite have the independence.
#
So you know I mean Azadi and Swaraj if you were to kind of sort of push that difference
#
little many more activities they will do they can go out with friends, they can enjoy themselves
#
you know without a male chaperone they can they can do things even in a mixed group in
#
some quarters they can go out but they cannot still they can they decide which college to
#
go to, can they decide purely independently, can they decide who to get married to, very
#
often not and I think that is still something that is being negotiated.
#
And why did you say the men are different why is that why are men more and more different
#
and I think partly I think it has to do with the fact that A of course I mean you it must
#
be acknowledged that you know when women's role changes it's a foundational shift you
#
know and there are parts in India where it doesn't seem like so it just feels natural
#
and organic but for large parts of India you know when what you call middle class values
#
was essentially how you control women, what you prided yourself on for a lot of communities
#
was actually the amount of how you circumscribe the role of women I mean that is the primary
#
source of your pride in your values and therefore when the role of the woman changes the kind
#
of anxiety that it produces the kind of uncertainty that it produces I think is one aspect that
#
creates unfamiliar it's new terrain for men the idea that women evaluate men just that
#
thought that in a marriage the fact that a wife is casually young wife it came across
#
now so many times casually evaluating the husband and it just makes the man it's paralyzing
#
for the man because that's nothing has equipped him for that experience of being just matter
#
of factly evaluated that's not how it's the script was not meant to be that and thinking
#
aloud is it also the case that there was a time where a man would automatically get a
#
woman and she would be his property and men felt and feel entitled to this and now suddenly
#
they actually have to fight to impress women and these women have access to the world and
#
their mobile phones and they're seeing men from everywhere else and suddenly this small
#
town kid who hasn't been taught or socialized in how you have a conversation with a woman
#
suddenly has to figure out how to negotiate on absolutely I mean I think you know a lot
#
of what you see even in terms of the way it plays out in politics for instance it comes
#
from the inarticulateness of men the inability to form in words and to be able to articulate
#
a response to an unfamiliar and rapidly changing context so it's actually when you do not have
#
the words either there's abuse or there is violence or there is you shrink you know because
#
these are you don't have mechanisms and you don't have frameworks that you are equipped
#
with to be able to articulate a response and I think that's what you are seeing so part
#
of it is certainly the dependence comes from there part of it comes from the fact that
#
which is the reverse kind of a pressure of a you know of a patriarchal kind of a structure
#
which is the fact that the expectations are loaded in that sense on the young men who
#
see at one level there is greater freedom there is a greater sense of opportunities
#
there is certainly as against an earlier generation the idea that you know there are many more
#
avenues by which you can make something of your lives but along with that come also the
#
pressures of having to do something you know make something of your life and I find it
#
particularly interesting that you know in so many parts of India the continued importance
#
of a government job and not just the importance but the fact that people devote years of their
#
life preparing for a government job and if you were to go to again you know North India
#
there are so many parts of North India in particular you enter a small town and the
#
only advertising and what 80% of the advertising that you will see there is education self-improvement
#
getting a government job you go to YouTube and you will find videos for every government
#
position there will be any number of videos telling you how to crack a section officer's
#
job how to crack you know a lower divisional clerk's job and this continued fascination
#
for something which is so fixed and the idea that you know you want a stable perch in otherwise
#
of an uncertain world I think is revelatory of I think some of the anxieties that that
#
populate particularly the male mind.
#
In fact you've written an essay on this where you wrote quote in large parts of India power
#
is a stronger currency than money for it is convertible into every other currency of note
#
stop quote and you also write and this is also pregnant about the number of young people
#
who get trapped in it where you write quote this results in a vast number of young people
#
finding themselves trapped in a bubble of competitive exams responding to a constructed
#
reality of exams and interviews that bears little resemblance to real life subjects have
#
to be mugged arcane skills developed purely for the purpose of landing the job the learning
#
here leaves little by way of residual knowledge all of it gets consumed in the act of finding
#
a job stop quote and where do you sort of like at a social
#
level we know we are in a jobs crisis in India and it's only going to get worse this demographic
#
dividend isn't really playing out you know we have one million people coming into the
#
job force every month and there simply aren't enough jobs for them what are the kind of
#
tensions that that is creating I mean quite apart from these movements for reservations
#
in government jobs you know the Jats party dars and so on but quite apart from that what
#
is it like you know you spoke about how it is a threat to the male ego that the patriarchal
#
notion of society that he grew up with is changing and women are asserting themselves
#
on top of that where is it to find this sense of self-value when there aren't jobs for him
#
that's why I think that's you know that's the reason why you find I think a lot of the
#
tenor of the politics of the day I think finds its origins in the fact that you know there
#
is this you know a sense of being trapped and not being left with much space and much
#
room and therefore the need to feel you know powerful and to feel as part of a collective
#
that you know in a way you rediscover a certain you know a swagger I think is one kind of
#
a consequence of it I mean this whole diffidence and this and the fact that there is resentment
#
and then there is you know sexual violence and other forms of violence against women
#
is another representation and a part of it but there's also the part of simply a certain
#
you know listlessness and which is you know a certain passivity so you find which is the
#
other pattern that you come across which is just a much more passive acceptance you know
#
on the other hand you know just you know just to sort of also acknowledge the fact that
#
just as you have this is a pattern you also have the enterprising and the inventive and
#
in technology in you know one of the effects of technology which I think is not yet fully
#
leveraged and I think it potentially offers a lot is the idea of how you know in a non-formal
#
kind of learning how it is facilitating for instance we've come across a few people and
#
one example comes to mind in Bengal somewhere where this young boy who dropped out of school
#
at third or fourth or whatever and basically have learned nothing and he has set up some
#
sort of an accessories kind of a business some purely by looking at YouTube videos and
#
he said it interestingly he says that the era of thumb printing has come back and he
#
was talking about you know using his thumbs to kind of navigate the phone and which was
#
I just found the interesting the idea that the fact that it is possible today to avoid
#
you may not have been part of a formal system and you may not have learned you know everything
#
or been to the best colleges but the fact that you feel that there are avenues that
#
are open to you to find your way and to be able to construct something and you do find
#
this also interestingly that you find a lot of younger and this is interesting that in
#
the smaller towns you know when you look at how the internet is used or how people represent
#
themselves actually find that in some ways a lot more creativity I mean again crudely
#
speaking and this is just again a very broad generalization the larger towns you have users
#
are curators and the younger towns users are creators and so the larger town thing is look
#
how cool I am because I've accessed the right somebody else has said this and I'm the one
#
who kind of brings it to you but as you find much more experimentation and just the acts
#
of creation TikTok for instance is a great place to see I'm a huge fan I'm a huge fan
#
too I'm sort of riveted by because just look at the raw energy and the raw creative kind
#
of forces that are that are operating there and I think this is the other kind of an aspect
#
that I think simply because we don't have an ecosystem that you know allows this to
#
go somewhere we are still so stuck in in traditional notions of education that we don't have a
#
way to harness this desire that you know so many and a lot of young men too I mean so
#
here you find a lot of young men who have either interesting business ideas and because
#
in a sense the freedom comes in some ways from not knowing better or not knowing the
#
rules or not know and so there is a much greater sense of experimentation that you find which
#
again because there is no ecosystem to kind of harness it often does not get the scale
#
that it potentially could and I'm so glad to find a fellow TikTok fan and the observation
#
I keep making about TikTok is that and it's one of those things which genuinely opened
#
my eyes to something I did not know which is that there is so much incredible creativity
#
and a creative impulse in small town India and also that our arbiters and gatekeepers
#
of culture especially in you know the film industry in Mumbai and elsewhere have completely
#
missed that you have elites creating for elites and the energy and I just wish there was
#
a way to breach that because the outpouring of art that would then emerge.
#
If I just again if I just broaden this conversation in some ways and maybe take it somewhere else
#
perhaps is the fact that you know our idea of reality of a kind is we construct a notion
#
of India as you know which is a mass media notion of India or it is it's either a mass
#
media that is one way of characterizing it or it's a it's based on linear ideas like
#
electricity like roads which means that we have this idea that the influences and progress
#
is rippling outwards in with dilution and so in ever widening sort of circles that are
#
successively diluting that's our mental model of reality.
#
At one level at another level there is mass media which means all of us are sort of sheltered
#
or in a sense under the same sky so all of us have the same sort of the virtual firmament
#
and they have the same reference points.
#
I think both these ideas are changing one the internet does not recognize linearity
#
so therefore things don't move they move if at all in circles you know you have a radius
#
rather than straight line so progress is not jahan electricity line laggi jahan you know
#
it's not that it's a wider kind of a and the other thing is that it's not driven by
#
mass media and which means I mean to illustrate what I'm saying is that while an Arnab Goswami
#
may actually over the period of a week be getting a few lakh viewers it's under 10 it's
#
under a million in most cases in most weeks you will find but everybody knows who Arnab
#
Goswami is so he is a reference point regardless of the fact that he actually reaches a fraction
#
of the people that for instance a youtuber reaches you will have so many people who will
#
have subscribers of 5 million who are receiving a video a week which is roughly the same you
#
know it's a like to like kind of a metric and there are millions but the thing is because
#
these are underground these are subterranean we have no idea because they're not common
#
currency even if they are actually being viewed and influencing a much larger set of people
#
so what I find fascinating is the fact that here's this so here we have a sense of reality
#
that is created by what we see over ground and what we see in mass media and that what
#
we imagine is the zeitgeist and here is this underground vast kind of you know shifts that
#
are taking place influences that are happening that most of us most of these names you would
#
have no idea you know Sapna Chaudhary now people know because she apparently joined
#
a party or two is a Haryana dancer the last time I looked at her I think most popular
#
video of her it had 174 million views yeah I know actually all the stars in that ecosystem
#
Gauri Rani Sunita Rachana Tiwari so I'm just saying you look at the Bhushpuri ecosystem
#
you look at that is one Sandeep Maheshwari etc which is the self-help kind of an ecosystem
#
another set of sort of superstars there then you will have in the fashion there are you
#
will have so many or you will have even including things like you know things like Delhi girls
#
talk about masturbation or if you see things like being Indian or you see where there are
#
people on the street even if it is I don't know if it is stage or if it is I don't know
#
how it works but the number of people who get exposed to such radically different perspectives
#
different kinds of content and how this is shaping and reshaping you know ideas that
#
people have about everything and because it does not have this mass media structure of
#
a trickle down common currency kind of a structure there is a lack of a common awareness of how
#
this is playing out and I find that quite fascinating as to imagine as to what are the
#
cascading consequences of our actually not knowing the ground that we are actually walking
#
on as to what is happening beneath us and if you change hats for a moment and put the
#
social commentator aside and put on the advertising hat doesn't this become an incredibly stimulating
#
challenge for you to figure out these new markets and new ways it is that's the same
#
thing you know the whole idea of you know the time and space idea of what is what is
#
our current reality it just gets so completely redefined otherwise we had such a stable sense
#
of time time is linear it moves in a certain way space is this is big and small and it
#
you know dilutes none of that is relevant anymore and so everything are little circles
#
you know these little eddies of influence and and they are overlapping you know and
#
and they are interacting with each other and they have to be found they have to be looked
#
for and found and made sense of and used if you are in advertising so I think yeah it's
#
I want to go back to another aspect which you mentioned and which I've been thinking
#
about deeply which is education our education system especially up till the end of school
#
was basically designed in the 19th century is completely dysfunctional there is no match
#
between supply and demand in the marketplace and therefore what typically happens is that
#
anyone who actually gets quote unquote educated in this country comes out with no skills and
#
and as it is is a jobs crisis but you equally have a crisis of the people who are getting
#
so-called educated not having enough skills at all and you know in some cases you can
#
do a jogar around it like the gentleman you mentioned in Calcutta who watches YouTube
#
videos and then he figured out how to become an entrepreneur but you know what are your
#
thoughts on this I mean are we going to get past this crisis because of technology and
#
individual initiatives or is this a much bigger problem than that?
#
I think it's a huge problem and I don't think it's going away you know anywhere I mean technology
#
might play a role again because even if it were to play a role it needs some ecosystem
#
and and currently there is nothing seems to be in place I think this is something you
#
know what has happened is that at one level access to education has grown because of the
#
fact that there has been privatization of education so now in the middle of nowhere
#
you will find these vast dental colleges and you'll find you know you'll find and you say
#
I mean wow I mean you know one level at another level you know you don't have faculty you
#
don't have facilities the laboratories are you know are primitive so it's you know so
#
you the whole eye has been well documented the idea that you know you create such a large
#
number of unemployable sort of graduates engineers you know with professional degrees also and
#
I think this is a problem that isn't going anywhere and I think which is the reason why
#
I do find that increasingly you will find in smaller towns things like you know animation
#
things like you know studying something to do with media and filmmaking these also have
#
started taking on a life of their own because it is recognized that you know a job backwards
#
view of education is making more sense than you know conventional degrees where you think
#
these are the jobs that are available and these degrees won't get me there so I'll
#
do something and also this competition here there is not and these are you know so I mean
#
and you know I can I can see places where I this has an application so I think in a
#
in a sense I think from the student side there is a there is a sort of an attempt to try
#
and find an answer but from a institutional sense I I don't think there is a there is
#
an end what has happened with privatization is that in fact there is a certain abdication
#
of responsibility to a market which is you know quite imperfect because what animates
#
this market a lot of these are real estate players you know so many politicians that
#
are running these institutions you know you get land on the cheap I mean there is a so
#
there is a there are whole set of other factors that that have actually propelled this parent
#
growth because you you know collect capitation so the financial and the market ecosystem
#
here is not helping the student and so I think this is a crisis and I think we are still
#
on the ground floor of the crisis because I think because I I simply see this you know
#
this gap growing and and the sort of frustration at the fact that you have a degree and you
#
have an apparent qualification and there's nothing you can do with it I think is is simply
#
something that is going to become a bigger problem in the times to come.
#
One of the things that has also happened in the last sort of 30 years is that we've become
#
In fact I had an episode with Ruben Ibrahim and Pritika Hingorani of the IDFC Institute
#
recently where they argued that we are far more urban than the government even recognizes
#
and we are urbanizing rapidly and this is sort of a given but I'm trying to think about
#
the ways in which it changed us as a society like one of the ways in which I would have
#
imagined urbanization will help is that you will find less discrimination and more diversity
#
because in a city when you're in a Mumbai local you're you're immediately thrown up
#
with so many people that you can't discriminate on the basis of caste self-interest in that
#
large economic network means that it is not in your self-interest to you know shun someone
#
because he's some other caste but have you seen it playing out like that and how have
#
people's attitudes towards things like caste and people I mean even outside of caste people
#
they would traditionally consider the other how has all of that kind of evolved.
#
Well there has been some movement on that front I mean one can't say that there has
#
been no movement at all on that front I mean you do see some work spaces where you know
#
it becomes less sort of overt certainly but if you were to look at you know the more implicit
#
structures that are at work you know that hasn't they haven't changed so I think so
#
if you still were to do a you know just to you know take cast a glance at the surnames
#
in organizations and private sector organizations you will still see a very clear casque there
#
is no question and those changes have not really happened so while you know you will
#
have obviously the usual kind of a lot of people saying that oh I'm you know this apparent
#
class blindness they're saying you know I don't look at caste because you don't need
#
to because there is no diversity for you to kind of you know process so while at a certain
#
level there is there is an you know an opening of some kind I don't think in a material sense
#
there is a there has been a significant difference and I think the ease with which you know a
#
majoritarian kind of an appeal can work across the board suggests also that you know the
#
mental models of differences and your own self and your place in the world has those
#
mental models haven't really moved and I think that's what you still see around you so I'm
#
not sure that there is the fact that we have an urban mindset has substantially changed
#
the reality and in fact we did some work on this also you know last year and we found
#
that in some ways caste continues to be a fault line that you don't need to you know
#
come face to face with it in most cases and therefore it is possible to profess that you
#
know it's not a variable but where you do come face to face with it the reactions tend
#
to still they haven't changed substantially and to be fair I mean nothing is a magic bullet
#
so urbanization wouldn't just somehow reduce you know make caste vanish overnight I mean
#
as long as it contains incentives in the right direction you'd say fine that is sort of at
#
least a step another question I sort of want want to ask you is that one of my constant
#
laments over the years is that you know for Indians I often say that our biggest religion
#
here isn't Hinduism it's a religion of the state that anything goes wrong even if it's
#
a social problem or whatever we look to the state for solutions and you'd imagine that
#
this deep abiding faith in the power of the state to solve all your problems would go
#
away a little bit after liberalization because more people would be exposed to private enterprise
#
and would realize that we can solve our own problems there are other ways of doing this
#
and then you know find themselves empowered to sort of do that is that really the case
#
you know how the citizen relates to the state has that been changing I think I think you
#
know the the in many cases you know the state is is a way of saying not me you know I mean
#
and you know so it's it's I think I mean sort of you know this is a simplistic explanation
#
but in some ways you know are given the fact that we come from such rigidly kind of ordered
#
and intricately ordered you know social structure very sophisticated in its construction elaborate
#
set of dos and don'ts and rules and customs and also that so in a sense the order has
#
been given to us right and you operate within the rules of the order making little adjustments
#
negotiating little rooms but the structure of order is in place I think I think there's
#
a tendency to struggle when order needs to be created in an ecosystem like a city in
#
an urban habitat where structure is not that structure that you know is not given where
#
interrelationships and hierarchies and reciprocal expectations are not kind of the knowledge
#
of the bones in a sense you know it's it all has to be arrived at and negotiated I think
#
you struggle to so which is why civic order is such a problem traffic you know as a anything
#
which which is a system which needs to get organized in an overtly I think one struggles
#
to kind of to find an answer and therefore the transfer of responsibility is to another
#
body and then the transfer of responsibility can take the name of the state so I think
#
in many ways the state in that sense becomes a default kind of place where you where you
#
park the expectations that that you don't want to fulfill of yourself for the responsibility
#
you don't want to fulfill I mean that I would speculate perhaps that that is one reason
#
one reason perhaps so you know the reason I'm in Delhi is I had come for this media
#
rumble we were on a panel together there on fake news and we discussed one of your essays
#
very briefly in that called the decline of collective trust basically is the theme that
#
you were addressing and this is something I've also written about in the past that why
#
one of the reasons why fake news has sort of proliferated so much today is that back
#
in the day 80s and 90s you know we had one monolithic source of news and knowledge you
#
had that one TV station you had that one newspaper or the set of newspapers but they were they
#
would all basically be similar you had a consensus on the truth and now you that has sort of
#
vanished we get our information and knowledge from completely dispersed sources and that
#
to some extent explains the prevalence of fake news but that's a different thing I don't
#
want to discuss that here but I want to discuss how back in the day there were all these institutions
#
that were repositories of our collective trust and they gave a sense of order to society
#
and they've declined tell me a little bit about that I think you know if you if you
#
were to look at you know most institutions that we that we kind of implicitly had faith
#
in and kind of you know surrendered to there was this sense a lot of I mean a lot of institutions
#
you know the idea of an institution in some ways I mean one way of seeing it is the fact
#
that where individuals adopt a certain role and separate their own individual sort of
#
motivations from the role that they're playing and the ability to play a disinterested kind
#
of a role you know as part of a larger mechanism you know and you create a structure around
#
that and here what you'll find I think increasingly what you're seeing is the fact that you are
#
being at the first stage I think in some senses you're dismantling that belief that you have
#
by being able to see its flaws and I think this is it's natural to see that I mean the
#
fact is that the that you know journalism is a product of a vantage point that a newspaper
#
is a construction that somebody is sitting and making choices about what is called the
#
news and what is not so that there are human agents that are actually sifting through things
#
and using their own personal frameworks to sort of now tell us that this is the news
#
as brought to you by that you know x y o z and as you start becoming aware of the fact
#
that this is a construction and that and that you cannot separate the news from the newsmaker
#
the you know judicial decision from the judge the bureaucrats kind of a ruling from the
#
bureaucrat himself herself globally I think in a sense as you start looking at institutions
#
with this more critical kind of an eye it becomes easier to kind of look through them
#
and I think this is what say particularly in the case of news for instance we are now
#
we don't just watch the news you you watch through them and then you are trying to understand
#
how they get assembled so part of the reason I don't I suspect this is the entire story
#
but part of the reason is the fact that we have encouraged through perhaps a liberal
#
kind of a perspective the idea that actually you know there are multiple narratives and
#
the whole idea that there are multiple truths and there are and alternative facts no and
#
so alternative facts is a product of the idea that you know there are multiple narratives
#
that are legitimate and that you know to one meta narrative or one frozen narrative is
#
a lie in a certain sense and I think but what you have as a consequence of it I think is
#
the fact that I mean I would argue that in a sense and I'm not sure whether you'd agree
#
with this or not but there is a certain kind of an illusion a collective illusion or hypocrisy
#
if you like that is necessary for order making because it is only when all of us decide to
#
believe in I mean look at I mean I find it fascinating how you construct something like
#
this right look at a court right a courtroom is the ultimate theatrical production now
#
it's the most see the the human institution that has the most amount of power over other
#
human beings the power of life and death in our case over other people how do we accept
#
that other human beings have such a right how do we come to accept this right apart
#
from the fact that they are given that power by the by the state by also the fact that
#
you create this and this ludicrous I mean if you think about it you know kind of a cheap
#
theatrical production where people wear funny costumes but there is a set virtually there
#
is a you know somebody on a you know who's in an elevated position there are two symmetrical
#
sides there are people in robes and in some cases wigs that are you know using sort of
#
very very particular kind of language to communicate with each other and you have it's like a stage
#
production where one side gets to say it's peace and the other but it it is and you will
#
find so many them the marriages ceremony is constructed that way the I mean so many rituals
#
are paid out which actually from a rational perspective would say why do people need to
#
dress up in funny ways in order to deliver such serious things like justice and perhaps
#
the answer to that is the fact that how do you believe in how do you manufacture trust
#
how do you manufacture trust in a fundamentally at a certain level what is a lie human beings
#
don't have the ability to judge as the human beings they don't they shouldn't get to say
#
who gets to live or who gets to die there are other human beings just like you know I am but
#
we allow that to happen I think when the more we are able to kind of poke holes into that
#
and see through that and ask I think that there becomes it's relatively easy to dismantle
#
trust but it's very difficult to put it back and I think that's a you know at least one
#
aspect of this loss of trust that I find quite fascinating as to how we have come to a stage
#
where the institutions that are so necessary for us they have flaws admittedly but by being
#
really really aware of those flaws and kind of in some ways taking apart those institutions
#
you facilitate the process of destroying them in fact there are political philosophers like
#
Michael Humor and Jason Benner who would really argue that the state has legitimacy but no
#
authority and therefore the same applies to say the Supreme Court of India and I completely
#
get how they are in a sense like modern temples where you know because the church wanted you
#
to believe in Christianity it had to put up with these imposing facades and these painted
#
glass windows and all of that but how is this a threat to us that if these institutions
#
of trust collapse what is really collapsing beyond that what is the threat that can we
#
not hold together as a society without these?
#
I think the fact of the matter is that then the V becomes you know what is the glue that
#
holds the V together right? I mean so the V itself becomes I think you know becomes
#
a it already is a question but I think the sense of V comes in some ways a mirror image
#
of the binding kind of forces that allow this vast kind of diverse set of people to even
#
imagine themselves as a V. I think that the question is that and you may argue that why
#
do we need a V at all in a sense you know why do you have a small self-organizing groups
#
but I mean that's a completely different kind of model and I would not make that argument
#
I mean while I do believe in the primacy of individual rights we are social animals and
#
we need these communities and what's been interesting over the last few years is that
#
I think it is not that any particular V is being diluted but I think there are more and
#
more V's which emerge and more and more communities which are not based in geography or the concept
#
of the nation-state and I want to sort of come to one of them and this is a question
#
I've been thinking of for a long time I've asked my other guests as well you know we've
#
seen in political terms we saw a Modi wave in 2014 and we've seen it again in 2019 and
#
it's clearly here to stay and to some this is something has changed fundamentally about
#
India to others and in fact even I would argue that this is not a fundamental shift that
#
our culture has been like this throughout and it is only now found expression like the
#
sociologist Timur Koran wrote this book in 99 called Public Lives Private Truths where
#
he coined a phrase preference falsification and you know to cut a long story short the
#
basic idea was that there were impulses which within society we kept to ourselves because
#
it was not polite to express them or they were not considered you know part of the consensus
#
of how you should behave but suddenly through social media and through various other things
#
they are now finding expression and a lot of them have you know coalesced into this
#
greater assertiveness of this culture which has resulted in this Modi wave and this new
#
hunger for a Hindu Rashtra is that something you kind of agree with or has a culture also
#
changed or what really is going on here in this sudden assertiveness and I think neither
#
of us will make a value judgment on whether it is good or bad but I would tend to agree
#
I would tend to agree with the fact that I think what was scattered and sort of underground
#
has kind of coalesced and you know come to the fore I don't think this is necessarily
#
a new impulse I think this is an impulse that is it's an unresolved question but it was
#
not politically material you know it came to the fore during riots and it came to the
#
fore you know on occasions otherwise there were whispers and you know I think one of
#
the things that social media does is you know the aggregating nature of social media and
#
the fact that you know what I thought was my personal opinion and since in a sense the
#
dominant world view at that time delegitimized that perspective I could not you know sort
#
of voice it I muttered it to a few people like me and then on occasion we kind of agreed
#
on it and you know it was an implicit consensus that we had but you know it could not there
#
was no public voicing that was possible of it and then you have you know apart from the
#
fact that your political formation that kind of legitimizes not just but does so aggressively
#
but what social media I think allows you to do is that there are just the fact that you
#
recognize that there are so many people who share that same worldview and it successively
#
starts you know sort of moving up in terms of what becomes the base level of consensus
#
and the base level of what is legitimate to express and over a period of time that keeps
#
building you know on itself and it becomes more and more assertive and that's an organic
#
process apart from the fact that you may have you know you know the IT cell and all of that
#
which are which are actually just you know cranking it up but by itself there is a certain
#
organic force that it the momentum it carries because of the nature of the platform that
#
Cass Sunstein called this group polarization.
#
It is and it is also that the immediacy and the re-circulatability or whatever and the
#
fact that it's sort of global right all of it and then therefore it is you know the scale
#
is huge it allows for you know so many voices to come together and for it to become a force
#
from being these isolated strands of you know opinions that people themselves thought were
#
And does this threaten what we are as a society?
#
For example if there are tribal impulses within a society which are now finding expression
#
does that threaten the fabric of what we are as a society and a culture and was it partly
#
held together all these years by inertia?
#
I think certainly does threaten the fabric of society without question I think because
#
I think part of the way in which it society worked was the fact that you allowed for you
#
know different voices and different strands of opinion while they had a certain place.
#
So they were allocated a certain place and they were part of that world.
#
So you know you have several relatives etc. who you know that actually have that view
#
but that view is a small part of who they are.
#
It's a small part of any manifest kind of reality of their lives.
#
And so it doesn't become anything sort of you know material.
#
I think what this does is the harnessing of it as a political force and the fact that
#
it all comes together while it is both things are true at one level it always existed but
#
the form in which it has come together did not and that changes things substantially.
#
And I think what it does is that it makes it much more material and much more of a factor
#
and therefore you know changes the way that we lead our lives or the changes the way that
#
it has consequences of a very significant you know and then which of an everyday kind.
#
And I think that is I think is an important change that has happened and that today there
#
is a change of a certain kind and I must also acknowledge this that you know when we do
#
a lot of work across the country at times there is a the social and the political don't
#
At one level there is a political map and a landscape which feels full of ferment full
#
of anger full of vile abusive kind of emotions and then there is a certain placid sense of
#
continuity a certain broad sense of contentment that you often find when you if you are not
#
looking for anxiety if you're not looking for you will find anxiety but you will also
#
find a broadly sort of a continuous landscape which is a certain degree of social continuity.
#
So you do find this you know which I always struggle to reconcile because this is a reality
#
that exists and you see that reality and yet when you look at it from the everyday lives
#
of people you know while it becomes material in electoral terms or in political terms in
#
everyday life in a day to day sense you still find that it's you know life goes on as
#
usual and so I mean I you know that is a that reconciliation one often struggles to kind
#
And I don't want to be glib but would it be fair to say that both brands and political
#
parties then face the same challenge in terms of accepting that look individuals contain
#
multitudes and people are a parcel of different conflicting beliefs and values and let's say
#
if one party like the ruling party today has appealed to an individual's specific set of
#
values there are other things that other parties could possibly appeal to and therefore not
#
I think the problem of course is the fact that you know because it's not just individuals
#
and you know the share of motivation that that a party speaks to it is also the fact
#
that there is a larger ecosystem in which this happens and there is a political ecosystem
#
there's a media ecosystem and when you are able to colonize you know other ecosystems
#
then what happens is that in a real sense the options that are left you know open for
#
individuals to you know go one way or the other they get limited.
#
So in a sense you end up limiting choice not because you know by virtue of the control
#
that you are able to excise over so many different parts of his larger reality.
#
Let's speak of limiting choice in a completely different context.
#
Our mutual friend Vikram was on the show many episodes ago where he spoke about Indian food
#
and a lament there which is a common lament he's made it in columns also is the Cavendish
#
Now his funda is that look India has this incredible diversity of different kinds of
#
We send the banana to the world and then what happened is that this very anodyne tasteless
#
kind of banana called the Cavendish banana became very popular in the US and elsewhere
#
and because of economies of scale basically the Cavendish banana drove finished all these
#
other kinds of bananas and then the Cavendish banana came to India and now what is doing
#
is ironically having made that full journey back it is destroying the diversity of the
#
local banana by driving all bananas out of the market for reasons of scale and there
#
might be a time where all our local bananas with their delicious variations in taste and
#
so on might be wiped out by this one anodyne Cavendish banana the Big Mac of bananas as
#
it were and this raises a larger question of why technology and globalization are sort
#
of allowing diversity to spread and express itself.
#
Is there also a danger of a certain homogenization of culture not just in the things people consume
#
like Cavendish bananas but even in the way they think in the way the kind of art they
#
There is a very real danger of that and I think certainly the world of brands and advertising
#
sort of you know do play a fairly significant role in bringing that about so and then you
#
see that you know you see that in a variety of ways you do see the fact that there is
#
a kind of a you know narrowing of you know say how people look you know so there would
#
be that the cultural differences but say in attire that you would find you know 15 years
#
ago versus what you will find today you know you will find much less kind of so you will
#
find differences become finer and they become but the patterns become sort of the broad
#
structures narrow within that the differences become sort of more you know they're more
#
fluent kind of differences and yet at the same time because in India there is a flourishing
#
you know unorganized sector and it's interesting that partly because of the inefficiency of
#
organized markets and brands and you know you find that actual change in many ways is
#
much more fluid and dynamic at the through the unorganized sector and therefore a lot
#
of what is actually moving is still coming from local impulses and being fed by local
#
market systems rather than large big organized markets because big markets are run by people
#
who don't you know who have their influences coming in from elsewhere and the rules of
#
the game are also framed elsewhere so they understand markets in a certain way they understand
#
you know their idea for instance of fashion for instance is kind of you know Paris runway
#
downwards whereas the idea of fashion here is sort of ground up but in India the idea
#
of seasons and you're changing clothes by season is an absurd idea meaning you know
#
and yet the industry has for years followed just that there is a spring collection and
#
there is a autumn or fall collection and you're saying what is fall I mean what is you know
#
what sense does that make in right but because the you know there is so much energy in and
#
now with you know because of the fact that you have YouTube and you have TikTok and you
#
have a lot of user generated you know so much of change also comes through from peer group
#
kind of influence and which you are seeing so for instance how to use makeup how to use
#
cosmetics the number of videos you will find where people are teaching people this and
#
for years brands it is interesting that brands have a big interest in doing this but for
#
some strange reason the formal market system has never done this so the fear of a very
#
homogenized kind of it's true in some way you find it eating out you'll find in the
#
same chains across the country you will find you know so dosas you know from the really
#
local artists I mean now what we would call artists but you know just local you know little
#
stalls you will and then the coming in of private capital what it does is that it because
#
it is so invested in scale homogenizes quickly so either is that one reality that is taking
#
place but there is the other reality which is ground upwards and which has a certain
#
uncoiling of a certain amount of creative energy so I do think that there are both these
#
realities that are existing simultaneously.
#
So we're almost coming to the end of our time but I want to end by you know one of the things
#
about your writing is not just a sharp insight that it contains but a lot of it is just beautiful
#
writing and like you know when I was reading the book I found myself underlining just lovely
#
sentences so I'll quote one of them which ties into what you were saying about fashion
#
and I'll end with the final question sort of based on that and this is from an essay
#
on the NARA and you've written quote the NARA is an elegant design solution to the challenge
#
posed by our bodies solving the problem by not acknowledging it stop quote which is the
#
best sentence I've read this year and to continue quoting another part of your piece quote the
#
NARA was part of a world full of rustic wholesomeness white comfortable pajamas petticoats battered
#
by the washing bats found in every home and profoundly unsexy underwear this was a NARA's
#
natural habitat in which it roamed free the drawstring is part of another world one way
#
comfort is a fashion statement stop quote and then you know another fantastic phrase
#
by you the tyranny of fitted clothes where you say quote the tyranny of fitted clothes
#
that respect neither a full stomach nor the passing of time is something we take for granted
#
today stop quote and you know one common complaint I have had through the years which is not
#
something that you have faced definitely is that whenever I go to buy a shirt if I find
#
a shirt that fits my shoulders it makes my ponch bulge out right and if I find a shirt
#
that feels comfortable and doesn't make me look too fat it's also drooping on the shoulders
#
and this again goes back to the homogenization of all of that but whatever at my age I'm
#
comfortable in my skin and past it but the final question I wanted to end with is that
#
what has changed fundamentally in the anxieties that a young person growing up in 1989 would
#
feel as compared to the anxieties felt by a young person in 2019.
#
I think you know I mean very crudely put I think at one level you would have the idea
#
in the early 80s and 90s of having enough choices you know hoping that you have choices
#
and today the fact of you know what do you do with the multitude of choices that you
#
have and how and whether the sense that you know whether there is something still something
#
else that you are you know the whole fear of missing out kind of a thing the idea that
#
you know somehow there is you know you've not found I mean there are so many things
#
that you've what you've chosen is somehow not good enough and therefore you keep delaying
#
and postponing sort of fixing a label onto anything and making definitive commitments
#
because who knows you know that there is bound to be something even better elsewhere.
#
So I think in India this thing of I think this is a generation I mean now perhaps it's
#
not the first generation but it's certainly our generation up to our both sort of whatever
#
the difference in terms of time but I think we didn't have choices to make in fact I've
#
always argued that you look at Hindi films you know the fact that you didn't know how
#
to make choices was you know in any love triangle one person had to die you know I mean there
#
was no way to resolve nobody could choose I choose you I like you better I mean that
#
was never a possibility even if actually somebody liked somebody better the other person had
#
to die for this to happen right we could just simply not bring ourselves you know make ourselves
#
you know make choices and now I think the problem is of another kind and therefore there
#
is a restlessness and there is a sense of not settling and again not talking about everybody
#
I'm talking about you know a smaller group but I do think that that is the big problem
#
of the day is to be clear about and therefore the question of also it raises question about
#
who am I what am I really seeking I mean those questions I think were relatively simpler
#
in an earlier time where you took what you got and you were happy that you got something
#
whereas here you want something which is you know much closer to perfection than I think
#
was the quest earlier and maybe the anxiety is just figuring out what it is that you want
#
and who you are I mean there's therefore this question of saying you know this I mean the
#
definition of the self I mean if you were to look at again you know indices like twitter
#
bios and the way people describe themselves you look at the I mean you are 22 things you
#
know you're not just one you're not an accountant anymore you know it's earlier in an earlier
#
time you're to account accountant passed out from so-and-so college and that would be pretty
#
much the end of your introduction but now you are sort of deep sea divers in ideas and
#
you are kind of you know you have so many things that you describe yourself as and I
#
think at one level that that sense of self is is liberating at another level which is
#
the next adjective to use you know is is not easy to figure out so much thanks so much
#
for coming on the show I've learned a lot over the years by reading your column and
#
in this conversation today my pleasure entirely if you enjoyed listening to this episode do
#
head on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up a copy of mother pious
#
lady making sense of everyday India by Santosh Desai you can also follow his columns at the
#
Times of India the link will be in the show notes you can follow Santosh on Twitter at
#
Desai Santosh you can follow me at Amit Varma AMIT VARMA you can browse past episodes of
#
the scene and the unseen at scene unseen.in thinkprakati.com and IVM podcast.com the scene
#
and the unseen are supported by the Takshashila Institution an independent center for research
#
and education in public policy Takshashila offers 12 week courses in public policy tech
#
policy and strategic studies for both full-time students and working professionals visit Takshashila
#
dot org dot in for more details thank you for listening are you looking for India's
#
most awesome cricket podcast are you now tired of listening to the same old guys drawn on
#
about cricket everywhere edges and sledges is a weekly cricket podcast hosted by three
#
fans of the game Varun DJ and myself Ashwin it was established in early 2018 has over
#
60 episodes now and is of course now proud to be on the IVM podcast network each week
#
we get together from three different time zones the USA the UK and Singapore and we
#
talk about things from the world of cricket with a focus on Indian cricket we often interview
#
special guests from all around the world including former cricketers and cricket media personalities
#
so check out edges and sledges the cricket podcast now on the IVM network are you constantly
#
seeking happiness wondering how to make the most of every day how not to let your inhibitions
#
stop you from achieving your goals it's now time to get your a game on it's time to unlock
#
your true potential tune in to the empowering series with me Zarina Poonawalla to feel empowered
#
in all genres of life from behavioral skills to management skills from health to relationships
#
from mental well-being to emotional well-being and of course your finances I've got you covered
#
with these tips and tricks from me Zarina and true life stories from my amazing guests
#
you're bound to bring your purest to the table tune in to the empowering series with Zarina
#
Poonawalla every Thursday on the IVM podcast app website or wherever you listen to podcasts
