#
The world is a complex place, perhaps too complex for us to understand in its entirety.
#
As a species, we cope by telling ourselves stories about the world so that we can explain
#
That's how religion came about, in fact.
#
In an age before science, we needed to explain the baffling natural phenomena around us.
#
Where does the sun come from?
#
Religions, of course, kept evolving.
#
And with time, rationalism and science played a part in building truer narratives, a journey
#
of discovery we are still on.
#
Now, I often say that we draw our pictures of the world by joining dots.
#
The more dots we have, the better the resolution, the clearer our picture.
#
And what are these dots?
#
At one level, these dots are knowledge.
#
Every data point about the world helps us understand it better, unless, of course, we
#
are getting those data points from news television.
#
But as much as information, we also need to build frames of reference through which we
#
And we need multiple frames because any one frame on its own will be simplistic.
#
Now, I know people who have one hammer for every nail, one lens through which they look
#
But the intellectuals I respect are those who have humility about how little they know,
#
how little they understand, and who are trying to learn something new every day.
#
One way of doing this is by reading a lot.
#
But quantity of reading is not enough.
#
You also need to be able to read across disciplines so you can think out of the box on any one
#
issue, bringing multiple frames of reference into play.
#
You can bring insights from psychology into economics or insights from probability theory
#
And ideally, you need to not just gather knowledge this way and sharpen your vision, but it would
#
help if you're a bloody good writer as well, so you can communicate your ideas to the world.
#
Brothers and sisters of the seen and the unseen, let me present to you Raghu Sanjelal Jaitley.
#
Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
#
A year and a half ago, I subscribed to a newsletter, Anticipating the Unintended, at publicpolicy.substack.com
#
by my good friend Pranay Kotasthane.
#
Now, if Pranay is listening to this, I don't want to embarrass him with praise.
#
I'll simply say that he's one of my favorite thinkers in the whole damn world.
#
And his newsletter was kick-ass until its 21st edition when he brought in a co-writer.
#
Now, typically, you'd expect the co-writer of such a fine thinker to dilute the quality
#
Anticipating the Unintended became even more kick-ass.
#
Pranay's co-writer was a gentleman named Raghu Sanjelal Jaitley.
#
And I swear to you, the first time I read him, my jaw just dropped.
#
Why have I not heard of him before?
#
Raghu's writing on politics and economics blew my mind and everything he wrote was so
#
He came across as so much more well-read than I was and brought so many fascinating perspectives
#
to bear on everything that he wrote about.
#
Even on the rare occasions that I disagreed with him, my thinking was sharpened by having
#
to articulate that disagreement to myself.
#
So I have finally gotten him on the scene on The Unseen.
#
Today's episode covers a lot of ground from politics to economics to Bollywood.
#
I conceived this episode to be a ramble through a series of themes that I found interesting
#
which Raghu had written about.
#
I am sure you will find a lot here that is stimulating and thought-provoking.
#
Now before we begin, three quick notes.
#
One, Raghu Sanjelal Jaitley is a pseudonym and we are maintaining that identity for this
#
I do know who he really is but I have never met him.
#
He is based in Singapore right now and I had not heard of him until I read his writings.
#
The second note before you start listening, my online course, The Art of Clear Writing
#
has now opened registrations for the March batch.
#
It consists of four webinars over four Saturdays.
#
Classes start on March 6th.
#
So register now at IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing.
#
And finally my third note, inspired by Raghu Sanjelal Jaitley, I will now start writing
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my newsletter regularly, at least once a week if not twice.
#
So please head on over to IndiaUncut.substack.com to subscribe.
#
And hey, if Twitter ever gets banned in India, then you can still follow me with all my writings
#
and podcasts coming straight to your inbox.
#
That's right, only to your inbox.
#
And now finally for our conversation.
#
But first, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
One of the things I worked on in recent years is on getting my reading habit together.
#
This involves making time to read books, but it also means reading long form articles and
#
There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the big question we all
#
face is, how do we navigate this knowledge?
#
Who will be our guide to all the awesome writing out there?
#
Well, a couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
#
which aims to help people uplevel themselves constantly to stay relevant for the future.
#
A few months ago I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
#
Every day for six months they sent me a long form article to read.
#
The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models to even marmalade.
#
This helped me build a habit of reading.
#
At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I had before.
#
Many listeners of The Scene on the Unseen ask me, hey, how can I build my reading habit?
#
How can I uplevel my brain?
#
Well, I have an answer for you.
#
Head on over to CTQCompounds and check out The Daily Reader as well as their other activities
#
which will help you uplevel your future self.
#
Their next batch starts on Saturday, March 13th, and they have already done 15 batches
#
What's more, you get a discount of a whopping rupees 2500, 2500 if you use the discount
#
This is for both The Daily Reader and Future Stack, another exciting program they have.
#
So hey, head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
#
Raghu, welcome to The Scene on the Unseen.
#
Amit, tell me a little bit about, you know, your name because your name comes from Bollywood.
#
You're an Aamir Khan fan and in a sense, Bollywood informs you and gives you an interesting frame
#
through which you look at so many issues in your newsletters.
#
So who is this Raghu Sanjay Lal Jaitley or, you know, where does the name come from?
#
Well, the name Amit comes from two Aamir Khan films.
#
In 1991, Aamir acted in a film called Dil Hai Ki Maanta Nahi where his character was
#
This was a, you know, our Indian version of It Happened One Night, the Frank Capra classic.
#
Mahesh Bhatt has either copied films or made films on his own life multiple times over.
#
But Aamir's name was Raghu Jaitley in that.
#
And right in the next year, in 92, Mansoor Khan made Jojita Vahee Sikand where Aamir
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Khan's name was Sanjay Lal.
#
So I sort of, you know, blended the two in to create Raghu Sanjay Lal Jaitley.
#
You know, in your newsletter, you talk about how you were an 80s kid growing up in Bollywood.
#
At one point, you say, quote, for the rare capitalist minded young boy growing up in
#
the 80s, Hindi films presented two viable career options, a smuggler or an industrialist.
#
And of course, you didn't go for the smuggler part of it.
#
But tell me a little bit about what kind of a kid were you growing up in the 80s?
#
I get the Bollywood obsession because we had nothing else.
#
We didn't have the internet.
#
We had television, which would, you know, one state owned channel, which would, you
#
know, paucity of great programs.
#
So what do you do for entertainment?
#
I mean, you know, Indians should not be judged for being so passionate and almost obsessive
#
about Bollywood and cricket because what else was there?
#
That's for my generation.
#
Young people today should find other things as well.
#
So tell me a little bit about that landscape.
#
What is it growing up in the 80s like?
#
Right, so, you know, Amit, a lot of your guests actually share a very similar kind of a background,
#
And that's possibly your background.
#
I grew up in a really small town at the heart of which was a public sector unit, a factory.
#
My father was a mid-level supervisor there.
#
And really there were three things that, you know, sort of my life revolved around at that
#
point in time outside of schools.
#
So the first one was, you know, TV and radio.
#
That was the window to the world outside.
#
Even if TV was just a single channel sort of a thing, but, you know, we got a lot out
#
of it than what today's people get out of television.
#
The other one was Hindi films.
#
So in some sense, Hindi films was a connect to the rest of India.
#
I mean, I never went to a metropolis till I was 23.
#
But you know, I had my own views about how Bombay looks like and what people do in Bombay,
#
colleges of Bombay and things of that kind.
#
And third, you know, the state for all its greatness had made sure that we had a good
#
So really these three were the things around which my life revolved.
#
Of course, there were open playgrounds and I played a lot.
#
I'm keeping that aside, but these three were in some sense, you know, fuel or food to my
#
intellectual curiosity in some sense.
#
And I was and I am a very, very curious child.
#
And I would still call myself a curious child because there is nothing that I don't sort
#
of read up and there is nothing that I don't feel, you know, more inquisitive about.
#
So I continued that particular passion right from the time I was a kid.
#
You know, one theme that I sometimes touch upon is that, you know, when we were growing
#
up, there were so few sources of information and knowledge, right?
#
So whatever we could get hold of, we read voraciously and therefore our reading was
#
not confined to any particular genre or whatever, because we didn't have a choice, we read whatever
#
And I sometimes contrast that with today's kids growing up, maybe Gen Z, which essentially
#
can access anything, listen to any song at any point in time, read any book.
#
But the flip side of that, it strikes me and is that it is often remarked that, you know,
#
young people of today don't have that deep sense of history, which is why, you know,
#
you, for example, you see communism making a comeback and it's become fashionable to
#
be a communist again, which after, you know, the horrors of the 20th century just blows
#
And one theory that's been put forward for that is that listen in this modern world of
#
hyper-connected social media, where there is so much new content being generated every
#
day, perhaps more content as it were generated in one day than it would have happened 10
#
years before, in any 10 year span before the internet or possibly much longer than that.
#
That people are all the time consuming, one, they take a knowledge for granted.
#
It's always there at their fingertips.
#
You can Google or Wikipedia it.
#
And two, what they are consuming is essentially very often stuff that was produced in the
#
last three or four days.
#
It is coming and going.
#
Therefore, that sense of history is not there and therefore these, you know, one can form
#
these ideological tribes on the basis of sort of all kinds of ideas, which, you know, if
#
you had the slightest knowledge of history, you know, you would not quite do so.
#
I've kind of rambled, so I won't elaborate on that.
#
But what's your sense of this, like, you know, I don't want to point to you and I being good
#
readers and all of that, because I think even in our generation, we were obviously outliers.
#
I keep saying in every generation, it's the same small sliver of people who are readers
#
and who satisfy their curiosity per se to that extent.
#
But what do you make of all of this, this sort of, you know, history ceasing to matter
#
and all these narratives forming all the time, the transient nature of the information that
#
I mean, it's a fairly interesting point that you raise, Amit.
#
You know, there is a certain level of shallowness which pervades, you know, every sphere these
#
days and especially the intellectual discourse.
#
And that's because, you know, people are very keen on getting something in bullet forms
#
and, you know, in listicles and getting to know about it and going ahead and, you know,
#
making a point or, you know, informing their worldview.
#
I think there is a space for curated content by experts, which brings balance and perspective.
#
And I think that we have reached that stage where, you know, gradually this, you know,
#
this plethora of choices that you have now for all kinds of information.
#
I mean, it's reaching a point where people are, you know, starting to feel that there
#
I think, you know, for instance, Yashoda Maung, you know, who started Persuasion.
#
I think that's in some sense a reaction to this.
#
A whole host of newsletters, I mean, of which, you know, whatever little sort of fame I have
#
got because of which you've known me, is an attempt to actually do something like that,
#
to actually take a topic, you know, view it, not just from today's immediate lens, but
#
ask yourself whether, you know, there is history behind something of this kind, I mean, which
#
will allow you to understand how similar things have actually happened in the past.
#
And you know, like Nietzsche said, I mean, it's, you know, we are, there is eternal recurrences.
#
We are in a, you know, eternal series of cycles.
#
And as I have, you know, discovered while writing this newsletter, every modern event
#
has an echo of it sometime in the past, if somebody has thought about that kind of an
#
event, somebody has written about it.
#
And therefore I believe that, you know, just having a transient view of a particular subject,
#
you know, forming a very strong view about it is absolutely the wrong way to go.
#
And people can go deeper, must go deeper if you really want to actually affect a change.
#
If you truly believe that you should affect a change, the shallow views actually won't
#
They will need to go deeper.
#
So, and I can give you multiple examples of it.
#
I mean, you know, I was just going through, you know, this insurrection at the Capitol
#
I mean, whatever these jokers try to do there.
#
And my thought immediately went to, you know, the first of this storming of the parliament
#
Not that I'm a history nerd of that kind, but listen, I mean, I've read history, like
#
you as I figured out, I was also a quizzer of dubious merit, but I, you know, went all
#
around the world trying my luck with quizzes.
#
But then you realize that, you know, in 1642, somebody tried to storm the parliament in
#
England and various things happened and there was somebody called Thomas Hobbes at that
#
point in time who was sort of observing this from Paris.
#
And you know, a whole political philosophy starts off from there because of that single
#
storming of the parliament.
#
So, you know, there are things for people to actually go deeper and make sense of what's
#
happening around them today.
#
So, you know, a number of different stands, which I'm going to touch upon.
#
The first kind of observation I'm going to make is that, yeah, of course, I agree with
#
you that, you know, there are cycles and history, if it doesn't repeat at least rhymes, as someone
#
said, but a counter view to that would come from what Jonathan Haidt said somewhere when
#
he sort of spoke about, you know, how there is, for example, imagine an equilibrium of
#
Everything is as it is and that is why the world exists.
#
And gravity is exactly, you know, this is a force and every, you know, it's almost as
#
if the perfect conditions for us existing as we are does.
#
And then suddenly one of those constant changes completely, say the law of gravity changes
#
completely, you know, which would obviously change the world completely, change our lives
#
completely, you know, depending on how much gravity changed by whether we would exist
#
And his point is that social media changed something fundamental around the year 2007,
#
And you know, very briefly for the benefit of the listeners, the thesis is that as the
#
Twitter's retweet button and like button and Facebook's share button, essentially with
#
the instant gratification of validation that they brought, did two things.
#
One is they made the discourse much shallower because of the nature of the form and B, they
#
made it far more performative, where simultaneously you lose depth because you're restricted to
#
140 characters, 280 characters, and secondly, you are getting validated for everything you
#
say and therefore that validation becomes a question itself.
#
And there is even a notion that it is this kind of need to constantly be performative
#
that has led to, you know, all kinds of mental health problems as well, where, you know,
#
in America he speaks about how, you know, teenage girls instead of interacting with
#
each other in a normal person to person social way, their social lives have been taken over
#
by social media, where it's brand management they're having to do all the time, which,
#
you know, has its consequences.
#
So my sort of question here is that, you know, don't you think that in this exacerbation
#
of these human traits, as it were, which is what social media has led to, it amplifies
#
everything about us, both the good and the bad, that that can be a problem?
#
And two, do you think that this form of discourse matters, like, you know, it's a strong thesis
#
of mind that whatever form you choose to write in will shape your content and therefore it
#
will shape your character, that if, for example, if I do 3R podcasts, I am delving deeply and
#
having deeper conversations and thinking more deeply about those subjects, and that shapes
#
me as well, whereas if I was doing like five minute nuggets and I was asking shallow questions
#
and I had to cater to the lowest common denominator as news television did, that would shape my
#
content, shape the discourse and shape me as well.
#
So form can change, content can change people.
#
So, on the first point, which you mentioned about, you know, history repeating or sometimes
#
actually being a discontinuity, yeah, I agree.
#
I mean, I think there are events in history, there are platforms and there are things that
#
happen in history which are clear discontinuities.
#
And in some sense, I would agree, I mean, Gutenberg's press was a discontinuity for
#
sure and, you know, we saw what happened because of that, I mean, Protestant movement would
#
not have started, I mean, Martin Luther, everything that he wanted to say spread around because
#
of Gutenberg's printing press and therefore the Protestant movement and the Protestant
#
work ethic and everything followed from there.
#
And in some ways, this ability to, you know, connect socially in a manner where you could
#
have, you know, a million people listen to what you have to say and your sound bite is
#
So, I wouldn't say that some platforms of the kind that we see today in Twitter and
#
Facebook are in any way sort of repeat of a previous pattern, except for the fact that
#
something like this has happened 500, 600 years back, but in a very different way and
#
Now, you know, those platforms do change how we actually have the discourse because, you
#
know, you are right, if you have to have, you know, a space of 140 or 280 characters,
#
you will choose a form of communication that suits that medium.
#
And Amit, you write and you teach writing, you know this and you teach people about this,
#
that you have to fit your writing to the medium and you have to both optimize for the reader
#
as well as what, you know, the form that you are writing.
#
So, in that sense, I completely agree with you, even in my case, you know, I do a lot
#
of corporate writing and if you ever see my corporate writing, you will like, listen,
#
I mean, why are you writing in this manner?
#
This is clearly written to obfuscate and my simple, I would plead guilty because that's
#
the whole point of writing that particular, you know, note is to obfuscate, is to have,
#
you know, plausible deniability one month down the line, is to sometimes say something
#
which you don't often intend to say in indirect forms.
#
So, there is a form that, you know, that actually changes and alters the way you want to, you
#
know, communicate and I fully understand and appreciate that.
#
Even some other instance of mine, I used to dabble in standup comedy, I mean, about six,
#
seven years back and it had become a bit of a passion, so, you know, three wise monkeys
#
or wherever I used to be hanging around in, at that time I was in Bombay for some time
#
and I realized that people are just absolute geniuses, you know, to be able to do the amount
#
of, you know, content, the weight, the, you know, the sarcasm in a three-minute piece,
#
I mean, later you wouldn't even remember what was the joke, but at that point in time, for
#
three minutes, they were just fantastic.
#
When you contrast that with, you know, thousands of pages of US Minister and US Prime Minister,
#
you know, it's very different, but both give you, at least to me, both gave the same level
#
of, you know, humor and joy, so, I agree with you on this.
#
Yeah, yeah, and interesting, I didn't realize that Rego Jaitley was also a standup comedian,
#
we discover new things every day.
#
That amount of filmy knowledge had to come in use somewhere.
#
Okay, so, we spoke about discontinuities and we spoke about history repeating or rhyming
#
and I want to go to one aspect in which it seems like we have seen all this before and
#
that, you know, there's a book Walter Lippman wrote called Public Opinion where the name
#
of the first chapter is something like the world as it is and the picture in our heads
#
where he points out the difference, the impossibility of ever knowing the real world because it's
#
If I remember, that first chapter starts out with this story about how after World War
#
I ended, you know, even after it had ended, four days, five days later, fighting was going
#
on in some places and people were dying because the news hadn't reached them.
#
So, you know, effectively the World War I had ended but it hadn't kind of ended everywhere
#
in a manner of speaking and that sort of dichotomy between the real world as it is, which is
#
complex and unknowable and the worlds that we construct individually in our heads, that's
#
a feature of the modern time as well where narrative control is everything.
#
Now, in, you know, one of your newsletter editions, you spoke about demand and supply
#
and politics and ideas where at one point when you were talking about the newsletter,
#
you wrote, quote, the focus of this newsletter is to make public policy accessible to the
#
That's a claim we often make around here.
#
There are think tanks and public policy specialists who advise those who are in power.
#
We are at the other end of the pipe, trying to influence the demand side of the market
#
The hope is that an aware and an enlightened public will demand better from their representatives
#
once a pattern of demand changes, supply will adjust itself, stop quote.
#
And you referred to the Lippman versus Dewey debates as an example of the wisdom of doing
#
this or the futility of doing this.
#
Tell me a little bit more about your thinking behind this and why you are more on Dewey's
#
So, I think firstly, you know, there are two ways of influencing public policy.
#
You just quoted what I had written there and a lot of focus of the think tanks actually
#
is on focusing on the supply side of the equation.
#
Our view is that you can do that thing on the demand side.
#
It takes time and it requires a lot of effort.
#
We are over 100 additions down and, you know, we will continue.
#
And my, you know, small hope is that even if 10,000 people, you know, change their opinion
#
or I would not say change their opinion or are informed better, you know, that's a success
#
because I really don't think I have the ability or the access to actually change the opinion
#
of a lawmaker or someone who actually, you know, makes the public policy.
#
But coming back to, you know, the Lippman Dewey debates and, you know, in some sense,
#
it was at the back of my mind when I spoke to Pranay about this and Pranay wanted me
#
to start writing as well because Pranay came at it with the same view that we should influence
#
the demand side of the equation.
#
But let's go back to Lippman and Dewey and the debate.
#
You know, it's a fascinating book that it's a great book.
#
And what Lippman says is that, you know, when democracy and he takes the American example
#
and he says that when, you know, just when democracy was, you know, the American state
#
was founded, most of the people who came representing their, you know, their provinces or their,
#
you know, constituencies, they knew their people really well because these were agrarian
#
People came from there.
#
They had very clear idea about what their people wanted.
#
And the people also had very limited sort of views about what they wanted, right?
#
I mean, their world was just the village, you know, and the farming they did or the
#
And this is in early 20th century, Lippman had already reached a conclusion that this
#
original thesis no longer holds because people have, I mean, the cities have come up.
#
People are so different.
#
They are doing different kinds of occupation.
#
And so his view was that firstly, people do not have a full picture of what the world
#
around them is like, right?
#
They are only seeing, you know, some narrow sort of through their windows, they're seeing
#
a part of the world and because they're seeing a part of the world to have to depend on them
#
to have a full view of what kind of a polity would they want to what kind of laws would
#
they want is almost futile.
#
And because they carry this picture in their mind, you know, people can be, you know, narratives
#
can be built around those images that they carry in their mind.
#
And those narratives then can be used and is used by politicians to actually win elections.
#
And Lippman was worried that this is a fatal flaw of democracy.
#
And so for him, the idea was that, listen, there has to be an intervention of experts
#
somewhere and experts have to come in, experts have to actually intermediate between this,
#
you know, masses of people who actually form the, you know, the electorate and who actually
#
And, you know, the experts have to in some sense, you know, filter the requirements and
#
the needs of these people, and in some sense, mediate between the lawmakers and the public.
#
And you know, just that idea is not is revolting to me that somebody should come in as a set
#
But Lippman was very convincing in this.
#
And you know, the idea that we all have an imagined world in which, you know, around
#
in our minds and all it's very powerful, a lot of it.
#
Do we who actually, you know, was admired the Lippman and he said this is I mean, as
#
a concept, it's great, but his argument was, we should not be giving up this fight so easy.
#
And his point was, listen, there is something which is the knowledge of the collective.
#
And the collective often has a view, which actually, if you sort of, you know, if you
#
are able to use it well, is will give you much better results than the view of the experts
#
and will actually lead to much more sustainable change in the society if you know how to sort
#
And therefore, his point was, don't give up on it.
#
And this is like that old, you know, debate between methodological individualism versus
#
methodological collectivism.
#
It's like, you know, Durkheim, there is a collective conscience.
#
So Dewey's point was work on this side, make people aware, improve their sense of understanding
#
of what's happening around it, and then, you know, harness the collective knowledge
#
and the collective sort of wisdom of the people, and then feed it back into the political system
#
for effecting a change.
#
And, you know, I fall on the Dewey side.
#
And that's why the newsletter is aimed at, we never address any sort of political or
#
any think tank or any sort of, you know, political party or anything, our audiences squarely,
#
the people, India, outside India, wherever.
#
Yeah, no, and that resonates with me a lot because I think when I won my last Bastia
#
Prize in the prize winning speech also, I referred to the same thing about how we need
#
to think about the demand side of the political marketplace, not the supply side, because
#
everyone responds to incentives.
#
Your supply side doesn't give a shit about, you know, what random experts may say.
#
They respond to either the special interest groups who are lobbying them on the one hand
#
So the best way to make change happen is to actually change the mind of people at large,
#
which is also, you know, a larger sort of foundational battle within the Indian Republic,
#
which we'll come back to later.
#
But my question sort of here is that at some point, I felt that this might not be something
#
which is, say, within the reach of somebody like me, and therefore, by extension, someone
#
like you, because we're writing in English, and because in India, it's just a narrow sliver
#
of people who will be reading this kind of thing in English.
#
Now, obviously, one can argue and say that, listen, history is made by elites after all.
#
So if you can reach enough elites and change their minds, that does make a difference.
#
You know, that's a different kind of influence, policymakers and bureaucrats of tomorrow, perhaps
#
even the politicians of tomorrow.
#
But I'm not sure how far that goes.
#
And like, do you think it's like last week, I did an episode with the venture capitalist
#
Sajith Pai, who sort of in his mind divided India into India 1, India 2, India 3, where
#
he said India 1 was about 100 million people had the per capita income of Mexico, and spoke
#
functional English with one sliver of that speaking the kind of English which would allow
#
them to read us and listen to us.
#
And then there are 100 million people who are in India too, who are, you know, plumbers
#
and Uber drivers and so on, who basically have the per capita income of Philippines.
#
And then you have 80% of the country in sub Saharan Africa.
#
And they are, of course, not reading your newsletter or listening to my podcast.
#
So you know, if we think deeper, where does the sort of the change come from?
#
Like, is there a second order thing happening where hopefully, somebody who listens to me
#
or reads you, you know, becomes a mass entertainer at some point and those ideas percolate through
#
that way and I mean, I'm glad that you are optimistic, but what's what's your sense
#
So, I mean, there are, I mean, when you frame it this way, Amit, it's like, kya kar raha
#
hai bose, time waste kar raha hai.
#
Every week, every week 6,000 words likh raha hai or koi, I mean, what is the point of it?
#
No, no, please continue.
#
I didn't mean it that way.
#
No, no, no, I'm saying there are, I mean, let me give you a few examples of what gives
#
There are people who send us mails saying that, listen, I've just cleared the IAS exam.
#
So and I used to read your newsletter, I always found it very useful.
#
I mean, so clearly somebody is going somewhere who might be in the position of actually affecting
#
real change because of reading this.
#
And I mean, the other one is you wouldn't believe the number of.edu mail IDs we have
#
I almost think that every week when I look at the people who have subscribed, I think
#
a third of it is.edu IDs, you know, so there is clearly interest and these are not, you
#
know, of course, there is a usual, you know, public policy institutions of India from where
#
people, but the number of people that come from, you know, technology institutes, and
#
it's a very, very reassuring and very, I mean, it really gives me a lot of, you know, pleasure
#
and, you know, happiness to see the number of students reading.
#
So I would tend to believe that there is a second order impact.
#
The second order impact could be people who, you know, even if they don't go into public
#
policy, they just might be, you know, working in a regular corporate world, talking to ten
#
other people, employing three or four people at their homes, you know, or maybe influencing
#
another five people because of what they do for them.
#
So I believe that's one way to continue doing this.
#
Of course, the other way is to start thinking about doing something more in vernacular.
#
He runs a podcast in Hindi, which I think does a lot more than our newsletter in terms
#
of, you know, how many people actually download it.
#
Maybe that's also, there is a medium benefit there.
#
But I think I would still err on the side of optimism because that's the right thing
#
You know, I agree with you.
#
And this is really, I think, in a sense, a long game.
#
And Pranay's podcast, Polyabazi, is, of course, awesome.
#
I have actually been on it talking about Hayek in Hindi, which is possibly the first time
#
anyone has spoken about Hayek in Hindi.
#
But by the way, since we are rambling, and you mentioned Bastia, let me tell you, I had
#
no idea about who Bastia was, right?
#
And I used to read India Uncut.
#
And that is when I realized that a whole lot of economics that I had read, and I had read
#
a lot of economics, had completely bypassed the Austrian school in India.
#
There was no mention of Hayek or Bastia or anyone from the Austrian school.
#
I remember distinctly the Candlemakers' plea, which you had written on India Uncut.
#
And I was like, where is this coming from?
#
Because I was surprised that there is something completely a different sort of school that
#
I have not been informed of at all while studying.
#
And I have not been taught economics, I have not taken economics as a part of your curriculum.
#
But I read up textbooks of economics that were prevalent in Indian schools and colleges.
#
And there was never a single mention of any Austrian school economics.
#
So that also is an interesting sort of a side note.
#
And also a bit of my gratitude for you to have introduced a whole generation.
#
And that's again an important point, going back to what you made.
#
Somebody is reading it.
#
And then somebody 10 years later is writing a newsletter about, who knows what are the
#
second order implications of things.
#
In fact, you'd earlier mentioned about the need for someone to curate all the content
#
and all of that, which is out there.
#
And I see us in a sense as curators of ideas.
#
Like I remember at one point when I was writing India Uncut.
#
And for those of my listeners who are too young or who may not be aware, India Uncut
#
is a blog I wrote between 2003 and 2008.
#
I think in five years, I did about 8,000 posts.
#
I do five posts a day, so I was incredibly prolific.
#
And then of course, I moved on to play poker professionally and blogging kind of died because
#
social media, they segregated all its functions.
#
But I remember receiving a letter from an NRI student, I think in New Zealand or somewhere,
#
where he said that, please keep doing what you're doing because I don't read any Indian
#
Every morning, the first thing I do is I go to India Uncut and see, okay, what has Amit
#
posted because that's where I get a sense of the country from.
#
And that's one of the things that motivated me to post in the kind of volume that I did
#
over the time that I did because that was gratifying in and of itself.
#
And you know, the Candlemakers petition, by the way, is Bastia's famous satire against
#
protectionism, which is a letter from a Candlemaker to the government saying, please ban the sun
#
because my business is being affected, which is quite wonderful and responding to your
#
That is one reason I'm glad that like you, I didn't study economics in college because
#
my thinking may have gotten fructified in certain ways and I may not have been open
#
enough to be able to discover Bastia and the Austrians who came after him, Mises Hyakins,
#
And of course, once you discover these people and read them, it's like a light bulb goes
#
It never kind of goes off again and kind of flicking that switch is extremely important
#
And speaking of flicking switches, I'm also sort of, I want to quote from another of your
#
newsletters where you've written a bit about yourself where, and this is your 108th edition,
#
You guys have done 110 so far at the time of recording and here you wrote quote, I don't
#
remember when I lost my faith in the ability of the state to improve the lives of its people.
#
Perhaps it wasn't an exact moment.
#
Growing up, the state was all around me.
#
I spent most of my childhood in what used to be called a colony.
#
One of the many that dotted the semi-urban Indian landscape in the 80s, a small industrial
#
township whose heart beat to the rhythm of the government-owned factory at the center
#
My school, my playground, the hospital and even the temple were all run by the state.
#
The state then subsidized a world-class higher education program for me.
#
By the turn of the millennium, I entered the workforce.
#
If you had cut me, then I would have bled state.
#
Over the next two decades, I lost my faith.
#
Why did you lose your faith?
#
So, I mean, sometimes when you read your, I mean, you hear someone reading your lines,
#
it's a bit, you're like, okay, what have you written?
#
But I love that phrase, if someone had cut me, I would have bled state.
#
That's such a beautiful, vivid way of putting it.
#
So, Amit, I think there are a few things.
#
See, when you are on the treadmill, right, you believe that everything that's happening
#
is happening because of you, right?
#
And I was on that treadmill that a lot of Indian kids have gone on before me.
#
And everything, I ticked all the boxes, the right boxes.
#
And for me, all of this was on account of me because I, in my mind, was a bit of an
#
underdog everywhere, you know, and therefore I thought that, listen, for an underdog like
#
me to have done all of this must be me.
#
And then once I entered the workforce and, you know, you started earning, but you also,
#
and till you entered the workforce, you actually, you know, when you're growing up, you're seeing
#
very similar people like you, right, especially if you grew up in a colony as it was called.
#
And then you went to college and you saw fairly similar people and, you know, if you went
#
to the right colleges and the right B-schools and things of that kind, you just saw people
#
In the workplace was the first time when I started seeing a little bit more diversity
#
or whatever it is worth for the kind of places that I worked.
#
And then, you know, I started hiring people, I mean, in large numbers and then, you know,
#
you started going to other places and gradually I started realizing that, listen, firstly,
#
this is not all on account of you and, you know, just your talent and enterprise, there
#
is a privilege that you're born to.
#
And the realization was not just that there is a privilege that you're born to, but that
#
privilege is of the kind where the state becomes a force multiplier in your life.
#
If you are born in the right place, then the state is, you know, helping you like nobody's
#
And whereas if you are born by the lottery of your birth, if you're born at the wrong
#
place, then there is no state there for you to be sort of, you know, for you to get anything.
#
And I saw this contrast many times over in the, you know, just the first decade of my
#
And once you sort of like, like you were mentioning, you know, the Austrian school, once you have
#
seen it, you can't unsee it, you know, to sort of make a pun on your show.
#
And then I just couldn't unsee it.
#
It was all around me that, you know, why is this not here?
#
I mean, in the sense, why is this guy not getting the right education?
#
Why is there no proper hospital here?
#
You know, why doctors are not there in just, you know, 50 kilometers outside of a metropolis?
#
You know, all of those questions started, you know, in some sense, gnawing at me.
#
And if you are a bit sort of, I would say, reflective, which I am, both observant and
#
reflective, then you can continue being on the treadmill and do all the stuff that you
#
have to do in corporate life or wherever you're working.
#
But this thing keeps coming back to you, that, you know, this is a privilege and this is
#
a privilege of a very specific kind where the state actually, you know, was benevolent
#
because of where, you know, because of the privilege that you are born with.
#
And that's what I wrote in that episode that in that edition that the state was simultaneously
#
for me omnipresent when I was growing up.
#
And then I realized for many people, for a large swath of, you know, Indian populace,
#
it was omnipresent, it was never there.
#
And this, you know, simultaneous omnipresence and omnipresence is what, you know, really
#
And, you know, why does it have to be this way?
#
I mean, you can do and there is in some sense, there is both these strands of writing this
#
useless omnipresence, you know, you know, place of the state and where it has to be
#
there, the complete absence of the state.
#
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.
#
In fact, you know, like I know both of us will agree, the Indian state is simultaneously
#
too small and too large.
#
It's too small in the sense that it doesn't fulfill its essential functions properly,
#
like the rule of law, which I think for most poor people in this country is absent, if
#
not for almost everybody, in fact.
#
And at the same time, it does too many things which it should not be doing and in many ways
#
is almost predatory and parasitic presence, like I like to say, suitably alliterative.
#
So let's kind of, you know, now talk a little bit about the state, especially the Indian
#
conception of the state.
#
And again, what I want to do here with you is a conception of the state has something
#
to do with our circumstances at the time that we gained independence, where again I'll quote
#
from one of your pieces, which is from the newsletter number 28.
#
In fact, where you write quote that the newly independent India needed to change wasn't
#
The colonial rule had drained it economically.
#
Its society was driven with ancient caste prejudices and practices.
#
The enlightenment values of liberty, freedom, and equality that philosophically underpinned
#
the Western democracies were difficult to root in the Indian intellectual or social
#
Democracy with equal rights to all citizens was therefore an audacious gamble, but we
#
chose that radical end.
#
All that remained was what means we should adopt to change India, a stop quote.
#
And here, of course, as you go on to point out that there were people who said that,
#
you know, the state needs to change society in a top-down way and Nehru and Ambedkar were
#
And there were others like Gandhi, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee Kriplani, who said that, no, you
#
got to change society first, otherwise it's not going to work.
#
And in hindsight, though, I think, you know, one could have come at this from the first
#
principles which we both hold where, you know, top-down interventions don't necessarily work.
#
It could be argued that, you know, the top-down vision was flawed.
#
I mean, I have often asked, and I think in one of your newsletters you cited it as well,
#
that eternal question of was our constitution a liberal document imposed on an illiberal
#
And if so, how can the imposition be liberal?
#
So I've asked that question to so many people, I'd be, you know, actually interested in your
#
But tell me a little bit about this, after answering this question, tell me a little
#
bit about this tussle at the founding moment of our republic and how that led to the conception
#
of the state that we have.
#
So, Amit, you know, there are sort of two kinds of lenses to take on this one, right?
#
One is Benedict Anderson's, you know, imagined community, you know, idea of a nation.
#
And you know, Anderson says that when a new nation is formed, they have, you know, these
#
three things that they should ideally be doing.
#
One is they should be showing that this is, in some sense, a break from continuity, what
#
You know, and that break from continuity is sort of important because it's important that
#
you show that there is something new that is getting formed.
#
Second, especially for those, you know, I would call it notion of a country which actually
#
had some history, you have to still show some continuum you are still going.
#
And this is not just something a complete new conception.
#
So often the European states used a reawakening kind of a construct for this, which is the
#
second one that you have to show that it is break but it is in some sense a reawakening.
#
And third, then you have to bring historians to construct this sort of story which sort
#
of fits all our past events into this sort of, you know, this kind of ideas.
#
And I'll ramble a little bit, so just give me a minute, I'll come to your point.
#
So that's one way of looking at it and I think we followed it to the T. We said this is,
#
you know, I mean, this is absolutely a new thing.
#
E, like Nehru said in the, you know, trust with destiny, he actually used India awakens
#
when the whole world is asleep, India awakens to freedom.
#
And therefore, you know, there was an absolute sort of right there, he uses exact words
#
that Anderson mentions.
#
And then the historians, which is what today we complain about, of a certain kind went
#
back and created all of these, I would say created all this served that narrative.
#
I think a lot of the narrative is possibly true as well.
#
But maybe there were a few places where they sort of went a little overboard in order to
#
make sure that this is a, you know, bit of a continuity and that's where all of this,
#
you know, whether Tipu is a freedom fighter or, you know, Ganga's Omnitezi, whether it
#
is real or not, you know, you could argue till cows come home, but that was how it was
#
Now, there is a very important line that Anderson makes there, where he says that, and I'm possibly
#
paraphrasing here, that the, you know, the modern concept of this nation has to contend,
#
I mean, so the, it's that the historians view of this modern concept of the nation has to
#
contend with the, you know, the notion of the antiquity that is there in the minds of
#
This is what is happening there, that there is a modern concept of this nation which historians
#
are trying to sort of now create, but it has to contend with the, you know, the deeply
#
felt belief that this is a more ancient, you know, sort of a land than what it was.
#
And that is, you know, that is the fault line, if you were to ask me, right?
#
How much should we have gone, you know, on this spectrum?
#
And I think in that sense, and a lot of people, other people have also mentioned, I think
#
the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi was a very, very pivotal sort of a, you know, thing
#
in this entire thing, because when he was there, I think there was a strong force that
#
maintained some amount of, you know, got a lot of both political as well as moral force
#
on the other side, that we need to maintain a certain sense of continuity.
#
And the idea that ours is an antique land, whereas, you know, Nehru and Ambedkar coming
#
at it very differently, Nehru coming at it from his Fabian socialist, you know, background
#
and, you know, whatever he had seen, and, you know, in Europe and the enlightenment
#
values and things of that kind, his view was that, listen, this, if you go into the society,
#
you will realize that this society stands no chance in terms of modernizing itself,
#
Because it is so riven with so many prejudices and so many, you know, is that it is not possible.
#
And Ambedkar, nobody need to tell Ambedkar about that, you know, he knew it, he felt
#
it from within, he had seen it.
#
So from both of them, this was clear, you know, opportunity for the state to affect
#
social revolution, right?
#
And I think the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi really, really crippled that other sort of,
#
you know, movement totally, because in some sense, when Gandhi said that Congress had
#
to be disbanded, which often today we get in WhatsApp, as if, you know, Gandhi was saying
#
that this Congress is a bad Congress or whatever, his idea was that, listen, we have not completed
#
the task of independence.
#
What we have completed is the task of getting, you know, over the colonial rule.
#
But it would be an absolute disaster if we just replace one set of colonial masters without
#
changing anything dramatically within the society and replace it with another state,
#
which exactly takes over the entire apparatus and continues to do the same thing with a
#
But that assassination crippled it and then what happened is whoever were the true Gandhians,
#
they had to make a choice.
#
Some of them like Replani, you know, Acharya, Vinoba Bhave, all these guys, you know, went
#
into the sort of the Gandhian way, into the villages and tried to do some, you know, Navnirman,
#
not Navnirman, whatever, Sarvodaya and things of that kind.
#
Whereas the others were like, listen, we have to, you know, we have to be where the state
#
is and we'll try and do this particular change.
#
And I think that, you know, that balance or whatever, I mean, that adequate rigorous debate
#
at that point in time that we missed because two, you know, titans, Nehru and Ambedkar
#
were both on this side, meant that we in some sense thought that we will get over this problem
#
and that, you know, if the state continues for a period of 50 years of running its agenda
#
of social revolution from outside, we will never again, you know, need to, I mean, we'll
#
I mean, the society will change.
#
But like now we are discovering, it doesn't change, you know, it's top down centrally
#
planned things just don't happen that way.
#
And this is where again, again, this is that old Russo and, you know, a whole lot of these
#
guys who believed in society as a sort of a, you know, place where everything starts from.
#
I think again, you can ask that question whether these, I mean, these guys were right.
#
And this is what one of my points is that, you know, the methodological individualism
#
is good in economic sphere.
#
But when you have to run the state, you have to bring collectivism into it, not as a notion
#
of economic sort of, you know, means, but definitely as a collectivism in the sense of how you
#
It can't be just a top down idea that someone guy does, you know, and we then change the,
#
you know, school curriculum and everything to say this is what we are.
#
But when the guy comes back home, his parents say, this is not what we are.
#
You go study in school, all of us are equal.
#
There is no casteism, untouchability is a sin.
#
You come back home and exactly the opposite is happening at your home and it's happening,
#
you know, with, while having the pictures of Nehru and Gandhi in your drawing room.
#
I mean, that sort of dissonance we lived with and those chickens have come home to roost.
#
And, and, you know, it sort of strikes me that, you know, now when we look back with
#
the benefit of hindsight, the sort of top down status thinking that came from Nehru,
#
where it failed is obvious in the domain of economics, where it is pretty much seen and
#
I think there is consensus on that, that it failed utterly and kept India poor for many
#
But where it is not so evident is in terms of social change because you don't know counterfactuals
#
and there can be arguments made that we would have been worse off if not for this and so
#
But a lot of this is sort of striking because that fear of replacing one set of rulers with
#
another is essentially what happened.
#
We took over the entire colonial apparatus that the British left behind.
#
We kept the Indian penal code, which was put in place to govern the natives as it were.
#
And you know, and I did an episode with Tripur Daman Singh where he spoke about the first
#
amendment to our constitution.
#
And when you read it, you realize that, you know, you spoke of Nehru's enlightenment values,
#
but Nehru is incredibly illiberal in that.
#
And Shama Prasad Mukherjee comes across as a great liberal in that, you know, today we
#
speak about all these activists arrested under the sedition law.
#
Listen, the sedition law was made unconstitutional in 1950.
#
Nehru brought it back with the first amendment.
#
So this is something that, you know, people need to pay attention to that, which is not
#
to necessarily demonize Nehru or, you know, agree with the current dispensation that everything
#
He did a number of great things, but people contain multitudes and this shit really went
#
down and the importance of looking back on it is kind of identifying, you know, instead
#
of identifying individuals as heroes and villains, but to talk about what structures of the state
#
have sort of let us down.
#
And again, you mentioned sort of the project of shaping our history.
#
And I did an episode with Kapil Komaredi where he spoke about this at length as well, where
#
he spoke about how you had all these historians sort of presenting a particular vision of
#
history, you know, with noble intent or whatever, but it backfired because society remembers
#
and what seems to have happened today in a manner of speaking is that, you know, your
#
politics has caught up with society.
#
Eventually, one society got empowered enough.
#
It is a politics that changed and that's sort of brought us to where we are.
#
You also had, you know, an interesting...
#
Amit, one, if I were to ramble a little bit and ask you a question, right?
#
So you mentioned that, you know, did we fail or not as part of Nehru's sort of social agenda
#
and the idea of what his social sort of views were and, you know, everything that we spoke
#
about and your point was we don't know what are the counterfactuals, right?
#
One way to sort of argue about this is how did others make this transition, right?
#
So if I were to sort of put this point or this sort of, you know, hypothesis that, for
#
instance, the transition of England from, you know, agrarian traditional feudal society
#
into a modern state, you know, how did the social change happen there?
#
And somewhere, maybe, I don't know what's your view about this, but this whole thing
#
about the protestant movement, you know, coming along with what Locke was saying at that point
#
of time about inalienable rights, about the primacy of the individual, protestantism saying
#
that was the God will only, you know, be happy with you because it's already predestined,
#
you know, and that's the big sort of message of protestant Calvinism was of course predestined.
#
What is the moral sort of thing that you have to follow if everything is predestined?
#
And then the idea with Locke and others brought into play was, listen, it is predestined,
#
but if you do well in your life and you succeed and the success is God's sign that your predestination
#
You know, some such, you know, broad kind of a notion and that's how the society sort
#
of took the idea of individual liberty and things of that kind strongly.
#
Is that, I mean, what's your view on this?
#
I mean, did that happen through organic social process rather than a top-down process?
#
And did we just not have, we have just missed that boat altogether or that bus altogether
#
because there is no reconciliation between some of our, you know, really core head beliefs
#
versus what political philosophy we want actually to espouse for a country like ours.
#
Yeah, that's a difficult question for me to answer.
#
I mean, first of all, in the context of England, I simply don't know English history well enough
#
to be able to comment on that with any degree of knowledge, so I don't want to wing it.
#
But just sort of speculating on the core question within that, that if you believe in certain
#
values, if you believe in Lockean values as say, I do and I'm sure you do as well, where,
#
you know, the individual rights really matter and are at the center of everything.
#
And we'll speak later about the Rawls-Nozick debate, but they would both have agreed on
#
this central point as well.
#
When the question comes up is that say you are in the position of your founders in 1947,
#
You can't just leave it to society and whatever, what are you doing?
#
So my tendency there would be is to have a bare bones framework, which protects negative
#
rights in the sense which protects the right to life, which is against coercion, which
#
sort of tries to respect the consent of the citizens and treat them as citizens and not
#
But beyond that, not try to do deeper social transformation because I think social engineering
#
can have unintended consequences which may not work out.
#
The idea that somebody, it's the same notion of Adam Smith in social science, right?
#
How can you imagine that you will know the preferences of millions of people and doing
#
millions of transactions every day, to be able to then arrive at this planned thing
#
that this is how I will change and listen, economic transactions, you can still believe
#
that there is rationality in that.
#
You can still take some solace that maybe in the economic sphere people are rational.
#
In social sphere, people, they're not rational, they do not act rationally for sure in social
#
sphere because it's your children, your friends, your relatives, these are the people that
#
And you know, you had mentioned Jonathan Haidt at the beginning of the episode.
#
And I find that's one of the reasons why I find him very, very interesting to read because
#
actually what Thaler or Kahneman and Tversky did with economics, Haidt actually did that
#
He said, yeah, it's not so rational, you know, how you decide on things and how you arrive
#
You know, that's why he then came out with this whole idea that it's a social intuition
#
that actually drives a lot of our judgment rather than some rational way of thinking
#
And I think I'll link it back to that, you know, that famous Haidt article called the
#
emotional dog and a rational tail and the idea is that the tail doesn't wag the dog.
#
The dog will wag the tail and you know, it's you, the rider on the elephant metaphor that
#
The rider thinks he's controlling the elephant, you know, the rider has no, the elephant is
#
The rider is sitting, hopefully they will both align in terms of where they will get
#
So I mean, some of these things are quite, you know, in that sense, intuitive that you
#
should not attempt some of these things at a macro, you know, large programmatic level
#
sitting somewhere in the center and planning for it down the line that this is how we will
#
I mean, that's where you eventually get into totalitarian instincts.
#
No, I mean, question there is where do you draw the line?
#
For example, someone could easily ask a counter question that, hey, what about something like
#
You can't say let society sort it out.
#
Obviously, you know, the state needs to sort it out before women are burnt.
#
And which is why I would say that I would draw the line at protecting negative rights,
#
protect individuals, protect their, you know, their right to life, their right to speech,
#
all of that, you know, remove all coercion.
#
But beyond that, how far do you want to go to, I mean, do you even have the capacity
#
If you could solve social ills, I would say you must.
#
But then the point is, you know, that is again what Hayek would have called the fatal conceit
#
of the state to imagine that it can do everything from the center.
#
Do you even have the capacity to solve for it anymore?
#
And in fact, that's the same kind of thought that I'll come to later when we talk about
#
sort of digital colonialism, as it were, and the power of, you know, Twitter, Facebook
#
and all of these people and people, you know, often put forward regulation as a solution
#
And I'm not certain social problems can be so easily solved through state coercion.
#
But we'll kind of come to that a little later.
#
You know, and you mentioned Hayek and you'd written about him in your 102nd newsletter.
#
And this sentence from that struck me as very interesting.
#
So before we get back to the state, I'll sort of ask you about this as well, where you write,
#
quote, regardless of how we define political access in India, left versus right, liberal
#
versus conservative, status versus free marketer, each side arrives at the ideology
#
based on what they believe is morally right for the society.
#
What's the basis for our inherent self-righteousness and why does it differ among people?
#
And then you talk about, you know, hate saying that we reach a moral judgment based on our
#
intuitions, which are shaped by, you know, moral and cultural factors and all of that.
#
And I'm reminded here of, you know, before we go on to talking about hate, one lovely
#
book I'd like to recommend to my listeners is called The Three Languages of Politics
#
by Arnold Kling, where Kling writes about, and he's writing in an American context.
#
And he's saying that a lot of political discourse becomes people talking past each other and
#
not to each other because their priors are different.
#
So he talks about how progressives will come at everything from a first principle of equality.
#
Libertarians will come at everything from the first principle of freedom and conservatives
#
will come at everything from the first principle of tradition.
#
And they are all coherent and logical when they come from that first principle.
#
So you could have two people who are having a completely coherent logical conversation
#
with each other, but it's not really with each other because they are starting from
#
And if you really want to have dialogue, you have to address the other person's concerns
#
and then talk on the basis of that.
#
Otherwise it's just pointless, it's just noise, it's just echo chambers, which is something
#
that of course social media exacerbates.
#
And he has a sort of similar point where he talks about the five foundations of morality
#
and how liberals only sort of take two of them into account.
#
How do you sort of place all this in a context of India?
#
Like what sort of the bedrock of our moral instincts, so to say, and where does it become
#
a problem for say a particular idea of India, which is the liberal inclusive idea of India
#
that privileges individual rights?
#
Let's take an example and then try and see if there, maybe we can take two and two sort
#
of very different ones and let's try and see if I can make any sense of this.
#
Sometimes like Amit, you say when you write, you really deeply think about a topic when
#
you talk, then you are not, I mean, you have to be really, really good, a really fast thinker
#
to be able to talk with the same level of clarity as you can write.
#
And maybe it's never possible, at least it's difficult for me.
#
So for instance, let's take this real example.
#
We had a whole lot of articles come out in recent past, Oxfam report and stuff that billionaires
#
made a whole lot of money during the pandemic and poor people were given a short shift.
#
And if Jeff Bezos distributed the wealth that he made during the pandemic, each Amazon worker
#
Now let's understand this from this Haitian framework.
#
So in India, because of maybe the last 70 years or whatever we have been trained and
#
maybe before that as well, we view a few things, I mean, these are our social intuitions.
#
And one of them is that too much of wealth is bad.
#
We have some beliefs in moderation and not showing wealth often, things of that kind.
#
And also we believe that people should be somewhat equal and that's the general humanitarian
#
sort of instinct that people should not be dying of hunger, et cetera.
#
Now you get two trigger events.
#
You get one event that all these migrants have walked all the way back and they're not
#
getting jobs and things of that kind.
#
And you get this sort of trigger event that the top three billionaires in India have added
#
so much of wealth during this time.
#
Now your social intuition immediately, which informs your judgment is, this is wrong.
#
How are these guys making all this money when so many people are suffering?
#
And because of the intuition that you already have, you made the judgment.
#
And then after that, now you are a privileged guy, you are driving a car, you have had a
#
good life during the pandemic, but it doesn't strike to you that, you know, what are you
#
It's the same thing for that guy.
#
He's not gone and done something illegal and without, I mean, with coercion and things
#
If there were no Amazon, the lockdown would have been terrible.
#
More people would have died if there was no Amazon.
#
But you then build a moral scaffolding of reasoning around this judgment of yours, right?
#
And that scaffolding is in India, very, very easy to build.
#
It's, you know, we've been trained by our films, books and politicians, speeches, all
#
kinds of things to say that was this is wrong.
#
Now the problem in what happens is in that framework.
#
Now this is sort of, you know, intuition, you know, whatever, and then reasoning.
#
And then we make this reasoned persuasion to other people, social persuasion to other
#
We tell these things to others and, you know, all of us sort of hang up and say that this
#
And, you know, that's how you get the Twitter mobs.
#
The two things that Haid says actually should happen if you were to be somewhat think deeper
#
about a topic is what is called private reflection.
#
And you know, and rational sort of reasoning, you know, that reasoning, your judgment should
#
now be informed by the reasoning.
#
And those two things don't happen enough.
#
And it doesn't happen most in most parts of the world.
#
But one of the problems of our sort of, you know, education system and others is that
#
this private reflection, this idea that we teach you something, you go back and think
#
And then you don't come back and write exactly what I have told you to sort of write.
#
You write, I'll give you a question, you think about it and then write it.
#
These are all sort of, you know, largely missing.
#
So, you know, so to your point, I think this this loop which comes back around private
#
reflection or, you know, or a more informed reasoning is a problem.
#
And we don't have that.
#
And you can take the same lens to any other problem.
#
I mean, you can take that lens to, you know, love jihad.
#
You'll find almost the same sort of thing because there is not enough and there is also
#
not enough discourse in the media, in these talking head debates that we see in TV.
#
There is nowhere this kind of conversation happening where three people are deeply having
#
a conversation about, can you think a little deeper that it's not a zero sum game like
#
in that sort of, you know, that Oxfam kind of thing, that it is not about, you know,
#
that somebody's made money by coercing others, that it is fine that we need growth for everyone
#
and then we will redistribute.
#
You know, you don't get to that point of conversation.
#
So I don't know if I've sort of given you some answer, but something of that kind is
#
just not there anywhere.
#
It's not there in the way we are taught.
#
It's not there in the way we have grown up to sort of reflect on things.
#
And it's not there all around us today in terms of any of the, you know, public forums
#
where people are debating or discussing issues, maybe except a few podcasts like this, there
#
is some time to do this conversation.
#
Yeah, you've actually made a couple of separate good points.
#
One is of course about pedagogy where, you know, the way that we are taught, you know,
#
we are not taught to think independently enough, though I'm not sure that that alone is, you
#
know, a sufficient condition for not falling for flawed thinking.
#
And the other part of it is that a lot of this is just counterintuitive stuff.
#
Like, obviously, I hardly need to say to my listeners that, listen, number one, a lot
#
of the wealth that these billionaires gained during the pandemic was notional wealth, you
#
know, in their stocks or whatever.
#
It doesn't really translate to real liquid money.
#
And the other point is that, you know, in a free market, the only way that you make
#
money is by making somebody better off.
#
You know, it's a positive sum game.
#
If all these people made so much money without state coercion being there, it means they
#
made that many people better off.
#
And like you said, in different ways, perhaps more people would have died if that didn't
#
I'm not saying all of the wealth gains are necessarily through, you know, legit free
#
market ways and positive sum games.
#
You know, we don't know what kind of cronyism there might have been at the back of that.
#
But a significant chunk of that and certainly, you know, Jeff Bezos' wealth going up is
#
clearly because, you know, Amazon was so incredibly essential during this time.
#
Bezos is one of the sort of the great visionaries and heroes of our time.
#
And to demonize him the way some people do is kind of absurd.
#
And you know, before we take a break on the show, let's take a Bollywood break.
#
You know, we were discussing this sort of conflict between state, society and markets,
#
you know, the balance between them.
#
And you've written eloquently in your newsletters about how markets were always out because
#
we associated markets with what the East India Company had done to us with colonialism and
#
Also, the fashion of the times when the Soviet Union seemed to be doing well and was admired
#
by Nehru was that kind of Fabian socialism.
#
So markets were demonized anyway, and it came down to society and the state.
#
And obviously, the way it panned out, the state took the sort of the bigger role.
#
But there was a film in the 1940s by B. R. Chopra, which sort of shows that battle playing
#
out and comes down on the side of society.
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
So this is a 57 film, one of the great films of the 50s, B. R. Chopra's Naya Daur.
#
Naya Daur means new age, headlined Dilip Kumar and Vaijanthi Mala along with Ajit, who played
#
his friend who later turns four, and an absolutely fantastic turn by a guy called Jeevan, who
#
is to often act in, you know, 70s and 60s film as a villain.
#
Now, you know, I have always been fascinated by this movie for various reasons.
#
One is this movie is often quoted as the movie that truly represented Nehru's view of what
#
And my view was either you haven't read Nehru or you haven't seen this film because this
#
film cannot be about Nehru.
#
And people, you know, as great as I think Meghna Desai, when he wrote his Dilip Kumar
#
biography, he also eludes to because his biography of Dilip Kumar, if I'm not, you know, misremembering
#
I think it's about it's called Nehru's hero Dilip Kumar or something like that.
#
I mean, you know, it's he believes that Dilip Kumar was a complete manifestation of the,
#
you know, the Nehruvian sort of liberal image.
#
Now, in this film, at the heart and the film starts with a Gandhi quote, by the way, which
#
in one of the newsletters where I have written, I have actually put that quote, I mean, I've
#
taken a screen grab of that quote.
#
Now, the at the heart of this film is that there is a small village, there is a temple
#
in the village, which is very famous.
#
So and there are Tonga Walas and Dilip Kumar and you know, his friend Ajit are both Tonga
#
And, you know, people come from different places to visit this village because of the
#
temple and the local economy largely is built on this, you know, this particular temple
#
and the business around it apart from the fact that there are farmers and things of
#
Now, the there is a guy in the village who's like the local moneylender.
#
And at the beginning, he goes off to Kashi or somewhere and, you know, leaving behind
#
his sort of moneylending business to his son, who's Jeevan.
#
Jeevan is shown actually as a Nehruvian elite.
#
He's studied in the city, had college education, comes back to village.
#
And he says that, listen, for this village to actually develop, we need a bus to come
#
More business will come.
#
Now, this is a complete Nehruvian idea, there is a society, you know, these are all Russian
#
sort of an ideal of farmers under an oak tree doing their business.
#
Here is the guy who comes, tell him bus chalate.
#
Now obviously, this is modernity versus traditionalism.
#
So these Tonga Walas say, boss, you can't bring the bus because our business will be
#
And, you know, I mean, had the access of debate been only this, it was fine.
#
But that Jeevan is shown to have other, you know, unfortunate sort of, you know, habits
#
and vices for you to completely not believe in whatever he's saying.
#
I mean, eventually there is a fight between Ajit and Dilip Kumar because of the girl and
#
then Ajit goes into the enemy camp.
#
And the climax of the film is that, you know, there is a race between the bus and the Tonga.
#
So this is very similar to a Lagaan kind of a thing.
#
And the point is whoever wins the race, they will continue as the primary mode of transport.
#
The other guy will have to go.
#
And you know, there is a bridge that has to be built for the Tonga to actually beat the
#
bus or to have any chance of beating the bus.
#
And so what happens is then, you know, all kinds of things happen.
#
There are great songs in the film.
#
It is Jab Jab Zulfi Teri Opi Nayar and Speak, I mean, you know, and, you know, there's that
#
famous song Saathi Hath Badhana Saathire.
#
That's when they're building the, you know, the bridge.
#
So and in the climax, the horse and the man beat the bus with, you know, all kinds of
#
hijinks of Ajit, you know, actually putting his body on the line to keep the bridge from
#
falling down and, you know, going past it.
#
And my point always is, this is actually a, I mean, this is complete indictment of the
#
Nehruvian idea that I will build temples of modern India and I'll bring modernization
#
I mean, Gandhi was saying this is what will happen.
#
People within the village have to decide for themselves.
#
If they believe the Tonga can beat it, they will build their own bridge and let them beat
#
When they are ready for the bus, they'll be ready for the bus.
#
In fact, that's what he ends the film with.
#
Actually the film has a dialogue of Dilip Kumar saying, we are not saying we are against
#
modernity, but it has to be on our terms when we are ready for it.
#
So it's a fascinating film.
#
I mean, it captures the debate of that time, but I think the most misunderstood film, if
#
Yeah, yeah, no, totally.
#
I totally kind of get that and I get the sentiment about someone who says that it represents
#
Nehruvian thinking as either not understood Nehruvian thinking or hasn't seen the film.
#
Quick aside by the way, since we, and tell me what you think about this because I seem
#
to be in a little bit of a minority here as far as this particular quibble is concerned
#
that when people talk about these three prongs of state, society and market, and I don't
#
I think in a sense they are two because the way I look at it is that on the one hand you
#
have voluntary action within society and the market is one of the forms that it takes.
#
And on the other hand, you have the coercive hand of the state.
#
And yes, that can sometimes involve controlling a market as well.
#
But ideally the way you and I think of free markets, for example, it would all be voluntary
#
action and therefore a part of society itself and therefore morally virtuous to begin with
#
for that reason that it is voluntary and there is no coercion involved.
#
Like I like to keep saying that, you know, that two people should be free to engage with
#
each other in any way they deem fit if they are not harming anyone else, whether it is
#
in the bedroom or the marketplace and because they are both positive some games.
#
And the irony is that, you know, voluntary action in one domain is frowned upon by one
#
kind of ideology and by the other in the other domain, which is kind of, and in India perhaps
#
is, you know, both domains is frowned upon.
#
So what's your sense of this, that this distinction of state market society, where to me a market
#
is just a mechanism for voluntary action and therefore is a subset of society.
#
See, Amit, the one of the problems right now is that, I mean, we are just agreeing on everything.
#
It's like one of those Bhajatiya movies, you know, Ham Saath Saath, everything is sweet
#
and saccharine and you know, nobody seems to have any difference of opinion.
#
I just hope that the audience or the listeners are not sort of getting tired of this, but
#
I think many of them will disagree.
#
So at least there's new things to think about, right?
#
So, and I didn't know if you'd agree with me because no one else seems to.
#
Yeah, I'm hoping that they are finding things interesting despite some fairly strong overlaps
#
in terms of our, some of our, you know, worldviews, but you know, the reason why I would agree
#
with you apart from just intuitively what you're saying is absolutely right.
#
Let's think of people who sort of first wrote about many of these things, right?
#
Was Adam Smith writing about market when he was writing theory of social, of moral sentiments?
#
No, he was writing about society.
#
I mean, he was like saying, well, what is, you know, how should society be doing things?
#
And you know, we have gleaned the idea of an invisible hand for the market from it,
#
these are sort of, you know, what we are extracting out of it.
#
And we are making this artificial sort of, you know, distinction there.
#
But a lot of these folks, whether it is Adam Smith or, you know, whether it is Hayek or
#
even Marx, these guys were not writing economics text or market-based text.
#
They were just writing, you know, society, class struggle, you know, power and, you know,
#
things of that kind of what is moral about this.
#
So, I would agree with you that this distinction is a bit artificial at the heart of it, you
#
know, and when you go back into some of the proto-text for some of these things, they
#
are all, you know, fairly, they just look at society and they just view society and
#
the interactions that people are doing and, you know, economics or market is one sort
#
of branch or whatever, one element of that.
#
And on that note of agreement, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
Hopefully, we will find things to disagree about after this is over.
#
So, see you on the other side of a break.
#
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Welcome back to the Seen in the Unseen.
#
I am chatting with Raghu Sanjalal Jaitley, co-author of the brilliant newsletter Anticipating
#
And I am not sure if you dear listeners anticipated the unintended, which is that I will now start
#
the second half off by disagreeing with something that Raghu said before the break, though in
#
a gentle way, where he referred to Dilip Kumar being called Nehru's hero.
#
And Raghu's opinion was that no, Dilip Kumar was not Nehru's hero, but okay, maybe not
#
But in general, you have written about Dilip Kumar elsewhere and spoken about how he almost
#
embodied the concept of farz, the classic example being the famous early 80s film Shakti,
#
where he is the honest police officer who ends up shooting his own son, played by Amitabh
#
Bachchan, because he is doing his duty.
#
And this, in a sense, would qualify him to be Nehru's hero for the specific reason that
#
Nehru's conception of the state and the conception of some of the other founders who believed
#
in the status vision was, listen, it's true we are giving the state a lot of power, but
#
it will be exercised by good people who will do the right thing in general.
#
And of course, you and I know that, listen, power always corrupts and, you know, that's
#
never quite going to be the case.
#
So tell me a little bit about sort of this concept of farz and Dilip Kumar and, you know,
#
and where you went on with this narrative when you wrote about it in your newsletter.
#
So this is a point that I was sort of wondering about when I was writing that newsletter, the
#
thing that sort of triggered that was, you know, I just started finding, and this has
#
happened over the last four or five years, that people that we often gave a lot of, you
#
know, we had a lot of admiration for in society, the judges or the, you know, the IAS officers
#
and things of that kind, I started noticing that a strange sort of illiberal streak was,
#
you know, starting to become prominent in many of their, you know, public statements,
#
judgments and things of that kind.
#
And I was wondering what is the reason for this?
#
And you know, through some kind of convoluted logic, I reached the conclusion that there
#
was a time when firstly, the people who came into many of these positions, whether you
#
like it or not, were possibly of a certain state of society, which had a very different
#
kind of education, etc., for them, I mean, they were exposed to very different things
#
than the ordinary Indian.
#
Now, that was not necessarily a great thing, because people have to come from the real
#
India in order to solve the problems of real India.
#
But for a moment, let's assume that these were people who came from these places, and,
#
you know, many times they also appreciated real India.
#
And then what happened was the state, through its various forms and machinery and everything,
#
consistently gave them the incentives to do the thing that the state was sort of, you
#
know, using the Constitution for, in terms of, you know, effecting a social revolution.
#
And you saw that all around.
#
So you would find a very pious man, and I know many sort of pious IAS officers, judges,
#
only pious, extremely religious, but then they would give judgments, you know, which
#
would sometimes make you question, you know, I mean, they would really give judgments where
#
their personal sort of, you know, convictions never got in the way of making those judgments
#
of, you know, giving statements in the press and things of that kind.
#
And this always fascinated me and, you know, this movie Shakti, where Dilip Kumar was the
#
father was a good sort of an example of that, where the guy, you know, does what is to be
#
Some of it is first, some of it is also an overlay of the thing that the state has, you
#
know, completely trained this person on.
#
You just have to follow what we have told you, because that's the right thing in the
#
greater sort of interest of the society.
#
And I then started, you know, noticing that what's happening of late, and again, this
#
is nothing to do with the specific government, but it's the point that we've made earlier,
#
you know, that other sort of, you know, experiment, if you might call so, of trying to change
#
the society from top down, is fraying completely at the edges.
#
And therefore, you know, the state has also figured this out, and they are also pandering
#
to that sort of, you know, that kind of instinct within the society.
#
And now all of these are in sync, you know, the state also is okay with people, you know,
#
giving vent to their original or whatever their real thoughts are.
#
Some of those thoughts, we might believe, are liberal, are different from what the constitution
#
or what we thought some of these positions have to possibly take in terms of stand.
#
And that's, you know, so the incentive now has changed, has flipped.
#
And you know, that if it has flipped, then we will get to see more of this kind, you
#
will get to see more of the kind of judgments where somebody will say that, you know, if
#
the if you are molesting someone and the woman still has their clothes on, that's not molestation.
#
This was a judgment of a couple of months back, or that other one where women's feeble
#
no cannot be, you know, cannot be construed as no.
#
So I think somewhere that's really what sort of animated my thought at that point in time.
#
And you know, then Shakti was a good vehicle to use as an example of what used to happen
#
in the past and contrasted with where we are today.
#
Yeah, and I'll take a quick aside because you mentioned the feeble no judgment and that
#
And that was obviously in the case of Mahmood Farooqi, who was first convicted of rape and
#
then he was acquitted by a higher court, which basically said he had done what he had done
#
and the woman had said no, but it said a feeble no can sometimes mean a yes.
#
And it acquitted him on this basis, and it's incredible how so many hypocritical Delhi
#
liberals so to say have immediately rehabilitated him, like they, you know, partially did in
#
the case of Tarun Tejpal and all of that, where, you know, on the day that we are recording,
#
in fact, the 23rd, he was scheduled to have performed today at the Jaipur Lit Fest.
#
And I just want to say in no unequivocal terms that the organizers of the Jaipur Lit Fest
#
who made this decision, you know, should be ashamed of themselves.
#
It's a slap on the face of all women.
#
It's a message to all the women at the Jaipur Lit Fest that your no doesn't mean a no.
#
But I'm sorry, this, this sort of aside of anger apart, because it really gets me going
#
and I had an episode also on, you know, how the laws are so weighted against women in
#
I'll link that from the show notes.
#
I think it was with Hamsini Hariharan was one of the guests.
#
But you know, the reason I asked you about to get back to our topic before I get carried
#
away, the reason I asked you about Dilip Kumar and Farzana Chakthi and that particular edition
#
of the newsletter, which was edition number 30, which I link is that I think it makes
#
an incredibly profound point, which, you know, made me think about this whole issue in a
#
So I'm going to quote you a little bit at length because I think it will be of great
#
interest to my listeners, where you talk about how one quote, the foundational premise of
#
modern India is that the state is ontologically prior to the society, stop quote.
#
And then you write quote, this created an unstable yet desirable equilibrium in India.
#
The state was founded on values of equality, redistribution, secularism, fairness and social
#
The society from where agents were drawn hadn't fully accepted and internalized these values.
#
So you had free market economists drafting socialist policies or an enlightened district
#
magistrate who pre social equality at work, but practice discrimination at home, stop
#
And obviously they are following their incentives because there is nothing else to do.
#
The state is the my bap as it were.
#
Now you talk about how liberalization changed this and what happened when liberalization
#
hit where you write quote, the free market incentives aren't the same as that of the
#
It rewards efficiency and value creation for the middle class.
#
Now there was no need to live the dichotomous life their parents led of having a professional
#
code that was different from the personal code.
#
Liberals are often surprised how well educated professionals working for MNCs turn out to
#
The answer is simple, the state couldn't change the society as it had expected.
#
And once the incentives stop mattering to the citizens, the mask dropped, stop quote.
#
And you later go on to talk about how the democratic mandate has now changed and you
#
go on to write quote, you can argue the democratic mandate now is for the idea that society is
#
ontologically prior to the state.
#
Stop quote, which is all of which is kind of fascinating to me.
#
And obviously it doesn't mean that, you know, I think both of us would agree liberalization
#
was largely, you know, drastically for the better, but with the state not being the only
#
source of sort of obedience and adherence and, you know, people were empowered in many
#
different ways, which is always a good thing.
#
But one of those ways was to express their bigotry and to rail against values which they
#
might have felt were imposed upon them in sort of the national debate.
#
So let's kind of go back to more sort of, I'm very curious as to what lenses you apply
#
to look at all of this in a historical sense, right?
#
Fine, I can understand that in an economic sense, fine, this is all the thinking you've
#
done out of it that forms a lens in the political philosophy sense that happens.
#
But in a historical sense, when you look at phenomena like this happening, you know, this
#
sort of tussle between the state and the society going from one to the other.
#
You know, can you look, because I am really only familiar of this tussle in intimate terms
#
in an Indian context, but looking outside, are there lessons that we can take from elsewhere
#
in the world and is it something that is, you know, bound to go in particular directions?
#
What are your thoughts on this?
#
So this will be some really random ramble, I mean, because this, again, the point of
#
trying to frame this while speaking sometimes is a bit difficult, but let me take a shot
#
I think firstly, see this ontologically prior, whether it's state or the society, I think
#
it's a deep sort of a point, not that I'm making, people have made before it.
#
And I think there is a view which is that, listen, the state cannot be ontologically
#
The society is always there.
#
What are you trying to do by putting that ontologically prior to it, right?
#
And in some sense, you know, Hobbes and others were almost like, you know, it's like a big
#
I mean, the society comes together, there is a covenant and then, you know, they start
#
forming the sovereign and you know, whatever.
#
But since you asked the historical context, I think in India, even till 1947, it was very
#
clear that the state had very limited things to do with society.
#
I mean, the English did something about it, largely because, you know, their enlightenment
#
values were so strong that they just could not believe that they will lord over a people
#
and not bring that enlightenment value to them.
#
But even then, the idea that what you did at your home, how you conducted your social
#
life, there was very limited sort of interference from the state.
#
And if you went just prior to the colonialism, the colonial era, then the state had nothing
#
to do with how you led your life, right?
#
And this is actually how India has sort of, you know, lived for a long period of time.
#
So 1947 was a huge aberration, so, you know, even in Arthashastra and, you know, Kautilya
#
and Chanakya, when they were writing, you never found that they were writing about anything
#
where the king's duty extended to changing the lives of the subjects in how they lead
#
And, you know, if you have sort of gone through some, I mean, our written history is often
#
But if you just read a little bit of, say, you know, Bhanbhatta's Harsh Charita, and,
#
you know, this Murti classic library has actually helped a lot.
#
And I would recommend people to read a few somewhat dense prose, I mean, you would throw
#
the book out as part of your writing course as to what is this, even the translations
#
But one thing that you would notice there is the absolute divorce of the state from
#
The only thing they were interested in was actually some tax collection and going to
#
wars and things of that kind and some very broad civil laws, criminal laws, sorry, around,
#
you know, theft and robbery and, you know, all of that.
#
And but if you take and that's true of India, now, this is true of most feudal societies
#
and I can take England and we can even take the United States.
#
And maybe let's take the United States for a moment.
#
The United States example, the American example was that, you know, there were all these folks
#
who had come whose, you know, one leg was still in the England and they would often
#
go back and forth, like Washington and all of them.
#
There the, you know, the idea that what we are doing as a society was completely driven
#
The idea that we have to pay taxes was idea that was an assault on their individual liberty
#
from a Lockean perspective and they fought against it and then they created a state.
#
Now when they created that state, then they ask the questions, what should be the, I mean,
#
you know, how should we create the state?
#
What should be the ways we should think about it?
#
The entire constitution is written not from a perspective of what we should do for the
#
society, but just how we should make sure that we avoid the trauma that we went through
#
where the state was starting to do things that were, you know, completely unjustified.
#
Now over a period of time, that constitutional document has been interpreted for all kinds
#
of social, you know, issues, but that was not the original purpose of that particular
#
England doesn't have a written constitution, but broadly it's the same sort of a construct.
#
They didn't write it, the idea of, you know, creating some kind of a parliament and some
#
kind of a constitution, which is not written, but understood is just the idea of making
#
sure that the King is under the parliament and the parliament is sovereign and takes
#
decisions on many of these things, but not anything about society.
#
Now over a period of time, the things, you know, you would ask whether gay rights are
#
right or not, and then you would go back to constitution and then you would say that,
#
listen, since they are saying everybody is equal or something of that kind, therefore
#
and pursuit of liberty and life and happiness is right.
#
And therefore these guys also must be given the same thing.
#
But that's the reason for some of the schisms in those society because the one section of
#
the society feels this is not the reason, this is not how the constitution was originally
#
And you know, this whole business of trying to pack the Supreme court in the US with your
#
people, I mean, a lot of conservatives use this idea called originalism or whatever,
#
the idea that what is the original purpose of point of what, how it was written.
#
And they use it to actually say that it was not written for social points, right?
#
It was written for a very different sort of a reason.
#
You can't be using that to sort of start sorting out some of the current social points.
#
Let society solve that in that sense.
#
So I think large democracies have used state as a very sort of limited instrument to make
#
sure that we run in a certain way rather than actually go out and change society on the
#
Another sort of question that then comes up looking at what is happening now, where if
#
you are looking at the world through, say, the sort of classical liberal perspective
#
that I'm guessing we share, which makes us inevitably agree on so many things, it would
#
seem that in some ways we're going backwards.
#
Like, you know, Martin Luther King, of course, had said that the arc of history always bends
#
in a particular good direction.
#
And you know, when Fukuyama spoke about the end of history, it was almost as if, fine,
#
you know, liberal values have won, democracies have won.
#
You know, there's a certain set of values which is now accepted and all of those, all
#
the strife and conflict is behind us.
#
And yet you've written recently about, you know, why that end of history never came.
#
This was in, you know, edition 99, where you referred to a book that I just picked up,
#
but I haven't read yet.
#
But you were raving about it called The Light That Failed by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes.
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, what really happened.
#
And obviously, Fukuyama is misinterpreted.
#
He didn't, it wasn't like, you know, he was saying that we won, it's over.
#
It wasn't that kind of complacent, whatever, his point was much subtler than that.
#
But clearly, even there, you know, there were issues and across the world, we see authoritarianism
#
on the rise, stratism on the rise, instead of getting more globalized, the world is getting
#
more insular in different ways at the level of how states behave with each other.
#
So give me a sense of what has happened, what's going wrong, and why are we to believe that
#
this is that, you know, that what King said about the arc of history was just not true.
#
So I think I mean, Amit, you make a very important point, very few people get the idea, get the,
#
you know, the fact that Fukuyama didn't mean end of history, the way people interpret it.
#
What the poor fellow was trying to say, and he has spent the rest of his life defending
#
or whatever, clarifying what he was saying, was that the idea that a liberal democratic
#
order is the final sort of frontier is established.
#
Now you might want some people will go up to there, some people will regress.
#
He had no sort of, you know, illusions about that everybody will eventually reach there
#
or we have already reached there.
#
His point is, it is now established when there was a contestation between this order versus
#
the, you know, whatever the communist or authoritarian, whatever you might call it, that this order
#
is the final one, not the other one.
#
Now you might want to, you know, on that scale, you might want to go from zero to 10 and back
#
again to zero, it's your choice.
#
Now what is the reason for what happened, at least according to this book, and you know,
#
some of it sort of resonated with some of the earlier editions as well that I've written.
#
And this is a bit of a, you know, subject that sort of has been in my mind and there
#
are multiple different ways I've come to this point in various editions.
#
I think one thing that these guys make a very important point is that they call it cheap
#
That is to say that you came to this, you know, you concluded that liberal democratic
#
order is the final one and then to many other places, and especially they take Eastern and
#
Central European countries that came out of the Soviet block and then adopted some of
#
these forms of government, there was no real sort of grassroot, you know, sort of understanding
#
of these things and, you know, grassroot, you know, sort of intellectual tradition which
#
actually built this up.
#
It was like something was transplanted into these countries and I would say not very different
#
from what happened in India.
#
I mean, maybe we just went through a deeper struggle, a longer struggle which allowed
#
us to sort of have way more legitimacy for people who were transplanting these ideas
#
But there it was like some World Bank guy would come and sit in a conference room, two
#
guys would come from some Brookings Institute and then they would start writing the constitution
#
along with a couple of people who studied in Cambridge.
#
And a lot of these guys, Victor Oban and all, are all educated in, you know, Oxford or Cambridge,
#
one of those places, right.
#
So this cheap imitation is one part of the problem that you just copied some and somewhat
#
sometimes the entire constitution is largely sort of, you know, copied and pasted into
#
this, which I think is a problem because you are not, you know, people will want to locate
#
their sort of, you know, their intellectual tradition, their history, you know, their
#
customs and ask whether this is in some ways consistent with what we are, you know, what
#
we are actually now going to follow.
#
It's somewhat similar to this, you know, you had Alex Tabarrok and Shruti Raj Gopal
#
an episode on public policy where our problem was we were doing some cheap imitation of,
#
you know, a lot of stuff which we should not be doing.
#
We are way behind on the economic sort of, you know, cycle to just start taking some
#
maternity leave and, you know, some environmental issues right now as the, you know, public
#
policy framework for ourselves.
#
They took the whole constitution, forget about just taking a few policies and imitating them.
#
The second was there is a demographic stress there, right, which is a lot of people who
#
could get out of those countries got out and in some sense in India this is also true.
#
I mean, a lot of people who could get out got out and once they went out they were then
#
forming their own pressure groups, you know, all kinds of things from there and trying
#
to influence and those who remained back they were just getting more and more xenophobic
#
because they were now starting to become a minority in the same country and in many of
#
these places there is a real fear that, you know, what is our original sort of identity
#
is going to get run over because of immigration and things of that kind and then they see
#
that you are now forming, you know, coming to us with a form of government where these
#
guys if they stay for five more years, they will become citizens and they will vote and
#
then, you know, then what will happen?
#
This is again our some of these things also animate our polity at this point in time.
#
So that's second and then the third issue I think is also the fact that there was a
#
sort of liberal triumphalism, boss jeet gaye, right, and, you know, then there is no further
#
sort of reflection and that, you know, what do we need to do?
#
What is the next set of agenda?
#
And then the GFC happened, the global financial crisis happened, which I mean, its impact
#
I think is much larger than what people are still, you know, have still written about
#
I think, you know, all of this, you know, in some form or the other, this populist movement
#
Trump and, you know, the Tea Party movement and whatever has happened to the American
#
conservatives and the American right and what is happening in many of these is a belief
#
that that liberalism eventually GFC is short is that old thing of, you know, socializing
#
losses and, you know, privatizing profits and, you know, this letting people get away,
#
you know, after they having done this, I think that imprint is very, very strong in many
#
And there is therefore a backlash which is continuing and I think the new combined social
#
media and a whole lot of other things along with it.
#
It's just, you know, created, I mean, it's just formed a very different sort of an, you
#
know, movement, which I think is a genuine threat to liberalism.
#
And I think more than I would say even the Cold War threat to liberalism.
#
And the sort of the interesting thing about the GFC also is that number one, I think there
#
was a misdiagnosis that a lot of the problems that why that failure happened have to do
#
I linked to a great essay by Lawrence White in my show notes about all the sort of the
#
distortions which kind of led to that.
#
And also we saw, you know, what I would not really consider would call free markets, like,
#
you know, bailing, like you said, you're socializing losses, privatizing profits, bailing out companies
#
which are failing is just, you know, creates moral hazard.
#
Then you bail out a company today for failing, tomorrow you are giving an incentive to people
#
to take great risks knowing that there is no cost to them for doing so, they'll be
#
bailed out and, you know, which doesn't make any sense at all.
#
I think it's a fundamental tenet of free markets that companies that fail should be allowed
#
And that's another thing that sort of distresses me.
#
And I know you've written about this as well is that markets get a bad rap because people
#
confuse what is good for business with what is good for markets.
#
Like I saw someone on Twitter use the phrase pro-Brisness and free market in the same sentence.
#
And I was just thinking to myself that, dude, these are opposite things.
#
These are completely opposite things.
#
What is good for big businesses are bad for people in general because, you know, what
#
is good for them is that if you sort of prevent competition to them, you protect their markets,
#
you create entry barriers.
#
That's not what is good for consumers.
#
So inevitably big business will always, you know, speak out against free markets.
#
But this sort of fundamental notion people don't get so they look at like a cronyistic
#
system like we've had over so many decades in India and we look at the bad aspects of
#
that where state coercion is helping companies, you know, make money or whatever.
#
And the assumption will be that, oh, look, markets are bad.
#
But these are not markets.
#
This is not voluntary action.
#
This is a coercive hand of the state.
#
But that's kind of a little bit of a ramble.
#
Let's, and I'll come to economics later.
#
You know, like you are, you run this writing course for almost what now, maybe eight months?
#
The 10th cohort is going on and I skipped a month in between.
#
And then you're doing a podcasting thing and you're doing a TikTok.
#
I'll suggest two courses if you still have time that you must do.
#
One is this, you know, just this course on economic reasoning, just because, I mean,
#
both the, you have the reach as well as your ability to sort of, you know, demystify some
#
of these things in a nice and patient manner.
#
I think what this economic…
#
I see so many people, otherwise well-intentioned, can argue things, etc., etc., just flip down
#
this path of not being able to think through.
#
And the second one, since you are a poker player, and this is, I have been thinking
#
for some time, that I should suggest this to you.
#
One course on boss, just probabilistic thinking, base, base and reasoning, you know, it's
#
like, it's a must for almost everyone.
#
I mean, it's, otherwise people just read so many wrong conclusions, it's just, it's
#
See, Raghu, I gotta tell you that you don't know what resonance your words have with me.
#
It's almost like you're reading my mind, like have you hacked into my brain or something,
#
because one of the things I'm toying with and I want to do at some point in time is
#
that my sense is that our education system is not flawed just in terms of delivery, but
#
also conception, which is why people who come out of our education system don't even have
#
basic skills and these specifically include skills of thinking about the world.
#
So I've been thinking for a while of putting a course together consisting of essential
#
things that I think everyone should learn, taught by me and perhaps others, which include
#
of course, writing and communication, which include things like financial literacy, which
#
I am not the person to teach, but it's something everyone should know, logical thinking and
#
economic reasoning and probabilistic thinking.
#
So it's almost like you're sort of, you're messing with my brain here.
#
Have you done a phishing scam on my brain or something is what I must ask at this point.
#
So I'll come to economics later and particularly to your father's scooter, which is a subject
#
of great interest to me.
#
But before we do that, I want to sort of talk a little bit about nationalism, where you
#
made a couple of interesting points and I want to take off of one of them to ask sort
#
So at one point where you're talking about the idea of India, you wrote quote, the real
#
dividing line on political thought in India has always been nationalism.
#
This spits one imagination of the Indian nation with the, with another complete with their
#
own imagined past, a lament of the present and a vision for an ideal nation.
#
And this is obviously the founder's idea of India as it were, and the current idea of
#
India of the current dispensation.
#
And even there, it's not like any one thing, there are many competing ideas within these
#
But my larger question is this, that I think that at some level, given that instinctively
#
we are hardwired to be tribalistic, to look at the world in terms of us and the other.
#
Would it then be the case that the question just comes down to how do we define the us
#
and how do we define the other?
#
And you can define it narrowly or broadly.
#
And one of the great sort of political successes of the Hindutva movement, and I'm not praising
#
them, it's success in the way that they have achieved this.
#
It's not a movement that I have anything good to say about.
#
But one of the things that they have successfully done is that they've subsumed a lot of identities
#
within this broad Hindutva identity, which is a remarkable political success.
#
Like a few years ago, I would have said it's not possible.
#
We are a country driven by identity politics divided by identity.
#
But yet they have created this larger banner of Hindutva, which has subsumed some of them.
#
And one illustration of this is that in both 2014 and 2019, the BJP got more of the Dalit
#
You know, they were described by a scholar of the Dalit movements in Prashan Jha's book,
#
I forget the name of the scholar in question, but he called them the default Dalit party
#
So they've managed this thing where they've subsumed all of these different identities.
#
And now the dominant sort of tribal vision, as it were, in India is a BJP's vision of
#
Now, the thing is, if somebody is to say that there are elements of this which are toxic
#
because they do the othering of Muslims, because it is, you know, so many regressive notions
#
are part of it, if someone is to come up with a competing vision, what is that competing
#
Is that competing vision cannot, you know, you don't have an ideas based nationalism
#
happening, that doesn't appeal at a visceral level.
#
You can't build a nationalism around liberalism, for example.
#
I know people think that it's possible, but I am a little skeptical of that process because
#
people don't have that visceral feeling towards, you know, ideas as they do towards notions
#
What's, what's your response to that?
#
I think just going back to that point, I think in that particular edition, if I remember
#
it right, the idea was the Indian state is always a status, conservative and also in
#
some sense, you know, socialist.
#
And therefore there is no difference among Indian parties on these grounds.
#
So the only access is this notion of idea of India or the nationalist idea.
#
And I think if you were to broaden it, right, like you rightly said, us versus them, I mean,
#
sometimes it manifests itself in India as nativist, you know, Mumbai or whatever, Maharashtrian
#
versus non Maharashtrian and things of that kind.
#
And then sometimes it manifests itself as nationalist.
#
And then there is one strand in India, which is internationalist, you know, these guys
#
who are using toolkits these days as it is alleged, right?
#
So I think what the success of the current dispensation is the idea of taking it to the
#
nationalist identity level, subsuming the nativist and the nativist I'm not saying is
#
only region-based, nativist is just any identity that is, you know, sub nationalist.
#
Now your question of what is the competing idea or a competing political force that might
#
I mean, I would rather go the other way, see, there are two things that will happen eventually.
#
One is, it's like the Carl Schmitt mentioned that, listen, politics is eventually about
#
friend-enemy divide, friend-enemy distinction.
#
The more agglomerated you make things, you will find that people will look for enemies
#
because you know, it is in the nature of people to find a competing sort of a view and then
#
And in that sense, it is what happened to Congress, right?
#
Congress was this sort of a, you know, tent, whatever a huge tent or whatever the term
#
And then, you know, everybody came in and everybody, you know, where they're under
#
it and then that agglomeration then eventually started splitting because there is an idea
#
that we have to have a friend-enemy distinction in order to actually do politics.
#
Otherwise, what's the point?
#
So I have a feeling that as opposed to the probability of a competing idea coming over
#
a period of time, maybe because of lack of personalities of the kind that actually created
#
this agglomeration, which is true of what happened with Congress as well, the agglomeration
#
will again split and the people will start looking for competing ideas themselves, right?
#
And you know, then start going and splitting and doing that.
#
Now, will that take 10 years, will that take 20?
#
I think it's all of us are underestimating how much it will take.
#
I think it's going to take longer than what people think it might take.
#
But it is going back to that other, you know, I like to do this and just because you brought
#
this up, suddenly, you know, the other notion came in.
#
It's this notion in economics by this economist called Minsky, which is the Minsky cycle,
#
that in the root, in the heart of the boom is the seed of the bust, right?
#
And which is what happened in the GFC in the subprime crisis, right?
#
So I think the Minsky and moment will, I think it's already happened.
#
As you build the agglomeration, you've already seeded it, that's a question of when it grows
#
up becomes a large tree and then, you know, cleaves this whole thing, we'll see.
#
But what form would it take?
#
Would it take a more extreme form?
#
Like, the reason I ask is, again, you know, you referred to Schmidt in your recent newsletter
#
on, you know, why coup won't take over Twitter and the obvious answer, of course, is network
#
effects and Twitter already has red space.
#
But apart from that, the two points you mentioned was one that you need an other to fight against
#
for political mobilization.
#
And that is something that an echo chamber won't give you, which is presumably what
#
But the other interesting point you made, which plays into this is that you're because
#
you always need another, even when you seem to be a homogeneous group, you will manufacture
#
it within that homogeneous group.
#
And sometimes like I look at these, you know, right wing Twitter feeds and whatever for
#
And there is already sort of these groupings between them of what they call trads and writers.
#
And I haven't bothered to look deep into the distinctions, but the trads are the guys who
#
says nobody should eat beef, the coercive hand of the state should prevent anybody from
#
eating what they don't want, they're basically imposing their values.
#
And writers, I don't really know what they're about.
#
But you know, I think they want to eat beef privately, but otherwise publicly, they support
#
So I don't know what the deal there is.
#
So the question that then comes up is that fine that, you know, this evolves, this is
#
not how it's always going to be, but does it necessarily evolve in a more extreme direction
#
in the sense that, you know, the trads beating the writers, for example, Yogi Adityanath
#
or someone even more extreme becoming the next PM.
#
And the reason I ask is, and this again comes back to, you know, the change in the gravitational
#
force as it were, how social media has changed everything, that I think social media drives
#
us naturally towards the extremes.
#
There is no moderating influence anymore, there is no middle, the middle is gone.
#
Everyone always has to posture and do virtue signaling to rise within their in groups.
#
And the only way of doing that is by going further away to the extremes.
#
And you see the same kind of schism in the liberals as well, where people will be berated
#
for being too centrist or too whatever, and it's almost like a bad word.
#
And you have to go more and more towards the extremes.
#
And so all your incentives are towards being more extreme.
#
And that makes me worry that perhaps a natural direction for politics is towards the edges,
#
towards the fringes as it were, where yesterday's fringe becomes today's mainstream, where yesterday's
#
firebrand rabble rouser, Yogi Ji becomes, you know, the Chief Minister of UP now.
#
Is that a necessary direction or do you feel that that might be countervailed either by
#
something that I'm not considering or by the fact that, you know, in general, the future
#
is unknown, unknown, so who knows something good may happen?
#
So this is a fresh point to consider.
#
So let me sort of, you know, on the fly, give some and please, please add or, you know,
#
Let's take two views of this.
#
One is what happened when the previous agglomeration split, you know, the Congress agglomeration,
#
they split on a few things like they split on this sub identity, because the sub identity
#
There was a history and there was a, you know, this recidivism or whatever this it's always
#
And it also split on the back of some socialistic flash, you know, the sort of guys who went
#
away from Lohia and then down to Taran Singh and Ram and things of that kind.
#
So and but nobody went the sort of the extreme in that sense that nobody became a radical
#
They went in some other direction.
#
So I have a couple of points to make one when you are doing this agglomeration, you are
#
again in some sense doing a top down view of what the common identity is.
#
And maybe there is a reason today to come together with the top down view because you
#
have all kinds of imagined or real grievances and other and all of that.
#
Once you have sort of, you know, sorted some of those things out largely or maybe at least
#
to some person, then will your memory of what you wear come back?
#
You know, the, you know, will you remember that you were, you know, during Durga Puja
#
on the seventh day, mutton was absolutely there, you know, bhog in the house and just
#
because now, you know, some kind of something was told to you and you sort of, you know,
#
left it and koshamangsa is no longer the thing which is kosher at this point in time.
#
But 10 years later, who knows, I mean, you'll say boss that was there and all it needs is
#
somebody reasonably persuasive and a few other grievances that you might have about other
#
things not coming your way for it to, you know, coalesce and start another sort of,
#
you know, splinter, splintering of this.
#
So that is one sort of thought.
#
Second is economic progress.
#
I mean, what would it mean that if today we are at $2,000 per capita economy and if we
#
become 5,000, how much of these things and then you have further aspirations of growth
#
or if you don't get to 5,000, either way, how would you look at some of these things?
#
You would look at these things as success that actually has sated you and you are very
#
happy despite having not enough growth and everything and will you be able to continue
#
with that, you know, frame of mind that this is fine or even otherwise once you get to
#
5,000, would that make you ask for more and you'll say why not 10,000 and then what does
#
it mean for us to do 10,000 and once you are in that journey, you will realize that, you
#
know, market is something that brings freedom, brings individual choice.
#
I mean, you know, it is the easiest way to break, you know, a lot of, you know, whatever,
#
you know, some of these firms, social beliefs, etc.
#
So now that is another one and I see this, you know, I mean, some of these are like apparent
#
to me in many of these conversations with friends and others, the guy is sort of starting
#
to become more and more, you know, whatever, right-wing and conservative, but, you know,
#
in the same instance, he's posing, I mean, he's very happy that his daughter is wearing
#
a short and, you know, sleeveless t-shirt and he wants her to go somewhere, right?
#
Somewhere these two forces will, you know, come against one another because somebody
#
out there is pushing against this source, right?
#
So today you might say all of that while on Facebook you are posting, you know, things
#
that your wife is wearing a sleeveless, which, you know, you never know, three years later
#
some guy will say, boss, that is also not allowed, you know, so this, I mean, the thing
#
that once you are done with some first level objectives for which you are agglomerating,
#
the next and the next level of objectives that people might go for might actually bring
#
you into that Schmittian friend-enemy, you know, distinction.
#
So I have a feeling that's also something that might happen.
#
I mean, eventually, maybe it's not, it will not go into the other sort of extreme.
#
It might actually regress and go back into something which is slightly more, you know,
#
I would say less extreme, more moderate because people have the memories of those things and
#
people will continue to see outside and look at the world that is outside of India and
#
what's happening there.
#
Yeah, no, that's a great point that, you know, becoming more extreme means you become more
#
splintered because they keep, there are drop-offs at every point, so, you know, and I can certainly
#
see that if this battle between the Trads and the Raitas accelerates, what are the beef
#
eaters within the party going to do or even the meat eaters for that matter.
#
The other, the other sort of interesting point here again comes back to one of the favorite
#
theme of the show, which is incentives, is that, you know, the point that you made about
#
role does economics play in this because I think that economic incentives are huge.
#
In fact, you know, one of the reasons that there is less of, say, these identity-based
#
problems in cities, like nothing is solved, but you still see less caste problems in cities
#
as opposed to rural areas where they're completely entrenched, is that you have a different set
#
You're part of a large economic network and there are many situations where you cannot
#
afford to discriminate.
#
Like, if you are a company in a very competitive marketplace or a, by company, I don't mean
#
just a big company, but you could even be a small outfit in a very competitive marketplace.
#
You are competing for the best workers.
#
You can't afford to discriminate on the basis of what someone's identity is and those economic
#
incentives come into play and that, therefore, I'm just thinking aloud that then there are
#
sort of incentives coming at you from two kinds of networks.
#
One is your economic network, where you want your economic network to be as large as possible
#
because that is most profitable for you and that's where your skills can get scaled.
#
But there are the incentives of your social networks, which is also feeding into your
#
economic network and vice versa.
#
So yeah, I kind of agree that progress is sort of something that can change these incentives.
#
Again, I do not want to say that this is panacea or that economic growth will solve all our
#
But on the margins, it does, you know, change the incentives and make a little bit of a
#
positive difference and that's kind of something to be noted.
#
And the other thing that comes to mind also is that, you know, in recent episodes, I've
#
been musing aloud on how a lot of this is a battle between the concrete and the abstract.
#
That when we focus on the concrete things in our lives, we are all actually pretty liberal
#
and inclusive, you know, like your friend whose wife may wear sleeveless or whose daughter
#
But when it comes to abstract notions, we get into all these narratives where it's us
#
versus the other and these people are bad.
#
So you will say that, oh, you know, Muslims are bad.
#
But if you actually encounter one in person, you'll be perfectly friendly and all that.
#
And this is sort of this bizarre dichotomy that I can't figure out.
#
You know, it's almost like, you know, Hitler being vegetarian, a nice guy being a fascist,
#
like what the hell is going on?
#
You know, why does the abstract have so much sort of pull over our lives when we behave
#
in when we think of the like this even applies to, for example, classical liberal values.
#
Like I say that in our personal lives, you're all libertarian, right?
#
We don't force anybody to do anything.
#
We don't like coercion.
#
You know, if we go to have a meal at a restaurant with our friends, we are not going to force
#
them to eat exactly what we want them to eat.
#
We are not going to force them to pay for us.
#
But when we sort of abstract it out into a larger domain, suddenly consent doesn't matter.
#
And I mean, is this sort of and this dichotomy is kind of disturbing to me.
#
Is this something that you've kind of thought about?
#
I mean, not in these terms.
#
I mean, there is this dichotomy which I think exists in many areas because what happens
#
is when it's concrete, then it's a bit difficult for you to, you know, play that, you know,
#
what's there in your mind out in real action because there are other things that come into
#
The ideas that you've been brought up with, you know, for a fact that, you know, you can't
#
be bad to a person on his face, abuse him onto his face.
#
Most of us would not do that.
#
But in abstract, I think it's a bit more, you know, you have these things in your mind
#
which are biases which you keep getting reinforced when you are having, you know, a conversation
#
when you are reading things and things of that kind.
#
Now I have a feeling that the, for the people who actually act on the abstract views that
#
they have, on the abstract notions that they have, there are a few who don't make this
#
difference and who act on it.
#
They actually get emboldened because of the fact that there are way more people that are
#
actually having these abstract notions because the guys having the abstract notions will
#
continue to give a license to people who will actually act in this manner till it actually
#
starts impacting their lives, which is when the splintering hopefully or whenever the
#
splintering happens, might happen that way.
#
But yeah, I mean, I really don't know.
#
I think there are many places where I would say that the same thing applies to me.
#
I have some abstract views, but I actually get in front of somebody, I'm not telling
#
him that, you know, what I have in my mind exactly, or I'm not behaving in that manner
#
which I thought I would behave because I was thinking about it that way.
#
So I think that's mind-body dualism it is, eventually, that we have a mind and then the
#
body acts differently because they still do it.
#
So one sort of final, and before we kind of move on, just I again want to clarify that
#
lest I be seen as generalizing too much, of course, there are exceptions, there are abstract
#
concepts which are good and beautiful like freedom and individual liberty, and there
#
are concrete actions which people do which are a problem, which is why our world is not
#
People do go out and lynch others because they are allegedly, you know, eating the wrong
#
kind of food or dating someone that, you know, the lyncher would rather have had an opportunity
#
So, you know, let's kind of move on to our final political subject before we move on
#
to economics, and I'm thinking of our Prime Minister Narendra Modi, fascinating character,
#
and in edition 33 of your newsletter you wrote, quote, even his detractors will admit PM Modi
#
is a transformational political leader.
#
He has an appeal that transcends ideological positions on both statism and recognition
#
His arrival coincided with a temporal phase in the Indian society that enabled him to
#
shift the ideological position of the medium Indian voter proximate to that of the BJP.
#
This has meant a Modi coalition of voters which only exists because he has willed it.
#
Unfortunately, he hasn't been able to transplant his success as a transformation leader in
#
electoral area to governance.
#
The medicalist planning and the attention to details that mark his electoral success
#
are conspicuously absent in many of the key decisions he has taken over the years.
#
And I think at one point even I wrote sort of a column when I think Amit Shah was made
#
Home Minister about that someone who is such a remarkable political strategist, you know,
#
and almost single handedly the architect of BJP's great win in 2014.
#
Can he bring any of those skills to governance?
#
And I felt he wouldn't.
#
I felt it wouldn't happen.
#
And the reason it possibly doesn't happen in Modi's case is simply because of the incentives,
#
you know, in politics, they'll put everything into it because that is an incentive, the
#
But when you are in government, the how you govern has actually nothing to do with whether
#
you get reelected or not.
#
Everything has to do with narrative control, which those guys are pretty good at, though
#
I think they make a lot of mistakes as well, such as, you know, letting their IT cell run
#
the narrative on issues where you need sort of a less thuggish kind of thinking, you know,
#
as in the case of the farm bills where they lost the narrative completely, I think, you
#
know, with the way they came down on the protests and painted the protesters as anti-national.
#
So one could argue that that may work for them in the long run.
#
But I just felt that there was a more sort of statesman-like approach they could have
#
taken, though that is perhaps expecting too much of this lot.
#
So what do you think of Modi when you sort of look at him, that at one level, such a
#
remarkable politician, and again, by remarkable, I don't mean it in a good or bad way.
#
It's just a fact in terms of what he achieved in politics and, you know, building this vote
#
bank and the kind of leadership that he has.
#
But on the other hand, you know, in governance, you know, just the opposite.
#
So what do you make of this fascinating figure?
#
So I mean, listen, I think all of us agree that in terms of maybe there are only two
#
or three really transformative political leaders that have emerged in the post-independent
#
And in some ways, I think Modi will eventually tower above all of them.
#
By the time, you know, Modi's innings is over.
#
And the question is, you know, what is the legacy going to be in the long run?
#
And I still hold out some hope for a reason, because I think that in some sense, he also
#
is aware of the fact that, you know, what he has done politically is, you know, almost
#
unbeatable, at least in so far as he's active in politics.
#
But then, you know, what is the 100-year view of him?
#
And I think my view is a lot of really good politicians do have this in their minds.
#
But you know, how is history going to judge me?
#
And I have a hope, I mean, this is more optimism speaking, that as more electoral victories
#
pile up and as you sort of, you know, finish off all the final frontiers, you know, you
#
had not won Bengal, you might win Bengal, and you not won some other southern state,
#
you win those southern states.
#
And it might happen in the next couple of years, for all you know.
#
This question will start animating, at least I hope it starts animating, you know, him.
#
And I have a feeling that, again, maybe it's optimism in my mind.
#
But I think there are some, you know, signs of that, as maybe the pandemic has precipitated
#
it, maybe the time is right now, because there is, you know, absolute decimation of the opposition.
#
Because you know, once you have decimated the opposition, and once you have pretty much,
#
you know, won all the sort of electoral battles, you have to win.
#
It's natural for someone who has a high achievement orientation, has a sense of, you know, that
#
history should view me in a certain way, for them to do something more.
#
So I have that kind of, you know, expectation that this thing might turn a bit differently
#
than what people are thinking that it might go.
#
And some of it is also my hope that, you know, we actually get to see that.
#
Because with that kind of both political capital, and the ability to set the narrative, I mean,
#
if channeled the right way, this can be transformational for the country.
#
I mean, and you know, we should somehow both hope as well as make this effort through various
#
means that, you know, that the right message and the right sort of, because politically
#
to sort of fight and defeat, I don't think is happening easily.
#
So the sort of if you're an optimist, then the hope is that the right agenda is then
#
And then you hope that if there are ways to sort of make sure that the right agenda is
#
picked up through whichever means that you can, you know, employ, you hope that that
#
Yeah, I lost to think about on a couple of points, which I'll make to that.
#
And one is that, I mean, I don't know if you've heard similar whispers, but I've heard murmurings
#
from the corridors of power that, you know, there's a bit of a rift forming between Modi
#
and Shah because Modi really cares about his image, especially to foreigners.
#
And he's a little pissed off that so many of the things Shah does with the Home Ministry
#
CAA onwards is hurting his image abroad.
#
I mean, I don't think Modi really listens to Rihanna while he's out doing yoga.
#
But those kinds of tweets cannot be something that he would not consider avoidable.
#
So, you know, so maybe there's a ray of light there.
#
But then, you know, I look back at the mandate he got in 2014, he could have done pretty
#
He had a demonetization, which, as I will say for the hundredth time on the show, is
#
the largest assault on property rights in human history.
#
But my other reaction to what you said was that, let us say that he gets all of this.
#
He gets that, okay, I got the mandate, I am the greatest politician, I have, you know,
#
I am the election overlord or the election OG, as it were.
#
Now the question is, I want to leave a legacy.
#
But the point is, aspiration has to meet ability and ability doesn't just mean governance ability
#
in terms of getting things done, but also includes the vision and the intelligence and
#
And you know, I once wrote a column called the Aankho Dekhi Prime Minister, which was
#
based on an anecdote, a friend of the Prime Minister told me that she mentioned that once
#
about 13 years ago or something, she was, when he was in Gujarat, she was at a house
#
at a gathering of seven, eight people.
#
And Modi started telling them a story about how once his mother was very ill and she was
#
So he went to switch on the fan and then he realized there was no electricity.
#
And from then on, he decided that, you know, if he ever is in a position of power, he'll
#
do something to get electricity to poor people.
#
And her point was that as CM of Gujarat, he did do that or try to do that, whatever.
#
I mean, I don't know what the facts on the ground are in terms of getting electricity
#
And my friend's point there was that he, his view of the world is very experiential.
#
He's experienced the importance of electricity.
#
He would have experienced the importance of good roads, whatever he can experience, he
#
can then try to do something about.
#
But now the point is when you, beyond a certain scale, beyond the scale of a neighborhood
#
or even a village, it's not just about what you experience.
#
When you're running a country, a whole bunch of abstract conceptual models and all are
#
important for you to understand.
#
And you know, one of the ways of getting that is through a lot of reading.
#
Now obviously he didn't have a privileged enough childhood to be someone who read a
#
lot of books and one cannot hold that against him.
#
But otherwise what a good leader would do is, you know, have a ton of humility, surround
#
himself with people who know these things and rely on them.
#
And you wrote in that column in that edition of your newsletter where you said that a lot
#
of his thinking when it comes to governance is system one thinking.
#
You know, he's going by his intuitions or his folksy wisdom.
#
And you know, I can see Demon would have also come from there that, oh, kala paisa hai kya
#
karne ka, let's ban the big notes without realizing that, you know, 85% of the currency
#
And this again brings me to the question of you've also, you know, spoken about how experts
#
in the government are like lampposts where you've said that, you know, the government
#
will use the experts like a drunk uses a lamppost for support and not illumination.
#
And I have written a column in the past, which I'll link from the show notes about how, you
#
know, there are so many well-meaning people who became in Lenin's phrase useful idiots
#
for the government that they would lend their credibility and their voice because they thought,
#
oh, our stature will rise within the government or we'll get some good change done or whatever,
#
whatever their intentions were.
#
But they ended up legitimizing a lot that was nonsensical, including, you know, things
#
And in an aside, it strikes me that, you know, you talked about Carl Schmitt earlier and
#
in a sense, Carl Schmitt was also a similarly useful idiot for Hitler and in fact was attacked
#
from within also in 1936 from within the Nazi party for, you know, not being sincere enough
#
and being exactly that.
#
So what's your take on this kind of landscape that we have seen where all the experts who
#
remain are basically, you know, I don't want to use a pejorative on the show and I can't
#
think of anything else when it comes to describing them.
#
I think there are, I mean, let's take the optimistic scenario and then let's take the
#
pessimistic scenario here.
#
I think for where we are in terms of, you know, economic growth and I don't think that
#
you need very sharp, deeply felt, deeply thought, you know, economic sort of decision-making
#
We have very basic, you know, things that we have to get right.
#
And my view on this one is that maybe in the past, you know, some of these ideas of black
#
money, etc., were manifesto-driven things, then you had to do something about it and
#
maybe you chose the wrong one.
#
But I mean, if you just take infra, you take agri, you take a few other things, I think
#
the decisions here are very apparent for most people.
#
I mean, we are not at the stage where we need economic thinking of the kind that is very
#
nuanced because we have a very sort of nuanced problem to address.
#
So my sense is that it's more a will and a point that I would now take this and solve
#
it with the simplest of sort of interventions, which I know will still be better than where
#
I think farm laws are that kind of intervention.
#
I think it's good, you know, maybe the narrative building and the consensus and everything
#
around it is not something that happened in the right manner.
#
So that's one optimistic sort of, you know, way of looking at this.
#
I mean, and there are some parallels here, right?
#
I mean, you take Reethan, Reethan was not, I mean, I would hazard a guess that he was
#
not necessarily a guy who used to read a lot.
#
I know for a fact that I, you know, and I read an interview of one of his sort of guys
#
who was his, I think, press secretary or someone, used to watch a movie every Friday evening
#
with Nancy Reagan at the White House.
#
I think that that was what he used to do very regularly, but I don't think so he read a
#
Now you might argue that he had maybe, you know, a Milton Friedman and, you know, the
#
entire Friedman sort of, you know, whatever rat pack which supported the and gave an intellectual,
#
you know, sort of foundation and structure to what he was planning to do and he followed
#
Now is that something that is lacking in India?
#
I would say that if you look at it very conventionally and, you know, you take the fact that, okay,
#
the right kind of intellectual support should come from a certain kind of universities,
#
a certain kind of background, it's not there.
#
But again, my question is, if you keep some of these things simple, you will still achieve
#
a lot and I'm hoping that you as long as we keep it simple and we do the smaller things,
#
the simpler things, right?
#
I think we can achieve still a lot of lot in the next five, 10 years, instead of trying
#
to do the more complex things, the more complex things we can get there or if you leave them
#
aside, they will sort themselves out.
#
I mean, so I still believe just infra and agri are too big enough agenda to take care
#
of next five, seven years of India.
#
I mean, if you sort them in the right manner and then you don't shoot yourself in foot
#
with some completely crazy out of the park or whatever, out of the left field idea like
#
the demon or something, and you just do two or three things, right, because all other
#
forces of digital and data revolution and things of that kind are anyway supporting
#
some of these broader sort of trends of people getting into the mainstream, getting into
#
formal economy and things of that kind.
#
So I'm hoping again here that if you just focus on a few small important things which
#
are simple enough for everyone to understand and do, we'll still achieve a lot in the next
#
Yeah, that's kind of a good point.
#
And aside on Reagan, I think at least Reagan's instincts were wonderful.
#
They came from the right place.
#
I'm not sure Modi's instincts are necessarily like that, that they're even coherent or consistent.
#
And equally, you look at the other transformative figure of that times, Margaret Thatcher, that
#
in her first cabinet meeting as prime minister, apparently, she, you know, put a book by Hayek,
#
I think it was the Constitution of Liberty, I forget which one, put a book by Hayek on
#
the table and said, this is going to be what is going to guide us in the next few years.
#
And of course, may not have been entirely consistent with that there is a political
#
economy, but starting with at least the right framework, while I'm not sure that's even
#
I mean, my sense in Modi's case is all the good things that he said, like, you know,
#
minimum government, maximum governance, the kind of stuff that we could agree with was
#
not some core conviction.
#
These were lines given to him by one group of intellectuals he thought he wanted on his
#
So he just kind of said it if he, you know, if I think his actions would have been very
#
different if his convictions were anyway near there.
#
And as far as the farm bills are concerned, I had an episode with Ajay Shah on it recently.
#
And there is also, I guess, a fundamental sort of tragedy in the sense that, you know,
#
both Ajay and I agreed that there is a lot about these farm bills, which is great, which
#
will help farmers, which all the parties have had on the agenda before, which all experts
#
agree will, you know, make a big difference, you know, given how the status quo has performed,
#
it's almost criminal to support it after what it has done to farmers for seven decades.
#
And yet the Modi government messed it up completely in terms of not building consensus, you know,
#
not seeing the unintended consequences of it, like, you know, you and Pranay have written
#
about at length in your newsletter, and that kind of felt sort of a little tragic in the
#
way it's played out because they've just handled it really badly, this painting of
#
the farmers as anti-national and bringing in Khalistan into this and all this nonsense
#
about it's a conspiracy against India.
#
And you kind of wonder that, you know, even if good economics is accompanied by bad politics
#
of this sort, and it fails because of that reason, you know, it will kind of be tragic.
#
But like you pointed out, yeah, I mean, thinking about it, there are a certain set of reforms
#
which should not be rocket science and should be doable, but there will be opposition to
#
it for the sake of opposition anyway, right?
#
Like privatizations, for example, you know, things that the opposition would have put
#
in the manifesto, but if the Modi government does it, they will oppose it and, you know,
#
mobilize against it and, you know, what does one do?
#
Yeah, but I think the only good part here is that the power of narrative is with them.
#
So I mean, if used, which is what my point remains that if you handle it well, this can
#
be quite transformational.
#
And I'm still hoping that when some of these things that you have sought to achieve from
#
a political perspective, those ends are met, all the final frontiers are, you know, finally
#
And I think that we are possibly at the home stretch of some of those political ends.
#
And then hopefully, you know, you will get some action happening in the areas that all
#
of us want the action to happen.
#
Otherwise, you know, you will not sort of start the day or end the day well based on
#
the news cycle that's around you.
#
Yeah, and it's honestly not only Modi's will that comes into play, the mindset of the bureaucracy
#
and the Indian state, the deep state, as it were, the inertia that's built into the system
#
comes into play as well.
#
And I'll quote another sort of lovely passage from you, which is from Edition 25, where
#
you write, quote, the default mental model of the economy among the executive and the
#
legislature is that of a giant planning machine where you plan for a certain volume of output,
#
say motorbikes, and you derive a specific volume of inputs, steel, tires, plastics,
#
et cetera, that you must produce.
#
You do this for each industry, and the planning algorithm will give you a complete picture
#
of what every sector must produce every year.
#
Granted, the reality has changed a bit over the years, but the schema is planted deep
#
This is a PC Mahalana based model, a variant of the Leontief input output model.
#
Overseeing this is a grand vizier of central planning.
#
The simplest gauge of efficiency of this model?
#
Well, my dad booked a scooter when I was born, and we got it delivered when I was in class
#
We got our lessons and virtues of patience early in life.
#
And you know, when young people ask me about what was the benefit of liberalization, kya
#
And the thing is, I just remember that, you know, back in the day, you had to wait like
#
wait seven, eight years to get a freaking telephone, you know, it was.
#
And today you see how accessible that is.
#
All the sectors that were liberalized, like, you know, telecom or headlines or whatever
#
have become so much more accessible than they were.
#
And there is scope for even more kindly reduced taxes on aviation fuel, dear government, and
#
the sectors that weren't liberalized, like agriculture and education continue to be our
#
But broadly, you know, when we speak about this mindset specifically, you spoke about
#
the default mental model of the economy among the executive and the legislature.
#
Now, you know, is this something that you feel is changing, has changed, even if you
#
because, you know, it's going to take a long, long time, it's a decades long play to be
#
able to change it sufficiently in the demand end of the political marketplace.
#
Certainly, many of these are unintuitive or do you feel that there is that mindset change
#
I think I really believe and I hope also that it should come true.
#
But based on some of my empirical evidence of this, I mean, there is a generation of,
#
you know, bureaucrats who are now the liberalization generation who are there now in the bureaucrats.
#
And you know, I don't think they, I mean, of course, the system can always, you know,
#
change you into becoming that.
#
But I think in the past, both the system as well as your instincts going in, where the
#
same and therefore, you know, there was no absolutely no opportunity for you to go in
#
and then change the system because for what I mean, you have not there is no dissonance
#
This is what I was taught.
#
And this is what I'm seeing here.
#
But I think now there is a whole generation of, you know, I think bureaucrats and other
#
people within the state machinery who have seen something different.
#
And also the fact that, you know, just because of the liberalization, people have traveled
#
out your brother, your cousin, somebody's there outside, they come, you go to other
#
I think in that sense, I believe that, you know, let's take, I mean, who in the sense
#
the secretaries in various departments of the government today might be, you know, closer
#
So these are all born in 1960s, you know, early to mid 60s.
#
And they, by the time they entered the administrative, you know, the bureaucracy, they had already,
#
you know, been steeped in the previous sort of thing, because they would have grown up
#
And then in 80s, they must have joined the machinery, then they would have seen some
#
But you know, it's very difficult to change some of the original mental models.
#
But even 10 years later, those who must have gone must have been people like us, right?
#
You saw one part of your life in that model, and then you saw the very, very different
#
one and they might have entered civil services in mid to late 90s.
#
So I'm hoping that even though the system is going to be sort of still supporting grand
#
planning, you know, kind of a, you know, model, many of them would have the instinct that
#
something of this kind is possibly not necessary, I mean, it's too much of over planning.
#
And I also feel that there are mechanisms now of and I think I have heard and seen many
#
of these bureaucrats go to, you know, foreign universities, do six month courses, one year
#
courses on public policy and things of that kind.
#
I think some of those things should bear fruit, in my opinion.
#
And you know, I hope that we get to see some of that in practice.
#
Although I have very limited interaction with many of the some of these machineries, I have
#
no clue whether that is truly happening or not.
#
But I would suspect that some of this should be coming up in terms of, you know, the change
#
in the mindset over the next decade, when many of these guys will become joint secretaries
#
and secretaries of various departments.
#
Brilliant, let's move on to lighter topics now after all this serious, dangerous talk.
#
But before that, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Welcome back to the scene and the unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Raghu Sanjalal Jaitley about politics, economics, India and his father's
#
Do you guys still have that scooter by the way?
#
The scooter is still there.
#
I don't think anyone drives it, but the scooter is there.
#
So it sounds fascinating.
#
So you know, one of the things that I enjoy about your newsletter, of course, is all the
#
references to Bollywood, which are quite wonderful.
#
Like you have this fabulous court.
#
You have a whole bunch of fabulous courts, but one that I noted down because I liked
#
so much was, you know, quote, debt funds are like Imtiaz Ali films, stop quote, where basically
#
the point was that they are all kind of the same if you think about it, but there are
#
minor, minor differences between all of them, which is sort of, which is your favorite Imtiaz
#
I mean, they are like Imtiaz Ali films because they're all similar and they take you for
#
Because, because all Imtiaz Ali films are about some kind of ride, right?
#
And you know, you go on a long sort of self-discovery voyage one way or the other, but yeah, that's
#
Yeah, that's a good one.
#
No, I've only seen Jabbi Met, but I wasn't going to ask you about either debt funds or
#
I was instead going to ask you about the Raghu Sanjay Lal Jaitley test for alcohol, which
#
you mentioned in edition 32, which is a takeoff from the Begdell test.
#
Now the Begdell test is of course named after Alison Begdell, the brilliant graphic novelist
#
who wrote one of my favorite graphic novels, Fun Home, and the Begdell test is basically
#
a test of gender inequality in fiction and films.
#
And the test is that if in a book or a film, there are two women characters speaking to
#
each other about something other than a man, you've passed the Begdell test.
#
Now you have something called the Raghu Sanjay Lal Jaitley alcohol test.
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
Well, I have to remember now, but I think there were three conditions.
#
The alcohol test has to be, I can actually read it out because I've taken the notes.
#
So basically a Hindi film passes the test.
#
If it has a rather Hindi film passes the Raghu Sanjay Lal Jaitley test.
#
If it has two or more characters drinking without one, anyone nursing a heartbreak to
#
planning or doing something illegal, three singing or dancing, uh, stop code.
#
I mean, I think this is, uh, I think the broader point remains one of my favorite sort of areas
#
to constantly have this sort of conversation and writing is about, uh, morality and society.
#
And my view is, I think maybe in the last 10 years, there might be a few films that
#
might possibly pass this test.
#
But I think pre 2010, the answer to this test is zero.
#
You would find hardly any films because for some strange reason, we just cannot show the
#
idea that people can have, you know, can have fun or whatever can indulge in what can be
#
just considered as mild vices, you know, uh, and, uh, without, you know, getting everything
#
I mean, so, and the idea, I think this particular post was around, uh, consumption being a public
#
I think that was the post where this comes from, uh, but yeah, that's the, that's the
#
I think only in the last 10 years, I think I've seen a few films where, you know, you
#
can see people just having a drink without doing, without going through one of these
#
three sort of life situations.
#
Yeah, and I mean, in a sense, I would, uh, you know, since you want me to disagree with
#
you somewhere or the other, I would actually say that, uh, while I agree with, uh, the
#
conclusions that you come up with about the role of morality in society, you know, the,
#
with this particular test is a bit of an issue for me because there is something in art called
#
Chekhov's gun, where the great short story writer Anton Chekhov said that if you show
#
a gun in the first scene of your story, it has to go off by at some point in the story.
#
Otherwise, what is it doing there?
#
So you could similarly argue that filmmakers and writers might take the Chekhov's gun approach
#
to alcohol and say that, listen, if we show alcohol, it has to like lead to heartbreak
#
or it has to be there for a reason.
#
And I remember a long time back, someone similarly making an observation that in the movies,
#
you never see someone going to the toilet, like don't they have to go to the toilet
#
in movies, which, but I don't think there's any larger philosophical point or observation
#
about society that can emerge from that specific thing.
#
And one of the nuggets that came up in this particular edition about drinking was that,
#
and I'll quote it where you write, quote, a study by Pehle India Foundation found a
#
manufacturer needs about 10,900 certificates or licenses from various agencies to operate
#
a plant in Maharashtra, stop quote.
#
And your quote is actually incomplete because the word that you took out from it was annually.
#
So it's not that you get 10,900 licenses once and you are done, you can run your plant.
#
You have to get them every freaking year.
#
And I'd done an episode with a friend on restaurant regulations and he was a restaurateur and
#
he once told me about these two sort of, I mean, plethora of regulations, but there was
#
one regulation from the excise department that they can only be one entry to your restaurant.
#
So they can sort of monitor the entry of alcohol.
#
And another regulation which said that they're from the fire department, which said that
#
for safety reasons, there must be multiple entrances.
#
So the thing is, whatever you do, you are on the wrong side of the law.
#
And actually it is irrelevant because you're bribing both people anyway, along with 40
#
other people for 40 other licenses, which brings me to another Bollywood film, which
#
is the famous Kalyug, you know, Shyam Benegal's brilliant version of the Mahabharata and which
#
is a film with a lot of Rajas, but one Raj is dominant over the others, which is relevant
#
to what we were just talking about.
#
So this is not out of nowhere.
#
Tell me a little bit about those different Rajas.
#
Yeah, so this, so, you know, Kalyug is Benegal's take on the Mahabharata, outstanding film.
#
And the Mahabharata set in early eighties in a business family and pretty much follows
#
Because, you know, there are two brothers and they have their kids and, you know, the
#
empire is split between the two and so on and so forth.
#
And what Benegal does is he gives them interesting names.
#
So the, you know, the Raj Babbar is, I guess, Yudhishthir is Dharmraj and, you know, Kulbhushan
#
Kharbanda is, I think, Bhim and he's some other Raj, I forget now.
#
So there are three, four Rajas.
#
And my point is that I saw the film and I saw the film when I was quite young, but it's
#
a more a retrospective sort of view about the film.
#
My point is, oh, there are four or five Rajas in the film, but the real Raj that dominates
#
the film script is the, is the license permit Raj.
#
Because on the back of license permit Raj is what the, you know, the whole sort of the
#
story turns and instead of Hastinapur and, you know, that one sort of split, you want
#
only five villages or whatever that, you know, the reason for which people went to war in
#
Mahabharat, it is actually on the license that people went to war in Kalyug.
#
Yeah, for those of my sort of readers who want to read it, this was edition number 26,
#
newsletter 26 of Anticipating the Unintended.
#
And let's kind of talk a little bit about, you know, we often, I think at the start of
#
the episode, I alluded to how we tend to kind of forget our history and where we came from.
#
And I often assume when I'm talking to people that my sort of shared experience of living
#
in those times, growing up in pre-liberalization India, the license Raj times, and sometimes
#
it's kind of worth full to, you know, remind people that that's not necessarily the case.
#
And the license permit Raj is really the biggest, a villain of all, bigger than anyone else
#
And tell me a bit about how it sort of shaped behavior and incentives and our economy kind
#
of through the decades.
#
Like, what was the fundamental problem with it?
#
And you've described a few of them in this edition, of course.
#
I think, I mean, the idea really was that the state believed as a central planner that,
#
you know, this is what we need.
#
And you had this matrix based on which you realize that this is the output.
#
And based on this output, these are the numbers of things that you might need.
#
And then you went out and, you know, made sure that people got licensed to manufacture
#
only that many of those pieces that you decided that they should make.
#
Now why only that many, you know, there are multiple reasons for it.
#
I think the chief among that reason was that you believed, I mean, the state believed that
#
we will have to make sure that there is no monopoly, I mean, there are all kinds of restrictive
#
trade practices act, there was suspicion that people would make too much of profit and profiteer
#
So the way it worked was every sort of business group got a certain license to make a certain
#
number and then somebody would come in and actually inspect that that's exactly the number
#
And as you would realize that, you know, while trying to do this kind of control, there was
#
no incentive for the manufacturer to look for scale, scale advantages, you know, do
#
Because what's the point?
#
I mean, you, you are only making that many things, there will be a price for that because
#
there is always going to be, you know, artificial, you know, supply constraint and you will make
#
your normal sort of profit out of that.
#
Instead what all the businesses did was they kept diversifying.
#
So it was completely inefficient allocation of capital instead of, you know, building
#
scale, competing, making sure that you are making world class products and then going
#
out and fighting in global markets.
#
All you were doing was trying to get license for the next industry because you had exhausted
#
your licenses on this and now maybe the next industry was not as sort of you were not as
#
good in the other industry as you were in this one.
#
And that industry needed completely different skills and different business acumen and things
#
But you know, the capital allocation used to happen on the back of that.
#
So the number of ways this actually was bad for the economy is just mind blowing.
#
I mean, you know, it's, it's like, basically you write an economics book and then write
#
exactly opposite of everything that you should be doing.
#
The license permit Raj is that there is no supply demand, you know, price is not a signal.
#
There is no real competition.
#
Accession of capital is inefficient, you know, diversification of mindless kind, which actually
#
threatens poor businesses, no ability to compete in market beyond India.
#
I think it's just remarkable that some business houses actually, you know, one is some of
#
them thrived because you had to play the license game and you had to play the government and
#
But even then, once you got the license, the fact that business houses still survived and
#
saw through that itself, I find is quite a testimony to the resilience of some of these
#
It's quite mind blowing.
#
And you know, another consequence of this is that we couldn't develop world class companies
#
because how do you become world class?
#
You need scale, you need to specialize and neither of these two things were sort of possible
#
So, you know, this kind of, there are two aspects of sort of the mindset that is prevalent
#
in India today, which I sometimes speculate came from this era and the way our institutions
#
And one aspect is, of course, the rent seeking rather than profit seeking, which is something
#
I've spoken about in this podcast various times before that, you know, Bhagwati had pointed
#
out that, you know, while Chinese have more of a profit seeking mindset, the Indians have
#
more of a rent seeking mindset.
#
What do we mean by that?
#
Rent seeking essentially means where you use the coercive power of the state to capture
#
some part of the market as it were, which you can do by being part of the state and,
#
you know, and extract rent out of that.
#
And our mindset somehow has become one of key, how can we exploit others?
#
How can we scam others instead of thinking in sort of a positive some way that what can
#
I do that creates value for others and I can make a profit out of that, which is how you
#
should logically think in a free market and the other thing that strikes me is that this
#
cultural distrust of markets that we have, which has also been reflected in our popular
#
culture through the decades.
#
Does it have something to do with the fact that all that you saw of markets like quite
#
apart from the colonial hangover and the East India Company, all that you saw markets in
#
independent India, all that you saw of the private sector, were these cronies who were
#
corrupt and connected and that's how they were surviving and getting by.
#
So could it be a factor that so much of our mindset and so many aspects of our culture
#
was shaped by these institutions that were put in place after independence?
#
Yes, I mean, I really sometimes, I mean, this is, you know, a conundrum.
#
I mean, listen, none of us really saw a businessman while growing up.
#
I was living in a proper public sector unit, sort of housing colony, never saw a businessman.
#
But you know, this idea that business and businessmen, meaning they were like doing
#
something shady, was quite deep.
#
I don't know whether the popular culture perpetuated that or we sort of, you know, actually had
#
that sense of, you know, that these guys were not exactly above board in everything that
#
I don't know how and where it came from, I think.
#
You know, and this is a question that I have asked many people of the previous generation
#
also that where did it come from?
#
Because many of you never saw any, you know, guy who was coming out and exploiting you
#
or a business guy who was doing something.
#
I never got a correct answer except that the state was possibly perpetuating this myth
#
in some, you know, one form or the other saying, you know, profits are a negative thing and,
#
you know, all those kinds of sort of messages across.
#
And then I think what happened is as the license permit Raj became deeper, then a lot of these
#
instincts that you had, you started seeing them get manifested whenever you had the small
#
opportunity to see a private sector at work.
#
You know, people would think that you could get by by bribing and you, I mean, basically,
#
essentially, if you're in private sector, you are doing all of these things.
#
But quite honestly, I don't know what the original sort of sin of the private sector
#
was in India apart from the colonial part.
#
Maybe it was some of the, you know, early independence state drive, which gave the state
#
such an exalted position that it just became that anyone who even sort of, you know, stands
#
up to the state or wants to compete with the state was seen as someone who would actually
#
Something that I have not understood at all, I mean, I can see it all over the popular
#
I mean, early 50s, you know, films and everything that was full of these kind of tropes.
#
But no idea where it was coming from.
#
Some people have told me that the Bengal famine was a huge, you know, sort of a mindset thing
#
But that was more a sort of a, you know, British Raj sort of dereliction of duty.
#
And out of that, yes, there were people who hoarded and the whole hoarding as a thing
#
that the rich people do became deeply embedded in our system.
#
Some of the farm laws are actually a result of that Bengal famine and the thought process
#
It was just some, a whole bunch of small things that came together.
#
Popular culture definitely perpetuated it.
#
I don't think many people ever actually saw a real businessman in their life, but they
#
had a view of what businessmen did.
#
Yeah, you know, this is very interesting because I was fortunate enough to have a fairly privileged
#
childhood where my father was an IAS officer.
#
But even I don't remember seeing a businessman in my childhood.
#
As you were talking, I was thinking about, wait, who are the businessmen I had met as
#
And I can't really think of anything until in post-liberalization India, I was out there
#
working and all of that.
#
And then I kind of encounter that part of it, maybe where we went shopping.
#
I mean, those are the only capitalists you would see who are selling you good things
#
and you're perfectly happy to buy from them.
#
The other very profound point that forms a TIL for me from all the newsletters of yours
#
that I have read was in number 90, where you talk about political versus economic institutions
#
where you say, quote, in my view, a nation has to have its political and economic institutions
#
It is difficult for it to have its political institutions extractive, exclusionary and
#
rent seeking, while its economic institutions are liberal and inclusive and yet succeed
#
Having an extractive and exclusionary political institution while continuing to work with
#
economic institutions that are free and inclusive is an unstable equilibrium.
#
And you talk more about the sort of unstable equilibrium.
#
And I'm fascinated by this because you point out how through the history of India, the
#
balance has shifted from one to the other, where first political institutions were inclusive
#
and liberal while economic institutions were statist.
#
Then under Indira, they both become statist.
#
Then the economic institutions reform after 1991.
#
Then there is a bit of an about turn with political institutions.
#
And you know, now they could all sort of turn illiberal.
#
So expand a bit on this kind of thinking because I haven't come across this frame anywhere
#
Yes, I again, I mean, I don't exactly recollect what sort of triggered this.
#
I think the point that possibly could have triggered is the, you know, just rethinking,
#
you know, Darren Asmoglu's book and about what actually makes nation succeed or fail.
#
And his point there was that it is about institutions.
#
And he takes us through an entire sort of journey about different people having views
#
about why nations fail or succeed, eliminates geography, eliminates all kinds of things
#
and comes to a conclusion that it is about institutions.
#
And my sort of taking off point from there was, okay, what kind of institutions?
#
I mean, are you only talking political?
#
Are you talking political as well as economic?
#
And you know, is there a sort of a difference?
#
And then sort of this, you know, analysis of how we might have gone out about in the
#
last 70 years on these two institutions.
#
And is there some, have these been in sync?
#
And so that's really how it sort of came about in terms of the thought process.
#
And then it sort of followed that, you know, there was a time when our political institutions,
#
not there was a time, I think they were designed to be liberal and inclusive, unlike say some
#
of the other, you know, democratic or not so democratic governments or models that other
#
And when that was happening, the economic institutions were fairly, I would say, different
#
So they didn't hew to the liberalized lines.
#
And then of course, during the 70s, both of them fell in sync, which was a disaster, complete
#
And then, you know, then we have had a little bit of a, you know, swing the other way.
#
And the hope is, and which is again the point around, you know, what is the hope?
#
The hope is somewhere somebody will get the sort of light bulb moment that both should
#
be, you know, in sync and, you know, liberal and inclusive.
#
Because you know, how many ways will you try before figuring out that this is the way that
#
might actually work because it's worked everywhere.
#
And you've now exhausted all combinations, you know, you've exhausted one of this and
#
So my view is, okay, you'll try 20 odd years of each or 25 odd years of each.
#
Hopefully, now you'll figure out that the next 25, the last 25 of the first century
#
of India's independence, you might try the last one, which is the one that possibly in
#
But you'll stumble at your way and reach there.
#
I think that's really where that particular thought came from.
#
But since you're thinking of the trigger, I think in this particular edition, you were
#
So that was one of the economic institutions you sort of had in mind.
#
But you know, to sort of probe a little bit further, if I may double click, if we are
#
to sort of demystify that, what do we mean by economic, both political and economic institutions
#
becoming more liberal and inclusive?
#
What do we mean by that in concrete terms?
#
Can you expand on that a bit?
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The economic institutions are the institutions that we have formed over the years.
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I mean, there are, of course, regulators, there are various kinds of, you know, bodies
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that are not exactly, I would say, that they are more permanent sort of bodies that are
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around, whether you call it a NITI, IOGAD, erstwhile planning commission, various regulators,
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various commissions that we form.
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And what are the mandates for these?
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I mean, mandates for many of these are even, you know, the kind of earlier we used to have
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these MRTP, you know, the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, we've dismantled all
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of them, replaced them with something more benign, you know, many in many of these areas,
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I mean, the forex, the what used to be called, you know, I think there was an act, I forget
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the full form of that act, which was...
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FERA, Foreign Exchange Regulatory Act.
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There was one before FERA, I think, Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of something,
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smuggling activities, coffee posa, and things of that kind.
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So all of these have moved towards institutions that we have now created, which actually are
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not as sort of terrible as they were in the past.
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And the political institutions are our usual political institutions, you know, they are,
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you know, the, you know, the parliament, the election commission, you know, the various
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bodies of legislatures and administrative machinery of the state.
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So that's where my view was that on the economic front, I think we have moved quite a bit of
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distance and gradually turned more and more inclusive and liberal, and you might argue
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that some of the regulators, etc. have disproportionate power, but that's fine.
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I mean, I think it's true for most of the regulators in the world, but broadly they
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are way more forward looking and forward thinking than some of the things that we have seen
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happen on the political institution space.
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And in terms of political institutions?
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So I think on political institutions, if you take, I mean, I would club most of the things
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that we do, you know, most of the institutions that we have of the kind, whether it is, you
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know, election commission, or it is, you know, I mean, any of the arm of the state, whether
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it is police or it is judiciary, or some of the things that where we have the governor
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and, you know, many of these sort of things where you expect them to be, you know, and
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we spoke about some of this in terms of where the, where some of these institutions are
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now taking an illiberal turn in the first part of the conversation.
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I think those we are again seeing that they have continued to remain.
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I think there was a time when it was starting to become somewhat more inclusive and liberal,
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but I think they are again, you know, I would say they have not kept pace with the change
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of the economic institutions.
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I think they have still, you know, in some places remain the same in some places, my
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fear is they are regressing.
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That's a fascinating frame to think about the problem with.
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So I've taken enough of your time.
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I'll ask you a couple of final questions and I think these should be easier and less sort
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And one of them is this that, you know, as you would know, listeners of my show are constantly
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asking me and my guests to recommend books to read.
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You know, what are the foundational books that you feel everyone should read, maybe
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books that shaped your thinking, or even if you came across some late books that you wish
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you had come across earlier and that, you know, made an impact on who you are and even,
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you know, to add a sort of another element to that books that can help people understand
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So in terms of let's start with books that can help you understand India better.
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I think I would recommend Ram Guha's couple of Ram Guha's books.
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I think the India After Gandhi is a fantastic book, it's a very sort of a broad but fairly
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well sort of researched and thought out book about where we are and what brought us here.
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So that's one book that I found quite useful.
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The other book that I think, and a lot of literature that's come out in the last couple
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of years and you've featured a lot of them on your show are quite actually fascinating
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and actually, you know, we're starting to do some good work and some good, you know,
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academic work around this in very accessible form.
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So I think that, I mean, for me, the India's founding moment, which was Madhav Khosla.
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That was again, a fantastic book, I think I learned a lot from that book, a very well
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And I think that's again something that I would recommend.
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I would recommend some of the books on history, which, you know, people must just go back
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and read for the medieval India, sort of that kind of time period, there is a five volume
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book of Jadunath Sarkar, it's quite an academic book.
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But the fifth one is just outstanding, it's just the post-Mughal, Maratha, British East
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India Company sort of the phase.
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And I read it long time back, maybe 20 plus years back.
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But that again, was very interesting, it gives you a very sort of real perspective of the
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all the things that the ferment, which sort of led to the British East India Company sort
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of establishing itself, which I thought was quite useful.
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I also, I mean, on economics, I have read both Bhagwati and Sen.
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And I would recommend both, you know, I think some of the early Sen, I mean, especially
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books on where he writes on freedom, I think those are very good.
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And I think there is a lot there, which will change your view about how, what Sen really
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In fact, in edition 82 of your newsletter, you write about Amartya Sen and freedom and
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how you began to reconsider some of his ideas.
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So I'll link that from the show notes as well.
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I did plan to ask you about that and about Rawls versus Nozick and all of that.
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But we'll have to save that for some other day.
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But sorry, sorry to interrupt, do continue.
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So that's, I would recommend both Sen and Bhagwati, I think both are very good, very
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The Idea of India, which was Sunil Khaldani's book in 97, on the 50th anniversary of Indian
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Again, fantastic book, very informative.
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And you know, one of the great influences of my life, again, forget the person read
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his book, kind of a guy, is Naipaul.
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And I find all three of Naipaul's books on India are very, very interesting.
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He was a perceptive observer, you know, he was a person who could spend like a day in
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a place and dig out things that you would take ages to ever figure out that this is
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what is happening there.
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So all three Naipaul books are very, very interesting.
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You can discount some of his ideas about India and you can discount, you know, some of the
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views he later had about his political views.
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But I think as this understanding of India, you can't argue that he got it right in all
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the three of the books.
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And now my final question for you.
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This is not the hope and despair question, but rather as you in your news, in the many
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editions of your newsletters, you've sort of made me rethink things that I hadn't thought
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so deeply about and, you know, given me a few TIL moments.
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So can you share with me one or more, but, you know, more would be Sone Pe Sohaga.
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But can you share with me one idea that you think everyone should internalize?
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One notion or concept or idea which you think everyone should internalize.
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So obviously something that's not popular right now.
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I think on this again, I think we will end the show on a strong note of agreement because
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the one idea that I think everyone should internalize is that spontaneous order works.
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I mean, there is something called spontaneous order works.
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I mean, let people have individual liberty and freedom, let them choose their things.
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If they choose, people do multitudes of these transactions.
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You know, all of these things then together create something where, you know, order comes
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Nobody needs to direct it.
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Nobody needs to guide it to a certain place.
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It's been proven over and over again.
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And any amount of tinkering with this, shifting this, trying to do something around this with
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all the good intentions actually leads to worse outcomes, proven time and again.
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That is a note of agreement.
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So, you know, voluntary actions, Zindabad, state coercion, Murdabad, and on that adequately
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filmy note, Raghu, let me thank you once again for, you know, sharing your time and your
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That was absolutely a play.
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Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of the Scene Unseen?
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If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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