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At the start of April 2000, I wrote an article in the Times of India that argued that we
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were fighting two disasters. One, of course, was the immediate problem of COVID-19. The
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other was a hidden problem of the dysfunctional Indian state. COVID-19 would eventually recede
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and indeed one hopes the worst is behind us now. But the Indian state remains and the
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damage it causes is normalized every day. Before COVID struck us, it was estimated that
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around 3,000 children die every day in India of starvation. One in four Indian children
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are malnourished. We would have to be blind not to see the poor all around us, often lacking
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livelihood and homes these 75 years after independence. If any of this had been caused
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by a natural disaster, the world would rush to help. The UN would declare an emergency.
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There would be headlines about it every day. But we've normalized and it took the disaster
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of COVID to reveal to many of us again the greater disaster of the flailing Indian state.
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Now, another potential disaster awaits us down the road, climate change. We must do
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something about it before it is too late and the cost is unbearable. But our dysfunctional
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state stands in the way. A problem like climate change cannot be tackled by central planning
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and rent seeking bureaucracies. We need to fix these problems of the state first. Can
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guests today are Akshay Jaitley and Ajay Shah. Akshay
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is one of the founders of the law firm Tri-Legal and he now lives in Paris, where he is more
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or less retired from the law, but still working hard on problems he has deep experience in
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such as our energy sector. Ajay has been a guest on the show many times and I know he's
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a listener favorite for his incredibly lucid insights. A few months ago, Akshay and Ajay
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thinking together about climate change released a superb paper named, The Lowest Hanging Fruit
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in the Coconut Tree – India's Climate Transition through the Price System in the
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Power Sector. I've linked it from the show notes. The paper describes how fighting climate
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change and reducing carbon emissions is achievable, but only if we reform the power sector, get
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the incentives right and society and markets will act in ways that move us towards a cleaner
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and safer world. How is this to be achieved? What are the problems we face today and how
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can we solve them? Akshay and Ajay join me to chat about their paper and much more. Now
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Ajay's been a frequent guest so we spent the first half of this episode exploring Akshay's
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formative years and from after the first break, around the 1 hour 55 minute mark, we got down
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to talking about this great paper of theirs. I loved every minute of this entire conversation
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and Akshay and Ajay gave me a lot to think about. Before we get to that though, let's
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take a quick commercial break.
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Ajay and Akshay, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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Thanks Amit. Pleasure to be here.
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Always happy to be here.
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You know, as I announced in my introduction, Ajay, you've been a frequent guest on the
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show and we've kind of chatted a lot. So I'd like to get to know Akshay a little better
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and we can kind of chat about his life a little bit right now. But before that, a little bit
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of trivia for you, Ajay, that one of my listeners sort of trolled all the data in my show notes
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and figured out that the book that I have linked to most often, you know, through the
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scene and the unseen is In Service of the Republic. So congratulations on that minor
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Yeah, and I am 100% a victim of the insecure author syndrome. So it means the world to
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me that people care about the book.
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I also want to start with a story that a friend of mine tweeted about. This is a gentleman
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named Narendra Shenoy who was on the show in episode 250, fantastic storyteller. So
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he told the story about how once when he was a kid, he had to go to a fancy dress party
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and this is like early 80s, 70s, whatever. So everybody at that time, like half the people
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will dress up as Arab sheiks because that's the easiest to dress up as you take a bedsheet
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or whatever and you make a hole and you put it around you. And my friend decided he wants
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to do something different. And he was a bit of a science geek at the time. So he took
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a disc condenser and he decided to dress up as a disc condenser and he gave an image of
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it basically. And he said, look, I already had the spindly legs of a disc condenser.
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So he made the rest of the sort of costume of what a disc condenser would look like.
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And then he went on stage and he sang, I am a disc condenser, disc condenser, which is
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and the reason I thought of you guys, the reason I thought of this rather well reading
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your paper is this full of discom, discom, discom. This story immediately came to mind,
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but kind of moving away from these trivialities. So Akshay, again, welcome again on the show
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and tell me a bit about, you know, your life. Where did you grow up? What was childhood
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like? Well, just, just before that, I've been really impressed with the amount of effort
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to come up with both visual and an audio pun that really appeals to the cheap humor that
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I've sort of grown up with. Well, you know, I was actually born here in Bombay, but accident
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of fate because my father at the time was the deputy commissioner of a small district,
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frontier district called Poonch. And this was in 1967 when there was something called
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the infiltration. And my grandparents lived coincidentally, both sets of my grandparents
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lived here. My grandparents on one side, my grandmother on the other. And it was not the
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nearest hospital in which I could be born, but the one where there was the most support.
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So I was born here in Bombay, but because my father was in the, in government and in
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the IIS in Kashmir, Kader, which was unusual for non-state officers at the time, I spent
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the, the first 10 years of my life in Kashmir. And in fact, when people say, where do you
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grow up? I say Kashmir, although it was only till the age of 10, but it's more home to
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me in intellectual, emotional, in a variety of different ways than anywhere, anywhere
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else. So Poonch was where I sort of had my first year or two. Then we moved to Jammu
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as my father was deputy commissioner there. Then we moved to Ladakh. And I was in fact
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in, in Leh as a four year old during the 71 war. So in fact, my first distinct memories
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are from then when, which is being in a blacked out room with a Bukhari, generating heat,
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my mother heating water on, on the Bukhari because there was no light, being put into
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a steel tub and having a bath in the living room while my father was in Kargil, which
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was at that time, it was the same district as Ladakh, where he was there with, you know,
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as the, as the head of the civil administration of the district, he was there with the army
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on the frontier. So, so it was, you know, I think there'll be many other aspects of
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my upbringing that there'll be common to a lot of people. But I think for me, at least
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the fact that I grew up in a place like Kashmir, I would like to think, and I'm quite sure
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that it's, there are various aspects of who I am, have been dictated by that for multiple
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reasons. And not just the physical landscape, but also the, you know, the unique history
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of the place, the unique religious breakdown of the state, et cetera. So all of those were
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really important. So I was there till the age of four. Then my father was, was sort
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of went on study leave to the UK, to Cambridge for a year. So lived abroad between the ages
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of five and six, at which point I picked up very, very small boys, irrational love for
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Liverpool football club, which remains with me till today in a very strong sense. It's
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not just a passing fancy. Around which year was this? This was in 1973. So you're talking
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about Kevin Keegan and John Toshack and Ray Clements. And basically they won everything.
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So obviously you want to support a team that wins, but also they wore red, which was nice.
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And they came from Liverpool and my father was a bit of a lefty at the time, socialist
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working class town. So there were all the ingredients for a father to tell a son, this
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is your team. And that was my team and still is. And I've, and it's the team of my nephew
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and my daughters, if they support anyone, they support Liverpool. So there's this funny
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quirky thing. Then we came back to India where we went to Kashmir. Funny thing here is that
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when we went to England, I didn't speak any English. I understood apparently, my parents
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would speak partly English, largely English to each other. Cause my mother's from Kerala,
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my father's from the North. So that was the common language between them, but I never
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spoke any English. And so I was put into school. My parents were worried, wondering, you know,
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how's this chap going to manage things? And they asked the teachers after a few days and
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said, no, he speaks perfectly fluent English. So apparently I'd picked it all up, but never
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found the need to speak any English. But by the time I came back to India a year later,
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I didn't speak any Hindi. I'd forgotten most of my English and then my Hindi, sorry. And
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then I had to pick it up again. And this was back in up in Kashmir again, where I went
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to a school called the presentation convent, which was a girl's school that accepted boys
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until class three, after which they were deemed to be too dangerous to be around girls at
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the time. So yeah, so that's, that's the first, you know, five, six years. Interesting thing
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there is I used to live on one side of the Jhelum and the school was on the other side.
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So I'm probably one of the few people you guys know who used to go to school by boat
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every day. I used to go to school by shikara and the shikara wala had a small paddle called
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the chapu. So, you know, you need to, if you want to cross a river, you actually have to
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row upstream and then you catch the current back down because otherwise you get carried
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down beyond the past, the point that you go to. So that little bit of river navigation,
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crossing the river every day at the age of seven, walking to school on your own and crossing
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the river. That's what Kashmir was like. This was in Srinagar. That's what it was like in
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the, in the mid seventies.
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Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. And just speaking of Liverpool, I mean, one theory
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I read about why people support the clubs they do is that at a particular age, which
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seems to correspond with whatever age you were, a team that's doing well, they end up
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supporting that team. And then later in life, that team may not do well or whatever, but
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they're lifelong supporters. But like good fortune for you that the Liverpool team has
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been so exciting over the last few years.
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Yeah, I know it is. And I, you know, I used to hold it very strongly against the people
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who started supporting Man U in the early nineties when, you know, when, when things
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started coming on TV, but effectively they were, they're the same, they're the version
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of me from the nineties with the technology that was available that I was at the same
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time. So I've sort of revisited that view. I still don't like Manchester United fans,
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but, but not for that reason.
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Yeah. So, you know, what he was saying about Kashmir and how you think of it as home reminded
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me of a question that I, a chat I had with Amitabh Kumar on the show at the time we are
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recording is not yet out, but it'll be out soon. And I'll read this bit out and then
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I'll come to my question from one of his books where he wrote in Raza's Adha Gaon, the protest
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against the nation is being made in the name of the village while the fiercely well-educated
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Muslim students come to Ganguly to preach about partition and the necessity for the
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creation of a new nation of Pakistan. The Muslim villagers are genuinely bewildered.
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One of the villagers is a young man called Tandu who has returned from battle fighting
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for the British in the second world war. He argues against the urban visitors in the name
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of his village. And now these are his words. I am a Muslim, but I love this village because
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I myself am this village. I love this indigo warehouse, this tank and these mud lanes,
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because they are different forms of myself. On the battlefield, when death came very near,
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I certainly remembered Allah, but instead of Mecca or Karbala, I remembered Ganguly,
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stop code, right? And what I asked Amitabh was, what is your Ganguly? Because I wanted
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to kind of get a sense of what his notion of home is, because in my own sense, I just
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feel that it is very splintered. I no longer think of a place. I think there are disconnected
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memories. There are people who are no more. There are things which have scattered or are
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not there anymore. And I found that interesting. And your answer, I guess, would therefore
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be Kashmir, right? That's what you...
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More specifically, I mean, it's Kashmir broadly and many different, you know, specific aspects,
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specific memories. I learned how to swim in the Dal Lake. I learned, I did a bit of skiing
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very early on. And these are sort of things that my contemporaries later in life had not
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done. So maybe the fact that they had not done them reinforced the memories that I had
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of these things and made them more special, at least to myself. But the one image for
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me that really makes me, it's going to sound a bit cheesy, but I'm going to say it anyway,
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makes me feel that I'm home is when I see the curve of the Shankracharya Hill effectively
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going into the Dal Lake in the evening. There's a sense of, oh gosh, this is so familiar.
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And I, you know, I've lived in many other places daily, notably much more than I've
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lived in Srinagar, but there's no other visual that comes into mind associated with a place
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more than that. So, and then other things like, you know, going fishing for trout, going
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to Gulmarg on a weekend, people, you know, going to Pehelgam on a weekend. These are
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the sort of things, you know, we would do. So I completely associate with, you know,
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the feeling coming out of what you just read out. And yes, it is Srinagar more than any
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other place in the world.
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And Ajay, you know, you kind of zoned out because you were told we are going to talk
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about Akshay for the first one hour, but this is a question we haven't actually discussed.
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I'd like to ask you this also. What is home for you?
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I was just struck by the coincidence. I also attended three years at Mount Mary convent
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because from class one to three boys were not so dangerous. And yeah, so I think for
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Home is Bandra for you. Lovely. So getting back to Akshay now after that brief Ajay break.
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So what after Kashmir? What happens?
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Well, I switched schools, went to a boy school for a couple of years and at the age of 10,
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we moved to Delhi. I think your father was in government as well. So yeah, Kashmir Kada,
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you get moved to the center for a few years. And it was a big, big change in my life. I
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mean, I went from being very much the small town boy. It shouldn't in some ways, maybe
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it shouldn't have been such a change, but I certainly felt it because, you know, my
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parents had a social life in a community in Delhi, which was very natural to them, both
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in government. They both went to Delhi University. So the sort of range of friends that they
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had and their kids were people who I had sort of met occasionally on holidays. And they
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were uncles and aunties who were very close, who I loved and continue to be in touch with.
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But I wasn't part of their world at all. And their world was, you know, the kinds of holidays
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they'd been on, the fact that they were either members of the Delhi Gymkhana or the Delhi
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Golf Club. And we were not. My father refused to go to an interview at the Delhi Gymkhana
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Club because he had to wear a suit. And he said, if they're not going to take me in the
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way that I am, then I don't want to be a member. Many years later, maybe 30 years later, he
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wore a suit and went to an interview and became a member. But, you know, that's another story.
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But so I moved to Delhi, it was a big change. And also school was tougher. The level of
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education was slightly higher in Delhi, primarily in maths and in Hindi. So, you know, suddenly
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there was concepts in maths had not done before. I was a good student in Kashmir, had come,
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you know, second, third, fourth in class. Incidentally, I used to come second for nine
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exams in a row. Three years, I came second to a girl called Valley Call. And I wonder
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where she is and what she's doing. But there's no way that I could sort of beat her. And
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in realisation of that, I took the foot off the pedal and I said, now third, fourth, we
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tell you, I got first name and that kind of thing. So and that's it's something academically
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something I have sort of always kept as a working principle, which is do well enough,
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do well enough not to get into trouble, do well enough to get into the right college,
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do well enough to not be not disgrace yourself. But otherwise, there's no real point in coming,
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you know, first or second, just do well enough. So anyway, we came to Delhi. That's what I
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did. Then it was, you know, very much the life of living in a government colony, playing
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cricket with boys, being told, you go out of the house, come back when it's dark. That
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was a level of parental oversight that used to exist for most of us, I think then. My
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house in Bharati Nagar in Delhi shared a wall with the community centre, which was called
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the club, where there was a badminton court, there was a table tennis table. So it was
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literally you jump the wall and play sports. I was playing sport all the time. Never was
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exceptionally good at anything, but again, did well enough to be included in in better
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players sports. There was also a tennis court behind, learned how to, you know, we all taught
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ourselves how to play tennis. And it was, you know, going around to Khan Market and
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other India gate on our bikes. Interestingly, if you know where the India Habitat Centre
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is in Delhi, which used to be barracks, it used to be some BSF barracks, which were abandoned
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and we used to play in those barracks. We then played in the building site that became
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the Nehru Stadium before the 1982 Asian Games, where they had these massive mounds of mud
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that had been dug out and we would run up and down them and roll down them and do that
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sort of thing. So it was just that sort of carefree, while not doing particularly well
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in school, but again, well enough. I think the other the next thing that's worth that
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was a big marker in my life was 1984. 1984 was, you know, again, looking back, it was
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much more of a defining moment than it felt. I think there'll be a lot of people for whom
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this Covid period will be like that, although it's much longer and arguably more traumatic,
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even though that was short and sharp and horrible. But my parents were very, very liberal and
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had a variety of meanings of that word. And they also perhaps, you know, arguably slightly
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foolhardy. So I was 17 when this happened, but they included me, took me along on peace
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marches. I was very, very involved with a bunch of other contemporaries in relief efforts,
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went to Gurdwaras where people were taking shelter to write hundreds of affidavits where,
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you know, the various names that we all heard at the time who were then members of the ruling
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party who their names as being leaders of mobs, wrote affidavits, organized clothing,
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did all of that sort of thing. But so this is not to say that I did some great thing,
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but that that was a massively big waking up moment. And my parents allowed us to just
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go and do this and not always supervised by them. You'd go off with other people who
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were from university and made lots of friends. I was in class 12, the beginning of class
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12, made lots of friends who were in college, who came from similar backgrounds, but we
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became friends over this much more than we had growing up because there was something
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important had happened. And we felt that whatever little we were doing was somewhat important
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at the time. So 84 for me was a very, very big deal. There was a very ugly echo of that
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a few years later in 1988. And this is something that was sort of largely forgotten in the
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annals of the time. But taking a cue from what had happened in 84, in 88, there was
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a university and a Gurdwara in Bidar in Karnataka that was attacked. And one of my closest friends
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from school got killed in that riot. There were three or four, five, six boys were killed.
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And that whole thing, that whole period and the series of events that happened and how
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they happened, the fact that there was complicit, the government was sort of complicit in it.
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All of that has an effect on what you think about politics, what you think about the narrative
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that a certain party gives about what its role is. So I've never been able to sort of
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move on from a certain aspect of what 1984 was. So that was another big, big thing in
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It's kind of interesting that there are these moments which form this kind of landscape.
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Like when I talk to my guests of similar age or older than me about these periods of time
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where we might have lived through together, they'll mention a time and I'll sort of remember
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where was I when this happened. Like I remember being told about the 84 riots. For example,
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I was in a car with my parents from Delhi to Chandigarh or vice versa. I don't remember
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in which direction they were going. And then my dad said, this horrible thing is happening
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and people are being taken out of buses and husbands are being killed in front of wives
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and all of this and all these stories were kind of coming. So it's just an odd feeling
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where someone tells you about something and you know, you realize I was like, I had another
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guest on the show where we realized that in 1989 at exactly the same time, we were at
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Mood Indigo together, though obviously completely different in whatever 89 or 91 or whatever
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it was. So that's interesting. So many things to double click on. And one of them, of course,
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is that if there was a chapter in a book about you, one chapter heading could be the importance
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of Valley Call, because what you said there is very interesting that because she was coming
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first all the time, you just said, screw it, I'm just going to chill and I'm going to do
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my thing. What if you had been coming first all the time? Like, would it have then driven
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you to go to a different lens and made you a different person to just retain your position?
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I mean, which is, I mean, you were kind of quipping when you said that, you know, there's
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not necessarily a causal relation. But it's interesting how we are shaped by all these
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sort of little things that happened to us. You don't know how much I believe in that.
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There are some of the most sort of seminal moments of decisions that I've taken or parts
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that my life has taken have been on utter randomness. I mean, utter random, I'll tell
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you one thing that happened much, much later, which was, you know, I studied law in England
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and I was going to come back and join a senior council like everybody did at the time. There
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were no such things as law firms really in India of any significance. And my mother happened
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to be visiting and she came and said, you know, why don't you think of doing a little
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bit of work here in England for a few months before you come back? Not knowing at all what
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the job market was like or anything. But I remember in university in Oxford, there was
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a something called the 8th week brochure. The 8th week is when Oxford and Cambridge, there
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are lots of rowing races basically. And in the brochure, there was this ad from this
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firm called Ashurst Morris Crisp, which had on one side this picture of a guy in a boat
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and said Olympic rower. It was Johnny Searle of the Redgrave and Searle combination. And
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on the other side, trainee solicitor. And it had him in a, swearing a suit on a desk in
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an office. And it said offices in XYZ and Delhi. This was, so we're talking about 1995.
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And in that, that moment, I remembered that, that brochure and I said, okay, let me give
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these guys a call. They had something in India. So let me call them. So I called directory
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inquiry, literally I called directory inquiry. And I said, you know, you have the number
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for Ashurst Morris Crisp. They're called Ashurst now and great people. I'm still in touch with
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them. And they said, here it is, which should be connective. And they connected me. So I
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ran through, through to the switchboard and I said, can I speak to someone who has something
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to do with India? And they looked, waited for a second and they rang it through to an
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extension, which rang to a secretary because the person whose extension it was wasn't there.
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So I repeated my question and she said, oh, this is so-and-so. He's in Delhi. Here's a
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fax number for him. And I was sitting in my boxer shorts and a pair of, and a T-shirt
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in a friend's house in London. I had no access to a fax machine or anything of the sort.
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So I took the number down and I said, okay, you know, dead end. Forgot about it. An hour
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later, the phone rings. The phone rings. I pick it up and this guy said, this is so-and-so.
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I believe you called my number. And I had this complete sort of, you know, Twilight
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Zone moment. How is this guy called me? Because caller idea was almost unheard of. They happened
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to have got it shortly before this happened. I didn't know how he called me, but I gathered
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my wits and I told him who I was. And it turned out that we had some similarities in terms
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of what we'd studied and what we'd done in the past. He said, sounds interesting. Send
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me your CV. So I sent him my CV and he called me for an interview. I was called for another
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couple of interviews and they gave me a job. And that's how I became a corporate lawyer.
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And that's how, and I never ever have appeared in court even for one day. So what randomness
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is there, is that your mother hints something to you. You call directory inquiry, this whole
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series of things happen. Caller ID is a thing and you become a corporate lawyer. I mean,
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so that Valley Call randomness is more speculative because I was a kid and God knows, I probably
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would have been, you know, more boring than I might have turned out to be. But I'm secretly
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happy I did not come first because I don't know whether that would have been the right
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signal for me that, you know, that this is something I probably would have crashed and
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burned in trying to achieve higher academic glory later on. Better to have sort of learned
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this at eight, seven or eight and moved on from there. But the randomness point, like
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a hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's another chapter title right there. The importance
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of caller ID. So just going back to those childhood years in Delhi, tell me also about
#
like on the one hand, this is a familiar social circle. These are all your parents, friends
#
there at home. You've met all the kids, you're going over the world to play sports, natural
#
habitat. But on the other hand, what kind of sets you apart from all the other kids
#
is that you were on Kashmir. You've gone to school on a boat. You've probably had quieter
#
moments than they did. So all of you had quite a moments in kids today because smartphones
#
and all that. You had a different layer to your personality in a sense. Do you, you know,
#
when you look back now, how important do you think was that layer? Did you notice it at
#
that time? Did it kind of set you apart? Because when you are in just one homogeneous world,
#
you can kind of take everything for granted and that can constrain you in the way that
#
you look at the world. But you also had this other sort of a layer behind that.
#
Well, you know, at the time it wasn't easy. Actually, I felt there was a degree to which
#
I felt left out. I wasn't necessarily invited to all the parties that these guys were, but
#
I had my colony friends, even though I had my time was FOMO was a thing even then. Right.
#
So I felt a bit of FOMO, especially because my parents were going to these people's homes,
#
but I wasn't in the in crowd. A lot of them also went to boarding school. So, you know,
#
when you, when you, when you're in boarding school, when you come back from the holidays,
#
you hang out with your boarding school guys. Also, one other thing was that, you know,
#
you've spoken very often to other people and it's obviously very true about privilege.
#
And we were all terribly privileged, but there was no money. Right. Privilege did not come
#
with money. Didn't come with any disposable income to do anything. But other people in
#
that social circle possibly had it. So there were things that they were doing that I couldn't
#
do. I just couldn't do. I didn't, I didn't miss it in any fundamental sense, but it was
#
there every now and then I'd think about it. But the flip side of that is that by the time
#
I went to college, I was 18, I happened to live in college and you know, I was in the
#
hostel and almost all my closest new friends from college were not from this background.
#
There were some who, there are a few who were, but I was friends with people who traditionally
#
would be in the hostel of a college in Delhi university. So people who'd come from UP and
#
Bihar and Andhra and other parts in the Northeast and other parts of the country. So if I had
#
been accepted more and if I had been part of the social circle that I would quote unquote
#
naturally have fallen into, I would not have had this completely other, you know, side
#
to my exposure, which made me much, much more deeply aware about other parts of the country,
#
what people were thinking, what was important, what was going on. I mean, if you do history
#
and since Stevens college in the eighties, you are going to do the civil services and
#
why do you do the civil services? There's a whole cultural and social and economic reason
#
behind that, which was not part of my socialization at all. My father went into the civil service
#
to do good for the country, but they were, but he could afford to do that in some ways
#
because he came from, you know, relative privilege and he went to good education, all the rest
#
of it. But lots of my close friends didn't have that sort of background. And it made
#
me, you know, I can't say that it was, I became, you know, a completely different person,
#
but it gave me an insight into things I would not have had. So I'm in the longer term and
#
I'm certainly grateful for that. But that, that layer, I think that you were talking
#
about that you started your question with, it was there. It was, it, it was there. There's
#
a small townness to you, which doesn't completely go away. It doesn't, it doesn't perhaps can
#
manifest itself in small town thinking, but it just, it is another window that has opened
#
up that other people haven't just haven't experienced.
#
And another source for other layers, which other people would not have were in a sense,
#
what you said about your parents being liberals in different ways, you know, having their
#
own set of concerns, like on the one hand, you're, you know, they're in government. So
#
there is that aspect of it. But on the other hand, they're also liberal. You get involved
#
in 1984 because of all of that happens. So tell me a little bit about how you are building
#
your frameworks of looking at the world, because I guess one direction to go in is you go in
#
the same direction as your parents. The other direction to go in is that, Hey kids are rebels
#
you go in some other direction. It also kind of matters what your peers around you are
#
doing or reading. Like I remember when, I mean, my dad was also in EIS, but I didn't
#
really have any sort of coherent framework of looking at the world till I was well into
#
adulthood, you know, not in college, because those are pre-internet days. You're not getting
#
so much knowledge and information enough to be able to form those frameworks. My peers
#
around me in Ferguson College in Pune, I didn't really, we were just chilling, living our
#
lives, having vague notions about everything. I remember for a week, I carried around Das
#
Capital in my raksak when I was 17, because I thought, Hey, it's a cool thing to do. Right?
#
And till I actually read it much later. So what was that sort of, how, how was that process
#
of formulating a way of looking at the world? Like was your journey also something from
#
a certain kind of vagueness into, you know, getting sharpened a little bit more as time
#
goes by, were there inheritances in a sense or received wisdoms that you had to cast aside
#
or did you early on find a groove that you could fit into?
#
I liked what you just said, you know, received wisdoms to cast aside. It wasn't to cast them
#
aside, but to reframe them in a way that was relevant to the person I became later on.
#
So we were, my sister and I, we were never told that this is what you should do for a
#
career at all. Very, very far from it. But there was a very strong sense that you can't
#
be doing things only for yourself, that there needs to be some part of public service in
#
a vague sense. That's one. Secondly, there was this said and unsaid both implication
#
that you can't have a non-intellectual life, that you can't, again, I have no criticism
#
of this now, but you can't become a manager in a hotel because that's not an intellectual
#
life. Now you can be a manager in a hotel and have a perfectly intellectual life, but
#
it was very much that your intellectual life must be wrapped into what you do as, as your
#
work, as your, whatever your primary work is and do whatever you want, but do it as
#
work as hard as you can and enjoy it and don't do something you don't enjoy. So these were,
#
these actually very difficult standards, even though they are vague, it's easier in some
#
ways when someone says, go and join the IAS because then you're, you know, so you were
#
then left with these ideas and the pressure of finding a career that works for yourself
#
or various parts of life, not just a career that work for you, that somehow build these
#
things in because of the pressure of them. And at the same time, you're not being someone
#
you are not. So I think that's a process that continues till today, actually. I don't think
#
that it's, I'm still continuing to, you know, as you said, shed some of those things, but
#
I don't think in some of those basic values, I don't think have changed. I still enjoy,
#
it goes up and down. Sometimes I just want to watch football, but I want a more, I want
#
an intellectual life. I want the work that I do to have some significance beyond, you
#
know, just for me and my family. Those things remain and those things I still, I encourage
#
other people to think about as well because they are fulfilling and they can be fulfilling
#
irrespective of what else, what the actual content of your work is. So yeah, that's how
#
that whole thing played out. But one big difference between my parents and me is that I have absolutely,
#
I don't have the view towards money that they had. They were, it was very much like, no,
#
money in business is not such a good thing. And I, on the other hand, do not believe that
#
at all. As you will have seen from the paper that we wrote, and we can obviously talk about
#
that later, but I think that, you know, properly done, it's a really positive force and that
#
I worked in corporate law for most of the last 25 odd years. So I was helping people
#
make money and, you know, making a little bit myself as at the same time. So that's
#
one big difference. But, you know, there are other things that you do that you hope has
#
have that broader impact that I believe that work should have.
#
I agree entirely that I keep saying that the best kind of social work is actually making
#
a profit, honestly, because the only way to make a profit is to make someone better off.
#
I was struck by, you know, what you said about kind of finding yourself or trying to figure
#
out who you were and all of that. And that's, you know, that again brings me to that nebulous
#
notion of the self. Like when we are young, especially when we are young, all our lives,
#
but when we are young, especially, we are too often, you know, dealing with the anxiety
#
of what other people think of us or what they expect of us. And we start shaping ourselves
#
in those molds. Like you spoke about the pressure that you had to have an intellectual life,
#
but at the same time, whatever career or calling you took had to be authentic to that intellectual
#
life and they had to kind of go together. So one, to what extent is, you know, did you
#
feel those anxieties and, you know, given to those pressures, whatever they were. And
#
two, just a general question throughout the sweep of your life, that how difficult has
#
it been for you to eventually get comfortable in your own skin, you know, eventually to
#
be able to kind of sit back and say that, okay, this is who I am. These are the things
#
I like doing. Like, yes, intellectual life, but I want to watch football also or whatever.
#
What's that kind of process been like? Because, you know, just looking at myself and many
#
of the guests I've spoken to, it's not smooth at all. You kind of go through life with this
#
kind of inertia where you are rarely, except in some moments, really making movement either
#
in terms of understanding yourself or doing things. And it's just a process that can take
#
No, it's ongoing. I think it's not at no point have I felt, okay, this is the perfect
#
mean. And there are many other pressures in life beyond just work that, you know, one
#
has to do. It's not, I've never thought of it as anxiety. I've never been, it's not something
#
I've been anxious about, but I'd be lying if I said that I didn't worry about what other
#
people thought. I wish I could say I really don't care. But even that is a process I care
#
much less now, and which is one of the reasons why I'm possibly able to say some of the things
#
that I'm saying now than I would have 20 years ago. So I think it's a question of how confident
#
you are and how confident you are, for me, is a function of what is it that you've done
#
in the body of your life. And if you've ended up doing something which you think, okay,
#
this is a bit worthwhile, then you can be a little more flamboyant and cavalier with
#
the rest of it, I find. So that process is ongoing.
#
And what were the kind of books you read while growing up? I mean, I know you played a lot
#
of sports, jumping over walls itself seems like a sport to me. To actually jump over
#
a wall and then have the energy to do something else is not something I can imagine in myself.
#
But what were the kind of books that you were reading? Who were the people who influenced
#
you? Do you remember any early heroes at that time? And even sporting heroes are fine. But
#
who were your kind of heroes? And especially, did you have a notion of yourself in the sense
#
that, you know, when I am an adult, I want to be like this person, or this is like the
#
ideal kind of person to be like?
#
No, that I don't think I had with any one person. But my sporting hero growing up was
#
Sunil Gavaskar. It was, and I met him once in 1975 in a bookshop in Pune. And that was
#
a high point in my life. But, you know, it's very difficult to say what books shaped me
#
because I read enormously. I mean, apart from sport, the only other thing you had to do
#
was reading. My parents only, actually, my father and I sneaked out and bought a television
#
in 1987 for the 1987 World Cup. Before that, there was no TV at home. We would go to my
#
grandmother's house to watch bits of highlights of sports and things like that. They were,
#
my parents were against television. It wasn't just, it was a conscious decision. But so
#
books were where it was. And they were, the house was wall to wall with books. We used
#
to, in my early, in my, you know, before I turned 10, Narnia was very, very big, the
#
whole C.S. Lewis pantheon. I probably read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 35 times
#
in my life. I absolutely adore that book. It was, it was just warm and nice and wonderful.
#
Later on, you know, then one of the things that we did when we came to Delhi is became
#
members of the B.C. Roy Children's Library at ITO. So, you know, so we would actually,
#
me and my cousin, Nandika, who lived with us at the time, we used to get onto a DTC
#
bus from Bharati Nagar, go to ITO, go to B.C. Roy Library, borrow books. And that could
#
be anything, you know, it could all sorts of different types of stuff. I read my first
#
Alastair McLean from there. I read all sorts of children's books, so maybe till the age
#
of 14, 13, 14. But then there was a rapid switch where a parent sort of handed, I say,
#
read this, read this, read this. And those could include, you know, Steinbeck. Steinbeck
#
was a big influence in terms, I loved the lyricism of his writing, where you can make
#
the sound of running water sound like the most amazing thing on earth. So of mice and
#
men and grapes of wrath and all of those. And then we, then we started reading the existentialists
#
relatively early. So, Jeed and Camus and all of this. And there were a sufficient number
#
of friends whose parents also were handing them the same book. So we would quietly have
#
that discussion amongst us, not talking to other people, because they would say, what
#
is this rubbish? You're trying to be a soot. That word has gone out of favor. Now, nobody
#
calls anyone a soot anymore. Yeah. In fact, I'm hearing it after 20 years, I think. There
#
you are. So, you know, maybe it's a good thing that soot is not a bad thing, but it was.
#
So you would hide a bit of your intellectualism because you would think that, you know, would
#
think that you're trying to be better than them. And James Baldwin, I loved as well.
#
I mean, Another Country is one of my favorite books from the time. So there was just, there
#
was a lot also, there was, and nobody, I haven't heard anyone else admit this, but I've not
#
listened to all your, all your shows, but also to, there was this whole range of slightly
#
raunchy thrillers where the pages where the raunchy bits were always a little more dog
#
ear than the other pages. And, you know, so those were, those were also there at home
#
and they were also out in the bookshelf and, you know, we would read those. So huge variety.
#
And you were, of course, a one dog hearing them. You know, before we move on beyond this
#
phase to studying in law and all of that, tell me a bit about how different was Delhi
#
in those days. Oh, you know, this, I'm telling you this, I said this in 1996 or seven when
#
I went to Lahore for the first time that Lahore felt like Delhi 20 years ago at that time.
#
So Delhi in the late seventies was, you know, this idyllic vision of lying out in a garden
#
after a nice meat, curry and rice lunch on a rug with the sun having a nap. That is one
#
of my images of Delhi at that time, where the sky was blue, where birds were chirping.
#
As I said, we used to go around everywhere by cycle and by bus and there was no, nobody
#
had a car or a driver to take you anywhere. So obviously that restricted where you went.
#
But we'd go on Sunday mornings, for example, to Sapru House to watch movies. Sapru House
#
had children's movies on a Sunday morning, which were either free or cheap. I don't remember.
#
And a whole bunch of us boys would get in and go there and watch a movie, North by Northwest.
#
I remember watching there and being absolutely terrified as a 12 year old because I'd been
#
gone with some 15 year olds. We'd also go, you'd go and wander around the ramparts of
#
the Purana Kila, walking again, walking or cycling. So it was, there was a sense of,
#
in a small space, utter freedom. So the radius of where we did all of this stuff must have
#
been five kilometers, but there was utter freedom in that five kilometers. And in fact,
#
you know, as you know, I moved to Paris a year and a half ago. And one of the reasons
#
to move was because I wanted to give my daughters that independence that I felt growing up,
#
that it's very difficult to give any child in Delhi, much less girls. And I have four
#
of them. So, so that's what, that's, that's sort of my image of Delhi at the time is just
#
sunny winters is, you know, is my sort of idyllic image of Delhi then.
#
And my next question actually has something to do with both growing up and parenthood.
#
Like one of the recent guests on my show, I recorded with him a couple of days back.
#
I have no idea if his episode will release before or after yours was the guitarist Warren
#
Mendoza, Blackstrat Blues. And one of his albums is called The Last Analog Generation.
#
And the reason he titled his album that way was that he said, look, he just had a daughter.
#
And he said that I realized that I am from the last analog generation, that the way my
#
daughter grows up will be so fundamentally different from mine. And that difference will
#
be much starker than between any two generations. And I just think that, you know, when I, you
#
know, you and I would have grown up, even though there's some difference, you know,
#
I'm in my late forties, we would have grown up in pretty much the same kind of way. You're
#
going outdoors a lot, you're meeting friends. When you're bored, you either read a book
#
or you go out or whatever, or you look into space, which is perfectly respectable and
#
whatever. While today, kids are just surrounded by sensory influences. They're always on
#
their smartphones. You know, Jonathan Haight once made this great point that stuck with
#
me. So I keep mentioning it on the show. So it's become a bit of a cliche that people
#
today, even though they have all the wealth of knowledge available to them through human
#
history, everybody's actually consuming something that was produced in the last three days.
#
Right? So you go from immediate experience to immediate experience. There is no taraw,
#
in a sense, there is no reflection, no sitting back, you know, and in future, you may not
#
be playing along the ramparts of the Red Fort in real life, but in the metaverse, you know,
#
it's just so, you know, as someone who's a father of four kids, and as someone who himself
#
has grown up the way that you did with relative freedom, and you said you wanted to be out
#
of here for that reason, what are sort of your thoughts on this? Like, obviously, there
#
are differences between how people will grow up when they're 30 years apart and so on.
#
But this seems to me to be really fundamental. What are your kind of thoughts from what you've
#
I have two sets of thoughts. I think one is that there's no doubt that more and more life
#
is going to be online. I'm just wondering, I'm wondering whether there's a bit, the worm
#
is turning slightly though, because when I look at my kids, they look at Instagram and
#
they've got their phones and all of that, but they're also doing other things. And they're
#
not doing it just because, you know, of parental supervision, there's only so much you can
#
do. But even their friends, one of my daughters, the other weekend said, I'm going out, where
#
are you going? I'm going to an exhibition, I'm going to a museum with a friend for an
#
exhibition. I think it's also the context. If you make these other experiences, cultural
#
experiences easy to access, and if there's a culture within which they are valued, then
#
kids will pick it up. And we force our kids sometimes on every weekend, we'll either go
#
to a park or we'll go to a museum or a dance performance or something or the other. And
#
there'll always be a bit of mourning before you go. And there'll always be enjoyment once
#
you've gone. And you can only hope that that will get picked up. And then they'll realize
#
that these real experiences in the physical world interacting with human beings and the
#
art that they produce or the various different kinds has a value that you don't get. And
#
things like Instagram, my kids don't post on it anymore. They look and they use it as
#
messaging. So the consumption of content, you were saying in the last three days, I
#
think there was a period, there's a high watermark of that. And I'm no expert on the digital
#
world. So I don't know whether that's still there or it's passed. But at least in for
#
my kids, it seems to have passed a little bit because they are getting maybe it's because
#
of what they study in school. Then you have a question and you say, okay, let's go back
#
and look at the Great Northern War or whatever it might be. And they will read the article.
#
One of my daughters wrote a paper recently on the crown and to say, was it right for
#
it not to for them to put out a disclaimer saying that there are this fictionalization
#
over here. And in doing so, she had to go back and look at the history and did a bit
#
of reading around it. And that's something that I think kids need a bit of guidance and
#
therefore I'm not one of those people who say let them do what they want. But that instinct
#
and that spark is there. So I can't comment on whether there's a massive change going
#
on or whether we've reached the peak or not. At least in my own limited experience, there's
#
a bit of a change there. But life is there's lots of life that's online, which was an option
#
And that leads me to the thought that is there one kind of scarcity in India, which doesn't
#
get talked about so much like when you said that, you know, your daughter's record a museum
#
with a friend and all of that and you can do that in Paris, you have those rich cultural
#
experiences in the Western world all around you. In India, do those rich cultural experiences
#
really exist? Like I think about the things that I would do in Bombay, for example, you
#
know, and actually I'm probably being unfair by saying that because I in any case, you
#
know, I'm not a theater going person, for example, I'm sure there's a scene at Prithvi
#
and all of that. But in general, in India, certainly outside the big cities, is it then
#
something that never gets talked about that those kinds of cultural experiences are actually
#
lacking? So if kids are bored, if you're sitting in say Kanpur or, you know, wherever, any
#
small town anywhere, what do you do with your time? You know, you don't have those wholesome
#
experiences when you go online and you do whatever and that becomes a thing.
#
No, and I don't think that's necessarily just a problem with India. I think it's a problem
#
with any society. And France is the opposite of that, which doesn't value the cultural
#
experience on a day to day basis. I mean, I've been going to France for many, many years,
#
but it's only after living there that you realize how much of it is part of the fabric
#
of day to day life. It's not, we would not be surprised to have a chat with a cab driver
#
and him tell you what exhibition he was going to or that he was some other thing that he
#
was looking forward to. And all listening to classical music while taking you from point
#
A to point B. And every small town, the social compact is such that it is expected that one
#
of the things that your tax euros are going to do is provide you access to culture. So
#
if you, I don't know if you picked up, but during COVID, one of the biggest constituencies
#
and there's a very large number of people involved in the sector that was hit very badly
#
was the entire area of culture. And one of the, and there was a lot of public support
#
for people who were in the world of culture saying, look, these are the people who we
#
depend on. So if you go to a museum and you get a guide at the museum, somebody who's
#
part of the museum staff, the chances that they, the way to a PhD in art are reasonably
#
high. So the society, and I think this is probably true of some of the older cultures
#
in Europe, certainly in non-English speaking places, that this is valued and money is put
#
into it. And therefore it's something that's available. So it's a, you know, there's a
#
demand because there's a supply. And this is one of those situations where I think that,
#
you know, as much as I believe that in sort of free markets, that you have to be a rich
#
society in some ways to then say, okay, we're actually going to take some of the money that
#
the free market generates and put it into this, because that's also essential for us
#
as human beings. So you'll find that in a lot of Europe, I think. But there's no question
#
that, you know, in India and in other places, this has just fallen off the band, the sort
#
of horizon completely. And that's why you'll find some of the more creativity that you'll
#
get out of these small places is on things like TikTok.
#
Yeah. I mean, TikTok getting banned was so tragic. I keep going on about that because
#
there's such an incredible cauldron of creativity really. And I wonder whether it's a function
#
of poverty, that of course we are a poor country and that is why, you know, in our hierarchy
#
of needs, culture is like way beyond, people are more just focused on the immediate so
#
culture comes later. Or is there something deeper? I mean, you know, you do among privileged
#
sets of people, you do have a certain kind of cultural life, like the music festivals
#
in South India, for example, and so on and so forth. But in general, in the life of the
#
common person, like here, you will not find a taxi driver who's gone to a museum, for
#
example, you know, so but that's I mean, that's neither here nor there. So tell me about the
#
so what what's the next step then that, you know, you've childhood in Delhi, you've done
#
your schooling and all of that. How did you start gravitating towards law? Like was it
#
kind of happenstance in a series of accidents? What was what was your conception of a future
#
Akshay at that age? What did you want to be? Well, actually, I thought of law relatively
#
early during college years. Again, if you were in, if you were in Delhi University in
#
the 80s, there were three or four different types of careers that were available to you.
#
You if you were if you're doing economics or maths or physics or one of those things,
#
then you could possibly go to, you know, you'd go to one of the IMs or one of the the business
#
schools that was one route. The other route was this phalanx of people who would go and
#
do the civil services exam. And the reason I did it was just didn't do it at all. Didn't
#
even look in that direction is very simply the value of my time was too much. So to spend
#
potentially one, two, three, four years of your life repeatedly studying for an exam
#
in which your chances of success were very low. Just didn't seem and for a career that
#
I valued, appreciated, but wasn't mad about, I didn't see the point. So I didn't even
#
look in that direction. And the third thing to do was to go abroad to study. So so I chose
#
this that option because there wasn't sort of didn't hand on maths. I did history in
#
college and was not was no calculus was beyond me. And so I took that option. And really
#
it was because partly by default, partly because both my parents studied abroad and they talked
#
about the wonderful things that it had done for them. So the one thing that you're not
#
supposed to write in a personal statement, which is that I'm going abroad to expand my
#
horizons. That was why I wanted to go abroad. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my
#
degree. So I first went to I went to Columbia to do a master's in international affairs.
#
It was an area, it was sort of politics. It was it was interesting. I specialized in in
#
international law in that. And then then I came I did that for two years. That was and
#
it was completely a horizon sort of opening experience. First time I part from that one
#
year where the Liverpool love came. I'd never been abroad. I mean, we didn't families at
#
that time didn't have the money to go abroad for holidays. So all holidays were leave travel
#
concession piled into a train going to see grandparents in Pune or whatever. That sort
#
of rich, rich, rich experience in lots of the country like that. But never been abroad.
#
So land up in New York in in 1989, not knowing how to really operate a computer done it once
#
or twice. I typed my personal statements on a brother typewriter, never used a washing
#
machine, learned how to cook a bit newer to cook few things, but wasn't required to cook.
#
So all of this stuff plus doing a degree in which I'm sure Ajay had a similar similar
#
experience doing a degree in which you had to do an enormous amount of reading every
#
week. I was you know, reading 1200 1500 pages and going to class so much so that I got got
#
an ulcer which was diagnosed as a stress ulcer. But apparently, ulcers are not caused by stress
#
that caused by bacteria, because I was doing trying to do as much of the reading in the
#
reading list as possible. And I went to my supervisor and he said, How's it going? And
#
I said, It's going fine. But you know, there's a lot of work. So he said, Yeah, but you know,
#
what's the problem? So I said, Look at this reading list. He said, Are you any chance
#
trying to read everything on the reading list? So I said, Yes. He said, But you're not supposed
#
to supposed to pick and choose. And that's when I took the pressure off myself and then
#
thoroughly enjoyed my degree. Fantastic University, the format where everything was not dependent
#
on one exam. I'm a terrible examinee. So I did well enough again, but I had to study
#
hard to do well in exams to add to study hard to do okay in exams, class performance, always
#
okay. In fact, I was once in college thrown out of class for asking too many questions,
#
but they were on the topic. So anyway, I was told by the tutor, you think that you know
#
more than me, because I said he hadn't answered my question, you can leave the class, don't
#
have to come back to for the rest of the term, I'll give you attendance. And at the end of
#
my degree, I got a first in his paper, I went back to him and said, Thank you, sir, you
#
really helped me a lot. Anyway, there's a little but it's so the big thing was that
#
they were these fantastic sort of the ability to listen to these fantastic professors and
#
have the freedom to question views. You know, I always say that our system, at least then
#
maybe a little less now was, was basically based on what are the five causes for the
#
decline of the Mughal Empire, that you have to give five, six are not required for isn't
#
enough. And there it was, you know, the questions were a completely different type. And there
#
are people like Bhagwati and various other sort of teaching you luminaries, legal luminaries,
#
people who were practitioners, and going and doing human rights work in Africa and coming
#
and teaching a course about that. So it was mind opening completely. So did that came
#
back to India worked for a couple of years at Terry, which was where I started around
#
92 started working on the Rio climate convention convention and did some paper writing and
#
research and that sort of thing on that. And that's where the interest in with this continuing
#
interest sort of stems from here, we are 30 years after that. It's difficult to think
#
of 1992 is 30 years ago, but there you are. And, and have friendships and contacts from
#
that, that period, which, you know, people who are now the top thinkers in that field
#
in India. Yeah, so that's, that's, that's what that was the next step. And then law
#
was after that. So I came back and I signed up for evening classes, because I was never
#
happy with the idea of being an academic and just writing something and then it going into
#
a paper or a report. There was one box from the world development report from 1990 that
#
I wrote, that was just, you know, it was otherwise you wrote a paper, which, which is what I'm
#
doing now. So it's a bit surprising that I'm saying that. But at that point, at the 25
#
year old me, it wasn't or 24 year old me, it wasn't what I wanted to do. So I went back
#
to the idea of doing law enrolled in evening classes in Delhi University and had a fight
#
with a tutor or the professor and left and didn't go back. Here's the, here's another
#
coincidence, a friend's, a cousin's friend came and said, help me fill out my application
#
form for, for Oxford, because I'm going there. So I said, Hey, let me photocopy it and let
#
me also apply to do law. And that's how I applied to Oxford to do law. And then I got
#
in and went. So again, a big, big coincidence. If he hadn't come, maybe I'd have just finished
#
that degree and God knows what I would have done after that.
#
God is crazy. If he, if he goes somewhere else that day or twist his ankle instead or
#
whatever. So, you know, you just said 1990 to 30 years, it's, it's kind of hard to think
#
of it as 30 years ago. Right. And one of the things that I've been thinking of recently
#
is, you know, when we are kids, time seems like, so sort of stretched out, you know,
#
when you're 20, 30 seems like really old, you know, you'll romanticize and say, Oh,
#
you know, bunch of people died at 27 bunch of people died at 34. And it seems old enough
#
and then before you know it, the decades pass and you're suddenly in your forties, fifties,
#
whatever. And you realize that that span of time, which when you were young, you thought
#
was a lot, maybe three decades in this case, isn't really a lot. And when you think of,
#
you know, when you speak of history, you think of something happening 200 years ago. Right.
#
When you're a kid, 200 years ago is a long, long time ago. It's history, history. But
#
I think when you're our age, it's not really that long ago. It's like four or five times
#
what has just passed in a flash almost for us. And does that has, does that realization
#
come to you and does that then shape the way you look at the world in terms of your priorities
#
and the way you might define happiness, for example, the fact that, you know, time passes
#
really quickly. I don't mean this just in the sense of being more aware of your own
#
mortality, but just you get it. Time passes really fast and does that. And it's a really
#
a question for both of you, I guess. I'm not bothered by it. I don't really think
#
about that. I think about it a lot, but more from a interesting, you know, what does this
#
period of time mean? So I was speaking to my mother just a couple of days ago and I
#
said, just realize that I was born only 20 years after independence. So you think, you
#
know, the India that I was born into would have been so dramatically different to the
#
India today. I have only a child sense of it, not in 67, but the few years after that.
#
But that it was such a fresh India, you know, in some ways it was such a new India and that
#
was the India I was born into. And this is the India I'm living in. It's just those
#
kinds of thoughts I find interesting to have every now and then and to just go into a bit
#
of an indulgence, self-indulgence to think about what that means. But the other thing,
#
the other type of thing I think of, and again, when you have kids, you realize that how different
#
a period of time is for them than it is for you. Now, two years for a 16-year-old is an
#
eighth of their life. And that's the COVID period. So an eighth of my elder daughter's
#
life has been COVID. An eighth of my life is nothing. I mean, compared to that is, you
#
know, it's a huge period. But for her, the importance of it, for me, this is just, you
#
know, two-fifty-fourth. Right? So there's a, that sort of, that's the kind of frame in
#
which I tend to think of this. What about you, Ajay?
#
Yeah, I've also thought precisely what you just described. The Second World War ended
#
in 1945. India got freedom in 1947. And my birth year, 1966, is actually closer to those
#
dates than we would otherwise think. So there is a freshness of that period and the way
#
our parents talked about those events, of the freedom movement, of how I felt the day
#
I heard Gandhiji was murdered, you know, those kinds of things. There's a freshness of experience
#
there, which would not strike a person growing up in today's world with that same level of
#
proximity. Similarly, I often noticed that I've spent a bigger fraction of my life in
#
the 20th century than in the 21st century, you know. So in a fundamental way, I'm wired
#
like a thinker of the 20th century and it has lessons of its own and it carries a drama
#
on a stage of a cosmic scale of the kind of things that we don't think about in this world
#
Yeah, I mean, like, another aspect of this is, like, sometimes I have to remind myself
#
that look, 60 or 70 percent of the country or whatever is born after liberalisation,
#
after this trip, you know, 1992, which we now realise is so long ago. And it's striking
#
because I realised that in the way that I look at the world, for example, there are
#
certain realities I take completely for granted. They are solidified for me. One of them might
#
be what the nation state of India is, for example, the idea of India. I think many people
#
our age, in fact, are sort of having to reconsider the notion that the country is what they thought
#
it was, that maybe it's something different and they were in their little bubbles and
#
they didn't realise it. And similarly, there is that sense that young people today don't
#
have a lot of that shared bedrock of understanding the world or looking at the world in the way
#
that we do now. And I think as communicators also, I keep reminding myself that we can
#
fall for the curse of knowledge in the sense that we can assume that, you know, if the
#
three of us are talking, there are certain shared experiences which we can just relate
#
to just like that, that you could say 84 and all three of us know what you mean in a visceral
#
level, not just in terms of, but to a young person, it may just be a date, they may not
#
even make that connection, you know, and that's kind of interesting because I think, you know,
#
or I'll speak for myself, my notion of the world to a large extent is based on really
#
a small sample size of things, like what is a nation state like? What is democracy like?
#
What happens in autocracies? How do things happen? You look at trends, but actually it's
#
a really small sample size of things happening just two, three, four centuries long. And
#
that's not enough to go on and to assume that there is always a directionality that say
#
the arc of history will bend one way or the other. It might be an illusion because we
#
don't have enough data. We have not enough life has been lived. So is that something
#
you ever kind of remind yourself? Are there moments where you step back and say that,
#
wait a minute, you know, I am, for example, taking the shape of India, you know, women
#
with a sari in the map for granted. It wasn't like that, you know, since 80 years ago. And
#
it may not be like that 80 years ago. We just don't know stuff like that. I mean, even Kashmir,
#
you know, all our certainties around Kashmir have had to change radically. Right. Yeah.
#
And I think it's, I think that's done by time and place. I was just reading recently about
#
why we should try and think like a Russian citizen today when we think about what's happening
#
with respect to Ukraine and NATO. And, you know, Putin is obviously betting on the fact
#
that what he's doing has resonance because his internal situation to him is more important
#
and perhaps more precarious than the external one. But if you are in St. Petersburg and
#
if someone is talking about Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia coming into NATO, you are thinking
#
of a historical foe at your doorstep. So that is going to make you think about the world
#
very differently than you would if you're sitting in Germany. And I think time has a
#
similar kind of effect as where you are in that particular point in time. And one of
#
my daughters, perhaps it's a failing on my part, but just a month ago said, and she's
#
13, she said, Dad, what's 9-11? So, you know, 9-11 is one of the defining things in international
#
events of our lifetimes. But for her, she's heard about it. But I'm glad she didn't have,
#
she wasn't like, I probably would have been at her age, which is, oh, there's something
#
it seems like I should know about and I don't, let me go and find out about it. She just
#
asked me. I would never have done that. And I'm glad she's like that. And she asked me
#
and then I had to go into an explanation of 9-11, but to an intelligent 13-year-old without
#
wanting to be condescending. This is something I learned from my father who would always
#
argue serious things with you, but without condescension at any age. It's a very, very
#
tough thing to do because you will know more than your child. I mean, that's, you'd better
#
otherwise you probably shouldn't have had the child in the first place. And you have
#
to go into an explanation, which is giving facts, which isn't giving too much editorial,
#
but you want your kids to have your values. And there are sort of consequences. If you
#
were explaining 9-11 to someone in the two years that followed it, you would have a very
#
different story to tell about it. Even someone like you or me, then we would have today because
#
we realized that there were no weapons of mass destruction. At that point, even we would
#
have thought right now we'll turn around and say, look at the so-and-so that Bush was,
#
but at that point we might have thought, yes, maybe they are. Maybe it was still the wrong
#
thing to do to invade Iraq, but maybe they are weapons of mass destruction. Today we
#
know that they weren't. So that point at time in which you look at something I think is
#
as important as where in the world are you looking at it from. So both I think are important.
#
Yeah. And I'm also kind of glad that your daughter asked you that question instead of
#
putting it on social media because the trend today, somebody would have screenshotted it
#
and 10 years later they would have put it up and said, this person didn't even know
#
what 9-11 was. Is she really capable of being a director at this museum for something she
#
tweeted 30 years ago? Or they would have said today, they would have said, Akshay Jaitley's
#
daughter doesn't know what 9-11 is. That too. No, but by the way, sorry, there's a story
#
there. Kids have become very cautious about what they post. Younger folks are very, very
#
cautious about what they post precisely because of being mocked, ridiculed, humiliated and
#
all the rest of it. So query whether that's questioning, that's suppressing freedom of
#
expression or not, or whether that is the right place. Twitter is the only place where
#
you should be expressing your opinion, but that's definitely happening. No question.
#
No, I sometimes think about what would have happened if social media had been around when
#
I was young. And I would be like, I would have been canceled 80 times by now because
#
when you're young, you're thinking whatever, you're experimenting. Like I said, I carried
#
marks in my rucksack for a while to college. You're experimenting with all kinds of ideas.
#
You're saying all kinds of things. The male brain doesn't develop properly till you're
#
25, which is why you have all this crazy male teenage violence and all of that. You're not
#
socialized properly and there's all this shit going on. And we never had that pressure.
#
We could just grow up in whatever way. Maybe if you guys knew the person I was when I was
#
20, you wouldn't want to know me. We'd never start having conversations. And vice versa
#
for all I know. Is it true, Ajay, that you were a punk rocker when you were 19 and you
#
Yeah, I was clearly a weird person at 19. I agree with everything you said that I would
#
have been all over social media in truly toxic ways that would have been damaging to me then
#
and to me now. So I'm just grateful that these technologies did not exist then.
#
It would have disproportionately influenced the way I think. And then there would have
#
been all kinds of angry people jumping at me. And this thing about storage of data is
#
terrifying. So systems that capture store data that can be used against you at future
#
dates are really chilling the human mind. And I think we were just lucky that at a younger
#
age, we have said all kinds of rubbish and it has not been recorded.
#
Little thought experiment here. I agree with all of this because that's the obvious answer
#
to all the rubbish we would have said. If we would have all said rubbish, we would have
#
all been called out for it. However, that was a time at which there was no cancellation.
#
So we are assuming that we have the culture of today where there's cancellation with the
#
words that you and I would have had then, which probably should have been cancelled.
#
But anyway, that's what we are assuming. If we'd said those things at that point where
#
there wasn't a wider culture which had become so divided and so polarized, then maybe that
#
you would have said it on social media then like you did in public and maybe you would
#
have got the same reaction because that's what you were saying it into. And maybe that
#
would have led to people acknowledging that these things are said and us not coming to
#
the point where we have a cancel culture because so many of the people who are doing cancel
#
culture are either young or hypocritical. So everybody has said rubbish, I mean, misogynistic
#
things and all of we've all done it. We all think that today we think it wasn't the right
#
thing to do and we've grown up and that's the part of the process. But if that had been
#
a time vacuum or a sort of if it's sort of frozen time then, then that might be true.
#
But that itself would have had an impact on the culture which would have then evolved
#
You're thinking about the culture, I'm worrying about something else. I'm worrying about the
#
human being. I want to use George Orwell's phrase, political speech. So there are two
#
kinds of speech in the world. You speak the truth or you speak very carefully. It is a
#
move in a chess game. It's a part of a chess combination that is intended to influence
#
the world in certain ways that fulfill some ulterior objectives. The guarded careful conversations
#
that we know how to do as adults in recorded spheres such as this one are not a complete
#
fulfillment of being a human being. And I fear that in the modern world, it's just becoming
#
the only kind of communication that people learn to do. So it has a chilling effect that
#
there is a very important role for the human mind to speak the truth. There should be safe
#
spaces to be able to speak honestly with each other, to do heretical, controversial expression.
#
And that is how we grapple with ideas. That is how we play with ideas. That is how we
#
make mistakes. That is how we fumble. That is how we learn. And for all of us here, we
#
know the unique deadness of the prose that is written in public life on a government
#
file. I fear so much of the oral expression of the world has become that. Whereas earlier
#
we used to be hypocritical about it, that we would speak honestly in a certain way when
#
there was no microphone. And then there was everything else that we did in front of recordings.
#
I fear a world in which everything is recorded. It will stunt the development of the human
#
mind and the imagination.
#
Couple of other aspects also, like one aspect is that not only does your data get captured
#
and you can be canceled later or whatever, but you also get solidified into those positions.
#
I take a position X, 30 people attack me and then I double down on it and then I become
#
associated with X and then that is who I am. That is who I become as well. Whereas otherwise
#
I might say X today, I might say Y tomorrow. You play around and you kind of discover and
#
all of that. So I fear that just in the shaping of the self, it is a problem. And the other
#
issue, you quoted Orwell and that is also true. The need not just to be careful about
#
what you say because it can be used against you, but the need to also make your speech
#
idiot proof because you know that there are people out there who are looking for gotcha
#
moments in bad faith, who will misinterpret everything you say. So you've not just got
#
to be careful about what you say, but even how you say it and make sure it's not misinterpreted.
#
And the point is if so much of your time goes into the framing of your thought, then that
#
much less time goes into the thinking of thoughts itself. And it's a chilling effect. It's a
#
paralyzing effect to thought. It's scary. Again, I'm wondering whether we might have
#
reached peak that because if I look at my 13 year olds and my 12 year old niece who's
#
with us at the moment, they seem to be beginning to have an instinctive reaction to, for want
#
of a better word, wokeness. They're not necessarily disagreeing with the underlying principle,
#
which again, many people who've been accused of, who have been canceled for not being woke
#
enough are not disagreeing with the underlying principle. They're just saying, allow me to
#
say this in a certain way. And I feel that there's at least at that age, the young teenagers
#
in my very limited experience are beginning to say, look, doesn't matter if you say it,
#
but are you actually like this? And perhaps it's because, and this is just thinking out
#
loud over here, perhaps it's because they're now seeing a lot more of what we heard about.
#
So for instance, there are two girls in my daughter's class who are going out with each
#
other at the age of 13. So it's completely normalized for them. We still have to think
#
about it, internalize it and intellectualize it and say, yes, that's fine. For them, it's
#
just fine. They don't have to think about it. So then their attitude towards that, when
#
that is normal, then they don't have to be woke about it in order to just consider it
#
to be normal. So maybe you're beginning to reach that point. I'd like to believe that
#
you're reaching that point, but on the speech front, Ajay, I completely agree with you.
#
And funnily enough, one of my girls, I talk a lot about my girls, by the way. So I was
#
writing an essay on exactly that paragraph and we were talking about it. And the same
#
discussion came up about what you say and who you say to that it matters, but that you
#
should be free to say in where you think you're free to say something, you should say it.
#
And I was made by my parents to read 1984 before 1984. So I finished it in December
#
What a fantastic start. That's another chapter in your autobiography, 1984 before 1984.
#
So you go on to study the law. Now, did studying the law also change the way you think about
#
stuff? Because I would imagine from an outsider's perspective, not having studied or known law
#
myself, that it trains you to think in a systematic way, in a rigorous way. You're reading a lot.
#
It will also give you habits of research, of thinking through arguments and all of that.
#
And if you apply all of those habits to your study of law, you will also then begin to
#
apply it to any place else. And now one way of looking at it could be that someone who
#
already thinks like that, who has those habits of mind, will naturally make a good lawyer.
#
But the other way is that it can also go the other way, that just studying the law makes
#
you look at the world more rigorously, look for frameworks that you can apply and go from
#
point A to B to C and all of that. So do you think you were naturally a thinker of that
#
sort or do you think that the happenstance of studying the law with all the happy accidents
#
that led to it sort of led you to the point where and changed you?
#
I don't know the answer to that. But I'd sort of qualify the question a little bit and then
#
I will give you an answer which might be somewhat interesting, which is it's not so much the
#
study of the law, but the practice of it. Because when you study law, at least the way
#
that I was taught it, you're taught in a very specific method in Oxford and in Cambridge,
#
which is the tutorial system. You go and basically you're not taught anything. You have to go
#
off and do a bunch of reading and come back and discuss the answer to a question in front
#
of your tutor. And what they're looking for is for you to find ways to defend whatever
#
argument you're coming up with, which is what law ultimately is about. But that same method
#
is applied to philosophy, English literature, the classics, anything. So it's particularly
#
useful for the law. So I studied law there and this method was used. And I think it's
#
something that helped me in the longer term. But it's when you start practicing law that
#
your mind starts, the way that your mind work starts changing. And sometimes not necessarily
#
in a good way for the rest of your life, but it's very effective. You need to think in
#
that way as a lawyer, which is a very risk averse way. You need to, and in fact you have
#
to do, it's a positive attribute while you're practicing as a lawyer to be able to pass
#
words and to think hard about what the potential meanings of what you're writing down could
#
be the placement of a comma, all the rest of it is all really important because there
#
are implications to your clients for getting it wrong.
#
So you become risk averse, but then what you find yourself doing is in your normal conversation,
#
you try and say something in a way where there couldn't be another interpretation, whereas
#
normal people don't do that. They say whatever things in whatever way they want. And if someone
#
doesn't understand, they'll clarify it. But I find myself, I've found myself many, many
#
times over the years thinking really hard about a sentence or something that I'm writing
#
in a non-legal context to make sure that there could not be two possible interpretations
#
of that. And that no doubt that changes the plasticity of your brain and you become slightly
#
more boring if you like in the way that you apply your analytical ability.
#
Now if you continue to be engaged with the rest of the world and you read other stuff
#
and you have friends from different walks of life, then that tempers that a bit, which
#
sort of leads me to a question that Ajay and I were talking about earlier is that I'm opposed
#
to this five-year law school thing in some ways, because you're telling 16-year-olds
#
to start thinking like that, 17-year-olds only with other people who are studying law.
#
So not only are you thinking just like that, but everybody, your close friends, our closest
#
friends are from college days, they're all lawyers. So the argument for some of these
#
national law schools to become broader universities I think is really strong. And Ajay tells me
#
that one or two of them are potentially thinking about that. But to be surrounded by people
#
studying political science and economics, et cetera, will not only give you a different
#
outlook on life, but make you a better lawyer, because ultimately you're practicing in the
#
world. You're not practicing in a vacuum. So the best lawyers that I've come across
#
are people who have a really good understanding of the rest of the world and can place their
#
legal analysis and work within that. So I have gone all over the place a little bit
#
No, no, that's a fantastic answer, much food for thought. And there's an orthogonal question
#
that I sometimes think about. I might even have discussed it with Ajay separately. But
#
it's about the nature of our education system and how it's right for disruption, but not
#
in the way that it is happening right now. Today, what we see is all of this so-called
#
ed tech and these disruptive influences are disruptive in terms of delivery, how they
#
deliver it to you. But what is being taught to you is the same. The thinking behind what
#
education is, is essentially the same. And I've been thinking for a long time that, you
#
know, our way of teaching, that you have 10 standards in school and then another couple.
#
And then these are the different streams that you go into. And if you're so many years old,
#
you'll be in this class and these are the exams you will do and you will all learn together.
#
And these are really notions which solidified in the early 19th century. And they were okay
#
for that time. They were okay in an instrumental way, that you're training kids to grow up
#
and be a particular thing, maybe a bureaucrat in a cog or maybe a particular kind of person.
#
And today, largely, they don't apply, but through inertia, we've just stuck with it.
#
And you know, so many of us, all the really important things that we have learned, much
#
more in my case than you guys obviously, but much more in my case, is something outside
#
of the system. Right? So I just, and you refer to one aspect of it, you know, and I, I sometimes
#
think that at some point at a deeper fundamental level as a society, we just need to rethink
#
this whole education itself, this template in our head, that you have 10 classes and
#
10 standards and you do these six subjects and so on and so forth. And then you go into
#
these separate fields, which are kept separate. If you're doing law, you only do law and
#
blah, blah, blah. And even if one were to be able to conceive of alternatives, how those
#
alternatives would come about is something that kind of beats me a little. And that's
#
the kind of disruption I'd like to see beyond, you know, the disruption of delivery that
#
he can online classes karenge, but the syllabus is still ICSE, CBSE. You have any thoughts
#
I think there's some experimentation with this that I've experienced with my children,
#
which is that they've put people in say grade five with kids from grade seven together to
#
learn certain things and they're learning from each other. I think the problem here
#
is at least in our countries from the, the, the concept or the phenomenon that I call
#
the Delhi auntie, the Delhi auntie doesn't want change. The Delhi auntie doesn't want
#
her kid to go to school during COVID times irrespective of what is doing, forget about
#
or to all the poorer kids who don't have access to online and all of that, and are doing it
#
answering questions with a phone or going to school once a week, getting a sheet and
#
filling it out and giving it back, but even on their own kids, because there's just this,
#
this shoehorning into thinking in a particular way, 10 plus two karna hai, uske baad ye karna
#
hai, wo karna hai. I think there's the, it's on the demand side that the real resistance
#
is coming and who is going to sort of turn around and say, no, I'm going to take the
#
risk of antagonizing all these people from whom I'm making a fantastic living by collecting
#
large fees. Who's going to take that risk? I don't know, but I think with the IB system,
#
there's a bit of a change in that they encourage analytical thinking, at least in the last
#
two, three years of school and more and more schools are switching to that. You know, the,
#
the, perhaps the change is going to come at least that in that end of school kind of level
#
by the fact, and this is only true for richer kids, by the fact that more and more people
#
are going abroad and what abroad is asking for, what universities abroad are requiring
#
is more analytical thinking. So you're going to have to produce it on the, on the supply
#
side. So maybe that's, that's one way in which it would change, but I have to say that this
#
is not, not an area of my specialization. Ajay probably knows more than I do.
#
Yeah. As somebody that has been in the machine all my life of taking and teaching and courses
#
and exams and all that rubbish, I've just become profoundly skeptical about the machine
#
that I feel what works in learning is reading and thinking and debating and exploring the
#
world in a more open-ended and unstructured way. I think apprenticeships are a great method
#
through which things are learned. I think whatever I learned well, I learned myself
#
and I think whatever good things I did for other people in their learning journey was
#
more in an apprenticeship model rather than in the machinery of a classroom and exams
#
and all that. So I'm just like very underwhelmed at the machine. I think we've tried to industrialize
#
something which really should be artisanal. It should be proudly artisanal.
#
Yeah. I mean, I, I'm just, my thoughts are just going back to my teenage years in Delhi
#
where our home was a place where people would come and go, all kinds of people would come
#
and go, not just for, you know, for meals in the evening, but come and stay for like
#
a few days. It was very much an open house. And the kinds of people that I interacted
#
with as a teenager in those years who I had conversations with were more sort of overheard
#
conversations sometimes when you were not supposed to, you're supposed to be asleep
#
and then you'd hear all sorts of interesting things. It was a very important influence
#
in, you know, how I learned things, how I, the fact that you had these views and views
#
should be debated and you should respect other people's opinions. So not just the content,
#
but the how of it were really important. I mean, people like, you know, Arun Shori and
#
Manishankar Iyer and Farooq Dondi, the journalist and Mrinalini Sarabhai and all these sorts
#
of people would come in and out of the house. And it was, it, I had no sense of what, how
#
rich my, my, this sort of quote unquote education was, but it, it was as important, if not more
#
as any other, any word I learned in school. So I think absolutely, I agree completely.
#
Yeah. Arun Shori, by the way, is one of my, sort of when I started the show, I had a list
#
of five or six names that I have to have these people on the show. And Arun Shori was right
#
on top and I got everyone else, but he keeps turning me down. I mean, if someone who knows
#
him well is listening to this, kindly convince him, we can have a nice 10 hour conversation.
#
And if Valley Call is listening to this show, please find Akshay somehow.
#
Yeah. You know, when he was talking about his college years, when Akshay was talking about
#
his college years, I immediately thought that if it was made into a web series now, not just a book,
#
then you could have this fictionalized episode where he is looking into a book in a cafe and
#
the waitress comes up to him and he looks up and he sees this Valley Call, which would be...
#
You know, Netflix would really be scraping at the bottom of the barrel if they were making
#
a web series about me. No, you know, I'll tell you something.
#
Netflix has completely lost it in India, the kind of garbage they are commissioning simply
#
because their whole thinking is to go to Bollywood, you know, not thinking outside the box at all.
#
I think in fact Prime is doing a better job. So actually if Netflix did a series on your
#
life, and I would gladly volunteer to be showrunner, I'm sure it would be
#
quite a success. But leaving that aside, so let's, you know, as much as you are a lawyer,
#
you also at this point in time, then eventually ended up becoming an entrepreneur.
#
So tell me a bit about that journey. Well, actually, being becoming, I say this
#
quite often, but becoming an entrepreneur probably extended my legal career by at least a decade.
#
In the sense that, you know, I'm not a lawyer's lawyer. I enjoy the law. I love the law.
#
I love the work that I did for a long time, but this sort of upbringing and the fact that
#
I did a policy degree and I'd worked in policy for a bit, it was always there.
#
And just, if I had continued working, I worked with an English law firm for five,
#
six years before coming back to India. If I'd continued to do that, I don't think I would have
#
remained a lawyer. I would have done something different. What that something different would
#
have been, no idea. But it was the fact that there was more to it than the, you know, the nuts and
#
bolts of the daily job. There's no doubt that that was a source of incredible sort of satisfaction
#
and engagement, just engagement. I mean, the fact that very early on when we, you know,
#
I think we're talking about setting up Tri-Legal and all of that, very early on those parts of it,
#
the firm building, institution building parts of it, was something that I'd really sort of
#
was engaged by and gravitated towards. While enjoying the legal work, I mean, I'd loved,
#
for many, many years, I loved the technical bits of drafting a complex, you know, construction
#
contract or a concession or whatever. And I enjoyed dotting my I's and crossing my T's and
#
making sure the cross-referencing was done and all of it, which is part of the job, but I enjoyed
#
it actually. But at the same time, we were, you know, the firm was becoming bigger and we were
#
doing more and more of management and the kind of management that you do in what was essentially a
#
startup, which is just building things and seeing what would happen, was incredibly interesting and
#
no idea where it would go or what it would become or that we were entrepreneurs. We didn't think,
#
we didn't have these words really to, we set up right in the beginning of the dot-com bust,
#
so not the best time to do it, but it probably gave us a little time to step back and think.
#
And I wrote some policies and- Who is we?
#
We. So we, there were six of us who set up the firm in the year 2000. So it's now 22 years.
#
Rahul Mathan and Prem Ayapa in Bangalore, Karan Singh and Sridhar Gorthi in Bombay,
#
and myself and Anand Prasad in Delhi. And the tri-legal came from the fact that we set up in
#
three offices at the same time and not the fact that there were three of us. There were six of us
#
plus a few associates. And from the very beginning, we had three offices, three cities. And I met Rahul
#
Mathan first. Rahul was the quote unquote Indian lawyer on a transaction where I was the English
#
lawyer when I was still in England. And both of us thought that the other guy was vastly more
#
experienced than we actually were. So we were obviously playing a good game, talking a good game,
#
but we were both two, three years qualified. And we'd been put onto this transaction that our
#
bosses weren't particularly interested in. Small deal. And we'd talk on the phone and exchange
#
notes and all of that. And at one point, India was playing Australia or Pakistan in Bangalore.
#
And early internet, I couldn't get the score. And I called to pick up the phone, couldn't resist.
#
I picked up the phone, called Rahul on the client's account, probably, I shouldn't be admitting that,
#
and said, Rahul, what's the score? And that broke the ice between us. And then we realized
#
that we were both a bunch of kids, a pair of kids who went behind our ears, who didn't know
#
what we were really talking about. But a few years later, we closed the same deal together.
#
It took a long time. We had to get the law changed, by the way, to close the deal. It
#
was in foreign exchange broking, which wasn't recognized as an NBFC activity. So when we did
#
the FIPB application, they said, what is this? And it's a foreign exchange trading. No, no,
#
no, it's not trading. It's broker. Somebody wants to buy, somebody wants to sell. I'm the guy in
#
between. And then it took us six, eight, 10 months to get a notification, to have it put onto the
#
list so that an approval could be given. So anyway, brief aside. So when we were closing
#
this deal, we both got very drunk here in Bombay in either the Oberoi or the Taj. I think it was
#
the Oberoi. And we said, what are you going to do? This must have been late 97. What are you
#
going to do in the future? And I said, well, I want to come back to India. I'm not an immigrant.
#
I want to come back to India and do something on my own. And he said, I want to leave the firm
#
I'm with and do something and say, let's do it together. And in the spirit of our 17th glass
#
of wine, we said, yeah, yeah, let's do this. And I went off to Tokyo to rejoin the English firm in
#
Tokyo for a couple of years. And he carried on. And then long story short, two years later, we
#
set up, we'd continue talking. We got the other guys involved as well. Raoul broke off a little
#
earlier from his firm, the firm that he was with then set up. And we just, whatever little savings
#
we had, we had a basement in which we called a lower ground floor in Delhi. We had a tiny,
#
the whole office, Amit must have been the size in Bombay of this room. And we had, it was out of
#
Rahul's house in Bangalore. And that's how we started. And I had 10,000 pounds, which then
#
cost was six lakhs of rupees as savings, which was put into buying books. Other people had similar
#
amounts that they'd saved. And that's how we started. None of us had family backgrounds in
#
the law other than Sridhar, whose father was the judge advocate general, but his clients are
#
soldiers. So, you know, you can't, there are no clients being handed to us. And we just got going
#
and got on with it. And so, you know, what were those early days like where, you know, you started
#
this and like you mentioned, it's common for family firms to come up and your dad is someone
#
and your uncle is someone and all of that. But you're just a bunch of entrepreneurs, perhaps
#
not using that term. And you've sort of started this up and there are six of you. And I imagine
#
that early on, you know, did people take you seriously? Did you have self-doubt? Did you have
#
imposter syndrome? How did all that work out? Funnily enough, we didn't have imposter syndrome
#
and self-doubt at that point. We just thought we'll just do this. The work will come. We'll do it.
#
And worse comes to worse. If it doesn't work, somebody will give us a job. None of us have had
#
a job since, so it did work. But there was a lot of winging it. We were the most experienced of us
#
had five years in the profession, which is not what you should have when you, you know, set up a
#
law firm. So we, the way we got around that was we discussed things intensely amongst us. We debated,
#
we questioned, we reviewed each other's work all the time so that we'd at least have two sets of
#
or three sets of opinions if we didn't, you know, didn't have someone who had 20 years of experience.
#
But and that's something that's really sort of, I'm sure for the others as well, but certainly for
#
me, the fact that I've not had a mentor and never had a, haven't had a boss since, you know, I was
#
in my early thirties is, it's something that sort of really shaped, it gave us some degree of
#
insecurity, but it also gave us the confidence once we were slightly successful that, hey, this is
#
doable. But we had to do all kinds of stuff. So I, you know, getting clients wasn't easy.
#
Now, one of the subterfuges I adopted was I wrote to one of the trade journals, trade magazines in
#
England from a fictitious email address, which was a composite of the two senior partners of two
#
well-known Delhi law firms, composed an email address and it was hotmail day. So still from
#
hotmail.com saying that, Oh, do you know that this associate from this well-known English firm has
#
gone to India and set up a firm and you may anonymously, and you may want to contact him.
#
So two weeks later, the phone rings and the magazine contacts me and they wrote a little
#
blurb about me. And a month after that, somebody said, Oh, we read this blurb about you and we have
#
a deal to give you. So, so that was, you know, one of those are the kinds of things that some of the
#
kinds of things we did. And then through the, through a contact of a contact, we got, we landed
#
this really big transaction, which was power grid wanted to wrap telecom cable around its electrical
#
lines. And it was complicated because we had to deal with the telecom law and electricity law.
#
And we were working with this big English firm. So this partner from this big English firm guy
#
called Chris Watson came and worked with us in our, in our office for a week and our office was really
#
pokey. And we tried to get him to do all the meetings with us in hotels so that we wouldn't
#
have to show him a miserable small office, but he said, no, no, no, I'll come to your office.
#
It is a great spot. And at that time we had a terrible Lou and we across from across the hall
#
from us was a Kashmiri carpet seller and his Lou was all right. So we told him, Oh, our Lou is sort
#
of broken and he had to go across the street to the Kashmiri carpet seller's office or showroom
#
to go to the Lou, but to give him credit, he worked with us for a week and said, look, I had
#
a fantastic time working with you guys. You gave me a great advice and all of that, but I should
#
stay on, but I have to go because there's the results of this audition that my daughter went to
#
that are coming out and she's possibly going to get a role in a movie. So I have to be there for
#
for that. So he said, no, no, you must go. And he went and his daughter got the role and she's Emma
#
Watson. So Chris still remains a friend and all of that. But, you know, so these are the sorts of,
#
lots of stories of this kind that date from the early times, but there was this sense, you know,
#
I think it's true for a lot of people who were getting more closely involved. Ajay, it probably
#
happened with you in government. You were in government at the same time. There was this sense
#
that kuch ho raha hai India mein. The economy is taking off. There are all sorts of opportunities
#
just get stuck in and the future is sort of limitless. There's this sense of wild west
#
almost out there that you were writing contracts for the first time. Nobody had done a wind contract
#
in India before one landed on my desk and I wrote a contract for a wind farm. These sorts of amazing
#
things were happening in the first decade of this century. And so, you know, you really went with
#
the flow and there is just no question that we had so much luck while doing it. The fact that
#
the right person called you at the right time and you had a friend who happened to be there,
#
who was looking for a lawyer and somebody was conflicted and this happened and that happened.
#
There was so much luck. But the only thing I'd sort of, the only thing I'd give ourselves credit
#
for is that we stayed together. And, you know, for all this time in a situation, in an economy
#
where people sort of brothers fall apart, we stayed together for, you know, forever. And that's
#
what allowed us to build, part of what allowed us to build what we built. So, I keep having arguments
#
about Mahatma Gandhi on my show with people who admire him a lot. And of course, I admire him a
#
lot as well. But he contained multitudes. And one of the many things he rails against in Hind Swaraj
#
is lawyers. Of course, he thinks doctors are bad and railways are bad and modern medicine is bad,
#
but he hates lawyers as well. And people do have this negative view of lawyers that for money,
#
they will sort of defend anything, take any side. Now, I understand the intellectual excitement of
#
working in a new environment. And let's say you're framing certain kinds of contracts,
#
like the wind contracts you described for the first time. And that just must be so exciting.
#
But if you look at sort of the common criticisms, focus and criticisms of the law, for example,
#
you know, it could be said that at one level, it's a form of narrative manipulation. You don't
#
care about what the truth is. You've got a client, you've got to go with your client. And in a sense,
#
therefore, your lawyer is much like, say, the political consultant of a political party. How
#
do we frame the narrative? Obviously, your audience is different. And that can have a deadening effect
#
on how you view the truth. Another way of looking at it could be that sociopaths would make good
#
lawyers. Now, I don't know the data on this. I wrote a column on sociopathy a few years ago,
#
and it's of course a condition of the brain with the amygdala is damaged. So your sense of empathy
#
goes down and sociopaths are well represented in prisons, as you would expect. And among bankers,
#
I think, and a couple of other professions, I don't recall if the law was among them. But so
#
what's your sense of that? Like, were you ever in a position where you feel a certain dilemma?
#
Do you automatically, if you're working with a client, always just become the client's person
#
and just see that point of view? Sometimes do you take pause and you say, why am I doing this really?
#
Well, easier answer for a corporate lawyer, harder for a litigator. It's a big,
#
big question for litigators at times. There is one sort of ethical answer to that,
#
which is that if you believe in the rule of law, then you believe that everyone needs
#
representation. And you can have a view on what the truth might be. But until you have a case
#
that's argued, you don't really know what the truth is. So both sides need representation, even a
#
murder, all of that. That's one side of it. So that's why for litigators, it matters more.
#
But for corporate lawyers, the one big difference is that both sides are representing companies.
#
So you're representing people with money. There isn't usually a David and Goliath kind of
#
situation. So at prima facie, you're not getting into that dilemma. And then you're saying there
#
are rules that govern the way that lawyers must function. You should not have an interest in your
#
client's matter and all of that. So there are sort of certain guardrails that the regulations
#
themselves present. And also there's a big sort of factor that relates to what your reputation
#
is going to be. If you play hard, fast and loose with someone today, and if you try and slip
#
something in. I mean, I've been in a situation where, for instance, where the other lawyer on
#
the other side made a mistake on a certain provision massively to the advantage of my client.
#
And I took my client aside and I said, look, we need to tell them about this mistake because
#
that's not what they intended. You know that that's not what they intended. I didn't even
#
say this is the right thing to do. I just said, this is going to cause a dispute. You don't want
#
to dispute. You're getting into a joint venture. You don't want to cause a dispute. So what that
#
does is that you get the right outcome. You avoid a dispute, but it also helps your reputation.
#
Your client realizes that if he, if the opposite situation existed, you know, you would do the
#
right thing by him if he was on the other side. So, and the reputation of doing, of being someone
#
who does things the right way matters in this profession. It matters in any profession, but
#
particularly because, you know, why do corporate lawyers get paid a lot of money? They get paid
#
a lot of money because they protect people's money because they manage risk. So if you want
#
to continue to do that, people are not going to allow you to do that if you act unethically.
#
Doesn't mean people don't, but I would suggest that the most successful ones and the people with
#
lasting reputations either are very, very good at managing that situation, which is hard,
#
or they're basically in the largest scheme of things ethical. So it's, I think that there is,
#
of course, the suits image of this, but that's utterly, you know, unrepresentative of the way
#
that things work. Mainly because all the files, I don't know if you've noticed, but all the files
#
in suits, it's one folder with one sheet of paper. And Harvey Spector looks at one sheet of paper
#
and says, I know what the answer is. And the deal flips. I mean, we are used to dealing with stacks
#
and stacks and stacks of boring files. So the reality is quite different and you're part of
#
a community or part of a profession. Reputation matters. And tell me a little bit about how
#
this habit that you have to develop by force of reading a lot, of taking in a lot of information,
#
assimilating it, organizing it in your head, how does it affect then other periods of your life?
#
When you're not lawyering so much, for example, like now when you're working on all these other
#
disparate interests and all of that, how does it help you look at all of these other things,
#
not just in terms of the frameworks that you might have had of how you approach a subject,
#
but just these habits that it's, okay, I can read like 300 pages in a day. I can organize
#
that information. I can take it in, you know, do you have any habits in terms of, or apps that you
#
use in terms of knowledge management and so on? Well, I'm, you know, you've talked a number of
#
times about Rome and I use it a bit. I use it very inefficiently, but I can see the promise of it.
#
So one thing is that, you know, my knowledge management system for 20 odd years was my
#
colleagues and the firm and juniors who you say, okay, I remember this from that, go and do some
#
research. Let's see if there's something new on it. And so, you know, the number of times when you
#
actually pull out stuff and read it yourself without having asked someone to go and get it
#
for you is very, is not that often. So I'm having to sort of retrain myself now because I don't have
#
a phalanx of people helping me and I don't, and the kinds of stuff I'm looking at is different.
#
So Ajay, for example, told me about Google Scholar, which I never had to ever think about
#
because I just had to go and say, pick up the articles and the articles were in legal journals.
#
We knew where to look. When you broaden your framework and when you're, you know, working on
#
your own, then you need the knowledge management tools. But I was always, always a big note taker,
#
even in, even in my early days. And partly once I was in a, I was called into a very big meeting,
#
a negotiation between multiple banks and power producers in Pakistan and contractors in,
#
in Korea and Japan, so multifaceted meeting. And I was very happy to be called, I was very
#
junior. I listened to the thing. I put up my hand, made a point at one, at some point and,
#
you know, people nodded and I was very happy. At the end of the day, the partner who I was working
#
with, she said, okay, now Akshay, go back and just type up your notes for today's meeting. So I sort
#
of looked blankly at her and said, what notes? So she said, you weren't taking notes? She said,
#
you think I called you in for the legal advice? You're going to give it this meeting. And from
#
then onwards, I just kept notes of everything that I did. When I read something, I write on the
#
margin. I put do post-its and that's, I don't have a great memory. So I have to find, you know,
#
tools and tricks to remember things. But I can see, and I'm recommending it to Ajay as well.
#
I can see how something like Roam would be super, super useful because of the fact that it works
#
basically like your personal Wikipedia. Yeah. Yeah. Zoom. Zoom. Did I say Zoom? That's because
#
I was thinking of Zettelkasten, which Roam is based on. Yes. Yeah. So Zoom is a complete game
#
changer for me. And I'd also recommend it highly. So take me through this last part of your journey
#
then from Tri-Legal, the firm becomes successful to where you are today. Like you're living in
#
Paris. How did that happen? What are your current interests and what are you moving towards?
#
Well, a number of things happened. One is that my interest in doing the day-to-day transactional
#
work waned. I was not as interested in drafting the contracts. I particularly started dreading
#
negotiations, especially negotiations on contracts, because you have the same people who are arguing
#
in the same way about the same points. And I just feel like, you know, putting my arm around the
#
shoulders of the person and saying, let's go to the next room. These are your three important points.
#
These are mine. Let's fight about those and let's not argue about all the crap. And I just got bored.
#
It was a waste of my time. But I think a pivotal moment for me came when in 2014,
#
started then. When I was with my father in hospital, he'd had surgery and I was sitting
#
on the windowsill looking out while he was in bed. And I just said to myself, you know,
#
I want to spend more time with people that I want to spend time with. And those aren't the other side
#
in a negotiation. Not that I've made friends like that, but that's not my choice. I want to spend
#
time in a different way. So from then onwards, I sort of started thinking about how am I going
#
to devise a strategy to not let this thing that I've created or been part of creating down,
#
because I love, I mean, whenever I talk about Tri-Legal now, even though I'm not a partner
#
anymore, I will say we. And there will be no other firm that I can ever work for. And I still have
#
a role with the firm as an advisor and I'm on the board and I love the people and some of my
#
closest friends in the world are there and all of that. And I'll be involved with them into the
#
future. But I just knew that I had to do things in a, so I started creating, first I looked at
#
sort of doing some policy and advisory work. And after two or three years of trying that,
#
I realized that doing through the front door lobbying to change policies for the good of
#
everybody is a very tough thing to do in India. It's very hard to do that. Your interlocutors
#
in government don't always know what you're talking about. Sometimes intentions are very good.
#
Sometimes the people are very smart, but if you've done 10 years of renewable energy and they've done
#
it for the last six months, you're not having the same conversation. After having tried to do that
#
for a bit, I said, look, I'd rather not do that. I'd rather not go through the pain of doing that.
#
Let me think of another way. And then I sort of, that was one thought. And then as I said earlier,
#
the fact that I wanted my kids to have both my wife and I wanted to have them the freedom
#
of growing up independently, taking their own decisions, taking their own risks and not being
#
driven around with in car driver, you know, all of that as you have in Delhi. That was one other
#
reason. And this is something that people laugh about and scoff at, but pollution. I mean, if you
#
are a rational human being, you should not live in Delhi if you have a choice. And then finally,
#
my wife is French and we'd always had this thing where at some point we'll go and live in France,
#
let the kids have access to that part of their life and culture and aunts and cousins and all
#
of that. So those were all the reasons. And it had been planned long before the pandemic and it was
#
announced well in advance and within the firm and people kept it quiet. And then we said, okay,
#
what is the role that I'm going to have? How am I going to work with the firm? So continue to figure
#
that out. And then I landed up there and I, you know, frankly, all the stuff that I was supposed
#
to do, I couldn't do because of the pandemic. I was supposed to help get new clients for the firm,
#
to do business development, to do client relationship management. And no one is going
#
to do a Zoom meeting for a vague kind of, this is who we are pitch. So I couldn't do anything
#
for a while. And I was doing a bit of strategic advisory work. So advising people on what the
#
implications of changes in FDI policy on China are going to be on your business or your investment,
#
on the power grid in vit, on what the potential impact of Biden is going to be on Indo-US economic
#
relations. And the methodology I follow is I develop a set of questions, speak to a bunch
#
of people who know about it, add my own analysis around it and do it as a report. It's fun work.
#
There was some of that. But then I source an irritating piece of law, an irritating decision,
#
an irritating circumstance in relation to the Chandigarh Discom. And I wrote a LinkedIn post
#
on it saying this is crap. Or I did a Substack article. And Menaka Doshi at Bloomberg Quint saw
#
it and she said, would you like to, can I reprint this? Would you like to do a column? So I said,
#
yeah, sounds interesting. And I started doing a column. And that's when I joined your course
#
to try and rediscover the hint of how I used to write before I became a lawyer and became boring
#
in my writing. And that column, people started getting a bit interested in it. And one of the
#
pieces, and that might be a good segue into the next part of the conversation. One of the pieces
#
I was writing was on solar manufacturing policy, where there's a combination of customs duty and
#
production linked incentives. And I just read Ajay's book. And I said, everything that's wrong
#
with this policy is theoretically anticipated by the Kelkar and Shah book. But I, not being
#
an economist and not wanting to make a fool of myself, which has always been a big theme in my
#
life, that I don't want to make a fool of myself, failed spectacularly in not trying, not made a
#
fool of myself many times. I sent the article to Ajay and I said, look, am I on the right track?
#
Are there any mistakes? And is it theoretically correct? So he read it and said, yeah, it's fine.
#
But what do you think? The grand question is, I think only he can, he said, I'm worrying about
#
the India's energy transition. How is India going to deal with climate change? Do you have some
#
thoughts? And I thought, boy, do I have some thoughts? I've been working on this damn thing
#
for 10, 12 years from the beginning of the renewable sector. I've seen all kinds of things
#
that could have been better. So I went away and thought about it for a few weeks. And he said,
#
let's connect again. Came back with four points to say, this is what we should do. And he said,
#
I agree with you. Let's write, let's write a paper. Wow. So this is like a fantastic
#
moment for us to take a break and then segue into the paper after we come back. Great.
#
Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
#
This means that I read more books, but I also read more long form articles and essays. There's
#
a world of knowledge available through the internet. But the problem we all face is,
#
how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put the right
#
incentives in place? Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this awesome
#
company called CTQ compounds at CTQ compounds.com, which aims to help people up level themselves by
#
reading more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called the daily reader.
#
Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read. The subjects covered went
#
from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade. This helped me build a habit of
#
reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
#
So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQ compounds and check out their daily
#
reader. New batches start every month. They also have a great program called future stack,
#
which helps you stay up to date with ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you
#
stay relevant in the future. Future stack batches start every Saturday. What's more,
#
you get a discount of a whopping 2500 rupees 2500 if you use the discount code unseen.
#
So head on over to CTQ compounds at CTQ compounds.com and use the code unseen up level yourself.
#
Welcome back to the scene in the unseen. I'm chatting with Ajay Shah and Akshay Jaitley on
#
their excellent new paper, which hopefully is going to be a lot more than that. And the title
#
of the paper is the lowest hanging fruit in the coconut tree, India's climate transition through
#
the price system in the power sector. Before getting right down to the paper itself, which
#
is fascinating and there are just many questions, tell me a bit. I mean, you've already kind of
#
taken me through a bit of the origin story where you wrote to Ajay and Ajay said, yeah, this is
#
great. Do you know something about this field? And then you got back with your thoughts. And
#
so how was it then deciding to work together? Like in the sense that at one level, it's an
#
intellectual exploration, but beyond that, what is this? What was your conception of what this
#
is going to be and where this is going? So we set up a video call and Akshay had
#
a clean articulation around four steps on how to think about this. And I come from the research
#
community. So I know the machine of how we think about problems and turn them into research
#
products. So I said to him, this should be a paper. And he said, who, what, how? And I said,
#
I'm happy to help you midwife it. And it's your ideas and it's your paper and I'm happy to help
#
you to build it. So that's how we got going on this. And what were the shared beliefs in this?
#
And what were, you know, the points where, for example, you Akshay said that, okay, I'm bringing
#
this or Ajay says I'm bringing this. Were there areas like that? Were there different strengths
#
that you brought to it? Or was it just one subject and you said, hey, you know, I, we both really
#
care about this. Let's just do it and take it from there. It was pretty iterative.
#
I think it wasn't for me. That is, you heard Ajay's bit about how it started. My, when he said,
#
okay, let's do this together and you have intellectual leadership. I didn't quite know
#
what that meant. I didn't want to have intellectual leadership. So I've got these four points and
#
now you're the scholar. Why don't you do something with them and I'll hold onto your coattails and
#
go along with it, which is partly what, what I feel at least that I've done. It was extremely
#
gratifying. The whole process has been wonderful for me. And those first, that initial period where,
#
you know, just, I had not gone away and thought as freely about a subject for a long time,
#
because my, all the, all the deep thinking that I was required to do was with respect to a very
#
specific problem. And of course you bring lots of divergent tools to bear upon that problem,
#
but the problem is, is very, there's sharp boundaries and you're using the tool of the law,
#
rights and the tools of the law. So your question is sharp and you know what the bag full of tools
#
that you have are here. The question is vast and everything is a tool potentially that you can,
#
you know, there are all sorts of things, disciplines you can bring to bear to, to, to, to,
#
to deal with the overall question of how India should do a, an energy transition in a climate
#
transition. So I went back, I basically dug into my own practical experience. And, you know, I,
#
I have to, you know, hasten to say that I'm not an expert on climate change. I'm not an expert on
#
even the electricity sector. I've done, I'm just, I've just done a large number of transactions
#
in the sector in which I've acted largely for investors or broadly for people who manage,
#
who need risk management. And what is it that you're managing risk around? You're managing
#
risk largely around regulation, around some market stuff, but basically around the huge dense
#
regulatory architecture of the electricity sector and the power sector more broadly in the renewable
#
sector specifically. And a year or two before that, I'd written a chapter in a book by,
#
which was edited by Devesh Kapoor and Madhav Khosla in which Ajay also had a chapter which was on
#
the regulatory state in India and where that was going. And I wrote a chapter on renewable energy,
#
talking about how it was like an oasis of lighter regulation within the more heavily regulated power
#
sector and, and why it was like that, why it needed to be like that and why it was a good thing.
#
So the instincts there were without me having thought about it in that way, whether that this
#
lighter regulation, this freedom of people to do things, this support from the state in the right
#
kind of areas is a good thing because I'd experienced that by doing all these transactions.
#
But in doing those transactions, I effectively came to the conclusion that when I did the first
#
wind contract that I did in the early, in around 2010, the 10 issues that I discussed with the
#
lending bank as the 10 risks, if I were to get into a room today with someone, I would have the
#
same 10 risks. The locus of that risk has changed. The degree of the risk has changed a bit. In some
#
transactions or in some regulatory frameworks, there's a little less risk, but effectively,
#
fundamentally, those things are still problems. So, and I'd advocated reform a few times, you know,
#
when I was trying to do the policy advisory work that I was talking about on behalf of chambers of
#
commerce, going and presenting white papers to government saying, here are things you need to do
#
and this is what your investors are asking you for. This is people who are putting dollars on the
#
table or not, or quote, bidding higher on something because the risk is higher as opposed to bidding
#
lower or having a fewer number of bidders in a bid. And this is across not just renewables
#
or the power sector, but across the infrastructure sector. We don't know how, we haven't understood
#
at a structural level of the Indian state, how private investors perceive risk and how capital
#
flows then mirror the perception of risk. So this was sort of having presented these white papers
#
and on the same topics. When I got the opportunity to think more freely about this, I basically
#
said, you know, this incremental reform that even I've been advocating saying, do this,
#
have a little more payment security. Why is all this happening? This is all happening because it's
#
all controlled by the state and the state does not have the right capacity to understand the problems
#
or to be the right contracting counterparty or the right interlocutor for people who are doing
#
business. So you've garnered this whole regulatory space for yourself and you don't know how to
#
manage it. So we have to, this is broken and it needs to be broken down and fixed. So I came up
#
with these four points. The four points were one, that you have to sell everything. Two, the biggest
#
problem in selling everything is the political economy and that's why privatization hasn't
#
happened to the degree it has had. So, and there is only one way to deal with this. You have to
#
deal with this like you did for the successful Bombay slum redevelopments, which is pay everybody,
#
pay them in the form of a new flat. If someone's stealing electricity, give them a connection and
#
give them free vouchers, but there's a bigger problem to be solved. So don't take a moral
#
view that he is a thief and he should be punished. Pay everybody off. For that, you have to map
#
very closely the political economy, state by state, who are the winners, who are the losers,
#
and devise a strategy to compensate them. That is the second. The third was in a privatized system,
#
regulation becomes much more important. So you need to change the regulators. You need to,
#
somebody coming out of a business school or a law school, the top law schools, they should want to
#
go and be a regulator for five years because the experience they get at a reasonable wage would be
#
something that would get them a really high paying job in a law firm in five years time because
#
that experience is invaluable. And thirdly, I took a very simplistic approach to say that unless
#
you're going to bring down the grid, there should be no reason why any electricity transaction in
#
this country should be regulated. If I want to, if I've got a rooftop, you're my neighbor, I want
#
to sell you solar power. I should be able to sell it to you as long as technical standards are
#
maintained. Let the government collect 18% GST. If you want to buy power at 100 rupees a unit,
#
what goes of your father? So those were the four simple ideas that I had and said that basically
#
everything is captured, that I think of as problems is captured as some aspect of this.
#
And now that you've read the paper and if you were to unroll the sort of carpet of those ideas,
#
to use a terrible metaphor, then Ajay, what he did was he took it and said, okay, what do we mean by
#
making all transactions open? It is bringing the price system. That was sort of economists speak
#
for that slightly intuitive idea. What does it mean to say that only regulate for preventing
#
the grid to come down? It means regulate only for market failure. So you've got a market failure,
#
four points on market failure in the paper. And on the privatization point and on the political
#
economy point, he just said yes, that just goes. So we had a starting point of deep agreement.
#
And for me, I hadn't thought of it in terms of the price system and the fact that you need to
#
allow all transactions to have a clearing price. I hadn't framed it like that, but the minute it
#
was framed like that to me, I just said, you have this deep sigh of relief and say, okay,
#
you know, this is what I've been talking about. I'll just have the right language for it now.
#
So that's what that initial period for me was. What I'd been unused to in many years of being a
#
slightly more senior lawyer and within my firm was to have the ideas and then tell someone to
#
go and do the work. I had to have the ideas and start doing the work myself this time after a
#
long time, which was a muscle that I had to sort of bring out and start using again. That's how it
#
all started. Reading your paper, it struck me and that struck me even more while you guys were
#
speaking just now is that it's like a perfect marriage of two things that on the other hand,
#
there is this deep knowledge of this domain where you get into the sector and you understand all
#
the fault lines and you get that sort of granular knowledge of different kinds of things that can
#
go wrong. And at the same time, there is this broad conceptual framework, which makes complete
#
sense. And I don't want to simplify it. Both of you obviously would have had some conceptual clarity
#
and some deep knowledge, but it would strike me, Akshay, that you would have had more of the deep
#
knowledge of the nuances of individual particular things that can go wrong. And Ajay would have
#
committed from that conceptual framework of free market, the price system rather of having
#
that price system, the information that gives you how the incentives play a part. And then these two
#
kind of get married without necessarily stereotyping what you brought to the table.
#
But at a larger level than that brings to mind two questions that how much was your understanding
#
of this domain enhanced by having that conceptual clarity, like do things then start falling into
#
place and you say, yeah, okay, it all makes sense. And the second part to that question is almost a
#
converse that you can at an abstract level have conceptual clarity that, you know, Hayek use of
#
knowledge in society, the price system is the one thing that works and so on and so forth, get the
#
incentives right and all of that. But when you actually apply it to a concrete field, like what
#
I saw here was really an application of Hayek's insights about how the price system works. And
#
suddenly seeing that, my God, at every level, at every detail, this makes so much sense to me.
#
So, you know, so these are the two questions that one, how much is that detailed knowledge of all
#
the nooks and crannies enhanced by applying that conceptual framework to it? And two, in terms of,
#
you know, the conceptual framework coming to life in this way, you know, what, how was that process
#
like? So I think that if you start from the Indian electricity sector, it is shouting to you that we
#
don't have the price system, we don't have the incentives. There's just a lack of buyer and
#
seller clearing around the price and then the price sending out incentives to reshape the demand
#
side and reshape the supply side. The Indian electricity sector is just central planning,
#
end to end, it's completely central planning. The price system doesn't tell the automobile
#
industry that your cars need to be more efficient. The government makes a regulation and says the
#
cars need to be more efficient. So the central planning is just all over the landscape. So that's
#
the first thing that is a weird feature of this field. Like many other fields in India, there is
#
a deep government interference in the system and a lack of the price system. That said, this field
#
is a little harder than many. So I want to be careful in what we say in this paper and what we
#
see as the journey ahead. What we're saying in this paper is that the way to solve the problems
#
of the sector is to get the price system to work. And of course, the main framing of the paper is
#
around climate change, carbon tax, electricity sector. So that's a very interesting juxtaposition
#
of the paper that we're going to have to do something about the pollutant that is carbon
#
dioxide. The cleanest way to deal with that is a carbon tax and not detailed regulatory interventions.
#
A government saying that at this place, you will have a solar plant. At this place, we will force
#
this industry to accept this efficiency standard. Just let prices work. So fine, you want to stop
#
carbon dioxide, tax it. But beyond that, let society figure out what's an appropriate use of
#
carbon dioxide in society. And then that takes you to electricity. The most important site
#
of the climate transition is the electricity sector, partly because today it produces a lot
#
of CO2 and because tomorrow when cooking and mobility move to electric, that heavy lifting
#
will have to be done in the electricity sector. So that's the clean argument of the paper that
#
there is a climate transition problem. The best way to do it is a carbon tax. For the carbon tax
#
to do its magic, the electricity sector has to be under the benign influence of the price system and
#
not a bureaucratically controlled centrally planned system. However, this is a field that
#
is truly hard. So now let me turn upside down and talk about this in a more traditional electricity
#
engineered worldview and electricity expert worldview. The consumer is a little spoiled in
#
that the consumer expects that when I flick the switch, the electricity will flow and that the
#
price will be broadly stable and predictable. Consumers are not ready for price fluctuations
#
and the price fluctuations that are required in the modern world are kind of extreme.
#
So demand has a very high time of day pattern and the renewables revolution generates
#
intermittency in production. So the solar production happens only when the sun is shining
#
and as the evening comes, when people switch on a lot of appliances, you actually lose
#
solar capacity and wind is inherently intermittent. It is a leap for us to think that there will be a
#
day and I am 100% convinced that there will be a day that before we choose to flick on the air
#
conditioner, there'll be a little LCD display unit on the wall showing us the present price of
#
electricity and we'll think about it. That will weave prices into our thinking when we make
#
decisions like flicking on an air conditioner. But that's a big change in society and we are not
#
there today. For an analogy, all the way until Nixon abandoned the gold standard, the world
#
believed that 35 ounces of gold was the dollar and there were fixed exchange rates all around.
#
And at that time, if you try to say to people that, you know, there should be a market
#
for the exchange rate and Milton Friedman was this amazing pioneer in talking about
#
floating exchange rates. It was a big leap and people would just get irritated at what
#
you want exchange rates to change every day, every hour and every importer, every exporter,
#
every capital flows transaction will have to think about currency risk and at this price,
#
does it make sense for me to buy this? Yeah, we did that. We have come here today,
#
exchange rates are floating, exchange rates fluctuate every day and we've all learned to
#
live with it. I think that similar intellectual transformation is required in the electricity
#
sector. So a lot of buyers and sellers are spoiled by the very fixity of prices and human beings
#
always want to declutter their minds. So you think I want to flick on the switch and some
#
fairly fixed price electricity will flow, but that is a very negation of the price system.
#
You want prices, you want price fluctuations, you want price flexibility, but this is a very
#
difficult field to do that. When the wind is blowing and the windmills are making electricity
#
and if the demand is not there at that point, the price can go to zero. The price can even
#
become negative. There have been days in Germany where the price of electricity has gone to zero
#
or to slightly negative numbers because actually for the grid operator, you're doing a favor
#
by consuming a little bit of electricity at that time. It's a very different world. It's not easy
#
to store electricity and the renewables generation is highly intermittent. Just to butt in slightly
#
at that point, I think that's the key difference in the electricity sector compared to any other
#
commodity product, which is that you have to consume it as soon as it's produced. You can't
#
store it. And one, that is changing. Two, you can still think of a system where you take that
#
factor into account and design a system which is still largely functioning on the price system
#
and providing technically for the fact that there's going to be fluctuation in the supply
#
of electricity into the system. What we're trying to do at a very high level over here is to say,
#
okay, we understand that that's the case, but your thinking has been in the planning mode
#
and you've been moving incrementally away from that. What we are saying is your thinking needs
#
to be in the price system and you need to move as far away from that as is necessary to take
#
into account the fact that this is a flowing commodity which has to be consumed as soon as
#
it's created. What we're trying to do on the basis of some strong intuitions, one about the way that
#
the market works, prices work, and the second about what hasn't worked in the Indian electricity
#
sector to put those two together to say, how do we then start thinking about this in a very different
#
way? Amit, this is the beginning of a process for us. We are learning the details of how this
#
whole transition could take place, but we're convinced about the direction, convinced about
#
the fact that that's where we need to reach and what's going to happen over the next year or two
#
or three or four, whatever is we're going to learn more about this and figure out how we can then
#
suggest something which is really concrete, which is grounded in the price system, but accounts for
#
the fact that for the moment, we largely don't have storable electricity. And what I'm struck by was,
#
Ajay, what you said about how getting used to that new paradigm where before I flick on my AC,
#
I can see what the price is. And I agree that that is something that can inevitably happen,
#
but I also agree that there will be a time where we won't need it because the price of electricity
#
will simply be so low. And you mentioned renewables coming in the form of wind or sun or whatever.
#
And I think the future in a sense is unknown unknowns. God knows where they'll come from.
#
We were talking earlier about nuclear and we'll come back to it maybe later after we finish
#
talking about this paper, but maybe that is a source that takes care of the whole problem.
#
But what I find illuminating in your paper is how do you create a framework where in this future of
#
unknown unknowns, in a centrally planned world, these unknown unknowns might just remain unknown.
#
But where individuals have the incentives to go out there and to try to solve problems,
#
there can be new and innovative ways of sort of...
#
I want to push on the idea of technical change, innovation and risk-taking. What happens a lot
#
in government systems is that there is extreme bureaucratic and policymaker risk aversion.
#
It's a filter that kills off a lot of the possibilities. Something very fail-safe is done,
#
which is typically 10, 20, 30 years after it should have been done. And that's the way
#
bureaucratically controlled systems work. And for instance, in the field of space exploration,
#
there is a lot of criticism about the way a NASA approaches it because they have to over-design it
#
because they're a government, because they're a bureaucracy, because failure is not tolerated.
#
Whereas the essence of this field is going to be innovation. So I have been an excited observer of
#
the technological developments around solar energy and around energy storage over the last 10, 20
#
years. What private initiative and innovation supported by state funding for R&D has done is
#
nothing short of miraculous. It's amazing the kind of changes that have come today. If you had told
#
me 20 years ago that this is what will be feasible standing in 2022, I would have said no way.
#
It's beyond my wildest dreams. But that's what the great free market innovation machine does,
#
that when there is a price system and there are profits to be made, people take risks,
#
people invent stuff, people try 20 solutions. Many of them will fail. That's absolutely essential
#
in our climate transition story. So the world is facing a big, hairy, audacious goal of getting the
#
carbon out. We don't know enough about the world to centrally plan it. We don't know enough about
#
low carbon technologies, about living in a low carbon society to think it through and have it
#
imposed by any central planner, even if we were willing to believe that central planner is
#
benevolent. So it's back to the fundamental vocabulary of having something that is designed
#
versus having a process of discovery. What we need around the climate transition is that process of
#
discovery. And that's the beauty of a carbon tax saying, I recognize that this thing is a pollutant
#
and we will keep raising taxes until we get the right carbon trajectory. But after that,
#
have a light touch and not try to have a government that is specifying the technical detail about how
#
society is structured. Rather, let the energy of the capitalism do it. Let the financial firms do it.
#
Look at the way venture capital and private equity has played in the transformative changes
#
that have taken place in renewables, in energy storage of the last 20 years. That's really the
#
template for how this story will unfold. So we should create that process of risk taking,
#
of making mistakes. There should be bankruptcies. And no official is going to do that risk taking
#
where they put up some plant and then they went bankrupt.
#
I'll give you a couple of examples. We talked a little bit earlier about not being able to
#
sell you the electricity off my roof. But that's a bit of a rustic kind of example of it. It's
#
relatable. But it's slightly more sophisticated. You know that electricity is consumed in peaks
#
and troughs, right? So there are times of the day where all the industries in a certain SEZ
#
will turn on the switch on their processes. Now, in any industrial process, energy is used
#
in a certain way. Some of it must be used at a certain time, but there are other processes
#
which are basically sort of neutral to when that process works. So there are people who
#
are in the business of what is called flexibility aggregation, where what they will do is they'll
#
go to an SEZ and they'll say, okay, I'm going to place an IoT device on your process such
#
that it will switch on the power when the price is low. And it'll turn it on and it'll also
#
smoothen out the peak because the prices are higher when there is a peak. And because of
#
the way that the Indian electricity sector works, this is actually a saving made by the
#
DISCOM because the DISCOM is buying the power from various people at various different times.
#
This business model works if this person who's doing the flexibility aggregation can share
#
the upside with the DISCOM, right? So if 100 rupees is saved, he says, okay, I'll give you
#
DISCOM, I'll give you 80, I'll keep 20. That's my profit. You can't do this deal in India today.
#
It's not possible. You have another kind of situation where say Google says, I want to be
#
a good corporate customer. I want you to renew power to put 100 megawatts of renewables into the
#
grid. If you do and you're putting it into the grid, I might not be consuming it, but you're
#
putting it into the grid, which is being consumed more generally. And an electron is an electron
#
regardless of what the source might be. I'll pay you three rupees a unit for that, what you put in.
#
If you get three rupees for that, fine. If you get three 10, you can keep the upside or you can
#
have an upside sharing. If you get two 90, I'll pay you the difference. So this is a con and they
#
want to do it because this is part of their mandate. They want to be a good corporate customer,
#
et cetera. Their shareholders are asking for this. This becomes what is called a contract
#
for differences and then it becomes regulated by SEBI. So there was until very recently,
#
this transaction was illegal. Now you can say, okay, now they've made it illegal or they made
#
it more possible, but this is deal by deal, business by business, business model by business
#
model. You need to tweak the regulation to allow something to happen. So instead, if there are
#
private people doing deals with private people, that's all you need because these deals and 50
#
others, as you said, the unknown unknowns, the ones we can't even imagine at the moment,
#
all sorts of other stuff will happen. And this isn't even on the technology side. This is just
#
on the business model side. You add technological innovation to this. Arguably placing IoT devices
#
is an innovation, but it's been happening for a while now. You'll have this combination of
#
business model and technology being able to be used to deliver value. And right now there are
#
so many ways in which this cannot be done. And the way to solve this is not to say, okay,
#
I'm now going to deregulate this, then I'll come up with guidelines how this is to be done.
#
And then there will be a process of verification and you will sign up for this and whatnot.
#
As opposed to saying, just do the deal. As long as the grid isn't coming down,
#
I'll just take my tax on it. Fascinating. So, you know, before we go deeper into the solution,
#
I want to go deeper into the problem because for many of my listeners and even for me while
#
reading this paper, it was great that, you know, right at the start, you sort of set out first
#
what the problem is. And I'm going to ask you about that at two levels. One is tell me about
#
the problem at the climate change level, at the global level, in terms of the push towards
#
decarbonisation. You know, you've used in your paper, all these phrases like COP26, COP21,
#
Paris Accords, all of which kind of went over my head. I had to Google to figure out what's going
#
on. So give me, you know, a sort of a beginner's guide to this world of how people, you know,
#
international community is trying to mitigate climate change. And after that, we can talk
#
about the scenario in India, what's wrong, the central planning, what's wrong at the level of
#
discoms, what's wrong at the level of the incentives for the private players and how that changes
#
because of the international environment. But first, I just want to understand that broader
#
subject a little better, that, you know, what are the efforts that have been made? You know,
#
you've spoken of our Prime Minister, you know, making different kinds of commitments at different
#
kinds of forum and all that. Give me a sense of what is a problem in terms of carbon emissions
#
and whatever. And what are the different mitigating steps that have been taken? And you know, where's
#
India in that scheme of things? And what is the challenge before us?
#
Well, you know, not wanting to go too back into the past, but 1992 is an important date because
#
of the Rio Climate Change Convention, where the world decided that this problem that everyone
#
knew existed needed a concerted cooperative international solution. And that was followed
#
by the Kyoto Protocol a few years later, which put into place certain mechanisms to try and
#
reduce the problem of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. And there were financing mechanisms,
#
there were cap and trade mechanisms that were suggested. There were various different types
#
of mechanisms internationally that were suggested to address the issue. Now, that whole process,
#
the COP is the conference of the parties. It's the conference of the parties of the original
#
Rio Convention. And COP26 is just the 26th one, which we just had at Glasgow last year.
#
Cutting a slightly long story short, there was an intense amount of negotiation that led up to
#
COP21 and what's known as the Paris Agreement, where people said, look, we have to now arrest
#
climate change at no more than two degrees this century. And we ideally have to do that. Ideally,
#
it should be 1.5 degrees. And that not only that, but that the world that historically,
#
and even at today's levels, most of the of the pollution of the carbon has been generated by
#
the developed countries. And it's not fair for the developing countries that they be asked to
#
stop their path of development, the path of development that has led to wealth creation in
#
the West, stop that in order to solve this global problem. So the burden disproportionately is
#
falling on the poorer countries. So they came up with this principle of common but differentiated
#
responsibilities in accordance with your ability to say that this principle already existed,
#
but it took the mechanism to say they will actually be transfers of technology and transfers
#
of finance from the developed world to the developing world in order to make this happen.
#
Now, the number that was talked about was 100 billion a year. To be fair, the West has been
#
abysmal in fulfilling that commitment. And it's not always been completely clear how much of that is
#
coming from private sources, how much of that is coming from G2G, government to government sources.
#
So are governments going to give the money or are private companies going to be involved in
#
making these investments? My view is that this is not going to come from governments, it's going to
#
come from private companies. And India is very well placed to receive a lot of these investments
#
because the dollar of investment that will come there will get you arguably more mitigation of
#
CO2 in India because it's cheaper than it would in the West. But we don't have an investable power
#
sector or we don't have a sufficiently investable power sector. So that's the link. But going back
#
to the Paris Agreement, the mechanisms in the Paris Agreement that were put into place, as I said,
#
haven't been followed through. So in COP26, renewed commitments were made to say, we will
#
come to net zero emissions by, the date has been 2050, by net zero emissions by 2050. And this was
#
discussed even earlier in COP21 and following that. And to get as many countries as possible
#
to make specific commitments in relation to getting to that. So that's where our Prime Minister went
#
and said, we will do this by 2070. And we will also make sure that by 2030 that we have 40%
#
renewable installed capacity, that emissions intensity is brought down by 40%, all of that
#
sort of thing. So that's where the world is right now. Now there's this tension between the fact
#
that there is this noble objective, which is an existential threat, frankly. I think people should
#
be having sleepless nights about this, which is what originally led Ajay to ask me the question
#
to say, are you worried about this? And I said, yes. So that's where the world is at the moment.
#
And India's in this position where we have a reasonably decently growing renewable energy
#
sector, although it's a drop in the ocean in terms of what we get in terms of international
#
investment to just give you one set of numbers in 2020 and there'll be new numbers out for 2021.
#
In 2020, it was the second best year ever for renewable energy investment worldwide,
#
despite the pandemic. It's about 300 billion, 86 billion approximately in the EU, a similar
#
number in China and India got 6 billion of that. And this is not just foreign investment, this is
#
domestic and foreign. So 6 billion is a big number and we talk about how well our sector is doing and
#
all of that, but it's a drop in the ocean in terms of what's happening elsewhere and what could happen
#
in India. So we are well-placed to get much more investment, provided we have a more investable
#
sector. And that's where we are at the moment. And as we proceed, I just, people keep
#
sort of telling me to do episodes on climate change and all that, which I haven't done yet,
#
because partly because there's just so much information that I'd have to take in just to
#
prep for it that I haven't bothered starting. But I just like to sort of point out my perspective on
#
it, which I think you guys would broadly share, tell me if you do or not, which is that number one,
#
I of course have no time for deniers. Climate change is a real thing. It's caused by humans and
#
we have to do something about it. At the same time, I'm a little skeptical of some of the more
#
alarmist scenarios out there, partly because they come from forces which are incentivized to be as
#
alarmist as possible. And we have seen that alarmists of the past have invariably been wrong.
#
So having said that, where is the line in between where I stand? I don't know, but my stance would
#
be that climate change is real. It's going to affect us. We need to do things about it. And
#
I'm broadly optimistic that given the right incentives, that we are resourceful and innovative
#
enough to find our way out of it and to get away from fossil fuels as we have in the past. I mean,
#
you look at the history of humanity, we used to rely on water for energy, on wood for energy,
#
on coal for energy. At various things, you put the right incentives in place and you move away.
#
So because of human ingenuity, no matter how real climate change is, I'm kind of optimistic.
#
But at the same time, when we look at the difficulty of getting these incentives in
#
place, which is partly what your paper is about, that kind of makes me wonder and think about the
#
urgency and the necessity to get that in place right away. So broadly, would you sort of agree
#
with my summation, which comes from a non-expert place? I would like to put three things into this
#
reasoning. The first is that I am very worried about the imprecision of climate modeling.
#
So I think that we are all acting as if there is a truth and we are able to make good forecasts
#
using modern atmospheric models that peer into 2050 and 2100. I feel that the state of human
#
knowledge is much weaker than that. Also, perhaps because of nonlinear science, that level of future
#
is unknowable. There is a possibility of tipping points of feedback loops developing. So as an
#
example, a famous feedback loop that we should be thinking about is that a lot of the sunlight
#
that's coming in the Northern Hemisphere because of the angle of the Earth, a lot of the sunlight
#
that comes in in the Northern Hemisphere reflects off this ice. Now, when the permafrost starts
#
melting, the color turns from white to either green or brown and then it absorbs more. So once
#
warming commences, the Earth absorbs more and that gives you a vicious cycle. It gives you a
#
feedback loop that the warmer you are, the warmer you become. The rate of change of heating goes up
#
and the level of climate science is primitive when faced with this level of complexity. So as a
#
card-carrying quantitative researcher, I am very worried about the level of imprecision of the
#
global state-of-the-art models. We only dimly understand this. So the models are good and useful
#
as illustrations. So just like you would not take macroeconomic modeling seriously,
#
macroeconomic modeling is not intended to be used as a realistic, careful, meaningful forecast
#
of what's going to happen in the next 10 years. It's illustrative. It builds intuition.
#
In that case, we should be very worried because there can well be a class of events which comes
#
together and gives us pretty bad dramatic change. Maybe not Hollywood movie versions,
#
but pretty gruesome stuff. So that's the first point. I mean, I buy that, but just to sort of
#
the models that we've seen in the past have often been wrong and they've often been wrong to the
#
extent of being too alarmist. They haven't actually been borne out to that extent by history.
#
Now you have to think like a risk manager that what are the scenarios we think about? What are
#
those probabilities? Can we do things that will rule out really bad scenarios? We all pay a certain
#
price. So imagine there is an asteroid out there that's going to slam into the earth. We'd be
#
willing to put in some amount of resource to buy insurance against that. We should think of this
#
field in that risk manager's way. And I just want to say to everybody who's listening that
#
don't believe the climate models that you see, because this stuff is too hard. And it is beyond
#
human and scientific genius to make precise claims about 50 years out and a hundred years out. These
#
systems are too complex. My second point is I agree with everything you said about incentives,
#
and those incentives are created and shaped by states. And that's where we hit the problem,
#
which is that there's a free rider problem here. Any one country finds it efficient to emit,
#
and it is monumentally difficult for all the countries of the world to agree. There's an
#
incentive for every one country to cheat. And it's hard to find enforcement mechanisms that will
#
bring people together. My third concern runs on climate mitigation. So let's play the game that
#
we've lost the game and the temperatures have started going up and the seas have started rising
#
and climate patterns change substantially. Now the game will turn on state capacity and state
#
capability. So, you know, if I was Germany, I'd be reasonably optimistic. I mean, I know they had
#
some really incredibly terrible floods recently, but by and large, if I'm Germany, I'd be reasonably
#
optimistic that they'd be able to grapple with a changing world and think about it. And I worry
#
the most about a place like India, where the Indian state is beset with a large number of problems,
#
is only dimly able to grapple with all the difficulties that are going on. And these
#
difficulties will be dealt with badly. It could lead to high levels of social stress and unhappy
#
outcomes. I worry that significant parts of India will become outright uninhabitable. So just a
#
little anecdote last year, I think, yeah, in 2020 or 2021, the temperature in Jacobabad,
#
which is in Sindh, went up to 52 degrees. And there was an article in The Guardian about this,
#
where there was a sentence that just struck me. The sentence was that this is like a lockdown,
#
that nobody steps out of the house when the temperature goes to 52 C. Well, we should worry
#
about parts of our, you know, the Indian interior, the Hindi heartland, where under conditions of a
#
significant increase in global temperatures, we will get heat waves, we will get the destruction
#
of economic activity comparable to a lockdown when those heat waves happen. The present distribution
#
of population in India is shaped by the benign climate of the last 5000 years. When climate
#
change takes place and the patterns of rainfall and peak temperature change, we will really be
#
down to only one answer, which is population movements of hundreds of millions of people.
#
And that straight away should set off alarm bells that given the difficulties of Indian society,
#
we don't have a working land market, people will be stuck to the land because they won't sell the
#
land, there'll be refugees, the recipient states will have nativism. You know, so juxtaposing the
#
welfare consequences of significant climate change upon Indian society and the weaknesses
#
of Indian state capacity is not pretty. So this is why this field is important. And, you know,
#
we should apply our minds and think about how best to play this. And just add that if you were to
#
troll through all the articles and papers that have been written in the last 10-15 years on this
#
issue, there aren't a lot of them that say, oh, we were wrong and the numbers aren't as bad as
#
they were. Most of them are saying warming is a little more than expected. The permafrost isn't
#
as thick as we thought. This is impressionistic, but the view I have of the science on this,
#
the science hasn't been wrong. And that's one point. And linked to that is the fact that it is
#
an existential threat. It's not that if we get it wrong, then we'll pick ourselves up and we'll do
#
something, but the stakes are too high in some ways for us to take a more optimistic view of
#
what the 95% of the scientists in the world are saying. You know, I would take a more pessimistic
#
view of that because it will pay to be risk averse. You know, I agree with that. But the
#
thing is that 95% is also not arriving at a homogeneous place. Like Nordhaus who won the
#
Nobel Prize for economics for just climate science also disagrees with a lot of the alarmism.
#
If you look at, for example, the projections made in Al Gore's film, most of them turned out not to
#
happen. But where I agree with you is that this is an extremely low probability event that the
#
Hollywood film happens and the world goes to hell. But even if it's a low probability event, the
#
impact is so high that we should do something about it. Now, where people would get skeptical is say
#
that sure, we should do something about it. But even if you buy insurance, how high is the cost
#
of that insurance? And where your paper gives me hope is that the cost need not be that high.
#
You put the right systems and incentives in place and we should be moving out of fossil fuels
#
anyway, right? Regardless of alarmism or not. Where it gives me hope is that the cost need not
#
be that high. Even a developing country like India can move out of it and can flourish and can
#
mitigate the damage, right? The frustration here is that there are many positive sum games to be
#
had. Exactly. And which is what we point out in the paper when we in the part where we talk about
#
why this is the right time for this. Because the way that international relations, the way that
#
international investment, the way that what the West is saying about carbon border taxes, all of
#
these, you line these sorts of things up and they couldn't have been a better time to do this. I
#
mean, what I'd really like to see have happened is a conversation between Biden and Modi where
#
Biden comes and says, where are your numbers? Give me your exact pathway to achieve net zero.
#
And Modi says, but you haven't given us enough money for this because you haven't fulfilled
#
your commitments under the climate accords. And Biden says, oh yes, but we'll give you money,
#
but you reform your power sector to electricity sector to make it more investable. And Modi says,
#
yes, okay, we'll do it because these are all good things for everybody. This conversation is a good
#
conversation to be had at some level, but that's not the conversation that's being had for a
#
variety of reasons. And that's a whole other story. But what we should be doing is to say,
#
and because it's beneficial for our power sector itself, and we've talked extensively,
#
and everybody's talked about how much debt there is in the distribution companies and how bankrupt
#
they are. To sort that problem out is a good problem irrespective of the climate transition,
#
but it also makes the climate transition more feasible. So this is a virtuous cycle that we
#
need to find a way to spin into. And we are failing to do this because we are still captured
#
within the concept of doing this within the state system. So let's dig deep into that then and double
#
click on the state system. What is wrong with the way the electricity is organized? I mean,
#
the third chapter of your paper lays this out in absolutely tremendous detail. So tell me a little
#
bit about what is the scene now? One, there is a mindset problem, the whole central planning thing
#
that the state has to control everything and so on and so forth. But going a little deeper,
#
what are the different variety of problems that we are faced with?
#
He will have a better narration about those problems in a practical way.
#
In a more conceptual way, I think two things. The first is that the central planning is the problem
#
that the Indian electricity system is largely controlled by officials. There are bureaucrats,
#
there are officials who make a vast amount of resource allocation decisions, who make decisions
#
pertaining to products and processes. And there is a lack of a price system. There are no prices
#
that fluctuate. There are no price signals. Risk taking doesn't happen. Entrepreneurship doesn't
#
happen because everything is controlled by the MIBAP. That's one way to think about what is
#
broken. And the other element to think about what is broken is that there is this great streak by
#
the government where electricity gets sold to different people at different prices.
#
And that's just a fundamental flaw in the arrangement. There are people who legally
#
get electricity for free. There are people who steal electricity and the government acquiesces.
#
In the paper, I think we have an example of Tamil Nadu, where there are 22 different prices
#
for electricity. And that's just no way to get a sound resource allocation. So there's just
#
so much redistributive politics that has been tied into the electricity sector. The electricity
#
sector has become the land on which the redistributive political fight is being played out.
#
And that is very detrimental to the possibility of a sound resource allocation in the electricity
#
sector. So there's this mixture of government control and then the abuse of government control
#
for political ends. Hypothetically, if the government controlled the bread industry in
#
the same fashion, you'd have had the same bad outcomes. You'd have 20 different prices of bread.
#
Bread factories would be inefficient. And there'd be 500 bureaucrats all over the country who would
#
be the thinkers on bread. And they'd be thinking more centrally planned solutions to the problems
#
of bread. Yeah. And it stems from the fact that we've done some reform. We got a new act in 2003,
#
which basically unbundled transmission and distribution and generation, put them into
#
different government owned companies and then said, okay, private guys, come, please come and
#
generate electricity. So we bolted on private generation to effectively a state system.
#
But who am I selling to? I'm selling to a government company. There are few that are now
#
private, Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and one or two others, but they're basically every, you know,
#
vast majority of them are owned by the government. They are busy fulfilling redistribution through
#
subsidies, which go through the distribution companies very often, or they are supposed to be
#
funded by the state. The state doesn't fund them. And then the state can, you know, the state doesn't
#
fund them. The distribution company will still give the subsidy, but it won't pay the guys who
#
are supplying power to it because they're not voting. Right? So that whole structure,
#
the argument there is to say, you want to pay a subsidy, that's a perfectly reasonable,
#
redistributive goal of the state if it wants to have it, but don't make the distribution company
#
do it. It's there to produce power and to sell it and to make money, even in the public sector.
#
But the idea that electricity is a public good somehow, that it should be given for free,
#
is what still permeates over here. That's one. The fact that that's what makes them bankrupt.
#
What makes them bankrupt? It makes them a bad contracting counterparty. They cannot give payment
#
security. If they give payment security, they don't honor it. There are strictures on distribution
#
companies to issue letters of credit and they don't. And they just don't. So what's the
#
consequence to a Babu if they don't do that? In any case, it's not the Babu's decision. The Babu is
#
being told by someone higher up the chain, don't do this. There is a state today, which I would
#
not mention the name of, where many people have not been paid on various contracts for months.
#
And now people are being paid depending on what kind of influence they're willing to wield
#
in a state that should be doing a lot better than that.
#
Now, why is this possible? It's possible because that company is owned by the government.
#
There is a private guy that would never happen. Then you have a situation where the contracts are
#
handed down. So the DISCOM in Maharashtra, not in Bombay, because that's private, but MSEDCL wants
#
to procure power. It will say 200 megawatts of solar. It will put out a tender with a contract.
#
The contract is sitting there. You don't have the chance to negotiate it. And the risk allocation
#
in the contract is what some set of Babu's have decided it's going to be, which is obviously going
#
to be risk averse for the government. Not only because they believe that you're doing us, we're
#
doing you a favor by doing this, but also because if the terms of that contract are more balanced,
#
they feel that questions will be raised internally saying, you've been bought out by the private
#
sector. So your contract terms aren't fair. Even where there is a contract term that is in favor
#
of the private guy, there's a change in law. There's suddenly a GST that comes in. The GST that
#
comes in now down the chain is increasing the price of power that this guy, what it's costing
#
him to generate power. That entitles you to go and claim relief and get a higher tariff
#
under the contract. But that will be contested. It will be litigated sometimes all the way to
#
the Supreme Court because again, there is no instinct to honor contracts. And there's a fear
#
that vigilance will come after me if I pay out money. So you have this whole series of issues
#
which all then, and this was sort of my learning process and saying, okay, the system itself needs
#
to change and we need deep privatization, is that you trace each one of these issues back and it
#
comes from the fact that there's either state bullying or there's lack of incentives to do the
#
right thing, whether it's to draft a contract which has got a good balance of risk. Take land,
#
for example. If there's a contract with a state entity, the state entity is a much better place
#
to organize the land than a private guy who's to go and get commissions approvals. But that's not
#
what happens. It happens now to a limited extent. So the issue really is, these issues, either what
#
you're going to have is that the state reforms and becomes, has an epiphany and decides that it's
#
going to be the best contracting counterparty that it could be, be fair, etc. Or you have to sell all
#
these discoms, which do you think is more likely to bring a result? Which brings us to the title
#
of the paper. It's the lowest hanging fruit on the coconut tree. All solutions are hard.
#
This is possibly a little less hard. So a couple of things strike me. One is, I don't know which
#
state you had in mind, but I saw a couple of news items over the last two days. And we are, of course,
#
recording this on February 18th. It will broadcast a long time later, I think, but still. But a
#
couple of news items recently. One is Amit Shah saying while campaigning in UP that, hey, if we
#
come to power, free electricity for farmers for five years. And the other was Punjab just the day
#
before berating Amrinder Singh and saying the reason that you guys don't have free power is
#
that I told Amrinder, give them free power. And Amrinder said that, no, no, there are contracts
#
we have to honor with all these people. And that is why you don't have it, you know, as if it is a
#
bad thing to honor contracts, which kind of blew my mind. Should blow your mind slightly more. I
#
mean, once it's blown, it's blown. So it can actually get blown more. But what I'll throw into
#
the mix there is that in Punjab itself, a few months ago, the Punjab government passed a law
#
which went through, which was unanimously passed in the legislature. This is not
#
just government action or one party passed a law saying we are going to redo the
#
tariff clauses of all the power purchase agreements in the state because power is too expensive. This
#
is causing a burden on the population and it's causing a burden on the state owned companies.
#
And the referred all these clauses to the to the regulator to say revisit these and come up with
#
a price. These are some of these contracts, Amitabh bid, they are not negotiated. The government
#
puts out a bid and the lowest bid wins. So this somebody has invested whatever they have on the
#
basis of getting a certain return. But because there are elections around the corner, we will
#
not only cancel these contracts, but we will put in a law to do it. Because what Andhra Pradesh did
#
some time ago was to refer the matter to the commission said, take a look and see if you can
#
reduce the tariffs. This case went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court has now said, no,
#
you can't do that. You've signed contracts. But what Punjab did was one step further. They said,
#
we know that this is going on in the Andhra case where they've referred it to them. Let's just pass
#
a law because law is law. We will change the contract. We will change the law in doing so.
#
They have violated the constitution. They have violated the contracts and forget about, you know,
#
what's a good thing to do. And what have they done to the impression of investors about putting
#
money in that state? So you just they should not have that tool to play with.
#
I want to add to that. There's been a phenomenal collapse of solar capital goods in the last 10,
#
15 years. So many people in the Indian centrally planned state electricity system seem to think
#
that that's a bad thing in the sense that we did a tendering and a bidding and procured solar
#
electricity five years ago at a double quotes high price. And now when I buy the same thing,
#
it's available at a low price. So there's something wrong with that contract. I should find a way
#
to renege on that contract or somehow disrupt that contract or break that contract.
#
Whereas absolute basics of contract law teach us that, OK, if you want to shut down that contract,
#
you'll have to pay them the liquidated damages, in which case you should just let those panels
#
continue to generate electricity because there is no benefit from disrupting that contract.
#
But this basic hygiene of commercial thinking that deals a deal. And if you are willing to be
#
tempted to violate deals, then just think of what that does to the risk premium. And how will
#
the domestic and the global private sector and financial sector get involved in the Indian
#
electricity system as vendors hanging at the edges of a centrally planned system?
#
And how will India achieve a giant climate transition of eliminating all this fossil fuel,
#
electricity generation and greatly increasing renewables generation if this is the body
#
language and the contracting stance of a wide variety of Indian state entities?
#
And this is really, it strikes me as a classic case of the scene in The Unseen,
#
where the politician says we will bring prices down, we are doing this for you. That's the scene
#
sort of posturing that is there. But the unseen effect is the incentives, like, you know, you've,
#
I think, given a bunch of issues with DISCOMs, some of which you summarise right now, for example,
#
DISCOMs will have bidding conditions that allowed private power producers to not price the escalation
#
of coal prices into their tariff bids, leading to power producers defaulting on their supply
#
commitments when coal prices went up, as it's not rational for them to produce it anymore.
#
Again, quoting from your paper, little things like what you mentioned about land, that whatever
#
permits and consents and all that, that has to be done, they will leave it to the private player,
#
they won't do it themselves. And then payments can be delayed, they can change the law, blah, blah,
#
blah. Also, you've pointed out our DISCOMs are so litigious, even in a case where they are at fault
#
and they're going to lose, they will still go to court, they will still hold the process up because,
#
you know, that's the way that they play the game. And just sort of a whole bunch of areas. And
#
therefore, the risk is so high that if you're a private player, you pointed out at one, then
#
foreign capital won't come into this because the risk is just way too high for them. The environment
#
is just way too unstable. And even private players here, like, why would you just get into this? And
#
you might say that, oh, I can start a, say, a renewables business here, or I can start X,
#
Y, Z, anything else. Everything is opportunity cost. And you'll just look at this environment
#
and you'll say, so you can do it if, if you're, if you're good at environmental management,
#
if you can manage the environment within the political environment, the political regulatory
#
and legal environment, if you know, if you're willing to price in what litigation is going to
#
cost, which means you've got to be very, very big. That's one. And also, you know, we will point to
#
the limited amount of foreign investment that's there to say, look, all the big private equity
#
funds are here. The big Canadian pension funds are here. Yes, they all have investments, but I've
#
seen internally, you know, I've sat on the same side of the table as some of these people and
#
evaluating these things to evaluating an investment and saying, I would love to make this investment,
#
but 30% of this portfolio of renewable energy assets is in the state of Andhra Pradesh. And
#
the state of Andhra Pradesh is not paying its PPAs. So I will not do this deal or I will price this
#
deal lower. So the Indian guy who's selling them their project is either getting lower value,
#
not for his fault, but the fact that his offtaker is not paying him or the deal is not happening.
#
So we, but we'll still go back and point to that 6 billion saying, look at that 6 billion, look at
#
the fact that we've got a renew power, we've got all these domestic industries as well.
#
But the question that no one can answer is bothering to answer is to say, what have we
#
lost out? I mean, it's a broader issue in of being an entrepreneur in India in general,
#
but I know at least 50 people who are sitting in well-paying jobs in Gurgaon, who would set
#
up a business tomorrow, if it was remotely rational to do so. And in this sector, even
#
more so because you're dealing with regulation and government much more than you are in anything
#
that's in the digital world, for example. Yeah. And just beyond the problem of discoms,
#
for example, you've given five reasons why these problems will deepen in your words.
#
So can you take me through some of them? There is a sense in the mainstream that
#
what's likely to happen is we'll just fumble along. We will do a little
#
little jugado improvisation here and there, and we will meander along like nothing much will change.
#
Okay. So we'll muddle along like nothing much will change. In the paper, we argue that
#
we are actually standing at a bit of a tipping point and the world in this field is likely to
#
change in substantial ways. Why? Okay. There are basically two important forces that are at work.
#
The first important force is the rise of renewables as a business proposition. So for more and more
#
people, the appeal of putting up a windmill, putting up a little bit of a solar generation
#
capacity for self-consumption, the business case is very strong right now. And that is leading to
#
the best customers peeling off. So the best customers who are so the present electricity
#
system overcharges the commercial and industrial customer to pay for the subsidized and stolen
#
electricity. Now those best customers are being charged such high prices and the renewables
#
revolution has generated lower prices that to an increasing extent, some of those users are peeling
#
off and saying, I'll do less business with the system. So now the system comes under a fiscal
#
squeeze because the paying customers are peeling off. The second dimension of this is coming from
#
the changes in the global world of investment. The rise of global ESG investment has implied that for
#
a large number of Indian firms, it has become important to make auditable promises to the
#
investor that I am on a decarbonization path. Individual firms in India are making promises
#
like net zero by 2035, even though the Indian state is not because it's rational and efficient
#
for the firms to do so. And ESG investment is already important. About 30% of the global
#
investment pool is now ESG and the number may go up over the years, but 30% is already a lot.
#
For instance, if you wonder why did important firms like Reliance and the Adani Group
#
pivot away from a pure fossil fuel strategy to a lot of effort and accent on clean energy?
#
And the answer lies in ESG investment that they would get a bad valuation for their equity if
#
they were shunned by 30% of the global investable pool. So when ESG investment is creating pressures
#
upon Indian companies to decarbonize that further accentuates the exit by Indian companies from the
#
grid. Partly the Indian company will try to say to the grid, I need you to give me auditable
#
renewable electricity and the grid will say, I'm not equipped to do so. That's not how I think about
#
it. I think electrons are fungible. Don't bug me about where I'm getting electricity from.
#
Then the Indian company, the CNI user of electricity will just say, okay, fine,
#
I'm going to go do my own renewables thing and they will peel off. So these are the two pressures
#
that charging high prices to the CNI customers to run across subsidy system has created conditions
#
where in many cases renewables are attractive. And the second is the ESG world is pushing
#
the Indian private sector to systematically seek renewables energy. The two forces put together
#
are hollowing out the revenue base of the Sarkari system. And the Sarkari system will come under
#
hideous fiscal stress as a consequence. Just to add a bit to that, you've got, for example,
#
Coca-Cola will require all its vendors to sign up to a sustainability pledge about where they
#
get their electricity from. So the buyers of products in the West in particular and increasingly
#
in India will want something to be certified to be green. Now that certification will lead to
#
somebody coming up with a set of standards and somebody measuring whether that product is green
#
with respect to those standards. Initially, it will be imperfect. Some people will fudge it,
#
but that system will improve and therefore you will have to. And people will make promises
#
to their shareholders that we will make sure that everything we buy is sustainable.
#
And then another thing that we talk about in the book, which is in the sorry, in the paper,
#
already saying book, because that may be that's something that we should do at some point.
#
But there's another thing that we can expect to happen in less than five years from now is that
#
countries, especially in the European Union, bring into place a carbon border tax where if you're
#
not green energy, if you're goods of a certain kind, steel, that sort of thing, not produced
#
with green energy, 20% tariff, which makes you uncompetitive. So people are already anticipating
#
that and pivoting away from that. But query how many people can actually do that. The big companies
#
in India will be able to do that. Some of the smaller ones will wither away. So there's a very
#
complex set of circumstances that you put them all together and it's almost like a perfect storm.
#
And you've pointed out that over the last three, four decades, people have tried to actually change
#
the system, but there have been incremental changes in localized ways and not fundamental
#
enough. I'll just quote this para from your paper where you write, why has considerable policy
#
activism and investments of significant political and financial capital not delivered the desired
#
results? The problem is at the core, a government controlled centrally planned system. Government
#
control transmits the limitations of state capacity into the working of the industry.
#
The growing complexity of the Indian economy requires subtle judgments that vary by space and
#
time on the production and consumption of electricity. Centrally planned systems lack nuance
#
and single national solutions fare poorly at many places and times. And later there is a key line
#
which sums it all up where you say, policy influences society by reshaping the incentives
#
of private persons, stop code. So let's actually sort of get down to what you are suggesting,
#
like what is your recommendation for changing the system, price system, complete privatization
#
and having a carbon tax as a key lever that drives everyone's incentives are sort of the
#
three fronts of it. So tell me a little bit about each of those and how, paint a picture of how the
#
system would then function. So you start at the problem of the climate transition. We consider it
#
inevitable that there will be a time where India has to get more worried about carbon emissions.
#
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised that India will come to net zero by 2070. Net zero is
#
actually a pretty hair raising promise. Zero. Zero is a very small number. It's net zero. It's not
#
a low amount of emissions. It is on net, no emissions. It's staggering to think of this
#
landscape without fossil fuels, without coal, without... Yeah, but you know, I can imagine a comic
#
strip on this that Biden comes to Modi and says, give me a number and Modi says 56 inches and Biden
#
says, no, not that number, give me a better number. And then advisor whispers into his ears and he
#
says, okay, net zero by when will I be dead by 2070? It's easy to do, right? Sorry, sorry, continue.
#
I couldn't help that. Yeah. So India will come under pressure and will need to figure out pathways
#
to reduction of carbon emissions. Well, how will that happen? At present, the paradigm is government
#
will order this and order that. So there'll just be a whole bunch of centrally planned instructions
#
to various industries. Well, that's very expensive in terms of welfare. The overall cost of adaptation
#
for the economy will be high. That any centrally planned system imposes a higher cost to get the
#
same job done. We argue that the way to get that same job done is a carbon tax. So yes, you want
#
to bring down carbon emissions, tax them and let the private sector figure out the cost minimizing
#
places where you can emit less carbon. So we have no doubt that there are pockets of society
#
where it is incredibly efficient to use coal. They should do it because they're willing to
#
pay more for the coal even after a reasonably high tax rate and they should do it. And there'll be
#
other places where people will say, at this price of coal, I'm better off changing over to
#
something different. And so all over the country, these local decisions will be made in terms of
#
production and consumption and how the economy works. And that's our argument in favor of the
#
carbon tax. So that's the first element. The second element is the electricity system.
#
When we tax fossil fuels, cooking and mobility energy requirements will come into electrical
#
solutions. So the demand for electricity will grow and the overall electricity sector will need
#
to become large. And the electricity sector is an important emitter of carbon dioxide.
#
The same carbon tax will need to play through in terms of reshaping the resource allocation
#
of the electricity sector. And the beauty of this approach is the carbon tax simultaneously fixes
#
both supply and demand. A lot of present thinking in the electricity sector in India tends to be
#
supply centric. We kind of think demand cannot be touched. Demand is inflexible. Demand is
#
incapable of thinking and adapting. No, it's a question of price that when prices fluctuate
#
by space and time, this will create incentives for people to change their behavior. Similarly,
#
we think high intraday price fluctuations create market-based incentives for storage
#
and market-based incentives to change consumption patterns. So when should you run a shift? Maybe
#
the right time to run a shift is deep in the night when the electricity is cheap in the present
#
paradigm or in the middle of the day when the sun is shining. These kinds of decisions will happen
#
both on supply and demand side. So that's the second critical building block, which is that
#
the carbon tax will play through into the electricity sector. And that's how the entire
#
reshaping will be done. So this is our big picture of how to think about this whole thing. And so
#
I want to be careful about the word transmission, because in this field, it means electricity
#
transmission. But there's a useful metaphor in the phrase climate policy transmission, which is
#
analogous to monetary policy transmission, that how do you get your work done? The climate policy
#
transmission runs through carbon tax and then electricity sector. You need both to work.
#
The electricity sector needs to be placed on a foundation of the price system so that when a
#
carbon tax goes up, the price system will respond. At present, the electricity sector does not work
#
through the price system. So even if you introduce a carbon tax, that heavy lifting of adaptation by
#
buyers and sellers will not happen. Now, one response that people could have to say to and
#
I'll quickly kind of sum up and you can tell me if I'm summing it up right. Well, what you're
#
essentially saying is that look, we have to move in a particular direction. This is a direction we
#
have to move in. You know, more renewables, bring down carbon emissions, make it net zero,
#
as the Prime Minister promised. And we can't do it in the current system, because the incentives
#
are just all over the place. You know, DISCOMs mess up in their contracts and putting too much
#
risk on the private parties and unjustified litigation in bad incentives. You know,
#
they're treated in a partisan way by regulators in court, so private parties don't get justice.
#
They respond to political incentives, free power for so and so and blah, blah, blah.
#
All that is fine. So the argument then is that look, we have to privatize completely,
#
let the price system have its way the same way it does in bread, as you said, or so many other
#
things. Everything that really works in our lives today is because there is a price system in play
#
and people are responding to incentives to make our lives better. And everything that is
#
dysfunctional about India is where at some level there is a problem and the price system isn't
#
allowed to have its way. Now, a question that would commonly come up, especially in the popular
#
discourse, would be that you want to privatize everything? That won't greedy capitalists then
#
come in and the Adani and Ambani's come in and charge insane amounts of money and, you know,
#
it is okay for the elites and all of that, but you're basically handing the company over to
#
the corporates. In some sense, some of the, you know, criticisms which were raised against the
#
farm bills, which we had a very popular episode on, how does one tackle that populism? I think at
#
the first level of winning the battle is not so much a question of winning it in terms of persuading
#
policymakers and politicians, but winning it in terms of winning the popular narrative, because
#
that itself sets the incentives right then for the politicians and the bureaucrats. We think even on
#
that the narrative is beginning to move. We finally sold Air India, that finally Air India is in
#
private hands. And there is, as far as the central government is concerned, there is a privatization
#
or an asset disposal program that's on board. There's good reason to believe that as far as
#
the central government is concerned, they are not opposed to privatizing the DISCOMs, because they
#
are regularly called upon to bail out the states in this. And it's the locus of the problem,
#
therefore, lies in the states. So you have to create, therefore, the right incentive for a
#
state to do this. And you have to do it by trying, by showing them that there is either money to be
#
had in making the transition, or that there is money to be had post the transition. And that is
#
why we've talked about a state-by-state approach, not just in terms of dealing with the political
#
economy in terms of individual people, but also in terms of the government itself, or the people
#
within government who stand to lose under those circumstances. So I think we think that the issue
#
on privatization isn't as bad as it used to be. That's number one. Number two, one of the market
#
failures that you're going to have to correct for through regulation is competition. So the
#
competition will come through two ways, one through the general competition law. And secondly, a new
#
regime of regulation that you have for electricity in a largely privatized world will also have some
#
amount of competition control done through it. I mean, that goes into a very complex issue of the
#
overlapping powers of regulators. But in some areas, it's good to have overlapping powers of
#
regulators, because on the one hand, you've got deep sectoral knowledge about how competition plays
#
out in this sector. On the other hand, you've got the general principles of competition, and
#
how that should work at the level of the economy. So a little bit of competitive competition
#
regulation, if you like, is possibly not such a such a bad thing. So that's the other answer
#
to that. But it is still a coconut tree. There's no question about that.
#
I want to add to that. It does not have to be a monolithic industry with two companies.
#
The bottleneck is rule of law and the behavior of the state system and the regulatory capacity. So
#
when regulators have arbitrary power and are capricious, and the rule of law is absent,
#
then for a smaller firm, this is a deterrent. For a foreign firm, this is a deterrent.
#
And then we end up with a collapse into a small market with a very small number of players. So
#
again, the machinery of this paper is key, that if we get the state system out of this game,
#
and you're not in a centrally planned world, and we actually build regulatory capacity and
#
set regulators in motion in a good way, as is described in the paper, and this is drawing on
#
the larger arc of the development of regulatory theory and public administration concepts on
#
regulation in India. So as you know, there has been considerable progress in thinking,
#
though not acting, about how to make financial regulators work properly. And so there's a lot of
#
knowledge on how to make regulators work correctly, and you bring that knowledge into
#
the construction of regulators in India. Then we are offering many, many private people profit
#
opportunities. It can be very local. It doesn't have to be monstrous. It can be, I'm sitting here
#
in Amravati, and I'm seeing this opportunity, and I'll build one small storage system, or
#
I have one small generation opportunity here, and so on. So there'll be many, many elements of the
#
energy all across the system. So the reason why we are criticizing this sector as having two giant
#
companies is the extent of government domination and the lack of rule of law and the failures of
#
how regulators work. So in a sense, the Electricity Act was a very nice achievement in the early
#
2000s, but it predated the modern development of thinking about regulators and regulatory theory
#
and the public administration about regulation that has taken place in India in the last 20 years.
#
Today, the intelligentsia in India knows more about regulation. We understand the failures of
#
regulation. We know how to construct regulators. And today that knowledge set is ready, and it can
#
be done right. So one important point I just want to kind of clarify for listeners is that when
#
Ajay and Akshay talk of privatization and the price system, they don't mean a random, anarchic,
#
free for all. In fact, that section on building regulatory capacity is a key section of your paper
#
where you point out, for example, that regulation should only focus on market failure. You point
#
out the four different kinds of market failure. You also talk about how it takes three hands to
#
clap, which is such a nice image. And you talk about the different ways in which you sort of
#
build that kind of regulatory capacity and so on. And as far as people worried about high prices
#
and so on, I would say that, look, look at every area of your life around you where the price system
#
is allowed to function. Look at bread. Bread is by and large, it is affordable and supply is
#
regular. And it is, you know, and why should not that, and that is really kind of the case with
#
everything else. So why not with electricity as well, where some of us just take failure for
#
granted. And this is, in fact, something the prime minister should also sort of take to heart,
#
because one of the stories about him, which I often, which I've told a couple of times on the
#
show is a friend of his, a friend of Mr. Modi's who had worked with him in Gujarat. She was at
#
a gathering at his house in circa 2007 or whatever. And he told the story about his childhood, about
#
how his mother was ill one day and she was sweating and feeling hot. And he went to switch on the fan
#
and he found there was no electricity. And as he told the story, he started crying. And, you know,
#
for us in the big cities in Bombay, Delhi, electricity is something we can take for granted
#
that we're going to get power all day. That is simply not the case for most of the country. And
#
well, that's also a huge failure. And that goes back exactly to the points that you're making.
#
The other key point that you've made, which I think deserves to be underscored, is the
#
localisation, the local thinking, that even if you build the system, you don't have to do it,
#
you know, where centrally the PMO will pass an order for the whole country, sub-privatise,
#
karo price system, karo. But you can do it state by state, allow different states to experiment
#
at a local level and to sort of compete with each other. Have I kind of summed that up?
#
That's a point worth underscoring a little bit from a couple of different perspectives. One is
#
that it isn't legally possible for the central government to sort of have a
#
diktat to say you need to do that. It can only be done through, if it wants to be involved,
#
it can only do it through a system of incentives. That we will give you money to do this if you do
#
that. And to some extent, some of the bailing out of the DISCOMs within the states has been done
#
on the basis that we'll give you this money if you do this reform. And in some cases,
#
a little bit of reform has happened. In other cases, it's still not been done.
#
But it's very difficult for some of the central government to pull the plug and to say, okay,
#
we're going to let you run into the ground because the state will turn around and say,
#
we want to give you electricity, but the central government isn't doing it. That's number one.
#
And secondly, when we talk about central planning, we don't mean that there is one
#
central planner, but there are a series of central planners all through the system.
#
There are central planners in each state. There are central planners for transmission versus
#
for distribution. So you put together the regulatory and state decision-making apparatus
#
and you could remove all the individual decision-makers and it would be a completely
#
centrally planned system. So the point being that this is not a willing buyer and a willing seller
#
doing a deal. People also say, but what do you mean price system? There's a price, there's a bid.
#
Somebody bids on a power purchase agreement and they win the bid and the bid is at two rupees
#
50 paisa and they supply power. But that is not what we mean by the price system. That is the
#
determination of the price of electricity on a long-term contract, as opposed to the day-to-day
#
adjustment of prices that could take place in a system where private guys were doing deals with
#
other private guys. So there's a big difference in those two ideas. And I just want to underline
#
that we say carbon tax, the price of fossil fuels should go up. Subsidies on electricity should go
#
away. Prices on electricity should go up. Prices of electricity should fluctuate through the day.
#
So there will be some 6pm surge at which your use of the air conditioner will be rather expensive.
#
Well, there is an alternative which is a centrally planned climate transition. If the government
#
goes around giving orders that there will be a solar plant here and there will be this ban
#
on use of coal by this industry there, that will also impose welfare costs on society.
#
They will just be concealed. So you won't see it as a change in prices and damage to GDP and the
#
incomes of the people that came about because there was a detailed regulatory restriction that
#
was introduced by the government. But the costs are there. The climate transition will introduce
#
costs upon society. The only question is, do you want to pay more or do you want to pay less?
#
So this is the lowest fruit of the coconut tree. A centrally planned climate transition will always
#
be more expensive than a climate transition that is implemented through the price system where
#
thousands of intelligent, self-interested people all around the country are thinking and acting and
#
finding clever solutions at every place that they are. There's a technical issue that Baez
#
mentioned over here, which is that because of the fact, as we mentioned earlier, because of the fact
#
that you can't store large amounts of electricity at the moment, it's not that you can produce it,
#
wait for a good price, et cetera. So there's going to be some adjustments that need to be made
#
between what you and I might otherwise conceive of as a completely free system.
#
There may need to be some amount of systems operation management, which might have to be
#
done by a central entity, which could potentially be owned by all the participants in the power
#
sector together, which is performing a public good. It's saying, I will not allow the dispatch
#
of that plant at this point in time, even though it's a good price for you to do it at because of
#
the fact that the grid is weak there and there's going to be a problem. But it's only on the basis
#
of on technical grounds. You may need to have a few power plants. This is just one of the solutions
#
that you could have. A few power plants that are sitting around relatively idle, that come into
#
play when they are required to be brought into play, and that is a cost that the entire system
#
pays through some sort of charge. So the way I'm beginning to start thinking of this is that you
#
may retain some amount of central planning, which can also be diluted from government and made more
#
cooperative, say 10% of the system to allow 90% of the system to work within the price system.
#
And that's okay. But at the moment, what we've got is we've got 90% in the thing for 10%, which
#
might be in the price system. And in fact, by coincidence, 10% is the amount of money that is
#
traded, the amount of electricity that is traded on the electricity exchanges. So that's exactly
#
what we have at the moment. So here's a question. At a conceptual level, I absolutely obviously
#
agree with you. Everything just makes so much sense. It falls into place. Are there concrete
#
examples of a such systems in play elsewhere in the world and other advanced countries? And two,
#
more importantly, such transitions that might have been made from a status system like ours
#
to one which respects a price system and then begins to work better because once you know,
#
you can point to examples of such things actually working elsewhere, it becomes a far easier sell,
#
doesn't it? Yes, I mean, there are there are some examples, the most prominent examples are the UK
#
and California, both of which have had enormous problems in the functioning of a market system in
#
the way that it existed. Now, there's a lot of detail as to why those problems arose. And you
#
know, you'll have seen that the prices in Europe this winter got of electricity went up significantly
#
and there were, you know, there were complaints about it, etc. But these are places where for
#
large amounts of the time, and for a fairly long period of time, the price system effectively has
#
worked. There have been periods of problem but problems or the problems have been caused because
#
of exceptional circumstances. So the point is not to measure the point is not to measure that
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what we achieved what we've got today against an ideal that could exist, but to measure what we've
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got today against what they've got in those places where you can choose your provider, you can change
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your provider. And that itself will be an incentive to the provider to give you a better price and to
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function better. One of the issues is that in a situation which is largely fossil fuel based,
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your price is significantly dependent on the price of the fuel. And that's an extra cost in if you've
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got a mainly renewables based system with storage with and with a few plants that perhaps are acting
#
as backup, you have got you've got a price where a system where the marginal cost of power is close
#
to zero. So you are not going to have that degree of fluctuation as you might have in a system which
#
is more fuel based. One of the heartening sort of things about your paper was a section that addresses
#
how feasible these changes are. And you've pointed out that there are six important reasons to believe
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that while we have been satisfied with incremental changes all along that these, you know,
#
wide ranging changes can actually happen today. I won't ask you to sort of go into each of those
#
in detail, you know, listeners can just download the paper and read that hopefully. But in general,
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when you have been talking to policymakers or politicians and so on, what's the kind of
#
response that you've got? Like, how likely for example, let's say on a sort of ask you to
#
speculate, but you have all the information you have the best possible information you need to
#
actually speculate on this. How likely is this to actually be implemented on a scale of zero to 10
#
by say, 2020, 2027, five years from now? Very low, very low chance of it being implemented. But
#
the you need one state, you need to have one state that has a vision of what its electricity
#
sector could look like in the context of a climate transition. And, you know, take the four
#
industrialized, most industrialized states, you know, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka,
#
they all stand to lose their industries stand to lose if they aren't in a more green energy
#
environment, as we were talking about earlier, because they are exporters, people will stop
#
buying their products, or they'll have taxes imposed upon them. So there's a good reason for
#
them to potentially look into doing it. Some states might want to do it because they want to
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have a target that is well before 2070. And they want to score political points there. But I'm
#
most heartened by a specific development that's happening under the aegis of the Paris Agreement
#
and COP26, which is that a deal has been struck between South Africa, on the one hand, and the EU,
#
the US and France and Germany in their individual capacity, by which eight and a half billion
#
dollars is going to be given to South Africa to move from being 80% fossil fuel to much more
#
renewables based over a certain period of time. That's in an MOU phase now, in two years time,
#
they'll come out with details, there'll be lots of problems, maybe it'll take five years to happen.
#
But there's a deal where if a state could conceive of a plan based along the lines of the ideas that
#
we have in this paper, a state could go with that to the EU and to other such people in the world,
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to John Kerry's team, etc., and say, look, we've got this plan. Can you find us some money to
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finance this? Now, that money has to go through the central governments, foreign money can't go
#
directly to a state government. But then if the EU were to go to the central government and say,
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look, you're already pro-privatization, you're already pro a lot of these ideas, you've got
#
these commitments internationally, which you've made, the states have not made. We've seen a good
#
plan for this state, we want to finance that, allow it to happen. If that then happens, then
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you get one state, one state happens, it's a success, you find money coming in to enable
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the transition to happen, and then you'll have potentially investment because that transition
#
has happened. And then you might have an effect on other states. As I say this, I realize that it's
#
extremely speculative and the chances of it happening are very small, which is why that's how
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I started my answer to your question. But this is one of the most plausible parts potentially that
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I see. I don't agree with you at all. Okay. I think that we are at the dying phases of the old
#
paradigm. The old paradigm is passed, it's sell by date. And there are inexorable pressures that
#
are messing with the old paradigm. And every year the pressure on the old system gets worse. So
#
there will be a market for ideas. And there will be many, many attempts all across the country,
#
different, different states will try different, different things. And there will be many experiments.
#
And I think in the end, we will end up with this kind of answer. I think we are at the cusp
#
of that transformation. Sentence in the paper is that men and nations will do the right thing
#
after trying every reasonable alternative. People and nations, you got to watch out for
#
this kind of thing. I'm on the original Churchill text. Okay. So I think that we are at a
#
transformative point in the story of this field, that there is a state control system and it is
#
trying to adapt what best it can. But there is just so many things going wrong under its watch.
#
And finally, as Akshay said, if you are Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, the very GDP
#
of these states is exposed to good quality, reliable electricity and export markets. And
#
the ESG world matters to the companies in these states. So all those forces are coming together
#
in these four states. And there will also be some other states that are facing this similar mix.
#
I don't know how much you believe in this yourself, but you don't have to worry. I'm
#
still going to continue working with you on this despite that, despite my relative pessimism.
#
Yeah, no, even though you disagreed with each other, my instinct is to agree with both of you
#
in this way that, you know, as that old cliche goes, that some of us tend to overestimate the
#
short term and underestimate the long term. And I think, yes, we shouldn't overestimate the short
#
term, as Akshay, you pointed out. And as you pointed out, we should not underestimate the long
#
term either. A couple of sort of final questions before we kind of wrap it up, because whatever
#
the, you know, the energy industry outside might be like, I worry that you guys are running out of
#
energy. We're not that old. So one, I want to go to nuclear for a second, because the more I read
#
about nuclear and think about it, it seems to me that that could be one kind of game changer,
#
which just makes this whole question moot. I mean, we were talking about Michael Schellenberger's
#
work before the recording, and I'll give suitable links. And there's also an excellent op-ed in the
#
New York Times co-written by Steven Pinker a couple of years ago, which kind of spoke about that. Now,
#
people think about nuclear and they say, oh shit, the dangers and all that. But those dangers are
#
massively overstated in the sense that one of the things that Pinker and his co-writers pointed out
#
in the op-ed was that if you look at the total number of people who died in Chernobyl, including
#
the several thousand from cancer, that's the same number of people killed by coal emissions in one
#
day, right? Nuclear energy is by far orders of magnitude safer than any other kind of energy.
#
In fact, even Chernobyl was really caused by a dysfunctional bureaucracy and nuclear energy is
#
really sort of, you know, the safest kind of power generation that exists today, as in fact,
#
France, where you're from Akshay, has kind of demonstrated and seems to be winning that argument
#
with Germany, which we were talking about earlier. So what are your sort of thoughts on this?
#
Well, one, I think there are two sets of risks with nuclear. One is the one you mentioned,
#
which is the danger of fallout and having disasters. The second is the more unseen risk
#
of waste disposal. So there was a pretty good article recently, I think it was in the Financial
#
Times, I'll find it and send you the link for it so that people can read it. But it's an article
#
which talks about the dangers of storage of waste or nuclear waste. There are caverns
#
underneath certain towns in France and in the desert in, you know, in the US, etc. That's a
#
bigger problem. But the way I look at it is this, and it might be, I might be accused for being
#
slightly flippant or technologically deterministic about it. But if we accept that climate change is
#
an existential problem today, then you shouldn't be ramping down on nuclear for sure. You should,
#
what Germany did, I think was wrong, because it is today burning coal. It's burning more expensive
#
gas and arguably it's more diplomatically, it's more open to being arm twisted by Russia than it
#
otherwise would have been. So I'm saying kick this, kick that problem down the road. It's not
#
not, you know, generally recommended that you do that. But kick that down the road,
#
sort out the climate change issue, and then figure out what you're going to do about that. That's
#
one. And secondly, there is promise with small, small scale nuclear. There's some promise with
#
the Holy Grail of fusion. So you know, we don't know how that will go. But I think that we need
#
to seriously consider it because the alternative is a little hard to contemplate, which is that
#
we'll go up in smoke. And I just like to quote from that op-ed since you mentioned nuclear waste,
#
where Pinker and his co writers write quote, nuclear waste is compact. America's total from
#
60 years would fit in a Walmart and is safely stored in concrete cast and pools, becoming less
#
radioactive over time. After we have solved the more pressing challenge of climate change,
#
we can either burn the waste as fuel in new types of reactors or bury it deep underground.
#
It's a far easier environmental challenge than the world's enormous coal waste, routinely
#
dumped near poor communities and often laden with toxic arsenic, mercury and lead that can last
#
forever. And the forever is in italics, which, you know, NYT doesn't normally,
#
I don't think newspapers use italics. I want to worry about the behavior of real
#
world states and political systems, and about the bureaucratic competence that
#
set the stage for Chernobyl. So I have the highest respect for the engineering capabilities and the
#
state capacity in Japan. Okay. And yet, A, we got Fukushima, which was just a horrendous disaster.
#
Where the tsunami killed people, the first say the Fukushima leak didn't.
#
But then B, political systems respond to these things in ways that are less than rational. For
#
example, apparently, nuclear reactors were closed down all across Japan at the time of
#
the Fukushima crisis, because people just panicked. And hundreds of people died of cold
#
in that period, because energy supplies to households were cut off. Okay, so there is
#
nuclear energy as an engineering construct. And then there is the bureaucratic incompetence
#
about how it is dealt with. And then there is the knee-jerk and extreme reactions of political
#
systems to extreme threats. And under the third category, I would put the decision by Germany
#
to mothball the nuclear industry in response to Fukushima. Under the third, I would put
#
the less than sophisticated responses of large numbers of countries to a threat like COVID-19.
#
Governments, political systems don't fare well when faced with risk. And the concerns around
#
nuclear energy lend themselves to panic, and the entire posturing of a political system that,
#
oh, we are so great, we are on top of this. And when you bring this kind of worldview to
#
a place like India, I would worry even more. That Chernobyl bureaucratic incompetence, you know,
#
it could happen here. A political system overreacting, you know, it could happen here.
#
So while I love and admire nuclear technology, and there is a lot to be said for technological
#
change, I'm a little nervous about how this could play out here.
#
But the thought just comes to mind that even if you solve for climate change,
#
how will you solve for human idiocy? Maybe climate change is solving for human idiocy.
#
Okay, a couple of final questions. My penultimate question is this,
#
that you've come out with a paper. It's a great paper. Everyone should read it. And obviously,
#
the download link and everything will be in the show notes. Two part question, a two part
#
penultimate question. So this is not the end. There is more after this. And the two part
#
penultimate question is that one, where do you plan to now go with this ideas in this sort of
#
body of thought that you guys are building? And two, if any of my listeners want to be part of
#
this, if they're enthused by this, they want to be part of this in some way, maybe to research,
#
maybe to fund, you know, what do they need to do? Oh, wow. Thanks. Thanks for that. We,
#
this is really the starting point. And as I said earlier on, we are really still learning a lot
#
in this process. We are still convinced with the power of the intuitions that went into
#
writing the paper. So there may be some tweaks to be made to the way that we put out the solution,
#
but what all of that will require is a lot of research, digging much deeper into each of the
#
different topics of the chapters in our book, again, in our paper. And sure, if there are people
#
who want to help in doing that, we'd be more than, you know, delighted for that to happen. And we
#
can provide some links for that. So what we're going to do is that we're planning, you know,
#
we're still in the sort of early stages of figuring out exactly how we're going to do this,
#
but there will be research. There will be outputs of that research. There will be a lot of conversations
#
with a lot of people who know more than us about various different aspects of this process. And
#
what we're going to try and do is try and be a filter for both for ideas and people to come
#
into the more into the public space so that this debate becomes more mainstream. Climate change is
#
never going to be an election issue in India. I mean, not in the foreseeable future, but at least
#
for the people who care about these kinds of issues, it needs to be with a sharper focus on
#
what the facts are, what the realities are, and what the possibilities are. So there's going to,
#
as I said, research, there will be output in the form of articles, there may be interviews
#
and conversations that we have with thinkers on the field. And then we'll try and distill those
#
and come up with a sharper plan and maybe with more detail on how to sort of go from here to there.
#
You'd like to add to that, Ajay? Yeah. So we're dreaming that we will build
#
a research program around this field. We recognize that it's a vast and sprawling landscape.
#
We hope to learn the field in great detail, and then we hope to invent and create new knowledge
#
that will help in thinking about these things. We hope to build knowledge and build community.
#
And we would love to have interest and involvement from the people listening to this podcast.
#
And I'm sure you'll help them find us. Yeah. I mean, you should give me some kind of contact
#
link, which I can put out there. So even people who want to fund you and not just volunteer for
#
research purposes can do so. And it also strikes me that if you're listening to this and you want
#
to figure this shit out as an intellectual challenge just to understand all of this,
#
I'd also say that in Service of the Republic, your book and all the previous episodes you've
#
done together are great because it struck me that on a subject that I didn't know,
#
I knew practically nothing about the energy sector. You took a framework, which I am kind
#
of familiar with, and suddenly everything kind of made sense. And this framework is something
#
that can be applied to so many things about the world and help us understand it better.
#
So I think that that is a worthwhile journey to go on for its own sake. My final question to both
#
of you would be that I often end the show by asking my guests to recommend books that they want
#
everyone to read. Like it doesn't have to be an all time favourite thing. It could be something
#
you read recently which struck you or a book that you're so excited about. You just want everyone
#
to read it. So I'll start with you, Ajay. Kim Stanley Robinson, Climate Science Fiction.
#
Okay. Well, you know, I've got back to proper reading or reading of other things than work
#
related stuff after a long time and I've dug into all sorts of... I didn't read fiction,
#
Amit, for years and I'm getting back to doing that and I'm really enjoying that. So when I
#
travel somewhere, I like to pick up a book from there. So recently I picked up, we were in Lisbon
#
and I picked up this book called Death by Intervals, which is by Jose Saramago,
#
who won the Nobel Prize and all of that. And the premise of the book is fantastic. The first line,
#
I think, is the next day no one died. So it's about a country where the next day no one dies
#
and what the moral, ethical and fantastical implications of that are. Then I started reading
#
this series of mystery stories by Andrea Camilleri, the Italian author, the Inspector Montalbano
#
series. So Shape of Water, Terracotta Dog. And frankly, I've bought a stack of them.
#
And my promise to myself is for every two or three other books that I read, I'll allow myself to read
#
this because this is like, you know, it could be binge reading very, very easily. And I've
#
got an addictive personality. So that would be a rabbit hole from which Ajay would have to come
#
to Paris to pull me out of. I also read a very interesting book called 21 Bites, very recently
#
by Jeanette Winterson, the author, which is actually a book on AI. So she read, I never know
#
how to pronounce his name, Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil, you know, the singularity is here. She read that
#
book and she got fascinated with the whole idea of AI and then dug deep into it by reading about
#
it for years and then has written a series of essays on it. And they're very well written.
#
You know, I'd read other stuff on AI before, but this is the first, the most accessible reading
#
that I've done on it, done by an outsider to the field. And actually that's a bit of what we are
#
doing. We're slight outsiders to our field and maybe that will give more clarity to people
#
who aren't familiar with it. But I loved that book. And this year, I expect to follow through
#
on some of these themes. But long-term, one of my most favorite books for a fairly non-religious
#
person is Report to Greco by Nikos Kazantzakis about his spiritual journey. And it's the most
#
phenomenal spiritual journey type of book that I've read by, again, a fantastic author. So that's
#
one that leaps to mind. But there's, you know, the reason I'm talking about recent ones is because
#
there's so much reading you do over the years. And you wonder whether you would go back and have
#
the same view of the book today as you had then. It was like amazing and fantastic. And maybe today
#
is not so much. Books are always contextual. It's about the you at a certain point in time.
#
The right book has to hit you at the right time. And Seven Lessons in Physics by Carlo Rovelli,
#
who's a professor at the University of Marseille. And he wrote seven Sunday articles for an Italian
#
newspaper on the biggest issues in physics and even for a non-scientist like me, phenomenal reading.
#
Lovely. I can't wait to read all these books. And if you like Andrew Camilleri, you should read
#
Michael Dibdin. Have you read Michael Dibdin? No, I haven't. Aurelio Zen, similar kind of writer.
#
You'll love that also. You know, next time we meet, I'm going to ask you about your running,
#
because I know that's a big deal in your life. And in fact, Ajay was telling me earlier,
#
you have to tell me if it's true that during lockdown, when all the flights were short,
#
you wanted to come, but there were no flights. So you actually ran from Paris to Delhi. Is that true?
#
No, but well, you can, people can imagine whatever they want of that. But what I did
#
do in the lockdown, first lockdown in Delhi, and this is really bad citizenship, I ran every day,
#
I ran 100 days straight, because I was just, I would have gone mad if I didn't. And I went out
#
early and I made friends with the cops and the cop said, no sir, it's good for your health.
#
So I've done all sorts of crazy things to run, including, you know, back from, coming back from
#
Bombay at night and running from Chanakya Puri to my house in the middle of the night to get my run
#
in. So it is, yeah, that is a slightly more, you know, irrational area of my life. But yeah,
#
I can't live without it. No, no, not irrational at all. You're inspirational now to me in more
#
ways than one. So guys, thank you for coming on the show. This has been such a great conversation.
#
Thanks, I'm always happy to be here. Great fun. We've gone for ages. I never thought that I could,
#
I would have lost it. Thanks so much. Thanks.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, check out the show notes, read Akshay and Ajay's paper,
#
enter rabbit holes at will. You can follow Akshay on Twitter at AkshayJaitlee2. You can follow Ajay
#
at Ajay underscore Shah. You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-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
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production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount
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you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
