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The scene in The Unseen would not exist if not for serendipity.
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Five and a half years ago, I congratulated a friend on his podcast.
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The owner of the network he was with said, hey, why don't you try podcasting?
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We started talking and the show was born.
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I've elaborated on that origin story in episode 200 and 258 of the show.
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The point is that it began because of a happy accident and I was open to that happy accident
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Since then, many episodes of the show have happened because I left space for serendipity
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as my guest today would say.
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I met someone interesting at a gathering or I picked up a book casually somewhere or I
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entered a rabbit hole and found an interesting person waiting for me.
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Being an introvert who doesn't like to party, I don't quote serendipity as much as I would
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But so much that is good in my life began as a happy accident.
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The friends I have, the books that shape me, the ways in which I changed as a person.
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So even though I often like to be alone, I also try these days to leave a little space
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for these accidents to happen.
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John Lennon once said, life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Abhijit Bhaduri, who started off living a conventional life, made a little
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space for serendipity, kept himself open to new experiences and shifted neatly from a
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corporate career to the creator economy.
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Abhijit has written many books on his journey, the latest being Dreamers and Unicorns, and
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they all come as a culmination of a process.
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First, he leaves himself open to experiences.
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Then he learns from them and forms frameworks to understand them.
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After that, he applies those frameworks in other contexts to understand the world and
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his own self a little better.
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And finally, he teaches them to others, either in real or virtual classrooms or through books
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I found this process fascinating, and I loved hearing about Abhijit's journey.
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Before we get to that, though, a public service message.
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The 23rd cohort of the online course I teach, The Art of Clear Writing, is now open for
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It's spread over four weekends, has much interaction, exercises with feedback, and culminates in
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a vibrant online community featuring students from the 22 cohorts before this.
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It costs Rs. 10,000 plus GST or around $150.
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You can go to IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing to register.
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And even if you're listening to this late, I conduct the course every month.
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So go to that link for more details, IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing.
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And now let's take a commercial break before we talk to Abhijit.
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Technology, design, innovation, they all come together in K-Nest.
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Abhijit, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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Thank you so much for having me here.
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You know, I really enjoyed reading your book and watching all your videos and all of that
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because you are doing something so well in that, that I kind of aspire to and try to
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do myself, which is that you look at the world through broad frameworks.
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You've taken a step back.
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You know, most people, they're just involved in the everyday running of the world and all
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And you've taken a step back and you're looking, you're getting meta.
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You're looking at first principles, you're applying them to everything that you see.
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It is not only in your field, HR, which you're an expert in, but you can extrapolate any
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of them to a whole bunch of things.
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Like while reading your book, I was like, ki haan, this is a thought I have had about
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And now I see it in this context and all the dots are kind of joining.
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So I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.
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But the part of it that I'm looking forward to is really not about that.
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You know, these days I love kind of getting into people's early lives and memories, their
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childhoods and all of that, because I think in this modern world where we are always stuck
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in the immediate moment and we take everything, every change for granted, I think we often
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forget how much our lives have changed.
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Like I'm 48 and I look back on how I used to live in the eighties and nineties and all
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Ki abhi toh we have all the music in the world available to us.
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Tab matlab you managed to get a mixtape together which you wanted.
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It was such an achievement.
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You know, it was a way of wooing someone, in fact, making a mixtape for her.
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You know, you're giving a part of your soul.
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You know, so I love to sit with guests of my vintage or older and just kind of talk
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about those times, not just in terms of a nostalgia for artifacts, ki cassette toh after
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all is an artifact, but you know, a certain way of living also, kyunki unde no kya tha
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you don't have a smartphone, you don't have constant distractions, you're forced into
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me time, you're forced into a kind of therav and all of that.
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You know, you're forced to spend more time with yourself.
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You're forced to talk to people.
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You know, one of the happy, one of the joys of doing this podcast is that I can sit with
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people and I can talk to them and I can make a connection, otherwise too much of the time
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we're on a laptop with this illusion that ki hum toh connected hai, humare toh itne
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dost hai, but you know, it's getting more and more disconnected from the real world.
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So tell me about your childhood, you know, when were you born, where were you born, what
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were your early years like?
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So when I think of childhood, it's almost like a collage of memories.
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You know, my father was in the railways while I was born in Kolkata, but you know, I spent
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the first four or five years of my life in many different places in southern India because
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dad was part of southern railways.
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And by the time I was closer to, you know, four and a half, five, he got shifted to northern
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railway and we started our life in the north.
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So we first went to Bikaner, we stayed there.
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I have very couple of snatches of memories from that.
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From there we went to Delhi, which is where I went to school first.
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And then dad somewhere, you know, by the time I was in the fourth standard, he got transferred
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to Jodhpur, which is where I spent about four years.
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And I also met my future wife there, you know, so I was all of 10 and that's, so yeah, no,
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we didn't start that early, but I met her there, then got back to Delhi again.
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And Delhi was where while dad changed, you know, within Northern Railway and the board
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and all of that in multiple times, but I was there in Delhi and grew up, school was in
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Delhi, went to college in Sriram College of Commerce, did economics and then went to XLRI
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Jamshedpur, which is where I fell in love with the place and came back to Delhi when
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I did a degree in law in the evening and well then from there it's been like in multiple
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cities, you know, so I was first in Delhi, then I went to Kolkata, then I went to Jamshedpur,
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then I went from there to Ahmedabad, from Ahmedabad to Mumbai, Mumbai to Malaysia, Malaysia
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to US, US to Gurgaon, Gurgaon to now Bangalore and Bangalore has been home for past almost
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Did that early moving around, you know, in a sense set you apart from the other people
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around you because in that time you don't have the internet, you don't have that exposure
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to the world, so in a sense you're limited and you're shaped by geography, what is around
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you and your peers and all that and I wonder for, you know, people whose parents are in
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the services or in the army and they're moving around and all that, would you say that in
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some ways that, you know, you look at the world a little differently and perhaps you
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realize that only in retrospect obviously, but do you feel that had any part in how you
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I certainly think that, you know, for me I was a very deeply introverted kid though anybody
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who sees me today will cannot imagine that, but because of all this moving around in different
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places and schools and, you know, localities, I was a person who found a lot of friendship
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amongst books, not friends.
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So I had very few friends till the time I was in class 11, 12 and all my friends that
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you see, you know, are largely from the time either, you know, one or two from the times
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in school, but most of them are college and beyond.
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So when I think of friends, I really think of them more from, let's say the time I started
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doing my post-grad, you know, so that's where, so over time I've developed deeper friendships.
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The most people say that it's harder to make friends when you grow older.
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My French circle has sort of really grown much later.
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My childhood was really, you know, spent in a lot of reading.
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I read a lot of Bengali books first and then I went on to reading the usual English literature,
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you know, which is common, you know, the usual classics and everything.
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I started discovering Hindi literature when I went into school, when I came back from
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Jodhpur in class eight when I started.
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That's when I discovered Hindi literature and I, you know, spent, I think eighth to
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tenth was almost entirely only Hindi literature and then went on to, you know, the usual other
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stuff and that's how it was.
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So are you still trilingual as it were, like my god, reading books in three languages is,
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you know, one of the things I often think is that on the one hand, I am extremely lucky
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to live in a multilingual country, like so many people in Europe can just speak one language
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and all of us can, you know, speak two or three comfortably and perhaps understand more
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and so on and so forth.
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So on one hand, there is that good luck, but on the other hand, I haven't made much of
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it because most of my engagement with the world will be in English, I'll be, all my
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reading now is in English and so on and I feel that that's a loss because when I interact
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with guests, for example, who might have grown up in Hindi medium and I realized that their
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view of the world is also just enriched by the extra angles that they see.
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It is not that, you know, one view is better than the other or anything like that, but
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they've got an added layer and I had an opportunity to get the added layer, but I don't have the
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And in some ways that constrains how I kind of look at the world.
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And in a similar sense, a sense that I get by looking at your career or reading your
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books or watching your videos is that while you have sort of operated at that higher level
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of ideas, you know, that has been kind of given flesh by your actually interacting
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with people all the time, speaking to people all the time, you know, there's this moving
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story in one of your talks or books, I forget what, but, you know, you were in a train once
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you were traveling from somewhere to somewhere and, you know, you fall asleep and when you
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wake up, the train is at a station, there is absolutely nobody there.
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It's a small mufasil thing where no one stops and you realize that the train must have broken
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down and maybe the next train will come tomorrow, you have no information, you have no idea
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You go out, you meet a sadhu outside, he invites you to sit with him and then you sit with
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him and you chat with him and you talk with him and all of that.
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And I found that such a charming and lovely story because to many of us, that sadhu would
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be unseen, as it were, if you look at the title of the show, The Scene and the Unseen.
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So you've engaged, but at the same time you've taken a step back in thought and how much
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of that, you know, what is the value of these kind of engagements and what is the value
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therefore of being comfortable in these languages because these languages really in a sense
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exist in different worlds, right, in a sense you almost have to code shift sometimes.
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So you know, tell me a little bit.
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When you live in different cities, you know, one of the first things that happens is you
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begin to interact with people when you step out of the place.
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And many of these were perhaps not deep friendships in my case, you know, but I think that I lived
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in two worlds, if you look at what was seen, it was specifically the books that I was reading
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I was a big fan of the radio, you know, because in our home, dad was very fond of music.
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My mother played Hawaiian guitar and classical Hawaiian guitar.
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And that's where I picked up my own love for music.
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So I used to sort of listen to a lot of it.
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I would read a lot of books, but I think the only conversations I would have would be with
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the people that I would meet on the streets.
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And you know, so if I would be sent to run an errand, then in which case I would stop
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by and chat with the person who was the shopkeeper, some of the people who were there.
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And that's where I, you know, actually I have been to more homes of strangers in some sense.
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You know, then I have been to the homes of many friends.
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For the simple reason that, you know, somebody would say, come have a cup of tea and we continue
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our conversation and chat with them.
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And because I was really always a fairly quiet, introverted kid, I listened a lot to those
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conversations and that I think shaped my worldview, you know, understanding how people across
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different sectors, different strata, how they lived and worked.
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I think that really shaped my world a lot in terms of what I thought the world was like,
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you know, it was formed by that.
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When you think about, you know, school and college friends, in many ways, when I look
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at the school that I spent bulk of my time in, in Delhi, you know, most of the people
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did come from varying backgrounds.
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But since I didn't have too many friends in school, I didn't really get to experience
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that world a lot and, you know, a handful of people.
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So a lot of this happened through, you know, when I would go and talk to people for some
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of the stuff that I was writing in school or college.
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And when I traveled with my parents, conversations with strangers, you know, that I would have
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in the train, those would be long drawn conversations.
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And somewhere I think my philosophy of living life without looking for a return on investment,
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you know, no ROI kind of a thing, kyo baat kar rahe ho, kya faida hai.
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That just didn't happen because, you know, you were traveling together for a while and
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you shared each other's world, you shared food with each other.
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So it was really, you know, for me, those conversations were really precious.
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So the incident about the sadhu that you mentioned wasn't one of those things where the train
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I used to sleep, you know, I was a really deep sleeper.
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I didn't realize that everybody had left.
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And so then I met this sadhu, as you mentioned, and I spent time on the completely abandoned
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You know, I think no trains stopped there except for these goods trains and all that.
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So I spent time chatting with the sadhu from the street and learned about his life, you
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know, what made him become a sadhu.
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And then, you know, when you are young, you are curious.
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So you ask a lot of those questions that why did you become a sadhu?
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What happens when nobody gives you food to eat?
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So you're right, somewhere it opens up a different world for you.
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For example, when you look at sadhus, that is evidence of the fact that there's a very,
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very large streak of generosity in people because these guys, they don't work anywhere.
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They don't have a source of income, so to say, yet they live.
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And not just one or two.
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I mean, there are thousands of people who do that.
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So there is an element of, you know, generosity.
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This is something when I was back home chatting with my father and I was explaining, you know,
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the tremendous experience of spending time with this sadhu.
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And this was my father's interpretation.
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He was saying that, you know, that's beautiful because this is evidence that there is optimism
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in people in the world that you can share, you know, that people can give without any
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expectation of return or some such thing.
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Even though it's a momentary engagement, you still give to a stranger.
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So I think it was those kinds of things and travel, you know, into the smaller towns,
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especially of Rajasthan, it was really precious because I got a chance to, you know, sometimes
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a car would break down as it was quite common in those days.
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And you have some of the most fascinating experiences of your life, you know.
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So I remember we were going through, you know, close to Pokhran.
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That time, you know, the blast hadn't taken place and it was a little further away from
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And it was a very tiny place called Badariya Lathi.
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It's so tiny that probably, you know, you can't find it in a railway timetable.
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While the car had broken down, there were a couple of us, my cousins and I, we were
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there, my aunt, mother, father, uncles, all these guys were there.
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We were traveling together and, you know, the driver said, there's absolutely nothing
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So we'll have to wait till sunrise and then wait for a car to come by and then get the
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We were waiting there and, you know, there was a villager who was coming by.
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He was walking, perhaps going back home and he stopped to ask, you know, what's wrong?
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And then he said, you know, I can take one person along with the tire to the next village
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where there's a person who can fix it.
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But then why don't all of you come and wait in my home?
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So he went there, he sent his brother off, you know, on a bike and he sent it off.
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So the driver went to get the tire repaired.
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We waited there and he said, would you like to have food?
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And we said, no, no, no, we'll, you know, get back and then we'll have something.
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So he said, no, no, you must have, so the first time you've been here and you must have
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And we were waiting in the courtyard, there was, you know, the lady was perhaps inside
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and she didn't come out, she was still in Gungat.
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And he'd sort of put a set of plates in front of us and said, you'll have to share plates
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because there wasn't, you know, I think there were three or four plates.
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So he did that and he said, I'll just be back, now he's here.
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And he disappeared for almost like two or three hours.
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And we were really, you know, all kinds of emotions go through you that, you know, are
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we in a safe place, you know, what made this person do this?
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Why are we here, you know, has he sort of gone off with the driver and then how long
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When is he going to be back?
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He came back after three hours and he came back and he apologized profusely and said,
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I had gone off to the village money lender because I didn't have money.
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So I had to first borrow money, pick up the stuff and then bring it home to cook.
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So I apologize for keeping you hungry.
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And I was, this is an incident I will never in my life forget that, you know, somebody
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takes a loan to feed a stranger.
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So while the sadhus, you know, story is one story of hope and optimism and generosity,
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but I think that when you look at the generosity of the stranger, who I've never met subsequently,
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who takes a loan, it's a different matter, you know, my parents sort of paid and all
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that stuff, but it's not about whether finally we paid for it or not.
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But the point was this person took a loan to feed a stranger.
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It can happen only, you know, in these places in India.
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And I have so many of these incidents.
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So I grew up with the view of small town India.
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Some of the places I don't have that much of an exposure to villages.
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But when you travel, it gets you to, especially when you travel in a train, you get to have
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the kind of conversations that you have.
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So every time I think of, you know, the visual that comes to my mind when I hear your podcast,
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that these 12 hour, 15 hour, 24 hour conversations are only possible in a train, you know, that
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you are sharing a meal, you kind of, you know, you have a cup of tea, you or she shares a
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story as you are getting off, you get a glass of water.
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So it's a very meandering, slow life.
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And because of my father being in the railways, you traveled quite a bit.
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I was privy to that world.
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So much to think about here.
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And, you know, I had written an essay a while back, which I'll link from the show notes
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talking about the relationship between form and content, where the point I was making
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is that, you know, if I was doing a five minute interview podcast, I'd approach it completely
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I won't even have to read your book.
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I could just, you know, ask you a couple of stock questions.
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If I'm doing a half an hour podcast, and maybe I have to read your book, but I don't have
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And I don't have to think around it.
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If I'm doing a four hour podcast, it goes into a whole different territory where I have
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to actually listen, where it's no longer about, you know, like one of the rules on my show
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is for me, there are no rules for the guests, but one of the guidelines I set myself is
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Just listen, because too many of us in the real world, we, like as Stephen Covey said,
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we listen to respond, we don't listen to understand, right?
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So the ego is always involved in that act.
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And my point was that the form not only shapes the content, it shapes a person, because I'm
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sure I've become a better listener and more patient and more open because I'm doing this
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week after week after week.
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And what you just said is almost like an extension to that, but taken off to an entire society
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that you travel in trains and you have these long expanses of time and it's an age before
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smartphones and you're surrounded by strangers.
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So you talk to strangers and there is that curiosity and you talk about their lives and
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And modern life in the way that I live it is simply not like that.
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Those opportunities are not there.
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You know, I do this podcast, so I have these conversations outside of this, it's not there.
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Outside of this, everything is instrumental.
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You get into an Uber, you go somewhere.
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If you travel, you fly by plane, you're not talking.
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You mentioned somewhere else that you always make it a point to chat with the person sitting
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You know, that's kind of how it is.
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And like you said, I kind of grew up extremely introverted as well where, you know, Satra's
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saying of hell is other people, that that was absolutely how I thought about it.
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And this is something I kind of think about without being able to put it into practice
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that we need to get out more.
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We need to meet people more.
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We need to be more open because I think a lot of the fractures that I see around me,
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like why is social media the most toxic, fractured place?
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It is because people aren't face to face.
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You know, they aren't talking to another person.
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They are talking to some constructed idea of a person and they are going down those
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So, you know, what are sort of your thoughts on this then that it is not just a trivial
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detail that, okay, we had more time than we have less time now.
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But I think just the different rhythms of life have made us different human beings.
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They have made us different people, like, you know, one of my older guests, Prem Panikkar,
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not one of my older guests, a guest I had a while ago, I don't want to call him old.
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So I did a long episode with him, which beautiful episode where he really opened up.
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And there also, he shared an example of a similar act of kindness as you experienced
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in a rural place somewhere.
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And I'm just thinking aloud here completely.
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But I wonder if you are more likely to see this in a smaller town and a rural place because
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your sense of time and again, you spoke, you spoke on how different generations view time
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But even across spaces, it might be the case that people view time differently because
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in a city, there are so many things you can do with your time.
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And it can get frenetic, but maybe in a quiet rural area or a village, there aren't so many
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things you can do with your time.
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So therefore, it becomes more meaningful when a stranger appears somewhere.
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And that human contact kind of takes on another quality.
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So I'm kind of just thinking aloud.
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You know, I would say that when you look at the lives that we live in, lead here now in
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the urban areas, a lot of it is, you know, really like social media, Twitter, the conversations
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are Twitter conversations, you know, 280 characters.
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At best, you will ask a stranger, you know, where is this particular address or, you know,
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how do I find this particular person or whatever.
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It's a very transactional conversation with strangers.
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I think the yardstick of, you know, the quality of life comes from the quality of conversations
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you have with strangers, not just with people.
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Whereas in many of these places, as I've traveled through, you know, rural India or small town
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India, et cetera, a lot of it has been with people who are strangers.
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But who have in many ways, you know, opened up their hearts when we have sat and traveled
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together for 24 hours, the train breaks down somewhere and there's a, you know, accident
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Are you kind of, you know, you're stuck in that compartment for another, you know, six,
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seven extra hours and all of it is because of, you know, those conversations that made
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I think when you make space when you travel, so in my case, now, unfortunately, you know,
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the number of times that I travel by train has almost dwindled to a zero.
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The number of times that I travel by bus has, you know, diminished.
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The result of that is your worldview becomes so homogenous, you know, you are not meeting
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people from different societies, different cultures, different social strata.
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You're meeting all the people who speak the way you do, whose worldview is the same.
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They work in the same kinds of places.
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So in that sense, I think there is a poverty of experiences that, you know, you are limited
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So unless you structure it consciously and say that I am going to meet people, you know,
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And the only way that happens is when you build in a space for serendipity, you know,
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you try out different things without really thinking about this whole question, what's
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the point of doing this?
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I think a number of times we shut off our diverse experience because you ask this whole
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question that what's the point of doing this?
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So when you think about this whole philosophy of living without looking for ROI in a conversation,
#
in a relationship, in going to a place and taking a road which is not the shortest distance,
#
most efficient, but perhaps more interesting.
#
So when you go to a city, I mean, there's one way to think about it is you can either
#
do those, you know, seven must-see places in so-and-so city.
#
The other could be to actually, you know, step into a shop and strike up a conversation
#
with somebody and very often starts with a transactional question that, you know, what
#
do I do about this, that and the other.
#
I have seen that most of the times, you know, the strangers will start chatting with you
#
and tell you stuff which you will never find in a regular tool book or whatever.
#
So you discover really to use the phrase that you use, you move from the seen to the unseen
#
when you are seeing it through others' eyes.
#
When you are looking at it from your eyes, you are constantly filtering.
#
You don't actually get to experience too much of something which is new because you
#
see something, you say, yeah, okay, I know what this is.
#
And if I had no exposure, let's say to a setup like this, I would immediately, you know,
#
What do you do with that?
#
Why have you kept that?
#
So those are the questions I would have asked you.
#
But the moment I know what the place is, even if there is something new, there's a great
#
possibility that, you know, I will miss it because I have predetermined in my head, oh,
#
So that's the curse of knowledge.
#
You stop listening and you kind of assume a certain level for the other person too.
#
And in that, you lose out all the details and nuances.
#
Then you are really talking in broad strokes because I assume you know what I'm talking
#
So I mean, this is one of the things I talk to my writing students all the time about
#
avoiding the curse of knowledge, that when you write something, you have a certain understanding
#
So you assume there's a certain baseline understanding the reader has as well.
#
And you kind of take that for granted and you, I loved your phrase, poverty of experiences.
#
And I think this plays out across two dimensions.
#
One is, of course, the dimension you mentioned that you're not talking enough to people.
#
So you're not seeing the world through their eyes and that constricts us like, you know,
#
I did an episode with the writer Amitabha Kumar recently and he said one of the exercises
#
he used to set himself as a young person was he would enter a room and when he would leave,
#
he would ask himself, how much of the room can I remember?
#
And the truth is, even the way our eyes take in information, we only actually notice a
#
few things, but our brain fills in the rest, right, based on what we kind of expect to
#
So like, I think there was a cognitive science experiment where, you know, a group of people
#
were told, okay, here's a basketball game, you're going to watch a video of it.
#
Tell me how many times the ball bounces.
#
And actually what happened was that they managed to count how many times the ball bounces,
#
but they didn't notice a gorilla.
#
And in the video, there was a gorilla walking from one end to the other, chilling around,
#
but they're completely focused on the ball.
#
So that's like the scene in the unseen, the unseen as a gorilla.
#
And I think about this in the context of our everyday lives also, that I might be at a
#
traffic signal in my car and my windows are rolled up and the AC is on.
#
Everything that's happening outside is unseen.
#
There might be, you know, a beggar or with his kid sitting on the pavement down below,
#
I have trained myself to kind of not see that aspect of it.
#
Now, one way of getting past this poverty of experiences, like you said, is just talk
#
Another way is by reading, by reading and showing that kind of interest in the world.
#
Like a friend and I were discussing recently, and I don't know if you've noticed this in
#
the many companies you worked in or whether the thought has ever crossed your mind.
#
And he is a CXO level person.
#
So he said that, you know, when I go out for lunch or dinner with my fellow leadership
#
guys who are all running the company, I don't know what to talk about.
#
It's that same homogenous problem you mentioned, that they're all on that one track and they'll
#
talk about a basic set of cliched things, but he can't discuss books with them.
#
He can't discuss movies with them.
#
You know, all of that is kind of out of bounds.
#
And for him, it was a lament that what is it with us?
#
He asked me that, are we the freaks?
#
And obviously, reading is a way of sort of getting past the poverty of experience.
#
Like we are born to live one life, but through reading, we can live the lives of others,
#
And you've mentioned that reading was a big part of your growing up in all these languages,
#
first Bangla and then English and Hindi.
#
Tell me a little bit about, like first, do you have any additional thought on people
#
having constrained lives in terms of interests, like, you know, in terms of the things that
#
they care about and like, for example, just to stay on this track a moment before we get
#
Earlier, you used an interesting phrase where you were speaking about the sadhu and you
#
said I spoke to him a lot because the young are curious.
#
I had the curiosity of the young.
#
And that's another thing I've noticed, that as we grow older, some of those things that
#
we have as young people, we lose.
#
And some of it is, of course, energy is the biggest thing, but that curiosity also, that,
#
you know, you're always looking around and whatever, and at some point you get jaded
#
And I think that's a terrible, terrible thing.
#
There are other good things about growing up, perhaps, but that's a terrible, terrible
#
So, first, what's your sense of this, that do people just enter a lane and they become
#
like really narrow in the way they look at the world?
#
And two, then after that, if you have any thoughts on this, we can talk about the books
#
You know, when you look at a couple of different things that I've observed that I did my masters
#
from XLR, I went and studied there, I did human resources.
#
Actually, it was called personnel management and industrial relations at that point of
#
Then that changed to HR.
#
Then it's now more contemporary term is talent management, because the view of how we view
#
people not just as resources or things, but how do you view them as talent.
#
One of the things that I think what made XLR at that point of time when I studied there
#
was the way the entrance exam was structured.
#
You know, there was a lot of stuff, you have to write a little essay, there was a lot of
#
quantitative stuff, a lot of convergent thinking, deductive logic, et cetera.
#
But I think there was a place for, you know, we had people who had degrees in literature,
#
you had people who had degrees in philosophy, you know, people who had degrees in naval
#
architecture, very diverse group.
#
Today, you see the entrance exam, 99% of the people in a class are homogenous.
#
There are people who have done, let's say, engineering somewhere and they have come in.
#
So I think when you look at, you know, bringing a lot of people who've been trained in convergent
#
thinking, because in science, there is only one answer, you know, that's the truth.
#
There's one truth, one, we are talking about data, there's one source of truth.
#
Whereas the arts lets you focus on insight.
#
You can say that, you know, 30% people, you know, do this.
#
What does that really translate to?
#
So I think arts focuses on sense making a lot.
#
And when you talk to people who are different, who are very different from the world that
#
you've inhabited, you begin to see a number of things which from your purge, you just
#
So it's like, you know, when you are in, let's say, you are the product of this convergent
#
thinking and you start working, your entire focus is efficiency, which is such a killer
#
that, you know, you're really trying to do.
#
So you always tell people, you know, today when you run workshops on storytelling, one
#
of the things that I noticed people struggle with is when I'm talking to them about a story
#
their first thought is, but you know, my boss always says, don't waste time with stories.
#
Tell me what's the heart of the matter, the essence of it, the executive summary, all
#
of it has taught us not to go beyond a curated version of life.
#
So you don't really have an original point of view because you've not seen other dimensions.
#
If everybody has had the same meal, you know, it's the same two things that have been, which
#
is why families are very homogeneous in many ways, though between siblings, you will find
#
But when you sort of really look at that in organizations today, the survival process
#
is going to be about, you know, nurturing different people, the creative people, innovation,
#
But the organization's cultures are not designed to make those things thrive.
#
Because it's all about, you know, a meeting is about efficiency, you kind of put three
#
items on the agenda, there is no time to actually talk about, hey, but this is something that
#
I heard in the cafeteria, we don't do that.
#
I've never seen an organization which they all do consumer research, yeah, because that's
#
where the money comes from.
#
But you know, I think the real source of insight would come from doing employee research, you
#
know, and by that, I don't mean, you know, employee engagement surveys, which are extremely
#
trivial and sort of fairly, you know, limited in their value.
#
But if you really start to study the people, you won't have to run seminars to educate
#
your leaders about how do millennials think or Gen Z, first of all, these labels don't
#
That's a different matter.
#
But I'm just saying that you would form your own worldview, when you speak to a cluster
#
of your people, not through task, but through relationships, that I first get to know who
#
you are as a human being.
#
And then we can decide to engage together, you know, then I don't need to incentivize
#
you by saying if you did this task, you will get this extra, you know, so the whole process
#
of incentives, and the way we structure, you know, tasks in an organization has become
#
very, very convergent and therefore limiting and very, sort of inefficient, ironically,
#
because the whole quest for efficiency has taken away the possibility of serendipity,
#
you will never discover anything.
#
Because the whole point is you put a research, you know, you put a research department there,
#
you fund it and say, by when will you produce the patent?
#
You can't, then the person is really completing that task, they are not really exploring,
#
so you will not get something which is going to be amazing.
#
And therefore you will feel disappointed.
#
But guess who started the cycle?
#
So I think the opportunity for organizations is to really start building those kinds of
#
places where people can have unfiltered conversations, because you build trust through unfiltered
#
conversations, where I can really tell you what I think, and you listen without judgment,
#
and you tell me what you think, again, I listen without judgment.
#
And that's where you kind of, even though your point of view may be a polar opposite,
#
but we still build respect for each other, which is what happens in childhood.
#
Because you say, he's like this, yes, I understand, but you know what, he'll always say this,
#
That process of acceptance diminishes because you're beginning to narrow down on the field
#
And so you kind of say that if I network with you, which is the air quotes I'm using, networking
#
is always with an end goal in mind, I network with you because it's going to benefit me
#
somewhere, whether five minutes later or five years later, it will benefit me.
#
When you build a relationship, you are in a far more giving mode, because without giving,
#
you can't build a relationship, as one of the guests on my podcast had said something
#
He had said that relationships are based on give and take, but you first give, then take.
#
And I think that in many ways was a moment because it sort of tells you that, okay, this
#
is how people have lived in the past, which is why those people with whom I've had those
#
conversations spread over 20 hours, 30 hours, have been things that have enriched my life.
#
It has led me to live a life which I have not experienced.
#
I've heard about people, movies, books, instances, which I have not been privy to.
#
And those are some of the things that have shaped me in terms of who I was.
#
It's not been so much with my colleagues, et cetera, until much later because that was
#
Living in the hostel in Jamshedpur was a really very strong influence in my life because that's
#
a place where you meet people from all kinds of strata and this is the two-year train journey.
#
You have many, many conversations with them.
#
And so those are things which have shaped.
#
So I think I would sort of say that I'm a product of the conversations more than what
#
I'm a product of conversations.
#
That's such a lovely phrase, a two-year train journey.
#
And I guess then the thing to aspire to is a lifelong train journey.
#
Let's talk about the books now.
#
And I'm also interested because three different languages, right?
#
So what are you reading in Bangla?
#
What are you reading in English?
#
What are you reading in Hindi?
#
What are the memorable books you remember from that time?
#
The very first book that I ever remember reading was a Russian book.
#
Those days, Russian literature used to be fairly accessible because they were, I guess,
#
cheap and readily available.
#
And someone had gifted me this hardcover book with lots of drawings as very vivid as a pink-colored
#
cover and the title was When Daddy Was a Little Boy.
#
So the story was about whoever's written their dad's childhood.
#
I think it was illustrated by a kid because when I recall those drawings, maybe it was
#
done by an adult, but it was meant to be like that.
#
That was the very first book I remember and stories about Russia.
#
In Bangla, simultaneously, the very first book was Upendra Kishore Rai Chowthary, Satyajit
#
He wrote a book which was stories about a sparrow, Tuntudirbui.
#
So it was stories about a sparrow who does a number of different things.
#
And then from there, I think I read a lot through magazines, Bengali magazines like
#
Shukhtara, or for that matter, we used to get this literary magazine called Desh, which
#
is absolutely stunningly well-edited and had all the writers who I discovered in Bengali
#
were all people who wrote in Desh.
#
And there was Shandesh, the magazine that Satyajit Re edited and I used to sort of look
#
at it more from the point of view of the illustrations and that was a big influence and the way that
#
I got fascinated by illustrations, the way Re did it, and I was a big fan of that.
#
When I look at all the stories that he would write about, so I read those, the Feluda stories,
#
I also then started to read, you know, parallelly when I was reading Desh.
#
So in that sense, I think there was a lot of children's literature, but I also started
#
because Desh was available, I started reading a number of these novels, perhaps I should
#
earlier than what I should have read, you know, if somebody had rationed it out and
#
structured it for me, I would have read, but I read, you know, the story of this artist
#
called Milan who wrote about his life in Paris, he wrote about that.
#
Traveling abroad was like just something, when you know that it's a dream which will
#
never be fulfilled, so that element of travel, etc, I lived vicariously because they used
#
to carry a lot of things about when people travel, they would write about those travel
#
So that was one, but I would read all these novels that they would serialize.
#
So you know, even though we lived in Delhi, you know, when I was reading these, I could
#
sort of read, you know, Shishendu, Sunil Gangopadhyay, and Asha Purnadevi, and Navaneetadev, a number
#
of people, you know, you read the poetry of, you know, different poets from the classical
#
to the contemporary, you know, so you kind of got a chance to sample a lot of it.
#
I was particularly, you know, fascinated by a number of Sunil Ganguly's, you know, writing.
#
He remained and one of my regrets is I never actually got a chance to meet him, I was supposed
#
to do that, I was in Kolkata two days before he passed away, and it never happened, you
#
know, one of the regrets I'll always lament forever.
#
And for me, that world was really this, you know, Tara Shankar, I read a lot of short
#
stories of Bonapur, I remember there were some six or seven volumes of his stories.
#
So I would sort of finish each one of them during the summer vacations when I would go
#
to Kolkata and I would read it at my, you know, my grandparents place, maternal grandparents
#
were there, and I would read those.
#
I read Asha Purnadevi had written a sort of series, that was one of the first exposure
#
to learning about the lives of women, she used to write a lot from the woman protagonist
#
I read the usual Shorak Chandra I read, and so those were some of the things that I would
#
say formed bulk of my worldview when I was growing up.
#
I started reading the usual English books.
#
But when I moved to Jodhpur, when I went into Rajasthan, that's when I first realized that
#
I had not read much of Hindi literature.
#
And that's when, you know, we started getting Dharmayog, Saptahik Hindustan, Chandamama,
#
Parag, Nandan, and a literary book, a literary magazine called Navneet.
#
And that's where I first, you know, read stories by Shivani or, you know, when I read many
#
of the other people, I discovered the poetry of various, you know, writers in Hindi.
#
I read a lot of Premchand, which I was very deeply moved by.
#
And I did that, and that carried on all the way till I think I was in class eight, nine.
#
It was again, so I would say until perhaps class four, it was entirely Bengali.
#
And then that stream remained.
#
Then I layered on, you know, the Hindi literature at that point of time.
#
Somewhere Hindi literature took a dip after I finished class 10, 11.
#
I think perhaps from college, I didn't, you know, read as much.
#
But I heard a lot of Hindi on radio.
#
So radio was a passion for me, you know, so I started doing a little bit of work for All
#
And, you know, as a kid, go there and write little pieces which would be read out and
#
feel really nice about it.
#
And then I started, you know, learning some of these shows on All India Radio, which gave
#
me an opportunity to hear the voices that I had grown up listening to, you know, Dev
#
Keenandar, Pandey, Melville de Mello, Shurojit Sengupta, Lothika Ratnam, you know, Boroon
#
These were people I met in the newsroom.
#
I used to read the news for All India Radio at some point of time.
#
And then as I did that, then it opened up my interest in writing, media, drawing, all
#
of that started to come alive at that point of time.
#
So I edited a Hindi magazine when I was in school in 11th and 12th, an inter-school Hindi
#
And I would do interviews with musicians and write about that.
#
So it gave me a legitimate opportunity to go and listen to all these concerts.
#
So I heard a lot of, you know, some of the great.
#
So one of the experiences was my spending time with Pandit Ravi Shankar.
#
I went across, again, I just said that, you know, I'm writing for the school magazine.
#
And there were other people who were there from the regular, you know, big newspapers,
#
But he sort of, you know, at that point of time, he was going to perform at the Swami
#
And he said that, you know, I'm going to rehearse, so if you don't mind, can we not do any interviews
#
I just want to get into the mood for that performance.
#
And I had just finished reading his autobiography in Desh magazine in Bengali.
#
It was called Raghonurag.
#
I still remember it so distinctly.
#
And I had made clippings of that.
#
The entire thing was stuck with a paper clip.
#
And I said, I'm sort of disappointed that you won't speak to us, but you can just sign
#
this because it's something I'll treasure.
#
So he looked at it and he said, where did you read this?
#
So I said, it's stuff that I've clipped, the one or two episodes missing, but I think it's
#
He says, come, come, let's do it.
#
And he sort of went inside and he said, why don't you sit down, are you in a hurry?
#
And who would be in a hurry if you are getting to spend time with the Pandit Ravi Shankar?
#
And I sat down and we got chatting.
#
He was playing, I kept listening.
#
I was just completely mesmerized by that.
#
And he kept talking in between and about his life and this and that.
#
And he talked about what is not there in the book and what he thought about music.
#
And a whole lot of things.
#
It's a bit of a blur, unfortunately, in my head because I was just pinching myself and
#
saying, this has to be a dream, this is not real.
#
So this can't be happening to me.
#
And then he said that, why don't you come in, I'll introduce you to some more of my
#
friends and come over in the evening for the concert.
#
So I said, we tried, but then there were no tickets available.
#
He said, no, no, you come as my guest, meet me at the gate and then I'll get you in.
#
So I was standing outside Mablankar Hall in Delhi and then his car came in.
#
I was there an hour early and then his car came in and he just signaled to me and I sort
#
I had the privilege of seeing Bhimsen Joshi and Kishori Amankarji.
#
And again, if I thought in the morning, if I was thinking this can't be real, then I
#
thought this must be heaven.
#
This is also a desire, right?
#
This is a desire because who can think that this can also happen?
#
So I think it's serendipity.
#
It's just going there, not with necessarily the idea of an interview.
#
And if the interview didn't happen, you kind of say, okay, then what's the point?
#
And then what you get out of it, unfortunately, I didn't record it.
#
I will only, you know, in that camera, which I had, I borrowed my dad's camera, I didn't
#
There was only two shots left.
#
So he had a student, you know, he told, I think his name was Kali Ghosh and I don't
#
I could be wrong on this.
#
He said, why don't you click a photograph?
#
So he took two photographs and he said, oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to put on the flash.
#
So one photo was gone and the other photo I said, okay, you know what, even if I'm
#
not there, let me click this.
#
So I clicked a photo of his, which is I think the only photo that survived.
#
But while I don't have something to show, but the memory of that day that I spent with
#
him was just so incredible.
#
And I kind of think that life was so unstructured that there was place for these moments of
#
serendipity and days of serendipity, not just moments, a day when he says that come sit
#
And so there is no end game that, you know, I'm spending 15 minutes with you, I'm spending
#
It's an open-ended thing.
#
And then, you know, at some point of time, I remember I cycled down home because it was
#
I cycled down and I told my mother that I'm going to go off to this and he said, you haven't
#
I said, it doesn't matter.
#
You know, and I kind of took a bus, went across to Mavlanka and stood there, it was a really
#
hot sun and I was waiting for him to come in, but what a reward.
#
So I think those were some of the things, as I said, that I'm a product of these experiences
#
and you know, all these things.
#
So these, the Hindi magazine, you know, got me in touch with many of these people who
#
were writers, whether it was, you know, Pandit Anand Shankar or whether it was Ustad Amjad
#
Ali Khan, who I got an opportunity, again, similar kind of thing, to spend time and not
#
just a conversation that when did you learn music, you know, the stock questions that
#
Those, I think, have been precious things which are unseen because, you know, it only
#
resides in my head and, you know, it's not on Instagram, it's not on this thing.
#
Today, I think I would put it on Instagram and share it with other people, but there
#
And maybe if you did that, you would lose some of the charm in the moment instead of
#
You'd be trying to capture it.
#
What's the role music played in your life, played and plays?
#
A lot, you know, my father was, so I had this real funny contradiction.
#
My father couldn't sing at all or, you know, couldn't play any instrument, but had a very
#
deep understanding and love for classical music or music in general, I should say.
#
And, you know, whenever we would go to Calcutta, you know, we would go to the HMV store and
#
pick up those 45 RPM EPs, then 78 RPM, you know, the other ones, mid-range ones, and
#
the long playing records at 33 and one third RPM, where, you know, I still remember it
#
was, all of it was entirely either Hindustani classical, there were some bhajans of Pandit
#
Paloskar and, you know, Kumar Gandhari, Bhimsen Joshi, they were, so these were people we
#
heard both on All India Radio as well as, you know, on these albums.
#
Much later, I think we got the very first time I remember getting a piece of Hindi music,
#
Bollywood music, was not from the, you know, so I used to hear it entirely on the radio.
#
The very first one was Devanand's Hare Ram Hare Krishna, you know, when that was there.
#
And my dad was, he was quite experimental in his taste.
#
So he sort of heard it and he said, well, it's pretty interesting.
#
And my mother had always been very fond of SD Burman's music.
#
She would listen to a lot of his old compositions, which he and his wife, Meera De Burman, wrote.
#
Meera and SD put to music.
#
And that was, you know, another parallel sort of track which went in.
#
In the evening, when dad will come back from work, so it was always quarter to nine was
#
the news, nine o'clock was the, quarter to nine was the Hindi news, nine o'clock was
#
And then we would switch to Hawa Mahal and listen to all these radio plays, which is
#
how I sort of became fascinated with the radio.
#
And as I was sort of looking at that, you know, then when that would finish, he would
#
sit down and listen to classical music or jazz or Western classical on some of the days
#
when there were days when they would play that in the evening.
#
And I didn't like so much of the Indian classical music, I kind of never understood it.
#
And it was something that had to suffer because, you know, he would say, no, you have to listen
#
to it before you develop the taste for it.
#
And so I would suffer through that.
#
It was only when I went to Jodhpur that I got a chance to, you know, listen to all the
#
greats of Indian classical music, that suddenly one fine day, I suppose, it's like compound
#
interest, you know, for a very long time, you know, if you say that you will double
#
one paisa every day, and then as compared to, let's say, a 10 million that I could
#
give you today, and what if it's compounded for a month, you know, every day, is that
#
I think in life, whether it's your skills or your interest or your knowledge or whatever
#
it is, your worldview, it's a compounding process.
#
So you hear a certain amount of it before it either makes sense or you like it or you
#
dislike it or, you know, you start to categorize it as good, bad.
#
And that listening to all that classical music on the radio, and one of the things I wrote
#
about my website, the charm of Raghadesh, you know, so, you know, so he was playing,
#
it's in the morning, they would play Vande Mataram in those days, early morning, first
#
thing you would hear is that.
#
And one day he says that, you know, today evening, we are going to a classical performance.
#
And I groan and say, Oh my God, I mean, not again.
#
And then we were at somebody's place.
#
And you know, later on, I kind of discovered that this gentleman was Pandit Nikhil Banerjee.
#
He was staying at this friend of my father's, he used to come and stay in their house.
#
He was a very well-known doctor and he used to stay at that place.
#
And he said, you know, he's one of the greats.
#
So when he sat down to play after dinner, he said, kya suna chahenge, and he said that
#
in Bangalore, Kishore Nagore.
#
And my father said, if I can make a request, can you play Raghadesh?
#
And for the first time, my dad whispered, this morning you heard Vande Mataram.
#
So when he's going to play this, it's going to be disguised, you know, but you can you
#
And then at one point of time, it suddenly clicked.
#
And I kind of, and I really enjoyed that performance because I kept on, you know, trying to find
#
those same notes in classical.
#
And for a very long time, that became the method by which I approached classical.
#
That was like, you know, you hear, and many of the composers those days, you know, Naushad
#
Sahib, S. D. Balman, many of them would use, you know, pure classical music and convert
#
them into, you know, more accessible film music.
#
And so that changed my relationship with, you know, the film music that I was listening
#
because I would find the raag in that film music and the film music in the raag.
#
So it sort of, in that sense, blurred the lines between these.
#
So it was a lot of listening.
#
But I also think that the way I view music, what has changed, you know, those days music
#
If you played music in one house, it was heard by everybody else and was considered to be
#
You know, so somebody likes to listen to Vivid Bharati.
#
Somebody likes to listen to classical music.
#
Somebody listens to bhajans in the morning.
#
Even now, if you go to Calcutta in the morning, you can hear all of that, you know, from various
#
That's what it was, is very eclectic.
#
It was, so my exposure to Western music was only when I came back to Delhi in the eighth
#
standard when I came back and joined the school, I found that there was a set of people who
#
were listening to, you know, groups like the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd and
#
And we had a phenomenal guitarist in our class.
#
And so, you know, he used to play these songs and that's the first time I heard Dylan.
#
That's the first time I heard many of these people.
#
And so that opened up another particular stream, you know, for me and of course All India Radio
#
gave me an opportunity to learn from people who were very accomplished people who would
#
I would sit in, you know, in the studios and listen to these guys and talk about it.
#
So that was how I sort of picked up.
#
I'm not that well versed.
#
I enjoy listening to Western classical, I enjoy listening to jazz and blues and all
#
But I think people who are my friends is the Indian classical rags, you know.
#
So that's how I describe.
#
And then, you know, in Bengali households, you listen to all those usual Bengali composers,
#
Ravindra Sangeet, of course, and then Najul Geeti and Dejendra Lal and Rajanikanth, Autul
#
These couple of these people, you know, this was very much a part of the musical diet that
#
You mentioned and by the way, I found when daddy was a little boy with a pink cover.
#
And the thing is the moment you said the name of the book, I thought of the cover as well
#
because shared experiences, right, if you're growing up in that time and there are Russian
#
books all around and you know.
#
So I remember that book as well and I just straight away googled it and I was like, oh
#
my God, it's like, you know, a portal to my childhood.
#
I have to get this book.
#
And I'm interested in what you said, you know, that point you made about shared experiences
#
that somebody plays a bit of music in their house, everybody's listening.
#
And there are like, there's a larger theme that I see today, which has to do with the
#
crumbling away of shared experiences, but the frame that I've been looking at it is
#
really in terms of the dissipation of the mainstream everywhere.
#
Like in media, you had, you know, you had a consensus on the truth and on what news
#
was and all of that in the nineties.
#
And there's been a dissipation, there's been a decentralization and a net net.
#
I think it's a good thing.
#
Obviously you still have to deal with things like fake news and the fact that we are engaged
#
in narrative battles all the time.
#
There is, you know, a more diffuse sense of what the truth is, but net net, it's a great
#
thing because anybody can get into it.
#
We have the means of production and all of that.
#
And mainstream media is kind of dissipated.
#
Similar thing has happened in music, similar thing in various other fields.
#
Some could argue similar thing with even nation states where governments no longer have the
#
same kind of absolute control that they once did over the people because we are all connected
#
by, we are empowered by technology.
#
We are connected by the internet.
#
We are, you know, almost by default, almost global citizens.
#
And this dissipation is kind of everywhere.
#
And on the one hand, there is this issue that those old shared experiences aren't there.
#
Like one illustration of this is that I spend a lot of time on YouTube and at one point
#
in time I decided ki yaar ye jo right wing fringe hai mujhe samajhna hai.
#
But I don't want it to mess up my YouTube algorithm.
#
So I opened an incognito window and under another account I signed in and then I started
#
exploring these things there.
#
And then after a few days, I noticed something interesting.
#
I noticed that my two YouTubes, as it were, are completely different.
#
One YouTube is just giving me one stream of content.
#
The other one is just giving me another kind of content and there is zero overlap.
#
So you think of a 15 year old growing up today, that 15 year old enters one kind of universe
#
and then the algorithms push the same thing to him and homogenize him in one particular
#
way while his neighbor in the other house could be getting homogenized in another particular
#
way and these worlds aren't talking to each other.
#
So that shared experience where you could tell me about when daddy was a little boy
#
and immediately I connect, right?
#
You can talk about oh, Beatles and Dylan and whatever and these are shared cultural sort
#
of signposts for us that we can all connect.
#
And it seems to me that they sort of no longer exist, that everywhere the mainstream has
#
kind of dissipated and the old way of doing things no longer applies.
#
And of course, you've written at length in Dreamers and Unicorns and spoken about how
#
this is especially true at the level of a company where just the way that you look at
#
a company, there have been different phases.
#
But now it's completely different and there in a sense, you also see that process of decentralization
#
You know, with the gig economy growing, you can work from anywhere, your work can be anywhere,
#
you can get talent from anywhere.
#
So is this broadly something that you would then agree with that yes, the mainstream is
#
dissipating everywhere?
#
And the deeper question then is that what does it mean for us?
#
I mean, I can't figure out if it's a good thing or a bad thing that there are less shared
#
experiences that you know, so you know, when you say when daddy was a little boy and that
#
pink cover comes into my head, it's a shared moment.
#
It creates a connection between us, right?
#
And so I don't know what to make of this that we are on the one hand, our individuality
#
can express itself better in many particular ways.
#
I am not forced into a shared experience.
#
I may not want if somebody at home plays a bhajan in the morning.
#
I don't have to listen to that.
#
I can listen to hip hop in my room and no value judgment.
#
They're completely separate things.
#
So it's a good thing that we can all find our individual selves.
#
But number one, are those really individual selves with algorithms sort of playing such
#
a big role in shaping us?
#
And number two, you know, don't shared experiences matter?
#
So I'm kind of rambling, but I'm just thinking aloud because you're you sparked off this
#
thought when you shared experiences do matter because it gives us a chance to connect with
#
people at multiple levels.
#
And if you if you see the game of Antakshari is so unique to India because we've had a
#
shared experience of listening to the same songs on the radio and then, you know, whatever,
#
we've shared that kind of history.
#
Even now, when you listen to most of the songs that people sing, you know, many of them are
#
And you sort of just, you know, it's not to say that no new songs come in, but, you know,
#
you'll find that beyond the point of time, you will see the number of shared songs that
#
come in drops dramatically from the time when music became an individual experience.
#
What I'm listening to in my headphone is not something you know.
#
And you know, so it's become and that fragmentation shows up in everything.
#
So what happens is therefore, we begin to live in our own bubble and the algorithms
#
And it becomes that bubble becomes a cage at some point of time.
#
Whereas when you are indulging in shared experiences, you are very often stumbling into worlds which
#
you did not plan or you didn't know they existed.
#
And when you do that, that's really what gives you a shared moment with the other person.
#
You know, when I've traveled into places even today, you know, when I travel, I think that's
#
the habit that I've retained, that I will go in and, you know, just start chatting with
#
a stranger in a coffee shop somewhere and then, you know, sit down and then when somebody
#
else comes in and their friends come back and then you sort of become part of this.
#
And as you plan out for this unscheduled, unplanned travel, even when you go to a place,
#
so you might decide that you are going to spend five days in a particular city.
#
But if you actually come to a time where you spend a little bit of time of that, going
#
to places at odd times, you know, in odd places and places where others are hanging around,
#
who don't look like you, who potentially don't think like you, you will discover that city
#
in a manner which will be impossible to replicate through any other experience.
#
So I think when you look at that, every place has an underground culture, every place has
#
a sort of mainstream culture, place has a culture for the elite few.
#
So the social strata gets replicated everywhere, in music and art and cinema and when we live
#
in a homogenous world, we are letting our algorithms decide what we should and should
#
Ironically, the group that fights most for individuality is the one which is most gauged
#
by the algorithm, yeah, because that's what you are consuming, that's what.
#
So I think, you know, so the other day I went in and watched a Tamil movie and consequently
#
now my Netflix feed is sort of loaded with Tamil recommendations, which may be good,
#
which may not be good and I kind of now think that, okay, what do I need to do, you know,
#
to make sure that I get a bigger variety.
#
So either I watch a Korean movie, if I do that, then it sort of gives me, so then you
#
have to always constantly battle, you know, the algorithm, the cage of the algorithm that
#
you do want to be part of, yeah.
#
So I am a big believer in shared experiences because, you know, the other day we were discussing
#
that, you know, the client of mine, he was talking about the number of people who showed
#
So this is the person working in a company outside of India, we were having this conversation
#
on Zoom and I simply said, and the fact that you laugh at this and that guy smiled at this
#
and he said, oh my God, you know, and you know, this is a shared experience, which is
#
impossible to have even within the family today because experiences are not common.
#
You don't listen to the same music, you know, most families don't sit down and watch the
#
same TV shows or Netflix movies or this, everybody has their own account, you know.
#
So it's good for the algorithm because then they get to know what is the parents' choice
#
of movies versus let's say the kids' choice of movies, et cetera.
#
But I think there is an element of human bonding which is missed out.
#
You know, you watch something together, some you understand, some you don't understand,
#
some which is, you know, disturbing content and, you know, so it's all of that, it's a
#
Today it's a very sanitized, structured, cleaned up antiseptic experience which is given to
#
And I think it's sort of become a part of our life today in so many ways.
#
Music has become fragmented, movies have become fragmented, food at home has become fragmented.
#
You know, it's just so many homes where there is no common meal time.
#
So there is no shared conversation because one person eats in their room and another
#
person eats at a different time in their room and some person is vegetarian, somebody wants
#
So great from the point of view of individuality but terrible from the point of view of a shared
#
So I think, you know, those are some of the things I think are worth looking at because
#
shared experiences make you become generous towards people with whom you will never get
#
You know, whereas when you meet people who are homogeneous, there is always this whole
#
thing of networking, as I said, you know, what will I get in return?
#
So I think the opportunity to live that life is diminishing very rapidly unless you hold
#
So when you sort of, you know, if you really look at the number of people you have a conversation
#
with, how many of them are completely different from you?
#
How many of them have professions which you would strongly advise somebody not to pursue
#
How many of them are doing things which are fascinating?
#
How many of them are doing things which are dangerous?
#
How many of them are doing things which are terrible?
#
How much do you know about these elements?
#
Otherwise you are presenting the Instagram view of everybody.
#
This is the view I want you to see of me.
#
You are not really seeing the unfiltered, you are not really seeing the unseen.
#
So I think that's where I view the shift that has happened in the way that we consume media
#
and the way that we meet people.
#
It can only happen through relationships.
#
When you build a relationship, stage one is trust.
#
Without that, I'm going to tell you what I think you want to hear.
#
So I think it's only when you travel together, say three, it's only at that point of time
#
do you really start to discover a world where somebody says that, you know, which sometimes
#
makes you shocked and that's fine.
#
I mean the whole world doesn't have to live by your values.
#
I mean, even though I may disagree with that, I may say this is so patriarchal, this is
#
so this or that, whatever it is, that person's, how do you know your worldview is better than
#
There are hundreds of things in my worldview, which, you know, five years later, I might
#
be embarrassed that I had this.
#
I do have plenty of things, you know, which I think, my God, I mean, that was just so
#
Now that I know a little more, I've modified my views.
#
A person who's very different gives you a chance to challenge your own worldview.
#
Now you might say, why would I want to challenge my own worldview?
#
Then it's a different conversation altogether.
#
No, I love your metaphor of Antakshari in all of this because that is like that, that's
#
such a perfect metaphor for the whole concept of shared experiences.
#
So I have never been someone who takes part in Antakshari because I don't listen to much
#
But for the first time in my life, I think I've now appreciated it that what a big deal
#
And what you said about music also strikes a chord.
#
Like there was this essay Ted Joya had written a while back and he's got this fantastic
#
newsletter on music, which I'll link from the show notes, where he speaks about how
#
old music is dominating so much today.
#
And this has become a big problem for the music industry because old music is vastly
#
outselling new music and what do new musicians do?
#
And part of this is, of course, the sort of lack of imagination on the part of record
#
And part of it is again just, you know, the mainstream has in a sense dissipated.
#
And in an earlier episode, one of my guests gave me this excellent illustration, I think
#
Chuck Gopal did in the episode I did with him about how form is shaping content when
#
it comes to music also, because Spotify pays you after 30 seconds of hearing.
#
So there are now musicians who are now optimizing for 30 seconds as one Beatles cover band where
#
every cover is 35 seconds or so.
#
Because you know, why why give more Spotify pays for 30 seconds?
#
You know, similarly, a lot of new bands by record labels today are told that we don't
#
care what the song is or you know, we don't care about any aspect of this, but give us
#
a 15 second hook that can go on TikTok so people can make videos with it.
#
So your typical way of creation is that whatever else you do, you get that 15 second hook and
#
then you pay big influencers to do TikTok videos around that.
#
And if it takes off, it takes off and that becomes a, you know, a mode of discovery.
#
And you know, you earlier mentioned, you know, buying those long playing records from Calcutta
#
when you went out there.
#
And those are also such an example of how form is dictated what we listen to your earliest
#
form of the LP at the turn of the 20th century can only hold three minutes.
#
So you have the three minute song, then you have, you know, it evolves till you can hold
#
about 40 minutes by which time the three minute has become the radio standard.
#
So there, therefore it becomes a conventional form that, Hey, if you want a hit song, everything
#
And it also cuts to beyond durations, for example, you know, 1920s, the first advanced
#
So now singers don't have to project anymore being cross we can whisper into the microphone,
#
And that changes everything.
#
So you know, a lot of that is kind of happening around us today and I find that interesting
#
But that's perhaps a bit of a digression and as for individuality, you know, on the one
#
hand you want individuality, but on the other hand, you have algorithms forcing you into
#
these directions where that opportunity for serendipity to come in, which you mentioned
#
isn't there because if the first five things I watch on YouTube are what then determines
#
everything else, then there is no free will.
#
I'm just getting, unless I physically search for something, I'm being forced onto a particular
#
track and you know, one of my friends was on the show talking about a long time back.
#
He keeps saying that what we need to do is we need an option to be able to shape the
#
You know, give us a bunch of algorithms we'll choose.
#
So if you, if you just don't want to think you can take your default algorithm, but if
#
you want to tweak it a little bit, you know, people like you and me should have the chance
#
to do that, that 20% I want based on this and 25% based on this and 25% pure dumb luck,
#
give me anything and so on and so forth.
#
And I think that would expand our bouquet of choices, but I don't know how kind of.
#
You know, one of the books that I've just finished reading, in fact, I'm talking to
#
the author on the, you know, shortly on my show, Luke Burgess.
#
So he's written this very incredibly original book called Wanting, and it talks about mimetic
#
You know, when I first saw the word mimetic, I had to look it up and say that is it certain
#
it's to do with miming.
#
And the whole thesis that he has in this book is if you are not conscious, you're likely
#
to not actually exercise individuality because you are sort of governed by what others are
#
doing through various kinds of models, road models, et cetera.
#
And a model is always designed to be replicated.
#
That's why it is a model by definition.
#
And there are lots of very interesting examples that, you know, when you think about the fact
#
that so many people during the pandemic got dogs, yeah, that's sort of when I look at
#
the number of people who used to walk dogs and the number of my friends and people in
#
the neighborhood, et cetera, who got dogs.
#
And each of them perhaps are individual decisions.
#
You know, they've decided that, okay, you know, I want a dog.
#
And I'm of course a dog lover, but you will discover that, you know, there is this unspoken
#
wave which has told people that, well, this is something you should be doing.
#
You know, a certain cuisine becomes popular because, you know, five role models or five
#
people who are super popular post it on Insta with 10 million views.
#
And suddenly you say, oh my God, that's a restaurant I haven't eaten.
#
I must go and eat there because 10 million people have said it's amazing.
#
So I think a lot of our desire when we, you know, so that I think is in Dreamers and Unicorns
#
I talk about one of the big forces you have to really sort of look at is balancing polar
#
So you will see that paperbacks and eBooks will coexist.
#
You will see that, you know, this whole thing of collaboration and competition will coexist.
#
It's a part of human nature.
#
So when organizations put their reward systems to reward the individual and then they are
#
wondering, you know, why don't we do a workshop on team building, you know, take everybody
#
out to the hills and sort of do that and they put them in a classroom.
#
It is not going to, you know, get them a chance to really build deep, meaningful relationships.
#
The only time to give them unstructured time.
#
But the corporates are so enamored by efficiency, this whole thing is, okay, what's the agenda?
#
We'll wake up at five o'clock.
#
Even if it is an activity, which is fun, you know, you will say, okay, everybody has got
#
to get up at six o'clock, five o'clock and then, you know, do yoga together and then
#
And then so it's everything is super structured.
#
So when people are given unstructured time, the first thing that you experience is boredom
#
because your mind is not used to deciding stuff by itself, whereas, you know, when you
#
look at the fact that most creativity comes when you are just sort of lying down doing
#
nothing and I can recollect when I think of, you know, drawing pictures from my childhood,
#
so much of it was just about just lying on the grass and looking at the sky, you know,
#
literally counting the stars.
#
I don't think I've done that in years now, yeah.
#
There was a point of time when we lived in Rajasthan, we used to sleep on the terrace,
#
And it meant you experienced the summer in its true form, you know, so and you used to
#
get a little chilly in the early hours.
#
And this whole notion of it being super hot during the day, it gets cool, then it becomes
#
cold, then it becomes pleasant and then hot again.
#
Then one day you experience this diversity of, you know, the feel on your skin, it's
#
Now what happens is everything is standardized, yeah, so you will walk in from one, you know,
#
your car into the office and it's all standardized temperature.
#
So even weather has become impersonal, you know, so it's what everybody else is experiencing.
#
Those are, I think, some of the things that shape people, so I consciously, I try to,
#
you know, look for people who have views very different from mine.
#
And I remember one of them used to say that on Twitter, for example, if you go around
#
and do a search on something, you know, like, I remember this very vividly, somebody had
#
recommended the name of a person and I typed the name wrong, you know, I misspelt it.
#
And it threw up a photographer who posts about fashion at funerals.
#
My first thought was, that's gross, I mean, why are you photographing people when they
#
are in their saddest moments about fashion?
#
And you know, and he's written a number of, you know, short little things, he says, look
#
at the fact that it's completely color coordinated.
#
Look at the fact that, you know, they've taken the trouble to sort of add that little frill
#
and this and that and posted a whole lot of this.
#
Now obviously for me, it was an act of serendipity, I mistyped the guy's name and then I saw
#
But that brief moment opened me up to the fact that such a thing was even possible.
#
But because I didn't follow the person, it's gone forever, right?
#
So sometimes I think that some of the best things that I've seen in my life, I have
#
no record of, I mean, this was one such example of that, or, you know, camera technology was
#
so primitive that, you know, many of them, even in one of those cameras, which we had
#
access to, there were small cheap cameras, you know, Agfa, Klik 3 kind of cameras.
#
And I have experienced the sunrise at Tiger Hill, which is such a gorgeous experience.
#
But I have no evidence of that because my father used to say that, you know, he used
#
He would say that 36 photographs of a vacation, what are you going to do with so many photographs?
#
And so our notion of scarcity versus the time of abundance that we live in also changes
#
how we view things, right?
#
When you live in a world of abundance, you deal with things and experiences very differently
#
because you know it'll come back again.
#
You don't hang on to something and make it part of your life because this is going to
#
If I miss watching the movie, I know in like, you know, whatever, a couple of days, it'll
#
be on one of the OTT platforms and I will watch it there.
#
So there's no hunger for a shared experience either.
#
And in any case, the pandemic sort of killed whatever little was left of it.
#
You know, you don't go to a movie theater to watch something.
#
You kind of say that, okay, I'm going to watch it because I can sit in my living room and
#
switch it on when I want.
#
There is a freedom to it and there is a certain experience of watching it with people laughing
#
together and when you watch movies in some of the smaller towns, when you go and watch
#
a regional film, it's an experience that cannot be replicated at home.
#
It will never be because you find there's a person who's selling tea, who's also got
#
that little push pump stove, you know, used to pump into it and sort of making tea out
#
there to serve to people as it is happening.
#
And when there's a song which is there, people are sharing coins, they go up in front of
#
Where would you see it in a sanitized environment today?
#
So the homogeneity of experiences is where you are losing your ability to be creative.
#
Creativity necessarily comes from a variety of those experiences where you are living
#
life without an ROI and you are connecting the dot maybe through a short form post or
#
you are sort of drawing from those many experiences.
#
But it begins because you are having that kind of a time to explore or stuff like that.
#
You know, I love your phrase living life without an ROI and I'm just, you know, here's what
#
sometimes happens, right?
#
As I grow older, I am thinking that too often, too much of our lives, we live without being
#
in the moment, not in the typical banal sense, but for example, like your thought about the
#
sunset sparked it off, that you're there, you're watching a sunset and at the same time
#
in the modern times, there is that imperative that I want to capture the sunset, right?
#
So you put it on Instagram or wherever or equally, so here you're experiencing something,
#
but you feel that you want to also capture it.
#
And equally, you might want to do something, but you might feel you want validation for
#
it and you want people to kind of, you want their approval.
#
And this added layer of wanting to capture, wanting a validation, I think takes away from
#
It takes you out of the moment because you want something else out of it.
#
You know, one of the sort of conclusions I have come to, and it's a double-edged conclusion,
#
is that look, the only way to happiness, and I know you have detailed thoughts on happiness,
#
we'll also discuss, but for me, the only way to happiness is really to be in the moment
#
and take that happiness in the small joys.
#
And I cannot capture them, and even if I were to capture it, like let's say I'm at my window
#
and I'm looking at out of the night sky and I feel nice, and then I say, oh, I got to
#
So I take a selfie like this, me looking out of the night sky or whatever, and then I see
#
Does it make me happy to see the selfie later?
#
No, I'm not even remembering a moment of happiness because at the time of taking the selfie,
#
And my sort of complicated thought about happiness, which I can't figure out, is that if you're
#
happy however you define it, you can't actually be conscious of it.
#
The moment you think, I am happy, you are out of that moment, and it doesn't kind of
#
Like this is very morbid, but a couple of days back, and I don't know why it comes to
#
me, I met a bunch of my writing students, and we were chatting about a bunch of things.
#
And I brought up the point that when someone dies, their whole life amounts to how they
#
felt in that last second.
#
In the sense that if I am going to die now, I'm on my dead bed, my whole body is screaming
#
with pain, I'm feeling bad.
#
Everything before it really is meaningless.
#
I could have had a happy life and contributed to a lot of people, but that is it.
#
At that moment, I'm reduced to that, and that's it, and vice versa.
#
Which is why I sometimes think that the best way to go is just to go suddenly.
#
You know, something happens and you're gone, and there's kind of nothing there.
#
But it also tells me about how everything is transient.
#
And you can't actually, you know, what is a happy life then?
#
You look at happiness always in retrospect.
#
You build narratives in retrospect.
#
But I don't know if it even makes sense to talk of it in that manner.
#
Because for me, therefore, you know, if you think too much of happiness, if you overthink
#
it, then it kind of doesn't work.
#
It's a bit of a rambling, but I know you have far more structured thoughts on happiness
#
and the distinctions between joy, contentment, happiness, all of those things.
#
But you know, with or without reference to that, what is your notion of happiness and
#
how has it evolved over the years?
#
Like when you are a teenager and you're thinking of yourself, what are the things that you
#
would have then said that, huh, this will make me happy?
#
Like, obviously, all the hasrat things I'm guessing going abroad or whatever, you know,
#
And what would your conception of happiness have been then?
#
And how has it developed now today?
#
So I think I didn't quite have a very formed view of happiness.
#
I had things which I, you know, and it was in a whole range of things, things that I
#
think some of the happiest things that happened to us are when we don't record them, you know,
#
because the act of recording is performative, that you are now, as you said, that you watch
#
the stars in the sky, your first thought is, boss, what an insta photo this will make.
#
So now your entire process of enjoying that, you know, starlit sky is gone.
#
You are now trying to figure out if I do this, then I must, you know, reduce the exposure,
#
reduce this, then it shines like diamonds and I'm going to put a witty line.
#
Would it be Lucy in the sky with diamonds?
#
And then you kind of say, okay, that would be fun, then I can put the track on that.
#
And that I think will get me more hits than if I didn't put.
#
So you know, you've stopped your engagement with the star finished long back.
#
And so the things that you experience, you know, there's sometimes when you, you know,
#
the people that I've never taken selfies with are some of my most precious relationships.
#
You know, my grandparents were such an integral part of my life.
#
I don't have too many photos of them because, you know, many of those photos for whatever
#
reason got lost over the years and therefore I struggled the other day in some magazine
#
They said, you sent me a photograph of yours from your childhood.
#
And I struggled with this because, you know, so many of them have just that en masse bunch
#
of albums got lost somewhere.
#
So my childhood is completely undocumented in terms of photographs in that sense.
#
And I think which is why I cling on so desperately to all my memories, you know, and I've seen
#
that with so many people who tell wonderful stories.
#
And many of this is completely undocumented.
#
So you will see a version of life which you have not seen because you are experiencing
#
that moment through this person's eyes and that, you know, when that person was eight
#
years old and when they talk about this, you begin to experience that world which you were
#
not privy to, but you now see.
#
And that happens when you have these unfiltered conversations.
#
I have seen that when you talk to somebody who's a stranger where you don't, you know,
#
take their phone number and email address because you are not going to go back and connect.
#
That person maintains the anonymity and therefore opens up and shares so much, you know.
#
And that, I think, is the most fascinating thing that you meet people who share a part
#
of their life knowing fully well that it's a gift I've left with you and you've perhaps
#
shared a gift back with them and nobody's ever going to go back and said that I gave
#
a more, you know, expensive gift as compared to the other.
#
It's just that you've traded moments with each other which are precious.
#
So I think when you look at your life as a collage of these precious moments, I think
#
that's, to me, what gives me happiness today.
#
Over a span of time, has it changed?
#
Things that I've aspired for have changed, you know.
#
I remember when I got my first salary, I bought myself a set of very good speakers.
#
That was the first thing I purchased.
#
And then I was playing those tapes through a car stereo.
#
So then there's this friend of mine who came and hooked it up and, you know, he put a little
#
bit of something, something, and he put an amp, he put all this.
#
Those are all things that I gathered over a span of time because, you know, at that
#
point of time, this was a luxury and I spent my entire first month salary with that music
#
But it gave me so much of joy even though the quality of music, you know, tapes used
#
to hiss and, you know, when you created a mixtape, it's not pristine quality that you
#
get today digitized and cleaned out.
#
But it is like the joy of eating at a roadside stall, you know, is it the world's most hygienic?
#
The answer is absolutely no.
#
The answer is absolutely yes.
#
So I think, you know, somewhere when you sanitize something over time, it sort of, you know,
#
loses its charm in some way because the moment any experience becomes so sanitized, there's
#
nothing unique and distinctive about it, you know.
#
And I think that is the opportunity that we can still create.
#
So it is possible to be happy, but you have to be happier on your own terms.
#
You have to be happy based on what matters to you and how you would structure the day.
#
And therefore, in some sense, being without necessarily looking at a role model that all
#
my friends do this, you know, they're all signing up for ABC, I should be doing the
#
same because I think they're doing the right thing and I'm not.
#
So I think each one lives on their own path.
#
But when you're traveling on that individual path, you come across millions of travelers.
#
And those moments that you spend with them are the precious ones, but the moment you
#
stop to take a selfie and record it, it in some senses, yes, that selfie will be shared
#
and remembered for a long time.
#
But you know, and sometimes what it does is it makes you lazy because you stop noticing
#
a lot of things because, you know, you can always go back and look at that photograph
#
and relive that, but you are reliving a very sanitized experience.
#
You are not reliving the smell of that place.
#
You are not reliving the temperature of that place.
#
You are not reliving the sounds that were there.
#
So I think those are some of the things that you lose out as you are looking at this whole
#
notion of trying to do the perfect thing, the most well curated, which is, you know,
#
what are influencers doing?
#
They are telling you what you should be experiencing.
#
In some sense, you build a relationship of trust with the influencers.
#
Therefore, you say, if this guy is saying it, there must be truth to it.
#
Because there's such an abundance of everything that you always feel that, oh, have you heard
#
Now, that's one reason for me to go back and listen to it.
#
So, you know, when you put the show notes, I take a lot of time to go through and click
#
on many of those, not necessarily all of them, because some of them are rabbit holes by itself,
#
you know, so you go to get caught in that.
#
But there is this entire thing that you want to read about this person, be my guest and
#
watch it, read it, experiencing it.
#
So I think those are some of the ways in which you can do that.
#
Today, of course, you have the advantage of reaching out to many people in unstructured
#
You know, so on an audio platform, you know, LinkedIn audio gives me an opportunity to
#
connect with people in an unstructured way, just switch it on and say, whoever is there.
#
And it doesn't have to be that, but the moment you announce it, yes, you are right that there
#
might be 500 people in the room at that point of time.
#
But the conversation of depth that you will have with that one person is probably just
#
So, so I think building space for serendipity without any structure, without anything is
#
probably the way I would define happiness.
#
For me, those moments which have been completely unstructured have given me a worldview which
#
I have not had the privilege of experiencing, good or bad.
#
Even when somebody shares something which has not been perhaps the most pleasant human
#
experience, you are still getting the privilege of reliving vicariously that experience which
#
Just sinking allowed, I was chatting with Amitav Kumar in this recent episode and one
#
of the themes we discussed was how if you write every day, you are not only understanding
#
the world a little better, you are deepening your sense of the self, you are growing as
#
a person because you are reflecting on things, you are writing that act is important.
#
And similarly, it struck me that every time you talk with a stranger, the same process
#
is happening because you are getting a window into something else which is outside of you
#
at that moment and that interaction also can deepen your sense of the self and your understanding
#
And taking that Instagram selfie takes you in the opposite direction, it freezes you,
#
you know, you are no longer looking outward, you are like focused on that process ki selfie
#
Now since you praise serendipity so much, I will tell you a joke about happiness which
#
a friend told me yesterday and I just thought of it and because you heard this joke serendipitiously,
#
you will perhaps like serendipity a little less because it is truly awful but now I have
#
I thought of it when you said Lucy in the sky with diamonds because this little joke
#
about happiness is about two girls called Julie and Shuli.
#
Okay, so the joke goes like this, the story goes like this, the wise moral lesson goes
#
like this that Julie and Shuli are two sisters and Julie is beautiful, she is just gorgeous
#
like you look at her and time just stops and Shuli is not so beautiful, I mean from inside
#
she is beautiful but outside matlab ho thora ho nahi hai.
#
So you know everyone thinks that oh okay are these two girls going to go in different directions
#
and Shuli is also kind of conscious that this is going on, she has always got this complex
#
that Julie is so beautiful and all that and this affects her personality also because
#
well Julie naturally more confident becomes outgoing, Shuli a little withdrawn into herself.
#
So they go to college and they go to college and already you can make out Julie as a happier
#
person if you are talking about happiness, well Shuli's notion of happiness is tied
#
up with her sister right and they go to college and Julie is popular, she is you know the
#
bell of the ball and all of that, everybody is booing her, Shuli is kind of randomly doing
#
her thing in a corner, spending more and more time in the library because hey lack of confidence
#
and all of that, so they kind of drift apart in terms of personality also.
#
And eventually they find boyfriends and they get married and Julie of course marries this
#
really rich hunk from an industrial family and he can have his pick of girls but of course
#
he picks Julie because she is just so incredibly gorgeous right and gregarious by now because
#
confidence matters, so he marries Julie and Shuli marries you know a standard accountant
#
kind of guy, not very rich, not very well to do but it's like you settle right but
#
she is obviously jealous of Julie but she is like okay I will settle and then after
#
their respective marriages you know Julie's birthday comes around and it's about 16 days
#
before Shuli's birthday, so in Julie's birthday her husband gives her this beautiful diamond
#
necklace which is glowing and it's like you turn off the lights and it's like you know
#
it's a necklace of stars and it's just beautiful, it's gorgeous.
#
So Julie shows it to Shuli and Shuli's happiness quotient just took a big dip because she is
#
like oh my god diamond necklace, so she tells her husband that you know has a scene and
#
her husband is a really nice guy, maybe Shuli doesn't deserve the guy but he is a really
#
nice guy and he is like no I love her very much, I have to make her happy again notion
#
So what does he do, he mortgages his house, his ancestral home or whatever he had inherited
#
this small sort of thing in a corner of the city, mortgages it, gets her that same necklace
#
and at that moment Shuli is happy and because Shuli is happy and her husband is a nice guy
#
and he loves her, he is happy in her happiness right, it's a beautiful story so far developing.
#
Then a couple of years pass and then on another birthday Julie's husband buys her this massive
#
palatial house and it's just a beautiful house and she takes Shuli there and she says look
#
what a beautiful house and I will have a house warming in this and that and all that and
#
Shuli is now feeling horrible and her husband a really good guy who genuinely loves her
#
still sees Shuli's unhappiness and therefore her unhappiness leads to his unhappiness and
#
he thinks I have to get her a house like this.
#
Now the point is his existing tiny house is mortgaged, what's he going to do to get a
#
house like this right, tough times he sells a kidney, he sells a kidney and he gets her
#
a house like that so Shuli and Julie are now in the same swank neighborhood and Julie's
#
got a beautiful diamond necklace and a big house and Shuli's got a beautiful diamond
#
necklace and a big house and the husband has mortgages and one kidney less and whatever
#
Then a couple of years later Julie's husband buys her this incredible bus right, it's almost
#
like a home in itself like you enter the bus and there's a living room, there's an area
#
where you sit and there's actually marble inside the bus, it's like really swank, the
#
bathroom fittings and all are incredible, it's like being in a luxury five star hotel
#
like even beyond that, it's like hasrath, it's hasrath okay, that bus is like hasrath
#
and there's beautiful pipe music playing everywhere like not the kind of crappy music you would
#
have put in your car after spending a month's salary, it's really good music yeah, beautiful
#
system everything is like absolutely top class and Julie's damn excited and she calls Shuli
#
over that come and look at this and Shuli is like fuck because no more does that diamond
#
necklace give her happiness, no more does that big house give her happiness, now she
#
So she tells her husband and her husband who's finally mid career whatever, he's doing things
#
even with one kidney, he's kind of managing and things are okay, he calls every relative
#
and takes every loan he can, he goes to every bank, he does all kinds of things in fact
#
I should not tell you this because it's confidential information and it's kind of sad but he defrauds
#
his company in a way that is guaranteed to get him into trouble later but he does it
#
because he thinks that I have to be happy, my happiness lies in Shuli's happiness, the
#
bus will make her happy, so he buys this bus for Shuli right.
#
So now both the sisters have a diamond necklace which sparkles like the stars in the sky when
#
you turn off the light at night.
#
I kind of think I know, quiet, quiet, quiet, don't spoil it for the listener and they
#
have this beautiful house and they have these two buses and one day Julie says you know
#
what I think both the couples we should go on a vacation in this bus and let's go somewhere,
#
they name some cliff or whatever and they go on a vacation in the bus and they leave
#
the buses by the beach and they go and they swim and it's a beautiful time and they're
#
in the moment, there's no structure, they're not taking selfies, they're happy, Shuli is
#
really happy and then they get back to the bus and both the buses have been stripped
#
bare, thieves have broken in, they've taken everything, the carpets are gone, the marble
#
is gone, the bathroom fittings are gone, the sofa is gone, the piped music system is gone,
#
who would take that, you know it's just an additional logical hassle to install it somewhere
#
else but it's all gone, everything is gone, both buses are completely bare and Julie's
#
sitting there, standing there by the beach looking out into the sea and Shuli from behind
#
walks through the sand leaving footprints as one tends to do in the sand, you might
#
be aware of this tendency of sand and she goes over to Julie and what does she say to
#
I know what you're thinking, you're thinking what have I gotten myself into, I need a break
#
so let's take a quick commercial break and we'll come back and talk more.
#
Do you want to read more?
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#
I read more books but I also read more long-form articles and essays, there's a world of knowledge
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Welcome back to the Scene in the Unseen, I'm chatting with my guest Abhijit Bhaduri who
#
just had a shared experience of a Bollywood song before we came into the break.
#
So I don't think he's going to be raving about shared experiences that much after this.
#
You know before we get back to your career track and get back to the linear track and
#
all of that, another question I had with reference to your earlier days is that did you see yourself
#
as a writer slash story teller in the early days because you're reading a lot, you're
#
reading in different languages, you are a creative person and you've gone on to write
#
But at that early stage as you were growing up and all of that and Bengalis do tend to
#
see themselves a little bit as artists, I mean I'm half bong but I kind of consider
#
myself more bong than anything else.
#
So that thing is there in the culture that you know writing, creating those are things
#
So how was it like for you, what was that journey through?
#
You know when I was growing up, my father was, he had a master's degree in English
#
and he was a gold medallist from Calcutta University, he was really very fond of reading
#
all kinds of languages as I said that I still remember we had the fattest Hindi dictionary
#
at home you know and so he used to sort of get me to read a whole bunch of things.
#
We used to get the illustrated weekly and I distinctly remember his method would be
#
that he would ask me to read some of these editorial pieces in a newspaper or some specific
#
writers you know, Khushwant Singh, Mulk Rajan and various people who used to write for the
#
And he would you know get me to summarize something, sometimes he would say write an
#
essay on a similar topic and I used to find it so completely pointless that you know what
#
is this even helping me do you know.
#
But that was his obsession, he just really wanted to inculcate a love for the language
#
and reading and all that and you know and this whole thing that I read a fair bit but
#
more importantly he would sort of correct all the errors and the structures, he would
#
say that's just so wordy, I still think you know I write very long sentences so I must
#
take your course and improve my writing.
#
But yeah that was you know the whole process but I think there was a grammatical part of
#
learning the language and writing but I think a lot of my writing was encouraged by my grandparents
#
you know so when I would travel a lot you know in these little experiences I would write
#
about them to my grandparents.
#
My grandmother would have a collection of these inland letters and you know envelopes
#
and sheets, all of it she would have it stuck in a file and she would mark them as some
#
are sad stories, some are funny stories and she would have these little things and she
#
would when she would get visitors she would you know completely bore them to death by
#
reading out some of these letters I wrote to them.
#
But that in some sense encouraged me to write because she would say you know it was fun
#
to read this and write about this and then at a point of time you know when I started
#
to draw a little bit I would illustrate those letters and draw little cartoons on the margins
#
So I started doing those then I would occasionally draw and send them something and write a little
#
So that was really a lot of the writing which is for others to read but I think I sort of
#
had my first short story published when I was in again eighth or ninth in school in
#
So I wrote that and I don't even remember what it was except for the fact that when
#
it got printed suddenly I discovered that seeing something in print gave me a real thrill
#
so then I would draw for some of these magazines and newspapers and all that.
#
So Hindustan Times for example used to have something called a children's corner which
#
I used to you know submit some drawings for and all that it was good fun.
#
So that was my indulgence that I would you know read something try to illustrate it and
#
Those were the pieces when I started editing the Hindi newspaper magazine which I did in
#
school in the 11th and 12th.
#
There was a time when I wrote you know a little more edited a little more stuff and then I
#
started also writing in English at that point of time you know I was writing little scripts
#
for those radio plays etc.
#
That you know got me to spend a lot more time writing English.
#
Bengali unfortunately my spellings in Bengali are terrible and you know so and it's an effort
#
for me to write so I never really got down to writing in Bengali but I think when I started
#
reading and writing I think there's a ratio until you read a certain amount you cannot
#
and should not be allowed to write you know so I think there's a little bit of that and
#
then you know progressively then I started writing for different kinds of magazines and
#
things here and there and once you get published I think you kind of get a feeling that all
#
right now I should write some more.
#
So it's it was that I published my first work of fiction much later when I was already working
#
and all that so that was a much later journey but yeah I wrote a lot of letters I guess.
#
My father would insist on my writing even though when I was living away from him I used
#
to call him every weekend but he would always say that no I mean this is not it does not
#
absolve you from this whole thing of writing.
#
He loved reading so letters and he wrote extremely well so he would say just write to me and
#
then there was a point of time when I founded a bird and I would tell him that look I can't
#
be writing you know like long letters to you every week that's not possible because I'm
#
also talking to you and so much is not happening in my life that I can tell you that this happened
#
So he says no nothing has to happen for you to write you can write about whatever strikes
#
your fancy what are you thinking about that's far better I would rather you sort of did
#
that rather than to be like a diary that today I went out to eat and tomorrow I so it's not
#
This whole process I think also in some sense built in this whole discipline of that writing
#
demands you know so then you have to sort of have a routine so I would feel very guilty
#
if I didn't write to him because I knew he at one level he would say it's not something
#
that I'm imposing on you but I love to read what you write for me and that I think built
#
the discipline of writing which I'm now the grammar that I learned or you know the prose
#
and exposure to various other great writers that I think I owe to him you know whether
#
it was my exposure to all the various novelists that I read but I also think that in parallel
#
I owe my love for music to my mother who would play a lot of these things and so I think
#
it was a great happy blend of literature and music in that sense.
#
Would I imagine that I would have wanted to be a writer?
#
I don't think I ever thought I have a book that I can write.
#
I was happy being a columnist you know so the occasional thing that appears in a newspaper
#
was good enough for me.
#
Writing was again I stumbled upon it you know so that's why there are so many roadblocks
#
in my writing I only stumble you know.
#
I don't know what you're talking about because I really enjoy dreamers and unicorns but you
#
know one recent lament of mine has been that back in the 80s 90s we used to write these
#
wrong letters right you sit down to write a letter to your friend perhaps with actual
#
pen and paper which even slows the process down further there's a lot of consideration
#
that goes into it and more than that there is this very touching connection you're making
#
while in which by the act of writing a letter to someone and spending that time and sharing
#
your thoughts you are also telling them you are important to me and when they write to
#
you they are giving you the same message and that is a connection and today in a world
#
where so much is just instrumental we are all the time in these short crisp emails or WhatsApp
#
messages are you free at it or I hope you're feeling better and all of that and we've kind
#
of lost that like I advise my students all the time to journal which in a sense is you
#
know writing to themselves and deepening their sense of themselves but you know just thinking
#
aloud maybe I would add to that that you know write to someone you love write letters the
#
way they kind of used to be because we don't do that enough and looking back do you feel
#
that you know the voice of the letters you wrote to whoever to your dad or to your friends
#
whatever to your grandparents the voice was different from what you would go on to publish
#
and write later because you know what was that like because the good part of something
#
like that where you're writing a letter to your grandmother is that you're not self-conscious
#
you don't have to posture you don't have to pretend you don't have to impress her you
#
are her grandkid she is impressed you don't have to do that what was your writing like
#
So a lot of it was you know my experience of meeting different kinds of people in different
#
places you know so when you live in some of these smaller towns my dad's work would take
#
him to even smaller places so you know the experience of being in those kind of things
#
where you know sometimes and photography was expensive you know it was certainly something
#
that was reserved so in some sense I kind of think about it as in those days we used
#
to hold our breath when a photograph was taken so that it doesn't get spoiled now you can
#
sort of take a photograph of your big toe and put 35 of those photographs anywhere that
#
you wish so we live in a world of abundance where you're far more careless with the resources
#
those days you know so what would happen is if let's say if I wrote on a white sheet of
#
paper and I would draw the you know those railway the signs of the platforms you know
#
which reads out in yellow and black in different languages so suppose you were in some place
#
where there's a third language is normally Hindi English and whatever regional language
#
it's there so when they do that I would try and mimic that particular script so it didn't
#
make sense to me of course I knew what was the station which they were talking about
#
but I would sort of mimic that particular script and draw it out in that sense and then
#
I would color it yellow and sort of put that so a lot of those letters you it was a labor
#
of love you know you spent a long time it would take a fraction of a minute to read
#
but a lot of care had gone into you know illustrating that and perhaps showing one person sitting
#
there etc so this whole act of writing drawing writing drawing is a very seamless process
#
for me because it was easier to draw than to take a photograph and put it there and
#
photograph would mean that you know you wait for the reel to finish and then that's rationed
#
out and then you kind of you know give it for processing and then that takes a couple
#
of days and then you come back and then suddenly you discover you what you wanted to send that
#
particular film is role has got spoiled so drawing was far more certain I could do it
#
there in the moment and that I think you know and then I would do I would copy a number
#
of you know like I started by copying RK Laxman's drawings or caricatures I would do that then
#
I would do a lot of Mario Miranda's drawings and I started to discover that he was very
#
good as an illustrator not I didn't like his cartoons so much but I loved his illustrations
#
you know I just thought they were magical and then after a span of time then I started
#
getting fascinated with Ajit Nainan who I you know we had the privilege of spending
#
a little bit of time because I was doing a series for this magazine called Target which
#
was then edited by Rosalind Wilson and she had a phenomenal set of people who would were
#
very encouraging of you know people were just beginning to write a little bit here and there
#
and I got a chance to do that kind of a series around drawing cartoons how do you draw cartoons
#
and Rosalind said that since this was part of the India Today group she said why don't
#
you go and spend some time with Ajit you will enjoy chatting with him that was my you know
#
there's again one of those things which was phenomenal because again somebody whose art
#
I tremendously admired so I think those are some of the things finally it comes together
#
in the form of a book at some stage but there is a whole lot of you know Riyaz that goes
#
into it before you actually write a book I think that's a much further down the path
#
so did I think of being a writer absolutely I wanted to be a writer but I didn't know
#
I would write a book the format was not very clear in my head I felt like writing a story
#
so I wrote a story then at some point of time wrote a sequel then I wrote you know non-fiction
#
as a way to challenge myself then I tried to illustrate it and I wanted to do a graphic
#
novel but you know there was so much of content that I wanted to write about so the book Digital
#
Tsunami happened in that format then of course this one Dreamers and Unicorns so that's been
#
the progression of writing let's kind of talk about your journey now but before we kind
#
of begin talking about your career and your journey one tendency in you know a lot of
#
your writing is that as I said at the start of the episode that you're taking a step back
#
and you're kind of taking a broader view and building sort of frameworks and the question
#
here is that was that a tendency that was always in you to sort of try and figure things
#
out and therefore go back to first principles or try and figure things out at a meta level
#
and whatever and then if you have that kind of thinking or that habit of thinking like
#
that then you can take a step back from anything and just look around and kind of apply those
#
so was that something that was there from the start or is it something that evolved
#
in the course of your career and you know like when I think of HR most people have a
#
really bad impression of HR people I have to confess till I saw your talks and I read
#
your books I was also like that these are the you know I won't use the word but go
#
ahead say yeah no no never but the point being that and this is true of everything
#
I guess not just of HR the point being that you can approach a subject or a field in two
#
ways and one is that while learning it you in a sense learn it in a shallow superficial
#
way and you kind of ratta maro everything that you have to ratta maro in the good Indian
#
tradition and then when you get out of there and you join a company you tick boxes things
#
are expected of you and you tick those boxes so that your boss is saying okay you've done
#
your work or you know when it comes to what you expect from others you are making them
#
tick boxes and you're not kind of really thinking deeper and going beyond that and I think most
#
people perhaps fall into the rut when it comes to simply thinking like that going through
#
the motions doing what has to be done in any field not just HR and what others would do
#
is kind of take the initiative think a little deeper think beyond those boxes that you have
#
to tick and ask that does this really make a question is it justified in this situation
#
why are these boxes here in the first place where have they evolved from you know what
#
can I do different how is the world changing all of that you've clearly done all of that
#
that's your whole body of work that you've kind of come out of it but when you started
#
were you kind of in the first category and you managed to move into the second category
#
do you think that some people perhaps get trapped in the first category like maybe if
#
you're studying a subject you don't like then you don't want to do the deeper thinking
#
you're like shit okay I'm doing this because I have to learn the skill and I have to make
#
myself employable so I can buy surely a bus later on down the line so you know a lot of
#
circumstances so tell me a little bit about that like I know it's all in retrospect hindsight
#
metho kuch bhi bol sakte hai but looking back on yourself were you that kind of person who
#
is you know taking that cross-disciplinary meta view you're applying concepts from one
#
thing to another thing and already your reading as we discussed has been brought you know
#
so what is that like take me a little bit through you know when I got into XLR a to
#
pursue a career in HR personnel management as it was called at that point of time I had
#
absolutely zero exposure to corporate India and as I wrote in my first work of fiction
#
mediocre but arrogant the line that I used there was that I knew of three companies Tata
#
Bata and Sunlight you know so it I was that naive about the entire thing my father was
#
in the government that's the only world I had seen but I didn't want to be you know
#
in the government and this was the new thing in some sense it was curiosity not necessarily
#
because I had a great formed opinion about what it would be like and so then I kind of
#
you know stumbled into it again from the point of view of writing exams and this and that
#
and I was not very academically inclined when I was growing up in college etc. College for
#
me was one of the most enjoyable experiences and I think it sort of you do meet a amazing
#
range of people you get to experiment a lot with your life and it's done when you have
#
no responsibilities you know college in India such a unique experience Delhi University
#
at least the time when I grew up was very not so much you know structured that you now
#
need to do this that and the other it was things that you did because you enjoyed so
#
I spent a lot of time in theater and college and you know I was part of the debating society
#
I got exposure to a number of people I read I traveled I did all of that so it's really
#
that academics was a very small part of what was there you had to do that in order to survive
#
so it's you know so that was the way I look at it. It was when I started working for Tata
#
Steel when I went there you know I was part of the setup which was being run by Dr. Jeetu
#
Singh who was then the you know when I was a student at excel he was teaching me he was
#
the dean at excel he had moved to Tata Steel and I was part of that group he was doing
#
and I had never been in training and development before in my life you know I had done regular
#
HR you know industrial relations factory strikes all that I was familiar with but when I joined
#
there you know so I was delighted to get the job for one simple reason it was in the excel
#
campus so it was just you know if you visualize a building shaped like a u one wing of that
#
one arm of that u was the excel ri library the other arm of the u was the office where
#
I went so I would sort of saunter in and out of you know that office and walk into the
#
campus for a cup of tea to have a cigarette and all of that was you know that just came
#
was the big motivation for me to take up this role when I went there he sort of said that
#
why don't you teach a course in learning and development now in retrospect perhaps he did
#
that because he realized that I was horribly illiterate about what I was supposed to be
#
teaching in the day during my day job so I while I protested but he said I've already
#
committed to teach one semester and then we'll look at what can be done you know that was
#
a transformational experience for me because teaching people you know where you've been
#
on the other side of the bench you realize that you know how the students can be completely
#
cruel towards you know profs who don't know what they're talking about or who are sort
#
of saying something which is obvious and mundane and all of that so you just put a tremendous
#
responsibility on me you know that I just felt I had to make up for lost time so during
#
the period when I was to actually offer the course I sat down and really structured my
#
thoughts I read and I created a coursework and all this stuff I first tried to you know
#
just look for the subject outline when I was a student and then I discovered that I didn't
#
have that so I had to start ground upwards and put that and the whole process of working
#
with some of the other professors there you know why we became great friends with and
#
those were people who sort of I learned continuously from I had great colleagues who I learned
#
from and of course you know this access to the excel library where there was no requirement
#
it was your own drive to you know that if I'm saying something and somebody says how
#
do you know that can I at least go back and say yes I actually read that that I think
#
was a real transformational phase for me and I developed the love for reading business
#
books that was when I first read otherwise I had no exposure and had no interest in reading
#
any business book whatsoever I think the very first business book that I would have read
#
after the excel library would have been years later when I read in search of excellence
#
or something to that effect that was the first business book that I read because the whole
#
notion in my head was who reads business books for fun I mean how can that be anything because
#
for me the yardstick was always you know the literature that I had gone through and then
#
I kind of thought that if I can bring literature and you know the my love for movies and all
#
that into the teaching it legitimizes my watching a movie you know while I'm sort of doing that
#
and that's what I started experimenting with you know so I remember when trying to explain
#
group formation you know to the to the class that I was teaching you couldn't sort of
#
just be pompous and talk about various models because I didn't know enough of them and
#
more importantly they were like friends you know most of them were like my vintage you
#
know they may have been a year or two younger than me with that there was it that forced
#
me to sort of say not talk down to them but how do I translate it in a manner which connects
#
so I started playing a lot of you know Bollywood movie clips and all that and started explaining
#
for I distinctly remember playing Mirch Masala you know the final scene where you know Smith
#
Apartheid is locked up in that fortress and they're trying to sort of do that and the
#
conversation that it emerges from or using Ek Rukav Gafas, twelve angry men to explain
#
group formation when you are looking at that I mean those are ways in which I started to
#
bring in a different discipline and as you start looking at doing stuff like that you
#
know I thought if I can bring in my drawings and you know create cartoons on those little
#
slides you know that would be fun to do so I started doing all of that again so once
#
again you know I carried back my movies and my drawing and my literature and everything
#
back into the business world that I was doing and I think that when you start to bring in
#
a multidisciplinary perspective and try and sort of explain it you can make it interesting
#
and simple to understand without really thinking that you have to dumb it down I also think
#
that you know one of the things that I heard from one of my professors he said if there
#
are 35 ways in which you can build something you must know all 35 it is only then that
#
you can simplify it and say okay forget all this here is how you would do it and that
#
is something that is straight with me I can't say that I can do it equally well all the
#
time but that's what I want to do you know so the sketches are really a method of simplifying
#
that this is how I've understood it and let me simplify this and make it accessible to
#
you so that's really the way I think so it's more of multidisciplinary point of view which
#
sort of gives you a very different interpretation and which is where I think if you really want
#
to do human resources or talent management as we call it today you must have a love for
#
reading sociology or anthropology and psychology and sort of bring all that in because it's
#
only then that you understand that it's really all fitting into one common kind of big picture
#
and then you are less bothered about this is the rule this is the thing which I think
#
a lot of times people resent but one of the reasons why people resent HR people is because
#
any function which is a boundary setting condition we resent we resent boundaries you know so
#
two functions in the organization like finance and HR they are both boundary setting conditions
#
finance for some reason we believe because it impacts business that you can't go and
#
spend this no I'll not let you buy this equipment or you can't get a second laptop because you
#
just bought the last one a month back we understand those boundaries people will put that there's
#
a limit to what you can spend when you travel people get that I think when it comes to organizational
#
norms a lot of these have actually been obsolete for a while because many of these norms and
#
practices were set up you know at the time of the second industrial revolution and many
#
of them are just you know little modifications of the same thing continuing and when a lot
#
of people protest those kind of things that's a sign that it's probably obsolete and it
#
needs to be revisited you know the pandemic was just that I mean it just challenged this
#
whole view that you can't work from home because the whole belief was that working from home
#
means you don't want to spend your privilege leave you're just sort of you know telling
#
your boss that you're this an extra day off that you're giving me and the bosses would
#
say that I've had bosses who said work from home was meant to be taking a day off without
#
applying for leave today we know that that's not true so the whole notion as it has been
#
challenged and it's gone off now we can now that this has disappeared now we can really
#
sit down and say what do we need an office for do we need it to go into our work which
#
I want to do in private because I'm much more efficient or do I want to go to the office
#
to socialize if you sort of really look at that educational institutions the value of
#
that no longer lies in the content that they share out it lies in the social interactions
#
so whenever there is a workplace then you are looking at the social side of work and
#
that always is enduring but to do the work in that setting is not necessarily a great
#
option so number of thoughts one I love what your boss did where he made you teach as a
#
way of learning like I you know the best way to learn something I have realized is to teach
#
it so you know these days sometimes I do that that I try I'm getting into something and
#
I'm trying to learn it and I tell myself and I'm not actually intending it but I tell myself
#
that I will teach a course on this you know because then that forces me to go into it
#
with that you know I have to understand it inside out from first principles and be able
#
to answer any question on it and so I think that's a very enlightened thing that your
#
boss did by pushing you into that and what you said about drawing connections like when
#
I was editing the policy magazine and we were of course writing about serious things public
#
policy this that but so I started this section called houseful economics where the idea was
#
we would take cinema and we would illustrate lessons of economics through cinema I don't
#
remember specific examples I think Salman Khan in one of his films said manager ek baar
#
commitment kar li to mai apni bhi nahi sunta ho and we use that to illustrate the notion
#
of constitutional rule setting where it doesn't depend on a person but you have these other
#
normative whatever so sounds complicated but it didn't sound so complicated then I want
#
to dig down on this very in this larger thematic question where you spoke about how a paradigm
#
that exists today came about at one time because of a particular reason but it's not relevant
#
anymore it's outdated and you know you mentioned that you know workplaces or educational institutions
#
can be ways of either socializing or if you're going to an Ivy League university it's not
#
what you learn there it's just it's a signaling effect it's a networks that you build it's
#
what that brand carries and all that and schools in fact are basically the main function of
#
a school is to be a daycare center otherwise parents would go mad if they had to look after
#
kids all the time now my question here is this like I think about education a lot and
#
what I see I think all the tech startups around me all the tech startups are missing are missing
#
the key problem they might be solving a small problem they're missing the key problem the
#
problem that they're solving is they're just changing the delivery kid TK up to school
#
will deliver education or knowledge in this new way but I think just a fundamental way
#
in which we think of education is broken I mean this whole thing the whole current structure
#
of education evolved in the early 19th century that okay you'll have 10 classes or 12 classes
#
or whatever standards grades you know kids of any particular age will all study together
#
these are the things they'll study geography history math blah blah all the way down the
#
line and through inertia and in an unthinking way we've continued with that for 200 years
#
where I think it's no longer relevant if we had to sit down today and design something
#
from scratch that is not what we would design we design something else entirely and I'm
#
not speaking in terms of delivery mechanism key online class carrying it that's so entirely
#
that's an entirely different matter and you've spoken about the same thing at length when
#
it comes to companies that you know companies were once designed in a particular way electricity
#
made it possible for people to convene in a particular physical location and all of
#
that and that's kind of been changing all the way to the pandemic where you know we've
#
started working in different ways and putting it into practice in little ways but conceptually
#
when people think of an office they're still thinking of a physical place where air conditioning
#
where people are together and there are cubicles and cabins and all of that now so take me
#
through a little bit of the evolution of this that you know what were the conventional notions
#
why did they come about what has changed and especially in recent times what has changed
#
about you know workplaces and how we should think about them.
#
So one of the things is you know you've got to look at three elements which are intertwined
#
so work worker and workplace they will always be intertwined and you sort of change any
#
one of them and the other two have to change so that's when the equilibrium is maintained
#
again so for example you're moving out from agriculture and you're sort of getting into
#
the first industrial revolution the way of doing work is through steam so then that allows
#
for a certain kind of work to be done it allows for you to lift a certain amount of machinery
#
and not lift heavier than that etc so that leads to a certain development of the workforce
#
so work changes the worker yeah and then when these people come together you need to manage
#
this particular process of the interaction of work and worker you have the workplace
#
norms fast forward a hundred years and you're looking at the second industrial revolution
#
and you are looking at you know is electricity so work is being done through electricity
#
what it means is it creates new kinds of roles for workers for example now that you have
#
electricity you can work at any time of the day so it leads to the you know three shift
#
kind of working yeah and we have assumed that eight hours is the optimal way in which people
#
can work and therefore you kind of do that and then when you work in shifts you're looking
#
at the shift supervisor why is it possible to have a shift supervisor and the norms around
#
the workplace develop like that because you're optimizing for mass production you're not
#
making one unique thing it's no longer handcrafted it's mass produced so you have many of the
#
same things therefore the you wanted to create a system where the individual worker is irrelevant
#
you can substitute one with the other and that's Charlie Chaplin's modern times is a
#
classic example of where he explained it so graphically and you look at that entire thing
#
and you say okay this is the workplace which is which needs a different set of norms yeah
#
because we are going to work around the clock will one set of guys work around the clock
#
I mean you know and the same common shift late night shift or this and that what does
#
it do to the worker and then you kind of say that people get tired now for me that was
#
a warning warning sign we should have really asked ourselves so why are people if you look
#
at the number of times when you hear on the radio every Monday morning there's Monday
#
motivation hashtag you know these are all signs that there is something drastically
#
wrong where people dread having to go back to work and you find the rgs are screaming
#
why do they feel this way why do they feel that you know it's something that we have
#
to endure in order to do something because there's a parallel larger system which is
#
stagnated and been left out of this entire ambit which is the education system because
#
that education system was feeding the people who would go into that workforce right and
#
education was all about standardization everybody studied the same thing everybody was you know
#
therefore you put people on that machine they can start doing everything slowly in order
#
to break away from that you kind of really have a scenario where somebody says okay there's
#
mass produced but this is handcrafted and because it was not an abundance it became
#
precious so you know you kind of suddenly start to look at that and then as manufacturing
#
gave way to services you are beginning to see a time where the importance of the individual
#
who provides the service has started to go up and many of the places you know when you
#
see shifts the arts and humanities sections see it first so you'll very often see that
#
you know a writer would have written about something that has happened only you know
#
30 years later 10 years later one year later you see contagion the movie you know it's
#
crazy how it sort of almost seems to have been like a documentary which was made in
#
advance and i had never watched it earlier at that point of time but when when you watch
#
it during the pandemic suddenly you know assumes a different meaning so you sort of start to
#
see that education has been left out of this entire change process so education remained
#
a little disjointed shifted and as work started to get more automated technology started to
#
get things done in very different way education became more and more distant from this and
#
it's still sort of you know at a point of time when i wanted to you know teach in a
#
certain college which i shall not name they said yeah it's great and this is after i wrote
#
the digital tsunami and they said why don't you come and teach you know hr in the college
#
and i said i would love to do that and when i drew up the course outline and said we'll
#
talk about how technology is changing i said no no no but that technology bit you can't
#
talk about because that has to be done by another department so then you have to be
#
part of that department but then you can't talk about hr wow so this is and i say that
#
this is one of the most respected institutions so then i said well i guess then i'll wait
#
for my turn some other time and i stepped out of that and then you have a scenario where
#
you know there's this entire sort of set of academics who will say that if you don't have
#
a phd you cannot teach so now of course you do have something called a professor of practice
#
and all that stuff but you know the academics all still will gang up and say but you don't
#
have a phd how do you know that this is right or not so this whole thing has meant that
#
you created two worlds so the best way to you know bring down somebody's thought process
#
is to simply say both impractical this is not practical at all whereas if you really
#
look at the philosophy of you know education as it was created earlier the greatest theories
#
were drawn out of practice and greatest practices were drawn from theory yeah but today you
#
have a scenario where the most greatest compliment you can give to a person is to say your work
#
is extremely practical there is nothing theoretical about it think about the irony of that so
#
we have therefore we've dismissed the value of learning and which is why you have the
#
roi-based learning you learn three questions if you can clear that exam it doesn't matter
#
whether you understand the subject or not you clear the exam and that in turn opens
#
up opportunities for you that in turn opens up further opportunities for you so the entire
#
basis has been you know how do you bypass the system which talks about you and the massive
#
culture of coaching classes everywhere how do you you know crack the system so those
#
are the kind of things that you you know there are classes which people have for cracking
#
how to appear in the con bonnet acrobatic game show there are classes which are where
#
people will say when you press the buzzer and you know you are called up you've got
#
all those 10 seconds while the others are thinking of 10 seconds you know they are thinking
#
of the answer and they are debating whether it's the first one or the fourth one you already
#
press the buzzer now you've got these additional 10 seconds when they say yes so what would
#
be your answer amit and you have had the answer and so now you can do that this one tip has
#
put so many people into that game show so we are extremely good at finding how do you
#
bypass that shortcut and take the shortest distance which is why you have the thing of
#
you know three easy lessons from this and you know it's a very popular theme you will
#
see that you win a match or you lose a match and next day linkedin is full of three lessons
#
from this match four is lessons of leadership from this four lessons from my dog who you
#
know this this is unfortunately this is the version that we are looking at because we've
#
put education to be something which is terrible it makes you theoretical and it is this whole
#
process why when you are looking at the nature of work as it has changed so many people are
#
now getting displaced because they've always been brought up to sort of declare very proudly
#
i'm a very practical guy i don't waste time reading yeah it's a number of times i've
#
heard you know people with many years of experience who say the last book i would have read would
#
be tinkle magazine because i read it for my kid now which may sound very cute when you
#
are announcing it somewhere but what it does is you shudder to think that this is the guy
#
who's leading that corporation you know so what options and choices would this guy have
#
other than you know in my wisdom that this is what i've tried when you have leaders whose
#
sole worldview is based on what i have tried and experienced it works when the world is
#
very small so there's only one way to you know make an omelet because that's the only
#
thing people will have there's only one way to boil milk but now you're talking of cuisine
#
it cannot come from just your experience you have to watch stuff you have to read stuff
#
you have to experience stuff you have to do all this and connect the dots and sort of
#
see how you can bring that in in this world of work education has been completely divorced
#
so therefore i think the challenge that we are looking at when we are talking about what
#
edtech is trying to solve is they're trying to figure out okay you don't need to go to
#
school you can get it through my app or my website or my this thing we'll give you a
#
video version of the book that is really not the process and the whole process is around
#
how do you build curiosity and build a multidisciplinary view because that's where work is you can't
#
solve for example you know in the pandemic a great example of this is look at the irony
#
of the scenario where the problem is not that you don't have a vaccine which at least supposedly
#
solves the pandemic you have a scenario where you are trying to convince people to take
#
the vaccine and the rich are hoarding several versions of the vaccine and it's going to
#
waste and there are vast number of billions who will not have access to it because it's
#
you know people would rather throw it away than to donate it now a lot of it comes from
#
the fact that when you don't build empathy for a person who cannot pay you back back
#
to the question of generosity you cannot think that that's the right thing to do then you
#
are only thinking in reductive processes you are saying how is it going to benefit me what
#
is the ROI of this entire process so I think this whole business of education being completely
#
driven by exams is one such casualty that you don't have interdisciplinary thinking you
#
know I can't go and teach something and draw in a reference from another you know discipline
#
because then it sort of treads into the fiefdom of another department so knowledge has become
#
trapped in departments rather than being free and you solve a problem using whatever you
#
do this is really like saying that imagine if you had to build a house and you're told
#
that boss you can take one tool of your choice it can be a screwdriver or a hammer you can't
#
have both how would you build the house you can't so I think that's where education is
#
today that you have these walls and it's it's very hard to find people who enjoy work because
#
they're constantly told this is not your work this is not for you to worry about so whereas
#
problems are not created in one single discipline problems are always multi-disciplinary so for
#
example back to the vaccine example it's a problem of science and storytelling it's a
#
problem of understanding human psychology and religion and culture of a country but
#
if you don't have leaders who have read the history of a particular tribe for no reason
#
or altogether you know how would they ever do that and so therefore one of the pieces
#
would be if he made literature and reading and humanities a lot more integral is not
#
looked at as something like the other day somebody was saying I don't know why my kid
#
has to study geography and history and you know he's got to study stuff like civics
#
and this whole business that every piece that you are reading has to have an instant gratification
#
you are not giving time for the person to process it and merge it into their worldview
#
it's it's very hard for people to find the value of that which is why when today when
#
you find that somebody doesn't understand history you have a certain kind of a view
#
I remember just about you know a couple of days back I was at a wedding and I was sitting
#
next to somebody who teaches history in a college and I was referring to you know the
#
version of history that I learned by reading Manu Pillai you know so the person says one
#
sec one sec one sec Abhijith Manu Pillai is not a historian and I said why do you say
#
that I said because you know so he says no no they are not researched I said you can't
#
say that he's got like 50 pages of references and so yeah but that person's book will never
#
ever be prescribed by my college I said well that's sad that you know your students would
#
I hope that they read some of the stuff outside of your college curriculum but I'm not even
#
sure whether that's going to happen to a lot of people so it's horrible I think the greatest
#
value that I see for work that you are doing for example in the podcast is to make content
#
available in a format which is which can be in you know in my head at some point of time
#
and I don't need to worry about you know that I'm learning history I'm just building a worldview
#
full of conversations so I think if we focus more on conversations as a way of shaping
#
worldviews it would be solving problems very differently.
#
So a bunch of threads and one is of course the clearest illustration of how there is
#
this massive mismatch between I mean you'd imagine that in a marketplace of supply and
#
demand you know education would be at the supply end where you are training people who
#
are then actually doing useful things in the real world whatever it may be however you
#
measure it but the fact is that not only do we have a massive jobs problem in India but
#
many of the people who are actually being churned out by the education system are unemployable
#
even when there are actually jobs because they're learning nothing of any value whatsoever
#
and that Manu Pillai first of all he's been on my show many times he's an excellent historian
#
I mean look at his rigor look at his work look at his he's absolutely fabulous and I
#
think that's one of the reasons I mean what that illustrates is one of the reasons that
#
many common people I think quite understandably have an anti-intellectual attitude quote unquote
#
and are suspicious of academia because academia has really gone into this whole you know warped
#
space of its own where you know the bubble has become a cage especially in the humanities
#
not relevant to the real world anymore like I look at the academic world and I'm like
#
no like if you know if I wanted to educate myself the university would be the worst place
#
to do so if it comes to humanities science and all obviously it's a different matter
#
the best way to educate yourself is read a lot maybe listen to podcasts educate yourself
#
in different ways you know joining a humanities department in any modern university would
#
really set you back and make you useless for the real world which is not to say that I'm
#
judging humanities I'm judging academia academia has completely failed and which leads me to
#
my next question which is that you know in one of your talks you give this anecdote about
#
how you were sitting in for this interview and the person who was interviewing someone
#
with you they asked the question to the young interviewee that what is your favorite animal
#
and that person said oh dog and then eventually you're the person who asked the question said
#
we'll take him and you asked why and you said because no no dogs loyalty and this and that
#
and then he asked the question to another person that what is your favorite animal and that
#
person said horse so he said what kind of horse and that person said running horse and
#
then your colleague rejected him because he said that running horse means high attrition
#
rate will run away correct right now this is a classic example of hardcore overthinking
#
right where you know there is one kind of theory which just comes from this kind of
#
overthinking sitting on top of anything and there's another kind of theory which interacts
#
with practice as you mentioned earlier and they feed off each other and therefore those
#
are frameworks that are based in what is happening in the real world and you can apply them across
#
disciplines you know as we'll also talk about after this and and those are that's useful
#
theory does useful frameworks my problem with a lot of academia is that a lot of your theories
#
have no connection with the real world and when they come in contact with the real world
#
they fall apart but do you feel that's also then a danger in say management studies or
#
in the books that are written about these subjects because people may set out to write
#
books management guides or self-help books or whatever and sometimes one wonders if there
#
is a force fitting of frameworks if you're trying to if you're overthinking it in this
#
dog being loyal kind of way and is that then a danger that you find yourself warning yourself
#
about it's it's something I've learned from practice and I can apply and I'm confident
#
it's there so I think both are important you know one of the one of the reasons why academics
#
and the world of practice have fallen a little apart I think it's a tragedy for both because
#
when you see that the best theories are drawn out of practices that what is a theory at
#
the end of it you observe something you know and you find a pattern and you kind of put
#
that together in a framework which gets challenged and there's further research and you sort
#
of put it together you modify it it's a iterative process it is when you kind of say that if
#
I cannot instantly apply whatever I've learned then there is then it is useless knowledge
#
then in which case you get to the version where let's say if you know I'm looking how
#
to use a certain feature on my phone I can look it up on YouTube and do that that does
#
not make me an expert on the phone it I will not be able to fix it one more time again
#
in future I think my point was not so much about a practical value my point was also
#
about understanding something you know if you if you tell me the physics and the electronics
#
of a phone I'll understand how it works if you tell me that the phone is a symbol of
#
patriarchy then I'm sorry you've lost me completely you know and that's the kind of area that
#
we've sort of gone into in modern times so I think a lot of it has happened because not
#
enough people are reading enough of literature and having those conversations because that's
#
the only way you build a worldview where you understand who you're building it for yeah
#
so for instance while in India you see a lot of people signing up for these online courses
#
our rate of completions are very pathetically low because you know you are hoping that somebody
#
is going to you know do something which you will instantly get you the job etc I think
#
this whole obsession of knowledge with something that has to be instantly applied in totality
#
creates a challenge that it doesn't give you time to build connections with other disciplines
#
your own life experiences your observations and that is where you begin to take borrowed
#
wisdom and apply it and then that gets concretized because you know you've done it and somebody
#
else has done it we are fortunately coming into a time where many of these conventions
#
have been blown apart yeah and education for example we talked about that briefly if you
#
look at this whole knowledge you know I wrote a short piece on my linkedin newsletter which
#
I talked about degree inflation so the whole notion of and I drew a cartoon which has somebody
#
you know saying that wanted BA and then you know somebody just paints an M in front and
#
says wanted MBA because it's possible for a job which requires a fifth grade pass out
#
and the knowledge of how to ride a cycle they're applying for a job of a messenger and up police
#
and it gets thousands of people who are of course graduates and thousands of people who
#
are of course post graduates and a few thousand people who are PhDs now the question is this
#
is degree inflation in its classic sense so if you take the person who is a PhD are you
#
being fair or unfair because the job requires you to just have that basic level of knowledge
#
one sign that you might want to think about is why are so many people applying for that
#
job in the first place but it also means that when you look at it's not just in that level
#
you see it in so many places you get an MBA simply because you can get an MBA to do the
#
thing and therefore you know you are having proliferation of you know management schools
#
every corner sets up one and offers that thing and suddenly you know people turn back and
#
say but you know this person doesn't know anything because you need a number of people
#
to teach that well and teaching has become one of the least attractive options when you
#
sort of really look at who gets drawn into teaching when you look at that the caliber
#
and the moment you create educational institutions the one place where you should be investing
#
is having better teachers teaching them how do you become more creative in the way that
#
you you know teach because today the students are not just exposed to books they're exposed
#
to movies they're exposed to podcasts they're exposed to YouTubes they close to Spotify
#
how do you teach a person who has that worldview is very different so I would say that even
#
the way that you read a book today what I very often would do is I would read a book
#
and then I often would watch the person talk about the book on say YouTube or Spotify or
#
something because I always find that when I've read the book I may have thought of something
#
as important and somebody else who wrote the book found something else to be completely
#
different and I never even looked at that shade you know when I read through that whole
#
book this didn't even register and I don't even recall so then I'll go back and reread
#
that segment that the person is talking about so in this process of engaging with a book
#
you know one thing that I would sort of look at is why don't we teach people to read books
#
faster and then summarize and write their own you know reflections on that book because
#
again the whole point is what's the point of doing this so everything you know education
#
is about doing lots of things which right now you can't see any relevance for but you
#
will connect the dots later you know so when you overlay many different elements you see
#
that if there is a country going to war you don't just take the common narrative that
#
this guy is good this guy is bad and this one is terrible you kind of say that okay
#
there is a you know economic incentive to sort of do that because I've had the privilege
#
of reading in economics and then you kind of also you know from the general reading
#
of literature that I've done you kind of say that all political systems will try and sort
#
of do ABC and you kind of begin to see that pattern so reading broadly especially for
#
those who are in the corporate world I think reading broadly not just business books but
#
reading about music reading about films reading about this actually helps you create a far
#
more holistic thing which you know is more human centric and therefore is not going to
#
get into that resistance you probably design work systems very differently you know so
#
so I think those are some of the possibilities that one should be you know exploring no and
#
one of the things to note is that that hunger is there people want to know people want to
#
read academia doesn't serve that I mean you look at two historians who frequently been
#
on the show Ram Guha Ram Guha and Manu Pillai they both look down upon by academia and constantly
#
criticized by them but they are producing incredibly rigorous works of history which
#
has expanded people's understanding of the world in so many different ways and more part
#
of them for that and you know you mentioned degree inflation and I'm just kind of thinking
#
aloud that okay a degree is a signal I want to hire someone a degree is a signal that
#
okay this person has done an MA this person has done a PhD whatever but these signals
#
have lost value because anything that is everybody has a PhD how do you distinguish anything
#
anything that is a metric can be gamed and they've completely lost all values so the
#
question there is that if you are looking for X what is a good signal for what X actually
#
is and it is not the degree anymore like when people who do my course a couple of times
#
people have asked you give a certificate and I'm like you know I can do a Jogadu certificate
#
if you want as I have for a couple of people but why does it matter why do you want a certificate
#
I mean for me whenever I try to learn something I try to learn something for the knowledge
#
for its own sake or because I want to do something with it irregardless but you know why do certificates
#
necessarily matter and the other aspect about reading books faster is something I completely
#
agree with but I think the danger there is that can also become a metric and that can
#
also become a goal especially when you set something like you know read a book write
#
a summary then the summary becomes a goal then you're rushing through the book to get
#
to the summary whereas what I try to stress in my course is that don't think of goal sync
#
of processes do you enjoy reading do you reach for a book when you look at no I don't look
#
at writing the summary as a goal so when I read books very often I do the doodles because
#
it just you know it helps me recollect the book much better so to me that's a summary
#
and then I'll watch the YouTube video then I'll listen to this guy on two three podcasts
#
then I'll think so I have explored the book from my eyes and others eyes and I have sort
#
of done that and then when you write something you've actually you've now between each of
#
these you've had the opportunity to sit back and reflect on some stuff and then when you
#
write about it it's potentially going to be a more thought-through piece which is a lot
#
more comprehensive it's not the metric so it is not that you know I would say I would
#
always there are books that you go back and reread and there are books that you don't
#
read again I mean it's a one-time read and you kind of do that but I find that all the
#
books which have had a nuanced view it is not painted in one single color there's shades
#
and hues you discover patterns which you missed for the first time or maybe even the third
#
time so I think the ability to do that if you are doing that you are not really reading
#
you know from a metric that I will notch it up and say oh you know I read this book but
#
when you look at when you've read multiple ways in which you can approach a problem you
#
have more choices what Ram Guha or Manu Pillay and you know all these people are doing is
#
they've done all these you know like I said if there are 30 ways to design an incentive
#
system you must know all 30 but then you have the liberty to say I'm going to use option
#
number 6 with you and option number 14 with somebody else and maybe with somebody I'll
#
do half of 3 and half of 11 you know because that's most appropriate that option does
#
not happen if you know only one way to do it so when you have so many of these colleges
#
which are supposedly giving you practical education what are they doing they'll call
#
a practitioner who will come and spend half the time talking about the great work their
#
company is doing when they do that the students go back believing that is the only way and
#
especially if it's a company they aspire to do you know aspire to join then those big
#
name companies you get somebody who comes in and says you know we tell our people don't
#
do ABC they will look at that as the you know as gospel truth because they don't have an
#
alternative point of view so to be able to understand nuances.
#
What I'm saying is different I think you misunderstood me that's your process in your case is part
#
of your process but the point is that if you set it out if you have a class of 30 people
#
and you say okay all of you read this book and give me a summary at the end of it what
#
tends to happen there is that they will treat it as a task to be done and this is for me
#
this is really important that you should never think in terms of goals but only in terms
#
of processes and habits you want to build a reading habit and that reading habit has
#
to come from your sense of yourself as someone who reads you know if I set a goal you know
#
like let's say if I set a goal that every day between 6 and 7 I'll read you know sounds
#
really worthy you can build your you know you can become a reader that way you'll do
#
it one day two days three days and you'll fall off the wagon then you'll follow further
#
then you will tell yourself kiyaar I'm not a books kind of person I'm a Netflix kind
#
of person or if you're gregarious and Netflix and chill kind of person right and you fall
#
off that and it becomes a vicious cycle where your failure to achieve a goal affects your
#
self image whereas the point is that if you begin with your self image if you say kiyaar
#
I'm a self taught polymath or that's my self image of who I want to be and I am the kind
#
of person who when I'm bored I don't pick up my smartphone I pick up your book then
#
if you own that self image then you will just be reading a lot naturally you know you will
#
be doing the summaries out of pleasure not because it is a task that has been set for
#
you so I think the challenge really is in motivating people and helping them to build
#
these habits rather than follow the whole school college system that this is your goal
#
do this isko sikko exam dena isko sikko summary so that's what I meant yeah yeah yeah I totally
#
agree with you I'm sorry I misunderstood that whole thing yeah you're right I mean I and
#
I think you you know as long as you are able to craft your own process of doing something
#
yeah you're right that you know there may be a time where you know you you take a break
#
from writing altogether and then there is a time that I kind of you know intensively
#
will write for a for a long stretch because all of them are important ways in which I
#
structure my world you know so I don't necessarily you know subscribe to this whole thing that
#
you must do do it from the again it's the whole process of living without an ROI the
#
moment you have a goal there is an ROI this is my goal I have to produce three book summaries
#
for this course then that becomes the be all and end all of itself you stop enjoying the
#
course it's the same pattern that you are saying when you take the selfie with the stars
#
you're not enjoying the stars you're not looking at the patterns that are there are they is
#
the the you know in the sky when you see a whole lot of stars as a kid I very often used
#
to because I could read three alphabets you know I would say does the sky right you know
#
using Bengali or English or Hindi and I would at some point of time I would say and some
#
days I would notice Bengali and some days I would say oh no that looks like a clear
#
oh oh that that's a you so I think it's written and they would sort of really go through that
#
whole process this this completely useless process now in again I'm using air quotes
#
in this useless is really what made me who I am today you know so so the ability to sit
#
down and you know just aimlessly lie on the grass and look at the cloud formation and
#
say that looks like so-and-so person's face can I draw a caricature of that then I turn
#
it and then I say oh the eyes are missing and then you sort of do that so it's always
#
this whole process of dabbling in different things and bringing it all together at some
#
stage so there's a convergent stage and a divergent stage writing is always about that
#
you know most people kind of say that oh it must be fun to be a writer no it's terrible
#
to write you know I don't think it's a fun process at all fun process is the divergent
#
process I meet a number of people this conversation triggers a thought in my head then I go and
#
watch a film I see that then I notice the same pattern now out here and then I do this
#
now comes a horrible part of writing the book where you just have to sit down and go through
#
that rigor of structuring your thoughts and say you may have thought about 15 different
#
things but what do you want to say today what is it that you are talking about today and
#
then it talks about convergence simplifying putting it together and saying am I being
#
too wordy about this whole thing that you kind of you know delete it you rewrite the
#
whole piece so yeah I mean and for me sometimes what happens is in my LinkedIn newsletter
#
for example I you know sometimes the I have the idea I know where I'm headed with this
#
this is the basic thing but I fumble and struggle when I am trying to put it together in real
#
writing so then I'll draw so I'll try and create a fancy you know banner then I'll try
#
and do an illustration of something and then I will do this then that triggers a thought
#
and it builds a connection I say oh my god how could I have even missed it and I'll go
#
back and sort of look at that and this whole process for me is about you know then I'll
#
go back and say oh you know something let's take a break and I'll listen to something
#
or I'll watch some YouTube video or something but all the time at the back of your head
#
you are thinking about whatever you are writing about that whole process writing therefore
#
is not just an act of putting an idea onto paper but it's a process of integrating your
#
world and putting the essence of that you know serving it it's like cooking up a meal
#
for a very large number of strangers and a few friends so when you start doing that you
#
know you are you're always asking yourself am I right cooking only for my friends or
#
should I be also cooking for some strangers because it's in that that you challenge your
#
craft. I love this framework of divergent convergent I think abhi kya hoga ki when somebody
#
asks me ki what is it Amit you were going to do so much writing what are you doing I
#
don't see you writing I'll simply say ki bhai divergent chal raha hai baad mein aayega
#
convergent. Yeah absolutely. Abhi toh hum chill kar rahe hai. Aap mujhe sky pe dekh
#
ke batao kaunsi bhasha hai. Correct. So okay so my next question in a sense is a different
#
kind of divergent convergent which is that if you look at the thinkers of the 15th century
#
the 16th century and so on they thought broadly about a lot of things because our knowledge
#
and everything was so limited that you could think broadly that someone like an Isaac Newton
#
was not only doing the physics that he did but was also interested in alchemy and was
#
also teaching theology to pura sab tha you know people like what Plato and Aristotle
#
are doing is asking questions about a whole lot of subjects rather than restrict themselves
#
to anyone in fact the way I define philosophy is it's like proto science it is asking big
#
questions that come before science and over a period of time science will take over some
#
of that area and some questions remain with philosophy and whatever remains is philosophy
#
you know otherwise gradually science kind of takes things over. Now what has happened
#
in the last four or five centuries is that fields get more and more specialized ki you
#
know sociology ek ho jaati hai economics aur ek ho jaati hai wahan se further splits till
#
you reach a stage where today there will be an esteemed professor somewhere who is like
#
an expert in labor economics in Latin America and blah blah blah which is a very narrow
#
field and they'll know that lane and they'll know nothing else but the trend that's been
#
around perhaps I mean I wonder if you'd agree that there's a little sense that now it is
#
expanding again in the sense that now people see the value of stepping back thinking broadly
#
and applying common frameworks to different things like the way that you know you've done
#
in your books and like the way that I try to do that tk framework here for example dissipation
#
of the mainstream decentralize over it's not just about one field it can apply to a lot
#
of things and you apply it like that you look at some of the great public intellectuals
#
of our times like say Steven Pinker right cross-disciplinary just you know getting great
#
insight into a lot of work and I think that's fantastic I think that you know if you narrow
#
down onto one damn subject and you just drill down deep on that and all of that that's great
#
and you know we need people like that we need hedgehogs now you've sort of I don't know
#
if you've used a specific term Fox with regard to yourself but I I read you writing about
#
yourself and I thought who Isaiah Berlin Kajo Fox in the hedgehog that the hedgehog knows
#
one thing a Fox knows many things and it seems to me that you are a classic quintessential
#
Fox you know I don't know if you were ever a hedgehog in terms of you know that particular
#
specialization but you're a classic quintessential Fox which is why these books are valuable
#
which is not to say hedgehogs aren't valuable of course they are in a different way we need
#
that kind of depth also but we also need this broad step back meta system syncing kind of
#
approach so what are sort of your thoughts on this you know when you look at the world
#
today as it has become a lot more so I in my book dreamers and unicorns I talk about
#
five forces that you must use while designing anything you know today one of them is about
#
boundary less less you know you talked about this whole thing that the world is so interconnected
#
that the problems are also fairly interconnected you can't solve a problem of one country
#
without you know automatically impacting five other places was somebody somewhere else is
#
going to get impacted and you might turn back and say that okay let's go and you know put
#
option A and you know push that country back and suddenly you realize that your own cousin
#
is stranded there and you know so you kind of it's suddenly from being very abstract
#
it suddenly comes back to strike you the pandemic you know when we've had you know tragedies
#
in the past you know one of the things that very often people talk about is that the tragedy
#
is a statistic in the newspaper until one of those people belongs to your family or
#
your is your loved one then it suddenly means something completely different a disease means
#
something different so when you look at the world from a very personal point of view you
#
begin to see what matters only to you but when you take a meta view you begin to realize
#
it all these things are fairly boundary less for example the largest companies in the world
#
today are boundary less you can never describe what is their core business I mean what is
#
the core business of Amazon it's not selling books they stop doing that long back I mean
#
they still do it but I'm just saying that it's a completely different planet altogether
#
what they are known for and where their revenue comes from and what they will do and this
#
employs you know such a huge number of people and if you look at that ecosystem it employs
#
a huge number of people and sometimes some of these companies are bigger than the GDPs
#
of many nations combined yeah so there is a subtle shift of power away from one kind
#
of a system into another kind of a system somebody who has read philosophy or economics
#
and history and a little bit of geography and civics can sort of map all this and say
#
oh gosh this is a repetition of this particular process you know so in economics when you
#
read eco and SRCC you know you also had to do political science and I always thought
#
my god why am I being made to read political science I have no desire to you know pursue
#
it ever in my life again now I look back how foolish I was because you know when you really
#
read about things like Hegelian dialectics yeah you learn about the fact that so powerful
#
thesis antithesis and synthesis which is one of the things that is the second piece that
#
I talk about in my design principle that the world will exist as ants you will never have
#
any more of that one homogeneous thing whether in media whether in society whether in education
#
whether in the method of learning it'll all be an ant you will learn partly from college
#
and from an individual and from YouTube and from Spotify and from a book it's all of that
#
which then turns back to explain oh okay it fundamentally means value is going to be created
#
through intangibles which is the third principle that one is talking about intangible things
#
like brands become important which is why you kind of say that you know suddenly you
#
find a youtuber who's like all of 10 years old who has 10 million followers now employs
#
his parents and you know runs a company and is featured on the magazine cover and you
#
know makes more money than your CEO suddenly you kind of say okay hold on is this the exception
#
or is this the signal of something which is going to it's a weak signal today but that's
#
where it is and therefore when you look at the fourth pieces about managing understanding
#
emotions it has become so important and if you see what is the element which is missing
#
in this world of zoom meetings that you're missing the human connect could we have done
#
this conversation over zoom yes we would have it would have been efficient we would have
#
you know sort of put our time and then we would have done this conversation efficient
#
yes many of those nuances get missed because part of the response gets shaped based on
#
your response to the thing and i observe you know the way you're looking or the nodding
#
of the head or you know when you're flipping something all of that it's a part of that
#
larger signal if you limit it to just one signal of what is being put across you know
#
it becomes very very limiting so and then the fifth principle is of course it's in
#
perpetual beta so there there isn't something called a new normal that's a myth it's never
#
going to be something like that but when you combine all of this so many of the things
#
begin to make sense that there is decentralization decentralization is happening in media decentralization
#
is going to happening in finance you know so and you see the cryptos happening suddenly
#
it all connects up you know so so i think when you have a multi-disciplinary point of
#
view you begin to experience the world very differently because you are using multiple
#
lenses and if you put in the lens of people what does it mean for somebody who is let's
#
say you know in a blue collar role or somebody who is earning below a certain threshold of
#
money what does this mean when you kind of do something like that is it good for them
#
is it bad for them who's the beneficiary what's the incentive you suddenly start to use many
#
different lenses when you created you know when you build multiple disciplines in your
#
head so i think careers will also move in that direction it's no longer going to be
#
about you know like i've used one of my you know highest views has come from this thing
#
which i wrote are you a career 3.0 person stuck in a career 1.0 job yeah it simply means
#
that you are going to be looking at a world where people will not just do one job which
#
is you're an engineer you retire as an engineer one employer maybe you change a couple of
#
employees but it's basically the same career 2.0 is trained as whatever and then decided
#
to go and open a cafe and or become a musician you know and that's the world that you know
#
many people have taken on that's career 2.0 it's like a fork career 3.0 is like a pizza
#
which is sliced into you know multiple things you have multiple skills which is monetized
#
at varying levels and that is the world that most people will live in because of a variety
#
of reasons one is of course we are living longer you know today our average longevity
#
is 72 years in india in 1947 it was 32 years four decades have been added so when you look
#
at that if you pause and say oh that means when people talked about four ashrams you
#
know brahmacharya grahastha you know vanprastha and sannyas when they are talking about this
#
you mean all of it had to fit in under 32 years or 30 years that explains why people
#
had to get married at age eight or ten because you are already you know you are 50 percent
#
down you know in terms of your lifespan and so then you know you are building space for
#
many other things so when you suddenly look at many of these processes a lot of things
#
connect back and now when you look at you know when people are going to live to be a
#
hundred this whole notion of retirement is such a irrelevant concept because you know
#
it was done at a point of time when this hard labor and everything meant people sort of
#
died at a certain kind of a pace and you said okay you know enjoy the last couple of years
#
based on what you saved up people today will not be able to do that because you are you
#
know when you look at your savings what you will need based on inflation just do the math
#
and you will discover that you know you will have to perhaps work out of economic necessity
#
for most people even if you don't want to do that you are lucky enough that you've made
#
your whatever money how much of Netflix will you watch for the next you know 40 years 60
#
years so the notion of time when it changes your notion of your career will also change
#
so I want to come to the notion of time because you've also spoken about that and I keep talking
#
to my guests about that but before that you know I love that video of yours where you
#
talk about the concept of thinking in an and kind of way becoming an and person and you
#
know and and the part of it which I really like there was Chindogu which is a Japanese
#
for useless inventions so I'll just direct people to that I'll link it from the show
#
notes but there is you know I thought of one I discovered one example recently who fits
#
perfectly into your framework have you heard of Miss Excel yes she teaches Excel on Instagram
#
yeah she teaches Excel on just incredible person wow I mean that's the that's the and
#
Excel plus EDM plus dancing there you go so that's your perfect and example so let's talk
#
about time because this exact example about why people used to get married young because
#
you wouldn't live so long I just chatted with you know one of my guests in a recent episode
#
I mean I've recorded six episodes in the week before this so I've forgotten who but this
#
exact thing that how does one's notion of time change and in another way I think of
#
you know people like you and me where we've reached middle age and you know when you're
#
50 it seems like time stretches out forever that 30 is an old man and at 50 is ah sit
#
down uncle you know that's how it seems but when you reach my age it's like a couple of
#
decades just went by in the flash of an eye and your notions of time changes which is
#
why you start thinking more in terms of happiness and activity and what you want to do now you've
#
got a video on this where you get played around with this one sentence which is I have worked
#
there a very long time and you know not to give a spoiler but to cut a you know to kind
#
of get cut to the chase video of you showed a picture of an old man you ask your audience
#
that this old man says I have worked there a very long time what do you think he means
#
in like 20 years 10 years blah blah all of that and then you cut to a bunch of teenagers
#
and for them it's like seven months that someone apparently I think you mentioned told you
#
that I have worked there a long time and it worked seven months in a place and your point
#
which I found very provocative and worth thinking about because I never thought about it in
#
this particular way is that therefore two people who are working together may in one
#
sense be completely incompatible because their notions of time are completely different.
#
Yes that's very true because when you you know when you look at people when they stay
#
in a company for a long time or they stay in a relationship for a long time very often
#
the unexplored assumption is that our notions of time are similar which means when I say
#
yeah let's do it quickly you know you and I roughly have the same thing it's unspoken
#
The moment there is a mismatch of time expectation it causes stress to either party and the relationship
#
will not last so therefore when you look at attrition when a lot of people young people
#
today are leaving jobs it comes from a variety of reasons multiple reasons so it's not a
#
single factor kind of a thing but when you look at it it comes from the fact that young
#
people also have a sense of impatience because you know there is so much of time that they
#
have spent you may say that oh this fellow you know worked with us for six months and
#
he left you know what an ungrateful person we invested so much but in that person's mind
#
I could have spent a very long time I gave six months of my life to your organization
#
and they feel dejected that it's looked at as you know an act of betrayal because the
#
people talking about this are older people whose definition of time is much older because
#
they have come from a point of time where if you sent a letter and in that video I talk
#
about that example in my inc talk that you write a you know letter to somebody in another
#
country it's going to take three weeks to reach and if the person wrote back that very
#
day and posted it will take another three weeks so your instant response is six weeks
#
away and today you find people who are competing with everything that you know this is on demand
#
this is learning is on demand your vegetables are delivered to you in 10 minutes and this
#
at the end of the day we are getting an inflated notion of how worthwhile our time is and parallelly
#
the polar opposite is they are getting bored so I don't know what to do with my time you
#
know because if you are not curious a long life can be a curse so when we say that you
#
know that is you know the worst thing to tell somebody who doesn't have the wherewithal
#
to engage themselves you know in their own world for so many years or who don't know
#
how to build relationships beyond what they've been handed over so they have no curiosity
#
to spend time with strangers your own kids are going to you know go away and they lead
#
their own life and which is why so many people talk about emptiness because nothing else
#
has filled their nest so you need to be able to figure out how do you structure time what
#
does that mean to you and that's an essential component of happiness because then you have
#
a great view that yeah if I spend you know five years you know it's a great place one
#
of the places where I worked where I you know completed five years I happen to be working
#
in U.S. at that point of time and this is a company which has you know seen people working
#
there for decades and come and spend great place to be and all of that and you know when
#
you complete five years they give you some kind of a gift and some that's a very small
#
gift but you get to wear a small little lapel pin kind of thing so I found that you know
#
my time was over and nobody made any reference to the fact that we should be having some
#
kind of a celebration to mark your five years and I was thinking maybe nobody knows me which
#
is true that nobody knew that I had completed five years they all thought I'd just joined
#
and you know whatever and so then finally you know I had dropped many hints to my you
#
know teammates and they said yeah it's been a long time and these five years have just
#
gone by and all and nobody reacted you know because everybody was used to working there
#
much longer so five years didn't seem like you know something worth celebrating it is
#
really what you know I felt when I saw these days you even you have a graduation ceremonies
#
from prep to class one you know which was like you know so it was one of those moments
#
I went to somebody in HR and said you know I've completed five years so now what happens
#
they said oh your gift should be on the way you know so then you see you can go and collect
#
it from so and so person so it was the dispatch office and I found that you know this guy
#
was there and he said yeah so what can I do for you and I said I've completed five years
#
he said oh there was a box full of those little lapel pins he picked up one and tossed it
#
like that to me and said okay go wear it and flaunt it I felt so angry I went and dumped
#
it in the dust bin I said and then I kind of thought that well in that place five years
#
is really my notion of time is not the same as the notion of time for this guy who's worked
#
there for you know 34 years or whatever for him what is there to celebrate is the same
#
thing I can understand celebrating graduation as in university but graduation from prep
#
to one today seems the same equivalent yeah so I think over time as our perception of
#
time changes how we view others who are different you know we start to look at them with a little
#
bit of disrespect and you know so we don't take them seriously because after all what
#
has this guy seen so a lot of it in every culture there's a premium placed on longevity
#
of time you know there are idioms phrases all of which celebrates that you spent a long
#
time doing something and yet if you look at for many of the people who are entering their
#
teens or you know people who are entering the early stages of work they look at that
#
as something which is not positive if you tell a company that we've got a long legacy
#
of you're doing something for last 40 years it's not something that a lot of people view
#
with great you know notion that awestruck oh my god you've done it for 40 years they
#
say okay you're probably someplace I am better off somewhere else so notions of time are
#
you know very very important that they determine you look at your friends you probably have
#
similar notions of time and which is why when you can sit down with classmates you know
#
you shared the same experience of time and you turn back and say you know when you think
#
about nostalgia nostalgia has no meaning for somebody from a different generation it's
#
boring and if somebody says that oh you know I lived in a time when there was only black
#
and white television a lot of people they were saying my god I mean what a disgusting
#
world to have lived in so until and unless you begin to set aside your own judgment and
#
you know evaluation and you start to say what was it like when there was you know one television
#
channel what did it really mean and you refer to it that there was a homogenized view of
#
what is the truth and everybody shared it then we knew a lot about agriculture because
#
of Krishidarshan see another shared moment we are just dating ourselves by doing all
#
this you know Krishidarshan was one of those Chitrahar was you know once a week and you
#
got to watch a Hindi film clip you know once a week and you kind of suffered through hundreds
#
of ads just to see those you know five songs that that would be played no and and the Pradeep
#
Kishan film in which Annie gives it those ones written by Arundhati Roy that's famous
#
for having aired only once on Doordarshan and I saw it and all my friends saw it not
#
because we knew about the film or we are waiting for it or whatever but you got to see one
#
film a week on TV and you didn't want to miss it for whatever you didn't want to miss it
#
so sab jo bhi dekhate the dekhte the correct and then they started sort of showing regional
#
films you know and then that's how I sort of you know again because there was so much
#
of dirt of entertainment you watch regional films also which was in some sense good because
#
it expanded my world view beyond what I had seen so it was lovely I mean so in that sense
#
it was doled out rationed it was precious so smaller things made you happy so you talked
#
about ambition, ambition bahut chhote hota hai, wahan toh koi ambition tha hi nahi.
#
My father was an IAS officer back in the day you know and very sort of conventional in
#
his thinking so once I remember sometime in the 90s after liberalization he gave some
#
talk about talking about the good old days saying ki now I turn on the TV I don't know
#
what to watch but back then we knew what to watch there was only one thing to watch and
#
he was romanticizing that and I had an argument with him I was like what are you talking about
#
like now I have so much you know I remember when star movies came and HBO came and we
#
would have films all day boss MTV jab aaya tha all day pagal ho gaye the hai.
#
But I get what he's saying from the you know the mental equanimity point of view that you're
#
not just going from one thing to the other like Jonathan Haidt recently made the point
#
that even though we are surrounded by so much information and knowledge and all of that
#
everyone is consuming what was produced in the last three days and that's just so such
#
a frightening thought to me speaking of time by the way I also once in a while I think
#
of dogs like how do dogs suffer us because dogs ke hisaap se no because dogs have a shorter
#
lifespan so their days are faster the nights are faster everything is much faster.
#
So to them their human masters or their human pets maybe they think of us that way are such
#
so ponderously slow of course I mean they must be thinking that get a move on throw
#
the bloody ball exactly yeah like or how someone might react if they meet me in real life and
#
they have to listen to me at 1x I can imagine a similar reaction let's talk about HR now
#
but you know what your book is of course much broader than that but in general as far as
#
the workplace is concerned as far as companies are concerned and so on what are the fundamental
#
ways in which the world has changed which people don't get yet where conventional wisdom
#
hasn't caught up like there is always a lag the world will change and then there'll be
#
a lag and people will figure it out and big companies are actually the worst affected
#
because they're the last people to figure it out because of their ossified bureaucracies
#
and all of that and some of them if they cope you know they survive and others go the way
#
Kodak went you know so if you have to speak to say your peers within companies or within
#
HR or whatever and tell those guys that was you don't see it but take a step back this
#
is how the world has changed this is what tomorrow will look like how would you put
#
So I mean I don't think I have any great wisdom which is different from what people have you
#
know who are working in different companies I would of course sort of say that for me
#
one glaring gap that I notice is that most companies do not have any way of researching
#
who their employees are you don't you see a lot of investment in consumer research you
#
know you think about qualitative research quantitative research semiotics why don't
#
the organizations have equal amount of investment in people if they did that A you would immediately
#
begin to understand what makes them happy this particular bunch and you are not limited
#
by your own world view one of the problems of the current method of power structures
#
is that rules are made by a set of people for the majority who they have no connection
#
with right and they do meet them occasionally you know you kind of the relationship is a
#
sort of really one of those occasional ones you come home and you pat the little thing
#
and the fellow goes off and then you do your own thing you read your newspaper it's a
#
lot like that and I think the only way you can build organizations once again is if you
#
really start to engage with the people and really understand what are their deepest aspirations
#
what do they want what are the things that they care about and there are you know different
#
places where of course I'm a still a big fan of reading listening and all that but those
#
are some of the ways in which you can pick up what has changed because the the medium
#
has changed you know so one of the pieces that I do for some of my clients is this workshop
#
called new media you know when you do that most most senior leaders have no way of engaging
#
with people on let's say a social media platform because social media doesn't really care about
#
how what an important guy you are if you have nothing worthwhile to say I am not going to
#
follow you and people can unfollow at a click so you know yes you might issue a dictator
#
and say tomorrow morning I want all 30 people in my team to follow me and day after they
#
will unfollow you you know so it just you know media has evolved all around and this
#
the world is no longer like an aquarium the working world the organization is not like
#
an aquarium where you are you know in this particular setup you can get a view of the
#
world outside but you know this is pretty much a self-contained zone today that aquarium
#
is part of the ocean so which is why you find organizations in really awkward settings where
#
they have to perhaps put a commentary on social events that are happening social movements
#
that are happening political choices that people are making the way they do ABC where
#
they sort of do that the leaders are really awkward about the whole thing because they
#
have never learned to have these dialogues you know with people who disagreed with them
#
who and you begin to understand while I don't quite still change to your point of view at
#
least I understand what you feel about it in the absence of that it is going to be harder
#
for people to lead others other than by force and dictator which is going to happen in organizations
#
where they say yeah you know what I don't want to waste time doing this you can find
#
another place which is what some of the companies have done in my view I think those are some
#
of the ways in which again just as work worker and workplace changes in tandem leadership
#
talent and culture also change in tandem the leader must spot the trend that is happening
#
now most of the times they can limit themselves to the product or the service that they're
#
trying to create so most people are extremely buttoned up on that they know that talent
#
is still looked at as part of a problem that HR or talent acquisition is going to solve
#
and therefore most leaders again get very distant from that except for the fact that
#
sometimes you know and hiring is one of the toughest decisions that you make ever in your
#
life and you know having done it for so many years I still think I'm like really average
#
or below average on that entire thing I get so many things wrong my predictions about
#
people whose hiring is really that that you are making a prediction that this person is
#
the best option for me to deliver ABC tasks and that I have a way to reward and engage
#
this person meaningfully very often the conversations just about the task but we forget that will
#
I be able to motivate somebody like this so when you know you hire a person who is extremely
#
creative and innovative which is great you can hire this person will you be able to manage
#
a person like that because that person is good you know is used to questioning everything
#
and anything and you know you will find it a drag because the other guys simply say yes
#
sir yes ma'am and carry on with their life this person will turn back and say why what
#
do you mean by that why should I be doing this didn't we do this yesterday why should
#
we be and those are some of the places where people feel threatened so the thing is they
#
will not hire somebody like that or the person doesn't survive in that organization system
#
and then the organizations worry about how do we stay more innovative then they do training
#
programs around that the answer doesn't lie in just the training programs it has to be
#
supported by the culture in which you operate so leadership talent and culture are again
#
interlocked and you can't change one without the other the other two so that is the other
#
equation that I think is so basic that you have to be able to you know start leveraging
#
it in the conversations and how has the pandemic affected all this across two margins one is
#
how has the pandemic actually changed the workplace and the things that companies have
#
to take into account about the way to the work and two maybe there were things which
#
were already changing but we didn't realize it and the pandemic made us realize it that
#
oh these things were redundant but we didn't know it but we now know that it's redundant
#
everybody doesn't have to come to office every day for example so what are what are the different
#
ways in which the pandemic has kind of shaken everything up so I think a lot is written
#
about how digital transformation has got sped up you know it's fast-forwarded during the
#
pandemic so a lot has been written about that I think less has been written about the fact
#
that you know the employees are not the same anymore and I'll explain in a minute what
#
that means you know very often when you see you have a teenager at home very often you
#
don't realize how they are changing you know they are getting taller the voices are changing
#
that you know you don't realize all of that until you find somebody who's seeing them
#
after one or two years and say oh my god you've grown so tall or you've you know changed so
#
drastically so what happens is this is really a bit like the classmate effect you know so
#
the people you've been to school or college with have a certain picture of you at that
#
point of time you know and they meet you once in a blue moon and they sort of perhaps get
#
to know that your Amit has got this podcast he's doing this that and the other and all
#
their successes and failures both surprise you because they are still looking at you
#
with a picture that's frozen back in time so if you are successful then the constant
#
thing is that guy was so useless how come that guy became you know ABC that's so amazing
#
he was pretty useless you know I mean he was not like this and he didn't he wasn't very
#
good at telling stories I don't know how he's become a writer and because we fail to understand
#
that people keep growing continuously yeah this is the adolescent kind of a thing that
#
happens employers are facing the adolescent kind of a thing right now with employees because
#
for two years they worked out of their own home and they are used to working in an unsupervised
#
environment where the boss if I you know don't want to see your face all I need to do is
#
shut off the camera and then you know keep the headphone on so I'm you know responding
#
to you you have no idea I'm not even sitting there you know so they are used they are not
#
used to the level of autonomy that the people have experienced and that's going to be very
#
hard for organizations to recreate the workplace where autonomy gets restricted people are
#
used to doing the work at the time that they do yeah and where they have you know found
#
very rigid systems they have quit a lot of people have quit because they were unhappy
#
a lot of people have quit because they had no choice a lot of people have quit because
#
they're really re-evaluating their purpose and saying and tell me once again why am I
#
doing this work to pay the bills can I lower my standard of living and you know take a
#
job which is not killing me like this and a lot of people are doing this the third is
#
there is you know a big generational shift which is coming from the way that we view
#
work because a lot of the people who are entering the workforce today they have seen their parents
#
work hard and still get laid off they've seen that you know they've given their life you
#
know they have not spent any time with the family and one fine day the company decides
#
to do that then in which case they have said I'm not going to let the company decide and
#
dictate terms with which I live and work I will do it by myself so the other day somebody
#
was talking about a fact that when you know he asked somebody in his team who had just
#
joined work and said that you better complete it and give it to me on Monday and the person
#
says I'm sorry today is a Friday evening I'm going out so he says okay do it tomorrow at
#
your convenience he says no no no Saturdays and Sundays I sleep and spend time with my
#
dog so he says but you can do work he says no but then who's going to spend time with
#
my dog now this is a question of you know people who worked for even 10 years 12 years
#
will not ask they'll complain and say you know I have had to work over the weekend and
#
this is so terrible but they'll do it a lot of the younger people are going to turn back
#
and say hold on I'm not going to kill my you know weekends for you because I have to send
#
some meaningless report which somebody's will spend all of three seconds scanning over for
#
what so I think production systems workplaces work is not designed with this degree of autonomy
#
it is being designed with that autonomy which was taken away during industrialization was
#
my way or the highway if you want to work in this factory then you will jolly well come
#
at this time before the siren finishes I want you standing at the machine today the person
#
says but I can't get up at 8.15 I can't I'll go at 10 I can stop later now that's inconvenient
#
because it's neither the shift not that shift so work has been you know created in little
#
silos and boxes which is very hard for people to manage now so I think we are this distance
#
has been you know the shift has been happening for a while it's a bit like what I've talked
#
about in dreamers and unicorns with you know how when movies happened initially we kind
#
of thought that it's like theater but there is a camera in front so people still spoke
#
in that exaggerated tone why would you want to do that we'd never spoke like this because
#
it was meant to be a performance and then somebody said hold on why do we have only
#
one camera static and you know why can't we move the camera around what happens if we
#
have that what happens if we have three cameras what happens if we put the camera on top what
#
happens if we put a camera near the person's feet and show just the feet walking away and
#
their new format of storytelling emerges is the same process that is happening in organizations
#
and you are going to see that that a lot of times people will behave as if it is still
#
theater they don't realize that you know the employees have moved further ahead I think
#
it's going to either mean a very different kind of a leader or the organization structure
#
and it will probably be both it'll be far more decentralized because you know work today
#
is done by networks and ecosystems whereas a lot of our reward systems a lot of our development
#
systems are still focused on the individual doing things for themselves so the notion
#
of leadership as somebody who manages an ecosystem you know needs a different mindset an ecosystem
#
is not just people who've had the same education as me an ecosystem is the community an ecosystem
#
is the illiterate people an ecosystem is the media an ecosystem is you know every everything
#
else around me so the importance of humanities as a foundation without which you can't work
#
because work is no longer binary you're either with me or against me is just not the model
#
anymore it is far more decentralized the building a community is a massive skill which nobody
#
has taught us and yet that's where businesses are so when you look at so today social shifts
#
are moving ahead of where technology is taking us the social shifts have to be understood
#
before they become completely divorced from what you're building and people who are able
#
to do that so today if you see what's happening in the Indian ecosystem you are looking at
#
people who are who have created products that that first wave of people who created stuff
#
for the you know top 1% of India is done and dusted and then now people are really building
#
for the next 400 million and this next 400 million have very different needs and expectations
#
and problems than what the top 1% have so it will give rise to a different set of startups
#
and unicorns and all of that but more importantly you will find startup founders who come from
#
that ecosystem who are not building for an alien system it's not you know a very fancy
#
premium product being built for a third world country so you kind of say let's build down
#
the cost a little bit it is going to be a different need altogether and only somebody
#
who's lived in that world can create that and those kind of companies will have to be
#
run in a very different way because they'll need different talent you need talent which
#
understands what they're doing there you know like I was talking to one of the entrepreneurs
#
and one of the VC members who said very interesting example she says that you know when you created
#
the particular app that they have built they said the shopping cart you know checkout is
#
through a shopping cart you and I we understand that now a lot of people wondered what is
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that basket for so then they suddenly realized that the shopping cart does not connect so
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the visual language will change so the apps will look different the only person who can
#
design something for that consumer is somebody who's lived that world you know it's funny
#
because when you see a number of times when I look at cartoonists they find it extremely
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difficult western cartoonists find it extremely difficult to do a good job of Indian faces
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so you if you sort of see Gandhi's face you know when you or you look at any of the Indian
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leaders who get drawn you know by western cartoonists for example caricatures they look
#
completely different because the Indian face structure is different in the same way when
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I draw an Indian face it is very different from drawing somebody who's you know western
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face structures are different a person from the African continent has a very different
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face structure and bone structure and body structure when you look at these individual
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differences suddenly you realize a lot of the products have not been made for people
#
like this you know and and so when you begin to see small weak signals from different parts
#
of the world you begin to do that you begin to become aware of a world which is so different
#
and it may be a weak signal in your part of the world it's already a mainstream trend
#
and that's why when they say when if you are reading about something and you know in
#
the mainstream newspaper it's already done in dust and it's on the way down so when
#
you suddenly discover that let me be part of it it's already old school.
#
So there's actually a term for like first of all what you say about you know artists
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from outside drawing Indian faces differently is fascinating to me so the next time any
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of my foreign friends you know does a picture of me I'll say I am not fat the problem is
#
with your gaze so I think that solves the problem no there's actually a term which
#
economists use called isomorphic mimicry which is basically you're transplanting something
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that has worked in another location and bringing it to this context and expecting it to work
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here and that's really dangerous because you need to get really local and deep into
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it and also what you that shopping cart thing which you described that's in design that's
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known as skeuomorphic design where you know when Apple came out with their first e-reader
#
they had a bookshelf thing there so people could relate or on many of these music editing
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softwares you will have a knob in the thing so people are turning a knob on the screen
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you know and email is still that envelope email is still that envelope who has last
#
seen an envelope yeah yeah so all of that in your book you've also thrown the provocative
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question that does the CEO have to be a polymath something to that effect which ties in with
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what you're saying that the function of a CEO has changed because in the nature of the
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company has changed now one of the anecdotes that I recall from the one of the talks you
#
gave which was really interesting to me was where you speak about this company which made
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these instructional videos for their employees and then obviously they can see when the videos
#
have been opened and they saw that the videos were mostly being watched at times like 2
#
a.m. and all and this is very counterintuitive because typically you would assume training
#
material they'll watch it in work hours and all that but it is not the case and this particular
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insight doesn't matter to me but what matters to me is that I value these kind of counterintuitive
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insights wherever they come from because they give you insight into you know your employees
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your readers your listeners who whatever the kind of case might be and a lot of it really
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comes from machine learning like you know you've spoken about how machines are really
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good on three different margins that if the work is rule-based machines are great if the
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work is repetitive machines are great for scale machines are great and I'd go a little
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further and I'd say that when you when you look at the current state of machine learning
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that machines are actually capable of sitting back and coming up with counterintuitive insights
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you wouldn't otherwise have considered like the example I use for this is AlphaZero and
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chess right now chess was dominated by computers for you know since 2003 they've been so far
#
ahead that it's not even close and humans really use computers for pedagogy and for
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and and you know as a tool for learning and your main program there was something called
#
stockfish and AlphaZero came and it took a very different approach it said we won't
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try for you know to solve the maximum number of you know calculations we can we won't aim
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for scale or rule-based or whatever the only mandate it was given was to play with itself
#
and learn from that and form rules according to that sort of teach itself how to think
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meta and build a framework and it did that for about a day and then it met stockfish
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which was until then the strongest computer in the world and destroyed stockfish and the
#
games are fascinating and what we also have is a sort of a record of how it taught itself
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and that record is incredible because in that record you see it try out every opening humans
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have tried out and is going through a similar kind of process that there is a period of
#
time when it is playing the French defense a lot and then it drops it completely and
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then eventually it evolves to the point where it is playing the Berlin defense a lot you
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know and which is currently very popular among grandmasters as well but the key thing there
#
is that when humans looked at chess because it is so incredibly complex they built these
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heuristics which were really good as first principles as ground rules for example occupy
#
the center or initiative is important and so on and so forth and what alpha zero demonstrated
#
is that the weightages between them these is different from what we understand that
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the relationship between say initiative and material may be different that may be initiative
#
is you know more important than we thought it was and so on and so forth you know Magnus
#
Carlson's coach Peter Hein Nelson once said that I sometimes used to think that if an
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alien from another planet which is just a superior species in terms of brain power if
#
they come and they play what how will they play and I found my answer when I saw alpha
#
zero play the point being that machine learning doesn't just sort of excel in all these specialized
#
tasks like you know calculate numbers really well and so on it doesn't just specialized
#
in these specialized tasks but more and more what we see is that they are going beyond
#
that and taking over many other functions a higher level functions than we would have
#
thought in the future so what are sort of your broad thoughts on this because you've
#
spoken a lot about this you've written about this what are sort of your thoughts on how
#
the modern workplace will change because of machines and what is the role that humans
#
can still play and the areas where they are still important and therefore what are the
#
areas in which they will develop their skills because then the education for this next generation
#
needs to be completely different from what it was for the previous generation because
#
a lot of the things we have to learn now will just simply be done by machine so much better
#
that we need to skip a level up so you know when you look at machines and if you just
#
sort of see that where is the direction where machine learning and you know this thing is
#
moving one of the principles that's happening is that it sort of has worked on this rule-based
#
repetitive and scale kind of a problem there's one end of the system the other end of the
#
system is general intelligence which is you know if you look at the other end you kind
#
of see that if you want to teach a machine how to recognize pictures of a dog then a
#
you not only have to you know show a particular dog but you have to show the same dog from
#
multiple angles you have to show a puppy then you have to show an older dog then you have
#
to show hundreds of breeds of dogs but the human baby who sees a dog one time you know
#
can instantly recognize another dog from a completely different species and not think
#
that oh that's like a table you know but for a computer you would have to instruct it so
#
the instructional process for creating that is you know as much as you are able to feed
#
it which is so the problem of that system is if the database that you are feeding it
#
from is not representative of the real world you find you know bias creeping in and all
#
of this happening which is a massive problem that you know machines have to solve in the
#
first instance so for example the moment I you know watch you know five polish language
#
films Netflix will suddenly say that oh okay so then you need to be shown only polish language
#
movies human beings are far more complicated than that so I think one of the principles
#
that we will sort of really look at is you will start with algorithms but you have to
#
burst your own algorithm because what makes us human is our ability to burst the algorithm
#
that you you know like one kind of cuisine but you also like something else you eat non-vegetarian
#
food but in India you know non-veg has many shades there are eight kinds of vegetarians
#
and non-vegetarians we sort of look at it you know some don't eat non-veg at home some
#
don't eat it outside some will not have the sauce but or the gravy but not the meat where
#
did I call kinds of variations this nuanced view comes from your exposure to different
#
people so the role of human beings will all come from generating insights from other people
#
and those are the kind of connections which a human being can make in an amazing kind
#
of way which machines will have to be taught but that's a while away so if you look at
#
the next I don't know five seven years for sure the nature of where the opportunities
#
will be will be in the human side of it it's not good before for example you may be really
#
brilliant at math you know so unless you are Shakuntala Devi there is no way you can answer
#
the question you know nineteen point seven eight five nine into seventy five point eight
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six three you you will take a long time even if you are really good at it a calculator can do it
#
quickly and now you have a time when you will ask but why would you need to know this right so I
#
think the notion of information and knowledge and learning and all of this has to change depending
#
on what technology makes it possible you may have terrible handwriting but it'll all get
#
standardized and put in the form of a font on the computer which hopefully if somebody
#
designs it really beautifully you will have great handwriting and now you can choose the kind of
#
forms from fonts from your handwriting forms to you know like a movie or this you can do all of
#
that yet at the same time you will find that people who can write with that beautiful calligraphy
#
will still get millions of views on Instagram you know because you're fascinated by the fact
#
that oh my god I mean how can this guy write so beautifully what is that all about so I think
#
those are some of the pieces that we will be sort of going towards. I'm actually optimistic and I
#
say optimistic it might seem I'm on the side of the machines but there's no dichotomy but I'm
#
optimistic that you know that all of this progress one I think it's inevitable and two I think it
#
will come faster than we even realize it even even something like AGI artificial general intelligence
#
so a couple of broad questions because you've been incredibly patient and you've spent a lot
#
of time with me and maybe tomorrow who knows in the future you could have bots designed so there'll
#
be a bot that talks like me and a bot that talks and things like you and we don't have to do
#
anything we can chill at home and look at the star and try to read Urdu in the sky but while
#
our bots kind of do everything so my penultimate question is this that if you're a young person
#
listening to this right and you're thinking okay in this changing world in the scary world where
#
you know the workplace is shifting rapidly paradigms are shifting new technology is coming up
#
everything is full of unknown unknowns what are the sort of qualities that I need or what should
#
I focus on to get ahead and prosper and my very brief answer to this would simply be and you've
#
described it as learnability but I'll think of it as attitude that if you have intellectual humility
#
you're willing to learn you're willing to work hard that's a core thing you definitely need that
#
what else you build on top of that is different so what are your thoughts yeah it's you know
#
learning actually has two again opposing elements one is you need the humility to say I don't know
#
because if I pretend that I know it all then you know this is one of the shifts that happens that
#
you need humility but at the same time you need courage to try it out you know so even when you
#
are wobbling if you are so self-conscious that no no I will emerge only when I'm perfect then by
#
which time things will change and you will not be there so I think it is managing this polar opposite
#
ends humility to say I don't know and I will learn from whoever it may be somebody who is much younger
#
than me and the person is going to say I'm amazed you don't know this yeah I will you know live with
#
that but then so what I mean there are millions of that's not the only thing I don't know there
#
are millions of other things I have no idea about and once you get comfortable with this then I think
#
you know it allows your curiosity to be free being being able to you know stay curious means
#
that you are open to learning things which you didn't know too I think when you look at learnability
#
it's also about not necessarily learning only something that you can put into practice right
#
now this instant you know it's something that becomes part of your DNA and you kind of know
#
how to do this that's the other way in which because you know when I did radio programs and
#
for a long time I did shows and when I was growing up in All India Radio and Yovavani or
#
Delhi Bee subsequent to that I when I went and worked you know in other places I maintained my
#
love for that that this is something that I want to be able to I used to really enjoy editing those
#
old spools and tapes and you know creating all those things when I went across when I was living
#
and working in US by which time technology had changed drastically I learned how to edit and
#
create you know little shows which I could do and I got a chance to go and become part of a radio
#
station in US and I used to do a show called movie magic which I where I would talk about retro
#
Bollywood and talk about some movie and play some songs and all that stuff so this is what I did
#
now when I look back and connect the dots that prepared me for the world of podcasts so that
#
when podcasts came in you know this was a world I was you know fairly familiar with because I had
#
done radio and I had done this tape mixing and I had done all all of this stuff it was easy for me
#
to sort of pick up and technology only makes it easier you know but you have to have the desire
#
to want to do this you know so today every other recipe is available you can learn from
#
you know the masters of you know you can learn how to chop an onion from Gordon Ramsey he actually
#
has a video with seven million views on how to chop the onion now those are things you have to
#
understand that if you are not curious you will not try it out so that's one part of it the second
#
part of it is I also think that there is one piece nobody talks about which is being comfortable
#
creating content in different media formats you know I think it's a very very useful skill
#
the fact that you can do something like this you can create a podcast and tell a story and hold the
#
attention of people for a while that's a precious skill to have you know and there are people who do
#
it through movies there are people who do it through you know photos paintings whatever so I
#
think being able to engage people in a short duration of time and a long format is a precious
#
skill so those are some of the things that I think are going to be important in future so besides of
#
course what a lot of people have said that you know you are curious about other disciplines you
#
take a multi-disciplinary point of view you you learn about many things you try out many things
#
and even when you are not good at it you stay at it so resilience as a as a you know as a human
#
skill and of course finally this whole new media that has emerged has changed the world so drastically
#
so putting all of that together is going to be you know very important for the future so that's my
#
view of what I would focus on and perhaps the way that we communicate will become more and more
#
critical and important so that's to me the way the world will shape up and evolve lovely I feel
#
like we have tons to talk about I mean if just barely started it's horrible this you can't achieve
#
much in a four-hour conversation no no no clearly because I'm used to 24-hour conversations there
#
you go I mean train journey yeah I thought it's a long episode I hope Abhijit can manage it but you
#
are used to trains no no that is why it is called a suffer, people travel together, listeners should travel
#
sir you have made such a pun that you know people of my vintage get these kind of puns right
#
Punjabi is not necessary exactly so my sort of final question for you therefore is and I'll
#
obviously recommend that readers read all your books Dreamers and Unicorns was great made me
#
think about a lot of things which I'll continue processing in the days to come so everyone should
#
absolutely buy that but where I'll sort of end by is my traditional question to my guests at the end
#
that can you recommend some books music movies anything for my listeners things that are dear
#
to you like either things that you feel that you know you've got an aha moment from it or just
#
things that are dear to you that you want to share with the world this is a really tough one I think
#
I just in when it comes to books I have really enjoyed you know two people who influenced me
#
hugely were you know Satyajit Ray you know his body of work and by that I don't necessarily mean
#
only his movies which a number of people may have seen but if you sort of look at the way
#
he composed music for many of these you know he's worked with Ali Akbar Khan Sahib and Ravishankar
#
Sahib you know and he's also gone on to compose his own things really understood western classical
#
music as much as folk music and you know created his own format very unique sound he created the
#
background score incredible and then he's got his drawings which I'm a big fan of and so
#
you know so that's some something that I really recommend that it's really enriched me to have
#
read Ray at different points of time in my life I in fact wrote you know about Ray in a book
#
about Feluda when he turned 50 Bori Amajumdar brought out a compilation so I got a you know
#
kind of a worldview and translated Feluda for the benefit of Boria's readers that to me was great
#
fun reading literature in general whatever language and things if you can read it in
#
multiple languages we've had such a rich variety of writers you know from poetry to prose so many
#
of them you know I think India's had a very very rich tradition of storytelling so you know reading
#
any of those people so I in Hindi I mean you know Prem Chand was somebody I read a lot of and I was
#
very very impressed with that I read a number of people you know articles and all of you know many
#
of you know many of these writers in Dharmayug, Saptahik, Hindustan they used to carry a lot of
#
literary pieces in those days so those are pieces that I think when you read long form you kind of
#
begin to develop a different taste and flavor and you get a chance to explore different worlds
#
it's really like if you see only an Instagram photograph of my room you will not know what I
#
you know am like what is my home like which only when you come and spend time you will sort of
#
discover that so that's these books are available in translations so you know Arunavasena has done
#
a phenomenal job of translating so many of these. In fact Sunil Gangopadhyay like you mentioned
#
Nara Nadeen Ratri I think he did that translation. Yeah or Nadeen Ratri and you know so many of
#
these things are available today for everyone so and you might say you know translation loses
#
the essence yeah it's okay but at least you are reading you know it's 95 percent of it is right
#
there and I think you know so that's quite a myth because it's a different you know book when you
#
see the book in you know movie format it's different when I read Harry Potter you know it
#
was very different when I saw Harry Potter on screen and I said okay Harry Potter looks like this
#
okay so be it it's somebody else's interpretation so I think it's all of that. I kind of I really
#
read indiscriminately so I don't really have a great one or two set of readers but I have enjoyed
#
listening to so many of your guests and the work that when you put those I get a chance to go and
#
read some of those things and that has enriched you know whether it is Peggy Mohan's book which
#
I really enjoyed incredible book or you know Manu Pillay who you know opened up a world which
#
I was not familiar with you know all the history of the kings of the south and the southern states
#
and all that I mean just so fascinating so just reading a whole range of things spending time
#
doing that is one way in which I think I kind of do that. As far as music is concerned you know I
#
just I'm a big fan of Indian classical music and if that sounds really daunting then I think you
#
know it's got so many formats Thumri, Dadra, Kajri, Chaiti, Ghazal you know there's like a whole range
#
of things so just enjoying the flavor of it and everything that you read or listen to you don't
#
have to be able to understand as long as you appreciate whatever is there you know there
#
are many forms of music I don't quite understand you know because one just hasn't heard it enough
#
so I think as you listen to it enough you develop a taste for it which is how I learned how to
#
appreciate Indian classical music and every time there's a piece like for example you know rap I
#
could initially never relate to rap and I always had one complaint if you can't put it and you
#
can't play it on a musical instrument it's not music but now when you sort of look at it and I say
#
why should I kind of look at that it could be a new form is evolving and why am I being rigid
#
about the whole thing so I think just being open to trying out many different things
#
the other day somebody forwarded Mongolian rock video and I was quite taken up by that so I think
#
as you open you if you don't break the algorithm you tend to have a world which is very boring
#
because it becomes predictable and I think the real challenge is to read people in different
#
languages try translations short form long form poetry and if you don't like something don't
#
give up too easily if you persist then there comes a point of time where you get really
#
cycled when you started to ride the cycle in the initial days you were wobbling and that was a sign
#
that you are going to build up the superpower that okay now I am able to balance on two wheels and
#
go anywhere so that it's only when you get past that wobbling that you are able to you know take
#
it on so I would just look at today there is abundance listen to the writers talk about their
#
books listen to if you can't read watch them on YouTube you know listen to them on Spotify they
#
give talks there are podcasts so we are in a world where there's abundance of content
#
so just changing different formats and you suddenly might discover you enjoy listening to
#
you know podcasts more than something else and so then you sort of go with that
#
that wise words and value was speaking I got the title for our episode
#
Abhijit Bhaduri breaks the algorithm which kind of sums up you know and is great advice to young
#
people also break the algorithm so boss thank you so much for your generosity of being so patient
#
sharing your insights I've I've had a great time thank you so much for having me it's an honor and
#
privilege to you know be featured on the podcast where I've heard some of the most fascinating
#
conversations if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit
#
holes at will do by abhijit's book strata listed there you can follow him on twitter at abhijit
#
bhaduri one word you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse
#
past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n and remember break the algorithm
#
now did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
#
production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any
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