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One of the great tragedies of life is that by the time we have lived long enough to gain
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wisdom, we are not young enough to do anything with it.
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This is why technology, from the Gutenberg press to your podcast app, is so marvelous.
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We have access to the wisdom of others.
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This is also why I love these long rambling conversations I have.
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The point of the conversation is not always the subject that might have sparked it off,
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but instead what you get to learn in the digressions that you take through the side roads of someone's
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My guest today has been a dear friend of mine for a couple of decades and we have spent
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countless hours talking about many, many things.
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And yet, in this conversation, I learnt a lot about him that I hadn't known earlier.
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And I also got much food for thought about the world we live in and about my own self.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Prem Panikkar, a legendary journalist who's been whipping up a storm
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in the media since the late 1980s.
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He's best known for his cricket writing and his ball by ball commentary for Rediff in
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the mid 1990s, might well have been the first blog in the world.
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He's also been a managing editor at Rediff and Yahoo and has taught both journalism and
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writing to countless young people.
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In fact, before recording this episode, I recorded a session on writing with Prem for
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the YouTube channel of WindowPain, the writing community that I run.
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That video will be released on Wednesday, March 24th, three days from now.
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We spoke about sports writing and writing in general over there, but in this conversation,
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we didn't cover many of the subjects you'd associate with Prem.
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There is little talk of cricket and writing and we spent just the last half an hour talking
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Instead, for the first two and a half hours, we discussed broader themes around life and
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art and Prem shared a raw intimate account of his life that I found both moving and inspiring.
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This conversation will always remain special for me.
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But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Why should we read books?
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I can think of many reasons, but one is that they teach us how to live.
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To give you a sense of this, allow me to recommend an online course for you.
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and check out a course called The Life Lessons from the Great Books taught by J. Rufus Fears.
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Over 36 lectures, Dr. Fears will take you through life lessons contained in the works
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That's right, unseen, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash unseen for one month of unlimited free
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It's time to start learning.
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Prem, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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Amit, they used to say that unless you have been profiled in the caravan, you haven't
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I think the modern version is unless you've appeared on an Amit Varma podcast, you don't
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So thanks for having me again.
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No, I'm very happy to have you.
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And you have arrived in the past, you have been on a couple of episodes in the past.
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We did an episode ages ago on the state of the media and there was an episode where you
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and Gideon Hay were the guests and we spoke about money in cricket.
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And to be honest, I was actually looking forward to today's conversation because sometimes
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all the researching and prepping and everything for these episodes gets really intense and
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then you have four hour sessions with people you may not know very well and it all starts
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So this week I thought that let me just have a relaxed conversation with an old friend
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where we can just shoot the breeze and I don't really need to do much prep but sort of just
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So what have you been doing during the lockdown?
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How have the last few months treated you?
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Well, it's been kind of odd really because dating back to January of last year, the previous
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two months, December I had taken off, but in October, Arti Kumar Rao and I had spent
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time in Kerala, we were walking basically along the coastline, started at Kovilam beach
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in Kanyakumari and came down the Kerala coastline.
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In November, I went back, I started at Trivandrum's Kovilam and went all the way up to Kulam.
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Basically we were researching what was happening to the coastlines and it was triggered by
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the fact that we were looking up some statistics and we realized that a survey in 2012 said
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that there was 45% coastal erosion.
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A similar survey in 2016 said that number had gone up to 63%.
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That's a massive, massive deterioration of coastline and that sparked a sort of curiosity.
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We weren't quite sure how the project would pan out or what its contours would be.
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What we wanted to do was what we typically do in these kinds of stories, go there, see
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what there is to be seen and try and get a fix on how, on what is happening and therefore
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what the story is shaping out to be.
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So we went without any preconceptions, we were just talking to people, we were just
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walking the coast documenting what there was.
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December we decided to take a month off, it was supposed to start again in January, which
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didn't happen for a multitude of reasons, but February was fixed.
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And then we started hearing about COVID, the early intimations, if you remember one of
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Kerala's first cases was in late January.
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At that time, officially there was supposed to be no COVID and there was no threat.
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And if you remember the health ministry saying, oh, this is just nonsense and all of that.
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But somehow I didn't have a comfort level with that whole thing.
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And March is supposed to be all our birthdays and oh, you know that, my birthday, Raji's
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birthday, our wedding anniversary, all of that.
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So these things come fairly close together.
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The wedding anniversary is 5th, Raji's birthday is 15th.
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So typically during that time, we take a fortnight off and go somewhere, we were planning that
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and somehow neither of us felt comfortable going and staying in some place.
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So we said, look, let's just spend a quiet year at this time, we'll just spend it at
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home to our own thing and all of that.
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So we didn't go and then everything blew up.
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So suddenly it was, you know, there's this whole thing of being confined to the four
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walls going out only when necessary, maybe once a week you go shopping for vegetables
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and stuff and that's it, the rest of the time you stay put.
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And since then, it's been, things started slowly, we got to a point that I'd also got
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a grant from Nat Geo to do a story.
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Again, it was a COVID related story, but Nat Geo is very particular that you don't put
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So you're not supposed to travel if conditions are not absolutely normal.
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So that was kind of, I was trying to figure out when I could go, it became September,
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then it became October, it just kept postponing.
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And then we started having a series of deaths in the family, three people, all aged 82,
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all very closely related.
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For two of them, I couldn't go, for one of them, nobody could go.
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It was during the quarantine period and nobody was allowed.
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So the neighbors actually did the last rites and stuff.
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Then there was another one and then in January, there was my uncle, the man who literally
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So it's been, I think after that, I haven't quite gotten back to a sense of normalcy.
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I think I do things these days more as a distraction.
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You know how it is in joint families, death is not the end of anything, one, there is
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a ton of paperwork, there's only my aunt who's a widow, she needs help.
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But also the remaining members of the family are suddenly aware of mortality, I think.
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So there is a constant reaching out and sharing stories and stuff like that.
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So it was, I think, been very hard to escape the aftermath, to actually find that private
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space to grieve and come to terms with it.
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And so yeah, I mean, I've been watching the cricket often on the English series, clubhouse
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started, so some of these guys, there's a guy called Ankit Menon, who's a producer
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He roped me into doing what he calls a watch along.
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So the match is going on and you're commenting every now and again on what's going on.
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Things like none of it is really work that I want to do or work that I'm supposed to
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But it's, I think for me, a way of easing back into a semblance of normalcy, let's say.
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I mean, obviously not the same kind of experience, but what is it like for you?
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You've been hyperactive, actually.
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It appears to be that way.
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I mean, as you know, I've worked from home for, you know, more than a decade since I
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left cricket for basically.
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So in that sense, it was pretty normal.
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And I am the kind of person who likes to stay home and read typically.
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I was just extremely fortunate in terms of, you know, extremely fortunate and privileged.
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I didn't really face a brunt of any of the shit that went down.
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Started my online course, which, you know, took off and went well.
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And it was interesting.
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And I wonder if this has happened to you, a tangential question that comes up is that,
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you know, I did an episode with Krish Shok, where he was talking about this pyramid of
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Like, how do you learn the best?
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And, you know, at one level, if you're told something, you learn it.
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If you have to write it down, you learn it better, and so on and so forth.
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And the deepest way of learning something is by teaching it.
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So I realized that, you know, I keep, I mean, the main thrust of my writing course is of
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course, to kind of tell, help the participants be more mindful of the language they use,
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and obviously build a frame through which they can look at their writing, but be more
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And then the idea is that by the end of the course, they are their own writing coach.
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They don't really need active guidance as such.
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And I found that I became more mindful as I was kind of teaching.
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I mean, you've taught so many things, writing, journalism, the whole gamut, has that kind
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See, I used to do journalism workshops for symbiosis when I was in Bombay, I'd go down
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I did that for a couple of years.
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The idea being that you go down on a Thursday night.
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And Friday and Saturday, you're at the disposal of the students.
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And it's full day sessions.
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And then you hang back on Sunday, because the kids just want to talk and stuff like
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I was also a practicing journalist, and I don't think I thought about what I was getting
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out of teaching so much as this is just something, I was doing it pro bono.
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It is just something that I think there was a guy called Sashidan Nanjumdaya, who was
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the Dean at Symbiosis journalism course.
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He's the one who wrote me into it.
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We just drive over once, I think a month or so.
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I think when the penny dropped for me was when I taught alongside Paul Salopek, during
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the Out of Eden Walk, we did three workshops in Delhi, Chennai, and Kolkata.
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And in the Delhi workshop, we were coming straight off that Out of Eden Walk, we literally
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drove down to Delhi and did the workshop.
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And a lot of them were actually practicing journalists from The Wire, from Indian Express,
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there was people from Print, from Caravan itself, all of that.
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And the initial structure was that Paul, there's a Don Belt, who for 40 years was a writer
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and senior editor at National Geographic before he became a full-time instructor.
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So Don and Aarti for the visuals were supposed to be teaching, I was kind of floating.
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There wasn't much that was part of the set curriculum.
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And on day one, the course was basically like we taught some theory, but we fixed an area.
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In Delhi, it was old Delhi.
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And the idea was that the cohort goes out there.
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They first have to identify story ideas.
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We question the pitches.
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Once it is accepted, you go there, report it.
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And at the end of a reporting day, you come back to base and we discuss what you've seen
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and heard and how you've taken notes and stuff, and we fine-tune that.
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You go back next day to fill in the blanks.
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The day after that, you come in and start drafting your story, and we oversee every
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We work individually with the students.
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So the first day was basically theory, broadly what you needed to know when you were doing
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that kind of journalism narrative.
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And I remember there was Paul's session in the morning followed by Don, followed by Aarti.
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And at some point, Paul said, Prem, can you do a quick session on structure?
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Because I left that out.
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So I did an impromptu session of about 15 minutes.
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And the thing was there was very little notice.
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It was about an hour before I was actually doing this was when Paul told me about it.
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So I was suddenly thinking, okay, how, I mean, you know how it is.
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There is so many structures.
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There is no defined template that you can just pull out of a bag and hand it over to
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So I was trying to think of how do I get them, how do I give them a way in which they can
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think structure for themselves as opposed to my prescribing a structure.
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And I ended up using the fishbone as an example, and how to organize material around the fishbone,
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which is the simplest and the most malleable form of structuring a story.
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And I think that is when the penny dropped.
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I realized that by being forced in that finite amount of time to think through a particular
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aspect of writing, and to then be able to explain it to practicing journalists in such
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a way that they were able to absorb it and then immediately apply it the next day.
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I forced myself to think through a whole lot of structures and disciplines that I had learned
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and then refine it and boil it down into I think it was a 20, 25 minute quick talk with
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sketches on a whiteboard.
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That is when I realized the value of teaching, not so much for the students themselves, but
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for me personally, because it made me go back to first principles, it made me think of things
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that I don't know if it's the right word, but you know how we do things by instinct.
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And then somebody says, how did you structure it?
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And you're reverse engineering and saying, see, I thought this way, that way.
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You don't actually, you just sit in front of a computer and the experience of all those
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years of doing it comes, forcing me to think.
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From then I actually started thinking through process.
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So there were two other workshops and then Arti and I did our own workshops.
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And for all of that, more than what I conveyed or what we conveyed to the students, I think
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it was boiling down everything that you knew or thought you knew, understanding what you
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didn't know, trying to find the answers for that, and then structuring it all in such
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a way that it was useful.
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I think that, yeah, you're right.
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I appreciated the writing and editing process more after I taught the workshops.
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Yeah, that's really interesting because, you know, one of the things as you were speaking
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that struck me is that how we learned whatever it is that we do, whether it is the writing
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or the journalism or whatever else, is often through a kind of osmosis where we're not
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thinking consciously that these are the first principles and it flows from this to this
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and from this to this, and this is why we do it.
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We learn things by osmosis.
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Sometimes we learn the right things, sometimes we learn the wrong things, which is why so
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much of my old writing makes me cringe.
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And that's kind of how we go.
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But much more useful way of doing it is, of course, by approaching it from first principles
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and kind of building a frame through which you can, and of course, adapting that frame
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as you go along, but having some kind of frame rather than things happen arbitrarily.
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Now, there's a question that arises from this, which is sort of tangential, but not quite,
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which is that people often make a distinction between art and craft, as in, you know, the
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craft is sort of how you're putting the table together or how you're making the sculpture
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out of a block of stone.
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And art is that beautiful thing which you cannot put in words, which you cannot break
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And I have recently been thinking that actually they're not different.
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I mean, there is a difference, and the difference is that art is basically craft which you cannot
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articulate, which you cannot break down into principles, but they're there, it's implicitly
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kind of happened, like when a musician sits down and creates a beautiful tune, it seems
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like art, like when he's producing it and when he's adding other instruments as craft,
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but when he composes it, it seems like art.
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But at a level beyond articulation, it's actually craft, because he's put those notes together
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because they have a certain effect on the brain of the listener and they will, certain
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neurons will fire in certain ways, the listener will feel a particular way, and it's intuitive.
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So the more we understand art, everything kind of breaks down to the level of craft,
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which again, and I'm thinking aloud and it's the first time I've taken this thought a little
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further than this, which is that if this is correct, and I believe it obviously is, if
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this is correct, that everything can be broken down like that, then, you know, when we speak
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of that hypothetical situation of artificial intelligence creating art, can AI write novel,
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which is as good as something by Abdikar, can a monkey with a typewriter write Shakespeare,
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for example, and of course, an AI is not a monkey with a typewriter, you know, that's
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brute force, machine learning is just a whole different ballgame.
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So what are your thoughts on this?
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I don't know if it's possible to say that art is merely craft that we're not able to
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For me, it's kind of like this, funnily enough, on Clubhouse the other day, there was this
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South African cricket coach, Jodi, who had joined in and we were, among other things,
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discussing what sets certain players apart from other players.
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We were actually watching Virat Kohli at that time.
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And this was, I think, in the previous one, they are not the one that just got over.
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And we were looking at how Virat was playing well within himself, India's position wasn't
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all that good, he needed to be there, he needed to do both, he needed to keep the score going
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and at the same time, he needed to be there till the end.
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And we were watching him cycle through the gears.
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And Jodi was making this point that some players, I mean, they say that some players have multiple
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gears and stuff like, he said, yeah, they do.
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I mean, some players have just two gears or three gears or whatever, some have five, six.
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And he said it all is built around that first gear, which is the absolute craft of batsmanship.
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The defense, the semi-defense, which is basically a kind of offensive defense, where instead
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of stopping a ball dead, you're playing it a little bit more with intent and taking the
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single or whatever, followed by the offensive strokes, which are merely extensions of defensive
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strokes when you think about it, right?
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So he was talking about how if your basics are strong, then somewhere along the way,
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your personality comes into it as well.
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So if we teach syntax to a room full of people and make them all write in a particular fashion,
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But if we teach that same syntax, and the basic principles of writing, how to craft
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a lead, how to do transitions, all of that, how to work on an ending, and leave it to
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people to then take it from there, then individual personality is kicking, which is where voice
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comes in, which is where art comes in.
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Some people will produce well-crafted prose, and some will produce magic.
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And that difference, I think, goes to personality.
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That difference goes to that individual and his peculiar sense of aesthetic.
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One reason why we are not able to precisely articulate what the art of writing, like the
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art of anything else, is probably because of that, that the art part comes from everything
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that we have known, and learned, and experienced, and gone through, which has made us who we
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And that translates into how we do.
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I had this magic moment once when I was in midday.
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Trilok Gurtu was about to release his first album.
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He was making a name for himself, he was big.
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And he was working on an album called Glimpses with Shobha, with his mom.
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And I called up Trilok, asked for an interview, and he called me to the recording studio.
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We were sitting and talking, and Trilok was explaining certain things.
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And I was just tapping the table as I went along.
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So Trilok said, do you play?
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I said, I used to play the drums at one time.
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So we started vibing at that level.
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He started talking about drum patterns, and rhythm patterns, and stuff like that.
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So after a bit, he said, OK, I'm going back into the recording room.
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Would you like to come?
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So I went in there, and what these guys were doing was they turned the recording on, but
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they had no script, no plan.
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What Trilok was doing, he would sit at the drums, and he would just start, he would pick
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up from a very basic pattern, and he would start complicating it.
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And Shobha would be sitting there quietly listening.
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And suddenly, she would start singing, mostly humming or just using basic sarigama notes.
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But she would be matching that rhythm pattern.
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So as Shobha caught up to that, Trilok would change, and Shobha would change with it.
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And they were creating music on the fly, and it was magical to watch, because there was
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There was no pre-planning.
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Neither of them knew where the other was going, and it was jazz fusion almost live in front
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And at the end of it, I asked Trilok, is this going to make it to the final cut?
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And he said, I don't know.
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What we're doing is just riffing and seeing what comes.
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And maybe there will be snatches here, which will be the foundation of a piece that we
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When I got that album, I was thrilled to see that there was one particular bit.
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It's not even a full song, just a little bit, which I instantly recognized saying, I was
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there when this was being created, and that was magic.
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And that came from not Trilok's mastery of the instrument or Shobha's mastery of voice,
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but from their mastery of themselves, I think, and how they could translate that into their
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As I was saying, that's probably a very convoluted answer which didn't make much sense, but it's
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It made a lot of sense when he stands there to unpack.
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Like first of all, you mentioned Kohli, and Kohli to me seems like if you could do a time
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lapse of his career over maybe the last 12 years, I think that time lapse would show
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you craft turning into art.
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Like I remember when we first saw him as a teenager, I don't know how you felt about
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it, but honestly to me, he didn't seem impressive at all at that time.
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He would play well Square of the Wicked, but some of his stroke play was limited, and he
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just didn't seem to really have it.
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And that just changed, and that changed because obviously because of his incredible work ethic
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where he put in those thousands of hours in the nets, and initially it is craft, it is
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You kind of work on different aspects of it, you do it again and again, till they become
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And then like you said, all the rest of you comes into it, and you can kind of sort of
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express yourself in a sense.
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There is an aside here, and the aside I think possibly applies more to sport than to say
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writing or art, which is that I came across this old interview of Bobby Fischer recently,
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and this was taken when he was in his 60s.
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And Fischer basically said he had no interest in chess anymore, it did not excite him because
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opening theory was so far that studying opening theory was a big part of making it to a certain
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And he said that look these days the theory is so advanced that till the 18th move you
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are basically playing what you have studied.
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And very often when I watch a top grandmaster game today, somebody will lose and he will
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say oh I forgot the move order.
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And a lot of the creativity goes into trying to figure out what your opponent hasn't prepared
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for or where you can find some random sidelines and all that.
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And he said that doesn't excite him.
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And similarly that was one of the things that at an intellectual level turned me off from
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poker, which is that point where you realize that initially when you look at it as an outsider
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it's very personality thing, you know people are bluffing, people are looking for tells,
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all of that shit is happening.
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But the more you play it the more you realize that it is all math to the point that there
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is something called perfect play and that doesn't allow for personality per se.
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The deeper you study the better you will be and you'll play in certain ways but you can't
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look at the way a particular person is playing and say that haan ye toh yahi hai.
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And I guess and even with cricket like I've often kind of mused aloud on whether if there
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was an AlphaZero of cricket what it would find like you know for the benefit of my listeners
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what AlphaZero did to chess basically was that it played itself thousands of times and
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then it came up with new heuristics for playing chess and it played what was until then the
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best chess software in the world which was Stockfish and you know if our top player Magnus
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Carlsen is 2800 plus in terms of rating Stockfish would be about 3500 and it had been developed
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over 20 years, it used brute force, it did a crazy number of calculations, millions of
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calculations per second and AlphaZero did a fraction of those calculations per second
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and destroyed Stockfish and one of the reasons was that it found that many of the heuristics
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that humans had internalized were just wrong and that you know it found kind of more intuitive
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ways of doing things and I've always thought that you know if there was something like
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that for cricket where you take the laws of physics, you take the laws of physiology,
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you put all of that together you might actually discover that some of the dogmas in cricket
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are possibly wrong you know people used to criticize Bradman and say where is his back
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lift coming from, people criticize Steve Smith for his technique or Rishabh Pand for example
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and the thing is it's not that these guys are doing anything wrong maybe they're doing
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something right by accident you know we don't know what the optimal is but when you find
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the optimal everybody will move towards that because hey that's optimal but I get that
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you know both in sport and art there's a role for personality but I think the craft is sort
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of a minimum requirement in terms of you know like the coach you were referring to set you
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on clubhouse right you know that basic stuff the defensive stuff you have to first get
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right and then the rest of it flows so you know after this digression and another digression
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by the way you were talking about gears and I remembered if you remember back in the 80s
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they used to say Ravi Shastri has only two gears first gear and fourth gear because he
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would do tuk tuk tuk and then he would go bam bam bam which was a lot of fun though
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in commentary one could say that Shastri had only first gear which was all the cliches
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he would fall back upon and Navjot Siddhu had only the fourth gear yeah but so I have
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a question which actually you know struck me from when you spoke about traveling around
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and doing all of these stories I think one of the things that all of us struggle with
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is to not get jaded to be able to see the world in new ways and to be able to see with
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new eyes typically what happens is we see the world around us and then we are used to
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it and then we don't see it you know it's there we take it for granted it is what it
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is we don't actually see it and it seems to me that you know like in my episode with
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Annie Zaidi we spoke about how as a writer you constantly have to force yourself to see
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with new eyes in your case you've also traveled you know and when you're traveling especially
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with the intent of writing you are seeing things with new eyes you're always kind of
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redefining your vision of the world what is that process like is it a process you've thought
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consciously about you know and is it an enriching process are you a different person from in
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fundamental ways from what you would be if you hadn't done all this sort of traveling
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and writing and seeing in new ways actually I think I had one of those those early days
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when I had no idea what I wanted to be it's not it's I suppose journalists at some point
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start saying you know I always wanted to be a writer in my case no I knew that I liked
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reading I knew that I liked the magic that words can can create and that's it and that
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was just like a liking for music or just sitting at a drum kit and playing and seeing what
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comes but not with any conscious mind that I wanted to do this for a living or whatever
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it's over time and there was that period after I dropped out of college and until I got my
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first job as a journalist when pretty much see it was a fairly fraught time at home because
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one I was the family's eldest grandchild two it was a family that was hugely academically
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accomplished pretty much everybody was you know highly educated and doing all sorts of
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big things and there I was I was supposed to be the hope of the family and all of that
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and I did my experiments with drugs and dropped out and at home and became very for want of
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a better word very difficult to just exist because there was this constant din in my
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years about what a waste real I was and you know how I had destroyed the hopes of not
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just my mom and dad but of the entire extended family all of that is coming into the thing
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so my escape at that time was initially I had a bike I mean I had a bike in college
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so I take the bike and just head off into some part of Tamil Nadu absolutely no agenda
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no nothing and I just just go where the bilanes took me I mean you go along the road and then
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find her and then at some point I mean I wasn't earning any money and the deal at home was
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if you don't earn we're not going to support you I mean there is a house for you to sleep
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in if you want to and there'll always be food on the table any time you want but that's
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about it we're not giving you any money for anything at all so I sold the bike and then
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I started taking these bus rides so I just go to the you know more physical bus stand
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and hop on the first bus that I find and go somewhere and it is a long it is during that
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period that I realized that the thing I loved best was to go to a place that I knew nothing
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about and just to sit there and let things happen people would come up and ask you where
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you're from and what you're doing there and they would tell you about themselves and they
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would take you around and show you things and that became for me I think the trigger
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that got me into journalism once I got in there I realized that journalism wasn't what
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I had imagined it to be in the sense of you know I had done some freelance writing here
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and there during the same period but actual professional journalism that started in 89
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when I came to Bombay and my initial idea of journalism or the dream that I had of going
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to all these places and seeing all of these things they didn't quite materialize that
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way because journalism was incredibly transactional you were sent somewhere to do a story to come
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back and you know how it is right I mean if this is a story then you go to that place
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you know quickly what you need to make a note of to get that scene right and then you need
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these two or three eloquent quotes from whoever the affected party is and and it's it's hunting
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and gathering very quickly what you need and then coming back to base writing the story
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wins repeat so for a long time I got sucked into that the brief periods when I could actually
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like for instance when elections were on Nikhil would send me off to some part of the country
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or the other and he was good enough to not tell me what he wanted from me so it was basically
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just go there and explore and those times I used to love to write the rest of the time
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it was just functional writing cricket happened which made it even worse because I mean I
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was captive to the TV camera and my laptop and keyboard and I think once I got out of
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that is when I told myself that I don't want to go back to that I don't want to become
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I still edit sometimes for some people who send me stuff I do my own writing for myself
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but I realized that nothing quite comes close to how alive you feel when you're in a place
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that you know nothing about and it slowly unravels and and it opens up to you and and
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it is probably during that time it also happened that that is when Paul Salopek started his
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out of Eden walk and we started getting in touch with each other so I was following the
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walk and then the whole thing of walking with him which was typically going to unknown places
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I mean we had absolutely no idea where we would end up at night who we would end up
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in the middle of what their concerns would be and it was just sit back absorb you know
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you're not forcing a story you're not even fussed whether there is a story or not you're
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just there to see and hear what there is to be seen in her and I think that made it incredibly
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difficult for me to go back has made it incredibly difficult to go back to what is called day
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to day journalism the quotidian kind of stuff that we do which is fit in the blanks of whatever
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it is but yeah it's it's it's brilliant because it also makes you break we talked about crafts
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and templates and stuff it makes you break away from that because every day is a new
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experience and nothing prepares you for that right so you have at one level to think in
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terms of what you're hearing and and you know that whole thing we keep telling students
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right if it's not clear to you it's not going to be clear to the reader so you're looking
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for clarity so a farmer in Rajasthan is explaining what his problem is with MSP and and you don't
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have a clue what his life is like so you get him to go into detail and you try to understand
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that and then you ask questions when things are not clear until it's all fixed in your
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head but then you have to go away from all the templates that you've been taught to use
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or have used or like you said internalized through osmosis and come up with a way to
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tell this in such a way that it makes sense so it was a constant sort of and that's that's
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the fun I think of being in the field it's a it's a constant reinvention of yourself
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of what you think you know and at the same time it's a constant infusion of new things
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and your thoughts and new new lives that you knew nothing about and yeah it's it's magic
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yeah and it you know what you say about you know being able to like when you were on the
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road with Paul Salopek and you're just traveling around and there's no agenda you don't have
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to sit down and write a piece the next day and that allows you to just kind of relax
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and imbibe and all of that seems to me to be you know so important a part of that process
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of seeing because sometimes also what happens is when you're a writer or a travel writer
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you go somewhere you say I'll write a travel piece or I'll write a book or I'll do this
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the desire to see changes the way you see and what you see and I think that that can
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often be something that distorts the way that you see the world and that's just one of the
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many anxieties that shape us I mean even otherwise I think outside the context of writing in
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say a social context the anxiety to appear a certain way to others or to get the validation
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of others or to be seen as someone you know compassionate or intelligent or whatever the
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case might be then shapes your behavior and then shapes you and all of these outside forces
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which should not really matter then kind of end up changing the person you are and shaping
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the person you are and I don't know if there's an escape for that because you know you can
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delude yourself into thinking that you're free from that desire for validation or the
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anxieties you can say that hey I am going to be one of those people who is not always
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trying to signal virtue but even by telling yourself that you are in a sense signaling
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virtue to yourself so it can get into these complicated loops now you know wherever you
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say something that might be unfamiliar to my readers who don't know you as well as I
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do I'll quickly try and fill in those gaps you refer to Nikhil Nikhil was your editor
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at readif which you know both of you were kind of part of the startup team right there
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from the beginning almost and you mentioned Paul Salopek and kind of walking with him
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so you know can you talk a little bit more about that that what was it that drew you
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to that project that just walking to strange unfamiliar places and also the other thing
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here that strikes me is that Paul of course was walking through India Pakistan all over
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the world he's walking but he's walking as someone who is a stranger his eyes are seeing
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these things for the first time in your case that is not the case you have even if not
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seen that exact geography for the first time you're an insider in a certain way this part
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of you that is translating for Paul I mean not in terms of language but just in terms
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of perspective and this part of you which is also seeing things maybe through his eyes
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for the first time what was that whole experience like what was the project even just talk a
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bit more about that yeah sure digression before that Nikhil was actually the only editor that
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I've ever worked with so he I worked briefly with Vijayan Kannambilli who's the father
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of Amok Kannambilli of AFP that was a free press but that was for about six months and
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then Nikhil called me over to the Indian Post when he was taking over as editor so Indian
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Post followed by the midday group followed by Sunday Observer followed by Rediff so as
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far as working with editors is concerned he's the only one I worked with I think it was
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about five or six months after he started his project that I came across it one of those
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random links and I went and looked at the Out of Eden Walk website and I was struck
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by the enormity of it a man saying that I'm going to walk 23,000 miles and that he's starting
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somewhere in the middle of Africa and going to end up at Tierra del Fugo at the extreme
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tip of Latin America to trace the migratory path of ancient man that was the idea of the
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project and something about the scale and the scope of it was enormously appealing the
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ambition because I was looking at you know you mentioned travel writing I was looking
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at going places and travel writing is opposite because if we go there and if we are expected
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to write a travel piece we are trapped in this thing of how can I go to say Agra and
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not write about the Taj Mahal so you end up with these things must do kind of things and
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your space is finite and you hit all the high spots and your piece is just like every other
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piece I'd love to see a travel piece where somebody just spends time with the locals
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of Agra keeps the Taj in the background completely and just talks to them about what it is like
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to be you know there's this place where there is all of humanity just flowing past but you
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don't get to do those kind of pieces right and those are the kind of things that used
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to attract me and suddenly there is this man who like you said is walking into the unknown
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and the unfamiliar every step he takes I learned later once we started engaging that he does
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a tremendous amount of research he reads everything there is to know about a country before he
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actually sets foot inside the country but that whole project had this enormity to it
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that was magnetic and at that time we were doing peoply that was Aarti, Rahul Bhatia,
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me and Galyan Verma and some of our stories caught his eye and he started reaching out
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to us and we started sort of doing back and forth initially through DMs and then emails
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and stuff like so when he was in fact when he was in Afghanistan is when he started mooting
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the idea of us joining him on that walk then he walked through Pakistan and by then it
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kind of got firmed up that yeah we would be walking with him and like it said it was for
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instance we started in Amritsar I mean we met him at the Wagah border and walked to
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Amritsar and then we spent about five six days in Amritsar itself I've been to Amritsar
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before about three or four times and you have a concept of that place there is the golden
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temple and there is the life all around it and then there is the larger Amritsar which
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is businesses and you know all of that and this time when we were in Amritsar there was
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Paul there was Aarti and there was me and one of us would always be with Paul for translation
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and you know things like that and to see what Paul was seeing to things that you take for
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granted he suddenly stops and looks at and says what is this and how did this happen
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and what is the origin of this and you know things like that these are questions that
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don't even occur to us because it is so familiar that we think we know it and we don't really
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question that assumption of knowledge.
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So seeing it through his eyes suddenly made me realize that there was so much about things
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that I had taken for granted that I didn't know about and I mean there was the physicality
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of it the walk itself and in the blazing heat of summers when we decided to when we ended
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up walking in Rajasthan so that was it was not something that you do by choice but whatever
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it was I think that was the standout feature for me that you're constantly seeing things
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that you know how it is for instance when we go to a strange place we are constantly
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looking at signboards and we're looking at the backs of rickshaws to see what the stickers
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are and everything is new and unfamiliar and we're trying to absorb it all but for the
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life of me I don't remember what the signboard is a street away from my place what signboards
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are right it's a blur you don't see it and our country is that familiar known place you've
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gone there to report on politics so you've gone there for some other reason and you think
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you know it all and you suddenly realize that there is so much more to it and there is so
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much extra there is so much that is new in the seemingly familiar and that I think was
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the magical part of that particular experience you talked about seeing it Paul seeing it
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for the first time and us seeing it through his eyes I think that bit about us seeing
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it through his eyes was was the takeaway because things that we would have passed by generally
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were things that he would stop and stare and want to know more about and initially you
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have this look every day you have to cover a certain distance and that distance is kind
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of not predetermined because once you leave a town the only thing you can do is you walk
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until you get to some form of human habitation where you can ask people if they can shelter
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you for a night and stuff that could be 30 kilometers away it could be 40 kilometers
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away or more so there is that urge to get to that place and walking 40 kilometers in
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a day is pretty much 8 to 10 hours in the middle when Paul stops at something that that
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seems very obvious and starts examining it deeper initially there is that fretfulness
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in you it's like look I mean what's the big deal can we move on but then you see what
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he is looking at and you see later when he writes these pieces what he makes of these
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little things that he's seen and suddenly it occurs to you that nothing is too trivial
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for for your attention nothing is too trivial for for a human being let alone a storyteller
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and if your default setting is to tell stories it really is magic when you you take that
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time to slow down to even question assumptions to see things again that you've already seen
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and see it with new eyes so I think this whole thing changed me as a person I remember there
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was a time this was before the lockdown there was one moment of epiphany when or at least
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I don't know I felt that somehow I've forgotten how to write and this was because somebody
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gave me an assignment and then I turned it down so I didn't think that I could do justice
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to it and I was telling Raji you know her so my wife so I was telling Raji about it
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and Raji thought for a bit and said listen I want you to do one thing within a week find
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something in our neighborhood that you would like to write about and write it just for
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me it's it's your gift to me and what I did was I just walked around the couple of streets
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fringing my house and I found a little human story and I wrote that and I gave it to her
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and she came back I mean she she gave me back the printout with you haven't forgotten how
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to write and a little heart symbol and sent it and it all kind of I think came together
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at that point that that's such a beautiful story can you give me some examples of what
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you were referring to about about seeing through Paul's eyes like you know something that he
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saw where you wondered like what is this why are we even stopping here and and then something
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else happens out of that yeah for instance if you go to say the golden temple one of
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the things that you take for granted is the longer that whole thing of service so early
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morning when you go there you find people actually cleaning the place where the footwear
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is kept it generally by definition becomes muddy right people walking up and down so
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there's this constant stream of people who are pouring water and then using a big scraper
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to get rid of that mud and pretty soon it becomes muddy again and they start doing it
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again then you go into the golden temple and you will find for instance there are these
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steps the tank only up to a point can you you know climb down and and wash it so there
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are a couple of steps and those steps because they are submerged in water 24 7 365 they
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can get kind of mossy and slippery and all that right so there are these three or four
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people who have these rubber long-handled rubber scrapers and they just keep scraping
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the steps all along and they as soon as they're done with one round they start all over again
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and then somebody else comes and takes over i've been to the golden temple and i've seen
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this and i think yeah okay longer and and service but for paul it is like who are you
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what what what brings you here and we realize that these kids who are doing it early in
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the morning they're college students who before college they come there at four o'clock in
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the morning and they start doing this they do it till about 6 37 and then they go to
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college meanwhile office goers coming at about seven or so and they start you know helping
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until it is time for them to go to office and then some senior citizens are coming in
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who have the day at their disposal so it is not just so for us the thing is volunteers
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are cleaning this but it's not that it is actually these are people who have other things
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to do and who think that it is necessary for them to find that time and put in that effort
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irrespective of lost sleep or or you know of of 10 other things that are awaiting their
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attention and paul would meticulously every time and we went to the golden temple multiple
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times so every time he went there there would be a fresh group of people and he would want
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to know who they were and what their background is and what what is it that they get out of
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them what is that feeling and it was amazing when when these kids started talking about
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these are regular college kids and there was one moment when we were actually standing
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there and watching and a couple of the kids who had done their deed for the day they went
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and they changed into the clothes that they were going to go to college in and it was
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your classic ripped jeans and you know funky t-shirt and they had a bandana knotted up
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and all of that and and these kids were there from apparently 3 45 till about 6 30 or some
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or so just cleaning the mud that people had trekked into that place of the footwear that
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was in all my previous trips never occurred to me to find out who these people are why
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are they doing this what do they get out of it what what is it that drives them and they
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don't do it just once in a while right they they commit to months of this okay this month
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we are coming here at this time and doing it and then somebody else is taking over whatever
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that was one i mean you could go on pretty much everything it was like things that i
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had taken for granted by what conters i because for him everything was new and strange so
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he did not know to ignore certain things put it that way to say okay this is not part of
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my story or this is not part of my narrative my golden temple narrative wouldn't have been
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about this it would have been about you know the guru gran saheb being read and the various
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rituals that take part around it and all that this was about people and yeah that is that
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is one of them there were so many moments of pure magic because of this you know that's
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fascinating and again so kind of inspiring you know i remember when i was sort of traveling
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through pakistan in 2006 following the cricket tour and i was also kind of blogging from
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there frequently not exactly live blogging but apart from the cricket i'd you know just
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go out with my camera shoot everything spent a ton of time just almost photo blogging as
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it were these are of course the days before instagram and all of that take off so it was
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all coming on my blog and at one point i kind of asked myself that how do i maintain this
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balance that on the one hand it's nice that i'm noticing things and that they're not not
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normalized and i'm not just looking at them with the jaded eye but on the other hand there
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is also the desire to find something remarkable everywhere you know every stone on the road
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has a story behind it and and how do you kind of balance that but i think you know thinking
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of it now i i'd rather that one goes too far in trying to see than not see at all like
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i have you know it just strikes me right now that you know 15 years after that in all this
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time that i've been living in bombay i have never gone out in bombay with my dslr and
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done kind of photo blogging and sort of looked for stories like this another thing that struck
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me as you were saying that things that we take for granted or we don't even notice and
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we don't ask what is the story behind it i remember a long time back someone had tweeted
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i can't remember who for the life of me but i vaguely have the impression it was someone
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who worked at the hindu but someone had tweeted about this interesting artifact on the roads
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of tamil nadu where there are sort of these ledges which are at shoulder height or so
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on and nobody knows what the purpose is and she asked around and nobody had any idea what
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they are doing there's no apparent function they're there on the highways they're there
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on the roads and all of that and then she later discovered that you know laborers who
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carry things on their head you know that's where they rest where they just transfer that
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load to that ledge which is why the height which is why everything and it struck me as
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so interesting that something that is not in use anymore something that no one remembers
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and yet it carries sort of a piece of the past it's all this sort of social and historical
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significance embedded within it which i yeah they call it sumaitangi sumaitangi translates
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into load bearer and you find that right across the countryside everywhere i was thinking i
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mean you you mentioned uh going out and doing a mix of cricket plus uh you know what i see
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and what i get and all that you also did the same thing after the uh uh immediately after
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the tsunami right when you and that should have informed that particular experience of
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not going with a particular story in mind so much as just going there and seeing what
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it was and then figuring out how to tell that story how to capture that story in words or
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images or whatever it is right yeah in fact i even wrote a piece for you when you were
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at read of land and i wrote a piece for you about nagapattinam and just the horror there
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just stepping over bodies and i think this must have been four five days after we get
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there and the bodies are still there and it's yeah and and vips are doing helicopter trips
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where they're literally helicoptering over and you know uh showing concern and all of
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that and that was interesting that was that that was also interesting because i you know
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i was like one thing i realized and when i realized it it just hit me hard and it never
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left me was uh and i wrote a very short post about it uh was of stopped clocks like across
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the coast of tamil nadu when you went to affected villages and all that you'd find that there
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were clocks that had stopped when the waves hit and they had stopped at different times
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so almost by you know looking at these stop clocks you could see when disaster struck
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again it's a static illustration of something so kind of uh momentous and and one doesn't
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know what to make of that but it's just for me it's a kind of a powerful image yeah and
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i think that's that's the thing about it right i mean one of the other things that i learned
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was we tend to think in story of story in terms of okay this this has to have a beginning
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a middle and an end and it has to have a point and it has to have a takeaway sometimes it
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is just something that is seen or heard or observed it doesn't have a point necessarily
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but it is there and and i realized that people identify the most with that kind of slice
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of life if you will uh the story of the stop clock so for instance on this walk with paul
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we had this experience where we left a place called hanumangal and uh started the walk
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and our destination for that night was something that on google it said uh tandi guest house
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t-a-n-d-i guest house uh so we said oh okay there's a guest house so maybe we'll have
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a room to uh sleep in that night and so in hanumangal i'd done something to my ankle
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and and twisted it a little bit so i walked i think about 20 to 25 kilometers this was
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about 35 kilometers away and towards that 25 kilometer marka is really struggling so
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paul said listen why don't you hop on a passing tractor go ahead and and sort of fix our place
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and all of that so i go to this place and i realized there is no guest house there's
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nothing and at the spot that google indicates all there was was there were about four shops
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on one side of the road the rest of it is it isn't it is a gradient uh you can see fields
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everywhere and in the distance a house here a house they're very very far off so at that
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point i was i was kind of desperate because i mean what the hell are we supposed to do
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that night because there's nothing else uh as far as we can see when you look at google
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maps from there so i was sitting in one of these shops had cigarettes and um soft drinks
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and i was sitting there having a soft drink and there was this old man who was looking
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at me very curiously and suddenly he said uh so i said look uh we came looking for this
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place called tandi guest house he wanted to know who we were and what we were doing so
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as a date gora sabha is doing this and there's this lady who's a photographer they're coming
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so i said that's uh that's your problem okay you sit here and and he climbed on this rickety
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cycle and he went off a little while later tempo comes some four or five people including
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the old man uh one guy comes uh comes up to me says come with me the last shop in that
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line was actually a flour mill um so he opens that rolling shutters pulls it up goes inside
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and there's there's heaps of flap all over the place sacks of it and and grain that hasn't
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yet been pounded he walks me through it opens the rolling shutters at the back and outside
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there was this hard packed earth compound with a surrounding wall which was part of
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the property so he said uh so we were like yeah cool i mean we can put up our tents over
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there and it says there is a wall and there is a lock and a gate and everything right
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so you're like yeah our tents are bitter so this guy just smiled at me and said down
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a little while later a small uh three wheeler comes in and a bunch of kids hop out with
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uh charpoys four of them uh blankets sheets pillows and starts setting them up again another
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half an hour 45 minutes later one huge uh lorry comes in with these massive desert coolers
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they're almost the your height i mean it's it's that big three of them and they set it
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up they jerry rig uh an electrical connection from inside the shop to connect these things
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up and i was looking at this and i was telling these guys yes they're quite used to you know
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just a tent and and we can in typical you know the fashion of of the we we keep saying
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rural which which i find increasingly a pejorative term but typical of people who live in the
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great outdoors uh that guy just said uh you're a guest we're not going to let you just you
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know sleep on the ground in some tent or whatever uh meanwhile paul had come and and uh arty
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and we were sitting and talking and it turned out the head of the clan it was actually tandy
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is a clan all the people there have the surname tandy they are one family multiple brothers
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branches all engaged in agriculture so this guy the oldest of them was actually living
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apparently in a village that got bifurcated during partition on the border of rajasthan
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he was a very small boy at the time and he talked about how this village was surrounded
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by seven muslim villages and one day the muslims came to them and said look you guys don't
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have to worry if you want to stay put we'll guarantee your safety if you want to you know
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migrate into deeper into india we'll escort you to a place till you feel safe and then
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we'll make sure that you're okay so he talked about his experiences of of migrating and
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then trying to make a life somewhere finally landing up at this place and and you know
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starting a family and all of that and paul was sitting there taking notes at some point
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in in between all this arty was thinking about dinner so i don't know she was saying hey
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you know what we can actually call the hotel that we were staying in and asked him to send
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some food in a car it's not that far it's just 35 kilometers right so one of the boys
#
and she was talking in english one of the boys who was hanging around quickly went over
#
then suddenly one man marched up and said what are you talking about ordering food from
#
a hotel and all that food is being provided what you thought we were going to let you
#
starve and after a while there comes this you know you recently saw that thing right that
#
gujarati some cricket tali or whatever the greatest biggest tali ever this i swear was
#
bigger and it had everything it had the most incredible food i've tasted it had kheer that
#
was so rich and creamy everything is grown in the land right it was brilliant food and
#
they were so thoughtful that they had a big bowl of curd and two small bowls one of sugar
#
one of salt and this lady was saying we don't know whether you take it with salt or with sugar so we
#
brought both and these ladies stood there made us eat then told us okay next morning you come for
#
breakfast at our place so we people like look we have to start at five o'clock because after
#
about 10 30 you can't walk in the desert when the sun is overhead you wait so we have to start at
#
five and all that and she was fairly pissed off and she said what do you mean you said you want
#
you came here to hear our stories you're only listening to the men you're not coming and
#
talking to us and all of that next morning four o'clock we get up we change into our traveling
#
gear and we're loading the donkey that we had and suddenly the gate creaks open and these same
#
women a bunch of them the matriarch her daughters-in-law her daughters grandchildren all of them come in
#
steaming flasks of tea and until then we had never ever had tea or coffee before we set out because
#
i mean at five o'clock who the hell is going to give it to you right it's only in the cities that
#
you get all of this these people had gotten up because they wanted to get here before we left
#
so they were there by 4 30 they would have gotten up at three o'clock made tea
#
dressed in their best clothes and walked all the way to give us the steam i just i just looked at
#
that tea and and my eyes just geared up because they know if i was to tell the story what is the
#
point but to me it's one of the most it's one of those moments that that will live forever within
#
me because it's what it's what we i suppose in a way we miss right that that that unquestioned
#
acceptance of the other that unquestioned reaching out helping doing things without being asked to do
#
things none of these are common in our world anymore or at least not in the cities that we live in
#
and when this kind of thing happens you just carry it and at some point i'll write about it
#
but i don't know what people make of it but it's there and those are the stories so it's it's a
#
lovely story and it kind of brings me to the theme of the kindness of strangers like just
#
today i think possibly responding to my episode with gazala bahab someone made a comment somewhere
#
i forget whether it was whatsapp or twitter or whatever i think it was probably a message in
#
one of my groups on whatsapp apologies because i've forgotten who said this but they said that
#
we are kinder to strangers and to our own people and this kind of got me thinking like i remember
#
when i for example in pakistan you know barring one incident my experience throughout was the
#
kindness of people like i remember we landed up there as journalists in lahore and we went to a
#
store to buy like batteries and all of that basic things for things and the moment they realized
#
that we are journalists from india or that the moment they realized we are from india
#
they refused to take any money they simply refused you know and you know without even
#
any rhetoric or mehma namazi or whatever but they just refused and the warmth everywhere was
#
pretty stunning and almost sort of instinctive where do you i mean you've traveled a lot right
#
and i'm guessing you've sort of experienced the same sort of natural warmth that comes from
#
strange like what's behind it are there are there cultural factors because it does seem to mitigate
#
a lot of the toxic polarization that is around us in these times that instinctively we still reach
#
out we try to help other people though having said that i would say that if you're lost in
#
traffic never ask in india if you're lost in traffic never ask someone for directions because
#
even if they don't know they will feel compelled to give you some direction or the other and you
#
will end up in the wrong place but that exception aside you know do you have any thoughts on
#
apart from the story you just told is almost like i'm asking a question after the answer
#
but what sort of explains this sort of kindness of strangers that we kind of get to see and is
#
there another side to our nation and our culture which is invisible to all of us or which doesn't
#
get a chance to express itself it's an interesting question i don't quite know how to answer it but
#
let me try so i live in this it's an old building that was converted into apartments so it's just
#
one apartment per floor the landlord lives above us and i'm on the second floor you know
#
that guy is also a mallu the landlord he's from kerala so you would think and i've been living
#
here for 10 years so you would think there is a lot that we have in common right i mean
#
references for parotta beef and whiskey and all of that the funny thing is we've not exchanged
#
more than i would think 300 400 words in all of this time because our relationship by definition
#
is transactional he's the landlord i am the i've leased this apartment every month i have to make
#
sure that the rent is paid and the maintenance is done and things like and that's it you see each
#
you see each other in the elevator you say hi and and you hop off on your respective floors
#
the same thing with with people in this vicinity you go out there is there is that whole array of
#
vegetable sellers but and and if you spend all your life just just going there you ask for the
#
vegetables you want you pay the money that they ask you you come away that's it but there was this
#
uh it was quite some time ago one guy was so i bought vegetables and i was buying some fruits
#
and i was in my hindi and and you know how pathetic that can be i was trying to ask him
#
for something or the other and he was he was equally uncomfortable in hindi i don't even at
#
this point in time know why we started talking in hindi in the first place probably because i don't
#
know canada and and english seemed an odd choice right so uh hindi seemed the lingua franca and uh
#
while this conversation was going on and and i was fishing around for something this guy spoke
#
to the chap sitting next to him in tamil so i just said look if i'd known that you were in tamil why
#
the hell was i you know giving myself log jaw trying to talk in a language i don't quite know
#
and that guy started laughing and he said uh boss down the street or pretty much anywhere in
#
karnataka tamil goes and on this street we're all tamils so the next time i pass by he starts
#
laughing and and and there is a wave and then there was this lady who sells you know if i want
#
things like broccoli and basil and all of that there's this this one shot of this one lady who
#
stalks all of that um she came to hear of the story so she yelled out to me and said ah you're
#
the tamil who talks in hindi and so i stood there and started exchanging conversation
#
and now it is like the same transactional relationship just because of that that one
#
moment of connect it is changed into when we go there we gossip so just this morning i was there
#
and we were talking about the Tamil Nadu election and and you know all the nonsense that's going on
#
over there uh i think it is not that we have to go to a strange place where somebody identifies
#
us as a stranger to be kind to us i think it is just that wherever you are you are partly
#
responsible for whether that that interaction is transactional or whether it is human to human
#
and the minute you make it human to human it changes the dynamic it is just that we
#
can't be bothered enough at least that's that's um what i think about the way i see it because
#
i mean even in bangalore uh these ladies are like uh you ask them for this that and the other you
#
pay the money suddenly you have an afterthought oh i need two limes she just takes two limes and
#
tosses it in my bag and says there you go you know it they don't they don't really think about
#
it there's a guy who sits next to uh next to these vegetable vendors who makes uh these
#
uh chili bhajis and uh all of that in the in the daytime and occasionally these uh ladies are you
#
know buying stuff from him and eating and if i happen to go there that time they're like huh
#
try this bhaji is damn good it's just fresh be uh hot off the tawa kind of thing and they give you
#
a bhaji it's it's just yeah it works i mean one of my feelings as a person and this is probably
#
true of most people is the sort of the blindness to the armor and the blinkers that one wears
#
normally like i guess what happened to you at that store is that that armor sort of slipped for a
#
moment and there's that human to human contact and that opens everything up and most of the time we
#
have that armor around us uh and we're probably kind of not even unaware like you know one of the
#
tropes which kind of amuses me a lot is when journalists go to a foreign country or whatever
#
and their first report will be will come from talking to the taxi driver and yeah and there
#
it's like it's they haven't let the armor go it's it's uh you know there's almost a sort of
#
condescension in that and just you know hey tell me what your life is like and what do you think
#
of this and then they'll make a report out of it which is you know classic kind of lazy journalism
#
and i guess one way of getting the maximum out of wherever we are is sort of uh you know um letting
#
those facades kind of uh slip away and just connecting though much harder for introverts
#
like me so what is one to do let's take a quick commercial break now and you know it's kind of
#
amusing that you know when i start my podcast i like to spend the first part of the show talking
#
about my uh guess sort of intellectual journey where they grew up all of that and and now i realize
#
this was like a start before the start we're just discussing ideas and themes and which is great but
#
let's kind of get to some of that journey as well uh after a quick commercial break
#
have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it well i'd love to help you
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one of the great joys of the lockdown for me was discovering how much i enjoy teaching what i've
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learned over the years and my online course the art of clear writing is now open for registration
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in this course through four webinars read over four weekends i share all i know about the craft
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welcome back to the scene on the unseen i'm having a delightfully digressive conversation
#
with my old friend prem panikar about his kind of journey journey through life sounds so you know
#
so ponderous and uh serious but let's let's kind of take me a little bit back to uh your childhood
#
because you know even when i and i'm a fair bit younger than you but when i look back to my own
#
childhood when i look back to the 80s and the 90s and all of that it doesn't seem like this world
#
everything is so different it's like you don't have all the knowledge in the world on tap you
#
don't have uh you know you you can't reach out to other people uh so much you are trapped in
#
communities of birth and circumstance rather than being able to form communities of choice as
#
you and i have and in fact that's why you and i know each other and so what were you growing up
#
years like you've already spoken a little bit about how elder's grandchild joined family
#
a lot of expectations uh you know and and all of that is there but what is your interior life like
#
what are you reading what kind of music are you listening to how do you end up being a drummer
#
in a band take me through some of that journey yeah i think uh i was born on the cusp of that
#
1958 um it was that hinge point in kerala history when the joint family was breaking up
#
um so until that point in time what you had was the patriarch and the matriarch controlling
#
everything and all the kids would be living under the same roof working on the family property
#
uh all of that uh the hindu uh succession act the hindu land ceiling act all of that i mean
#
the land ceiling act the hindu succession act all of that came in and everything got scattered
#
and for the children it then became imperative that they go out and earn a living so dad uh
#
migrated to dad and his uh and the brother immediately next to him in age migrated to chennai
#
my uncle joined the public works department my father joined the telephones department there he
#
met uh this girl fell in love uh made a huge drama at home saying i'll either marry this woman nor
#
i'll commit suicide and all of that stuff and uh so then i was i was typically at that time the
#
woman goes to her mom's place for delivery right so i was born in a place called chapasheri in palgad
#
district and uh i think i was about five days older three five i don't know how uh very very
#
early uh they drove down to calicut to uh my dad's place and left me in care of my grandparents so
#
there were my grandparents there were five other elders um so the children and children's children
#
of my grandmother by her first alliance um and there was one uncle there were about 10 adults
#
some five six family retainers and big house and i mean you were talking about us not being able
#
when you were young to form communities of choice or to reach out to people and
#
like-minded people and form interest groups and all of that we didn't have electricity
#
so uh basically it was you know and and and it was kind of for me i i think it was a kind of
#
definitive experience because uh as it turned out my grandparents my uncle um a couple of the
#
other elders they were all absolutely marvelous storytellers they were sanskrit pundits uh they'd
#
uh they'd read uh the epics the vedas the puranas all of that and they'd gone beyond that so for
#
instance my uncle would start talking about the mahabharata and suddenly related to something
#
from the iliad for instance uh which he knew equally well so evenings that what we call the
#
kallu valaku kallu is stone and valaku is light land that's the one that is kept in the central
#
uh seating area and uh everybody gathers around it and there's conversations going on and stories
#
are being told and and uh so for me i mean like unlike most people who sort of start reading
#
stories before they hear stories for me it was like i grew up hearing stories um and somewhere
#
along the way the the rhythms of storytelling and all that came from came from that experience i
#
think i was there till about the thing was dad and mom were both working and neither of them
#
would have been able to care for a young uh child which is why this happened i think i was about
#
11 and fairly able to manage for myself when i went over to chennai to to my dad's place and
#
that came as a bit of a culture shock uh on the one hand there was this huge house while most of
#
our land had gone away there was still the land surrounding the house um the usual mango trees and
#
jack trees and and you know all of that um you are free to play and and also that entire area
#
in this place called kalluket kaurikode it was our family so you could walk a mile in pretty
#
much any direction without ever leaving the properties of extended families so you had a
#
ton of freedom you just went out and wherever you happened to be you walked into that house and and
#
they didn't hear you and you know fed you and and amused you or whatever uh and then suddenly
#
i was in this little apartment with i think two or three rooms or some such um you can't go out
#
and play because it's the road is right there and and i think that is when i started going inwards
#
um started reading and and on the good side one was dad's voracious appetite for books which meant
#
that the house was constantly stocked with books uh he was today we talk about processes how to
#
inculcate these things in children and all that i think he knew that intuitively so he taught me to
#
read through a simple process of deprivation um comics that i uh look forward to and and which i
#
would get a huge bundle of the day after the exams uh they suddenly disappeared and there was just
#
one book um it is called dr sally by pg woodhouse and he left it on the table and they both went to
#
work i woke up later after the day after the exams and i realized i had nothing to read i couldn't
#
find the comics and uh i suppose i picked up this book and then put it down because there's no
#
pictures or whatever and then picked it up again because what else can i do
#
and i realized much much later that dad dad had already taught me the basics of never
#
bookmark your never fold your edges of the page you always use a bookmark
#
so he was looking at the bookmarks and when he realized that i finished one book another one
#
would appear so dr sally was followed by laughing gas which is followed by something else
#
and pretty soon that was all i was doing i mean i didn't need comics and uh the other good thing
#
about him was i don't think he bothered to differentiate books by age to say you're too
#
young to be reading this so you're too young to be reading that so whatever was in his bookcase and
#
whatever took my fancy at that time i just pulled out and read so in between the pg woodhouse books
#
and the earl stanley gardener books and agatha christy and and uh you know henry sissle uh there
#
were the westerns louis lamore zane gray max brand uh all of that i was also reading faulkner and
#
somerset mom and and uh there would be uh nathaniel hawthorne uh raven chandler uh nebukov
#
so on the one hand it wasn't a structured reading and therefore and i i realized much later that i
#
had read a lot of books before i was old enough or new enough to actually appreciate them
#
uh but at the same time somehow they all gelled together and and uh i think that is where the
#
whole thing of i just love how words combine into stories um so you're reading everything from at
#
at one end of tostarsky at the other end of dickens and in between there is all this pulp fiction
#
and you know stuff when new books would keep coming in uh malayalam uh literature as well so
#
i had that trans cultural experience and and christian high school i think the the time my
#
life went off the rails was i was good academically without actually trying i had a retentive memory
#
so you read a chapter once in a textbook and you pretty much knew what it was about
#
so it was acing my exams and that i think started all these ambitions that is where this whole
#
eldest grandchild thing comes from um dad and mom typically dreamt in terms of medicine and surgery
#
and things and and uh hey there was this uncle of mine who wanted me to be in the army and i remember
#
this family discussion where they finally settled on okay he will be an army surgeon
#
i don't know what yeah but the thing is i hated that whole idea it it and and and it struck me with
#
uh the greatest force when your electives begin in 10th standard we had 11 plus one in 10th standard
#
you elect for the science stream which i had to do because of this whole he will become a doctor
#
thing and you have these practicals where you have to cut open cockroaches and stuff and that's
#
filled me with a kind of revulsion um by then i was playing sport and our college was fairly
#
encouraging of all kinds of cultural activities so i was doing a bit of theater um i was playing
#
cricket badminton football and there was uh somewhere along the way i think i progressed
#
almost without knowing it from cigarettes to dope to hard drugs and by the time i got to my pre-degree
#
which was in Madras Christian um i was addicted and i had this uh moment where i don't quite know
#
what happened what what what we used to do during those days is you're taking hard drugs and you
#
carry downers like mandrakes for instance mandrakes was the drug of choice at that time to bring
#
yourself down so there would always be a strip of mandrakes in my pocket and apparently one day i
#
didn't go to college at all i uh i've taken some drugs i don't i don't have very clear recollections
#
of what exactly happened what i do know is that mom went to office and she developed a migraine
#
so she came back home and she found me lying on bed with froth coming out of my mouth and stuff
#
uh two doors away there was a doctor uh his home was there and he happened to be at home
#
so he came he got my stomach flushed out or whatever just and revived me and and at some
#
point he told me you were about five minutes away from dying and if your mom hadn't come home you
#
were gone apparently i'd swallowed an entire strip of mandrakes uh for i don't know what reason i
#
mean subsequently it was theorized that i was trying to commit suicide i don't have any
#
recollection of that but uh yeah then i was sent back to calicut um to be with my grandparents
#
on the assumption that that kind of influence would be good for me and stuff
#
but the ambitions of others for me didn't die uh all that happened was okay fine he doesn't want
#
to study science let him study history economics double main and then sit for the ias exam which
#
again it didn't appeal to me the problem was that the family would sit around and talk about me and
#
i would be there and they were talking about me but not to me and what i had to say that
#
i was interested in english literature which is what i wanted to take and nobody was willing to
#
listen to that uh the comment would be what are you going to do become a teacher in some school
#
what what's english literature got to do with things so i went to college for what it was worth
#
uh there was there was a six month period of recovery i had to get the drugs out of my system
#
then i rejoined college and uh i just went i went around playing the drums uh with a with a sort of
#
ensemble group played sevens football which was very lucrative those days uh played cricket when
#
i could and uh the first year was languages english and hindi which i did uh comfortably
#
sail through the second year was history which i used because i love history and the third year
#
was economics and i just couldn't understand why i mean i understood that part of economics
#
syllabus which had to do with the theories of economics but there was a subject called
#
indian economics which for some reason i was expected to know the production of rice
#
and wheat and pulses in india from the time of independence all the way to whenever that
#
time textbook was written uh with no explanation about why these spikes or dips happened and it
#
was taught by probably one person who should never have been allowed anywhere near a college
#
he would just you know memorize whatever it was the previous night and then come and regurgitate
#
it in class so i just dropped out i uh as long as college was there i kept going and doing all the
#
fun things that i like to do and then i didn't write the exam uh which i think for my family
#
was the final straw so then i came back to madras and uh yeah life was like i said before somewhat
#
fraught uh mom stopped talking to me my dad's conversations would be purely functional uh do
#
this do that go to the shop and get this whatever and i think that is when it hit me that
#
there was no there was no prospects in those days for somebody who didn't have a degree or
#
a certificate of some kind um so for a while i was a steward in a
#
uh restaurant and then i was playing the drums for a band in a hotel i gave that up because
#
i remember uh back then you didn't have these cassettes and stuff so what you knew about music
#
was what you heard on radio salon and and there was one program uh on indian radio so they would
#
have this top 10 right so everybody heard the top 10 and knew those songs you knew hotel california
#
because it was top of the box you knew thing so when you're playing in a five-star hotel like
#
chola the people who come there are the people who can afford it and those days not everybody
#
afforded five-star hotels just on a whim and these guys would come and they would want to impress
#
whoever they were with with their knowledge of music so they would send up a request right
#
there was a song called one way ticket uh back in the day and that was top of the pops at that time
#
it was played every single day and there was one night when i had to play that song seven times
#
because it was requested seven times i just end of that night i just chucked the stick guys it's
#
look i can't do this anymore and i walked out of that um i was telephone operator for a bit
#
because i mean dad and mom were both in telephones and so i hung around there and learned
#
that one but that got boring i mean how many times are you going to say hello this is a matter of how
#
can i help you so and around that time there was uh indian express had a page called you think
#
uh which was a combination of youth and ink uh it was for young people to write in uh fairly
#
uh bad construct but it is what it was um i was attracted by a particular writer who was writing
#
under the name androlica doe uh androlica is a karnataka raga uh very rare and dove comes from
#
dove landau from iron rand so i liked the pieces that started coming and i remember i wrote a letter
#
to the editor about one of those pieces next thing i know i get a postcard from this lady called
#
aditi day who was then the editor of this page and the features page uh she said come if possible
#
can you come and see me so i went to her and uh she said i love the way you've composed this letter
#
do you write so i said i don't know i have never really written written outside of college essays
#
or whatever it is um so she said will you write for me and and she started giving me these little
#
assignments for that page and that started becoming fun and i think the that is when i
#
realized that okay this seems like something i want to do um you think shut down for some reason or
#
the other by then i met abraham irali again aditi day sent me to abraham irali who was running
#
um a city magazine called a site so he would give me a few assignments the thing is
#
i was getting to write but i wasn't really getting the pay was abysmal and there was no other and
#
it was not a it was not a full-fledged form of livelihood there was a guy from the indian
#
express called vijay shekhar who was a brilliant journalist and a chronic drunk i mean he was a
#
film journalist primarily but he was actually brilliant absolutely stunningly good writer
#
he literally brushes his teeth with alcohol so he got kicked out of his job and he conceived of
#
this idea of starting a broadsheet with almost zero funds uh starting a broadsheet which was
#
uh on south cinema in english and for the people of that time it was it was very rare
#
for for the stars of that time to be written about in english because the bollywood press
#
never bothered with them so the film says and all that they never appeared so suddenly we found
#
ourselves on friendly terms with pretty much all the big actors and actresses of that time
#
um people like uh mamuti and mohan lal uh nagamudi venu all of those from malayalam people like kamal
#
and rajini and prabhu uh from thing and they were all very supportive we look all we had was an
#
electric typewriter so we typed the story into the typewriter and then we cut sheets of paper
#
in galley size printed it out that way and because you don't have adjustable font sizes you only have
#
a single font so you have to work within a grid with room for expansion so when you took it to
#
the plate makers they would expand it to the actual size and we kind of figured it out on the go so
#
you learned a lot about production about about cropping pictures and about sizing and you know
#
fitting things in columns and all of that so we'd spend all day on the sets um we had lunch there
#
we drank with the stars then came back and wrote whatever we wanted among other things funnily
#
enough i learned a lesson in ethics a very early lesson in ethics because there was this uh
#
character actor and director called kuchan hanifa kuchan because he is from kuchan in malayalam
#
the guy was making his first feature film and i went to the set and said uh hanifaka uh i want to
#
do a story on your movie what's it about so he promptly called one of his assistants and said
#
give this boy all the pictures you know all of that and in about two minutes he told me what
#
the story was i said look this was supposed to be a center spread but let's talk a little bit he
#
said this is all i know this is what the story is you don't ask me questions i said how am i
#
going to fill up the space he said you write what you want so i must have been particularly drunk
#
that day uh what i ended up doing was an interview where kuchan hanifa expounds on international
#
cinema on kurosawa and ice instead it none of which so and and it was printed and and we
#
would distribute it ourselves so we took it to various book stands and some of the railway
#
stations and all that and placed it there just shaker and i and uh suddenly i walk into the
#
office it offices shaker's house one one room in that house uh and there's a message for me call
#
kuchan hanifa urgently so call the set and get him on the phone i said what happened come and see me
#
sorry go there as soon as he sees me he grabs me takes me aside and said who the hell is this
#
kuro kuro what kurosawa what was he so i said okay what happened you see people are coming
#
and asking me questions now some Tamil journalist came and asked me can you talk more about kurosawa
#
i don't know what what have you gotten written and i said you told me to you know make an interview
#
so i made an interview and then shaker told me don't do this you don't make up quotes ever but
#
yeah i mean talk of learning on the job it was one of those things and after a bit it just folded
#
because the way we were bringing it out we didn't have money for the paper for the printing and
#
stuff like so we would go to people like gv prakash gv sorry uh who's money ratnam's elder
#
brother who used to run gv films um and said look we don't have enough money for the next edition
#
and the guy would just give you a couple of ads and give you the money right even if he didn't
#
have a movie in the works it would be just a gv films kind of ad um prabhu's brother again was
#
very helpful that way pretty much all the all the producers sometimes the actors would step in and
#
talk to the producer and say give this boy an ad whatever so beyond the point it just just became
#
untenable so there was about a period of three and a half four years when i had nothing to do
#
the one thing i did was attend an interview at internet express uh for a trainee journalist
#
and the first thing they asked me so what have you studied i said i'm a college dropout and they
#
said oh we're looking for graduates in literature and that was the end of that interview so yeah um
#
1989 somehow lucked out and and uh there's a friend of my father's who was in bombay who called me
#
once and said look uh there's this paper called free press journal not too many people read it
#
but they do want people and uh would they like to come over i said uh so what what are they paying
#
me this at 750 bucks so i said how the hell am i supposed to live in bombay on 750 you said you
#
can stay with me that's not a problem and uh you said you wanted a chance here is a chance if you
#
make it you make it so i had nothing to lose i just went and yeah that's that's pretty much
#
that's such a delightful story and again lots to sort of think about in there and i'll come back
#
to your career later but i kind of want to go back to your earlier days like one story that really
#
struck me which you spoke about was how your father would recognize from the bookmarks how far you had
#
gone down a book and when you finished a book there would be sort of a new book and and i
#
remember when i was a kid and and we were in chandigar where my dad was in the is and he'd
#
go to delhi every once in a while and he had and this is in the 80s right pre-liberalization and
#
all of that and he had hit upon these uh this dude somewhere there because he was a big patron of
#
bookshops and all that got lots of books so he had hit upon a guy who would sell him old editions
#
of marvel comics so what he would do is he'd buy big bunches of marvel comics every time he went
#
but he wouldn't show them to me right up he'd give them in dribs and drabs so he'd give me
#
a bunch and when i had finished that and when i was suitably bored and made enough of a noise
#
he'd give me another bunch and all of that and the pretense was that he doesn't have any more
#
but i always knew that of course you know they are there uh somewhere or the other so you know
#
tell me a little bit about your father tell me a little bit about your mother what was
#
that sort of like because you know another thing that kind of happens to us as we go through life
#
is that our parents we form an image of them and you know we maybe edit it slightly as we
#
go along and we grow older and um you know experience more life uh but essentially they
#
are always kind of that whatever the image we have drawn of them is and it's sometimes hard
#
to even be able to think of them as flesh and blood human beings as flawed indeed in many ways
#
or as you know to us there they are like fixed points in space maybe complex points maybe you
#
know there's good and there's bad but that's what they are like i recently came across a picture of
#
my parents when we'd gone to when we'd made a trip to america in the early 80s i think in 84 or
#
something like that and so uh there are my parents and and and i kind of looked at that picture and
#
for a moment then i did a calculation and i said oh my god at the time this picture is taken my
#
father was younger than i am now and yet you know that so how was that relationship like what were
#
your parents like what was your father like i mean i imagine there is a certain kind of love and
#
caring which the bookmark story illustrates but there is also deep disappointment uh uh you know
#
and you know not all of it sort of undeserved given the kind of things that you were up to
#
tell me a bit about that no you're right it uh it was deserved um actually today is what um
#
march 17th march 16 1997 is when my dad passed and i was busy covering the india series in the
#
western east uh the famous 81 not all out and all of that um dad dad was a quintessential
#
product of kedla uh old world values uh value truth and justice and honesty and he was at one
#
point uh i think either the head or number two in a naras's shaka he was religious he was i think
#
the fundamental the core of my dad's uh being was that he went at a time when he was doing brilliantly
#
academically his world fell apart and he was suddenly in the position of having to actually
#
go and start making a living so um our family so my grandmother had one sister and both the you call
#
it a tarawad the ancestral uh property the tarawads were joining my grandmother's sister's children
#
one of them became the principal of the calicut medical college one was chief secretary to the
#
government of kedla uh one uh who still uh is alive he's one of india's foremost uh orthopedic
#
surgeons he used to teach at uh american universities and and medical colleges and stuff
#
uh brilliant guy they were all like that they were fabulously they were all brilliant and they
#
accomplished a lot and i think it stayed with my dad that he could have been that he and his brothers
#
they were all bright all smart all uh extremely erudite but by an accident of fate when they were
#
pretty young they had to go and and and start making a living and my mom again highly traditional
#
so um there is a concept among the nambudri is called kovilamma which is uh the women attached
#
to a temple um so there's a temple in chattaseri my mom's place and my mom's maiden name was
#
rokmani kovilamma uh the family was part of the temple or the temple was part of the family which
#
of a way you want to uh look at it and uh she had again those same old world values in her case
#
she was a kind of I suppose you call it of things like arithmetic and stuff like she was absolutely
#
brilliant and she was in telephones uh one of the things that we used to laugh about was the fact
#
that she had the entire telephone book memorized uh you pretty much ask any number literally she
#
just just reels off numbers anything to do with numbers she was amazing but again um family reason
#
stopped studies when she was pretty young came to madras uh and and ultimately ended up joining
#
telephones which is where uh she and uh dad met they complemented each other in a lot of ways
#
because my mom's governing nature was a kind of placidity a calm uh she was unfazed by pretty much
#
anything um she had a very even temper my dad was uh he his drug of choice was adrenaline I think he
#
had these highs and lows uh fiery kind of temper and at the same time uh the next minute it would
#
all cool down and and uh earlier we were talking about you know the kindness of strangers
#
dad went out of his way to help people who he didn't even know
#
so it was only after dad passed and people started coming home to control we met people we didn't
#
even realize existed and they would tell us stories about how their kid something happened and dad
#
went and rescued them and um or something in the family and and many ways in which exactly like
#
this uncle who passed away recently uh those two brothers were very alike um I think that that is
#
why their marriage was so very strong and that is also probably why mom pretty much collapsed once
#
dad passed um it is only in the uh early 2000s that she started getting uh dementia but her zest
#
for life pretty much ended in 97 when dad uh dad passed away I think for all that I was hurt by
#
the fact that my parents couldn't see my point of view and and couldn't have a rational conversation
#
with me about why are you doing these things and what is it that you want to do I think they were
#
equally seen from a distance they would have equally been baffled and hurt by the fact that
#
these are opportunities they didn't get and they sacrificed a lot to give it to me and I was just
#
throwing it away so that I think is what made the relationship go sour um I hadn't seen or talked
#
to my father for about from 1989 to 97 when he passed so we were completely estranged um it's
#
only when I went for his funeral that mom and I again started talking to each other and all of
#
that stuff but yeah I think I think they had a they had an enviably rock-solid relationship
#
and I think the lucky one was my sister because while there was no articulation of this I think
#
they also realized at some point that children need to be given some space to think and grow
#
and be themselves and so everything that happened with me the reverse happened with my sister she
#
was allowed to be whatever she wanted she was allowed to study what she wanted um she was given
#
a degree of freedom that I never got so for me with withholding of freedom was a kind of punishment
#
for whatever and I don't thrive within four walls I need I need my space somewhere they figured that
#
out and this was this was the one punishment that would always hurt me when I was grounded
#
in my sister's case it was the exact opposite so yeah I had like you said it's it's it's a
#
composite complex kind of picture I think at the end of the day it is I would think that my parents
#
suffered mostly from having been brought up in a particular kind of environment
#
and then having to suddenly come to terms with a completely different way of life
#
of making their own way of not having you know in in traditional families one brother has problems
#
the others the extended family is there to help but once the family fell apart financially
#
all of that changed so it was everyone to himself it became an atomic family as opposed to
#
a joint family they never really came to terms with all that it meant and that I think at the
#
same time having to bring up a fairly volatile kid even at my best I was kind of you know I had my
#
moments so all of that I think at a time when they were struggling to do what the normal middle
#
class couple is trying to do you know raise a kid educate a two kids educate them build a house
#
all of that to have to cope with me must have been a bit much. So a question at two levels
#
and and one level is this that you know it's poignant when like you describe your parents
#
there at a time where they're living through so much change like one your kids are going in these
#
different directions as the world is changing so it might be hard for them to kind of comprehend
#
exactly what's going on you know joint families become nuclear families it becomes everything
#
becomes atomic the kids go off in directions they don't understand and they're kind of bewildered
#
by it all so one you know do you feel that you know looking at that as an analog for where we
#
are today do you keep worrying that that might happen to you like in multiple ways do you fear
#
that you're turning into your parents or you're turning into your father as as they say about
#
many men that you know they kind of turn into their fathers so it's a question at two levels
#
one is of course at the level of character and at the level of you know all those similarities you
#
might notice but the other level also is that kind of existential sort of confusion or angst
#
or whatever that the times are changing so fast like I and I'm asking this because even though I
#
even though I am relatively young I'm in my 40s but I I keep telling myself that I have to keep
#
you know I've seen you know older people I've seen my father struggle with technology and
#
just be bewildered and therefore feel lost because he can't handle it and I keep telling myself that
#
look when when I am that old if I get that far I don't want to be so helpless I don't want to be so
#
you know adrift and all of that and and that is a fear and and and one doesn't know what to even
#
sort of how one is going to kind of navigate that is that something you've thought about or something
#
that's there somewhere yeah I I think not now I think those thoughts were actually in my mid to
#
late 20s before I'd actually settled on one of the side effects of of doing the kind of things that
#
I used to do play sport at a fairly decent level or or act in plays and and play the drums on stage
#
and stuff like you end up it's quite easy to make friends with girls so there were always some
#
relationship or the other going on right and I never wanted anything permanent until 1988 when
#
I met Rajeev for the first time and then we started sort of seeing each other exclusively
#
but even then I was reluctant to commit because I didn't want kids that was my fear that I would
#
turn into my parents that with the best will in the world if I see my it's one thing to say kids
#
deserve their freedom but I kept thinking what if this kid of mine starts doing something that I
#
personally don't agree with will I remember my own experiences and let him be or will I sort of
#
do what all parents do which is say you know we know best this is not what you should be doing
#
and all of that so one of the reasons why we took about three and a half years of knowing each other
#
before we finally got married was because I never asked and one day it accidentally in
#
course of a conversation it suddenly came up she said you know I've been thinking of settling down
#
with you but there's this one thing I don't want kids and I know that most of the kids don't want
#
kids and I know that most men want kids and I was like oh god you could have told me this two and a
#
half years ago and saved me a lot of hard work so we got lucky that way but at a larger level yeah
#
I'm now 63 and you know I can think back to a time when 63 was considered old you looked on
#
them as your family elder and stuff right so suddenly I realized that I'm that now
#
and I do have that fear of for one there are three people in my immediate family who have had
#
dementia and before they passed including my mom was last so there's always been that even if you
#
accidentally forget a name of a book or a thing and suddenly you're like oh my god so you you do
#
a lot of trying to recollect things just deliberately to see if if your memory is still
#
memory is still working and that is one part of it the other part of it is that other helplessness
#
that you were talking about a physical helplessness so for all that yeah the the smoking and stuff
#
apart there are things that I've stopped doing I no longer drink at home by myself that I haven't
#
done that for the last 10-15 years now I have a beautifully stocked bar but it's only when somebody
#
comes and even that is very rare because I've been increasingly I think distanced from pretty
#
much everybody I don't have you remember when back in the day when we were all in Bombay we used to
#
hang out in each other's homes sit and talk late into the night till one o'clock two o'clock get
#
drunk you know I honestly miss that so much I remember Anandram Chandran yeah Sumanth all the
#
bunch of yeah Chandrahas and those were lovely times yeah that that's no memory I don't do that
#
anymore I don't go out for these things I basically find spending an evening drinking alcohol that I
#
don't really need and ending up talking of the same political tropes over and over again it just
#
it just seems so pointless to me I don't get any fun out of it I come back and say what the hell
#
was I doing I could have read a book in this time but there is a certain consciousness that I don't
#
I don't want to or I can't afford to be physically helpless so with all of this I still do
#
I go out for long walks or I work out at home I keep track of my fitness and that fear is ever
#
present also probably because I think at least in dad's time even though the family was fragmented
#
and and his brothers were all in different parts of the thing there was still they all grew up
#
with that sense of closeness and tightness and stuff yeah there's just me and my sister she has
#
her own life her kids to look after her husband who recently had a heart attack so she has that
#
on her mind so I realize that I don't have the kind of automatic support system that the previous
#
generation had so that consciousness that fear is kind of ever present losing the ability to
#
think to write to to to function let's go back to untangling one of the strands which kind of
#
struck me when you were talking earlier about your childhood and this goes back right to the very
#
start where you spoke about how you grew up in a home where stories were being told all the time
#
and and of course we have a windowpane episode releasing soon on youtube where you speak about
#
this at length about the influence of storytelling on your writing so I won't go into that here but
#
what I am interested in is a couple of tangential things one is what role does language play in
#
language play in even the way that we write in English for example you know I have sort of grown
#
up reading English all the time you know you spoke about how you would serendipitiously discover
#
serious writers because we were basically reading everything similarly and you know my introduction
#
to serious literature was when I came across Dostoevsky's house of the dead in my father's
#
library and I thought that sounds like a fun book and it just completely changed who I was I mean
#
that year I read all of Dostoevsky or most of the other Russian stuff from that era all of Shakespeare
#
even by the trip before I turned 11 though I probably didn't get most of it but parallel layer
#
for many of us on that other languages whatever those languages are and with me it was mostly
#
English really so I didn't have the benefit of that I wish I had immersed myself more into
#
literature and some of the languages or culture in some of the languages because I think that has
#
an enriching kind of influence what was it like for you in terms of maybe Malayalam literature or
#
Tamil literature or Hindi I mean I guess you wouldn't have read much in Hindi though you
#
did mention you were you did well in school in it so how do you feel all of that influences you
#
because a writer writing in English in the western world has only the world of English a writer
#
writing in English in India has all these other worlds I don't know when I went to college the
#
first day of college there was this absolutely brilliant English professor George Matthew he
#
walked into class and said okay I want to get to know you guys so one by one just talk tell me about
#
yourself and also hit some of the high spots like you know what's your mother tongue what's your
#
thing and this one boy stood up and when he came to the mother tongue parties at English
#
and George Matthew looked up and said his name was Ram Subramanian or some such so he said what the
#
hell do you mean by English and he said look I mean I read I write I think and I dream in English
#
so I don't know what else to say I don't even I can't read my mother tongue Tamil so English is
#
my mother tongue and and that made me think of what mother tongue really means is it the inherited
#
uh is it the inherited language or is it the language that you're most at home in if the
#
latter definition holds true then it would be English because I think in English at the same time
#
by some fluke I've retained my knowledge of and ability to communicate in whatever brand of Malayalam
#
and Tamil you choose from the highly literary to the absolute street the thing though is
#
it's opened me to new ways of writing it has opened me to a whole lot of of different styles
#
and voice and and even themes one of the things about Malayalam literature is the way they can be
#
talked about this in the earlier uh before the before the ad break if you remember about these
#
little stories that mean so much and Malayalam literature and Malayalam films are full of these
#
kind of stories just I haven't been watching too many films uh of late but a couple of days back
#
my wife insisted that I watch something called which basically translates into the woman I
#
married as my angel it is a story of a boy in a in a village in an agrarian sort of environment
#
just him and his mom whose two sisters are married and gone and he has reached the age of 35 without
#
ever being in a relationship ever being able to carry on a conversation with a woman other than
#
his immediate family and he keeps stalling whenever the subject of marriage comes up and then finally
#
one day he sees one of those typical arranged things he sees a woman who he actually wants to
#
marry uh he does and then he doesn't know what to do with them in the sense of he doesn't know how
#
sex works and all he has is the village loafers and and you know the kind of hangers on and stuff
#
and somewhere this sticks in his head so he makes all kinds of excuses on his honeymoon night he
#
pretends to be having high fever and he just stays in bed for two days while this girl is like running
#
around and getting him food and things and he says I can't get up and he's shivering and
#
all of that he's just he's just making excuses not to be with her and then somewhere he overhears a
#
conversation about how women like men who are strong and work does that and he misinterprets that
#
he gets drunk he goes so many rapes his wife and it is fairly brutal to the point where she ends up
#
in hospital and that becomes a huge problem and the entire movie is about how these two people
#
how he breaks out of his shell or how he is gradually taken out of a shell and taught what
#
taught what real life is all about and how she gets to understand where he was coming from when
#
this happened it's not a justification of marital rape or even rape but it is a process of understanding
#
and a kind of mutual accommodation that happens at some point but it was all based on that one
#
little trivial incident so that's what Malayalam literature gave me Tamil literature was what I've
#
read and honestly I haven't read the contemporary authors my knowledge of Tamil literature would be
#
the Tamil epics and a couple of established writers like Sujatha for instance who has a
#
huge body of work they do epic very well Malayalam per se doesn't have an established epic culture
#
we have myths and legends and then more contemporary forms of storytelling but we
#
don't have epic as a form Tamil does if you think of the Silappadigarhams and the Manimegalais and
#
where a big saga is told and through that the daily lives of people the culture the
#
traditions all of that is interwoven into that so I think these things inform the way
#
I think and write in English without necessarily informing my voice or my
#
style they just sort of expand my sense of the possibilities of you great let's let's take another
#
quick commercial break and on the other side of the break we'll continue chatting about this and
#
that and that and this long before I was a podcaster I was a writer in fact chances are
#
that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut which was active between 2003
#
and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I
#
was shaped by it in many ways I exercised my writing muscle every day and was forced to think
#
about many different things because I wrote about many different things well that phase in my life
#
ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it only now I'm doing it through a
#
newsletter I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I
#
will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy I'll write about some of the themes I cover
#
in this podcast and about much else so please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe
#
it is free once you sign up each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox you
#
don't need to go anywhere so subscribe now for free the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
thank you we're back with the seen in the unseen where normally Amit asks questions and his guests
#
respond occasionally at rambling length like I just did until now but Amit this time I want to
#
reverse the thing and ask you a question it's funny I have known you for the better part of
#
20 years we've been friends we've collaborated we've worked together off and on it occurs to me that
#
your trajectory in in your profession was exactly the opposite of mine I did a lot of random things
#
and then kind of stumbled and tripped and fell into journalism almost by accident or maybe because
#
there was no other option but you straight out of college you decided to get into journalism
#
right and and you picked create and then you started doing other things you became a fiction
#
writer you started playing poker for a living you were a blogger for a bit then you went
#
it deep into the sort of writing that among other things one one you're two bestiats you're a pioneer
#
for India and the podcast thing all of that it occurs to me that it's a rather funny arc
#
which which on the face of it defies logic so I was curious about how you got where you were and
#
how you how you yeah yeah um so the 200th episode of the scene in the unseen was all me answering
#
questions from others covering many aspects including this arc but you know I was just
#
thinking when you were speaking about I said at some point I hope you know Prem won't think
#
otherwise if I ask him to send me a photograph of his himself as a young man because I really wonder
#
really wonder what you look like and one of the things that has kind of happened to me while I've
#
been speaking to old friends on the show like you right now or Deepak Shenoy a little bit earlier
#
or Sonia Faleiro who was also on is that you realized that these people are people you feel
#
close to right there is a lot of affection there is a lot of warmth you've known them for a long
#
time and yet you don't really know them at all that's that's sometimes a feeling I get that there's
#
so much you don't know and your question revealed some of that because I didn't come straight into
#
journalism I spent a few years in music television I worked for a few months in advertising in Delhi
#
I graduated in 94 I finished my BA literature and then for a few months I worked in Delhi in
#
HTA where I worked in a group called the Pepsi group HTA is today J Walter Thompson it was in
#
the number one ad agency in the country hated advertising came to Bombay worked to channel V
#
where quick gun Murugan was just out and that was the in thing so I landed on a Friday called up
#
their office I said you know I'd like to kind of work with you and on Monday I had the job worked
#
in channel V for a couple of you for two and a half years worked in MTV for two and a half years
#
tried a dot-com startup that failed partly because the Nasdaq crash happened in 2000 just as things
#
were taking off drifted into journalism like my entrepreneurship efforts left me in a bit of debt
#
and I needed a job and so I joined Sambit Baal at Wisden we later went on to buy Crick and Fo and
#
all of that and Sambit was kind enough to cut a deal with the organization where they gave me a
#
sort of a loan which covered you know the amount of my debt and they'd cut it out of my salary
#
every month eternally grateful for that and just a great editor like you spoke of how you only
#
worked with Nikhil you know for me Sambit is up there as an editor also because and we spoke
#
about this in the windowpane session also how he nurtured so many talented young writers like Rahul
#
Bhattacharya and Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, Chandrahas, Rahul Bhatia all of these people
#
so you know enormous talent but you know we must not make the journalistic mistake of ascribing
#
a post-facto narrative on something that basically randomly happened which is kind of what happened
#
with me that everything was random so the counterfactuals are of course interesting
#
and I just drifted from one thing to the other and a lot of that is and it's interesting I teach
#
this course called the art of clear writing where I talk about the link between clear writing and
#
clear thinking but a lot of this journey happened because I wasn't a clear thinker so I didn't
#
really know exactly what I was aiming for what I wanted to do there were all these sort of
#
confusions and so I stumbled from thing to thing which I enjoyed doing I've spoken a little bit
#
about this journey in that sort of in the episode that I did but I think one of the things and I'll
#
turn this back into a question for you but one of the sort of realizations I had at some point like
#
I think what happens is that there are two sort of transitions that I have seen one is that moment
#
where you realize you're not exactly young anymore where you know you're in your 40s and you still
#
behave like someone who's 25 and you think you know all of your future is ahead of you and then
#
you suddenly think what the fuck 20 years just passed you know while I was procrastinating or
#
not doing stuff and then one has to reorient oneself and in a sense that reorientation can
#
also be painful because there is a point where you realize that let's get real here you know most of
#
my dreams are not going to happen but there's another reorientation that happens that makes
#
us okay which is an understanding that you would dreaming the wrong dreams anyway that happiness
#
doesn't come from achieving a or b or c it comes one to take joy in what you're doing in an everyday
#
basis to kind of find those little joys the things that you enjoy doing like I get a lot of joy from
#
these conversations right so even if and that's something in and of itself and I guess that process
#
of sort of reorienting in these multiple ways of course for me is sort of ongoing but how has it
#
been for you for me I think there are two things that I can think of one is I look at myself today
#
and I think I'm not going to say it's my abiding fault or that it's a problem or a weakness or
#
whatever it is a complete lack of ambition and I've tried to figure that out and I realized that
#
you know those eight years when between my dropping out of college and between finding my feet
#
it was so hellish and it nearly drove me to taking my own life a couple of times and the one thought
#
that I had in my head all that time was somehow I want that opportunity to prove that I have what it
#
takes because when everybody around you is running you down and saying that you'll never amount to
#
amount to anything and inside you you know that if you had that opportunity you could do this
#
it becomes a it becomes a terrible place to live in and so I came to Bombay and I don't know my
#
my first day at Free Press Mr. Kanapalli called me into his room for an interview and obviously
#
I had no degree or anything to show him so he said fine I'll take you on as a trainee and after a
#
month I'll give you a test in English which in a funny kind of way kind of amused me but what I
#
remember about that day is after that I was somebody he called somebody into the room and
#
said show him a table and chair where he can work and I went and sat down and suddenly I got up
#
ran to the loo and I threw up and I think it was the realization that all this time I had been
#
living in this world inside my head where all I needed was a chance to prove my point or to
#
prove that I had what it takes and suddenly here was that chance and I think I was struck by the
#
dread that I would fail and then the one justification I had for all the mistakes I had made till then
#
would also vanish and I just barfed and as it turned out some four days later I was looking
#
at the pages as they were being made and and Mr. Kanapalli's editorial there was a there was an
#
error of both fact and syntax which I corrected and he wasn't there so I just took a call I
#
corrected it I didn't know what was right and wrong at that time right so next morning I went
#
to him and said there was this problem yesterday and I've corrected it and he sort of took a look
#
at me and said okay you can go home now and come back in the evening so I was like what is that
#
about he said you come in the evening I'll let you know so I go back at about six o'clock and he was
#
waiting for me he said I want you on the night shift and start making pages and straight away
#
he said I don't think you need any tests or something and I think what happened in that
#
moment was I realized I had what it took and that was it so if you spend eight years locked
#
inside of yourself and and only wanting to accomplish that one thing which is just get
#
that chance just just prove to yourself more than to to to your family or to whoever that you can
#
do this and then you tick that box that I was suddenly left with no more boxes to tick and I
#
still don't have any boxes to tick I think now the only thing is I similarly there's a dream which
#
which led to the starting of Peeply even before that when I was in Yahoo and to the extent that
#
was possible I bargained for budgets to do we had this thing called originals where people went out
#
and reported at length on various stories that were not really chasing the headline so much as
#
narrative I remember we won a whole heap of reading awards for those stories that was with Nisha and
#
Gautam Jain and then Aarti went out and did something called River Diaries which was what
#
caught Paul's attention in the first place and then we started Peeply with this dream that
#
there is still both a market and a need for deep immersive journalism journalism that looks not
#
at what the headlines are but what so we said look if you're looking at the long term India has
#
about two three problems one is the problem of water resources basically an environmental problem
#
water is central to it but there is a lot of dominoes that then start to fall once you once
#
you start interfering with the water supply the second is a combination of health care and education
#
which is one of the things that to my mind is holding back this country's productivity in a
#
good way one we we keep talking of the demographic dividend and there's no way to capitalize on that
#
dividend if the kids are not being given an education that is of some use to them in their
#
life they're not productive if they end up you know working in malls and stuff like just to earn
#
a subsistence living it's what do they call a disguised unemployment if that is the case
#
you're losing out on that and the third is what we call development which isn't really we are
#
putting up these structures here and there but we're not connecting the dots at all
#
which is what Rahul Bhatia was doing if you remember he was talking about one factory that
#
produces condensers which is required by another factory at 180 kilometers away and to carry this
#
condenser across the distance of 180 kilometers takes almost a year because our roads are not
#
equipped to deal with that kind of massive transport so these are not headlines but these
#
are issues that will ramify and and funnily enough for instance I remember went to Sundarbans on one
#
of her early explorations and she came back and she talked to me and then wrote about this moment
#
when she was in this little boat and in the Sundarbans by about five o'clock you have this
#
enormous mist that shrouds everything fog that shrouds everything you can't you can barely see
#
to the if you hold your hand out in front of you you can't see your hand and the boat suddenly
#
veered she nearly toppled off the boat and it turned out that right in front of her the boatman
#
had seen it in the nick of time there was a huge tanker coming towards them no lights no sound no
#
nothing and she was talking about what this means the possibility the Selar river is a protected
#
Sundarbans is a protected environment it is a unesco project and all of that and here you had
#
these massive tankers carrying things like fly ash crude oil and various other you know extremely
#
harmful products and she said someday there's going to be a crash and soon enough three months
#
later there was and 350 000 liters of oil spilled into that thing and completely ruined that
#
environment for subsequent to that there have been at least four or five other tanker mishaps
#
that I know of fly ash fertilizer all kinds of things have been dumped into that extremely
#
sensitive ecosystem so I believe that it is necessary to tell these stories I believe that
#
it is necessary and increasingly you're looking at a media world where there is no space for this
#
kind of storytelling there is neither the ability nor the the ability not of the individual reporter
#
but of the the management let's say to think of the necessity of all this and to and to find the
#
ways and means to make it happen there isn't the space there isn't the time and there isn't the
#
inclination and because of this combination of factors the most important stories of the day
#
remain untold or largely untold there are independent journalists who are on their own
#
time going out and telling these stories people like Arti or Priyanka Dubey or you know Baha Dutt
#
and people like that who are taking the trouble Prerna Bindra for environment related stories a
#
lot of these people are doing it but they're doing it despite the system and I think the only dream
#
that remains is to create that system which is what we try to do with people but
#
convincing people that it is worth investing in I fail that and I don't know how to turn that around
#
so yeah that is to your question it's kind of in one sense I have no ambitions in the other I have
#
this one or at least in one sense I have no personal ambitions I'm not I have to do this
#
particular kind of journalism or I have to write this book or I have to do xyz none of that seems
#
to matter and it hasn't mattered since that day I told you about my first week but at a larger
#
level I suppose this is the one thing that that haunts me that I wasn't able to make it work
#
you weren't able to make what work does this project of this people yeah people you are any
#
you know variant of that but essentially the idea of consistent beat reporting on the
#
seminal issues the issues that will really make a difference to this country in the
#
coming years that so you know let's talk about your time in journalism and journalism itself
#
but before we get there I'm sort of interested in I mean I think if one was to rephrase the question
#
as not as what ambitions may be and how you've recalibrated them but what are you driven by
#
and what you seem to be describing at that early phase is that you're driven by the desire to
#
prove that you're not a waste that you know that you can excel and and that comes to you on that
#
day when you're put on the night shift and you don't have to do the English language test as such
#
and that's a personal drive fulfilled and now what it seems to you and something that resonates
#
with me is that there is a drive that is almost dual one it comes out of a passion for what you
#
do which is journalism and the writing and two it comes out of caring about these issues which
#
have become important to you and obviously the two of them come together like again for the benefit
#
of my listeners peeply at peeply.org was a project that Prem put together after he had left Yahoo!
#
where he was a managing editor for a long time and it was all about this deep immersive long-form
#
journalism and and and you mentioned you know Rahul Bhatia story there and there's also a
#
famous FT story about how I forget which those two cities are South Indian cities whether it's
#
Chennai and Bangalore or Chennai and Hyderabad or whatever I forget but basically at that time
#
when FT did the story a few years ago if you wanted to send goods from one city to the other
#
it was cheaper to do it via Paris and directly because of all the shit that happens at state
#
borders and so on and by the way another aside you know I finally ventured out to meet someone
#
recently and I went with Rahul Bhatia to meet him for coffee at a nearby restaurant and they
#
had this bizarre thing that they had this large outdoor section where they were not allowing anyone
#
to sit but everybody could sit indoors which was full of these shouty kids and air conditioning and
#
all of that so I think people really need to think about this shit you know it should absolutely have
#
been the other way around but my question is this that you know obviously we see here a kind of
#
a deepening of one's mental makeup in the sense that initially the driver is personal validation
#
and I want to do this and I want to prove myself and then later the driver becomes something else
#
and part of the reason the driver becomes something else is that you are forming a frame through
#
which you look at the world and that gets sharper and sharper as it kind of goes along in a sense
#
your picture of the world gets more and more high definition as you gather more and more dots to
#
connect so tell me a little bit about that process of worldview forming because despite growing up in
#
a generation after you till I was almost an adult I did not know much about you know political
#
theory I didn't know what left or right was I had mildly left liberal inclinations in college
#
because it seemed compassionate it seemed a good way to go and you know extremely unformed and it's
#
later in adulthood that I started reading much more and kind of figuring stuff out for myself
#
so what was that process like for you of forming that frame through which you look at the world
#
you know whether it is looking at politics whether it is say looking even at journalism or
#
society or the world around you what was that like I think politics and society predate my involvement
#
with journalism largely because ours was and whatever vestiges remain it remains a hugely
#
political family I did mention my dad's involvement with the rss one of his younger brothers was a
#
marxist and there was a time when he was in hiding because he was supposed to be involved in a
#
murder case political whatever and dad moved from the rss to hardcore left hardcore as in his
#
thinking went left mom was a diehard congress person until the day she lost cognition I mean
#
I keep saying this in mom's religious worldview there are four goddesses Saraswati, Lakshmi,
#
Parvati and Indira Gandhi so dinner obviously when the family gets together dinner tends to be
#
quite fun because everybody is shouting at each other about you know their various political
#
differences are being aired and growing up in the kind of family I did it was difficult to escape
#
not that I wanted to but culture and societal change for that period was so intrinsic to our
#
lives that it became again staple fare of conversation so those things kind of came to me
#
by default and my first few years in journalism were largely political journalism or feature
#
writing there was a brief foray into Bollywood because midday and therefore it was needed but
#
but these were the kind of things that I would get to do cricket happened by accident and
#
after about five years of that I think I mentioned this in the windowpane session as well
#
one I was no longer taking a delight in it that I once did I was losing even the fandom for the
#
sport forget about the journalistic urge to to view the next match and write about it even that
#
that joy that I used to have as a fan was was getting bleached out of me a lot of external
#
reasons you know them as well as I do the match fixing and and the growing sense that you were
#
seeing a kabuki play rather than a cricket match that that what was going on behind the mask was
#
different from what we were perceiving in front of it and then I went back after that there was
#
that period in New York where you know working on India abroad it left a lot of time to myself to
#
a lot of time to myself to sort of reassess and like you said reset and I realized that for me
#
until that point in time I had done very little in terms of environmental journalism or issue
#
based journalism it was mostly unless you count politics as an issue it occurred to me that that
#
is what I wanted to do which is why when I came back I did a bit of that and then left read if
#
came to yahoo realized that I now had the levers or at least some of the levers in my hand as long
#
as yahoo was being run out of India I could work with the managing director on budgeting and stuff
#
lad so started giving increasing prominence for that kind of thing going out for that kind of
#
stories as well I think that is how it evolves that these are your personal preoccupations look
#
I lived on land I my grandfather being what he was by the time I was four and five I had a little
#
spade and a shovel and an axe of my own scaled down to size and he would take me out into the
#
fields pretty much every day and he would insist that I learn all the basics how to dig a trench
#
how to chop down a tree all of that or chop it up into firewood you know all the basics work with
#
your hands and stuff and and that was part of my formative years right so it never quite left me
#
that sense of importance of land and and how people and land interact with one another so all
#
of that was already marinating inside of me then I met arty who was hardcore into these issues I
#
mean she's a brilliant scholar with I think three postgraduate degrees to her name had a great job
#
in intel quit all that wanted to do this so her passion kind of just when I was beginning to sense
#
the first sparks of there has to be more to it than quotidian political reporting her coming along
#
just sort of took it up another few notches then paul happened and and and then it became a sort of
#
continuous process even today I mean I write a lot in my journal which I don't know what I'll
#
make of it at some point but most of that writing is about these kind of issues not what is happening
#
in West Bengal okay and you know one thing since I've known you I've constantly been haranguing
#
you about why you don't write books like for example cricket you know the whole fascinating
#
post John Wright sort of ganguly period is so incredible and most of what really went down
#
and happened is not even in the public domain and I used to keep nagging you I think please write
#
a book about it but there are so many books that you could really have written on just a variety
#
of subjects not just cricket and you haven't done that is that something you thought about like in
#
my case and I will hopefully write many books but in my case the fact that I haven't written
#
10 by now is it's really a lack of discipline and it's got to do with those kind of personal
#
feelings and not necessarily desire but in your case did you look at writing books as something
#
that you would do is that something that waxed and waned with time at different periods how was
#
that like like one reason I think that you know I was thinking the other day about you know why
#
should one privilege writing a book as necessarily the pinnacle of a certain kind of artistic or
#
intellectual achievement like it seems like a standard end goal you know why not a podcast
#
why not whatever you know it's it's we kind of tend to think in these old structures of how
#
we consume the world back in the day 30 years ago but today everything has changed but was that ever
#
a part of your makeup that I should write books or was it something you really didn't care about
#
and you were like what is this Amit telling me again and again well I mean you kind of answered
#
your own question on my behalf when you talked about why privilege writing books as as the
#
pinnacle of of intellectual achievement to the specific thing about cricket I think we both know
#
why I haven't written it for the simple reason that like you said it's not in the public domain
#
because it is not in the interest of either the players who are central to that era or to the
#
administration for a lot of things to to become public almost all of what I know is from the
#
players and the administrators themselves and I also know with a dead certainty that if I ever
#
were to write about these things the very same people who took me aside asked for my time sat
#
me down and told me things will be the first to deny it at the end of it I'm going to end up with
#
a book that is universally denied and to what purpose you know I mean if if the the principal
#
players in this history do not want the story to come out I don't see the point of my doing it
#
I don't think I have never felt that I have to write a book you and other friends Nilanjana Roy
#
for instance Kartika Nair people I'd keep talking to me about it I played around a bit with that
#
transcreation of Beams Inn but that was more of a of a writing experiment that I wanted to try out
#
but for me a book has to evolve from the story it has to be the other way around and I'm not
#
talking fiction fiction doesn't interest me I mean I love reading fiction but not necessarily
#
uh writing it I don't even think in that direction non-fiction though yes and for me it is like I
#
said if you remember we talked about that coastline exploration um that we were doing and which got
#
truncated thanks to COVID and all the other issues but at some point that is a book that
#
I want to finish because you see the coastline and you see beaches on which you played football
#
or where you picnic with your family when dad and mom came down for the summer holidays and stuff
#
and they have vanished they've literally vanished the the beach does not exist anymore the water
#
comes to the shoreline uh to the road for instance so that is that is one part of the story but then
#
when you think of how it ramifies the beach encroaching is fishermen disappearing homes
#
uh homes getting destroyed every single monsoon along that stretch uh from from trivandrum all
#
the way up hundreds of homes are just being swept into the sea every single monsoon for the last
#
five six years that is that many displaced families uh that many displaced livelihoods
#
to keep the sea from encroaching you're going and mining uh stone from the western guards from
#
ediqi from from kalpata and sutans but battery and places like that and every year now for the last
#
three years you've had landslides in those places which are killing people there is multiple
#
ramifications across this and all these let's say economic or livelihood ramifications then
#
translate into cultural ramifications as well so there is a huge story with the coastline as its
#
spine and to do the entire indian coastline of 7400 kilometers is an ambition that rp and i have
#
but just to do kerala it strikes me that what is happening environmentally in that place and how
#
it is ramifying into the social the political and the cultural uh lives of the people is a is a book
#
worth working on and that's that's not an ambition that i've given up on at this point but again that
#
depends on do the basics first which is go there see what there is and then see if the story is
#
the story is worth writing and if you are capable enough of of putting it all together and i guess
#
that requires funding if someone listening to this wants to fund this what what do they have to do
#
where do they have to go well talk to me okay that's always accessible so yeah part of the
#
thing is see i can't talk to a vc on the regular lines of how many page views will you get and how
#
many uh you use will you get i can only talk in terms of is this a necessary thing to do uh is
#
this something important that is not getting done right now and what will it take to do it and and
#
i'm not looking at huge sums of money i don't think that is required at all uh we we did that
#
entire coastline 15 20 days uh one month and then another 15 days another month 30 odd days our
#
budget was less than a lack we stay in these small uh lodges uh we walk a lot uh we take public
#
transport you know it's it's not it's not like you're saying okay i need to be put up in these
#
five star hotels and i need uh tons of equipment and stuff but there needs to be somebody willing
#
to do it because it is a good thing to do not necessarily because the the roi can be calculated
#
or makes it a cheat and i haven't found that person so very wise words hopefully you will
#
through this episode i i i have great hopes for that so you know let's let's kind of talk a
#
little bit about journalism and we've done this before i think in 2017 we did this uh if i remember
#
correctly we did an episode called the state of the media where we uh you know spoke about where
#
things are and those days my episodes were much shorter though i think this was a one hour episode
#
but i don't quite remember but you know i still can't quite get a handle on what the media will
#
look like 10 years later like one thing that is clear to me is this couple of big changes uh one
#
is that there was a time where there was a consensus from the truth because you got all your news from
#
a bunch of uh singular sources and that was pretty much it and it was both good and bad it was good
#
because you there was a limit to how much fake news could get through and you had what you had
#
and you know two plus two was always equal to four um today you know that's coming at you from
#
disparate sources everybody constructs their own alternative uh realities and in a sense is good
#
because it means content creators like me can just create content i am not dependent on a platform
#
for publishing me i don't have to conform i can do my podcast as i want nobody's going to ask me
#
i can do my newsletters as i want uh which is uh kind of great but and the other thing that's
#
changed is that especially in the last 10 years with social media uh on our smartphones that the
#
way people discover consume and filter information has changed it is no longer the case that you will
#
go to a destination that you'll you know pick up the times of india in the morning or you'll go to
#
even an india uncut in the morning and uh you know as back in the blogging days some people said
#
they used to do and people don't go to destinations anymore the news comes to them they'll click on
#
links on social media or somebody will send them something on whatsapp so everything about the
#
consumption has changed uh everything about you know at the demand end it is all different
#
at the supply end they haven't figured it out they haven't figured out that you know or if they have
#
figured out they haven't figured out what to do about it right the advertising model may be broken
#
that you know a lot of what was taken for granted like the bundling of many things together in this
#
big thing called the newspaper or the publication may not even be relevant anymore and i don't know
#
how those pieces are going to fall into play at some point the supply will fit into the demand
#
and i don't know when it will happen and even now the landscape of how we consume information is
#
changing so fast uh that like you know just this week there was an episode out of a show that i
#
produce uh there's a show called brave new world hosted by vasanthar which i produced for the
#
idfc institute and vasanth spoke to jonathan height and jonathan height made an interesting
#
point where he spoke about i think the phrase he used was wisdom deprivation where he said that
#
yes today people have access to a lot more information but most of us tend to consume
#
something that has been produced in the last two or three days you're always kind of in the moment
#
especially and this is more this is a bigger concern not when you take oldies like us but
#
when you take new generations who are still being formed and the question is what are they
#
being formed by and they are being formed by uh you know ephemeral shallow content which is
#
just coming out and i don't want to generalize and say everybody is like that kids generally
#
today are obviously much smarter than us they have a partly because of you know access self
#
pedagogy is much easier and so on and so forth but that's also uh and i think the phrase jon
#
used for it was uh wisdom deprivation and because things are just um uh changing so rapidly that it
#
is and because the demand side is continuously changing while the supply side is still stuck in
#
some paradigm of 12 13 years ago uh you know and i i can't put a finger on what the media landscape
#
will look like uh 10 years from now and and so on and obviously you have been in media at the
#
highest levels for all this time what are your thoughts on uh this look i mean the smaller point
#
about the democratization of media is i think a wonderful thing it's uh you talked about your
#
podcast but you could also have equally with with the same amount of uh relevance talked about
#
the writing group that you formed uh which is now producing content at a rapidly increasing both
#
pace and quality uh not just the quantity of stuff that your your cohort is turning out but also the
#
quality of stuff and and the way they are systematically broad basing their interests
#
so that they are covering more and more ground um which is a good thing but as far as conventional
#
media is concerned i think it has fallen too deep into a trap of its own making and instead of trying
#
to climb out they're reaching for a shovel i think the genesis of the problem was the early days of
#
the internet when your monetization model depended on audience on page views on on the number of
#
let's say the amount of attention of a reader that you could catch and retain so if your content
#
was good enough to make a person spend x minutes on that site and to revisit that site multiple
#
times a day you had a good chance of making it with the advertiser two things have happened
#
subsequently one is that more and more media houses have come up every media house operates
#
on this excel sheet model of what are our page views what are our unique users what is our repeat
#
visits and stuff in order to accomplish these goals without thinking of why you want to accomplish
#
these goals what the media houses are doing is turning out more and more irrelevant content
#
for instance one of the better run websites that we have in india today the other day i saw this
#
link on twitter this video went viral blah blah something and i just clicked on it to see what
#
the hell they were talking about and it was one of those random moments and i realized that what
#
they had done was this was a video that had gone viral on twitter somebody had posted it all they
#
had done was embed that twitter in this page and that's it gave it a headline and pushed it out
#
why would you do that it's already viral on twitter you're hoping to write that virality for a few
#
extra page views and the joke is you haven't thought of what those extra page views mean in
#
terms of revenue somebody did put in even that little bit of effort to find that and embed it
#
right they haven't done the basic math of saying the more page views i produce and the more page
#
views everybody around me produces the less each page views value is so at a time when you used to
#
sell what you call the cpm cost per million page views when the cpms were counted in dollars
#
today they're not worth pennies so your basic unit of production which is your page view is
#
increasingly irrelevant in the marketplace and yet you're chasing that metric and you're not only
#
chasing that metric you're you're actually doing more and more of that you're desperate to meet
#
these so-called monthly targets and stuff right now having done all that you are not clearly
#
making money therefore your annual cycles are okay we have a lot of red ink therefore lay off
#
a few more people uh your quality comes down the remaining people are put to the job of churning
#
out more content the the relevance of that content to the average consumer is therefore getting
#
depleted and it's a vicious cycle and you're not at no point are you hitting the pause button you
#
talked about as an individual the times that we reset ourselves uh that that moment when we think
#
okay what have i been doing and why am i doing this and is this what i'm supposed to be doing
#
a media by and large has not done that no have they explored potential it is not for lack of
#
alternate revenue uh options so much as the media is in the trap of thinking that this is the only
#
way um in fact i remember making a presentation when i was in yahoo about how yahoo could be
#
monetized and everybody in the room said okay brilliant idea is blah blah blah and nothing
#
happened and then a friend of mine in another website when i left yahoo he came down to banglore
#
and said i wanted to talk to you uh about monetization do you have any thoughts and i
#
gave him two three of these ideas and he said will you come and help us do it and i said look i'll
#
give you the ideas just do it it doesn't matter because at that time i was more preoccupied with
#
people it didn't happen years passed and i've had the same conversation in these exact same ideas
#
at least four times to my recollection and at no point has anyone shown they've all shown great
#
enthusiasm for the thought but it does take an effort to say okay i'm going to stop doing what
#
i'm doing today in order to do this tomorrow and that they're not willing to do so you are
#
ending up in a trap where your single biggest sponsor is the government it is the government
#
advertising that is the government advertising the government the personalities presence at your
#
events these are your primary monetization models if that is the case you're then captive to
#
because i mean you you automatically sink to being a propaganda outlet for uh whoever is in power
#
uh whoever is in power that particular time and that's a trap from which you can't climb out of
#
until you stop that dependence now as long as you are that in that particular trap the problem is
#
you become less relevant to the audience because propaganda does not it's not subtle it's it's
#
sledgehammer stuff and people see it i mean we talked about this i think in the writing class
#
episode as well that people are very very good to spot fakes and the same way they're very good at
#
spotting when there is an agenda behind what is being written so you've now gotten into the
#
self-perpetuating cycle and part of the problem is that the people who are sitting in positions
#
of authority in media houses do not spend the time to explore their own ecosystem they do not
#
spend enough time to see what is working elsewhere and why it is working what model is adaptable to
#
this country what is the model that is probably not used somewhere else but will work in this
#
country because we have scale none of those questions even come up in these management
#
discussions what does come up is how do we get 25 growth quarter on quarter in fact in yahoo i
#
actually asked that question when when i was asked how i was going to ensure 25 growth i said the
#
last quarter these are the numbers we've done how much of it did you sell the guy didn't have an
#
answer i did i told him you only sold 35 percent so what why are we what are we going to do with
#
this 25 percent growth when you can't even sell what i'm producing right now so yeah the future
#
of media is frankly in the media's own hands if they don't see the trap that they've fallen into
#
and if they continue to dig deeper pretty soon you become irrelevant to the audience you make
#
the point increasingly nobody goes to a website right i mean learn behavior for you for me
#
in the morning you needed to catch up with news therefore you had one or two preferred news
#
sources whether it is times of india hindustan times or hindu whatever it is but you went to
#
that website at the time that you stopped actually reading the physical paper you went to the website
#
and you went through it you wanted to know about cricket therefore you went to esp and cricket for
#
and similarly you had certain specific interests so you had a set of about maybe 10 12 bookmarks
#
which was the first thing that we did every morning cycle through those bookmarks and catch
#
up with the world and whatever happened while we were asleep today there is no url that you type in
#
and that tells you that there is no website that has become of even remote relevance to us
#
it doesn't matter i i i'm operating under the assumption that if it is important enough
#
somebody on social media will be talking about it and i will find it and that is not because
#
of the rise of social media people are putting the cart before the horse in that particular
#
argument it is not the rise of social media that is making the newspaper irrelevant so much as
#
the newspaper has made themselves irrelevant and therefore people are turning to alternate sources
#
of news or information for instance why do your podcasts work your guests talk brilliantly about
#
huge variety of subjects i mean the last two guests you had bazala wahab before that you had
#
annie's ivy before that you had deepak chenoy all three are entirely different the areas of
#
expertise are different their subject matter is different right why is all this not part of
#
mainstream media if it is irrelevant your podcast wouldn't work if your podcast is working it does
#
say that these are themes and topics and and ideas that a certain section of the audience is
#
actually interested in they are willing to invest what three hours of time listening to all this
#
i know media houses that would kill for three hours of your attention and advertisers who would
#
die to get that kind of time spent on a website so i mean for newspapers to say you know social
#
media has killed us and facebook is doing this to us and all that sorry you did it yourself
#
marvelous so there's lots there to unpack and i'll unpack some of it but since you mentioned
#
sort of the clear writing community i'll quickly uh uh take a brief digression to tell listeners
#
about that so basically i started the scorsi auto clear writing in april last year and i've
#
you know i'm on my 11th cohort right now and around the ninth cohort the former students
#
kind of got together and they formed this separate online writing community uh which i am a part of
#
but not the grand poobah as it were i'm just another member and so are you in fact and uh
#
it's voluntary it's free and it's only for people who've already done the course so they kind of
#
share the same frame of reference and all that and they give each other prompts exercises we have
#
this youtube channel on which you know we've spoken to prem recently before that we spoke to
#
nilanjana roy and akar patel about writing we have a newsletter at windowpane.substract.com we have
#
reading groups book clubs for fiction and non-fiction and now they're talking about
#
forming a film club as well so a lot of enthusiasm a few hundred people lots of action there
#
now kind of getting back to why has this podcast taken off and that's something i've thought about
#
because it it caught me by surprise when i started i thought attention spans are shallow you've got
#
to grab them in the first 15 minutes first 15 seconds don't do anything longer than 20 minutes
#
that was all bullshit and it it was all received wisdom that came from youtube and may not even
#
necessarily be true for youtube anymore because there are interesting new things happening there
#
but uh we can talk about that some other time but one reason for this is that if you look at the
#
media you have in the past described the indian media as being an inch deep and a mile wide and
#
that's exactly what it is and it is like that for a different kinds of incentives one obviously is
#
that if you look at news television why is it so shallow why is it so shouty and screamy and in a
#
race to the bottom because there are price gaps on for example subscribers which means that most of
#
your revenue has to come from advertising you know and that proportion of advertising revenue to
#
um subscriber revenue is um incredibly skewed far more than any other country and therefore there's
#
a race to the lowest common denominator when you invest a lot in big media you want your money back
#
you're racing for a lowest common denominator so you keep it shallow you can't afford to go too deep
#
and here's an interesting nuance here what this means is not only that you cannot cater to a niche
#
what it also means is that you never even discover a niche a niche doesn't know that it exists because
#
because people aren't throwing things at the wall and the wonderful thing about the internet and
#
technology is that it empowers individuals to throw everything at the wall i can do a four
#
hour podcast i can do a newsletter about whatever i can do my blogging in your case smoke signals in
#
my case indian cut and niches form communities uh form which is a wonderful thing about it but the
#
other very fascinating and deep point that you have made previously which i just want to uh you
#
know take our listeners through is you've pointed out that when you enter this death spiral like we
#
spoken about how uh demand is one thing supply is another thing what people want is not what the
#
media is giving now when that typically happens the media starts losing money what do they do
#
when they start losing money they won't sack the salespeople or whatever they'll sack editorial
#
and this is a very telling phrase that i heard from you where if you have less journalists you
#
will have more generalists because you can't hire that many specialists and therefore the work is
#
spread around more among generalists who have to produce more work who have less time to work on
#
stories and the quality suffers like there's a phrase called gelman amnesia which is named
#
after the physicist marie gelman which basically means that you know whenever i read a story by a
#
mainstream publication on a subject i know a lot about could be podcasting or poker or even
#
in economics sometimes i find that the story is rubbish because i know the subject was so
#
much depth and the generalist has probably worked on it for six hours and called the four people for
#
courts but when i read the rest of the newspaper on subject that i don't know i am trusting it as
#
if it is gospel as if it is all you know and and that's what is called gelman amnesia it's that you
#
forget that uh this has happened that whatever subject you know about the newspaper has bungled
#
up completely why would you assume they haven't bungled absolutely everything and this causes a
#
vicious cycle where there's a degradation in quality and therefore the quality gets worse
#
and worse and obviously then the reader who is no longer you know going to these mainstream media
#
sites in any case will uh you know the filtering effect will come into play and they'll read less
#
and less of most of this garbage another thing that happens which i think is uh you know outside
#
of these contexts is a way that in the past because of either you know a lack of imagination
#
or uh you know individuals not being empowered enough in terms of individual consumers not being
#
empowered enough is that we think in terms of packages in newspaper of course it is key times
#
of india you have a bunch of pages you have politics news sports news opinion blah blah blah
#
you put it all together education is like that education we think in terms of packages where
#
we are still in the 19th century paradigm that kids of the same age must be in the same class
#
and they'll be taught this package of subjects history geography english whatever and it has
#
to be this nothing else and we've been stuck in that equilibrium and it is clearly not working
#
especially when you look at the indian education system where even though we have a jobs crisis
#
we have another crisis in that most people who are getting educated within our system
#
don't have the skills to be employable so it's like this crazy dual sort of crisis that is
#
happening so there's this spoken of many things here the the just the kind of do you have any
#
thoughts yeah you made a point which is central to this entire thing you don't know a niche exists
#
until somebody comes along to service that niche which is central to this entire thing about your
#
original question was around you're not being clear where the media is going or where it will be 10
#
years down the line this realization is what is the north star that the media needs the media is
#
servicing things in a by-road fashion exactly like our education system it has gotten this template
#
it has gotten this template and it says yeah this is what the people want the the question of is
#
there something else that the people want that we are not aware of and we're not giving and
#
therefore we are losing readership or not gaining more readers is never asked in a newsroom and never
#
answered the other part of the issue is we talked about how it is not the salespeople but the
#
journalists who get sacked the additional layer to that is that it is the senior journalists who
#
get sacked because they are the ones who are highest paid but the reason why they are seniors
#
they have spent some time in that profession they have acquired a knowledge base that knowledge
#
base belongs to that particular media company as long as say for instance i spend x amount of time
#
working in newsrooms being on top of politics building contacts and having a certain reservoir
#
of both information and the ability to to acquire information quickly i know where to go i know
#
what dots to connect and then you get rid of me you have lost that entire experience that you have
#
actually spent money and time nurturing and increasingly you are keeping the bottom layer
#
of journalists there kids who are just out of school who haven't had the time to build all this
#
up and it is not just that you're keeping them you're not giving them that opportunity to build
#
a knowledge base for themselves because today you are expected to do a piece on the west bengal
#
election about which you know nothing and tomorrow you're doing a piece on the kerala election about
#
which you know even less and you don't have somebody there to go and ask you know this seems
#
to be somewhat odd who where can i get that information from the the journalist is googling
#
and finding an article that somebody has written which is fairly ill-informed in the first place
#
taking that as gospel like you said and basing her so her you know analysis or piece on on that
#
bit of garbled information and garbage is just perpetuating itself and then the media is wondering
#
why are we losing readership what is happening you're losing readership because you're no longer
#
relevant in any form of fashion to the reader and you also made the point about how pathetic
#
the education system is how many times in the last few years have we seen stories about say for
#
instance the railways posting a requirement for a thousand people to work on the tracks and phds and
#
ba's and you know people with those kind of qualifications applying by the hundreds of
#
thousands a simple sir that's in fact been the case from my childhood since i remember from the
#
1980s onwards that you'll have you know a vacancy for two pns being announced and 600 phds will be
#
among the 300 000 people who apply yeah i mean that's that's probably the most tinging indictment
#
of both our education system and at a larger level the fact that as a country as an institution
#
we're not thinking these things through we keep talking about all these fancy concepts like
#
demographic dividend and how we will be the youngest uh nation of workers but what workers
#
is and and that that question doesn't seem important enough for any kind of informed debate
#
or discussion it doesn't seem important enough for any kind of policy framing at at and and
#
increasingly these are questions that you don't even ask because who the hell is left in these
#
newsrooms to ask them if funnily enough i mean just today i was reading about how Pratap Banumetha
#
is quit as a professor at Ashoka University you have very few voices today that are capable of
#
understanding what is going on in our world and articulating it in a way that makes sense
#
i read everything that Pratap writes i don't always agree with everything that Pratap writes
#
but i read it because he takes the trouble to think he has information he has that knowledge
#
base and what he writes is based off of that you might disagree with the conclusions but there is
#
again to a point that you raised earlier there is a broad set of facts that both Pratap and i can
#
agree on asking you right but look what happens to people like that they just get hounded out of
#
all the public spaces that that they currently inhabit and what is left are the people who
#
there's an India Today story written by the author of a book on Modi about how the book was released
#
in the presence of Modi and how Modi praised the book that's that's media and i mean it's i don't
#
know it feels sad because there's some vestiges left in me of the the idealism and the enthusiasm
#
with which i entered this business yeah sure i i stumbled into it by happenstance but i loved it
#
and today i'm looking around and saying what's wrong with you guys you don't know how to do
#
journalism anymore you don't even know how to make money off of this business anymore at least if you
#
were doing that one thing then fine i mean you can say look you know for all the fancy talk and
#
all that it is a business and it needs to make money but you're not making money either you're
#
neither fish nor fowl in this case so yeah no and and you know the sadness that i feel is not so
#
much for Pratap per se you know he's fine he'll get by what i worry about is the future Prataps
#
you know that all the young people who might uh say to themselves that no that is anti-national
#
that's not a direction to go in or if intellectualism is given a bad name it's like no no we don't want
#
to be like them ivory tower intellectuals and all of that we do you know and and you aspire to
#
different things and when you aspire to different things you become a different person you know in
#
a similar way like after what happened to Munawar Farooqi who by the way is a brilliant brilliant
#
comedian i i wrote a newsletter post where i've linked to some of his videos also just brilliant
#
and after what happened to him the worry is not about Munawar himself though of course one is
#
worried about him but he is seems to be a brave sensible kid and he said he'll continue his
#
comedy the worry is about all the young budding comedians who might have thought along those lines
#
or gone along those lines even if they're not doing stand-up they might write satire they might
#
write literature they might create different kinds of art one and now saying no it's not worth it
#
and especially if they're the wrong identity if they're born in the wrong religion doubly more so
#
saying ki nahi yaar mere liye toh it's not worth it just make a good life for myself
#
leave all this and all of that is unseen all of that is you know what the chilling effect does
#
in what it destroys is uh you know sort of unseen and and here i'll ask you is that you know you
#
have a lot of interaction with young people today you've taught uh perhaps hundreds if not
#
thousands of journalism students right and uh what's your sense of the young people today do
#
they you know is because also while we see what is happening to the country we also see a certain
#
kind of idealism and awareness that happened after the caa when all those protests took place
#
and all of that we see that energy as well so when you speak to young journalism students today
#
what is your sense because within the newsroom i do not think that they really have role models
#
uh though i should not be too um sort of at an individual level i know many fine individuals who
#
still work in journalism but when they look at their big media houses and all that they see
#
people who don't really actually care about the journalistic output their money is coming from
#
events and media conclaves and all of that rubbish what's your sense of this younger generation and
#
uh you know should we be uh more hopeful of them than we could have been of um uh you know people
#
in our time there's a good side to this and there's a bad side to this one of the things
#
that i used to do i haven't done this last year um i don't know if i'll be doing it this year but
#
every year uh the asian college of journalism does this thing where in the first uh two months
#
of each new year academic year they bring in people to do a session on various aspects of
#
journalism so i've been doing that and typically how it works is you're doing a presentation or a
#
or a talk for about an hour and a half two hours and then there is a q a and every single time i've
#
been struck by two or three things one is every single year i find the number of women entering
#
this profession far outpaces the number of young men who are entering this profession the second is
#
i've found uniformly intelligent kids and to get into acj it is fairly expensive
#
um so these are people who can afford it which by definition means that they could also afford
#
other types of education other other avenues other streams to go in and they have come into
#
the stream voluntarily they they have a lot of passion um it's it's a standing joke in uh acj
#
that these sessions they're supposed to end after about two hours typically what happens is it starts
#
at about 10 o'clock in the morning one o'clock is their lunch hour so these kids say can you hang on
#
till lunchtime and we can talk and and so all the people who are sitting nicely and there are about
#
250 of them uh each time the entire all the batches come together they kind of hang around and they
#
just have so many questions about what is this like and what is that like and what do you think of the
#
future of the media and the economics of it and the politics of it and all of that it goes on to
#
one o'clock and then there will be this group of kids invariably who will say will you come and have
#
lunch with us so we can talk some more and there are times when i ask them what what what are your
#
expectations from this profession to be honest there are also some kids who think that a journalism
#
degree is a passport to the communications advertising stream and they are not going to
#
stream but there is a significant number of talented bright young kids who are coming in
#
every single year which is a good part and and they seem to have that same idealism that sparked
#
previous generations they think that they can change the world they think that that
#
journalism is a profession that is worth being part of that i hate to use this word but in some
#
way it is noble for want of a better word we heard this when we were young right journalism is a noble
#
profession they still believe it and it is not a belief born of naivety they're clear right about
#
what is happening in in the media business today but they still believe that it will not be the
#
same uh tomorrow and then there is because one of the things that happens is i give my email to
#
whoever asked for it so these kids invariably ask and and i give them the email and some of
#
them find jobs in mainstream media and then there are these increasingly puzzled questions
#
one kid actually wrote in and said in your time was it easy for you to go up to the editor and
#
ask for comment on what you had just done because i'm not getting any feedback at all
#
and that speaks to what you were talking about there are there are good journalists still in
#
the newsrooms around the country but that old habit of mentorship and and you've been in both
#
those places right when you joined cricket for you had a some bit to mentor uh to mentor you but
#
you also mentored newcomers in your own turn the other kids who who subsequently joined like said
#
we and people that that mentorship is gone so there's a growing disenchantment once you actually
#
once you actually get into the profession and there is no countervailing uh positive to it
#
there is no one making sure that that enthusiasm remains undiminished or that that that fire that
#
they had is not banked which is which is the sad part and and all of this is based on say one
#
journalism school there are plenty around the country now and they're all produced these young
#
kids and who are getting into i remember in delhi for instance there was a particular journalist
#
from a website who was part of that workshop uh the first day she drafted a little note on the
#
basis of what she had seen and heard in old delhi she was pursuing a particular story and she
#
condensed that into two paragraphs and paul was the one who read it and he suddenly turned to me
#
and arty and don we were sitting and reading other people's submissions and said i want you
#
to stop what you're doing and read this and we read it and i swear move our minds it was that
#
good and we called this kid and said what do you do and what she does is do things like 10 things
#
you should know today and and you know little compilations for that website and at the end of
#
the course she came and told us something that still stays with me she said i didn't realize
#
there was another way of doing journalism until i took this workshop and now i'm not satisfied
#
with what i'm doing anymore so there is that there is the ability uh sadly there is a tremendous
#
amount of ability in the country it just requires that somebody have the willingness to tap it to
#
resource it and to and to actually you know let it happen you also made the point about munawar
#
farooqi and i was just like you i i loved his videos um and i think recently i saw one that
#
he had made after he came out of jail not the one way he talks about his jail experiences but
#
another comedy thing and he's doing that was actually recorded before the ghost story right
#
i was recorded before but it's lovely it's great yeah yeah it's beautiful but i was also thinking
#
of you know people who raise their voices against the various inequities in the world the activists
#
uh you suddenly get hit with uh sedation whether it is a safur azar or a you know north deep core or
#
any of these places and you made the point about the number of young munawar farooqis
#
who are probably not taking to this because you know i i can't deal with this hassle and similarly
#
the number of people speaking out for those things that matter that deserve to be spoken about
#
about there is also this this this kind of effect on them as well right this daunting effect on
#
this is what will happen if you speak up for what is right and therefore
#
just shut up and and you know on your daily bread so yeah it's it's i think you use that
#
downward spiral race to the bottom phrase in a similar context earlier but that's exactly what
#
we are at right now as a as a country as a polity as a society is just raised to the bottom i start
#
by something i saw on twitter today um somebody had uh taken a photograph of a newspaper uh with
#
two back-to-back stories actually two side-by-side stories the first story was that a court has
#
decided to revive a panel or whatever to explore the origins uh and the history of the saraswati
#
river and the other is that a court has decided to disband the pollution control uh mechanism
#
and both of these are happening literally side by side in a newspaper which is for me a stark
#
indication of where we're going one wants to elevate the abstract the other wants to ignore
#
the concrete and we all know what happens when that happens you know and aside which just strikes me
#
when you spoke about you know with your tongue firmly in cheek about the noble profession of
#
uh journalism and it struck me that there is nobility and i'll tell you where the nobility is i
#
think the nobility comes from the individual where the individual is driven by either the desire to
#
observe things well and write about them well or to bring about change by uh writing or to speak
#
truth to power or whatever the case might be the nobility comes from an individual journalist
#
it's not an inherent part of the profession i mean what a media house is a business you
#
got to make profits all of that is there but journalists can individually be driven by whatever
#
they're driven by and then that drive will show in their work and if good work is enabled which
#
it is not being uh listicles are being enabled now but if good work is enabled then good journalism
#
will result which will show in the bottom line because it is not true that people just want
#
listicles and they don't want deep information i mean you know this podcast alone is sort of
#
affirmation of that that people crave deep content everywhere they crave knowledge they don't want to
#
be condescended to they don't necessarily want to be told oh these are 10 interesting things about
#
prime panicker listicle you know and there aren't enough people giving them that depth and i think
#
that once we kind of get through this period of time where i mean i hope young entrepreneurs
#
listening to this actually figure out ways of solving this problem that the way we consume news
#
and information and knowledge is so different from the way it's given to us there are so many
#
gaps to be bridged and you know i think both of us are too old to do much else but write and create
#
the kind of content we do but some young person should come forward and maybe fill this gap so
#
you know i've spoken to you for you know just upwards of three hours i don't want to hold you
#
anymore and the interesting thing is we haven't even touched on cricket so all the cricket fans
#
who will click on this thing oh amit and prem talking about cricket this is heaven at the end
#
of three hours they'll be like give us our money back and we'll be like what money so you know we
#
can talk about cricket some other time and writing of course we have spoken about in our window pane
#
session which will release in three days you've already spoken about what kind of drives you
#
the kind of long-form journalism you want to do the kind of issues you want to highlight
#
but you've also uh through this period of time through these 63 years seen a country that's
#
changed incredibly radically like what others will read about in the abstract you have experienced
#
in the concrete as it were at this present moment in time you know what gives you hope
#
and what gives you despair when you think about where our country is going what gives me hope is
#
the time that i spend with ordinary people who in those famous words live lives of quiet
#
desperation there is a there is an unwillingness or or or they just don't ever let go they don't
#
they don't lose that in a sense of it's not just that they keep struggling and they keep
#
you know surviving by the thinnest of margins it is that there is still a joy in them there is
#
still a glow in them there is there is happiness and and they they still are able to take pleasure
#
in the smallest of things uh share a laugh share a cup of tea uh they're not you look at what is
#
happening and you even wonder how they manage to keep their spirits high but they do and this this
#
is across the gamut right i mean i've sat and had a rec with the fishermen in a place called rdp
#
is called adi malathura and and we had a brilliant night they were telling stories and laughing and
#
the women folk joined in and the kids are sort of hovering around but the thing that most interested
#
me was the next day some of these fishermen went out fishing they came back the net was half empty
#
the total catch was sold for 150 bucks that had to be divided into seven shares and yet are we
#
meeting this evening was the first thing they asked when they saw me that gives me some kind
#
of hope that that the people haven't given up that the people still have the habit in them to
#
not just somehow survive but in their own fashion in our own fashion to to still smile against the
#
odds and to still survive and what gives me despair is that with this wealth uh this human
#
wealth that we have we are burdened by people who purport to govern us and i'm not talking
#
just at the central level i'm talking right across the country at every possible level the
#
the politicians the bureaucrats the the heads of institutions etc who do not realize this wealth
#
and who do not realize that tapping into it is a single uh biggest way to to sort of you know
#
lift everyone up that they are they are they're busy playing politics with no defined goal inside
#
i mean you have a party that continuously supports election results and takes power
#
i would understand that if having ones got power they have an agenda to do something
#
but that has been completely missing so on the one hand you have people who are surviving despite
#
the system and on the other hand you have a system that seems completely oblivious
#
and right there you you have both extremes of the spectrum right you have hope and you have despair
#
very moving words prem thank you so much for your wisdom it's a privilege to have you on the show
#
but more than that it's a joy to be able to have such a conversation with you and i hope we can do
#
this maybe once every six months just get together on the show and just gab about stuff uh so you know
#
thanks a lot for coming in all the best with your uh upcoming projects thanks omit i mean more than
#
coming on the show which i absolutely love doing uh i actually wish that we could go back to that
#
time when we used to hang around in each other's homes uh because i mean it's not just that it was
#
a bunch of friends hanging around right so many things would be talked about and and it was
#
enriching and i seriously miss that maybe one of these days you can think of expanding the podcast
#
into a sort of you know reunion thing with multiple people or whatever i don't know what
#
the answer is but yeah that's actually a good idea but but yeah man let this let this bloody
#
time get over and i'll come and i'll hang out in your home for so long that you'll have to kick me
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out see you have a guest room see you take care if you enjoyed listening to this episode do check
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out the show notes which has links to much of what we discussed my window pane session with prem
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where he talks much more about writing will be released later this week on youtube you can follow
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prem on twitter at prem panikar you can follow me at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse
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past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
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