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One of my favorite quotes about writing comes from the great Susan Sontag, who said, quote,
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a writer is someone who pays attention to the world, stop quote.
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Now, that might seem banal, don't we all pay attention to the world?
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The truth is that we don't.
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All of us tend to get drawn into our comfort zone, not just in terms of physical spaces,
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but also the mental maps we draw of the world, the frames of reference with which we see
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everything around us, even the universe of acceptable facts outside of which no facts
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This is why art is so important.
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It can take us outside of ourselves, even into someone else's head and someone else's
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This is also why journalism and narrative nonfiction are so important.
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They can reveal a part of the world in such vivid detail that we come alive for a moment
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and see everything differently.
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This is why Tom Wolfman said, quote, nonfiction is the most important literature to come out
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of the second half of the 20th century, stop quote.
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And in times which are so complex, when we are surrounded by such simplistic narratives,
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I would argue that we need nonfiction more than ever before to make sense of this world
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Saman Subramanian, a journalist whose narrative nonfiction has appeared in
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publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, Harper's,
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He is also the author of three acclaimed books, the most recent of which is A Dominant Character,
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The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S.
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Saman is also a legendary Indian quizzer, and he used to be my colleague at Crickenfow
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around 17 years ago, which is so far back that if you wrote a book about it today, it
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would qualify as a book of history.
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I was eager to get him on The Seen and the Unseen to talk about his new book, and I also
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wanted to chat with him about an art he has mastered, the art of narrative nonfiction.
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So this episode is therefore an episode of two halves.
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The first is about writing, and the second is about Saman's book on J.B.S.
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Holden, which is a fascinating study of a great scientist and a flawed human being.
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Before we get to our conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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If you enjoy listening to The Seen and the Unseen, you can play a part in keeping the
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The Seen and the Unseen has been a labor of love for me.
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I've enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe,
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and hopefully yours as well.
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But while the work has been its own reward, I don't actually make much money off the show.
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Although The Seen and the Unseen has great numbers, advertisers haven't really woken
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up to the insane engagement level of podcasts, and I do many many hours of deep research
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for each episode, besides all the logistics of producing the show myself.
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Scheduling guests, booking studios, paying technicians, the travel and so on.
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So well, I'm trying a new way of keeping this thing going, and that involves you.
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My proposition for you is this, for every episode of The Seen and the Unseen that you
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enjoy, buy me a cup of coffee, or even a lavish lunch, whatever you feel is worth.
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You can do this by heading over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contributing an amount of
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This is not a subscription.
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The Seen and the Unseen will continue to be free on all podcast apps and at sceneunseen.in.
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This is just a gesture of appreciation.
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Help keep this thing going, sceneunseen.in slash support.
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Samant, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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Samant, you know, before we get started and get to this book, let's talk a bit about sort
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of your personal life and your personal journey.
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You know, I've known you for a long time.
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We were, of course, colleagues at Quicken 4, and you know, so I've known you as a
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quizzer, as a writer, and as someone who's always also very interestingly thinking at a meta level
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about these things and writing about them as well.
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Tell me a bit about, you know, how you grew up, how did you become a quizzer?
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Were you a voracious reader?
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What were your early influences like?
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I think I was always a reader.
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I mean, I remember the first sort of book of quote, unquote, serious literature that
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I read was Smith Journalist by P.G.
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Woodhouse that somebody gave me back in the day, very sort of prophetically, I guess.
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And I was, you know, until then, I'd been reading comic books and adventure novels like
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The Hardy Boys, and this gave me a taste of what a real book could do and what real language
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And I think that sort of hooked me.
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And so throughout my childhood, that was what I did.
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You know, I was not a very sporty kid.
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I was asthmatic, and so there was not a lot of activities I could pursue outside.
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And so I would stay indoors and read.
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And I think my quizzing sort of came out of that because when I read, I found that I was
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reasonably good at retaining what I read, but more importantly, I used to like to read
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across genres, across topics, you know, not just fiction at the time, but, you know, nonfiction
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And I would even sort of, as the cliche goes, read the newspaper packets in which the roasted
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peanuts were sold when they were sold to you.
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So, you know, I mean, it was that kind of reader.
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The quizzing, I think, started when I was in school, and I've just sort of never given
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I think I started around the ninth grade in Chennai where I was living at the time.
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And it was just, it was such a sort of good community of people and such an interactive
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activity at the time that I just, I decided I just wanted to do this all the time.
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Let's kind of talk a bit about quizzing.
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You wrote this super piece on quizzing for the Guardian, which was selling from the show
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notes, where at one point you said, quote, whatever I'm doing at any point of the day
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is probably safe to assume that I would rather be quizzing, stop quote.
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And at another point you say, you drink to forget, you quiz to remember.
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And you know, one of the things I was struck by was how you refer to a friend of yours
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calling quizzing an act of bricolage, you know, a term that Levi Strauss used to talk about
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how, you know, different small ideas can be mixed and, you know, bring about something
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new, which seems to me to be both sort of a theme of, you know, a guiding philosophy
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of Haldane himself and we'll get to the book shortly, but also something that also seems
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to drive you in the sense that the subjects that you've written on are very eclectic
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And it seems that even when you wrote about cricket, for example, you brought a lens to
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it, which was not necessarily off cricket.
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You've spoken about how, you know, when you wrote about cricket, you looked at it as a
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metaphor for a bigger thing.
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So it's almost, you know, as I said earlier, that you are kind of stepping back from every
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subject you're writing about and you're applying all of these different things.
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Is that how you see yourself as well?
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And is that part of, you know, what makes you a very good quizzer and then what drives
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your writing that it's not just a subject you're writing about, you're bringing everything
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That's an interesting question.
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So there's two things here.
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And I think we can, one is just what you might call in whatever limited form it is, my philosophy
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of writing or of journalism, and we can come to that later because maybe there's more to
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The second is just, as you put it, is this kind of magpie-like obsession and fascination
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with small, interesting things.
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And then also sort of a curiosity to see what all those things build into.
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You know, I think a lot of this comes from people that you and I would both have read
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when we were growing up, you know, for example, in the nineties, still, for a lot of people,
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the archetypal cricket writer was Cardas.
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And Cardas famously was a music critic for the Manchester Guardian, even as he was a
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And he brought that same approach to his cricket writing, in my opinion.
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He brought a knowledge of the world with him when he went into the stadium to watch.
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And it was not just a question of analyzing the game for its own sake, but a question
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of drawing bigger themes out of it.
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I think that is interesting to me because once you have perfected, it's too strong a
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word, but once you become addicted to that approach, you can then apply it to anything.
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You can kind of read and write about science and you can draw these themes out.
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You can look at sport, you can look at art and culture.
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It's all in the process itself, the process of viewing, of regarding these subjects as
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And the thing is that we will always be an outsider, you know, I mean, there is in cricket
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writing, for example, there is always the eternal conundrum of why people who are not
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able to play a James Anderson delivery should be writing about how this batsman out in the
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cricket field should be doing that.
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You know, we are not able to do it.
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Why should we comment on it?
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And I know a number of cricketers who have held this view in the past.
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But I think, you know, to bring this particular philosophy of viewing and regarding and analyzing
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to bear is to privilege that outsiders to a certain extent and to privilege what the
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outsider brings by way of insight and perception.
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So I think that's where all of this comes from.
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And bricolage is a part of that.
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I mean, the quizzing is a part of that in the sense that you are reading about and learning
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about secondhand or even thirdhand a lot of these topics.
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But in your own particular way, they somehow add up into something, you know, a larger
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answer or if you're setting a question, a larger question, which is interesting in its
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own right in that particular moment.
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So I have a couple of larger questions relating to what you just said, but a couple of mundane
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things that I'm genuinely curious about that, you know, for the benefit of my listeners
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and tell them that, you know, when Samant and I were colleagues at Cricket for long
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ago and I hadn't heard of his quizzing prowess at the time to me, he was just another young
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colleague and there was this quiz we heard about in Mulund of all places and our office
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was in Andheri and we said, let's go and take part.
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So we went as a team in this rickety auto all the way to Mulund.
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And to my basically what happened in the quiz was Samant answered every single question
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and just won it on his own.
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And everybody else, including me, was kind of like a spectator after which, you know,
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I think one gentleman in the audience came to you and said, are you that guy from Chennai
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who wears a cap backwards?
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And it then turned out that you were a legend and that was like an iconic image of you with
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that cap backwards and all that.
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So the mundane questions I sort of want to get out is regarding A, your reading habits
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and B, then your retention habits because obviously, you know, all regular quizzes in
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the circuit that you are part of and I was very briefly part of not good enough to stay
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All of us, you know, look askance at the notion that quizzes are just memorizing stuff and
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So there is an element of that you've wrote in your Guardian piece about how Pat Gibson
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keeps Excel files and, you know, he'll have across categories, he'll give different files
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and note down up to a hundred facts a day.
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But you know, most quizzes when they quiz, it's like a deductive process.
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You're bringing all your knowledge to bear and you're really working out problems as
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So my sort of two part question is that what was the process of retention like barring
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the fact that you read very widely, did you also have to take specific efforts to make
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sure you remembered or categorized information?
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And apart from that, what was your reading like and what is your reading like?
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How much would you read?
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How would you pick what you read?
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There's a cultural difference here actually, which is quite interesting and my, you know,
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I didn't have time to get into in my Guardian piece, but it's, it might be interesting for
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our listeners here, which is that in the US and in the UK, quizzing is, is about memorization
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and memory and retention to a far greater extent than it is in India.
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So you know, the Pat Gibson's of the world when they compete, compete in something like
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the world quizzing championship, a lot of their prowess comes from having, you know,
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created these databases and these lists of facts, which they then sort of revise almost.
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It's very much a student like activity over here.
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It's not like that in India, I feel.
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I mean, India is my big theory about this is that Indian quizzing has grown up as a
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reaction to Indian education because Indian education is already so steep in rote learning
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and memorization that Indian quizzing is like some form of lateral thinking exercise that
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has grown up as a reaction to that.
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And so in India, the quizzing revolves largely around what you might call the interesting
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bit of trivia, the piece of information that sits at slightly odd angles to the rest of
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And just because of that oddity, you remember it as soon as you read it.
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I mean, it's just, it's not an effort to memorize it in any particular way.
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And so I think I have never, and I know a number of my friends and colleagues in the
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quizzing world have never gone in for the pure retention exercise.
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I mean, the truth is definitely that we all have possibly quite good memories and we will
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remember a lot of what we read because we read widely, we tend to just remember a lot
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of those things, but that's never the, it is the basis, but that is never the key.
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The key to unlock a lot of these baroque Indian quiz questions is a particular kind of lateral
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thinking that kicks in depending on the framing of the question and these facts that, as I
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said, slip, sit at slightly odd angles to the rest of the world.
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So that is a charm of Indian quizzing, I feel.
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And so retention is important, but secondly, in my opinion, in terms of importance.
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My reading itself has tended to vary over the years as all of us have experienced.
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I used to read a lot more fiction than I do now to my regret.
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I went through a phase, I think about five or six years ago when I realized, I kind of
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looked back upon my calendar year and I realized I had just not read that many books.
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And this was, of course, again, something we've all experienced the profusion of the
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internet and various other things.
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And I was reading and I continue to read a lot of magazine pieces because of my own work.
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And so that takes out a lot of my reading time.
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And so I decided I would make a conscious effort to read more books for one year.
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I set a target of a book a week, at least to read more challenging books.
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I felt that habit had gone out of the window to sort of read books that maybe you have
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to read passages two or three times to get the import of that.
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So I started doing that and it's gone reasonably well.
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Some months are better than others.
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You read a lot for work anyway.
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So sometimes at the end of the day, the last thing you want to do is pick up yet another
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But the range is there, fortunately, and partly that this is because of the eclectic
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range of topics that I work on for my journalism.
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So you tend to read across subjects anyway, but then also my own interests just lie in
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So I will look at book reviews and try to figure out what is new and interesting that
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So right now, for example, I'm reading this book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett called
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Darwin's Dangerous Idea, which is an extremely dense and very, very rigorously thought out
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piece of writing about how the idea of natural selection, Darwin's idea of natural selection,
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the world, but also sort of why it was dangerous in the sense of how it upset a lot of preconceived
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notions about the world and how those preconceived notions were put in place by the power of
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structures that were around in the 19th century.
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And so how it was, quote unquote, dangerous to all of these power structures, but it goes
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I mean, he goes into computer science and algorithms and he goes into systems and how
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systems and processes work.
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It's very much a magpie-like approach to evolution and natural selection, which is why I was
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attracted to the book when I first read about it.
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And it's definitely one of those extremely difficult books because you have to kind of
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immerse yourself in it for a month at least to get a sense of it.
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And so obviously in the middle of all of that, I will sometimes read, as I did this time,
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So I read A Perfect Murder by H.R.F.
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Keating, which I've been meaning to get to for a long time.
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So it's, as I said, it's varied and weird and quite whimsical sometimes.
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Yeah, I read Darwin Dangerous idea a few years ago and Love, as well as Consciousness Evolved,
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which is another book by him, which is sort of sitting right here, very rewarding, right?
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I just realized that, you know, one thing that kind of resuscitated my own reading habit
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was that when I started doing the podcast, I had to read a lot for research, often multiple
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books for a particular episode.
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And then just the practice of reading so many books for work also makes it easier to read
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And I guess that's the case with you also, as you said.
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But thought that strikes me.
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And this is something that came up in the last episode I recorded with Russ Roberts
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of Econ Talk fame as well.
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You know, is that how much the technology around us and the gadgets around us can change
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who we are as a people by changing our experience of how we imbibe knowledge, like back in the
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day, if you're reading a book, you're taking a book, you're sitting down with it.
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And there isn't that much distracting you relatively.
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I mean, those lack of distractions also indicate why for so many decades, that circuit was
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But today we are sort of surrounded by distractions and what these distractions inevitably mean
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is that we are constantly in a state of shallow skimming, that we rarely have the time and
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the attentional bandwidth to be able to immerse ourselves in something.
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So a lot of people like I find that when I'm not actually sitting and reading a book, I'm
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not reading anything, you know, longish stuff on the internet or whatever, you know, it's
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just you're on social media, you're chasing different dopamine rushes, Twitter notifications
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And how you discover content is you're following links from here and there.
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And if you want to know something about a subject, you'll do a quick Google search and
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you might read a couple of articles in the Wikipedia page, but it's all incredibly shallow.
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And because the knowledge that we consume and which is our learning, therefore, is what
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shapes us as people, you know, would say either of us have been grown up to be different people
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I mean, I'm just kind of thinking aloud.
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I mean, I always say the guy who has a lot to answer for in the history of technology
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is a guy who invented the alt tab shortcut has basically kind of completely destroyed
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us in that single stroke.
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I mean, it's interesting because, you know, 20 years down, we look at kids who grew up
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We'll see the kind of work that they do.
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I mean, in the sense of both creative work, because creative work, I think, requires some
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sort of sustained attention to what you're doing, but also other forms of work.
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And maybe there's a, you know, you, for example, have been writing and thinking about TikTok
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And TikTok as a form of creativity is quite ripe for our age, right?
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I mean, it's that short attention span, but how creative you can be within those confines
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is something that I guess we will only find out once all of this has reached a certain
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kind of fruition and maturity and we can look back upon it and assess it on its own terms.
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I mean, right now, TikTok is mostly a diversion, sometimes a Chinese security threat, but not
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yet kind of full-fledged creative form in its own right.
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I mean, we'll have to see what kind of creative fruit this bears.
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No, I'm a big fan of TikTok.
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Of course, what all of this shallow surfing could also indicate is it could enable the
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different kind of bricolage, but to sort of get back to the, the couple of questions I
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had from what you said earlier, one is, you know, you often looked at cricket as a metaphor
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for other things, or if you're writing about subject X, you'll also bring to bear upon
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it a larger view of the world and of society and all of those things.
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And it strikes me that there is also a danger in that.
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For example, you've also spoken about how, I mean, all writers will speak about how you
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want to avoid cliched language.
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You also said you want to avoid cliched ideas and that's also important and that's something
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that you're conscious of.
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And it strikes me that the danger of sort of, you know, having these different lenses through
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which you look at the world and applying it to different things.
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The danger can also be that, you know, you have a bunch of hammers and you apply one
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of them to every nail and you're not kind of going beyond that.
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I mean, just as an example, thinking aloud, you know, if you look at something like the
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IPL, for example, depending on your ideology, one, you can come at the IPL either from a
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point of view of, oh, this is capitalist greed and this is a corruption of what the spirit
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of the game is all about.
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And you know, longer cricket reveals character and blah, blah, blah.
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And you can bemoan the commercialization.
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If you come from another ideological lens and you can talk about that, no, it empowers
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so many people and expands the reach of the game and look, it's got women viewing the
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game and so many more cricketers make money from the game and the incentives for kids
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coming into the game have changed for the better and all of those things.
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And danger there is that, you know, whatever lens you bring to bear, it expands your view
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because you're obviously not just looking at, you know, the sport alone or IPL alone.
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You're bringing other things to bear on it, but it can also constrict your view because
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it is a particular lens.
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And I'm assuming that as someone who's sort of taken a meta approach where you, you know,
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you don't just write, but you think about writing at a broader level.
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Is this something that you've thought about and is this something that you have to watch
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out for in yourself that am I going in there with a particular lens or a preconceived narrative
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and to what extent is it necessary and to what extent would you need to watch out for
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The fundamental truth is that I think everybody goes into everything with a preconceived lens.
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We all know this already.
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And so there is no such, the myth of the objective journalist has long been shattered and replaced
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by hopefully the myth of the fair and at least balanced journalists.
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But this would be a problem.
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I think if I was an opinion writer, I think if I was commenting on things, I think if
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I was commenting on things and doing nothing but that, it would be a very difficult thing
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because you would, as you say, only have a limited set of hammers that you would bring
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to bear on everything that came before you as a journalist.
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I feel there is a deeper rigor, which is quite enjoyable, which is that whatever lens or
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ideology it is that you bring to bear on something, it is then your responsibility to go out and
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find quote unquote proof of that.
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You have to illustrate, you have to show, for example, how the IPL has empowered people,
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who it has empowered, what their stories are, what are these stories of empowerment, where
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did they come from and where have they come to.
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If you think the IPL is a machine for corruption, you have to show how it is a machine for corruption,
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what kind of hyper capitalist excesses it indulges in and how it's distorting the game.
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I find that there is where the power lies in the kind of work that I and many others
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like to do, which is that it is not only a question of telling, it is a question of showing.
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And it is not only a question of postulating, it is a question of then going out in some
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limited way and proving.
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And that is also where I can indulge my absolute love for narrative.
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I mean, just the fact that you can tell a story and through that story, these themes
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can sometimes even be implicit.
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You don't even need to sort of explicitly make them clear the way an opinion writer
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This is also, by the way, why I have a huge amount of respect for people who write opinions
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on a daily or a weekly basis.
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People like you and Mehir Sharma and many others, people who are able to somehow sort
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of bring a certain freshness to each column and not make it seem as if it is all a question
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of just looking at the world through these set of lenses.
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I am unable to do that for some reason.
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I think it's because I perhaps I don't have as many opinions as I would like.
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They are not as fleshed out as I would like.
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But fortunately, my job gives me the liberty to feed my opinions and nurture them and nourish
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them by going out and doing this kind of reporting.
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And that is something that I think then I sort of transmit to the reader.
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So there are a few cases in which I've gone into a story, not at least in my view, not
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having a particularly strong opinion on it and coming out of it with a particularly strong
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There are many other instances where, as you say, I've gone in knowing what I think and
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kind of looking at narratives that I think tell that larger truth.
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And in fact, I must at this point say that I found all your journalism and your book
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on Haldane and all that extremely fair and balanced and a model of how journalism should
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But it also strikes me, like you illustrated with the kind of questions that you brought
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up that different people chasing that IPL story from different angles might ask, that
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the fact is that you can actually write that story from both points of view.
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You can find evidence of the grand corruption, the degrading of the skills in the game, all
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But you can also find evidence of the empowerment and all of that.
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And to some extent, the choice of what material you gather, what angle you take, what questions
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you ask and who you ask those questions to also kind of shapes a piece.
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But I guess you've sort of already answered that.
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But you know, for those of my listeners who might wonder, like, of course, no one is subjective.
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We all bring our own bags of biases to bear on anything that we do.
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But given that you made a distinction between objective on the one hand and fair and balanced
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So can you define fair and balanced a little bit?
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Yeah, that's a good question.
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I mean, because even that is actually there's a lot of talk about what it means to balance
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So in my view, fair and balanced is not so much a question of what the output looks like
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as what the procedural aspect of journalism is.
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So for example, if X has said something about Y, it is my responsibility as far as it is
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possible to go to Y and ask him or her what they think about this and whether they would
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like to say something in return.
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Now this, you know, this applies very much in the case of these cases where, you know,
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it is about people talking about each other, which happens quite often in journalism.
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The bigger debate in journalism that has come up now about balance is when you are tackling
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things like climate change, there is a huge resistance now to the fact that you have to
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be balanced when you're presenting a new set of climate change data.
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You have to also necessarily include on your panel of experts on TV or in your story as
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a talking head, somebody who is a climate change denier.
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That kind of balance, I think, is not what I'm talking about.
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And it's something that we have increasingly come to learn is fruitless.
#
I mean, if there are 99.5% of scientists out there who think that climate change is real,
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it is not incumbent upon you to seek out the other 0.5% and ask them and include their
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views just for the sake of quote unquote balance.
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I don't think that's the kind of balance we're talking about here.
#
Fairness is probably a better word for it because then there is a responsibility that
#
comes upon the journalist to decide what is fair.
#
You know, fairness is subjective.
#
Again, everything is subjective.
#
And you have to decide whether if somebody has said something about a topic, whether
#
there is a value to be added to the story or a truth to be gained about the story by
#
talking to people from quote unquote the other side.
#
I think that is so it's a procedural thing that you wrestle with on a day to day basis
#
as you're reporting the story itself.
#
The output may or may not reflect it.
#
And this is where this whole notion of journalists being gatekeepers of these kind of narratives
#
comes into play because as a journalist, you are actually deciding well for the stories
#
out what is important and what is not, what truth is better reflected by what kind of
#
writing and what kind of quotes that you include.
#
I mean, you know, and so you have to unfortunately hope that readers repose a certain amount
#
of trust in you and in the institution to be able to discern all these various aspects
#
of truth and fairness and objectivity and balance.
#
You know, the another example of, for example, Quest for Balance used to be, you know, in
#
a subject that you've written about is when people used to insist that if you're talking
#
to, you know, someone who believes in natural selection, you also must have an intelligent
#
design guy out there, thereby implying an equivalence and that kind of balance is, I
#
mean, just nonsensical.
#
You know, tell me a little bit about your process of writing nonfiction.
#
And even before that, like, you know, of course, you went to the US in the eight nineties to
#
study journalism and then you went again to Columbia to study IR after your crick and
#
But before that, what shaped your ideas of what, you know, narrative nonfiction were?
#
Because I remember, you know, growing up in India, as I did in the eighties and the nineties,
#
you didn't really, unless you were very privileged, which I have to accept I was, you didn't really
#
get to read much great writing of this sort.
#
You had access to a whole bunch of great books, but pre-internet, you didn't really have access
#
to great long form journalism.
#
You know, what was that process like of discovering what journalism can do?
#
And you know, is your, you know, desire to be a writer of narrative nonfiction, something
#
that happened gradually, or did you know early on that that's the kind of writing you wanted?
#
You know, like many other people, I think growing up in India in the nineties, I had
#
no exposure to any of these great writers and magazines that published narrative journalism.
#
I think, you know, when I went to study journalism and after I came back for a long time, my
#
idea of what I wanted to do, what kind of journalism I wanted to, was driven very much
#
And we go back again to, you know, the books that maybe all of us read in the eighties
#
and the nineties, growing up, you know, books where we came to admire literary style, a
#
certain kind of literary style.
#
For me, that was sort of the driver of good writing itself.
#
And that was the pillar of it.
#
And so this was one of the reasons why I got into cricket writing, for example, because
#
I thought cricket was the kind of arena that would allow a certain literariness to flourish.
#
I didn't realize at the time that the era when you could be literally in your cricket
#
writing at long past for the most part, and that, you know, there was a lot more sort
#
of day to day journalistic rigor and stripped away language that went into cricket writing
#
But I thought at the time that that is what I wanted to do.
#
And then I, you know, beyond, I tried a number of other things.
#
You know, after I quit cricket for, I was a film critic for a little while.
#
And again, I thought that that was a way in which I could indulge my love of the language
#
I would write features for newspapers, I would write travel pieces, but all of these were
#
still sort of what you might call, you know, medium form journalism, right?
#
Maybe 1000, 1500 words at the most.
#
And then I think in this must have been around 2003 or 2004, which is when you must also
#
remember this, the New Yorker famously decided that they would sell 80 years of archival
#
issues on a set of DVDs.
#
And I splashed out for one of those DVDs and they arrived by courier to my house in Chennai.
#
And I would, I just started sort of picking articles and writers at random and reading
#
And I would simultaneously also read on these new websites that were springing up Slate
#
and Salon, all of these websites that were doing longer journalism.
#
I think even the New Yorker at the time had started to have a website where they put the
#
So anyway, so I would read all of this stuff and I was entranced by this because I think
#
I felt here was a perfect marriage of all of these things that I loved, which is that
#
a writer was not necessarily wedded to one beat story after story.
#
There was a certain flexibility of structure, stories serve different functions.
#
They went into elements like character and plot and scene.
#
And importantly for me at least is that there was a certain encouragement of imaginative
#
language, literary language.
#
When I read those stories, I think I felt as if I'd finally found a form in which I
#
could, which I wanted to occupy.
#
Now from doing that to actually occupying it, it was like a completely different ball
#
game altogether involving a lot of luck.
#
But I think that was when I think it was around 2004, 2005, when I read these articles on
#
these DVDs that I decided that if I wanted, you know, sort of for me at least the ideal
#
kind of journalistic work that I wanted to pursue was that kind.
#
And it also I think suited, and this is a huge confession, but it also just suited my
#
own metabolism of work.
#
I had tried and completely failed at doing big journalism that requires you to sort of,
#
you know, pursue the same topic day after day and write stories almost day after day.
#
Each story is sort of an expansion on the previous one, each story running at around
#
I found I didn't enjoy it, I wasn't cut out for it.
#
You know, the inherent problem is laziness as it always is with me.
#
And so therefore this, with this piece or these kind of pieces, I felt that I had time,
#
sometimes months to think and to read and maybe sometimes not to think about it, to
#
put it away for a while and come back before I started writing it.
#
So when I realized all of these things, I think maybe that is around the time that I
#
decided this is the kind of work I wanted to do.
#
So you know, before we continue with the process, a brief digression, something I wonder what
#
I mean, you're a little younger than me, but we grew up around the same time.
#
I think you're four or five years younger than me, perhaps.
#
You know, so I teach this writing course online and you know, one of the sort of bad habits
#
I warn my students again, which is something that Indians especially seem to have internalized
#
in their writing is the use of these pompous phrases, like instead of stop, they'll be
#
like put an end to and instead of now they'll be like at this moment in time and always
#
a use of, you know, bigger Latinate words where shorter Anglo-Saxon words will do.
#
So you know, like enable or fructify or even, you know, technical language like that.
#
And I once thought that struck me as I was saying that one, I have a feeling that this
#
is more commonplace in India than elsewhere.
#
But two, I think one reason for that that I have speculated and I wonder what your views
#
are is that part of it is because we carry this post-colonial baggage that English is
#
And therefore one way of signaling how sophisticated you are or where you stand in society is somehow
#
showing, you know, quote unquote, good English.
#
And that includes showing bigger words and, you know, the mastery of phrases like this,
#
the mastery of cliches.
#
Like I don't, you know, when we were both cricket writers in the early 2000s, one of
#
the things that struck me was that a lot of the older cricket writers wore their mastery
#
of cliches as a badge of pride.
#
It was a feature, not a bug.
#
It was a good thing to have a cliche for every occasion.
#
And you know, so question number one, do you think that's kind of true?
#
And question number two, is that something that in your own writing, did you see an evolution
#
of the sort of writing, which was, I mean, on the one hand, of course, we were reading
#
great books and reading great writers from abroad.
#
But on the other hand, we were surrounded by this sort of language around us and in
#
Is that something you have to consciously think about and fight against?
#
Did your style evolve, you know, in a mindful way or did it sort of organically just through
#
reading good writing become what it is?
#
No, I think you're definitely right.
#
In addition to the marker of class aspect that you mentioned, I think there is also
#
the question of, you know, the sort of lag with which we in India received a lot of what
#
you might call literature.
#
And so I think in the 80s and 90s, we were not yet at least, I mean, not a lot of us
#
We were not reading the kind of stripped away new journalism kind of thing.
#
I mean, you would read some Hemingway, but you would also often read a lot of 19th century
#
British literature and British literature was florid and it was ornate and you know,
#
so you would read that and you would kind of internalize those words and think that
#
they were just to be used in everyday writing, not realizing that time had in a sense passed
#
And so I think that was, you know, one of the key drivers of this, the kind of literature
#
you read growing up in school as part of your non-detailed exercises or whatever, was all
#
sort of from a particular era, it was set in stone, it was frozen in time and you internalize
#
that in your classroom and then you move out and you just continue to think that that is
#
a marker of good writing.
#
And of course, we all know that Indian bureaucrats, for example, still use a lot of pompous obfuscatory
#
So you see that kind of stuff in government documents and releases and that then makes
#
its way into the newspapers and Indian newspapers were for a long time notorious for the usage
#
of government ease as well.
#
And so it was just all around you at that time, I felt, and there was no internet to
#
update you on how people were writing at this particular moment in time in the nineties.
#
So that was, and it definitely, again, this is a question purely of privilege and nothing
#
The fact that I was able to go away just after school for university to study journalism
#
and be exposed at what was still quite a formative age to people consider good writing.
#
And what is actually, I think, in my view, good writing, which is to strip away a lot
#
of the pomp around language.
#
I still haven't done it to the extent that I think a lot of my colleagues do.
#
I still do like a certain element of play in language, a certain inventiveness.
#
I will sometimes sort of use uncommon synonym for a common word if I think it fits into
#
the rhythm of a sentence or if it fits into the context.
#
But what a lot of this did and what reading a lot of this did forced me to actively, consciously
#
as you say, question how language works and when it is permissible or even desirable to
#
use an uncommon synonym for a common word, as I said.
#
If I may actually have a particular use and connotation in a particular sentence, it is
#
just a question of knowing when that is and knowing that those instances don't come by
#
as often as you think they might.
#
So you know, as you made this sort of shift towards longer writing, longer narrative nonfiction
#
and you in fact said that your comfort zone is in the seven to eight thousand word piece
#
What are the early memorable pieces that you remember and what are your learnings along
#
What would your process be like when you set out writing one of those?
#
I mean, between my reading of these and my writing of these, I think there was like a
#
good six year period, I mean, before I began to work on my first piece.
#
But I remember among the first ones, the first pieces I read, there were a lot of, you know,
#
Liebling, who was a New Yorker writer who wrote a lot on boxing, on food and on the
#
Second World War in France, again, eclectic range of subjects.
#
I remember reading him and enjoying him thoroughly because I think he was sort of funny and irreverent
#
when it came to two out of these three subjects.
#
He was quite serious about boxing and, you know, he was again hugely inventive with the
#
language in a way that has gone away to a large extent in American journalism now, but
#
was still back in the day in the 1930s and 40s was still a feature of the journalism.
#
And I loved reading him.
#
And I remember buying a compendium of his book, of his articles and devouring that.
#
I remember reading a lot of Calvin Trillin, who was a food writer.
#
I read a lot of Joan Didion, her essays from California.
#
I mean, all of this stuff was introduced to me again in the early part of the 2000s, either
#
by people who I had gone to college with or people who had read these in the US and pressed
#
And in all of these, I mean, I was just, I would read them almost.
#
And this is, again, the sort of foundation of a particular kind of narrative journalism
#
is that they should read almost like fiction.
#
And so this is how I would read these pieces.
#
I mean, they were almost sort of fictive in their effect.
#
You could read them and not realize that you were reading nonfiction at all.
#
And that appealed to me enormously.
#
And so when it came time to write sort of my first piece, I think the first piece I
#
would have written in this vein was Profile of Lalit Modi for Caravan.
#
I think that was the first long piece I actively set out to do.
#
And so all of that, I mean, I was just like, wait, it was like an explosion of desire to
#
write these kind of pieces and, you know, all of these ideas and things I've been thinking
#
about for the last six or seven or eight years, all sort of came out, I think, in that 8,000
#
word piece on Lalit Modi, which came out in, I think, 2011.
#
And you know, one of the things that is sort of notable about the Lalit Modi piece is,
#
you know, which sort of marked it out from the sort of stuff you would read in India
#
at that time is the accretion of details, you know, in your very first para, you sort
#
of quoted the Libchurian talking about how he's very fast with SMS, he has to think as
#
fast as he types, which immediately, you know, gives you one little picture of the guy, then
#
you talk about how he smokes a cigarette.
#
So not just a tale of he would smoke ceaselessly, but even the show of he would begin a cigarette,
#
drag on it a couple of times, and then toss it away as if, you know, all of that.
#
So when you write a story, like if we talk about process now, and you begin work on a
#
story, like I'm guessing there are two sort of distinct phases, and one is where you conceptualize
#
a story and you start getting the material together.
#
And the other would be when you actually sit down and write it.
#
So at the stage when you start getting the material together, you know, what is your
#
process like, because I'm guessing here, you see, it seems as if you have to be simultaneously
#
mindful of two different kinds of narrative elements.
#
One is the key narrative of what is happening and what people have done and all of that.
#
And the other is you're also looking for these rich, vivid details, which can then make that
#
work, you know, shine in a novelistic way, sort of to say, so how do you think about
#
How do you go about it?
#
You know, how do you take notes?
#
I'm just very curious about that process.
#
I mean, I feel like all of this has changed over time for me also.
#
I mean, the way I do it now is there's three phases, actually, there's sort of once the
#
story has been pitched and accepted, we can get to pitching and accepting later if that's
#
like of interest to you.
#
But once it's been accepted, I then set out to do a whole bunch of reading that never
#
I would just go out and start reporting immediately because I thought that's what journalists
#
Now, I think like, I, you know, I buy a couple of books, I go online and read everything
#
that has already been written, right?
#
I'm midway through researching a profile now and I had to read three books, two of them
#
were memoirs written by this guy before I even could start.
#
It is important when you go into that world to be as prepared as you can be, which is
#
not something I thought much about earlier.
#
You know, the second thing is, of course, this whole roster of interviews, the more
#
the better for Lalit Madhya, I think I had like 30 or 40 interviews.
#
And it is difficult, it is surprisingly difficult to get people to describe Amit.
#
I don't know what your experience has been with this, but when I, you know, when you
#
ask them to describe a room, when you ask them to describe a person's habits, when you
#
ask them to describe what it is like to be around someone or to be in a particular place,
#
I don't know whether it is, it's just that we have not learned to do this as much as
#
we should or whether we don't pay attention to these details or whether we think they're
#
not important when they tell the story of somebody like Lalit Modi, it's more important
#
to focus on his achievements and on his character.
#
So it was, you know, it's an enormous sort of challenge to draw this out of people.
#
I mean, there are some Americans for some reason tend to do this much better than anyone
#
They are immediately thinking in terms of almost cinematic terms.
#
They will tell you sort of, even if you want them to talk about the theme and their work,
#
they will tell that to you, they will narrate that to you in a story like fashion.
#
It's uncanny, almost uniformly and no one else in the world, no other culture in the
#
world sort of manages to do that.
#
So in my opinion, what has usually worked is that you start off by allowing them to
#
talk about what they want to talk about, which is sort of how Lalit Modi built the IPL.
#
Well, first he did this and then he did this, all of these details.
#
And you allowed them to get that out of their system almost.
#
And then you keep asking again.
#
And at that point, having run out of things to say about his work, they will then automatically
#
reach for other things, the kind of details, the scenes that I want them to talk about,
#
the personal takes and habits that make this guy go.
#
How do you get the cigarette detail though?
#
How did you get those details?
#
I can't for the life of me remember, but I think, I mean, you know, I would just ask,
#
I think that was part of a larger question where I asked about what he would do at the
#
You know, what was he like to be at the stadium?
#
And so I think that is where whoever, I can't remember who it was, but was telling me about
#
how he would sort of constantly just be looking around him.
#
He would kind of be trying to direct all these operations at the same time, he would drop
#
into the celeb boxes and talk to them over there and smoke a cigarette.
#
And so it sounded to me like he was just like really keyed up all the time.
#
And I asked, I remarked on this.
#
And at that point, I think this person said, yeah, you know, I mean, even these cigarettes
#
that he kept smoking, he would never finish them.
#
He would just sort of toss them away after a couple of drags.
#
That's how keyed up he was.
#
So I mean, that is the kind of thing that you want ideally these people to say.
#
And it's very difficult to get them to say.
#
I have realized, and this is interesting, because I was thinking about this yesterday
#
in the context of our upcoming interview, is that I have realized that very often people
#
think that these details bore the journalist.
#
Because I was thinking for often, for example, when I was thinking yesterday, when I talked
#
to Amit, what are the sort of things that he would even want to know about a journalist
#
I mean, it must sound immensely boring to the average listener and possibly even to
#
Amit, even though Amit is sort of a journalist himself in a sense.
#
But like, why would you want to know about like the process of writing long form?
#
But then I realized this is exactly maybe this is the kind of process that goes through
#
And maybe that's why they decide these details are not important or to tell or even to register.
#
So you have to convince them that you are there, you have time for them.
#
And every time they let drop a morsel of detail, you pounce on it and show enthusiasm and say,
#
yes, yes, I want more like this.
#
And slowly then these things emerge.
#
So it's often very often it's a question of just getting to spend enough time with that
#
What are your theories for why Indians are not so descriptive and Americans are, for
#
I mean, even in India, I mean, as I find now when I'm living in England, I mean, even people
#
in England, it's very difficult to get them to describe.
#
With Americans, I don't know.
#
I mean, I have a number of theories, all of which are completely sort of speculative.
#
One is that they have grown up listening to talk radio and things like NPR and NPR does
#
this kind of storytelling, oral storytelling and oral storytelling at such length that
#
you know that this is the way to tell a story.
#
Maybe it's the influence of Hollywood where you think in sort of a cinematic way right
#
There is just a certain kind of discursiveness about that conversation, even on a day to
#
day basis when you're not interviewing anyone that I have not found anywhere else.
#
I was a cohost for a time of this podcast called The Intersection, which is a science
#
And the idea was to get scientists to tell stories, not just to describe their work and
#
analyze their data for you on the podcast, but to also talk about how they set about
#
researching this and what kind of themes they're interested in and so on, and tell stories
#
And again, invariably, it was so difficult to get non-American scientists to do.
#
It's definitely there's an essay or at least a column in there somewhere for someone.
#
And at some point, I hope you write it.
#
That's really fascinating.
#
So when you gather material, are you also forming the narrative in your head or is that
#
a process that comes later?
#
You know, Joan Didion once said quote, I don't know what I think until I write it down, stop
#
And she would, I guess, perhaps have been speaking more in the context of personal essays
#
and so on, where you're sort of working out your thoughts as you kind of get into those.
#
So what's that process like?
#
Like I imagine you get into a story fairly open, you have some notions of the angles
#
But, you know, when does it start to fructify, if I may use that term?
#
You may definitely use that term, it's completely appropriate here.
#
So you go into a story not with, at least for one of these big stories, you go not so
#
much with angles as with what one of my editors like to call themes, which is that you have
#
ostensibly one surface narrative, a surface story, but then you have three or four layers
#
And obviously listeners can't see the thing I'm doing with my hands here, but I'm kind
#
of sandwiching them one below the other.
#
But these layers that operate at a level below the main plot or the main story, and those
#
themes sort of weave in and out of the piece as you tell it.
#
And I think the craft, the only craft worth talking about in writing long form journalism
#
is how you weave the main plot and the themes in and out of each other.
#
That is basically the only thing you have to do when you sit down to write.
#
And so when I go into a story, most often I know the themes, sometimes I discover new
#
themes as they're coming up and as I'm interviewing people.
#
And so I will kind of replace one with the other.
#
But then I will essentially, and as the reporting goes on, and this is a matter of months in
#
many cases, my reporting, my interviewing will get more and more pointed.
#
My reading will get more and more pointed.
#
So I will stop seeking out some kind of sources because I think they possibly can't speak
#
to the themes that I want to pursue and I will look more for another kind.
#
My questions get more, revolve more and more around these themes until I feel as one, there's
#
a great piece of advice in a book on journalism called The New New Journalism, where somebody
#
says you keep reporting until you see yourself coming the other way.
#
By which I mean that the minute you know that you already have a more detailed answer in
#
your mind to what this guy has just given you, you can kind of stop reporting at that
#
point because you feel like maybe there is, maybe you keep it going to get some more anecdotes
#
But basically the information that you have is all mostly there.
#
But that takes a long time, you know, there's thousands and thousands of words of notes.
#
I always these days tape record wherever I can so that I can take notes about other things,
#
you know, which includes follow up questions that have just stopped me or the scene that
#
we're setting in or whatever that might be or what this guy is like.
#
And then I come back and at that point is when you kind of sit down and you put a structure
#
down and you kind of, so I have right now next to me, actually, I have a legal pad on
#
which I have a structure for this profile I'm writing.
#
And in the top right hand corner, I have themes and I have a list of four themes, which is
#
profile itself, the guy who I'm profiling.
#
But then the second theme is lockdown over the last three or four months.
#
Third theme is fast bowling because it's a profile of cricketer and the fourth theme
#
So, you know, these kind of like things that I want to pursue as ideas in the piece that
#
will go in and out of this story.
#
And then you structure it according to that and you kind of keep wondering how you can
#
bring these things to the surface occasionally again.
#
The thing with long form journalism also is that it isn't always a question of just saying
#
this happened and he said this and she said this and then this happened again.
#
It is also sometimes a question of inserting in your own voice, your own idea about what
#
And so you need, you know, a definite take on some of these themes that you will then
#
put in there at some point.
#
And that's kind of the joy of it.
#
It's an intensively subjective form.
#
It is never meant to be objective.
#
In fact, objectivity in long form journalism, I think, would be intensely boring.
#
The whole point is to have a narrative and the whole point is to have it be subjective.
#
That's quite fascinating.
#
You know, how is then the writing process like?
#
You've gathered all the material, the themes have sort of fructified as we've gone along
#
and you actually, how do you discipline yourself during the writing process?
#
I think the key problem most writers find is discipline.
#
And you've spoken about how, you know, without a deadline, you wouldn't get anything done.
#
So having said that, you've written a bunch of books.
#
So clearly, you know, those have such concrete deadlines usually.
#
So you've managed that.
#
But how do you kind of discipline yourself?
#
Do you write first thing in the morning?
#
You know, what are the challenges you faced just in that process of getting things written?
#
Yeah, I mean, I write, I write very slowly.
#
You know, if I write 500 words a day, I consider it a job well spent.
#
I try as much as possible to write first thing in the morning.
#
It doesn't always work out that way.
#
You know, today, for example, we're doing our interview at 6.30 in the morning my time.
#
So I'll only get to writing maybe later in the afternoon.
#
But I try as much as possible when I'm working on something to do this 500 words a day thing.
#
You know, if I do 600, it's a bonus.
#
The thing that was really difficult was when I was doing long form.
#
I mean, it's easy to discipline yourself to that.
#
I think the real difficulty came about when I was working on books in parallel with these
#
I needed the pieces to make a living and I had to write the book because there was still
#
a deadline for it and I wanted to do it.
#
And so that would involve sort of writing 500 words of the book in the morning and then
#
setting that aside and doing another 500 words of whatever piece I was working on in the
#
And that's quite exhausting.
#
I mean, I think once you've done that for a year, by the end of the year, you are ready
#
to take a few months off and not do anything.
#
I think with the journalism itself, once the structure is down, the structure is key, once
#
you have the beginning and maybe the end crack, it sort of, it tends to flow.
#
I mean, and then you just kind of obsess over things like what word to use in this sentence
#
and that kind of thing.
#
You are free to then devote yourself to the party part of the writing process, which is
#
just the selection of words and the rhythms of the sentence and how they sound.
#
So a final question before we get off the writing process and actually get to your wonderful
#
new book is sort of you make a living doing long-form journalism and doing journalism
#
and you write for the Guardian, the New Yorker and all of these people.
#
Now you know, it's sort of a dual question.
#
One and both parts of the question really relate to voice.
#
One is that over time, have you developed a particular journalistic voice or is it something
#
that shifts from piece to piece depending on your writing on, I mean, can someone pick
#
up a piece and say, oh, only someone could have written this or that this is so typically
#
him or can you, you know, switch depending on the needs of the subject as part one and
#
part two and something that struck me because a decade and a half back I used to write op-eds
#
for the Wall Street Journal and a couple of others.
#
And one of the things that struck me about writing for foreign publications is that the
#
cultural difference between you and your editor also applies to how you look at your writing.
#
So one thing, for example, that you have to do for those guys is that you need to explain
#
things which the Indian reader would take for granted and therefore you need to simplify
#
And that really became an irritating process because if you're, for example, talking about
#
the BJP, you don't always want to say, comma, the Hindu Nationalist Party, which came to
#
That's always the example that I use also when I'm talking about how frustrating it
#
is and how I never want to write another piece about Modi again, because you have to find
#
some short, brief, but effective way of talking about 2002.
#
You know, that is the most annoying thing.
#
You know, so there are many reasons why 2002 should not have happened, but one of the reasons
#
is that you have to keep summarizing it in a sentence before moving on to what he's doing
#
A very specific answer that it was also among the many other things that it did wrong.
#
It was a bane for writers who occasionally write for foreign publications.
#
To complete the second part of the question then, how does that affect your voice and
#
can that process get frustrating?
#
Like do editors in these places, you know, are they trying to fit your piece into a particular
#
kind of house style or their conception of how a good piece should be or, you know, because
#
you're someone who's been writing for so many years and, you know, you're a trusted and
#
recognized writer, do you get a certain amount of leeway with language and voice?
#
The first part of your question was about voice across publications and so it does change
#
I mean, you know, the New Yorker has a very distinctive house style that very few people
#
who write for the magazine and the website are allowed to break on a regular basis.
#
I mean, so for New Yorker geeks who are listening to this, you know, Anthony Lay in the movie
#
clearly has a very distinctive style, you know, a writer like Nick Baumgarten who writes
#
quite often has a very distinctive style.
#
But for many others, you would only have to, you know, if you blocked out the byline and
#
you read the rest of the piece, you would guess who wrote the piece only by what it
#
So if it's a law piece, you know, it is written by Jeffrey Toobin and if you, you know, you
#
know, if it's like a deep state piece, it's a Jane Mayer piece and so on.
#
So and whereas, and it's a cultural thing also in the sense that, so from the New York
#
Times magazine is a little bit more flexible, Harper's as a magazine is still more flexible.
#
It's a cultural thing across the Atlantic that British publications allow you a lot
#
more leeway and sort of playfulness with your language and your structure.
#
But even in that, the Guardian Long Reads is a little bit more American than say 1843,
#
which is the features magazine of The Economist.
#
So it varies from publication to publication and you have to also temper your voice to
#
You know, a piece like Quizzing Piece, which is partly a personal essay has, is a lot more
#
flexible than a piece would be if it was about, say, I mean, I wrote a piece on Fair Trade,
#
which is for the Guardian Long Reads, which is a very sort of intense, quite detailed
#
subject about a particular kind of niche in the industry and you have to, there's very
#
little flexibility over there, you know, but the personal essay is a lot more flexible.
#
And so, so you do learn over time to tweak each article according to who's publishing
#
it and how and what it addresses.
#
Now, having said that, there is still, I think, underlying all of that, there is still, or
#
there should be a voice, which is particular to me and unique to me.
#
And I don't know whether it is a case that somebody would read a piece and know instinctively
#
that it was written by me.
#
That is for readers to say in a sense.
#
But I think in my mind, at least when I set out writing a sentence, for the most part,
#
it is still the same kind of approach that I bring to it.
#
And so I, and the words that I use and the kind of structures that I use, you know, for
#
example, I use a lot of semicolons and M dashes, you know, that is just a linguistic kind of
#
tick in my writing that never goes away, whatever I'm writing about.
#
I love things like interleaving dialogue between thick passages of text, you know, wherever
#
that is possible, I will do it.
#
And so there are these things that make up, I love texture.
#
So texture of prose itself is such that you, you know, it's almost like a visual thing
#
But on the intermediate page, you don't necessarily just see, you know, three equally sized blocks
#
You sometimes see big blocks, small blocks, just a standalone quote, sometimes how much
#
you use quotes and where you use quotes.
#
So all of this stuff is tailored to what I like to read and how I like to read.
#
And so therefore, I think it reflects in what you might call a voice.
#
We were talking earlier, I think we put it off for a later part of the podcast, but this
#
is probably a good time to bring it up, which is that the whole philosophy behind this kind
#
of journalism, at least for me is you have a certain set of tools and you are like a
#
You can go out and you can quote unquote, fix or address practically any topic out there
#
given time, you know, you have taught yourself how to read deeply and how to talk to people
#
and know whom to interview and then what kind of questions to ask them and what kind of
#
detail you want to put into your story.
#
And then you have learned how to synthesize all of this and assimilate it in your own
#
mind and then craft a story, a narrative out of it.
#
This is a limited, like Liam Neeson, I have a small but limited set of tools, but they
#
And the philosophy is that you should be able to go out and apply these to any subject out
#
there, whether or not you are a newcomer to that subject.
#
And this is why I enjoy doing this kind of work, which ranges across subject matter,
#
both in my books and in journalism, because every time I do one more of these pieces,
#
it kind of strengthens my belief that really the set of tools is immensely useful.
#
And I love the, I just adore the idea of being able to apply it to anything in my work.
#
I think that's sort of the thing that keeps me going on a day to day basis.
#
Why did you call it a limited set of tools?
#
Because the form itself, obviously, like every form, this form also has certain limitations.
#
I mean, you know, for example, I'm not an imaginative person in the sense that a novelist
#
is imaginative, you know, so I don't have, you know, a world building sense, I have a
#
world discovering sense, you know, so that, and a lot of these set of tools is limited
#
because they are quite functional tools also, like how to structure a piece is like a very
#
specific skill that you will use only in this field and nowhere else.
#
So that's why I called it small and limited, but effective in this particular field.
#
As I said, they are functional things that maybe people outside this field would not
#
even care or have heard about, but here it's sort of, for some reason, it finds its own
#
So, you know, when I teach my writing class, I often sort of talk about the difference
#
between strategy and tactics where strategy is sort of the approach you bring to a particular
#
piece of writing, or it could be your overarching writing philosophy and tactics are, of course,
#
all of these little tools of the language, you know, the paragraphs and the punctuation
#
and the ways in which you manipulate rhythm and the music of it and all of that.
#
So, you know, at a strategic level, obviously part of your strategy would be dictated by
#
what you're trying to do in a specific piece, who you're writing it for and all of that.
#
But another part could be sort of an overarching writing philosophy that you have set for yourself.
#
Is there something like that which you're used to, you know, guide what kind of writing
#
I mean, as far as possible, I think this, you know, this, I have still not lost my fascination
#
with making a piece of writing as fictive as possible, by which I mean, it still has
#
It is, as I said, not always possible, it's more possible with some pieces than with others.
#
But insofar as it is possible, I want to give the reader an easy and organic reading experience.
#
You know, in a lot of these long reads, these long form pieces, very often, it is necessary
#
to encapsulate a set of difficult ideas in prose that might be jargony, you know, because
#
the nature of the subject is such, although you try to mitigate that as much as possible,
#
it is necessary to be abstract, maybe even sort of talk about ideologies in this weird
#
A lot of people have no problem reading that.
#
But I know a lot of people do, I for one do.
#
I mean, I am always much better when I'm reading things that are set in the concrete world
#
that kind of have an underlying message or idea, rather than having those ideas expressed
#
as sentences, you know, abstraction set in words.
#
So this is for one of the reasons why I find it really difficult to read lengthy political
#
analysis that is completely diverse from what is actually happening in the real world.
#
So in my mind, what I want to do is to avoid that as much as possible, to give the reader
#
an easy way into a lot of this material.
#
And that inevitably involves sort of doing things like presenting characters, setting
#
scenes, having dialogue, almost sort of, it's sort of, you know, a spoonful of sugar to
#
make the rest of it go down more easily.
#
I think that is more than anything else, the guiding philosophy for me.
#
And it's, again, it's determined entirely by what I find easy to read and difficult
#
Yeah, I want to explore the use of your word fictive there, like I'm presuming you can
#
mean, you know, one of a couple of things.
#
One is that, like you just said, you make it more vivid.
#
So you avoid the abstract and you go for the concrete.
#
So you won't talk about, say, quote unquote, the great crisis of migrant labor, having
#
to walk through highways, instead you, you know, you look for an image like a woman pulling
#
a suitcase and her little three year old child is on that and you make that vivid.
#
That is one of the possible interpretations I'm drawing from it.
#
And the other one is that you have deeper layers you build, like in a novel, you'd have
#
sort of a universe of things and not just one narrative, not just one sort of linear
#
And I guess long form nonfiction also gives you the scope to do that, to have these different
#
layers as you pointed out.
#
So are these two things what you mean by fictive?
#
I mean, they're both what I mean by fictive.
#
I mean, to present somebody the essence of what it's like to read fiction, but to have
#
it be fact, which involves sort of creating a little mini universe for the reader, populating
#
with real people, with real settings, with real occurrences.
#
One of my editors has a nice phrase, which is that over a long read, you should somehow
#
be able to convey the passage of time in some sense of the other.
#
And that is important, I think, because I think people move through time, events happen
#
And so to even have that happen is a novelistic thing, I think.
#
And this populating with real people thing, I think, is something that is often underlooked.
#
I mean, with one of my editors in particular, we have intense and enjoyable differences
#
of opinion on how much a real person should be focused on as a person rather than as just
#
as a vehicle or a carrier for ideas and themes.
#
My own view always is that I think people read about people and they are interested
#
And through that, they will then assimilate in a much more effective way the things that
#
you're trying to convey, whereas his view is that you should just sort of describe the
#
person only insofar as it's necessary.
#
But then to actually be on that, just have him or her be a name that occurs in the rest
#
of the piece as you are trying to explain certain things.
#
So these philosophies are quite enjoyable.
#
They differ from publication to publication, editor to editor, journalist to journalist.
#
And it's nice to talk about these things and discuss them.
#
So we'll move into a commercial break now.
#
And after that, come back and talk about your book on JBS Alden.
#
But before we do that, you know, for people who are interested in writing, for people
#
who are interested in long-form journalism, you know, one, do you have any advice to share
#
on maybe what you've learned through your journey of all these years?
#
Like if someone was to ask you that, OK, over the last 20 years, what have you learned about
#
What are the big lessons or even what are the things you wish you knew 20 years ago
#
I think I have only recently come to really appreciate the power of structure of our outline
#
before you set out to write.
#
For a long time, I did it without an outline, but I would just sort of have section one
#
is about X, section two is about Y, section three is about Z.
#
I would not actually break those sections down further for myself.
#
And I do it now to the extent that I know what each paragraph in each section will address.
#
That is obviously fluid as you're writing, because sometimes what looks good on a structure
#
and an outline does not look good on the page once you've started writing it.
#
So it's subject to change.
#
But I think that is something I think is important.
#
I think the thing I have done a lot more of over the last few years is reread pieces four
#
And the first and second time, maybe this is not my own pieces.
#
These are pieces that I admire and deeply appreciate.
#
The first and second time, I will still be reading it almost as if I am a regular reader.
#
But in the third and fourth time, I will actually take pen and paper and I will start breaking
#
things down, trying to understand for myself how these various things interlock with each
#
other, what this section is doing and why this particular writer started with an image
#
like this, which then moves on to a nut graph of this kind, which is then exemplified by
#
the scene that comes next.
#
All of these things, why this character pops up here and not there.
#
These things I think I've started understanding in a deeper way only over the last five or
#
six years as I've started doing this exercise of breaking these pieces down, of reading
#
And I think that is something that I think all writers could stand to learn from and
#
And are there pieces which are like, you know, models to you of, you know, which you think
#
you learned a lot from or you would present as a model of what long form narrative nonfiction
#
I mean, there are models in each genre and field, I guess.
#
So like to list them would be tough.
#
But I mean, one of the things I use in my own writing workshops and classes is a profile
#
of the chef Mario Batali by the writer Bill Buford, which is a long piece and eventually
#
then went on to become the basis for a book, a very fine book.
#
But it is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, which is that, you know, Mario Batali
#
is this intensely larger than life, sensuously inclined kind of chef in New York, an Italian
#
And, you know, Bill Buford sort of tweaks his language to suit the subject.
#
And so the first paragraph is a long and deeply detailed scene of what happens when Mario
#
Batali once came over to his house to cook for his guests, and what that is like and
#
the kind of excesses that Mario is prone to.
#
And you know, it just, it strikes me as a piece that gives you this deep insight into
#
a person, populates his world, describes what the kind of spaces are that he moves through,
#
why he is the way he is, and what it is like to be in his presence.
#
I think there are very few pieces, I think, that convey better what a person is like,
#
if you were to meet him.
#
And that is something that I'm always trying to do with, you know, my profiles as well,
#
because that's the whole idea.
#
It has this great sense of how to use detail, how to accrete it and how to deploy it.
#
The language is also, in a sense, slightly larger than life, but in a good way, because
#
Whereas if this was the same, if you're writing about a much more sober, restrained person,
#
maybe you wouldn't quite write the same way.
#
So it's something I talk about often in my classes and I kind of break down how the piece
#
works for people who are sitting in my classes to learn.
#
And maybe that's something that people want to check out on this podcast.
#
I'll link that from the show notes.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side, we shall meet the fascinating
#
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#
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It costs rupees 10,000 or $150.
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Welcome back to the Scene on the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Saman Subramaniam about his book, A Dominant Character, about J.B.S.
#
What drove you to this interesting figure because, you know, you've been a cricket writer.
#
You studied international relations at Columbia.
#
There are so many things you could have and there are so many things you do write about
#
in your journalism has so many eclectic subjects.
#
How did you arrive at him?
#
Ironically, I think perhaps for the first time I'd heard about him was in a quiz many
#
And then I kind of looked him up a little bit online.
#
And even his, even if you read his basic Wikipedia bio, it's a very fascinating read.
#
I mean, the kind of work that he did, but also the kind of life that he led was a really
#
sort of larger than life, so to speak.
#
And it seemed to straddle all of these worlds that I found myself interested in.
#
I mean, he was a scientist and I have been interested in science for a long time, but
#
also he was intensely politically committed.
#
He lived an adventurous life in the sense that he fought in the trenches in the First
#
He went to Spain during the Civil War.
#
He did sort of research on himself for the British Admiralty in the Second World War.
#
And then he had this Indian connection, of course, although it wasn't necessarily because
#
of that that I latched onto him, but I found it interesting that he came to India and lived
#
the last seven odd years of his life and died here to the extent that he became an Indian
#
And that movement itself, we are always familiar with movements in the reverse direction, scientists
#
leaving India to go overseas.
#
And so I thought it might be an interesting life through which to examine these intersections
#
of science and politics, science and society, and also to examine his particular milieus
#
in that time, the first half of the 20th century.
#
That is the explanation that I would give from the point of view of Haldane himself.
#
But then the second thing, which is diverse to Haldane in a sense, is that I'd written
#
a bunch of profiles by the time I started working on this book.
#
And I was intensely curious to see whether I could write a biography.
#
So a form that has fascinated me and that I read a lot of, and it seems to be an extension
#
of the profile, although as I realized, it isn't exactly.
#
And then all my journalism until now has been structured around places that I can go to
#
and people who I can meet.
#
I depend on my being in a particular place to make things vivid for the reader, which
#
was definitely the case with my first two books.
#
And I wanted to see almost as a kind of experiment of form, how you would pursue and achieve
#
that kind of vividness.
#
If you were not in a place, if you were not able to talk to people, if you had to rely
#
purely on archival and documentary material to present your scenes and your character.
#
So it was sort of mini challenge that I set up for myself and Haldane seemed to be sort
#
of a good way to do that, partly because he himself wrote a lot.
#
So there's a lot that you can glean from his own materials and writings.
#
But then secondarily, he lived through such interesting and widely described times, you
#
know, the first world war, the second world war, that there's a multiplicity of sources
#
you can consult to then synthesize all of that and make a vivid scene out of it.
#
Something that can hopefully come alive in the mind of the reader.
#
And these were the two reasons, I guess, that I was drawn to Haldane as a subject.
#
So you know, when I think of the biographies, I love and I loved your biography of Haldane.
#
You know, one book which I spoke about on a recent episode and I really loved was Robert
#
Carew as a power broker.
#
And one of the main reasons I loved that was it works at so many different levels.
#
It is a life story of one man, yes, but it is also in a sense a biography of New York
#
It's a study of how power corrodes character.
#
It's a study of how political economies evolve over a period of time.
#
It's a study of competing ideologies when you, you know, look at the battle between
#
And similarly, it seemed to me that what I really enjoyed about a dominant character
#
is not so much the biography of this one incredibly interesting man, which is, you know, fascinating
#
in its own regard, but also the larger themes that came up specifically.
#
And of course, we'll talk about it in much more detail about the intersection between
#
politics and science, which is, you know, such a big theme in this.
#
So, you know, did you sort of have these themes in mind when you actually entered the project
#
or did they take shape?
#
I see I didn't say fructify or did they take shape as you were sort of moving through the
#
I think the main theme of the, which is the theme of the interplay between science and
#
politics, I think was something that is quite transparent to anyone who has even read a
#
little bit about Haldane.
#
So I think even when I started, when I sent the pitch out for this book, that was definitely
#
one of the themes that I wanted to explore.
#
There were other things that I thought were interesting that came up much later.
#
One of them, for example, was Haldane's view of what a utopian society was for him.
#
And that view itself changed over time as he got older and grew to be disillusioned
#
with certain things and entranced by new other things.
#
And so those themes, I guess, like came up as I researched it.
#
But this question of the twinning of science and politics was something that I was fascinated
#
by when I first started reading about Haldane, and this was in, I have to think back here,
#
I think January 2015 is when I started really reading to research this book in some detail.
#
I could not have known at the time how intensely those themes would resonate five years later.
#
Definitely there were, I already had at the back of my mind some notion of how science
#
and politics intersected in the realm of climate change.
#
My wife was for a long time a climate change journalist, and of course, anybody who's reasonably
#
well read these days has read enough about how climate change science is itself shaped
#
by political and economic interests.
#
But I wanted to broaden that a little bit and kind of look at the history of that and
#
look at how Haldane himself dealt with it, indeed even acknowledged it and then built
#
But five years later, here we are, where a president is in power in the US who denies
#
so much of science to the extent that science, you know, marches for science started three
#
and a half years ago in America first and then spread to the rest of the world.
#
And even as that built, we come to 2020 when a pandemic is in play all over the world,
#
when the science of vaccine research, of disease, of epidemiology, of how data is interpreted
#
and presented has become an intensely political idea because to lose control of this narrative
#
would be to admit not only political failure, but also to admit a certain lack of comprehension
#
I'm living here in the UK where, for example, the government took a decision to go with
#
one kind of, you know, model to control the epidemic before changing track after a couple
#
They wanted to pursue the Swedish model of trying to build herd immunity before they
#
realized that, you know, health services would get swamped and they had to just lock the
#
So these, even more than, you know, three years ago, two years ago, or even last year,
#
this is a moment in time when I think Haldane would have spoken most eloquently to what
#
the government isn't doing, how literate and numerate policymakers are, and even how literate
#
and numerate all of us are in terms of science, because I think Haldane's overarching principle
#
was that everybody should have a scientific mindset and ability to look at information
#
and assess it based on evidence that is not just useful to people who work in labs and
#
in biotech companies, but people who go about their daily lives in a world that is dictated
#
And I was sort of fascinated also by the bits that you have on Haldane's childhood, one
#
of course, because he was extremely prodigious, like you write in his book, quote, the time
#
Haldane legend has it, he looked intently at the blood trickling out of a cut on his
#
forehead and asked, is it oxyhemoglobin or carboxyhemoglobin?
#
He was not yet four, which is, you know, obviously a crazy kind of prodigy, but also a creature
#
of circumstance in the sense he was born to a certain kind of extreme privilege where
#
his father was a great scientist.
#
And more than that, what possibly made him different from his peers was that his father
#
believed in actually going out into the field and practicing science.
#
Like if he wanted to figure out why miners were diving, he would go down into the mines
#
himself and spend time and experiment on himself with the whole, you know, notion of taking
#
a cannery to the coal mine came from him and the young JBS accompanied him on all these
#
So he saw this sort of this other side of English society, which similarly privilege
#
You know, how much of, for example, when you look at say the British intellectuals of the
#
1910s or 20s or 30s, would it be fair to say that they were pretty much all born to extreme
#
privilege and that what kind of might have drawn Haldane apart was that he also had a
#
sensitivity to the other side, which came both from accompanying his father to all of
#
these places and also the time he spent in the trenches in the first world war, as you
#
Yeah, I think definitely among the, you know, the intellectuals in this field of biology
#
and physiology, whom I read about while writing this book, you had to have done the whole
#
public school, which here is a book, you know, it's called public school elsewhere.
#
So a public school education followed by a stint at Oxford or Cambridge at the very least,
#
maybe two stints, you know, and Haldane did follow that model in some detail.
#
He went to Eton as a King's scholar.
#
He followed that up by going to Oxford for his undergraduate degree.
#
So, you know, all of that seems to fit the CV of many other intellectuals in the physiological
#
But you're completely right in that what set him apart and what set his childhood apart
#
was this exposure to parts of British society that none of the others would ever have had
#
or very few would have had.
#
And I think, you know, this taught him a few things.
#
One is that it taught him that the effects of science has real world effects and it has
#
real world problems that can be addressed.
#
And as his father believed, it didn't just all have to be done within the confines of
#
a lab on our pen and paper.
#
This is ironic because Haldane himself would for the most part use pen and paper and very
#
little else in his own work.
#
But he was always aware of the link between what he was doing and what the real world
#
needed or required or had a deficit of.
#
So there was the fact that he got to meet people like this all the time.
#
But the second thing that was quite egalitarian about what his father did was that he used
#
himself as a guinea pig.
#
This is something that would have been quite unthinkable at a time when you could pay a
#
poor person to serve as a guinea pig for you.
#
You know, there are distinctions in class, in race, all of these things were so vast
#
that you didn't have to use yourself.
#
It was a very egalitarian move on the part of Haldane Sr. to subject himself to the kind
#
of pressures, quite literally, I mean, air pressure, temperatures, you know, humidity,
#
lack of oxygen, all of these factors that go into play for sailors and submarines or
#
for miners very deep down in a coal mine.
#
He would put himself through those same conditions and examine what the effects were like on
#
Haldane Sr.'s logic in this was, how would you ever know the precise physiological effects
#
unless you underwent them yourself?
#
And maybe that was a scientific way of looking at it.
#
And he didn't quite think about the egalitarianness that was implicit in this.
#
And I think that taught young JBS a lesson that he would remember all his life, which
#
was basically that everyone is essentially physiologically created equal and that they
#
should therefore then be equal in the eyes of the law and of society.
#
And I want to read out a bit from an essay that Haldane wrote much later, but I want
#
to bring it to bear on a question about his upbringing, in fact, where, you know, toward
#
the end of his life, he wrote an essay called What Ails Indian Science?
#
And in that he wrote, quote, I noticed that in India, a new caste system is developing
#
before the old one has disappeared.
#
The new system is based on academic degrees.
#
One cannot teach Bengali chemistry history or what you will without a degree in that
#
subject and a higher degree given for research is almost obligatory if one hopes for a professional
#
It is only a matter of time before I am debarred from teaching science or statistics since
#
I have no degree of any kind in these subjects.
#
But in terms of the new caste system, I'm qualified to teach the classic since I secured
#
a somewhat marginal first class in literary humanures, vulgarly called greats at Oxford.
#
So this question sort of here goes, you know, also to the term which you mentioned in the
#
context of quizzing, which is bricolage, which is Haldane was born in the 19th century in
#
November 1892, seems to be that classic, maybe in that last generation of 19th century intellectuals
#
who have studied a variety of different subjects.
#
They haven't specialized in one thing and, you know, which shows even in his scientific
#
work, I think one of your chapters is called Synthesis, where, you know, he's bringing
#
this broader outlook, this ability to step back and solving that debate between, say,
#
the Mendelians and the Darwinists because he can take that step back because he has
#
all that training and other things and he can quote Plato and Aristotle and Lucretius
#
And how important do you think that is to break through thinking in any field?
#
And is it a loss for how knowledge develops that we don't seem to have much of that anymore?
#
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
#
I think Haldane would have been among the last generations in science who could come
#
to science without a degree in it.
#
I doubt, and as a part of research for this book, I would, I mean, obviously I didn't
#
have anybody to interview and quote, but what I would do is talk to other scientists just
#
about his work, but also about some of these themes and one of the themes that came up
#
quite often is this question of specialization and how Haldane would have been among the
#
last of the serious scientists who would have not specialized at the undergraduate level.
#
In part, it is a nature of how science develops is that it has gotten over the 20th century
#
genetics, let's take an example like genetics and got so specialized that you had to start
#
specializing quite early to be able to then fine tune your research to an even deeper
#
point by the time you reach a post-doctorate level.
#
You couldn't start off or very rarely could you start off studying English and then switching
#
broadly to biology at your masters and then going further in that.
#
I mean, it didn't happen.
#
I mean, this is also the structure of higher education itself today is that by the time
#
you finish your undergraduate degree, you're expected to have completed two internships
#
and spent time in a lab in the university somewhere and it's a very intense and intensely
#
specialized field and a lot of that is inevitable.
#
A lot of it has benefits because obviously if you start thinking about specific problems
#
from the time you're 21, by the time you're 30, you've actually sort of made great headway
#
in that particular problem.
#
But a number of scientists told me that there is a loss in it as well as you said.
#
So this, you know, what Haldane said about the Indian caste system, about the specialization
#
of knowledge has permeated every field everywhere by now and it particularly includes the sciences.
#
And I think a number of scientists felt that loss, felt the loss of the generalist, not
#
the journalist, the generalist coming to science and seeing bigger problems and being able
#
to knit various aspects together from a multidisciplinary point of view.
#
And this catchphrase, multidisciplinary, I think is only now slowly starting to reemerge
#
in academia, somewhat in the sciences, I think, but in other fields as well.
#
I think the advantage of what people like Haldane brought to this table is being starting
#
to be recognized again because precisely because scientists have not, over the last half century
#
say, have stopped thinking too deeply or too intensely about the political effects of their
#
In one silo, you rarely see the effects of that silo on other silos or upon the general
#
world or upon the world outside.
#
And I think that is starting to be realized more and more as everybody becomes a little
#
bit more politically aware.
#
I think that is starting to be realized more and more.
#
I hope, I mean, and again, the last three years have seen a complete efflorescence of
#
political thinking on the part of scientists aided in no small part by the kind of political
#
regimes in power all over the world.
#
I think more and more we will start to see the benefits of that in scientific research
#
And what was also sort of apparent in the biography, and I want to, you know, discuss
#
three different aspects of Haldane first as a scientist and as a writer slash public intellectual
#
and then finally his politics.
#
But it struck me while reading about his scientific career that in a sense, he went wherever his
#
intellectual curiosity took him.
#
And it also strikes me, and I don't know if you'd have a view on it, that modern day scientists,
#
so people training to be scientists, are subject to different sets of incentives, whereas you
#
know, this is your tenure track, and this is your publication track, and if you want
#
to get funding, these are the kind of projects which are, you know, quote unquote, sexy,
#
and all of these incentives will then shape their entire careers and their entire bodies
#
Is that something you've heard about from the scientific community?
#
Is that something that, you know, people kind of have thought about and written about?
#
I mean, a number of scientists told me, for example, the fact that many scientists for
#
a long time chose to not have too much of a political voice.
#
You know, in part, it's because this ivory tar phenomenon has built up more and more
#
Academics feel that they're insulated to an unreasonable extent from the real world because
#
they don't often experience its problems, especially once you have tenure.
#
So all of that is there.
#
But there's definitely people who told me that having a political voice meant often
#
speaking out against a government that is in power when it is that government that decides
#
Institutions decide what grants you get, and so therefore you try not to piss them off.
#
Sometimes entire research programs are funded by corporations that eventually want to monetize
#
technologies or processes for themselves.
#
Speaking out against those corporations is not a wise thing to do if you're depending
#
on them for your research money.
#
And so a lot of these constricted scientists' ability to have a voice.
#
Now this is also, again, a natural byproduct of just how science evolves.
#
If you look at what the field of genetics was like when Haldane was born, Mendel had
#
There were big problems out there that you could access from a generalist point of view
#
with very little equipment, certainly.
#
And whatever equipment you needed wasn't very expensive.
#
In Haldane's case, as always turned out to be, it was pen and paper.
#
And you could apply yourself to these things without having to depend on large grants and
#
And even Haldane, despite all of that, did feel the pinch of the lack of finances at
#
various points in his career.
#
Now the situation has progressed to the point where you need a plethora of expensive equipment.
#
Your big problems have been addressed for the large part, and you have to drill down
#
And as a result of all of this, you don't want to jeopardize, perhaps quite rightly
#
and understandably, you don't want to jeopardize your ability to get these big grants to then
#
work on these quite specific problems.
#
I think it's an inevitable nature of the march of science.
#
From when the 20th century started and when the 21st century started, science is unrecognizable.
#
Whereas you couldn't always say that of say the 16th and the 17th centuries or the 17th
#
and the 18th centuries.
#
I mean, the paradigm shift has been immense.
#
And I think it's a consequence of that scientists feel that a lot of their freedoms and a lot
#
of what they would otherwise want to say and do is dictated quite heavily by the nature
#
of their work and the way their work is funded.
#
So let's talk about Haldane as a scientist now.
#
Obviously his major contributions are in the field of genetics, but he also dabbled widely
#
For example, I was not aware it's something that I learned in your book that our notion
#
of the primordial soup, so to say, comes from Haldane, that he simultaneously and independently
#
with a Russian scientist, you know, conceived of the origins of life lying in some kind
#
of chemical soup where the sun interacted and with chemicals and created amino acids
#
and so on, which I wasn't aware of, but broadly he's remembered for his contributions in genetics.
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
And when I say broadly, he has remembered, as you point out, that he's not even remembered
#
that much because much of his work was so foundational and essential that we kind of
#
just take it for granted.
#
Which is something he always thought was the best fate ever for any scientist, by the way.
#
He thought that the best compliment you could pay to a scientist's work is to not even think
#
about how it's done, that you just think that they are natural laws and axioms that we found
#
out there are then attributed to one person.
#
So I mean, Haldane's biggest scientific contribution was in the subfield of what we might call
#
So to take us back to the early 20th century, what had happened was that Darwin had set
#
out the theory of evolution by natural selection, and it had found a lot of traction, but for
#
some reason, nobody could quite understand how natural selection would work at this cellular
#
And when I say that, the reason is that Mendel, who had published his papers also in the 19th
#
century, his work had been sort of largely forgotten or not quite recognized for its
#
significance in the way that it should have been.
#
Nobody had tied Mendel to Darwin.
#
Nobody had seen that Mendel had set out these units of hereditary information called genes.
#
And the big riddle left by Darwin's theory, which is how actually natural selection works
#
at that level, at the cellular level, that could have been answered by uniting Mendel
#
And that rediscovery happened in 1900 and a few years thereafter, about eight years
#
after Haldane was born.
#
So that was a state the science was in when Haldane went into university.
#
And broadly, people who worked in this new field of genetics and evolution split themselves
#
One was the Darwinians and one was the Mendelians.
#
And the Mendelians believed that these units called genes existed, and they produced big
#
discrete changes in organisms because they were going by Mendel's work.
#
So they believed that, as Mendel had discovered, there was a gene for determining whether a
#
pea had a smooth surface or whether it had a textured and wrinkly surface.
#
There were two types of genes.
#
And whichever one was dominant would dictate what the pea's texture was like.
#
The Mendelians assumed that this is how genes work.
#
The Darwinians believed, because Darwin had also postulated this, that what was actually
#
happening in a population was that there were a number of very small variations that would
#
eventually accumulate over time to produce enough variation to then distinguish a species
#
So the Darwinians would criticize Mendelians for saying, look, you can say that a pea is
#
textured or smooth, but you can't explain a variation of heights in a population, for
#
example, because it's not just people are either tall or short.
#
There is every single height on the spectrum is to be found, and you have a smooth bell
#
curve where there is an average kind of height.
#
And the Darwinians believe that that was explained only by their own theory of small variations
#
in a population, but they couldn't explain how these small variations would have the
#
kind of huge effects that would then create a new species altogether or to create a completely
#
different feature altogether.
#
And so this was a big inherent tussle that nobody could quite explain.
#
And Haldane, along with a couple of other scientists, explained this, essentially united
#
these or synthesized these two views of genetics and evolution with what we call the modern
#
synthesis, which is intensely mathematically based.
#
But what he and a couple of others did was to show through math that the small variations
#
that Haldane, that Darwin postulated, those small variations could, with the power of
#
natural selection, and he would build models out to explain how this would be possible,
#
could have enough of a selective advantage to actually create new species or to create
#
big changes in a species.
#
So the power of natural selection, and at a time when people thought natural selection
#
was almost dead because it couldn't explain speciation as powerfully as that, at a time
#
when it was almost dead, Haldane and these two other scientists, Ronald Fisher and Sewell
#
Wright, they managed to explain through mathematics how this was possible.
#
They essentially brought natural selection from the 19th century into the 20th century
#
and pushed it forward towards the 21st.
#
I also found it fascinating how big and, you know, how passionate he was about maths and
#
how big that was a part of his arsenal, like you've described on, you know, how he'd be
#
on a bus and he'd always have a briefcase with him and it was very common for him just
#
to take out paper from there and start doing algebra on the bus and, you know, he was kind
#
of scribbling all the time.
#
And you also illustrated how using math alone, he showed that natural selection was responsible
#
for a certain kind of moth population instead of having mainly, I think, silverish wings
#
going to, you know, black wings, which I found, you know, so fascinating and so illustrative
#
and so amazing that someone can just, you know, essentially get to that proof by just
#
taking pen and paper and kind of getting it done.
#
You want to talk a little bit about this because I just found it really fascinating and...
#
One of his favorite phrases was, an ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument,
#
which is, I think, like a fascinating way to describe it.
#
So Haldane was, you know, consummately the pen and paper guy to the extent that he would
#
not even go out and collect his own field data, you know, field data was often collected
#
by other people and he would just sort of get those data sets and he would look at it.
#
So one of the things that he worked on was the data set of moth populations in and around
#
Manchester in the 19th century.
#
And what had happened, what on it, what lepidopterists had observed was that there used to be, you
#
know, a moth with silver-gray wings called Biston betularia.
#
A surprisingly short period of time, these silvery moths disappeared to be replaced by
#
moths with almost entirely black wings.
#
And it happened so fast that people couldn't quite figure out how this was possible.
#
For a long time, one of the theories was that the soup from the factories of the industrial
#
revolution was darkening the wings off the moths.
#
It was actually as a layer, it was a black soup layer on top of the wings.
#
There was another theory that said that there were a lot of chemicals in the air that caused
#
these moths to mutate very fast.
#
So a silvery moth itself became a black moth in its own lifetime.
#
You know, these were the kind of theories that were floating around at the time.
#
And then eventually, of course, people did realize that the moths that had black wings
#
were getting some kind of selective advantage because the trees in that area where these
#
moths used to perch, their bark was gradually getting blackened by soot, the trees and the
#
And so these moths, these black wing moths would sit on these trees and they would be
#
camouflaged because they couldn't be seen by the birds that hunted them.
#
They were black on black.
#
Earlier it was silvery bark, so earlier it had black eyes.
#
And as the black darkened or blackened, the silvery moths would stand out.
#
They would be easy prey for birds, whereas the black moths wouldn't.
#
And so they would survive.
#
But even then, you know, it wasn't sort of an established, nobody had confirmed this.
#
And the only way to confirm this was to prove in that short span of time, natural selection
#
could work on giving the silver moths a disadvantage and the black moths an advantage to the extent
#
that they could almost completely replace the silver moth population.
#
And this is what Haldane did.
#
He took this data that was published over the years and he set up an equation by which
#
he could figure out what coefficient of selective advantage was for black wing moths.
#
And he proved that, you know, with these datasets, he proved that this kind of selective advantage
#
Natural selection could act in short span of time so as to completely replace one population
#
And it was the first time anyone had done that kind of rigorous analysis of data on
#
this moth population or indeed on any other biological population.
#
And it was the first of a series of 10 papers that he would publish over the next 10 years
#
in which he constantly refined and tweaked this model of selective advantage in various
#
You know, he would examine what would happen if a population migrated elsewhere, what would
#
happen if a plague struck a population, you know, all these kinds of various permutations
#
and combinations of situations.
#
And he would figure out selective advantages in each of those.
#
And through an accretion of all of this, he built up, I think, a body of evidence to conclusively
#
demonstrate that power of natural selection and the fact that Darwin was right, that Darwinism
#
was not dead after all.
#
It's also such a great example of the seen in the unseen that you have chemical effluents
#
from a factory making the bark of trees dark and then within two or three human generations,
#
all the moths change from silver wings to black wings.
#
It's fascinating and also so beautiful the way the whole sort of process works.
#
You know, Douglas Adams once said that he stopped believing in God when he understood
#
natural selection because the beauty and the awe that he felt when he really understood
#
it was, you know, God could not compare with that.
#
That's kind of, you know, all his scientific work is enormously kind of amusing, but then
#
we also, amazing rather, but then we also sort of come to where, you know, they shade
#
over into his political beliefs, how his political beliefs are almost shaped by his scientific
#
Can you talk a little bit about that?
#
And would you say it was kind of inevitable that attraction to Marxism would happen given
#
the dual propensity of him being that sort of man of science, as it were, obsessed with
#
how systems work and therefore, as Marx was being therefore drawn to Darwin's theory for
#
And also the sympathy that he would have felt for the underclasses given that, you know,
#
he had far more interactions with people from other classes and others like him did.
#
I think it's interesting how the art of biography works, which I've realized through this.
#
I mean, in the sense that you look at another person looking at Haldane's life story might
#
pick up completely different reasons for why he eventually became a socialist and then
#
And I think it depends.
#
This is where the subjectivity of the biographer comes in, which is I, in my own life, I tend
#
to place a lot of emphasis on what my childhood was like in order to explain who I am today.
#
And it's just something that I have done, you know, everybody constructs their own origin
#
stories for themselves, and this is possibly mine.
#
And so therefore, when I came to Haldane's life, I sort of yielded to my proclivity and
#
I just sort of also explained a lot of it, although not all of it, a lot of what he became
#
later to his childhood.
#
And so I explained it to the model that his father set up, which is the model of a scientist
#
who believed that science had to be done for the benefit of the masses, a man who believed
#
in a certain kind of equality in society.
#
And so all that exposure that Haldane had at some point, in my view, helped a lot towards
#
making him a socialist.
#
Definitely, he was never a conservative of any kind, even though his uncle was a conservative
#
His own family and his father and himself never went into that side of the political
#
But then as he grew up and as he continued to work in science, even though his own science
#
was not in any way directly related to, you know, the practical matters of society in
#
many aspects, you know, he always had in his mind, this link between science and society,
#
the fact that science had to work for the upliftment of society more than anything else.
#
That was the noblest thing science could do.
#
And so when the Russian Revolution happened a couple of decades thereafter, as the Soviet
#
Union paid at first real attention to science, and then after that lip service, obviously,
#
and not anything else, but as they continued to champion this model of a scientifically
#
built egalitarian society, it was inevitable that he would, you know, fall for the attraction
#
He toured, he went to the Soviet Union once with his wife in 1928.
#
And while his wife came away with decidedly mixed views about how well the Soviet Union
#
was succeeding, he came away completely captivated.
#
He genuinely saw, you know, or thought he saw an enormous amount of funding and attention
#
being paid by the government to science and scientists and scientific institutions.
#
It was something that was always sort of a quibble for him in England itself.
#
He thought capitalist societies were inevitably organized around what corporations want and
#
not what the people want.
#
And so therefore, governments would do what interests wanted them to do.
#
This was a view that his father also held.
#
And he, you know, again, multiple times through the course of his early career, he had seen
#
that politicians in England frequently disregarded the advice of scientists, much to the, and
#
they never bore the brunt of that ignorance.
#
In fact, the people who bore the brunt of that ignorance were the regular people.
#
So for example, if his father designed a particular kind of gas mask to protect against chlorine
#
gas attacks in the First World War, the government and its civil servants would substitute one
#
ingredient for another, make the mask less effective than it should have been.
#
And, you know, the people who bore the brunt of that were the soldiers in the trenches,
#
working class men quite often, who would be saddled with these non-functional masks and
#
And he saw this time and time again, I mean, he would see politicians be rewarded for scientific
#
advances that had been made by scientists.
#
And I think all of this disillusioned him quite a bit about the way that Western capitalist
#
societies were set up at the time and drove him more and more to the left of the political
#
I was always founded curious that, you know, Marxists saw Darwinism as a validation of
#
or a natural sort of extension of what they believed in because, you know, I did an episode
#
with Matt Ridley a couple of years back called The Evolution of Everything, you know, based
#
on a book he had written where he pointed out that common force between a natural selection
#
itself and the way languages revel up and the way markets work is basically that it
#
is a kind of emergent order, that there isn't a grand planner, there isn't a grand designer.
#
You know, I mean, the whole intelligent design argument which came from William Paley was
#
that, look, this is so complex and beautiful, someone must have designed it.
#
And the genius of Darwin and those who followed him like Haldane was to point out that, no,
#
you don't need a designer, this stuff happens on its own, which is so counterintuitive.
#
And you know, and that would lead you not to therefore believe in things like central
#
planning or that you can design a society.
#
And I think, you know, when I read about Haldane, I thought he kind of fit the description of
#
what Adam Smith would have called the man of system.
#
I'll just sort of read out what Smith's, how Smith defined that, where writing in The
#
Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith wrote, quote, the man of system is apt to be very wise in
#
his own conceit and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his ideal plan of government
#
that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.
#
He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts without any regard either
#
to the great interests or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.
#
He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with
#
as much ease as a hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard.
#
He does not consider that the pieces upon the chessboard have no other principle of
#
motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them, but that in the great chessboard
#
of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own altogether
#
different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it, stop quote.
#
And it strikes me that one in this sense that Haldane and so many others in that era, you
#
know, we've also spoken about how eugenics held so much sway over both the left and the
#
right and was almost common wisdom in a sense.
#
And how so much of that seems to come from the belief that, you know, when scientists
#
realize the power of their tools and there is no denying that they are incredibly powerful,
#
you know, the things that Haldane could prove with algebra and sort of the advances of knowledge
#
he could make, it's easy to get carried away with that sense of power and then be arrogant
#
enough to assume that it applies to society.
#
And of course, you know, a classic illustration of that which you've given in that excellent
#
first chapter in your book was of course, the Soviet scientist Lysenko, you know, got
#
Lysenko, of course, was a shitty scientist, Haldane was a great scientist, but what it
#
seems to me is that he is applying a certain kind of rigor to his science, but not a similar
#
rigor to his politics, which we again see later in his defense of Lysenko, for example.
#
What is sort of your sense of all this and is that a danger that say men of system, scientists
#
or people who are, you know, very accomplished that, you know, it could be science, it could
#
be managerial work, like there is this notion that if you're the CEO of a company, you can
#
run a country as well, which is another mistaken notion people seem to have as if there is
#
any remote comparison between the complexities involved.
#
Do you think that this was sort of Haldane's kind of fatal mistake?
#
And not just his, but I think a lot of Marxists embraced Darwinism, right?
#
Because as you point out in your book.
#
Well, there's so many layers to this.
#
So let me like, let me unpack some of them.
#
A couple of things that I thought about while you were talking about this mystery as to
#
why Marxists and Darwinists at the time seem to find common cause.
#
One is I think that in the 19th century, these were both challenges to the established order.
#
I think Marxism was obviously a challenge to the way that markets were structured and
#
Darwinism was a challenge to the church.
#
It was sort of a refutation of any principle of God or the Godhead in any way.
#
And I think as many as to happen quite often, differences were papered over just because
#
these two were allied at the time, sort of quite radical causes.
#
The second also was I think both, I mean, Marxists and Darwinists, both I think might
#
have been seen to believe in what might be called the theory of bottom-up change.
#
That basically that organizing happens from the bottom, you know, animals change, well,
#
species evolved because first there was one unit or one individual mutant or variant that
#
emerged that then proved to be more, you know, so there are these broader principles that
#
operate, but the change happens at the bottom.
#
And I think the idea of Marxism as a kind of revolution that begins from the bottom
#
through the agglomeration of people and how to change their material well-being in order
#
to then change society, I think again, there's a similarity over there.
#
But the interesting thing and maybe the point where maybe we can choose to part ways here
#
is that I think everybody who approaches politics underplays the emotional reasons or the irrational
#
reasons for which they are drawn to a particular political ideology and overplays the rational
#
reasons that they are drawn to it.
#
Certainly Haldane and other Marxists of his time, examples, you know, Haldane, as I point
#
out in my book, I mean, a lot of the reason that he was driven to the left was because
#
of the circumstances in which he grew up, the kind of things that he saw that left an
#
impression on him and that directed both his work and his political ideology.
#
But equally, I think, are people who tend to believe that economics is an exact science
#
and that they have figured out that there is an exactitude, there's a precise way in
#
which a market can work for the best benefit of society and approach it from there and
#
insist that they're being rational when they're doing it, that there is no tug of emotion
#
or sentiment or irrationality or even sometimes blind belief in the way in which this works.
#
I think you could say it for people on every part of the political spectrum and not just
#
Of course, there is a completely valid argument to be made about how Haldane and other Marxists
#
and communists should not have been blind to the perversions of science that were happening
#
in the Soviet Union at the time.
#
In fact, this is a point I make in the opening chapter and certainly Haldane's insistence
#
on defending Stalin even into the 1950s when the extent of his show trials and his purges
#
were starting to become quite well known, I mean, that was completely mystifying and
#
I can only ascribe that to Haldane's stubbornness, which is demonstrated in many other forms.
#
So you're completely right, he didn't bring to his politics the nimbleness and flexibility
#
and willingness to change his mind that marked his scientific work.
#
But I think that is the nature of most people who approach politics in any part of the political
#
A bunch of things to unpack here, one that's a great insight that you shared that we often
#
underplay the emotional reasons and overplay the rational reasons and I would completely
#
agree with Haldane and I think that society was broken, that government was in the sway
#
of private interests, which kind of remains the case today, so one can sort of understand
#
That said, I think, and he could not have known that at this time, but while in terms
#
of science, his rigor was spot on and he was obviously one of the great geniuses of the
#
He didn't understand the principles of economics, for example, like you've referred to, I'll
#
quote from your book, in 1932, he released a science fiction story, The Goldmakers, an
#
approximation of a wellsean yarn in which a new technique to distill gold out of seawater
#
threatens to disrupt the world's mining concerns.
#
The inventor plans to use his profits to start endowing science as it should be endowed,
#
a pet course for Haldane, although in the tale, he doesn't recognize how these profits
#
will plummet if the markets are suddenly flooded with fresh gold, stop quote.
#
But leaving that aside, the other thing that I kind of take an issue with is that, yeah,
#
in Marxism and theory, they might talk of it being bottom up, but in practice, it can
#
only be achieved through top-down coercion.
#
And that is something that, you know, Haldane also seemed to have turned a blind eye to,
#
you know, the moral question of do the means justify the end, for example, in 1928 when
#
he met one of the scientists who hosted him and showed him great hospitality was Nikolai
#
Vavilov, I think his name was, and then later Vavilov was arrested because, you know, Lysenko
#
didn't like him and he was murdered in 1942, essentially, that he was imprisoned and then
#
And that is something that, you know, Haldane completely shaded over when he was asked to
#
comment on, for example, you know, the many political prisoners, the many scientists,
#
you point out in the book about how at one point in an essay or a piece that he's writing,
#
he mentions that a couple of scientists were no longer in their positions.
#
But then later on, he sort of says, oh, they didn't do any important work anyway.
#
And you see these sort of this kind of finessing happening where, you know, again, it seems
#
to me to be in that sense of wonderful study of how his character also is corroded by this
#
political affiliation and this ideology to the extent that where there is a clear choice
#
to be made between his science and his politics, that is when Lysenko basically says there
#
is no such thing as a gene and, you know, goes into that Lamarckianism that, you know,
#
that qualities we acquire during a lifetime can be inherited.
#
And at that point, when it is completely cleared that the science is on one side and these
#
guys are on the other side, he sticks with these guys because he's a card carrying member
#
of the Communist Party and he feels that for the larger cause, he must.
#
And this was incredibly fascinating to me.
#
And you've pointed out in an interview somewhere that you sort of see this as the exception,
#
the one weak moment, the defense of Lysenko.
#
But to my eyes and just judging from I haven't read anything else on him except your remarkable
#
And there are enough details on that.
#
And my sense from that was that this was sort of a pattern like even in 1928 when he went,
#
It's just that he fell for the confirmation bias and chose to completely ignore it while
#
his wife, you know, noticed some of it.
#
And it seems to me and it's almost a very tragic human story in that sense where he
#
is letting his politics.
#
And this brings me to sort of, or I'll ask you to, I'll get to my question later.
#
I'll ask you to, you know, comment on this.
#
Yeah, you know, his one fatal mistake, I think, was, as you quite rightly point out, was the
#
defense of Lysenko and by extension, the defense of the Soviet Union at a time when many of
#
its policies could not bear defending.
#
And the fact that he did this in itself sort of instructive.
#
But let me point out a couple of things.
#
First is that as a scientist, to be a scientist in the 1910s and the 1920s and to look to
#
a regime which promised to bring the benefits of science to the masses, to promise a whole
#
new political system, I mean, we have to look at this from the point of view, not of people
#
who are living in the 21st century and you've seen what happened in the 1980s and 90s with
#
the collapse of communism.
#
But as people living in the 1910s and 20s who are seeing a whole new alternative system
#
of government and society spring up somewhere in one of the great nations of the world and
#
the promise that science will be used to equalize people and all investment in science will
#
be used to improve livelihoods, to improve agricultural practices, for example.
#
I mean, this must have been an immense lure to the extent that it fooled somebody like
#
Holden who went there in 1928.
#
And even in 1928, as we know from the chronology of events, the show trials had only just about
#
They were often inaccessible to people who didn't probably speak Russian.
#
So to see squalor around you is one thing and you'd think that maybe it is only the
#
effect of the new Soviet regime not having been in power long enough and that eventually
#
the squalor will disappear.
#
But to gauge perversions of power that was starting to happen at that time already was
#
another thing altogether that I think would have been invisible to Holden quite naturally
#
as somebody who didn't speak Russian, whose entire visit was possibly curated by Pavlov
#
and other people from the Soviet state.
#
I won't accuse him of blindness at that point so much as just an inability to access a lot
#
of what was happening around him.
#
As things progressed, I think in the 1930s, this is very much a human factor, as you rightly
#
point out, a human frailty, which is that as you wed yourself more and more to a political
#
cause, you dig yourself in more and more.
#
You are unwilling to make radical changes in your political judgment.
#
And this is something we see all the time today.
#
And so it's particularly instructive to read of Holden's experience of this.
#
My big curiosity about the Lysenko affair was whether he genuinely believed either that
#
what Lysenko was doing was saying was accurate.
#
It couldn't have been because then that meant he was negating his own decades worth of work.
#
So then did he believe that this was all sort of permissible, that a few lives lost and
#
a few scientists imprisoned was permissible for the larger cause?
#
And the third thing I wonder is, did he ever stand up within the Communist Party itself
#
for some of the principles that he believed in?
#
It was the third thing that intrigued me the most because nobody had written about it.
#
Whether nobody had analyzed his papers and his documents deeply enough or hadn't read
#
them, it felt to me to kind of look through his correspondences with other members of
#
the British Communist Party at the time, the memoranda he circulated within the party.
#
And the thing I found that is he criticized the Soviet Union and Lysenko and Soviet science
#
extensively within the party itself.
#
So what he clearly thought was that he was best serving the cause of both science and
#
society if he restricted his criticisms to that close group, if he tried to effect the
#
change from within rather than seeming to abandon the party in the public eye.
#
And I think this is a choice that many of us very often are called upon to make even
#
You know, we all have entrenched political beliefs in one way or another.
#
We are all painfully aware, at least those of us who think about this, seriously, we
#
are all painfully aware these political positions are limiting in and of themselves.
#
Very often they are tied to the fortunes of one party and every party is fickle and flawed
#
and we have to stand up for that party or that cause even while ignoring its hypocrisies
#
It is particularly true in a two party system like the US.
#
It is even true in a multi-party system like India.
#
And my point and the reason I wanted to explain this Haldane episode in depth, this Lysenko
#
episode in depth, was to illustrate that this happened even to people who purported to approach
#
all of this with a scientific point.
#
Yeah, no, I found it very interesting and relatable.
#
And you know, another theme that you sort of pick upon is you talk about how like, you
#
know, Haldane, of course, was a prolific public intellectual, wrote a lot, which we'll talk
#
But one of the themes that you pick upon is how there was that sort of space where scientists
#
were speaking out in politics.
#
You refer to the book, The Visible College, and you've spoken about the, you know, the
#
five guys at Cambridge who were, you know, prominent scientists and people who were speaking
#
out politically at the same time.
#
One of them, Bernal, wrote a book called The Social Function of Science, and then you lament
#
that it went off over the decades as scientists got into an ivory tower and so on.
#
And then in the end, in a hopeful note, you said that, okay, they are now gradually coming
#
And I had sort of two opposite reactions to this.
#
One reaction was that we need more of the scientific viewpoint in politics because otherwise
#
politics, you know, they build their own narratives which need to be countered with good science.
#
So there I completely agree with you.
#
But the point that I'm conflicted about is that while I would like to see more science
#
in politics, I'm not sure I would like to see more politics in science, because what
#
happens today, and this is something that is, you know, I think a crisis on both the
#
right and the left, is that politics impinges upon science in a way that in some particular
#
context there is a chilling effect upon scientists, for example, there was a recent debate on,
#
you know, involving J.K.
#
Rowling about whether biological sex is real or not.
#
My point is not to take a stance on that, but my point is to say that this is something
#
that scientists should be able to debate and discuss.
#
But it seems to me that today it's just one of those subjects which has been put out of
#
You cannot debate and discuss it anymore.
#
And if you take a particular position on it, you could lose your job or you could, you
#
know, not get hired by the university you were applying to.
#
And this is just one example.
#
And again, I'm not taking a position on this one way or the other.
#
And you know, there's even been a similar chilling effect, for example, when you talk
#
about something like inheritable differences.
#
And there again, you see sort of perhaps an overreaction to an earlier politics where
#
a particular kind of science, the science of inherited differences was used to justify
#
horribly coercive state action in eugenics, which we've seen, which is one of the big
#
But regardless of that, you know, when it is prescriptive and is used in a particular
#
kind of politics, yes, it's a problem.
#
But when is descriptive and you just have scientists exploring different subjects, why
#
should you stop studying it?
#
So my point here is again, not to take a stand on any of these issues, but say, but just
#
point out that the scientific temperament as I think even Holden would have agreed is
#
that you study all sides and you let that openness remain where anybody is free to study
#
And yet, today, we have politics impinging upon science, where some areas of potential
#
study are just out of bounds because of political reasons.
#
I mean, what Holden's argument and what his experience was, is that politics has never
#
ever stopped being a part of science.
#
And it is sort of a fool's errand to believe otherwise.
#
And it's exemplified so beautifully during the course of Holden's own life, which is
#
that as soon as genetics became a thing, as soon as a very first decade of the 20th century,
#
as soon as people thought about evolution and the fact that there were genes and there
#
is such a thing as fitness, immediately they started to apply it to races, to the extent
#
that the British government, which had suffered terribly in the Boer war in the late 1800s,
#
early 1900s, they started to think about the fitness of their population.
#
I write extensively in this book about this campaign of sterilization in the US to weed
#
the fit people out of society, of sort of sequestering people here in the UK to make
#
sure they don't breed and produce further quote unquote unfit people.
#
So this has been a part of science since time immemorial.
#
The things that we talked about here that you mentioned, which are enormously interesting,
#
which is somebody like JK Rowling sort of talking about biological sex, for example.
#
Hall-Date wouldn't quite characterize that as, I guess, a scientist's ability or inability
#
to work on the intricacies of biological sex.
#
I don't actually know, I haven't looked into this in any detail, whether funding has been
#
granted, not granted, publication status has been granted, not granted, to papers based
#
But certainly the pressures are immense and the pressures have always been there.
#
One of the things, you know, we talked earlier about how the Lysenko episode was this regrettable
#
one-off in Hall-Date's career.
#
And what I meant to add onto that is also relevant here, which is that Hall-Date's scientific
#
approach to things in so many other cases led him into exactly the right direction.
#
You know, Hall-Date grew up as a child of the 19th century, early 20th century, and
#
he was saddled initially with a lot of the racist biases that belonged to Englishmen
#
He grew to outgrow that because he did more and more science, understood more and more
#
about how human populations and genes work.
#
It led him to take an extremely vociferous stance against fascist notions of what science
#
and science, racial purity were, to the extent that he put himself in harm's way when he
#
went to Spain during the Civil War to help in whatever way he could on the front to fight
#
I mean, he was that committed to an anti-fascist stance.
#
So you know, in many of these cases, scientists picking up and having the weight of scientific
#
experience behind them, I think has inevitably enriched public debate.
#
And it has definitely very often stood up against distortions of science that are propagated
#
by politicians or people on the left or people on the right.
#
I think the Lysenko episode is remarkable precisely because it was the only time where
#
he allowed his political beliefs to override his scientific beliefs.
#
If he had acted in character in that episode, as in every other episode, he would have stood
#
up against the Soviet Union, perhaps quit the party and said that this was a clear violation
#
of scientific knowledge and rigor.
#
He did play Stalin after he died as well.
#
So I have a question for you, but before that, I want to move on to Haldane's writing now.
#
And you had cited this excellent article he wrote, which was almost meta because he was
#
extremely prolific in terms of writing and even giving talks.
#
You mentioned there was a year where he gave a hundred talks.
#
And he then got meta and wrote this piece called How to Write a Popular Scientific Article.
#
And you write, his first piece of stern advice, know a great deal more about your subject
#
than you put on paper, then look for a familiar analogy or pull it out of the facts of everyday
#
And now you quote Haldane, compare the production of hot gas in the bomb to that of steam in
#
a kettle, the changes which occur in the bird each year to those which take place in men
#
once in a lifetime activity, the precipitation of casein by calcium salt to the formation
#
If you know enough, you will be able to proceed to your goal in a series of hops rather than
#
And you also sort of talk about his philosophy towards his craft, which, you know, I think
#
Hemingway, who he hung out with during the Spanish Civil War, I mean, he seems to have
#
been like Forrest Gump.
#
He was very much a kind of Gilroy was your type of guy.
#
So you know, the picture that one gets of him as a writer about science is of a person
#
of remarkable craft and knowledge and bringing it to bear.
#
In another part of the book, you write about sort of political writing about communism,
#
which is again, though you didn't use those words, I'm kind of just thinking aloud, but
#
were more woolly, would have tended to be more abstract than concrete, unlike in these,
#
you know, amazing scientific examples that we used.
#
So while you were going through the archives, is that a difference that you noticed?
#
Did it feel like, you know, the Haldane who was writing about science and about things
#
of which he had deep knowledge was, you know, was the writing different?
#
I think the purpose was different.
#
I think when he was writing about science for the lay public, I think his effort was
#
to get to explain and to get people to understand, but more importantly, to get people to understand
#
how scientists think, you know, the kind of series of logical steps in the weighing of
#
evidence that scientists often do.
#
I think when he spoke about when he wrote about politics or spoke about politics, his
#
purpose was to convince, to persuade, to bring people to his point of view.
#
And I think necessarily for that reason, he often allowed himself to slip into what might
#
sometimes be called propaganda.
#
Not always, and not with every political article, for example, a lot of the political pieces
#
he wrote about Nazi science, about racial science, he was very clear about, and he was
#
quite over there, he was sharp and clear and unambiguous and scientific even.
#
But I think every time he tried to refer to the Soviet Union and to communism as an ideology
#
to be admired, he let himself slip into propagandistic mode, which was, I mean, and the distinction
#
You read a lot of his essays and the essay for essays for the most part will stick with
#
science and they'll be clear and precise and little gems of explication.
#
And then towards the end, he'll want to draw a political moral out of it, just to buttress
#
his own political philosophy.
#
And at that particular instance, he will slip into a kind of nebulousness in his language
#
that he would otherwise have deployed.
#
While you finish the book, and we're kind of getting to the later stage of his life,
#
and while you finish the book, did you sort of get a sense of the evolution of his character,
#
like quite apart from the things that he's doing in, say, the scientific domain or the
#
political domain, you know, you've spoken about how is the transition between his marriages
#
and all of that, but do you get a sense of him as a person?
#
For example, one thing you pointed out is that many people would wonder about why he
#
chose to come to India, of all places, in 1957.
#
And one reason that you point out, which you discovered when you went through his bank
#
statements and, you know, all of those papers, which are otherwise inaccessible, is that
#
he was actually very short of money.
#
You describe how, you know, partly because he had alimony payments going out to his first
#
wife and all of that, and you describe at one point about how an American journalist
#
wrote to him with a bunch of questions.
#
And he said that, listen, it would take me hours to answer these personal questions.
#
Are you willing to, you know, kind of pay for it?
#
Which reminded me of an experience I had in Crecganford, I don't know if you ever had
#
a similar experience, or rather at Wizard and when I called up one of the famous spin
#
And he said, tell me about vitamin M. Wow.
#
And then I realized, and I felt so sad, I felt like crying because a legend of the game.
#
And so it kind of strikes me that after this immense career, where he's been a hugely successful
#
public intellectual, and all of that has happened, and he stood up against fascism and fascism
#
And at the same time, communism is crumbling, and he's not crumbling, but has revealed its
#
And he's sort of in denial about that.
#
Does one get a sense of sort of the human side of this great man?
#
Like one of the quotes I most loved in your book was when he talks about going to India.
#
And he says, one of my reasons for settling in India was to avoid wearing socks.
#
60 years in socks is enough.
#
It gives such a great sense of the guy.
#
I mean, it's absolutely right.
#
The context, the broader context for his brokenness itself also should be explained, I feel, which
#
is, of course, the alimony is one part of it.
#
But all the money he made, he gave to his own university, the university that was supposed
#
He was giving money to the university to make sure that labs could remain funded.
#
He once gave, he bought a set of teaspoons for 10 shillings for the men's staff room,
#
the men's teacher's staff room in the university because they had no teaspoons in the university.
#
This was a post-war period.
#
University College London had been heavily bombed.
#
The nearest tennis court, as I said, was 14 miles away.
#
It was just a complete shell of itself and rebuilding was going on.
#
At this time, funds for doing science were quite limited.
#
And so he once gave 300 pounds, which was an eighth of his annual salary, he gave back
#
to the university to make sure his department could continue doing research.
#
So a lot of this money, the aspects of money that I talk about in the book are not for
#
personal enrichment because he was a bizarrely low-maintenance guy in that sense, all through
#
his life, not just in India, where he was definitely sort of living a very simple life,
#
But I think he felt that there wasn't enough money to do the science that he wanted to
#
And all of the money that you would get from writing articles, he would make over to some
#
grad student of his or to some lab.
#
There are letters to that effect saying, listen, I know you owe me this much money.
#
Can you make it over to University College London?
#
And similarly for this money that he asked for when he did interviews, the money was
#
not for his own bank account.
#
So in that sense, he was a remarkably uniform character throughout his life.
#
He was never fastidious about himself.
#
He drove old beaten up cars, lived in almost slovenly mess, and continued to do that well
#
In fact, the thing that attracted him to India was, you mentioned this line about socks,
#
which is a beautiful sort of bon mo, he just kind of tossed it away.
#
The thing that is inherent in it is that a certain simplicity of lifestyle is what attracted
#
The fact that, for example, you didn't need winter clothing, you could just sort of go
#
all year round in cottons and maybe one jacket or whatever it was when he was living in Calcutta.
#
You didn't have to have expensive furniture.
#
In a relatively poor country, he could live the sort of relatively poor lifestyle that
#
And it also struck me, and this is a complete aside, that one of the letters you've quoted
#
from him is where he's writing to Mahalanubis and he's saying that, please forgive me for
#
not being more productive.
#
It's just too freaking hot, not in those words.
#
But I just thought that, my God, I think another thing that is unseen by most people is a massive
#
difference that the invention of air conditioning has just made to humanity in general.
#
As Lee Kuan Yew said, it is the greatest invention of the 20th century, at least from the point
#
of view of Singapore and other Asian nations, because it transitioned them from being sort
#
of an economy that had to do work outside or not at all to be able to work indoors.
#
I mean, it's an entire lifestyle and professional change.
#
My two great inventions are the AC and the jet spray.
#
But yeah, so here's the thing, I read your book, and in fact, I read it yesterday because
#
You know, I bought it months ago when it came out, but I wanted to read it just before our
#
conversation so it would be sharp in my memory.
#
And I absolutely loved it, it's so beautifully written and so many insights, and I learned
#
My question to you to throw that back to you is in the process of writing it, A, how did
#
you thinking about the world and society and perhaps science expand and B, just about the
#
I mean, you've written two excellent books before this, mind you, which we didn't even
#
But in the sense that this was just such a different project also, how did your sense
#
of, you know, your own writing and the craft of writing in general, how did those kind
#
Well, to answer the second question first, I mean, the writing was, as I mentioned earlier
#
on the podcast, it was an extremely interesting process because I had to depend on what I
#
read to make things vivid for the reader to bring this character to life who I'd never
#
met to get an insight into him and to write about him that word again, in an almost fictive
#
sense and convey him as a character and a person.
#
So you know, a lot of this was quite challenging, I was doing it for the first time I would
#
read extensively from other books that I thought had done this well.
#
And you know, it took much longer to write as a book than either of my previous two books.
#
And partly that was down to the writing, partly also it was a material.
#
I'm not a scientist, you know, I haven't been trained as a biologist, certainly.
#
And so to understand a lot of the subjects that he worked on in the papers that he wrote,
#
I had to train myself, I mean, obviously not to the level of a scientist, but to the level
#
of somebody who could at least understand the science and simplify it.
#
And that involved very often talking to other scientists to get them to explain it to me
#
as if I was a first year college student, to read papers again and again, and to kind
#
of enough scientists, friends who I could call at a moment's notice to ask them, you
#
know, doubts about one thing or the other.
#
All of this was very different from my previous two books.
#
And then the act of boiling that science down itself is something else altogether.
#
I mean, it's something that I've never done before, because it's inherently more complex
#
and technical than the Sri Lankan Civil War, for example.
#
So to constantly find real world examples, very much as Haldane did, in fact, to find
#
real world examples in his papers, or to find real world examples that his papers retrospectively
#
applied to or went on to apply to.
#
I mean, all of these things were challenges that I set myself precisely for this purpose,
#
because I felt that I'd never done this before and I wanted to see what the limits of my
#
language and my prose and my writing were.
#
So that was really difficult.
#
And I think in terms of how I myself changed over the course of researching this book is
#
well, I mean, we talked about this earlier, I mean, a lot of these thoughts and ideas
#
about the frailty of our political stances and how contingent they are just on what we
#
You know, I've been thinking about that perhaps superficially even before.
#
And certainly, events since 2014 have helped me clarify some of these a lot more, be they
#
events in India or in the UK or in the US.
#
But writing through this book helped me understand it from the point of view of something that
#
happened within one person's lifetime and kind of you can look back on your life, but
#
it's still only a limited life.
#
You haven't seen the full extent of your own life, whereas writing through someone like
#
Haldane's life enabled me to see the whole thing in its entirety.
#
And I grew immensely fond of him.
#
I mean, I can't say to him that this is the most unusual thing, the most unexpected thing
#
that came out of this process.
#
You know, of course, everybody says if you write a biography of somebody, you should
#
It doesn't apply to people like Hitler, but obviously, to spend that much time inside
#
one person's mind, you are fond of them, I agree.
#
But I told Ram Guha this, I said like, Ram, you never told me how sad a biographer feels
#
when he or she reaches the end of the subject's life.
#
It felt like somebody very close to me had died and I was somehow witness to it and not.
#
I wrote a small piece about this somewhere else, about Haldane's handwriting and sort
#
of just how I grew to adore it and how, you know, describing the end of his life felt
#
And this is a terrible example.
#
So I apologize in advance for anyone who has ever lost a child.
#
This is in no way comparing the scale of the two things.
#
But only in these two instances, do you see the entirety of a person's life from birth
#
to death and be there to observe the death itself.
#
Of course, mine is in a much more sort of superficial case of the same, but I, you know,
#
you see the person being born, I saw JBS's sort of childhood letters, I saw the mistakes
#
he made when he was a kid, I saw how he was bullied when he was at Eton, I saw the person
#
he went on to become, I saw the mistakes he made in his personal and professional life,
#
and I saw the way he died.
#
When else do you ever get to experience this?
#
So there was a real sense of acute loss I felt when I was writing that last scene when
#
he died, you know, and that again, sort of, there's so much about the biographical craft
#
that we can discuss, although you should probably talk to people who have written more than
#
one biography, but that I think, a real emotional charge to it that I didn't expect.
#
And I'll also, in the show notes, I'll link to this talk you gave on the book, which is
#
on YouTube, where you have this fascinating slide, which has three handwritten letters
#
by him at different points in time, it actually gets neater as it goes along.
#
And I thought it'd be like a bell curve where the middle one when he's this thing will be
#
the best, but it's extremely lucid and readable at the end.
#
And you know, maybe this is a reason Robert Caro hasn't yet finished his biography of
#
He doesn't want to say goodbye to the guy.
#
Well, Robert Caro, I mean, I once had the extreme good fortune to sit next to him at
#
And he told me about, you know, he was talking about the first book and he said about how
#
he didn't understand LBJ's background at all, sort of Texas and small town Texas that he
#
And he said, well, so I only saw one solution to this.
#
And I said, what was that?
#
He said, well, I moved there.
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I moved there for three years.
#
He lived in a small town in Texas for three years, just to understand that Texan background
#
that LBJ would grew up in.
#
So I mean, that kind of commitment to the biographical craft is something else entirely.
#
I mean, you know, look, if publishers are willing to pay me enough, I will go anywhere
#
to, you know, he was not being paid at that time.
#
I mean, he was still sort of, but this was just what he wanted to do.
#
This is, he had also been a journalist for a while and he decided he just wanted to get
#
into the nuts and bolts of a person's life to that level.
#
Samant, I've taken enough of your time.
#
I'll let you go now, but thank you so much for your time and your insights.
#
This has been such a pleasure and it's been great to catch up with you.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do hop on over to your nearest bookstore online
#
or offline and pick up a dominant character, the radical science and restless politics
#
Samant's previous books, Following Fish and This Divided Island are also worth your
#
You can follow Samant on Twitter at samant underscore S. You can follow me at Amit Verma,
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A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. Do check out my writing course at indiaankar.com slash clear writing.
#
Registrations for the August batch are now open.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
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