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There is a story I have told a couple of times on this show.
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And while it's a true story, it's not the full story.
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There is another side to it.
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Let me tell you that story again.
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A few years ago, I was hanging with a friend who worked closely with Narendra Modi in the
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She has fallen out with him since, but for a period of time when Modi was the Chief Minister,
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And she told me that one day in his residence, some of them were hanging with him, maybe
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six or seven people, and Modi told them a story.
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He said that one day when he was a kid, his mother fell ill.
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At one point, she felt hot and wanted the fan on.
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The young Narendra went to switch on the fan and then realized that there was no electricity
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and he couldn't even do this for his mother.
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When he reached this point of the story, Modi started crying.
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My friend's point was that this is how he understands the world through experience.
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He's an experiential Prime Minister, or as I wrote in a column later, an Aankho Dekhi
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He has experienced the importance of electricity.
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So when he becomes CM of Gujarat, he makes it his mission to electrify as many villages
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Similarly, he has walked on roads and he can see their importance and so on.
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And my friend who told me the story felt and I agreed that this approach has its limitations.
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There are some things you can experience and understand and there are others that you can't.
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They may be outside your experience or they may be frameworks, ways of looking at the
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world which affect real people and remain unseen, like spontaneous order, for example,
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or the power of voluntary exchange or the countless oppressions of the state that we
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This is why Modi as Prime Minister made huge blunders like demonetization.
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There was no way he could have understood the working of the economy from direct experience.
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And he had never learned the mental frameworks that would help him make sense of this.
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Now, in the column I wrote about this, which I'll link from the show notes, I made this
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an argument for reading.
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How can we learn those things about the world which direct experience may not teach us?
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We do it through reading.
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The lives of others, the thoughts of others, all of human knowledge is available to us.
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And while one can't blame Modi for not being much of a reader, as he didn't have that sort
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of privileged upbringing, he should have realized his limitation, remained humble about the
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extent of his knowledge and read more, listened to experts more instead of pushing them away.
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Now, this story, this narrative, while it is a truth, is not the whole truth.
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There is an opposite problem also.
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That opposite problem is this.
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You may have all the intellectual knowledge in the world, theories about public policy,
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notions of how to make the world better.
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And you may imprison yourself in an ivory tower because you feel you know it all and
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you don't need to interact with reality because hey, you get it.
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This is also a mistake and it leads to a top down way of thinking.
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In fact, if you consider Jawaharlal Nehru and Narendra Modi, they both came to the fatal
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conceit of top down central planning, but they came to it from different roads.
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Nehru's intellectual arrogance, and I had a recent episode on this I urge you to listen
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to with Rupur Daman Singh and Adil Hussain, which I'll link from the show notes.
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Nehru's intellectual arrogance led him to believe that he had figured out deep truths
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about the economy and society and he could engineer both from the top down.
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He was wrong and he failed.
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Modi thinks that what he has learned from his experience of the world is all that needs
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to be learned and now he must guide others from the top down like a wise sage.
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He is also wrong and he has also failed.
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And the big lesson in this is something that my guest today figured out through years of
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being both an intellectual and a grassroots activist, that a true understanding of the
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world can only come in a bottom up way.
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There is always more to it than you think you understand.
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We cannot stop searching for the truth.
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And the truth lies out there, not in here.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a man I adore, a dear friend, a wise guide, a man I call Dada Muni.
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Arun Mitra is that rare creature who is both a man of ideas and a man of action.
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He was a prolific participant in the marketplace of ideas from the 1990s, writing powerful,
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counterintuitive and thought provoking pieces.
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He also founded a classical liberal think tank or a libertarian think tank called the
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He was also always a grassroots worker.
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He threw himself into various farmers movements, including a mass agitation led by the great
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Sharad Joshi that led to actual policy change around two decades ago.
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He also participated in a remarkable movement to get property rights for tribals in which
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modern technology played a part in solving an ancient problem.
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We'll discuss both of these in our conversation.
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The highlight of which is when he shares how in his journey, he realized that for his ideas
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to mean anything, they have to be informed by ground realities.
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His idol and someone we discuss here is Mahatma Gandhi, who made our freedom movement into
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a mass movement by taking his ideas to the people by putting them first.
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Varun says a key moment in his way of thinking about the world was when he realized that
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the important word in the phrase public policy is not policy, but public.
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You have to go past the abstract and look at the concrete.
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I have always admired Varun for his clarity and depth of engagement.
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And when I double clicked on those, I realized where they came from.
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His clarity comes from his curiosity.
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He always tests his ideas and he's open to challenge.
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His engagement comes from his genuine empathy.
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Over the years, I've learned a lot from Varun and I could go on and on talking about this.
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But why don't you listen to this conversation instead, which by the way, we had in November.
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That's when I recorded this.
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But before that, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, the art of clear writing
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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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There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
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The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about $150 and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com slash clear writing.
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It's indiancut.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just the willingness to work hard
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Varun, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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I'm still wondering why I'm here, but thanks for having me.
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Firstly, you've been here before.
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Secondly, this is an episode I'm excited about because I'll just tell my listeners that when
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Varun just sat down, he was like, why are you calling me?
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I have no accomplishments.
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I haven't written books.
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He hasn't written books, so he should.
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But my whole point was that one, accomplishments are something which is not up to us to judge.
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Varun, your social work is so immense that some of the value of it is perhaps incalculable.
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And also, one of my friends once described himself as a person who collects interesting
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And I think in a manner of speaking through the show, I have conversations which make
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me think and therefore by extension also make listeners hopefully think.
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And the other thing that I have realized is that when I speak with people I already know
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as friends, like we've known each other for 15, 20 years, like you just mentioned, I find
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that after the conversation, I realize I hadn't known them at all because we talk about so
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So that's kind of what we want to do.
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Like, since I have known you, you have basically been father time with your flowing white beard
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and all of that, a 21st century libertarian Marx, as it were.
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So tell me a little bit about sort of your childhood, wherever you born, where did you
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What were your early years like?
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Give me a sense of the texture of your life because the texture of these modern times
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are so different where we are surrounded by smartphones and sensory influences and networks
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But it wasn't like that when you were growing up.
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Yeah, it wasn't like that.
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And you know, I'm kind of split on history or the past, mine or otherwise, because, you
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know, we seem to invariably draw kind of very destructive lessons from history.
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I rarely look back as such, except to figure out how is it going to shape or influence
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what I'm going to do next.
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So I rarely look back in any particular meaningful sense.
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And I grew up in a, you know, compared to you, I grew up probably 10, 20 years before
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I think you've just passed 60 and I'm 47.
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I'm probably heading towards 61.
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You might be father time, but you haven't stopped time.
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I was born in Calcutta and a very different Calcutta, a city that's still my home.
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And that actually also shows every time I go back to Calcutta, it's kind of a benchmark
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for me to where we are and where we were, I mean, personally, socially, city, collectively,
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Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a sea change.
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And I studied in a Bengali school.
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So that was one of my first kind of, kind of throwback.
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My primary education was in a Bengali medium, you know, like a local school, like most of
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us in that, in those days.
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And then the Naxalite movement happened in the late sixties.
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And my father had been in politics for, since his youth days.
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He was a member of the Congress and a manager of the local, election manager for the local
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So it was a challenging time for him and for us and the schools, et cetera, were to shut.
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So my father shifted me to my uncle who was then in Madhya Pradesh.
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And so my first shock was how, or for all of them and me was I had no knowledge of English
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You know, English, I could read alphabet, but nothing more than that.
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And Hindi, I had no knowledge.
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And you were like nine or 10.
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And so that was a shock.
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And what kind of amazed me and what I still remember, I don't remember the name of the,
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But I do remember the length to which she went to have me in the class and yet prepare
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me in a way for which I needed to be prepared because I was far behind the class in virtually
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And that to me was quite an interesting because I was different, yet I was made to feel, you
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know, part of the same class.
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So that was, I mean, looking back was one of my nice, pleasant experience that she took
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And that's how, I mean, English became my second language as such.
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Otherwise I probably wouldn't have, but then I came back to Calcutta for my higher secondary
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and, and did my engineering, you know, in my days it's from my kind of a family.
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You either had to be a doctor or an engineer.
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I mean, there was literally no option and we just tried our luck that whichever we got
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So I went for engineering in the REC Suratkal.
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So that was another first, for instance, for my class or my friends, I was probably the
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first one who, who was put on a flight and asked to go to the college on his own and
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figure out everything of admission, which compared to what's happening today.
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And I see all around me is, you know, people don't believe it was fun.
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And, and the best part was that that college five years that I spent, my engineering was
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Those days it was 11 plus five and I really enjoyed it.
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Even because the experience itself outside the outside home and alone and in a, in a
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very cosmopolitan place because regional engineering colleges were literally mini India.
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I had no idea of South India when I landed there.
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So to get used to everything, the food and people, the language and everything.
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But most importantly, what I remember and what I really, you know, that's my kind of
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second bright spot was that that college was located on the beach, literally.
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I mean, there was a tiny village, but it was really tiny fishermen's village.
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Now it's quite different because it's developed like most places and, but we could virtually,
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in fact, our kind of preference as we climbed the ladder in the, in the, in the college
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was to find a room from which we could see the sea, you know?
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So that was an incredible experience to have that.
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And did you get a room where you could see the sea?
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Because you climb the, you go on the higher floor, second or third or fourth floor, you
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The sea was just there.
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So and the breeze, you could always smell the sea.
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So that was an, yeah, really the most memorable college experience because I was a mediocre
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student and I mean, like we all had to finish.
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And we had to look for, you know, all the public sector exams for jobs, et cetera, et
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So that was, but I do my, my, I mean, apart from the location, the thing I think I learned,
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perhaps the only thing I learned or I still remember and use perhaps is, you know, engineering
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is about solving problems.
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I try to look at what's the problem, how to break it down, how to figure out the steps
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And that to me, I think has been the real education that I, I think I'm very pleased
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or very grateful about, that I didn't know it'll turn out this way, but that's something
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I've used perhaps right through, I mean, for the last, last 30, 30 plus years.
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So that I think has been, so I'm still carrying that sense all the time in my mind that I
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can perhaps look at things somewhat differently and figure out how to go around it and give
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me, and that's my only satisfaction that if I can find out something that I had not thought
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before, that I had not come across before and get a handle on it, to me, there's nothing
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more satisfying than that.
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So it's a, yeah, it's a completely personal, personal trip.
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So which is why, you know, there's no book to showcase.
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So, you know, as you were speaking of your school in Madhya Pradesh, the thought struck
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me that in a sense, and I'll explain what I mean by that, in a sense, we are all born
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blind in the sense that we don't really have a way of seeing the world when we are born.
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And when we begin to see the world, we are blind to a lot of things because we haven't
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kind of experienced them.
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Like it strikes me that you're not knowing English or Hindi and the teachers spending
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that time with you, being compassionate, reaching out to you, empathizing, understanding, you
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know, for she must have had that extra layer of empathy for someone who is not one of her
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kids in the sense, not from there.
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And equally for you at some level, it must have also made you more aware in your later
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life forever that there are people around you who may not see things the same way, who
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may be unfortunate in different ways and they don't need to be condemned or cast aside,
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but helped and all that.
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And, you know, one of your qualities as our mutual friend, Moit and I were discussing
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last night is your incredible compassion for people you don't even know.
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And for all the other kids, it might not have been like that.
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They may have completely ignored you and not given a shit because they haven't had that
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Like I look at myself growing up also in a cocoon of privilege and I was blind to a lot
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of things and you grow older and you experience a world and more and more layers kind of fall
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And I'm just thinking aloud here, but how much do you think there is something to that
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in the sense that people can be innately compassionate and empathetic, I mean, to lesser or greater
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extents or experiences can play a big part in them seeing the world a little differently
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or making an effort to see the world a little differently in this way.
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And the reason I ask this is that too often through our lives as thinkers, as people wrestling
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with ideologies or ways of looking at the world too often, I think me and many other
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people I know have made the mistake of thinking of everything at an intellectual level.
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And one of the things that I am still learning from you is that don't think about ideas.
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Everything is really about people and reaching out and connecting, which you are so good
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So a bit of a ramble, but what are your sort of thoughts on this?
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It's interesting you put it that way, I probably wouldn't or probably that wasn't my kind
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of direct experience while, you know, I am grateful to everything that has happened in
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the past and most of which I had no control.
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But I think, you know, for instance, after my initial first 20 years since I thought
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and that was one of my reasons to explore public policy, all that I'd look into things
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that I'm interested in that I had not done before.
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And to me, that was my biggest kind of stimulus that you can venture into any issue because
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as a citizen, as a member of the public, you must have a handle to it.
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And which I realized very late, although I experienced it for since about 2000 on.
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But I realized it only in the last five years, perhaps, that we forget the public part of
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Public policy, you're saying before the policy considered the public.
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We forget the prefix, you know, it's always the phrase is public policy, but we forget
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the public and we focus on the policy and we think, you know, we are doing the best
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job we can, we are, you know, preparing the most rational, most contextual policy we can
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think of and the public will just lap it, accept it because after all, what's the public?
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I think that has been one of, I mean, as of now, I'm sure it may change as I go along.
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As of now, that has been kind of my realization, which was a conscious realization because,
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I mean, whatever is innate or whatever was seen normal, I wouldn't be aware of it as
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But last five, six years, I've become really aware that where we went wrong.
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And I think, and I mean, not just me, but I think what you just said a little earlier,
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that the intellectual discourse has a tendency to create a sense of knowledge and an imperceptible
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sense of arrogance, which I've tried, at least consciously, tried to break down and challenge
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myself, at least in the last five, six years, every time I kind of felt that, you know,
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So the moment I feel that I think I know something, I try to push to see, is there all to it or
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is there a way to look beyond?
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And I think that is, I think has been a real realization that why we made the mistake and
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which is what I've been very provocative, even before that, when I was kind of grappling
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with this, that, you know, among the kind of circles I was in, education and awareness
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was a big thing that we need to make people aware, make people educate people.
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And to me, that itself carries in it the seed of arrogance and therefore the blindness to
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people, because a teacher is supposed to know and communicate that and make the student
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who's kind of innocent or ignorant, aware of the so-called issues.
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But that I think is only half the story.
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If the teacher can't relate to the student, or if the teacher can't place the issue in
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the context or through the lens through which the student might be seeing it, no amount
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of education and awareness is going to help.
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So all this came to me much later because I began to kind of ask at many meetings, what
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To whom are we teaching?
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Is it because we know or is it because every opportunity is an occasion for us to know
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You know, that puts me in a kind of a jeopardy because I tend to always think on my feet.
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And therefore, even when I prepare a text, I deviate because if I prepared it, I know
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You know, I need to push no matter what I am trying.
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But that comes with its risk because I may not know where I'm headed.
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But to me, the satisfaction is that at the end, if I make a mistake, I hope I try to
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recognize it so that I can rectify it and take that one more step.
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And if I think I put the thing in a way that satisfied me, then perhaps I have a base to
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So I look at it as a win-win, you know, no matter what happens and which to me actually
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has kind of helped, I believe that currently or last few years, I actually tried to go
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out and engage with not just people I didn't know, but engage with people or try to reach
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out to people with whom I might actually have a disagreement and figure out how do I learn
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to communicate, to have a meaningful discussion dialogue with people with whom both of us
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may know that we disagree on some things and some disagreements can be quite fundamental
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in terms of ideology or intellectual perspectives, but yet have a conversation, which is another
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way of saying that that's another way for me to push myself.
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That how do I and in today's context, it becomes even much more relevant because 10, 15 years
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ago, there was no eco chamber to speak of as such, you know.
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So today's context, I mean, to me, there can't be anything much more fundamental than
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figuring out how do we break out from our own cocoons, own, you know, safe zones and
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really have some exciting, exciting things to do, to learn, to push.
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So that I think, which is probably why I'm interested in people, because it always puts
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me in a new situation because everybody is different.
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Everybody is looking at the world through a different lens than mine, even those who
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may agree with me on very many things.
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So I think that's, I think that's quite an exciting, exciting way of taking the next
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So yesterday I recorded an episode with Abhinandan Sekri, the news laundry founder that will probably
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come out a few weeks before this one.
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And in that, he said something very interesting.
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He spoke about how while shooting for a television show, he was going through the Northeast.
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And in the Northeast, when they were in these different villages, they asked the people
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that, you know, if the government is to spend money on you or if you have money to spend,
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what would you spend it on?
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He said that we were expecting in all our arrogance, we thought they will say roads
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or infrastructure or bridges or whatever.
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And they said, cinema theater, yeah, dance hall.
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And he said his initial reaction was one of a sort of a patronizing looking down on these
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people that don't they understand their greater good?
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Why do they want a cinema hall?
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But then when he spoke to them deeper, he realized that what was behind it was as a
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young people were growing up, they wanted to see movies because there was nothing in
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their own village or town where they could see movies.
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They would go to other cities like whatever Imphal, Shillong, whatever is a near as big
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And the roads were so bad that an accident rates were so high.
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The death rate was pretty high just going to watch a film.
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What if the cinema theater was in the village itself?
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Now, this is something no central planner from a distance can foresee.
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So if you go with the arrogance of a public policy person and you say that they see externalities,
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make roads or from another point of view, you might say that they make temples for them.
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And they will vote for us if we build a temple for the gods.
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But actually, locally, what people may want individuals in a community they want is completely
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And as you were saying that it just reminded me of the wiseness of that, that even though
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you're an engineer, you thankfully don't have what we derisively call the engineering mindset,
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which is that thing that you can design a society or you can design an intervention
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in particular ways, assuming that people are a static thing, but people are not a static
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Their needs and desires are very local, very specific and inaccessible to outsiders.
#
This realization of yours, which I'm beginning to think about seriously and realizing myself
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and just by talking to you learning from that must have happened over a period of many years.
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So can you, for example, think of mistakes in your thinking, assumptions you made at
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some point, perhaps, which got corrected when you actually, you know, met with people like
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moments where you thought, oh, my thinking was arrogant and wrong and simplistic.
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And now I know better because I made the effort to kind of reach out.
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So can you give me like instances of that so I can understand how the process went?
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Yeah, it was like you said, it was long drawn.
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I mean, obviously, there was no no kind of a sunrise moment that it happens.
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I mean, primarily, it was that when we started or when I started in the late 80s, early 90s,
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India was liberalizing and we didn't know where we will head.
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But by that time, I had kind of a clear idea where we I would like to head.
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And therefore, public policy greatly interested me in the hope that it will shape the tomorrow
#
So in that in that early 90s, the issue primarily as I see it now was how do how do I win the
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You know, how do I score the points that I want to score so that the other side is kind
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Over the next 10, 15 years, I realized that that is one of the fundamental flaws.
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It's not about defeating the other side.
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It's about winning over the other side.
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You know, so to me, that became I mean, again, this realization didn't happen overnight.
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But as I see it, it began to happen about 10, 15 years since I began.
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And one critical point, which I again, which I didn't realize, which happened 20 years
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ago, but I actually didn't realize its significance.
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Since I'm looking back now, it was in the 2000 and when I was really active, I mean,
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you know, I mean, the climate change or the WTO or whatever, where a liberal angle could
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be placed and where I could be as provocative, I would be as provocative.
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I mean, for the sake of scoring that point.
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So I wrote and spoke on things which would be outlandish even today.
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But in 2000, I happened to come across a movement that Sharath Joshi was leading at that time.
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I mean, Sharath Joshi is the farmer's leader who passed away a few years ago.
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I met him in the early 90s, so I knew him.
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But we knew each other intellectually that we had a liberal orientation, etc.
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But in 2000, I came across his first, and that was also mine, our first direct experience
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exposure even to a limited extent of a mass movement because I did grow up during the
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anti-emergency when I just went to college.
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And I still remember the blank pages of newspapers that came on the day emergency came when I
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was just completing my class 11.
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And therefore, I had seen that era of a public enthusiasm for change, etc., etc.
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But it was in this one in 2000 that I began to see and actually experienced it because
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you know, proof of the pudding is in eating, that Sharath Joshi's ability to connect with
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the people beyond the intellectual, intellectual dimension actually made people aspire or get
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inspired to strive for things which otherwise they may not have or it may have happened
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And secondly, once the people connected, the policy followed.
#
So that was my first direct experience on a movement that was built on the first generation
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genetically modified cotton, which the farmers, cotton farmers in Western India, particularly
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Gujarat Maharashtra and some other parts wanted.
#
They were already growing the unauthorized, unapproved varieties, which is how the world
#
came to know that Indian farmers were already growing something that hadn't been approved
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or authorized by the state.
#
And Sharath Joshi sought to leverage that.
#
And in 2002, in a matter of a month, the government changed its policy.
#
To me, that was, you know, I was more an observer, but a close observer since I knew him and
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had been to some of the things and because it was new to me because I had never interacted
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with public in my adult life as much as then.
#
So it was kind of an eye-opener that the policy could change if we can build the political
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capital and the political capital can only come if we can take the people or significant
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number of people with us.
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Something which I had not experienced nor thought of then.
#
And again, I didn't realize the full significance till over quite a few years, a decade or more.
#
But to me, that was one direct personal experience that I can think of, which turned me from
#
the policy to public policy.
#
So for that, and Sharath Joshi not being primarily an intellectual, although he was, given his
#
background, you know, extremely educated, accomplished person coming back to India to
#
look into agriculture from a family who had not been in agriculture for a few generations.
#
So he did it as a practitioner, you know, that's why he was not pursuing the issue
#
primarily on the intellectual plane, which to me is my kind of lesson that intellectual
#
dimensions are important, but they're not nearly the whole story.
#
It's the people and how do we reach out.
#
And to reach out, it becomes two ways, you know, like either you reach out patronizingly
#
or you reach out more as you're equal.
#
You empathize with them in a way a human being ought to empathize with another person.
#
And which to me is amazing that five, six years after his death, in parts of Maharashtra
#
I've been, people still give me or show me wedding cards for their daughters or sons.
#
Not with pictures of gods, but with pictures of Sharath Joshi, which to me is something
#
amazing that people would hold someone, you know, who was merely an Rajya Sabha MP, you
#
know, I mean, he, I don't know how long he'll be remembered as such beyond the people who
#
But that this could happen.
#
And therefore, how did, how could this happen?
#
That how do you build the relationship where this level, this depth of bonding happens
#
and what a contrast it is with today, with social media and the rest, well, we are more
#
I mean, I feel it really amazing.
#
That's beautifully put.
#
And I'll just give some context to my listeners about Sharath Joshi and the specific movement
#
you were, you know, you're, you witnessed up close.
#
Sharath Joshi was a great leader, bureaucrat, et cetera, et cetera, who essentially came
#
back to India in the late seventies and said, I'll go back to farming and then realized
#
as a farmer, the problems that agriculturalists toward the country face.
#
But unlike the other political rhetoric of the day, which saw the state as a solution
#
to these problems, he realized that most of these problems had been created by the state
#
and that these counter-intuitive ideas had to be communicated to the people at large.
#
And he managed to actually build a mass movement of farmers who were in a sense asking for
#
the state to get out of the way.
#
And I have a very good episode in Hindi, which kind of explains this with the leader.
#
You introduced me to Varun Gunvan Patil.
#
In fact, you were present at the recording in the room when I recorded with Gunvanji.
#
I'll link it from the show notes.
#
And I also wrote a column called A Tale of Two Satyagrahas.
#
And one of them was the one that you speak of that essentially just to give context again,
#
in the 1990s, as the nineties were coming to an end, cotton crops across India started
#
failing because there were pests like bollworms that were averaging these crops and farmers
#
had to use increasing amounts of pesticide to keep them at bay.
#
And there was so much more labor involved.
#
The costs of the pesticides were high.
#
The crops would often fail anyway.
#
It was just a downward spiral.
#
Farmers heard of something called BT cotton, which was a genetically modified kind of cotton.
#
And it was being used across the world, completely safe.
#
But because it's a new technology, Luddites everywhere were kind of protesting and they
#
So then what happened is farmers in Gujarat got hold of a bunch of these BT cotton seeds
#
And what happened in 2002 was that all cotton crops in Gujarat failed except the 10,000
#
You would imagine that there would be a lesson in this.
#
But the lesson that the government took was not that these are the crops that survived,
#
but that these are the crops which are illegal.
#
So they wanted to burn these 10,000 hectares of cotton.
#
And at this point, Sharad Joshi, who leads the Shedkari Sangatana in Maharashtra, took
#
around 10,000 farmers with him to Gujarat to stand with their fellow farmers.
#
And they basically just went into those fields and they said, you want to take the cotton
#
And like you said, the people's movement there was just too much.
#
And the ban on BT cotton was lifted by the Vajpayee government, which is such an inspiring
#
Like I think I've seen a clip of you at a press conference of farmers in 1999 or something
#
right or 2002, yeah, where, you know, a distant clip where you are also holding forth on this.
#
And by the way, I'll put a link to my column, which kind of talks about why, you know, GMO
#
Now, let's go a little further back in your journey that we've spoken of public policy.
#
We've spoken of policy and we've spoken of public policy, as you said.
#
But before this, you were a marine engineer and you sailed the world.
#
So you know, post your engineering and all that.
#
Tell me about those sort of experiences, like at that time, when you were in college in
#
RSC Suratkul, doing engineering and so on.
#
What did you want to be?
#
What was your view of the world?
#
And in ideological terms, how was your view of the world sort of developing?
#
Because I remember I didn't think the things I think today when I was 20 or even 25.
#
It took a lot of time for me to gradually come around to my way of thinking.
#
And otherwise, it was very vague.
#
In college, I was just all over the place, no fixed ideas on anything, which is not surprising
#
because the received wisdom around you is so flawed in so many ways with the religion
#
of the state and so on.
#
And also you have so few books to read, though I was more privileged than most, but you have
#
you just don't have that kind of access and exposure.
#
So give me a sense of your intellectual development through that early period and how the way
#
you look at the world begins to change.
#
I mean, I grew up in, like I said, I grew up in a family which was very political.
#
From both sides, from my father's side and from my mother's side.
#
Although part of my from my mother's side was on in the left, quite actively involved
#
with left politics in Bengal, and my father's side and my maternal grandfather.
#
They were all deeply into Congress from, you know, almost the time they were born.
#
And my father continued in that vein.
#
So it was natural that, you know, I grew up in a family that would be anti CPM or left
#
in Bengal and and and Congress.
#
But then I saw my father change during 77 or 76 emergency time.
#
And that was just the excitement, you know, like it was a David versus Goliath thing for
#
I mean, more than because I didn't really have a full grasp of emergency except the
#
blank spaces I saw in statesman in Calcutta that, you know, the printed blank spaces because
#
So apart from that, I don't really have a direct this thing except for occasional columns,
#
Mino Masani or things that would interest me that something different something to think
#
about or something that made me think.
#
But I think what what happened was or how it happened perhaps is is the emergency and
#
the and the turmoil and the best part of that turmoil was perhaps that it happened in the
#
You know, having and seeing how the social media space or the digital space, the behavior
#
takes place, I think my initial experience were all in the physical space.
#
So while we had less access to books and there was no Internet in the 80s.
#
But we did and I actually, I mean, me, my brothers, we came up from a family which read
#
You know, I was I remember books and comics and things of every kind in our household
#
And my mother used to feed me anything that she thought I could read.
#
And all of our brothers, we read a lot.
#
So reading was natural.
#
And therefore, in the 80s, while we didn't have direct access or a quick access, because
#
of this physical involvement or presence, because we happen to be in a situation where
#
there is so much ferment and turmoil, you know, emergency, then Mrs. Gandhi's assassination,
#
you know, I mean, there was always turmoil and major ones.
#
And which invariably makes one, at least made me curious to look and read to try to figure
#
out what's happening all around, because it's happening all around, literally.
#
For instance, you know, I still remember that when Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 84,
#
I was in a village in Sundarans.
#
We were stuck for a week because all connections were broken.
#
But people were taking out rallies with, you know, chanting Indira's name and the flag
#
and all the rest, even in a remote village, which had no electricity, no toilets.
#
So, you know, and that kind of made me wonder.
#
And I came from a world which was very urban, you know, I grew up completely in urban India.
#
So to grow up to experience that and to think that how different we can be and how do we
#
survive in such diverse situations.
#
The marine engineering experience actually only expanded that because I joined the marine
#
engineering primarily as my incentive was to see the world at no cost, because I was
#
not as intelligent as my brother, who could go to an IIT and go to US for his higher studies.
#
And therefore, I had to be satisfied with with less.
#
And therefore, I thought marine engineering would at least give me a chance to see the
#
world at no cost, which it did.
#
But that, of course, actually increased my sense of curiosity or inquisitiveness or at
#
You know, so I remember my one of my first letters to my mother from one of the ports
#
I visited was particularly a Western port in Canada, that it does look like you see
#
in Bollywood films, you know, until that time, I had no experience, realization, actually,
#
because in our home, we didn't have television till after 84, 85.
#
So we had experience of the outer world, primarily through films, you know, as a visual medium.
#
And the Bollywood was one kind, and we all knew that Bollywood either depicts things
#
that are too harsh, you know, the realistic ones, or are too fantastic.
#
But the harsh ones are something we don't directly experience, most of us, we haven't.
#
And the fantasy ones, we can only imagine.
#
Whereas in the West, in Canada, I found that the roads, the people are actually as what
#
So that kind of, I know it was an eye opener that how could it be so different?
#
And that was probably my first introduction coupled with this experience in the village
#
after that for a few years, that there is something going on that we need to grapple
#
You know, that why is this Gulf?
#
Why is this Gulf that my brother who could get admitted in the US and spend next 25 years
#
working for multinationals, could be an Indian, enjoy the Western standards, yet the family
#
and the community and the country is a century, perhaps, behind, in every which way, not just
#
financially, economically, but every which way.
#
So that was my kind of quest into actually trying to understand public policy as such.
#
And something that happened, which again, reflectively, you know, because one of the
#
stand-alone thing about emergency is the Nasbandi, which everybody almost in North India or perhaps
#
Even as a youngster, I knew that something was happening, because everybody talked about
#
So it was there, which basically was apart from the policy aspect of it, or the physical
#
torture and the grossness of it, the policy aspect of it was that population is a challenge.
#
And which would seem that population is indeed a challenge, how can you deal with people
#
with so many people growing, etc.
#
That's when primarily one kind of another piece fell in place.
#
Because I used to read, I sometimes or quite often actually whenever I could, I could visit
#
British Council or American Library in Calcutta, just to read what's happening elsewhere.
#
And I discovered Julian Simon.
#
Just an accident, no one had told me anything about that.
#
And I found he was a man who was arguing something very different.
#
And then in 1990, he won his famous bet that while the population would increase, the prices
#
of some basic commodities that were decided on would actually decline.
#
And there were some people, biologists and economists on the other side who said, since
#
the population is increasing, the prices would rise.
#
Just to give context, the person on the other side of the bed was a guy called Paul Ehrlich,
#
who was a famous Luddite, who was a famous sort of Malthusian, rather, who would-
#
Otherwise a learned man, but completely wrong about this one subject.
#
And so Julian Simon made a bet with him and said, no, growing population is a good thing.
#
And they made a bet about certain commodities, whether their prices will go up or down, where
#
Ehrlich said, of course they will go up because population will go up and there'll be less
#
And Simon said, no, no, no, no, no, they'll go down, wait and watch.
#
And Simon, of course, won the bet.
#
Yeah, so that happened over, I mean, the bet was from 1980 to 1990 in the tenure period.
#
And I began to read Simon early and late 80s, I mean, just as an accident.
#
And then I read the news that he's actually won the bet.
#
So that was kind of a startling this thing.
#
And because I was reading these at the American library, because there was no internet, I
#
found his address and wrote to him that this is amazing.
#
And because of the past 10 years where the population, demography, et cetera, was such
#
a big issue in India, so I thought that I want to know more.
#
And that was kind of the single biggest spark as far as policy world is concerned because
#
before that I had no idea of public policy as such as a kind of a domain by itself.
#
And Simon introduced me to the whole world of public policy and particularly free market
#
public policy and free market environmentalism.
#
And I kind of, my first 10 years was almost completely on how do we understand the market
#
in the, or the economics in the context of environment.
#
Simon wrote back to you when he wrote to you.
#
He wrote back to me and I mean, we corresponded for the last eight years of his life then.
#
And he came to India, he and his wife came to India in 97 when we did our second conference,
#
so called Libertarian Conference in Devlali in 97.
#
And Simon passed away in 98.
#
And before that, he'd introduced me to a whole world of free market think tanks in
#
Europe and US particularly.
#
So all that excited me and my interest particularly was because one, the demographic battle, the
#
policy battle, which was so demonstratively won in my view as Simon won the bet.
#
But from all the others that I was seeing because environment and population is related
#
to environment was such a big, I mean, it kind of interested me because I hadn't thought
#
And therefore I thought, let's try to apply it and see.
#
So that was kind of my own way of self-education, that let me take the biggest challenge that
#
people say it is there in terms of policy, that what to do with environment.
#
And let's see if my understanding or my understanding of economics of markets, which I had not studied
#
at all through my education, I could help resolve it, at least in my mind, even if I
#
don't convince anyone else.
#
And which had some interesting fallouts in the sense, for me personally, in the sense
#
that I realized that being from outside the disciplines, neither economics nor environment,
#
I was relatively free to ask anything and was only limited by my own lack of imagination
#
You know, that I hadn't studied environment or economics in my college or school or whatever
#
or any formal way, didn't kind of deter me.
#
To me, because I had not studied it, I probably tried to understand it and apply it in a way
#
that I could, which was kind of, I mean, I think was very, very helpful because firstly,
#
it gave me the confidence that I could think, because at least in my mind, I thought that
#
what I'm saying makes sense to me.
#
So that was very satisfying.
#
Secondly, they were in the late 90s, by that time, or mid 90s, I started writing for newspapers,
#
And while the editors, et cetera, may not have agreed with what I'm saying, but they
#
It was different and it was, in a way, related to the liberalizing tendency of the society
#
and the state at that point.
#
You know, the 90s was quite exciting in that sense, that people were exploring different
#
So I got some space to write.
#
So that was my first, what should I say, inter immersion into the world of public policy.
#
But there was another thing, another turning point, I think, during my shipping days, apart
#
from the Gulf that I said before, was the coincidence, you know, ships generally had
#
libraries and videos, VCRs, but because I was more attracted to reading, so I did.
#
And one book, again, hardly, no one had actually recommended it, I just came across, which
#
was Ayn Rand's Atlas Run.
#
So that was another of those kind of turning points in the mid 80s, that there is something
#
You know, that there is something that I need to explore, which I hadn't thought of, and
#
which seems to make a lot of sense in where I am, that is, in India and in our context.
#
And I, that's, and because as I read Rand and read other things that she and others
#
began to recommend, that's how I kind of accidentally came across Julian Simon, that here's something
#
I should read because I thought it was interesting.
#
So you know, so those mid to late 80s was a kind of two big kind of stations in my journey,
#
And the next 10 years, in the 90s, I just did that, that how do I apply?
#
And in that search, you know, we had the Liberty Institute and all the rest as a public policy
#
think tank trying to copy or model on more Western think tanks.
#
We are perhaps one of the very few at that time who were very, very public and gung ho
#
about liberty and free market and all the rest.
#
And so 90s went, you know, I mean, was personally an extremely hectic because I was involved
#
in so many issues, so many campaigns, so many, so many policy dimensions, intellectual property,
#
environment, climate change, WTO, trade, yeah, I mean, I can't think of, there was no end
#
to the issues I could plunge into.
#
And that was exciting, not because I knew, but it gave me an opportunity to know something
#
I hadn't known before, you know, to explore that new world, new issue.
#
But the next one was this Sharad Joshi's movement, which is on hindsight, which I didn't
#
Rand and Julian Simon, I realized while I was reading that I was reading something different
#
and I would like to explore it.
#
Sharad Joshi's intervention in 2000, 2002, at that time, I was elated that we had won
#
a victory in terms of the policy dimension that the government changed its policy on
#
GM Cotton and GM Cotton was approved in 2002, in February or March 2002.
#
But it was more, you know, a feather in the cap.
#
It was nothing more, I hadn't really grasped the public part of the policy still, which
#
took perhaps another 10 years of struggle.
#
And in that time, I was kind of getting more attracted to things that were happening on
#
You know, I came to know about organizations who were acting on the ground to make things
#
And particularly their focus, because they were coming from the ground, so their focus
#
was or the starting point was the public, whereas my starting point was the policy.
#
So that, you know, so one major thing or exposure for me was the archivining, you know, in Gujarat.
#
I mean, I couldn't believe that I would or I had never dreamt that I would ever come
#
across a grassroots organization who was so steeped into the ideas of liberalism and freedom
#
from their experience on the ground.
#
That to me was, you know, the next kind of a turning point and that change could happen.
#
So that was in the, you know, from the late 90s to early 2000s or to mid 2000s or late
#
So that's probably 10 years.
#
It took me to realize that what I'm seeing is not an exception, but could be the rule,
#
you know, that we could reach out, that it is possible to reach out.
#
So you know, so what Sharath Joshi showed in actual performance of reaching out, here
#
were people who were on the ground, who could still relate their ideals and the people,
#
you know, the ideals of freedom and liberalism, etc., with the people and build from that.
#
Because most of, a lot of activism still, and more so then, were completely on the other
#
side that we wanted the state to intervene to do this, that and the other, that we accepted
#
that people were helpless, ignorant, illiterate and all the troubles that they have.
#
That it's the responsibility of the society and the state to do something, to intervene
#
as aggressively as they can to root out some of these challenges.
#
And here was something that was arguing very differently.
#
And in that, another landmark was, and again, primarily because I probably would never have
#
observed it, or had the opportunity to observe it in such close quarters, had I not come
#
to know Archiboy, because they were deeply involved in the forest rights movement for
#
the tribal people for a long time.
#
And then they were part of the groups that were mobilizing, campaigning for recognition
#
of the rights of the tribal people over their lands and local resources in the forest areas
#
So that was taking place through the early 2000s.
#
And that was another policy change that I saw, not as directly, but through my personal
#
interaction with them primarily, that the government did change the policy.
#
They did pass an act in 2005, recognizing the rights of the tribal and indigenous communities
#
and others who live in traditional communities who are living in the forest areas, whose
#
rights are generally were not recognized till then, so that it was possible.
#
And the second learning was that legislative change would never be perfect.
#
It will only be incremental.
#
And we have to build from that again.
#
And it's because many times it happens that we think of a legislative victory and think
#
that the battle has been won forever.
#
No battles won forever, neither in GM cotton, which is a glaring example that we haven't
#
approved the third generation GM cotton since 2006 or 2008.
#
The world has moved on to the fifth, sixth, seventh generation of GM.
#
And not just in cotton, there are more than 12 GM crops that are being commercially grown
#
across the world, but we are still debating and stuck with the second generation BT cotton
#
So the battle is never won and may never, I mean, the battle may be won at a particular
#
point, but the war is a continuous one, you have to keep fighting all the time.
#
And same with the forest rights act, here was a change, which is a big victory for the
#
people who fought for it.
#
I was more marginal in this, but I tried to understand it as closely as I could.
#
Because to me, what was interesting and to my friends in Arch, that it was also a property
#
rights movement, which was one of the core beliefs or principles we held of a liberal
#
free world, that property in land and whatever else.
#
So it's not a perfect legislation, but it's still a step ahead of where we were.
#
And again, because of the people, you know, so things perhaps began to fall into place
#
that I really need to grapple with this people question even more.
#
And then of course, I had been, I had some opportunity to be with them and see how their
#
work were actually progressing on the ground and what were the potential of and what were
#
the limitations as well of reaching out, you know, how it can happen, whether the new communication
#
and other technologies available can help, which it did 10 years later with them in terms
#
of using satellite imagery and GPS to help people document their claims much, much better
#
than it was ever possible when the law was enacted in 2005.
#
And people are incrementally getting at least some rights recognized, although perhaps it's
#
There are probably more people whose rights have not been recognized even 10 years or
#
15 years after the law was passed then.
#
But like I said, it's a continuous journey, every, every generation, every community has
#
to every individual has to engage and fight for what they stand for.
#
So that was, you know, that was the beginning of my trying to really move and try to understand
#
that I, that, that I had missed something that the people dimension.
#
So that probably has been the last five, seven years.
#
And in fact, I just wrote to somebody that that the people dimension is a practitioner's
#
Sharad Joshi was a practitioner.
#
He was not an ideologue.
#
You know, he was not an armchair ideologue.
#
I was an armchair ideologue.
#
I could write anything I wanted, anything my imagination would let me and be satisfied
#
But to implement, and that is where my engineering also fit in, that to implement, we need practitioners.
#
Engineers are practitioners.
#
They're not theoretical physicists.
#
And Sharad Joshi was the first practitioner that I saw, which could, who made a difference.
#
Arch Vahini was another set of practitioners from rural India who had amazing achievements,
#
And as I looked into it, I rediscovered Gandhi, that he, to me, is the ideal practitioner.
#
So this has been, it's been a long journey.
#
It's been a long journey.
#
But I mean, to me, I mean, it's been a very exciting, exciting journey.
#
Each breakthrough is, you know, to me, since I'm a non-believer, I don't go to temples
#
or have any prayer to say, to me, these are as ecstatic or as I could enjoy it as much
#
as any other excitement, stimulus I could have.
#
So we'll discuss Gandhi in length later.
#
And I'll also double click on the Arch Vahini forest rights movements because I think there
#
are so many lessons there.
#
So before we do that, an observation, a little setting of context, another observation, and
#
then a couple of questions in that order.
#
So my first observation is that, you know, I used to believe that many of the things
#
we believe in are counterintuitive ideas, like the fact that every voluntary interaction
#
between two people is a positive sum game, both people are better off, what I call the
#
double thank you moment, or spontaneous order, the way it works, that you don't need something
#
to be centrally directed, that societies and languages and cultures, you know, should not
#
be centrally directed, they can run on their own.
#
But I thought these are counterintuitive ideas and people may not necessarily understand.
#
And one experience which forced me to reconsider this notion of mine was when you called me
#
to that farmers conference in Deolali three years ago, where in fact, I had had that conversation
#
with Gunvan Patilji episode 86.
#
And there I realized that all of these people, farmers and farmer leaders, held pretty much
#
identical ideas to mine, except that those ideas did not come from books and thinking.
#
They came from lived experience, and that these weren't necessarily that counterintuitive.
#
It was from the fabric of their lives, they could devise these lessons, they could protest
#
against the oppression of the state and realize all the ways in which they were sort of held
#
So that was a moment for me, which taught me that don't be condescending, don't be patronizing
#
these people, you know, from their lived experience, they can arrive at, you know, similar ideas
#
to you, except that they are in a sense deeper because it's come from the bottom up and it's
#
not like a top down intellectual thing.
#
The context I want to set is I want to click a little bit on the Julian Simon and the population
#
thing, that this is a common trend through Indian history and a dangerous trend, which
#
is why I want to click on it, that we assume that our population is the greatest of our
#
And this is also a belief that's been incentivized by others, for example, in the early 50s,
#
I think the Ford Foundation in the late 50s and early 60s, rather, the Ford Foundation
#
was giving incentives to India to do population control.
#
Population control was a big theme, Sanjay Gandhi kind of believed in it and did a lot
#
of coercive nonsense, Kumi Kapoor has a great book on the emergency, which talks about that
#
And this belief has kind of persisted to the current day, where there are still incentives
#
given for Nazbandis and population control and all of that.
#
And at the time we are recording in November, there have been rumors for a while that this
#
government may do some population control policy.
#
But the truth is, population is not a problem.
#
Population is, in the words of Julian Simon, he wrote a book with this title, The Ultimate
#
People are brains, not stomachs.
#
And one thing that illustrates this is that the movement of human beings throughout history
#
has been a movement from villages and rural areas to cities and urban areas, to places
#
with more population density, because that population density is a feature, not a bug.
#
You have deeper economic networks, more opportunities, all of that.
#
That's why people go to cities.
#
There's a great study by Nicholas Eberstad in 2007 called Too Many People?
#
And that found no correlation between population density and poverty.
#
You know, Monaco has 40 times the population density of Bangladesh, Bahrain has three times
#
the population density of India.
#
So this is a terrible misconception, and it's important to point that out, because it leads
#
to coercive policies on common people, which are crimes on humanity.
#
And this kind of thinking still continues.
#
So I'm really glad that you kind of mentioned that.
#
And it's very interesting.
#
I never knew you'd corresponded extensively with Simon.
#
The other sort of sideways observation I'll come to is Ayn Rand.
#
In the sense, it's become fashionable, for example, on Twitter, to shit on Ayn Rand.
#
Now, I've got to say, I haven't read Rand.
#
I tried and I didn't like the quality of the prose, and just for that reason alone, I didn't.
#
I've seen some of the quotes which sound very interesting to me, and I agree with them.
#
For example, the smallest minority is an individual, which I think is something we should all internalize.
#
But it's kind of become fashionable to have this thing about what is the worst book ever,
#
and people will say Fountainheader Atlashrugged.
#
And it's such a, you know, this speaks to a tendency within us to show our virtue by
#
standing in judgment over others, like, I am too good for that.
#
See, I am so discerning.
#
And to me, that question itself, what is the worst book ever, is fundamentally flawed because,
#
you know, whenever any of us starts reading a really bad book, we stop reading.
#
If we never read it, we don't complete bad books.
#
So how are we in a position to judge what is the worst book ever?
#
And I bet that many of the people who write these things haven't read Rand, and neither
#
And I know that we share many of the same beliefs about individual freedom and liberty
#
and why consent is good and coercion is bad.
#
And I have arrived at it through different places.
#
And to some extent, you and another person I also admire greatly who's influenced by
#
Rand, which is Alex Tabarrok, both of you have arrived at it through Rand.
#
So I'd like you to kind of talk about the ideas that like how does she change your thinking?
#
What is a way of looking at the world that you got from Rand?
#
You know, Rand was kind of a shock that from everything that I had heard, read, experienced
#
in the first 25 years, and I read Rand relatively late in my life, I was already a graduate
#
and all that, most people read Rand, begin to read Rand, it seems, in their school or
#
high school or college.
#
So I read Rand late, and perhaps because we didn't have, there was no internet and there
#
was no such thing to get to acquaint with her and I read her by accident.
#
But the shock of it, that how could somebody think and provide a perspective which seems
#
to stand against or stand alone in the backdrop of everything we have read, heard, believed?
#
And what you said that, you know, and that the individual is the smallest minority in
#
any collective, no matter which group, whereas today we talk of all the minorities, minority
#
rights, et cetera, but we never consider the individual within those minorities, because
#
that's the unifying bond, that could be the potentially unifying bond cutting across various
#
communities, ideological, ethnic, religious.
#
And second was that, and because perhaps, and this is perhaps my context, because I
#
came from engineering, I studied science, pure science, physics, chemistry, mathematics
#
throughout my education, so I had no particular inclination or understanding of social sciences
#
And that Rand could provide, and perhaps because I was a blank slate, at least in that dimension,
#
so Rand could provide a social science explanation for what's happening in such a telling manner.
#
And which is probably why I think the books are pirated and I first, in fact, long before
#
I even realized what intellectual property and copyright, et cetera, were, I used to
#
buy, and I still have some of those copies, bought copies from the streets of Calcutta,
#
which were all, from today I know they were all pirated.
#
You know, if people were not reading, no one would be pirating and copying and printing
#
and in those days where even photocopying was so difficult.
#
Yeah, photocopying was not as easy as it is today.
#
So all that, and which meant that in Calcutta I did, when I began to read, I began to really
#
One, because reading came naturally to me and secondly, I could look around and I could
#
find so many of her books and the books that she recommended and otherwise.
#
So that was, and my first impulse, in fact, not just me, another friend whom both of us
#
know, Parth, we came across each other in around that time, 86 perhaps, because of our
#
common affinity to Rand and some others also, Rakesh Vadwa, another friend, you know, Ajay
#
Gandhi, another friend, you know.
#
Yeah, we were so sad that he passed away so suddenly last month.
#
Amazing, I still miss him each day because he used to correspond so much on WhatsApp
#
almost on a daily basis.
#
So all these people I came to know and many others, and most prominent of them, my wife,
#
that it's in the 80s, late 80s, that we had these Aindraan clubs in many parts of many
#
cities of India and we used to circulate reading material and audio cassettes to listen to
#
because, you know, we had to literally post them from one place to another.
#
One group would listen to first few sets and pass the rest of the lectures to the next
#
So it was a large network, which is how I came to know some of these people in Tara
#
Malkani and Govind Malkani in Bombay.
#
So in that, in the personal journey, that period was interesting because we were all
#
exploring to figure out are there other people like us?
#
Or are we being taken for a ride?
#
You know, it was amazing to discover Parth or so many others.
#
And that's how I met my wife because she responded to one of these efforts.
#
And because she was in, she was from Calcutta, so we could meet up in 87, 88, perhaps, and
#
And that's one person probably, I mean, I have no, I can't express how glad I am for
#
But more than that, she, I mean, much more than that because she's borne me for the last
#
It's not easy because of my habits and because of my way of doing things that she's virtually
#
subsidized a lot of what I do and what I think.
#
So that's been, at a personal level, an incredible, incredible journey.
#
And that we shared so much in common, at least, you know, the basic premises.
#
So that was, yeah, that was, Ran was, in that sense, quite, I mean, quite startling because
#
I had, perhaps because I had not come from that world.
#
Many people from the social sciences who are already familiar with economics and social
#
issues, they have a frame and therefore can assess and therefore can reject Rand as much.
#
But I think most people do not, like me, so many people like me then, do not come from
#
a set perspective because for any number of reasons, either we didn't, we are not educated
#
in that stream or we are not practitioners in that stream.
#
You know, so that probably, and which is probably why people like Rand sell across the world
#
or continue to sell, how many years, 30 years after her death in 82, she died and the books
#
are still being piloted.
#
I mean, this is a phenomena I cannot, you know, one can't understand unless one feels
#
that there are people who are, of course, reading doesn't make one take it up in any
#
But to me, I mean, I probably took it up a little bit more than some others.
#
But that was, to me, that was my first and the Julian Simon was my next.
#
And one query, I mean, of course, Rand made me completely convinced me about the needlessness
#
of believing in God or a superhuman force or person or whatever.
#
So she completely cured me of that.
#
But what she didn't show, which kind of came to me much, much later, 20, 25 years later,
#
is and what I said a little earlier, that the point is not about winning the debate.
#
The point is about winning over.
#
Sharad Joshi gave a glimpse of that winning over, Arch Vahini provided another glimpse
#
of trying to reach out and winning over people who may not be coming from your side.
#
And the ultimate one, for instance, for me is in this regard of winning over and not
#
being a practitioner to the core, to me is Gandhi.
#
Because public policy and which again is my, you know, I mean, my rereading of Gandhi,
#
but public policy, if you have to take people forward with you on the on issues that you
#
think deserve, deserve, deserve social political capital to back it.
#
Then no one, I think in the modern era, or perhaps ever could reach out and connect at
#
a scale and at a time that Gandhi did.
#
So that to me was, you know, so to me, in fact, this is my current, my latest passion.
#
That if I really believe that, that it's not about winning the debate, but by winning,
#
but winning over people with whom I may disagree, not so much to convince them of my merits,
#
but about legitimacy of the different, different perspectives, because once we recognize the
#
legitimacy of different perspectives, then we'll take a step back from imposing our
#
So that's the first step.
#
And in that, I think my, my current, this thing has been, I mean, I'm completely into
#
it personally, as well as intellectually.
#
How do I reconcile, for instance, Rand with Gandhi?
#
You know, there would seem, and till 10 years ago, I would have thought that it's not easy.
#
But precisely because it's not, it didn't seem easy, I'm now completely into it.
#
That if it's not easy, is there a way?
#
That how do we reconcile people and ideas that I think, and that many of us think are
#
Is there something in the ideal, in the premises of socialism, which can be brought together
#
with the premises of a free society, for instance, or if there is Julian Simon's way of looking
#
at environment and consumption, et cetera, that mind is the ultimate resource, and therefore
#
the more we consume, the more we have, and which to me was one of my direct experiences
#
that in the, in the, when I spent a few years in the villages of Sundarbans, we consumed
#
hardly anything, but we didn't even have tap water.
#
I mean, we had to really struggle to get clean water and we had no toilets, it was all outdoors
#
and we had no consumption.
#
Yet when I, when I saw the West, they were consuming so much, but it was so clean.
#
You know, so to me, that it's not necessary that consumption leads to pollution, or there
#
is something called over consumption leading to pollution.
#
So how do I reconcile Julian Simon with, with again Gandhi?
#
Because Gandhi would be seen as, you know, the famous court, which is kind of tenuous,
#
but still, I mean, which is referred to, although he may not have actually said it, that the
#
world is enough for, for everyone's need, but not sufficient for everyone's greed.
#
Because then we don't, I mean, no one goes on to define what's need and what's greed
#
is, and Gandhi was not in, not an intellectual, he was not in the business of defining things
#
He was a practitioner, we had to see it from his life.
#
So some threads, one, I think that there might be a false dichotomy here in the sense, I
#
think it is possible to be like you probably are, both a Randian and a Gandhian, in the
#
sense that if you look at Rand in, say, the business of ideas, that this is the way the
#
world works and, you know, these are values which help move us to a better place.
#
Then that's a business of ideas and Gandhi more in the business of that second aspect
#
How do you convince people?
#
How do you bring people with you?
#
How do you build mass movements?
#
And I think that they're kind of orthogonal and can, you know, one can follow the other.
#
One can learn from Gandhi how to build a movement, but not necessarily share many of his ideas.
#
And as you know, I admire many of his ideas, I despise many of his ideas.
#
People contain multitudes.
#
There are all of those kind of angles.
#
I want to now double click on again something that you alluded to earlier and to just now
#
where you said that once you sort of found this frame of looking at the world from Rand,
#
from Simon and so on, you moved heavily into the environment, which I find really
#
interesting because, you know, people who support the free markets like you and me talk
#
about the beauty of markets.
#
The most common counter given to them always is that, okay, fine, we accept that all voluntary
#
transactions leave both people better off and markets are great and blah, blah, blah.
#
But what about externalities?
#
What about the environment?
#
What about the smog of Delhi?
#
What about, you know, all of those things take me through sort of your thinking about
#
all these issues because that also seems a very interesting reconciliation to make, to
#
be able to go into that domain like you did to, you know, to band with all the experts
#
on it and the practitioners on it to enter mass movements all the while holding firm
#
about how, you know, you need to look at it a little differently that markets aren't evil,
#
maybe they are the solution.
#
So expand on that a little bit because I'm sure many people who have this objection to
#
free markets would be interested in knowing.
#
Yeah, I mean, I was not looking at people at that point, primarily, I was looking at
#
it as a challenging intellectual exercise, which was very satisfying because I was looking
#
into a problem differently and I was applying it to our context in India rather than what
#
one would hear or read from the Western or other context.
#
And you know, so for instance, I found it quite natural, which I know is not so natural,
#
but I found it natural in those days, one of the first questions that kind of struck
#
me is that how come we have more chickens than we have more tigers or elephants?
#
And that to me was relevant because, and from personal experience too, because I grew up
#
at a time in the 60s when there was hardly any chicken.
#
You know, chicken was, I think in our house, in a Bengali household, complete non-vegetarian
#
all the time, I think we had chicken only in the 70s, started having chicken only in
#
Before that, it was mutton, the goat, or at times if there are people coming from the
#
village, it was the duck, there was no chicken.
#
And my grandmother, as long as she was running the house, she wouldn't let chicken be cooked
#
in the common, in the common chulla, you know, the coal-fired stove that we had, I mean that
#
everyone had at that time.
#
So why is it that we have so many chickens?
#
You know, that was kind of filling, I mean, fill in the blank kind that how is it that
#
Western city, New York or London or Tokyo, where not just there is huge population, enormous
#
wealth and incredibly clean, you know, so all the three were together.
#
So that to me was my kind of lived experience that some, there is something that we need
#
to explore, that we need to understand.
#
And that is where I think Rand and Simon and all the rest kind of, Rand for instance, the
#
basic advantage was that she provided an ethical frame of, you know, of the idea of rights
#
and what's right and wrong as a first shot, which I hadn't thought of earlier.
#
And Julian Simon with his enormous information base on how things are changing, was that,
#
you know, that if this is really happening, then why isn't it happening here?
#
You know, and perhaps while India was reforming liberalizing in 1990s, that was, I mean, I
#
really didn't have the technical expertise to look into the fiscal policy or, you know,
#
So my interest grew into environment because, you know, that was a big, you know, 92 was
#
So you know, that was a big buzz and then WTO, so that was another big buzz.
#
So I plunged into it because there were big buzzes and because I wanted to know, I really
#
wanted to explore that is there something I can say or think which makes sense to me
#
If it makes sense to me, then I can take it forward.
#
So the environment fit in exactly in that, in that post Rio scenario.
#
And the more I looked, the more I felt that I can ask questions which people are not asking
#
and which needs to be asked, for instance, why there are more chicken than tigers and
#
I, one of my first and not just chicken, there are more crocodiles, there are probably two
#
million crocodiles being killed across the world for the, for the leather, whereas in
#
India, crocodile is an endangered species and, and, and harvesting and farming is illegal,
#
You know, and to me, that was one of my starting this thing and, and it was at around that
#
time, probably, I don't remember the exact year now, that I came across, because I was
#
exploring these ideas, came across the ideas and experiences of a person, I don't know,
#
I mean, which most Indians may not remember these days, Romulus Whitaker.
#
He I don't know what his background was, but he set up a farm in outside Chennai, Madras.
#
And once, I think my wife and I, we were on that stretch of the East Coast and had visited
#
The answer question was, here is a farm that, that was pioneer in the world in terms of
#
figuring out how to ensure a more efficient breeding of crocodiles, but has been prohibited
#
So that to me, perhaps because I was not coming from the stream, I had a frame which was different.
#
My experience and the frame, I was trying to link the two because I had nothing else
#
I had no baggage, so to say, to carry.
#
So that, that to me was my and my, you know, I mean, so when I wrote one of my kind of
#
pieces, which a lot of people remember 20, 10, 20 years after that, I still remember
#
it at New York Times piece on tigers.
#
But why couldn't it be?
#
Why can't we imagine a world which is different?
#
I'll quickly tell my listeners what that piece was, because I remember reading it and being
#
And your piece essentially made the argument, and I think it was in a context of China,
#
that if you want to save tigers, and you know, make sure that they don't die out, the way
#
to do it is to allow commercialization of tigers, because then people will be incentivized
#
to breed tigers and therefore the species won't die out exactly as has happened with
#
chickens and crocodiles elsewhere in the world, but not here.
#
And that is so counterintuitive, because your intuitive response when you think about how
#
do I endanger a species is stop people from killing it.
#
But your answer is do the opposite, and they will thrive and you know, the difference between
#
So sorry, continue, but I just had to share.
#
And to me, I mean, I mean, those are kind of my in my intellectual journey, those were
#
kind of, you know, landmarks, that how could I ask?
#
And I think this is where the demography, the population issue and this issue also fits
#
in that, that it's not in the numbers in terms of population.
#
And it's not in the scarcity in terms of tigers or chickens or crocodiles or whatever,
#
but these are all constructs and outcomes of certain way of looking at things.
#
And because of certain ways of looking at things, we construct our policies to fit that,
#
which may not be the whole story.
#
And at the back of my mind, and this is where this is where kind of, you know, the other
#
dimension plays in and where both Rand and Gandhi is quite important, which is what happens
#
when you impose, you know, we think we impose because we know what happens if we, if we
#
are wrong and we have imposed emergency was a very good experience and a tragic one of
#
what happened when somebody believed in something and imposed it in on others.
#
You know, it was a human experience and a tragedy of enormous proportion, you know,
#
something comparable to, to, to what happened in some of the communist countries because
#
of the whims and fancies of their leaders.
#
That is where the ethics comes in that what do I really, even if I know, do I have the
#
right to impose what happens if I'm wrong?
#
And the impositions aren't just during the emergency, but all of us, the mindset continues.
#
It is this mindset that has impacted our policy on environment, on tigers or on everything.
#
The mindset is that, you know, that is where, that we are looking at policy in a frame that
#
we have internalized without reflecting what impact or what's the relevance for it for
#
Like you said about, about the Northeast, what the people wanted and what the, what
#
the funding was, the state funding was aimed at doing.
#
So that gap is not just a gap, it's the mindset that makes us do that, which is where, which
#
is where carrying people along as Gandhi showed is so critical because we wouldn't be able
#
to carry people along if we persisted in, in, on that track for long.
#
I mean, that might be an initial, and we can see that we have so many campaigns on so many
#
social political issues, but what kind of a shelf life do they have?
#
No, we need another campaign as if to overcome the current campaign because the current campaign's
#
shelf life is over, so we need another drama to take it forward to the, you know, take
#
it, take the next car, next campaign in order to keep the people addicted to something.
#
So while we can keep doing it, but are we achieving anything meaningful or are we achieving
#
the kind of change that I'm sure most of us would agree on?
#
And I think, I think, yeah, so that ethics part, and then the natural distinct was, which
#
I think we've discussed earlier too, which is many of us may agree on the ends.
#
We need to look at the means.
#
We need to look at the means and we cannot achieve our ends unless the means relate to
#
And this is where even a non-believer, non-practitioner, non-temple-grower, a beef-eating Hindu can
#
claim to be a Hindu, which I do, I have no reason yet to disown my legacy or my, yeah,
#
my legacy, my presence in the Hindu fold.
#
But I can completely relate, for instance, to the essence of Gita, you know, without
#
having any divinity in it.
#
The central message of the Gita is at the end justifies the means.
#
The whole, yeah, it's exactly the opposite.
#
It's the whole quest for finding the means, that the end is whatever.
#
We agree that we have to win the war or whatever.
#
And the means is kill all your cousins.
#
The whole discourse is that, that a God, those who believe in divinity of Krishna, couldn't
#
dictate or order or press a button, that he had to engage in such a dialogue at such a
#
critical point in general to just convince someone that this is why and this is how you
#
To me, it is this process.
#
That's the means, not the specifics of the details.
#
It's this process of searching, of questioning continuously till you are convinced.
#
The conclusion at a particular point in time may turn out to be wrong.
#
Later on, you have to change.
#
But that's life always.
#
So, my reading of Gita is completely different and I think my reading of Gita is actually
#
quite consonant with quite a few people who have actually interpreted Gita from the original
#
because I'm reading in Bengali or in English, but people who read it in Sanskrit, I mean,
#
I find this essence of action detached from the outcome is possible only when you have
#
the capacity in your mind that you have got the means right.
#
And then it's free for all.
#
I mean, I'm not an expert on the Gita.
#
And there are things I admire greatly about the book.
#
For example, I think Lord Krishna would have made a great poker player in just his lesson
#
of don't worry about the fruits of your action.
#
Just do the right thing, which is very, you know, non-results oriented process oriented
#
lots to learn there for modern sportsmen also.
#
But then I look at, you know, what the the Pandavas did like our friend Mohit was pointing
#
out last night at dinner that they killed almost all their main enemies by deception.
#
I just feel that there's an issue there with the means, but that's a larger discussion
#
and it's a great book on its own.
#
I do want to talk about means and ends and Gandhi after the break.
#
But before the break, one more piece of context setting and then a joke that you might like
#
and you must have heard.
#
So the context setting is that I also want to double click on what you said earlier for
#
the reader's benefit that in the Western world, the consumption is high, the wealth is high
#
And this is like something that I remember is counterintuitive.
#
And I first read about it in Beyond Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist when
#
it came out 16 or 17 years ago.
#
Great book then kind of outdated now, but do follow Beyond Lomborg's recent writings
#
The revelation there was that London at the end of the 19th century was possibly as polluted
#
as Bombay is today or even Delhi is today.
#
All these great Western cities were incredibly populated, but there was like a sort of a
#
bell curve of pollution that once you reached a certain level of economic growth and a certain
#
level of wealth, these cities started becoming cleaner because the Kuznets curve in a sense,
#
you could also apply that and they started getting much, much cleaner because technology
#
became better, people started applying ingenuity, citizens became more empowered and demanded
#
cleaner air, combination of reasons.
#
And the wealth that enabled it.
#
And the wealth that enabled it.
#
So you know, a city like London today consumes much more than it used to, has many more people
#
than it used to and is much, much cleaner than it used to.
#
And the last I heard was Thames, the water in the Thames is potable.
#
And that it happened, you know, 150 years Londoners and English literature has been
#
lamenting, you know, the fog, the famous Jack the Ripper and the London fog at the turn
#
But post-war in about less than 20 years, things had changed so dramatically, you know,
#
post-colonization because London was no longer the imperial capital during that phase.
#
It lost most of its, almost all of its colonies.
#
Yet the city and it's not just about London.
#
I mean, it's not the city.
#
England today has more trees standing and more wooded areas than a century or more ago.
#
United States today has more trees standing and more wooded areas than a century ago.
#
So to me, it is this relationship between the lived experience, provided we are willing
#
to open our eyes to see what has happened and then trying to figure out how and why
#
it has happened so that we can see what are the lessons that can be drawn because we don't
#
have to, you know, the Kuznets curve, actually the beauty of the Kuznets curve is because
#
societies that are developing later, like India is and many others, can leapfrog.
#
So the peak of pollution, which the Western societies industrialized, the societies that
#
were industrializing at first, that level should not be, need not be reached by anyone
#
So we should make that turn much quicker, provided we get the lessons and the perspectives
#
And Steven Pinker has also written very eloquently about, you know, how we think the world is
#
getting worse, but actually it is just such a much better place.
#
And now the joke I promised you before we go to the break, and this has something to
#
do with what you mentioned about how when you were a kid, you wouldn't eat chickens
#
and you'd sometimes you'd eat a lot of mutton and sometimes you'd eat ducks.
#
Now ducks, as you know, the Hindi word for ducks is batak, right?
#
So there is this famous story about how Gyanizayal Singh, when he was president of India, he
#
was in England and the Queen of England took him on a walk around the, you know, Buckingham
#
Palace or wherever the royal gardens are.
#
And there was a pond there and there were some beautiful ducks there.
#
And Gyanizayal Singh turned to the Queen and said, Madam, you have lovely buttocks.
#
Of course, for a Bengali, that's not exactly the word we use for ducks.
#
What's the word you use?
#
But buttocks, I'm right, right?
#
Yeah, I mean, in Hindi, that's what you would say.
#
But of course, I had the fish option too, being a Bengali, fish is our second.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break.
#
And on the other side of the break, we'll talk about means and ends, Gandhiji, forest
#
rights and the importance of GPS.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
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In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog, India Uncut,
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which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
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I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
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I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
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because I wrote about many different things.
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Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
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Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
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I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
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regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
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I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
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So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
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Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
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You don't need to go anywhere.
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So subscribe now for free.
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The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
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Welcome back to the Seen in the Unseen.
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I'm chatting with my good friend, Varun Mitra about his life, his learnings and so on and
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You know, there's this book I read by Arnon Kling called The Three Languages of Politics
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and Kling's central premise there is that many of us when we discuss politics, we are
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not talking to each other.
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We are talking past each other.
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Like, for example, he talks about how all three tribes and he's speaking of the three
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American tribes, I'll start from different first principles.
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So for example, a libertarian will value freedom, a conservative will value tradition, and a
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more left liberal orientation will value equality.
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And the point is every argument then becomes a question of talking past each other because
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both can be equally coherent and equally persuasive, but they're coming from different first principles
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and they're not taking the other one into account.
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So one of the great lessons of that, therefore, is when we talk to other people, rather than
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talk from our own point of view that I am communicating what I know to be right, we
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have to understand where they are coming from and talk to them at that level and so on and
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so forth, get into that kind of dialogue, which is something that increasingly you have
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also tried to do over the years.
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Now what we see today on social media is that people harden themselves into firm positions.
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Like it's very intoxicating when you're young, you get on social media, you want to belong
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and you want to feel respected and you want to feel right.
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And so you join these little tribes, whatever they are, the bhakts, the voks, whatever.
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And yeah, and and then within that tribe, then you're constantly want to raise your
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status within that tribe.
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And the only way of doing that is number one, of course, you follow the party line and the
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dogmas at all points in time.
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But you also do it by attacking people on the other side, never addressing the argument,
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never getting into a dialogue, just insults and court tweets and snark.
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And you also shit on people on your own side for failing purity tests within the tribe.
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And everyone gets hardened into position.
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Like I was discussing this with Abhinandan as well, that, you know, he and I are the
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same age, 47, and when we were 20, you know, we thought ridiculous things.
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If he were to tweet it, then we might well have felt committed to those positions and
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become that kind of person who thought that kind of thing instead of gradually having
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dialogues with people and learning from them and so on and so forth.
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What do you feel about this?
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Because in a sense, over the last five or six years, whatever conversations you and
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I have had, the one thread that I feel I can learn a lot from, from you, from the way that
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you think about it, is the importance of just dialogue, reaching out.
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The person who does not agree with you is not your enemy.
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She is not a bad person.
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You've got to reach out.
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You've got to sit down.
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Tell me a little bit about, you know, your thinking on this, how it's evolved and, you
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know, what for you is a way forward in these deeply polarized times at building bridges?
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Yeah, again, like I said, you know, that this, this, I mean, I read Arnold Kling and I would
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say it's, it's, it's a, it's a very common feature these days and not just these days
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for the last 10, 15 years, that, that ideas become ideologies and ideologies become identities.
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And therefore our questioning, if somebody questions my ideas, I can perhaps take it
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If somebody questions my ideology, I become harder.
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And if it threatens my identity, it's impossible.
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And because one becomes the other, anyone who questions your ideas is almost, it's a
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Because ideas, you know, as long as it's abstract, you would hold it, you know, like you will
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be able to tolerate a slight variation.
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Once it becomes ideology, which is almost like belief, these are your core principles,
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as one would say, then it's related, you're relating to its identity and which is where,
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you know, which is where I think another thing I'm probably rephrasing Gandhi, that, that
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your political opponents are not enemies to be vanquished, but critics are friends to
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And that, and which he wrote even in his last days, that, that burned down everything that
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If you want to really know what's my position on a particular thing, only read if you want
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Otherwise, just look at my life, that, you know, that a person who can change, and this
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is where ideology does ideology, once it gets linked to identity, it makes us makes us blind,
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because then anything that changes, if we change, like say, if we have a different perspective
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from what we had five years or 10 years ago, then it's a threat.
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We will not even acknowledge it.
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And I think this is a struggle.
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I mean, all of us have gone through it.
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I mean, and perhaps because I'm in big, perhaps because of the context in which we all of
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us are in terms of the polarization and the divisions, I mean, and because of my kind
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of instinctive this thing that can we reconcile the so called irreconcilable, you know, for
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instance, economics and environment, can economic growth be reconciled with environmental cleanliness
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and it actually, and therefore, can I reconcile these differences?
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And in that, from all in the last 20 years, what I've been seeing, the only instances
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that I can think of, or have experienced or have read are of people who reached out, that
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the connection was people first, the second was, you know, then we can accept the ideological
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or intellectual differences as something we can take in our strides, because we know can
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this we have seen, for instance, you know, we have seen in so many cases, that once we
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establish that relationship, and this I particularly saw in Sharad Joshi's case as a personal
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experience that I used to wonder because that was in the early, the late 90s, early 2000s,
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that how is he how has he collected this motley group of farmers leaders, many of whom were
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not as intellectually pure as I would like them to be.
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And they were not even as pure as Sharad Joshi was, but they worship Sharad Joshi.
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That's the connection that once you build the personal bond, you will be enormously
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flexible in terms of to what extent you are going to be able to, you know, reconcile the
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intellectual or the policy differences that one may have, because that can come over over
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time over experience, etc, etc.
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But the first thing is, you know, what you said at the beginning, like my teacher in
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my in my primary school in MP had that she wanted to connect with me, because I was an
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outsider, because I came with so much handicap, no language, no local language, you know that
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if we if we if we can build that into us, then we'll be able to face this, this this
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challenge that we face today, because this challenge is particularly getting exaggerated
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by the technology and the and and and the systems that we are currently adopting, it
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is suicidal that we have to connect and which is why going back to the people is so critical.
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So it means it seems that today with the technology, we could reach out to millions, perhaps your
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podcast reaches out to millions, you know, and there are many programs, people who are
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reaching out to millions.
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But it's not helping in building a community in any meaningful sense, it's only at best
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it's building an intellectual community.
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And therefore the it's not being able to bridge this, this, this, or not bridge it's not being
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able to break this this bond between identity and ideology, we need to figure out how to
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And I think the only way the only experience the only experience I can think of are from
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the people like Sharad Joshi or even to an extent Archbishop who are actually reaching
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out to people doesn't matter how many you convince, it's not the conviction that
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winning over will may happen later.
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But if we first build that relationship, the human relationship, because after all, all
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of us say, you know, that that that man is a social animal.
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But we have transferred that society from from the real life to the to the virtual life,
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which is I think part of the which is which is greatly creating this problem.
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And this problem has now been kind of is going to get in my my fear is that it may get
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much more serious, because now across the world, as a fallout of the pandemic, we are
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instilling a sense of fear for the other, including my immediate neighbor.
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And we are putting in place things which would make freedom of assembly and association almost
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And this is a dream of anyone who's trying who's seeking power over others.
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Because if people can come together, can share, can experience each other, they are going
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to be atomized atomized even further.
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Who gains those who have certain degree of ability to control at least their network,
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and if they're dominant, there's no way to break it.
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So I think I think it is it is and this is global, there's nothing to do with India
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This is this is an universal phenomenon to me, you know, to me, it's amazing, isn't
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Because 91 was India's liberalization, 90 was the collapse of the Soviet Union, 89 was
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the Tiananmen Square in China.
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From that to today, it seems it's the Chinese approach or policy or politics that have won
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Whereas it was supposed to be the other way round.
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You know, 89, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and all the rest.
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I mean, it was a sign that the world is changing.
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91 followed immediately after.
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You know, so it was while no one or none of us I know, I've been asking people who were
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involved in 91 reforms, there's no one who could honestly say that they recognize what
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could be the potential of this till about 10 years after 91.
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It is only in 2000 going into the 2004 election that a political party like Vajpayee's claimed
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India shining and tried to claim the legacy of liberalization.
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No one since, no one after.
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And in this process, in fact, yeah, you know, I mean, I'm not so sure because I don't follow
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technology as such, but there's something that I've been listening a lot, I mean, you
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must, I'm sure you know him, I mean, you know, often at least, Jonathan Haidt, you know,
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he is specifying a date, which is amazing, if it's true.
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He is specifying 2014-15 or thereabouts as a turning point.
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And what's the turning point?
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That like buttons on the social media.
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I think he talks about 2010-2011, he was a guest on a podcast I produced called Brave
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New World, which I'll link from the show notes.
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And he did a great episode there, which is this quest for validation drives, hardens
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our position and drives us into these echo chambers in this much greater way and exacerbates
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the whole process and the Twitter retweet and the Facebook like are sort of a critical
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And a few observations that one, I think what often happens is that the more solidified
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our sense of identity, whether it is identity as some thing we are born into or whether
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it is a tribe we have chosen, the more solidified that sense, the more it separates us from
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And the more it forces us to think of people in terms of the other.
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So you want these to be kind of more fluid.
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And in a sense, this is actually what I, you know, one of the reasons in my podcast, as
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you've noticed in my episodes, I will often have this long personal conversation at the
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start before I go on to whatever work I'm discussing is because I want to humanize a
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person because I don't just want it to be about a subject or a theme, but when you humanize
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a person listeners and become much more receptive, you know, they may, they may then disagree
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with the person, but the person is not an enemy.
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And I think that openness to ideas and communication is so important.
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And we've kind of lost that and that other, you know, you use the phrase atomized and
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one very shallow critique of say, liberal libertarianism, for example, though I no longer
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use labels or ascribe them to myself, but one shallow critique of that kind of classical
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liberalism slash libertarianism is that thinking in terms of individuals atomizes you.
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And it's actually the other way around because we are all for voluntary interaction and,
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So the richness of social interaction is very key to that.
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What I would say is the opposite thinking in terms of groups and not individuals.
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That is what can atomize you in the manner that you sort of described.
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And that can, you know, instead of letting us express some multitudes that we contain,
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it will often force us into certain other conceptions of ourselves, whether it's a
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conception of victimhood or a conception of, you know, intellectual superiority over others
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And that's kind of dangerous.
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And you have said that we can fight this and I don't know how I'm trying to imagine in
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So, so tell me, how can we fight this?
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I don't know if, if, if, if fight would be the right word to say this.
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So the, yeah, that's where the problem is because if the other side is identified, then
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of course you end up more like that you are ending up fighting with the person identity
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So that's always a challenge.
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But I think to me from everything that I've, I've seen experienced in the red, tried to
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understand in the particularly in the last 10 years suggests that we have to reconnect
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and the pandemic has only confirmed that, that we have to reconnect, which means we
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You know, the atomization is not like you said, it's atomization, it is atomization
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You know, so which means that it is, we think we are being individualistic without realizing
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that we are part of this group, which is actually failing us to be that kind of an individual.
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So which means, you know, a person could be like say for instance the hippies of the past.
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They all thought that they were ultra individuals, but in a sense, in a way, in another way looking
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at it in another way, they were part of a collective.
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That collective had that feature.
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So I think we need to figure out how do we, how do we look at and understand atomization
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in the context of the invisible collective that we are all forming all around us.
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And those boundaries are becoming, like you said, are becoming solider by the day.
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And therefore, I think is at least personally as a personal exercise.
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And perhaps also because I'm not used to, I didn't get used to the Zoom and the online
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meetings, conferences, et cetera, because I want to feel the energy of the people with
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whom I'm interacting in a group or in a meeting.
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It has not never worked for me in the last 18 months.
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But so that maybe I'm personally biased then.
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But my distinct is that we need to reconnect and reconnect physically.
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We need to reconnect in a manner which we haven't forgotten to do in the last 19, 20,
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or even 30 years, because with urbanization has come mobility.
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With mobility has come breakdown of a civic community and formation of professional communities
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or business communities or things of which are segmented identities.
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But not a civic identity, not a community identity, for instance, just think.
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And this is something I realized in the last 10, 15 years, just think of my father.
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He was in politics, Bengal was extremely polarized, even at that time in the 70s.
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In the 69, I think it was 69 or it could have been 67, I don't remember now.
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There was an election in Bengal, the Congress lost for the first time.
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My father's candidate, I think lost, I don't even remember that, because I was probably,
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So the net result was for the first time there was a coalition government in Bengal.
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But that election night is one of those terrifying moments that I have, that I've lived in my
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You know, some of the childhood memories, for instance, one that lives is actually,
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is we have an old fashioned house, you know, the traditional conventional house, which
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is kind of a not an apartment, a house with big gates or doors, you know, solid wooden
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doors, which used to look at as a fortress.
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And which would look from inside and from the outside, it would look imposing gate and
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imposing wall to block everything out.
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That gate broke down after my father's candidate or the party lost.
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The party definitely lost.
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I don't know whether I don't remember whether my father's candidate lost.
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But the door broke down.
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Because in the celebration that was happening outside, because the other side has one, the
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left has one, there were some who came and rammed a rickshaw or a thela or some kind,
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which virtually ramrod onto our gate.
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And that gate with its iron bars, the wooden gate with its iron bars fell.
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Because you know, that was one thing that we could, that was a symbol of our security
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in our home for, you know, for a child like us, that this is something that this is where
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the home begins and everything is secure.
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And I have not forgotten that that noise and that it happened.
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And it was, it happened probably at nine thirty, ten o'clock, so relatively late because we
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had all had our dinner and all that.
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So we kind of shook up.
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But my father told me afterwards, much after that, that he could have been killed that
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night, but for the for the left or the CPM leader who lived just next to literally assured
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him that nothing will come, no harm will come to you and your family.
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Can we think of that today?
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Can we think of that today?
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You know, here were two people who were, you know, there may have been five years age difference,
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you may have been older or younger or whatever.
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They both fought a hard fought election for the first time Congress lost Bengal.
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Our home was assaulted and this man said that nothing will, no harm will come to you.
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Because my father told me he could have been murdered that night.
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That of course he told me ten years later that he could have been murdered that night.
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And which we can see this is common thing happening today.
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Because their social bond with this neighbor, even for us, you know, I've been long after
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all this, you know, my father got out of politics and he retired.
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We were still neighbors.
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You know, every time I returned to Calcutta after my college or holidays or whatever,
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he would sit in his veranda and greet me.
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And sometime give me something to eat or munch or whatever.
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Whereas in his house, you know, like in Calcutta that was the fashion, the CPM slogans would
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all be written and in our house exactly the opposite.
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That's my lived experience.
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It's because the people, the two people had their social bonds predating or overcoming
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their ideology and identity.
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We need to rebuild that.
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That can't happen in the digital world.
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That can never happen in the digital world.
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Because we are not meeting people.
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We are only meeting people or coming across people only in the dimension in which we want
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Not in the totality of our existence.
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Because economics is not even 5% of our existence or politics or any such or hobby or any such
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These are tiny fractions of our life.
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So physical meeting I think is primary and which is what I think we really must figure
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You know, like I was just saying before we started that what about the libraries that
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There used to be Muhalla libraries.
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The libraries were not just books for information and now we can read on the net or on the computer.
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They were also physical spaces for people to meet and chat and discuss things.
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You know, they could read newspaper together, they could discuss a policy issue together
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and all of us have seen that there is a huge difference when we behave and interact with
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Even when that somebody has a completely different perspective or philosophy or ideology or politics
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than us, which is a complete contrast to how we behave when we are on the net, you know,
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One because we can hide our identity.
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So that only adds to the problem.
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But even if we have our identity, because we think that we don't know each other personally
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and therefore we can say whatever we want, which we'll never do in our discussion at
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a tea stall that was common and is still common in large parts of India.
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We need to revive that because I think intellectually we are driving down a rabbit hole.
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It's called the online disinhibition effect what you just described and you know, I did
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an episode I keep going back to with Aanchal Malhotra and I think one of the stories if
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I remember correctly, she told in that and she of course wrote a book on partition and
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people carrying the effects of partition over the other side.
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And I don't remember whether we spoke about it in the episode or I read it in a book,
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but I remember being struck by this description of a village somewhere in Western Pakistan
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where there were Hindus and Muslims and they used to gather in the evening and listen to
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the radio for news in those pre-partition days and try to figure out what's happening.
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And obviously those social bonds are very strong.
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They're all neighbors, they live together in the same village, but over time as bad
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news starts coming, those bonds start getting shakier and shakier and shakier.
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And my sense over a long time is that there is this difference between the abstract and
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the concrete and the world that we build in our head, some things are abstract and some
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things are concrete like Aanchal would say that when she would meet with families in
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Pakistan because of their experiences, they would say, oh, Hindus are like this, Hindus
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But my dear, you're fine, you're not like that.
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Because she is there in the concrete, they can see the physical person, but they're different.
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And that's one of the challenges that online everything becomes abstract.
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I mean, if I think of all the dangerous things in the world today, they're abstract notions,
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nationalism, patriotism, the other, the purity of our culture, Sanskriti, all of this abstract
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It makes us hate each other.
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But in person, we are not like that.
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Even if you hold a different ideology.
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Even if you hold a different ideology in person, it's different.
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It's not like that at all.
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Like I'm reminded and this is a book I'll send you and you'll enjoy it.
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There's a book called Think Again by Adam Grant, where he talks about how in 1983, this
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pianist called Darrell Davis goes to Maryland and he performs there and he's an African
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And there's a white gentleman in the audience who goes to him after the shows and says,
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And they chat for a while.
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And it turns out the white gentleman is from the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan.
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And they meet and the white gentleman begins to realize that what he thought of in the
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abstract is very different from what it is in the concrete.
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That here is this African American gentleman who's warm, cultured, intelligent, someone
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who can be a friend and they become friends.
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But what he also does is over a period of time, he brings other members of the KKK to
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see this performance by Darrell and they become friends and some of them are senior people
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And it's like the collision of the concrete and the abstract.
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And when I read this, I was wondering that in the modern world, how do we do this?
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Because one thing that is very real and that you and I know and we can say it explicitly
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today because people are expressing it explicitly today.
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One thing that is very real is this anti-Muslim sentiment among so many Hindus.
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And I believe that at some level, this is abstract wherever it comes from.
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Maybe it comes from memories or stories or partition.
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Maybe it comes from stereotypes or what they are like.
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But at some level, this is abstract.
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And concrete encounters can change this.
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In fact, if you look at it, you can look at someone like a Modi and say he's an Islamophile.
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Because after all, the dress that he wears, the elegant Choridhar Kutas are from there.
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And the food that we eat, the biryanis that we eat or really any food, I mean, besides
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a bangan, I think basically everything else has come from outside.
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So to me, this is the puzzle that in this modern world and something for the listeners
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to think about as well, because I don't have an answer.
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But I think part of the solution has to be to help people engage more in the concrete
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world, including with those they hate and they consider the other.
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And I think that that's the key.
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And we need to have more of that happening.
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And what are your sort of thoughts?
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You know, I mean, one thing I actually experienced it myself twice.
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I had an opportunity to visit Pakistan and 10 years, 11, 12 years ago, I had an opportunity
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It was amazing the kind of warmth I felt in both places, irrespective of any difference.
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Yet WhatsApp policy sealed the borders.
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In fact, this is exactly why we should completely open the borders.
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And for both reasons, for strategic reasons, as well as for social reasons, social reasons
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And for strategic reasons that then we'll have a much clearer flow of information to
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know what's happening and who's planning what, because we will be there and they will
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So everyone, at least those at the decision making points would be much more concretely
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aware that what is really being planned or proposed as an attack or whatever, and diffuse
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it much, much before, than otherwise, and there would be no social political capital
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I mean, there would be social political capital to diffuse it before, than to raise the social
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political capital after an incident had happened in order to further the divide.
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So in both places, I was shocked, you know, because I was really surprised.
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I had heard and read about it, like you read in the book, but I had no experience that,
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you know, I mean, there are people who are Muslims, who are my friends, who I know, so
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I'm not looking at them as others.
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But these were countries I went where I hardly knew anybody.
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You know, I went as a visitor and I knew that I'm from India and I knew that our official
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relationship may not be what is desired.
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And I met a taxi driver in Bangladesh, in Dhaka, who told me that if we open the border,
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we could easily go and have this custom of, what do they say, pigeon flying.
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Because in that part of Bengal, it seems there has been a long tradition of pigeon being
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sent from villages hundreds of kilometres away to the other side and it's a kind of
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a race and a social custom.
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But today it can't be done, it can't be done properly because the borders are sealed.
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I was surprised that this guy has a, I mean, I had not even known, you know, I read that
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there used to be post office pigeons and things of that kind, but that's, you know, 200 years
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But this guy was talking about it now, 10 years ago, that for him, that was a priority.
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That was his kind of interest.
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And if you open the border, he would be able to go easily and have a much freer open competition
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in pigeon flying among people who have that interest on both sides.
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You know, so we can't even imagine at what level people are thinking.
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And this is where it brings us to our perspective of people, you know, which is where the identity,
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population and all this are linked, I believe, that how do we look at other people?
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Do we look at them as people or do we look at them only through the lens that we hold
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because there's no cost attached to it?
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And the digital world has made it that much more easier, there's no cost attached to
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Physically, we'll never do that.
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So I think, you know, and one would have expected and which is probably, probably one reason
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till 65 war, the borders with Pakistan was open, literally, people could come and go
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as easily as anybody else.
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And since we have only solidified and increased the height and capacity of those walls.
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Yet, India had an official policy, which was kind of non-aligned, kind of tilted to the
#
Soviet, etc, as a kind of a geostrategic balance, whereas there were many more Indians who could
#
go to US and the Western countries than the than the Soviet Union.
#
So what social capital was generated because of that interaction?
#
You know, the government of India may have a policy tilting towards whatever.
#
But given a choice, most Indian students would prefer to go to the English speaking world
#
of the West than to Soviet Union of the of the of that of that era.
#
It is the policy today we have actually played up this divide.
#
And which is why I think we have to begin at home, every one of us have to figure out
#
how do we interact with people physically in our own spaces, in our neighborhood, in
#
our markets, in our with our tell us, you know, whoever we need to relearn it, we have
#
We cannot assume we cannot give this blank space or the blank slate or the or believe
#
that the digital technology with its capacity to reach out can help.
#
Perhaps the algorithms, perhaps whatever it is, it's definitely not helping.
#
Like Hyde said, the likes button and the retweet buttons are making things different because
#
we are looking at those counters.
#
We are not building the relationship, which is why we must.
#
And if you remember the Devlali meeting, that was one such attempt that urban and rural
#
India in at least some people, even a fraction of them could come together to understand
#
what's the perspective and who's coming from where we don't have to win over anybody overnight.
#
But we can win that trust.
#
We can win, have that inner confidence that the other person is not there to be at my
#
And then, of course, we can discuss all the other issues, for instance, you know, all
#
the talk about farmers getting subsidized.
#
It's actually the other way around.
#
It's been so all these years.
#
It's the farmers who are subsidizing the rest of the population.
#
Forget about the transfers.
#
It is the rural sector, society and economy that is upholding 50% of the population.
#
Who is subsidizing whom?
#
50% of the population is being subsidized by 15% of the GDP.
#
It's the broad shoulders of these farmers who are holding 50% of India's population
#
alive, keeping them alive.
#
Who is subsidizing whom?
#
I love this concept of Sharad Joshi called negative subsidy to find out what negative
#
Listen to episode 86 of my show, you know, and I'd also say that there is in me the hope
#
that while OK, some of these problems are created by technology, but at the same time,
#
I think technology is a huge net positive.
#
Maybe the way forward lies out of this.
#
I mean, you know, people are listening to you and we have this conversation because
#
of this technology and because of the Internet.
#
So maybe there's some hope there.
#
And I share your experience of Pakistan in the sense I went there with India's cricket
#
And I remember we landed up in Lahore and we had to buy some basic groceries and pencil
#
And we went to this nearby store.
#
And the moment the person realized we are from India just refused to take money.
#
And this is almost a cliche.
#
We thought of it as a cliche.
#
We've heard about and we saw it on that first day.
#
And again and again and again all through Pakistan.
#
And I remember being in Lahore and thinking that one, it's such a beautifully lit city
#
I remember that the way it's lit up and Indian cities often aren't like that.
#
But I also remember how much it is like Delhi, you know, Lahore and Delhi are so much closer
#
together than, say, Delhi and Chennai, which could be separate countries.
#
Karachi being like Bombay.
#
But when I was in Karachi, it did kind of feel that way.
#
And that sense is there among the people like, you know, my my friend Pranay Kotasene uses
#
the phrase the military jihadi complex for the Pakistani state.
#
And the important thing to remember is that the Pakistani state or this military jihadi
#
complex is different from the Pakistani people.
#
And the Pakistani people are exactly like us.
#
The difference is so minor that, you know, the differences between Indian states is far
#
And so I completely agree that, you know, people to people contact, these kind of interactions
#
And which is why so many of these policies like we, you know, the military, the Pakistani
#
state and civil society are different things that are at opposite ends.
#
And we think that when we stop, say, Pakistani cricketers from playing in the IPL, we think
#
we are hitting out against the state.
#
But actually, we are helping the state.
#
We're hitting out against civil society.
#
And that just kind of we know technology can surely help, but technology can help only if
#
we have a perspective to use the technology in that manner.
#
See it's in the initial phase of technology, these were all new technologies, et cetera.
#
I remember I come from a generation where we didn't have emails and how the emails came.
#
I distinctly remember in the late, in the early 90s, how we had these, you know, kind
#
of servers where we could have access only once or twice in a day at night to be able
#
to connect to the, you know, to the telephone lines that we had and all that.
#
So technology can surely help.
#
And we have all seen, and I'm sure you have too, that how when the emails first came,
#
groups were formed on the email groups, e-groups, and how they used to be outbursts.
#
You know, I mean, quite frequent outbursts among people who didn't know.
#
You and I have been in groups, yeah, like that, yeah.
#
But they were kind of limited because those groups could only reach up to, you know, a
#
certain number, 100, 200, whatever.
#
But now it's completely public.
#
And we are now fixed, you know, this is where, this is where it reminds me of Gandhi's that
#
this thing, you know, that burned down everything that he's written.
#
Forget what he has said in the past.
#
If you want to find any meaning, think of what he has said on that issue in his latest
#
this thing, because he's evolving.
#
He's not ashamed of change.
#
We are afraid of change, not even ashamed.
#
That we will be accused of being hypocrites.
#
Whereas that's what is growth all about.
#
Every day a tree is changing, you know, a tree is growing.
#
New leaves are coming, old leaves are falling.
#
So if we can't change, because we realize that that's necessary, that is what we, I
#
mean, life is about change.
#
So what are we afraid of?
#
So it's not just shame.
#
To me, it's this fear because we lack fear, because we lack that confidence in ourselves,
#
which to me, I think I was fortunate.
#
I was really fortunate.
#
This is the only thing I think I was lucky, apart from, you know, I don't think there
#
was anything particular about my family or anything else.
#
Many people have gone through exactly the same experience.
#
The only difference was, as I see it, that I dabbled and ventured into domains that I
#
had no particular expertise, you know, I had no expertise.
#
And therefore I could ask that why couldn't there be more tigers as there were more chickens?
#
And that's a feature, not a bug, because no expertise means no dogmas either.
#
No intellectual baggage.
#
All species don't breed the same way.
#
So all species may not be, it may not be possible to do it in the same way.
#
But it's like all trees don't grow the same way.
#
All trees grow in different season, they flower in different season, crops are grown as per
#
So there's nothing extraordinary about it.
#
So you've got to tailor to it.
#
And which is what is the difference, as you said earlier, between the abstract and the
#
The concrete is always limited.
#
Abstraction is, you know, the sky is the limit.
#
The challenge I think is, and to me, this is the beauty, to me, I really enjoy this,
#
that how do I reconcile the limitations of the concrete that I face today to the abstractions
#
of my imagination that I would like to go tomorrow?
#
I'm always thinking that how do I reconcile the two?
#
You know, I like the imagination, the abstract part of it, I like the concrete part of it,
#
because that's the real world.
#
And that's probably my engineering and my, you know, like kind of concrete details.
#
And then I realized something, you know, that what's the difference between, in fact, just
#
the other day, I was talking to another friend, another old friend from our old island groups
#
who just retired from IIT Delhi, that it's very customary or quite fashionable these
#
days to say that Newton's laws have been overcome or Einstein proved their limitation and gone
#
You know, as Newton himself would say, that he stood on the shoulders of giants.
#
And so the current and the later generation stood on the shoulders of Newton and people
#
Newton's laws are abstractions.
#
There can't be an abstraction that is in concrete, because then there is no difference between
#
abstraction and concrete.
#
He's idealized the concrete into the form of an abstraction and demonstrated it through
#
the equation and through all the rest.
#
So the Newton's laws will continue to hold, irrespective of what the concrete is.
#
But because the Newton's law is not explaining all the concretes, people will find different
#
ways to figure out how to explain the new concrete, or the new understanding of the
#
You know, the material sciences are changing, the electromagnetism, the Einstein and all
#
that is the quantum physics, they will try to explain it in somewhat a little better.
#
So that this gap between abstraction, you know, perhaps because I came from the physical
#
sciences, so this kind of interested me that how do I understand this gap between what
#
we call the laws or the principles of physics with actual engineering, which I did, because
#
There is nothing in engineering that I can apply, where I can apply the laws of physics,
#
none of the laws, because there will be efficiency losses, there's efficiency losses because
#
of technological limitation, there are efficiency losses because of economic limitation, there
#
is efficiency losses because of lack of social awareness about that.
#
Environment being a very good example, that people are more aware about environment.
#
So they're willing to put in more resources to figure out how to do it, and they will
#
try to solve it, which wouldn't have been the case 10, 15, 20 years ago.
#
Yeah, so to me, you know, to pit the two as two poles, I think is completely futile, completely
#
futile, and which is which is something I realized, you know, something you mentioned
#
earlier, engineering mindset, hike, yeah, that's hike.
#
And I this is the thing that I really find myself lucky, that I didn't fall into the
#
dogmatic trap, because I didn't come from any domain perspective, expertise.
#
And I read that essay of Hayek, the knowledge one, where he actually identifies this problem
#
as an engineering mindset.
#
And everything else seems to follow that I can solve the problem.
#
And therefore, the other person becomes a jigsaw puzzle, whom I can put wherever I want
#
in order to solve the problem.
#
And I don't I'm not looking at the other person as an equal at all.
#
I link this essay of Hayek, which is called the use of knowledge and society from the
#
show notes, which is just the greatest essay of the 20th century.
#
And so important, so fundamental.
#
But I'm going to read out something else now.
#
And this is sparked by you know, I have this weird tendency that sometimes someone is speaking
#
And I'll think to myself that wow, what a beautiful sentence.
#
And a little while back, you said that every day a tree is changing.
#
And that's such a lovely sentence.
#
And it reminded me of this poem by Philip Larkin called the trees.
#
So I'll just read that out for my listeners.
#
I don't remember it now.
#
The trees by Philip Larkin.
#
The trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said.
#
The recent buds relax and spread the greenness is a kind of grief.
#
Is it that they are born again and we grow old?
#
That their yearly trick of looking new is written down in rings of grain.
#
And still the unresting castles thresh in full grown thickness every May.
#
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
#
Begin afresh afresh afresh.
#
And I love the phrase in this, like something almost being said, you know, trees coming
#
into leaf, just very beautiful.
#
Let's move on to what you and I have spoken a lot about and argued about, which is Gandhi.
#
I find him fascinating.
#
You know, I did a two episode special on Gandhi with Ramchandra Guha.
#
I've just read a bunch of books.
#
You can't read all his collected writings because there are a hundred volumes.
#
So they are all online.
#
So, you know, one should dip into them from time to time.
#
He's just a fascinating, incredible man, one of those great figures of history and one
#
who also contain multitudes.
#
And I don't want to go into detail with all my criticisms of him or all my praise for
#
But over the years, increasingly, I find you talking more and more of Gandhi and what you
#
have learned from him and so on.
#
Tell me a little bit about your perception of Gandhi, like, you know, when we grow up
#
in India, there's always this notion, you know, it's always Mahatma Gandhi, not Mohandas
#
The Mohandas to me is as interesting as Mahatma.
#
And it's but it's always Mahatma Gandhi and there's always that iconic figure of that
#
old man wearing just one piece of cloth and all of that in his old age.
#
But you read more about him and it becomes kind of richer and richer and you see the
#
limitations and you see the greatness.
#
Tell me about your love affair, as it were, with because as an engineer, perhaps at the
#
back of my mind, I was looking for practical ways to go beyond the intellectualization
#
that I had been trapped into or had opted for for the first 25 years of my life.
#
I mean, of the policy activism, advocacy, etc.
#
And they're so limited, so few successes that I can count on, not just successes because
#
of me, but any kind of success.
#
So my this thing was that that how do we look at politics?
#
Because we particularly, I mean, perhaps more in the in your generation, perhaps than mine,
#
because I grew up during emergency, there was still an idealism about politics and change
#
and the possibilities of politics.
#
So and that has clearly evaporated like my own family experience shows from my father's
#
experience in the late 60s.
#
So that has clearly evaporated.
#
Now therefore, the question is, what is politics?
#
Is it about politicizing an issue and therefore an instrument to go to battle with the other?
#
Or is the essence of politics is precisely as a platform to reconcile the differences
#
that might arise in society?
#
And therefore, if you look at it this way, then you find that the politics is starting
#
from from everyone's home.
#
Every family has to kind of politically decide that what's the priority to be given?
#
Should you go for a movie to celebrate a birthday or should you have a pizza to celebrate a
#
You know, we are constantly negotiating and figuring out how to balance that's politics.
#
That's the purpose of politics.
#
And that kind of kind of one, one kind of a breakthrough for me was when when in Gandhi
#
in his autobiography talks of politics as his way to moksha to meet his maker.
#
Which you know, that means he was idealizing it to his conception of an ideal to the ultimate
#
That he was a practical man, you know, completely down to earth man, he was not a theoretician.
#
He hadn't written any of the books on philosophy as such.
#
All of his letters and things were all on practical issues that he was grappling with
#
with all their complexity.
#
Yet he was projecting or aspiring to try to have a kind of politics that would reconcile
#
that is go back to politics to its essence, to its original.
#
That is politics is a platform to reconcile differences, not to flag it, because if you
#
have flag it, then it is, you know, like we have another saying that war is politics by
#
So we are at it now, virtually or literally, therefore, to me, that was kind of reignited
#
and which actually made me think about my father's experience that he could have been
#
I hadn't thought about this in the 20 years since he told me he is dead now, almost 10
#
So and, but it has come back in my mind because of this, that that is what politics was.
#
So, so Gandhi underscored the relevance of politics in a manner I believe no one else
#
No one else of the contemporaries who or of the last century had put into practice a kind
#
of politics that was incredible and he could do it because he could connect and he figured
#
out how do I connect to me and which is what you know which kind of and the other thing
#
that kind of brought me to it is because another one whom I probably not talked of as much
#
but whom I almost listen every day is Tagore.
#
Being a Bengali, Robindra Sangeet comes naturally to, I don't think, but I love to listen.
#
You look like him also right now with your flowing white beard.
#
Yeah, this is probably temporary, but yeah, so, so I found that he was a man, Tagore,
#
who was so far ahead of his time, we are still grappling to understand how far he could,
#
he had been able to go.
#
And like Atlas Strug kind of had a major impact in my way of thinking, his novel apart from
#
his poetry because poetry I would, it would be all Bengalis, but his novel which is accessible
#
to all is one of his novels is perhaps the major political novel or the second one is
#
Gora, you know, not the home and the world, you know, which is well known, but Gora because
#
it's amazing that what he depicted 125 years ago in that story, in the condition in which
#
Bengal at that time in that great ferment wars is amazing.
#
And how he sought to break out or break down the boundaries.
#
And he was trying to do it within his own community, that is the Brahmo, you know, because
#
that was another sect he was born into, and therefore he was probably much more familiar
#
He was trying to break it in his own.
#
And this I saw reflected in the real, what should I say, discourse between Gandhi and
#
Tagore on the issue of that earthquake, or on the issue of Charkha and the rest, you
#
know, the Swadeshi and yeah.
#
That two people were looking at it quite differently, clearly.
#
I mean, they probably looked at it through their own perspectives in their own context.
#
But what to me was interesting was that that didn't create identities.
#
That discourse actually made their bonds even stronger.
#
So that when Tagore was nearing the end of his life, he sought to hand over the board
#
of Shantiniketan to someone like Gandhi, that you be on the board to continue the legacy.
#
This is exactly the same when Subhash Bose, whom we hear so much, Gandhi and Bose, Bose
#
named one of his brigades on Gandhi and Nehru.
#
You know, we hear all the differences, this is in the last phase of Bose's life, last
#
That it is this man who called Gandhi the father of the nation, the Bapu.
#
So, you know, we have so much of instances we can pick on to figure out how people are
#
reconciled and they were reconciled not because they had a new realization, they were reconciled
#
because they had their bond from before.
#
You know, so that relationship ensured that no matter their policy differences, political
#
differences, they would still have a lever or a thread to connect.
#
You know, so I can't think how such major differences as we seem to think they are today
#
were overcome so easily, so graciously, so amazingly as these.
#
So the differences don't matter if you have the relationship, which is what we need to
#
Each one of us need to be able to make the relationship with our communities, which was
#
a challenge with mobility itself, I mean, which is a challenge every time.
#
Ambedkar warned about the problems of community in rural India, I mean, which is precisely
#
a very similar kind of a challenge in another way, perhaps.
#
The same with the complete lack of community in ultra-mobile urban India, where in an apartment
#
most neighbors may not know each other.
#
So we need to figure out how to break that.
#
Whether technology helps, well, welcome it.
#
But it has to be technology neutral because, you know, no technology cuts both ways, nuclear
#
So technology would just be a tool in how we use it, how we think about it.
#
We really need to figure out how do we break that.
#
So in that sense, Gandhi to me as a practitioner showed me how something that was kind of in
#
my mind, I had not kind of thought of it as concrete, made me make that shift.
#
I mean, Tagore spoke about it, wrote about it, but those were abstracts.
#
You know, that's a novel, after all, it's a novel.
#
But Gandhi put it into practice, you know.
#
So I had an aunt who went to know Akali with Gandhi, you know, at the height of all that.
#
And I heard the story not from the aunt, but from her husband, who was a doctor, a British
#
He used to tell me that he told only one thing, that death before honor.
#
So I had not understood what does it mean, you know, that he would always say that, that,
#
you know, that I told her that death before honor, that you are fine, you are free to
#
go with Gandhi, but should any harm come to you, you should opt for death than your honor.
#
Now that was a risk, which was obvious risk, which was an enormous risk, that a young girl
#
like my aunt at that time in 46 took, like many others, to be part of Gandhi's journey
#
To be able to rebuild the literal connection, the physical connection, which was getting
#
broken by the abstraction of the bomb partition and the borders and the Hindu-Muslim and all
#
Which is why, you know, a book that kind of really amazes me, and when I read it, it kind
#
of, I mean, still brings tears to my eyes, even though I didn't experience it myself,
#
is the miracle of Calcutta, you know, which Gandhi did, and people, my grandfather, grandmother,
#
I haven't seen my grandfather, and my parents would tell me how parts of Calcutta, including
#
our own where we are, had bodies outside on the streets.
#
Much more gross than what the Naxalite violence could, you know, because that was just a bullet
#
and in some far out forest most of the time or in the prison, most people wouldn't see
#
it, but they saw it and saw the transformation.
#
Because Gandhi had built that bond that could connect, and therefore people could figure
#
out a way to overcome, you know, we need to build that bond.
#
So we can't expect a Gandhi to save us, because Gandhi was not born.
#
And even in a literal way, we can't expect a Gandhi to save us.
#
So we have to figure out how somebody, anyone, any one of us, anybody, what lessons can we
#
draw so that we try to avoid some of the horrors that might haunt us again.
#
And it's a very realistic order, it's a very realistic order and because of the technology
#
and the advances, like I think you mentioned in one of your episodes sometimes, I think,
#
you know, the Rwanda radios, you know, what kind of horror it was caused 20-30 years ago
#
just by an old technology.
#
So we need to be really, really conscious of the possibilities and therefore the alternative,
#
that there is an alternative possible.
#
And therefore, and Gandhi showed me this alternative in a concrete sense in a way which my engineering
#
mind could grasp much more concretely than the abstractions that I would have read from
#
Hayek or Rand or Tagore or anybody else.
#
So Julian Simon was that, but Julian Simon was concrete in a very narrow sense, you know,
#
the environment and the relation to economics, etc.
#
But Gandhi was all-encompassing and which is why I don't like to refer to Gandhi as
#
the Mahatma or the Bapu or the father of the nation and all that because that only puts
#
I don't want him to be on a pedestal.
#
I would not have approached Gandhi in this manner had I looked at him on the pedestal.
#
I'm looking at him as somebody I can argue, debate with and which I find, you know, which
#
you find, not just me, I think everyone finds that when we go back and, you know, which
#
is classically true for the epics, the reason epics survive in every culture is because
#
they have a new meaning for every generation.
#
You know, otherwise there is no reason epics would survive, whether it's Greek ones or
#
There are books that survive and outlive precisely because of that, you know, people reinvent
#
And that's nothing, that's completely natural because that's part of our growing, part
#
of our, you know, the life is about change.
#
So those are the ways we change.
#
So we read a book and think that's done and dusted.
#
It's not, if it's done and dusted, then it was not a book that was really worth looking
#
at it or reading it more than once.
#
But the books that are ideas that survive are never done and dusted, never done and
#
dusted because you can find new meanings into it, which happens to me whenever I read Gora
#
or whenever I read Ran or whenever I read Gandhi, that there's a new angle that I find
#
and I look at them precisely because I have no dogma.
#
I really don't have any dogma.
#
I was not born into a Gandhian belief, like I was not born into a Tagorean belief, although
#
partly because Calcutta and Bengal, Tagore is looming large, very large in a, in a, in
#
a, you know, cultural space or mental space.
#
But it's not because of dogma because I could, you know, I've not spent since, since 1976,
#
I've not spent perhaps a year at a stretch in Calcutta.
#
It's been a long time since I left high school, I passed my high school, I've studied outside,
#
I worked mostly outside, Calcutta has been a home and a visit.
#
But I can still relate one perhaps because the language which I did learn in my primary,
#
so that's my mother tongues and I'm really, I'm really proud that I can read two languages
#
and I envy my wife who can manage, who can speak three, four, five languages in that
#
sense because I think multiple languages give us that extra enrichment, extra words and,
#
you know, emotions that you can't connect maybe in one language.
#
And this actually, you know, made me think another thing that I, that I recently heard
#
or this thing that if there's something about monotheism that creates or that facilitates
#
formation of identities that much more quickly because it's mono, that is the truth and that
#
is the only truth and therefore the identity is there to defend that truth.
#
And there is also a book.
#
Whereas the multi or the, what do you say, the polytheism of Hinduism is probably the
#
reason why I can't think of any past, you know, any past war or of what should I say,
#
invasion of India where it was primarily because of religion, religion came road on whatever
#
Mohammed Ghori was invited into India to defeat another guy who was as Indian as anybody else.
#
So it was not, it was always power.
#
Shiraju Dola lost the war because somebody else bought the, bought somebody else from
#
And if you look at it, isn't it amazing that three major of the four major wars that the
#
British fought, you know, the game-changing wars which happened literally in a day and
#
changed history, Shiraju Dola in 1757, Tipu 1799, 1857.
#
In between there was the Maratha war.
#
Who were fighting whom?
#
You know, the crown didn't have even a hundred thousand, you know, at its peak, the British
#
empire had one lakh Englishmen or British or European in India.
#
You know, they were all typical political struggle where politics had broken down and
#
war was, if politics breaks down, then the war is another form of politics.
#
So we really, I think, I think there is enormous capacity to reimagine because the blinkers
#
If we can, if we can just let our imagination fly, we might go here and there and everywhere,
#
but we might find something more, much more meaningful.
#
I think that's why change to me is something that we need to be able to absorb and accept.
#
And monotheism, I'm very fortunate that we are in a polytheistic society culture where
#
truth are numerous from the beginning, from the origin, there is no, no one truth.
#
And that's what, that's what all the books, the Upanishads and the, and the Gita, that's
#
A debate, a constant dialogue to figure out what is the truth, how to get there.
#
And the gap that you said earlier that all the duplicities that happen in war, that's
#
That is exactly the lack of efficient, the gulf between laws of physics or the principles
#
of physics and actual application in engineering.
#
So I'm not surprised by those gulfs, those gulfs would be inevitably necessary because
#
otherwise there's no way to go because you're concrete and otherwise you'll have to say
#
that the concrete and the abstractions are the same.
#
That can perhaps happen only when we are in that singularity where sunya has the potential
#
to be everything, you know, so it's a complete abstraction of that kind where the abstraction
#
and the concrete would be all merged into one other than that, where, where would you
#
So I think, I think that's huge, you know, which is why I, like I said, I have not entered
#
a temple for any religious purpose and most often for any purpose for decades now.
#
The last time I remember, I went to this, to this Akshardham that had just come up and
#
some relatives wanted to visit.
#
I couldn't enter that temple, but that had another reason.
#
Because 20 years ago, that area was a slum or 30 years ago.
#
Those guys temple manufactured a claim because their guru supposed to have sat on that and
#
seen the yoguna to build it, therefore the slum was moved away.
#
So I couldn't, I just couldn't, I thought this is something I cannot participate by
#
the ticket and enter a place where I'll not be able to associate, identify at all.
#
For this practical reason, forget the religious beliefs.
#
And then I'm, I'm very glad that somebody else could figure out how to build that, that
#
another kind of, you know, the, the, the Asian games village 2010 in front of that temple
#
so that the Yamuna is now far away.
#
We, we really must figure out how do we, how do we connect in a manner that will be completely
#
secular, secular, not in the, in the political policy sense, secular in terms of the thinking
#
sense that it doesn't matter what your beliefs are.
#
We can still deal with each other and deal with each other very productively, very fruitfully
#
because there's no reason why our beliefs should clash.
#
Just like laws of physics doesn't clash with engineering.
#
So a couple of observations and the second one, I guess, leading to a question of sorts
#
and the first observation is that, yeah, I mean, one way I think of Hinduism is kind
#
of as an open source religion.
#
Like I was chatting with my host in Delhi, our mutual friend, Mohit yesterday or today
#
morning, in fact, before I came for this recording and he was looking at this book called On
#
Lakshmi on the Goddess Lakshmi by Devdutt Patnaik and he showed me an image in that.
#
And in that image, Lakshmi is sort of kneeling at the feet of Vishnu.
#
And he said that he found that image very interesting because for him, it meant that
#
wealth should be used in the service of preservation, which is an interesting interpretation.
#
And I, of course, being my cynical self told Mohit ki ya, that way you can make any interpretation
#
out of anything because millions of images, millions of gods.
#
But it's interesting that you have a religion with that openness, which is kind of open
#
source that you can, you know, bring the concerns of the present times into it.
#
And what fills me with a lot of dismay, I am also, of course, a non-believer, but born
#
a Hindu, but what also fills me with dismay is that what we have in this political movement
#
called Hindutva over the last hundred years is an effort in a sense, explicitly or implicitly
#
to homogenize Hinduism into one particular strand, a Brahmanical strand, in fact, a later
#
Brahmanical strand, like someone on Twitter just pointed out today, I forget who that,
#
you know, to think of vegetarianism and Hinduism as Brahmanical is wrong.
#
It's actually later Brahmanical because if you look at the Vedas, killing and eating
#
animals and including cows and this sort of homogenization of Hinduism into
#
this one fixing, does it such a disservice?
#
Like I would say in a sense, agar Hindu khatre mein hai, toh wo Hindutva se hai, because
#
it is reducing it down.
#
Otherwise non-believers like you and me could still possibly call ourselves Hindus.
#
I know you do and yeah.
#
And because there's so much else other than all of this.
#
It's actually a copycat that this Hindutva product of one of the exports or the imports
#
from the Western nationalism, that religious nationalism that came in.
#
So this is exactly a copycat.
#
It's a complete, I mean, what should I say, destruction of anything to do with the ideas
#
of Hinduism that I would associate with and I have no conflict, you know, just like I
#
have no conflict with laws of physics, I have no conflict.
#
I don't see any such conflict.
#
Now I want to go back to Gandhi, reading about Gandhi, one of the things that strikes you
#
like a black swan event for various reasons within the Indian freedom movement.
#
And one of the ways in which he differs from everyone else is in his intellectual development.
#
I mean, Naipaul once referred to Gandhi as quote, the least Indian of Indian leaders,
#
And all his early influences are from elsewhere, you know, learns about non-violent non-cooperation
#
through Tolstoy's writing.
#
You know, he later finds validation of that in thorough, he, you know, looks at the sermon
#
on the mount as an inspiration, his distrust of machinery and the idealization of village
#
life come from John Ruskin.
#
All these influences are later and later he claims of Bhagavad Gita as an influence.
#
But to me, in a sense, it seems like a post facto thing.
#
And his intellectual development is not so much from reading books like all the other
#
great liberals, the Gokles and the Feroz Shah Mehta's and Agarkar's and Rana Day's and all
#
They read widely, you know, that they read the great, you know, Mill and Bentham and
#
the great liberal writers of the age, Adam Smith, they were steeped in the enlightenment
#
to a certain extent and he wasn't.
#
And this led him to a lot of strange ideas, like for example, and I once asked Ram Guha
#
about this and I found his answer lovely and I'll share it with you.
#
And I read out bits from his book Hind Swaraj, which, of course, he wrote in 1911, 1912 when
#
he was on the ship back from South Africa to India, where he railed against, say, the
#
So, for example, at one point he said, quote, railways, lawyers and doctors have impoverished
#
the country so much that if we don't wake up in time, we should be ruined, stop, quote.
#
In another place, he said that, quote, it is beyond dispute that railways propagate
#
He was against modern medicine, though when he fell ill, he always took modern medicine,
#
but he railed against it.
#
He railed against lawyers and all of that seemed to be completely against modernity.
#
And you know, so much so that when he came to India and he shared his ideas with his
#
great hero, Gokhale, Gokhale actually told him that boss, you're a little out of touch,
#
so don't enter politics actively.
#
Now you go around India for a year, see the country for yourself and only then enter.
#
And Gokhale died shortly afterwards and Gandhi's bizarre response to that was to continue his
#
journey around the country quite correctly, but barefoot, because he thought that would
#
be a tribute to Gokhale.
#
And similarly, at a later point, there's this beautiful book called The Mahatma and the
#
Poet, which has those correspondence of Gandhi and Tagore.
#
And you see at points, you can sense that Tagore is also a little bit exasperated and
#
is, you know, gently chiding him and so on.
#
And it's just a lovely exchange.
#
So I asked Ram when I spoke to him about Gandhi, after his biography was out, that what do
#
Like I understand people are evolving, but he wrote Hind Swaraj when he was in his 40s,
#
mid 40s, you know, you'd expect a person to have evolved beyond that stage and yet his
#
ideas are very simplistic and muddy on these subjects.
#
But on a subject like Satyagraha, on certain subjects, his words are incredible.
#
They're inspiring, they're incredible, they contain deep truth.
#
And Ram's answer, which I know you'll agree with, was that when he experienced something,
#
you know, that deep knowledge he gained from experiencing it, from being a practitioner,
#
as you put it, brought great wisdom and great insight.
#
But when he hadn't experienced something and he knew it only in the abstract, you know,
#
like the good that railways can do or modern medicine, then he would rail against it and
#
you don't take his view seriously.
#
And to some extent, I guess at the end of his life, Gandhi must have figured this himself
#
and he said, burn all my books, you know, and I mean, I'm rambling a bit, but it seems
#
here that there are different ways of arriving at views of the world and one way is ivory
#
We read our books, we get our ideas.
#
The other is from the grassroots bottom up way, like the farmers you and I met in Deolali.
#
And perhaps there is a mix of the two.
#
Perhaps people like me, people like you have certainly gone into that India and people
#
like them also are very well read and they kind of find validation of their lived experiences
#
But Gandhi's way is very interesting.
#
He's learning kind of by immersing himself into doing things and it almost seems an accident
#
what emerges like all the satyagrahas basically, if you look at the proximate aims, they kind
#
You know, the last South Africa one had like a face saver kind of half success, but they
#
all kind of failed in their proximate aims.
#
The salt tax remained till 1946, the salt tax today is much higher.
#
So they all failed, but what they succeeded in was by mobilizing the public imagination
#
by turning what was a movement of elites into a movement that was a mass movement.
#
And you and I have discussed this before and I think it's kind of accidental and it's,
#
he got lucky and it's only in hindsight that we attribute political genius to it that,
#
you know, this was his vision and he made it happen and we put a teleological plan to
#
And it's actually irrelevant which of us is correct on this one point.
#
It's completely irrelevant.
#
He did what he did and it was kind of incredible.
#
So what are your thoughts on what I just said?
#
We need a few sessions to discuss Gandhi for the reason that I'm not a Gandhi scholar.
#
So I am relating to Gandhi through my own experiences.
#
Just like Gandhi evolved through his own experiences.
#
You know, I'm kind of secondhand, but at least through him.
#
So I mean, I don't, if I understand Gandhi, he literally believed in detached action.
#
He created in his own life, a kind of detachment, which we can only dream of.
#
You know, just try, you know, so many of us, we try, we know so many bad things in us.
#
We want to rectify it, you know, smoking or this, that, or the other.
#
Many of us give up and try again, some of us succeed, some of us don't.
#
And that's true in very many aspects.
#
And so it was with Gandhi.
#
But once he set the goal, the focus was not on the goal at all.
#
So the salt tax was not the goal at all, neither was India's independence.
#
His transformation was that he crafted the identity of Indians as citizens, which hadn't
#
happened then, before, which hasn't happened since.
#
I mean, an amazing transformation that a society that lived without a state, literally Indians,
#
you know, Indians didn't depend on a state protection to remain Indians.
#
The civilization of India survived for all these years for the, for the various factors
#
that they were, but, and people can still relate to some common elements.
#
They can share the epics, et cetera, et cetera, but there was no political anchor to it.
#
So here is a civilization that didn't act, that never in its history relied on a political
#
Gandhi had this amazing challenge, incredible challenge, that to create a political identity,
#
yet go far beyond that identity, which is why he was a nationalist leader, perhaps the
#
only one I can think of, who didn't need history to justify himself.
#
You know, do the right thing, exactly as, as the Gita would say, that figure out what's
#
the right thing, stick to it, forget the goal, the goal would happen in its own due course,
#
because you don't have all the control over, you are not God.
#
So you won't be able to deliver the goal, a goal as such, if you claim it.
#
So do figure out what's the right thing to do, figure out how to do it, go about doing
#
it, which is why it led to such amazing experiences for Gandhi and he kept evolving.
#
To me it is this process that I find fascinating, very few authors, including Rand, would acknowledge
#
that evolution, Tagore did, amazing.
#
So to me that correspondence is not about the conflict that they had in terms of ideology
#
or ideas or principles or philosophy, it is that they could, they were struggling, grappling,
#
just like Krishna was trying to grapple or Arjuna was trying to grapple with Krishna
#
and Krishna was trying to explain to Arjuna.
#
You know, so to me it is this process of engagement that is the most exciting part.
#
To me, if you and I agree, we would have nothing to discuss, we'd only discuss that whom to
#
bash up because that's the guy I don't agree on or we don't agree on.
#
You know, literally or metaphorically, whichever way we think of how to gang up against other
#
But we can discuss precisely because there are threads, nuances that we are exploring.
#
So I have no this thing about you disproving me because if you do, I'll thank you because
#
it will give me a new insight into something that may not have come to me.
#
And if you don't, that only reinforces my this thing that okay, I'm on a right track
#
and I presume that would be the same with you.
#
This is the means to me.
#
This is the means there is no the ends are irrelevant, irrelevant in the sense that you
#
can set it that the wherever you are, wherever you are headed, but that's that that's irrelevant,
#
which is why we cannot, you know, I mean, it's unnecessary or, or it creates the drama,
#
it creates the effect that had it not been for the for the salt tax and the salt movement,
#
good millions have kind of gelled into such a movement, you know, so I'm sure the other
#
events do play a significant role, but they're not the whole story, they're only the starting
#
They only set it they only help to set in motion a process, which we should all aspire
#
You know, so Gandhi and Tagore and Tagore was, of course, much more of an intellectual,
#
although he tried to be a practitioner in terms of his shantiniketa and efforts and
#
But Gandhi was a practitioner through and through, which is perhaps why I relate with
#
him as an engineer, you know, even conceptually, that I'm looking at a problem as to how do
#
if this is a problem I'm facing, how do I come across and how do I what do I take away,
#
how do I improve upon it, etc, etc.
#
He was constantly doing that.
#
So I have no problem that he has he has differences with the philosophers and the principles because
#
those philosophers and the principles had had a fraction of our reach in terms of how
#
Tagore also did the same, but of course, much more intellectual, I mean, Tagore is much
#
So to me, it is that both of them acknowledge this process of evolution, whereas what we
#
have created today is that we want our icons to be born icons.
#
I think it will be a dead end.
#
I think it will be a disaster.
#
We'll all turn into fossils and rocks.
#
If we are born into what we are, we will turn into fossils anyway, but for a while, for
#
At least you'll pass on the gene to the next one.
#
So I think I think to me it is this process, which is why the poem that you read, you know,
#
is the rebirth and the freshness of it.
#
That's what makes life interesting.
#
Otherwise we are all gone.
#
You know, this actually, you know, to me, one way of, I mean, one thing that kind of
#
fascinated me and I was telling some other friend just a few days ago, why don't we look
#
One is the pollution and all the rest, many of us in urban India can't, but look at the
#
sky, the enormity of space and the insignificance of our tiny battles.
#
You know, I really think it will be a very enriched society if, if, uh, astronomy or
#
things of that kind were built in as part of our education system, look at the sky.
#
You know, whether you think of it created by a creator or not, I don't think it was
#
You think it's a creator.
#
That debate won't get resolved immediately, but that different would not, should not lead
#
to the other differences in the practical world because the practical world differences
#
are not because of that difference, which is why, you know, the, the thing that kind
#
of another from Gandhi's own life thing that made me completely rethink Gandhi was when
#
I began to, at least in my perspective, when I began to ask how and why did Gandhi change
#
from God is truth, he was a believer from his beginning.
#
And it's not true that, that Gandhi was only influenced by the West or the philosophers
#
of Tolstoy and Toru and things like that, his Jain and his Vaishnav teachings in India,
#
which was predating his played a huge role in terms of what he was.
#
But how a man who hardly ever went into a temple yet claim to be spiritual and prayed
#
every day, twice a day, at least shifted from God is truth to truth is God.
#
To me, this was an eye-opener and which actually made me, made me realize or accept as of now
#
at least that I have no conflict with Hinduism, even though I'm a non-believer, I'm a non-practitioner,
#
I have no beliefs, I have no, no custom that I would follow.
#
The only time I'd follow custom is only because the family and the society around me wants
#
me to adopt a particular one.
#
I don't want a confrontation on, on that because that's a practical thing, that's not a principal
#
I have no, I have no prohibition.
#
To me, this was the starting point of understanding why, that if you say God is truth, then firstly
#
you'll have to believe that there is a God and then there is a question of who's God,
#
which God, you know, Shiva or, or Vishnu or the Christ or Mohammed or, or the flying spaghetti
#
We have to debate all that.
#
The truth is God, is that process transition from the end where you are giving the end
#
and saying that truth is a way to God, you're now reversing it.
#
You know, you don't have the end.
#
You have the truth and then it leads to wherever the end is God, no matter what, what that
#
And this, you know, this is, I believe this actually can help us understand why Gandhi
#
said many of his anti-technology things and why he said it.
#
Because as a practitioner, we must always look at the context in which he's saying
#
His is not a theoretical journey.
#
He is not looking for a theoretical, beautiful theoretical construct that physicists and
#
mathematicians look for, you know, symmetry and beauty and all the rest, he was not looking
#
He was looking at hard ground realities, which meant that this transition enabled him to
#
relate to scientists, relate to philosophers, relate to atheists and relate to believers
#
Have you ever seen a picture of Gandhi entering a temple or sitting before a deity?
#
And of course, one section of Hindutva Brigade disowned him, which is how he got killed,
#
But he was close to another section.
#
In fact, he defended the Varnas system at a different point in time.
#
So that's the part of the evolution.
#
That's the part of the evolution.
#
That we need to, which is why, you know, otherwise we are expecting Gandhi to be born a Mahatma,
#
which is the one reason why he said that discard Mahatma, in fact, that was his kind of one
#
of his absolute rules in his ashrams, that no one should refer to him as a Mahatma.
#
So that's why I don't look at Gandhi as a Mahatma, Bapu, father of the nation or anything
#
I look at him as a person who actually lived in flesh and blood and who actually tried
#
to do things in practice, which is probably I can relate because, you know, I didn't come
#
up through the intellectual route.
#
You know, I mean, all my exposures were because I was trying to relate in terms of my lived
#
So I didn't come through the intellectual route, which I think is very critical to understand
#
And what I also think of it and the reason I won't litigate this too much is that I have
#
increasingly come to believe that the biographical details of the life of a dead man are kind
#
They've left impacts on the world in different ways.
#
And those impacts are important, especially their ideas.
#
So we should debate their ideas and discuss their ideas and what we learn from that.
#
But the biographical details is something useful served by going into it because a guy
#
is dead and the guy should be dead.
#
Like his ideas in Hind Swaraj are kind of ridiculous at, you know, his ideas on caste
#
also evolve in strange ways.
#
In the last decade of his life, he's completely lost it with the kind of experiments that
#
he does like sleeping naked with his 17 year old grand niece, Manu, you know, all the other
#
leaders of the movement kind of were like, you know, what the fuck?
#
What's wrong with this guy?
#
But I think at that level, that's irrelevant.
#
I mean, in certain ways, he was a great man in certain ways.
#
He was exactly the opposite.
#
But what we are left with is his ideas and the learnings that we can take from that.
#
And the subject of noticing sentences, I love the sentence of yours, why don't we look at
#
That's such a beautiful sentence.
#
And I think more of us would benefit from A, looking at the sky and B, talking to the
#
person next to us instead of being absorbed in our smartphones all the time and just being
#
sort of in that abstract kind of world.
#
Let me sort of in the context of the current time and a debate that you and I have had,
#
let me, you know, talk about something that we both agree on that the end does not justify
#
Now, how I often think of it in the context of the state is that, look, I'm against coercion.
#
Consent is everything to me.
#
At the same time, I realize that the existence of the state is necessary to protect our rights.
#
You need a state with a monopoly on violence to protect these individual rights with you
#
But the existence of the state itself implies, as Gandhi also pointed out, implies a certain
#
base degree of violence, because to protect our rights, you have to first infringe our
#
rights in terms of the state existing.
#
It exists on our taxes and there is coercion involved and the very notion of the monopoly
#
of violence is exactly that.
#
And therefore, my thinking always has been that I am not going to be an anarchist and
#
say there should be no state because society would evolve towards having a state of some
#
sort, even if there wasn't one in, you know, in a perfect condition.
#
But I'm always conscious that as I wrote a call, you know, as is the headline of a column
#
I once wrote, that every act of government is an act of violence.
#
Therefore, whenever we think of the state doing something, we have to acknowledge the
#
We have to pretend that there is no cost, that government money is unlimited or the
#
state can do whatever to solve this problem.
#
Everything that it does has a cost and we need to kind of acknowledge the cost.
#
And therefore there needs to be a really high bar on what the state should do, because with
#
everything it does in some way or the other, it is infringing on our freedom as citizens.
#
And I would say that a justifiable intervention of the state would therefore come in protecting
#
our rights and protecting our lives.
#
I think I'll just, you know, it's not the economic cost.
#
And Gandhi actually said that in another form, that every action of the state is manifestation
#
And it is that violence that needs to be restrained because we need the state, but only need it
#
to that limited degree and not beyond, which is why, and this is something is very new.
#
I mean, you know, I'm and maybe we'll have another occasion to discuss this, this distinction
#
And I think there has been very little understanding or discourse on that, that Gandhi really spoke
#
He was speaking of duties.
#
For the last three or four hundred years, we have been talking of rights.
#
And the way I see it, and like I said, I'm not an academic coming from that world.
#
The practitioner, as I see it, rights are our relationship with each other, governing
#
our relationship with each other, enforced through the coercive power of the state or
#
the arbitrary arbitration power of the state, the judiciary.
#
That of course depends on whether the state is efficient and capable and even wants to
#
do that kind of activity.
#
Second, duties is our own.
#
It's our commitment to ourselves.
#
Which means that irrespective of what the rights are and which is what Gandhi had, in
#
fact, just last night I was reading something because I was looking at something and I suddenly
#
came across, I think Gandhi had an exchange with HG Wales regarding these rights and duties.
#
And then I think somebody else wrote to him about this Universal Declaration of Human
#
Rights, which of course happened a few months after Gandhi passed away.
#
That probably happened later, but the same year.
#
And Gandhi had the same point.
#
And this is something that's kind of coming from, say, my first introduction to this kind
#
of social science was through Ayn Rand, and therefore the focus was on rights.
#
And then my experience through many activities, farmers elsewhere, where property rights became
#
a key component of our frame.
#
And Indira Gandhi introduced duties into the Constitution and therefore it became a problem
#
because you are trying to institutionalize duties.
#
Duties cannot be institutionalized because it's our own, which you can see daily on the
#
streets of anywhere, village to cities.
#
Why do most people, anyone could, any to five people could gang up against one and snatch
#
away the mobile or the money or whatever, whatever, just beat him up for fun.
#
99.99% of the time, you don't see that kind of things happening.
#
The poorest of the poor in India would not, 99.999% of the time, throw a stone at a Mercedes
#
just because the Mercedes is passing by.
#
It's ingrained that we perform duties because we believe that's the right thing to do, which
#
cannot be enforced by law.
#
And therefore Indira Gandhi did a great disservice by doing this duty business into the Constitution
#
and which has meant that we have now, what should I say, right-ized our duties, which
#
means all the positive rights, et cetera, has been passed off as rights because we've
#
So let me kind of push back on that.
#
Like first, I find that Gandhi's thinking on this particular subject is incoherent and
#
we can go into that in detail later, but I think there's a category error in talking
#
of rights and duties like this in the sense that I think like, first of all, rights are
#
Otherwise, what does it mean to be a citizen?
#
What does it mean to be an individual?
#
Rights are central to the way I think about our relationships with each other, but rights
#
and duties exist in separate domains, except for the duty you could say we have to not
#
infringe the rights of others.
#
So if you phrase it like that, in that particular sense, that one duty is something that is
#
But other duties, like you correctly said, I think come about from the voluntary actions
#
of individuals and therefore cannot be coerced by the state and therefore Indira Gandhi got
#
it completely wrong over there along with many other things she got wrong.
#
So for example, I might have a duty towards you that Borun is in his sixties, let me not
#
keep him talking for more than five hours and that might be my duty.
#
And you might have a duty towards me that, you know, Amit has come all the way to Delhi
#
to call me for a podcast, we'll talk for seven hours, I'll give him what he wants.
#
But these are voluntary actions.
#
These are things that we feel and like you correctly said, a lot of what is so beautiful
#
about social interactions is this sense of duty towards our fellow citizens where we
#
are helping strangers without needing to and, you know, looking after others and all of
#
And rights are in a separate domain.
#
I think rights are like a hygiene factor.
#
I think, I mean, this may not be the whole story, because firstly, and historically,
#
societies have existed predating rights.
#
And if rights are defined just by the states, then there is a...
#
I agree that rights exist before the state, except that we implicitly recognize each other's
#
rights and some duties emerge from that, some.
#
I think, you know, this is in a way semantic, but I think it is important that it is because
#
we recognize our fundamental duty to ourselves, we begin to recognize what is the basis of
#
our relationship with somebody else, because we look at that person as our equal.
#
And it's only in the interaction phase, in some form, in some specific spheres, that
#
the issue of rights might come in.
#
Otherwise, 95% of the time, we are all functioning in our domains of duties, not in the domains
#
of rights, because just think of it.
#
Yeah, but, Barun, those domains of duties emerge from our implicit understanding of
#
For example, it is my duty that if I disagree with you, and I suddenly feel violent, it
#
is my duty not to slap you, right?
#
But that duty emerges because I understand your rights and my rights, and that I would
#
be infringing on your rights by slapping you.
#
But maybe it's kind of...
#
No, I think it doesn't end there.
#
Because if you do slap me, then I can invoke the state to say that, arbitrate and figure
#
out whether this is right, wrong, etc, etc.
#
And therefore, the rights, while we say it is inalienable, but in a strict sense, it
#
is dependent on that somebody, ultimately, who's willing and able to do it in a manner
#
which is just and proper and accurate.
#
Which is true, but which is not the whole story, because 95% of our interactions are
#
Yeah, but you're not disagreeing with me.
#
No, I'm not disagreeing.
#
I'm not disagreeing at all.
#
I'm only saying that we should not categorize it as either or.
#
That's what I'm saying.
#
That is the relationship between the two.
#
Yeah, I'm saying there's no dichotomy.
#
I'm saying that it's a category error, because rights sort of depend on the state and they
#
need to be kind of, you know, formally spelt out and all of that.
#
And duties emerge within society from this incredibly rich web of personal interactions.
#
But the question that I was coming to is that therefore, I think, because of the way that
#
I see it, that, of course, coercion is bad, but you need a limited amount of coercion
#
to protect everybody's rights and make sure that there isn't only coercion.
#
And it's kind of, to me, what I call the liberal paradox.
#
And therefore, we need to litigate very closely what a state should do and what a state should
#
not do, because everything a state does is a violent act in its end.
#
So whatever, wherever you invoke the use of the state, you have to be very clear about
#
And this is where you and I kind of disagreed, where at the start of COVID, I felt that in
#
such a massive crisis, that the blunt tool of a lockdown at that time, you know, today
#
we can look back on how the lockdown was done really badly.
#
And you know, a lockdown at a different point in time is a different matter.
#
And a lockdown is a coercive tool that states will misuse inevitably in, like I heard recently
#
because of the Delhi fog, somebody was musing about how Delhi meh lockdown hanache.
#
Which is absolute nonsense.
#
And on all those matters, I agree with you.
#
But when the lockdown was first called, I think in an idealized sense, there is a moment
#
where a lockdown may be necessary.
#
I understand it's an infringement on our rights and no one defends those more than me.
#
But at the same time, the duty of the state is to protect the lives of its citizens.
#
And this seemed to be the edge case where that would be the case.
#
But you, on the other hand, took this principle stand that no lockdowns are wrong period.
#
They're an infringement.
#
No, no, no, I didn't take a principle stand on lockdown.
#
My distinct was that we are not ending up normalizing another expansion of the state.
#
And that would come to haunt us as it has.
#
The Delhi may have a lockdown now and now we can have it now.
#
It's not an India phenomenon at all.
#
China and the Chinese party have won the war as of now.
#
Every government is aspiring to wield that kind of authority over their people.
#
That to me, you know, lockdown is secondary.
#
The pandemic will come and go.
#
It has happened before.
#
Incidentally, there was no manual, including WHOs, which called for lockdown in case of
#
epidemics and pandemics.
#
You know, it shows to me, it shows it's not the lockdown.
#
This is this will pass.
#
It is how we were just waiting that as a society, not just our leaders, as a society, we were
#
all waiting for an opportunity to allow the state to expand itself.
#
And that it has happened in the freest of the free countries.
#
To me, that is incredible.
#
And that this is going to now lead to a kind of internal divisions which didn't exist
#
So to me, this is, I mean, the cost of this in societal terms, forget the health.
#
I mean, that's some people, I mean, we have in one crore people die in India every year.
#
So there will be a few people dying extra.
#
That might be somebody.
#
I mean, we have lost two members of our family, one due to COVID, one non-COVID.
#
But that we all take it that this is going to happen.
#
But to me, this cost, because we have no conception today, what is a state.
#
And this has been normalized, not overnight, not because China did it and we copycatted
#
It has been happening for the last 50 years, 60 years, since the end of the Second World
#
Second World War was fought against the Nazis, the National Socialists.
#
After that, the Britain had its National Health Service.
#
Now we can say that we can expand the state.
#
But every time we are expanding the state, scope of the state, we are completely forgetting
#
that we have also normalized one extra bit of violence.
#
And there is no pullback.
#
I'm not seeing any pullback.
#
There were accidental pullbacks, like in 89, as we can see now.
#
The collapse of the Berlin Wall and everyone was so elated that the wall has gone and therefore
#
new dawn of freedom, etc.
#
91 to me is another great example.
#
That 91 liberalization in India was state-driven.
#
And today, it's the courtesy of the state which is reversing it.
#
So we have completely disconnected our values and morality and duty from the kind of instrument
#
that we are willing to wield.
#
I'll make a couple of observations and I'll come to a question.
#
Observation one is that, of course, I agree with you that any power that the state takes,
#
it never holds it back.
#
It's extremely rare, like you pointed out, and therefore it's a problem and it's something
#
As Thomas Jefferson famously said that, you know, we can't take liberty for granted.
#
It requires eternal vigilance in his memorable phrase.
#
His phrase was refreshed by the blood of…
#
Eternal vigilance was actin.
#
No, eternal vigilance wasn't actin.
#
We'll leave this in the recording.
#
So one of us, possibly me, can be proved to be wrong.
#
There's no shame in that.
#
My second observation is this, that we can evaluate an action by the right thing or the
#
wrong thing to do through two lenses.
#
You know, one is a moral lens, a deontological lens, but to cut away the jagan, the moral
#
lens, that if we agree coercion is immoral, then if something involves coercion, it is
#
The other which comes into play when you think about what the state should do, where it is
#
justified in using coercion, is the utilitarian lens where you say that, you know, the end
#
The end is good for the service number.
#
And I am extremely suspicious of utilitarianism because of the high X knowledge problem, that
#
you can never actually know the outcome of anything.
#
And whenever you project a particular outcome while designing a policy, all your biases
#
will come into play and your ignorance will come into play.
#
And we should be wary of utilitarianism.
#
Because you might get locked in.
#
You might get locked in.
#
And obviously, when the lockdown was called, it was called on a utilitarian calculation
#
that something really bad may happen.
#
And of course, this is also bad.
#
We got to choose this over the other.
#
Now my question to you is, let's take a thought experiment.
#
Now COVID, we were in a fog of information then we understand it a little better now.
#
But let's say that there was a pandemic, which had, let's say, an hour, which is how many
#
person an average person spreads it to, an hour of three, which is very high, and a fatality
#
rate of 50%, which is also very high.
#
Would you then call a lockdown?
#
Is there any rate at which you would say a lockdown is justified?
#
Like, what if mathematically it was inevitable that if we don't call a lockdown, everybody
#
will at some point die?
#
You know, at what point do you say that a lockdown is justified?
#
To me, this is a thought experiment.
#
I look at it beyond the pandemic.
#
One reason being that something has been with me for much longer than the pandemic is very
#
The average problem is much greater.
#
But in my thought experiment, I've laid it out.
#
To me, I'm using an analogy to hopefully to get to that.
#
That Newton's third law, you know, very famous school students know it, you know, action
#
reaction, politicians use it, whatever.
#
But does it actually, has there been any engineer who's been able to craft that law into action?
#
Okay, I'm an art student.
#
That is, you know, every action would have an equal reaction, condition that there is
#
So the two balls, two planets, two stars will come and go, come and go, bounce each
#
other indefinitely because there's no friction.
#
That's true, provided those conditions apply.
#
And even nature, you know, the ultimate reality, as far as we can conceive it, even nature
#
hasn't been able to create that ideal situation ever, which is why truth is a pursuit.
#
These challenges will come, pandemic, lockdown, whatever, whatever.
#
The question is, are we recognizing where we might earn and therefore figuring out from
#
the beginning that how to hold the line?
#
Otherwise I can document from 1947 or 46 or whatever, when the second world war ended,
#
the whole world, not just China and the Soviet Union and all the rest, whole world has incrementally
#
moved towards enhancing the state and normalizing violence.
#
Now the violence is, you know, I agree with Steven Pinkham that the physical form of violence,
#
you know, may have decreased, which is true.
#
But the coercive form of violence hasn't, it has expanded all around, which to me, you
#
know, it is not because we don't need to do, there could be circumstances where we need
#
exceptions and we need to figure out.
#
But if we lose that line, which we have, the whole world seems to have lost that line that
#
where is that line where we are going to, at least a recognition of that line.
#
Today it is a blank check.
#
All of us expect in the name of our rights that let's take a claim.
#
The state will deliver.
#
If we have the numbers, if we have the votes, we can get to whatever.
#
To me, that line has become invisible.
#
In fact, even in our imagination is a huge cost.
#
I agree with that so strongly that I will urge listeners to rewind this as it were and
#
listen to what you just said one more time.
#
That strongly I agree with it.
#
But you're not answering the question.
#
And the question to me is important because, you know, the recognition that there is a
#
state is a recognition that there are exceptions.
#
So going back to the thought experiment, you know, at what point would you say a lockdown
#
Where do you draw the line?
#
You said about holding the line against state overreach.
#
What I have increasingly seen is that, you know, you and I are thinking this out.
#
We are thrashing it out.
#
We're looking at all the different angles.
#
In this particular case, I recognize that there are tradeoffs, that whatever a government
#
is to do, the costs are seen and the benefits are unseen.
#
You can't see the lives you save.
#
You can see the lives that go whether you call a lockdown or the other way around.
#
But the positions many people took on this depends on which tribe they are from.
#
So Trump did not call a lockdown.
#
So people are anti lockdown there on the right.
#
But here on the right, Modi called a lockdown.
#
So people were pro lockdown.
#
And these positions are kind of hardened.
#
But I'm just trying to figure it out on my own because I still think we don't have enough
#
knowledge on whether a lockdown and what extent of lockdown was the right decision then, though
#
at that time, it seemed sensible to me, given the fog of knowledge.
#
But I would say that there are some circumstances when a lockdown is necessary and some when
#
they're absolutely not.
#
So is that something that you agree with?
#
Is there a condition in which you would say, if the hour is three, and if we know that
#
50 lakh people will die, five people will die, whatever the number is, at what point
#
do you say that lockdown is necessary?
#
Would you ever say that?
#
You know, as an engineer, a trained engineer, I mean, my education is engineering.
#
I get the knowledge problem.
#
No, no, not the knowledge problem.
#
This is not an experiment.
#
Not the knowledge problem.
#
It's the lack of even recognition in our imagination that what is the nature of the problem that,
#
you know, it's like what you said, you know, the worst might happen.
#
Some people may cheat Ramayan Mahabharat, the war would be fought not in an ideal situation
#
because the concretes are never ideal.
#
So there could be situations where people may do lockdown, people may not do lockdown.
#
But to me, that's not the point.
#
The point is, firstly, what's the process through which we are going to arrive at that
#
And more drastically, and which is what modern politics and particularly Gandhian politics
#
should teach us, that have we, did we prepare the ground, that is the popular awareness
#
and participation in the process so that there is a deepening of awareness about where the
#
line is, so that it can be pulled back when the, so if we have not done all that, then
#
to me, if you do this, we are on a downfall.
#
Bhai, I agree with all that, but you're giving abstract answers to a concrete question.
#
If you want to really ask me, ask me personally.
#
You would never have a lockdown.
#
I would never have a lockdown.
#
Even if everyone is guaranteed to die.
#
Because even I will die, but I would not impose, I would not try to impose my will without
#
first ensuring that there is, firstly, I know the knowledge problem has been overcome to
#
the extent it can be overcome.
#
And secondly, that the wider society in which I am one is in sync with and realizing the
#
To me, can there be a greater distinct, we all laugh at now, it's quite common now to
#
laugh at Francis Fukuyama because of end of history.
#
Which is misinterpreted.
#
He's a great, great, great.
#
He's a very, I mean, a deep thinker.
#
I mean, one has to, so this is a misinterpretation, just like I believe you partly misinterpreted
#
Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and all the rest.
#
We can have another discussion on that.
#
I don't want to go into that.
#
Or people can read Hind Swaraj for themselves.
#
And, and like I did, it will, it is likely, and at least for me, it'll, it'll give you
#
new meanings from what he's saying.
#
So we can, we can discuss that separately because then it's a bit more, my, this thing
#
is that as, and this is what gets me to the early points that I was saying about public
#
If we are not going to engage with the public to make them realize the implications, make
#
the whole society aware of the implications of what's going to happen, we are digging
#
Gandhi's single biggest success or his effort was focused on raising this sensibility among
#
Everything else to me is secondary.
#
We today have outsourced citizenship.
#
We expect somebody else to take care of everything that we want.
#
That's a lovely phrase, outsourced citizenship.
#
And this policy in this approach, you know, that is why means become so important because
#
we have ignored the means through which we have arrived at that conclusion.
#
It will be a Herculean challenge trying to come out of it because, you know, last hundred,
#
150 years, the society, because, and you know, this is a distinction I recently realized
#
I had read about it, but I had not really realized it.
#
I don't know if I had shared it with you earlier.
#
What we are confronting today is a bottom-up totalitarianism, not a top-down authoritarianism.
#
That's a very good phrase.
#
Bottom-up, it's not my phrase.
#
I think Hyde or somebody else, I listened to it and I've been re-listening and rethinking
#
Totalitarians can collapse either because their counter-revolution, coup, palace coup,
#
people revolution, whatever, whatever.
#
Totalitarians don't collapse.
#
If they collapse or when they do, they take the whole society down.
#
Hitler was one of only the latest or the recent and the most memorable tragic example of that
#
because the support base is not coming from the willpower of the leader no matter what
#
The demand is providing the supply.
#
Which is why we need to prepare the ground, which is why I tried to shift from policy
#
And that's one place where Gandhi was spot on, where I absolutely agree with you.
#
That change cannot be top-down, it has to be bottom-up.
#
And that is the power of today's modern totalitarianism and you can see it everywhere.
#
Every society is now going through it, including the so-called free world of the West.
#
It's amazing how quickly they've adapted to this new normal.
#
Which is why we need to rethink politics because this is happening in the public eye through
#
the political process because the political process is increasingly geared to capitalizing
#
on the us versus them rather than political process as it happens in a family that you
#
figure out what dispute to resolve, how much resource to allocation within a certain modicum
#
of force or authority of parents and certain modicum of negotiation.
#
You may say that this weekend we'll go, you'll buy a book, next weekend you'll go to a movie,
#
you do all such juggling act.
#
You know, so we shift our priorities, preferences from the immediate to the next, et cetera,
#
To me this is fundamental, we are digging our own grave, we are digging our own grave.
#
So without that context, you know, which is why engineering to me is, you know, this wouldn't
#
have come to me had I not been rethinking Newton's third law or any law for that matter
#
because third law is the most commonly rethinking that, you know, for instance, we are sitting
#
in a room, this room is perhaps 10 feet, I don't know, whatever.
#
Can we measure it to its ultimate precision?
#
We measure it only to the context to which it is necessary, you know, so the concrete
#
architect would have needed something else, the old time stone architecture would have
#
needed something else, the modern architecture which might be whatever titanium or whatever
#
would have something else.
#
To us, to me, what is important is the process through which you are arriving at and realizing
#
that the context in its totality, that what is economically, politically, socially, technologically
#
viable and what is going to be carried at the fallout.
#
To me, you know, to me, in fact, just last night, I think I wrote to a friend that because
#
I have most of my engagement interactions personally, which is why I am not in most
#
social media groups, because I like to talk to people, I am talking to you, I talk to
#
So I just wrote to you last night, actually, that this is a major challenge, to me is probably
#
the number one challenge that we are unable to figure out that the line is even necessary.
#
We are yet holding the line.
#
We have completely surrendered that, which is why I said surrendered our citizenship
#
because we the people ought to be the sovereign.
#
Somebody else is claiming sovereignty and you look at the other side, that sovereignty,
#
whether it is democratic, authoritarian, whatever, that sovereignty of the top is always temporary.
#
Because either there will be an electoral change or there will be a biological change
#
that the person at the top will go at one point or the other and even a natural death.
#
So some totalitarians have died that way, you know, Tito, for instance, he died that
#
way and he took the whole society with him in Yugoslavia.
#
Therefore that change would be completely outside the outside control, which is why
#
Gandhi's rephrasing of politics and which I came because, you know, between 89 when
#
VPC in one to, you know, till today, most of the time, I'll be extremely apprehensive
#
about what we think of politics as such, you know, what we generally think of politics.
#
But last five, six years, because I was rethinking Gandhi and as a practitioner, because politics
#
is the art of the possible, the practitioner, it's not a theoretical field.
#
And that field requires engagement with people.
#
That's what Gandhi kind of, you know, I mean, I won't say that this is my final position
#
because I can change again if I realize something different.
#
But as I stand today, as citizens, our primary responsibility is or duty is to reclaim our
#
citizenship, which we cannot do if we don't even imagine that there is such a line.
#
Today, the social sciences and the physical sciences and now the biological sciences all
#
have converged on giving up the line, which is why a right wing, left wing, everybody
#
can have a lockdown with them without a bother, because it doesn't exist in popular imagination.
#
Therefore, do whatever, you know, like Krishna, I mean, go to war, do whatever at some point
#
will time might come when a war might be necessary.
#
Otherwise, we are sacrificing ourselves, which we are.
#
The whole world is sacrificing, sacrificing citizenship and and self sovereignty over
#
all this rest that has happened.
#
So in this sense, in the political sense, and then Gandhi has been an eye opener for
#
me in the last five, six years, because I had no clue, you know, like most Indians,
#
I'd said, like including coming from a political family, that this has degenerated this, that
#
But this degeneration is not a kind of a, you know, a black magic by somebody else who's
#
So let me ask you a question.
#
You've traveled a lot across the country.
#
You meet people more than anyone.
#
So like my sense of what has happened recently is that Indian society was always illiberal,
#
though there are threads of liberality, because anything you say about India, the opposite
#
But there was an illiberal strain.
#
There was also this kind of bigoted Hindutva kind of strain.
#
And of course, we contain multitudes with these strains were there and these strains
#
were never acknowledged.
#
They were never worked upon.
#
And now they've become dominant in a way politics has caught up with society.
#
And I love the phrase bottom of totalitarianism, because what I see as happening is that I
#
think this movement is really driven from the bottom at this moment in time, that if
#
Modi wasn't there, somebody else would be there to exactly.
#
So global, mostly sure.
#
But I'm talking in the context of India that this is driven this specific strain, this
#
anti-Muslim nature and all of that, whatever is happening, this harkening back to a supposed
#
monolithic tradition and that this, you know, people should wear bindis and all this should
#
happen, which is very disturbing to me.
#
And I think all of this is coming bottom up.
#
I see it very clearly, you know, Modi and Shah did not cause it.
#
The BJP did not cause it.
#
And they are riding a tiger which they cannot control.
#
So and it is what it is.
#
And it's going to continue for a while.
#
Now you actually meet people.
#
You're not an ivory tower intellectual as to some extent I am.
#
At least to an extent I try to.
#
My pessimistic sense is ki yahi hum hai, yahi hona tha.
#
My optimistic sense is that, listen, we contain multitudes.
#
The guy who hates Muslims may also want prosperity for other reasons.
#
He may want his kids to go to a good school.
#
He may want a job when his kids grow up.
#
He may want a biryani made in a Muslim kitchen which tastes much better.
#
So there are multitudes and maybe there is hope in appealing to some other, the better
#
angels of their natures, as Pinker might put it.
#
And I don't know if that's fruitless optimism.
#
So you go out there, you meet people.
#
Beyond the bias of your optimism, because I know that you have an optimism bias.
#
You believe that the world can be changed like Gandhi did.
#
Beyond that, if you were to sit back and think about it, what is your sense?
#
I mean, is there anything, any alternative to hope?
#
Okay, that's a wrong question.
#
Is there reason for us to be hopeful?
#
Like rationally my brain tells me that no, it's going to be much worse.
#
I think it depends on, depends on whether we think something can be done, more importantly.
#
It is, it is the responsibility of each of us to try to do something.
#
To me, that is the bottom line, because the outcome, we can't be sure, obviously.
#
But the, the process of participation and the process of engagement that we can be.
#
So the question is whether we think it is useful, you know, useful in the sense of that
#
it may initiate or sow the seeds of change at some point at least, or if we give up and
#
say that this is a downhill that we are headed.
#
So I mean, to me, since I don't know whether I'll, I'll of course become extinct, but
#
I don't know whether the species will be extinct and what timeframe, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So to me, I mean, there's no alternative, but to explore whatever options you have.
#
My question is not about what we should do.
#
I think both of us in, in a sense, take a Lord Krishna approach to this, that we can't
#
We're going to do what we're going to do, you know, and I think we should do what we
#
think is the right thing to do.
#
My question is, my question is about the ground reality.
#
Yeah, but the ground reality is us, you know, isn't it amazing?
#
I had never experienced it because we had never seen it this way, that in my kind of
#
environment, social circles, Hindutva was not imagined.
#
Yet it has become so apparent, it may not be dominant yet, but it has become, or maybe
#
it's even retreating at some places, but it had captured an imagination of a section,
#
which is why apart, and it got reflected in real life, that apart from our dual identity
#
in the real world versus the virtual world, the impact was that in real world, even many
#
families had a difficult problem having dinner together because the fear of raising issues
#
that might blow things, blow up.
#
Mummy, aapne aaj bindi kyu nahi pehni?
#
Haan, it might blow up.
#
So that to me is a problem, it is a huge problem, which means that we are losing the essence
#
of the social dimension of human civilization.
#
And that social dimension, which has evolved through millions of years, you know, at least
#
two, three million years since the human race came about, was physical.
#
You know, one could be a shakuni to hide the intention and try to manage, etc., etc.
#
But it was just a matter of time before people figured out that this is a shakuni.
#
Because the interactions were physical, the costs and the benefits were enjoyed in a real
#
sense, which is what I'm saying that, I mean, apart from all the intellectualization, and
#
I know, I mean, I'll not even make a, scratch the surface of it, even if I try my best,
#
that our first obligation to ourselves and of our kind, that is mankind, society, is
#
to reach out, to engage, to re-establish the legitimacy of reaching out and therefore the
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legitimacy of the diversity.
#
Because our interactions are always very narrow, we are not, you know, like we have biryani
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So our interaction is very narrow.
#
So should that be the defining criteria?
#
You know, so this wall that we have built, this boundary that you said a little earlier,
#
is in our mind, which is why to me, it's really, you know, even now, I mean, whenever
#
I went to Jalgaon last month, and that was an interior area, therefore you could see
#
the sky so brilliantly, occasionally even you could see meteors and the satellites moving,
#
then you could distinguish that which is a satellite and which is a meteor.
#
You know, to me, this is, you know, I mean, this is probably my most optimistic sense
#
that look at the sky and the things might begin to shift because it will give us a perspective
#
because we can all look at the sky.
#
But other than that, I think it is our obligation, our duty to reach out if we accept that man
#
is a social animal in the society, and the state is only a small part of that society
#
and evolved at a particular time and kept crashing every, every few generations.
#
So the state part of it to me is secondary, necessary, evil, whatever way we want to look
#
But unless we as people, we as individuals, we as community, we as society are unable
#
to realize and recognize the necessity of that line that where coercion and violence
#
will begin and how will we restrain it.
#
We are onto the onto the cannibalistic path.
#
It's just a matter of time because we are swallowed, which is why bottom-up totalitarianism
#
swallows up the followers and the leaders.
#
And it's not just with Hitler.
#
Think of the French Revolution.
#
It's only colorful cannibalistic part, so isn't it amazing that the French Revolution
#
consumed its own leaders, you know, so graphically, the guillotine not just consumed the king,
#
it consumed them inevitably.
#
I feel like I've been asking you the question how bad are things and you keep answering
#
with we can change it, which is but which is of course inspirational.
#
So I don't think I don't think we can change it.
#
I think as I said, we've got to do what we've got to do, is there an option because I don't
#
know whether things will change.
#
Okay, so my final question and this is based on the work that you did with those tribals
#
for forest rights, which you alluded to earlier and which is in fact documented in this superb
#
documentary called India Awakes, which I will link from the show notes and I'll give a
#
Cliff Notes version of it for my listeners that Barun was essentially part of a group
#
of excellent people, he was more an observer and he was part of the and he will of course
#
downplay his role, but he was part of this movement with some excellent people and they
#
were trying to get, you know, property rights for tribals because property rights is really
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at the core of so much that he and I believe and perhaps we can someday do and a separate
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And the problem was proving that these people stayed in these particular lands over which
#
they wanted property rights.
#
Now, there is no paperwork, there's nothing.
#
How do you prove a thing like that to the government?
#
And what Barun and his fellow travelers did was they use Google Earth data to go back
#
15, 20 years, whatever, and actually prove from that data that these people had actually
#
lived in and occupied these lands for a specific period of time.
#
And this data was so convincing that the government eventually allowed property rights to these
#
And then the most interesting part of the story, which comes in the postscript, which
#
when you told me I was, I was just knocked off by it, is that for the first time in their
#
lives, when they built houses now, they built toilets within those houses because they had
#
that sense of permanence that they may not have to move tomorrow.
#
You know, just such a sharp example of how incentives can work.
#
And when I look at that, it seems to me remarkable that tribals who are asserting their right
#
over a land rightfully, which where they've lived for hundreds of years, should be able
#
to do so with a technology that is so recent and it must have taken such a mental shift
#
on all your parts to even suddenly realize that, yes, we can use Google Earth data to
#
actually prove all of this and kind of make it happen.
#
What was that moment like when that realization happens and it all works out?
#
Because I think it happened somewhat differently in a sense that I was an outsider.
#
Archwine in Gujarat had been working in the tribal pockets for decades and they have been
#
Initially, they worked a lot on the displacement issue, reshabilitation after the dam, the
#
So they had roots in the communities in which they worked.
#
And they were part of the movement, which I observed from the sidelines, which tried
#
to enact the Forest Rights Act, which would recognize the rights of the communities that
#
Then the question came, okay, we recognize it in the abstract.
#
How do we define it in concrete?
#
You know, how do you know that my arm is not reaching your nose?
#
So how do and there, I think it was Ambarish Mehta, who is one of the core of the Archwine.
#
Looking at how to get that, and that was almost coincided, it was a coincidence again, that
#
Google Earth was beginning to come on, you know, second half of, you know, after 2006,
#
2007, 2008, Google Map was just beginning to appear and we could give.
#
And then what happened was that archival maps, that is, Google was also trying to put up,
#
you know, going back as much as they could, because initially the maps were all the later
#
So they went back and that kind of made Ambarish realize first that if we could get maps of
#
2000, I mean, these images, they were not maps, actually, the satellite images from
#
2004, five, six, et cetera, you might have a much more granular picture of, because the
#
right would have to be determined on the ground.
#
So it's a concrete thing.
#
It's not an abstract thing, freedom of speech.
#
You know, it's a concrete thing.
#
So it has to be determined.
#
One is you determine culture, et cetera, which is provision is there, you know, the elders
#
agree, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But the state would typically say that there's an interest in all of you to agree among each
#
So this was Ambarish's, I mean, and to me, I was technologically novice.
#
In fact, one of my first trips during this period, when I went to Gujarat to see actually
#
this, that the first time I realized that I had another phone at that time, the Nokia,
#
that it had a GPS in it and a neighbor who was traveling in the train showed me how to
#
use it because I had never even known what a GPS was, even in my own phone, because I
#
never needed to use it.
#
There was no Google map that I'll use to come to this recording studio looking at the map.
#
So firstly, that was first step that I think Ambarish did, figured that the Google map,
#
particularly going back.
#
So he actually corresponded with Google seeking that, please see if you can provide maps going
#
Then the question was the map themselves are not sufficient because how do you know what
#
you are seeing on the map is actually the place or what we see on the image is actually
#
the village that you are in.
#
So that's where the GPS came in.
#
And that was another kind of technological coincidence that the availability and the
#
applicability and access to GPS kept increasing for through the phones and then through the
#
through handheld simple devices, which are pretty low cost with a degree of accuracy
#
That then gave this idea that this can be done, that you would know what place where
#
because image doesn't tell you that is exactly what you are seeing or where you are.
#
So those two correlations you can make that this is where you are and that's the image
#
of the place you are seeing.
#
My surprise was not so much the technological change because technological change we have
#
seen I grew up in an area where in at a time when there was no telephone.
#
I mean, yeah, literally, I waited five, four years in Delhi waiting for a landline connection.
#
So I have spent that time so that technological change doesn't surprise me as much.
#
What surprised me was that in one of our first visit when I went with Ambrish and Trupti and
#
others I need to go to their field and see this was the ease with which a semi literate
#
person could understand what was being sought and figure out why and how to operate that
#
That to me was a surprise because here was I say 15, 10, 12 years ago, an engineering
#
graduate had no idea what GPS was.
#
And here were people who many of whom at that time didn't even have mobiles.
#
And the mobiles were that old type, you know, the button type, not the not these feature
#
phones as they call it.
#
So some of them had that connectivity was extremely poor you have to go to a hilltop
#
But they could relate and I began to realize I began to experience what Hayek was talking
#
about discrete and dispersed information.
#
That people living on the ground know their community and their terrain like the back
#
of their hand, which I sitting anywhere else or anybody else sitting somewhere else would
#
So they only they already know what they have.
#
The question only is to figure out through technology so that other people who do not
#
know can figure out that this is really true.
#
So they took it, you know, like fish in water as they say.
#
And since then, Amrish and Archivani, Trupti and others have reached hundreds of villages,
#
primarily in Gujarat to train people, local community to undertake it.
#
So that, you know, it's a lived experience, the strength of them of this movement in their
#
part of India is precisely because the ownership is claimed not by Archivani as such, but by
#
the people themselves because they figured out they've understood what is what is being
#
sought and how and how they can, you know, so they're participating in the process.
#
That brings me to the point that we had been discussing for last two hours.
#
The focus on the process, the focus on the public.
#
I didn't realize it as much as I'm talking now, but I realized that the people can do
#
And it's amazing how much people can do without their formal education, which kind of reinforce
#
something that I've been telling my liberal libertarian friends for years that we are
#
barking up the wrong tree by saying that we need awareness and education.
#
It has to be put in the context, you know, lived experience of people where those awareness
#
and and education could help.
#
This was a demonstration of that in my own lifetime.
#
So I know, so I mean, what they achieved and how they did it to me is a phenomenal learning
#
for me because I had no idea that this could happen, you know, property rights to me was
#
For them, it was life and death.
#
So who has an incentive to grasp it?
#
So what what this this, I mean, of course, there are a lot of limitations they have had
#
to fight legal cases and it has gone on for 10 years till it's been going on the way the
#
But to me, this just provides a glimpse, just like Shraddha Joshi's movement in 2000 provided
#
a glimpse of what's possible when you are able to connect with people on terrains or
#
figuratively, terrains in which it matters to them.
#
It kind of opened my eyes, actually concretized what I was abstracting, you know, like high
#
discreet dispersed information, etc.
#
I was abstracting, but here I was concretizing.
#
So to me, it was, I mean, it transformed my life.
#
Forget about the, you know, the umbrage and all are still still at it, trying to change
#
that, change the community and get some benefits.
#
And secondly, the consequence was not just the toilet that came later or perhaps together.
#
The main consequence, which I to me was the sense of dignity that here were people who
#
were beginning to climb the ladder of citizenship, that they are equal partners as citizens of
#
To me, there can't be anything, no substitute for that.
#
The rights are no rights.
#
To me, it's phenomenal.
#
You know, people said that, that, you know, in fact, one example, almost 10 years ago
#
now, or maybe around, it may not be 10, it's not 10, probably 2013, 14, 15, whatever.
#
In one place, we had gone to a village, you know, Arjun had organized a meeting and I
#
had gone just like so many others have been just to see what people think and believe
#
So one man was narrating his story.
#
And this is one of those moments from the ground that I'll probably never forget.
#
One middle-aged man narrating his story.
#
He told about all this map application, this, that, and the other rejection reapplication
#
But to me, what remains is not all that, is that he said, previously, when we used to
#
go to a government office, whichever Tesla or a punch or whatever, they would never even
#
Today, they ask us to sit down and sometimes even offer us a glass of water.
#
That to me was eye-opening.
#
That's what citizenship is.
#
That's what citizenship can be.
#
That's what we need to reclaim.
#
There is no substitute.
#
I would never have realized what is citizenship about and what's the significance of the process.
#
Unless I'd actually experienced it and I still didn't grasp it.
#
Till I began to focus, you know, that's where Gandhi comes in as a practitioner because
#
he was providing a broader frame for the, for practices and, and participation.
#
Because that's what, that's what he's all about.
#
How to encourage process, how to stimulate a process through participation.
#
So to me, this was a personal experience and therefore I can relate to Gandhi in a manner
#
that I'm talking to you sitting across.
#
That I'm not looking at him as a Mahatma or a Bapu or a pedestal and all the rest.
#
I'm looking at him as an illustration on a macro scale, at a scale perhaps the world
#
had never seen before or since.
#
What I was experiencing at the tiniest village among three, 400 people.
#
To me, you know, so this connection didn't, this was not a puzzle that fell in place at
#
This is filling in place as I'm traveling my journey and which, which is what makes
#
me look at, look back at Gandhi so many times, particularly when I'm facing practical challenges
#
that how will we overcome because I experienced it.
#
So Archivaini's work in that regard, you know, I was only a narrator.
#
My involvement is tertiary, which is true because what can I do from Delhi?
#
I don't even speak the language and I had no funding as such to help.
#
But whatever little we could, to me, this learning that I learned from those few years
#
that I was closely following this process, to me has been amazing that property rights
#
is not a question of abstractions, you know, that it is our right.
#
We should be, the people should have the capacity to do their duty in order to claim that right.
#
So I find this story inspiring for a number of reasons and reason number one is you see
#
after centuries, a group of people getting empowered with agency and with dignity as
#
What I also find inspiring and which makes me hopeful for the future is that modern technology
#
which Gandhi would probably have scoffed at had it existed at the time of Ainswaraaj plays
#
a big part in empowering these individuals.
#
And that's in fact, one of the hopes I have for the future that, you know, technology
#
in strange and unexpected ways continues to empower individuals.
#
I mean, that could progress liberalism far more than everything else.
#
Gandhi's opposition to so-called technology and modernity was not because of technology
#
It was because the technology was enabling to erase the line that he wanted to hold,
#
that imperialism followed on the heels of liberalism and the technological...
#
Bhai, modern medicine me kya wo line ho raha hai?
#
Modern medicine is secondary.
#
That's what, this is not a specific thing, specific is that he was a person who experimented
#
And I recently heard an episode on Tagore where exactly the same thing, he was experimenting
#
with his diet as a fad.
#
As everybody told him, a new guy told him something, he was experimenting, he's free
#
That's not the point at all.
#
The point is he was a man who was capable of shifting, being a true believer, a genuine
#
believer who prayed twice a day at least, shifting from God is truth to truth is God.
#
I can't think of a more powerful statement than his commitment to science and his progress
#
and to everything else, because by that statement, in my view, he was trying to hold the line.
#
And we have failed to hold the line, which is why technology is coming to consume us.
#
We may have failed to hold the line, but Barun, I believe that we are also capable of shifting
#
from this recording studio to a restaurant where we shall have a hearty and wholesome
#
So I need to thank you profusely once again.
#
Thank you so much for your time and your insights and for talking to me, because every time
#
I speak to you, even when I disagree, as I did so many times today, I feel that you've
#
given me so much to think about.
#
I mean, I'm looking at it.
#
What will I take back so that I can take the next step tomorrow?
#
Thanks a lot and always a pleasure chatting with you and the most undistinguished guest
#
Just kindly tag him and tell him he's not the most undistinguished guest.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you can follow Barun on Twitter, even though
#
he isn't very active there because he's out on the ground, but you can follow him on Twitter
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of this show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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