#
What's in front of me right now? It's a microphone. I can see it clearly. There's
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also a laptop in front of me. I can see that clearly as well. It's not a horse. Acer does
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not make horses. The laptop is on a table, the table is on the floor, the floor is in
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a box in the sky in a city that people call Mumbai. There are many boxes in the sky and
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sometimes I walk out of my box and meet friends who have stepped outside of their boxes to
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meet me. And then we find that all of us live in different cities, in different worlds,
#
and the certainties that I can embrace about mics and laptops and tables cannot extend
#
to the outside world. Everything is complicated. The universe contains multitudes. As this
#
earth rotates and revolves, my head begins to spin. I want certainties, so I start building
#
them about the world around me. Soon I have a story to explain everything. The world makes
#
sense again. You also might have a story that explains everything. And if I find your story
#
is not the same as mine, I can say that you are wrong. I can say that you are evil. And
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thus, comfortable in our certainties, we can lose the comfort of friends. My point here
#
is this. The world is difficult to make sense of and it is tempting to fall for a story
#
that offers certainties. This could be religion, this could be ideology, this could be a conspiracy
#
theory about the seen and the unseen being a plot to take over the world. And even for
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a writer and ex-journalist like me, it's tempting to say, stop thinking boss, too much effort,
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order the seafood platter, get the pina colada. I think we all have that urge, don't we? As
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the famous lines from Kashika Sigo, bhar me jai duniya, hum bajai harmonia. That's why
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it's so important to seek out questions instead of answers. That's what I try to do on this
#
show and so does my guest today. Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly
#
podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is the outstanding journalist, Rukmini
#
S, who was on the show in October 2020 to talk about her pioneering data journalism,
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as well as her teenage years in a rock band. After that episode, Rukmini went on to write
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a book called Whole Numbers and Half Truths, which uses rigorous data to take a good hard
#
look at our multitudes. The chapter titles themselves indicate the sweep of the book,
#
what India thinks, feels and believes, how India really votes, how India works, how India
#
is growing and aging, and so on. What makes this book so enlightening is her approach.
#
She gets into every issue without preconceptions or biases. She's open to letting the data
#
speak for itself, even when it indicates patterns that make her uncomfortable. The result is
#
a book that contains many truths that seem counterintuitive to us, that fly in the face
#
of received wisdom. The episode I released a couple of weeks ago with Shriyana Bhattacharya
#
on the loneliness of the Indian woman was full of insights that made me stop and think.
#
So is this conversation. For example, until I recorded with Rukmini, I did not know that
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98% of the sexual violence committed against women in India is legal. 98%. There's a lot
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else in her work that will surprise you and perhaps alarm you about India. But one thing
#
that does make me optimistic is that there are still journalists like Rukmini around
#
who are questioning everything, searching for truth, trying to go deep. Before we get
#
to this conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading
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habit. This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and
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essays. There's a world of knowledge available through the internet. But the problem we all
#
face is how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put
#
the right incentives in place? Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this
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awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com, which aims to help people up level themselves
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by reading more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily
#
Reader. Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read. The subjects
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covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade. This helped
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me build a habit of reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little
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better than I did before. So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to
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CTQCompounds and check out their Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They also have
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and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future. Future Stack batches
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start every Saturday. What's more, you get a discount of a whopping 2500 rupees, 2500
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if you use the discount code unseen. So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com
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and use the code unseen. Uplevel yourself. Rukmini, welcome back to The Scene on the
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Thank you for having me Amit.
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We are recording this on December 24th. And one of my favorite writers and essayist Joan
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Didion died today. And I was just revisiting some of her work. And there's a beautiful
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passage from her work, The White Album, which resonates with what even we are going to talk
#
about. So I just want to read that bit out.
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Quote, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate.
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The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge
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outside the window on the 16th floor is a victim of accident. Or the naked woman is
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an exhibitionist. And it would be interesting to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes
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some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to
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register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to
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the human condition by the fireman in priest's clothing just visible in the window behind
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her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for
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the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the
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most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers,
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by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ideas with which
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we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. Or at least
#
we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises
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of all the stories I had ever told myself. A common condition, but one I found troubling.
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Stop Code. This is from the White Album. And she goes on, of course, to move into a personal
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narrative about her own journeys and her own self-doubts. But in a sense, this is really,
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it seems to me, the theme of much of your work, that we tell ourselves stories, not
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just in order to live, but also to kind of make sense of the world. And we do that in
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order to live, of course. And what a lot of your work is based on is kind of examining
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these stories, not just from a point of view of data or numbers or whatever, but just looking
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a little deeper, examining sort of all of these stories and going deeper than. So do
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you, you know, when you look back on yourself, say over the last 15 years or since you started
#
your journey in journalism, how different is your view of the world? Like, are there
#
any significant stories that for you are completely different today? You know, take me a little
#
bit about that. Like, would you be a different person if you were not in the business of
#
going deep into stories? If you were, you know, if you were a banker or an engineer
#
or, you know, someone who fed coffee into a civet cat to make it shit, something we were
#
discussing a while back, would you kind of be a different person? How have you changed?
#
Yeah, just the question has made me go back a bit and think about these things. And, you
#
know, I think I was the sort of person who would annoy me now in terms of my absolute
#
certainty about things that I had read so little about, experienced so little, talked
#
to such few people about. And I see, I think part of the reason that I don't necessarily
#
feel angry with people who hold, I mean, I feel angry with people who hold some sorts
#
of views, but not angry with everyone's certainty is because I see where mine came from as well.
#
And it did come from a position of, of sincerity in a way that, you know, feeling very, you
#
know, where the passion comes first, and then the sort of the meat to it comes later. And
#
what I would hope is that as the came to it, I changed those positions, and maybe not everyone
#
always feels that way. But yeah, I really do think that a lot of the last few years,
#
for me, it has been important to, and I don't think of it as a mission in terms of challenging
#
narratives or challenging my own assumptions or other people's deeply held assumptions.
#
But I do think that that is the way you see things unravel. And again, unravel is not
#
even, you just see all of those elements to it. And it's really become the only thing
#
of interest, which is absolute certainty around established positions has just lost a lot
#
of appeal for me. But you know, if I was doing something else, I would hope that I would
#
have been at the same place that I am now in terms of having these questions, both around
#
my beliefs and others. And, you know, I remember talking about this to you the last time I
#
was here, is that for me, these questions came from having come to quote unquote, standard
#
leftist positions far before I had any experience. So the world even had had the opportunity
#
to have those positions challenged. They were delivered to me by people I admired so greatly
#
that I hadn't even gone through the intellectual journey that they had gone through to take
#
this. I just received it with pleasure from them. And yeah, it took a lot of, I can't
#
pinpoint what it is that led me to question some of those things. Even now, you know,
#
even in the last two years, I've again found that so many of the questions around COVID
#
don't fit into easy narratives. You know, it's hard to say, we were talking earlier
#
about lockdowns and I feel that too, I really could argue things both ways. I feel that
#
even in terms of just the numerical aspect in the early days, especially of the pandemic
#
of thinking about infection fatality rates and how, since obviously that's a low number
#
for COVID, what that should make you feel about our response, what's adequate, what's
#
not. And I suppose the comforting part is that people who even hold these, say a particular
#
leftist position, hold it very dearly and would not agree broadly with the sort of unraveling
#
that I have had. The ones who really think deeply and who I continue to admire can see
#
this questioning. You know, they can come along on part of the journey with you at least,
#
even if they may not end up in the same place. So I speak often to Jean Drez, for example,
#
who I admire greatly and I would not say that he and I hold the same position. And you know,
#
I'm saying he and I as if we're sort of buddies or equals and that's not how I think of it.
#
But I still think that he would hear me out in the sort of questions I have about these
#
things. It's not doctrinaire in that respect. So yeah, I would hope that even if I was doing
#
something else, I would have had the same feeling in the last few years of not wanting
#
to just receive things in this way. And in an odd way, one of the reasons that's one
#
of the sort of strands of thinking around this is, and one of my frustrations with journalism
#
was a lack of the absence of creativity. Like there wasn't enough beauty, there wasn't
#
enough creativity, there wasn't enough flights of whimsy. And I think part of this questioning
#
has come from there, that these sorts of certainties also lend themselves to a very, it's a bleak
#
view of humanity, you know, to think that we are all on these pre-decided or fixed paths
#
and we just choose whether we're going to, you know, Jogishwari, West or East, you know,
#
that's almost how it begins to seem. So I think that that's something that came along
#
with it, a search for sort of more detail, but also more creativity. And you know, this
#
is something that I still don't feel that I get across well enough in my journalism
#
and I can't instantly think of someone else who does it either. But you cannot have an
#
uninteresting conversation with most people, right? It's very hard, especially with strangers
#
when you just have snippets of conversation. Like the vast majority of things people say
#
are very interesting, especially about their own lives. And the fact that so little of
#
journalism reflects that is such a tragedy. So part of this is that, which is that if
#
I was doing election reporting and I had to talk to someone who quote unquote subscribed
#
to one political party or the other, and then maybe I'd take those two quotes and put it
#
into my story and be like, this is how, you know, whatever, Jats in this constituency
#
say they're going to vote. And then I'm sure once I put my pen away, I would have such
#
a complex and interesting and funny conversation with the person. And then, you know, you don't
#
know what you're going to do with it in your journalism or what it's going to do. So talking,
#
just talking to people and finding that so much of what they said didn't end up fitting
#
into what I was writing is also part of this pushback against narratives. That's partly
#
where it comes from. And yes, the feeling that the more that I look at nationally representative
#
data, the more I realized that some of these dearly held beliefs are actually not grounded
#
in the broader Indian reality at all. But then of course, there are also sort of certainties
#
in the data that themselves need to be poked at because certainties around say how Indians
#
vote, which is something that a lot of people come at through the data, not just through
#
being on the go, are also so much grounded in poorly asked questions, instant judgments
#
based on single line answers. It's a quest and I don't think and I think the data complicates
#
it in a good way. But I don't think either that data is what's going to, it's not going
#
to stop with the data either because there's a lot to ask of the data too.
#
So you know, something that I've been thinking about for maybe just over a year pretty seriously
#
is this interesting framework, which, you know, when it first came to me more than a
#
year ago, I started applying it to various things and tell me what you think about it.
#
They've spoken about it on the show a few times. And this was when I was doing my episode
#
with Anshul Malhotra, who's written that lovely book on partition. And at one point, she spoke
#
about how when she was sitting in Lahore or Karachi, one of those places, and she's talking
#
with a family, they're remembering partition, the horrors of partition, and they're fulminating
#
against the Hindus and Hindus are this and Hindus are that. And at one point, they noticed
#
that she is there and they say, tum nahi beti, tum toh theek hoon. But Hindus are like that.
#
And throughout that conversation and many others that followed, one of the things that
#
I realized is that important to distinguish between the abstract and the concrete. Like
#
my sense is that when we encounter things in the concrete, we look at them differently
#
from when we encounter them in the abstract, like in the abstract, we learn to hate because
#
abstract notions like nationalism and the Hindu nation or a certain kind of pride and
#
all of that, I think can be really toxic because we stop thinking of people as people we're
#
thinking in these abstract terms. But when we encounter, say, Muslim friends, or we go
#
to a friend's house to have biryani and all of that, and I'm just taking one example of
#
a purported Hindu bigot, but it really cuts across anything that in the concrete, we respond
#
to it differently. And what strikes me here is that I think that also therefore becomes
#
a challenge for a journalist, because on the one hand, you have these larger narratives
#
which are kind of abstract. Like, you know, you've spoken in your book eloquently about
#
how thinking of something as a vote bank can sometimes be too simplistic, but it's an abstract
#
narrative. So and so is a vote bank, they are with so and so party, they vote this way,
#
or this is going to be anti-incumbency. And all of these are kind of broad abstract statements,
#
which may, you know, which may capture a part of the truth, but when they purport to be
#
the whole truth, obviously they're not. And what you also mentioned about interesting
#
conversations is that then you're getting concrete in those conversations. How was your
#
day? What did you eat for breakfast? Where did you go to school? You know, and I love
#
having conversations with people because one of the points that I remember I used to make
#
in my podcasting course also was that every single human being in this world knows something
#
you don't. Every conversation can be interesting, and we don't get enough of this. And this
#
is also a challenge in journalism that of course, sometimes you go with a pre-decided
#
narrative and you're, you know, you're a slave to that narrative, all your conversations
#
are in service of that narrative. The people you're speaking to are instrumental for that
#
purpose. You're not sitting back and just looking at them as what they are. So first,
#
what do you feel about the concrete abstract distinction? And two, how do you navigate
#
the trade-offs that this represents? Like on the one hand, the big picture does matter.
#
You do need to step back, you do need to look at larger data and what it tells you. But
#
on the other hand, that data only comes alive when you're actually speaking with real people
#
with real stories. So you really got the heart of two of the things that I, you know, worry
#
and puzzle about the most in sort of slightly tangential ways to what you've mentioned.
#
So about the issue of the concrete versus the abstract. And the reason I think about
#
this a lot is because then it leads me to think about, then do these experiences in
#
the concrete have the potential of changing views in the abstract? And this is something
#
that I'm coming around to feeling is not actually as significant in changing views that I would
#
have hoped it would be. And you know, it's funny the example that you gave as well, which
#
is that I think it's precisely that sort of belief about the fundamental nature of
#
Indian attitudes to religion in particular that we have, in a way, come to hold dear,
#
which is that people say these sort of things, but then, you know, if they were your neighbor
#
and something happened and they would actually help you. And, you know, when you take it
#
to a broader view, it is, in a sense, something that was put forward in a Pew Research Survey
#
about a year ago around religious tolerance in India. And their sort of broad thesis was
#
that Indians may be, you know, they're quite live and let live in a broader way, but in
#
their personal lives, these boundaries are drawn tightly. And I think, in a way, this
#
is somewhat has been something of a liberal fantasy of how religion operates in India,
#
which is that people may hold these beliefs or they, you know, talk about it, but in their
#
real lives, they would not necessarily behave like this about, you know, another person.
#
And I'm beginning to feel that that's not actually true because I don't feel like I
#
see adequate evidence that even in this broader, broadly held way, people do hold these tolerant
#
beliefs. So I felt after that same Pew report, when I finished reading it, my feeling was
#
Indians are universally intolerant in the personal sphere, in the public sphere across
#
the board. And I didn't actually agree with the narrative that the, you know, by just
#
putting it as their headline in their press release that Pew decided. And then I saw sort
#
of repeatedly repeated across all news coverage and all discussions around it, because in
#
a way I felt like it, it confirmed what many of us like to feel about the country. So it's
#
entirely possible that when people get into the concrete and encounter actual people,
#
they might behave differently. But I don't have that much faith anymore that that has
#
the potential of changing the abstract. And ultimately, if the abstract is what decides
#
who you vote or in a moment of sort of mob frenzy, how you behave, who you marry, all
#
of that, then sort of fleeting moments in the concrete may just be that, right? Like
#
fleeting encounters or fleeting moments. So I worry about that stage of the loop, how
#
the concrete affects the abstract.
#
And the second part that you mentioned, you know, about, especially when you deal with
#
it in your journalism, which is you can't run away from these narratives, but you also
#
want to want to encounter the much more of people than you can when you do your reporting.
#
Yeah, I think there's been a real narrowing of imagination in how journalism is done.
#
And that if you've decided that there's only one way that the story can be told, only one
#
way that you're going to tell the story and no other and not do anything with all of these
#
conversations that you've had, then that leaves you in this poor space of having to turn people
#
into archetypes, really, you know, rather than all the other things they've said.
#
And so I have a story in the book, for example, about this man who accompanied me, a Hindi
#
newspaper journalist who accompanied me on a reporting trip. And, you know, not to get
#
into all of the details of it, but he sort of displayed a casteist behavior on that trip
#
to the person we were speaking to, you know, outright untouchability in terms of not accepting
#
tea from the person's house. So even in the telling of that, he could come to represent
#
a certain sort of archetype, which is this upper caste Hindu male, a North Indian male
#
who's practicing untouchability. Then what happened next then though, is that he took
#
me to his house because he wanted to demonstrate to his young daughter, his college going daughter,
#
that here is a woman who's come all the way from Delhi. So he did have that too. He wanted
#
to show his daughter, a woman who was traveling by herself on work. So even in that, slotting
#
him into one sort of archetype would have been deductive. He had those beliefs, he had
#
other sorts of beliefs. And, and I don't, I mean, luckily that wasn't what I was reporting
#
on, but if I was, I don't know, you know, if I would have been forced to sort of slot
#
him into one category or the other. But I think when you're writing with data as well,
#
this becomes particularly problematic. And honestly, this is the biggest challenge that
#
I have with doing the sort of journalism I do. And I encountered it in the writing of
#
the book as well, which is that I find this trope of taking one person's story and then
#
broadening out to the data, very tiresome. It's not just because it's cliched and you
#
know, it becomes sort of the only way you, you're told that the only way into a data
#
story is if you start with a person. And I never liked to assume these things about readers
#
and maybe that's not how every story has to be told. So it's a tiresome trope, but it
#
also means that in a way you're not really doing justice to the principle behind which
#
you're doing data journalism, right? Like the idea is that, that maybe individuals speak
#
in different ways, but this is what the overall mean or the median of what you're talking
#
about is saying. And then if you're picking out this one individual, who are you choosing?
#
Are you choosing the person in the bottom half of the distribution? And you're saying
#
they fit into what the median is showing. Are you going to pick an outlier, say that
#
they are the outlier? These decisions then complicate the act of data journalism itself.
#
And I struggled with it in the writing of the book, because I do know that I enjoy stories.
#
I like talking to people and I wanted to put these in. And anyone from any sort of background,
#
whether a data background or not, in their responses to me about the book has talked
#
about the stories that have stayed with them. That yes, the data is the part that, you know,
#
shocked them or was a piece of information they retained. But the things, the stories
#
people wanted me to talk more about or the parts they want me to read out are always
#
the human stories. So that was the right choice in a right sort of storytelling choice, because
#
it did stick with people. And I know how much I enjoyed that as well. But I absolutely do
#
not have the right answer of whether that is the best way to do data journalism or not.
#
Because in a way, it's not staying true to the data. And in fact, the single story that
#
has, you know, most people have come up to me with is the story of a young man named
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Nitin Kamble in the book. And in the section that I'm talking about love and marriage,
#
and he is in an intercast relationship. And then at the end of the chapter, when I take
#
the data to him and I show him how uncommon intercast marriage is, and I ask him if it
#
makes him feel like an outlier, he says, you know, the reason I got talking to him about
#
it, because I have an intercast marriage too. So I said, you know, that tiny percentage,
#
that's where I am. So do you see how small that is? And how, what does that make you
#
feel like? And he said, well, that's data about marriage. That's not about love. And
#
he said, if you ask people about love, I feel a lot of people do have these intercast relationships,
#
but they get thwarted because, you know, we can't leave our families ultimately. And
#
I think he meant it as much about the girl that he was worried was going to leave him
#
as for himself. So innovate undermines my data, right? Because my data is saying this
#
about intercast marriage. But if I'm saying that there are all these intercast relationships,
#
but aren't reflected, then what am I saying? Am I saying that there is a lot of intercast
#
love? I don't know. I don't have the data for it. So it's a story that has stuck with
#
so many people. And I really enjoy talking to him as well. But it undermines the point
#
in a way in if I was sort of trying to convince someone or if it was an academic paper, I'm
#
undermining my own point with it. So yeah, I don't, I really don't know if, if this
#
is the best, most honest, most accurate way of doing data journalism at all.
#
I didn't mean these two aspects as something that have to be reconciled. I think they can
#
be orthogonal to each other that you can look at the big picture, but you can also dive
#
down and kind of make it human in different ways. And that story about the gentleman who
#
didn't want to have a cup of tea also struck me. I mean, he didn't want to have a cup of
#
tea because of caste, but you realized it was just an excuse where he said he wanted
#
to eat something after you had left. And you told the story to his daughter when you went
#
home and the daughter said, you know, at least I hope you said it's because you're fasting,
#
which also speaks to her perceptiveness of the situation. And also there is an implied
#
sort of disapproval there. And in fact, this is, while reading your chapter, and this was
#
of course in the second chapter, what India Things Feels and Believes, where you speak
#
about how the lived reality of people is, doesn't embody the sort of tolerance that
#
people, and this was just the opposite of what I was saying in a sense, where it is
#
the abstract, which is nice, you're saying nice things in the abstract, we believe in
#
tolerance, we should all live together. But in their concrete everyday lives, it's kind
#
of very different and they have all these terrible stereotypical notions of each other.
#
And just thinking aloud, one thing that I would like to see more of, I think within
#
the creator universe, I don't even know if it's journalism's job, but just within the
#
creator's universes, more of these stories of the real textures of real lives of real
#
people. I think a lot of what we see on social media is posturing, a lot of what we see in
#
journalism is narratives that are pre-decided and that can only go so deep. A lot of what
#
we see in the creator economy is constructed, but more and more there is space for much
#
more authentic content. So I'm just throwing this thought out there for creators. Now before
#
we actually start talking about the book and all the things that you've discovered, many
#
of which in fact challenge my beliefs like this. In fact, I always said everything you
#
say about India, the opposite is always true, that old cliche, right? And so of course we
#
are deeply illiberal in many ways, gender cast and so on. But I remember saying this
#
once to JP Narayan in an episode I did with him, episode 149. And he said, but you know,
#
if you look at it another way, we're also extremely liberal in terms of look at our
#
food, look at our clothes, look at the way we live our everyday lives and all of that.
#
And your data makes me question that a little bit more, that yeah, you know, we are liberal
#
in all of these other inanimate things like food and language and so on. But the people
#
aren't really all that liberal. But before we get there, you know, let's talk a little
#
bit about the book. Like how did you conceive of the book? You know, did you feel that the
#
book needed to be written in the sense that there are so many flawed beliefs out there,
#
there are so many people on TV channels purporting to be experts, experts, not experts, the one
#
wishes they were experts. And there are so many sort of false narratives that people
#
just believe in. It's all over WhatsApp or they're convenient to believe in all that.
#
So did you have the idea of this book for a long time? Or did it start coming to you
#
when you decided what you want to write about? How did it all happen?
#
I absolutely did not have a book in me at all. Because, you know, as you know, I'm a
#
sort of regular news reporter and I do a fair amount of it. And so I didn't even have this
#
sort of sitting back and thinking about whether I had a bigger story to tell. I very much
#
did not have a book in me. Sometime last year, I had to send Pratap Bhanumetta a bunch of
#
articles for something I was doing. And he read them all. And then he said to me, you
#
know what, you should put these together and it would make a book. And he actually said,
#
you should have one chapter that's on how people vote and one on the idea of having
#
it as you. So it's really, it's his idea. I've said as much to him as well. And then
#
I thought, yeah, okay, I do have all of these things that I've been writing over time. And
#
I did not come at it from a sort of myth busting or fact checking place at all. More of a place.
#
If there was any of that, it was in terms of wanting to put out things that by now should
#
have been institutional knowledge instead of exhuming them every time a news event came
#
up. Like just the numbers. And I feel sort of indicated in that because of how much this
#
chapter two has surprised people. Anyone who wants to do a new story around it invariably
#
picks that chapter to want to talk to me about. And I actually felt that I had seen this so
#
many times. I had done, I had reported, you know, there are maybe seven or eight surveys
#
referenced in that chapter. And I have written on all of them when they came out and they
#
all said the same thing, yet that sort of institutional knowledge that this is the state
#
of what we know now about people's thoughts and beliefs from decent data that had not
#
happened. So more in terms of these things that I keep pulling out, let me put them all
#
together and in one place only in terms of that. And I suppose some of the things that
#
have surprised people, I didn't even know that they would. This part about, I'm so surprised
#
honestly that the intercast marriage part surprises people so much. I would have, if
#
it came up, you know, some of these things, especially when you're in a newsroom, someone
#
will make some comment and then they'll be like, hey, fish out the data and do a piece.
#
If I was in that place right now, I mean, like, I'm not going to do it. I've said it
#
too many times. Everybody knows it. That's what I feel about the state of data on intercast
#
marriage. So clearly my instincts on those are quite wrong. I had thought it had been
#
said ad nauseam. And then, so I ended up, I had a great conversation with Kartika, the
#
publisher at Westland, who's a really, really kind and wonderful person. And she was, you
#
know, interested in the idea, excited about it. But this trip I took to Delhi was in March
#
2020. And by the time I came back on the flight back, I was one of maybe two or three people
#
wearing masks then, because I had begun to see the news. And then maybe 10 days later
#
was lockdown. And, you know, we spoke while we were all under lockdown then, slightly
#
more relaxed stage of lockdown. But at home with two kids and also doing a lot of news
#
reporting then, I didn't work on the book idea at all. And it really sort of went out
#
of my mind. And I've told you this already. So I'm not saying this just because I'm on
#
the podcast. But when you're that sort of snowed under both with kids and with work,
#
you stop taking your own ideas very seriously, or yourself very seriously. I don't think
#
I've had a four hour conversation with my husband in the last few years, because our
#
kids interrupt us every 30 seconds. So I told you this then, which is that having that coming
#
on your podcast, not just, you know, the flattering feeling that someone's taking your idea seriously,
#
but also to know that you do have some theories about the world. Because I don't anymore,
#
you know, when I was in Delhi, working journalist, you'd go out to dinner and you were all talking
#
about the state of the world. And so you felt like you had theories. But when you stop putting
#
them in words, and they're just running around in your mind, and all your words are around,
#
you know, going to the beach or Peppa Pig or whatever, you start, you don't feel like
#
you have theories anymore about the world. I feel like coming on your podcast and reminded
#
me that I did have things to say, I did have a point of view, I did have things I wanted
#
to say. So I restarted working on it then. And then it was all pretty fast, because that
#
was the, I started working on it in the end of 2020 and was sort of done by the summer
#
of it, summer of 2021. So yeah, that's, and you know, that's really how, because one sort
#
of Pratap had put it in this way to me, which again, I thought was very useful, because
#
I'm not sure I would have thought of it in terms of 10 things that I want to say and
#
structure things and you know, the data under it. Then that came out that, you know, happened
#
quite easily. And again, because of my training as a journalist, I'm sort of used to writing
#
a thousand words on something, you know, at a couple of hours notice, I've been doing
#
it for 15 years now. And I had all of these things that I had filed away, you know, even
#
the stories, some of these are people I got in touch with and sort of that pyramiding
#
kind of effect to get to stories that you end up using. But so many of these were little
#
bits of information that I had just picked up while reporting over the years. And those
#
were not the points of the reporting assignment then, but the sort of side things that never
#
made it to the news story, added up to a picture of India that I was trying to get through,
#
you know, just funnily enough on my way here, I was just, I love Bombay and I haven't lived
#
here for a long time. I love it. I would, my favorite city to have lived in, as you
#
can see, by the way, I can't stop staring out to the window. And the last house I lived
#
in was in lower Parel and it was, it was still 2008. So it wasn't the city that it looks
#
like right now, but we lived, me and two friends, we lived in a sort of modernized style behind
#
the, I think Grand Maratha, the ITC hotel then. So as you can imagine, it was the most
#
sort of mixed up piece of architecture, geography, all of that politics. And so all the way here,
#
I was sort of, you know, looking out of the window of the taxi and trying to think of
#
what if it was, what if it resembled the city I lived in then and how much of it would be
#
new and what came up when. And I was thinking of a reporting trip I did once and see the
#
assignment to me was Bombay's bar, dance bars were closing. So because the then home
#
minister R.R. Patil had decided that in a sort of moral clam town. So I was sent out
#
to do a, go to a bunch of bars, dance bars and do a story that night. And I don't know,
#
I can't remember what I wrote then, but it was probably pretty staid, you know, spoke
#
to some of the girls there. But as it happened, I went on that reporting assignment the night
#
before my birthday. And at one of the dance bars, they were playing, I can't even remember
#
what the music was then at all. But let's say, what is that Munni badnaam hui or something.
#
That was the vibe. And so the song was playing and then suddenly it pauses. And then the
#
song that comes over and all of the girls stop dancing. And then the song that comes
#
over is, it's a hap, hap, hap, happy birthday. They were playing happy birthday to me in
#
the middle of the dance bar because someone had told them that the next day was my birthday.
#
I had gone with a couple of people that the next day was my birthday. It was just such
#
a hilarious and surreal scene. I still remember the sort of disco lights that were on then.
#
And where would I have slotted this into any story? And the other thing that I remember
#
then is that because my assignment was to talk to the girls, so I did get chatting with
#
them and went back into their little dressing room areas. And one thing any woman will tell
#
you is an annoying thing about traveling in public transport in India is that other women
#
sometimes do moral policing about your clothes. And not moral policing, it comes out of a
#
place of concern, I should say that. But if you're wearing a sleeveless top and if another
#
woman sees your bra strap sticking out, rather than say anything, they'll tuck it in for
#
you. This happens all the time. Every woman listening will know this has happened to them.
#
So I was talking to one of these girls who was like in the briefest jolly possible. And
#
while she's talking to me, she casually tucks my bra strap in. And the whole thing just,
#
it just amused me so much. All of the dynamics or sort of power relations or hierarchies
#
that you could have imagined were all so much more complicated. And I was just thinking
#
none of this made it to my piece and what would I have, I even done with it. But it's
#
all sort of added up to what I think of Bombay. Because when I was driving by, I was seeing
#
a sort of dive bar, not a dance bar. But yeah, it immediately took me back to just that tinny,
#
happy birthday. Yeah, so cinematic, these memories, actually. Yeah. And at the end of
#
the night, the person who was taking us around, who was a friend of a corporator, took us
#
to a restaurant in Mahim because everything was shut by then and the shutters had to be
#
pulled up and you could just scooch through and there was a late night meal to eat. And
#
I had spent the whole evening with this person. And then as we sat down at the table, he pulled
#
a gun out of his pocket and put it on the table. He'd had a gun in his pocket the whole
#
night and I hadn't even known it. So yeah, as cinematic as it gets. Yeah, fabulous. And
#
by the way, in case people are wondering why you mentioned looking out of my window, we
#
are on the 27th floor and my curtain was closed because there are thick sound dampening curtains.
#
But Rukmini said, no, I want to look out and it probably won't affect the sound because
#
it's in a different direction. So the windows are open right now. And you mentioned the
#
dance bars. So in those days, one of my very dear friends, Sonia Fallero was working on
#
a book about dance bars called Beautiful Thing. And I was lucky enough to be able to have
#
an inside view on a whole writing process. And she did some four or five drafts of the
#
book. And the one thing that struck me, in fact, the one thing that blew me away, and
#
I discussed it with her when I read an episode with her last year on her latest book, The
#
Good Girls, which is also fabulous, was that each of those drafts is completely different,
#
completely different top to bottom. It's not as if paras have been moved around, small
#
structural changes, typos have been removed. She just wrote them all from scratch. Sometimes
#
a main character and one was a side character and another, but she had that kind of discipline
#
and the process to do it and it took her years, but she did it. The similar process which
#
she went through with The Good Girls, which again she wrote from scratch. And I want to
#
ask you about your process now. Like many years back, this book came out by Mason Curry
#
called Daily Rituals, where Curry basically looked at artists and authors and spoke about
#
their rituals and their workflows and all of that. But he copped a lot of flack for
#
that book because there weren't enough women, or I think there were no women represented.
#
And the point that women correctly made there was that, listen, our processes are very different.
#
Men might have the privilege to take out large chunks of their time when they actually work
#
and set those routines for themselves. But women often are struggling work, they're struggling
#
marriage, they're struggling, not as in the marriages are struggling, but they're struggling
#
with all these multiple things. There's marriage, there's children, there's work, there's looking
#
after the household. Even when you do get some free time, it's not quite free because
#
mentally it's all there. So Curry to sort of Mason Curry to realizing to his credit
#
that he had kind of messed up here, came out with another book, which was Daily Rituals
#
Women at Work, where he just kind of focused on that. And one, regardless of what else
#
you might be doing, I'm just amazed you got a book out in such a short time. And this
#
is not a light book in the sense that on Kindle, it's about 3400 locations of actual text before
#
the data starts, which I normally read in one sitting, and I managed to read it in one
#
sitting anyway. But it would have normally taken me longer, not because the prose is
#
lucid and clear, but you've packed in so much. And there are so many places which are so
#
thought provoking. So it's a big book in that sense. It packs in a lot, as obviously,
#
you know. So what was that process like, or just in terms of pure habits, being able to
#
create that mind space where you can sit down and get into the flow of the book and all
#
of that? Share some of that with me.
#
No, it's so interesting that you asked that because in my case, it's the time and the
#
ritual really dictated the book. And in some ways, I would say not just the time that it
#
took, I really think it ended up having an impact on the content as well. I don't know
#
if in another time, both in my life and in the world, if I would have written maybe another
#
version of this. You know, I'm not a writerly writer, Sonia is, she's a wonderful writer.
#
So you know, I would not have had, I'm not sure that I would have the creativity to have
#
multiple ways in, I would probably have the same way into it. But it would definitely
#
have been different in multiple ways. So once the book got picked up at the end of December,
#
I have a wonderful agent whose name is Anish Chandy, who runs an agency called Labyrinth.
#
So I know nothing about writing books, I knew nothing about it. Then I had no idea what
#
timelines were like. And he set me this, now that I realize extremely aggressive timeline
#
of, he said, so what about by the end of May, which was like five months, and I thought,
#
okay, that's what you're supposed to do. So I said, sure. And now I realized it was
#
a tight timeline. So once I knew that that's what I had in front of me, it was really driven
#
by everything else in the world then, which is one is that I had these, so my husband's
#
a lawyer, and it wasn't work that he could continue doing online because, sorry, from
#
home because courts had both restarted partially physically, but the other thing was also,
#
he has a lot of paperwork around it, colleagues who, you know, support him, and he had to
#
go into work for that. So I knew he would be out all day and I'm home with the kids
#
and they're really small. So I can't have video calls or that sort of stuff around them.
#
So I used to work, get up early in the morning and work for a bit before he left to work.
#
And then the rest of the day, it would really be chunks of work done over someone asking
#
me for a color pencil or where their rabbit has gone missing, bits of that through the
#
day. But then I got these three big chunks to write in. The first was when my parents
#
came to visit at the end of February and stayed for nearly two months. And they agreed with
#
my kids and my kids were really happy with them and I could just write. And I had taken
#
a break from most other regular journalistic work for again, because it was, I'd set myself
#
five months. It didn't feel like I would be, you know, I could take five months off and
#
I didn't end up doing that because so much in the world was happening, especially around
#
COVID. I did end up doing regular reporting anyway. Then they left and then it was a sort
#
of summer holidays for courts as well. And between my husband and my in-laws, they could
#
do the remaining two months till the summer was over. So I knew I had that as well. And
#
I have a friend in Chennai who has a lovely little studio apartment with a big wooden
#
dining table. So as often as I could, I'd go, because even if I am at home, if even
#
if someone else is watching my kids, there's always like a Lego piece that only I can find
#
and you know, someone is always asking me for that. So I could go to her house, just
#
spread all my stuff at her dining table, drink lots of her coffee and get it done. And because
#
I had that deadline hanging over my head that the summer would end, the kids would be back
#
in at least online school and my husband would be back in court, I knew I had to finish it
#
off by then. So I don't know if I was, so one of the things that that meant is that
#
because I have all of this existing news reporting to build on, I took that as a lot of the sort
#
of skeleton for the book I wrote then. So I wonder if I had, you know, if I was on a
#
one year writer's residency in the south of France, maybe I would have done a sort
#
of radical reimagination of everything and come at it from another place and maybe even
#
re-examine some of the things that I had written or thought, I don't know, maybe it would have
#
been another book then. So, but because of the way my time was structured, it did end
#
up having, you know, there were bones that were already there from my news reporting
#
earlier. So yeah, in my case, it is entirely a case of the daily rituals driving the story
#
and probably in terms of content as well.
#
You know, was there a sense that there were parts where you were happy to satisfy? Like
#
satisfies for my listeners, of course, is a combination of satisfying and satisfying
#
that sometimes rather than try to look for the perfect choice, you just, you're satisfied
#
with what suffices. For example, you know, I'll go out to buy a new shirt, I won't try
#
a hundred shirts. I'll just, the first one, which I like, which happens to fit, I'll just
#
pick that up and similar for small purchases and so on. And in writing, what I often tell
#
my students is when it comes to the first draft, you know, satisfies this, but tradeoff
#
between getting it done and getting it right. And too many of us focus too hard on getting
#
it right. You know, we make perfection the enemy of production and it's important just
#
to at least with the first draft, just to get it done. Because I can understand that
#
when you're a journalist, you're writing a thousand word story and there's a certain
#
amount of effort and you've done so many of them that it's much easier. So, but when you
#
write something bigger, like, oh, this is a book, it is, you know, it feels like such
#
a serious thing and you really want to get it right. Were there moments where you were
#
sort of second guessing what others would think of it or moments where you were saying
#
that shit, I'm overthinking it. Let me just get it done. Let me just get it down on paper.
#
What was that like with you? I mean, was it relatively smooth or was there, were there
#
any agitated moments? No, there were certainly agitated moments also, because until I finally
#
sent it out, I didn't do a lot of showing it to other people or didn't do any of that
#
at all. In fact, and because in the last few years, I have spent so much of my time interacting
#
with other people who do also work with data. The big question, you know, you had Pramit
#
recently and Pramit and I talked and interacted so much about data. If this was a book that
#
I was first showing Pramit or picturing Pramit as my reader, I would think that there's nothing
#
in it for him to learn or be surprised by because, you know, Pramit knows all of this
#
already. So I certainly had that, that feeling that because I am not doing new and original
#
reporting for this, and again, as a news reporter, I'm so used to the need to say something
#
new and something new that you have yourself either drawn out from the data or from talking
#
to people that that feeling that I'm not saying something new stayed with me literally till
#
the first absolutely unbiased feedback from people at Westland. I was truly worried that
#
I was not saying anything new at all, because I felt like these are things that I have reported
#
on so often before. I think satisfying is pretty much how I do a lot of journalism.
#
I do operate on tight deadlines. And I'm okay with that, you know, because most of it, I
#
am quite okay. And I have been okay during the pandemic also in terms of saying things
#
that do need to be said now with all while being honest to the data and saying that we
#
don't know I have felt liberated by the ability to say we don't yet know in the last two years
#
so much. I have said it so much in the last two years. So for example, recently, I began
#
to see in a couple of states an increase in the share of those 60 and above in total COVID
#
deaths. And in other parts of the world where the data is in better shape, the immediate
#
question you would then end up asking is are we seeing waning immunity? Now, the thing
#
is, we can't yet answer this question in India, because we don't have the vaccination
#
data alongside it that would give us these goods. But I was okay with doing that story
#
to say that this is what the data shows. It might not show waning immunity. It might just
#
show that younger people have now got vaccinated at rates that no longer give older people
#
relative advantage because now everybody is sort of equally vaccinated. But if this is
#
the case, then at least let's examine the data and have a conversation about boosters.
#
So I was okay with not having to not waiting for another month or two or till better data
#
comes out. I don't think I did that with the book though. I don't think I was maybe the
#
first draft was adequate and then I added things to it later. But no, I do feel that
#
I looked at all of the data that I did want to. I discarded things that I felt weren't
#
good enough. I stuck to only narratives that I felt were being honest to what the data
#
said and not sort of picking outlier things. I'm also happy with the conversations I ended
#
up having the other reporting to fit into it.
#
I don't think I'm a writer with much sort of writerly flair. So I don't know if I had
#
given that more time, if more of that would have come out. I don't think so. I don't think
#
I have that sort of, I don't think I have those flourishes in me at all. So in news
#
reporting, yes. But again, as I said, I don't, and you're not saying that either. I don't
#
see satisfying as a problem. In fact, for fast developing things like the pandemic,
#
I think we should keep satisfying every day and then we'll reach a satisfying point with
#
the collective knowledge at some point.
#
Yeah, that's well said. And I keep saying the only way to get it right in the end is
#
to just get it done again and again and again. And what you sort of spoke about, about thinking
#
that everything that you were writing about was obvious is something that I've thought
#
about. I mean, it's what is called the curse of knowledge, right? You know a subject so
#
well that everything about it seems obvious. And you assume sometimes that there's a certain
#
baseline level of knowledge that your reader shares with you, which is not always the case.
#
And I've realized that while doing a show also that sometimes there'll be episodes where
#
I'll be like, okay, nice conversation. Maybe there's not much new in it. And then there'll
#
be feedback coming in saying, oh, this was a TIL or that was a TIL and my God, I didn't
#
know that. So I keep reminding myself not to assume that everybody knows everything,
#
that you just have to make a good faith effort to strip yourself of those assumptions and
#
just kind of keep going. So we'll take a quick commercial break. And at the other side of
#
the break, we'll talk about whole numbers and half truths.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it? Well, I'd love
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to help you. Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 19 cohorts of my online course, The
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Art of Clear Writing. And an online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students and vibrant community interaction.
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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about the craft and practice of clear writing. There are many exercises, much interaction
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and a lovely and lively community at the end of it. The course costs rupees 10,000 plus
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GST or about $150 and registration is now open for my February 2020 cohort. Classes
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start on Saturday, February 5th. So if you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com
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slash clear writing. That's indiancut.com slash clear writing. Being a good writer doesn't
#
require God given talent, just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you
#
need to do to refine your skills. I can help you. Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Rukmini S about her wonderful book, Whole Numbers and Half Truths. And the
#
reason I paused there was I keep forgetting the name of the book. So I had to kind of
#
get the physical copy of the book in front of me. And Rukmini pointed out that you can
#
actually read the title of the book if it is standing in front of you without having
#
to incline your head, which you do with everything else, which made me realize that even though
#
we are a left leaning country when it comes to browsing books, we are a right head inclining
#
country just because of the way our book covers are designed. So maybe publishers ought to
#
think more about that. And as Rukmini was telling me when I shared this thought with
#
her, we're not perhaps a left leaning country either. So anyway, coming back to the book,
#
I just want to start off with a comment on something that, you know, I thought I should
#
kind of, I didn't want to butt in there, but you said you're not a writerly kind of writer.
#
And you said you didn't have the time to aim for flair and maybe you don't have it in you.
#
And I think you were being unnecessarily modest because I think what this book succeeds in
#
very well is just the clarity of prose, which is important, which is what is the important
#
thing in a book like this. So for a book like this, I don't think I'd want writerly flourishes
#
or a novelistic approach, you know, which is much more suited to the kind of effort
#
that says Sonia was doing with the good girls, right, where it makes so much difference.
#
But over here, I sort of didn't feel that to be an issue at all. Now, one of the sort
#
of things that you start off with in the introduction to your book is you talk about how so many
#
popular narratives have no basis in fact, obviously, and yet they're popular. And these
#
are not just WhatsApp narratives, which, you know, of course have no basis in fact, but
#
these are even narratives that are popular among the commentary art, so to say among
#
the experts that you see on television, and so on and so forth. So why is this, you know,
#
when we are surrounded by data, we are surrounded by facts. And in fact, when many of these
#
facts, much of this data has been pointed out by journalists like yourself, why is it
#
that bad narratives continue to persist?
#
So unfortunately, I think it lies in the fact that the people who allow it to persist are
#
the ones whose beliefs that particular narrative conforms to. And you know, this again gets
#
at the heart of something that I worry about, which is, and we talked about this a bit before,
#
which is people come to me sometimes with a sort of hope that data journalism is the
#
thing that's going to change minds. And just as I feel, you know, worried about the
#
ability of journalism to change minds at all, I feel equally worried about the ability of
#
data journalism to change minds just because there has been, I have seen this repeatedly,
#
which is the data driven, even though it might be faulty data, the data driven narratives
#
that persist are the ones that persist within that same bubble. And I have seen how these
#
operate, which is that if you do sort of cherry pick certain parts of a data set, or that
#
data set that thing at one point in time, then you sort of freeze your understanding
#
at that moment. And you continue to make that point for decades after because it fits your
#
biases. So for example, if you look at sort of intra left debates, one of the sort of
#
persistent questions, maybe 10 of 20 years ago was around why in a period of then increasing
#
incomes, calorific consumption was falling in India. And you know, this is a point that
#
was raised by genres and Angus Deaton at the time. And there were these passionate debates
#
in the EPW with people like, you know, the Patnaiks on the other side. So I think what
#
had happened then, and you know, I read everything that Angus Deaton writes, and similarly that
#
John does, right, because, because what they did was this, which is that there was an understanding
#
about how calorific consumption operated that had got ossified in time. And John and Angus
#
Deaton were seeing in the data that it didn't, you know, that that might have been a snapshot
#
in time, but the continuing trend didn't sort of merit that narrative. And they looked
#
at the numbers and they sort of raised questions about it. And it's invaluable what they did
#
because it has ended up advancing our knowledge of how food operates, how societies develop,
#
what it means for food, what it means for calorific consumption, what changes in the
#
nature of work mean, all of those. And it's complicated. I mean, Angus and Angus Deaton
#
and John's articles ended with questions, not certainty around why this was happening.
#
I see this again, similarly in the last, say, five, seven years around the issue of child
#
stunting, which is a sort of, you know, pernicious, an indicator that's not shifted considerably.
#
And around which again, the sort of narrative had gone through two phases. One was a sort
#
of right pushed narrative around genetics, which was sort of largely debunked. I mean,
#
debunked in the sense that we know the extent to which genetics plays a role. And then there's
#
all this variation that genetics cannot explain why, for example, upper caste are the tallest
#
people in India, and why, for example, South Asian communities overseas are so much taller
#
than an earlier generation would have been, similar in heights, why Bangladeshis have
#
become taller than those in West Bengal, for example, despite being poorer at the time,
#
not poorer anymore. So I think again, that conversation on stunting then took a significantly
#
advanced turn in the last five years, where conversations around one inequality, both
#
within households and among communities became central to that discussion. And the key issue
#
of sanitation, which, you know, we now know, accounts for a large proportion of the variation
#
that you see in stunting, which is simply because if you are repeatedly subject to bouts
#
of diarrheal disease at a very young age, you're not able to accumulate the nutrition
#
that then has a lifelong impact on something like height. So people who did look at the
#
data to advance knowledge and sort of take ossified narratives forwards are the ones
#
who've done us such a service in terms of truly advancing human knowledge. But the narratives
#
that people love to hold dear to themselves, just as the narrative around India being largely
#
a tolerant country, that I think is actually very damaging, that we've, so many of us
#
have grown up with this sort of feeling that this, you know, going to each other's houses
#
at even the valley is the sort of central Indian ethos and the rest is the fringe. And
#
I think not recognizing what is the fringe and what is the mainstream has has done us
#
a great deal of damage. Similarly, you know, there are narratives around, you know, other
#
issues around in the economy, role of liberalization, for example, and outcomes from from there
#
on and the impact it had. So, yeah, the narratives that I think pursue the long, sorry, persist
#
the longest are the ones that enjoy the greatest uptake within their own constituencies. And
#
I really have to think hard about how it is that narratives wither within constituencies
#
and I admire people who have taken on board and by no means am I the person, you know,
#
who's doing the majority of the sort of pushback or mid-busting out there. But for example,
#
those in the feminist movement, who I feel in the last five years have really significantly
#
taken on board the what's come out from the data, which is that equating sexual assault
#
statistics with the sort of quote unquote stranger rape that that we think of often
#
around sexual assault is problematic and sort of accepting the role of laws that are there
#
to protect women against sexual violence, the role of those very laws in victimizing
#
both men and women in consenting relationships that go against other social norms. I think
#
the feminist movement has taken that on board that, you know, even though it has meant challenging
#
deeply held beliefs and also challenging coming to terms with whether the laws and reforms
#
that you pushed so hard for have had horrific unintended consequences against women, who
#
I really see as the continued primary victims of this. So I do see that acceptance. I also
#
think that this acceptance among, you know, I like seeing acceptance among people who
#
feel that they are middle class, for example, or that, you know, that there's only a very
#
tiny super rich and they're not part of it. And that acceptance that they are, they, we,
#
us, all of us are part of the one percenters. You do see that. And when you see that sort
#
of dawning realization, it is gratifying. So I don't have a theory about what it is
#
that causes, I have a theory about what it is that causes narratives to persist. But
#
what is it that causes narratives to wither away is the thing that I find harder to understand.
#
And it matters because if you do want to believe in the goodness of some others in the ideologically
#
opposite positions from you, and you do think that that constituency to appeal to goodness
#
or to, you know, factfulness in other people does exist, in some people does exist, then
#
it becomes important to think about what will it take for those narratives to go. And yeah,
#
I don't have the answer to that. But I think it's really important. And we should be thinking
#
harder about what it will take to change, change minds when when something has been
#
I think one quote that comes to mind is how paradigms change one funeral at a time, which,
#
you know, essentially alludes to the point that you can't really change people's mind.
#
But dominant narratives change when a lot of the people who held them grow old and they
#
die out. And then new narratives come like what I think of people like me doing and people
#
like you doing and in the different ways that we approach this is that we are really playing
#
the long game. And this is more true for me than a few. Hopefully, you can change a lot
#
of minds in the short term as well. But I see the game as you're playing a long game,
#
you're trying to you know, people who haven't made up their minds yet, people who are still
#
intellectually curious, who haven't really decided upon one worldview, or who are still
#
young enough to not be rigid in those worldviews. Hopefully, you can have an impact on them
#
and an impact on them not in terms of persuading them to this worldview or that worldview,
#
but merely the value of skepticism, the value of conversation, the value of kind of questioning
#
everything. So I see it partly as, you know, playing that kind of long game. And again,
#
one of the things that increasingly and partly through the conversations I've had I've realized
#
is that I was so wrong about so many aspects of India, because I grew up in this elite
#
English speaking bubble. So we made these convenient assumptions like, oh, bad way.
#
Basically we are liberal and basically we're tolerant and we made all these assumptions
#
and those assumptions are really not the fact. In a sense, we are the fringe, right. And
#
the way to look at that is therefore not with despair, but to take that as a challenge.
#
I mean, this was a whole point that I think Gandhi was trying to make those decades ago
#
when he said that you cannot fashion society in a top down way like we try to do with our
#
constitution, you have to change society from within, which is a challenge all of us have
#
Amit, if I can just jump in around one thing you were saying, in a very literal way, the
#
quote on paradigms changing one funeral at a time, something that struck me was the way
#
I did see some minds of views changing around when the data around excess mortality in India
#
started coming in. And in a very literal way, I literally felt that this was happening one
#
funeral at a time, because and you know, when you were using the word worldview, word worldview,
#
one of the things that came to mind was that even if worldviews are not changing, there
#
are aspects of it within that, that I think can change. And then maybe, you know, and
#
I don't I don't have a grand project. So I don't know what it is that I sort of want
#
to change in worldviews. But if it is still possible that you might have this grand worldview,
#
but elements of that you are still willing to see what comes of it and maybe change mine.
#
So I do believe that that a significant, this is totally unscientific, but I do believe
#
that people have broadly come around to the acceptance that a lot of people died of COVID
#
in India, and the official data does not count this. And they do not have to come at it from
#
a union government suppressed data way. It can come from all sorts of things like doctors
#
don't put the right names on death certificates, or there were so many people that people couldn't
#
be counted or in rural areas, nobody even knows what people die of, or a particular
#
city government or state government who you hate is the one doing the suppressing. But
#
I do feel for two things. One is just because of the ridiculous sheer number of people who
#
died, everybody knew someone who died. So it, it no longer became a narrative that could,
#
you know, we don't have that sort of centralizing or sort of intoxicating force that even if
#
you see reality crumble around you, you'll still continue to believe what your sort of
#
dear leader is telling you is reality. And I do feel like people, because enough of this
#
reporting happened by multiple people across newsrooms and across languages, you know,
#
we had the Gujarati media reporting on this, we had the Hindi media reporting as well as
#
the English media across multiple states. And I don't think this necessarily matters
#
to more than like 25 people, but we all of us put all of our data on GitHub. So if you
#
were the sort of person who'd want to look at that, you could look at the data yourselves.
#
So yeah, I think maybe one news report at a time and one funeral at a time, minds did
#
change around deaths in India. Just to think of it in terms of if you and I went downstairs
#
right now and had a cup of tea at the Chaiwala downstairs and asked the people around us
#
that you know, the official number in India is that four lakh people died of COVID, do
#
you think it's more than that? I really don't think it would be very hard to find a single
#
person anywhere in the country who says, no, is the union government saying four lakh?
#
Then I totally believe only four lakh people died of COVID. So yeah, those same people's
#
worldviews are not necessarily things that I'm changing. But it does seem, yeah, maybe
#
parts of it, you know, just by being confronted with if it's something that you can see with
#
echoes of it in the real world around you, as well as broad based reporting. So yeah,
#
Yeah, that's a great point and an added twist to the phrase one funeral at a time. And you
#
know, we were chatting about this earlier at lunch and where you asked me if I'm still
#
consider myself a libertarian and I said no, you know, I reject the label, but that's the
#
closest anyone can come to, you know, putting one on me. So I don't mind it, but I reject
#
the label because labels are used always these days in a tribal way as pejoratives and why
#
not just avoid that. But you know, just sort of going back to that, I find that the things
#
that I am rigid about are values, but the things that I am completely open to being
#
convinced otherwise about are facts. So I know what my values are, you know, so I value
#
individual freedom, autonomy, consent, all of those things. I'm fairly rigid on that.
#
But as far as facts are concerned, you know, are we a tolerant people? Has calorific intake
#
gone up and gone down? I'm willing to be convinced by, you know, the most convincing argument
#
and so on. And I think that this is also something that can apply to everybody. Like Arnold Kling
#
wrote this great book called The Three Languages of Politics, where he pointed out that we
#
are talking past each other so much of the time because we start from different first
#
principles from which we can draw different coherent arguments. Like he looked at the
#
American example where the progressives care about equality, libertarians care about freedom,
#
conservatives care about tradition, and they'll start from the first principles and reach
#
different conclusions, but they're completely coherent. And they're talking past each other
#
because they don't take each other's first principles into account. And what I would
#
simply say to everyone is that don't change what you value the most, whether it's equality,
#
freedom, tradition, whatever, you don't have to change that. But as long as you're open
#
to facts of the world around you, because the world is deeply complex, it is so incredibly
#
arrogant to think you have anything figured out. Even within your book, after all that
#
I've read and all the conversations I've had, there were certain parts of your book
#
which took me by surprise and made me look at things in a new way, but always when it
#
came to the facts. And that would be the case regardless of what ideology I might have as
#
But you know, what would happen if parts of your values were based on facts, which then
#
could change? And I do feel like that is something that I have encountered when I have had these
#
questions around some daily leftist beliefs, for example, because if you, I suppose this
#
is taking the idea of a value very far, but if you believe that there are some aspects
#
of how states function that do achieve aims that you believe in, like better redistribution,
#
equality, and then you find that those pathways don't lead there, that's when you start
#
to shut your ears to the facts, I think then, you know, because if you find that, you know,
#
states that you believed had the most redistributive policies, but are not the ones that ended
#
up giving the greatest leg up to those who started the furthest way behind, then I would
#
imagine that that's sometimes where this might break down.
#
I can think of a couple more examples of that. Like one is a simple Hindu Khatre Mein Hai
#
narrative, where it is very easy to bring data and show that boss, at least in India,
#
Hindu Khatre Mein Hai, we are the dominant majority, we are chilling, we are doing really
#
well, broadly speaking. And the other area is, like, for example, you know, a lot of
#
what the left would, I mean, I don't want to use labels, but what to do, a lot of what
#
the left would support depends, a lot of the policies they would support, they would support
#
on the basis of good intentions, and ignore the outcomes. For example, when the UP government
#
last year decided to get rid of the labor laws, now you can argue about the way in which
#
they chose to carry it all out, and with specifics in the bill. But the fact is that those labor
#
laws, while they may have been well-intentioned, harmed workers more than they helped them.
#
We have, like, decades of sort of, you know, history backing that up, and yet people who,
#
you know, just went by the intention of the laws, and by the fact that it came from a
#
political regime that they opposed, and that I also oppose, you know, it was just a reflexive
#
doubling down on, oh, how we, you know, we need these labor laws, and an inability to
#
actually examine that, do these laws even achieve what they're supposed to achieve.
#
So I get that, but my next question then is, you know, just taking off from that, that
#
sometimes facts are also unclear in the sense that they don't prove one thing or the other.
#
Like, you can't do controlled experiments in social science. Like, my friend Shruti
#
Rajgopalan once gave me a great example where she said that if you are doing a scientific
#
experiment on whether dropping a coin in a beaker of water displaces some water, it's
#
really easy to do it in a lab because you measure everything precisely. It's almost
#
impossible to do it in a swimming pool, because there's just so much activity, 40 people jumping
#
up and down, you'll sometimes get the opposite result, no matter what happens, you can't
#
attribute causation, you can't say it's because of this, the real world is messy, so many
#
things interacting, and therefore, you know, as you correctly say in your intro as well,
#
that, you know, statistics don't tell us everything, quote, they need context, interpretation
#
is free from ideological spin and to be held up to the light, quote. And in some cases,
#
this is obviously easier to do than in other cases. So you can convincingly today make
#
the case that more people died of COVID than the official figures indicate. But it's much,
#
much harder to make a nuanced point about, you know, whether farmers in a particular
#
place would be better off without an APMC or whether the labour laws in a particular
#
state actually harm the workers more than they help them, because there are so many
#
factors at play, there are no counterfactuals, there's no controlled experiment, I mean,
#
I'm just kind of thinking aloud from.
#
Yeah, no, and I know that then this leads people to a place of feeling that that one
#
set of facts can be argued with another set of facts, it leads you to a place of not knowing,
#
I mean, all sort of WhatsApp arguments are not about facts versus lies, there's also
#
one set of facts versus another set of facts. And I remember in the early days of the pandemic,
#
when I started this pandemic podcast, I remember feeling then that it was like my job to figure
#
out what the facts were. And very quickly, I realized that that was going to be impossible.
#
I don't have, you know, the training to evaluate scientific evidence. And I was feeling just
#
as other people were that I was seeing sort of contradictory sets of things by otherwise
#
sort of credentialed people and not knowing, you know, so having been through that myself,
#
especially in a moment where I felt like I had to have an answer. And maybe many people
#
do even on WhatsApp, they might feel like they need to show that they know what it all
#
means. Yeah, I see how that gets difficult and complicated. And then, you know, assuming
#
bad faith about people arguing one way or the other is not fair, if they are sort of
#
choosing to look at evidence that then goes along with their beliefs.
#
On some things, there is a sort of broader truth, which is that you evaluate all of the
#
evidence from these different places. And there is a sort of larger argument to be made.
#
And of course, it's always a nuanced argument. It is. And you know, the argument may be that,
#
yes, this really was good for these people and not good for others. And if you are one
#
of those people, or you care about those people, and then you want to take a decision based
#
on that, fine, that that's what you're doing. But then, you know, don't go ahead and argue
#
that it's going to be equally good for everyone. Maybe just accept that it's good for the
#
people you care about, or you are yourself. Yeah, but I can see how it leads people to
#
feel, I think people have felt this a lot in the last two years, that any set of studies
#
can be argued against with another set of studies, and all of these are sort of published.
#
And yeah, so I suppose at some point, then that leads you to, again, seeking out evidence
#
from people who you, you know, I find myself doing this sometimes, and I really have to
#
stop myself that if I see a study, then I'll want to know a little bit about the politics
#
meaning not party politics, but the sort of worldview politics of the person who did it,
#
to know then whether I, and you know, this might be something about masking, it might
#
be a study about masking that's been published in like, the BMJ. But I still feel like I
#
want to end up looking at this person's views before deciding. I don't know, maybe, you
#
know, maybe you need some filter to get through the world, otherwise, what are you going to
#
read about everyone? Yeah, I don't I don't have a good answer for this. And I don't blame
#
people for then having these, these sorts of arguments about sets of facts, as opposed
#
to satisfy yourself, you should know that you've done whatever due diligence you at
#
the level of either a, you know, regular reader or a journalist have done with the data, which
#
is that you have tried to assure yourself that you haven't cherry picked it. And you
#
know, you've been true to the broader story of what the numbers saying, not just looking
#
for that one terrible indicator, which is the way a lot of us journalists are taught
#
to report on something like the census, which is pick the one indicator that tells a bad
#
news story and tell a story about it. So I suppose, when I talk about holding the numbers
#
up to the light, and along with context, it's that you're that at least you satisfy yourself
#
that you're being fair to the numbers, if nothing else. Yeah, and I agree with you,
#
the last two years, especially has been damn complicated, because you have so much contrary
#
information flying about that, on the one hand, if you see a study on masking, like
#
you said, the logical, the correct way to look at every study would be to ignore the
#
affiliation of the person or what they might feel and just look at the data on its own,
#
but we don't have the time or the mental bandwidth to look at every study. So it's a useful heuristic
#
to have, who is this person? Where are they coming from? I remember I did an episode with
#
Gotham Mennon, or one of the COVID episodes I did, maybe Lancelot Pinto, where we spoke
#
about how Ivermectin is rubbish, it doesn't work, right? And there had been enough studies
#
that showed that. And I got assaulted on email and Twitter by so many people with such anger.
#
It's like somebody believes in God, and you're telling them, Hey, your God doesn't exist,
#
he's rubbish. You know, it was that kind of furor that they took it to took it so much
#
to heart that no, Ivermectin works. And one of them sent me like reams after reams of
#
so called evidence. And if I'm a neutral person who doesn't know how to read all of this information,
#
it would seem so convincing to me, right? So just kind of navigating that alone becomes
#
a problem. And so I let's kind of go back to your book.
#
And Ivermectin army in particular is quite unlike most things that I've encountered,
#
and I would say they sort of stand out in sort of true believerness. And I have been
#
not assaulted by this army, I have been attempted to be recruited by this army as well. So people
#
who I otherwise, you know, knew in my normal professional life to be people like you, you
#
know, they took their office bags and went to office and you never knew what was going
#
on. I've got in touch with me as if they're sort of, I don't know, Freemasons or something,
#
literally an attempt to recruit. So it's, you know, you always and there are some, it's
#
almost like the hashtags that you mute on Twitter. There's a particular, so I'm going
#
to allude to it without mentioning it. Otherwise, we're going to get another fresh wave of this.
#
But you know, of a popular conspiracy theory around a recently deceased actor that's taken
#
over Twitter, it's sort of had that. Ivermectin has had those echoes in it to me, which is
#
of a bizarrely organized army. So I've spoken about my favorite SSR theory quite often on
#
the show. You're feeding the quantum mechanics one, you know, the quantum mechanics. I link
#
it from the show notes. Now I have to tell you, you can pretend to ignore me and look
#
out of the window. But basically the theory is that once he had SSR had tweeted, say showing
#
his interest in a particular phenomenon in quantum mechanics, which I think split something
#
into two, an atom or a proton or whatever, it splits it into two. So the theory is that
#
he had mastered this technique or whatever and he had split himself into two and the
#
SSR who died was actually the duplicate. And the real SSR has been kidnapped by someone
#
or is in hiding because Yogi Adityanath is looking for the real SSR because the real
#
SSR invented Covaxin and it gets really crazy. It's a fantastic long thread. It's a masterpiece.
#
And of course, there are many other conspiracy theories, like he invented the game Fawji,
#
the Indian version of PUBG and Akshay Kumar had him killed because Akshay Kumar wanted
#
to claim whatever. So that's another crazy story that is out there.
#
See, Amit, since I have a book to sell, I'm going to nod in a genial fashion to all of
#
these things and not risk upsetting anyone except to throw in this thing, which is that
#
I recently found out that if through accident, a starfish gets broken into two pieces, each
#
of them form new starfishes. And this has not stopped. I mean, I've spent an inordinate
#
amount of time thinking about it. So that's the direction I'm going to take the splitting
#
into two into. You have no idea what you've just done. There
#
are going to be threads on this. We don't even need quantum mechanics. We need starfish
#
here. But you know, so here's again a question that I'm sure since you think a lot about
#
truth and facts and alternative facts and these narratives and all that, something that
#
I can't figure out that a lot of the vehemence of these either these SSR types or the Ivermectin
#
types or the QAnon types or so many types is that they all seem to be cultists in search
#
of a cult. Why are so many people cultists in search of a cult? Do you have any thoughts
#
on that? Like what? Like what is this? Why do so many people want so desperately to believe
#
in things like this? I'm going to come up with pure pop psychology
#
for this. And I wonder if, you know, the sort of standard pop psychology explanation of
#
this would be that there were figures in the past to whom at whose feet you could prostrate
#
yourself and seek their, you know, seek community and sort of shared belief then whether they
#
were caste leaders or religious leaders. And maybe with the way, you know, with the way
#
we all live now in the cities, we all live, you can't, you don't have access to Godmen
#
of choice anymore. Though there are those, there are equally vehement Godmen cults on
#
Twitter as well. So yeah, maybe in the absence of that, people are looking and you know,
#
I'm being facetious about this, but there is, I do understand that sense of wanting
#
to belong to a community that believes strongly in something and that seems to have a higher
#
purpose than just your mundane existence. And I don't mean this in a condescending
#
way. We all want that. We all want a higher purpose community. And you know, we find it
#
in different ways, but perhaps this is what people are seeking. And also, I mean, clearly
#
there is a sense of, you know, in the conspiracy ones, at least there is a sense of being
#
wronged by the state and the need to put it in some concrete fashion or have an individually
#
wronged person embody that even, you know, the reasons that you're willing to believe
#
all of this in a way has to be because you have seen some of the depredations of the
#
state and you do believe it as a state that can do acts of terrible violence, including
#
having people killed for business interests. I mean, these are not, these are not fantastical
#
beliefs in that respect. The quantum mechanics part might be, but you know, all of the rest
#
of what an all-powerful state or a corporate can do are sort of based in fact. So I do
#
sometimes see, when you see what parts of the Indian state do, then imagining them to
#
do things to individuals to whom it was not then is not that big of a leap of faith.
#
Yeah. And a lot of things that sound like conspiracy theories actually did turn out
#
to be true. For example, you know, everything we know about diet is wrong. For example,
#
everything we believe for decades. I mean, America's obesity epidemic was in part caused
#
by the state coming up with those dietary guidelines in I think 1977, where they basically
#
followed the dictates of the sugar lobby, which had funded so many studies which demonize
#
fat and said, hey, sugar is okay. Well, today we know it's just the opposite. So they see
#
Ghee Zindabad and don't look at me like that. I've just been eating carbs, carbs, carbs
#
all through the lockdown, which is why I am what I am. But when I was last on a keto diet,
#
I was 22 kgs lighter. But we shall not go to diet territory. And in fact, some of my
#
friends tell me that all this keto, intermittent fasting, this is another cult.
#
It absolutely is. You can't get keto people to stop talking about keto. That would be
#
a true sort of act of restraint if they stop talking about it.
#
Yeah, I haven't mentioned keto in the longest time. But there is that joke. How do you know
#
if someone's on keto? They will tell you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And just a sort of a
#
thought that came like when I have been chatting about the creator economy or the media in
#
recent times, one thing that's definitely happening there is that that mainstream is
#
dissipating and many, many niches are kind of coming up. Like Steve Van Zandt, who was
#
the guitarist of the East Street band with Bruce Springsteen, once said that rock was
#
mainstream between the late 60s and the early 90s, a period of about 30 years, I think,
#
till Nirvana. And now there's no mainstream anymore in music. And similarly, if you look
#
at the media, there was mainstream media. All of us got our information from the same
#
places. Once upon a time, there was a consensus on the truth that's completely dissipated.
#
Everybody consumes information from different places. And I wonder if a similar thing is
#
true when it comes to belief, that earlier you had mainstream sources of belief, mainstream
#
delusions we could all agree upon, like religions, you know, or the state, which I say is a bit
#
the biggest religion in India is the religion of government or the state. But now you have
#
all these little sort of perhaps intersecting at times, little niches of belief. So you
#
have your SSR and you have your, oh, the pharma lobby created COVID, you know, which is doesn't
#
sound that far off from the sugar lobby caused obesity, which of course it did, and so on
#
and so forth. So I wonder if you have any thoughts on that in general, that in those
#
two fields, at least the creator economy and media, I find that you had mainstream monoliths
#
once upon a time, and now it's all dispersed and all little pockets happening. But do you
#
feel that's also the case, perhaps with belief or in other areas?
#
Yeah, though I find it hard to imagine, hard to be sure of how much of belief was consolidated
#
in the past, and whether these sort of individual whimsies did exist then too, but perhaps with
#
less documentation and with less sort of real world impact. I mean, all of us can think
#
of grandparents who were completely convinced about some particular thing or had a particular
#
belief and, you know, I don't mean that these were all wrong or fake, these were things
#
that they particularly deeply held or believed in. And yeah, you know, you really do see,
#
you really do see the diversity of sources for information. I see it, for example, in
#
even in the ways people have come to hear of the book, I find it so fascinating to ask
#
people if they come to talk to me where they heard of it from, because it's, for example,
#
Ravish Kumar, the journalist who I admire deeply, did an Insta post about my book, and he did
#
it in Hindi and it didn't have a link or anything. I think he had, I don't even know if there
#
was a picture of the cover, perhaps just a picture of the cover, and he said nice things
#
about it. And I met a young man in Bangalore who said he saw that and then sought it out.
#
And so just the whole pathway to it, you know, was fascinating to me. And yeah, of course,
#
I mean, nothing like speaking to younger people to feel like you don't, it's so hard to say
#
what the best way to get any sort of information out would be, you know, I remember if people
#
were ever planning an event, then they would have like three, four verticals, you know,
#
we'll speak to the three top newspapers, we'll speak, I really wonder what those sort of
#
conversations look like right now, because it depends so much on what it is that you're
#
talking about as well. And yeah, I mean, again, I feel like I would get into the realm of
#
pop psychology, if I began to think about what these beliefs come from. Also, you know,
#
not to overstate that point, because the sort of core of many of the beliefs that I do talk
#
about in the book, I do sort of coalesce around a few key issues that are very mainstream,
#
which is Islamophobia, for example, which is really a sort of central focus around which
#
a lot of the smaller beliefs do come around. So I don't know if, you know, maybe they're
#
entering into the space through multiple and unusual and newer ways, but they do seem to
#
be coalescing around fairly well-trodden paths.
#
Yeah. So before we get down to many of the sort of concrete insights in your book, a
#
final kind of abstract question which takes off from this paragraph from your introduction,
#
which is also a piece of excellent writing. So I think you do yourself a disservice when
#
you underplay that part of what you do. So I'll just read it out and then come to my
#
question. And you write, quote, this is a country of wonder and beauty, of idealism
#
and sacrifice, of extraordinary leaps of faith and people who move mountains. Numbers, far
#
from being cold and unintelligible, can capture much of this nuance, this humanity, that pre-packaged
#
narrative sometimes flattened out. If Indian statistics have seemed impenetrable, that
#
is a failing of the community that produces data and works with it. Everyone should hear
#
the stories numbers tell and then make up their minds about the country. Stop, quote.
#
And to what extent, and I ask this since you've also thought about the craft of writing, since
#
you've written this book, to what extent is storytelling an important part of what you
#
do? Because many data people could just say that I'm going to get the data and I'm going
#
to get the best data I possibly can and that's the end of it. That's my job done. Whereas
#
you clearly are not just getting data, you're also thinking about how to contextualize it,
#
how to make it persuasive, how to tell the story. So, you know, what are your insights?
#
What are the insights that you've had while thinking about this aspect, the storytelling
#
aspect? And do you feel that more people in the data business should take this more seriously
#
if their work is to have more meaning? Yeah, I think about this a lot. And one of the things
#
I worry about is that by having these sorts of conversations or sort of creating this
#
sort of theory around how storytelling around data can be done, that I will myself end up
#
creating a formulaic model, which I really worry about because some even people in government
#
have recently gotten in touch and said, you know, we put out these reports and nobody
#
reads them. But then the way you've written it is making people read it. So, you know,
#
we also should think about how we should open with a good story. And just my heart sinks
#
when I hear that because if the only point is to have that person for the introduction
#
of your story, then that's another reduction, another formula, which is why I feel very
#
privileged that so much of these stories I picked up without intending to pick them up
#
as stories, you know, as they weren't as this wasn't the point of those conversations
#
to have them reflect this data. Because in the few instances when I did that, which is
#
when I was writing about something and I needed to find a few people who would accurately
#
sort of reflect what I was talking about, it always ended up following a pretty, you
#
know, it felt like I was doing social science research rather than storytelling. I needed
#
to say, okay, well, I'm looking for a town of roughly this size and a family or maybe
#
a woman who belongs to perhaps this community who has a BPL card that says this on, you
#
know, I never felt very good about that. And those stories, I mean, that'll check that
#
box, but it won't necessarily provide an interesting story. So I feel lucky that having
#
been a reporter who was sent all over the place for reporting stories, I ended up picking
#
up the stuff as byproducts that then form these pictures in my mind. And if this wasn't
#
how I had gotten to it, if I had started as a data journalist or even started as someone
#
who wanted to write this book, I don't know how I would have done it and whether it would
#
have told these same stories at all. So I don't know, I really struggle with this.
#
If I was to write, you know, suppose there was another book in the future, which took
#
say another 10 themes. And if there were some of these that I hadn't done reporting around,
#
I don't have a good model for how to do this. I see the power of stories and actually connecting
#
with people. And I also feel that it's important. In some places, it really felt satisfying
#
and validating to have stories that made the points about the messiness of data that I
#
was trying to talk about. So for example, and you know, when I hear that paragraph being
#
read back to me, I realized that in my mind, I had a lot of it was around data on voting,
#
because I really do feel very passionately about electoral and sort of political data
#
and the sort of flattening of it, especially faced with an electorate who is so passionate.
#
People are so passionate around voting and with such deeply inspiring beliefs that drive
#
it. And you know, I have a couple of stories in the chapter on voting where I speak to
#
two women in Chennai, one of whom was voting for the ADMK because she was voting in Jalalitha's
#
name. And her reasoning was that this was a woman in a man's world. And she felt she
#
identified with that. And the other her neighbor was a woman who was voting for the DMK who
#
felt that she wanted to keep out a party that she believed was a Hindi Hindu party. Both
#
of them had taken money from the respective parties that they had voted for. And this
#
sort of flattening of people in Tamil Nadu vote for the person who gives them money is
#
so common, especially in the last few years. And I feel offended on behalf of voters that
#
this is what they're, you know, the complicated matrices in their minds have been reduced
#
to this. So in that was an instance in which I felt good about those stories being able
#
to explain the messiness in the numbers that otherwise when you report purely on surveys,
#
you sort of have this veneer of scientific reasoning or certainty that stories like this
#
actually complicate. So those are instances in which I feel convinced of the importance
#
and the power of storytelling in it. In others, I do worry that, you know, am I giving the
#
medicine with a spoon of honey, which is drawing people who typically are not fond of looking
#
at numbers in with a well told story. And should I think of it as okay, well, that's
#
bringing them in to look at the numbers and that's what's important or is that not a
#
sort of intellectually honest way of going about it? So I don't know, there are some
#
instances in which I feel satisfied with the storytelling and others in which I know it
#
did the job, but it isn't necessarily intellectually satisfying.
#
Yeah, that's that's really interesting in the sense that you seem to be saying that
#
there are therefore two imperatives that you can have as someone doing these stories. And
#
one is what you referred to in terms of doing the job that you're drawing the reader in
#
and making making whatever case you're putting forth compelling to the reader. And you're
#
doing that with the help of a story. But on the other hand, you seem to be implying that
#
that it also feels a little manipulative to you. Have I read that correctly?
#
Yes, absolutely. It does. And, and it also, because the sort of broader aim is to have
#
people respect the numbers for what they are and feel and sort of come at it as grownups,
#
you know, not that you are children who need to be led into it, and sort of a story being
#
dangled in front of you. And you know, I really resist this thing that people don't want to
#
read this people are not interested in data. If you look at the top most read stories in
#
anything, any website, it always shows Bollywood. That's what people want to read. I really
#
resist those theories. And I have never felt that in a newsroom. I also don't feel that
#
from my bubble of the people I speak to. So it doesn't just feel manipulative. It also
#
feels that I'm not being straight with people, you know, that I'm treating them as children
#
or someone who can't handle data. And I'm having to sort of sugarcoat it for them. And
#
maybe that's not what people want. Maybe they could have dealt with those numbers just straight
#
up. So I do know that the number one editorial feedback I get, and I imagine this happens
#
to a lot of people who work with data, is the phrase humanize, that you need to humanize
#
the numbers. And you know, I was recently rereading a book called Dataclysm, which was
#
written by one of the co founders of Okie Cupid. And in the book, he sort of has access
#
to a lot of it's a sort of book that you wish would be written now, because there's so much
#
richer consumer data. And in fact, that's a big area of data that's not made available
#
in India. So all of my data has that sort of old schoolness to it, because it doesn't
#
have data from an Amazon, for example, or Google or Facebook, all of which tells us
#
so much about modern India, but I don't have access to that data. So he had access to Okie
#
Cupid's and I think maybe Tinder had just or maybe there was match.com then, and a bit
#
of consumer data. And he uses that data to sort of come up with, you know, broad theories
#
around stated and revealed preferences about institutionalized racism, that sort of stuff,
#
you know, how much less likely people are to match or look for people of African American
#
men, for example, that sort of stuff. And he too grapples with this in the book, which
#
is that the standard way is to start with the story of the person, but he says, I'm
#
not going to do this, I'm going to let the data speak for itself. And that's, that's
#
a bold choice. And yeah, it's a it's a thought experiment too. It's worth thinking about
#
what what the book would have been like without these as well, which is being totally honest
#
to the data and where the stories needed that complication, bringing that in, but not otherwise
#
sort of very instrumentally thinking about humanize humanize, which is the feedback a
#
lot of people working with data always get. Yeah. And I think the danger like you mentioned
#
earlier about how a particular approach can become like a formula or a template. And in
#
that case, like if there is an approach, always start with a story, then that kind of humanizing
#
is actually dehumanizing in one way. And the other thing that kind of strikes me is that,
#
you know, when you start with a story, you might achieve the short term end of making
#
that particular piece that you're writing more compelling for the reader. But if your
#
long term aim is to inculcate not a specific narrative, but a specific attitude in the
#
reader that this is how I read data, this is my process of looking at this kind of work,
#
then you're not actually working towards them. You're taking them away from that by kind
#
of spoon feeding them. So would you say that's also the case?
#
Yeah. And I also think of this because I think one of the sort of imperatives around me working
#
in data and perhaps in a way also the growth of the data journalism field in India came
#
in some ways as a response to political reporting, because forget party political reporting,
#
which anyway is, you know, an embarrassment. Even electoral reporting, the typical sort
#
of formula was to parachute into a constituency and speak to three people and say that this
#
is how this one will vote, that one will vote. And the idea was that data can take you some
#
steps away from that and you're being a bit more faithful to what the broader trend is
#
rather than just the three people you chose to speak to under the people tree are saying.
#
But if I go back to bringing in a story, then am I essentially going back to that, which
#
is that I'm bringing in the one person that I chose to speak to? Sure, I can reassure
#
myself that this is a person who is sort of either an archetype or an outlier in the data
#
and that is why they have been chosen. Yeah, but again, that's the thing that I grapple
#
with, which is, am I then going back to exactly what I was trying to resist in electoral reporting
#
by this sort of manipulative formula and all of the highly subjective choices that it involves.
#
And you refer to data clism that got me to thinking about another book by Seth Stephens
#
Rabidovitz called Everybody Lies. Have you read it? So Yes. Everybody Lies is basically
#
what he does in it is he looks at search data because his premise, which I kind of agree
#
with is that people are most truly themselves when they are searching for things on the
#
internet because nobody's watching them and therefore there's no filter. And he got obviously
#
anonymized search data from Google and I think some others and he found really interesting
#
things about it from there. Like for example, the one that kind of blew me away, which I
#
could not figure out, which just completely blindsided me was that if you look at the
#
Google search, the number, like when you type out a particular phrase, a Google search will
#
auto complete it for you by country. So you know what the popular auto completes are.
#
And if you type my husband wants dot dot dot, the most popular auto complete in India is
#
my husband wants me to breastfeed him. And the second most is my husband wants me to
#
breastfeed his friends. And there is this obsession with, you know, breastfeeding, which
#
is quote, four times higher in India and Bangladesh than in any other country in the world. Stop
#
quote. And I could not for the life of me understand that or even come out with a candid
#
explanation for this. But what this and what a lot of other counterintuitive insights in
#
that book kind of told me is that we know nothing. We think we know so much, but you
#
just take a slightly closer look at data. And we really know nothing about what people
#
are like. And it also struck me again there. And I thought of asking you about this because
#
it struck me that a lot of the data you're working with is kind of, you know, government
#
agencies are coming up with data. Private agencies are coming up with data. It's data
#
that's out there. You know, a lot of it is data that's, you know, all these national
#
surveys and all that. There are sampling issues. There are issues of how do you frame the question?
#
How do you present the question? And it seems to me that with these private companies, which
#
are like, our lives are so embedded within them, or rather they are so embedded in the
#
way we live our lives, that a lot of you don't need to ask anything or look for a sample.
#
There is just so much rich data that is so indicative. So, you know, what are your thoughts
#
on this? Do you think in the future you'll be looking at such data more and more? Do
#
you already look at such data?
#
The example, first of all, made me think of the other sort of non-data place that you
#
get in a window into how people really think and which always makes you feel like that's
#
what people are thinking, which is this Mahindra Vatsa's sex questions column in Mumbai Mirror.
#
I think it used to be on midday.
#
No, no, it used to be in Mumbai Mirror. And recently I was clearing out my dad's house
#
of all his books and all of that. And somewhere I found old magazines from the 1960s. And
#
I came across this excellent feature on Mahindra Vatsa from a 1992 issue of Fantasy. Do you
#
It was like Debonair. It was one of those Indian soft porn magazines. And there was actually
#
a picture of Mahindra Vatsa in that when he was young, which leads you to the realization
#
that he was once young.
#
Yeah, so that's the, I mean, very similar question. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read
#
a breastfeeding question multiple times in that column as well. So there's really, there's
#
something going on there for sure, which of course Mahindra Vatsa has captured. Yeah,
#
so there's a few in the defense of old school data, I would say that there are some things
#
that well done household surveys can capture that you would imagine, you know, that they're
#
too sort of old school to get at otherwise, you know, just the very fact that we have
#
data on, and I'm sure it's under estimations, but we have data from household surveys on
#
the experience of physical and sexual violence in women's lives from a government survey.
#
This comes from the National Family Health Survey, which is definitely one of the hardest
#
questions to ask. And the fact that, you know, overtime enumerators have been trained to
#
ask that question and get some estimates at least, which are far in excess of what reported
#
data is. So at least that shows you while those might be underestimates, they at least
#
take our understanding of officially reported data forward. So I would have some defense
#
of these sort of surveys. I'd also say that there's a couple of privately done surveys,
#
including the India Human Development Survey, which will now soon have its new round, as
#
well as the LOC surveys that were done a few years ago, which do do things like ask questions
#
about, you know, the experience and the practice of caste based practices of attitudes to gender,
#
which are, which are ones that, you know, they're difficult questions and they do get
#
the, and again, triangulating data takes you forward, which is like, you might say that
#
jobs is the number one thing you're voting for. However, if you're simultaneously also
#
saying as people do in the LOC survey that 45% of respondents would want an MP of the
#
same caste, it goes to say something about your sort of caste-less response that you
#
want, you're voting for jobs alone. And by putting those sources of data together, you
#
do get at something more. In the sort of final writing of the book, I made some final pushes
#
to getting data from some of these, some of these companies that have so much of our data
#
now. I will say, first of all, I didn't get it. I will say a couple of things. One is
#
that these are not nationally representative sources of data because, you know, if you
#
are online in India, you're much likely to be male, Hindu, upper caste, all of those
#
things. Of course they can be corrected and it's only going to get more representative
#
as time goes by, but you know, these aren't sort of, they, they do not yet replace broad
#
national surveys for these reasons. I find it very worrying that the only data that comes
#
out from them is so heavily curated. It comes like literally as a press release. You'll
#
never really get data from, from any of those. And when I, I suppose when I see a data clism
#
or another booklet that you think that perhaps in other countries, they are beginning to
#
sort of give some of this anonymized data out, at least in a very specific way to some
#
people who they can be largely sure will not have terrible things to say. So people have
#
asked me if I feel that just as I make demands of the government to do a better job in putting
#
out data, if there should be a greater movement towards asking these companies to do a better
#
job of putting out anonymized data. And I don't know. I mean, I would love it. I would
#
love to have access to it and use it and talk more about it. But I think that ship of entitlement
#
to them has sailed long ago for all sorts of things. So it's a pretty faint hope right
#
now that, that, that me or other researchers will get this data in any sort of fair and,
#
you know, no strings attached fashion to use. So yeah, I do feel like I'm missing out on
#
a lot by not being able to even just any one of them, either Google or Facebook, if I had
#
more access to the data, there's a lot I would love to say. Occasionally there's some sources,
#
you know, some data that I've used in the past, for example, from ad preferences, because
#
Facebook based on your activity plots you into some ad categories. And then, so it's
#
interesting to think of what Facebook thinks of you. And through that, I was able to get,
#
you know, some sort of some, they even classify you as liberal or conservative. And then
#
you can, you can see where maybe put out the, I had written something about how you can
#
go about figuring whether Facebook thinks you're liberal or not and see it for yourself.
#
And then I had got some sort of summary statistics on what, how they classified the majority
#
of the country. But yeah, not, not got much further than that. And let me just like put
#
out a fond hope into the ether, which is that if anonymized data could be put out, there's,
#
there is so much that people in the journalistic and research fraternities could use to say
#
about the way the country is changing. And if, if someone reads the book and feels that
#
it has a, you know, more sort of state data, old fashioned bias and would like to know
#
more about the new India, then, then these people should just share more of the data.
#
It doesn't have, it doesn't, you know, it, it can be pretty agnostic in that, in that
#
respect. So yeah, I'd love to, I'd really love to have more access to this data. And
#
my fear is that it's going to be sort of given in curated fashion to, to people who they
#
think, you know, people in the pink press or someone who they think will do like the
#
job that they want them to do off it. So yeah, not much hope, but I would love to have it.
#
Yeah, no, I mean, and just thinking about, you know, we of course have to ask the government
#
for data because, you know, they're supposed to be our servants. We are entitled to that.
#
That's not exactly the case with these big companies because it's voluntary association.
#
But if I was running one of these companies, I would on my own give as much anonymized
#
data as I could, not just to researchers or to, you know, specific professions, but just
#
put it out there because who knows what some 18 year old kid using the data in a creative
#
way could find, which could in one way be life saving for people, which could, you know,
#
just provide so many insights. So if, you know, senior people from any of those companies
#
are listening to this, kindly give all your data to Rukmini and me.
#
APIs for all that, that really should be what we ask of them.
#
APIs for all. Can this ever be a popular movement? Who knows? Last year, people were waving copies
#
of the preamble out in the streets. So maybe APIs for all could also be a rallying cry.
#
Let's kind of now get onto your first chapter. Now, I was very intrigued by like number one,
#
I love all your 10 chapters and how they tackle different aspects of what we believe, what
#
we eat, how much we earn, where we spend, all of that. But you started with how India
#
tangles with cops and courts and specifically with the problem of rape, which I found fascinating.
#
And this in fact was, had the most counterintuitive insights for me. And of course, I should know
#
this if for no other reason than you actually spoke about it in the last conversation we
#
did together. But despite that, just reading about it again and reading about it in the
#
granular detail that you laid out was sort of a revelation for me. And of course, you
#
begin the chapter with the story of Seema and Sameer, you know, young people fall in
#
love and they run away and then the family catches them, take the girl back, they file
#
a case against a boy and that becomes a rape and kidnapping case. And then you go on to
#
say, quote, official statistics often misreport non-criminal activity as crime, intentionally
#
use wrong sections of the law to book some crimes and significantly under count a vast
#
range of typically non-violent crime, stop code. And it's eye-opening because not only
#
does it teach us that we need to look at rape statistics differently, that not all is as
#
it seems on the surface, but it also tells me that the greatest source of violence against
#
women is actually their own families of birth and not necessarily strangers and people who
#
abducted them. And it also kind of in another very counterintuitive way shows you that the
#
laws that came after Nirbhaya, like in 2012, the harsh rape laws that came and then the
#
stringent amendment in 2013, actually in many cases had unintended consequences which made
#
life worse for women. So this whole chapter to me is, you know, completely eye-opening.
#
So tell me about how you started sort of questioning the obvious, intuitive, common assumptions
#
about the subject that are there and how you gradually got deeper and deeper into the story
#
and discovered all that you did.
#
Yeah, so it comes back to Bombay, which is that when my first four years working in journalism
#
were in Bombay and all newspapers and I don't know if they have them the same way at the
#
time, but all newspapers had a day shift and a night shift reporter. So when you were on
#
the night shift, your job was to come into office and imagine what pleasure that was
#
on the locals to be coming in at four o'clock to office. Then you ordered yourself a lovely
#
meal from Pratap lunch home in town. And then you had to be on the phone with cops and the
#
fire stations every hour on the hour and ask them what was going on and sort of hope against
#
hope that a crime would be committed somewhere in the city and you would have something to
#
do that day. And yeah, it became, you know, it became important also to develop sources,
#
to become chatty with people. At that time, I used to use my full name, which is my last
#
name is Srinivasan, which is a very Tamil sounding name, thanks to my father. But since
#
I grew up in Pune and my mother's Maharashtrian, I speak Marathi. So the cops would always
#
be struck with this sort of contrast between my name and my Marathi. So that would usually
#
sort of start a conversation. Then there would always be a photographer assigned with us
#
at the time and they all had bikes. So sometimes we'd just say, OK, let's just go to like
#
Dn Nagar and of the happening police stations where a lot of crime happens and see if something
#
comes up. So you end up spending hours there around police stations. You end up spending
#
a lot of time with crime reporters who do this all day, in fact, and, you know, have
#
great stories. And you see how police stations operate. You see the sort of backstory behind
#
a family coming to the police station. You see the process that an FIR, that getting
#
the FIR down on paper requires all of that. And so you can't anymore see an FIR as a
#
straight statement of fact. And so one of the things that happened in 2012, I lived
#
in Delhi at the time, and I too found, I found the city aggressive. Having lived in Western
#
India most of my life, I found it aggressive. I was very unnerved by how few working women
#
I saw out on the street. I was so used to in Bombay, seeing this huge army of women
#
get off the ladies' compartment with you. Even at four o'clock, they'd all be heading
#
into work. Or at one when you were heading back on the last local, there'd be nurses,
#
you know, happily alone in the train. So I did sense all of that about Delhi and it did
#
scare me in those ways. But what I felt that I was seeing in the news after 2012 didn't
#
seem to have a sort of direct grounding in reality. And I knew that a lot of this was
#
sort of uncritical reproduction of FIRs. I could tell even in the language that was being
#
used that although these were probably in Hindi and I was more used to Rati FIRs, you
#
could tell the sort of scripting that was going on in the writing of those. And I wanted
#
just for myself to try and figure out something more than what the NCRB data, which is a collection
#
of FIRs, could alone tell me. And I just, you know, want to reiterate that by no means
#
is judicial data a sort of, you know, ultimate end. It just takes you one step further than
#
police statistics. So I don't want to give a sort of veneer of scientific certainty to
#
what I was able to find from this, just a little more than what the FIR tells you. And
#
I started, I thought that the best way to do this would be to look at one calendar year
#
of sexual assault trials in Delhi's district courts, because then that would tell me a
#
little more than what, and sort of try and trace the journey from the FIR to what ended
#
up happening at the end of the court case. And at that time, I found many in the judicial
#
system quite easy to talk to. I could speak to public prosecutors and cops. And I even
#
found judges quite keen to speak then, partly because they were getting such a bad rap for
#
low conviction rates. So they were very keen to sort of explain their process and show
#
me the evidence that was coming in front of them and sort of ask me in this, you know,
#
very wrong tones, would you be able to convict someone on the basis of this? Of course, not
#
to say that they didn't, many of them have extremely misogynist and patriarchal views
#
themselves. So there is that element to it as well. And yeah, so the minute I began to
#
see this sort of story coming in again and again, which parents going to all sorts of
#
lengths to recover couples who had had, who had run away, who had eloped essentially, and
#
that both, both rape and kidnapping, IPC sections were the ones being used there. Having seen
#
it happen repeatedly and with the same script, I could see what was happening there. I then
#
did the same process for Mumbai and also for Madhya Pradesh. And then, you know, it became
#
pretty clear to me that, and you know, I didn't even need to do all of that. You literally
#
needed to speak to like two cops, one judge, and two women's rights activists. And they
#
all said, yes, this is what we're seeing again. I recently spoke with a bunch of people doing
#
legal work. And some of them, lawyers too, said how they were so used to while waiting
#
for their own cases to come up, seeing this sort of case, usually a bail application come
#
up. So they too knew how common this was in the courts. I think this is one of those cases
#
in which I sort of grappled with the knowledge that what was coming out from this data didn't
#
necessarily support my sort of worldview. And it made me worry that it was a sort of,
#
that it was traitorous to the feminist cause to be saying these things. But the more I
#
sat with it, the more I, first of all, I knew that this has to be told. And also I could
#
see that I was worried that this would add to the narrative of most rape cases are actually
#
false cases foisted on men. But that isn't exactly what it was. I mean, there was false
#
cases being foisted on both men and women. The men were the accused and I don't want
#
to minimise at all what they went through. The women were also being put in government
#
shelter homes, often subjected to violence, forced abortions, all sorts of horrific behaviour
#
being enacted on them by their parents. So yeah, having seen this trend repeated across
#
the jurisdiction, seeing it in the data and on the ground, I felt like this is something
#
that really needs to be told that the view of the country, of our own safety, the limits
#
that we are placing on ourselves, the comparisons between areas and states that we're making
#
based on this data is very damaging. And I agree that a lot of what has happened in the
#
legal sphere since 2012 has also been deeply damaging for women. It's damaging for all
#
of the male accused and what they have gone through and their families. It's also been
#
damaging, I think, for the agency of women and for all of their freedoms. And I look
#
back with a lot of sense of collective shame in the conversation that happened post 2012
#
and a feeling of failure that we could not lower the volume on the way the discussion
#
was happening then, whether it was in terms of making stricter laws, also in terms of
#
removing discretion from judges, which is one of the things that happened then. And
#
the sort of reporting around it then was that judges were being patriarchal and telling
#
people, oh, just get married to each other. The reason that was happening is because these
#
were people in relationships. And the judge was trying to protect the man from a statutory
#
rape sentence and instead saying, okay, as soon as she's 18, you can get married. And
#
that discretion was removed. That, I think, was extremely damaging. I think the raising
#
of the age of consent of women from 16 to 18 was deeply damaging because what it has
#
ended up doing is criminalizing teenage sexual relationships. And this is something that
#
work by the lawyer and activist Bharti Ali of Huck has repeatedly shown has been a big
#
problem with POCSO cases in Mumbai that they looked at, which is that there too they found
#
that a very large and growing share of POCSO cases were again consenting teenage relationships.
#
So that's again, you know, and these things are very hard to undo. I mean, who is going
#
to lower the age of consent for women in the country? That's gone now. That's not going
#
to, that's unfixable now, you know. And once you set those bar, it really became competitive.
#
Like, you know, then who was going to argue for the death penalty? Who was going to argue
#
for minimum sentences of 10 years? And, you know, state governments have gone on to make
#
even harsher laws themselves say that there should be a death penalty in POCSO cases where
#
again, now that we know that there's so much teenage sexual activity that's being criminalized
#
under POCSO. So yeah, I think it was a truly damaging period. I mean, a lot of good came
#
about it in terms of keeping the rights of women to public spaces at the center of it.
#
You know, Kavita Krishnan, who you've had on and who has led a lot of this championing
#
the right of women to public spaces in Delhi, for example. That was an important conversation.
#
And I think feminists like her kept the sexual and other agency of women central to the issue
#
instead of allowing others to convert it into a hide women more, keep them out of colleges,
#
keep them out of workforce sort of sentiment. It's because of them that it didn't go in
#
that direction entirely. But yeah, I do, I feel very regretful of what has happened in
#
the legal space since 2012 and a bit of sort of collective shame that we all allowed it
#
to happen on our watch and we weren't able to persuade MPs well enough that these were
#
very bad and damaging laws to be passing. And again, I want to, you know, reiterate
#
that none of this is sort of agnostic to other factors. And the sharp edge of all of this
#
is the rampant and growing Islamophobia in this country. And the sharp edge of these
#
laws is going to hang over Muslims the most. And one of the things that I saw in the data
#
then itself was that it was particularly a problem in inter-caste and inter-religious
#
marriages. And I cannot but see how there's going to be an increase in the number of Muslim
#
accused in these sorts of cases because it gives people seeking to go after inter-caste
#
and inter-religious marriages yet another sort of tool with the veneer of legality.
#
So yeah, we've done so much damage to the agency and the sexual agency of young people
#
in the last, in the nearly 10 years since the Delhi attack.
#
Yeah, and I want to quickly summarize for my listeners some of what I found so eye-opening
#
and insightful. One is you examined rape cases in Delhi, Bombay. In one of your studies you
#
found that out of 460 cases, as many as 189, quote, dealt with cases involving or allegedly
#
involving consenting adults. A majority of these 174 out of the 189 cases involved couples
#
like Seema and Sameer who seem to have eloped, after which parents usually of the woman filed
#
complaints of abduction and rape with the police. Many of them involved inter-caste
#
or inter-religious relationships. And this is problematic for a number of reasons. Like
#
for example, you talk about the 2012 laws and the result of that, and you talk about
#
how even if the couple could subsequently prove that the woman was 18 at the time, the
#
family, by using that provision, that the age of consent thing, would have gotten the
#
couple separated, the male partner arrested, and the woman either back in her parent's
#
custody or in a state-run shelter home. So most of these FIRs, as you've pointed out,
#
would say the young woman was between 15 and 18 and the court would have to decide. And
#
in the 2013 amendment took away the discretion of judges there. So even if judges were sympathetic,
#
they could not do anything about it, and as you point out, quote, the move placed young
#
men in romantic relationships with young women in the same category as pedophiles, stop quote.
#
And the other aspect that you point out in your book is because one of the Nirbhaya rapists
#
was a juvenile and people were shocked. You know, there was a law that they could be tried
#
as adults, you know, made with that particular boy in mind who was so brutal. And the result
#
of that, as you point out, is quote, if a 17-year-old boy indulges in a consensual sexual
#
act with a 15 and a half-year-old girl, he can now be tried as an adult for rape and
#
kidnapping in a court which will have no option but to sentence him to a minimum of 10 years
#
in prison, stop quote. And the keywords here are consensual sexual act and the court will
#
have no option, which, you know, makes the whole situation completely bizarre. And what
#
I was also struck by is this para which I'll read out where you talk about where the real
#
violence on women is coming from, where you write, quote, in case after case, as well
#
as in interviews with me, the behavior of the families of these young consenting women
#
was shocking. They arrived at the hotel or friend's house a couple had eloped to and
#
dragged them home. They beat and even injured the couple, in one case breaking the young
#
woman's spine. They threatened their own daughters and nieces with acid. They forced them to
#
submit to invasive medical tests and in many cases even to an abortion. Young women deposed
#
about the suffering they faced at the hands of their parents, beatings, confinements,
#
threats, being forced to undergo medical examinations, being forced to undergo abortions. Even as
#
they pleaded before the court, they'd be allowed to stay with their husbands. There
#
are undoubtedly crimes taking place against the women here, but not the ones that are
#
being prosecuted by the state. Stop quote. I have a couple of questions here and the
#
first one here is this, that were you able to report this and be taken seriously because,
#
partly because you were a woman? Because I imagine if any male reporter had spoke, you
#
know, made the case that these laws aren't working and whatever or tried to argue on
#
any of these grounds that many of these rape cases aren't rape, you know, that, you know,
#
they could be accused of having an agenda. They could be accused of, you know, being
#
quote unquote men's rights campaigners and so on and so forth. So, you know, did your
#
being a woman who was, who also had credibility as a serious journalist, did that make it
#
easier for you? And what was, you know, you mentioned somewhere at the start of this episode
#
that the feminists engaged with these ideas seriously and they took it into account and
#
they were willing to reconsider their notions. But how much pushback was there at the start?
#
And like you said, you know, you can't put the genie back in the bottle. And even now
#
we have this whole thing about the marriage age of women being raised to 21, which in
#
context of what you, you know, the sum of the data you have here on what in any case
#
are the age at which women are getting married, it just makes no sense. You're just, you know,
#
changing the law as an act of posturing or whatever it is. So, you know, tell me about
#
your experience with kind of reporting this and so on.
#
So, on the first question of, I'm just going to jump in with one sort of modification,
#
which is that the juvenile in the Nirbhaya case, the media reporting decided that he
#
was the most brutal and that is that, you know, led a lot of the push towards these
#
changes in laws that dealt with juvenile offenders. But subsequent reporting by journalists who
#
accessed, you know, the juvenile board decisions and that sort of stuff. And, you know, these
#
are, of course, degrees of violence. They were all convicted. And so let's all accept
#
that they did all commit the crime. But the singling out of him as the most brutal with
#
some of the media did, did not necessarily have basis in fact. And I strongly believe
#
that part of the reason for that is because he was, is Muslim. That aspect was released
#
to the media and, you know, used repeatedly. You will even see it on social media. It's
#
still used. So, while it might feel like a particularly gruesome thing to be comparing
#
the degrees of brutality of men who were convicted for a crime put to death, some of them for
#
a crime in which a young woman was, you know, horribly assaulted and murdered. It does matter
#
to me that gruesome distinction because of the weaponization of that evidence, quote
#
unquote evidence, and because of what that did in the propaganda towards changing juvenile
#
laws. So, you know, since I know the consideration with which your listeners approach an argument
#
and, you know, from the beginning of the end to it, which is why I even feel able to sort
#
of make this point because it is not a point that you can, you know, you can, you can jump
#
the gun and you can sort of misinterpret this entirely. But this is something that does
#
need to be said. I do, I think often that sometimes that being a woman helps me with
#
some aspects of reporting, partly because our socialization expects sensitivity, kindness
#
and an ability to listen from women. And that's helpful when it, when it's a journalist,
#
because you know, people do feel that you're going to respond like this, then, then that's
#
great. I also think it is possible that a male journalist writing this might have faced
#
some pushback. But I would like to believe that my fairness in accessing and reporting
#
the data is what led to it being taken seriously. And again, this is one of those cases in which
#
I made all of the summary data publicly available. I was at the Hindu at the time and my spreadsheet
#
in which I had sort of coded all of the data, we put it up online. And as far as I know,
#
it's still sort of publicly available. So I would like to think that all of those processes
#
led to why it was taken seriously. I think more, more than pushback against it was my
#
fear of there being pushback against it. But because I do think that anyone with any sort
#
of grassroots or ground level connect had encountered this already and was already worried
#
about what was being done to young people. So, you know, all of the feminists who are
#
feminist lawyers who I spoke to all of whom, you know, deal with these things, they were
#
very admiring of the effort taken to get this point out that it wasn't just being done
#
on the basis of one or two cases. And I had spent all of this time on it and felt that
#
this was something they were seeing. I was, however, sort of quietly cautioned by a couple
#
of feminists to think hard about how what I was writing would be taken and then whether
#
it was something that I should do. And of course, I did do it. So in that way, it did
#
remind me that when these sort of narratives are complicated, then not everybody feels
#
comfortable with that. One thing that did happen and probably continues to happen is
#
that there is a subset of people who use this study to say that the large majority of rape
#
cases in this country are actually false cases. I would not characterize this study as saying
#
that. And at some point, I have to absolve myself of, you know, the guilt of feeling
#
that this is what people are doing with it. I think in the initial days, I probably even
#
responded to each person who said that by saying this is what it's actually showing.
#
But the advantage of feeling that I did a sort of fair job of it is that I don't feel
#
obliged to continually defend the piece of work for it. And again, I feel thankful that
#
I was able to do it at the Hindu at the time, which let me do it over three parts that ran
#
on consecutive days, as well as put all of this data online. So I didn't have to compress
#
all that I was saying, I could see it in its full to its full extent, I put out a lot of
#
stories of the people that you know, this was going on. So I was able to put all of
#
that out. And you know, when you were reading that portion about the violence that women
#
underwent, one of the things that it made me also think about is that we talk often
#
about the stigma of rape, and what that means in terms of filing complaints. And of course,
#
it's it's absolutely a fact is borne out, you know, by all sorts of other things. And
#
anyone will, anyone who has been through it will tell you all of the terrible sort of
#
questioning in court that they've had to face that sort of thing. But I do also want
#
to make the point that there is that the stigma of your daughter choosing her own partner
#
can in some instances be even greater than the stigma of having a rape case associated
#
with your family, which is what all of these families were demonstrating that that was
#
a shame that they could not tolerate. Because people asked me this, how would they do this
#
when they have the stigma of a rape case, you know, in their family, but, you know,
#
agency was the most dangerous thing of all. And that was the thing that that in any sort
#
of form had to be pushed back against. And yeah, when you when you talk about the raising
#
of the age of marriage, I have been thinking about this a lot for the last couple of days.
#
And I find it I find it a little hard to place myself on one side or the other of the debate,
#
which is because I think one of the things that's happened, and I find this through
#
conversations is that the age of marriage being 18 means that many families feel that
#
let let the girl complete high school, because anyway, she needs to do something till she's
#
17. You don't want her just being at home alone in the vasti early, you know, let her
#
and then she'll get married the next year, it will take that much time to set everything
#
up. Maybe this will be a case of norm setting in which the normal then be set that she can't
#
get married officially till she's 21. So let her go to college anyway, you know, BA colleges
#
are a dime a dozen, it's not necessarily expensive. It could be a case that that that
#
norm setting changes. However, what it means in terms of the weaponization of the law,
#
particularly again, against inter caste or inter religious couples involving Muslims,
#
which is where I feel, you know, this, the sharpest edge of this will be felt. That's
#
a big problem. But in and of itself, whether raising the age of marriage to 21, if your
#
aim is to set a norm that will encourage or force families to send girls to college, I
#
feel agnostic on that part of it, because I do think that there is a role for norm setting
#
through through laws that that exists. Yeah, and it's interesting. I mean, later in your
#
book, you also speak about early marriages, where you're referring to the marriage age
#
of 18. And you write quote, a quarter of newly married young women got married before the
#
legal age and more than 10% of women had a child while still a minor. But overall, both
#
men and women have been getting married later and later, nearly half of married women now
#
in their 40s were married by the time they were 18. But among women currently in the
#
early 20s, that proportion is down to just 25%. Stop quote. And what that seems to indicate
#
is that the setting of the norm itself may be a lagging indicator in the sense that society
#
is already changing and you're setting a law later, in which case I'm kind of, again, agnostic
#
about that. I don't think you would be able to change society by setting a law in a top
#
down kind of way and hoping so social norms change, but your data indicates are already
#
changing. Right, but the norm setting of the age of marriage at 18 happened a long time
#
ago. So it's not entirely clear that that, that that is a lagging indicator. In fact,
#
you could argue that that is what set the norm for these processes to take place in
#
society, though I don't think that that's true. I do think that as people get richer
#
and better educated, these are natural processes. And you know, you see it in the case of fertility,
#
for example, nobody has needed to do anything in India except for allow states to get richer,
#
allow women better access to education and health. And then for perfectly rational reasons,
#
everyone has limited their family size when health outcomes for women and for babies improve.
#
And in fact, what we have seen in states where there have been either financial incentives
#
or coercive measures, like not allowing people to contest local body elections, is that this
#
has worsened the sex ratio. So you have had horrible unintended consequences. So again,
#
you know, so all of this is a great argument against setting a two child law because these
#
processes are anyway happening. And setting laws can have these sort of dangerous consequences.
#
So that is the argument that I could extend to the 21 years of age, which is that these
#
things will happen anyway. And you know, putting in place a law just gives people a stick with
#
which to beat Muslims further. So as I said, I feel like I can argue this both ways I don't
#
I feel a bit agnostic about it.
#
Yeah, in fact, earlier you also speak about how a lot of these laws are being used for
#
purposes of fighting love jihad. Like you speak about how, you know, a Muslim man was
#
arrested for meeting a Hindu girl on a pizza date, right? And much as sugar is poison,
#
you know, and carbs are not good for you, pizza date should not be criminalized in that
#
matter. And again, you wrote the quote, once again, there is a crime taking place here,
#
just not the one that is being reported. Stop quote. Now I have a couple of questions for
#
you coming from this. And one of them is that, how much do you find that attitude of women
#
being the property of men still persists? Like a lot of it was even hard coded in our
#
laws, like the adultery law was struck down, I think a couple of years back, and which
#
was of course, part of the IPC, which came from the British, but it also, I think embodied
#
a common Indian attitude. And what the law said was, quote, whoever has sexual intercourse
#
with a person who is and whom he knows, or has reason to believe to be the wife of another
#
man without the consent or connivance of that man, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, therefore indicating
#
that if you want to have sex with a woman, the consent of her owner is needed, whether
#
it be father or man. And, you know, and there are other laws in the IPC, like 408, you know,
#
enticing or taking away or detaining with criminal intent a married woman, which are
#
exactly like that. And it seems to me that a lot of even these kind of cases, you know,
#
like you pointed out that even though people don't want to admit to rape because it carries
#
a social stigma, at the same time, they don't want to admit also to their daughter running
#
away with someone else, you know, and that also carries a stigma. And it's like someone
#
stole your property from you, which is, you know, seems to be driving so much of this
#
love jihad hatred as well. It's not only the other, but the other is taking away something
#
that kind of belongs to you. And in your later chapter on how India thinks and believes and
#
all of that, one of the things that you've, there's lots of pretty stunning data on, is
#
that India is not just conservative, in the words you use, but I'd also say in many ways
#
regressive, that many women also have these attitudes that it is okay for their husband
#
to beat them and to discipline them and all of that. So do you find that these are also
#
kind of gradually changing in different ways? And obviously, I'm not necessarily just asking
#
about this from a data point of view, but as a journalist point of view that, you know,
#
you've been around spoken to people, what's your sense?
#
So there's no greater example of this consideration of women as property than the fact that a
#
marriage exception exists in India's rape laws, where if it's okay, and especially given
#
that we know from household surveys, that 97.7, nearly 98% of the sexual violence women
#
faces from their husbands. So if you feel in this country that you have to do something
#
about sexual violence, but you are not criminalizing the vast majority of actual sexual violence,
#
precisely because you believe that within marriage, whatever you do is fine. I mean,
#
there's no greater example of this property aspect than the fact that this absolutely
#
unconscionable law continues to exist in India. It's such a massive national shame that we
#
still have this. So the violence and the disciplining of women indicator is, I think, one indicator
#
that has over time shown some decline. And I do think that going forward, that is something
#
we are going to see some change in. I also think in terms of what people feel that it's
#
acceptable to say, either in the media or to surveyors, I do see the needle shifting
#
in terms of what it's acceptable to say about women.
#
So if you see sort of across the board, right leaning, left leaning media outrage about
#
something an MP says, you'll usually see it about something they say about women. There
#
is a bit of unity in terms of you can't say this. There is absolutely not that unity when
#
it comes to saying Islamophobic things. The majority now of television media, for example,
#
Hindi media for sure, and a lot of English media as well, will not push back against
#
an MP saying something or a prime minister saying something Islamophobic. So I do think
#
that there has been some needle shifting in terms of what people feel it's okay to say.
#
The worrying one is when it comes to labour force participation and sort of economic participation
#
as such. And I was on a conversation recently in which the political scientist Milan Vaishnav
#
was on this. And he had a question to ask of me from the data to which I don't have
#
a great response, but I have been thinking about it, which is that he says that my data
#
shows this impressive sort of political empowerment of women that has happened, you know, all
#
of the almost all of the increase in voter turnout in the last 30 years has come exclusively
#
through women. Male voter turnout has not really moved much. So if you do believe that
#
this is a political empowerment of women that they do feel, you know, they have been made
#
to feel part of the political process in that respect, and even the physical act of actually
#
coming out to vote, why is this not translating into economic empowerment? Why are we not
#
seeing labour force participation numbers improve? And my sort of broad feeling is that
#
norm shifting in terms of not feeling that the home is your primary responsibility and
#
work is what you get to do on the side before you have kids, that norm shifting has not
#
happened. But that's not a full answer, because why has that not happened if we are
#
not able to, if we have had this sort of political empowerment? So I'd say at least in terms
#
of what a lot of people feel that it's acceptable to say about women, that that is something
#
that has changed. We are still a country in which a majority of people feel that it's
#
okay to say that inter-caste and inter-religious marriage should never happen. But I don't
#
think that now it's okay to say that women should never do paid work. The majority don't
#
feel that that's okay to say or that women shouldn't have the right to speak up, that
#
sort of thing. So why that hasn't translated into economic empowerment and participation
#
has in some ways as much to say about the economy as it is about what's happening within
#
homes and what it means in terms of the jobs that we are able to offer women and the economist
#
Ashwini Deshpande and the demographer and scientist Sonal Desai, for example, have been
#
arguing of late that we need to think harder about supply side factors when it comes to
#
jobs for women. My sense is still that social norms around working is the biggest barrier
#
and that's the part that's not shifted. If I do see some needle having moved, I would
#
say this is probably the one at least in terms of what is acceptable to say that I do feel
#
Yeah, and I also recorded an episode a couple of a week back, in fact, which Rana Bhattacharya,
#
the World Bank economist who's written an excellent book, which is not about Shah Rukh
#
Khan, even though it might seem like that from the cover, where she, you know, in her
#
book, she gives four reasons for why women's participation in the workforce has gone down.
#
But by the time we discussed it in the episode, that became six reasons. So that was a great
#
episode, which I'll link from the show notes. And again, to underscore what you said about
#
women as property and marital rape, that effectively means that 98% of sexual violence committed
#
against women in this country is legal.
#
Yes, it means exactly that.
#
That is such a mind blowing statement. That is, you know, it should be on billboards because
#
that is just completely nuts. My other question is this, so you haven't written about it in
#
your book, you've written about love and marriage, but not about sex. And I once asked a friend
#
of mine, you know, with how many in his estimate, how many people has the median Indian man
#
had sex with? And I don't think he understood my question properly, because he said 1.6.
#
But one of the things that kind of strikes me when I think about many of the problems
#
in our society is, I wonder how many of them are because of the sexual repression of men.
#
Like even a lot of the data in Everybody Lies, the book we were discussing, Seth Lieffen's
#
Rebidobits, I wish he had a shorter name, kind of indicate the sexual frustrations and
#
even perversities of men, who are we to judge? And how much of this anger and resentment
#
comes from there? Like, you align this with the notion that women are our property. And
#
you know, you put that together with the fact that young Indian men are not getting enough
#
action for whatever reason. And how much of their resentment and anger comes from there?
#
I mean, do you have any thoughts on this? Have you, you know, does any of your data
#
have indications to this effect?
#
Yeah, so we definitely don't have great data about sex, but we do have some from a series
#
of surveys called the Demographic and Health Surveys that are done all over the world.
#
And I was just looking at the book to see if I have put it in. But, you know, one of
#
the things which I have used in other work that I've done around data around sex is
#
that Indians for the large part have sex after they get married. Their first experience of
#
sex is post marriage. And of course, there's got to be some amount of social acceptability
#
bias in what you tell surveyors. And sure, there's some of it that must be getting missed.
#
So if you agree, it's not 99%, but say 95% or 90% discounting for some of, you know,
#
not telling surveyors that. The data, the internationally comparable data shows that
#
Indian men have sex the latest of any country in the world. I think about this number quite
#
often. And I sometimes think about whether we aren't talking about this enough as a
#
country. And, you know, the last thing that I would feel comfortable theorizing about
#
is sexual violence, because it has, you know, complex roots. And I have in the past felt
#
very unhappy and uncomfortable even with people who locate it within things like, you know,
#
urban density, or poverty, or sort of past experiences of violence. I don't think that
#
these are direct explanations. And I don't feel very comfortable theorizing about that
#
in the least at all. But whether we are not, you know, even if the outcome that we're
#
talking about is not sexual violence, even if it is just for mental health, or just the
#
way you sort of deal with the world, we should probably be talking about the fact that Indian
#
men have their first sexual experience the latest of men in anywhere in the world. And
#
Indian women, it also corresponds very close to the age of marriage. So if we're talking
#
about norm setting, it's entirely possible that in a few years, the age of first experience
#
of sex for women too will rise considerably to levels that are much higher than in most
#
of the rest of the world. Of course, it's one more of those things just like I found
#
that, you know, I did end up thinking about whether data on marriage actually adequately
#
captures the world of love. I do similarly wonder about whether data on sex after marriage,
#
which is what most of our official surveys capture, because we do capture a lot of data
#
about sex, including how often people have sex, and you know, which is, you know, the
#
majority of Indians have had sex either within the last week or the last few weeks of national
#
surveys being conducted. It's actually quite amazing to me that we have all of this information.
#
And even if it, you know, misses a lot, the fact that we have a trained enumerator force
#
that's able to ask these questions and get some answer, whether it's, you know, semi
#
accurate or not, is one of those things that humbles you about Indian data. And this is
#
the National Family Health Survey that's been going on for five decades. You know, it's
#
not some sort of new source of data that's coming out now or an online survey or something
#
which you feel is the only way you will get these answers. So I do too wonder about what
#
we're missing about premarital sex just because of the nature of the types of surveys. You
#
know, if you're asking this question as part of the National Family Health Survey, you're
#
probably missing a lot of premarital sex. And again, we need to think of this hard not
#
just because of the lives of young people and their lives, their agency, their freedom
#
to live their lives as they want, but also because of what all of these, you know, repressive
#
new laws that are coming up are going to mean for all of this, you know, because if the
#
norm is being set that the age that sex is something you only have after marriage, and
#
then you raise the age of marriage, and then, you know, you feel comfortable in filing sexual
#
assault cases to anybody having sex before marriage. And what is the sort of legal mess
#
that we're creating for young people is something I worry about.
#
Yeah, and like I had, you know, I'm probably the only person to ever have been trolled
#
on Twitter with Urdu Shairi. I put out this playful tweet about how most of the Urdu poetry
#
was the entitled whining of incels. And of course, people threw examples at me of how
#
that's not the case. And we write towards social issues and all that. It was quite delightful.
#
That's a one time in my life. I'm glad that people responded to me with anger and they
#
expressed it in verse. Yeah, let's you know, and I'm also there's an anecdote a friend
#
of mine had told me when you know, back in our book in my poker playing days, we used
#
to travel to Macau, Philippines and all of that. And one of my friends got chatting with
#
sex workers. And those people told him that they will go with anyone but they're worried
#
about Indians because Indians are apparently the most incredibly violent. It's like in
#
their words, they've never seen a woman before. And that really makes me wonder. And I think
#
this is perhaps an underappreciated factor for all the anger that is out there among
#
our youth there and which need not be the case because you know, it's you know, Srinath
#
Perur has this book, if it's Tuesday, it must be a Madurai. And one of the it sort of follows
#
travels of Indians within the country and around the world. Delightful book absolutely
#
love it. You know, the journey with the varkaris is one of the most moving bits of writing
#
on modern India that I've read. And on one of his in one of the chapters, he goes with
#
a bunch of men, not all of them young men, some of them married to two, I think he intended
#
to go to Uzbekistan, but ends up in Thailand, as far as I remember, with a bunch of men
#
who are basically there on a holiday to have sex with sex workers. And he you know, in
#
the repression that he captures is so strong, that it's really terrifying to think of
#
what the sex workers are undergoing. He captures exactly the point that you've made in the
#
people he actually speaks to. So yeah, that that I immediately thought of that chapter
#
and nobody reading the chapter would feel anything but serious fear for the sex workers
#
these men have to encounter. Yeah. And typically, you'd imagine that sex has everything to
#
do with lust. And later you realize it has everything to do with power also. And here
#
it has a lot to do with anger also, which kind of really is so disturbing. And Srinath,
#
of course, is a translator of Gachar Gachar by Vivek Shanbhav, which is just one of my
#
favorite Indian novels of the last couple of decades, just a brilliant, brilliant book.
#
Now, I was also sort of struck by your section on crime statistics in India. Like, first
#
of all, you point out why it's important that, you know, accurate crime statistics
#
can help the police, you know, figure out how to allocate resources, where to handle
#
what kind of crime, comparative crime rates can spotlight regions where there is more
#
or less crime. And you can then start figuring out why why is something happening more in
#
one place than another. And also crime statistics help the public, in your words, quote, form
#
perceptions about a place's relative risks and take actions that might protect them.
#
Young women in Delhi, for instance, are more likely to choose colleges that do not need
#
them to take unsafe bus routes, even if they are of lower quality. Stop, quote. And you've
#
pointed out a lot of problems with crime statistics. For example, the principal offense rule, which
#
I find so interesting. And the principal offense rule basically is that a person might have
#
committed a crime that can be bracketed under various different heads, but only the main
#
one is taken and the rest are not taken because the police feel it will give an impression
#
that so many crimes were committed instead of just one. So, for example, in the Nirbhaya
#
case, you point out that the police, when they reported it, reported it as a murder,
#
not as a rape, everything else kind of, you know, kidnapping, rape, all of that just went
#
out of the window. So tell me a little bit about what else is wrong with the way that,
#
you know, crime statistics are recorded. And, you know, are people in positions of power
#
who can change this? Are they aware of it? What do they do to change it? What's happening
#
So I think the focus that that crime statistics began to get after 2012 was one was unlike
#
anything that had ever happened before. And the processes and methodologies have not sort
#
of responded well enough to this increased focus. But it did sort of make us look at
#
things that we should have been looking at a long time ago. We should have been looking
#
at the fine print of all of this a long time ago. The very fact that this principal offense
#
rule was not mentioned in their limitations and disclaimers before the report begins until
#
I wrote about it. And they wrote, they were very angry and, you know, wanted the Hindu
#
to issue a clarification and saying, this is how we do it. And there's nothing wrong
#
in it. But they had never thought to make it publicly known. And they did do that subsequently.
#
And of course, the explanation in it is that will artificially inflate the number of crimes
#
to which my answer is cross tabs. I mean, the whole world's statistics functions on
#
cross tabs. That's not a good enough explanation. And the other thing is, we also should be,
#
you know, their complaint is the NCRB report already runs into hundreds of pages and not
#
everything needs to be a PDF report. So, you know, we have accepted that we have NCRB statistics
#
only on the subset of IPC sections that the NCRB has decided we need to have information
#
about. There's the whole universe of IPC sections that we don't have data about. What is, since
#
they collect it, what is stopping them from just putting out the information on their
#
website in Excel for someone to download if they want that extra information. So, that
#
too is something that, you know, it's a sort of constriction of the data that we should
#
not be accepting. And I think a lot of the ways in which the data is collected and put
#
out is something that has escaped scrutiny for too long. So, at some point, I think between
#
2012 and 13, the NCRB decided to change the calculation of crimes against women as crimes
#
against women as the numerator and the denominator being the whole population to the denominator
#
being women alone. And they did that with it only being in the fine print of like one
#
chart. So, if you were plotting it on a chart and you just plotted that number over time,
#
you would see the sudden explosion and wonder what was going on without being told that
#
the denominator had been halved without any proper, you know, at least it merits a page
#
of explanation on why this happened. So, it's been opaque and impenetrable for very long.
#
It's bad. It's a bad sign that it continues like this, that we haven't built the public
#
pressure or the democratic pressure on the NCRB to get much better at what they do. I
#
think another problem with the NCRB is that people have these sort of pie in the sky wish
#
lists about what sort of data they'd like to get from the NCRB without the sort of basic
#
acknowledgement that the NCRB can only give you data on crimes for which there is a clearly
#
existing IPC section. So, we can't expect to have data on lynchings, for example, because
#
there isn't a clearly defined IPC section for that alone or on sort of communal violence,
#
which everyone would like to track, but there's a bunch of different sections. Sometimes the
#
particular section on communal violence even is not the one used, it's sort of group violence
#
that's used. So, the NCRB can only tell you data, can only tell you about the data that
#
it does collect and it doesn't collect enough of it and it doesn't collect it well enough.
#
I also think there's a broader issue about the way we do interstate comparisons, whether
#
it is about crime or COVID, which is that we end up conflating a state's ability to
#
report numbers with a larger number of incidents in that state. So, year after year, there's
#
often a headline that says, Kerala reports highest crimes against women or sometimes
#
it's Delhi and without the acknowledgement that other indicators show that it's likely
#
that women in these states feel more empowered to report crime and that the administrative
#
mechanism is more able and willing to record that crime. In the absence of these variables
#
that would complicate the issue, equating it simply to sort of a linear numerical thing
#
of more in one and less in the other is a real problem. And I found this the same in
#
the case of COVID as well, which is this question of everyone asking as if it was such a mystifying
#
thing after the first wave, how come UP has had such few cases and deaths while Kerala
#
has had so many? And now that we know from excess mortality numbers that UP missed a
#
lot of COVID deaths, we should have sort of been asking the question of why is UP doing
#
such a poor job of registering numbers rather than how does UP magically have such few numbers?
#
And in the book, I have a chart that looks at violence experienced by women as against
#
violence reported by women to the cops. And the experience of violence comes from what
#
women report to household surveyors, while the recording of it comes from what they report
#
to the police. And the quadrant that has high reported crime to the police is the one that
#
usually gets all of the media focus. While my sort of argument is that the quadrant which
#
has high experienced crime, but low reported crime is the problematic one. And that's
#
the one that ends up getting no media focus at all, because that ends up being the quadrant
#
with low reported crime. So, you would not compare numbers in say, London with Delhi
#
on sexual violence, because you would acknowledge that London is closer to full registration
#
and Delhi isn't. Then why we feel it's okay to compare states in India which have sort
#
of equally dramatic differences in their ratios of state capacity, empowerment, why we feel
#
like these sort of interstate comparisons are okay is beyond me. And what we're ending
#
up doing is penalizing states that work better.
#
There's a powerful sentence in your, towards the end of that chapter, which really sums
#
up a lot, which I'll read out again, before I double click on parts of it where you write
#
quote, registration of crime is a culmination of multiple realities. The existence of a
#
grievance, the empowerment of an individual to report it, the decisions behind the police
#
choosing to register it, and mechanisms for accountability. With the last three components
#
so sorely lacking in most of India, it might at the very least be time to stop treating
#
crime statistics as a spectator sport, stop quote. And obviously it's a fair warning
#
against people not to build narratives based on crime statistics alone, because like you
#
just pointed out in Kerala's case, it's so complicated. But again, some of the statistics
#
here are very telling. Like for example, you know, you've, you did a survey in Rajasthan
#
or there was a survey in Rajasthan, rather, where you point out that quote, a large survey
#
on crime in Rajasthan found that most crime victims never report their experience crime
#
to the police. Only 29% of crime victims surveyed stated that they had visited a police station
#
to report the crime. The biggest deterrent to reporting a crime was a victim's perception
#
that the crime wasn't important enough, 28%. The next most significant deterrent was the
#
belief that the police could not help, 20%, or did not want to help, 17%. Among those
#
who attempted to report crimes, 17% were not able to register them. In an experiment conducted
#
by the surveyors where they sent decoys to report crimes, the police were willing to
#
register FIRs only 54% of the time. And, you know, similarly you've pointed out this 2015
#
survey in Mumbai in Delhi, where 13% of the households surveyed in Delhi and 15% in Mumbai
#
experienced at least one of the seven crimes under study, with theft being the most common.
#
But only half of these were reported to the police and only half of those registered as
#
FIRs, stop quote. And elsewhere, you also write about how there are parallel systems
#
of crime reporting in countries like the UK, where, you know, there are crime victimisation
#
surveys along with the household level surveys that happen. So even if someone doesn't go
#
to the cops to register a crime, there is a way of getting that data, getting a sense
#
of what's really happening. So do you think that there is scope for something like that
#
in India? Like on the one hand, you've spoken about how there needs to be massive amounts
#
of advocacy and political will to solve the problem of just capturing all these crimes,
#
reporting on these crimes, just making that kind of accurate. And the way my brain works
#
is I sort of, you know, anyone who wants a state to function well, you know, please go
#
ahead. It's a great job. Good luck with that. But I also keep thinking about how at a private
#
level we can fill these gaps and what can civil society do to get this data. And as
#
you pointed out in places like the UK, it does happen. So what's your sense of, you
#
know, just a holistic, like what can be done at the level of the state and how likely is
#
it and what can be done at the level of civil society, which maybe isn't being done yet,
#
but maybe someone listens to this and says, hey, I want to put my money there and make
#
Yeah. And just, you know, to extend the point that you made about the ability to report
#
a crime and then how much of those get registered. I also want to repeat the fact that I worry
#
sometimes about the excessive focus on sexual crime alone and, you know, at the cost of
#
a broader understanding of the universe of crime. Because for example, in the same Rajasthan
#
survey, they found that the undercount, you know, the likelihood of not reporting was
#
greatest for property crime. And in violent crimes, including sexual crimes, you were,
#
there were missed crimes, but you were more likely to report it to the police. So if you
#
ask someone about the issue of underreporting, they'll probably immediately point to something
#
like sexual crime and say that that's something that's not getting reported. And you know,
#
it is a problem, but it distorts our view of the broader landscape of crime, because
#
the underreporting of property crime is so much greater. So, you know, if you look at
#
only those numbers, you'll get a sense of sexual crime occupying a far larger share
#
than of the overall landscape of crime than it actually does. So, you know, that is a
#
real distortion to worry about. And, you know, some of these things when you think of are
#
so intuitive. I spoke to Jacob Punnus, the former Director General of Police in Kerala.
#
And he just said something which when he said it immediately made sense to me. He said,
#
one of the crimes that will have least underreporting will be motorcycle or car theft, because you
#
need an FIR to get insurance and you know, for various things. And I also wondered if
#
one of the things that would have the most FIRs for would be ID card theft, because at
#
least when I worked in newsrooms, if you didn't have an FIR, you would not get a fresh ID
#
card and you could not swipe into your office. So, all of us who had, you know, our purses
#
stolen in Delhi, we would go not for the money or whatever, but to get that ID card because
#
otherwise you wouldn't get a fresh ID card. Even for passports. In fact, I think that
#
must be overreported because even if you lose a passport, you have to file an FIR to get
#
a new one. Right. So, he said, you know, those are the crimes in which like if you're trying
#
to understand what full registration looks like, those are the crimes that would probably
#
have full registration. And then, so his point was also that crimes like molestation, which
#
is something that is sort of endemically, endemically exists and endemically underreported
#
because it is treated in this sort of matrix as one which, you know, either you don't take
#
seriously or the police are not going to take seriously also because it's so common. So,
#
his point was that if you see a significant increase in the reporting of murder in a city,
#
then you will feel that murder has increased substantially. However, if you see a significant
#
increase in the reporting of sexual molestation, then you should feel that the police has done
#
a good job of something because this is a endemically underreported crime and an increase
#
in that is, could have a lot to do with better reporting. So, you know, the cops themselves
#
understand this universe much better and you know, would, are far closer to understanding
#
real trends rather than what the data shows. There have been a few attempts at crime victimization
#
surveys in India. There's the little ones like the Rajasthan, Bombay, Delhi ones, but
#
the IHDS, which is a national representative survey also has a question on the experience
#
of crime. It, as far as I know, it doesn't ask about sexual crimes. So, it only asks
#
about things like theft. So, that is one sort of non-government source that you're likely
#
to get of better reporting of crime. There was talk at one point of the government itself
#
conducting a crime victimization survey, which I think has had a pandemic setback, but is
#
likely to still happen at some point. If we think about civil society initiatives to better,
#
you know, to improve this, I think one of the acknowledgments has to be in understanding
#
who is less likely to report crime and who is least likely to have their crime registered.
#
And you know, I haven't seen good evidence of this, but if we, as I would imagine, systematically
#
find that the poor are less, least likely to get taken seriously, then, then that sort
#
of gives a direction to efforts as well, right? Which is, there's no sort of great nobility
#
in having the police commissioner's number on your cell phone and, you know, being quite
#
sure that you will have crimes registered easily, if without the acknowledgement that
#
you are in any case, most likely to be able to, and if you're not doing it, it's probably
#
just to save yourself the hassle of it. My friend Smita Nair used to be a crime reporter
#
at the Indian Express in Mumbai for a long time and now works, lives and works in Goa.
#
She had an article that not just has stayed with me, stayed with many people about a Mumbai
#
cop who became deeply invested in the issue of missing children and one missing child
#
in particular, even including after he retired and how that child, you know, became something
#
he could not stop thinking about, the circumstances around it. And that sort of thing, because
#
this issue of children going missing is so much more a problem of the poor than of the
#
rich. And, you know, I don't know if there's civil society ways that will fix it or this
#
sort of almost fanatically committed cop who really made it like his life's mission to
#
find that girl. So, yeah, I suppose an acknowledgement of who is suffering the most and then how
#
to help them would be the best way to go about it.
#
Yeah, you spoke about kidnappings. I'm reminded of this story. I was told just a couple of
#
days back by my friend, Mohit Sathyanand, who's also been on the show. And he spoke
#
about how the child of someone was kidnapped, one of the Delhi elites. And the guy got in
#
touch with Mohit because Mohit is a friend. Mohit knew the police commissioner or somebody
#
very high up made a phone call. The police commissioner then personally got in touch
#
with the parent whose child had been kidnapped and said, don't worry about it. This is going
#
to be a straightforward case. And they got the kid back in 24 hours. And what Mohit then
#
found out was that in a particular slum, he got some data which showed that 500 kids had
#
gone missing within the last year or couple of years or whatever. I forget the time period
#
and never found none of those cases was obviously sorted out by the cops because, hey, no connections.
#
You can't call up the commissioner. And many of those kids were actually kidnapped for
#
things like ritual sacrifice because somebody was ill and they believed sacrificing a kid
#
would help them. They were kidnapped for kidneys and so on and so forth. It's quite horrific
#
I don't want to go down that road. But it tells you just the absence of law and order.
#
And it also tells you something at the heart of one of these stats you mentioned was about
#
how a certain percentage of people will not report something because they don't think
#
the cops will do anything. And given that the rule of law really doesn't exist for most
#
of the country, I'm not surprised at that. Short of a really serious crime, even I would
#
not bother to report anything, you know, unless I lost my passport, which I'd have to report.
#
But you know, that's kind of worrying. Let's you know, we are still in your first chapter
#
and we've almost touched three years. So let's go to your second chapter. So your second
#
chapter is titled What India thinks, feels and believes. And again, a lot of this is
#
some stuff that people in this in our English speaking bubbles might not understand is true
#
to the extent that it is. And your core finding is this quote, at its core, India is conservative,
#
even fundamentalist, if there is going to be change, it will take work. Stop code. And
#
you've given a number of illustrations of different aspects of this. For example, you
#
point out that Indians care about civil rights even less than Pakistani respondents do. You
#
know, Indian respondents express greater support for a strong leader and for army rule than
#
most other countries and the global average. Indians think a strong leader is good for
#
the country, more so than even people in Russia who like strong leaders and have a strong
#
leader. And Indians mistrust NGOs, they mistrust the role of the opposition. They don't care
#
about a fair judiciary. They don't care about honest elections. You know, they believe that
#
the political elites are out of touch. But having said that, they also are, quote, among
#
the most satisfied in the world with how democracy in their country was working. Stop code. There
#
is almost this religion of government, as I say. More worryingly, speaking to current
#
concerns of the polarization on in our society, you point out, quote, a study of four Indian
#
states Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka and Odisha found that two thirds of respondents felt
#
that the state should punish those who do not say Bharat Mata Ki Jai, a nationalistic
#
slogan that Muslims say militates against their religious beliefs in public functions
#
and those who do not stand for the national anthem. Stop code. And you know, Indians also
#
tend to be against free expression. Seventy five percent are for majoritarian nationalism,
#
you know, and you write, quote, Hindus in particular tended to see the religious identity
#
and Indian national identity as closely intertwined. Nearly two thirds of Hindus, that's 64 percent,
#
said it is very important to be Hindu to be truly Indian. And you know, this kind of goes
#
on and on. And so, you know, just looking at this, do you think that this is something
#
that's actually, if anything, become worse in recent times? Like one of the things that
#
you do point out with data is that young people are not more progressive as you would imagine.
#
One of my sort of theories on why our politics at least has become so polarized and has driven
#
to the extremes comes from, you know, what the sociologist Timur Kuran in his 1999 book
#
Public Lives, Private Truths, calls preference falsification, where back in the day there
#
were certain things you just didn't say in public because they felt beyond the pale.
#
But what social media has done is it's led to what Kuran would call a preference cascade,
#
where you suddenly discover other people who are taking those positions, that this is a
#
country for Hindus only or whatever the case might be, across a set of different issues.
#
And you feel emboldened to say that and to double down on it. And when you do that, it
#
makes everybody's beliefs stronger. So I might believe 10 things, right? I might believe
#
that jobs are important or I might believe that I want my kids to have a better future,
#
but I might also believe that Muslims are the other or that a woman's place is in her
#
kitchen. And those aspects of my identity sort of get emphasized and encouraged by what
#
is happening in social media alongside me. Like Cass Sunstein talks about this thing
#
called group polarization, where studies showed that, you know, he put a bunch of Democrats
#
and Republicans in a room with, you know, the Democrats in one room, Republicans in
#
one room, and found that the average view of the group had shifted towards something
#
that was more extreme than the most extreme member of the group thought before they met.
#
So when you are together in a group, you drift towards the extremes. In fact, this, you know,
#
this recent gathering of Yati Narshan Anand and all these, all these so-called holy men
#
who were effectively calling for a genocide of Muslims, which is very recent when we are
#
speaking, but will be a few weeks in the past when the episode is released, is also an example
#
of that. One of the reasons they are going out and saying more and more extreme things
#
is they're also competing with each other for attention. And how do you compete with
#
attention within a political party or a gathering or whatever? You don't do it by being moderate
#
and reasonable. You do it by being more extreme than the next guy, more pure than the next
#
guy. And all of that is happening. And that would lead me to think that there are therefore
#
two contradictory impulses at play. And one impulse would be that, listen, the world is
#
getting globalized. Young people today are seeing everything on the internet, liberal
#
views from across the world, all kinds of evidence that the other is not really the
#
other, you know, everyone shares a human condition. But at the same time, there is also this trend
#
happening in our society where everything is getting polarized, where, you know, the
#
better angels of our nature in a sense are getting suppressed and these tribalistic toxic
#
aspects are coming out. So what is your sense of this? You know, is there a change towards
#
a good direction? Like you write at the beginning of the chapter that it's very conservative
#
and it's going to take a lot for that to change. That doesn't really seem hopeful. But on
#
other margins, you point out that there is go for hope. For example, we're getting married
#
older and older, which is a good thing. You haven't mentioned it in this book, but I think
#
our rising divorce rate is also fantastic. It speaks to the empowerment of women and
#
the fact that they have more choices. Similarly, you talk about same sex marriages, how approaches
#
to that have certainly become more progressive. Like I remember if, you know, had 377 been
#
outlawed in the 1980s, people would have reacted in a different way. I'm confident of that.
#
And yet here it was like nobody condemned the repeal of 377. Many people such as us
#
were welcomed it obviously, but nobody really protested it. It was like a done deal, which
#
to me was a sign of how at least on one margin Indian society is getting more progressive.
#
But overall, I look at the data and especially the data when it comes to age. And I get the
#
sense that one should not necessarily be too optimistic that things like youth and education
#
and urbanization don't always correlate with more liberal attitudes. What's your sense
#
of all this? Yes, I think what we're seeing right now is
#
whatever the things that we assume would be automatic forces that lead to more progressive
#
attitudes are not going to operate that way in India. And if we continue to believe that
#
those will be the pathways to more progressive attitudes, we're not going to get anywhere.
#
So we're going to have to come up with a new sort of political science vocabulary to figure
#
out how these changes will occur, if we can even get to the consensus that these are changes
#
we want to take place. I think the findings that neither youth nor education nor urbanization
#
are necessarily are not in fact preconditions for more progressive values is important.
#
And then thinking hard about the changes, the norm setting, whether political or social
#
that it's going to take for the needle to shift in these sorts of ways is going to become
#
important to think of. But one of the things I would disagree with you is that I don't
#
think that it's social media, which is what has emboldened people. I do agree that people
#
are emboldened, but I think the backing of a muscularly majoritarian state is what has
#
emboldened people. When you see that essentially your views are the views that are being espoused
#
by the government and being enacted in violent means on the streets, then that is your tribe.
#
You found your community and it is the government. That's what people are feeling. So I also
#
disagree that people are forced to compete with each other in being more hateful because
#
you need to stand out. I think it's more a sort of party to the top, which is that this
#
is a broadly accepted thing and then you can run with it and get as genocidal as you want
#
because there's going to be no repercussions. I don't think there's any element of artifice
#
in the, again, because that would again be sort of ascribing fringe or sort of manipulative
#
or politically manipulative intentions to people who essentially do believe these things,
#
I think, and are now feeling emboldened with good reason, facing no state response to be
#
able to say these things. So there is a lot to think about in terms of what we're going
#
to be able to think, what the sort of future direction in change in this is. And honestly,
#
I can't see it in the immediate future because I don't see any norm setting at the, forget
#
at the political level because this is the government and it has broad support and is
#
likely going to continue to have the support for some time. But I can't see really an existence
#
apart from really, you know, sort of tiny groups in Delhi or in Bombay, for example,
#
of any sort of mass social mobilization around broad support for religious tolerance, for
#
example, even just the fact that Hindu-Muslim unity, now just the phrase has such a sort
#
of quaint ring to it because I think this is something that in the post-Babri era really
#
was a sort of project of the Indian liberal and there were street movements, there were,
#
you know, media movements. It really was a project then. It's now, if anything, that
#
is now a sort of quaint fringe, which is an Instagram handle. It's a street play. It's
#
not taken on the position of a large social movement. So I don't know, I don't know what
#
it is, whether it is some sort of embarrassment about really owning this. I don't even feel
#
that I see a sort of universal acceptance among liberals that that sort of this muscular
#
and violent majoritarianism and anti-Muslim sentiment is as widespread as it is. You know,
#
I think it's sort of sometimes equated into becoming very intolerant. These people, they're
#
also misogynist, they're also anti-caste, they're also anti-Muslim. But I feel the centrality
#
of anti-Muslim sentiment to all of this is not as clearly acknowledged as it needs to
#
be. And when you talk about things that, you know, if you take it in the opposite direction,
#
not things that you now feel emboldened to say, but rather if you start talking about
#
things that you now no longer feel that it's okay to say. I do think, as we spoke earlier,
#
I do think that some amount of sexist stuff is not okay to say in the broad public sphere.
#
And while I do see a lot of casteist beliefs espoused in, you know, both in what people
#
say as well as, and a lot of it on social media, any sort of active Dalit person, particularly
#
women faces terrible casteism in the responses that they routinely get. But I feel like there
#
is at least some pushback to that in the sort of unconnected group of people. So all of
#
this sort of brings me back to the feeling that the centrality of anti-Muslim sentiment
#
to the current moment is not something that's adequately accepted. And you realize this
#
when you speak to young Muslims, which is even a well-off, avowedly apolitical young
#
Muslim cannot exist on social media without encountering abuse. And you know, you shouldn't
#
have to be avowedly apolitical. You should be able to be as political as you want and
#
still not have to face that abuse. And just how endemic it is, is, you know, everyone
#
will say, yes, it exists. But how central it is to this current moment is not something
#
that I feel is adequately talked about. And pathways to the future. I mean, there's one
#
way is to think about whether making it not okay to say these things is the first step
#
towards it. And then, you know, you can think about how that might happen. But I have a
#
lot of faith in the power of political norm setting. And so, of course, it worries me
#
then that the ghettoization of Muslim politicians and the sort of pushing to the fringe of Muslim
#
politicians means that even that sort of political norm setting will be difficult. And then espousing
#
again this quote unquote Hindu-Muslim unity sentiment is then some is a lonely enterprise
#
for, for politicians then. But I place a lot of faith in that because I do feel that I've
#
seen it in conversations with politicians and in data on the role that affirmative action
#
for Dalit politicians and then the sort of act of seeing them in power, the impact that
#
this has had on norm setting in at least in their constituencies. But if you've reached
#
a point as we have right now, that a Muslim cannot get elected in this country except
#
in a Muslim majority constituency, where are we going from here? Because there's absolutely
#
no conversation and you know, we can almost sort of throw it out of the discussion of
#
having affirmative action around political representation for Muslims. That is as far
#
from the national discourse right now as is possible. So if that's not going to happen,
#
then you have to be a politician who really goes out on a limb to espouse something that
#
may not have broader political dividend. And I can't think of too many people who do that.
#
So yeah, I can't, I can't see immediate pathways out of it.
#
Yeah, I mean, at one point you do write code, but for lasting change, the hard work of rewiring
#
values will come from politics and the creation of social norms, stop code, but all the data is,
#
you know, extremely grim and very clear about what kind of country we are and what direction
#
we are moving in, which makes me wonder, like, if I'm wrong in one of the assertions that I make,
#
like I have constantly been bemoaning the way in which opposition parties also quote the Hindutva
#
vote, like Ahmadmi Party, of course, does it in various ways and free pilgrimages and so much
#
religious posturing that they do, even the Congress does so much soft Hindutva. You know,
#
when the Babri Masjid judgment came, Priyanka Gandhi boasted it was my father who threw open
#
the gates and all of that. Everyone is quoting that word. And my sense was that this shows a
#
lack of imagination, that there is an assumption they have made that this nature of the Indian
#
people is non-negotiable. This is what it is. You have to cater to it and you fight for issues on
#
the margins. And my sense is that, no, my sense is voters contain multitudes and there might be
#
someone who hates Muslims, but he might also want better jobs for his kids. He might also want more
#
economic prosperity for himself. So you want to appeal to the better angels of the nature,
#
as it were. You want to use more political imagination and find out ways of making this
#
particular thing a little irrelevant and speak to those aspects of this. But looking at all
#
the data in your chapter, I get the sense that that might be a fool's errand, that maybe it is
#
just too idealistic and that maybe all these parties kind of have given up on all of that
#
and they just know that this is what it is. This is an easy thing to do. And I believe,
#
one, no one can out Hindutva, the BJP. And I also believe that even the BJP can't ride this tiger.
#
It is going to lead to horrific consequences. And none of this what Yati Narshanananda,
#
I've been watching his videos for months, I've gone down right-wing rabbit holes
#
in just shock and horror to see what's happening out there. And for those people, not just Modi,
#
not just Amit Shah, even Adityanath is too moderate. They're not doing enough for Hindus.
#
They want to do far worse. And that's kind of where it's headed to a point where I think it'll,
#
you know, it keeps getting more and more extreme and splintering further till it collapses under
#
its own weight. That is a hope. So do you think there is that possibility that if other politicians
#
showed more political imagination, that we could sidestep this issue? Or do you feel that we are
#
inevitably going where we are going? So it's hard to think of what comes first in these,
#
right? And I do agree that voters contain multitudes, but the weaponization of one part of
#
their beliefs into what they should believe is the most important one. And in fact, the sort of
#
conversion of that one belief into somehow being at the core of all of their other beliefs is
#
something that the Hindu right has done very successfully. So if you convince people that
#
everything from population to the economy is to be laid at the door of Muslims, and if you've done
#
it really successfully by, among other things also, taking control of the media, then you're
#
sort of flattening those multitudes. There are, you know, from places where we seem to be not
#
in exactly this binary, I suppose there are questions to ask about how that has happened
#
and what it means and what sort of fault lines exist there then, which is when you think about
#
Kerala and Tamil Nadu, for example, which do not have precisely these fault lines in the same way,
#
at least. So there is something to think about. Of course, it meant that a hundred years ago,
#
these movements began a hundred years ago in these states. So it's a depressing thought to
#
think that if we begin something now, maybe in a hundred years, this fault line will be less
#
significant in those states. Maybe there is, you know, a social science experiment we had in someone
#
attempting this leap of political imagination and bringing back to the core economic concerns and
#
the economy and jobs and see if they're able to, if they're able to be, you know, decent people with
#
a convincing story and a convincing message. And if they're able to get past this, because we
#
haven't had that attempt. It's not that someone's attempted it and failed. We've just not had that
#
attempt of... Actually, I'd say we saw an example of it just a decade ago, which was the whole
#
India against corruption thing, where corruption kind of became the locus. And obviously, as I
#
wrote at the time, the way Hazare and K.H.D. Valanol went about it was completely wrong.
#
Ajahn Lokpal was not going to solve the problem, where the problem essentially was too much power
#
and discretion in the hands of the state. But for that moment, corruption became the big issue.
#
So, you know, and of course, the moment shifted and other things and this whole agenda took over.
#
I find it hard to agree with that, because that would assume that what India against corruption
#
said was its core concern, was truly only its core concern, and that it would have been and
#
that it believed sort of the sort of egalitarian sentiment about everything else was true to it.
#
Now, given how all of the products of that movement have turned out to be majoritarian
#
to one degree or the other, authoritarian to one degree or the other, I find it hard now,
#
forget in hindsight, I don't think I felt moved by them then either. And you know,
#
in Maharashtra, we know Anna Hazare more than the rest of the country knew him then.
#
So, I find it hard to think of the India against corruption as a movement that was purely about
#
corruption. But my point there is that I agree with you about these people. And even I wrote
#
at the time that, you know, these are false messiahs and don't get taken in. And I was
#
skeptical of K.G. Wells from right then. But I think in a lot of the popular imagination,
#
the anger against corruption, forget the intent of the leaders of the movement. I think in the eyes
#
of a lot of people, corruption was a big issue and you could galvanize around that. And, you know,
#
that certainly was one of the factors which helped the BJP come to power. And of course,
#
when they came to power, they did what they did. They went off in one particular direction. But
#
otherwise, you know, I think it was a bit of a factor. But the question to be asked is could
#
anyone have galvanized around corruption? Or is there a reason that the people who did do it,
#
who did turn out to be authoritarian and majoritarian, were the people who were successful
#
in galvanizing around it? I cannot find myself sort of, I'm not able to feel confident enough
#
in the pure anti-corruption feelings of people at that time to feel that if a bunch of young
#
Muslim men had similarly come up with a movement or a bunch of Dalit activists from universities,
#
that it would have had the same uptake. I think there is a reason that these people leading
#
these movements, galvanized people around this issue, when you are convinced at the back of
#
your mind that the other issues are taken care of, these guys are not going to start talking about
#
Hindu-Muslim stuff in the future, you know. So, I find it hard to think of it as pure galvanization
#
around corruption. Even then, even if the people who were galvanized around it then felt that that
#
was what they were rallying around. Fair enough. I mean, I know many people who galvanized for them
#
and are completely against Hindutva today. So, I think regardless of what the intentions of the
#
leaders were, I think many of the people who felt moved by that moment were not necessarily
#
motivated by what eventually transpired. Right. But I think the reason that it's important to talk
#
about the movement as a whole and to think about why some succeed and why others don't,
#
is to think about why those succeeded. So, while individuals might not have been there for
#
Hindutva-vadi reasons, the next step of thinking around it is why that particular movement around
#
corruption with some people who later turned out to be Hindutva-vadi, despite being supported by
#
people who were not Hindutva-vadi, was the one that succeeded. Let's talk about sort of your
#
third chapter and we'll go through the different themes really briefly because I know you have to
#
go back home. And your third chapter is about, it's called How India Really Votes. And the broad
#
point you make there, of course, is our simple narratives are wrong. And you begin with a story
#
of the 2015 VR elections where, you know, you have all these experts on TV and people are saying
#
X1 and they're all giving Gyan about YX1 and then suddenly the narrative changes, actually Y has
#
one, and they start giving Gyan around YY has one. And there's this great book by Philip Tetlock
#
called Super Forecasting. You must have read it, no? No, I haven't. Fantastic book, yeah. So,
#
it's a very profound book for various other reasons. And I particularly loved its focus
#
on the importance of probabilistic thinking and avoiding certainties. But one of the themes that
#
it does look at is how the so-called TV experts often get everything wrong because they are
#
supposed to, you know, go out there on TV and be pundits and, you know, be full of certainties
#
because that's why they're there. If you're going to start giving percentages that, you know, I
#
think it is 33% likely that blah, blah, blah and start putting nuance everywhere, you're going to
#
get nowhere. And he speaks of these forecasting tournaments where inevitably the experts do the
#
worst. And the people who do the best are just people who are generally intelligent, but most
#
importantly, skeptical, who are open to changing their mind. And by the way, for my listeners,
#
a great book on the theme of changing your mind and being open is the book I just finished reading
#
called Think Again by Adam Grant. So, just pick that up. And that's kind of what Super Forecasting
#
is about. And in your chapter, you bust sort of a bunch of myths. You point out something that I
#
remember, you know, I used to blog about more than a decade and a half ago that people would talk
#
about a wave, that there is a wave and this has happened. And I was like, there is, you know,
#
no such thing as a wave ever. Narratives are always complicated. They are not simple.
#
Now, as you point out that, you know, many of these narratives are wrong. People are not voting
#
just for money. You know, X group of people just because they're X group of people are not
#
necessarily a vote bank. But one of the interesting things that I noticed and wanted to ask you about
#
is how female voter turnout has exploded. In fact, in our most recent parliamentary election, female
#
voter turnout was higher than male turnout for the first time in history. I think it's grown by 75
#
percent while male turnout has grown by 50 percent. And something very real has changed. So what do
#
you think are kind of the factors for that? And you've, of course, been at pains to point out that
#
they're not voting in a homogenous way. Being a woman is just part of the many multitudes they
#
contain, right? So you could be voting for your particular tribe or for, you know, an MP of your
#
caste because you feel a look after your interests or blah, blah, blah. You could have various
#
reasons. But what is it now that so many women are turning out to vote? And is there maybe a
#
little bit of hope there because this is a country where women have been treated as second class
#
citizens all the way throughout. And it's a deeply misogynist country. And at some point, you know,
#
you think that even if they're not voting in homogenous ways, they could take that into account.
#
There is maybe scope for new kinds of political narrative there. What's your sense of all this?
#
So I think one of the things is that the Election Commission really has done a very sort of good
#
and purposeful job around taking more women onto the electoral rolls, first of all, which was,
#
you know, an issue. You weren't registered on the rolls at all. And then sort of doing things to
#
encourage women to vote. I think the fact that political violence during elections has
#
significantly declined has helped women come, you know, be more confident about coming out to
#
vote. I think there's also some amount of, you know, there's a certain sort of adorable
#
sincerity in government messaging sometimes. So and that does get somewhere, you know, the thing
#
that's the slogan that's painted on the government school does get followed pretty sincerely on
#
some things at least. So I think that that conveying the sincerity of go out, vote,
#
it's important that that's got through. And that has been very systematically in a decentralized
#
and apolitical way sort of pushed across the board. There's really no constituency
#
that pushes back against anyone voting at all, you know, that doesn't happen. But I think it's
#
also important to think about who doesn't get to vote. And a large, the largest sort of explanation
#
of that is migrant working men. So the fact that sort of short term, especially migrants are not
#
women means that they are less likely to miss voting day. And while I think it's an important
#
story and sort of has the potential to be very transformative. I do also think that we need to
#
pay attention to the fact that male voter turnout, we're not, we're nowhere near 100%. So it's not
#
that we can be satisfied. I think we need to think hard about how to improve male voter turnout as
#
well. And again, one of these sort of tired narratives that a lot of newspapers do around
#
election day is that, oh, you know, South Bombay didn't turn out to vote or South Delhi didn't
#
turn out to vote, which really misses the broader point, which is that those who miss voting are
#
primarily migrant men or those who have shifted residence and fallen, found themselves fall off
#
the rolls. So yeah, there's scope to do better research on why, you know, women turn out in such
#
large numbers now. And also definitely reason to worry about why we've not been able to push male
#
And you know, another sort of belief of mine, which you challenged and made me think about in
#
this is how most political parties are effectively the same in my view, they're left of center on
#
economics, the right of center on social issues. And you know, broadly, statism is a dominant
#
political ideology. Now you've pointed out here, I'll read out a couple of quotes from you, where
#
at one point you say, quote, most parties do promise development, but despite the common
#
refrain that they're all the same, the key political antagonists in India are ideologically
#
distinct, particularly on religion, and voters know clearly where to align themselves. Stop
#
quote. And later on, you talk about how the economic access has become less important, where
#
you write, since the 1990s, however, this access has become less salient to India's voters, with
#
economic distinctions between political parties diminishing and religious distinctions sharpening.
#
Stop quote. So a couple of questions. One is that I buy that people vote for parties for
#
drastically different reasons. So they're different in their appeal, they're different at the local
#
level. But in macro outcomes, where you look overall, they seem pretty similar to me in this,
#
like even Modi, you know, I keep saying that he got his whole love for central planning from
#
Nehru and his whole authoritarian streak from Indira. There's not much difference. If there is
#
one difference, it comes from Arun Suri's formulation, that NDA is UPA plus cow. And it
#
seems to me that the whole of the difference today is cow. And even people like Ahmadmi Party
#
in the Congress, sometimes with their soft Hindutva, are trying to bridge that gap and
#
trying to incorporate more cow. So, you know, what would be your sort of...
#
So I think there's probably a sort of historical break that we'll have to in the future account
#
for, because this has not been the trend of the last, you know, of the post-independence years.
#
And, you know, part of my thinking around this comes from a book by Pradeep Chibber and Rahul Verma.
#
Rahul's been on my show a couple of times, yeah.
#
On identity and ideology. And they, you know, make the point around about the sort of continued
#
conviction of voters over time around political beliefs and how that sort of, sorry, you know,
#
broader social beliefs and how that aligns with the parties that they vote for. And it's
#
distinct and also something that I feel is borne out in sort of conversations and what I see around
#
me. And I think on the economic front in particular, there has been much more movement in the last 20
#
years, which is, it doesn't seem like it right now, but there was a point at which there was
#
a sort of active opposition to reservations along the economic right. And that the role of a less
#
active state was a sort of political point around the right. I agree that that is, you know, less
#
central to right-wing political parties now. I don't agree that the two parties are broadly similar
#
along all economic policies. For example, you know, I don't want to get into it at length,
#
but I don't believe that what happened on labor laws, for example, would happen under a Congress
#
government. I do think that there were sort of directions like that, but this sort of mass
#
loosening, I don't think would have happened. I think there's other, you know, more recent
#
economic decisions as well that only could have happened under this government. And I think the
#
sort of expansion in the parts of the welfare state that happened under the UPA, while they have sort
#
of other resonances in the current government, I do see distinctions in economic terms between
#
the two as well. Of course, it's not a Democrat or Republican in that respect. And I find this
#
Congress plus cow sort of diminishing of just how majoritarian the BJP is to an unfair degree,
#
because, you know, it's not sort of empirically testable right now, but I don't think that this
#
is precisely the situation that would have happened under a current Congress UPA government.
#
I do think that there was a there was large sort of public frustration with slowing economic growth
#
and a sort of culture of frustration and a frustration about what was seen as a culture
#
of corruption. And those sort of economic issues did play a role in the 2014 election.
#
There's a there's a lot that the Congress needs to be criticized for in terms of its
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soft and not even soft Indutva often. But I think Congress plus cow is a bit of a
#
diminishment of the issue. Yeah. So I mean, just to briefly push back before before we move on.
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Firstly, I think I think at different phases of time, parties have shown liberalizing instincts
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like the Congress in 91 under Manmohan, which I had put, which I rank as a very similar government
#
to Vajpayee, where both of them had strong liberalizing instincts and did a lot of good.
#
And completely at odds with that is say what Modi is doing now. And, you know, Modi made noises
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about minimum government, maximum governance. But the fact of the matter is he quite obviously
#
never believed in it because he never implemented anything to that effect, either in Gujarat or at
#
the national level. I mean, it took them seven years to sell Air India. So my sense would be
#
that there was a little bit of posturing, but there was never a genuine ideological difference
#
in that, that the dominant economic ideology going by the actions of our parties has always
#
been statism with the notable and honorable exceptions of, you know, Narsimha Rao and Manmohan
#
at the moment of liberalization and then later on with some of the things that Vajpayee did.
#
But otherwise, a dominant move has been that in economics is statism. And there are a lot of
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other things happening at sort of the social level, like you spoke about them being anti-reservation.
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But if you actually look at how they won 2014 by actually just using caste, you've also written
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about it in your book that they recognize that in UP, they need to appeal to non-Jatav Dalits
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and non-Yadav OBCs and similarly in Maharashtra to non-Maratha OBCs. And I mean, they were playing
#
caste as skillfully as any other party ever did. So on that margin also, I don't think that they
#
were particularly different. Yes, my argument is not at all that the current BJP is anti-reservation.
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Quite, I definitely do not think that that's the case. It's more that the, in fact, my point was
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that we've forgotten that there was a time that there was an economic right that was anti-reservation
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and that was one of the axes that separated left and right wing beliefs. And that sort of coalescing
#
around right wing economic views as well has, sorry, left wing economic views as well along
#
what was the right as well has happened. So I, in fact, disagree that Rahul's and Pradeep Chiba's
#
analysis of reservation being one of the axes that separate the left and the right, I disagree
#
about that. I don't feel that there exists an anti-reservation constituency in government,
#
at least, although there is a lot of talk about that. In fact, I mean, what exists now is a sort
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of trying to keep, trying to sort of satisfy majoritarianism as well as these hard caste
#
calculations, as well as use the language of reservation. So I think the economically weaker
#
section reservation is one of the sort of examples of how the right tries to do reservation, you know,
#
and it's, I think it's a real travesty. There might have been many debates around reservations
#
and op-ed pages, but in terms of what political parties actually did when they're in power,
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I don't think there's any significant difference in any of them. It was just a question of thinking
#
how they can use different caste calculuses, if there is such a word as calculuses, different
#
caste calculuses. Calculus should be plural, right? So to kind of figure it out, but anyway, that's...
#
Just to add that the 10% economically weaker section reservation attacks the heart of,
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and I should, you know, put it out there that I'm a strong proponent of reservation,
#
it attacks the heart of the purpose and the ethos and the sort of intended outcomes of reservation,
#
which is, and it has absolutely no basis in data. And, you know, if at that moment,
#
when it was being offered or put into law, if anybody had actually looked at the data and
#
looked at who was the most deserving for affirmative action, it would have been the Muslims of this
#
country. So the instrumentalization of that reservation, which is essentially an upper caste
#
reservation by another name, is a break from... That's the point at which I disagree that everybody
#
has just done reservation the same way. That particular piece of legislation is a break from
#
how reservation has been done so far and is a uniquely right-wing problem. Sure. Fair enough.
#
Data, again, being something that, as you pointed out, more people should look at. So, you know,
#
we have like just, you know, not much time to go, 10 minutes before you have to sort of leave. So to
#
sum up some of the big themes of your book, and I think all listeners should read the entire book
#
with great attention because every chapter has great insights. One of the things that struck me
#
is that one, we are, you know, one of the most religious countries in the world. 84% of Indians
#
say that religion is very important in their lives, which, as you point out, makes us more
#
religious than, quote, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Israel, Latin America,
#
and the United States. Only in sub-Saharan Africa and some regions with large Muslim populations,
#
similar or higher shares of the public say religion is important to them. And as you point
#
out, 97% of people believe in God. You know, I'm part of one of the smallest minorities, clearly.
#
You also point out that young people are religious, where you say, quote, young people
#
are quite religious too. About 78% of respondents in a youth survey reported praying quite often.
#
68% said they went to a religious place of worship frequently. 49% reported watching religious shows
#
on television quite often. And 46% often engaged in activities such as singing religious songs,
#
bhajans, or taking part in satsangs, top-quote. And, you know, 46% fast and 39% read a religious
#
book often. All of which, when I read them, seem to me to be far greater than I would have imagined.
#
Perhaps I have too much of an optimistic view of the youth. Yeah, you also talk about how much
#
money do Indians make. And again, I think the big insight, which should be pretty standard by now,
#
but isn't, is that people like you and me are really in the top 0.1% of the country, if anything.
#
We're absolutely, you know, so, so many people call themselves middle-class. And I feel like
#
laughing. So one reason... Or the people who are like, you know, push back against the 1%. Like,
#
sure, push back against the 1%, but you're the 0.01%. Yeah, exactly. It's just nuts. The middle
#
classes, you know, even your domestic help is perhaps too rich to be in the middle classes.
#
It's really that kind of scene. So your chapter, again, for people who haven't really thought
#
about this, your chapter is in Ayyopna. You speak about how we make our money, how we spend our
#
money, how we work, how we are growing and aging. Where, you know, I had a rant about how,
#
you know, referring back to Modi's little rant on population, where he said we need to control
#
our population. Throughout our freaking history, politicians have been ascribing problems, failures
#
of governance to the people, where they are saying governance is not the problem. The people are the
#
problem. You are the problem, which is basically what they're telling citizens. And you quoted Paul
#
Erlich and his nauseating book, Population Bomb. And of course, he had a famous bet with Julian
#
Simon, which he lost, I'll link details to that from the show notes. But I am totally of the school
#
that believes with Julian Simon, as the title of his book goes, that human beings are the ultimate
#
resource. We are brains and not stomachs. Our population has always been our greatest strength.
#
That is why people move from villages to cities, though, as you point out, not in the rate people
#
think they are, but they move from villages to cities. And another of the great sort of insights
#
in your book, which I first heard from Chinmay Thumbey when I did an episode with him on migration,
#
is a large chunk of migration in India happens because women get married and they leave one
#
home to go to another home. And again, a great TIL moment for me is that much of the migration
#
in India is rural to rural migration, not rural to urban migration. And it's coming from the women
#
who are leaving one home to go to another home. And again, you make some great points about
#
urbanization on how it's happening, but not as fast as people imagine, and challenge some of
#
my beliefs there as well. And there is just done in your book, as you can see, I'm very excited
#
about it, but we don't have enough time because you did not commit eight hours to me. So kindly
#
come prepared next time. And in your conclusion, when we talk about, you know, fixing the problems,
#
you write quote, the only way to fix the problems is to accurately identify the flaws and talk to
#
experts about how to fix them. A vague, overly broad skepticism and suspicion about all official
#
data and all inconvenient private data will not help. It will only strengthen the arm of those
#
who seek to suppress it. And you also talk about how ideology is a problem. We are so bound by
#
ideology that each side refuses to engage with the other side. And to get out of it, you say,
#
quote, we are going to have to dig deep and get specific, stop quote. And those words dig deep
#
and get specific are important to me because I think that people, especially elites like us,
#
we cultivate this approach of abstract skepticism and just dismiss all of these efforts that are
#
happening. And the abstract skepticism beyond the point is not helpful. Concrete action is needed.
#
What can we do? What can we do to get our hands dirty and make things a little better? And
#
If I can just jump in there, because I've been talking about the book to groups. The number one
#
question I get asked at the end of it is, how can we believe any data when all of it seems to be
#
manipulated or made up? And, you know, when the media is so taken over. And my point is that all
#
that we know about what went wrong or was suppressed in the data came out through good
#
journalism in the last couple of years. And the reason that we know, and you know, we know specific
#
issues about specific surveys or datasets that had specific problems for specific reasons. So I will
#
be completely sort of skeptical or suspicious about a dataset when I know why. I mean, when we have
#
had people able to be whistleblowers and speak out about it and also have reporting around it,
#
I don't then feel the need to worry about the fact that there could be sort of mass manipulation of
#
fudging going on unknown. Of course, it means that we need to be more vigilant for the future,
#
and we should not assume that there'll never be a sort of greater manipulation. But this is the
#
thing. I mean, and I find it a bit intellectually lazy for people to say that, you know, data can't
#
be believed, all of it is being fudged. It just means that you've not paid enough attention to
#
the people who are speaking out about it. And you've not engaged hard enough to figure out what in it
#
is questionable without just being sort of overbroadened in criticism about it.
#
And I'll add to that and make a point which you also make in your book in different words is that
#
I think to a lot of things that the state does, hand lens razor applies and hand lens razor is
#
never attribute to malice, what can be adequately explained by stupidity, or in this case,
#
incompetence that there are many things within our data gathering system, which don't work,
#
it's deeply complex, but it's not necessarily because of malice or bad intent or someone's
#
trying to push a narrative. It's just incompetent, shit is hard, people are trying to figure it out.
#
You know, I described demonetization also really to hand lens razor stupidity rather than malice.
#
Some people might feel that I'm being too generous. And the heuristic that I kind of use,
#
like this is something that I face also, right? That during the pandemic, who do I trust? There's
#
so much stuff going around. And I think the process I worked for myself to figure out what
#
to trust and what not to trust is figured out a few people I considered trustworthy,
#
whether it's Eric Topol or the journalist Zainab Tufekci, or within India, people like Brahma Mukherjee
#
and Gautam Menon and all of that. And after a certain point in time, you figure out, okay,
#
I'm going to trust these guys. And you're still skeptical, but you broadly trust these guys.
#
And similarly, I think when it comes to data, people can trust stuff that comes from you or
#
Pramit, for example, I mean, that would be my heuristic that if I'm, you know, what you write
#
and what Pramit would write would carry a certain amount of credibility, because I know that there's
#
a certain amount of rigor that has gotten. And journalists earn that credibility over time.
#
And I think it's so important that people like you are also kind of working in this field and
#
doing this work. I mean, people often argue about Thomas Carlyle's great man theory of history.
#
And, you know, where the argument is that history doesn't need great men or in the formulation of
#
those days, great men or women would be what we would probably say today. But and the currents
#
of history go their own way. And I'm not sure I agree with that. I think if you or Pramit didn't
#
exist, I think our landscape would be a lot poorer if a handful of people didn't exist. So I just hope
#
that people listening to this who are interested in this field can be inspired by you and kind of,
#
you know, take this journey forward. But before I embarrass you too much and you just walk off and
#
leave. And Amit, if I can just jump in with two things. One is that I do agree that there is a
#
lot of incompetence. However, there have been some notable instances of malice in the last couple of
#
years. And it's particularly important to pay attention to those so that we don't paint the
#
sort of broad history of Indian data with the same brush, because the breaks in continuity that have
#
happened in the last two years are sort of historic breaks. And I've said this before that, you know,
#
I think every generation feels about a few things. How did we let this happen on our watch?
#
And as a data journalist, I feel about two things that happened in 2019. How did we let this happen
#
on our watch, which is that for the first time in Indian history, a national statistical survey
#
report was completely ready. And then the government officially said that they were not going to
#
release it, although many of us already have it. And we know that it showed sort of historically,
#
you know, an enormous slowdown in growth to the point that it would have led to,
#
it would have shown a decline in real incomes and the first increase in poverty in decades.
#
And this was pre-COVID.
#
This was pre-COVID. And journalists by the name Somesh Jha from Business Standard brought this
#
out. We all know this is what the data said. It was cleared by the government's own National
#
Statistical Commission. So it wasn't that it lacked, you know, rigor. And for the first time
#
in Indian history, under all of our watch, the government has been able to just say that they're
#
not going to release a report that we know showed them in a bad light and nothing has happened.
#
There's no repercussions. They've been allowed to go ahead with it. So there has been a lot of
#
historic incompetence, but there is some fresh malice. And I want to make a point about trusting
#
people like Pramit in particular. So I don't necessarily subscribe to both sides and everyone
#
should criticize everyone. But I think one of the reasons someone like Pramit has the credibility
#
that he does is that an important piece of journalism he did in the last couple of years
#
was pointing out the flaws in the GDP calculation. And in his writing around it, he has pointed out
#
sort of historic failings of the national statistical architecture, past mistakes.
#
So when you do see that, that a critical eye is being turned on the whole sort of scope of history
#
and not being, you know, only switched on at this moment in time, that helps build credibility too,
#
because, you know, hopefully we will all outlast governments. But if our reporting stays on and
#
people can see whether that critical lens is only being turned on for one government or the other.
#
Yeah. And my point about data was that at least the data there which came out was reliable.
#
You know, the government not bringing it out is obviously a malicious act and there is much
#
malice we can accuse him of. I mean, malice and stupidity kind of go together. And there is so
#
much malice that we have to be glad that they are stupid also because otherwise the consequences
#
could be even worse. But that's a different matter. So to wind up a couple of questions.
#
And one question is that if you look forward to India in 2032, 10 years from now,
#
what's the best case scenario and what's the worst case scenario in your eyes? And I'm asking
#
it in a broader sense, not just a sense of data journalism or data gathering or whatever, but,
#
you know, you can give whatever, you know, you can highlight whatever aspects you want to answer.
#
So I would suppose, you know, the worst case scenario is that the bubbles that we are building
#
around ourselves, which are not just sort of problematic in that they don't advance knowledge,
#
but also end up as you were pointing out, sometimes, you know, amplifying the worst
#
parts of our lives and the sort of biggest gaps in our knowledge get worse. And because
#
this is something I'm seeing, you know, much more of this effect of, you know, this not talking to
#
each other situation. If that got a lot worse, that's a worst case scenario. And the worsening
#
of the current Islamophobia in the country would be the worst case scenario. I suppose the best
#
case scenario would be that movements, both political and social, were able to build broad
#
social norms around equity, equality, egalitarianism, tolerance, those sorts of movements
#
that have had their movements in the past and that don't seem like something that can't happen,
#
but that some of them came together in a sort of critical mass around public declarations of
#
commitments to equality took off. On the data side, a sort of greater commitment to fairness
#
in approach and analysis of data is what I would hope for. So yeah, those are my best and worst
#
case scenarios. Great. So my last question is this. And of course, one more worst case scenario is
#
that by then, scene unseen episodes will go on for 15 hours and you'll be one of my guests and we can
#
talk for 15 hours as we discuss your eighth book or such like. But so final question. These days,
#
I like to ask my guests to recommend books for my listeners and for me to read and discover and not
#
necessarily books on data or statistics alone, because I don't want to pigeonhole you, but any
#
books. What books have had the greatest influence on who you are or have changed the way you look
#
at the world or you've been so entertained by that you just want to shout and say, hey, you know,
#
look at this, read this. We've talked before about Raag Darbari and I think that is one of
#
the books that's had the most impact on me. Did I ask you the question in my last episode? I've
#
completely forgotten. Not about books, but I talked about it anyway, because I love the book.
#
It's a lovely book. Yeah. I've also really, really in the last couple of years love
#
Shobhaan Chaudhary's The Competent Authority. In some ways it felt like a modern and futuristic
#
Raag Darbari, you know, in all of its sort of understandings of the levers of Indian democracy,
#
as well as the, I mean, it was all absurd, but not so absurd that it seemed impossible and
#
I loved it. Trying to think of what else I would recommend. In the last year, I have really enjoyed,
#
despite the state, by my friend Raj Shekhar, he and I disagree about many things too, but
#
you know, it's a great book. Just for, you know, engagement and fun, I would recommend a book that
#
I've recently started reading, which all of Tamil Nadu will roll their eyes at, because they've
#
all read it as children, which is a book, you know, an epic called Ponni and Selvan. So sometimes you
#
realize you just want to sort of lose yourself in a world of characters. So either the book or the
#
English audio retelling that, you know, lose yourself in an epic. Well, thanks so much for
#
that. And thank you for coming on the show. It's been such a, I've had fun having this conversation.
#
Thank you so much, Amit. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hop on over to your nearest
#
bookstore online or offline and pick up whole numbers and half truths by Rukmini S. You can
#
follow Rukmini on Twitter at Rukmini. You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A. You
#
can browse past episodes of The Scene in the Unseen at sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene in the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
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production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any
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