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The other day someone asked me, give me an example of the seen and the unseen.
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Now everything is an example because there is so much unseen in everything.
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But one perfect example is this.
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We live in a world designed by men for men and that world is the seen world.
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Women have to fit themselves into this world and all that they do to fit in, all that they
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go through inside is unseen by men and often by women themselves.
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We tell ourselves the world is what it is.
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We normalise as many oppressions and injustices.
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The cost of this is a psychological cost that cannot be measured.
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The cost of this is also an economic cost that we can try to measure and that is more
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If we care about the world we live in, we have to try and peel away the layers of this
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unseen world of the Indian woman who is lonely in the kitchen, lonely in her bedroom, lonely
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If we want to solve this problem, first we have to try to understand it.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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My guest today is Shreyana Bhattacharya, an economist at the World Bank and the author
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of a brilliant new book called Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, India's Lonely Young Women
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and the Search for Intimacy and Independence.
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This is not a book on Shah Rukh Khanna cinema.
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This is a book on the loneliness of the Indian woman.
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And it is a book that is constructed on a mind boggling scale.
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This is a book that contains anthropology, sociology and economics, disciplines that
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often don't come together.
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And it is told with storytelling that stands with the best of literature.
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We see the interior lives of women across different classes and castes and regions and
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circumstances in the bedroom and in the kitchen, in barren fields and concrete offices, united
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by crippling solitude, which Shreyana explores through the device of their common love for
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This is also reflected in numbers, in the many movements within the labour market, in
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an impact on our economy that is more tangible than feelings.
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And this is what is so amazing about this book and about Shreyana's gaze.
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She is as good at zooming in as she is at zooming out.
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We get inside the heads of different young women across the country and we also get a
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sense of the bigger picture.
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Economists and sociologists and anthropologists and novelists will often see different parts
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Shreyana sees them all equally well and shows us well the elephant in the room.
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That makes a book the best kind of scholarship and it makes Shreyana the best kind of scholar.
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I hope young people listening to this and reading her book will find themselves inspired
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The conversation we had turned out to be so rich not just because we spoke about the subject
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We also discussed academia and its perils and failures.
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We argued about Shah Rukh Khan and she also spoke about her many intellectual influences.
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Listen, I urge you, go into the show notes, pick up the book she recommends, read them,
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It's an education as indeed I found this conversation to be.
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Before we get to it though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet.
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But the problem we all face is how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called the Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
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Shreena, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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Amit, it's such a pleasure to be here.
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Thank you so much for inviting me.
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Yeah, I love reading your book, though I have to point out that I don't share the fandom
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of Shah Rukh Khan as you do.
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Yeah, as you're probably well aware.
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It was eye-opening for me in various different ways.
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And I'd just like to start this off by telling my listeners that, listen, don't go by the
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The title is perfect for the book, but don't go by it.
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It's really a book to me about Indian society that can really open your eyes into how this
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country works in so many different ways.
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And economics is just a part of it.
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But you know, before the book and before Shah Rukh, tell me a bit about yourself.
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So where did you grow up?
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What kind of kid were you?
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Do you remember watching your first Shah Rukh film?
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I must actually say, I don't have, I struggled to recall my childhood.
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It's not extremely lucid for me.
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I was born in Calcutta, then moved to Durgapur.
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So dad was a steel, Tata steel man, worked in human resources.
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And I have very vivid memories of how stressful that was for him because he used to manage
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negotiations with labor unions and workers, which created a lot of, it's a difficult space
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to be because essentially he was constantly bargaining while they were fighting for their
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And so I think this notion of unions and labor and what it means to be workers and what it
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means to manage large organizations and keep people happy, I think seeing him struggle
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with that, I remember that very clearly.
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And those are some interesting conversations from the past that I remember him just coming
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back and grumbling about how entrenched patronage networks were essentially within labor unions
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This is particularly true for, you know, Jharkhand, Bengal, what was Bihar back then.
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And then we moved, funnily enough, when I was around, I think five or four, to Chandigarh.
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And my mother and father believe that I must be the most Punjabi of all bongs out there
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because Chandigarh was where I learned Hindi, my idioms, the way I speak, all of that completely
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happened when I was there.
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I went to nursery school there.
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I have very fond memories of Chandigarh.
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To me, it's just all sky and just a gorgeous area and architecture and all of that.
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And then we moved to Delhi, where my mother was working as a social worker for the UNHCR.
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She was managing refugees who were coming in from Afghanistan, and it was her job to
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help them fill out the paperwork to get benefits that the UN essentially allocated to refugees
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who were settling into India.
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And we had days and nights where, once she fainted in office, once she fainted at hospital
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because just the hours and the expectations and the stress, and it was, I think, psychologically
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Social work is a very difficult job psychologically.
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And I remember being a kid watching her and being quite fearful, actually, of just how
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much she was dealing with and how much she was doing.
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And all these young men and women who had come, who were hoping to resettle, they'd
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left everything, had abandoned their homes and livelihoods in Afghanistan, and are now
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in Delhi, in defense colony, waiting outside a refugee center, and all their hopes pinned
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And I think somewhere there, perhaps my early interest in the welfare state, the politics
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of paperwork, social protection, safety nets, which is an area now I work on, really began,
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I think, watching my mom.
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So I'd finish school, I'd be dropped off near her refugee center, and I'd sit next
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And there were these hordes of young Afghan people who I couldn't understand what they
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And there were interpreters.
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But I used to watch her and her patience with people.
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And it just, it was remarkable to me, and it was extremely exotic.
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And I remember that very well.
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And on the other hand, my father at that time was working for Maurya Sheraton.
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You know, he was, again, managing human resources in a big hotel, very glamorous, but also extremely
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hard hours, saying a lot of yes to things that I sensed he really didn't want to say
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yes to, and having to deal with, you know, we know hospitality is one of the most difficult
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sectors to work in, because people just treat service staff and people who work in hospitality
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terribly in our country, and they continue to do so.
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And I think my father really dealt with that.
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So it was moving from labor unions into difficult customers, posh, difficult customers in Delhi.
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And I think my memory of childhood, honestly, is being very conscious of the jobs that my
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I was very aware of just how complex those jobs were, how difficult dealing with people
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was because both their jobs involved immense amounts of constant negotiation with tons
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And there was this one scary moment, which I'll never forget, which is we used to live
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in this home in Delhi, and one night, essentially, someone broke the glass of the house.
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And later, we found out it was actually one of the Afghan refugees because he was upset
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that my mother had not signed off on a piece of paper, he'd found out, I don't know how
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there was all kinds of case files that were formed.
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And I think I just grew up realizing that our lives are very precarious.
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I mean, seeing that, that someone felt the urge to essentially violate someone's home
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and to make someone feel unsafe, it came from the fact that they themselves felt so unsafe
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and so precarious in their life.
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So I think my childhood, I mean, I remember as a kid, I just remember being very conscious
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of these very early memories, somehow this has stayed with me.
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And then the other stuff was just incredibly banal, right?
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So I went to a school in Delhi, I, you know, picked up all the reading habits that are
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very typical of kids born in the early 1980s.
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I think, you know, right from be it, you know, Enid Blighton to, I started reading Jane Austen,
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I think much earlier than many of my other friends probably did, I was quite young.
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And I think through that, suddenly then being exposed to satellite television in the early
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90s, which was just so incredibly exciting, right?
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I mean, I've heard you talk about this with so many of your other guests in the past.
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And being obsessed with the X-Files and discovering mathematics, which was for me at a point of
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time was just a really, to me, math was just this beautiful language, which I really wanted
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to understand and use, but I struggled to completely.
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I'm not a great mathematician, but it's something that's always interested me.
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And so I just remember my childhood being, you know, spending a lot of time with books,
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struggling with trying to understand a lot of math problems and puzzles.
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I think that was something that was really important and fun for me to do.
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I wasn't a very social kid.
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I'm not still very social.
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I'm quite reticent and a bit of a recluse.
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And I think observing people who are very social has been part of, I think, my growing
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I mean, when I was a teenager, even in my late teens, I was friends with people who
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were far more boisterous than, you know, popular girls in school or boys who were really sought
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after for their social credentials or who they were.
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I think maybe because I read Jane Austen at a very early age, I learned the value and
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pleasure of just watching and observing.
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And so, yeah, I think those have been the sense of experiences, I think the books.
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And as for Shah Rukh, I encountered him.
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My mother's family comes from a small town in Bengal.
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It's called Kollani, which is it's further out from Kolkata.
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And I was sent to Kollani for essentially summer holidays so that, you know, my parents
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could have some break, a little bit of time to themselves.
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And I used to spend a lot of time with my grandmother and my grandfather.
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And I think a lot of my reading habits, in fact, particularly came from my grandmum.
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She's really someone who encouraged me to read.
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And she was an avid reader.
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She used to read Bengali literature, but she was an avid reader and she would suggest lots
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And there was a cinema hall, which still exists.
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And their house was right opposite the railway station of Kollani.
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It was so exciting for me because I would go there and I would spend all my time staring
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at these trains just going in and out and the people in them.
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And I used to write, make notes then as well about what I was seeing.
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And I was just trying to capture, I think, what I was seeing constantly and constantly
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being unhappy with the way I was capturing it.
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And there was a cinema hall next to her home and they were playing Bazigarh.
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And I think this must have been 1993 or 1994.
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And I went to watch Bazigarh, which actually I do not think is the first film anyone should
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be watching or Shah Rukhs because he's actively harming women, killing them, putting them
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All kinds of terrible things are happening.
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I have to just confess, I mean, I realize I'm saying something that won't be politically
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correct, but I know that it's actually true for so many fans, female fans who may feel
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uncomfortable with the things that he was doing.
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When we saw him in that film, there was something about the charge of desperation, revenge,
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attempting to sort of make a point, just who he was, the way he looked, all of that.
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It was just love at first sight.
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And I think after that, I started following up just on his, each time we had a film out,
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I would try and watch it.
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But to be honest, my parents weren't particularly keen that I go and start watching his films,
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especially these films, and they found it a bit perplexing.
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And this, as you can tell from the book, is actually very common with a lot of upper middle
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class and elite English speaking fans.
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The parents were a bit confused as to why these young girls were suddenly connecting
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with a man who was not a particularly ideal figure at that time, right?
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And I saw DDLJ with my parents in 1995.
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And that completely then was just, you know, I was bowled over.
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I mean, it's just now so trite to say that I think the country fell in love with him
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You didn't, Amit, but the country did.
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And we'll talk about that.
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And after that, Amit, actually what I remember of him the most is that when I was, I was
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And I think that's a, we're a meagre minority in India still, you know, people whose both
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their parents are working.
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Because I think in the book, as you know, most women don't work in the country.
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So I'd come back home and I just let myself into the house.
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And satellite TV had now emerged.
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And Mr. Khan started doing all these interviews suddenly, you know, there was an interview
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I don't remember with Farida Jalal, I think, or, you know, various others.
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And I used to watch these interviews and somehow I think it was the interviews that really,
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I connected with the person I saw in those interactions.
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And to me, he just captured this, this idea of feeling left out, but then also trying
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That was something about what, how he was presenting himself.
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And a fan was born at that stage.
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I mean, I think I loved imagery in DDLJ and Bazigarh and all of that, I won't deny it.
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But I think it was the interviews that really set me off on this path of being a nutty fan
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that I still continue to be well into my late thirties.
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I wouldn't say though that Mr. Khan was a very integral part of my childhood or teenage
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I mean, he was there and I watched him.
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But I think it was only after I became, I think in my twenties, where I started rediscovering
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some of the old films again and particularly through the course of the book, I think actually
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my fandom for him has been enriched because of just the way I've heard different people
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But I saw him, I think it was that early nineties phase and it was, he was, he was like a friend.
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He was someone you would just sort of see on TV and he was giving you guidance about
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And I remember that very well.
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And I think that helped with all the competition and just the anxiety of just what will my
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What will my life be like?
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He was just a diversion from that and that helped.
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But I think my, my, my fandom, I think has now has been burnished in a way well into
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my late thirties that I don't think it was even in my teenage years or my, you know,
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So isn't Bhajigarh the film with that song, Kitabhi bahut si pari hogi tumne, and you
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Pining for a man who would throw you off the roof.
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Yeah, but by God, you know, Amit, now when I look at that film and I watched it recently,
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I really, I mean, I was wondering what was the younger version of me, number one, doing
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I mean, now I don't think we live in a world where they let a kid, you know, I think I
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must've been 12 or something, what to watch that movie.
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And you know, and then the other thing I was, I was watching, I was thinking about filmmaking
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was so innocent back then as well, because while he's doing all these terrible things,
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there was this way in which these films were made as if it was so matter of fact, there
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was no, there was no code to try and hide the fact that he was just a terrible person
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And yet you could feel that he, he drew some empathy out of you.
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And yet it was done without any, you know, it wasn't, it was just a very simple way of
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telling a story, which I just doubt you'd see now.
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And my God was those outfits he was wearing, which were just those oversized blazers.
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And then in the song and dance, there's some strange, you know, outfits going on.
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Those films, I mean, they'll never be made again.
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And I think that part, that partly makes me sad, but partly I'm also amused with the fact
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that how far, you know, the, it's a very simple era, I think, in even telling a very difficult
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story, but it's just told in this, you know, it's, it's, it's a potboiler.
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But if you look at the story, it's actually quite, it's quite dangerous and it's quite
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complex for what it's trying to do.
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And yet it's told in this really simple way.
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I mean, if you look at films as a modern mythology, you know, looking back, if you just look at
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all our myths, all our great epics, the people we are supposed to sympathize with do some
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pretty terrible things.
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But it is kind of understood that you just go along with them, you're there with them.
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You've mentioned about how you like to watch, you like to observe other people.
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You also were keenly aware of differences, I guess, in the sense that you could see what
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the Afghan refugees went through.
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So in a sense, you had an extra layer of awareness that people within that typical bubble, your
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peers might have been a part of, they weren't aware of.
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At what point did you start becoming self-aware?
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Because one of the things I loved about the book was a very personal way in which you
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start, which is so unvarnished and so self-aware and, you know, brutal with yourself.
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And when I think of my own self-awareness, I don't think I was at all self-aware in my
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teens or into adulthood, right?
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It's only after a certain period of time that you actually start thinking about stuff
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You take that step out of yourself and look at that.
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So were you also sort of watching yourself?
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Like you just mentioned that you can't imagine why you watch Bazigarh as a 12-year-old to
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So you're looking back on your old self and you're reflecting on that.
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Is that something that came to you naturally because, you know, you read a lot, you wanted
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to write, obviously, you were a watcher, so were you also watching yourself?
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Tell me a little bit about that process where you begin to be able to see yourself because
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I'm sure that there are defensive reactions which stop us from doing that because you
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won't like what you see.
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In fact, a dear friend of mine recently told me that, you know, it's amazing that technology
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is so many of us use to just hide from ourselves, right?
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We're constantly hiding from ourselves.
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I was hiding from myself, absolutely, and in fact, the book, the reason I write personally
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is that the book became a way for me to actually not hide anymore.
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I'm very transparent about it.
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I think in the way I write, it sounds self-indulgent, but my hope is because the book is actually
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about the stories of others, the self-indulgence is balanced out with the fact that this is
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actually a story of just women in the country and society, as you said, Amit.
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But for me, I think I really entered that path of self-awareness through feminism.
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And what I mean by that, Amit, is that in 2004-5, I was studying economics, I was studying
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development studies, and at that time, I'd taken a bunch of courses on gender and economics.
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And there were these wonderful books by people like Naila Kabir, there's a book called Power
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to Choose, which actually to me was the first.
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For those who don't know, Naila Kabir is a revered feminist economist.
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She was the head of the International Association of Feminist Economists for a while, a woman
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from Bangladesh who wrote about what starts to happen when young Bangladeshi women start
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making money in export zones in their country.
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And instead of taking a very macro picture, she started going into people's homes and
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using economic theory to understand, well, how do the incentives of behavior within families,
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love affairs, relationships start to change?
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And I'd always been someone who was very moved, it sounds odd, but very moved by the language
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of economics, so the language of taxes, incentives, I think where many of us see chaos, economists
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tend to be able to see some frameworks, and I find that terribly moving, actually, not
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just illuminating, but I find that the language is something that really, I really enjoy it.
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It's to me, it's like seeing a painting that moves you.
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And I read these books, and I devoured them.
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So I read Naila Kabir, I read every paper she wrote, she's definitely my, you know,
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At that time, I also started reading Marilyn Warren, these are, you know, founding texts
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And in these books, I started to realize that the way I was behaving in my day-to-day interactions
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with men, with my mother, with my best friend, was so deeply structurally coded by what women's
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experiences and women's expectations should be of society and the economy within it.
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And I think it was that reading and those experiences as a student with feminist texts
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that really pushed me into sort of thinking a lot more carefully about how I was behaving
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and my modes of behavior.
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And so I think it started there, and then I had a bunch of terrible love affairs, one
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of which I talk about in the book quite transparently.
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And nothing, I think, triggers more self-reflection than heartbreak, right, of any kind.
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And I think that can be of any form, but I think for women, particularly heartbreak in
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the area of love and intimacy tends to be very potent because women are socialized into
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believing that loving is what you're supposed to do, right?
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Love is so fundamental to a female life because the economy and the world outside is supposed
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to be for men and the intimacy in the interior world is supposed to be for women.
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So women have to secure love.
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And so when you don't secure love or the love that you think you've secured suddenly
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vanishes, you are left asking a lot of questions about why did I choose this path?
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What was the dynamic between me and this person?
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And this was, I think, Amit, around 2013.
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And by then, actually, the idea of the book has somewhat germinated already because I
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was interviewing people in the past, but I had a very different idea what the book would
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But I think it was around that 2013 period where along with, I think, all the sort of
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early feminist texts that I had read compounded with this heartbreak.
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I then started reading women, largely, actually, American women, funnily enough, whose memoirs
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I just found incredibly moving.
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I was reading Vivienne Gonick and I was reading Emily Witt.
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If anyone ever just wants to understand, I don't know, I think there's something really
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beautiful particularly about the way Vivienne Gonick, I call her the first lady of the contemporary
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memoir and there was something about the way she was writing and reflecting on her own
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experiences and this book that I read was when she was in her 60s.
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And I realized one of the things she wrote in the book was keeping oneself company is
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one of the hardest things that you will ever have to do.
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And I realized at that point, it was this eureka moment for me when I was reading her
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writing and at the same time dealing with my own heartbreak and what was happening in
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my life in Delhi, that I started to realize that I was behaving in ways that were partly
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were predictable because I think I didn't want to keep myself company.
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It was almost textbook escapism, right?
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So you escape into torrid, complicated love affairs because you don't really want to do
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the business of just being with yourself and sitting with yourself and being at peace with
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You want to just sort of run away from all of that.
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And in a way, each time I try and run away, I just come back because there's that great
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line at wherever you are, you are always there.
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And I think it was that heartbreak along with all the reading I was doing that pushed me
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to be, I don't think I'm fully self-aware yet.
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I think this is like a practice for all of us, but it pushed me to think much more carefully
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about how structures, incentives, status, taxes, all these things were shaping the way
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And I think that finds itself in the page.
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What I will also say, Amit, is that I think the book is a, I think I'm far more self-aware
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in the book than I probably am in person, if that makes sense.
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I think writing allows you that space, right?
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Because then you can be liberated of even having to perform a certain way.
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Even right now when I'm with you, there's a performance here.
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And when you're writing, I wrote not to perform, but to liberate myself from performing.
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I do know that there is writing that sometimes does the opposite, which can also be very
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I mean, that has its own balance and it means something.
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But for me, I wrote in a somewhat open-hearted way because I wanted to escape, to me, writing
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and reading is the place where I've escaped that performance art of being a certain kind
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And the last thing I will say, and probably we'll get into it more, is I think that Delhi
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is a city in particular.
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And the way it's set up, it guarantees, unlike, I really believe this, unlike a Mumbai or
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unlike a Kolkata, definitely not like a Bangalore, there is something particular about Delhi
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that just gets people to put on this farce of who you are much, much more.
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And I'm yet to understand it.
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Maybe my next book or whatever I try and do will delve into that.
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I try and attack it a bit in this book.
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I don't think I've understood it enough.
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I don't think I want to glibly dismiss it as always because it's the capital and there's
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power play and all of that.
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I don't think it's that.
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I don't think it's just because it's a city of power.
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There is something about opportunity and the way opportunity is mediated in Delhi, the
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way network wealth in a way works in Delhi, that everyone then starts to behave in ways
#
There is no incentive in Delhi to be self-aware because you're always playing this game within
#
And I think the book was a place for me to escape from that.
#
And then if I'm able to actually practice that level of self-awareness in real life,
#
then can only hope and I'm a work in progress.
#
But thank you for noticing that.
#
I mean, and what you say of Delhi always having to be performative, always playing a game,
#
one that is at some level true of everything else.
#
I mean, you're not just performing for me, you're also performing for yourself right
#
And specifically what you said about Delhi could also be true of South Bombay and various
#
other little parts of the country.
#
A couple of things, one reason I really, what elevates this book for me beyond what I expected
#
is that it is not just a project, it is your project.
#
The personal is very much part of it, which is one of the things I really enjoyed about
#
it because then you know that the quest is real and you can see where it's coming from
#
and the way it cuts across.
#
The other thing that strikes me and this is a very interesting sort of mix of two different
#
aspects which many people would think are contradictory, but which should actually be
#
And one of them is that you're embracing the messiness of real life.
#
People are complex, you're acknowledging those complexities, you're not really passing judgment,
#
you're vicious about certain kinds of people and we'll discuss those kinds of people.
#
But on these individuals, you're not really passing judgment, you're incredibly empathetic
#
and that's one aspect of it and that's something that you'd expect say from literature.
#
And the other aspect of it is like earlier you spoke about being moved by mathematics
#
and I get that, I really do, when there's a beautiful, elegant sort of expression of
#
a deep truth, it hits you in a visceral way, right?
#
And I see that aspect also because running through this is also, you're an economist,
#
there is a fair amount of data in this book though, in a very reader friendly way.
#
And there is also to some extent that clinical gaze that this is a data, this also shows
#
So what you're doing is you're bringing together these two pictures of reality, both of which
#
are equally valid but most people will focus on one.
#
So often you'll see economists who will give you a bunch of numbers but they don't come
#
alive, they're not vivid, they may be the truth and equally you'll have people paint
#
you stories of lives, human struggles and so on but you don't see a larger picture and
#
that's also the truth, right?
#
And you've kind of brought these together and I want to actually ask you about these
#
two aspects separately before we get to how they come together.
#
And I want to start with the literature aspect, like you said you read a lot, you were watching,
#
you would sit by the railway station and write little stories, I presume what you saw, which
#
is similar to something I used to do back in the day and it's such a writer's habit.
#
So clearly there is a storyteller, someone wanting to be a storyteller within that, right?
#
So tell me a little bit about that aspect of it, what kind of books did you read?
#
What kind of books did you like, what really moved you, you know, was there something which
#
made you say that I want to do, I want to write like this or these are the kind of stories
#
Yeah, Amit, you know, firstly, I have to say, I thought of myself as a reader more than
#
In fact, I didn't even know that I had this book in me, it reached Shruti Devi, who's
#
my agent, but she's really not my agent, she's my guide in this book.
#
And I think she saw the book as a writing text, because for me, it was just a bunch
#
of things that I had, and I think a lot of us do this, right, we just make notes.
#
These were diary entry notes, I didn't particularly know that they were lyrical, there was a way
#
I was writing and I wrote it and I somehow thought with some grand fit of confidence
#
that I would put it all together.
#
And so I've actually always seen myself and I think still see myself as a reader more
#
And the books that I absolutely love, you know, there are sort of two genres there.
#
One is I think I hinted at this sort of large genre, particularly I think a lot of women
#
writing what we would call confessional style writing, which tends to get dismissed at a
#
You know, I'm thinking of Kamala Das in India, I'm thinking of, as I said, Vivian Gornick
#
before, I'm thinking of Deborah Levy, I'm thinking of a lot of women who wrote about
#
But it was never this self-indulgent trite, right, it was, it was actually a very rigorous
#
disciplined look at life entering the world through your own experiences, but in a way
#
you're commenting on the world and you're just situating yourself very honestly.
#
And to me, these books, in particular a book called Odd Woman in the City by Vivian Gornick
#
was for me just eye opening in what writing could do.
#
It just changed the way I was thinking of text and I was one of those people who thought
#
memoir and all of this was sort of, you know, again, as I said, just somewhat narcissistic
#
effort to just dwell on yourself and make even, you know, really banal things seem lofty,
#
And I think I read these women and I realized that there was a way to situate yourself in
#
larger structural forces that were very important.
#
There was Bell Hooks who recently sadly passed away and her books, again, just her books
#
were a bit different because they were much more theoretical.
#
They were essentially in a way very, they were prescriptive somewhat, they were telling
#
But I found them very instructive in, again, thinking about all these very everyday feelings
#
we have, feeling unloved, feeling lonely, feeling cut up, short-changed, all of us deal
#
with these negative feelings.
#
And what I loved about these books was that they were telling you that these negative
#
feelings, well, number one, you were not alone in them, which I think is the function of
#
But the other was that they were telling you, unlike other kinds of art, they were actually
#
telling you that there's a structural reason why you seem to be persisting with these feelings
#
and you seem to also always be dwelling on these feelings.
#
And I realized that there was a way to write about intimacy then, which would very beautifully
#
connect with the structures of the economy.
#
Suddenly, I think the notes that I had kept from 2006 with all these fans that I had interviewed,
#
these women, it all just came alive around the time that I was reading these different
#
So there's, I think, a lot of the feminist memoir literature and the feminist literature
#
around love, in particular, bell hooks and so on and so forth.
#
The other genre that I was reading, Amit, is economics.
#
And here, I have to sort of say that the books still, I think, I read Abhijit Banerjee's
#
and Asadou Floh's Poor Economics, there was essentially just, you know, there was Exit
#
Voice and Loyalty, which was one of my favorite books.
#
And all of these books were very heavy handed in the way that they were structured, because
#
there was still technical economists writing in that language, and it's a beautiful language.
#
But I felt that I was reading those books, I was reading a lot of academic work on contract
#
theory, on incentives, on taxes, as I mentioned, microeconomics of the household.
#
So there's a book edited by Haddad and Hodinath, which is on intra-household bargaining power.
#
It's extremely droll and very technical.
#
And I was reading it along with reading Kamala Das talking about her personal life.
#
And what's interesting is you start to realize when you're reading these different genres
#
together, I think somehow for me, they just came together because I realized, and this
#
is something I'm trying to do in the book, is I'm trying to tell you that the way you
#
feel in your family has something to do with the way you are treated in the labor market.
#
And the way you're treated in the labor market has everything to do with the way your intimate
#
relationships are treating you.
#
And this was a link between these two genres of reading that hadn't really been made, I
#
felt, in Indian writing, and at least in nonfiction.
#
I think it was tried, but I felt my book was just an effort to push that along.
#
And I also, at this point, the other book that really, I think, has shaped the way I
#
think about writing is there's a book by Eric Fromm called The Art of Loving.
#
And I think it's a must read for everyone, only because it's a slim book.
#
He was a psychotherapist, but also a philosopher, a social philosopher.
#
And he essentially was telling us that love is not, we now live in a world within sort
#
of capitalist modes of production, that we've all started to believe love is power, that
#
if you have power over someone, then they love you, right?
#
If you can get them to do something, if you can get them to pick you, if you can get them
#
to have sex with you, there's this always getting and having, it's very transactional.
#
And he, I think, way before this became trendy to talk about recently on Twitter, he was
#
telling us that love is an art.
#
Love requires, you have to sort of think of it not as a self-maximizing endeavor, but
#
actually an act of generosity.
#
And somehow when I was reading all these writers, and most of them, actually, I recognize many
#
of them are not fiction writers per se.
#
Many of this is, it's memoir, it's philosophy, it's works of economics, some of it is somewhat
#
But I think these were the books and papers that really pushed me to think about writing
#
about seemingly banal things, but with a fair amount of empathy.
#
And then the last thing I will say is I've been obsessed with this writer, Nancy Mitford,
#
She just, if you, if you pick up, you know, any amount of me trying to be sardonic in
#
the book, I think it owes tremendous debt to me reading her.
#
And I think that The Pursuit of Love, you know, just all these books, because she was
#
writing about these extremely wicked people, they were self-indulgent, self-involved, self-obsessed.
#
And yet you loved them because she wrote about them in this deep sense of empathy.
#
And she wrote about them in this extremely interesting stylistic way where you would
#
recognize what they were doing was so narcissistic, and yet you understood them and you understood
#
And I think that really had a very significant impact on at least the way I think about writing
#
women in particular, because I think she was able to do that much more with women per se
#
And I think that this was sort of the broad sets of, you know, influences and thinking
#
about just literature and writing.
#
When it comes to Indian letters, I read, I read Hindi, I love Hindi literature.
#
And Shrilal Shukla to me is, I just, I think because I was, you know, when you have that
#
choice between Sanskrit and Hindi, I had chosen to study Hindi, you know, when you have that
#
before your board exams, you choose.
#
And I'm so glad because I just, you know, Premchand, Shrilal Shukla, these are, these
#
And I realized this again, tried to mention, but particularly Mr. Shukla because, you know,
#
to me, the way he was writing about government, the way he was writing about what the emerging
#
middle class even in his time was, he wrote satire.
#
And you know, one of my favorite stories that he did is called Mummy G's Donkey.
#
And I really think everyone should read it.
#
I think Penguin has come out recently with, they've re-translated and it's out.
#
And essentially what he's trying, it's a story actually about someone's son, who they call
#
And the English translation is extremely fantastic as well.
#
But the Hindi is just as, it's just superior, of course.
#
And I think some combination of reading Hindi satire along with these really biting feminists
#
who were trying to write about people, I think that all of that finds its way, at least in
#
the influences that you're seeing on the page.
#
And you mentioned bureaucracy, you know, there's this excellent little excerpt from your chapter
#
about the accountant where, just quote that bit, you're talking to someone, so you also
#
quote her during this bit.
#
So it's like it's a quote within a quote.
#
Relentless record keeping must be part of a young bureaucrat's oeuvre, there is no meeting
#
if there are no minutes.
#
There are no minutes if you don't take proper notes, Director Sahib had emphasized while
#
staring at her breasts.
#
Eleven months at the Secretariat have taught her three things and she has taught me well.
#
One the Sarkar notes everything especially breasts, two to avoid trouble it is best to
#
file and forget, three the most valuable meetings have reams of notes which say nothing.
#
Yeah, you mentioned sardonic also.
#
So to go back to that other angle of it, that you're studying economics, right?
#
And why did you choose economics per se?
#
Because it's not really a straight line from math to they're always necessary.
#
You know, was it kind of happenstance?
#
Did you have a natural interest on it?
#
And where do we reach that stage where it feels interesting to you for the way it applies
#
Like one of the criticisms you've had of economists in this book as well is that, you know, economists
#
like and that I lament also all the time on my show is that economists sometimes, you
#
know, lose sight of the real world in the sense that they'll have their meta way and
#
the frameworks of looking at everything and they'll have the dry data and somehow it doesn't
#
connect up with real people, you know, and you the consequences of this can be pretty
#
bad because you look at something like demonetization and it would just make me so angry that people
#
are talking about costs and benefits and of course, there were no benefits.
#
But the point is, even if there were benefits, the cost went to one set of people, the benefits
#
went to another set of people, there is a moral issue there.
#
The people who are suffering are real people.
#
You got to get down to that level of looking at the real people and thinking about it.
#
And many economists I know don't make that connection.
#
They are trapped in the discipline.
#
Everything is abstract.
#
What you do so well in this book is that you make it concrete.
#
But when you started, was it like that?
#
What was that journey like of like applying what you have learned to the world?
#
It's a very frustrating journey, Amit, because the one community that I am a part of, I don't
#
have a PhD in economics, but I'm trained in economics and I'm what we call a jobbing
#
So, you know, economics is my job.
#
I'm a part of the community, but I absolutely loathe what is happening in the way economists
#
engage with the real world.
#
And what I mean by that is even if you look right now at the COVID crisis, and I'll come
#
to the book in a second, but if you look at the COVID crisis, it's fascinating to me that
#
some of the best economists in the world who happen to be South Asian, Indian, have come
#
out time and time and again and said we need a livelihood stimulus, and it needs to have
#
an income support package.
#
There are very sensible reasons to do it, and there are feasible solutions to do so.
#
They have been saying this in op-eds, they've written books, they've appeared on television
#
shows, podcasts, you name it, and the best, including Nobel laureates, ex-RBI governors,
#
And yet, no one is listening.
#
There is this complete paralysis in first just picking up what the community is saying.
#
And I think part of the problem is that over the years, and I think you're absolutely right
#
in picking up demonetization as an example of this, because to me it is, I fully agree
#
with you, by the way, that to me it is the dividing line between whether I can even talk
#
to you or not, to be perfectly honest.
#
And for me, when I look at the way, even during the farm laws, this really unemotional, really
#
disengaged way even most technocratic economists would talk about what's happening, immediately
#
then you know that it's already just become something that experts in the world of economics
#
are essentially now brought out to essentially fill in TV sort of infotainment gaps, so there
#
are debates and it's become that.
#
But the ability to actually translate some of the really important insights into the
#
real world, I think is heavily compromised.
#
And I think there are two reasons for that.
#
And I think this speaks to my frustration, which has found its way in the book.
#
I think one is Danny Roderick had a set of fabulous tweets.
#
It's very rare that I say someone had fabulous tweets, but he actually had a set of fabulous
#
tweets where he basically, I'm going to say maybe two years ago or three years ago, he
#
essentially said that economics and academia, academic economists, especially those trained
#
in elite universities in the US in particular, tend to become socialized in what he calls
#
you know, this jerk quotient, he actually called it the jerk quotient.
#
And he said that you are taught to be always with your elbows out, the notion of collaboration,
#
sharing let alone within your own peers, but with other disciplines, with civil society,
#
with activists is heavily frowned on because you need to produce a paper, there is brutal
#
competition in the way these departments work.
#
And what he was trying to say, very sensibly, I thought was that then those modes of competition
#
and lack of collaboration just become imprinted on you.
#
So even though you've left the department and you may do very well for yourself, when
#
you're engaging with what you and I would call the real world, you're constantly engaging
#
with them with still that mindset.
#
So people are only useful to you if they have a data set to give you, if they have grant
#
funding to give you, if they can help you with your brand or status, and they can ideally
#
put you on some kind of panel with a politician or someone who will probably help you run
#
an RCT or something like that.
#
There are very few economists and to me, the gold standard in this is Professor Jean Drez.
#
I don't think there is anyone who sort of embodies this, which is that he went out to
#
say you need to keep all research people centric and he is, you know, as much activist as economist.
#
And you know, it's not that the rigor of what he's doing has ever been sacrificed.
#
But the way it is practiced, I think is just remarkable.
#
I don't think I would not be able to do it.
#
I think the kinds of sacrifices in the way he lives his life, it would be very difficult
#
But I really think that those are the kinds of stories about professional academia or
#
you need to talk about.
#
And yet we don't see that, right?
#
We see a very different kind of rock star worship, which is completely associated with
#
So I think part of the problem is the real world is not interesting because unless it
#
accrues status in your professional ambitions, good luck.
#
And the second I think, Amit, is that somewhere in all of this, and I think this is something
#
I really believe has a lot to do with the caste system as well, because education is
#
so heavily mediated through, you know, upper caste, it's a very Brahminical pursuit, right?
#
And I say this bearing a Brahmin surname, and I'm acutely conscious of that.
#
But I do think what's happened is that when men, particularly men, and I think I make
#
fun of them quite a bit in the book, and I'm sure it'll be interesting seeing the reactions
#
When men have these really posh degrees, it's almost, you know, the character in a book
#
said to me that, you know, you give a man a degree and a good job, and then he just
#
And there is this constant patronizing of other fields, of other ways of looking, of
#
people who don't have the same prestige as you.
#
And I, you know, I work in social protection, I work in social policy, and I can tell you,
#
Amit, if you're a social worker now, or you're a non-techie, non-PhD, who happens to actually
#
work every day in the program management of a livelihoods program or the public distribution
#
system, no one will take you seriously.
#
This group will constantly essentially, you will be expected to run through hoops of trying
#
to gain legitimacy for your voice.
#
And there is such caste pride in the profession, I think, particularly amongst its men.
#
I actually think the women in the profession, there's a very small pool of women.
#
I do think it operates differently because they're extremely aware of what it feels like
#
to be a marginalized community within the profession.
#
And I think my book was actually honestly a way for me to voice my frustration with
#
this, there's this game that economists, young economists are playing, not, I actually don't
#
think established economists are not playing that game anymore because it's very different
#
They will operate in a very different reality.
#
But young economists are constantly being trained to look at the real world only from
#
the perspective of their research projects.
#
But surely there has to be more than that.
#
And to me, one of the things that we're risking in that is, I say this in the book, that the
#
economy actually has a very rich ethical and emotional life.
#
The economy is a feeling being.
#
It is not just a bunch of soulless transactions.
#
The stock market is soulless.
#
The economy is not the stock market.
#
The economy is all our relationships, you and me drinking our coffees here, our moods,
#
our predilections, they find their way into the numbers on consumption, growth, jobs.
#
And there is tremendous sentiment that the economy holds.
#
And the best writing on the economy has always captured those sentiments, be it as Jean Drez,
#
be it in Abhijit Banerjee.
#
And I felt that I was trying to write a very different book.
#
It was not, as you say, this is a book on gender and society and the economy shapes
#
But I was very keen to tell a story about women's employment from the perspective of
#
Because we all know that graph, Amit, that graph from 2004 to 2017, sharp drop in female
#
And I think we've all grown inured to it.
#
And a lot of people even said this about death statistics during the pandemic, sadly.
#
And I wanted the reader to walk away from the book and realize the tears, the frustrations,
#
the loneliness of that sharp drop, but that you see in that graph.
#
And in fact, the book starts with that graph.
#
It's right up on the first page.
#
And at the end, I have a set of data and textures and I quote someone and actually nobody knows
#
who wrote, who said this, but they say it's Bertrand Russell, which is, it is the mark
#
of a civilized man to look at a column of numbers and weep.
#
And I think we should all be weeping when my hope actually is that by the time you reach
#
those numbers, you are weeping because there is, it's brutal what's happening with that
#
sharp drop in job rates for women.
#
And yet economists, I mean, I think there's some economists who are obviously committed
#
to it, but I don't think we are committed to telling the stories behind the statistics.
#
And I think if you understand the statistics well enough, then only will you be able to
#
tell those stories well.
#
And I was privileged to at least have that kind of background to be able to mirror the
#
two together and marry them.
#
And the book is essentially an effort in that direction.
#
But I will say one thing that I also think that this is a larger problem when you start
#
to, you know, the book is also a, is a hat tip to the female gaze.
#
And I like to believe it's actually without sounding too lofty and full of myself, maybe
#
I will, but I think it's the, it's the female gaze towards the economy.
#
Because if women start to look at the economy, I was very curious, what does that look like?
#
And in fact, I think the stories over the 15 years that I followed all these women,
#
they're actually telling me what, when they look at the economy, what are they seeing?
#
They're seeing the home because the home remains their principal productive workplace.
#
It is not the factories and fields.
#
And yet when you look at the conversation amongst technocrats and policymakers, the
#
home is yet to be acknowledged as a productive workplace because if it were, then conversations
#
and policy around tenure security and around domestic infrastructure, around water would
#
be radically different around reproductive health as well.
#
And we don't spend enough in these areas and the quality of spending remains poor because
#
there's a very different gaze.
#
I think the conversation on the economy is still dominated, I won't say by men, but I
#
think by a masculine gaze because then many of us who, even women who have been trained
#
in a way of thinking, you inherit that kind of technical way of thinking without recognizing
#
that the home actually is the principal workplace for half the population.
#
And we don't talk about that.
#
The second thing you realize when women start to look at the economy is that notions of
#
love, of care, of social relationships become fulcrums and levers of any kind of change
#
That's actually where incentives and taxes come into play.
#
In the book, I give people a flavor drawing on work of Sandil Malayanathan because he
#
has this wonderful framework, he calls it a hidden tax.
#
And he says that anytime people start to do things that social scripts really don't want
#
them to do, interpersonally we start taxing people, making them feel unloved.
#
And in the book, the stories are of women who want to just earn their own money and
#
It sounds really simple, incredibly complex thing to do.
#
I think the book gives you the flavor of that.
#
And they also happen to have a favorite actor.
#
And it's their own way of asserting their selfhood.
#
And something as simple as that, suddenly lovers, boyfriends, fathers, mothers, in-laws,
#
their own friends, this is not a male-female issue, it's cross gender.
#
People start taxing these women for, oh, how dare you want to stand on your own two feet?
#
How dare you want to do things that are moving away from what is conformist?
#
And it makes us comfortable, you know, you as a mother or you as just a caregiver.
#
And I realized that the female gaze of the economy would focus on those things because
#
many of the women in the book will say this, and I think you've read it, but they will
#
say that we don't work because we know if we start to work more number of hours, our
#
loved ones will feel neglected.
#
And so love as a lever in the way women are participating in the economy becomes very
#
clear when you start to ask the questions in a different way.
#
And I don't think that's currently the way economists are thinking about the economy.
#
And I think it's shifting, I think as more as feminist economics as the field starts
#
to grow, I think things will change.
#
And the notion of obviously, I think there's been a lot of lip service paid to valuing
#
And we know that it's a huge contribution to the economy, the workforce would not be
#
And I say this in the book that the economy, the surface of it is a bunch of men trading
#
money, but behind that is the invisible love and care that women provide that allows for
#
these men to trade labor and money.
#
And right now, the economy works in such a way that women earn love and men earn money.
#
And the earning money is actually much easier than earning love.
#
And the labor of what women are doing in the economy just continues to be disregarded.
#
I don't know, there are several solutions about what that could look like an economy
#
that actually values care.
#
Fiscally, it could be very challenging.
#
But I think those are the questions to ask, especially as we emerge out of a pandemic,
#
when we know that care has been absolutely central to the way we've emerged out of the
#
pandemic, be it nursing, doctors, be it women telling kids to wash their hands or wear a
#
mask, all of that requires care.
#
And if women are doing the giant share of care, and India still continues to be bottom
#
five when it comes to the share of men supporting care work in the world, surely then a female
#
gaze to the economy is a helpful thing to at least ask us to think about policy very
#
And I'm yet to see that shift happening.
#
I think it's happening in spaces and in some different initiatives, and I'm hopeful.
#
But the book essentially tries to tell you, well, what happens when women start to look
#
And what does that look like?
#
And what does that feel like?
#
And I think the feel is the emphasis in the book for me.
#
Yeah, you know, I mean, there are about 40 things in what you just said, which I want
#
to double click on, which I will duly do in the course of this nine hour conversation.
#
So I hope you've got your energy bars with you.
#
But you know, my mind goes back to that cliched parable of the blind man and the elephant.
#
And all these blind men are feeling different parts of the elephant, seeing different things.
#
And I think society is a bit like that.
#
And an economist will look at one aspect of it.
#
And a social scientist or a social worker will look at another aspect of it.
#
A feminist will look at one aspect of it.
#
And what I really liked about your book is that you've got multiple aspects to bear on
#
So we can see some of the connections, some of those dots become clearer.
#
I mean, what is really the economy?
#
It's a subset of society.
#
It's the sum total of the voluntary transactions between people.
#
And that's one way in which you can see what's happening in society.
#
And the other way, which is more nebulous and harder to put down in numbers is all of
#
these interpersonal relationships, these social structures, how some of them are so oppressive,
#
how people deal with those oppressions, the interior lives of the people who do that.
#
And that's one thing I really liked about the book, that it brings these two kind of
#
And I found your quote about economists from the book, and I'm going to read it out because
#
I liked so much of your book for the writing.
#
Often when we think of the economy, we think of it as some intimidating notion accessible
#
only to a group of stuffy technocrats and Davos attendees, so precious that it can only
#
be discussed and understood by finance dude bros, stock market analysts and know it all
#
However, the best economists know that the economy is nothing but our moods and relationships,
#
which define who produces and transacts what the economy has a rich emotional and ethical
#
The economy is made up of the loves and losses of the women I encountered, their fandom and
#
A set of feelings we must be able to conjure up when we look at bland data sheets on jobs,
#
consumption sales, or box office collections.
#
Those statistics represent an ocean of sentiment.
#
And I love that quote, which you said is allegedly by Bertrand Russell.
#
And you know, I feel like saying numbers are people too.
#
But then some people in a certain party in India would no doubt create the hashtag not
#
There's a slippery slope there.
#
I also want to talk a bit about academia.
#
I think I put out a tweet a couple of days back.
#
We are recording this on December 17th, though it will probably come out a long time after
#
But I put out a tweet talking about how academia is a big circle jerk.
#
And I've had conversations with my good friend, the economist Ajay Shah, who's also been on
#
the show, and one of his laments is that so few economists engage with the real world
#
in the manner in which he tries to do or you have done.
#
And that, you know, the academic game has its own incentives, its own constraints.
#
You know, you get into a particular department somewhere, there'll be a dominant ideology,
#
you know, there'll be a certain set of research projects you can do and others that you better
#
And all of these constraints drive you down particular directions.
#
And it just seems to be completely separate from the way the world works.
#
And I'm just thinking aloud here, one of the things I've noticed in the creator economy,
#
which I've thought a lot about and experienced, is that gatekeepers are becoming irrelevant
#
in the sense that in the 1990s, if I wanted to write something, means of production are
#
not available to me, I have to go to gatekeepers, I want to make a movie, I want to record a
#
song, whatever I want to do, I need to go to gatekeepers.
#
Today, over a period of time, we've evolved to a space where I think gatekeepers are becoming
#
irrelevant really fast for most creators they already have.
#
Like if I was to pitch the show to some established company and say, I'll have four hour conversations
#
with feminist economists, you know, I'd be laughed out of the room.
#
But it's happening, you know, in one of my earlier episodes, which is not released yet,
#
but will be released before this one, my good friend Chuck Gopal told me about this lady
#
on Instagram called Miss Excel, and she's great at Excel, and she loves dancing and
#
So she does these Instagram videos, where you have this window on top where there's
#
an Excel sheet, and there are instructions there on how to do whatever, and she's dancing
#
And she makes I think $100,000 a day, because she sells courses on how to teach Excel.
#
She is the most successful Excel teacher in the world, right?
#
And no gatekeeper would allow that, but within the context of the creator economy, she actually
#
fits what I would say the formula is, which to me is number one, be authentic to yourself,
#
and she knows Excel and she loves dancing and EDM.
#
Number two, be relatable, and that's relatable because everyone wants to, so many people
#
And number three, create that intimate space where, you know, your reader feels that they
#
know you, which also she does.
#
Now if I transpose that to the context of say something like economics, which people
#
think, okay, it's a dry field, it is an academic field, sometimes there is a correlation between
#
what happens there and what happens in the real world, but it's like a separate thing,
#
And at the same time, we realize that there is a hunger among people to figure the world
#
There's no question about this.
#
There's a hunger among people who want to figure the world out, and no one's speaking
#
Their academics are in their little circle joke with their abstruse jargon, with their
#
predetermined mindsets, and no one's speaking to them.
#
And therefore, it seems that over time, do you think it is a possibility that even from
#
within this discipline, the gatekeepers can become irrelevant, and there can be a way
#
for economists to exist outside of this?
#
Amit, in fact, I think it's happening.
#
So there are organizations like, for example, Bahujan Economics.
#
And, you know, what they are doing is, it's a collective of scholars who want to look
#
at it's the Dalit gaze to the economy.
#
And it's really exciting, some of the things that at least I've read, and I'm really curious
#
to learn more about what they're doing.
#
Look at the right to food, in particular as a movement, and I think the academic work
#
that so many of the economists connected with right to food have done.
#
And honestly, Amit, the reason we have a public distribution system that was able to provide
#
food grains to 800 million people during the crisis is because of the sustained work of
#
economists who were involved in that fight, in making food security universal.
#
So I think there are some phenomenal and really good examples of that.
#
And then there are limits to that, because now the same movements are trying to contend
#
with how do you use technology better?
#
And how do you study the use of technology better as economists on the ground?
#
I think there are two things to me that really need to change.
#
And again, here I will go back to traditional good old economics, which is incentives and
#
compensation, which is that currently, if you look at...
#
I've done a bunch of surveys during the crisis even before.
#
I work for the World Bank, and often we need to do real time data collection to understand.
#
I work on safety nets and social insurance programs.
#
We need to run surveys to understand who's getting what, are people even receiving benefits?
#
We run these surveys, the data sits and we use it for our dialogue with state governments
#
or the national government or different stakeholders, but then it just sits there.
#
And at least the one thing I'm really pleased is that the World Bank as an organization
#
has a policy that you're supposed to open up the data, you're supposed to make it available.
#
And so other researchers and scholars can use it in whichever way they'd like.
#
And I think that as access to information and data starts to become more democratic,
#
because one of the biggest hurdles in doing what we would call real world engaged economics
#
or ground up economics in a way, is that it's really costly to collect data.
#
It's costly to do some of the things that you would want to do, and especially because
#
you want to do them in an ethical, good, rigorous way where you're protecting the people who
#
are collecting the information as well.
#
And that's an extremely expensive enterprise.
#
And right now, I'm sure you noticed that Professor Drez, there have been lots of articles back
#
and forth between him and his colleagues in CMIE about access to CMIE data as well, right?
#
Because it is extremely expensive organizations like the World Bank can access it and there
#
are others who can, but then there are lots of young students who might be in small towns
#
or villages who may be able to make some remarkable, make that data sing in a way, but they currently
#
don't fully have access.
#
So I think the first thing we start to need to do is the costs of access to just fundamental
#
data, which will be useful to create some of this rich information just needs to be
#
And in going back to your creator economy parallel, one of the beautiful things about
#
the creator economy is that some of the gatekeeping has gone because access to data has become
#
an access to the internet as well has become far more democratic and it's just made platforms
#
I think we really need to think about things like that when it comes to data and economics.
#
I think there needs to be a big shift there.
#
I think the second is if you look at again, the surveys we run and what we write often,
#
and you're absolutely right.
#
It's like we live in this bubble where many of us write op-eds and an occasional op-ed
#
There'll be an article in EPW, but it's not really considered academic prestige, right?
#
And I remember once I was listening to Professor Aguram Rajan at a, I think it was a seminar
#
He'd come in to talk to somebody and he said that the problem is that economics departments
#
in academia will socialize you into believing that anything other than these top peer reviewed
#
journals is just, that's just meaningless.
#
It's just trash in a way, well, not even trash, but sweet trash, somewhat helpful, but not,
#
and I think he had a very clever way he put it, which I've forgotten, but it was, it was
#
And even he was saying that that needs to start to change because in fact, if you look
#
at a lot of macroeconomic work, it's in fact chief economists of banks that, who are producing
#
some really fascinating analysis.
#
It may not be academically valid, it may not have legitimacy of that kind in academia,
#
but it is extremely useful information.
#
And I think trying to create communities that reward value, recognize that work, the quality
#
of that work, it may have very different metrics of assessment.
#
I think that really needs to be amplified far more so that you create an economy of
#
prestige of its own, right?
#
Because people do want to feel meaningful.
#
I think human beings, it's just not possible for us not to want to put something out there
#
and not feel that it's being recognized and it's being valued.
#
And there is a competition inherently, which is also healthy in a way amongst people that
#
will just play itself out.
#
But just like, as you mentioned, Miss Excel, I think is that, yeah?
#
Just as what you just described, you know, now there is an audience and a platform that
#
recognizes and rewards and appreciates that kind of effort.
#
I'm yet to see that happen in more grounded economic writing or surveys, analysis.
#
I think there's some stuff that what tends to happen is even there's a crisis, as we
#
saw with the pandemic, there was such useful stuff that was coming out from different typically
#
civil society organizations who just somehow, despite all the perils of the pandemic, just
#
were able to collect data from migrant workers, from others.
#
And then it's right now, for example, Azeem Premji University now maintains an entire
#
database where they're trying to collate all these papers and all the data.
#
But you know, why not create a space where, you know, papers of that kind essentially
#
can be published, can be rewarded, can be discussed.
#
Often people who are participating in this kind of knowledge production, and it is economics,
#
will never be invited to, you know, the fashion week for policy economists, right, like which
#
is all these events that you have in Delhi, curated typically by economists who live abroad
#
And I think we need to start to think about creating spaces like that, that are very different.
#
It could be done through local think tanks.
#
And I think there has to be a way to value it.
#
And I think if the two start to happen, we democratize access to data and incredibly
#
so, not just seeing that there's a portal and you can go access the portal, but doing
#
it in a way which actually makes it easier for people to access through local organizations,
#
online, so on and so forth.
#
And the second is if we start to create incentives of a very different recognition, a very different
#
kind of work, and come up with a language and a set of codes for that, I think that
#
will be really helpful as we move forward.
#
And the third, Amit, I will say this, is that, and I think my book is one little meager attempt
#
at this, I hate a certain kind of economics writing, which assumes that the government
#
and people with power are the only audience that matters, right?
#
So there's a kind of stuffy, terrible writing, just terrible, which I just loathe where you
#
have all these extremely powerful men, it's usually always men, who will write these books
#
saying the government should do this and the government should do that, it's like a list
#
of prescriptions and of course the government is not listening, the government is going
#
to do what it is feasible politically and administratively to do.
#
And I think economists also need to stop writing for power.
#
Why don't we write to explain the world to ourselves and to others, to people we know?
#
And I think it is happening, in fact, people like you and even a lot of activists are trying
#
and Mr. Shah, Professor Shah, you mentioned, so many people are trying to now write in
#
a way where they're not really interested whether the government or, you know, structures
#
of power are listening, it's more for the general public or it could actually just be
#
So this idea of the Bahujan economics group is really interesting to me because suddenly
#
the audience, it's not just for government, it's actually to understand our own communities
#
And if you look at the feminist economics movement, I mean, it's very similar, the interest
#
is not in just getting governments to see the value in seeing this research as viable
#
or legitimate and actionable.
#
They are not in the business of giving advice to prime ministers and chief ministers, they
#
are in the business of completely changing the way we think about the world.
#
And that they realize is not just something powerful people can do, they're interested
#
in students and communities and the general public.
#
And I think the more we have that, and that will require some people to take risks in
#
And some people have, and I think the more we see that happening, I'll be more hopeful
#
of the way economics as a profession is moving.
#
And yeah, so I'm hopeful, but I think these different things need to happen and we need
#
to stop kowtowing to just an audience of power.
#
I think there's a larger audience out there and then perhaps the structures of power can
#
But I think it's a different game then.
#
Yeah, I'll double down, not double click, but double down on a couple of the things
#
you said because I feel so strongly about them as well.
#
And one of them is democratic access to data.
#
One of my best books I've read in the last few years is a book called Super Forecasting
#
by Philip Tetlock, where one of the things he points out is how often experts get predictions
#
Where there is so much data that shows that all these experts with their fancy degrees
#
and their Ivy League school professorships will go on TV, they'll make predictions, they'll
#
While it is actually, there are forecasting competitions and the kind of people who really
#
do well in them are just self-taught people who are skeptical about everything and open
#
to changing their mind.
#
And my sense is that, you know, if every data set is available to everyone, then somebody
#
from God knows where without a shred of privilege can just access it on the internet, apply
#
her own brain and as you said so well, make the data sing, see something that others can't
#
see because they're coming at it differently, while the whole academic world will come at
#
You know, Amit, I think the reason that's so powerful is because I once foolishly, I
#
had gone to a seminar because, you know, I'm of course, I'm such a nerd and I'm obsessed
#
So I went to a seminar that Amartya Sen was doing, I think the last time he was probably
#
in Delhi and it was at the Habitat Centre and you know, large audience and then it was
#
opened up to questions.
#
Sharmila Tagore was there, which is very exciting for me.
#
It was like economics meets Bollywood, it's so exciting.
#
She's not even Bollywood, Shatujit Rai, that's where she started, what kind of Bengali are
#
I also think of her as Kashmir Ki Kali and all of that.
#
She's too good for Bollywood.
#
No, Amit, no, this is your arrogance coming in, but she's both, but she's marvelous.
#
But what I was going to say is that, so I remember I asked him and I asked him, I said,
#
do you think that RCTs have just changed the incentive for students in academic economics?
#
And you know, he said yes, because now, and that was RCTs a while ago, so that was almost
#
a must be five, seven years ago, I'm longer than that.
#
And now, you know, there are different trends.
#
I mean, I don't want anyone listening to us to think that, I certainly don't think
#
that there's anything wrong with being on trend within academia because there might
#
be very useful reasons why, you know, certain models and modes of investigation are being
#
privileged in certain places and we will find, learn lots of very useful things from them.
#
I think the RCT movement also teaches us that there's something very useful there and then
#
there are things you have to take with its caveats as well, which is true for everything.
#
But while that world can exist and do its thing and play its game and the circle jerk
#
and all of that that you mentioned so eloquently, there need to be other worlds as well.
#
And those have to be created by people.
#
I don't know who and I don't know where.
#
I mean, if sometime, you know, I leave the bank, these are the kinds of things that I
#
think I'm really interested in trying to do.
#
I know that I think tanks that are thinking about these kinds of issues as well.
#
So to me, I think the task is not to get lost in what the academic world is doing at all.
#
I think let it do what it's doing and that I think there will be value there.
#
I mean, I'm not in judgment of that.
#
And if people want to play the game of those incentives, I understand that as well because
#
people's livelihoods often are also on the line.
#
I mean, you have to sort of do certain kinds of things to then get a certain job and then
#
you can do different more perhaps open-ended work.
#
But people like me who have chosen not to go down the path of I don't have the talent
#
or the tenacity to finish a PhD in economics, I would never be able to do it the way it
#
is structured and done.
#
I have different talents and I have a different kind of tenacity.
#
And then you have to sort of think about where are the spaces where I can then apply that.
#
And I think that's where my energies will be better served.
#
And I think the onus is now on all of us who recognize that there's something wrong with
#
the way, well not wrong, but there's a mismatch between the kind of economics that academia
#
is producing and generating and deeming legitimate.
#
And are what we call the more ground realities, the real world that we would like to sort
#
of apply and marry with this kind of work.
#
And I think the onus is now on us completely to try and create that.
#
It will require people who will finance it, it will require people who will actually change
#
The Brahmanism that I was telling you about, you'll have to stop thinking that only someone
#
with a doctorate degree has something fancy to say.
#
Anyone can have actually anything fancy to say.
#
And one of the things I actually really enjoyed when I was writing the book and even books
#
that I love reading is everyone has a theory on life and everyone is actually a philosopher.
#
And I think in the book, you find that all the women, I mean, when they're talking about
#
Shah Rukh, in a way, what are they doing?
#
They're not actually talking about him.
#
Nobody really knows him.
#
They are constructing him based on some social philosophy that they have about how the world
#
works, what their sort of knowledge systems are, what they're drawing on, what they think
#
of the way the world is structured.
#
And I think it is now, it's completely up to us to try and feed a very different kind
#
And I'd rather just, you know, pay more attention there.
#
I've abandoned with this book, I've 100% abandoned the idea that, you know, formal
#
academia, especially academic economists are going to suddenly, you know, listen to the
#
I mean, I sort of know.
#
And I think this goes back to the self-awareness that you were talking about.
#
I know exactly the way people perceive different people and knowledge claims and so on.
#
And I'm not interested in that game.
#
I think I'm interested in trying to see if we can cultivate a very different space.
#
And that's the space that I'd like to operate in.
#
I mean, if academic economists don't pay attention to your book, it's their loss, not your loss.
#
Let's be very clear about that.
#
And yeah, I totally agree that you need like, let a thousand flowers bloom, let academia
#
do what it does, but let there be a space for heretics to do what they do.
#
And the other point I wanted to double down on is what you correctly said that so many
#
people are writing as if they're writing for the government or as if they're writing for
#
the, you know, the finance ministry to read, or they're writing for think tanks who may
#
That's absolutely right.
#
And I always felt that if you think your ideas are important, that they express truths about
#
the world that you want to get out there, then you don't need to go to the supply end
#
of the political marketplace.
#
You need to go to the demand end.
#
You know, as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream of culture.
#
You need to get these ideas out into the culture, which is why I hope that, you know, Shah Rukh
#
Khan reads your book and decides to do something about this.
#
I know that my publishers have sent it, multiple people, I think, have tried.
#
Sadly, I also think he's been through just a hellish crisis in the past few months.
#
I'm waiting with bated breath.
#
I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that, that at some point, or maybe at some point,
#
or maybe the acknowledgement will never come and that's okay as well.
#
I'll tell you a funny story about this, which is I heard from an artist who had exhibited
#
this really beautiful piece of work at the Delhi Art Fair several years ago.
#
And I think now this is a story which could be true or it could be realm of gossip, but
#
I think it's actually true.
#
But I still want to tell the story because I think it'll be instructive for what you
#
And the work was essentially a pixelated image of Mr. Khan.
#
And it was essentially his face, but you know, there are images of people in there and it's
#
And I think at some point, someone who's known to Mr. Khan was at the gallery when this was
#
And then they turned and then they said, but you know, we get these kinds of collages every
#
And I think it's a joke, but to essentially say that, you know, last year, there was this
#
huge hip hop song, which was about him, you know, I think maybe something about how this
#
man is also Shah Rukh Khan.
#
I think there are people who write poetry and books and Lord knows what, right?
#
So I wouldn't be surprised with the book, essentially, may even drown in just the deluge
#
of wonderful things that are, you know, of acts of creativity that his fandom has inspired.
#
The one thing I will say actually, though, about him, I'm very grateful for is I don't
#
think I would have been able to tell this kind of story.
#
You know, what you asked me right in the beginning, I think those two bits, right, the empathy
#
and the economics in a way, I think the two E's somewhat.
#
I don't think the two would have coexisted so easily or the people I spoke to would allow
#
themselves to talk about things so freely had it not been for him.
#
And I think that is the power of his icon, because it created this space for all of us
#
to talk about different structures and ways we were feeling lonely.
#
And because fandom is not just, you know, we tend to think of it just as a it's your
#
You like Van Gogh or you like something else.
#
But actually, fandom is an economic activity.
#
It's a social activity, but it's also an economic activity because to be a fan and to unambiguously
#
adore the work of an artist, you need money.
#
You need access to leisure, free time.
#
You need access to markets so that you can consume and buy and transact.
#
You need access to media and mobile phones increasingly.
#
And all of these are sort of attributes of, you know, formal the statistics of the economy
#
because their consumption, their employment, their liquidity, their purchasing power.
#
But all these women then just told such beautiful stories about the way they found them.
#
And I think the only reason that happened was because I entered the lives through fun
#
and fandom as opposed to going down another route.
#
And so even if he never reads the book, I mean, I will just I'm always a fan, a perpetual
#
I know you want, but we'll talk about that.
#
No, my last criticism of him actually was an economic one.
#
That in Raees, they didn't understand the concept of the Baptist and the bootlegger.
#
If you remember the plot of the film, right, which is such a basic kind of, one can't expect
#
But Amit, I mean, look at that film, right?
#
Because what did he do?
#
He took what was, I mean, the movie is supposed to be fiction, but we know it's based on
#
someone who very much was real and existed.
#
But he took essentially history's straightforward bad guy, right?
#
Because you know, you've been part.
#
And he made him complex and he made him real and and he made him suddenly there was this
#
facet of the Indian Muslim experience that I had never thought about in essentially the
#
it wore the dress of a of a very typical masala slick mob film, like it's a gangster mobster
#
That's I think the way he himself sees it.
#
I've seen his interviews when he talks about it.
#
So yeah, so I see what you're saying.
#
But the film was also doing these really interesting other things as well.
#
But so I think going back to your original question.
#
No, he has not read it formally that I don't know.
#
And even if he doesn't, I'm forever grateful because I don't think this kind of, you know,
#
it's a labor of love, but it's I don't think it would have happened had it not been for
#
And it's very interesting.
#
Like one of the things that you point out in your book is how so many women want their
#
men to be like Shah Rukh, but the men are actually like Salman.
#
If Salman didn't exist and like you could actually do a book on toxic masculinity using
#
Salman as a key figure there, desperately seeking Salman would be a book exactly about
#
You know, I say this in the book, Amit, which is that of the three Khans, right, if you
#
look at their filmography and I do have to take just one side note to say that so many
#
of the intelligent things that I'm able to say or even seem like I'm saying and I'm writing
#
in the book about film because I'm not a film scholar, I'm not Jay or Uday or any of those
#
Like I'm not, I don't look at it the way I think they look at it, but I'm so grateful
#
because I was able to interview all these fantastic film critics were people like Anupama
#
Chopra and so many people who just gave their time.
#
And you know, one day I realized the book is a sheer act of generosity.
#
I didn't know any of these people, Amit.
#
I mean, I literally, I was cold calling them and I think they all just thought that the
#
project was a bit odd and what is this girl trying to do?
#
And people were just curious.
#
And so they chatted with me and people can be generous.
#
I think that's one thing I learned through the book.
#
So all what I'm about to say about the filmography is based on all these things that I've heard
#
I just want to give that caveat.
#
But if you look at the three of them, Salman is, you know, brash masculine confidence exactly
#
There's the strong body.
#
There's the stoic traditional masculinity.
#
Amir's masculinity is one of, you know, productive professionalism because we sort of, he is
#
the, I think what traditionally Western audiences and increasingly now Indian audiences amongst
#
the elite would think an actor is, Mr. Amir Khan conforms to that, right?
#
Because he takes these great roles, these great scripts, meaningful cinema, all that
#
Shah Rukh is, his icon is one of vulnerability, anxiety.
#
These characters are always vulnerable.
#
I write this in the book, vulnerable to the gaze of the other.
#
They are very aware of the way they are being seen.
#
And is it really, and you know, then they shed tears about it.
#
They talk about their feelings.
#
And is it really surprising that in a country where women are constantly made to feel aware
#
of the way they are being seen, the way they're holding their bodies, the way they are being
#
scrutinized, that a man who then starts to perform these roles where he's so aware of
#
how women are seeing him is everyone's super hero.
#
I mean, he, it's just, it's, you know, we talk about demand and supply.
#
I think this is actually what sets up the demand and supply of his, of his icon, which
#
is he's just always been playing men who engage with women.
#
I measure, as you know, for the book, I measure how much time women speak in his films compared
#
to his other male contemporaries and other big box office hits in Bollywood.
#
Women just speak far more.
#
There are more number of female characters.
#
He's interested in what women have to say.
#
His characters care, they listen.
#
It is not like a lot of these current movies, which apparently are feminist because they're
#
about women's issues, but then you have a man essentially speaking through most of them.
#
His films are not interested in that.
#
His films may seem candy floss and they may seem soppy, but actually if you look at them,
#
it's actually a set of interactions between men and women who are really trying to understand
#
each other, which is why I think he just, he creates this space for female love and
#
I don't know whether, I don't think these characters were written with that in mind,
#
but I think if you now look at his body of work, it becomes very apparent that that's
#
I think at one point it seemed that, you know, I forget about whom I made this observation,
#
either Obama or Modi, who are very different people to make the same observation about,
#
but the observation was something to do with how they are a Roshak test.
#
And you know, you can look at them and this was of course true of maybe Modi pre-2014,
#
obviously not now, but you could look at them and see what you wanted to see in them.
#
And I guess to a certain extent it, you know, going through the cross-section of all the
#
women in your book and their different interior lives and their different social circumstances,
#
you know, and he's playing a different role for them, a lot of subtle different roles,
#
which would, you know, even I think take Shah Rukh by surprise, which is why I wondered if
#
It's interesting what you just said, because one of the things that I really wanted the
#
reader to walk away from, you know, when we think of fandom and especially when we think
#
of fangirls, women who gush, immediately, and I've noticed this in some reactions to
#
the book in the early phase, now I think it's sort of ebbed out, but which is that, well,
#
if women are gushing, it's just silly and it's foolish and it's not serious.
#
It's just a bunch of dumb girls, it's so cringe-inducing, right?
#
That all these girls are sitting and saying all these gushy foolish things about some
#
guy who they don't know or some actor.
#
But Amit, one thing I realized is, you know, these things that we dismiss as being silly
#
and very unserious, if you start to pay attention to them, they'll teach you things that will
#
And the book, I think a lot of things I learned took me by surprise.
#
And you realize that actually beneath all the gushing and the, you know, the exuberance,
#
in a way, each one of these women are projecting their realities onto him.
#
And I say this in the book, which is his extraordinary icon is completely built with the ordinary
#
frustrations of all these women.
#
I mean, they are completely projecting.
#
And in the book, you would have noticed when I speak about him in public fora, I call him
#
Mr. Khan because I don't know him and he's a real person and one has to sort of maintain
#
respect and dignity and all of that, you know, maintain the fact that I don't know this person
#
But in the book, he's always called Shah Rukh.
#
And the reason that is, is because none of the women I interviewed, nobody called him
#
Mr. Khan, nobody called him SRK, they would always call him Shah Rukh.
#
And I remember watching this interview of his where he actually said, fans behave like
#
And even when I talk about him, you know, with my friends, when I'm not conscious of
#
myself, I would call him Shah Rukh, like I know him.
#
But actually none of us know him.
#
We have all created him out of our own hopes, aspirations, frustrations, lived experience.
#
So the book, as you know, is structured in different parts and the first part is elite
#
upper middle class women.
#
The principal characters in these stories love him as a sign of social mobility post
#
They hate Rahul Gandhi.
#
Some of them are Modi voters and now things are shifting.
#
I write about this in the book and they love him as a person who symbolizes someone who
#
has essentially escaped entrenched network wealth, someone who's trying to find a house
#
These are things that they really look, when they see him, that's what they see.
#
When you move towards the second part of the book has women from, you know, the first generation
#
of the middle class, right, trader caste families, girls who come from homes where they were
#
just expected to get married and stay at home.
#
The women in the book didn't.
#
They decided to follow professional identities and parts and love and marry based on their
#
They see him essentially for him, he is consolation and comfort because their families make it
#
Another principal characters in that part runs away from her family because the family
#
makes it so difficult for them to just be who they are and they feel very unloved and
#
yet they have to put on this front of being very cool and austere and he is essentially
#
the person they cry to.
#
He is essentially the person who's providing them comfort because they can't talk about
#
what they're feeling in their extremely conservative lives with anybody else.
#
And he plays a very different function.
#
And then when you move to the third part of the book, where there are all these women from extremely
#
harsh economic circumstances, agarbatti makers within their homes, domestic workers migrating
#
from Jharkhand to Jor Bagh in Delhi, they see him essentially as announcing opportunity
#
and announcing not just the opportunity to leave your village, but opportunity to find
#
Because one of the most interesting stories to me in the book is how one of the women
#
I follow, she's one of the first women I met when I started the idea of this book.
#
She was a unionizer actually in a slum in Ahmedabad.
#
Now it's no longer a slum anymore, it's an upgraded colony.
#
She did very well for herself and I describe the journey of that within the labor market.
#
And her daughter went to a really good school and they watched Shah Rukh films together.
#
And I say this in the book that actually if you look at the older woman, she's Zahira
#
She couldn't read English very well and her daughter could, her daughter's called Meenal.
#
And they watched Dil Toh Pagal Hai together often.
#
It's their favorite film.
#
They love everything about it.
#
And at the end of Dil Toh Pagal Hai, there's a line that flashes, Amit, I forget what the
#
I think something about it's an overture to love that people should love, you know,
#
you should find someone who loves you, something like that.
#
It was written in English.
#
And Zahira, the mother, she loves Mr. Khan, to her he is a fantastical ideal of just this
#
beautiful fun man, men who are now in cities, you know, things that are happening in cities.
#
But it was not real for her.
#
To her it was just sublimation and she couldn't read English so that line really didn't sit
#
Her daughter, on the other hand, refuses even now and I end the book with her actually.
#
In fact, Zahira is trying to get Meenal married, that you must marry.
#
And she says, no, she read those lines in English.
#
She believes in the totalitarian idea of romance and love, that I must love someone who I marry.
#
And I think for them, he is essentially the person who announces that your opportunities
#
and your freedom now is unbounded.
#
You can do things that your mother perhaps couldn't.
#
And I think all of these parts essentially go to show that people are just constructing
#
They're constructing Shah Rukh.
#
They're constructing Mr. Khan.
#
But we are all constructing Shah Rukh.
#
And he has participated in that myth.
#
I really hope he reads it just to see what he's co-created with a whole bunch of us,
#
this entire generation of women.
#
It's quite special and quite spectacular.
#
But it is a creation, it is a construction.
#
And I think the book is in service to understand how is it that society and within society,
#
the economy is allowing the space or pushing women to construct this Shah Rukh.
#
Why are they doing that?
#
And they're doing that because the economy and their society and homes make them feel
#
very unloved in places, unsafe in some places.
#
And so they're projecting onto this image.
#
In popular culture, one of the interesting sort of shifts that I've seen, not really
#
a shift, but it's a new development in one sense, is that back in the day, stars would
#
So you'd have, you know, you'd have temples for stars and blah, blah, blah, and all of
#
Or you'd wait outside the house just to catch one glimpse.
#
And where that's kind of changing in modern times is that there is what people call the
#
economy of intimacy, where because of, you know, YouTube streams or podcasts, you feel
#
like you actually know the person.
#
Like I did this episode with Abhinandan Sekri and I got this lovely piece of feedback.
#
I think someone tweeted it or wrote to me.
#
And he said that I felt so much like I'm sitting on a sofa with you guys and you guys are talking
#
and I'm enjoying myself that at one point I actually interrupted you before realizing
#
that shit I'm listening to a podcast, which is lovely.
#
And the interesting thing about Shah Rukh, as you mentioned, and even I called him Shah
#
Rukh, see, is that he seems to straddle both of these.
#
He is on the one hand larger than life, but on the other hand, you call him Shah Rukh.
#
And I recently wrote a post about the Beatles documentary, Get Back, where at one point
#
And of course we know that the first time you mention someone in a piece, you have to
#
But I just said Paul and Ringo because to me they're Paul and Ringo, right?
#
They're my childhood friends, study buddies.
#
And in the book, in fact, it's something that I noticed at the very end.
#
It didn't even occur to me that I was doing this, but I was.
#
And I was doing it because all the women who I spoke to were doing it, which is we only
#
call him Shah Rukh because there is this, he's accessible.
#
But you know, it's interesting, Amey, because he's like, in a way, he, I think, in India
#
really revolutionized this, I've actually, this economy of intimacy is a great phrase
#
and I'm going to go look it up.
#
I thank you for telling me about it.
#
It's interesting because if you look back to 1992, and I know so many of your shows,
#
you talk about the changes there and I find those conversations really fascinating.
#
It was such an era of promise and so much change, right?
#
Because suddenly there were satellite network televisions, there were, you know, page three,
#
which needed Bollywood.
#
And he was the first actor who could be intimate with us in a way on our televisions, even
#
before the internet came and completely changed things even further, that I don't even think
#
Rajesh Khanna or, you know, none of the actors of the past had who had the temples and, you
#
know, the mad fandom as well, but in a very different way.
#
And so as a consequence, he just seemed like this guy you knew.
#
So when I was watching him on TV and also then, and then it requires talent because
#
obviously no celebrities ever really presenting themselves.
#
I mean, that's, I don't think that happens.
#
So there's a talent in which he also had this facility to engage with media, to talk to
#
It was just his interviews.
#
Amit, I mean, I think they're just delicious.
#
Just listen to the things he's saying.
#
And I know you don't, you may not like his movies, but highly encourage you to look at
#
And I mean, I can even give you a list of interviews to start with, but always useful
#
things about secularism, the economy, work ethic, professionalism.
#
He has this terrific line.
#
When someone asked him, this is when the film Dilwale came out, I'm going to say 2015 in
#
a big press conference, you know, this young woman got up, you know, young journalist.
#
And she said something about actually her working life that apparently she couldn't
#
work and she was struggling to whether hold onto a job, right?
#
This is exactly in link with the theme of the book.
#
He said something like, ladies, don't leave your job, your day job for a night husband.
#
You know, who says things like that?
#
Amit, I mean, the comments are just, and I sometimes you just have to listen and the
#
book is full of quotes of his, because I just found that the things he was saying and the
#
fact that now telecom and the TV allowed for those things to then be said and relayed.
#
And then the internet has just amplified that.
#
But I think for a certain generation of us, for us, he essentially represents that change
#
because he was the first star that we saw who made that dramatic shift, which just became
#
much more intimate to us.
#
And I actually say this in the book that all the elite fans always call him, you know,
#
he's India's first post liberalization superstar.
#
But for women who don't know words, you know, like GDP, they don't know what happened with
#
Mr. Manmohan Singh, they know Shah Rukh was liberalization to them, his poster, him drinking
#
a Pepsi, him being on top of that truck and, you know, dancing with Shahid Kapoor and all
#
They've seen all of that.
#
It's signal to them that their call would always connect now, suddenly there were powders
#
and creams in the local shop and Shah Rukh was, you know, was a little poster there.
#
And so I think there is an intimacy that he has with us, not just because of course the
#
TV allowed for it, but I think because he represents this nostalgia of this really promising
#
And now, of course, we're in a very different moment.
#
And I think he is also capturing that and we'll talk about that later.
#
But I do see, I do see that.
#
The other thing I noticed when I was talking to women now about, you know, all these actors
#
now available to us through YouTube and one thing that's also happened, and I mentioned
#
this in the book and it's a thesis that I can't fully test, but I do think my gut tells
#
me that there's something to it, is that I think people like him are part of the last
#
generation of umbrella superstars who connect people from across classes, languages, regions.
#
Because now when I talk to younger people, if you are in Jharkhand or you're in Kerala
#
or you're in Delhi, because the media market and what's accessible to you has become so
#
fragmented based on your taste because of the internet, right?
#
You can see things that are almost curated to you on YouTube or anywhere else.
#
The idea of this one star who everybody likes is actually, it doesn't hold as much weight
#
The closest I could sense of that kind of popularity is actually now the female actresses.
#
I hear a lot about, you know, be it a Deepika Padukone or Priyanka Chopra, and they really
#
seem to now embody feminine aspirations for even younger women in the book because they
#
are independent, they're not ashamed of having boyfriends, they continue to work after marriage.
#
But the idea of this star who connects people, be it a boatman, a bureaucrat, across the
#
country, I think Shah Rukh might actually be, that generation might actually be one
#
of the last because now we're just living in a very fragmented media system because
#
of all the forces that you mentioned, be it the internet, YouTube and so on.
#
Yeah, that's a fantastic insight and a great term umbrella superstar.
#
I'm going to come back to that after a break.
#
But before we go in for the break, I just want to say that I don't think we really
#
look at that I disagree with any of what you say about Shah Rukh.
#
I think we're looking at the elephant through different lenses, and you might not agree
#
See, my lens is that, like, one of the things I've come to realize is that Indian cinema
#
is a completely different beast from cinema anywhere else.
#
There are different incentives.
#
Yeah, and we could just break it down economically, but it is just incredibly different.
#
It's catering to something else.
#
And therefore, our notions of acting also have to take that into account, that you cannot
#
judge an Indian star through your lens of what a Western actor would be and how they
#
would act and play a part and all of that.
#
And Shah Rukh, I think, seen from that Western kind of lens is, I think, the worst actor
#
But in a sense, that is irrelevant.
#
It's orthogonal because it's a category error, perhaps, to judge him like that.
#
Because at doing what he is doing, which is build this persona, that persona clearly has
#
a resonance with so many different people in so many different ways.
#
And to maintain that persona and take it into all these different directions is a phenomenal
#
And by the way, I love some Bollywood.
#
I love Govinda, for example.
#
Sarkari khatia private karo.
#
And as far as his interviews are concerned, please do share all the links.
#
I'll put them in the show notes for people to see for themselves.
#
But my sense from the little that I've seen is that they're also very skillfully, he's
#
built a persona and he is that persona.
#
And he says some things where he is clearly posturing.
#
Like even in your book, you quote this part where he says that, and this is like virtue
#
signaling max, where he says that, I don't believe in feminism because feminism only
#
says that women should be equal to men.
#
And he says, quote, I believe women should be more than a stop quote.
#
But you know, I mean, no, no, I know, but a couple of things.
#
One, I have friends who are trained in like posh, fancy, you know, drama school.
#
So they went to RADA and all of those places.
#
I asked them once, this is like a test, I was doing research.
#
I don't write about it.
#
I thought about writing about it, but I didn't finally, because it didn't involve the women.
#
I asked them, can you do like that arms wide open, you know, with that just, can you conjure
#
And it's near impossible.
#
And they all told me that the kind, it requires a kind of talent and register, which is quite
#
I think it's unique to very Indic traditions of, you know, drama and local theater.
#
And I can tell, you know, when you watch him as well, when he talks about acting as a craft,
#
you can tell that he's bringing in all these different elements, right?
#
And so I do think that while I, you know, I'm not going to judge anyone because if we
#
start judging Keanu Reeves, for instance, from the perspective of a Western actor, I
#
think we may actually end up saying similar things.
#
In fact, I think there's a strong parallel between the two of them, interestingly enough.
#
So maybe on my next, we'll be desperately seeking things, Keanu, but what I'm trying
#
to say to you is that I think there is a kind of talent and technique there.
#
It's just so skillfully done that we don't see it for what it is, but it's really difficult
#
And there are trained actors who will try and there are trained actors who have tried.
#
There's some very talented actors who've tried, but they just can't get that register.
#
So I think we do have to acknowledge that while I see your point.
#
And the other thing I will say about him is that even the, you know, what we would think
#
is posturing or some of the lip service kind of comments, I still felt when I was talking
#
to the women that I was, and I think about this myself as well, you would have noticed
#
this actually comes up in the book a lot.
#
A lot of women say, well, even if he is just saying it as marketing, I appreciate that
#
And one of the places that really keeps coming up is he's actually one of our only icons
#
who from a very early stage has been talking about women's issues.
#
And even if it is, I don't care honestly, Amit, if it's a stunt, if it's posturing,
#
whatever it is, given the society we live in, given, look at where we are when it comes
#
to gender, things are incredibly bleak, more power to more powerful messages.
#
I would like him to, you know, shout more about lots of things, but you know, he won't
#
He'll do what he wants to say.
#
And that's his prerogative and sovereignty.
#
So I actually appreciate all of that because, you know, one of the women said to me, she
#
said, well, have you noticed that he says all these wonderful things about, you know,
#
his family, his wife, you know, women.
#
And she says, she said, and it's quoted in the book, she said that even if it is an act,
#
I appreciate it because who else is doing that?
#
And I think particularly when he came onto the scene, nowadays, I think there's some
#
cache to being the tender male in sort of, you know, certain kind of appearance and social
#
But I see that for what it is.
#
He was doing this way before.
#
And I think one of the places where he was doing this significantly, which is really
#
interesting is, and I write about it at length in the book is, you know, he was always Indian
#
cinema's poster child for marital fidelity, which is really interesting, right?
#
Like all the women I met, they would tell me, so great.
#
He's always with his wife and he's so caring and loving for his wife.
#
And, you know, he's been with her forever, whereas everyone else is sort of seen as some
#
constantly chasing skirt, playboy superstar, and he was definitely not that, he completely
#
He departed from that completely.
#
And he in various interviews would constantly say, because people would shamelessly then
#
Amit ask him, and all people was Tavleen Singh, who asked him in an interview, very serious
#
interview she asks, and I quote this in the book.
#
She says, how come you don't have any affairs?
#
Because it's so common for actors to have affairs.
#
And I think Rajiv Shukla asked him something similar in an interview once on Doordarshan
#
And he just looked bored.
#
And he said, well, I thought that the women I work with, they are my coworkers and colleagues.
#
I didn't realize that I'm supposed to make love to them.
#
And of course, he's being his beautiful sarcastic best.
#
But so many women just appreciated the fact that he treated women as comrades, as colleagues,
#
as friends in the workplace, and this is the pre-MeToo world.
#
And we can only imagine what was happening in Bollywood at that time and what kind of
#
And so even if it is an act, Amit, and even if there is posturing, and I think you heard
#
Paramita Vohra say something similar to what I'm saying, I think there's a club of women
#
who are so hopelessly in love with this man.
#
But we appreciate it because I think at the time that he was saying this, no one else
#
at that time really was in our culture, the way he was saying it and with the intensity
#
And I think that's really appreciated.
#
You seem to have researched me as well as I researched you, you're referring to the
#
Paro Mehta episode where I just remembered Paro and I also argued about Shah Rukh.
#
No, I completely agree with this.
#
And you know, this mirrors what Salman Sose, the Congress politician once said to me, he
#
came on my show and I asked him that is there anything about Modi that you like?
#
And he said, I like the Swach Bharat campaign because forget what the result is.
#
The fact that he is preaching the virtue of cleanliness, preaching the virtue of something
#
that is desirable itself makes an impact given his massive reach.
#
So now that we have established that the Prime Minister Modi has something in common with
#
both Barack Obama and Shah Rukh Khan, I think it's time we take a break.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
#
because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons.
#
And now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene In The Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Shreena Bhattacharya about Shah Rukh Khan, about Indian society, about
#
so many different things.
#
So you know, I have so much to talk to you about that I don't even know how to proceed.
#
But let's talk about some of the serious stuff first, because that's really important to
#
And I think kind of understanding, you know, the structural issues, the way society works,
#
the way economics works, you know, to do that first will, I think, help if we then zoom
#
in later into a lot of the particular stories that you've gotten into, because that context
#
Now, I did an episode a while back, a couple of years back, about women in the workplace
#
with Amitabh Bhandare, and we kind of discussed that really puzzling thing that as our economy
#
has grown, and it was growing at that time, as our economy has grown, less women are working.
#
And you've broken this out extremely well in your book.
#
So take me through sort of the four different reasons why we see less women in the workplace.
#
Amit, I think the first thing that we need to understand when we talk about this is,
#
I want to set the context for how the data is collected on the basis of which we say
#
that this is happening.
#
And I actually know the episode as well.
#
And I follow your show quite regularly.
#
I think you've learned stalking from your hero.
#
Oh, Amit, don't embarrass me.
#
But a couple of things.
#
One is when the government, this is the NSS data on employment and unemployment, it tends
#
to be, what I want to just tell everyone is it tends to be quite consistent across the
#
So it's not like there are some changes in methodology, some changes maybe in sampling,
#
but broadly we're talking about, it's a broad apples to apples comparison.
#
So when I say that female employment rates and labor force participation rates have dropped
#
dramatically from 2004 till 2017, that's actually a robust claim because it's a robust
#
claim using a measure that stayed quite standard.
#
I think that's very important to know.
#
It's not like we're suddenly changing the way it's designed.
#
The second thing I want everyone to know is that when we measure women's work, in fact
#
statisticians and a community that I have deep admiration for is more than economists
#
as statisticians because they really get into the nuts and bolts of how do you construct
#
these numbers, which try and convey something about reality, right?
#
And one of the things that you learn when you look at the history of Indian employment
#
statistics and I get into that a little bit just for the reader to have some context and
#
the book is that they were very concerned about the fact that Indians hold multiple
#
The nature of our labor market is segmented, very fluid.
#
You could be doing something one hour or something else the next hour.
#
You could be paid for it.
#
You could be helping your family with something productive.
#
And so actually the measure that they use is fairly broad and inclusive.
#
So I often get asked, is my domestic worker counted?
#
Someone who is a part-time domestic worker or full-time domestic worker, even if you're
#
not working the traditional office job, nine to five, you will be counted.
#
So casual workers, self-employed workers and so on.
#
I just want all of us to just be clear that it's not that this is just salaried workers
#
who are often counted because I get questions like that all the time.
#
Now given that, we see the sharp drop and you're absolutely right.
#
I think there's been a lot written about even with economic growth, we see this complete
#
drop which actually makes India quite an exception from other countries.
#
Even in a Turkey and China where you see stagnating female employment, you don't see the same
#
sharp drop that we've seen.
#
And if you look at all the literature, there are sort of broadly four buckets of things
#
One is what I think many people call the income effect.
#
And it's quite worrying, but essentially the data suggests is that as families start
#
to earn more money, they are able to purchase more conservative values.
#
And this is particularly seen amongst the upper caste.
#
So for example, in the book, upper caste, well-to-do families in particular, where if,
#
in fact, if you look at the top 10% of India right now using the CMI data for 2019, and
#
I mentioned this in the book, of all married women, I think in the richest cohort, only
#
And so the income effect is giving you a flavor of why this is happening and what this body
#
of literature suggests is that because families now earn more, there's no need for an additional
#
So women don't need to go out of the home to work.
#
So they can now retreat into full-time mothering and caring.
#
And this explains why 7 out of 10 women between the ages of 15 to 59 are full-time working
#
They're tending to household duties, that's what it's called statistically.
#
But just to sort of double-click on that itself one more time, the psychological aspect of
#
that is very important, like the phrase you used is, once the income goes up, they can
#
buy more conservative values.
#
And therefore, the way I would interpret that is that the traditional notion is that a woman's
#
She should be looking after the kitchen, after the children, so on and so forth.
#
And somehow the honor of the house is stained if the woman has to go out and work.
#
But when you have constraints of income and she absolutely has to work, what do you do?
#
But once that is gone, the women get back into the house.
#
And Amit, in fact, you're seeing that play out right now because what many people are
#
expecting and you would have seen in the recent round of the Periodic Labor Force Survey,
#
we see female employment rates actually rose a bit and then have stabilized.
#
And one of the things that people are now trying to understand and we need to dig into
#
it much deeper is that, is it that crisis is now creating this need for women to step
#
But you're absolutely right.
#
There is this notion that women's work is flexible, women's labor is flexible.
#
So remember, women are always working.
#
We say they're not employed for money, but women are always working.
#
If you look at time poverty numbers of women, women are always busy cooking, cleaning, collecting
#
water, creating firewood, all kinds of work in rural areas, in urban areas, women are
#
working managing domestic roles.
#
Not everyone has a maid.
#
I think that's a fallacy.
#
We need to sort of have some vision correction.
#
It's the really wealthy who do and the real upper middle class that does.
#
Most women are always working, Amit.
#
But I think when we're talking about these sharp drops, it's for paid employment, of
#
Now, given that if women are seen as a flexible resource for the household, you then realize
#
that if you really need it, then women can work outside the home.
#
And so what the income effect is saying is post-liberalization, post this big boom in
#
the economy, essentially many households said, we don't need you to work.
#
Now I want to just caveat that also by saying that there's a little bit of nuance there
#
because that may not always be a bad thing because there may actually be women you encounter
#
them in the book who actually say that I don't want to be working outside because I'm working
#
Now I need to go out and earn in the world, which is so unsafe and horrid to women in
#
Why is the man in my life not meeting the bread winning end of his contract in the marriage?
#
And so many women actually would say that if he's doing well enough, I'm happy to be
#
at home and care full time within the home.
#
That's something that actually is an empowered choice in a way for some women.
#
So while this effect is existing and we're seeing women drop out, there's a sense of
#
nuance there, which is part of it could actually be welfare enhancing for some women and part
#
of it, it couldn't be as well.
#
So that's the income effect.
#
The second is of course, an underestimation effect Amit and that I think when I started
#
by discussing the way these numbers are constructed, I myself, when I was working for the Institute
#
of Social Studies Trust, this is a paper which was published in EPW.
#
We did a survey of women's employment in Delhi.
#
And what we realized was the moment you use female surveyors, volunteer students who will
#
essentially these are young students that are interested to probe more, ask more questions,
#
they will pick up women's employment.
#
Whereas if you just go standard and ask, do you work, most women will just say no.
#
So many women will say, mere paas naukri nahi hai, lekin mein kaam kartein.
#
Which means that I don't have a job, but I'm working, right?
#
And so when someone asks as a statistical entity, are you working?
#
The temptation may just be to not report their work.
#
So there is a kind of underestimation because of misreporting, not capturing women's work
#
well, not asking enough probing questions to do full justice to a very good survey instrument
#
that the government does implement through its statistical machinery.
#
I think it's quite robust.
#
So there is an underestimation effect there, which continues to hold and it's not just
#
our paper, then this has been corroborated by several other pieces of work by different
#
organizations and different scholars, essentially saying that women's work tends to be misunderstood
#
The third is more hopeful is what I think people like Sujit Bhalla, Ravinder Kaur, they
#
call it the education effect.
#
And the idea is that because younger girls and young women are studying more, are spending
#
more time in college or in continuing to finish school, they are essentially not working in
#
the early part of their career.
#
Well, these aren't careers.
#
These are typically people doing ad hoc jobs, given the kind of milieu, the social milieu
#
we're talking about, because they're studying more, they're not working.
#
And so that's actually quite good, which is that you're studying more, then you immediately
#
get married and then your marriage is your job in a way.
#
The fourth, which I actually find the most interesting and I don't think enough is said
#
This is work by Martin Rama and Rinku Murgai and Urmila Chatterjee, in fact, colleagues
#
Others have been doing this work as well, essentially saying they call it the structural
#
transformation effect in a way, or the structural transformation of the economy.
#
And one of the things I'd really encourage everyone to look at this paper, not only because
#
I think it has really beautiful insights on what's happening to women's work, but the
#
data work is really nicely done.
#
It's just a very good work of econometrics using government data sets.
#
One of the things they find is that the way the Indian economy has changed with the move
#
away from agriculture, the boost to construction, certain kinds of services, sectors that traditionally
#
used to employ women, such as agriculture or flexible work within the home, small-scale
#
cottage industries, for instance, those have been in deep decline.
#
And the transformation of the economy seems to have really helped men because there's
#
a study by scholars of the ILO.
#
What they find is if you look at the top 10 fastest growing sectors in the economy, post
#
liberalization, women have only received 19% of the jobs, one nine, which means most of
#
the employment gains of that growth and the transformation in the Indian economy have
#
And it's a bit different from the others because instead of a supply story that the household
#
is unwilling to let women supply their labor outside the home, this is looking much more
#
at sectors who demand labor.
#
And what they're saying is that the economy is moving and changing in such a way that
#
sectors that would typically demand women's time and their labor and pay them no longer
#
And in fact, you see this playing out in the book, Amit.
#
I met all these home-based garment workers and Agarbati workers in 2006.
#
This is a time when there was a slight bump up right around that period.
#
Immediately after, slowly and particularly post-demonetization, these home-based industries
#
and it's all essentially, it's a depressed sector now because incense sticks, garments
#
have moved to either special economic zones or they're much more organized and clustered
#
And so in fact, some of this flexible work that women were doing and they enjoyed this
#
work because it allowed them to combine their reproductive work as well as their work outside
#
Those opportunities are shrinking, the wages that are shrinking as well.
#
And so that's the structural transformation story.
#
There's a specific, so these are the four broad buckets.
#
There's one very interesting, I find the paper just fascinating.
#
This is by Farzana Afridi, she's at ISI and her colleagues and what they find looking
#
at rural women, because one of the things that we have to realize about this drop is
#
that while urban female employment rates has always stayed around 13%, 14%, it's always
#
It's been fairly stable.
#
So the gap actually has been fairly stable over the past 30 years.
#
It's actually rural areas where this sharp drop in female employment has been acutely
#
seen as a rural phenomena.
#
And part of it is that agriculture structural transformation story that I told you, part
#
of it is the education story, underestimation, households are earning more money.
#
You see this in the book, there's a character who's in rural Uttar Pradesh, her husband
#
is an electrician and a carpenter.
#
Post-liberalization, suddenly government wants to give out PWD contracts, right, to all these
#
young men, they're earning much more.
#
So the expectation is now the woman doesn't need to work.
#
That's the income effect.
#
And you see all of this playing out.
#
But in rural areas, there's one additional factor, which people like Farzana and others
#
are trying to sort of unpack more and I think it's just really interesting work.
#
What they're saying is that with more primary education, women's role as unpaid caregivers
#
who will improve the human capital of their children, because they've studied more so
#
they can manage children better, invest in their nutrition better, teach them better.
#
So the kids can grow up to be more productive members of the labor market.
#
The value to the home of women as unpaid workers is actually much higher than the wage that
#
they would earn outside doing low-end agriculture work or other kinds of work.
#
And so women are retreating because it's almost a way to improve the productivity of the household
#
I think it's really interesting and they find this specifically in rural areas.
#
And so I think these are broadly the big theories.
#
And I think three messages around that, right?
#
One which we all know, motherhood and marriage are typically what are just kicking women
#
out of the workforce constantly.
#
And I say kicking, but then I want to, again, nuance that because many times just a voluntary
#
And I think we have to just acknowledge that, that many women would just say that I'd prefer
#
and I find more meaning in just being at home, being a mother, caring, and that's a choice.
#
And I think the other is that if you look at the way women are interacting with the
#
job market, essentially, if you look at manufacturing, for instance, I think 64% of women involved
#
in manufacturing work from home.
#
The home, even before the pandemic, before work from home became a public health measure,
#
the home was the principal workplace.
#
And for men, it's about 15%.
#
So there is this very important schematic, I want all of us, in fact, read the book when
#
you consume these numbers, when you read the studies, to recognize that actually often
#
when we're talking about women who are working, who is the working woman, she's at home.
#
She may not be going out of the home.
#
She may be making something at home.
#
She may be cooking and cleaning at another person's home.
#
But the home as a site for female labor, that's a very enduring aspect of women's presence
#
in the economy that hasn't really changed that significantly.
#
And so I think these are the five buckets of theories.
#
There's marriage motherhood, which I think is often talked about.
#
And the fact that the home is the key site, if you want to really impact the labor conditions
#
of women, you're not going to do that through policies that don't attack the home, be it
#
I think I talked about this earlier, be it shelter security, childcare investments, thinking
#
about improved access to water, and you're seeing these dynamics play out.
#
And the last thing I will say, this is sort of emerging work, which is not really a theory,
#
but I think it intuitively makes sense to everyone, which is that India has grown in
#
such a way that there are clusters where jobs and opportunities exist, right?
#
Jobs don't exist everywhere equally.
#
That's just not the case.
#
That's not at all the case.
#
What's happening is men can migrate out to find jobs from Bhuvaneshwar.
#
They can go to Bombay, from anywhere else they can go anywhere.
#
Public space is safe for them.
#
Housing is safe for them.
#
For really low-income men, even sleeping on the streets is potentially a possibility,
#
There are these labor chocks and so on.
#
For women, though, educated, even those who come from very difficult backgrounds, the
#
idea of migrating en masse to follow economic opportunity, the benefit to that is just not
#
worth families incurring the social cost because they're worried about girl safety.
#
What if she finds a boyfriend?
#
What if something happens?
#
There are all these concerns.
#
And so often what ends up happening is the few stories we hear of women migrating for
#
work, often now with special economic zones, they migrate through a contractor or domestic
#
workers who migrate through a contractor, are harrowing stories of harassment because
#
often the contractor and many of these factories and SCZs are treating women the way a benevolent
#
patriarch would, like extremely rigid rules about where you can go out, whether you can
#
use your phone, all these kinds of things.
#
About domestic workers, we know there's issues about withholding wages, not being paid on
#
time, abuse, harassment again.
#
And so hearing these stories, listening to these experiences, migration out to follow
#
jobs is not something that women can safely and freely do.
#
And I think that's really important.
#
And the last thing on this, I will say, I realized I've said a lot, is that caste continues
#
to be the most important, not barrier, but mediator of jobs.
#
And what I mean by that is that there was a Pew survey recently, which essentially found
#
that even in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, when people asked Indians, are you comfortable
#
with your daughter marrying outside of her caste community, most Indians said no.
#
And they're extremely worried about who the woman marries.
#
This obsession with female sexual purity just doesn't seem to change.
#
And that fear around caste purity plays itself out in the labor market, because why is it
#
that all these families are so scared of women going, even to Gurgaon, in the book, you actually
#
talk about a character, her father's willing to let her work in the Delhi secretariat,
#
because he thinks that's government and it's understood.
#
But the idea of her going and taking up perhaps a higher paying job in a private company in
#
Gurgaon is very worrying because he's immediately associating it with boyfriends, love affairs,
#
Lord knows who she will suddenly end up with.
#
And this fear around female sexuality, what will women do with their bodies and their
#
We don't think of sexuality when we think of the labor market, but actually the two
#
are extremely connected and you see this in the book.
#
And I think caste is the reason why, because there are such scripts of womanhood needs
#
to bear, as you mentioned earlier, not just the honor of the home, but the caste honor
#
And that is the reason why women's access to jobs just remains so severely compromised.
#
Because even if options exist, families will make women feel so tense and unhappy about
#
following them up that many women will just say, well, to hell with it.
#
Whereas in the book, in fact, there are stories of women who say, no, we want to still pursue.
#
And then the stories tell you what happens when they try and fight their families to
#
A lucid illustration of social pressures having an impact on the labor market.
#
People wouldn't often connect the two.
#
Before I move on to my next question, I want to not double click, but mouse over perhaps
#
on what you said about the structural transformation effect.
#
Can you give me examples of some of these new industries which are coming up, which
#
tend to attract more men?
#
Construction and often, and in fact, imagine, and Amit, the thing that we also need to realize
#
is these are all interacting effects.
#
So for example, with construction, sometimes wives may follow men.
#
But because of the underestimation effect, many of times that work is perhaps not even
#
But and also many other times, women are not paid independently.
#
They're essentially following for care purposes.
#
And many times men just migrate out on their own.
#
If you look at the sectors that have really boomed post-liberalization, it's construction,
#
it's retail, it's transport, and majority of employment gains here.
#
And this should not surprise us intuitively.
#
These are jobs that require movement.
#
These are jobs that require interacting with public space.
#
These are jobs that require a fair amount of haggling and negotiating and interacting
#
with lots of strangers.
#
These are all jobs that largely men have essentially found.
#
And also the nature of the skill and what's required.
#
And it's frustrating, I think, for a lot of women in rural India, I think the urban landscape
#
I actually think the urban landscape hasn't dramatically changed.
#
I think the jobs have changed and women are the kinds of families who would support women
#
to work like mine, for instance, will continue to do so.
#
And it's just the nature of the job may change.
#
We may now work in a bank much more than perhaps just be a teacher, but we should remember
#
These are actually the core occupations that urban women are involved in.
#
But in rural areas, it's very frustrating, and this is a frustration that finds its way
#
in the book, is that many of these girls are the first generation to study in a school.
#
After Sarvshik Shabhihan, which was the district primary education program, the predecessor
#
And I say this, they're numerate, they're literate, and they're ready to go somewhere,
#
And their brothers take up jobs as contractors, plumbers, electricians, all kinds of things
#
that are available to them.
#
And to them, it's an adventure, moving from even a village in Rampur to the city of Bareilly,
#
moving from Bareilly, then perhaps to Dubai, like all that.
#
These are all transitions that are happening in the book.
#
But for girls, it's still, you need to be married if you want to go somewhere.
#
I think the structural transformation story really bears itself out, particularly in rural
#
India, because suddenly you had jobs in building roads, trading, transporting.
#
Those jobs just were not available to women at scale.
#
And what you said about women having to be married to go somewhere.
#
One of the best books I've read in the last few years while doing the scene and the unseen
#
was India Moving by Chinmay Thumbe.
#
And my great TIL moment there was that the maximum internal migration happens in India
#
because of women getting married, because women get married and then they just go with
#
their husband, which just tells you so much about the lack of agency and so on and so
#
You know, in fact, there's a beautiful line, I forget, Indian author in her book.
#
She says, once you're married, you're free to do anything your husband wants you to do.
#
And you know, in the book, this finds in my book, it's interesting, I see that play out.
#
There's a particular woman I met in rural Uttar Pradesh in the district of Rampur.
#
She makes embroidery work at home.
#
And one of the things she says is that for her, marriage is her ticket to malls.
#
And she says, you know, if you marry someone who let you watch Shah Rukh movies, wouldn't
#
You know, so marriage, the tyranny of marriage in mediating women's access and social sanction
#
to access public space still continues.
#
And Amit, I mean, it's not just women in rural Rampur.
#
I mean, you look at me and I've been mentioning this example constantly while I've been talking
#
But I live in a really plush neighborhood in Delhi.
#
I am extremely well-to-do in the economic pyramid of our country.
#
But even for me, Amit, to find a house on my own without being married is hideously
#
There are all these, you know, conversations, lots of grumbling.
#
This is true for women and friends of mine in Bombay and many other cities in the country.
#
What always surprises me is how internalized the lack of female agency has become that
#
we don't even talk about these things that much.
#
We're not out on the streets protesting any of this, right?
#
I mean, we protest when comedians say things that are just innocuous and actually don't
#
even say things that are innocuous.
#
And you know, we get upset about those things.
#
But the sheer lack of freedom that women have, I just don't see anyone getting really agitated
#
I think you find that anger in the book, but I just, I don't see that.
#
The tyranny of marriage and the tyranny of motherhood.
#
And to me, these are scripts of womanhood.
#
There's a kind of Indian womanhood that has just been reified and constantly affirmed
#
And all the women in the book, Amit, are all deviating from these standard scripts in their
#
own ways, the very different ways.
#
And I think the appeal of Mr. Khan is when you're deviating from these scripts, when
#
you're looking for fun, escape, comforts, you know, something else, a man who will support
#
that deviation, he's essentially who they find.
#
And I think you're absolutely right, which is I think marriage and the lack of agency
#
is just, it's an enduring characteristic.
#
And just thinking aloud, you mentioned protesting, and I just saw that this, you know, we live
#
in a country that wants to lock up Munawar Farooqi and Akwit Mahmood Farooqi.
#
So continuing with the theme of women working, you also point out in your book that women
#
working outside the home also face so many problems.
#
Like you've quoted, you know, Santhil Malayanathan talking about the hidden taxes.
#
I'll just quote that bit out because I think it's so illuminating, quote, the working
#
world is unfair to many women, yet even when they succeed, they must confront another series
#
Their hard-won successes are taxed in ways that men's are not.
#
The taxes I'm talking about aren't paid in dollars and cents or imposed by the government.
#
They take the form of annoyance and misery and are levied by individuals, very often
#
I call these impositions taxes because they take away some of what an individual earns,
#
diminishing the joys of success, stop quote.
#
And what you sort of demonstrate so movingly in your book is that it's almost as if women
#
are condemned to be lonely.
#
They're lonely in the workplace, they're lonely in the kitchen, as you point out.
#
So can you expand a little bit more on this from your conversations and your experiences
#
Just make this concrete for me in terms of what are these hidden taxes?
#
Like one would imagine, like the typical way one would think about this is that women are
#
It's one step further to empowerment and to agency and all of that, but it's more complicated.
#
And I think that's also why women are dropping out of the workforce.
#
I think that's the contention that I make.
#
It can't be tested statistically because it's a sociological claim, but it's different.
#
But you know what's happening, Amit, is this links back to the conversation of how do we
#
tackle this crisis of jobs for women?
#
And what I really believe listening to all these stories and following these women for
#
15 years is that behind the crisis of jobs, there's a crisis of love.
#
And what I mean by that is that each of the women in the book, any time they try and have
#
their own bank account, have an independent space, which is completely private to them.
#
Each time they're asserting something about themselves as an economic agent and economic
#
individual, because there's something about the market where it really highlights the
#
individuality of yourself because it is your labor fundamentally.
#
They are always made to feel unworthy, unloved, second-guessed, and there are different ways
#
this is playing out through the book, depending on your class position and where you are.
#
So for instance, amongst the upper-class elite women that I was speaking to, most of whom,
#
in fact, during the time that I knew them, many of whom just dropped out of the workforce,
#
it plays out in even if you have a maid, even if you have a nanny, even if you have, you
#
know, a cook cleaner, all of that.
#
Women are exclusively responsible for keeping track of what is happening in the household.
#
And I think some economists call this the cost of keeping track.
#
You're constantly keeping track.
#
And men just aren't expected to keep track that way.
#
And there's statistical data that bears that out, which is in the book, that women just
#
constantly labor on lists and following up and all of those things.
#
Men are not doing that.
#
Men are out in the world and then they come back and they have this clean separation between
#
leisure time and working time.
#
Women are always working.
#
And the other place where this hidden tax on women plays out is, in fact, in the romantic
#
market where what I kept hearing from women is that men are not comfortable marrying,
#
loving, caring for, and supporting women who perhaps are more economically successful than
#
them or perhaps even their economic equals.
#
That while femininity, particularly amongst the English-speaking elite and upper middle
#
class has changed to the point that women expect a Shah Rukh, they want someone who
#
will be a partner and a supporter, men and masculinity is yet to transform that radically.
#
And you see this playing out in different ways.
#
So then men lash out at successful women by either cheating on them, making them feel
#
bad about their bodies, all kinds of really bad emotional behavior, which makes women
#
feel very unworthy about their bodies, about their selves, about their ambitions.
#
And I kept hearing from a lot of very successful women.
#
In fact, I think my chapter in the book is an illustration of this, which is that you
#
will be made to feel bad if you happen to have a professional identity, which you even
#
It's not like you're showing it off.
#
It's just something you wear.
#
And I was told by people I was with that you better just hide that.
#
Don't talk about your work.
#
Women are supposed to talk about work.
#
So I think those are the hidden taxes and sort of the upper crust and that milieu.
#
If you look at the hidden taxes when it comes to sort of this emerging trader caste middle
#
There are women in the book like that, a woman who decides to pursue a career in government,
#
despite the fact that her family just wants her to get married.
#
I mean, marriage is the only thing that her family believes she can do with herself.
#
And she believes actually she can do accounts and she can do government accounts and she
#
She finds such joy in them.
#
I was actually just so moved and I think I was privileged to just know her life because
#
how much her immediate cousins, father just would ignore her professional achievements
#
to the point that she once said to me, and I write about this in the book, that I would
#
like to talk about what I'm doing at work, but everybody makes me feel like a bit of
#
And we talk about Shah Rukh and films, right?
#
And the other place in her life where these hidden taxes are playing out, Amit, is she's
#
earning a lot of money.
#
She's earning more money, in fact, than many of the other male cousins in her family are.
#
She buys one of the cousins a bike because he needs it.
#
And they hide the fact, the family hides the fact that it was her and her money, that it
#
And her family tells her, no, if we announce that it was your gift, it won't look good,
#
that a girl is giving this gift, that a girl is essentially supporting financially.
#
And so you make someone's successes feel so small.
#
And I think she desperately in her life wanted someone.
#
I actually think this is why she actually participated in my project.
#
I really do believe this.
#
I think she enjoyed talking to me because she felt that I was validating some of her
#
decisions because I was a stranger.
#
And I was a stranger who had certain credentials that she did respect.
#
And she felt that she needed someone to tell her that valuing accounts over the marriage
#
market was a valid way of being.
#
And no one in her immediate family was doing that.
#
And I think that's, again, sort of a hidden tax that is only, and these are taxes that
#
are only imposed in our interpersonal domain, right?
#
And when it comes to, I think, low income communities, you know, what we call the working
#
class, then the taxes are hidden, but they're not that hidden because it actually plays
#
And it's in the book where when men start to drink, they are uncomfortable with women
#
There's this constant fear that she will run away with another man, a lot of mocking.
#
And not only that, what's fascinating to me is even the largest labor unions in the world,
#
I talk about this in the book, when they unionize, many of them want families, and perhaps sensibly
#
so they want men and families to support the decisions that women are making.
#
And in these communities, families are almost letting women work out of sheer dire need.
#
So I think this goes back to that conversation of the income effect, right?
#
So there's this big grudging, well, we let you go do this job, but we're not very comfortable.
#
And we'll constantly watch you and there's this constant surveillance.
#
But I think there the taxes play out just very directly in economic taxes on women,
#
how much they will earn if they don't have a man with them.
#
You can't survive as a single female household, although one of the principal characters in
#
And it's a really remarkable story of the sets of negotiations that she has to go through
#
to do that and how she earns her own money.
#
And you have to negotiate violence.
#
And violence was just seen as such an accepted way of life in some of these neighborhoods
#
that I was visiting that I didn't know how to get my head around it, to be honest.
#
I think the only way I could do it is to just write faithfully what was told to me without
#
adding my own analysis or adding anything that I had to say, because it was just so
#
telling that it was just something you had to live with.
#
Or if you chose to walk out of your husband, you better have economic resources to walk
#
out of a violent marriage.
#
And I think just to end there, Amit, which is that, yes, so these hidden taxes are playing
#
out in different ways across class groups, is that when we think of intimate relationships,
#
we don't recognize that actually so much of our economic decision making is occurring
#
and being mediated through intimacy, right?
#
Because you don't want to do things that your loved ones will not support you in doing.
#
And one of the things I realized when I was talking to all these women was, you know,
#
when we talk about gender discrimination, we're always talking about the other, right?
#
So it's the bhakts, the dented, painted, you know, it's always the other.
#
But I wrote this book out of sheer frustration because actually I realized the problem is
#
It's number one, what women as themselves can expect and will push themselves to expect
#
Will you stand up for yourself?
#
I mean, will you stand up for what you really want to do for yourself?
#
And then in your daily lives, the people who claim to love you and who do love you.
#
But you realize that in very strange ways, we're all very violent to each other and to
#
And that plays out in the way we're engaging with the market because so many other women
#
just felt that they would not be supported if they decided to pursue what they professionally
#
So a couple of things struck me about what you just said.
#
And one was the notions of love that drive this.
#
And the other was that you said that the accountant was actually happy to speak to you because
#
in a sense, it gave her validation that the sort of things that she was talking about,
#
they were not unique to her, that they were valid, they were legitimate.
#
And that brings me to the question of how do we understand the world we live in, right?
#
And you and I being elites, growing up the way we did, we're reading a lot of books,
#
we have access to the best media, all of that.
#
We have so many ways to understand the world, so many ways to build frames of seeing.
#
But not everyone is that privileged.
#
In fact, most of the country doesn't have access to most of those frames for no fault
#
And that brought me to this quote of yours where you write about love and how Hindi films
#
show love, where you write, quote, despite the intensity of their passions, you'll never
#
truly understand why people in Hindi films love each other as much as they do.
#
Love is youthful and naive and popular Hindi cinema.
#
It becomes an attribute or a noun, not an action or verb in these images.
#
It is an innate immutable feeling within a person catalyzed by another, not a series
#
of ever-changing interactions between two ever-changing people.
#
In the standard Hindi film format, love usually leads to marriage and sex, stop quote.
#
And this is, like you point out, it's a limited view of love.
#
And it's understandable if this view of love should prevail, because that's it.
#
Where are they getting their knowledge of the world from?
#
They're getting their knowledge of the world from their limited lived experience around
#
them and from Bollywood.
#
Do you think that, number one, that this is understated?
#
And I wouldn't say that the causality goes one way.
#
The causality may even go the other way, that films are, of course, a reflection of what
#
society wants and so on and so forth.
#
And it could become a vicious circle in that sense.
#
But is this also why Shah Rukh, in a sense, Mr. Khan, in a sense, is so important that
#
at least at some tiny levels in terms of being kind to women and being in the kitchen and
#
talking to them like they are normal people, he's a little bit of a step ahead?
#
Yeah, I think two things.
#
And this actually funnily goes back to almost where we started, which was about power, right?
#
And in fact, that line that you just quoted is heavily me thinking about the writers I
#
was talking about in the beginning, be it Eric Fromm, people who theorize about love.
#
And I think what's happened is we've all become, sadly, commodities and love has become transactional.
#
And I end the book essentially by saying that the reason why women in our country are so
#
exhausted is because we're constantly hustling for love.
#
I think men are hustling too.
#
They're hustling probably much more for money than they are for love and for a kind of status
#
that men are supposed to have.
#
That's the script of masculinity.
#
Women should have love and they're hustling for it, be it what they're doing to their
#
bodies, the constant compromising, the constant negotiating, the constant settling, right?
#
And in this current framework, love has become, especially for men and even within families,
#
So love is, I control you, so I love you.
#
I allow myself to be controlled by you, so I must love you as well.
#
It's this very strange, codependent, power-centric notion of what love is.
#
And in that world, the love that we are seeing all these women seek, it's almost like they're
#
being taxed for saying, well, I don't want that kind of love.
#
I just want to love who I am at work.
#
In a way, that's actually what all these women are doing.
#
They're choosing to love what they want to do with their bodies, their hearts, their
#
Mr. Khan is very powerful because, in a way, what he says is, you are fine the way you
#
I will love you the way you are.
#
And by women finding money and their own free time to watch something that gives them pleasure,
#
which is Mr. Khan, they are saying, I love myself.
#
So it's, yes, you're right, which is that it's his imagery of being in the kitchen,
#
talking to women, listening to them, but also fandom being an economic act.
#
The fact that these women are spending money the way they want to, to see something that
#
they want to, to see an actor that they enjoy watching.
#
It's also a way for them to say, well, it doesn't matter what my family thinks.
#
And many families, as you know, were very uncomfortable with fandom for Mr. Khan because
#
it signals all these things about female sexuality and people think it's silly.
#
But the fact that these women just said, well, to hell with it, we want to just watch him
#
It was also an act of self-love.
#
And I think that's why he's important.
#
On the broader conversation around, you know, where are we in the state of love?
#
And I write about this, which is, I think the one place where the economy or economics
#
should not be, we now have become all hyper-rational economists when it comes to love.
#
I actually, I write about this.
#
And what I mean by that is we are constantly loving people, conditioning it based on what
#
it does for our welfare.
#
That is actually now what the state of love, not only in our country, I think globally
#
And we love people for the parties they take us to.
#
We love people for what their body signals about us.
#
We love people for status.
#
We love people based on CDs.
#
We love people for all these, there are lots of conditionalities.
#
We love people if you behave a certain way.
#
And I think for the women in the book, all of them were being told, we will love you
#
more as families, as men, as husbands, as fathers, mothers, whoever, if you conform
#
to the script of womanhood that is acceptable to us, which is you either, you don't go
#
work outside for so many hours.
#
You maybe work an hour, but mostly you spend your time on ritual, on caregiving, on marrying
#
someone that we tell you to marry.
#
And all of these women are victims of this new kind of conditional commoditized culture
#
of love, where they are constantly being told you have to behave a certain way to earn it.
#
And if you don't, your own worth is questioned and so you feel bad about yourself and you
#
feel bad about the shape of love that you're receiving.
#
And I think Mr. Khan, there's this kind of existential loneliness, honestly, Amit, and
#
philosophers have been talking about this forever, but I think it's become very acute
#
and it's very acute in the stories in the book because these are truly women on the
#
You would think it's a very banal thing to just want to watch a movie, want to just go
#
and giggle at an actor, want a mobile phone, want a job.
#
It sounds very, like there's nothing revolutionary about any of this.
#
But what I realized when you actually start to listen and pay attention to these stories
#
is each one of them is essentially saying we are not happy with this current culture
#
of love that expects us to constantly condition ourselves a certain way and behave in certain
#
We should just be loved irrespective.
#
We should be loved for who we are and what we want to do.
#
And we shouldn't be taxed for it.
#
And so I think there is an existential loneliness in our culture right now and different cultures
#
then find different ways of dealing with it.
#
The women I follow, including myself, turn to Mr. Khan as sort of relief, as respite.
#
And then we also turn to ourselves and we're trying to navigate this culture right now
#
that we have and this crisis of love.
#
And he then because of his imagery is a great conduit and a foil for that, right?
#
But there are others who would turn to some other forms of art.
#
I do believe I think this is actually the function of art given that we have just destroyed
#
the state of love to the point that I don't know where we recover, where we recover that
#
concept from to the point that, you know, so many people will tell me with the only
#
place which is, you know, pure love is between mother and the offspring.
#
But even there I would contend it's look at what's happening.
#
It's again becomes so conditional.
#
You behave, you are successful X way.
#
I love you a certain way.
#
I love you based on X, Y, Z.
#
And I think all of us just want an out from that.
#
So some people listen to Beethoven and some people watch Mr. Khan.
#
And I think the book is essentially a study of that existential loneliness that this culture
#
of hustling for love is creating.
#
And sadly, the economy is not helping.
#
In some cases it does because there are stories that actually what happens when you say, well,
#
I will just create my own community.
#
So there's a character in the book called Gold, who's an in-flight attendant who runs
#
away from her family because she realizes that they will never love her for who she
#
And she decides that she's just going to go do what she wants to do.
#
She feels extremely lonely.
#
I think it's one of the chapters a lot of people have told me I've had calls from people
#
saying that they've cried while they're reading it because it is a I can sense.
#
And I think it's because of the way she told the stories to me and my relationship with
#
We were very close and we are very close.
#
And I think that when you see her story, what's happening is there the job, the service sector,
#
the fact that these jobs opened up and they were very well paying.
#
She works for an airline, which is a good recruiter.
#
They are good about social security.
#
She feels stable somewhat.
#
And as a consequence, she's able to love herself.
#
And so the economy can help in funny ways, right?
#
A job can help you love yourself when your family won't.
#
You'll feel meaningful there.
#
You might meet someone through your job who will make you feel loved.
#
I mentioned this in the book, being an aid manager for files than an unpaid manager of
#
But I think each of the women is just responding to this culture of constantly having to haggle
#
I mean, this is a new kind of laveria that we have right now, not Shah Rukh's laveria.
#
And I think the solution to that is part escape, which Mr. Khan provides the women in the book
#
and partly it's yourself and resolve within.
#
And I think each one of the women is just demonstrating that in her own ways.
#
So before we get back to the economics, one more question about love.
#
But before that aside, you mentioned that even the love between a mother and a child
#
may not be quite so pure.
#
So I recorded a superb episode with Vinal Pandeyji yesterday, which will probably release
#
after this because it's more timeless.
#
But there's this little snippet from her book, which I read out and we discussed that where
#
she talks about how she was with a bunch of her women friends.
#
And they read this news piece about this mother who murdered her third born or fourth born
#
in the hospital after giving birth.
#
And then she and all her friends started discussing whether they ever felt like that.
#
And each of them was confessing that, man, there was a time when I really wanted to murder
#
my child, each of them.
#
And just today morning before coming to the recording, I was discussing this with one
#
of my hosts where I'm staying in Delhi.
#
And she said that, yeah, that there was a time where at one point my mother-in-law and
#
I looked at each other and she said to me, you feel like throwing him in the dustbin,
#
And she said, yeah, I do.
#
But my question about love is this, which is a difficult question because I couldn't
#
possibly answer it, so it's unfair, but I wonder what you think of it.
#
And it's a two part question, which is that you spoke about how the nature of love is
#
changing and we love for different reasons.
#
So number one, is love always transactional?
#
And number two, the second part to that is that if so, is it then the case that all we
#
are aspiring towards is changing the nature of that transaction?
#
I think it depends on what you actually think is the end goal of love, to be honest.
#
I mean, if there is an end goal.
#
So for instance, you know, there's a body of work which is religion, right, which just
#
says that we should love all, I mean, in a very funny way.
#
And then it tells you that there is this one, you know, way of loving and it's very prescriptive.
#
So in a way, in fact, people, why do people love religion?
#
They love religion because it gives them very clear markers of how to live.
#
And if you live X way, you will be loved, right?
#
You will be loved by someone or the other, mystical forces, people around you, the structures
#
I think families have their own versions of that.
#
One of the most horrifying pieces of art I saw recently was this documentary on the murders
#
in Delhi, where it was the Burari killings, I think, if I'm not mistaken, it's a Netflix
#
The name is Escaping Me, but essentially it was, essentially the family was following
#
an occult practice where they believed the male head was channeling the dead father or
#
And then at some point they basically committed mass suicide and it's a horrifying, stunning
#
But if you watch it, one of the things you realize is that even in families, what was
#
The structure was if you adhere to this belief, we will all love you and we will take care
#
So if the point of all of this is material security, feeling stable economically, which
#
we should remember in our country, which is so economically harsh for most is a very important
#
goal to have, then in that case, love will always be transactional.
#
So it's linked to our, funnily, into our economic circumstances, right?
#
Because the more difficult life is materially, how will you then move beyond a transactional
#
love because you're always tied to having to find love so that someone will take care
#
of you when the state and market won't right now.
#
And I think that's a comment on where we are.
#
I think there's another kind of love which perhaps operates amongst people who have those
#
privileges of certainties, right, that they can, life can be stable.
#
Where then I think the real question you have to ask yourself is it's a question of, you
#
know, if you want love, which is a love that helps you grow as a person and as a person
#
who then is a sentient being in the world, then marriage is perhaps not the way, perhaps
#
You may have to then explore very different ways of living your life.
#
I mean, and I don't, I don't know whether being single is a way to do that, but I think
#
there are different ways people can come to that.
#
But I do think that what's happening in our current culture is that we have really conflated,
#
even amongst the elites who have the privilege of certainties, we have completely conflated
#
love with this idea of power, of status.
#
I think Amiya Srinivasan has this, it's just a wonderful book of essays, right, to sex.
#
I think everybody must read it.
#
She says that are our desires mutable?
#
Are we constantly just mirroring what society wants us to aspire for?
#
Or are we able to actually disengage and think critically for ourselves?
#
And her answers are not a little bleak because actually what you realize is that we're all
#
But I think that's changing.
#
I mean, you look at, you know, the queer movements, non-binary people, I think people are questioning
#
scripts of love and what love entails.
#
But I would argue, Amit, and maybe it is a bit depressing to say it, and I hate to be
#
the, I don't want to be gloomy, but I want to just say this is actually a fact.
#
As long as our country continues to be as unequal and the economy works the way it does,
#
whereas most people in the country live lives of complete uncertainty and you need material
#
security, particularly women, because they cannot be materially secure on their own,
#
love will be transactional because you will constantly rely, in interpersonal dimensions,
#
you will constantly need people to love you to feel secure materially.
#
And then within that, there's of course fantasy and escape.
#
And that's a very different kind of, you know, love, you love yourself in that fantasy, you
#
find love in odd kinds of fantasies, everybody daydreams, it doesn't matter which economic
#
So I guess my answer to you is love will be transactional depending on one's material
#
security and love will be transactional as long as we conflate it with this status game.
#
And I think we need to take a deep, hard look at our own personal preferences.
#
And I, in the book, I'm very transparent about this.
#
Why was I involved with someone who essentially was, you know, had more status?
#
He signaled something about me in the book, The Gentleman, I call the one, he signaled
#
So he made me feel good in that very transactional way.
#
And at the end of the chapter, I actually write this, you know, he just became a prize
#
I mean, it felt like, well, I didn't feel worthy.
#
So now I'm with this person.
#
So now maybe I'll feel better about myself.
#
And then I had to do the really hard work of just keeping myself company and figuring
#
out what kind of love do I want on my own terms.
#
And I think the more we start to take a step back and think a bit critically about those
#
preferences, as opposed to entering the rat race for status, which is often conflated with
#
I think until that happens, I don't think things will change too much for this transactional
#
So that's my long philosophical.
#
Yeah, but you called yourself gloomy.
#
I object to that because everything is relative.
#
You're sitting in a room with me right now.
#
No one can be gloomier than me.
#
Like earlier when you were talking about how women, you know, seek meaning from say a job,
#
a job can make their life seem meaningful when family doesn't.
#
And I was just thinking to myself that life is basically meaningless.
#
We all know that we are just choosing our own illusion.
#
So perhaps we're hunting for a better.
#
Yeah, no, that's one philosophy.
#
And that's a way of looking at life.
#
And then there's another way, which is well, even in all that churn and you construct meaning
#
Yeah, we've got to assume there is meaning even if there is not.
#
Yeah, no, I mean, or that meaning is something it's for you, right?
#
I mean, I think that and it's fine.
#
I think people will find that in their own ways and that's okay.
#
What I guess I'm worried about when I talk to younger women and even women in their thirties
#
and forties is that I really think that we have this and I should write about this in
#
the book when I talk about the upper class meeting market, that it sometimes feels like
#
you have this world of men with unwarranted self-confidence and women with unwarranted
#
I mean, Amit, the mental health crisis that love is creating for women.
#
And I get into this a little bit in parts of the book is remarkable.
#
And I'm sure that there is a corollary to this for men as well.
#
It's just not something that I've studied particularly, and there are people who will
#
and I'm very curious about.
#
But the women I speak to, because they find this meaning, they've constructed this meaning
#
out of these gender scripts around love and a certain kind of heteronormative.
#
I mean, the book starts with the line that my life is heteronormative.
#
Hell, this is a very heteronormative take of what love is and marriage.
#
And there are people like Parumita Vora, I was recently on a panel with her and she basically
#
said on this panel was about love and sexuality.
#
And she essentially said that, you know, until marriage is just not as an institution, we
#
This is just going to be the way it is, but we do live in the reality that currently we
#
I can't dive off a, you know, a deep end where we live in completely different constructed
#
We live in a life where there is a tyranny of marriage in the way women's lives are organized.
#
Some of us try and resist it.
#
I mean, I don't expect that of everyone because people may find meaning.
#
But given that these women find meaning in marriage, motherhood, love, given that just
#
the sheer onus, the burden, the harassment and abuse that all of that is generating.
#
I don't know whether men, I'm sure men are feeling cut up as well, but I just don't see
#
it as at least amongst the elite.
#
I just see a bunch of men feeling very good about themselves and then pretending to be
#
brash when I think they're just trying to cover up insecurities.
#
And I don't think they suffer as much in love as I think women are right now, but that's
#
Okay, I'm allowed one dad joke per episode.
#
That if the one was actually cut up, what would he be?
#
Anyway, so actually it depends on how much you cut him up.
#
Although because he gave me, he allowed me to write about this, I would not want him
#
I think he can be the one.
#
We'll spare him the cutting up.
#
Yeah, no, and I love that sentence of yours about how the upper class mating market seemed
#
neatly divided between males with unwarranted self-confidence and females with unwarranted
#
self-doubt, which is superb.
#
And our mutual friend Shruti Rajgopalan once put up this cartoon on Twitter of there is
#
this man sitting with a woman and telling her, let me interrupt your expertise with
#
And you know, Amit, my God, I write about it in a very sort of trying to be light in
#
touch when I write about it, but people get very angry when this happens.
#
I know women who've been on dates and told your business idea is foolish, your, you know,
#
Leave your job from men who barely have jobs and all the sort of, you know, and of course
#
there's the converse of that, which I absolutely abhor, which is anytime a woman is getting
#
ahead and she has male mentors, Oh, there must be something funny going on between the
#
Like this constant scrutiny of female success.
#
I just don't see male success ever scrutinized in that manner.
#
It might be scrutinized a bit the way, you know, about nepotism, but not in like questioning
#
a person's character, right?
#
You inherit something from your family, you inherited men do and women do, all of us do,
#
but women's success, especially when they're then showing up in romantic encounters, the
#
kind of nonsense that you just have to deal with.
#
And I think, you know, in 2021, surely this should be retired, but it isn't.
#
I do believe, Amit, we are in a crisis of, there is a deeply wounded masculinity because
#
and, and in fact, Mr. Khan's films recently seem to echo that, you know, he's playing
#
these really narcissistic men who are very worried about the fact that they've fallen
#
for women who have higher status than him.
#
And I think my sense is when I talk to all these women in the upper class mating market,
#
the stories that are in the book, my own experience is that I think men are yet to actually adapt
#
to the fact that there is now this new generation of extremely confident women who can do potentially
#
without them, because again, the economy has allowed them to do so because their parents
#
They may be able to find land to just live on their own in small enclaves.
#
It might be possible for you to live as a single woman.
#
And the fact that these women are very vociferous about what they expect from men, I think is
#
And I think men are still struggling en masse to be able to deal with that.
#
And I think the stories in the book are illustrating that a bit.
#
Yeah, I read an interesting essay, I'll try and link that if I can find the link from
#
the show notes about how, you know, this has actually been measured, this crisis in confidence
#
Like, I think there was some study where, you know, within an organization, people were
#
asked to apply for a particular position, and there were 10 prerequisites for it.
#
And no woman applied unless she met all 10.
#
But men, if they met even six of them, happily, they are applying.
#
And the gap just keeps on increasing as this kind of happens.
#
And in fact, Amit, I would contend that this in the romantic, I mean, you're talking about
#
the professional arena.
#
In the romantic arena, this is even more remarkable, because I write about, you know, supermodels
#
being made to feel bad by, you know, men.
#
I don't want to make comments on the way people's physical appearances are, but like a man giving
#
a supermodel a hard time about...
#
You wrote it in his book.
#
Yeah, this is for people, and then it's just remarkable to me the confidence with which
#
so many men, and this I will keep, of course, nuancing this, which is this is men very much
#
typically upper caste, upper class.
#
I can't say what's going on in sort of different communities.
#
I'm looking forward to books that do and research that does.
#
But the mating market that I know so intimately well, and the mating market that Gold, one
#
of the characters in the book is occupying, it's a men's market, and it's quite remarkable
#
that it's a men's market.
#
I think Mukul Kesavan had that hilarious essay, right, about the ugliness of the Indian male.
#
I would actually, I think John Abraham has ended that, because I think he was talking
#
about the ugliness of the Indian actors relative to a Madhuri Dixit or so on.
#
But I think once now men in movies are actually probably as sort of aesthetically pleasing
#
as objects as well as women.
#
I think they're now quite equal.
#
But Indian men are actually much worse looking than Indian women.
#
I'm not going to, I'm not going to participate in that claim because Shah Rukh Khan is an
#
Yeah, he might be an outlier, but I, you know, I don't want, this is, this is actually, this
#
is not the kind of statistical fact that I will not, I will not adhere to or abide by.
#
I would believe in a complexity here.
#
But what I will say is that the confidence is quite remarkable and the lack of confidence
#
that girls are growing up with is just something that, you know, and I face it, all the women
#
in the book face it, you're constantly made to feel unsure about knowing yourself.
#
And you know, we were, we started this conversation, we're talking about people who hide from themselves,
#
And I think women are almost socialized as they're growing up to hide from their own
#
desires to conform to a script that will earn them security, status, survival.
#
And that takes very different shapes based on where you are and your circumstances.
#
It really worries me that this is now, unfortunately, this crisis of confidence is just, it seems
#
to just get compounded professionally and romantically.
#
There are studies that measure depression rates and suicide rates amongst women.
#
And there's some, India has one of the global highs when it comes to some of this.
#
And I quote some of the data in the book and it's a tough one to crack through policy.
#
I think that's where I'm really struggling when I hear these stories.
#
And I think the book is essentially to try and communicate these experiences to just
#
But then how do you start to resolve them is a very tricky ask because I think a lot
#
of it will perhaps require women to exit some of the structures that are incentivizing them
#
And I don't know whether the economy and public space currently will allow for that.
#
So I have again a deeper question coming from this observation about, you know, in your
#
book, you made this observation about how you went to talk with a bunch of women, but
#
they weren't saying anything and they were all clammed up and there were men around.
#
But when the men leave, then they start talking, which indicates that there was one persona
#
they were maintaining that was socially acceptable in that milieu.
#
And the moment they found that they could speak, they spoke.
#
But it also seems to me that some of them would have become the persona in the way a
#
mask can become a face.
#
So in your experience, how much does that happen, like how much like on the one hand,
#
I can see some people kind of internalizing all of this.
#
So they also believe it's OK.
#
They don't have an issue with it that he was right to hit me.
#
I must have done something wrong or, you know, my husband works for the family.
#
I must spend all day cooking good food for him and all of those things.
#
But on the other hand, there would be people who realize that they are trapped and this
#
And they live in Thoreau's words, lives of quiet desperation.
#
So which of these you think is more prevalent or they're all true?
#
They're all true, although what I have noticed based on just the stories I know and the people
#
I've met, I'm not going to make more of a generalized statement beyond that.
#
What I have noticed is that there is a class distinction here.
#
I notice any time you talk about a MeToo case, any time you talk about men treating women
#
poorly, I notice that upper class women tend to be much quicker to apologize and explain
#
In that there's a lot of internalized misogyny, you know, the boys will be boys, a little
#
And I actually mentioned this and in fact, sometimes Mr. Khan's characters himself and
#
certainly the characters Ranbir Kapoor's plays, all of them are like this, which is they're
#
all these seemingly charming men, but actually they're just man children who need to be coddled
#
and constantly validated and their narcissism needs to be encouraged and cultured in a way.
#
And women that are constantly in these movies playing the burden of someone who will do
#
There's a scene which I mentioned in the book, which is in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, which by the
#
way is one of my favorite Hindi films.
#
I actually love that film.
#
Ranbir Kapoor was just fantastic in it.
#
But you know, there's a scene between him and this stunning Aishwarya Rai and they've
#
had this encounter, they've slept together.
#
And then the next morning, I think they're trying to figure out where they stand.
#
And you know, he asks for her poetry because he's a musician.
#
And then she turns to him and she says, well, if I give you your poetry and I get you, you
#
know, you're sort of recovering from a heartache and I'm helping you with that, what do I get
#
in return being with you?
#
And he pulls her towards himself and says, am I not enough?
#
And I think what's happening is this, am I not enough is seen as charming amongst upper
#
class women that, oh, this is a confident man.
#
How, you know, there's a kind of man who's considered charming, right, amongst some of
#
And actually, if you look at him closely, he's a bully and a child.
#
I mean, hushed whispers, anytime you talk about a MeToo case in India, you will notice
#
there are lots of hushed whispers coming from women who will say, well, you know, maybe
#
the guy was misunderstood, all that nonsense.
#
I have no patience for that.
#
And I noticed that amongst largely upper class women, I wonder if that's because upper class
#
men hold so much power, money and prestige that women are locked into those networks
#
and then the internalized misogyny is even higher.
#
I wonder if there's an economics of this as well.
#
Some people who write about it say that there is.
#
But in working class communities, Amit, I actually notice much stronger will and desire
#
amongst the women I know to fight, to fight against any time a woman is told, you know,
#
your place is at the home or is made to feel inferior.
#
One of my favorite quotes in the book is the daughter of a domestic worker.
#
The domestic worker's name is Sandhya in the book.
#
She's Bengali, loves Shah Rukh.
#
Her story in the book is about how she basically buys a television so she can watch Shah Rukh
#
And her daughter said to me, her daughter loves Shah Rukh, but she really loves Priyanka
#
And when I asked her, so what do you like about her?
#
And we were talking about her.
#
She said to me, she said, well, did you see that she married a foreigner and she married
#
a foreigner because no Indian man would ever be okay with a girl as successful as her.
#
And so you see, this is the first generation girl who's gone to school, speaks English
#
in her family, living in the slums of Delhi, growing up actively articulating and very
#
much encouraged by her mother because these are intergenerational things.
#
She's learning all of this because also what she's seeing around her, that men are not
#
supportive and one should talk about that.
#
And she is criticizing her brother, she's an agentic being.
#
And I wonder if it's because they're the gains from being associated with a male prestige
#
network are actually low now because how much security can men now provide you in the current
#
labor market that we have amongst working class communities where jobs are so insecure?
#
I often wonder if this internalized misogyny and almost coddling this child of a man who
#
treats women really poorly and is abusive to women, I wonder if the desire that I've
#
noticed to sort of coddle to this man and call him charming amongst the upper classes
#
is because of the economics of it, because there are gains of material security there.
#
Whereas I think in working class communities where everyone now is in this economic churn,
#
I wonder if now women are out there speaking out a lot more because beyond physical safety,
#
which if you can negotiate for yourself somehow through communities, through brothers, through
#
other kinds of families, maybe you can speak out more because now the gains of sticking
#
with a man in some circumstances are not as high.
#
And this goes back to why I think women in jobs is such a critical policy issue because
#
actually we don't realize it, but women in the economy will start to fundamentally alter
#
all of these dynamics around love, how you feel about yourself, how masculinity has to
#
reform because then women standing on their own two feet can critique credibly so and
#
can exit harmful relationships and can censure men when men need to be censured.
#
Right now, I think the economy is not fully allowing for that.
#
And of course, as you said, the economy as a subset of society is not allowing for that.
#
But I think if the economy starts to shift, if we had a world in which we suddenly said,
#
and this is a radical notion that I really abide by, which is that in sub jobs who are
#
just for women, what would happen then?
#
Because then families would have to adapt, men would have to adapt.
#
This is a thought experiment.
#
There are things like that.
#
And I think that that would then change the terms of intimacy, it would change the terms
#
of that would trigger social change.
#
So I think to answer your question, I felt that this mask and this internalization, I
#
found it much more amongst upper class women where I think that the economic incentive
#
to do so is very strong.
#
Yeah, I agree with you.
#
But I'm wondering if there's a selection bias in play, because obviously the first
#
people who come to mind are the sort of upper class Delhi liberals who jumped to the defense
#
of Mahmood Farooqi and Tarun Tejpal and all of those and one immediately thinks of them.
#
A couple of questions arise from this and this is really, I think we started digressing
#
So, you know, eventually maybe we'll come round back to the economy and gender, which
#
I will eventually come back to.
#
But a couple of interesting digressions and one is this whole question of adulthood that
#
Like one thing I have kind of realized is that, you know, I don't know where I read
#
it, but I agree with it completely, which is that no one's ever really an adult.
#
We're all just winging it, right?
#
And you wing it in different ways.
#
It's like, I think one of the people you spoke to, you know, encountered someone when she
#
was in her 30s and this person said to her, oh, you're still a fan of Shah Rukh Khan.
#
I thought you would outgrow that.
#
And it's like, why should you outgrow anything?
#
And equally, all these men who are behaving like big babies and part of the reason is
#
they're probably intellectually still big babies.
#
So do you think there's something to that?
#
Do you think that, you know, this whole notion of, and this is of course not related at all
#
to your book or to India, but just in general, that, you know, do we misunderstand adulthood
#
Should we just embrace the fact that we are all struggling to understand and figure shit
#
out and we don't need to pretend?
#
Yes, but I think that to me, adulthood is, I sort of see it somewhat differently.
#
I think of adulthood as this phase in your life where you can no longer blame anybody
#
else for the choices you've made.
#
And I think the reason why we call some men babies or even some women babies is that everything
#
that's happening to them is always someone else's fault.
#
You will never hold yourself accountable for what you have done, right?
#
And the circumstances in your life.
#
And to me, adulthood is a milestone, perhaps a philosophical one, a psychological one,
#
whatever you'd like to call it.
#
I don't think it's a ritual.
#
I don't think it's 18 and you're an adult.
#
I think I became an adult when I started to just own up for my own choices, right?
#
To own and hold myself accountable for them, for my own wellbeing, as opposed to constantly
#
thinking it was because of my boyfriend or my father or, you know, these other circumstances.
#
Yes, of course they shape what is happening to you, but you are playing some role in it.
#
And I think to me, that is adulthood.
#
And I think going to that, I feel that we live in a world, particularly co-created by
#
men and women, where I think women are, and anthropologists call this the patriarchal
#
Essentially, the idea is that because women know that they need to make sure men love
#
them enough that they will always take care of them, be it as a son, be it as a husband,
#
that there is this molly-cuddling of men done by women and women are complicit in it, where
#
essentially the man is never really accountable.
#
The woman barely holds him accountable for his own choices.
#
It's always, oh, you know, something happened at office.
#
Someone else has done something.
#
And so much family drama, if you look at television shows, right?
#
What is all that family drama showing you?
#
It's showing you scripts of how women will constantly make excuses for men because they
#
want to maintain a decent term of relationship so that when they're elderly or when things
#
are bad, a man is insurance, marriage is insurance, right?
#
Now in that world, do we ever expect anyone to be adult in the way I defined it, where
#
you will hold yourself accountable?
#
I don't think the social terms of it will sustain.
#
And I think for women, it's a strange thing because you're seeing, you always see yourself
#
in this constant relationship of dependence and overt dependence.
#
It's not interdependence, it's not an equal dependence.
#
You will invariably then hold this other person responsible for your welfare, right?
#
So we do have an equilibrium of big babies because our social structures, because of
#
the way particularly the family is set up and the way resources and land in particular
#
is set up, it's still in male name.
#
I mean, while the Supreme Court has made these changes, they're still yet to be fully adhered
#
to and families have all kinds of ways.
#
I have people in my own family who are taking cousins to court because the land is in the
#
woman's name suddenly and then people are fighting about it, right?
#
And essentially, till you don't start changing, I hate to sound like a good old Bengali communist,
#
but I guess this is where I will end up, where if you don't change the terms of land asset
#
distribution, how in the world we continue to have these terms of overt dependence?
#
Women will be mollycoddled, women will constantly rely on men for welfare and we will have an
#
And I think we're seeing that.
#
It is a politics of big babies pretending to be big men.
#
I think that adulthood, that whole notion of holding yourself accountable will only
#
happen when you feel that these terms of dependence are changing, but that's yet to happen.
#
Yeah, I love your definition of adulthood though.
#
It is so narrowed at very few people fit, but it's better than mine because I was practically
#
saying no one can be an adult.
#
So go back to my next question.
#
I will say one thing though, Amit, which is that, you know, I think the way you meant
#
adulthood in one way, when you were talking about it in the context of Shah Rukh, is that
#
there's this like delight and joy when you're a child, right?
#
There's the delight of wonder and just delight and there's such freedom in that.
#
And to me, that's not, that's not a child.
#
I mean, I think all of us, even into our forties, we should be delighted.
#
We should be living lives where we are doing things and we are with people who delight
#
I think it's very important.
#
And one of the reasons why I think I was able to sustain this project is because Mr. Khan
#
delights me and I am able to hold on to that aspect, what you would probably call the child
#
I just think of it as part of, you know, you can be an adult and still have those sources
#
of complete wonderment and delight.
#
So I do agree with you when you say, I think if I understood you correctly, there is a
#
part of this one being curious about the world, being open-eyed, being open to experiences,
#
which I don't think we should only associate with childhood.
#
I think, you know, you can enter adulthood and still have that, but we need to nurture
#
No, one, I agree with the delight part of it also.
#
I mean, one of the things I kind of realized as I went through middle age is that, you
#
know, what brings you happiness is a small joys, right?
#
But I think what I also meant by adulthood was that there is this notion that an adult
#
has stuff figured out, right?
#
And therefore that leads to this sense of people posturing that they have everything
#
figured out at false confidence, which actually men have so much more of.
#
And that at many levels to me is toxic because nobody has anything figured out.
#
And when we behave like we have things figured out, our certainties lead us to be judgmental
#
And a lot of the delight then diminishes because I think we can find delight in every other
#
human being because from every person we have so much to learn, but if you're always putting
#
labels on them or tags on them or othering them or whatever, then just so much is lost
#
But you know, actually it's fascinating to hear you say this and I never thought about
#
it this way, which is that often when I was telling people that I was working on this
#
book project about women who gush about an actor and what that tells us about society,
#
everybody gave me this really puzzled look and then they said, but what is this, I mean,
#
it's the work of children.
#
Somebody actually told me, what are you doing?
#
I think this actually goes to what you were trying to say, which is that I don't think
#
I would have been able to attempt the book or these conversations if I just assumed that
#
I knew this feminist text and I knew what the scripts of life were and I've got this
#
I think maybe because of heartache, because of Mr. Khan, because of multiple experiences.
#
Sometimes heartache opens you up, right?
#
In a funny way, you're just open to in the tradition of all lonely people, you want to
#
find wisdom and comfort in the lives and experiences of others, so you're very open to the lives
#
And I think in a way actually that's what fandom is.
#
It's this unambiguously adoring someone in our current civilization of cynicism and this
#
ironic distance that all of us are supposed to maintain amongst each other.
#
To say that I absolutely love someone and I don't know them, but I really love what
#
they do, it's childish to many people.
#
And I know that sometimes when people react to what I'm trying to do with the book, I
#
could sense that that was initially sometimes a reaction, so I completely agree with you
#
Amit I think on what you were trying to say.
#
I guess what I feel is that we have now, and I think this is going back to that notion
#
of particularly around the masculine, for men to say they don't know something and
#
for men to say that they don't have it all together, in fact women are allowed to break
#
down, in fact women are encouraged to break down sometimes because you should not fully
#
know yourself, you should be a bit scattered, that damsel in distress kind of dynamic.
#
But men being saying that we don't have this is, I think that goes back to that crisis
#
of the masculine right, that you are supposed to have it all figured out.
#
So I hear you and I agree with you, and I'm glad that at least as a woman I'm allowed
#
a little bit of space to be foolish, and I think society is comfortable with foolish
#
women, in fact we like it when girls are a little sort of you know, like that.
#
But I think had I not been a little foolish and a bit open, this line of inquiry would
#
never have happened, and it's such a seminal project for my life, and I wouldn't have
#
been able to do it had I just…
#
No, thank you for being foolish, and I would encourage all my listeners to be similarly
#
foolish and go down these roads.
#
Let's get back to serious subjects now, those serious but fascinating.
#
So in your book about the accountant, you had this sort of fascinating story where she
#
talks about how when she was in her second year of college, she goes to see Mohabbate,
#
and the thing is she wins some money in a college academic competition, and she buys
#
a ticket for the film with that, then she's being dropped home by a friend and her brother,
#
and her parents are so pissed off when they see her that they slap her, and one of the
#
Of course they are pissed off that she went out in a public space, and they're all so
#
pissed off that she spent the money on something as frivolous as a film.
#
It's one of those moments where in all my privilege and my kind of good luck, I have
#
to kind of sit back and think about this for a moment, that the money that you win from
#
an academic competition that goes to buy a film theatre ticket can actually be so significant
#
for people that your parents are saying, why the hell are you wasting this on whatever?
#
And it wouldn't have been more than 300-400 bucks.
#
Yeah, it was around a thousand.
#
And speaking of public spaces later in the chapter, you write, quote, India is busy modernizing
#
Women occupy a different experience.
#
As per the India Human Development Survey in 2012, 80% of Indian women need approval
#
from a family member to go outside the home to visit a health centre.
#
Three out of five women need permission to visit the local grocery store.
#
In 2015, only 47% of urban women could go un-chaperoned to a public space.
#
Even within loving families, women are always made to account for what they do, where they
#
go, what they eat, and who they see.
#
A little later, you then write, quote, claiming comfort in public space, being at ease with
#
one's body in the company of strangers, remains an everlasting hurdle for Indian women.
#
According to a large scale survey by Save the Children in 2018, three in every five
#
adolescent girls felt unsafe in crowded spaces.
#
One in four feared being abducted, physically assaulted, or even raped if she ventured outside
#
Two out of three adolescent girls were worried about being verbally abused, stalked, or being
#
inappropriately touched in public.
#
In urban areas, 41% of adolescent girls felt unsafe in local markets, while nearly half
#
feared using public transport.
#
Only a third of urban women dared to venture out to local markets alone, stop, quote.
#
And I just found it important to read this out because most men simply do not get this.
#
Like, I keep saying that, you know, until a few years ago, I did not realize the experience
#
for women in public was so different.
#
I can walk out at midnight and I can go for a walk and it's cool.
#
I can enter a lift and not have to see who are the other five people in it.
#
It's just completely different.
#
Tell me a little bit about what you have seen of this and how much do you think this is
#
also, not just the whole, the social pressures and the way our society is, but also a failure
#
of the state in providing a rule of law and how much do they feed into each other?
#
Why don't, do we not take it more seriously because it is women and their places in their
#
Amit, let me start by saying that I'm quite disillusioned with the political will behind
#
I mean, even in states that talk a very progressive talk, we're yet to see money, sustained implementation
#
I'm still hopeful, but I'm tired of waiting, I think, for the state.
#
You know, Urvashi Batalia in the book said to me that all the gains that women have had,
#
they've grabbed them and then they've held on to them.
#
And I think that might actually have to, this is what's probably going to end up happening
#
It's going to be a social movement more than the state that will make things change.
#
Public space played a very interesting role in the book.
#
I had not expected it to come up as much.
#
When we were talking about watching Mr. Khan's films, you know, typically the first thing
#
that would come up is I don't have money and all of that, and I don't have free time to
#
watch a movie that I want to.
#
My brother or my husband might, so I won't go.
#
Then a lot of women started telling me these stories about, and in fact, the accountant
#
is not the only one to receive censure to go to a cinema hall on her own.
#
There's another set of characters in the book who also face similar things.
#
The cinema hall is seen as a place for masculine leisure, where men take their crude desires.
#
For a woman to be occupying the cinema hall is quite remarkable and unusual.
#
And there's a study by Ormax, which Film Companion had published, essentially saying that six
#
out of ten people in a cinema hall are men.
#
And so the cinema hall is a masculine space.
#
And I recognize that for many people who are listening to us right now, that's a bit odd,
#
because that's, you know, people like you and me, I go to the cinema hall alone, and
#
I actually mentioned this in the book.
#
And it's so interesting to me because I start the book by being in a cinema hall with someone
#
else who's of my own class background.
#
And for us, a cinema hall is actually a place for a woman to just, you know, ease up.
#
You know, if you're stargazing, it's lovely.
#
For all the other women in the book, I started to realize as I was talking to them and hearing
#
their stories, accessing something that seems so innocuous to me, like a cinema hall, is
#
so ridiculously tough because it is seen as a place of male sleaze, largely, and men go
#
And also this social sanction of women spending on leisure.
#
Why are you spending on things that are fun and frivolous?
#
You should save that money for the good of your family and for other kinds of things.
#
And so public space came up in very unusual ways in the book that even to access fun,
#
you have to access public space.
#
And if public space is so uncomfortable with women occupying it, if we think of public
#
space as actually a being, how in the world are women going to have fun?
#
And I think the data bears this out.
#
And I think when it comes to solutions, I don't think the solution is going to come
#
sadly from courts and judges that seem to be as patriarchal and worried about, you know,
#
the heteronormative way that women behave and all this kind of rubbish that's coming
#
out of courts, particularly lower courts.
#
And I'm not expecting, to be perfectly honest, big scale changes coming from the police on
#
I think what will start to happen is as, and we're seeing this in some places, so the South
#
Because women are out and about much more.
#
They're out for work, they're out for ritual, they're out to collect grains, they're out
#
just participating in public space, treating it a certain way.
#
This is true also of Southeast Asia.
#
There is no reason why that cannot be true of the North.
#
I don't think, you know, people are saying, is the North immutable to change?
#
I mean, there are parts of Delhi that have changed, in fact, where I do see women being
#
out and about much more than they used to in the past.
#
And then as women are out and about, then the rule of law, the state will have to, it's
#
almost, you know, this demand and supply equation, right?
#
As people start to occupy space, then authorities and legal structures will have to then start
#
to accommodate the needs and shifts that that involves.
#
Right now we have this odd equilibrium where using the language of safety, and Naila Kabir
#
in fact, who's interviewed in the book says this, that she says using the language of
#
safety, we just want to shackle women.
#
We use that language to say, well, you don't go out because it's so unsafe.
#
And I think a lot of women, including myself, would risk being out.
#
I take walks at midnight and there are movements, right?
#
I'm forgetting the name, but there are movements about occupying space in India, about being
#
out on streets, women, just large groups of women.
#
I remember after the mass, I mean, in India only we have things like mob molestation.
#
I mean, and that term, I'm quite certain has come up first, you know, in South Asia, India.
#
Now we saw cases in Pakistan.
#
The mob molestation in Bangalore, I remember one year during the New Year celebrations
#
on a very crowded, popular street in the city.
#
I forget which street, Amit, but immediately after that, there was a whole group of civil
#
society organizations and just women, regular women just saying, no, this is our city.
#
We will walk the streets.
#
And so my hope when it comes to public safety and public spaces is not from institutions
#
I think it's from women themselves.
#
And there again, my hope is as markets open late, as jobs maybe trigger women to be out
#
and about more, the dynamic of that public space will start to shift as well.
#
And I think that's where my feeling, looking at the data, knowing what I know about what's
#
happening in the economy and in society broadly, I think here I would actually rely much more
#
on communities and communities of women who will come out and occupy space.
#
And then I think in response to that, then structures will have to react and accommodate
#
I think one movement I recall from a decade and a half ago to reclaim public spaces for
#
women was by Jasmeen Pateja of the Blank Noise Project.
#
And you know, there's, I think there's a wonderful book also called Why Loiter, which is written
#
And so when I look at what's going on, I think this is where I really think consumption,
#
the consumer economy, the market can really play a huge role in shifting social norms.
#
Because if women are out and about taking taxis or are out and about, yes, there will
#
And then the state will be called upon to essentially do what is right and what is required.
#
And I think in India, the current track record of the state and responding to those claims
#
But my view really is that there must be places and there are, I've seen them, which you do
#
not hear about in the news, maybe because things are not going grotesquely wrong there,
#
where suddenly women are occupying more space.
#
It could be fish markets in Bengal.
#
It could be coastal communities in Odisha.
#
I've seen them where suddenly there are more and more women because the nature of the jobs
#
require now more women to be out doing the trading and the selling.
#
Men have migrated out to do construction work.
#
The economy is allowing for that.
#
And that shift has happened and it's happened seamlessly and they are part of space and
#
And so I really hear, I really do believe that the market and the way retail markets
#
are organized and jobs are organized can really be a very important catalyst in the way space
#
is occupied and we hold it together.
#
And the last thing I will say on this is there are economists and sociologists who talk a
#
lot about essentially counseling for men about how to hold public space, you know, what you
#
just said, being conscious of how easy it is for you to hold space.
#
And I think that's actually a very evolved view.
#
Men don't realize that.
#
And there is interest in thinking about can we get schoolboys to just be more conscious
#
of these scripts and there are curricula around that.
#
I'm very hopeful with that because I think you start young and I think things start to
#
But the last thing on this that I will say, I don't know if the earlier thing was the
#
last thing I said I would say, but this is the last thing I will say on this, which is
#
that all the data from feminist economists, from sociologists tells us that boys who see
#
their mothers occupying space and working outside the home, the way they treat women
#
out in public space is radically different.
#
They're much more comfortable with women holding space with them.
#
They're much more respectful.
#
There are norms that are negotiated because they've seen their mothers have to make those
#
negotiations with other men.
#
And they've learned from that sometimes and they've heard about it.
#
And so again, my faith is in the perhaps such an economist thing for me to say, but my faith
#
is in the economy where I really think as women start to participate and not just the
#
economy, but also local politics, community work, as women start to step out of the home
#
for these different reasons.
#
I hope that even men then start to adapt in the way they deal with women being in public
#
space because they're used to it.
#
And I think that will take some time.
#
Yeah, absolutely agree with you.
#
I mean, it's not just the economy.
#
I mean, it's society, right, because economy is subset of society and you know, the market
#
being just one mechanism of voluntary actions of people within society.
#
So I also do believe that, you know, any social change cannot happen in a top down way through
#
It's got to be bottom up.
#
You know, even on the subject of kids learning, I think it will happen through culture.
#
It won't happen through curricula.
#
It will happen through culture and peers and you know, the films they watch and the music
#
they listen to and all of that coming together.
#
You know, Amit, there's a bit in the book and I really believe this.
#
There are very few things that I think are like absolute truths, but I really do think
#
that social change is intimate and it's incremental.
#
I don't think I know the structures can change very quickly in a flash.
#
There could be, you know, governments that are toppled down, but social change in the
#
way I treat you because of your identity, because of your gender, because of who you
#
are, that is an intimate and incremental process.
#
And I fundamentally believe that to make those changes, we have to start in our own, as you
#
just said, your own interpersonal realm, right?
#
Like who are you taxing people when you see them treat women poorly?
#
Are you paying your domestic worker enough?
#
In your immediate home, what are the practices that you are setting up for yourself?
#
And that's why in the book, I mean, the book is, it doesn't take a macro view because it's
#
The book is full of stories.
#
It's my new show of people's lives precisely because I was very interested in this idea
#
that if you follow people over a decade, what are the incremental changes in their intimate
#
And I'm actually, the one thing that has made me very hopeful is each of the women in the
#
book, they've negotiated a different equilibrium for themselves.
#
And that makes me very hopeful that yes, as jobs in this case, livelihoods allow for women
#
to interact with the world more, there will be changes that then happen for the better
#
through a very messy process.
#
But there will be changes for the better that allow for them to own more space and to feel
#
better about themselves, feel more loved.
#
And that's an intimate process and it's an incremental process.
#
It's an incremental process.
#
And I'd add to that by saying that the increments compound.
#
I think what often happens is that, it's said about futurists or science fiction writers
#
and I say it about creators, that we tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate
#
So there will be no radical change.
#
There will be no revolution that suddenly women will be free in five years and so on
#
But I think that change compounds and so, my God, I'm sounding hopeful.
#
This is completely not my persona at all.
#
I'm so happy to hear this.
#
I'm so glad I've come in and Mr. Khan and I have converted you into an optimist.
#
But what I was going to say though is, this is precisely why, Amit, and now I'll get
#
gossipy a little bit or maybe complain, which is that I hate all this kind of, you know,
#
the smashing the patriarchy kind of feminism because everything that I have seen and read
#
and witnessed tells me that social change will not be one noisy smash.
#
It will be a slow melting.
#
It may be very quiet and I actually contend real social change is not happening on Twitter.
#
I know that there are hashtags and there's all this stuff and it's great because I realize
#
how toxic the internet is for women.
#
So power to women who hold that space.
#
But social change is happening in places we are not studying.
#
The book is doing well among sociology students and one of the things I'm really hopeful
#
for is that I think we should just go back to doing very traditional sociology.
#
We don't do that anymore.
#
You know, the kind of work that Srinivasan and others were doing, which is you just study
#
You see what's happening, you know, in these local communities and there is so much changing.
#
I mean, the Patwari wearing jeans suddenly, you know, there is a lot going on which we
#
don't document enough and what that means.
#
One of the things that's very important, at least to me as an analytical prism, maybe
#
for this book and what I will do in the future is I think looking at the real minutia of
#
things that seem utterly banal.
#
Someone wearing jeans is utterly banal.
#
Someone having a job is utterly banal.
#
But actually, if you start to study it for what it is, someone liking Mr. Khan is utterly
#
It's like, what is there to study there?
#
But if you start to study that, I actually think you learn a lot more about the big shifts
#
that are happening in our society, much more than any loud interaction on the internet
#
And I'm grateful that at least I had the opportunities and the experiences to be able to do that.
#
I'm looking forward to that kind of scholarship.
#
I love that kind of work.
#
And the one thing on this, which I will also add is that there's a kind of belief I find
#
even amongst my own friends, well-intentioned feminism, which seems to believe that you
#
have to conform, that there is a standard script of what a feminist life is.
#
And that's not true because all the women in the book, they will not hold up to the
#
label because I don't see feminism as a label, as a practice.
#
And all of these women in their own ways are just fighting for a different reality for
#
And they're doing it in ways that may subscribe to feminist scripts, may upset feminist scripts,
#
but they are attacking structures in terms of dependence.
#
And I think our society will be better for it.
#
And I noticed that in a lot of writing around women, there's this writing that we tend to
#
focus a lot on the heroes, right?
#
So the big business women, women who really made it, and those are great stories.
#
And then we also tend to focus on victims of brutal crimes because obviously those are
#
very important stories to tell.
#
My interest with this was to look at the missing middle, where there are things happening and
#
they don't seem particularly interesting on the surface of it.
#
But I'd like to believe, and I hope when people read the book, they find that what's going
#
on is actually quite remarkable, that there's a lot of change happening in places without
#
protest for the capital P. There are subtle ways in which people are changing norms.
#
And what's important about the point that you just made and which I'd love to underscore
#
is that we should not go by conventional notions of what is worthy of study or not.
#
The textures of everyday life, the interior lives of women, what do people feel when they
#
go inside a cinema theater and they watch a star come on the screen?
#
All these also reveal so much about us and that's kind of one of the areas that you've
#
So another fascinating aspect of the book for me is that in a sense, your book contains
#
Like people often complain about nonfiction books, that it's one idea and somebody published
#
it as an essay somewhere and then publisher said idea is good, make a book and they make
#
a book and it's basically two, three interesting chapters and the rest is filler.
#
And your book is not like that at all because with every chapter, it's like you're adding
#
So you have that first section on upper class women and then you kind of go down the line
#
and a lot of it is eye opening because these social realities also are so different from
#
I'm particularly struck by a couple of those examples.
#
You say about the working women of Bapu Nagar, quote, the working women of Bapu Nagar had
#
many theories on men and marriage, a good husband was divine intervention and sheer luck.
#
Even the best man's character would eventually curdle and rot.
#
Life was tough on men and they took it out on the women and children, losing interest
#
in being devout, kind and courteous.
#
Women were protected from the harshness of the world outside, so they remained hopeful
#
And then you write about the hamlets of Rampur.
#
For generations, the labors of women within the hamlets of rural Rampur were hidden.
#
Women were engaged in farming homestead plots and animal rearing as unpaid family helpers.
#
This was in keeping with the way agriculture was organized in Western Uttar Pradesh.
#
Jobs within farming were neatly segregated by sex.
#
As Manju explained, anything that needs looking at an animal or looking down on the ground,
#
Anything that requires looking up at strangers or going outside the village, the men do.
#
I mean, stop her quote.
#
Weeding and the cleaning and storing of grains were exclusively female chores.
#
The dictates of Pardha meant that women would only work in their own fields or the fields
#
of their relatives and nearest neighbors.
#
And obviously to go deeper into all of your observations, I'd just encourage people to
#
buy the book because everyone should read all of it.
#
But just going to your experience of covering all of this, one, you know, the book is a
#
combination of memoir, reportage and sort of analysis backed by data.
#
So there is a certain amount of going out there and talking to people.
#
And as you earlier mentioned, you're an introvert, not in so many words, but you would agree
#
with me in my agreement of what Sathra said, hell is other people.
#
But you actually went out and you spoke to all of these people and kind of made them
#
comfortable with you and all of that.
#
And so what was that experience like, like, you know, was it easy for you at first?
#
And also, did you change in the process of doing all of this?
#
Did you change the way you look at them and the way you look at the world?
#
You know, Amit, actually this book happened by accident.
#
So in fact, when, and I mentioned this in the book, which is when I went to Ahmedabad
#
to Bapu Nagar and to Rampur, I was in my early twenties.
#
I was supposed to be doing a survey of women who were working in home-based sectors, right?
#
Be it embroidery or making incense sticks at home.
#
And when I started asking them the standard survey questions of wages and working conditions,
#
those women were just so bored because they were dealing with their economic realities
#
And I think to take a break, then we started talking about Mr. Khan.
#
And then that led me, suddenly, the tone and tenor of these conversations just opened up.
#
And I think what really helped, and I am a recluse, it's difficult for me.
#
But I think what really helped was that shift in energy, that suddenly you had all these
#
people who were so bored of, you know, this girl from Delhi who's like wearing kajal with
#
her khadi kurta has come and they've seen now versions of me multiple times, you know,
#
there's jokes about that.
#
And I mentioned that in the book.
#
One of the characters, Manju, she says to me, she said, what you Delhi girls find about
#
being here, I don't understand.
#
I just love the shift in energy.
#
Suddenly, we all wanted to talk and it was a very moving experience for me.
#
And maybe this is why very early on in 2006, I decided I would write this book because
#
what was moving about it is in a country where I'm always told that I have nothing in common
#
There are all these lines of division.
#
Identity, so on and so forth.
#
Suddenly we all had this one person to talk about and we talked about him in an equal
#
What do you think about Shah Rukh?
#
Let me tell you what I think about Shah Rukh, right?
#
Suddenly all those very narrow divisions of identity very briefly just disappeared.
#
And it was just a very exhilarating moment for a young person, young foolish person as
#
I think those conversations made me a lot more thoughtful about what unites us as opposed
#
to just the standard scripts of what social science teaches you.
#
You should of course be mindful of difference, but I don't only see difference.
#
And the experience of the research was really complicated because I often actually say that
#
this was not standard research because it's not like I had specific schedules saying,
#
okay, I'll come back in six months or four months.
#
And I followed these women for more than a decade.
#
But each time Mr. Khan had a release, each time he had a film, then there were festivals,
#
Some of these women didn't have mobile phones, but I try and reach them.
#
Sometime in 2013, I did lose touch because I went off to study in Boston.
#
I was not fully in contact with everyone.
#
I came back and when I decided the book was going to take a certain shape, I needed to
#
go back to seek permissions, catch up on their lives.
#
And in fact, going back, I discovered one woman had run away from her home and there
#
was all this churn going on in their lives as well.
#
And so it was very complicated.
#
And it felt sometimes like it really wasn't research, it was just, you know, I was following
#
If I were trying to meet Shruti, for instance, our common friend, and she was no longer where
#
she was and I was trying to find her where she was, it was like that, it was just life.
#
And in a way, I think I was just bobbing along these women's lives.
#
I don't think I was participating in the standard way an anthropologist or a researcher would.
#
But then as a consequence, there is a lightness in the way we were speaking to each other
#
because it was very open.
#
The process changed me in making me much more aware of our unity as opposed to our divisions.
#
It also made me much more appreciative of how precarious people's lives are.
#
I mean, I knew the data on precarity.
#
I know that our lives are precarious.
#
But there's something, you know, when you go to meet someone and she's crying and she
#
tells you that I'm going to have to go back to the husband that I do not love at all,
#
because I cannot be somewhere on my own and you've held this person's hand, it just changes
#
the way you think about people's lives.
#
So it's made me very considerate.
#
In fact, a lot of people who meet me, it's going to sound really strange, but they think
#
that I'm a little too considerate, like I'm a pushover.
#
I'm not going to be a pushover because I've now realized that I think we are so privileged
#
and people's lives are so precarious, mostly in our country, that you should have some
#
patience and tolerance for what people are going through.
#
And I think it's really taught me that.
#
And I think the third thing it's taught me, which I've mentioned time and time again,
#
is that the power of culture and the power of popular culture, not just, you know, sort
#
of niche culture, which is sort of high brow, but mass culture, because had it not been
#
for Mr. Khan, the relationships that were sustained between myself and many of the women
#
in the book just wouldn't have occurred.
#
And I'm very grateful for that, the sheer power of that popular Hindi film and his icon.
#
And the last thing I'm struck by is how difficult it is to do research on women's lives, Amit,
#
because none of them ever had time to talk to me.
#
So even if I wanted to be a standard researcher and set up a time for an interview, suddenly
#
a call, these women are called to deal with kids, something, you have to go do something
#
in the field, irrespective of your class background, this was true across.
#
Time poverty meant that it was so difficult for women to just find time to do what they
#
wanted to do, let alone answer my questions, that I really appreciate that when we as privileged
#
women can do whatever we can with our time, we are, I mean, A, we're such a minority,
#
and it makes me appreciate my own time much more, because I've seen that it's a true
#
luxury in our country, just having time to yourself.
#
Yeah, and time poverty was a phrase I first came across in this book, so to my shame,
#
and it's such a lovely phrase, it says so much.
#
So I now want to ask a question about language.
#
You make an observation in the book where at one point when you're talking about Manju
#
in your chapter on Manju, you talk about the link between language and agency, and you
#
say quote, so marriage happened to Manju that year at the disputed age of 20.
#
She wasn't getting married.
#
Marriage was happening to her.
#
She was simply along for the ride, a spectator with a front row seat.
#
And this reminds me of something Jackson Katz once said, where he said, quote, we talk about
#
how many women were raped last year, not about how many men rape women.
#
We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many
#
We talk about how many teenage girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather
#
than how many men and teenage boys got girls pregnant.
#
So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect.
#
It shifts the focus of men and boys and onto girls and women.
#
Even the term violence against women is problematic.
#
It's a passive construction.
#
There is no active agent in the sentence.
#
It's a bad thing that happens to women.
#
It's a bad thing that happens to women.
#
But when you look at that term, violence against women, no one is doing it to them.
#
Men aren't even a part of it.
#
And you know, that link of Jackson Katz was shared with me on Twitter by one of my writing
#
students and I'll link that tweet from the show notes.
#
And the discussion that this kind of led to was the role that language plays, the insidious
#
role that language plays that when you use language in these ways, you know, you're denying
#
women agency and choice and equally it is as if shit just happened, shit happens.
#
You know, it's not somebody's fault.
#
How much of this did you, you know, did you notice a lot of this?
#
What are your thoughts on this?
#
Because you know, you pointed this out and about Manju saying that marriage was happening
#
She wasn't getting married.
#
How much of this did you see and is this something that there is some kind of class distinction
#
to also or do you feel all women are equally likely to think along these lines?
#
How does one think about this?
#
I think it depends on the phenomena that we're talking about.
#
When we talk about marriage, there's certainly a sense.
#
So what she said was, meri shaadi ho rahi hai.
#
And it's not like shaadi is happening to me.
#
And that is actually a way some other people would talk about it.
#
And I noticed that that was actually the way many of her friends.
#
So many people I knew would say that shaadi ho rahi hai, it's not something that is happening
#
But that's because marriage happens to all women.
#
It's not that in a world where only 5% of women are choosing their own partners, marriage
#
is happening to everyone.
#
You are not actively participating necessarily in that process.
#
You may be, but it's obfuscated.
#
It's a marriage arranged market.
#
And I think around marriage, that use of language was very passive for women.
#
Where in a way you realize that this is a rite of passage.
#
You needed to go through this to be able to, as we talked in the beginning, to access the
#
world to do what you want to do as long as your husband is okay with it, but you need
#
He'll confer status and you will be appropriate then.
#
So marriage I noticed was something that everybody sort of said, it happens, you know, amongst
#
particularly middle-class, low-income women.
#
Even the way some elite women would talk about their marriages, it was something you were
#
And there's a Rajput woman in the book who comes from a very well-to-do background, but
#
she marries someone because her father's in debt and she has to conform to what her family
#
And it's not a particularly loving marriage, but even the way she would talk about her
#
marriage, and she's quite posh, the way she would talk about her marriage was very much
#
as if it was something she had succumbed to, she had given in to.
#
So I think this is true of marriage.
#
Everything else, be it Mr. Khan, be it trying to earn money, be it...
#
In fact, there I noticed particularly amongst sort of women living very harsh economic lives,
#
there was this great delight in using the active voice, life is boring.
#
The word boredom and boring, I heard more than even I heard the word Mr. Khan and Shahrukh.
#
Because it felt like inequality was being almost expressed through boredom.
#
Because what was happening was men had access to public space, men had access to money,
#
so they could go out and have fun.
#
Whereas women were expected to stay at home and life was boring.
#
And some of the women who are first generation English speakers, they learned the word boring,
#
and then they spread it around in their villages, and everybody was talking about how women
#
And I actually say that inequality was experienced as boredom for these women.
#
And they were very active in the way they used these phrases and words, they were the
#
This was not something, boredom was not happening to them, they knew that their lives were boring
#
because boys had more freedom, and they said that we don't want our lives to be boring.
#
And I think when it came to cultural practices, when it came to fun, when it came to economic
#
freedoms, the language that was used tended to be far more individualistic in a strange
#
way, because they were keeping themselves and their selfhood at the center of what they
#
So it was always, I want to watch a movie or I want to do this.
#
Because I quote actually a W. H. Auden line, which is as long as the self can say, I will
#
And I think these were women, first generation women in their families were saying I, I want
#
And this was a part of a new self that they were constructing.
#
Whereas their mothers were much more, their sense of identity was much more based on family
#
Whereas these girls, I noticed they would always say I, mujhe karna hain, mujhe jaana
#
hain, mujhe mall jaana hain, meri shaadi karne nahi hain.
#
There would always be the mujhe, mujhe, mujhe.
#
It was very popular and the various versions of that in Bangla as well.
#
And marriage was the place where I noticed that when you think of the language, which
#
is why I mentioned it the way she did, which is that ho rahi hai, it's not like I am getting
#
You are not, you're complicit, but you're complicit in something that's just happening
#
I think there's a poignant moment where one of the people you meet, I think maybe Gold,
#
where her marriage is fixed up.
#
And I think a song from DDLJ is playing and she starts crying and her mother and sister
#
tell her that listen, listen, we know how you feel, but the real world is different.
#
That marriage is not going to always be adventure and travel.
#
And so many of, I think the women in the book think that marriage will be the path to fun.
#
Then access unadulterated fun in the way you want.
#
You can watch TV, you can do whatever you can.
#
And in Gold's case, she realizes that she's actually being married off to a guy who is
#
extremely conservative.
#
He will regulate her movement.
#
And then suddenly she sees Shah Rukh in London and holding on to Kajol and serenading her
#
in a city that at that time Gold thought she wasn't ever going to be able to see.
#
This is giving it away for the reader.
#
And you should read the book to know how.
#
It was a very sad moment.
#
And in fact, there are moments like this a lot.
#
So even the Rajput woman who I talked about, who's posh, marries someone she doesn't want
#
And she says to me each time, her favorite film is Kal Ho Na Ho.
#
And she says each time Shah Rukh dies in that film, I remember when I was told that I was
#
going to get married and I feel like I'm dying with him because I think that movie came out
#
around the time that she was supposed to get married.
#
And so it's salient for her.
#
And so I think people just see his image and the contrast of that or maybe the mirroring
#
of that in some cases with their own lives.
#
It's quite poignant for them and they react to that.
#
Neurons that fire together, wire together.
#
So like you've looked at sort of the loneliness of Indian women through the prism of Shah
#
And a larger theme, of course, is how films reflect society.
#
Like at one point you write, quote, if India's employment rate helps us track our economic
#
transformation, popular Hindi film extravaganzas track our moral transformation, stop quote.
#
And later on, you talk about how films teach so many women about love, sex and the world.
#
Like at one point, even just how someone touches someone where, you know, you quote a young
#
lady, a garment worker, say to you, quote, I wish someone could talk to me or touch me
#
the way he does with Kajol in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, but that's never going to happen.
#
How do you think films have kind of changed to reflect whatever change there might be?
#
Like at one level, like, you know, there is this constant argument, what shapes what?
#
And obviously, you know, the causation doesn't go one way.
#
But there is a certain kind of cinema being made by woke elites that doesn't really come
#
from society that is perhaps a little more progressive and all of that.
#
But otherwise, when you look at films, where do you see those sort of reflections of change
#
happening and additional kind of sideways question that is there a chance that someone
#
looking for an icon like SRK to write about 30 years later will not be looking at an actor
#
like Shah Rukh Khan, but a role model who is a young woman who can live alone and doesn't
#
need men to help with men?
#
Let me first, the answer to your second question is yes.
#
In fact, already now, I have a line in the book and so many women would say this to me
#
in different ways, which is, you know, Shah Rukh represented their idea of a benevolent
#
patriarch, you know, a man who would care for them, love them a certain way.
#
But Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone represent women who love themselves and can love themselves
#
despite with or without men and, you know, they've openly so talked about their private
#
lives and they're so successful.
#
And so I think that's already happening.
#
I think that shift is very much underway.
#
I think on cinema and love, there's so much said and written about this.
#
I will essentially focus on two themes.
#
I think one is if you look at the way love and I'm thinking about the recent films, romance
#
films no longer are like the big stay of Bollywood, right?
#
If you even look at the multiplex movies that tend to do well, it's no longer love stories.
#
These are all now gritty scripts about gritty realities.
#
I actually say in the book that most of the films that we're seeing are just sympathetic
#
stories of capitalisms, male losers, you know, like sperm donors, unemployed men, all of
#
And I think, in fact, I feel that many of the younger actors, they are not matinee idols.
#
I think the scripts that are given to them are so terrific that it's actually the script
#
that is the new matinee idol in India.
#
Now, in that world, love is a very small element.
#
And in fact, if you measure, and I have measured how much women speak in these films, they
#
And these are like big multiplex hits, you know, you could think of a Gangs of Vasipur
#
or you could think of, you know, many of the movies recently that have come out pink or
#
Actually, female dialogue is not that significant.
#
And female dialogue on terms of intimacy, talking about love, talking about sex, trying
#
to decode the sex and love that you're feeling or having.
#
That's just not part of many of these new multiplex films.
#
They're not interested in that project anymore.
#
The gangster story barely have any of those scripts.
#
Usually the women are just quiet, supportive characters or quiet, bewitching characters,
#
you know, who trigger all kinds of trouble.
#
So I haven't said that they're like the bitch, the bitchari or the beauty.
#
I mean, it's sort of the three, right?
#
And you don't necessarily see much deviation from that.
#
Now, go back in time to the 1990s and to Mr. Khan's films, they may seem very regressive
#
and soppy in a certain gaze, but actually each one of them have women who are writing
#
poetry about the kind of man they want, their own freedoms.
#
I mean, DDLG actually starts, we should always keep reinforcing this, DDLG actually starts
#
She holds the agency because she is defining the man that she wants to meet, an unknown
#
stranger, andekha anjana sa, that's what she's, she's written a poem for herself.
#
And that first scene, then you see Shah Rukh in the film.
#
It's actually first you, the audience is introduced to her fantasy.
#
And then you meet Shah Rukh, who essentially concretizes that fantasy.
#
But then it ends when her dad gives her permission to go, jaa ji le api zindagi Simran.
#
I agree, and I think there, there, I think dreams and I get into sort of how different
#
people see that scene so differently, right?
#
And I see that, but, but we should recognize that in these films, women had agency to define
#
love, relationships, Madhuri Dixit keeps a diary and listens to music on her own in
#
Dil To Pagal Hai, Karishma Kapoor has this beautiful scene where Shah Rukh, where she's
#
so upset in Dil To Pagal Hai that he's not choosing her.
#
And they have this very awkward conversation about romantic rejection.
#
Shah Rukh is being rejected in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, he's talking about what it feels
#
like to be romantically rejected.
#
We are not seeing, other than in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, which is a thing that came out in
#
I don't think we've seen those kinds of scripts too much in films anymore.
#
And so if we're looking to films, and I have an Andy Warhol quote there saying that I didn't
#
know what to do about love and I wanted to learn about love.
#
So I went to the movies to learn about love.
#
If young kids are trying to learn about love now, amongst the elite, they can watch K-dramas,
#
they can watch foreign shows, they can watch Netflix.
#
But amongst working class communities and low income communities, I don't know where
#
a lot of that is going to come from.
#
I mean, it's probably social media, I'm not sure.
#
But the films are no longer necessarily interested in that big project of explaining love or
#
I think that time seems to have passed and maybe it'll come back again, but we'll see
#
because the scripts now are very different.
#
Now the second is, if you think about the terms that are being portrayed of the love
#
and sex that we see in film.
#
One is, still if you look at the big blockbusters, the mass films, right, and even to some extent
#
the multiplex films, but certainly the mass films, female words and women's voices when
#
it comes to expectations of partners, expectations of men, and men engaging with those expectations.
#
So than that one scene I mentioned in Edul Hai Mushkil, I don't really know very many
#
big box office hits that were pan-national box office hits that do that.
#
I actually think you'll see much more of this in regional cinema.
#
You don't see it in popular Hindi film anymore.
#
And sex increasingly, and I mentioned this, is sort of, while earlier love led to sex,
#
I think the one thing that has changed now is that sex has been liberated from love in
#
And so you have the traditional Imran Hashmi film where sex is always a way for people
#
to manipulate each other.
#
The sex is consensual, but it's a way for people to get something, to profit from something,
#
to trick somebody, all these stories.
#
And then you have this one depiction of sex, which I really think started with this film
#
Cocktail with Deepika Padukone, where essentially you have women who have casual sex as a shorthand
#
to show how modern or hip or cool she is.
#
But even in that film, and as many people have pointed out, she's punished for it because
#
she has a car crash, the boy doesn't eventually choose her, all of that, right?
#
And so I think if you look at the depictions of love and sex, what's interesting is while
#
now I think love largely is no longer dominant in the stories that we tell in big popular
#
I think it's moved to OTT and it's moved to other platforms.
#
Sex, which is now liberated from love, is still shown in this extremely transactional
#
And then what's even worse is that while people are having sex, you can show people having
#
Any conversation about sex is still taboo, which is why, again, I keep mentioning that
#
scene in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil because I really do think credit to Karan Johar for what he
#
did because in a way that film is one of those very rare films where people are actually
#
talking about, well, we hooked up and what does that mean?
#
And so many young people find themselves nowadays in that dilemma, right, like they're trying
#
to decode what their encounters are meaning, where is this going, what is it leading to?
#
And they do rely on scripts of films to sort of mirror for them how to negotiate and have
#
But there's very little talk of that.
#
And while we see this proliferation of casual sex in cinema, there's very little conversation,
#
which actually, I don't know what's causing what, but it's mirroring what's happening
#
in society because people are having casual sex and then men ghost you or girls will ghost
#
and nobody really talks about it because any talk about sex or the sex that is being had
#
or the terms of love is apparently going to scare men away and all of that will happen.
#
And so I think that there's a very strange silence around love right now in cinema.
#
And I think which is why many of the women that I know in the book are looking to Shah
#
Rukh Khan's films because those were films that at least they were talking about some
#
of these things, they were seeing all of that happen, but that age of big, soppy, romantic
#
So it's almost four hours and I feel like that's, we could talk for another four hours.
#
I have so much to talk about.
#
We haven't even discussed any of the individual stories, which I so wanted to do.
#
But I'll end with a couple of last kind of questions.
#
And one of them is not really connected with your book per se.
#
It's just sort of a, you know, love is something that you've sort of looked at deeply and especially
#
the instrumental nature of love in this.
#
And I love this quote by, I love this quote by, I love this quote by Iris Murdoch where
#
she says quote, love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself
#
And it also speaks to Khan's, that's not Amitabh Khan's, Immanuel Khan's second categorical
#
imperative that always treat every other person as an end in themselves and not as a means
#
Not as instrumental, not as transactional, something other than oneself is real.
#
I feel that I need to remind myself of this time and time again, because I think all of
#
us are most of the time really living out a play in our heads where we are the central
#
character and everyone else is instrumental and we get different things from them.
#
Friendship, companionship, sex, whatever, AVCD.
#
And it seems to me that one way out of this, one way of realizing that we are caught in
#
the chakra view as it were, is just awareness of oneself and awareness of others where you
#
just sit back, listen to them, get into their lives, empathize.
#
And you've been doing a lot of that in the process of writing this.
#
So is this a subject you have any thoughts on?
#
And as a corollary to that, do you feel that the process of writing a book like this changed
#
Do you think you would be a different person if you were just doing important economics
#
papers which are elite males everywhere?
#
I would be a very selfish person.
#
I'm sure I'm still a selfish person, but I think my selfishness is a bit more in check
#
I think that I realized through the lives of, the love lives of others in particular
#
and just the struggles to find things that are very easy for me, that as you say, life
#
is complex, it's messy, and I think these stories just reminded me of that every day
#
through the process of writing it, through the process of engaging with it.
#
And I think it's made me less transactional in my dealings with people, I'd like to believe.
#
And that's something that I keep holding myself accountable to, part of my adulthood.
#
And I also think that what the book has done is, I have to be honest, I mean, there are
#
lots of grudges that I was carrying about feeling ignored, dismissed, not being treated
#
well by a certain type of person.
#
And I think I just poured all my grudges as well into this book.
#
And now I am somewhat cleansed for, I don't know, the next set of grudges that I might
#
But on a serious note, I think what I'm trying to say essentially is that I think it's been
#
a process of letting go of a lot of preconceived notions, of a lot of concerns about how will
#
people see me, and will this be a serious book, and I had to just let all of that go
#
to actually write the book that I really wanted to write.
#
And I think it's been a process of that kind of transformation for me.
#
I would like to believe that even for the women who participated in the book, I think
#
the reason they participated in the book, I often joke, one is of course pity for me,
#
because they felt that no one was marrying me, so they should at least participate in
#
this project to help me out, so that my life wouldn't seem as useless and lonely as someone
#
who's unmarried, their lives are.
#
But the other reason is that I think we co-created just a set of frameworks and stories around
#
Mr. Khan that I think many of us were interested in.
#
I really hope the book is translated, because actually many of the conversations, as you
#
can imagine, Amit happened in Hindi, I would like more younger people who actually speak
#
the language of the larger part of the country, especially where the stories are situated
#
where Hindi is actually a dominant language for that, Hindi and Bangla, I really hope
#
And so I think it's changed me in that I'm a calmer, more less transactional and a bit
#
I mean, I'd like to believe that.
#
And on the question that you asked about transactions, I mean, in the book, and we talked about this
#
I think some time ago, I describe it as a disease, it's the disease of laveria.
#
It is a transactional hustling of love.
#
Love in its truest form, looking at, be it religion, the good parts of religion, be it
#
reading Eric Fromm, be it Mr. Khan's films, is making peace with the romantic injustice
#
The world is unfair, and you will never find the mate that you want.
#
Maybe you're lucky and you do.
#
Maybe you won't always be as desired as you want to be.
#
I think there's this beautiful quote, I think it was Pico Ayer who said that all pain in
#
life happens when people don't see you the way you see yourself.
#
And I think love is being okay with that realization, that people will never see you the way you
#
really want to be seen.
#
And loving yourself, as well as loving the world in general, is an attitude of generosity
#
where you say, well, that's okay, that I may not be the most desired, I may not find my
#
But much like Mr. Khan in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na, which I believe is his best film, you
#
just have to hold yourself, do what you need to do, and find the small joys and delights
#
And to me, I think that is love.
#
That is, I think, the exit out of this transactional hustle culture of love, which is to accept
#
that there is injustice in the world.
#
There are some injustices you can try and do something about.
#
And then there are some which seem unfair in the interpersonal domain.
#
And sadly, we all have to make our peace with it and perhaps create art out of it and make
#
sense of it in our own ways as we can.
#
Yeah, and if it's any consolation in the end, it doesn't matter because we're all going
#
So that's my, yeah, repudiating the optimist that suddenly emerged a while back.
#
We should leave it at an optimistic note, which is to say that, well, even if you die,
#
there are these memories and there is something that you've left behind for someone or the
#
So before I go on to my last question, I just, like one aspect of the book, which I haven't
#
spoken about at all, which we should speak about some other time, is the writing, because
#
I think the writing is so good, so entertaining.
#
You've been so vicious to so many people.
#
But kind to others as well.
#
Kind to others as well.
#
You've been kind to the good people.
#
You've been vicious to the bad people.
#
You enjoyed the viciousness.
#
I love the viciousness.
#
You were vicious to economists, to academics.
#
And one hidden part of it is how often you were alliterating so naturally.
#
Like, you know, you begin with heteronormative health and earlier you said, bitch, bechari,
#
And the book is full of these really subtle.
#
I mean, it just sounds so good if you read parts of it out.
#
So if some, you know, there's an audiobook of it one day, I'm sure it'll sound good.
#
And I noted down a whole freaking page of great sentences from this.
#
I'm just going to read a couple of them out because I want listeners to kind of pick up
#
your book because it is not a serious, serious read.
#
The content is serious, but the journey going through it is so much fun.
#
And these two lines, especially I love one where you quote a friend saying, in real life,
#
men are sex-crazed robots who can barely express themselves.
#
And this goes to your earlier thing about man-childs.
#
But my favorite line is, quote, in Delhi, it is a truth universally acknowledged that
#
a single man in possession of a good fortune must be busy building his harem.
#
That's my head tip to Jane Austen.
#
And I think that sadly, this still holds to be true.
#
I'm convinced, Amit, that my next book will be a drawing room theater of Delhi.
#
And I will labor in service of that.
#
But thank you for enjoying the book.
#
So my final question is this.
#
And you will feel that you're not competent to answer it.
#
And you will feel the imposter syndrome.
#
I think it would be very useful coming from you, which is for young people who are listening
#
to this podcast, whether they are on the one hand, in fact, let's make it a two-part question.
#
On the one hand, if there are young women in India who are having trouble negotiating
#
the realities of everyday life and everything, what advice would you have for them?
#
And number two, if there are young academics and researchers, or even people who are not
#
academics or researchers, but who are interested in diving deep into this world to understand
#
And by this world, I just mean Indian society in general, to understand it better, what
#
advice would you have for them?
#
So I'll start with the advice for people who want to delve deep into this world.
#
I sound like such a stuffy traditionalist, but I am a stuffy traditionalist.
#
Don't spend time on Instagram.
#
Don't think that self-presentation on the internet is actually what's going to help
#
you delve deep into our society and do not believe that seeing how others are representing
#
themselves online is a way to better understand us.
#
I'm sure it tells us something about aesthetics and presentation, but that I don't think is...
#
There's no reality, it's a hollow reality to me.
#
So I think the main advice I would have is don't be on the internet and don't always
#
be looking at your phone because it programs your brain in a way to stymie a kind of creativity
#
And the second thing I would say to them is read, find a reader with you.
#
Because I found, for me, Amit, I have to say, the sheer joy of this book and to read was
#
actually to discuss these things with people who you can create a community around.
#
That is the joy of this, and this is one of the small joys of life.
#
And so I would say find a community that will read with you, that will investigate with
#
you, that will co-create this process with you, and I think there's a sense of solidarity
#
So I think I have very simple advice for people who aren't curious about the world.
#
Don't be online, find solidarity networks, find a community, and that can be anything,
#
The question on women is a bit hard.
#
I would say two things, and I've actually thought about this actually a fair amount
#
as I was writing about the book, not as advice, but just even for my own self.
#
I think, number one, stop giving premium to a kind of love that you've been told to give
#
So it's fine if the boy that, and I have to just, it's sad that I think so much of women's
#
realities are just, especially young women's realities are so dictated by this thing about
#
the Boyfriend Olympics is what I call it.
#
It's fine if it doesn't work out, and it's okay.
#
There's no shame in it.
#
It does not mean you're unworthy, unbeautiful, all of those things.
#
I think it's okay to deviate from those scripts, and so I think that's one.
#
The second thing I would say to women who are really struggling to just actuate their
#
ambitions is find art, and I don't just mean art in the sense of something you do, but
#
something you consume, something you participate in, just being able to access something that's
#
outside of your own reality and outside of your own milieu, I find that very helpful.
#
It saved me at a time when I was really going through a very rough time, and I have to confess
#
that had it not been for the books I was reading and had it not been for Mr. Khan, I think
#
I would be a very different kind of wreck, a conformist wreck perhaps, and I have him
#
and various feminists and books and economists to thank because I was reading their wonderful
#
So I would say try and lose yourself a little bit in something else, and ideally this links
#
to that whole notion of delight, that I think women are told that you should just do things
#
No, you should find something that you truly enjoy, spend some time on it, and I think
#
through that you may actually surprise yourself that internally, psychologically, navigating
#
your life, you might find instruction in those moments of delight for yourself, and so I
#
think to young women, I would say, retire a little bit from the boyfriend Olympics, if
#
it doesn't work out, it's fine, if it works out, it's fine, don't take it as seriously
#
as I know girls in their early twenties and in their teens do, please don't, if they're
#
watching this or they're listening to this or if their mothers are, and the second is
#
just find delight, find delight in art or find delight in whatever you like, but I think
#
delight as politics, I really believe that that helps.
#
I've learned so much from reading your book and from this conversation, so thank you for
#
writing the book and thank you for giving me four hours of your time.
#
Thank you so much, Amit.
#
It was such a pleasure.
#
I'm such a, I think you know, I'm a fan and I love the show and more power to you and
#
what you're trying to do.
#
It was just a delight to be here.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode and you agree with me that this is an important
#
subject, then please share it with anyone else who may be interested.
#
Also hop on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up Desperately
#
Seeking Shah Rukh by Shreena Bhattacharya.
#
You can follow Shreena at Twitter at Bshreena, that's B-S-H-R-A-Y-A-N-A.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A, and you can browse past episodes of The Scene
#
and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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