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Arthur C. Clarke once said, quote, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
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magic, stop quote. If someone from say 1981 travelled all the way to 2021, this world
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would look magical. I suppose every generation feels that the world has changed so much in
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its time. But this is more true of our generation than any other. Technology has made the pace
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of change almost exponential over the last few decades. A friend of mine once remarked
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that kids today may never know what it is to be lost, physically lost. All hail GPS
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and the internet. When I was a kid, we would struggle to get hold of books and films and
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music that we wanted. Our life was a series of lost counterfactuals, things we did not
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discover because we were in a bubble, journeys we could not take or even conceive of. All
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that has changed so much. And here in the second half of my forties, I sometimes find
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myself taking this change for granted. What I would have found magical yesterday is commonplace
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everyday. And I think it makes sense to sometimes sit back and take stock. This is especially
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so in India where so much has changed and so much has also not changed. Some of the
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change is superficial, some of it is deep and fundamental. Our lives have changed, our
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society has changed, our politics has changed. And what better way to consider all of this
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than through the life of someone whose main preoccupation for more than 40 years has been
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to document and make sense of the present moment. There's a lot to learn from that
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen. My guest today is Veer Sanghvi, one of the giants of
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Indian journalism. He became an editor in his 20s around 40 years ago and shaped what
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I thought was a finest news magazine of my growing up years called Sunday. He would go
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on to be a pioneer in Indian television as well and he also edited the Hindustan Times
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for a few years and brought it kicking and screaming into the 21st century. He can write
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about food, politics and society with equal ease but in all these years his gaze has mostly
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gone outwards. Until now. Veer has just come out with a memoir called A Rude Life and I
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love reading it. I've admired his clear lucid prose since the early 1990s but the one thing
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that surprised me about this book is the humour. It's sharp, witty and self-reflective and
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I found myself laughing out loud throughout the book. But this book does much more than
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just make us laugh. It also gives us a sense of the times and is especially acute when
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it comes to understanding Indian politics. I loved having this conversation but before
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we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Know yourself. We're welcome to the scene and the unseen. Thank you. It's a pleasure
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to be here. So, you know, before we start talking about your book and about your life
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and your book is about your life. So in a sense, they're kind of the same thing. Tell
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me a little bit about how the last few months have been for you because you're someone who
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travels a lot, who likes to, you know, go out, meet people. Sometimes your work requires
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that in terms of your shows or your journalism, you go to a lot of restaurants as we know.
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So how have the last few months in COVID been for you? And, you know, are there things that
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they've made you kind of rethink and look at and so on? Yeah, you know, Amit, they've
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actually not been great for me. They've not been great, I think, for anyone. But like
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the first few months of COVID, which was what? March last year, we didn't do anything, my
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wife and I, we just stayed at home. And then when that first wave appeared to recede slightly,
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we said to ourselves that this is not good for your mental health to just be restricted
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to one home. We were too scared to meet people. So when we spoke to people, it was always
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Zoom or phone calls, FaceTime. And then we said we've got to learn to get out. By that
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stage, fortunately, hotels had opened again. So we picked hotels that were within driving
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distance of Delhi, and where I was pretty sure of the COVID protocols. And it's probably
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an unfair advantage, but because of the work I do, I can call up general managers and insist
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that I live in a bubble, that the people around me are people who've been tested or whatever.
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So we started traveling, we started doing, at the moment I'm in Jaipur, for instance,
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we started doing one weekend a month, just to give us a sense of what it was like being
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out of home. And it did huge things for our mental health, like I'm sitting here and I'm
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talking to you. I wrote, I've written an article today. So it's not as though what I do when
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I'm away is significantly different from what I would do when I was at home. But it's just
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the change of scene, I think, makes you feel less like a prisoner of circumstances. But
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we're still careful. I still try and do room service. I avoid crowded restaurants. If I
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am in public, I wear masks. So travel, I think I've done an article next Sunday about what
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you should do when you're traveling. I've also, when it comes to my social life, it's
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zero, I think. I've been in the last 20 months to two people's homes for dinner. Both are
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people who I knew had either had COVID recently and therefore were okay, or had been double
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vaccinated. And it was nice. It was, in a sense, reassuring you felt human again. But
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it's also, I mean, scary. I know people say that. I mean, I was double vaccinated many
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months ago. I was one of the first people to be double vaccinated because I have the
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advantage of being over 60. But even so, I think I continue to be terrified.
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Yeah, I mean, that's quite resonant. And this whole sort of theme of relooking at relationships
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and how we live our lives is something that's in your book. One thing that kind of struck
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me and resonated with me in your book was that it sort of bookended with your mother,
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in a sense. Obviously, it begins with your parents and then it ends with her death three
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years ago. And that resonated with me because one of the themes that you struck upon was
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how much she changed, where at the start of the book, she's an entirely different person.
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At the end, when you mention her, it changes. And I've seen a similar change with my own
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parents. You know, my mother died some 13, 14 years ago. And, you know, she had changed
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a lot for reasons that, you know, one can only sort of speculate upon. My dad had kind
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of changed in a different direction before he passed earlier this year, kind of mellowed
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and become a very different person. And this is a difference that one can sort of see from
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the outside. And so, I have two questions here. One is that, does one's understanding
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of how people changed and all of that, does it become clearer when you're remembering
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because your book, in a sense, is an act of remembering your life? Does it become clearer
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with that? Can you take that step back and look? Because at some point, you've also done
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that about yourself, where you have reflected on how after you came back from abroad, somebody
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told your mother that, oh, he used to be so arrogant, but now he's kind of chilled out.
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And then there are some lovely passages where you sort of reflect on your own possible transformation.
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So how does this act of memory sort of help you look at others in this way? And when you
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see the change that has happened to others, possibly because of biological reasons as
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well, it's not that someone overnight changes, you know, the chemical imbalance in your brain
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changes or whatever. People just change differently. I mean, I remember I wrote a column after
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Chris Connell, the musician committed suicide a couple of years back. And there was a sort
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of speculation that he had been on some medication which causes suicidal thoughts. So it's not
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as if he fundamentally changed as a person. It was sort of something beyond his control.
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Similarly, we hear stories of how some of these mass shooters in the US, I think the
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last big incident like that, they did an autopsy on the guy. And they realized that around
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the time he started getting violent, there was sort of a tumor in his brain, you know,
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which caused that sort of behavior. And that kind of made me think about how character
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is so contingent, that identity is contingent, that we think that I am this, this is my essence.
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But it's all contingent upon all these accidents of circumstance, not just outside, but inside.
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So you know, does that change the way you kind of look at yourself? Does this act of
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remembering enhance your self awareness in a sense?
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It's a very good question. It's also, I think, very accurate, because I'm not the kind of
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guy who looks back a lot. I tend to just move on. But when I sat down to write this book,
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I had by definition to look back. And I saw, I mean, most clearly, I think about myself,
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but also about my mother. She is at the start of the book, this very confident, Western
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educated woman in an era when hardly anyone was Western educated, who earns her own money,
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who is qualified, who arranges for my father, who didn't have that kind of money or any
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of her advantages to go off and marry her abroad, who then works in London, puts him
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through the bar. To contrast that woman with the woman I saw after my father died. It's
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like there were two completely different people. I think to some extent, it was tragedy that
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I did that to her. I think she couldn't cope with my father's death. I think in many ways,
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Indian women, particularly of that generation, were taught to treat their husbands as lord
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and master. And that even if you had a career or you had anything, once you were married,
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everything was second to what your husband wanted to what your husband did. And then
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when your husband was not there any longer, you sort of lost your way. I think that was
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one of the big problems that she faced. She'd also had in the sixties, a very serious bout
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of ill health during which she nearly died. And though people say she recovered, et cetera,
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I think when you're conscious of how fragile things are, you lose your confidence. So I
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think that made a lot of difference to her. And of course age, by the end, most of her
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friends that died, she was hanging on. She didn't really know what to do. She was dependent
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on me. She was at the mercy of anybody who wanted to pick on her. I mean, I say all this
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now with certainty, but until I sat down to write the book, you're absolutely right. It
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had never occurred to me that these were the changes in our life because to be widowed
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at 50 to never, as far as I know, have a boyfriend, a relationship again is not normal. It's strange.
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And yet women of her generation would not consider marrying again, but all the obvious
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things that people now would do. Certainly I would never have objected, but I think she
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herself was built in the way in which she thought this was it. I was in love with this
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man. I married him. And now that part of my life is over. I remember when we came back
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to a different New York after my father had died, she considered whether she should wear
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a bindi, whether she should wear jewelry, that the widows in her family before had worn
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white after that. And I was only 15, but it just struck me as such an offensive idea that
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she should have to do any of these things. So I said, no, you wear jewelry, you wear
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your colors. And despite that, I think for several years, five at least after my father's
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death, she refused to put a bindi on her head until I made an issue out of it. And I said,
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life, his life has ended. Your life has not ended. You shouldn't be like that. Now all
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of that makes a certain amount of sense when I sat down and had a lot of time during the
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lockdown to think about it. At the time, no, I don't think, I think when you live with
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people or they're close to you, you just see them change day by day without ever figuring
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out what it is that changed them. It's the same with me. You quote the example from that,
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what my principles are. Until my father died when I was 15, I had in many ways the last
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few years, certainly a fairly charmed life. In the last couple of years in school, I was
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doing very well. I had good academic results. I had all the usual stuff that people like
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me have, head of the debating team and editor of the school magazine, et cetera, et cetera.
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And I had this, what was then I suppose seen by outsiders as a fairly glamorous life in
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that we had a house in London. I went abroad for my summer holidays and it seemed almost
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too good to be true. And then my father died, we came back and there was this sickening
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realization that there wasn't going to be that much money. There was not going to be
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a house in London. I had no future mapped out for me. Whatever I had to do, I had to
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do on my own. That my mother was not going to be any help. That even if I was going to
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go and study abroad, which eventually I did, I had to find the school, the university myself
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and that I was really left to my own devices. So I think the contrast when you're at that
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age between leading this charmed life and thinking everything is set out and gold and
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you know what you will do and things will be all right, which sad to say is true many
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people now from young business families and political families, but it was certainly less
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true of most people then. I think that probably scared me inside. I mean, of course it changed
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me, but I think it changed me because it scared me. It made me conscious of how fragile everything
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is, how life can change. My father in April, 1971 was this glamorous, globe-trotting figure
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who thought he'd had a bit of jaundice. By July, 1971, he was dead. So I've always realized
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that nothing in life is permanent, that things change, that you never take anything for granted,
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that often it's circumstances beyond anybody's control. And I've also, I think, realized
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watching my mother that people change. Never make assumptions based on what somebody is
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like today. There is no guarantee that the person will be the same even a month later
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or two months later. And often then all of us must do this. You work with people and
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they change. You work for people. And I think it happens to nearly everybody. Initially
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there's a honeymoon period. They're wildly enthusiastic about you and you say, I've never
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had a better job. And then of course they move on and they find somebody else less enthusiastic
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about you. Many people are shocked by this and try and regain the attention or affections,
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for want of a better term, of their employers or their bosses. And I think I always realized
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that things would always change, that nothing was permanent. So in that sense that my mother
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and my father's death changed what I was in how I looked at people. Now I say this again
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so confidently in answer to your question, but it's something I only really understood
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when I sat down to write the book.
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So how did it precisely change the way you look at other people? Like did it make you
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more compassionate towards them?
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Yes, it made me much more compassionate, much more understanding of other people's problems.
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It made me less judgmental of people because people do one set of things when circumstances
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are good and they do a completely different set of things when circumstances are bad.
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And you've got to understand that when circumstances are bad, choices are taken out of people's
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hands. They have to do what they have to do. I mean, there's that first line in the great
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Gatsby, which is in my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice, which
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I have been turning over in my head ever since when judging other people. Remember, not everyone
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has been born with the advantages you have. And I was born with advantages, there's no
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getting around it. And I lost many of those advantages. So I was very conscious that other
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people either weren't born with those advantages or had lost those advantages. And to sit in
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judgment about them or to say things about them was wrong. So it changed me in that way.
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It also changed me, I think, in how I respond to people. Many people in social media will
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say that anybody says anything nice to me on Twitter says I enjoyed your column or whatever.
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I nearly always, as much as it's humanly possible, reply. If I have an email or a message sent
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to me, I try and reply within the hour. It's taught me that you can't take people for granted,
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that you should be grateful for every little bit of praise, every little bit of human contact.
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Even if you can't necessarily do what people want you to do, be polite, be decent. Because
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ultimately, you could well be in that situation, you could well be the supplicant asking somebody
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for something. Nothing in life is written, nothing in life is guaranteed. You can't change
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that. The only way you can change it is by A, not having expectations of people, B, by
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recognizing that there will be change, and C, in all your dealings with people, be as
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compassionate and as polite as possible.
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That's a profound insight. What strikes me is that you got it so young. I think I got
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it much, much later than you. I think many people don't get it at all. There is, of course,
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this philosophical debate about whether there is any free will or not. I think there's a
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very good case to be made that there isn't. But even if it were not the case that there
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is free will, we should still behave as if there is free will, of course, because you
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want to hold people accountable for their actions and so on.
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But by an extension of that, it often happens that we judge people for things that are essentially
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beyond their control. Even in our own case, when we succeed, we ascribe too much credit
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to ourselves. When we fail, we are too hard on ourselves, and we do a similar thing with
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others, whereas luck and fortune play such an incredibly big role, and especially on
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social media. Social media, of course, is the fountainhead of being judgmental, and
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we can kind of discuss that later. Another thing that intrigued me about your book is,
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at one point, you say that the years 67 to 71 were your happiest years when you were
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11 to 15, and 15, of course, is when your father died. So, I'm thinking about how you
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concluded, like, how does one define particular years as happiest years? Like, do you remember
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being happy in the moment then, or is the happiness in the remembering that those were
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good times, even though then you may not have been particularly aware of it? And the thing
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is that if you were to conclude that the happiness is in the remembering, then one could argue
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that you can remember the happiness of any particular period in time and sort of take
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pleasure in that, including the present moment, like elsewhere in the book. And this, I think,
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is towards the end, where you write about how you have learned to take happiness from
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small things, which is, again, a sort of a realization that I came to much later. Obviously,
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those years are something that you kind of look upon wistfully. So, tell me a little
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bit about this, about what were your notions of happiness earlier? Have they kind of changed?
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And how big a role do you think that our own act of remembering plays in them? Because
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if I remember a memory as happy, it becomes happy. If I remember the non-happy aspects
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of it, it doesn't seem so happy. Maybe the happiness I get is from remembering it, and
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at the time, I was just going through the motions.
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Yeah, no, no, I think it's a very valid question. I think, I mean, now that you've put it to
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me and I think about it, one reason I see them as being such happy years was those were
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really the last years I spent with my father. And therefore, memories of my father, memories
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of that closeness make it happy for me. These were also the years when my father, who had
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not always been successful, was very successful, had lots and lots of disposable income. And
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when you're what, 11 years old, 12 years old, what do you want? Do you want to go on a holiday
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to London? You want to go to Hamleys, buy toys, when you're slightly older to go to
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Carnaby Street, buy nice clothes. All of that happened. There were very few demands on me.
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I was a lonely child. I had the love of two doting parents. And then, of course, it collapses
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in 71. So it's entirely possible that while I was not probably the happiest during that
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period, because of what followed from 1971 and the unhappiness that followed, I have
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romanticized that period in my memory. And it seems like one gorgeous, glorious, sunlit
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period. And it wasn't really. I mean, the way you asked me that question has made me
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think about that. I certainly think of it always as being this happy period. But that's
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not tied up with any notion of happiness. It's tied up because I had all the things
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that I was to lose in 1972.
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Yeah. I mean, one of the themes that I keep coming back to, and which I kind of read about
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a few months back and it sort of blew me away, is the nature of memory, how our brain processes
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memory in the sense that when we remember an event for the first time, we are remembering
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the event. But every subsequent time, we remember the remembering. And it's like Chinese whispers
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in our brain and things can kind of gradually shift.
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Now, as you mentioned that you were born to great privilege, and some of that was stripped
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away. But regardless of that, a lot of that remained. And when I kind of look back on
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my own childhood, I mean, I was the son of a civil servant. We were relative to the rest
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of India, extremely well off, absolutely in the elite. And it took me many years into
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adulthood to realize how some really negative character traits of mine were kind of formed
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by this. Like I realized it from my father, who was very proud of reading, who had thousands
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of books. From him, I think I got a certain intellectual arrogance. From my mother, I got
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a certain social arrogance because of where we were. And it took me many years to kind
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of strip those away and sort of become my own person as it were. And obviously, we are
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being formed throughout our lives. But we can only sort of look back on the forming
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of the past and not whatever might be happening in the present.
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Now, you just mentioned and you've written about in your book about how perhaps at 15
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after your father died, it was a shock for you at various levels. You became more independent.
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You became more compassionate. You started taking things less for granted. But beyond
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that, can you kind of elaborate on how self-aware were you in your journey? In your book, of
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course, it is the act of writing down. It forces you to be self-aware. But how much
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of that self-awareness is there? Like when you look back on the younger Veer Sangh, you
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have same 20 years old, 25 years old, 30 years old. Do you see things that just make you
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go like, shit, I was like that, or I did that, or I thought like that? Tell me a little bit
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I'm trying to think. I think it's fair to say that people who grew up, as you and I
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did, in upper middle class households in India, who went to what we would now concede were
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elite institutions of learning, who were able to speak in our own language and speak in
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English with the same dexterity, were as much at home with Western reference points as we
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were with the way we were brought up, were hugely, hugely privileged during that period.
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And I don't think I saw it because the people I was around, I went to school at the boarding
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school. It wasn't like a fancy boarding school, like Dune School, where everybody was super
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privileged or whatever. Most of the people who were my friends were children of lieutenant
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colonels in the army. Now, lieutenant colonel is a senior position, but it's not like you're
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a general or whatever. So there was that sense, or joint secretaries, there was not that sense
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that you were this huge privileged person. So we thought of ourselves as just being middle
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When I went abroad and I went to England, I had the option, I guess, of choosing a school
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that was full of privilege. And there were options to go to Harrow or places like that.
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And I deliberately chose a school that gave me freedom rather than one that had a great
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reputation or one that was a privilege. So whether this was me consciously rejecting
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privilege or whether this was me saying I'm privileged anyhow, let me just go and have
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a good time, I'm not 100% sure about. When I came back to Bombay, and I worked first
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for Bombay magazine in India today, and later for Imprint, I became more conscious of the
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fact that even within South Bombay, we were in a bubble relative to the rest of Bombay.
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It didn't make that much sense to us to go to, say, Malar or someplace like that, because
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we lived in an environment where people knew each other. And India was in the 1970s, essentially,
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a relatively small country when it came to the upper middle classes. I knew then that
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there was something wrong with this. I knew also that Bombay wasn't India that I needed
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to get out, which is I've written in the book. It's possibly one reason why, though I've
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put it slightly damningly and said I didn't want to be a Bombay journalist all my life,
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but it's one reason why I went out and tried to do things. But the honest answer is I think
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that I started working for Sunday, and by then I was, what, 30 years old. I don't think
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I was so conscious enough of the advantages I had had, of the privilege I had had. As
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you say, I'd had heartbreak, I'd had loss. But even after that loss, I was still enormously
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conscious. And I don't think that it occurred to me till I was about 30, which is when I
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began to come to terms with it.
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Right. It's interesting that you should mention Doon School as a posh school, because I had
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Kanti Bachbhai on a couple of weeks back, and he had gone to Doon School. And he was
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saying, you know, people have the impression that-
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Isn't he principal of Doon School or something?
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He was headmaster of Doon School at one point.
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Sorry, they're called headmaster in those schools. Yeah, but our schools, we just call
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There you go. That alone shows you how posh Doon is. But his point was that Doon isn't
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posh. His point was that people have the impression all the Babalog go there, but the Babalog went
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to Delhi schools. Doon had all the people in smaller towns who did not have access to
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good schools there. But regardless, that's something we can't get into.
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That's the sort of unusual view of Doon that was for the middle classes of Bareilly and
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Raipur as the right school. Not a view I've heard before, but if the headmaster says that,
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If the headmaster says that, indeed. No, and another interesting theme that kind of keeps
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cropping up is something you just referred to, that in upper class India, everybody knew
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everybody else. Like I had Ram Guha on the show, and you know, when he was in college
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in the delis and 70s, he was telling me about his classmates, and they're basically the
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upper crust of India today. And similarly, Kanti mentioned, oh, Ram was junior to me
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in school. So it was that kind of a scene which has kind of, you know, changed drastically.
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How does that make you feel? I mean, the fact is that for about maybe 30, 40 years, for
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a long time, the elites were the same people, right? The people who had access to everything
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who ran the country, they were the same people. Now the rules of the game have changed in
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the sense that you can't even be sure that there are any elites because apart from the
#
power of the Indian state, other power is spread out in different ways. It's much more
#
diffused. Wealth is spread out in a different way. Influence is spread out in a different
#
way. Is this sort of something you've thought about? Is this something you've ever felt
#
kind of threatened by? Because you were a prominent person in the old elite. You've
#
been an editor in journalism since your 20s. And the world has suddenly changed, I think,
#
most drastically in the last 10 years. And there are a lot of it on social media where
#
you have possibly been exposed to a sort of rudeness and disrespectfulness that you wouldn't
#
have been otherwise. So just looking at these changing times, you know, how does one feel
#
about it? Well, I think there are many levels at which I can answer your question. The first
#
is business of elites and people who've been educated together and know each other is,
#
I think, to an extent true of most countries. I think England today, even now, is still
#
more Oxbridge dominated, more elite dominated, even when it's when you're talking only of
#
England. I think Scotland, Ireland, perhaps a different way. But England certainly, despite
#
all the egalitarian moves of the last few years, the current prime minister is an Etonian.
#
The man before him was also an Etonian. So there is that element in societies like England,
#
which in many ways influence us. But even if you go to America and you talk to people
#
at higher levels of government, higher levels of finance or banking, almost all of them
#
are Ivy League. So yes, there is that element of he was two years junior to me at Harvard.
#
Oh, I knew him at Yale or he was in my college at Cambridge or whatever. So yes, there is
#
that element of all elites. I accept that. The second element, though, this is hard to
#
believe because I don't think at Mayo we ever saw ourselves as the elite. We saw Doon as
#
the elite. And the logical progression from Doon was to go to St. Stephen's College. And
#
nearly all these chaps who will say he was at college with me, they won't call it St.
#
Stephen's, they'll say at college with me with a capital C are basically people from
#
St. Stephen's. I actually miss that part of it because after I finished at Mayo, I went
#
off to do school in England for two and a half years, which you had to in those days.
#
And at school in England, I was just another boy from India who was different and not anything
#
like the other people over there. So it knocked out any sense I'd had of being an elite. And
#
there was also another aspect to it, which is that by the time you finish in school in
#
India, if you're a monitor or a house captain or whatever, you feel you're a dada, you're
#
at the top of the system. But you go back. And I went back to school because I had to
#
do A-levels. In my first term in Mill Hill, which is a school I went to in London, I was
#
put in a dormitory along with 12 other boys. And all my friends then were in colleges,
#
places that allowed them a great deal of freedom. They were horrified by the idea that I was
#
still wearing school uniform, still sleeping in dormitories. So I think that knocked out
#
some of the elite pretensions that school in India may have had for me. And the thing
#
about Oxford, at least the kind of Oxford I knew, was in a way I was not a member of
#
the Bullingdon Club or any fancy dining society, is that if it was an elite, it was an academic
#
elite. You were very conscious that it was very, very difficult to get into Oxford. In
#
those days, you could get into an American university if you could pay for it. But in
#
England, they paid for everybody who went to university, whether it was Oxford or Cambridge.
#
And as I discovered to my delight, they also gave you a maintenance grant. So therefore,
#
it was really much more competitive perhaps than it is today. So I did have that sense,
#
and I will be honest about it, of a degree of intellectual superiority. But I did not
#
have that sense of being the Doon, Sun Stevens Network, which then went off and joined the
#
IAS, went off and joined some box waller company. So in that sense, I was, I suppose, a bit
#
of an outsider. Also, when I came back, the jobs I was offered, I was offered by Prem
#
Shekhar Jha, who was then at the Economic Times, to become an assistant editor there.
#
And he shifted to the Financial Express. He offered that to me. I was offered by Giriraj
#
Jain to become an assistant editor at the Times of India. These were establishment jobs.
#
The job I took, editing a glossy magazine, which many of my Oxford contemporaries thought
#
was a strange thing to do after having studied PPE for three years, also put me out of that
#
normal elite stream, because I was doing something I think that most people in the elite frankly
#
had contempt for, or looked down at me. So yes, I'm never denying that I was part of
#
the sense of privilege that I got where I had, at least in the early years, almost entirely
#
because of advantages of birth and of class, not necessarily because of intelligence or
#
IQ. But all I'm saying is that there is a classic Indian network. I was not part of
#
it. And even within Bombay, the people who were the elite in Bombay, it's very different
#
from Delhi, were the rich. And I was very clearly not part of the rich. I was not part
#
of the set that had lots of money and lots of disposable income. So I was a bit of an
#
outsider there. And journalism is good because it gives you access to every set without having
#
to be part of it, which was one of the reasons I like journalism. But in answer to your bigger
#
question, which is that India has expanded and the old middle class counts for less and
#
less, how do I cope with that? Well, I think I knew this was inevitable when the economic
#
reforms of 1991 came about. It was clear to me that there was going to be a new middle
#
class. It was also as clear to me that many of these people would be first generation
#
English speakers. And I think Manvansingh, who's the man responsible for liberalization,
#
also recognized that. And all of us, I think at some level welcomed it because we thought
#
this was a great thing that India would be much more egalitarian society. But I don't
#
think anybody expected the direction to take. I remember Prem Shankar Jha wrote in those
#
days a piece saying that with this growth, many, many people who have not been part of
#
the middle class will now be raised to wealth and will become part of the middle class.
#
They will not have been brought up on secular values or on the values that were considered
#
the right values for India. They were an odd vote for the BJP. And basically in the century
#
ahead, the BJP is the natural party of government. And I actually didn't agree with him. So maybe
#
he's right. Now, when you look around, because the new class that was raised to wealth, the
#
new middle class does not subscribe to any of those ideas that my generation were brought
#
upon. It believes, for instance, that if Pakistan was a Muslim country, why shouldn't Hindu
#
countries have run India? Why shouldn't it be a Hindu country? What is all this secular
#
nonsense except a way for a political class to get the Muslim vote and to cultivate vote
#
rights? I mean, you can argue and disagree with those views. But I think those are pretty
#
much the views of many new members of the middle class. What I didn't expect also is
#
how much hatred there would be of the old middle class, among the new middle class.
#
If you look at the abuse that is directed at the so-called Lachens elite, pronounced
#
in this case as Lutyens, the term Lutyens has become not really a reference to people
#
who live in Lachens' Delhi, because the people who live in Lachens' Delhi for the last seven
#
years are Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, and their paths, right? So it's no longer a reference
#
to the powerful people in India. It's essentially a reference to English speakers, to people
#
who speak in English, who went to, say, good colleges, good universities, and a sense that
#
you no longer matter where in charge, which is fine. I think every middle class is entitled
#
to some element of triumphalism. And fortunately for the new middle class, social media has
#
arrived to give them a much greater voice than they would otherwise have had. So I am
#
quite reconciled to them abusing me because I speak English or I'm part of some Lachens
#
class without ever having stayed in Lachens' Delhi. I'm quite happy to do that. But I also
#
feel, for better or for worse, that this is a phase that their children will not feel
#
the same way. This is a moment of transition. And this is a transitional generation, which
#
has a lot of bitterness and a lot of triumphalism. How their children will feel about Hindu-Muslim
#
issues, about secularism, I think we'll have to wait and see.
#
Wow. That's like a fascinating note of optimism there, because everything you said before
#
that is almost sort of a trope on my show. I've discussed it with various guests. You
#
know, Mr. Chah's words, if he wrote it at the time, are just remarkably prescient, because
#
one of the themes that I've explored in many episodes with many different guests is about
#
how the constitution was sort of a liberal document. I mean, it's not as liberal as
#
I would like, but nevertheless more liberal than our society, that it was a liberal document
#
imposed by liberal elites upon an illiberal society. As Ambedkar himself said, this is
#
basically a topsoil on our society. And there was some sense there that we'll put this topsoil
#
and we'll kind of change India from the top down. And obviously that failed. And my sense
#
has been for the last few years that Indian politics has caught up with Indian society.
#
What is the sort of polarizing politics that we see in place today is not something that
#
should really surprise us. And this blindsided me, because I think all through my childhood
#
and my young adulthood and all of that. My assumption was that most of us sort of are,
#
you know, like liberal, secular, all of those things. And I now realized that I was in a
#
bit of a bubble that I didn't realize to what extent I was in a bubble and to what extent
#
my thinking was shaped by Western notions of the enlightenment and all of that, which
#
most of the country simply doesn't share. Now, you would not have been in that bubble
#
per se, even if physically, geographically, you're in a bubble. You're a journalist,
#
you're writing about everything. You would have sort of figured this out much earlier,
#
like in your wonderful chapters about politics of the 1980s and all, which I'll ask you more
#
questions on as we go along in this episode. You've also spoken about the Hindu vote and
#
how Hindu resentment was growing and the different shapes that took during the 80s. So in a sense,
#
you did see it coming. You did realize that it was all there. So was there anything about
#
the whole process that blindsided you? And was there a period of time where you kind
#
of began to realize that the country was different from what one's original notions of it might
#
Yeah. I mean, to take your point about Dr. Ambedkar and the topsoil and that it would
#
go down and there would be a change. I actually think that worked. It worked from 47 to about
#
1994, 1995, largely that the old liberal class that had framed the constitution, even if
#
it didn't continue to rule India, because all kinds of people ruled India, but those
#
values, those constitutional values that set in place were transmitted down the line because
#
we were growing at a very slow rate and the rate at which we were transmitting them was
#
also slow. I believe that the break with the past comes with 1991 because suddenly there's
#
a huge spurt of growth. Suddenly there's much more affluence than India has ever seen. Many
#
families that didn't say have telephones, didn't have cars, didn't necessarily take
#
newspapers, let alone English newspapers. Suddenly the children come into the kind of
#
affluence they've not seen. The whole notion of a phone being a classifier or a dignifying
#
factor is over because everybody now has more than one mobile phone and then they can do
#
everything on it. The whole sense of a car, which meant something because many middle
#
class families consider themselves to be upper middle class when they got a car, that changed
#
because there was this big revolution and sort of just fiats and ambassadors. Every
#
kind of car was available in India, often at prices that were affordable to the newly
#
affluent. So when that happened, when this new middle class was created, partly because
#
the collapse of the old signifiers and partly because the huge rate of growth. I think the
#
attempt of people at the top to try and convey this to people died down. And I think many
#
people, the RSS for instance, if you look at the appointments that were made in the
#
what there was no HRD ministry then, but in various key officials and positions and ministries
#
from 77 to 79, many people were sympathetic to an RSS worldview gotten. And even during
#
the Vajpayee time, we forget this now because we sometimes romanticize the Vajpayee period.
#
The HRD minister was my friend, Murali Manohar Joshi, who's, I mean, I said this about him
#
to his face so I can say this again, that most politicians set out to make history.
#
He's the only chap I know who set out to rewrite history. I mean, his entire mission was not
#
to do anything of any note himself, but to rewrite what people had done before. And he
#
and Uma Bharti was briefly his minister of state, legitimized the writing of history
#
in a way that played down Muslim achievements, played up Hindu achievements. If you look
#
at this, it's now a very fashionable controversy in sanghi circles. If you look at the story
#
of the Indus Valley civilization, about which we really don't know very much, and we have
#
always wondered if those people were Hindus or they weren't Hindus. I mean, maybe they
#
were, maybe the statue of what looks like Shiva in his Pashupati pose, Israeli Shiva.
#
Maybe it's a precursor of Hinduism. We don't know. But it was during Dr. Joshi's time
#
that it became the stated policy of the sanghi elite to claim that the Indus Valley civilization
#
was a Hindu civilization. It was not an Indus Valley civilization, Dr. Joshi said repeatedly.
#
It was a Saraswati civilization created on the banks of the Saraswati River, which no
#
longer exists now. And it was built by Hindus. And I could never really understand it. And
#
I used to say to him, how does it matter whether they were Hindus, whether they had some pre-Hindu
#
religion, whether they were Dravidians, whether they were Aryans? And it was only much later
#
I realized what they were building up to. They were building up to saying that all Muslims
#
were invaders and therefore not true Indians. Now you had a problem because the Indus Valley
#
civilization from all accounts was a pre-Aryan civilization. So if you accepted that, then
#
you had to accept that the Aryans were the first people who came in, possibly through
#
invasion, otherwise through migration. He didn't say that at the time. But now when you see
#
the controversies and you see the manufactured stuff about DNA, et cetera, this is what they
#
were building at. And it was, I think, in a way done at such a basic level that people
#
like me who, as you say, blindsided, we didn't realize what they were doing. That's when
#
they began. That's when they started changing the whole idea of history. We think that their
#
motive is to erase memories of the Nehru's and the Gandhi's and to portray them as crooks
#
and all that, which I'm sure it is. But that is not their primary agenda. Their primary
#
agenda is to say that Hinduism is the oldest, greatest religion in the world. We were always
#
a Hindu nation. There was never a non-Hindu over here. Hinduism grew in India. And anybody
#
who came from outside, if it was a Muslim, he was an invader. If it was a Christian,
#
he was a toady of the East India Company or white people because why? Brown Sepoy is such
#
an insult and slugging circles. So they started at that stage with that kind of agenda. Not
#
all of us have got it. And that agenda now, because it's been taught in schools, the state
#
governments rewrote history books. Many of the teachers who joined and they were appointed
#
were RSS sympathizers, people like that. You have a whole generation that's been brought
#
up to believe that we were a vegetarian Hindu civilization from time immemorial. And then
#
these nasty Mughals arrived, killed our cows and turned us into non-vegetarians. And we
#
must always resist that influence. Oddly enough, the Delhi Sultanate and people who came before
#
the Mughals, I don't think they're aware of because they certainly don't mention them.
#
They believe that Muslim rule in India began with the Mughals. And it's frightening how
#
many people who you would think would be brighter than this actually buy into this vision of
#
India. And this vision of India is the vision of India they've picked up in the schools.
#
It's the vision of India they've picked up from their school teachers. And so when you
#
have a class that has not ever subscribed to the great secular liberal values that appeared
#
to be the foundation of the new India, and one that has been brought up on this RSS version
#
of Indian history, it's not difficult to see why secularism is in its death throes.
#
Number of ironies here. And one irony, of course, is that the real vision of the vision
#
of what India really was is far more glorious than this artificial sort of made up vision.
#
I mean, I think the most glorious part of what makes us Indian is that we take influences
#
from everywhere and make it our own. You know, this rich, delightful khichdi that we are
#
right down to the, you know, the elegant churidar kurtas of our prime minister, which of course
#
have an Islamic origin and practically all the food that we eat, you know, which is from
#
outside. And I've of course had an episode on food with Vikram doctor, you know, and
#
none of that would be new to you. I also had episodes with Tony Joseph and Peggy Mohan.
#
So you know, the Indus Valley thing and the campaign of slander and calamity has been
#
unleashed against Tony and people who dare to tell the truth there.
#
Yeah, because I think this is one way in which the Sangh were blindsided because their assumption
#
was this history is so old that you can make up whatever you want. And then it becomes
#
a battle between narratives. And suddenly there is science in the picture. Suddenly
#
you can act, you actually have irrefutable scientific evidence that, hey, you know, these
#
are the different times at which these migrations happened. And hey, the Indus Valley people
#
might well have spoken in early precursor to Tamil, which is by the way an older language
#
than Sanskrit. And all of this, I think would have blindsided those guys.
#
The other interesting thought that kind of comes up here is about the unintended effects
#
of liberalization, which is almost ironic because I of course, I'm a big champion of
#
liberalization and how it empowered millions of people and so on and so forth. But if the
#
thesis is true that our elite was liberal and our society was not, then what the empowerment
#
of the rest of society meant paradoxically is that becoming more liberal in, you know,
#
at an economic level allowed the illiberalism at a social level to sort of express itself.
#
And that kind of became what it became. Like there's a great book, the sociologist Timur
#
Curran wrote in 1999 called Public Lies, Private Truths, where he coined this phrase
#
called preference falsification. And his thing was that most people do something called preference
#
falsification where if they feel something that is apparently not acceptable in society,
#
they won't say it. His example was you look at the downfall of the Soviet Union where
#
it appeared to happen overnight. But for decades, many people held a resentment against a state
#
which they were afraid to express because they thought they'd get into trouble. That
#
was preference falsification. But you reach a critical mass where you realize that, hey,
#
many more people are like you. And that leads to a preference cascade and overnight things
#
change. And I think in a sense, social media especially exacerbated that as many people
#
who felt a particular way and not to get judgmental. I mean, of course, I disagree with a lot of
#
what comes out of there, but not to be judgmental about that. But they felt X. They thought,
#
oh, you know, this is a liberal, secular country. We are not supposed to feel X. And they realize,
#
hey, everybody feels X. And it kind of just explodes from there. So just a whole bunch
#
of ironies. Before we go on to talking about politics and society.
#
Let me just add one more thing. When we talk about these people who say Muslims are invaders
#
and Savarkar was God descended to earth, et cetera, we use terms like liberal and conservative
#
or left wing or right wing. And when you actually look at the issues on which there is a difference,
#
the way in which you define a person who's not a liberal in India, and the way you define
#
a person who's allegedly right wing in India is not economic. Mr. Modi's governance is
#
much more left wing than, say, Manmohan Singh's was. So it's not. So what is it? Ultimately,
#
this whole distinction comes down to just one issue. How you look at Muslims. If you
#
take away the Hindu Muslim distinction, what is the right wing left with? There is nothing.
#
It's essentially this ideology, the Indian right wing. The ideology is based on nothing
#
more than the sense of othering the Muslim. And as part of the process of othering the
#
Muslim, creating a great Hindu nation in its mind. Now, the irony is that there is a great,
#
great Hindu heritage in India, just as there is a great Muslim heritage in India. But the
#
great Hindu heritage that really happened, that really existed, doesn't seem to worry
#
them at all. They don't even seem aware of it. They feel it necessary to create a bogus
#
Hindu heritage in which Ganeshji was made what he is by plastic surgery, in which Rishi
#
Munis went around on airplanes, in which there was Ram Rajya all over. It's not even history.
#
It's mythology. And if you take away that mythological heritage and their hatred of
#
Muslims, there really isn't an ideological plank at all. Whereas if you look at, say,
#
the liberal positions, the values, the beliefs and freedom of expression, freedom of speech,
#
freedom of religion, there is no counterpart on the other side. It's only about hating
#
Muslims, which is what's worrying.
#
Yeah, no, absolutely. As Arun Shourie famously said, in fact, NDA is equal to UPA plus cow.
#
So I agree, it does come down to that. And it's ironic that Modi should fulminate so
#
much against Nehru and Indira because he has totally adopted Nehru's top-down status thinking
#
right down to import substitution becoming made in India and Atma Nirbhar and whatever.
#
He's totally been inspired by Indira Gandhi's authoritarianism and her ways. One feels that
#
sometimes he almost envies the kind of power that she had and so on and so forth.
#
I sometimes feel that if Sanjay Gandhi had lived, he would have been like Narendra Modi
#
yesterday. He's pretty much in continuation of that strand. He's not in continuation of
#
the Vajpayee Advani strand at all.
#
Yeah, absolutely. And it's ironic that every time Sanjay Gandhi's birth anniversary or
#
death anniversary comes up, the Congress will tweet out, you know, celebratory tweets of
#
what a great man he was. And I'm like, this is another rewriting of history happening.
#
I mean, he was a monster. And this leads me to then therefore to another thought, which
#
is that, you know, the German political theorist Karl Schmitt had once spoken about how in
#
politics to be successful, you need an enemy, you need an other, right? Which, as you pointed
#
out, you know, Shourie said NDA is equal to UPA plus cow. He made cow the symbol of that.
#
You're saying it's hate to the Muslims, which it absolutely is. I did an episode with Akshay
#
Mukul on his great book, Bada Geeta Press, which kind of spoke about how all of these
#
themes, cow slaughter, love jihad, they've been around for decades and part of politics.
#
Now, if you look at Indian politics, it would seem that till the BJP came up, perhaps not,
#
because who was really the other. But on the other hand, I think an argument could be made
#
and I'm thinking aloud again, that what really happened at independence was you had one big
#
party, there was a congress, and you had, in a sense, decades of inertia, minor little
#
tactical skirmishes here and there. But what's this kind of politics in your view always
#
inevitable, because, you know, you rise in politics, you get the vote out. So to say,
#
you mobilize your bases by whipping up hatred against the other is much easier to do it
#
that way than to talk vaguely about abstract notions of hope and togetherness. In that
#
sense, would you say that politics like this was always sort of inevitable or is that falling
#
prey to the hindsight bias? Are there different paths that could have been taken?
#
No, look, it'll be foolish to deny that there were always Hindu-Muslim tensions. If there
#
were no such tensions, there would be no Pakistan today, there would be no partition. But equally
#
once we got on with the task of creating India after 1947, tensions between Hindus and Muslims,
#
the proportion of Muslims who felt strongly that there were illities in India, the proportion
#
of Hindus who felt that no business being there, was relatively small. If you look at
#
the history of the RSS, which dominated this kind of thinking, it really wasn't a significant
#
factor in Indian political life. The first time the RSS begins to matter is around 75,
#
76, maybe 74, when Jayaprakash Narayan ignores the advice of all his colleagues and says
#
the RSS are wonderful chaps and we must use them in the fight against Indira Gandhi. And
#
from then on, there's been no looking back for the RSS. The Jansung stroke, which became
#
the BJP, on the other hand, has never had it that good. In the 1984-85 election when
#
Rajiv Gandhi won that huge slide, Charan Singh got three seats. The BJP Jansung, it was then,
#
though they called themselves the old Janata Party, effectively they were the Jansung.
#
They got just two seats. So as recently as that, there was no evidence that they existed.
#
Now there are two theories for how they took off. And both, I think, have some element
#
of truth. One is that Advani was able to pick up on the resentment amongst Hindus and that
#
resentment was exacerbated by what they saw as a lack of growth. There were other resentments
#
which were all mobilized under the Hindu umbrella. I have a slightly, which I mean, it's true,
#
there's no doubt about it. I have a slightly different theory, which is not, I think, contradictory
#
to this one, which is that the Hindu vote actually comes about in India in the early
#
1980s when the Sikh agitation starts. Until that point, there'd always been Hindu-Muslim
#
tensions. But most Hindus had always regarded Sikhs as being brothers, as being almost Hindus
#
in the way that Hindus regard Jans as being almost Hindus. When that turned violent, when
#
the Sikhs turned against Hindus, and though we airbrushed this out of history, there were
#
massacres of Hindus. They would stop buses and segregate the Hindu and Sikh passengers
#
and kill the Hindus. Many important Hindu newspaper owners, leaders, politicians were
#
killed. I think that led to a certain amount of anger within the Hindus of India. And if
#
you look at the way in which we reacted to Blue Star, which I opposed at the time, there
#
was so much triumphalism that now we would call Hindu triumphalism. There was a sense
#
of we've taught these guys a lesson. It got increased after Mrs Gandhi's assassination.
#
I do not for a moment dispute that the Delhi riots were led and organized by Congress leaders.
#
But the people who took part and the people who supported it weren't all congressmen.
#
They were also ordinary Hindus who seem to think, as people do in communal riots, that
#
this was not such a bad thing. I think that Hindu backlash, that Hindu vote contributed
#
to Rajiv Gandhi's huge, huge election victory in 84, 85. Nobody had had that. And he could
#
not have done it, I don't think, if the Hindus had not voted for him. People forget this,
#
but in 84, 85, the RSS backed Rajiv Gandhi. Nobody from the RSS went out to campaign for
#
BJP candidates. The BJP did very badly. Atal Bihari Vajpayee lost his own seat. So there
#
was that opportunity from 85 to 89 for the Congress to decide what it wanted to do with
#
the Hindu vote. If you spoke to people like Arun Nehru at that stage, they believed that
#
they could harness the Hindu vote and use it for constructive purposes. I mean, you
#
can say this is an oxymoron, but this was genuinely Arun Nehru's view. It wasn't the
#
BJP that opened the locks of the Babri Masjid. It was the Congress government. It was, from
#
all accounts, Arun Nehru who then looked after UP, who gave those instructions. Arun Nehru
#
wanted then for the Congress to become the party of the Hindus. Not in a bad way, he
#
says, not he said, not in a way that meant you attacked Muslims or whatever. Rajiv Gandhi
#
did not agree with that or wasn't even happy with that. If you look at the things Rajiv
#
Gandhi did, Shah Bhanu, the ban of the satanic verses, those were maybe Shah Bhanu slightly
#
more significant, but satanic verses was a book that now the Hindus were outraged about
#
it and now the Muslims are outraged about it, was ever going to read. But it was symbolism.
#
It was impossible after the way Rajiv Gandhi had behaved on those issues for any Hindu
#
to suggest that the Congress was a Hindu party. By this day, even Arun Nehru had been thrown
#
out. So Rajiv turned his back on the Hindu vote. Where was it going to go? And I think
#
Mr. Advani saw it, saw the opportunity and then capitalized on it, weaponized the whole
#
Ayodhya agitation and began the BJP's rise to fame. Even then, during the Narasimha Rao
#
period, there were elections, state elections held after the demolition of the Babri Masjid
#
and the BJP was defeated in all of them. So it was still a kind of thing that could have
#
gone either way. But as the Congress became more and more aggressively secular, as more
#
and more people joined the middle class, as there was much more money with newly enriched
#
Hindus, I think that Hindu wave grew.
#
Yeah. And that narrative in your book about the 84 election onwards was quite fascinating.
#
And as you pointed out, most people don't realize that, you know, when the BJP was formed,
#
Vajpayee gave these vague talks of, you know, Gandhian socialism, quote unquote, and all
#
of that. And they kind of moved away from that stand. I did an episode with Vinay Sitapati
#
recently who wrote the book on the BJP before Modi. And his thesis, which you add a lot
#
of nuance to and even contradicted points, his thesis was that, look, you know, it was
#
a Congress which went after the Hindu vote in the 80s, and the BJP realized they have
#
to compete and then they went after it also. And they had to go to an extreme because that
#
was the only way they could get ahead of the Congress. And the nuance you've added is...
#
The nuance you've added is that at the level of individuals, that's not quite true. That
#
Rajiv Gandhi actually stopped quoting the Hindu wave. You pointed out he didn't even
#
realize that the 84 win could have had the Hindu wave as a contributing factor. And he
#
seemed to believe, and I presume there were others in the think tank at the time who believed
#
that, listen, it is safer to go for the 11% Muslim vote or whatever that percentage was
#
because they will vote as a block and the Hindu vote will always be splintered across
#
the caste line, which I kind of found interesting just breaking up, you know, the different
#
factions within the Congress that Arun Nehru believed this, Rajiv believed this and so
#
on. But sorry, you were saying?
#
I was saying that I think the point Vinay makes in his book is that we make this big
#
contrast between Advani and Vajpayee. But the truth is no secular person in that era
#
would have joined the RSS, right? Literally it's not in the traditional definition of
#
secular. So yes, Mr. Vajpayee also grew up from that background. The difference ultimately
#
between him and the average BJP person was he wanted to have his cake and eat it too.
#
He wanted the Hindu vote to get him into power. But once he was in power, he wanted to be
#
Jawaharlal Nehru and he wanted to be much more statesman like. And I think that was
#
the inherent tension in the Vajpayee leadership between Vajpayee, Advani and it was not a
#
sustainable situation and it collapsed. And you had, I mean, BJP is actually quite big
#
on Nehru Gandhi idols. After Vajpayee's Nehru act failed, you had Mr. Modi with his Indira
#
Gandhi act and so far it's working.
#
No, that's a very nice way of putting it that when he came to power, he wanted to be Nehru
#
and actually Vajpayee I think was an outstanding Prime Minister. I mean, one can quibble about
#
small things, but on the whole, he was so different from what we have now. And so my
#
next question is this, that it is rational at that stage once, you know, Rajiv turns
#
away from it and Arun Nehru eventually, like you mentioned, ended up joining the BJP and
#
then going back to the Congress and long story. But it's rational at that point for Advani
#
and Vajpayee to quote the Hindu vote and go to whatever extremes that they were going.
#
But were they riding a line that they could not control? Like you point out and Vinay
#
also points out in his book that after the Babri Masjid was demolished, Advani himself
#
claimed to be blindsided by it. He broke out in tears. It wasn't what he intended. And
#
one of the shifts that we see in Jansangh slash BJP, that whole thing is that each leader
#
is kind of more extreme than the previous guy that Advani seems more hardline than Vajpayee,
#
then Modi comes, maybe Adityanath is next. And I have actually entered a lot of these
#
right-wing rabbit holes in a sort of fascination these days, where you have people not only
#
saying that Modi has let the Hindus down, but Adityanath is too moderate, you know,
#
and it seems to be getting more and more extreme. And you would imagine that in these times,
#
for someone to rise within a party like that, you can't rise by being a moderate. You rise
#
by being an extremist and holding everyone to purism tests and all of that. And therefore
#
a party will naturally get more and more extreme till the point that it splinters. So what
#
do you think of this thesis?
#
No, I actually agree completely with you. I think when you go down this path towards
#
what is a slightly loaded terms, but communalism, intolerance, et cetera, it's a slippery slope
#
because how much intolerance is enough. If you can say that we should do this to Muslims
#
and the next guy will come along and say, no, no, why don't we go further? It's a little
#
bit like being an alcoholic or a junkie. In the beginning, a couple of drinks is enough,
#
but as time goes on, you need the whole bottle and then the whole case. So I think that is
#
the danger with the BJP. And in many ways, oddly enough, as bizarre as this sounds, the
#
hope for Indian inclusiveness, because the more extreme it gets, it will begin to turn
#
people off. And as you say, it will splinter. I think a leader like Mr. Modi, who has the
#
ability to control the whole party, to tell the RSS where to get off, is what, once in
#
a century leader? Advani or Vajpayee couldn't tell the RSS where to get off. Mr. Modi has
#
that kind of power, that kind of charisma. You can argue about how he acquired it, how
#
much is manufactured, but let's not dispute that he has. But once that goes and once people
#
start saying, he's let the Hindus down. He's not gone far enough. Yogi ji is much better
#
or saying that Yogi ji is now being captured by power. He's forgotten his roots, which
#
is beginning to happen. I don't see how the BJP can survive as a coherent force.
#
Yeah, I'm reminded of this and this doesn't seem apropos, but I'm just reminded of something
#
that a journalist friend of mine, Rishi Majumdar once told me, where he was once lynched and
#
lynched by the way, doesn't mean a crowd kills you. The crowd beats you up basically.
#
So he was once lynched and he explained to me the anatomy of how lynchings absolutely
#
occur. And after that, I kind of read up on this and realized that there's a common pattern
#
to it, which is that it's not as if somebody goes up to you and they start beating you
#
immediately and everybody just comes and starts beating you. There are two dynamics at play
#
here. One is that typically what happens is that a bunch of people will come and talk
#
to you and there'll be an argument and blah, blah, and you'll be fighting with a bunch
#
of people, arguing with a bunch of people. And then somebody who isn't part of that argument
#
will just decide to take it into his own hands, come from outside, give you one back and then
#
others join in. And then there is this phenomenon where everybody has a threshold for joining
#
in the violence. There are people who if they see one other person hit you will get emboldened
#
and hit you. There are others who will hold out till 10 people do that or 20 people do
#
that or 100 people do that. But at some point, everybody in the crowd is kind of paying for
#
blood, which, you know, metaphorically does sound like the way a lot of things.
#
That's actually a very, very good parallel. That's exactly right. Yeah.
#
Yeah. So let's, let's kind of take a quick commercial break. And on the other side of
#
the break, there's lots to talk about.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it? Well, I'd love
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Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
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a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills. I'd like to help you.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with Veer Sanghvi about his exciting
#
life, which somehow, you know, the title of your book, A Rude Life is really not appropriate
#
because you know, what you define as rudeness is really asking provocative questions once
#
in a while to important people and rudeness has taken on just an entirely new dimension
#
in the modern age. But leaving that aside, you know, we were chatting about politics
#
before the break and I'll come back to politics later, but I kind of want to go back now to
#
your personal journey. How important were books and reading to you? I remember reading
#
you from the 1990s. I can't recall what your writing was like then, but I really enjoyed
#
Sunday. I thought they had the best political coverage and so on. And I always enjoyed your
#
writing in the sense that you always had this clear, lucid style without any sense of, you
#
know, the pros being labored or a lot of the problems that you typically would find with
#
Indian journalism. So, you know, I know your dad was a writer. He wrote articles and columns
#
and a bunch of books. So, what kind of stuff did you read back in the day and did you have
#
aspirations of being a writer? What was your perception of yourself when you were a kid?
#
Well, I used to read a lot. I think mainly because my family used to read a lot. I didn't,
#
I mean, I never really got to the stage where I read lots and lots of literary books. It
#
was Agatha Christie and Perry Mason and spy thrillers and stuff like that, which I enjoyed,
#
John Le Carre and stuff like that. But I think a stage came, a phase came when I stopped
#
reading that much fiction. Most of my, I still read a hell of a lot, but most of my reading
#
now is non-fiction. And my wife who reads lots and lots of fiction always says that
#
people who read fiction generally have bigger imaginations. They have a bigger sense of
#
what people are like, a more creative worldview. Fortunately, I don't have that. I enjoy reading
#
non-fiction. I read biographies. I read lots of political books. I enjoy learning things
#
and pretty much everything I do from food to whatever I've learned from books. So books
#
have in a sense made me what I am, though they're not necessarily great classic novels
#
or whatever, just biographies, accounts of what has happened. That's the kind of stuff
#
And that kind of gets me to thinking because obviously, you know, Agatha Christie, Perry
#
Mason, I'm in my late forties, so maybe about a decade and a half younger than you. And
#
I've had other guests on the show of a similar age or older than me. And we'll all talk about
#
kind of the same kind of books because in India you had a restricted supply of books
#
that you can get. So it's all your Enid Blyton's and Hardy Boys to begin with. You read a lot
#
of Woodhouse. You even listen to the same bands as you go through college and it's all
#
restricted. And obviously, it's a bad thing that is restricted and one celebrates everything
#
that is available today. But what that also does is that I have this sense that there
#
are common reference points that I can have with someone, say, a couple of decades older
#
than me or a decade younger than me. But today, those reference points have vanished. Whereas
#
you had people who were born in maybe four decades reading the same people, listening
#
to the same stuff, having the same kind of cultural checkpoints. That's no longer the
#
case. Is that something you feel? And is there a disconnect there between our generation
#
and the generation today? Not just in the sense of a standard disconnect between every
#
generation, but particularly so. Like, you know, one of the guests who had appeared on
#
a podcast I produced, Brave New World, had mentioned how it's a bit of an illusion that
#
people will know history better or will have a wider set of references because everything
#
is available for free on the internet. He pointed out that study showed that most people
#
are actually consuming what was produced in the last three days, whether it's on YouTube
#
or podcasts or whatever. So is that something that you notice? Because you are actually
#
a media person yourself in that sense. And the way people consume media, discover media,
#
filter media, it's just changed completely. Yeah, I think also, first of all, people don't
#
read books in the way they're supposed to. Publishers will tell you that book sales are
#
up and it's one thing that survived the collapse of media. It may well be true in terms of
#
figures, but I find fewer and fewer people seem to read books. And you're right, there
#
are no reference points. The good thing for me about the internet is the mountain of information
#
and background it provides. If you want to find out about something, you go on the internet,
#
you find articles from six years ago, seven years ago, you learn, you read. But that unfortunately,
#
as you say, is not how people are consuming the internet. People see the internet as being
#
a guide to the here and now. And therefore, the more topical it seems, the more sensational
#
it seems, the more fun it seems, the more likely they are to go on the net. When it
#
comes to nonfiction, which is the kind of stuff I read, I find that younger people are
#
much less interested in nonfiction books, unless it can be shown that it will help them.
#
So if somebody does a book on learning from startup geniuses on how to become a millionaire,
#
22 young people read it, they won't learn anything, they won't become startup geniuses,
#
but they will feel that it is something that's actually going to help them. The sense, and
#
it's ironic, we've never had so much information available for free for so many people. The
#
sense that learning is worth it for its own sake, I find is disappearing.
#
Yeah, and I'll just produce a counterpoint to that, because having kind of presented
#
the negative view, the positive view is something that I discovered to my surprise, like, you
#
know, I had the publisher, VK Karthika on my show a year and a half back, and she spoke
#
about how book sales are, you know, exactly what you said, they're doing fine. And my
#
sense there is that there has always been a small group of people in every generation
#
who read and that group will continue being whatever percentage it is. So your book sales
#
will stay what they are. The question is, what are the others doing? But you know, when
#
I started this podcast, I had the impression that people have short attention spans, they
#
don't want depth, you got to be topical, you got to keep episodes through 20 minutes, I
#
even had a nine minute episode. With time, I realized that I was completely wrong about
#
that. And part of that is, of course, the nature of the medium that people listen to
#
podcasts when they're a captive audience, like when they're commuting or working out
#
or doing errands, they listen to it at higher speeds, usually double speed or more, you
#
know, good taking it one step up at a time and getting used to it. So captive audience
#
listening faster. But most importantly, the third point why this longer length really
#
kind of became popular is that people crave depth, that, you know, we seem to, I think,
#
judge social media. And I know, I certainly made this mistake, that you see vocal minorities
#
out there who are getting shriller and shriller, and you assume that everyone is like that.
#
And there's so much shallowness and all of that. But there is a silent majority out there,
#
which one is not part of those polarized discourse, which might watch it with amusement, but not
#
participant, which is not participate, which is why silent majority. But there is a craving
#
for knowledge. And part of the craving for knowledge is because the rest of the media
#
has actually abdicated. Because, you know, whether you're looking at television or newspapers
#
or whatever, they are, as a friend of mine, Prem Panikar puts it, they are a mile wide
#
and an inch deep. And part of that is, of course, economic imperatives, that if you've
#
paid a huge license fee to buy an FM station or a news channel or whatever, the costs are
#
so high, you have no option but to cater to the lowest common denominator. So someone
#
who actually comes out and provides deep content, that there is a hunger for it, which struck
#
me. And one of the memes that happens on my show is that I have exhaustive show notes
#
where I recommend books and my guests recommend books, more importantly. And there is this
#
meme of seen on the unseen bookshelves where people will post pictures on Twitter of books
#
they've bought, you know, having discovered them from my show. So there is this irony
#
that there is this hunger. There is this content out there. How do you discover and filter
#
this content? And my show kind of filled a fortuitous kind of gap. But I think that there
#
is something there that media has missed, that the way that we consume and discover
#
and filter information and knowledge has changed completely. And a traditional media hasn't
#
kind of kept up with it. So a bit of a ramble on my side. But what are your thoughts?
#
No, it's actually a fascinating ramble. I know your show is very, very successful because
#
people quote it all the time. But like how many people listen to say the average episode?
#
You know, in a good month, I'll have a total downloads of 180,000. So now 180,000 is more
#
than any magazine or newspaper or anybody in India is able to manage. Let me elaborate
#
on that if I might interrupt because someone who might hear that figure might say that
#
hey YouTube videos 2 million, 3 million. No, that's very different. Yeah, it's very different
#
because on YouTube, your average viewing time of a video, maybe 15 seconds, 20 seconds,
#
whatever. You know, my average session is 40 minutes. And this is something it's not
#
just my podcast. Other great long form podcasters have also discovered that the level of engagement
#
is far greater. And when I say the average session is 40 minutes, people will listen
#
to an episode in multiple sessions and all of that. The level of engagement is far greater.
#
And that translates to a much deeper sort of involvement, not just with the podcaster
#
with whom you'll often feel this intimate connection because you have their voice in
#
your head all the time, but also, you know, all the rabbit holes you enter because of
#
No, I think maybe you've got me thinking. I think maybe you're right. Maybe I'm falling
#
into the trap of looking at YouTube and Twitter and taking this superficial view of the loudest
#
parts of social media and that there is something going on there, like say your podcast, other
#
long form podcasts, which show that it's wrong to just look at the loudest voice in the room,
#
look at the voice that people remember. So yeah, you're absolutely right. I will rethink
#
Yeah, let's let's and we'll come to the media because I'd love your insights on many other
#
aspects of it. But before that, let's continue your personal journey, which we keep getting
#
sidetracked from because I keep digressing. A really fascinating part of your book is
#
that after your dad died, you actually put yourself in school in the sense you went through
#
the application process, you found yourself a school, you then found yourself college
#
going to Oxford and everything. Tell me sort of about how that period was like. Like at
#
that point, what is your conception of yourself? When you put yourself through that grind,
#
through that education, you go to Oxford, you do a PPE. And you earlier pointed out
#
that, you know, a lot of British prime ministers are still elites. And there is this traditional
#
cliche about how all British prime ministers have done the PPE. I think Johnson also must
#
have done the PPE. So perhaps you knew many prominent politicians personally. But at that
#
point in time, when you're putting yourself through that, you obviously you're not, you
#
know, a lot of what happens to you later seems to be serendipity. So what is your conception
#
of yourself at that point? What is it that you want to be and where do you want to go?
#
Well, you know, my father had always said that I should go to a British university.
#
And I think it may be because he went to Elfinsons College in Bombay, and he was very keen that
#
his son would have some of the advantages he didn't have. So it had been taken for
#
granted that I would go abroad to study, that I would go to an English university. What
#
none of us realized, I don't think he realized it either, was that you couldn't go, I couldn't
#
finish at Mayo and then go to university. When all my friends went to colleges in India,
#
you had to go into two years of school first, and do what I don't know if it's still the
#
same, were called A levels. And that was complicated, because I had to do this in a boarding school.
#
And I didn't know how to organize it. So I went out and bought, and there was nobody
#
else to do it for me. So I went out and bought this book called The Public Schools Handbook,
#
which I don't know if they still publish, probably on the net now. And I made a list
#
of schools that were near London, because I didn't want to go to a very conservative
#
school, because all my friends were in college anyway. So I found this one which was 20 minutes
#
on the tube from the center of London, and it was large and seemed quite cool. So I wrote
#
off to it as I had written off to many other schools. And then I finally called and they
#
were very sniffy. And they said people have registered for so many years and your term
#
begins in October, we're already in April. And it's just my good luck, I think at this
#
right place, right time. Good luck. I found a principal who was willing to listen to me.
#
He said, come and see me. He came and I went and saw him. He had me interviewed by the
#
head of his history department and the head of his English department. English department
#
was fine. The history department, I thought of a little bit of jugard. I said, I've only
#
studied Indian history. So he had to ask me questions about Indian history, which he was
#
not good at. So I could have said anything. I could have said Akbar was Baba's father
#
and I would have got away with it. But they agreed to admit me on the spot, which I thought
#
was really, really cool. It doesn't happen even in India. It was just the principal there
#
was willing to take a chance on somebody from outside. And it's probably because I went
#
to that school that I got a sense of being able to fit into England without ever fitting
#
in in the sense that it wasn't Eton or it wasn't Harrow. Harrow is one of the other options
#
because it was near London. Eton was Windsor, which is not far from London. So those were
#
options. But somehow I didn't actually want to go to Eton and wear a tailcoat and a mortar
#
board and a white bow tie. And I didn't want to go to Harrow and be part of some glorious
#
English tradition, which I have nothing in common with. So this suited my purposes. It
#
was a school that was liberal, that was happy to have me, that was near enough London. And
#
I had a great time. And I think I learned. I mean, I dare I say this. I learned more
#
at that school than I learned at Oxford. In Oxford, because the system then was that you
#
had tutorials in which you wrote an article or an essay and your tutor disagreed with
#
you or agreed with you and made you defend that essay. I think I learned how to write
#
oddly enough and I learned how to argue. PP, which you mentioned with all politicians do
#
is less a degree than a flag of convenience for people who want to do other things while
#
they are at Oxford. So I was not overly academic at Oxford. I did economics, I did all kinds
#
of politics, most of which I don't remember. But what I do remember is the arguments with
#
tutors, the way in which you take apart somebody's argument, the way in which you construct an
#
argument. And you are you asking about how I write and whether I've always written like
#
that. I think I write like that because of the training of those years. Though I was
#
doing academic essays, I was taught and I think I say this to everybody. When you write,
#
it isn't how you write. It isn't the big words or the complicated constructions. It is the
#
ideas. Ultimately, all articles or all essays are vehicles for ideas. So unless you have
#
at least one idea in your thing and you are able to get it across, there's no point writing
#
an article. I mean, unfortunately, many of us try and make things that are clever or
#
that are funny or that are witty. Just try to simply get the idea across and you're done.
#
There's a fascinating part of your book where you're interviewing for a college in Oxford
#
and you point out how your interviewer asks you. So would you say you were a Keynesian
#
or a monetarist, Mr. Sanghvi? And your reply is my teachers are Keynesians. I have no strong
#
views on the subject. I am hoping to make up my own mind once I get here and discuss
#
it with economists like you. On the one hand, it's obviously a very, you know, a practical
#
and jugaru answer where you're not pushed into a corner, but also, you know, it indicates
#
a bent of mind where you're careful at arriving at worldviews. So what was your journey towards
#
forming a worldview? Because I think what often happens in one's teenage years is that
#
you are entranced by the seductive appeal of simple ideas which seem to explain everything
#
and simple ideas can explain everything in a wrong way also, you know, and the world
#
is much more complex than that. And it is over a period of time that you start figuring
#
that out. So what was your process like of arriving at worldviews? Did you change your
#
mind? Were there significant ways in which you changed your mind? And also, this also
#
strikes me as important because all this is your schooling, your college is happening
#
through the 70s at a time where, you know, India is going deeper and deeper into a form
#
of statism that is harming the economy, that is harming society, all of those things. So
#
not only are you sort of being educated in a universe of ideas, but you're also looking
#
at your own country from the outside, and therefore are not sort of hostage to the received
#
wisdom of the time as you might have been in India. So what is sort of this process
#
like of discovering what you think and how you think and then how you view India?
#
That's actually a very, very interesting question, because I mean, in terms of the Keynesian
#
and monetarist thing, it was simple. I recognize the question for what it was. It was an invitation
#
to enter a trap. If I had said, no, I am a Keynesian, he would have said, but Keynes has
#
said this and Keynes has been wrong on this. So how would you define? I had no, I think,
#
clue of what Keynes had said or whatever. So the best thing to do was to give, as you
#
say, this Jogadu answer and not be led into that trap. On the most serious note about
#
how I looked at India, I don't know if it's still true. I suppose it is still true that
#
whenever any Indian is abroad, he or she becomes a hyper patriot. You go and people criticize
#
India and then you feel bad that they're criticizing India and you look for ways to defend your
#
country. And in the 70s, not that many British people knew that much about India. They thought
#
we were poor and primitive country and were astonished to find someone like me who could
#
maybe hold my own with them, could speak English as well as them or whatever. And so that made
#
me, I think, some kind of super patriot in a way that I perhaps wouldn't have been if
#
I wasn't at home, sort of my country, right or wrong. And that lasted, I think, until
#
76. In 75 when Mrs. Gandhi declared the emergency and the whole world condemned it, I was actually
#
really shocked. It never occurred to me that there could be expressed censorship in India,
#
that the entire opposition could be locked up, all basically same one woman's chair.
#
But when people started criticizing India and criticizing the emergency, there was some
#
knee-jerk response where I felt obliged to defend the emergency and to say it wasn't
#
such a bad thing and you have to look at what's happening in India. And I mean, really pathetic
#
arguments in defense of what was pretty probably indefensible. And then in 76, I came back
#
to India and my gap year and I spent some time and that was the same time as the rise
#
of the notorious Mr. Sanjay Gandhi. And anybody who had any sympathy for Indira Gandhi during
#
that period lost it because this tug-like motor mechanic son of hers could not be imposed
#
on the country as her successor. So when I went back to England, I was in this extraordinary
#
position where I still felt I was obliged to defend India and yet I did not feel I could
#
defend what was happening in India. So I walked the sort of middle path. You must remember
#
also I've written that in the book that I came from a progressive background. My father
#
was a communist even when he abandoned communism and communism abandoned him. He still had
#
this progressive, vaguely lefty view of the world, illogical though it might have been,
#
but it was still a lefty view. It came from a lefty place. And as Mrs. Gandhi had framed
#
the emergency in terms of fighting vested interests and I had believed in 1971 when
#
Mrs. Gandhi split the Congress and won a mandate for herself, that this was a good thing for
#
India, vested interests, the syndicate had been defeated. And staying away and having
#
some sense of distance and looking at what was happening gave me an interesting perspective.
#
I stopped defending what was happening in India with quite the same enthusiasm. And
#
I began looking at what Mrs. Gandhi was doing and being horrified. And then when Janata
#
was elected, I thought it was a great thing and Janata government would last forever.
#
We had a paper in, at Oxford, I did one, which is called The Politics of Developing Countries.
#
And one of my teachers, a guy who taught me South Asian politics, a man called Gopala
#
Krishna, Dr. Gopala Krishna, and his view was that Janata would last forever in Europe.
#
Basically political science is a way of doing journalism with big words. So it was like
#
the culacs who in the local notables who had been sidelined by Indira Gandhi have come
#
together and formed the Janata party. And they have roots in the villages that Mrs.
#
Gandhi doesn't. And this kind of crap. And I remember, I was quite taken in by it. I
#
have to say that I call it crap now, that one of the papers I did in my finals, the
#
questions in the developing countries was, there is no reason to believe that Janata
#
is any more than a nine day wonder in the history of Indian politics. And of course,
#
I gave them the whole Gopala Krishna thesis that Janata will go on forever and there is
#
no problem. And I took my exam and I went back to India and the Janata government fell.
#
And then I was called back to Oxford for a viva, which is what you get when you say not
#
good enough for a first, but slightly better than a second. Then they talk to you and decide
#
whether you're really worth the first. So they asked me then to defend this question
#
and there was no way I could defend it. And that was the end of my first division. I went
#
back with the second division. But yes, you're right. If you have that perspective and you
#
look at India and you've been brought up to be broadly sympathetic of what Indira Gandhi
#
was doing, that whole emergency period made you look at India differently. It made you
#
look at what was happening. Nobody was thrilled about the RSS joining or the Jansan joining
#
the government. But you kept thinking that the Congress can't run the government forever.
#
There has to be some alternative. And when there wasn't, when Mrs. Nityanta collapsed
#
and when Mrs. Gandhi was reelected, I remember being profoundly depressed.
#
So take me through your early years in journalism, because even while you were still in college,
#
you kind of became a journalist, you became an editor at one point where, you know, first
#
you start with the India Today group, then you talk about how you set up their magazine
#
in Bombay, in Bombay. So tell me a little bit about that. Because is that something
#
that you had given thought to about journalism itself, what it involved, what it implied?
#
I was very clear that I wouldn't be a journalist, which is why though various job offers, Indra
#
Marotra, who was a friend of my parents, had suggested I join the Times of India, which
#
he was a recent editor the other day. Various people had done it. And I kept, I don't know
#
if you remember what papers were like in those days. But if you were an assistant editor at
#
one of the big newspapers, it meant you got a cabin, you got paid quite well. And you
#
sat in there and you wrote these leaders, these editorial page articles, and then you
#
went home. And you really had nothing to do with the famous story, which I'm sure is untrue
#
about Shamlal, who was a legendary editor of the Times of India, going out to a gathering
#
and meeting a man who was who said lots of things. And Shamlal was very impressed. And
#
he said to the man, you seem very well informed. What do you do? And this chap said, Sir, I
#
am your news editor. But that is the extent to which the news site and the editorial side
#
would divorce from each other in those days. And the guys who wrote the editorials looked
#
down the chap who actually did the journalism, who actually produced the newspaper. So I
#
rejected that option of becoming that kind of editorial page writer. As I say in the
#
book, writing for India Today happened because they were desperate. They had nobody to write
#
for them. I was unemployed. I was waiting to go up to Oxford. And I was cheap. And I
#
was young and I was bushy. And I was able to get them interviews and nobody else would.
#
And then they kept at it. So if that had not happened to me, if I hadn't kept up with India
#
Today, then I think I probably would never have become a journalist.
#
Serendipity again. And at this point, like how does one form a conception of good journalism?
#
Where are the role models? Because in India, journalism, like, you know, I have actual
#
memories of journalism only from the 80s. But it was horrendous. It was so bad. And
#
so what are your role models? How do you arrive at a set of values in terms of what you do
#
in your reporting? How do you arrive at a set of values about the language itself, which
#
I remember as being incredibly poor, even in the 80s and the 90s. And you also described
#
in your book at different times in Sunday and Hindustan Times.
#
Yeah, it was it was so horrendous. I mean, you mentioned how the Hindustan Times was
#
described by people as an English paper written in Punjabi.
#
I mean, yeah, I searched for an answer to that question, because there were very successful
#
journalists in my early years. It was Arun Shourie, who invented investigative journalism
#
for India. There was M.J. Akbar, who with the original Sunday was a firebrand editor
#
who created a new kind of journalism. So there were these people, but almost all of them
#
were people who took a position. Now, we talk about Ramnath Goenka and we talk about his
#
battles with the government. And I knew Ramnath Goenka quite well. There was no doubt that
#
even as he was fighting with the government or whatever, he was doing it from a particular
#
political position. He was committed to destroying the Congress and helping his friends in the
#
opposition come to power. If you went to his penthouse, which I did, you met people like
#
Guru Murthy, who was then just an RSS guy and various other opposition, Mrs. and Mrs.
#
Vijayaraja, who would all sit and complain about the Gandhis and what they could do,
#
how they could change things. And afterwards, when he turned against Rajiv and against Irvai
#
Ambani, it would be full of those plots. So, I mean, I liked him a lot and I admired him
#
enormously. But was this a role model? I don't know. It was journalism done with a purpose
#
to achieve a purpose. So should journalism be done like that? Or should it be much more
#
neutral or much more open? Akbar, for instance, his slogan he chose for his Sunday, I think,
#
was a strong view, strongly expressed. He was very clear which side he was on. So I
#
was a little uncomfortable with all of these obvious role models. There was much to admire
#
in them and I did admire them. But they did not seem to me to fit what I wanted to do.
#
I wanted to write about things. I mean, you will have a certain bias because you will
#
be biased towards liberal values or whatever, but not a sort of party political bias. I
#
wanted to write about things generally. And Arun Puri, in many ways, came closest to that
#
because I started my career working for India today. And Arun was a printer. He had no experience
#
with journalism. And when he got into it, he just read and read and he evolved a way
#
of doing things. There used to be a series of books by Harold Evans on being a journalist,
#
one of which was called Newsman's English, which Arun made all of us read. Another one
#
on photojournalism was called Pictures on a Page, How You Use Photographs. Arun made
#
all of us read that. His idea was always don't look for role models in India. Try and learn
#
from the best in the world. And I think to some extent, I went with him.
#
And you sort of brought up the normative question of, in a rhetorical sense, you asked, is this
#
what journalism should be? And that leads me to a question of what should journalism
#
be? Because on the one hand, we have talks about the ethical values of journalism, that
#
you speak truth to power and you afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and
#
all of those cliches and these are the values, separation of news and opinion and so on and
#
so forth. At the same time, you have these imperatives which often drive businesses in
#
undeniable ways, such as just a profit motive. Or you could be in a country, for example,
#
where a government can put an enormous amount of pressure on you and that becomes an imperative.
#
There are the individual incentives of journalists themselves. So when we speak of sort of the
#
higher ethical values of journalism, much as the Hippocratic oath is for doctors, is
#
there something to that or are we fooling ourselves?
#
Yeah, look, in an ideal world, everybody would want those absolute ethical values to be maintained
#
by every publication. But in the real world, journalism is always a high wire act or a
#
trapeze act. Because there are always in any newspaper or publication, so many different
#
interests. There's the government, which is nearly always putting pressure on you. There
#
is the owner. And in India, we don't have corporate ownership as much as individual
#
ownership. Owners nearly always want the papers to be seen as their papers. So you have to
#
keep that, you have to maintain that. You have often the owner's commercial interests,
#
because most people in the business also have other interests, which they are not willing
#
to endanger just because you want to write a column. So you have to worry about that.
#
You also increasingly, and the time seven day was a good example, because I joined it
#
because the owners never wanted to be high profile. They had no political loyalties. They
#
tried to produce a paper that was free of any kind of bias. And yet you had then internally
#
another kind of trapeze act, because they saw the paper not as a means of fulfilling
#
some higher social obligation. But as a business asked by the New Yorker a decade ago about
#
what he did, Vinith Jain said, we are in the advertising business. The Times of India was
#
very clear that it existed because advertisers needed a medium to reach readers. And the
#
Times of India provided that medium. If along the way, it could bring enlightenment and
#
entertainment on that, that's very good. But there was never any doubt about what its primary
#
purpose was. I mean, if the ad department calls the shots, then is that still this high
#
ethical form of journalism? So because there are so many competing pressures, some internal,
#
some external, all journalism ultimately is a trapeze act, a high wire act. You get in
#
there, you try and tell the truth, you try and write the truth, but you can, it's never
#
an absolute thing. You can never succeed all the time. You do the best you can.
#
There is this amusing anecdote in your book about, you know, when Narasimha Rao was prime
#
minister at one point, you know, when you were in Sunday, you wrote quote, the key to
#
understanding Narasimha Rao lies in recognizing that he is a small time manipulator who masquerades
#
as a statesman. Stop quote.
#
Yes indeed. Yes. First line and the very first counterpoint I wrote.
#
Yeah. And, and then, you know, your publisher, Avik Sarkar, you know, wants something out
#
of Narasimha Rao and he goes to Delhi and Narasimha Rao is saying, why have you come
#
to me? I am a small time manipulator, some passive aggressive thing like that. So that's
#
sort of a classic example. You've also given a good breakdown of how the newspaper model
#
instead of being subscription driven, became advertising driven. So you could basically
#
give it away for close to free, but you were catering to the lowest common denominator
#
And to the interest of the advertisers, because your ultimate customer was not your reader,
#
It was the advertiser. Exactly. And the other thing that strikes me here is that when I
#
look at modern times, for example, it strikes me that a lot of the dissenting voices in
#
today's journalism in India are small independent folks, you know, who haven't been around for
#
that long, which brings to mind that old line from rock and roll. If you ain't got nothing,
#
you got nothing to lose. I think it was Dylan. So, you know, the scrolls and the wires and
#
all of that might take their dissenting lines because they are small, whatever. But when
#
you look at the larger newspapers, they're not just standalone newspapers, they're part
#
of industrial houses. Somebody who's running a newspaper could be running a chemical factory.
#
And if the government of the day does an IT raid there, there's just too much to lose.
#
There's too much at stake. So at some level, you almost understand that there's a fear
#
of the stake. And then there is also the carrot. If you're an industrial house which owns certain
#
publications or media houses, obviously you're incentivized to stay with the government line
#
to push those narratives to not cross certain boundaries. Do you see some truth to this?
#
No, absolutely, without a doubt. I think if a government wants to put pressure on the
#
newspaper house, it can do it without any talk of censorship or whatever. All it needs
#
to do is to ensure that the business interests of the owner are not favored, that permissions
#
are not given, that say a pollution inquiry is started. I mean, everybody did this. I
#
remember during the Vajpayee government, the owner of Outlook had many investigations started
#
on him. They didn't touch Outlook because, of course, they respected the freedom of the
#
press, but they went for the proprietor. And ultimately, as you know, my friend writes
#
in his autobiography, it had to have some impact. He doesn't like hanging around in
#
enforcement directorate offices that smell of urine. We kept waiting for hours being
#
humiliated and he begins to wonder, why am I letting my editors have so much freedom?
#
What am I getting out of it? So, yes, all governments at some level put pressure on
#
journalists, and often this pressure comes through their proprietors.
#
And you know, I mean, just looking back in the past decades, and I'm obviously not privy
#
to the inside story of what happened, but you see this in different governments. Like
#
in the UPA time, you see Raju Nare Satti, you know, leaving Mint because apparently
#
Chidambaram, who was then finance minister, got upset at something. Similarly, later you
#
have, you know, Bobby Ghosh having to leave as editor of the HD because Arun Jaitley reportedly
#
got upset at something. You know, are there incidents that you feel free to talk about
#
of this sort that have happened in the past that kind of illustrate this?
#
Well, the HD examples are a problem for me because I cannot diverge what either of any
#
of the principles have told me. But I mean, it goes far back. Prem Shankar Chah, I think
#
had to leave the HD because Rajiv Gandhi objected to something he had told V.P. Singh, and we
#
are sticking with the HD without things that I was personally privy to. Khushwant Singh
#
was appointed, K.K. Birla writes in his own autobiography by Sanjay Gandhi, who said to
#
him that, I hear you have vacancy for an editor. And he said, yes, I do. And he said, okay,
#
I have a candidate for you. And so K.K. Birla says who? And he said, Menaka. And so even
#
K.K. Birla finds that this is a bit much to bear. So he thinks he goes away and thinks
#
about it, says he will think about it, comes back and he says, I'm sorry, I don't think
#
this will work. Fine, says Sanjay, appoint Khushwant Singh. And Khushwant Singh is promptly
#
appointed. I mean, that happens all the time in newspapers during the 10s.
#
So is it the case, and this might seem a pessimistic view, that is it the case that those who are
#
dissenting today are able to do so because they are too small? No one really cares about
#
them that if they get beyond a certain level of influence, say, if they're right outside
#
the elites, they'll just be struck down. And there are so many tools.
#
No, but they look at the wire, which is one of the dissenting voices. They've done everything
#
possible they can to try and shut the wire down. There've been all kinds of cases, there've
#
been investigations. Look at NDTV, which isn't even a particular dissenter or whatever, the
#
kind of ordeal it's had to go through. So sometimes if you're lucky and you're strong,
#
you survive the ire of the government. Most times you decide it's not worth it.
#
Yeah, that's a note of hope. And of course, the wire has been leading the way with the
#
Pegasus revelations, for example, very bravely. Dhanik Bhaskar just got raided and they've
#
sort of been... Everybody kept saying when Dhanik Bhaskar
#
was doing those COVID stories, how do they hope to get away with it? And the answer was
#
they were waiting for the COVID crisis to pass and for the government to seem on a stronger
#
wicket before coming down and they're now there.
#
Amazing. Let's sort of talk about the changing media landscape over this entire time. One
#
thing that was certainly true till the end of the 90s, maybe even for the first few years
#
of this millennium was that there was something called mainstream media. There was a consensus
#
on the truth that you might have different papers, have different characters in some
#
small ways, but broadly there is a consensus on the truth on what's going on. And most
#
people are getting their information, their knowledge from a small set of sources. Today
#
that's completely splintered. Now one, it's a good thing that is splintered because with
#
the means of production becoming available to anyone, more and more people can enter
#
the fray as creators, as indeed I have with my blog earlier and the podcast today. But
#
the other side to that is that then that consensus on the truth has vanished. That nothing is
#
mainstream anymore. Everything is splintered. Like just yesterday I read this interview
#
of Steve Van Zandt, who was a founding guitarist of the East Street band with Bruce Springsteen.
#
Yeah. And Van Zandt was saying that rock is no longer mainstream. And his point was that
#
rock becoming mainstream was an aberration. It began when Dylan went electric, according
#
to him, and it ended when Kurt Cobain killed himself. And whatever the timelines might
#
be, I mean, obviously there are gradual processes, but his point was that rock is not mainstream.
#
And when I think about that, nothing in music is mainstream. Whether in entertainment to
#
some extent, because the means of distribution has still haven't opened up, even if the means
#
of production have, there is something called a mainstream and whatever. But in media there
#
probably isn't. If anything, there are platforms that are mainstream, like a YouTube or a Twitter
#
or a Facebook or whatever. But the conception of the mainstream is changing. People get
#
their information from different sources and all of that. Now, the significant chunk of
#
your career was spent within institutions, which were sort of mainstream institutions,
#
doing traditional things. And the landscape has so completely changed, sort of in the
#
last 10 years. So, you know, has this made you redefine, has this made you rethink, rather,
#
the things that you do, the things that you want to do, the kind of things that give you
#
Yeah. I mean, I think all of us have had to find ways of adjusting to the changing medium.
#
So while I do the rude food column for the Hindustan Times branch, my political column
#
appears on HD.com and reaches many, many more people than it would have in many, many parts
#
of the world than if it just appeared in a print thing. So I've tried as much as possible
#
to do things that are accessible to people in a variety of ways. I started my own YouTube
#
channel about eight years ago. I think it was too early. I was just crap on YouTube.
#
So the channel wasn't a great success, but I've tried very hard to get into that. I started
#
my own website where everything I write about and everything I write appears in 2008, which
#
I think was slightly ahead of the curve. So I've tried to keep up as much as possible
#
with changing media. I find now that my online stuff usually gets much more noticed, has
#
much more impact than something I would write, say, on the editorial page of a newspaper
#
or as a column in a magazine. So you try, I think, to adjust to different ways of getting
#
your message across. A lot of the stuff I've done on television, I think, works best because
#
we will no longer watch television that much in real time, works best in YouTube or stuff
#
like that. One of the things I run and founder of is a company called Easy Diner, which is
#
an online restaurant platform which is based on the internet. You can do your bookings
#
and all of that on the internet. So I think probably earlier than most journalists, I
#
embraced the internet and the sense in which things had changed. Have I started an all
#
proper internet venture of my own, whatever? No. Would I have, apart from Easy Diner within
#
mainstream journalism, would I have if I was 15 years younger? I think I would almost certainly
#
have done it. But when you're 65, you have less and less urge to set up new organizations,
#
to manage teams of people, et cetera. You're much happier being the sort of position I
#
am where I anchor television shows and I write books and I do columns and nice people like
#
you invite me to come on and hold forth. But yes, I would have done things very differently
#
So a couple of questions, which I think are actually the same question. And the first
#
one is that does the media then need to consider the way that it does everything? Because it
#
seems to me that, you know, whenever change happens, there is a lag between the change
#
actually happening and traditional corporations kind of figuring out what the change is and
#
how to deal with it. For example, I think, you know, a lot of the newspapers people,
#
they get the circulation because of inertia. And therefore, you know, you may not even
#
look at it, but you have your three, four newspapers coming every day and that's kind
#
of it. But as we discussed earlier, the way people discover content, filter content, consume
#
content has changed completely. And it seems to me that none of the traditional media houses
#
have really figured that out. You know, they will have a checklist of things they will
#
do where they can take boxes like Instagram presence on a chair, have a Twitter presence,
#
have a this presence, do, you know, stories on Instagram, all of that. But they haven't
#
really adopted their fundamental ways of working. And the second question which feeds into this
#
is if you were 15 years younger or 20 years younger or 25 years younger, what would you
#
start? What are the learnings about the media landscape and about society which you would
#
incorporate into starting something in the media today?
#
Let's do three answers to the question. The first one, is it a good thing that the media
#
landscape is fractured? And there aren't just this oligopolistic control of a few media
#
houses. Yes, I think absolutely. I used to always say about India, that freedom of the
#
press is guaranteed to anyone who happens to own one. But the point is now, unlike then,
#
you don't have to own one, there are ways of getting your message across. So that's
#
a good thing. The bad part of it is for better or for worse, most traditional media had certain
#
norms in the way in which information was checked, in the way you tried to do things
#
that were responsible. In a splintered landscape, there will always be people who will do things
#
without any of these checks and filters, who will do things for clickbait. So you have
#
to balance out the advantage and the disadvantage. That's one question.
#
The second one on what I would do if I was 15 years younger, I would almost certainly
#
have started an opinion website. I think there is a need for an opinion website. Many people
#
tell me that the internet, only an investigator website or a website that tells people something
#
they don't know would work. I don't know if that's true. But I genuinely think that
#
the level of commentary in newspapers has sunk pretty low. That in many cases, because
#
people are scared of getting commentators who will say things that are unpopular or
#
whatever, they fall back on the coward's option of getting academics to write vaguely obscure
#
articles on their specialities. Now, I have nothing against academics writing articles
#
on the right way. Well, but when it is done to avoid getting proper commentators to comment
#
on current events, then I don't think it works that well. So I still think that there is
#
room for a website that had a lot of opinion. Your third question about newspapers and the
#
web. Yeah, I think almost all newspapers in India realized 20 years ago that the internet
#
is going to be the next big thing. Almost all of them started newspaper sites and almost
#
websites and nearly all of them screwed it up. I think there is something in their mentality
#
that stops them from understanding. I know that traditionally, I mean, I've heard, because
#
we've been around so long, I've heard so much crap about integrated newsroom and a
#
guy will come in and he will go straight to our radio station and he will talk about it.
#
Then he will do a piece to camera. Then he'll come back and he'll write the story for the
#
internet and then the evening he'll file for the newspaper. I mean, millions have been
#
invested in these ventures. Nothing has ever come of it. As far as I know, no newspaper
#
organization in India has succeeded doing anything like it. Abroad papers like the New
#
York Times have had much more success doing things like this. I pay a subscription to
#
read the New York Times on the net every day. Would I necessarily pay the same subscription
#
for an Indian newspaper? I don't know. I don't think so. There's never that kind of content
#
that strikes me as being unusual or worth reading. Among Indian news sites, the one
#
I would probably subscribe to though, fortunately it's free, is the NDTV app because that does
#
tell you pretty much everything you need to know quite quickly. In fact, when I've often
#
been a guest on various news discussion shows, I've quickly cogged and seen what the NDTV
#
app is saying about 10 points about the budget or whatever, so I can seem clever and knowledgeable.
#
So yes, some things have that work, but nothing on the net that anybody in mainstream media
#
has done that I can think of at all impressed me. It's a case of vast organizations throwing
#
vast resources at the vast world and coming up with nothing.
#
No, that's very well put and I agree completely. It's interesting that you said an opinion
#
website because I think that one thing that people do hunger for in this age of ubiquitous
#
knowledge all around them, one thing that they do hunger for is perspectives. I'm reminded
#
of this shout out to my friend Shakeel who keeps telling me that I should start something
#
like Persuasion, which is a newsletter magazine of sorts started by Yasha Monk in the US and
#
they've got a bunch of great writers for them. The other thing, and I'll just kind of think
#
aloud and share my thoughts on it and tell me if this is something that has struck you
#
because it's something that kind of took me by surprise, is the sort of intimacy that
#
a new content creators can now find. For example, here's a metaphor. Let's say you're, and
#
I'll start with the visual arts. Let's say you're in a cinema theater and you're watching
#
a movie and the screen is a certain distance away from you. And similarly, the camera is
#
a certain distance away from the actors. Somebody's coming in on horseback and then you get closer
#
or whatever. If you make it a little more intimate, you have a television screen. It's
#
a couple of meters away from you and the camera is also a couple of meters away from the actor.
#
So you'll have friends and Seinfeld and people in flats and all that. YouTube brings it even
#
closer where you're sitting in front of a laptop screen, which is a few inches away.
#
And similarly, a lot of made for YouTube content is that close and that personal. Now I got
#
to thinking about this when I sort of took this to audio and I thought about how podcasts
#
are different from radio. Like it is not true that podcasts are only on demand radio in
#
terms of access. That is true. But a fundamental way in which this is different is radio because
#
of all different kinds of incentives and imperatives has to kind of go abroad. So I think of radio,
#
I think of driving in a car and the radio is on and there's a song on and there's a
#
limit to how deep you can go. When people speak, they will speak in these artificial
#
broadcast devices. They will project and so on and so forth. But podcasting is intimate.
#
There is someone's voice inside your head and it's very personal. And it's something
#
I realized when gradually as my podcast grew, I began to realize almost with a shock how
#
seriously people sort of take this relationship. And I'm starting with my own example, but
#
this is true of a lot of creators in the creator economy, not just in podcasts, but also on
#
YouTube where everything in a sense feels very personal. There is a personal connect
#
that wasn't there earlier. So earlier, if you enter television, you have to learn certain
#
skills of presenting yourself or what talking or whatever. If you get into say journalism,
#
you have to learn the house style or whatever publication you're writing for. But if you
#
are a blogger or if you are a podcaster or if you are a YouTuber, any of these intimate
#
mediums, you just have to be yourself. And that to me is incredibly fascinating, incredibly
#
liberating. And I sort of thought of this also in a different context where in your
#
book you speak about how one of the reasons Amitabh may have sort of felt drawn to go
#
into politics besides his close friendship with Rajeev and the sentimental attachment
#
and all of that was that when he had his accident in 1982 and he was so ill, you point out how
#
he was stunned by the amount of love and adoration that people have for him. And that's love
#
and adoration at a distance where you're building temples for someone. But there's something
#
much more intimate about this new creator media, which is something I've only started
#
thinking about in the last couple of years, because by accident, I find myself in the,
#
you know, in the thick of things. Is that something you've also thought about as, you
#
know, you've spent decades almost doing the old school thing where you're one person speaking
#
I actually thought about it a lot because I'll give you an example. Whenever I did television,
#
there's an old axiom, and you'll still find it in British television or in American television,
#
that you speak to the camera as though you're speaking to a person. Yeah. And that whoever
#
is watching you at the other end will feel you're talking to them. That like, for instance,
#
our conversation could have been a non tape recorded conversation. It would have been
#
the same. We are making no concessions. The fact that this is a broadcast. Now, telecasting,
#
I was always taught, always learned, was that like, if you interviewed somebody, you interviewed
#
him like it was a conversation. There should be no artifice to it. It should be like you
#
were chatting normally. One of the things that's happened in Indian television is that
#
anchors have purposely abandoned intimacy. If you go on to one of the more popular English
#
news channels today, there is no sense in which the anchor is talking to the camera
#
as though it's a viewer. One indication is the number of times they will say, ladies
#
and gentlemen, viewer, in the manner of a ringmaster at a circus, that you never ever
#
do that in television classically. You still don't do it in television abroad. So oddly
#
enough, mainstream media has become much more circus-like, much more dramatic, and much
#
more theatrical, at least mainstream television, which I think is not only a mistake from the
#
point of view of quality, though it may well work from the point of view of popularity.
#
Because mainstream media has now become so theatrical, has become so much like tamasha
#
and drama, people actually crave something that's much more intimate, that talks to them
#
as though they're real people. I'll give you an example. For much of my television career,
#
I've been an interviewer. And one way to do an interview, and I'm sure the other way
#
to do it, is as though you're talking to a person and the viewer is a fly on the wall,
#
somebody who's heard the conversation. You can't do that kind of interview now. Now you
#
have to ask hostile questions, you have to shout a lot, you have to indicate to the viewer
#
what a muscle macho man you are, et cetera. There is a much greater consciousness of the
#
audience in mainstream television media now than there was earlier. In say, YouTube or
#
whatever, if the audience is recognized, it's recognized by people who think, hey, you and
#
I are both in on the joke. It's much more sly and it's knowing. There isn't this ringmaster
#
approach. And though these people all say they're getting huge ratings, I think they're
#
actually driving people away from this band bhaja ringmaster style of presenting towards
#
mediums that are towards media that are much more intimate, where people talk. Radio, for
#
instance, now, as you said, with all these funny voices and these accents and this forced
#
hilarity and this sense of, hey, we're all having fun on this wonderful radio station.
#
I think that actually started to put people off. They are much happier with somebody who
#
treats them like adults. And do you think some of this forced theatricality, so to say,
#
comes from sort of falling into a trap that let us say that you're in a, you join a TV
#
news channel today, there is a conventional way of doing things and you don't want to
#
get away from the convention and there is no discovery process where you can try out
#
different things and figure out what works. And interestingly on YouTube, on podcasts,
#
there is a natural discovery process because anybody, everybody's throwing everything at
#
the wall and some things stick and niches get formed and niches get discovered, which
#
wouldn't otherwise even get discovered in the bigger places. So, you know, is that a
#
kind of a trap that you see? Absolutely. You look at the younger people, people who've
#
been for three years, four years in the business on many of these news channels, and they're
#
also saying things halfway through talking to a guest, you know, do you think the people
#
of India will stand for this? Our viewers know who's telling the truth. So they started
#
out with this sort of band bhaja approach and unfortunately it will become normal for
#
them. Yeah. And there's sometimes a lag of decades before change happens in any field.
#
I often talk about, you know, Ignace Semmelweis, the mid 19th century doctor who realized that
#
a lot of deaths in hospitals occurred because people didn't wash their hands and he wasn't
#
taken seriously for decades. It took millions of deaths potentially from that before people
#
kind of figured it out. And that of course had a real human consequence. So one could
#
argue the human consequence here is sort of unseen in a way. I also want to ask you about
#
the auto conversation because again, it's something that I think about a lot. I taught
#
a podcasting course at one point where I examined different styles of interviewing and I found
#
something you said in your book resonated with me and I agreed completely where you
#
were at one point asked to do a program that was like hard talk and you were like, no,
#
I don't want to do something adversarial. I want to have a conversation. And it strikes
#
me that a lot of interviewing that you see, like you just mentioned is adversarial, is
#
looking for gotcha moments, is looking to put a person in a spot. Like one of the values
#
that I've developed for myself is one, of course, I don't like to do Q and A's. I like
#
to do conversations, but the other value is I simply never interrupt because what really
#
gets my goat in interviews that I see online is that the host is just interrupting all
#
the time without taking any names. And this keeps the conversation at a shallow level.
#
The guest never really relaxes, never gets a chance to go deep. The host is always thinking
#
about his or her next question rather than actually listening and, you know, following
#
those kind of rabbit holes. Now you have like way, way, way more experience than I have
#
in constructing conversations and in thinking about it. So can you share some of your insights?
#
Yes. My approach to an interview is probably different from many people in the business.
#
Lots of people do detailed research before they go in. They are like cross-examination
#
lawyers. They know the answers to the questions before they ask. I do some research, so as
#
not to seem like an idiot, but not much more than that. My perspective is that of a viewer
#
who doesn't know very much about the guest, but I am slightly better informed than the
#
viewer. That's it. Then the rest of it has to be curiosity, because you assume the viewer
#
has the same level of curiosity. You put the man at ease. You let him tell a story. And
#
periodically, as you've done with me, you make him question his assumptions and say,
#
do you think that really makes sense? And if the interviewee is honest, he will probably
#
say you're right. I've thought about this again, as I have with you in the course of
#
this conversation. I think that is how you get the most out of a person. There's also
#
a danger, particularly with celebrity interviewers, that you make the mistake of believing that
#
people watch the show for you. They don't. They watch the show for your guests. So what
#
you've got to do is get the best out of your guests, make them feel you really understand
#
the guest. You know what the guest is like. I think all of that is now forgotten. You
#
have that same, I'm going to get you, I'm going to trap you kind of moment. And yet,
#
if you sit down, can you tell me in the last 10 years, anybody of consequence who's ever
#
been trapped in a television interview on Indian TV? It never works. They never manage
#
to trap anyone. They just wreck the interview. And often it is this, I want to show the audience
#
who the macho guy or lady I am. I gave it, I don't care. If you do that, which is, I
#
mean, okay, if you think the whole thing is a narcissist exercise, but as an interview,
#
it's a disaster. I mean, I agree with all of that, except I'll add a little nuance to
#
one point, which is that all the podcasters I follow, I actually, all the interview podcasts,
#
for example, whether it's Econ Talk by Russ Roberts or Conversations with Tyler by Tyler
#
Carvin or Sam Harris's great interview podcast, I don't follow it because of the guests. I
#
take it for granted that they'll get an interesting guest. I follow them because I'm following
#
their intellectual journeys and their curiosities. And of course, those are rich and enriching
#
because they are respectful of the guests and they are not looking for gotcha moments
#
and they're basically adhering to the principles that we both kind of spoke about. So to that
#
extent, I think that the personal does become very important, which kind of brings me to
#
my next question, which is something that I have kind of wondered and thought about
#
and struggled with at different parts of my past, which is what do you do for personal
#
satisfaction and what do you do because it seems like a sensible thing to do within your
#
career and it'll make you money. So, you know, like in your book, when I follow your journey,
#
I see you doing a lot of shows and obviously at one point it's lucrative and you're doing
#
all of these shows. But what are those things you've done which you were really passionate
#
about? You know, you really, that you look back and you say that even if I hadn't got
#
paid, I would have done this. Well, I do a lot of writing, for instance, the writing
#
I do for HD.com. The column is very popular. I don't get paid very much for it. I do it
#
because I want to have a voice. I enjoy having a voice. So much of my writing, if you write
#
books, there's very little money in books, for instance, but there is a sense of satisfaction.
#
So television on the whole is for the money. Let's be brutal about this. But almost all
#
of the writing is done for love of writing and saying something rather than making money.
#
So here's my next question about a journalist. Like one of the things that comes out again
#
in your book is that you've got great access and a lot of the journalism that one does
#
is built on building access, having people talk to you because that's how you get great
#
stories and all of that. How does this access change how you look at these people? Like,
#
you know, a lot of these people, you speak about what a warm, lovely person someone like
#
Bal Thackeray is. So on the one hand, you relate to him in a personal way. But on the
#
other hand, you relate in a different way to his politics. And there seems to be a kind
#
of dissonance there. So how does it affect your writing? How does it affect your perspectives?
#
At some point, do you feel that, you know, this is all just a grand play that is playing
#
out and you're playing a part in it as well? Well, two, three things. First of all, I think
#
India has changed. In the era when I had access, I was far from the only person who had access.
#
Journalists were more respected by the political class. People came and spoke to us. They discussed
#
things with us. When we had objections to what they were doing, they took us seriously.
#
Nowadays, you're either a poodle or you're garbage. I mean, nobody really has any respect
#
in the political class, has any respect for journalists or for our views. When they have
#
to engage with journalists, very rarely with anybody of consequence come. Instead, they
#
send these sort of moronic spokespeople onto television to take part in more moronic debates
#
and fight. The real actors hardly ever come onto television. Once upon a time, they would,
#
I mean, I got nervous when Gujral, various people, to come to the studio and talk about
#
it. So, there is a difference in the way people respond to us. Secondly, the price you pay
#
for access usually is that you're supposed to be kind to the person who has given you
#
this access. That's always true to an extent, but it's less true than you would think.
#
For instance, I had a great deal of access to Bahar Thackeray, who you mentioned. Yet,
#
almost everything I wrote was against the Shiv Sena. I don't think there's one initiative
#
they took that I supported. You gave me the example of my saying that Narasimha Rao was
#
a small-time manipulator. Yet, Narasimha Rao did not deny me access. I continued to meet
#
him. So, yes, there will always be politicians who will say that since you've written bad
#
things about me, I don't think I should waste time with you. But most mature politicians
#
in that era, even if you were hostile to them, would call you over, partly because they respected
#
you, but mostly because they thought by giving you access and explaining things, they could
#
change your mind. But in answer to your larger question, all access journalism is dangerous
#
because there is often an unspoken trade-off, which is in return for the access to get favorable
#
coverage. So, you have to make it quite clear in the beginning that while you're quite willing
#
to put across their position sympathetically, you're not willing to put across the right
#
position or say that you agree with it. So, my next question is a slightly complicated
#
and rambly one. One, you know, you've written in your book about how so many politicians
#
are, I mean, all people are creatures of circumstance, but so many politicians as well. You gave
#
the examples of Naveen Patnaik and Jyotiraj Duttis in India as people who were on a completely
#
different track, but because of circumstances, kind of came into politics and surprised everyone
#
with the personas they adopted and perhaps even the persons they became. Now, it gets
#
me to thinking about, you know, somebody had raised the question of why are Indian politicians
#
today so apparently venal when our freedom fighters or our founding group of politicians
#
are independent, so to say, were such noble people. And my point there was that the incentives
#
were different, that when those people were fighting for freedom, like the Nehru's and
#
the Gandhi's and the Patel's and all that, there was no power to be had. So, it wasn't
#
lust for power which drove them. It was a higher set of ideals and therefore that's
#
the kind of people that they were. Even if they made mistakes as politicians or mistakes
#
in governing and all of that, they were honest mistakes made in good faith. They were driven
#
by the right ideals. The incentives have changed completely today because the state is so incredibly
#
all-powerful and power-corrupt, as the cliché goes. And perhaps this is simplistic, that
#
politics always corrodes character because you might enter politics having a certain
#
set of principles. But then, to get ahead in politics, you have to adopt a persona.
#
So the question is, does the persona then become a person? And the secondary question
#
is that, is there a particular type of politician, a type of person, almost a sociopath as it
#
were, who is therefore likely to thrive? Like, I'd done a column on this as well a few years
#
back where studies had found that sociopaths, and sociopathy by the way for my listeners
#
is not an empty pejorative, it's a particular condition of the brain where a particular
#
part of the brain, I think the amygdala is damaged in a particular way so you don't feel
#
empathy for others. And sociopaths are over-represented in, I think it was bankers, prison convicts
#
and politicians. And my point was that sociopaths are more likely to be drawn to politics because
#
they have the characteristics it takes to get ahead. And in this context, I was struck
#
by something that you said about V. P. Singh, and I'll just quote from that lovely chapter
#
where you write, quote, the problem with V. P. Singh was that he was a little like Arvind
#
Kejriwal is today, financially upright, soft-spoken, competent and capable of evoking strong emotions
#
among his supporters. But he was also a man without any core beliefs, without any long-term
#
loyalty except to one or two political friends, and without any transparency. Even Advani
#
who was vilified by the secular media was a relatively straight person. If he said he
#
was going to do something, he usually did it. V. P. Singh, on the other hand, was capable
#
of such duplicity that if you asked him what day of the week it was and he said Tuesday,
#
the chances were that it was really Friday. Stop quote. And I love this because Kejriwal
#
is exactly like this as well. So that's a beautiful comparison that is drawn. Now, in
#
the simplistic view that I put forward to you, it would seem that every politician will
#
inevitably be like this. But your book is full of slightly richer and more complex characters.
#
So what is your sense one of, is there a type of person who thrives in politics? And two,
#
how do politicians in your experience wrestle with these kind of dual imperatives, this
#
conflict between the persona and person as it were?
#
Gosh, it's a difficult question. I think there are many different kinds of people who join
#
politics and they do it for different reasons. We talked about the freedom fighter generation.
#
They didn't join politics because they thought there was any chance of them ever getting
#
anything out of it. They joined because they had a mission to free India. The generation
#
after that is believed in a term we laugh at these days, which is nation building. They
#
believed that they were part of building this great democratic experiment that the rest
#
of the world said couldn't work. I think in subsequent generations, it gets more and more
#
difficult and it depends on which party you're part of. Look at the RSS and the Jansang.
#
There was a time before Vajpayee when nobody thought the Jansang would ever come to office
#
or would ever come to power. In 1996, Vajpayee became prime minister for 13 days, had to
#
resign because nobody would touch the BJP and they regarded them touchable. So what
#
kind of person joins the BJP or joins the RSS in that situation? It's clearly not a
#
man who wants to get rich or a man who necessarily wants to be powerful because the chances are
#
that he'll never get near power. So the answer in my experience is the man who joins in these
#
circumstances is a man who's ideologically motivated, who disagrees usually with the
#
kind of India that the freedom fighters and the founding fathers created, who wants to
#
transform India to be more a mirror image of Golwalkar or somebody wanted. In many ways,
#
this kind of man is more dangerous or certainly worth watching more closely because he believes
#
that the end, which is the transformation of India, is much more important than the
#
democratic means, which kept them from getting power for 40 years or 50 years. Therefore,
#
he will do whatever is necessary, whatever is required to achieve that aim. And then
#
you're possibly right, it may help to be a sociopath, but that kind of person therefore
#
doesn't care about norms, doesn't care about other people and just does it. So that's one
#
kind of person. The second kind of person is the kind of politician you see today. Many
#
of them are dynasts. These are people who joined politics not because they had any love
#
of politics or any commitment to people, but because it was the family business. For them,
#
politics is no more than a business opportunity. I mean, people are always think it's extraordinary
#
that so many people who joined the Congress in small loyalty to secularism are now in
#
the BJP saying absolutely opposite. But for these people, politics is not really about
#
ideology. It's not really about belief. It's only about self-advancement. Like a businessman
#
who's done very well in the steel industry, but now sees an opportunity in the computer
#
industry, so he leaves the steel industry behind and goes off to join the computer industry.
#
That's what they're like. And therefore, in many ways, you have to take everything they
#
say with a pinch of salt because they're saying it only because they believe that's the requirement
#
of the industry they're in. When the industry changes, their rhetoric changes. So there
#
are different kinds of people who joined politics.
#
It was fascinating. I'm reminded of Keynes who said, you know, when the facts change,
#
I change my mind, sir, what do you do? A politician might well say that when my incentives change,
#
I change my party, sir, what do you do?
#
After Roshishtha Tharoor did a column in which he said that people who joined a career, say,
#
I'll give you, and my own example, this wasn't his example. So you join HDFC Bank and you
#
realize your better career prospects are stand chart, you change jobs. Politics has become
#
a bit like that. People just look at career prospects. There is no sense of ideology of
#
having ever believed in anything.
#
So that's interesting because then what that also makes it more likely that the true believers,
#
as it were, are people who are within the BJP because they joined the BJP. So, you know,
#
that could either be a feature or a bug, depending on how you look at it. My next question goes
#
to a conversation that you report having with Advani about the Babri Masjid, where in your
#
book you report at one time you asked him that how do you know this is the birthplace
#
of Ram? How do you know Ram even existed? And so on and so forth. And his answer is
#
that it doesn't matter what the facts are. It matters what people believe. You know,
#
that faith is important and this brings that whole dichotomy of faith versus facts. And
#
this is a larger dichotomy in today's times. And this is, in a sense, is a question to
#
you about both politics and media. Like you must have read Walter Lippman's classic book
#
on journalism, Public Opinion, where the first chapter is titled The World Outside and the
#
Picture in Our Heads, where he points out that most people have a construction of the
#
world in their heads that cannot correspond exactly to the world, obviously, because the
#
world is so complex, but which is kind of made up. Now, back in the day when you had
#
a consensus on truth, you had a mainstream media, everybody got information from the
#
same place. That picture was very similar. Now, the picture can be anything that anybody
#
wants it to be. And therefore, you know, what Murli Manohar Joshi was doing, inventing history's
#
whole scale when he was in the HRD ministry, is not something that is so unusual. It is
#
something that would be successful, perhaps was successful, will be successful. And just
#
taking that thought forward, it also strikes me that this is something that the ruling
#
dispensation realizes that what matters is constructing narrative. Governance doesn't
#
really matter so much, one because Indian people have just become so apathetic and resigned
#
to bad governance, but also because you can always build a narrative about anything. And
#
these are really two different skill sets. One is a skill set of winning elections by
#
pushing narratives, and the other is a skill set of governing well. And they seem to me
#
to be two totally different skill sets, which have nothing to do with each other. So a party
#
that excels at the one, you shouldn't expect them necessarily to excel at the other or
#
be outraged when they don't. But in a larger sense, how does this make you feel? Because
#
all your life as a journalist, as a newscaster, it's in a sense, I mean, I know I'm stating
#
it a bit idealistically, but it's in the pursuit of truth. It's at least in the recognition
#
that there is a truth. While in modern times, there are just different narratives. How do
#
Well, I think in many ways, Advani with this, it doesn't matter what the truth is, it's
#
what people believe the truth is, was ahead of his time, because you watch Kellyanne Conway
#
and all these other Republicans on television now, alternative facts, which is what Advani
#
was presenting us without knowing the term. But I'll give you three examples from social
#
media and the government over the last three days. One is the government got up in parliament
#
and said there have been no oxygen deaths in India during the pandemic. Two, it got
#
up and said there has been no shortage of vaccines. And three, throughout social media,
#
the glove puppets of the ruling establishment picked up a story about amnesty and what it
#
said about the Pegasus revelations, twisted its meaning and ran it throughout social media
#
saying that amnesty has denied the truth of the Pegasus report, has said we never said
#
these Pegasus phones were hacked. All three are utter and complete lies. All three got
#
white circulation, at least in the case of the first two, because they came from people
#
you don't normally expect to lie, ministers in the government of India. But as you say,
#
the sad reality is that they have built a narrative over what you were kind, you could
#
call it alternative facts, but if you were brutal, you would call lies. And that ultimately
#
is how governance functions today. You don't let the truth ever get you down. You invent
#
your narrative, you stick with your narrative, you manipulate social media to promote that
#
narrative, and you browbeat traditional media to also carry that narrative. If they don't
#
carry that narrative, they will say you're being unfair to us. Why aren't you carrying
#
our side of the story? And you say, but your side of the story is a lie. They'll say, so
#
you have to be fair to us. That's what we've been reduced.
#
Yeah, I'm reminded of that story of if a journalist is in a room and one person tells him it's
#
raining and the other person says it's not raining, his job is not to report both. His
#
job is to go to the window and look outside. Yeah, and I don't know if you've read this
#
book by Harry Frankfurt called On Bullshit. Yeah, so Harry Frankfurt is a philosopher.
#
I think he wrote this essay in the mid 80s and it came out as a book in the early 2000s.
#
And he uses this phrase bullshit in a particular way. He says that many politicians aren't
#
lying. They are bullshitting. And the difference is that a lie acknowledges that there is a
#
truth and that, you know, it is not the truth. But when it comes to bullshitting, people
#
don't care about the truth. It doesn't matter. They'll just say whatever. It may be true
#
sometimes accidentally. It may not be true sometimes. It doesn't matter. They're just
#
bullshitting going with the narrative. I think Trump did this a hell of a lot. I see a lot
#
of this coming from this dispensation. In fact, these seem to me to be examples of just
#
bullshitting that there was no oxygen shortage. The government ministers saying there was
#
no vaccine shortage is more than bullshitting. It's a lie. It's a lie. It's a specific question
#
to tell a lie that is easily demonstrably disprovable, that everybody knows there was
#
a vaccine shortage. Everybody can get the figures. But the guy says it because he can.
#
He can get away in today's environment with telling a lie.
#
Now, I won't argue this particular example, but Frankfurt's distinction was...
#
No, I think it's a good distinction. I think it's a good distinction. We ultimately nowadays
#
do politics by bullshit. These guys just make it up all along and never let the facts get
#
Yeah, exactly. And we see a lot of this in social media as well. So let's kind of talk
#
about social media because I see two sort of disconcerting trends in social media apart
#
from the polarization of the discourse and all of that. I see two sort of ways in which
#
social media can turn a user into a different person. And one is... And this is again perhaps
#
from the vocal minority and the silent majority is not like this. But from a lot of people,
#
you see a rudeness which you would not otherwise see in traditional media. A classic form of
#
that being the court tweet. Like if you and I were having a disagreement and I said something
#
you thought was stupid, you would not immediately in my presence turn to a third person and
#
say, oh, look, Amit is such a fool. Amit is an idiot. But this happens all the time on
#
Twitter. And it's almost become a reflexive thing that you're passing judgment on others
#
to show your own virtue. Because every time you diss someone, you're basically saying
#
something about yourself as well. You're saying, I am better than this. I am at a higher moral
#
ground or whatever intellectual ground to pass judgment on this person. And this, it
#
seems to me, can have a corrosive aspect on a person's character even in the real world.
#
And the other aspect is that people adopt certainty much sooner. Like you know, if social
#
media had been around when I was in my teens or early 20s, it would have been a disaster
#
because one does so many stupid things. One says so many stupid things. But as you go
#
through life, you learn, you become a better person, you change your views. I think social
#
media often what happens is if you're 19, you know, you find your echo chamber online,
#
you get comfort from being part of an ideological tribe, you put out tweets, you say whatever.
#
And after that, you're jostling for position within that tribe by expressing your purity.
#
I think then having taken hardened stance, you then find yourself doubling down, which
#
is a human tendency. And you become more and more hardened, which otherwise you might not
#
have, if not for these imperatives of posturing and seeking validation and all of that. Is
#
this stuff that you've thought about? I mean, I know you've been at the receiving end of
#
trolling and rudeness and all of that as well yourself. And at the same time, you know,
#
you have a following of your own, you use social media, a fair bit, I see you on Twitter.
#
So what are your thoughts on this? I think some of it is the tyranny or the advantage
#
of distance. I'll give you a simple example. If you watch any television show, people are
#
very rude to each other. They are always most shows degenerate into fights or abuse or whatever.
#
Now if you were to take the guests on that same show and you were to put them in a television
#
studio, they're always much more civilized. Here they're in windows, they're talking alone
#
into a camera or into a computer. They don't actually see the other person. So they feel
#
they can get away with treating that person with less respect, being much ruder, being
#
much more offensive than they would be. You take that forward into social media, where
#
not only do you have the disadvantage, if I'm talking to you, I'm obliged to be polite.
#
I mean, it's human nature. If I'm tweeting to you from a great distance, I can say what
#
I like. So I think that if the impersonal nature of communication always leads to an
#
increase in rudeness, then there are all the factors you talk about, which is that the
#
great thing about social media is that it provides a level playing field. Somebody like
#
the prime minister can tweet something and you can tweet a response to him. He may have
#
millions of followers, you may have 5,000, but at least when the tweets appear, they
#
appear side by side. So there is that illusion, that sense of equality that you too can have
#
your say. Now that's incredibly empowering in some ways, but also I think it allows people
#
to be more abusive than they otherwise would be. Many of the people say who abuse Rahul
#
Gandhi? If they were next to Rahul Gandhi, they would not do this, but they feel powerful.
#
They feel you can say, Tremere, you're a pappu, you count for nothing, et cetera. So social
#
media strengthens, gives a sort of Dutch courage to people who want to be negative, allows
#
them to do something. Also, and you made that point about social media mobs, that if you're
#
in it from an early age, you fall in with one lot and then you double down on your things.
#
Even social media makes you feel more powerful than you are as an individual because you
#
feel you're part of something greater. Say you're part of a Congress mob that attacks
#
anybody who says anything bad about Rahul Gandhi, or you're part of a Sanghi mob that
#
does it. And then add to that the control rooms, the glove puppets, the two rupee wallahs
#
who are sent in there basically to lower the tone of discourse, to make it abusive, to
#
make it rude. Once the debate takes on that tenor, when you join, you tend to follow that
#
tenor. So I think it's a combination of many, many factors.
#
It reminds me of this experiment that was carried out in the US where basically people
#
exiting a sports arena were sent into a tent or whatever. And there's a puppet there of
#
a sports star who was at that time unpopular with the franchise. And they could say whatever
#
they wanted, went as it were. And the whole deal was that this person would go in and
#
he would shout and scream or abuse or say whatever. And then from behind the puppet,
#
the actual sports star would emerge.
#
So I'll actually look, I don't think there are video clips of it. I'll look for them
#
because it's just fascinating. And it's a fascinating experiment of sort of how that
#
kind of works. You know, your book is, I love reading it so much and I won't ask you more
#
questions on the politics and the media aspects of it. I suggest everyone should just go out
#
and read that. But I'll end with some general questions. And one of those is kind of an
#
observation as well really that I wanted to make because one of the things that I was
#
delighted by when I started reading this book was how LOL funny it was to use millennial
#
lingo, which honestly I have to say, I've been reading it for many, many years. I did
#
not expect it to be this funny. Like there were chapter titles, which just made me laugh
#
The chapter titles are my wife's work. I can't take the credit for them. She edited the book
#
and she wrote all the chapter titles.
#
Well, they're fantastic, but they come from your chapters, which you did right. So, you
#
know, little things like Pondit here, but I cannot hear, which is your colleague in
#
the Calcutta office calling BBC. But the funniest part, which I just burst out laughing and
#
alarmed the people around me was Atlas Bihar Vampire, where H.T. in Bhopal carried a headline,
#
which was Atlas Bihar Vampire Comes to Bhopal. And you investigated further and found out
#
that it was somebody using a spell checker and they had meant Atal Bihari Vajpayee Comes
#
to Bhopal, but it became Atlas Bihar Vampire, which is just hilarious.
#
For that, for the man in question, it happened on a day when I, who entered the Hindustan
#
Times, Shobana Bharatiya, who is the owner, who is the owner of the Hindustan Times, were
#
both in town. And we both woke up in the morning, read this and went ballistic. If he had done
#
it on some other day, he would have got away with it, I think.
#
It's just hilarious. Yeah, I mean, Bhopal readers would have been like, what the fuck?
#
So that is something I really enjoyed. My next question is this, that what drives you
#
now? You know, you've been in journalism for so many decades. You're still doing new things.
#
You're experimenting with new things. A lot of your thoughts about the intimacy of the
#
medium, about the nature of how people consume media have changed are extremely spot on from
#
where I'm sitting. So what drives you? Like, you know, what are the things that we can
#
expect from you over the next 10 years? And in general, like you've, you've shared, you
#
know, brief snippets of what your philosophy towards life is, like, you know, taking happiness
#
in the small things and so on and so forth. But what is it that really keeps you going,
#
keeps you excited at a personal level? I don't know. You know, it's a very difficult
#
question to answer. You use the word serendipity for a lot of my career. So much of life has
#
just happened to me. There's never been a grand design, never a desire to do something.
#
I've done things that haven't worked out because they seem the right thing to do at the time.
#
I joined NewsX because I edited a newspaper. So it seemed right to now try and run a television
#
channel with that with the fiasco. So whenever I've tried to do something that seems like
#
the right thing to do, it has almost never worked out. So I've just let life pass me
#
by. I have in the last few years taken much more interest in food, which I think is a
#
growing area. Apart from Easy Diner, I'm also chairman of a company called Culinary Culture,
#
which is going to rate restaurants and courage chefs that had really got going and then the
#
pandemic happened. With a bit of luck, that'll end and we'll go on with that. That takes
#
up a fair amount of my time. I like doing political writing. I do it. I've been less
#
keen on television over the last year or so. I mean, I'll do it because the only kind of
#
I have no interest in anchoring debates. So the only kind of television I could do would
#
be an interview show, which I am happy to do. But during the pandemic, this was impossible
#
because you couldn't meet people face to face. And there is the other problem which we will
#
have to reconcile ourselves to, which is that nobody in a position of great authority in
#
the government will give me an interview. The way it now works is that if you're Rajnath
#
Singh or somebody with an independent statute of your own or Ghatkari, you decide who you
#
give interviews to. But almost everybody else has to refer all interview requests to the
#
prime minister's office. And I don't think the prime minister is too high in mind to
#
get more, but the people lower down take the line that if the person is not one of us,
#
then he shouldn't be given any access. So you end up therefore doing interview shows
#
with opposition members, with people who are not in politics. I mean, I did it for a while,
#
but it's frustrating and it got even more frustrating because I did say an interview
#
with Jen Sinner when he was civil aviation minister, he was very good. I had an interview
#
with Alphonse when he was tourism minister and he spoke well. They were the two ministers
#
who were dropped immediately when things went on. So the people who are willing to talk
#
to you, the people who are willing to express their point of view are the people who are
#
out of sync anyway, and probably won't last. If I wanted to say to interview Nirmala Sitharaman,
#
for instance, there's no chance I would ever get that interview. If I went to Amit Shah's
#
house to ask for an interview, I'd probably be shot on sight. No, I'm exaggerating, but
#
I would certainly be progmized out of the building. So there is no way you can get access
#
into this government. And it's frustrating for an interviewer if you're doing interviews
#
with the people who matter, if the people who run this country close themselves to you.
#
The prime minister has not given a single interview as far as I know, apart from a few
#
things to a few selected media people on areas where the questions have been rearranged or
#
whatever. He's not attended a single press conference. So there is no tradition in this
#
government of openness, of being willing to answer questions. So that is the problem with
#
doing an interview show. If I can find a way of getting around that, then I'd love to do
#
an interview show. And I have spoken to channels who are interested in doing that. I love writing,
#
so I continue to write, though it doesn't necessarily make me much money, but it's in,
#
I think, keeps me alive. There's also a sense that when you're 65, which I am now, you've
#
had your say, you've had your turn. There are newer people coming up who want to be
#
on television, who want to run newspapers, et cetera. And there's nothing more irritating
#
or annoying than an old guy who's had a say but keeps hanging on because he can't find
#
anything else to do. So I've tried very hard and as gracefully as possible to move out
#
of the way. And now it's not just the next generation, several generations below me have
#
come of age for them to appear. So on the whole, I want to now do, I mean, I've worked
#
fairly hard most of my life. I want to do the things I enjoy. And with a bit of luck,
#
do enough to keep body and soul together and make enough money to survive.
#
So a digressive question, because you just mentioned food and I realized that I have
#
to ask you at least one question about food writing. What is the show even? And this is
#
something I've explored with other sort of food writers who've come on my show earlier,
#
like Shobana Rayan and Nandita Iyer and so on, which is that when you write about food,
#
initially one might think that, oh, I like movies, let me write a film review or, oh,
#
I like food, let me write a restaurant review. And one may start like that. But when it becomes
#
a vocation, when you continue doing it and you go deeper and deeper, one, does your appreciation
#
of the food increase that much? Like, are you that much more mindful about everything
#
that you're eating and you're thinking about it in different ways that you otherwise would
#
not have? And is there then a larger lesson in it perhaps for journalists that the best
#
way to increase your mindfulness about something or your appreciation of something or your
#
knowledge of something is to force yourself to write about it?
#
I think that's true. I think I don't, I mean, I like food and I've learned much more. I
#
was doing this column and now I think next year will be 20 years. So I've been doing
#
this column for a very long time. And obviously I know much more about food when I started
#
than I did when I started out writing this column. And as time goes on, you learn more
#
and you realize the things you've written earlier were wrong, which is always a very
#
humbling experience. But frankly, I've now lost interest in writing about restaurants
#
or writing about food that's good. I'm more fascinated by the other aspects of food. My
#
column this week, for instance, is on biryani. Now biryani is a huge, huge craze in India,
#
despite many efforts in the part of the past that we do indicate that khichdi is a more
#
appropriate subject for us to love. But still India loves biryani, no matter how you vote.
#
Now there's, because biryani has become such a craze, there's a lot of misinformation.
#
There's this argument, which I believe for a long time that biryani, which I know I said,
#
I bet I didn't believe the argument that biryani came from Iran, which is nonsense. It was
#
invented in India. We think it was invented around the time of Shah Jahan or perhaps Jahangir.
#
But because something was invented at the time of Jahangir, it doesn't mean that Jahangir
#
necessarily ate it. Just because we are having this conversation at the time of Narendra Modi,
#
that doesn't necessarily mean he's watching. He is watching, though we know that now. That's
#
one good thing in India. You're never alone. They're always watching. But more seriously,
#
I mean, just because something was created during a period doesn't mean it's necessarily
#
regal or royal. And the whole mythology has been built up around biryani, saying it was
#
a court dish and all of that. In fact, the more I've researched this, my research shows
#
me things I'd never guessed about and how I was wrong before. All the evidence is that
#
the emperors ate yakhni pulao, which is a dish that came from Iran and is a more delicate
#
dish and more difficult to do. Biryani was made in these large vessels to feed everybody
#
else. So it was a dish for the masses. It was never really a royal dish, despite the
#
mythology we have now. So doing that story, talking to historians, talking to people who
#
read the original texts, trying to figure out from somebody, for instance, in Lucknow,
#
the biryani, what we call biryani, the chefs insist on calling it pulao. So in what sense
#
is the Lucknow biryani a pulao? What sense is it not? I actually enjoy doing stuff like
#
that, which goes beyond saying a Lucknow biryani is the best or whatever. And I think the only
#
way you can still enjoy writing a column like that is if you change the focus from simple
#
I love, it's great, and take a pumpkin, slice it into four and I'll tell you a great way
#
of making it. If you look at the other aspects of food illuminating, and this reminds me
#
of a poem by Vijay Shishadri, where he talks about, quote unquote, the mountain at the
#
end of the universe. And the philosophical question there is that if the whole universe
#
ends and there is just a mountain remaining, is it really a mountain? What is it really?
#
Like, what is it a mountain in comparison to, for example, and the same thing could be said
#
about a dish of rice at the end of the universe. Is it a biryani or a pulao? But is it just
#
a dish of rice? Yeah, is it just a dish of rice? And what is rice even? So my penultimate
#
question to you, and it's a two part question, I guess, that you've just written this great
#
book where you've looked back not just on your own life, but also on Indian politics,
#
Indian media, all of that is a very rich book. If I ask you to look forward now, and let's
#
say look forward to maybe 10 years from now, what gives you hope and what gives you despair
#
about the sort of direction we are moving in and about the possibilities that lie ahead
#
of us? I believe, for better or for worse, that the Prime Minister's greatest achievement
#
is that he's done what people considered impossible. He's weaponized Hinduism. It's easy enough
#
to weaponize a minority and to make them feel they're discriminated against and they have
#
to vote. It's almost impossible, I would have thought, to take what 85% of the population
#
and make them feel that they're being discriminated against and attacked by the other 40% or 15%.
#
But he's pulled it off. The Hindus who feel that they're, what's the term, second class
#
citizens in their own country, that they're under constant attacks from jihadis, the jihadis
#
are coming and taking their women away from them with love jihad, and this whole mythology
#
has been built up. Now, you and I may laugh about this mythology, but what it does is
#
that people now vote for the BJP and for this government, not because of what it does, but
#
because of what it is, which means that till now, the Prime Minister has been moralist,
#
performance proof. Even if demonetization happens and it's a complete disaster, he's okay.
#
In the first wave, the lockdowns were a complete disaster, but research by some psychologists
#
has shown in Bihar that even the migrants who were displaced went and voted for the
#
BJP. So, so far, it hasn't mattered so much. I don't know if the COVID deaths and the terrible
#
mishandling of the second wave will make a difference, but you can only carry on what
#
is ultimately done where we're all pious about Mayawati and Mulayam. What the BJP is now
#
doing is the ultimate in identity politics. But experience has shown us that identity
#
politics cannot last forever. So, while there is an absence at the moment of a clear alternative,
#
I think things could change in the next two years or three years. Certainly, maybe not
#
enough to defeat the BJP, but enough to weaken it. If it weakens it enough, it has to follow
#
it. Then Mr. Modi is not quite the Titan he seems at the moment. So, if you work on that
#
assumption, then the India that he has created may not survive for that long. You may have
#
an India with a more vibrant politics rather than a unipolar politics that revolves only
#
around the BJP. And you may have been in other regimes and other politicians who are willing
#
to talk to the media, who are willing to give more access, that another spirit of give and
#
take is introduced between the media and the rest of the country. If that does happen,
#
if politicians are willing to talk to us, then I think we are going to be in the next
#
five, six years into a different India. There's also another factor that all of this Muslim
#
bashing is based on the assumption that Muslims will sit there and take it. And so far that
#
assumption has been right. Nothing has happened. But will that happen indefinitely? Will people
#
just continue to have their children abused at school, continue to be made to feel that
#
they're traitors to their own country, the country that families are given their lives
#
for? I don't think they will. So, if this kind of divisive politics continues, then
#
I think we're in for quite a lot of trouble in India on the communal front. And ironically,
#
all of this is self-fulfilling if, say, young Muslims who feel discriminated against or
#
unemployable resort to any kind of violence. This is taken to the Hindu majority and said,
#
here, we told you these guys were jihadis. Now, here is proof. So, I think that unless
#
things change, we are in a very dangerous phase when it comes to the communal, fragile
#
communal balance in India. So, that is something that concerns me about the next 10 years.
#
I'm also very concerned about the economy. I mean, one of the things we were proud of
#
in the Manmohan Singh era was that India-Pakistan hyphenation had ended, which was now India-China.
#
Nobody bothers to even talk about us the same breath as China. We are back to being India-Pakistan,
#
at least largely because the political establishment has not only screwed up the
#
economy, it has focused, it's been obsessive in its emphasis on Pakistan. We used to say
#
once upon a time that India is top of the mind for every Pakistan, even for Indians.
#
Who even thinks about it? We hardly even think about it. Not true any longer. Politicians
#
think about it every day. I think that's also a very dangerous phase. If the economy does not
#
deliver, there are many, many people joining the job market. They will not get jobs. There will be
#
a huge amount of unrest and a huge amount of frustration. So, what are the solutions required?
#
I think one, you need some kind of more tolerant, more inclusive regime. That may not be possible
#
with the current cast of characters, but perhaps those circumstances will change.
#
You also need somebody who understands the economy, knows how to manage it. I mean,
#
the distinguishing factor of this government's economic management has been mediocrity.
#
Nobody says that they're geniuses. They don't do things. I hope that changes very quickly
#
because we've gone in seven years from being the country the world looks at
#
and wonders what will happen to being the country the world worries about. There's a huge
#
uproar in India at the moment because the economist is called India the sick man of Asia,
#
which is the kind of thing they used to say about India in the 60s. But I think we risk
#
going back to those days and that worries me greatly. So, there is some reason for hope,
#
but there are many, many reasons for concern.
#
Yeah, wise words. And you know, that old cliche, I think Harold Wilson, it was who said that,
#
you know, a week is a long time in politics. So, it's actually unfair to ask anyone a question
#
about what politics could look like 10 years from now because things change so fast. I mean,
#
just looking at America and I'm thinking aloud in 2004 when Bush beat Kerry,
#
who would have thought that your next president is going to be a guy whose surname rhymes with
#
Osama and whose middle name is Hussein? Or who would have thought when, you know, Obama won for
#
the second time to the next president is going to be Donald Trump. So, crazy things happen.
#
So, all political predictions are a high risk business.
#
Yeah, exactly. So, my final question and this is again something that's particular to the show
#
because people like to read so much and they're always looking for book recommendations without
#
any bar on subject or genre or whatever. You know, if there are four or five books or whatever
#
number is easy to come up with you on the spur of the moment, which you want to share with the world,
#
you feel that, hey, these are books everyone should read or if there are books that you feel
#
shaped you and change the way you look at the world, you know, give us some recommendations.
#
Christ, it's difficult. I'm trying to think. Well, fiction I've quoted from it. So, I'll quote
#
from it again. I think in many ways, it's the perfect novel. I think everyone should read The
#
Great Catchment because it's ostensibly a simple story but there's so many little pearls of wisdom
#
like the lines I quoted early in the show. I think everyone should read that. Thinking,
#
I think anyone who lives in Mumbai should read Sacred Games. I think it's still the definitive
#
Mumbai novel. I wouldn't be too worried about the television adaptation. The first one was good,
#
the second one was rubbish but just read the book. I think the book is worth reading.
#
If you're interested in the media, which I think many of us are, particularly the history of the
#
media to understand how we got here, read The Powers That Be by David Halperstam that came out
#
in the 1980s when it tells you how CBS became what it is, how Time Magazine became what it is.
#
The Washington Post, it talks about great media organizations and what it takes to fund them
#
or to become them. Books about India are pretty much anything by Ram Guha. I don't think I've
#
ever read anything Ram has written and not felt enriched at the end of that. And both of Nandan
#
Nirekani's books, I think they're both interesting. The first one is even better than the second.
#
But both of them deal with stuff at the level of ideas, which I think is unusual in India.
#
And he sustains your interest. And I think Shashi Tharoor's book on empire,
#
I don't remember what it was called or what the British did to us in India was Inglourious Empire,
#
something like that. Please read that. I think it's very important for every Indian to know
#
what the British actually did for us and what we should be upset about. And yet,
#
as we all know, we gained also, but we gained at enormous cost. Big enough list?
#
That's a big enough list to start with. Maybe some other time, if you're on the show, you can
#
come better prepared with more books. I'll think of this. This was the curveball here.
#
Veer, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing your insights, for giving me your time
#
and for writing this wonderful book, which made me laugh so much and which also taught me so much.
#
Thank you so much. Thank you. It will be a real pleasure and a real joy. Thank you for inviting me.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
#
production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
