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Do you think of yourself as an intelligent person?
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If you do, let me share a thought with you.
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If you're smart, the optimal way for you to behave is as if you're stupid.
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Let me explain what I mean.
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Let's say you're a genius, and you think you're a genius.
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This gives you confidence, which is great, but it might also give you intellectual arrogance,
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You might think that, hey, you're so smart, you can figure anything out.
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In fact, you think that you have figured many things out, and this is dangerous, because
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you see, the world is complex, even if the smart people among us tell artful stories
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that make it seem simple.
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And if you're a genius and you believe that you're a genius, you may not have the intellectual
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humility to work hard, to be open to new insights, to learn, learn, learn all the time.
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So if you're a smart person, the smart way to behave is as if you know nothing.
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Everything is a mystery at some level.
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The world is full of wonderment and opportunity.
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And you want to work hard and soak up all the knowledge you can.
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This is why the smartest people should think of themselves as stupid.
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It would indeed be stupid to think of yourself as smart.
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Now, I know we can play word games and this can get circular, but you know what I mean?
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Intellectual humility and the desire to fill the gaps in our knowledge are the secrets
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Nurture these attributes.
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Welcome to The Seen 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 Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Max Rodenbeck, a remarkable journalist who until recently was a South
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Asia bureau chief for The Economist based in New Delhi.
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He told me during this conversation that when he first came to India to take up this assignment,
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he decided to think of himself as stupid so he could learn as much as possible about this
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This is a fantastic attitude for any newcomer to any country to have.
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I've seen foreign correspondents in the past who come to a country, talk to taxi drivers
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and elite friends, apply their pre-existing frames into a madly complex nation and think
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they have it all figured out.
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And this is a trap Max avoided when he came here.
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Max has mixed American and British parentage, but he grew up in Cairo and is perhaps more
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from there than from anywhere else.
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He's written a fantastic book on the city he grew up in called Cairo, the city victorious.
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And as a journalist, he spent many years as a Middle East bureau chief of The Economist
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predicting the coming of the Arab Spring in Egypt.
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He's considered a global expert in the Middle East in fact.
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He's also contributed to the New York review of books and foreign policy and I'll link
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some of his essays in the show notes.
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I'd first met Max in Delhi a couple of years ago and since then he's dropped me more than
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a few kind words about this podcast to which I'd given him an open invitation.
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So when he turned 60 and decided to leave India, he offered to come on the scene and
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Thus, we have this episode.
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I was impressed by the fact that Max had avoided the typical traps foreign correspondents often
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fall into and continued to look with wide-eyed wonder and curiosity at the world around him.
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The fact that his gaze was different from mine meant that he could reveal facets of
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my own country to me, which I had long normalized and perhaps you had too.
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We spoke a lot about Cairo and what Egypt has in common with India.
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The rise of lunatic extremism is one of them and Max had thoughts on the similarities between
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the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the RSS over here.
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There is so much in common between Egypt and India not just in our politics but also in
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We also spoke about the changing shape and relevance of journalism in these modern times
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and after the episode was done and we were chilling over a bottle of an excellent single
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malt named Rampur, Max regaled us with one fantastic story after another.
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So I said, hey, let's get some of these on tape.
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So just as I did in episode 250 with Narendra Shanoi, I sat Max down for a storytelling
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That comes at the end of the episode, just when it seems that our conversation is over.
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And now, before our conversation, let's take a brief commercial break and let me tell you
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about an exciting new show hosted by a former guest of the seen and the unseen, Harsha Pogle.
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The Turing test was once proposed as a test for whether a machine had achieved human
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Well, artificial intelligence is going to go past human intelligence pretty soon.
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And my contention is that many humans would fail the Turing test.
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Well, for some of the problems that we are not smart enough to figure out with our own
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brains, thank goodness we have AI to help us and telling us about how this journey is
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happening is a sponsor of this episode, a podcast called Paradigm Shift.
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Paradigm Shift is a new show by Microsoft India produced by ATS studios and hosted by
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my friend Harsha Pogle.
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In this show, every Friday, Harsha tells us stories of the intersection of artificial
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intelligence and human lives.
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How is AI making us better at forecasting the weather?
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How are elite sportspeople coached as much by AI as by humans?
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How can Indian agriculture be transformed by AI?
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How can we figure out which species need to be saved by us and what can we do to protect
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AI is solving real world problems and making life better for us puny human beings.
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And I urge you to listen to Paradigm Shift for some pretty funky stories about how this
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Paradigm Shift is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, basically all podcast
#
And Harsha is the man, the best kind of storyteller for the best kind of stories.
#
To learn more about how Microsoft is empowering developers and organizations and all of us
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with the power of AI, do visit Microsoft.com slash AI and check out Paradigm Shift right
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Stories of Innovation Shaped by Intelligence.
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Max, welcome to the Scene of the Unseen.
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I mean, it's a great pleasure to be here.
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I've been looking forward to this a lot.
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And the comment you made just before we started recording was that I should design the room
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as a confessional with those little boxes and so on and so forth.
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So you know, you were telling me just a while ago that during the lockdown, you actually
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wrote a racy, steamy thriller, which no doubt might come as a surprise to people who don't
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know you personally and have just been following your writing with great admiration for a long
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So how was the lockdown for you and how did you get down to writing this racy, steamy
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Well, it sounds like a horrible thing to say, you know, a couple of years later, the first
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part of the lockdown back in 2020, it was I was in Delhi, it was actually a lovely,
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the most beautiful spring I remember in the history of Delhi, it was gorgeous day after
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And the sort of tragedy of COVID hadn't really set in, that was the next year, then things
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But we had this lockdown and not much to do.
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And I'd been wanting to do something that was not journalism, to write something that's
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completely fiction, absolutely off the top of my head.
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And it had stories rattling around in my brain for quite a long time before.
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And so this, you know, basically 200 page book came pouring out all in the space of
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like, you know, four weeks, I was just getting up at six in the morning and it just came
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I had it was fun because it's just, you know, pure sort of fantasy.
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It was all set in the Middle East, nothing to do with India, nothing to do with where
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I am right now or my own life, particularly.
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But you know, making up characters and doing things to them was a lot of fun.
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And so waking up at six and like, what was the routine like?
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How long would you write?
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How much would you work?
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About five hours a day, something like that in the morning, get up, have a cup of coffee
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or make a pot of coffee and just keep going.
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When it was really flowing, I was writing like 2000, 3000 words a day, which is quite
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a lot actually of polished stuff ready to go.
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So that's the kind of writing that as a journalist, you know, because I've been practicing as
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a journalist for such a long time when you actually have to write about a particular
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subject to a particular audience, to a particular timetable, it was just really liberating to
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just do whatever I wanted.
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And I found it just came, you know, pouring out a great speed, which was kind of great
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And did it sort of make you reconsider the kind of work you do and what you want to do
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I think I'd much rather be writing kinky thrillers than working as a journalist.
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But you know, we have to make a living and there are other rewards to being a journalist.
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So, but I will certainly at some point in the future, write more things like kinky thrillers.
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So, yeah, I love reading your book, Cairo, by the way, and parts of that do read a little
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bit like a thriller, which is something that, you know, you find in, you know, history,
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that history well told can be, you know, as exciting as anything else that's out there.
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For example, you know, there are these lovely bits about Shagar-al-Dur, am I pronouncing
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Yeah, I won't say it again, because I don't think I'll manage to get that, I'll get something
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wrong, but the sort of the daughter of an Abbasid slave who landed up in Egypt and got
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married to the big boss there and the big boss dies and she hides his death for a while
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because, you know, till her son can come back, but her son is a bit of a creep, so she gets
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rid of the son and then she marries, you know, her head slave or not exactly a slave, these
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Mamalooks, am I pronouncing that right?
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And she pronounces, yeah, and Mamalooks and yeah, so she rules for a while.
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But then she figures out that this Mamalook she's married is planning to marry someone
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else and so she gives him a summons to come to her and he's apparently, as you mentioned
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in your book, he's a little worried because a fortune teller has foretold that he will
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die at the hands of a woman and sure enough he's on his way to see her, he's stabbed by
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five assassins after which you have this great para, which could be from your steamy book,
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you know, it's extremely entertaining where you write quote, it was said that Shagar-al-Dur
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– sorry, apologies to anyone who's offended by my pronunciations, I pronounce Indian words
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this way also, so it's not very good.
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It was said that Shagar-al-Dur realized she was doomed and so crushed her jewels in a
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mortar to stop them ever falling into the hands of another woman.
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Soon after that, Ali, her Mamalook husband's son by his first wife, stormed the palace
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with a furious band of his father's troops.
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They hauled the Sultana from her quarters and flung her at the mercy of his father.
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Umm Ali, who had been divorced from her dashing officer in favor of Shagar-al-Dur, struck
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her rival and hurled insults before having her female servant strip the ex-Sultana and
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beat her to death with wooden bath clogs.
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Then as a 15th century Ibn Iyas recalls quote, and this is Ibn Iyas' words, not yours,
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she was dragged by the feet and thrown from the top of the moat naked with nothing but
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a garment around the waist.
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She remained there in the moat for three days unburied until it is said one of the rabble
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descended into the moat under cover of night and cut off the sash of her garment because
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it was of red silk with a circle of pearls and because it smelled of musk.
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At length Shagar-ul-Dur was buried in her own magnificent tomb.
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So a lot of fun but where I kind of want to start is really with your personal history
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which I also learnt about because of your wonderful book on Cairo where you spoke about
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the imperial fishing fleet and the donkey without which you would not have been here
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Tell me a little bit about that story.
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Yeah, the imperial fishing fleet is what they used to call the ladies who would set out
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from Britain basically towards India to find a husband among the British colonial imperial
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officers in India because these guys were eligible bachelors well paid.
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And so the fishing fleet would set forth and people would go and find a future husband
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among these British officers.
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And my great-grandfather was an Indian civil service officer who came to India when he
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was 21 I think, you know, really young and became an advisor to the Raja of Mandi among
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And he ended up, he was in India for 27, no, longer actually, 40 years actually and ended
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as the financial secretary of Punjab, the United Punjab.
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Anyway, at some point in his career, sort of late 1890s I think, he was going back from
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India to England for a holiday, sailing through the Suez Canal and stopped in Cairo.
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And my great-grandmother, who was actually American not British, she happened to be going
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on a grand tour of civilization as they might have thought of it then, Egypt, Italy, Greece,
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that sort of thing, and they crossed paths at the pyramids, this young British man and
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this young American lady.
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But what happened at the pyramids became this kind of contested story in different parts
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My great-grandfather's version was always that he found my grandmother falling off a
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donkey, off the back of a donkey and managed to rescue her and pick her up and save her
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from the disgrace of falling to the ground in the desert in front of the pyramids.
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Of course, her version was that he was captivated by how elegantly she had gotten off this donkey.
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At the time, that's what tourists did, you know, when you visited the pyramids, you didn't
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go around on a tour bus, you went around on your own donkey.
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So the donkey incident became the meeting point between my great-grandparents, and this
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They actually followed each other across the Mediterranean.
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And then my great-grandmother's diary describes a meeting in St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice,
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where she says something like, and behind the third pillar on the left, dot, dot, dot.
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Anyway, they ended up getting married.
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So ultimately, my great-grandmother moved to India with my great-grandfather, and they
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lived in India for a long time, mostly in Lahore, actually, and that's where my grandfather
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And yeah, I was born in India.
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And you were born in Egypt in 1962, I mean, you weren't born there, sorry, you grew up
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there from the age of two.
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Yeah, yeah, I was actually born in America, in Virginia, and my parents moved to Egypt
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when I was two years old.
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So you know, one of the sort of themes I've touched upon on the show, which I'm sure you've
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come across as well, is sort of how we view the passage of time, you know, in the sense
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that most of us, when we live our lives, we are kind of caught up in the present moment.
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Is the passage of time seen or unseen?
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It's unseen, but it can become seen if you talk about it on the scene and the unseen.
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And it's like, you know, you're caught up in the present moment, and it feels like the
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present moment is everything.
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And it's like when you're 20, you think that 40 is a long way away, you know, 45 is a positively
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old man who will even live that long and so on and so forth.
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And then the years pass and the decades pass, and you look at time in a very different way.
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And what you did in your book, Cairo, is that there are these sort of different spans of
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time you're looking at.
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One is, of course, a millennia through which there is a history of Cairo itself.
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So here you are in the city where you grow up and you're seeing it all around you.
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But you're also aware of all of the history and, you know, everything that's been there
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The cities of the dead, as it were, if I am to now use that term as a metaphor, you've
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used it in different ways in your book.
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And equally, when you're looking back at your own life, you're kind of looking at, you know,
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looking back at the 1890s when, you know, the donkey incident, as it were, happens.
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And the distance between the donkey incident and your birth is similar to the distance
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between your birth and now, in a sense.
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So over the years, have you begun to view time differently?
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Does it, you know, does the writing of a book like that make a difference to that sort of
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Because I think what the way most people see the world is they just, you know, they normalize
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everything, the world as it is now.
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And it's like the current, just as we tend to view ourselves as the center of the universe
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and everyone else is just instrumental in this great play where we are the central character.
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You also view this current moment as kind of everything.
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I mean, just to think that, you know, 10 years ago, we didn't have so many of the technological
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marvels we now take for granted, you know, on our smartphones.
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So how has your perception of time sort of changed, you know, through the years?
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That's such a fascinating question.
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One could go on about that for a great length, because it's constantly changing and constantly
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distorting as you get older.
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Now I'm pretty ancient.
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I can say I'm 60 years old.
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In fact, I just turned 60.
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And I hadn't even thought that you're quite right, that that donkey incident is as far
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from my birth as I am from my own birth.
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In fact, someone was just pointing out a couple of, I think it was last year, was it?
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One of these little anecdotal bits of information that the movie Top Gun, you know, Tom Cruise,
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as this Navy pilot, you know, wow, that the distance between the making of that movie
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and right now, the present, is longer than the distance between the making of that movie
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You know, which is kind of strange.
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It's like, wow, there's been a longer, you know.
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Because when it came out, World War II seemed like ancient history to us.
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No, and you look at that plane that Tom Cruise is flying, it's sort of F-14 Tomcat, you know.
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That looks like a modern plane, not so different than what's up in the air these days.
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And it looks totally different from these propeller things that were, you know, bubbling
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around in World War II.
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But I mean, so these distances are constantly sort of distorted.
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And it's shocking to me when I think back to the things that I remember, because I lived
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in Egypt for such a long time, but that are just like, people look at you in bafflement,
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I mean, I can remember traveling up the Nile, and this is, I can remember it clear as day.
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I mean, it wasn't, that doesn't seem long ago to me, when most of the water lifted for
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irrigation in Egypt, was lifted by people with using a pivot, you know, a bucket and
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pivot system, something called a Shadouf, an ancient Egyptian system.
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All up and down the Nile, everywhere we'd go, there were people, they'd spend most
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of their day lifting water, lifting water.
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Of course, all replaced by diesel pumps now, et cetera, et cetera.
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But this is not that long ago, it's well in my lifetime.
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Also the Nile was, there were traffic jams of beautiful sailboats, I mean, gorgeous feluccas
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on the Nile with these sort of Latin sails, these wonderful, very dramatic looking boats.
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Now there's not a single one.
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I mean, it's all, only except for tourists, I mean.
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So that's the sort of thing that has changed in my lifetime, and people imagine that I
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In fact, it's not that long ago, really.
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So they're constant distortions.
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But also you kind of run into a point where you, you know, you enter the sort of internet
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age, and the internet age is now ancient history too, you know?
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And when, you know, I know that, for example, my daughter would sometimes get frustrated
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with me, why can't you figure out how to use this new bit of something rather?
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And I try to explain that that's because I've, this is like the seventh different, seventh
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version of, you know, a damn word processor that I've had to kind of adapt to, you know?
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So you just kind of get tired of having to constantly adapt to the new, the new, the
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And it's not just because one is inept, it's just like how many different iterations of
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something can you really bother to get better at?
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So you know, we live in such a peculiar world, and what's around the corner may be something
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dramatically new, but I'm sure the world around the corner will also be filled with strangely
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old, you know, familiar things that never change.
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And does it make you look at the current times differently?
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Like, it is sort of the mood that I sense around me when I talk to friends, when I talk
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to whoever, is that, you know, that there is a bit of despair at what's happening in
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the world around us and so on and so forth, not just in India, but elsewhere as well.
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And you know, one question again that I asked my guests is about whether the arc of history
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as Martin Luther King said really bends towards something good like justice or freedom or
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whatever, or whether, you know, the sample size is too small and we don't know yet.
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Does it make you a bit more equanimous and sort of less emotional?
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Because having written a history book, not a history book, but written a book that has
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history in it, among many other things, and goes through centuries and centuries and millennia
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of so much change, and having, you know, lived around the world and seen so much of it yourself.
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What's your sort of kind of perspective on that?
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Or, you know, do you think that there is something to the direction we are moving in and so on
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Well, one of the things that I learned from writing my book about Cairo, which is very
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relevant to your question, is how cyclical history can be.
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I mean, Cairo is an extraordinary place.
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I mean, it's, you know, basically, I don't think there's anything compares 5,000 years
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of continuous, you know, big city in one place, slightly shifting around within the same location.
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It's always been more or less the capital of Egypt right there in the same spot.
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And there's a cyclicality to those 5,000 years.
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The cities have died there, come back and died there and come back.
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And one of the chapters of my book, I think, I go through one of the things that repeats
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in these cycles is people moaning about the present and saying the past was always much
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And I mean, there's some, you know, I found at every single age of Egyptian history, people
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were complaining about how dreadful things are now and how much better they used to be.
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And the thing is that for myself, I'm a horrible moaner too about Cairo, for example.
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It was much nicer when I was growing up there than it is now, you know, and the same is
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true of many, many places that I've been around the world.
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The world is unfortunately geography of the world is filled with places that I don't really
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want to go back to because I'm sure they were nicer.
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My memories of places better than the reality.
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So that does temper one's understanding of the current moment, which I agree with you.
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We were all pretty grim these days.
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And you know, when one would like to think that it's just a mood, you know, and these
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And there have been times in history when everyone got very gloomy, you know, you know,
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the post sort of World War One period, there was a period of real gloom around the world,
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which by the way, coincide coincided with the Spanish flu epidemic around the world.
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So not so different in some ways than the present.
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So there's definitely moods go up and down.
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And there are kind of strange times of fairly positive mood all around the world.
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Like for example, the 1960s was largely pretty happy in much of the world in many ways, you
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know, although I'm sure there were some people who would dispute that.
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I mean, you know, in places like Vietnam, it wasn't so great.
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But in general, there was sort of there's sort of optimistic seasons.
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And or the 1990s, for example, I think that was quite a cheerful moment for much of the
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You know, if you think about the enthusiasm about the early internet age and what the
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internet was, internet was going to solve everything and it was going to be this zone
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of total freedom where everyone was just going to hang out, it was going to be absolutely
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And it's amazing how that has turned into this sort of trepidation and danger and you
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know, it's poison and, you know, so that cyclicality is in evidence.
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At the same time, the current moment, I mean, there are reasons why we're all grim right
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I mean, and that's that's a whole other issue.
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And I wouldn't want to be, you know, the fact that everything is ultimately cyclical, that
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there are mood swings, et cetera, shouldn't make one be, you know, rosy eyed about the
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I mean, we are in a difficult time for the for the world and, you know, the responsibilities
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that are kind of upon us as humanity are particularly heavy right now because we can't really claim
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ignorance, you know, as we used to be able to.
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So knowledge is is always, you know, a heavy burden.
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Well, I mean, we can't claim ignorance, but we can claim alternative facts, as it were.
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And you've got a few eloquent lines about, you know, how every generation winds about
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decline, where in your book, you write, quote, And then reading into Cairo's past, I saw
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how foolish it was to fret about its future.
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How silly to imagine that this great town could ever decay beyond repair.
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The fact that not one generation in Cairo's five millennia of incarnations had failed to
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whine about decline and still the city had endured.
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And later you write, quote, Invaders have come and gone.
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The Asiatic Hicksaws, Libyans, Ethiopians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs,
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Turks, French, British and recent hordes of tourists.
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And I guess that last category will always continue to invade.
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So yeah, so let's kind of go back to your childhood now.
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You know, you're born in America, but you're growing up in Cairo.
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So you know, what is it like paint a picture of, you know, Cairo in the 1960s?
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What was it like for you to grow up in it and discover yourself in it?
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So it was rather an idyllic childhood in many ways.
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I mean, I lived a pretty privileged existence.
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My dad was a professor at the American University in Cairo and my father's American and my mother's
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British and they were sort of cosseted by the institution, you know, in order to get
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professors to come and work there.
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The university had its own housing.
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It had its own sort of carpenter and plumber and electrician and stuff like that.
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And so we had, from much of my childhood, we lived in rather large, nice houses in the
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suburb of Cairo, south of Cairo called Ma'adi, which is very much like a rather idyllic sort
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of Indian suburb, you know, of the 1960s, big leafy trees.
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We had 12 mango trees in the garden, I remember.
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And we had oranges and grapefruits and various other trees and plants.
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And we also had servants, not dads of them.
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We had a cook who kept putting his, he put his plastic shoes in the oven to warm them
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And of course they melted all over everything.
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And I can remember often going, my parents were quite social and we used to go to parties
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a lot and take us kids along sometimes.
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So I can sort of remember the smell of hashish and long taxi rides in Cairo with the sound
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of the music, you know, in the background and sailing on the Nile and yeah, very idyllic.
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We also, we were members of the Ma'adi club, which was the sort of the local little social
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club, sporting club in this suburb, which is a very sort of garden suburb.
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And in the sporting club, there was an outdoor cinema with a really giant screen.
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I mean, a full sized screen.
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And as kids, we used to pay the equivalent of sort of like, you know, sort of three rupees
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or something like that for a movie and watch a full feature movie.
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And we had no television.
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We didn't own a television, but we watched a movie every night for years and years and
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We watched Italian spaghetti westerns or, you know, various French thriller movies,
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you know, sort of low end American movies.
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So I had this kind of cinema education watching this giant screen for night after night, which
#
was fantastically kind of different, I suppose, from growing up with TV.
#
So that was our kind of exposure to the outside world and, you know, the world of culture.
#
And otherwise, you know, we were, as I say, cosseted and rather happy, I think, in general.
#
But interrupting all of that, because, you know, Egypt is the Middle East, we were also
#
interrupted by political events.
#
And so there was a kind of, Cairo always had, in the 1960s, had this kind of slightly sinister
#
air of something lurking going on, you know, there was secret police everywhere.
#
And we just sort of whispering and talk of spies.
#
And in fact, in the suburb where we lived, there were ex-Nazis who were helping Egypt
#
with his rocket program against the Israelis.
#
And then we were actually interrupted by the 1967 war, which happened when I was five years
#
And there had been some indication that things were not going well.
#
And I think my parents were advised it would be better to leave the country for a bit because
#
it wasn't quite clear what was going to happen.
#
And we were actually, we took a boat from Alexandria that went to Beirut.
#
We were in Lebanon for a few days.
#
And then we took another boat from Beirut to Istanbul.
#
And we were actually on the ship from Beirut to Istanbul when the 1967 war broke out, when
#
Israel, the Six-Day War, and the Israelis conquered Sinai Peninsula and basically gave
#
Egypt a terrible defeat.
#
And yeah, we were on the boat and it was a Russian boat and I contracted German measles
#
I was very sick and I was found by a Russian doctor who threw me into the quarantine without
#
My parents, they thought I was a missing person on the boat.
#
They didn't know where I was for about 12 hours until they found me in the infirmary
#
But in any case, when we arrived in Istanbul, it turned out that we couldn't go back to
#
And that was a bit of drama and there were constantly interruptions like that during
#
my childhood in the 1973 war, six years later, when the Egyptians did a little bit better
#
We actually watched dogfights in the sky over Cairo and there was bombing not far from where
#
So one was always very aware of the sort of turbulent politics.
#
And during this time with all this sort of politics and the wars breaking around you
#
as you're young, how is your view of the world kind of shaping up?
#
At one level, of course, you're too young to understand exactly what's going on.
#
You are at sea in more ways than one, as it were.
#
But it's the initial response to be that go Egypt, go and you're completely on Egypt's
#
And later as you sort of go to boarding school, I think you went to boarding school when you
#
How does your view of sort of politics and the world around you evolve from there?
#
I think we were just so exposed to this.
#
I mean, we listened to the radio was on all the time, just like all the time.
#
The BBC basically was on all the time.
#
And I was reading newspapers when I was really young.
#
And my parents were educated university type people and their friends were educated university
#
type people, rather critical of Western policy everywhere.
#
And in the middle of the Arab-Israeli mess, of course, everyone was highly politicised.
#
So we used to think of the Israelis as being these kind of very alien devils from far away.
#
And we'd see sort of Egyptian propaganda films, which we didn't take very seriously.
#
So I think basically, I got a very critical attitude to virtually everything that I heard
#
You know, we used to watch in these great cinemas, this outdoor cinema where we used
#
to watch films, there were often newsreels, which were kind of, I think Egypt probably
#
But before every film, there was a newsreel, just like the British used to do during World
#
In fact, that's an interesting thing is how many countries have never really gotten over
#
World War Two, as countries including India and Egypt in a way, that a lot of the habits
#
and things that the British introduced in wartime have sort of stuck ever since.
#
But in any case, newsreels were very bombastic with kind of martial music and a lot of people
#
saluting and tanks bouncing across the desert and things like that.
#
And we just never took it seriously at all.
#
So I think I grew up being very sceptical of almost everything that I heard.
#
And we used to occasionally go back to America or to England in summers and so on and so
#
forth, and it all seemed almost a kind of fantasy that they lived in a bubble of peace
#
and security that just seemed so far from the kind of dangers that we sort of grew up
#
thinking were quite normal.
#
Tell me a little bit more about the texture of those days growing up in Egypt, because
#
obviously these days we sort of take the internet for granted, take the fact that we're surrounded
#
We have any book we want, any music we want, any film we want, it's all at our disposal.
#
But how would a typical day be for you?
#
Of course, you're watching a movie in the evening as you mentioned, but apart from that,
#
how would a typical day be for you?
#
You were reading newspapers as well, but what kind of books were you reading?
#
Were you, in that sense, different from the people around you, by which I mean, was sort
#
of your university community or the expat community kind of different?
#
You've mentioned in your book, you had a friend called Ashraf, who you spoke about as being
#
from the other Cairo, as it were.
#
So what were the sort of, how would you spend your days?
#
How do you think he would spend his days?
#
That's an important point, because I mean, the fact is that when I was a kid, up until
#
the age of sort of 18 or something like that, or 14 rather, because then I went to boarding
#
school later on, we lived in quite a bubble, frankly.
#
I mean, first I went to a French school, then I went to an American school, and my friends
#
were mostly my own friends.
#
My parents' friends were mixed up, and most of their friends were Egyptians.
#
But because these schools that I went to were international, and there were rules for Egyptians
#
not being allowed to attend international schools, so my friends tended to be completely
#
random mix of international people, as in many other international schools.
#
So my friends were Yugoslav, Korean, Swedish, some Americans, but mostly other stuff.
#
English, a complete scrambled up mix, I had Pakistani friends, so the kids that I grew
#
up with were mostly of that sort of ilk.
#
And in the sporting club, I did have Egyptian friends, but they weren't people that I went
#
to school with, so it's a different sort of relationship and bonding.
#
So quite frankly, as a kid, it was an expat bubble.
#
And we used to go into Cairo as an adventure, used to take the train into Cairo, into the
#
city, and we'd sometimes go to the movies, but we would be sort of basically little foreign
#
kids on an adventure in this wild big city.
#
So that all changed later.
#
It was later, and at the time also, I didn't learn Arabic properly as a kid, also partly
#
because we left the country and came back, and left and came back, and we had to leave
#
during the Six-Seven War, when I was five years old, and we were away for four years,
#
I came back when I was nine years old, and then left when I was 14.
#
So there was in and out, and at each stage, one sort of like lose contact and so on.
#
And I didn't actually move back to Egypt properly until I was 19 years old, and it was only
#
then that I properly learned Arabic, and then I had a completely different relationship
#
with Egypt and with Cairo than I did as a child.
#
At that age, in my 20s, I had obviously a very different experience, and it was at that
#
stage that my circle of friends became very largely Egyptians, and I learned Arabic properly
#
and really immersed myself in Cairo in a way that was just radically different.
#
And would you say Cairo was home for you then?
#
Like one question I again ask my guests is about what they consider home or what their
#
sense of home is, and for a lot of people, they may be nothing of that sort.
#
And in your case, you're an American in Cairo, so you're not entirely Egyptian, but at the
#
same time, you're not entirely American either.
#
So when you think of home, is it Cairo you think of?
#
The fact is that the Cairo that I consider home doesn't exist anymore.
#
I mean, it sort of lives on a plane, as I was saying about places that you don't want
#
to go back to because they've changed so much.
#
So the Cairo of now is really very different.
#
I mean, and just to give an example, when I was a kid growing up, I just remember one
#
one occasion, a friend of mine who was Dutch, I think he was the son of the Dutch ambassador
#
or something like that.
#
And his dad was trying to quiz us.
#
We were sort of 11 years old and sort of, okay, boys, tell me what is the population
#
And I very cleverly said, it's 33 million.
#
And he said, very good, very good, very good.
#
Do you know what the population of Egypt is going to be in 2000?
#
And I said, no, I don't know.
#
And he said, it's going to be 70 million.
#
I was like, oh, come on, you know, that's not possible, impossible.
#
How could it be 70 million people?
#
And of course, now the population of Egypt is 110 million.
#
So the Cairo that I knew as a kid was a place that was, you know, a big city in a medium
#
Now Egypt is a country of the population is more than triple and it's changed the nature
#
of the place radically.
#
It's just a very, very different kind of, it's a far more sort of urban place with bigger
#
distances to grow through endless traffic.
#
And it's just has a different feel entirely and doesn't feel like home, you know, other
#
places that I used to go to in summers to the beach, wonderful beaches in Egypt, pretty
#
absolutely gorgeous beaches on the Mediterranean.
#
And they're, you know, now just not nice.
#
I mean, they're just one of the one place we used to go.
#
There was a steel mill built there, you know, so you can imagine what that's like.
#
Yeah, there's a lot that's just kind of lost.
#
So the whole question of home is, is a bit fuzzy.
#
I mean, I kind of have to make it up.
#
I think I sort of have many different versions of something that's home like, and I'm basically
#
most at home in my own house.
#
And there's certain like smells that you suddenly smell something you think, oh, wow, that brings
#
back childhood or something like that.
#
You know, sort of like the famous, you know, Madeleines from Proust, you know, brings back
#
in a whole range of things with the smell of one thing, but I don't really have a place
#
And I'm sure like in the future, I'm actually, you know, leaving India after six years here.
#
But there are things that I'm sure there are certain smells and sounds that will come back
#
and I'll immediately think home, but I'll be thinking it'll be India.
#
I mean, for example, if I hear the sound of birds in Delhi, which is quite spectacular,
#
I mean, it's an amazing racket of sounds.
#
Or if I hear the sound of another sound that's very constant in India is the sound of people
#
sweeping, you know, just to sort of switch switch switch of people sweeping on the street.
#
It'll feel like home immediately.
#
And that home will be an India that I remember, you know.
#
So that's a complicated answer.
#
Yeah, no, and there's a lovely quote in your book again, where you write quote, if Cairo
#
was in the words of his great novelist, Sunnobel laureate Nagi Mefus, like meeting your beloved
#
in old age, then was I to tell about her wrinkles, her bad breath and worst taste, and her unfortunate
#
habit of shouting at the servants.
#
Because just as one could expand on the city's wonders, its pyramids and minarets and showbiz
#
glitter, one could also mutter over his noise and pollution and sheer bewildering, annoying
#
And there is also, you know, another quote later about Cairo, which struck me as something
#
that is possibly true of any city, any old city, where you write, especially in India,
#
where you write quote, the fact is a city which is so astoundingly old is also surprisingly
#
In the past century, its population is swollen by a factor of 25.
#
Crowding is twice what it was in 1950.
#
It's three times the level of 1920, when the city housed barely a million people, a third
#
of Kireans are under the age of 15.
#
Few remember the statelier ways of a mere generation ago, let alone give more than a
#
passing shrug for ancient lorries.
#
Except, that is, when it comes to inflating the aura of the pharaohs to prime the lucrative
#
curiosity of foreign tourists.
#
And what you said earlier is evocative to me, because my sense of home is also, perhaps,
#
you know, not rooted so much in geography as in a certain kind of vibe, you know, and
#
then the question is where do you find that vibe and to some extent you can construct
#
it within your own home, you know, but outside perhaps that isn't there and that may not
#
be either a good thing or a bad thing.
#
You mentioned a couple of things about Delhi, which is the sound of the birds and the sound
#
of the sweeping, right, so which is, so that leads me to a couple of related digressive
#
questions and we'll come back to biography later.
#
One of those is that, you know, these are both things that I've never noticed while
#
I simply haven't noticed them.
#
But when you mention them, immediately the sound of sweeping came into my head, right?
#
But you could say that it was unseen to me as such.
#
And something that I meant to ask you when we spoke about India was that coming here
#
from outside, you know, coming here from a country that is also old and messy and all
#
of that and going through a lot of change, coming here from outside and therefore not
#
having normalized everything, what is it that strikes you about maybe Delhi, maybe India,
#
that you feel Indians don't even notice, that they just take for granted, that it's unseen
#
to them, you know, like you mentioned the sound of the birds and the sound of the sweeping,
#
you know, which are sounds, but apart from that in general as a general question, what
#
That's an interesting question because I think there are layers to that.
#
I mean, you know, one thing that I mean, I find because I've done a lot of traveling
#
and also as a journalist, you know, when I was in the Middle East, I covered a lot of
#
countries and I had to go to completely new countries and sort of get up to speed very
#
So you realize that your first impressions are very important and it's like meeting
#
a person, you know, your first impressions are really strong.
#
And so with India, yeah, some of my first impressions are things that I don't even
#
So I know exactly what you mean that if you say that Indians miss these things, I miss
#
them too because now I've gotten used to it, it doesn't mean anything.
#
But just, I mean, I relate a couple of things.
#
One is when I first got here, there's a kind of the presence of the very poor, the like
#
really, really super poor was something that, you know, this is nothing new that I'm saying
#
about India and this is, you know, but there's a sort of strange quality to the fact that
#
just going around Delhi, some of these posh colonies that I was living in, they were adjacent
#
busties full of people who are living at a different level.
#
There's nothing, you know, I mean, that's not a shocker surprise to me coming from Cairo
#
and there's nothing that I find striking about that.
#
What was striking in India though is how invisible those people feel themselves to be.
#
You know, they sort of shrink from contact in a strange way.
#
And often even, you know, there's in Delhi, I would find that some of the very poor actually,
#
their colour is washed out, partly because their clothes aren't, or they can't wash
#
their clothes or their very old clothes, their clothes are colourless, you know, their faces
#
are grey, they look unhealthy.
#
I mean, there's a kind of strange black and whiteness to the very poor, which I just found
#
really striking when I first came here.
#
And now I don't see it anymore because I'm used to this, you know.
#
But another first impression coming from many, often people would say to me when meeting
#
a Western looking foreigner arriving here, they'd say, oh, how are you getting used to
#
our chaos here in India and the heat and blah, and I was like, well, I've done chaos already
#
and I've done heat already and there's nothing new about that.
#
And in fact, I found India to be rather orderly and pretty impressive actually in many ways.
#
And, you know, I think the things that India does well and that work well, people get used
#
to and kind of forget about, but coming in from another sort of so-called developing,
#
so-called third-worldish country, India is just so far ahead in terms of things like
#
the digital world, digital technology, the use of digital stuff in banking, in all kinds
#
You know, a lot of the infrastructure in India, people complain and it's true, roads are bad.
#
But I mean, getting around by plane in India is pretty damn good actually.
#
I mean, it's impressive.
#
So I was actually impressed by a lot of things in a sense of things that working quite well.
#
And also, you know, as a journalist coming from the Middle East where I spent most of
#
my career, I found that I was suddenly arriving in a free country.
#
I'd never worked in a so-called free country where, you know, you can actually call a ministry
#
and ask for a quote and so on and so forth, where there's expected to be some response
#
from the government or some kind of, you know, accountability is kind of expected.
#
This was all new to me and kind of like, wow.
#
So I think people take for granted some of those things.
#
Of course, you know, that's all changing over time.
#
I mean, in the years that I've been in India, many of those things have changed.
#
But I'm just speaking of first impressions there.
#
There are other things.
#
I mean, one of the things that I think is surprising about India to someone coming from
#
outside is how washed out the sky is often in India.
#
It's a rather strange thing.
#
You don't notice it when you've been here for a while, but if you've flown from one
#
end of India to many times and you look out the window and often all you see is just haze,
#
which is a strange thing.
#
You get used to that here.
#
But I kind of, particularly in Delhi, of course, with the pollution, one misses the really
#
blue blue skies, bright blue skies.
#
There's often a kind of fuzz as if there's a filter over the lens in India, which is
#
Yeah, and that's actually a striking observation about black and white.
#
And I'll have to, you know, start noticing that.
#
I mean, I do, of course, say that, you know, if you're sitting in a car and you're driving
#
by the beggar at the traffic signal is always unseen to you.
#
That's just kind of how we are.
#
Another observation I made and at the time I made it, it took me rather by surprise was
#
in the mid 90s when I first came to Mumbai and I, or Bombay as it then was, and I would
#
travel by local train and I'd notice traveling from first class and first class and second
#
class are almost equally crowded.
#
First class is mildly better, but you're basically just standing in the heat and you're surrounded
#
But I noticed a height difference that people in first class were always an inch or two
#
taller than people in second class.
#
And when you notice that and you realize why that is nutrition, poverty, all of that, you
#
know, that kind of strikes you because it is there again visible, you know, and once
#
it's visible, it's sort of tragic.
#
And then of course you learn to kind of unsee it again as it were.
#
The other sort of question, and we'll come back to India and talk about it much more
#
later of course, but the other question I had arising from your mention of bird song
#
and the sound of sweeping is something that I noticed in your book and in your writings,
#
so much more in your book and Cairo than in your journalism because I guess there's not
#
so much space for it in your journalism, is your acute skill of observation in the sense
#
that what you're seeing and what you're hearing and all of that is, you know, so kind of acute,
#
which is exactly, you know, where you sort of, which is, you know, an example of that
#
is a bird song and the sound of sweeping.
#
And you know, I'll quote this passage from your book where you speak about your early
#
memories after you arrived here at the age of two, where you write, quote, what I remember
#
is heady color bursts of Bogan Villa crimson, Jacaranda violet and flame tree red and the
#
glistening blackness of olives at the Greece grocer.
#
I remember the crackling urgency of bagammon dice in cafes and the tooting insistence of
#
human animal and motorized traffic.
#
I recall the glamour of seeing Lawrence of Arabia open at that art deco jewel of a cinema,
#
metro on Suleiman Pasha street and the sheer fun of hurling potatoes into the gap tooth
#
maw of a hippo at the zoo.
#
Still elegant then with his pathways in Portuguese mosaic and lemonade served beside the still
#
lush Lotus ponds and so on.
#
You carry on like this for a while and these are so remarkably vivid.
#
And here, and the thing here is that how many of these memories are sort of in retrospect
#
when you're looking back and you remember those things and then you make these notes
#
right, huh, you know, Bogan Villa crimson and so on.
#
And how many of these are sort of ingrained that you are a noticing kind of person.
#
You know, you can either be sort of, I guess, a noticer who's noticing everything anyway,
#
or you can train yourself to notice things because you're a writer or a journalist and
#
So you hear a new sound, it goes into the notebook in your head or the sound of sweeping,
#
So what's, what's that like?
#
Well, I think, you know, that's an important question because it, in fact, a lot of this
#
noticing doesn't happen so much because you notice, it happens because of the process
#
of writing, you know, that it's all there.
#
You just have to draw it out and get into the right mood and let it flow.
#
And you'll find that you have noticed a lot more than you realize you noticed.
#
And also, that's one of the, that's one of the, you know, sort of pleasures of writing
#
is that you can pull these things out of yourself.
#
No one would ask you this normally unless it was Amit Varma who gives you five hours
#
to talk, you know, which is very rare, rare privilege.
#
But you know, you know, I think one notices as one goes along and there's certain kinds
#
of people who do make an effort to record and notice every little detail and really,
#
you know, sort of soak it up.
#
And I'm not particularly one of those people, but as I say, in the process of then recreating
#
and trying to paint the picture for someone else with words, that's what comes out.
#
Because you know, this is what you need to, what you need to, to sort of convey the thing
#
that you're trying to, trying to talk about.
#
That's what makes it tactile and convincing and real.
#
And so you want to find and do that in the most succinct way possible.
#
And to be succinct, you need everything.
#
You need color, smell, you know, everything is a big package.
#
So there wasn't an effort of noticing, there's an effort of recalling that comes out because
#
At the same time though, I think the act of noticing is really important.
#
I mean, and you know, that is one of the things that, you know, the sort of profession that
#
I'm in allows one to do.
#
I mean, you do have to pay attention and you do have to take notice.
#
I mean, even in the profession of being a journalist, you look at the, you know, expressions
#
of the person you're talking to, you look at the, what rings they're wearing, you know,
#
what everything counts and can, you know, trying to assess what you're dealing with
#
So you, you do have to do a great deal of observation and it's, it is useful to sort
#
of be trained in observation.
#
I'm not particularly keen.
#
Often I find that other people have noticed things and I'm completely oblivious to crucial
#
things that have been said.
#
I'm also tend to be slightly more visual.
#
I often find that I miss spoken words and wasn't quite paying attention, but I'll get
#
the visual stuff very clearly and miss the verbal.
#
People that I know are much more acute in catching every single little nuance of what's
#
And I wonder sometimes if my lack of sort of verbal acuteness might be partly having
#
lived in too many different countries with too many different languages where very, very
#
often the sound of speaking in the background is something, you know, you're not going to
#
So you don't try to overhear, you know, you don't try to eavesdrop if you just know it's
#
all gobbledygook, which is, you know, what happens to people who are not from Kerala
#
when they listen to lots of people yacking away on the streets in Kochi, you know, you
#
just don't know what's going on.
#
So you don't pay attention as a result.
#
And you know, as for the visual, you know, I've always been something of an esthete.
#
So I'm always on the lookout for something that's memorably beautiful or striking or,
#
you know, some contrast that really leaps out.
#
So there is a bit of an effort at observing, but actually the kind of granular detail that
#
you're talking about, that comes out of the process of writing about it rather than just
#
And were there movies that you saw, you know, in your sort of daily movie watching, which
#
really struck you and at around what point would it be that you got interested in writing,
#
for example, was that an accidental thing or was it right from when you could read,
#
you had the sense that here, this is something I want to do.
#
It was pretty much from the get go, I think, in many ways, I actually, I was torn.
#
And in terms of professions that I wanted to do, they were ranked, I want to be a movie
#
director first and an architect second and a writer kind of trailed in the background
#
as a kind of loser option.
#
So movie director, that sort of faded out as soon as I realized what a pain in the ass
#
it is to actually have to deal with the number of people you have to deal with when you make
#
I mean, a director has to deal with thousands of people, all of them difficult, all of them.
#
It's kind of a nightmare job.
#
So I have a lot of respect for directors who survive as directors and then even make good
#
It's amazing, actually, because it's a process of collaboration that's just very demanding.
#
And I've always been more of a sort of loner creator than that, that would never have worked.
#
But in terms of movies that were influential, it's more styles of movies.
#
I really liked, there was a certain kind of French kind of thriller movie from the early
#
70s with Alain Delon, quiet music in the background, a little bit bloody, but a bit cool.
#
Very cool, but convoluted plots, a little bit film noir.
#
I really liked some of those actors.
#
Those films were very influential.
#
Yeah, I remember when The Godfather came out, for example, that was great, it was very good.
#
And there was a certain kind of, I watched a lot of Italian spaghetti westerns, including
#
the ones that afterwards became famous.
#
At the time, we thought they were just more cheap movies like the Sergio Leone ones, Once
#
Upon a Time in the West and so on, that became kind of iconic.
#
At the time, they were just more spaghetti westerns.
#
So those were a lot of fun.
#
But I always liked thrillers and detective films.
#
We also, because of the era that I grew up in, we saw an awful lot of war movies.
#
There were just lots and lots of war movies.
#
So those were exciting, but they didn't grab me in quite the same way.
#
But I got absolutely indoctrinated with all the sort of Cold War triumph of the Allies
#
against the Nazis and so on and so forth.
#
And we never heard anything about what Russia got up to in World War II, for example.
#
When you only learned that later, the version of World War II we had was that the Americans
#
were the good guys who rescued everybody.
#
And there was another phase of movie watching.
#
We moved to America after the Six-Seven War when we were living in America as a little
#
Suddenly, we had television.
#
And so we became devils and just watched television all the time.
#
But there was a program on Saturday afternoons called Creature Feature that had three back-to-back
#
And these were cheap black and white horror movies from the 1950s, Godzilla, a lot of
#
Japanese monster movies, and really, really bad, bad American movies, Monster from the
#
Those were also influential, and we liked just sort of surrendering to watch this ghastly
#
And what kind of writers did you like reading?
#
Well, I went through different phases.
#
I mean, I was always a voracious reader.
#
And I was one of these kids who would read one Agatha Christie book and then just not
#
stop until I read them all.
#
So I just had a wall of Agatha Christie in my room.
#
I eventually collected them all.
#
I used to go to bookshops all over Cairo to find the ones that were missing.
#
English murder mysteries was big on the list for a long time.
#
And I also liked thrillers at the time.
#
But tastes change a lot.
#
I think probably between the ages of like, I don't know, eight and 12, 13, 14, my absolute
#
favorite was Tintin, Tintin, which I used to read in French or English.
#
But I think if there's any influence on me, in many ways, that's the strongest one.
#
Because those cartoon books bonded, Dessiné, as they call them in French, they're somewhere
#
between a movie and a book.
#
And the way those Tintin books were written was totally with a cinematic kind of understanding
#
I mean, the herger who wrote those books was a film director, Monquet, who ended up working
#
by himself to make movies in books.
#
Like I was saying, he maybe discovered that making films is too complicated.
#
But if you look at those books carefully, they're designed so that at the end of every
#
page there's always a little bit of a moment of suspense.
#
There's always a little bit of humor.
#
There's always a little bit of, you know, and it's full of gags that are straight from
#
the movies of the time, you know, Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin, you'd find the same kind
#
of gags in Tintin books.
#
And incidentally, I always find it amusing that quite a lot of what happens in Tintin
#
later on happened kind of in real life and in rather odd ways.
#
I mean, you know, things like having bombs on airplanes, you know, that was something
#
he made up and hadn't happened yet.
#
And then, you know, it happens in our lifetime that that becomes quite a normal thing.
#
People start blowing up flying aircraft and many other little bits and pieces.
#
And those books have also been sort of seminal because a lot of the characters in Tintin's
#
You know, they're cartoons, so they're slightly larger than life or exaggerated characters.
#
But I've met an astonishing number of people that I've known in real life who are astonishingly
#
like the people in Tintin, look the same, act the same or equally exaggerated, and sometimes
#
Well, you're a journalist and you're nothing like, you don't look like Tintin perhaps in
#
Tintin, Agadacristi, I mean, these are, you know, whenever I talk to guests of my vintage
#
from India, I realized we grew up on the same things because you only had so many, so much
#
So as a little kid, you might read your, you know, your Enid Blyton and your Hardy Boys
#
and you kind of grow a little older and you're reading Tintin and Asterix.
#
I was forbidden to read Enid Blyton.
#
My mother said, no, she's terrible.
#
She literally get them out of the house to take them away.
#
And I see it of a different sort.
#
And by the way, for those of my readers who also like Agadacristi or who read Agadacristi
#
Once Upon a Time, there's a great book I'll recommend and put in the show notes called
#
The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards.
#
I've read the entire period and that entire sort of school of crime writing, you know,
#
before the Scandinavians came and they, you know, took it in a different direction and
#
So sort of a fascinating book, which is also like a portal of rabbit holes because while
#
reading that book, I must have bought some 2025 other books just to figure out the other
#
sort of crime fiction of that era.
#
A lot of them are just as good.
#
Actually not as prolific.
#
I mean, Agadacristi took the cake in terms of just numbers and just sheer volume.
#
I used to read some of those others at the same time.
#
And so here's the thing that I realized that people in our generation and I'm sorry for
#
listeners if this sounds too sort of back in my day kind of nostalgia, but I'm coming
#
at a broader sort of point here, which is that people like you and I can meet and you
#
grew up in Egypt and I grew up in India and we are 12 years apart, I'm 48 and we can figure
#
out this common base, this common sort of source of cultural understanding where we
#
share much of that, whether it's Tintin or Asterix and Agadacristi.
#
And if we keep talking, I'm sure that even our journey through literature and through
#
music would have in certain ways gone along similar lines.
#
And I don't think that's the case today where people have that shared bedrock of cultural
#
Like in a way, I think it's good that everywhere across different fields, the mainstream has
#
So you've seen that in media and we'll talk about that also later in that context.
#
But you know, in media, the mainstream has kind of disintegrated.
#
There's no consensus on the truth.
#
Everyone has a means of production and that's net net really positive and but there are
#
negative effects, of course, and so on and so forth.
#
And I think that's happened in the culture also, like I'm just thinking aloud here.
#
But after Harry Potter, what has really been mainstream in that sense?
#
You know, earlier when we were chatting during lunch, I told you about Brandon Sanderson,
#
who is, you know, more prolific than you during the lockdown, wrote four books, and then did
#
this whole crowdfunding thing where he just went online and he said, I don't want to give
#
I'll give it to anyone who pays for it now.
#
And I love membership tiers and all that.
#
And he raised some 45 million dollars last I heard it might be more now.
#
And you hadn't heard of Brandon Sanderson, right?
#
And that's not unusual, right?
#
That an author so big is still nevertheless, you're very well known in a certain community
#
And nobody else knows you at all.
#
So, like, for example, not to make any kind of comparison, but on a much, much smaller
#
scale, my podcast for many people, it'll, you know, be part of the lives.
#
But where I live in Versova and seven bungalows in the filmy world of Bombay, nobody would
#
They won't have the slightest clue who I am, right, which is perhaps a wrong example,
#
because this would be a category error anyway.
#
But what I'm coming at is that everything in our culture has kind of fragmented.
#
So there is no mainstream.
#
And therefore, there are no common links.
#
Everybody is kind of on their own lane on their own path.
#
You know, if you like my YouTube channel could, you know, my YouTube with this algorithm skater
#
to my preferences could show me something completely different from, you know, the person
#
So and recently, I remember this thread on this email group, I'm part of someone started
#
a thread asking on the lines of that, you know, I have some interest, which nobody shares
#
What are the interests you have, which nobody shares with you, and you are totally alone.
#
And the point was that, interestingly, in a physical way, all the friends, you know,
#
physically, none of them might share that online.
#
You can find people like that.
#
So and here I'm just totally thinking aloud.
#
This is not a sort of a pre planned question, but what do you sort of think of this fragmentation
#
of culture and cultural influences and you know, what does it what are your thoughts
#
Now, I think you're quite right.
#
Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, it varies from country to country.
#
And you know, there's also a class element, what class of people you are to get what kind
#
of dose of what sort of culture from, but there's no question that it's fragmented immensely.
#
I mean, it's fragmented in slightly different ways in different countries.
#
I mean, I think of, you know, America is the easiest place to think of because it's the
#
biggest sort of mass culture that's been going on for quite a long time.
#
But you know, when I was in America as a kid, and even later on, you know, there were three
#
networks, you know, ABC, CBS, NBC, and there was something called broadcasting, you know,
#
which means exactly what it was broad, you know, casting and everyone got the same stuff.
#
You'd go to someone's house and they'd have three channels that had, you know, some variation
#
of the three main channels and maybe some local bits and bobs, but that was really basically
#
And those three channels were also competing to deliver very much the same kind of stuff,
#
you know, and so the news wouldn't be radically different from one to the next channel, you
#
know, they'd be the same sort of mainstream version of events that was cast at you.
#
So the voting public in a place like the US had a pretty similar take on what was going
#
You know, there's something in common there.
#
And as you say, it's fragmented, you know, radically.
#
So there's no such thing as broadcasting anymore.
#
It's all narrow casting now.
#
And it's people, you know, getting into their own village and being algorithmed into some
#
So you don't really hear much alternative to your, what appears to be your preference.
#
And yeah, that's, that's an entirely different world in a place like America and sort of
#
in the wider world, you know, I think people are, this is happening in different ways in
#
different countries, you know, but we are definitely shaken up.
#
And I suppose, you know, people like yourself and myself, we belonged, you know, in living
#
in very different countries, slightly different ages.
#
But we belong to a kind of international, you know, sort of class of people who are
#
sort of absorbing broadcast, you know, Western culture to a large, large extent, you know,
#
which isn't, you know, there's nothing wrong with that, it's fine.
#
But we certainly have access to more interesting and variety now.
#
So that's a positive side is just the accessibility of so much different stuff, which is amazing.
#
I mean, it is amazing, but the lack of commonality has implications that are obviously we haven't
#
And it's obviously causing a lot of trouble in the world, actually, I mean, that's the
#
root cause of so much political turmoil in many, many different countries, in fact, all
#
over the place is the lack of commonality to information, you know, and it's not we
#
should all be reading Pravda, you know, every morning and listening to Durdarshan, you know,
#
but having a common understanding is important for building nations, you know, to a certain
#
And this fragmentation can be, you know, dangerous to the fabric of a society.
#
But also, you know, it can take on this kind of nasty polarization, which can have ill
#
effects in that people are strident about what they believe in what they think is reality,
#
because they've never challenged and they never have to be challenged, they don't need
#
to be challenged by something new.
#
But I don't know quite what one is to do about that, you know, we perhaps lived in a moment
#
when there was unusual.
#
It's interesting, you know, you go back to different technologies.
#
There was, you know, an old book market in Cairo, I bought this rather wonderful book
#
that I'm afraid some, you know, drunken friend at a party stole from my house or something
#
But it was a rather fantastic, thick, thick volume.
#
It was an American scientific magazine from about 1920, it was a bound volume of that
#
year, 1920 of all the stuff from that year.
#
And the scientific invention, it was about like home science, basically, sort of like,
#
you know, the magazine was called Science and Invention.
#
Every issue, all 12 issues, a monthly magazine, I think, was about the fantastic things that
#
And radio was going to solve all the world's problems, you know, the police were going
#
to broadcast the names of criminals and people would catch them, there would be, you know,
#
you'd be radioing, everything was going to be resolved by radio.
#
So everyone have a radio in their car.
#
You could call your car with your radio, etc, etc.
#
There would be a radio station in every home.
#
And it's funny, because I had that book around the time when the internet was exploding,
#
and it was exactly the same thing, this internet will solve everything, you know.
#
And what's interesting is that like when radio first came in, in the 1920s, people did have
#
radio stations, you know, and I discovered when I was writing my book about Cairo, that
#
Cairo in like 1927, I don't remember the exact date, had like 500 radio stations, 500, you
#
A lot of them were some little guy in an apartment because you could buy all this equipment and
#
make your own radio station, there was no regulation of the airwaves, etc, etc, etc.
#
And eventually what happened was it got more and more and more and more regulated until
#
Egypt had a, you know, state radio monopoly.
#
And Britain had the BBC and America had three networks, you know, amalgamated, it used to
#
be literally tens of thousands of radio stations in America.
#
So there's always this kind of exuberance and explosion at the beginning of something
#
that then eventually gets amalgamated.
#
And that exuberance and explosion comes with dangers and trouble, you know.
#
And we're in a moment like that right now, I think.
#
And you know, there are sort of pluses and minuses to everything, there's a plus and
#
minus to the exuberance and having many, many different sources of information.
#
But as we can see, as you say, the fragmentation now means that you're not quite sure if you're
#
dealing with the same cultural baggage as other people, which can be, you know, it can
#
be difficult having a lack of commonality.
#
So I don't know if there's a resolution to this, but I mean, your observation is
#
And I think what often happens is that where a lot of communication fails between people,
#
it's because of the curse of knowledge, that I might be talking to someone and I might
#
assume that things that I take for granted are things that the other person knows.
#
And that might not be the case, especially since, you know, in what you mentioned about
#
Cairo that, you know, it's an old city with young people.
#
And you know, in India, for example, I think more than 60% of the people by now are born
#
So I can get into an argument with the understanding that of course we know why licenses are bad
#
and price controls are bad and all of that shit is bad because, you know, I have that
#
lived experience and it's an assumption I have.
#
But then I realised that, wait a minute, you cannot take it for granted that the other
#
person shares this understanding, right?
#
So you have to kind of make an effort to go that extra mile, like often on my podcast
#
during a conversation with someone, you know, there might be a stretch of conversation,
#
which I later think that, huh, we were kind of stating the obvious.
#
And then suddenly 20 people on Twitter will come up and say, my God, that's a TIL, you
#
know, today I learnt moment, I didn't kind of know that.
#
And by the way, those predictions about radio have in a sense come true today because now,
#
you know, all the things that they said you can do with radio, you can, I mean, in a sense,
#
this is, you know, this is a radio station.
#
So welcome to the seen in the unseen radio station is radio on demand five hours a week.
#
So for all of you who say five hours is too much, no, it's not, it's too little, it's
#
five hours a week, you know, that's hardly a radio station.
#
But here we sort of, so sort of a digression from the digression and it's perhaps a mischievous
#
personal question, but to go back to the question that my friend asked in that email thread
#
I told you about that, you know, what are you into that no one you know, is actually
#
into, you know, which could be a secret interest or a passion or just something that is kind
#
of off the beaten track.
#
What would you say would your interest be?
#
Gosh, that's a tough one, actually, I don't know.
#
I have rather kinky, not kinky, but I have very diverse reading habits.
#
I just like to, I like to pluck things out that I know nothing about and just plunge
#
in, you know, so I'm not, I'm, you know, this is sort of the hedgehog and the fox different
#
I'm, I'm a totally Foxy person, I, you know, so, so I often go down sort of funny rabbit
#
holes of knowledge and information that, so I just like to be as diverse as possible.
#
So I'm constantly getting distracted actually.
#
So it's hard to say that there's some particular, I don't have some little, you know, interest
#
in, you know, 17th century porcelain or something like that, that I hide from the world, but
#
instead I just have lots of little interest and, you know, constant curiosity about other
#
places and other things.
#
Yeah, but, but in terms of sort of habits and hobbies, gosh, I, I'm, I'm very boring
#
I don't particularly play any wild sport.
#
I don't do any great, you know, works of art.
#
I don't play music particularly.
#
I don't even listen to a huge amount of music, but I listen to extremely diverse stuff.
#
I mean, very eclectic from sort of Uyghur chanting to, you know, Beethoven to whatever,
#
you know, so I think I may have to disappoint you slightly on that.
#
I haven't, I'm not coming up with some funny little thing.
#
But no, no, no, no, no, otherwise quite ordinary tastes.
#
And, and, you know, describing your reading tastes, you've already given me this great
#
new category we could put in bookshops called kinky not kinky, which is how you described
#
So yeah, I think that could be a sort of a popular category.
#
And so I'm, I'm taken back to an old memory.
#
You know, you were talking about how we just, you know, there was a consensus on the truth.
#
You had three channels and this and that.
#
In India, of course, we had Doordarshan and every week Doordarshan would show one sort
#
of art film, quote unquote, right?
#
And they'd show it once a week.
#
So there is this legend about how, you know, Pradeep Kishan's film, which Arundhati Roy
#
wrote and acted in, in which Annie gives it those ones that showed only one on once on
#
So you would think, hey, everybody missed it.
#
It showed only once on Doordarshan.
#
But everybody I know saw it because it came only once on Doordarshan, right?
#
And I, my dad was a bureaucrat and he was for a while the director of the film institute
#
in Pune in the late eighties.
#
And he once gave a speech at one point, which I disagreed with vehemently and which I now
#
disagree with mildly, not so vehemently.
#
And his point of the speech was, and this was after liberalization and all the channels
#
came and his point was that, no, you know, fine, you have all this choice, but you're
#
Back in the Doordarshan days, you knew what to watch.
#
You knew something would come and you knew you would watch it and now you're just surfing
#
And of course I disagree with him because more choice is always a good thing and having
#
so much available has totally shaped me.
#
But when I spent five, six hours just mindlessly clicking on links and all of that, I kind
#
of get where that is coming from, you know, how much more would I have read if I didn't
#
have all the books of the world available to me.
#
So let's kind of go back to sort of your journey.
#
What was boarding school like in the US?
#
I went to the particular boarding school I went to, I got a scholarship, which was nice.
#
It was in the countryside.
#
So it was a rather beautiful place and it was kind of strange to be thrown into a place
#
with people entirely your own generation.
#
It was also coed, which was also quite nice.
#
So it wasn't some sort of, you know, little, you know, boys running around in little uniforms.
#
We were just in normal clothes and it was in the countryside and it was rather liberal
#
and kind of fun actually.
#
Yeah, I was there for three years and I hadn't lived in America for a long time.
#
So it was a sort of a reinsertion into America, but it was actually rather nice because it
#
was also full of other people of my age in the same generation who were also slightly
#
uprooted in one way or another.
#
A lot of people came from slightly broken families, for example, divorced parents or
#
something like that, or their parents worked someplace and they needed to go to school
#
And there are quite a lot of international people there as well.
#
So the mix of kids was very nice.
#
I was there for three years from like 14 to 17, something like that, years old, and it
#
We had a very good time.
#
I mean, we spent a lot of time outdoors.
#
You could actually go skiing right there, cross-country skiing, these rather beautiful
#
mountains in the winter.
#
So I remember the, you know, the colour of the snow in the late afternoon, which turns
#
kind of purple-y, brown-y, yellow, it was rather, rather stunning.
#
Yeah, I had my first exposure to drugs, sex, all that stuff, lots of music, you know, all
#
the other kids were very big on music.
#
And I had been, having grown up in a place like Egypt, I was kind of like a barbarian,
#
you know, these kind of provincial tastes, although we weren't that provincial, but suddenly
#
And it was an interesting time for music.
#
I mean, like the early seventies, I guess, in the US.
#
So there was a kind of education in all of that, you know, things like Pink Floyd and,
#
you know, David Bowie and so on, Rolling Stones were all kind of huge.
#
And I sort of got to know about jazz, I'd never listened to that before.
#
And we also used to escape from boarding school and I got, for several years, I was a big
#
I used to hitchhike all over the place, which sounds insane and, you know, it was probably
#
I'm lucky, luckily nothing ever happened to me.
#
But I used to hitchhike to New York, which was quite a long way away.
#
So I hitchhiked several times, you know, all the way to New York City.
#
And I had a couple of friends who had apartments there that would hang out in New York City.
#
So I fell in love with New York for the first time.
#
And yeah, it was full of adventure.
#
And with another group of friends, I think I was 16, we drove all the way to Florida
#
for, during a holiday, someone's borrowed old Chevrolet, which actually had a hole in
#
You could see the, see the highway underneath and yeah, we drove all the way to Miami and
#
back, which was, you know, wildly adventurous.
#
And are you in touch with any of those friends?
#
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, some of them, yeah, it's a good question because
#
you know, having moved so often, I'm not very in touch with, you know, like a cohort of
#
like high school friends or something like that.
#
I mean, just it's a very, in very small numbers, yeah.
#
Which is kind of a shame.
#
I mean, that's, that's the thing, that's the sort of thing that one loses by having
#
a very peripatetic upbringing is having that sort of, when you ask about home, for a lot
#
of people, home means your friends, you know, and if your friends are all over the place,
#
that's a small problem.
#
So I do regret not having a, you know, sort of long standing group of really old friends.
#
And when I meet, you know, friends of, other friends of mine who do have that, I'm often
#
just respectful and a bit envious of having a, you know, a body of friends that you've
#
stuck with for your whole life.
#
I mean, where this thought came from was I was just chatting yesterday with a friend
#
about how, you know, no one from school is my friend still today in the sense I'm not
#
even in touch with them.
#
A couple of them in Facebook, you see a name, you say, okay, you know, you take a friend
#
request, but you're not really friends.
#
And it's did too with college with a couple of exceptions.
#
And what I was speculating about as a possible reason for that is that back in that day,
#
we are restrained by geography and circumstance.
#
So you have a very small sample size of people to choose from for people to be friends.
#
And if your interests are not quite mainstream or whatever, then you're unlikely to find
#
people quite like yourself.
#
And the internet changed all that.
#
So many of my closest friends are really people I met through the internet once the blogging
#
age kind of started, which is well into adulthood for me, right?
#
And before that, not only was I a very different person, but I don't really have friends from
#
so I don't know how many of my listeners would sort of share this, I guess for younger people
#
is kind of easier because if you're going to school and college when Facebook and all
#
are already there, then by default, you're just a part of those communities.
#
And by default, you know, the world has already opened up for you, in a sense, which is which
#
is where that kind of question came from, because I was wondering because initially
#
you're thrust into communities of circumstance, like perhaps in your elite bubble in Cairo
#
or in your boarding school or whatever, but eventually you begin to form communities of
#
Well, maybe maybe this is one of the upsides to what you were talking about before, which
#
is the fragmentation of the world, you know, that, you know, it used to be that we couldn't
#
choose our friends very much, just like you can't choose your own family.
#
A lot of people are, you know, are sentenced to be with their family forever, which is
#
often not nice, you know, I mean, they may not get along, you know, but you're sentenced
#
But we, you know, many people were sentenced to the friends that they've always known forever
#
and which there's an advantage to it in the same way there's there's an advantage to
#
everyone listening to Doordarshan, you know, and knowing what we're sharing the same movies,
#
But so maybe the fact that we now choose friends more carefully or not more carefully, but
#
but you're likely to get a finer tuned kind of friendship because you share a lot in advance
#
through social media, for example, you know, it's interesting and new, maybe to some extent.
#
And maybe that's that is the upside to fragmentation is is more sophisticated or different kind
#
So tell me about going back to Cairo, because you mentioned that after you came back from
#
boarding school, your relationship with Cairo changed in the sense that you kind of, you
#
know, dived in a little deeper earlier, you were in your expat bubble and now you're sort
#
of, you know, making new friends, seeing the city more.
#
What was this process like?
#
Well, that was when I, you know, I completely fell in love with Cairo, I like and had a,
#
you know, sort of, I just think of myself as being a really voracious creature in every
#
I just wanted to know everything about everything.
#
And so I had I had a rather weird career actually, I was at university in Cairo.
#
But it took me seven years to get a an undergraduate degree, because I was actually working at
#
So I worked as a journalist, I worked as a tour guide, I worked making maps, I did various
#
other funny odd jobs, and didn't actually do that much studying.
#
And I had my own apartment most of the time, or a shared apartment, stuff like that.
#
And I was just a huge experiment, I, you know, Egypt is rather like India, I mean, the divisions
#
between classes are very strong.
#
And so you tend to, you know, hang out with other middle class people of exactly your
#
You know, there isn't a caste system in Egypt, but it's, you know, basically, if you belong
#
to the middle class car driving, you know, slightly attuned to the Western world, you
#
don't mix with people who are, you know, driving taxis and, you know, working class people.
#
So as a as an outsider coming in, I had this kind of privilege of being able to roam around,
#
and also privilege, but also the lack of, you know, barriers, you know, particularly.
#
So I was kind of able to do some social voyeurism of a kind that wouldn't necessarily be allowed
#
to another to an Egyptian, and that was probably in some ways unwise, or I don't know, you
#
know, I mean, but so I, I hung out a lot with very sort of, you know, traditional working
#
class people, and got to understand them and made some very good friends.
#
And I also experimented a lot with drugs, I did a lot of hashish, which in Egypt at
#
the time, everybody did hashish, it was just all over the place all the time, you know,
#
completely normal sort of thing.
#
And also, as I began to work as a journalist, to a certain extent, and got involved in sort
#
of politics and how it works, and, you know, having friends from all walks of life, I got
#
interested in crime stories and business stuff and how money is made.
#
And I did quite a lot of traveling as well, all over the Middle East.
#
And yeah, experimented with very odd different living circumstances, I went through a lot
#
of different relationships.
#
You know, I lived with a, in an apartment with this rather sort of seven foot tall guy
#
from Detroit, a black American guy who was really quite amazing.
#
He was a singer, gay singer, who just kind of adopted Cairo and was hanging out and living
#
this kind of very bohemian life.
#
I was actually pretty bohemian too, yeah, that was a sort of wild period when a lot
#
of the kind of personal experience that ended up going into the Cairo book happened then.
#
But I lived for like 10 years, a little bit on the edge, and just had a lot of fun basically.
#
And that was one of the things that Cairo is rather wonderful at the time that you could
#
do that and actually make a living.
#
I wasn't ambitious, I wasn't trying to go anywhere, I was just trying to soak up stuff,
#
information, experience.
#
And I had this sort of 10 year long period of sowing wild oats and doing slightly mad
#
things, but having a wonderful time.
#
And what was the, how did the journalism come about?
#
Like had you decided always that you want to be a journalist or had you decided that,
#
hey, I want to write and this is one good way of writing or you know, how did that happen
#
and how were you thinking of it?
#
Well, there's a great deal of oozing that happened, there were very few decisions were
#
ever made about anything.
#
I mean, there's just like, these are the things that I could do and make some money from.
#
So I could write an article and make a little bit of money and then write another article
#
and make a little bit more money.
#
And one thing followed another.
#
And the thing is that after 10 years of living in Cairo, my Arabic was excellent, I really
#
understood the place extremely well.
#
And I was already doing things like writing for guidebooks and travel magazines and things
#
And I got a job because I needed one steady job to sort of just pay the rent.
#
And so I got a job as the kind of assistant person for an American newspaper, the Los
#
And it was like a morning job, it was a half day job, but it was kind of useful because
#
But it gave me a schedule for the first time in my life, I actually had to be somewhere.
#
And I had to translate the newspapers every day and sort of help the bureau out with everything
#
to do everything in Arabic, what's happening in the region in terms of news.
#
So I kind of had to be more systematic.
#
And when I was doing that for a bit, I got offered some proper pukkah news stuff.
#
I did some work with the Financial Times, I actually became the, there was someone who
#
had been writing for The Economist from Egypt.
#
And when she left, she said, why don't you take up my string?
#
And so I started, my first article for The Economist was I think 1987 or something like
#
that, it was a really long time ago, 88, I think.
#
And then these things, it just turned into more.
#
So I suddenly found myself working, and I finally got my university degree, they got
#
rid of me and sort of get out of here and take this degree and don't be a student anymore.
#
By that time, I was already working for, as a stringer basically for different newspapers.
#
And it just took on a life of its own and I found I had lots of work and I was traveling
#
a bit around the region and I woke up one morning to find myself kind of full-time journalist
#
without ever having decided to do this job.
#
And I enjoyed it actually, it was great.
#
I was just looking through some files I have and I've got frightening stacks of articles.
#
I mean, it's hard to even imagine that I actually wrote so much junk.
#
And of course, at the time, I would actually file stories first by telex and then by fax
#
and stuff written on a typewriter.
#
I had a big stand-up typewriter, so there was a lot of clackety noise.
#
And then I think I had my first laptop, which was wildly ahead of its time, I had a Toshiba
#
laptop that weighed sort of like 20 pounds or something in like 1991 or something, which
#
was quite fancy stuff at the time.
#
So yeah, the technology changed, it became easier to do a lot of that stuff and still
#
no internet, of course.
#
I mean, no real internet, that didn't come until later.
#
But yeah, so I just oozed in and found myself doing quite nicely as a freelance journalist.
#
Similar questions, one, you know, whenever I sort of teach my, I remember I was teaching
#
my writing course recently, I teach a course on writing every month, it's an online course.
#
And somebody asked me about how I learnt the stuff that I am teaching and I had to regretfully
#
inform them that it was really, it was a process that took many, many years and no one taught
#
me and I had to learn it by doing.
#
And like, my God, had I done this course when I was 24, I think my life would have been
#
different in the sense that when I look back on the stuff I wrote then, it's like cringe-worthy,
#
I want to deny I ever wrote that.
#
And thankfully, that's pre-internet and none of it is out there and people can't take screenshots
#
and say, okay, look, four adverbs in a sentence and what are you even doing and all of that
#
So a couple of questions and the first of them is this, that how did you, like one,
#
what do you feel when you look at your own writing and how did you then kind of pick
#
up the values of A, writing and B, journalism and the kind of different things, you know?
#
So in the sense that if you're writing for multiple people, you're getting different
#
I'm guessing that the expectations on you as a stringer are also different from what
#
they would be from, say, maybe a staffer at some point in time and they gradually start
#
going up as, you know, you get more and more writing and more and more responsibility.
#
So how did you sort of learn to write?
#
What were your early tendencies like?
#
How did you pick up the values that you picked up about first writing and then about journalism
#
I'm not quite sure I'd answer.
#
To start with, I should say one thing, which is that I had the luck of being in a place
#
where quite exciting things were happening all the time.
#
I mean, you know, I was there for the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War, the first Intifada,
#
the second Intifada, the end of the Lebanese civil war, the beginning of this, you know,
#
and so all that Middle East turmoil meant that there was constant stuff happening.
#
So there was never any lack of dramatic material to get one going and get your curiosity going
#
and also to have a market in which to sell whatever I was producing.
#
And I'm not sure that there were any special models.
#
I mean, as I say, you know, I really grew up as a huge consumer of the news.
#
You know, I was always reading stuff, always.
#
I mean, we used to get the Guardian Weekly.
#
There was this wonderful airmail edition on this fantastic, thin, crisp paper that weighed
#
absolutely nothing, very white.
#
I don't know if you remember this.
#
It would come once a week, rather late usually, but we, you know, it was the Guardian, Washington
#
Post and Le Monde all in one weekly package.
#
So there's a lot of always really good stuff in there.
#
I'd read The Economist when I could.
#
We also had things like, you know, the Herald Tribune no longer exists, a very global international
#
So there were a lot of models for, you know, how to, I was always very conscious of trying
#
to explain the world to other worldly people.
#
You know, because I grew up somewhere else, I was never trying to explain the world to,
#
you know, Americans or to some particular nationality or, you know, what does India
#
need to know from this particular thing that's happening?
#
I always thought of my audience as a very general, general reader and also partly because
#
I, you know, I've been, you know, living in a different culture almost all my life.
#
I'm quite aware of the things that other people don't know and need to know to understand
#
something, which is often quite important, you know, to actually give the context about
#
something, to actually give the background, you know, to make sure that you carry your
#
reader with you and don't go out on a tangent where they don't understand what you're talking
#
So that's, it's important to have that kind of in the back of your mind and I think that
#
was, that was always part of my, you know, sort of building, you know, to use a fancy
#
German word, you know, is the need to make sense to people who are not necessarily speaking
#
the same language or having had the same experience as you.
#
So that's, that's always been important.
#
But in terms of, you know, actual models, I think, you know, you just get a sense for
#
good writing and it's like you say, I mean, one just has to do a lot of it.
#
I mean, there's the famous 10,000 rule, you know, where you just have to do something
#
10,000 times and you just get better at it.
#
And you know, it's, it's inevitable.
#
I mean, some people are always bad and remain bad and we will, they will remain nameless.
#
You know, they just never get good at it because they're just not good at it.
#
But you know, sort of practice definitely makes, makes perfect.
#
I think there's, there's also, there's practice, but there's also form is very important.
#
So you know, something that's improved my writing a lot with, you know, writing for
#
something like The Economist, for example, or other things that I've had to write for.
#
And this is one reason that journalism is, as a discipline can be quite useful is that
#
you have to write to length and time, you know, I mean, you have to deliver in a certain
#
limited amount of time.
#
So you've got to get the damn thing done and you've got to cut it out and it has to
#
It's got to be compelling and it's got to be true, you know, because if it's not true
#
then you know, not good.
#
But you also often have to write within a format.
#
So you'll have 800 words or 650 words or a thousand two hundred and twenty two words.
#
And this is very, very important because, you know, when you get more skilled at that,
#
that shapes the whole story is what you get to know what you can fit into that space.
#
But you also, the discipline of concision is quite important.
#
It doesn't mean you have to, everything has to be written in abbreviations or in a great,
#
you know, kind of a gush of, you know, cramming all the information you can, but you just
#
know that you've got to make sure that you cut things down so that you stick to what's
#
important and keep it clear.
#
And that's also, it's practice, but there's also the discipline of form is really quite
#
And, you know, one point I keep making in my course as well is that clear writing and
#
clear thinking have a two way relationship.
#
So obviously for a clear thinker, you're more likely to be a clear writer, but it works
#
If you force yourself to write clearly, you will force have to think clearly because you
#
cannot hide behind vague abstractions or, you know, the jargon and so on and so forth.
#
And I guess now thinking aloud from what you say, a constraint also helps because if you
#
have that constraint that I have 800 words and no more, then you're forced to figure
#
out what is essential about the subject that you're writing about.
#
And just that process, I would guess kind of clarifies your thinking on it.
#
My next question also comes from something that you mentioned that when you're writing
#
because you're an outsider, you realize that there are things that I cannot take for granted
#
So I have to explain it to them.
#
Now I had this phase maybe 15, 16 years ago for a couple of years where I was writing
#
on cricket for the Guardian and the Observer and I was doing op-eds for the Wall Street
#
Journal and I got tired of that really soon and I didn't want to do that anymore.
#
And the main reason for that is exactly this, but in the negative sense for a writer, which
#
is that I felt that I have to dumb it down too much to explain really basic things to
#
my reader, which therefore, you know, given the constraint of space reduces how much I
#
can actually say and how deep I can go and how many things, you know, I can assume that
#
Like when I read someone like my favorite essayist in India, Pratap Bhanumaita, for
#
Now Pratap, I think, packs in more insight into each sentence than any other writer in
#
this country does, but it also assumes a certain background level of knowledge or understanding
#
on the part of the reader.
#
And that works wonderfully well for readers like me, but it may not speak to everybody.
#
So in that sense, he's kind of a writer's writer.
#
Now how much is, so there is a trade-off here.
#
And one is that if you are writing the first draft of history, if you're writing about
#
something that is happening in a particular society and you want that first draft of history
#
to speak clearly to as many people as possible, then, you know, you can keep it wide and not
#
worry about going too deep.
#
But if you want to yourself kind of go deeper and deeper and make certain specific points,
#
you know, then that kind of comes in the way.
#
So how do you sort of deal with this kind of, you know, having to maintain this kind of balance?
#
Well one is generally very aware of the audience you're writing for.
#
I mean, you know, so there are certain kinds of things in the right time and place.
#
I mean, you know, when I look at an article by Pratap Bhanumaita, I am expecting Olympian,
#
you know, wisdom and, you know, and enjoying Olympian wisdom because he's fantastic and
#
he really is wonderful, a wonderful writer.
#
But and he's expecting to deliver that too, you know, so it depends on that.
#
And, you know, when one does different things for different audiences, so, you know, even
#
within the confines of The Economist, for example, you know, we have lots of different
#
frames for different kinds of things.
#
So I write the opinion articles for The Economist and sometimes news articles, sometimes analysis
#
articles, sometimes, you know, and it can be frustrating sometimes exactly as you say,
#
because you feel like you don't have the space to say what you want to say.
#
Or that because it's so short, you end up repeating the same thing again and again,
#
which is dreary and you'd really rather write it once and get it over with and, you know,
#
do it at length and, you know, that's all very true.
#
So having a variety of outlets is a very useful thing.
#
You know, different phases in my career, you know, one of the things I used to write quite
#
often for the New York review of books, I don't write for them that much anymore because
#
I just, I found myself too busy and, but I found that it was a good balance that I could
#
do my sort of, you know, slightly more pretentious, heavy intellectual stuff for, and a greater
#
length and depth for the New York review of books and then just make a living doing my
#
actual journalism, journalism, day to day thing.
#
So but, you know, one also tries to, even in mundane stuff, you know, stick in a note
#
of something more interesting if you can, if one has a profound insight or you think
#
you do, or you get a quote from someone that's really, you know, seems to be really enlightening,
#
one can stick it into a very otherwise dumb story, you know.
#
So you know, one doesn't want to draw these lines to, you know, these barriers too strongly.
#
But I think, you know, ideally it's nice to have different outlets for different kinds
#
of moods and, you know, purposes.
#
So that's one of the things that keeps me going.
#
If I were just doing the same, you know, race course announcement, you know, day after day
#
after day, I would get very tired, you know.
#
But also, you know, occasionally it's nice to write, you know, something completely different,
#
like a slightly racy thriller, just to break the rhythm entirely and try something, you
#
know, absolutely different.
#
I can't wait to read your racy thriller, actually you have sent it to me.
#
Hopefully I can persuade you to read out a passage from after the break when the reader
#
has context, but still a while to go before that.
#
So here's my next question, which is a standard one that, you know, which is exasperating
#
for a non-journalist when you're looking from the outside.
#
But when you are a journalist, you simply don't know how to get around it, which is
#
a tension between being a generalist and a specialist, right?
#
Like one of the laments I have of sort of what is happening in Indian journalism today
#
is that because budgets are getting cut, too many journalists are forced to become generalists.
#
So earlier you'd have a particular person say on a medicine beat who understands medicine
#
But here today, you just have generalists being thrown into the thick of things.
#
They don't have time to work on stories.
#
It's like they're doing one story, two stories a day.
#
So everything is very surface.
#
And for a journalist, especially, that's really something you can't beat because you'll
#
never know any subject you're writing about as well as a specialist in that.
#
So to that specialist, you look like someone who's very naive and general, especially
#
if you are writing in layman terms for an audience which you might know even less than
#
You know, and so how does one sort of get past that?
#
Because, you know, on the one hand, it's just it's an occupational hazard.
#
On the other hand, looking through the excellent essays you've written in the New York Review
#
of books like, you know, your recent essay on Arabic, for example, where you were reviewing
#
a book on that or earlier than that when you had this essay on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and how
#
her view is simplistic in some ways and, you know, you were kind of explaining Islam to
#
her in a manner of speaking and people might say, hey, who the hell are you to do that?
#
You're Islam-splaining.
#
But it's a subject that you've lived with and covered and thought about deeply for decades.
#
And it shows in your writing.
#
I have a degree in it, actually.
#
You have a degree in it, so there you go.
#
So in your case, it's clear that, you know, you're coming with that sort of expertise
#
and it doesn't matter what your name is.
#
But how does one sort of manage that kind of trade-off?
#
Like, one complaint I've heard about journalism is what Michael Crickton named after his good
#
friend Murray Gelman, he called it Gelman amnesia, right?
#
You've heard of this, right?
#
So Gelman amnesia is when you read, let's say you're an expert in subject X.
#
So you read The Economist on subject X, right?
#
And a friend of mine made this exact complaint about The Economist.
#
I do not agree with him.
#
I think it's a great magazine or newspaper as it was originally called.
#
But the thing, let's say you're an expert in subject X and The Economist writes an article
#
on subject X and you're like, what bullshit, they know nothing about it, right?
#
But everything else that The Economist writes on subjects you know nothing about, you take
#
So this is like Gelman amnesia, that you immediately forget that the one thing that you're an expert
#
on they knew nothing about.
#
So why should you give them credibility on any other thing, right?
#
And I think this is particularly unfair to ascribe this to The Economist, but it is certainly
#
true for a lot of the journalism that I see otherwise around me.
#
And this again is something that would arise from the generalist versus specialist kind
#
of situation, especially because now the specialists have the means of production in their hands
#
They've got blogs and newsletters, and so on happening out there.
#
So if you are covering economics and you write something really silly, I can go on marginal
#
revolution and read a far better take and I'm like, man, that journalist knows nothing.
#
So how have you dealt with this sort of dilemma?
#
I think it's a very interesting dilemma.
#
I mean, we're in a strange phase right now, because the world is full of instant experts.
#
As you say, everyone is a generalist, but then suddenly they're instantly an expert
#
on COVID or instantly an expert on the Ukraine or instantly, it's partly also TV has this
#
awful effect of casting up people who just like listening to the sound of their own voice
#
so much that they want to be instant experts on everything.
#
And absolutely it's a hazard of journalism and it's difficult in the economic circumstances
#
of a lot of the press, they can't afford to have experts on everything as perhaps they
#
used to a little bit more in the past.
#
And it is certainly a hazard.
#
I think it's a kind of strange that people often have expectations of the press that
#
are, I think, slightly unreasonable, that you should expect the press to be what the
#
It is trying to deliver a fast impression of things that are important.
#
It may not be the best picture, the most accurate, the most perfect, the most anything, but it's
#
an attempt, it's an effort to get this across with various degrees of seriousness, sometimes
#
not serious at all, and sometimes downright frivolous or misleading actually.
#
But I think this is something that does distinguish a better journalist from a worse journalist,
#
aside from clever writing style, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is really doing your job
#
in terms of finding the information, making sure that you know enough of what you're writing
#
about to not to be an expert necessarily, but to grasp it to the extent where you understand
#
the parameters of the thing that you're talking about, you have some idea of its background,
#
its past, of the factors that contributed to it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
#
I mean, often that's just all it takes is to just read the Wikipedia article about something.
#
And unfortunately, quite a lot of journalists don't even bother to do that sort of thing.
#
They just plunge in and want to make a good story, and the result is often a lot of bad
#
But I think I've always found it really important, and there are limits to this, though.
#
As you'll know, academics have the same problem, there's a sort of research-itis, like you
#
just have to research the hell out of something to the point where it turns into noodles in
#
your brain, and you are no longer capable of writing about it.
#
This is what happens to a lot of people when they're doing their PhDs, for example.
#
That can happen in journalism, too.
#
You think, I've got to have one more interview, I've got to understand one more thing.
#
And then as a result, the story suffers, and you've just got to get the damn thing out,
#
It's often the most important thing.
#
But there's got to be, basically, as you're aware, and as I'm sure you tell your students
#
all the time, again and again, there's got to be a balance between these things.
#
So I think the thing is, as a journalist, you're up against your own conscience.
#
I try really hard to understand what I'm talking about and not be stupid about subjects.
#
And occasionally, of course, every time that you make a mistake, it's caught out.
#
But the sort of people who are constantly picking apart stories to say, as you say,
#
the expert getting hold of some story in a mainstream newspaper and picking it apart
#
That said, I think there's always room for improvement, for a better approach to things.
#
And I think some, for example, newspapers in India do a very good job of kind of taking
#
things apart, like having an explainer to explain things or having a longer article.
#
And this has happened more and more that they don't try to pretend that a news story is
#
going to have all the information in it.
#
You'll find that somewhere else, which is a perfectly good thing.
#
And as you say, now that we have access to everything, you can get the expert word if
#
So the purpose of mainstream news is more to give the broad picture and point you in
#
the right direction of where you might find something more profound.
#
So I think everyone has their role.
#
And one wishes the quality everywhere were a little bit better than the, and one wishes
#
the ethics everywhere were a little bit better too.
#
You know what I look for in a journalist when they're writing about any subject is, is it
#
a good faith effort, you know, beyond my real objection comes where it is obvious that either
#
they have been a very lazy or they've got a predetermined conclusion to whatever they
#
are writing and they're just kind of finding facts to fit that.
#
But if you make a good faith effort, obviously you're not going to get everything right.
#
And that's kind of okay.
#
And what you also said about, you know, the research it is and how you can kind of get,
#
you know, it can become noodles in your head.
#
And yeah, I mean, what I do tell my writing students about is the trade off between getting
#
it done and getting it right.
#
And I always say that, you know, the important thing is to get it done.
#
I have a bias for getting it done because the more you write, the better you become,
#
you know, getting it done is a way to kind of getting it right.
#
And my next question kind of comes from there and I'm going to quote a little bit from the
#
start of this New York Review of Books piece you wrote in Arabic, in fact, because I found
#
this concept really nice, where you write at the end of a cart party, a QAT, is it pronounced
#
At the end of a cart party, typically close to sunset, there comes a moment when the effervescence
#
settles, conversation slackens, and thoughts turn quietly inward.
#
This solomonic pause, Yemenis call it Lehzad Suleiman, serves as a cue.
#
Guests rise from their cushions, hosts slip back to their own pursuits.
#
It is a time to be alone.
#
Cathinon, the stimulating compound in the fresh shoots and leaves of the card bush,
#
at this stage induces a calm, crisp focus that drivers find useful for long trips and
#
students for cramming, stop quote.
#
And Cathinon, by the way, sounds a lot like modafinil, which, you know, I use.
#
And it has exactly that same effect, not a blunt tool like coffee, but much sharper.
#
But I love this sort of this solomonic pause, as you call it, the Lehzad Suleiman, where,
#
you know, you take a step back and you relax and there's no hurry anymore.
#
And as a writer, it seems to me that, again, this is another trade-off, that, for example,
#
for you, as a journalist, you spoke about the constraint of space and the constraint
#
You have your deadlines, you've got to get the work done.
#
You can't afford to kind of sit back and let it simmer and marinate and so on and so forth.
#
But at another level, you are also doing another kind of engagement with whatever your subject
#
is, especially, you know, all your years in the Middle East, all your years in India,
#
where you're writing about the similar kind of society and a similar kind of politics
#
for years, where you are taking that pause and you're letting things simmer and you're
#
thinking about them a little deeper.
#
And I'm guessing a lot of your first book, which we'll talk about, also kind of comes
#
from that kind of a process.
#
So how has that sort of been for you?
#
Like, you know, do you therefore find that this is also important?
#
Do you find yourself doing more of this?
#
Do you wish that you did more of this than just writing to a deadline?
#
I mean, obviously, that is useful as well, because you're working out your writing muscle
#
and it helps you to focus your thinking and, you know, get to what is essential and that's
#
an important part of it.
#
But in general, when you look at yourself, like you've spoken about how what excited
#
you about journalism was, you're putting that first draft of history out there.
#
But at the same time, you are seeing that first draft of history and you're also doing
#
in a sense, a more considered draft of whatever is going on after the first draft in various
#
You know, today you might write about something you've thought about for a couple of years
#
and it's coming out that way, or you might feel I have to write a book about it.
#
And as we were chatting before this at lunch, you really should start a newsletter.
#
But in general, what do you kind of think about the tradeoffs involved here and these
#
different modes of writing, as it were?
#
Yeah, I think I know from myself, I, you know, I've in my head, I've written about 20 books
#
and you know, lazy, basically, you know, if I if I were driven in a different way or didn't
#
have some, you know, a kid to send to college bills to pay people to employ stuff like that,
#
you know, and, you know, expensive habits to maintain, I would certainly have written
#
And, you know, some of the ideas that I've had for books that would have been great,
#
I've seen them come out come to fruition.
#
There's something very strange, there's unquestionably sort of, you know, zeitgeist out there that
#
where people have the same idea at the same time, because I've several books that I've
#
thought of thinking that make a big publishing success, bam, next year, there are three of
#
them, you know, they're just, so that one word of advice to your students is just don't
#
be lazy, just go ahead and do it, you know, I mean, which I regret not having done.
#
But aside from those regrets, often, the more insightful bits, passages, you know, ideas
#
that I've had for stuff that I've written have been done as you're suggesting, not sort
#
of at the typewriter, at the, you know, interface, you know, on the coal face, you know, with
#
your screen in front of you is actually lying down, you know, taking a nap and waking up
#
and suddenly thinking, ooh, or like when I was doing my writing the thriller that I wrote
#
during lockdown, I would actually just wake up in the middle of the night and think, ah,
#
you know, and get up and then scribble that passage, you know.
#
So there's a kind of repose and, you know, kind of gestation period is really important
#
It can't be too, too, too forced.
#
You know, of course, just like, you know, we were saying over research is bad, but over
#
gestation is also bad, I mean, it's not like, you know, sit there and wait for inspiration,
#
which seems to be what a lot of people do and that waiting for inspiration goes on for
#
months and years and then lifetimes, that's obviously not on either.
#
But I think moments of repose and reflection and quietly sort of just talking to yourself,
#
you know, getting into your, in rolling things around in your head quietly away from a screen
#
and away from a deadline is actually a very good thing.
#
Even stories that I've written, you know, new stories that I write on deadlines, suddenly
#
you think, ah, gosh, I'm stupid.
#
This is what should be the opening of that story, you know, or here's the passage that
#
I should end that, you know, really short piece with because it's, you know, that's
#
what is a really good send off.
#
So those little bits of epiphanies and inspirations and the sort of quiet thinking are also an
#
extremely important part of the creative process, but you know, everything within its own limits.
#
And earlier you mentioned about how you start writing and you have this stand up clickety
#
clackety typewriter, which is, you know, making all kinds of sounds and, and, and then you
#
move on to a laptop and so on and so forth.
#
Suddenly you're sending things by telex and fax and all that does the mode of writing
#
also change the way that you write?
#
Like I would imagine that when you're handwriting, at least when I'm handwriting, you know, it
#
is, and now I hardly write anymore by hand, but it is much slower and therefore it forces
#
me to think more slowly, which could either be a feature or a bug.
#
Similarly when we are, when I'm back in, when I started writing, I used a typewriter for
#
very brief while before, you know, the age of computers happened and, and there's no
#
You know, what you're typing is it, you know, so it is not final.
#
Of course you can type another draft, but it's so much of a pain that you're forced
#
in a sense to perhaps be more considered to construct a sentence in your head before you
#
actually start with the sentence, you know, which might not be the case today where, you
#
know, you can immediately backspace and you can write the thing and edit it on the page
#
itself and you don't have to type it out again.
#
So did you feel that difference in your writing that did the process actually make that kind
#
of a difference at any point?
#
Actually surprisingly, no, strangely not.
#
It's funny, you just adapt.
#
I think when I first started using a word process and realized I could just throw away
#
things and, you know, I got more fastidious, you know, kind of tidying, tidying things
#
up all the time and making sure they're a bit more perfect all the time.
#
But I don't think it affected, strangely enough, it didn't affect the quality of the writing
#
so much, you know, oddly enough, you'd think that because you can write things over and
#
over and again and it's easier.
#
So maybe it has to do with some process that you're suggesting about, you know, just having
#
to construct the idea in your head a bit more carefully, but I'm not even sure if that's
#
They're also, you know, they're different kinds of writers.
#
I've watched, you know, friends of mine who write, you know, who start at the top of a
#
story and just keep writing sentence by sentence and will rewrite the same sentence 20 times
#
and then move on to the next one and rewrite that 20 times and the next sentence 20 times
#
I just don't do it like that.
#
I just write a paragraph and then go back and start fiddling with it, you know.
#
That's much more my way of doing things.
#
So I think to each their own kind of approach to how that unpacks itself and the actual
#
technology is sort of almost immaterial.
#
You know, word processors, you know, that is a big revolution, obviously makes things
#
I don't know if there's any sort of better or worse or orthodoxy to suggest in that.
#
So in your book, you quote this lovely old proverb where you say, he who drinks the water
#
of the Nile is destined to taste the sweetness again.
#
And you've mentioned elsewhere about how, you know, going back to Cairo, you know, after
#
being in America was kind of a big deal for you.
#
And that eventually led to the book where you felt that you had to write about this
#
So tell me a little bit about that because even, you know, I've heard you say this on
#
another interview, which of course I'll link from the show notes where you spoke about
#
how you were in the U.S. and you kind of went to the docks and you saw a ship and it was
#
going to Egypt and you said, fuck, I have to be on that ship.
#
And so tell me a little bit about that kind of process and, you know, you know, what was
#
it that made you want to go back?
#
And when you went back, what did you see differently and, you know, how the book emerged out of
#
Yeah, well, I'd have to take myself back to be my 18, 19 year old self because I was kind
#
of washed up in America.
#
I had a first year of college in the U.S. I got into quite a good college right after
#
In fact, I didn't even finish boarding school.
#
I think they actually literally made a mistake and actually admitted me to Wesleyan University,
#
which is a very good university, without having finished high school.
#
It was an error on their part.
#
I just, I sent in an application as a joke, literally, and I got admitted to the place.
#
And so, which was a mistake because I went to this college where I had no idea what I
#
I was only 17 years old.
#
I didn't know what college was all about and didn't know what I wanted to do.
#
I sort of bombed out because I was just unhappy, I guess.
#
And as a result, I find myself kind of washed up in America with no college degree, da-da-da-da.
#
And I had to kind of make up my mind at that quite young age of what to do with myself.
#
And I had a girlfriend who was in New York and I spent the summer in New York City and
#
I tried to make some money just to kind of get by and survive.
#
And the only job that I could find, well, not the only job, but I had this slight, slight,
#
because I'm a very curious person and slightly curious about everything, the job that I found
#
to keep myself alive for the summer was as an attendant in a gay bathhouse.
#
And this was at the height of like gay promiscuity.
#
This is just before the AIDS epidemic.
#
I was an attendant in the St. Mark's baths in New York City on the midnight to 8 a.m.
#
shift for a couple of months, which I must say I saw some very peculiar things there
#
and quite an education.
#
But in any case, I was not quite sure what I wanted to do with my future.
#
And I found myself one morning in Brooklyn Heights, which overlooks New York Harbor.
#
And at the time, there were still actually functioning docks.
#
They're no longer functioning at all, haven't been for years.
#
But at the time, there was still actually a functioning dock there.
#
And I was trying to decide, should I go back to Egypt, should I stay here?
#
This is a bit of a dead end job that I'm doing, blah, blah, blah, what am I going to do?
#
And there was actually a ship that was in the harbor that was actually being loaded.
#
It was a sort of freighter.
#
And I could see that there was the name of the ship on the stern of the boat was sort
#
of written and the port that it came from.
#
And it was being loaded up with these big red buses, a crane was lifting them up and
#
And at the time, I knew that Egypt was getting a lot of aid from the U.S., including buses
#
There were like buses being sent to Cairo.
#
Egypt had just signed this Camp David peace accords with Israel.
#
And as a kind of American payoff, there was a huge amount of American aid, including these
#
And I was thinking to myself, are those buses going to Egypt?
#
Why would there be loading buses in New York Harbor onto a ship?
#
I wonder where that boat is going.
#
And I pulled my glasses out of my breast pocket, I was wearing a jacket, pulled out my glasses,
#
which I, and with the idea of like using the lens of the glass as a kind of like, you know,
#
little miniature telescopes, which you can do that.
#
I mean, it's kind of magnified a little bit.
#
And as I pulled out the glasses from my pocket, I hadn't really taken account of this.
#
I'd forgotten that my little roll of hundred dollar bills that was like my savings was
#
And I pulled out my glasses and this roll of hundred dollar bills went up into the sky.
#
And there was a brisk wind and it went, you know, all this money went flying off across
#
the docks across the into New York Harbor.
#
And lo and behold, when I looked at the ship, it was actually from Alexandria and these
#
were buses going to Egypt and it was going to Egypt and basically the only other possession
#
I had, except for the sum of the money that was in my wallet, I did have a return plane
#
So I actually left to Cairo very shortly afterwards.
#
So anyway, that's one of these mystical stories, but who knows, it felt like fate was intervening
#
to send me back to Cairo.
#
And this was a message of some kind, you know, I'm taking your money, here's your ticket
#
going, is a pretty direct message.
#
So that's, that's what, you know, that's why I ended up back in Cairo.
#
But then, as I said, you know, writing a book about Cairo, which is many years later, it
#
wasn't until 15, 16, 17, 17 years later that I actually published a book about Cairo.
#
In the first 10 years that I was living back in Cairo as a grownup person, I had such a
#
wild time and really that I felt I had a sort of debt to the city.
#
I mean, you know, which had been very kind to me.
#
I mean, lots of people had been kind to me and also I had got, I had done dangerous things
#
and never gotten into serious trouble.
#
And I just felt like I'd sort of, I'd had a lesson in humanity that only a place like
#
Cairo can really teach you.
#
You know, I mean, Mumbai is the same kind of place.
#
I mean, it's, it's just so many layers of humanity doing so many crazy things all the
#
It's, you know, if you can actually start exploring those layers, you know, it's a fascinating
#
The luxury of being able to do that in a place like Cairo, I always felt like I owed the
#
And the opportunity later came up to do a book, but that was again, partly forced.
#
My whole life is like very few decisions, everything was like fate and things being
#
I was actually in London for a time because my wife got a scholarship to study in London
#
and I went, I went along as baggage to London.
#
At the time I had only an American passport.
#
I now have a British passport, but at the time I had only an American passport.
#
It was very difficult to work in London.
#
I had, there's nothing much I could do.
#
And so I needed to find some gainful employment and I managed to do a few things sort of semi-legally,
#
but I really, you know, I needed to find something.
#
And so the idea of doing a book on Cairo came up as a sort of like, you know, necessity
#
And I happened to just write a inspired book proposal to do this book about Cairo and got
#
a bunch of different publishers bidding on it.
#
And so when I returned to Cairo, I was returned armed with a book contract to write something
#
And, you know, your book starts with this excellent quote from Thomas Gold Appleton
#
from his Canal Journal, where he writes, quote, every year a little deposit of mud is left
#
by the Nile on his banks and every year sees deposited upon the counters of the London
#
booksellers, the turbid overflow of journalizing travel.
#
Alas, it has not the usefulness of the leavings of the sacred river.
#
And later you yourself write, quote, books about cities were of two kinds.
#
They were either travelogues or histories.
#
And I knew that while a travel story could barely scratch the surface of Cairo's depth,
#
a straight history was bound to found it in the immensity of the city's past.
#
Both of it seem valid points.
#
Like if I was, you know, if I was to consider writing about Mumbai, for example, I'd have
#
exactly the same kind of thoughts.
#
So how did the conception of the book then take shape in your mind?
#
Like were there any models where you could look at and say, okay, so and so book has
#
been written in the way that I think, you know, I could write my book, like, you know,
#
maybe it could be a book about a city, it could be a book about whatever.
#
How do you then decide?
#
Because then there is sort of the temptation, I'm guessing, to put in, you know, an impressionistic
#
sense of whatever you have been through in that city and what it means to you and make
#
Then there is also that historical sense, you know, that broad sweep centuries and centuries
#
and millennia of action happening there as it were.
#
And then there is also sort of a sense of stepping back a little bit in capturing society
#
as it is now and capturing politics as it is now and all of that.
#
So you're trying this thing with multiple layers.
#
So which of them was, you know, how did the book evolve?
#
Like was that a case that you decided to go for all of these or one of these or what was
#
your anchor as it were?
#
There really weren't many models.
#
In fact, they're kind of counter models.
#
I didn't want to do it like that.
#
So I didn't really have a model.
#
But also the idea for the book evolved as I wrote it.
#
I mean, you know, I warned you there's a lot of oozing in my life and not many decisions.
#
So the way that book came out in the end was really largely a product of the process of
#
I tried, started off in one direction and realized that that direction wasn't quite
#
working and so I had to change direction.
#
One of the things I want to avoid with doing a book about Cairo is just to do like a chronology,
#
like a history of plan.
#
You know, it starts in one year, it goes the next year and the next year, the next dynasty,
#
Because for Cairo, it just really is endless.
#
I mean, it's 5,000 years.
#
It goes on and on and on and on.
#
And not only that, but I want to write something that actually, I mean, as Thomas Appleton
#
suggests the mud on the banks of the Nile accumulating over time, I want to do something
#
that actually added to the pile of knowledge.
#
You know, it wasn't just another book on Cairo.
#
And so my conception was that I wanted to write a book that was more thematic than linear.
#
And I found a lot of repeating themes and cycles in Cairo and I tried to make it like
#
But actually, I discovered that it's difficult to escape from the chronology at the same
#
time because you can't, it doesn't make sense if you don't have the time element in there.
#
So the book does generally kind of follow the chronology from old to new with cycles
#
And it's kind of an unusual approach and risked not working at all, I think.
#
I also started off thinking it was going to be a much more personal book.
#
And part of the trouble with that is that I realized as I was writing the book that
#
I was getting annoyed with the sound of my voice, I was getting bored with myself.
#
And I realized that I'm a bit of a moaner, you know, there's the chapter with this section
#
we mentioned before about people moaning about Cairo used to be better, used to be better,
#
Then I realized that I was a rather negative whiner about things.
#
And the sound of my own voice was going to be this whiny voice about how it all used
#
So I got annoyed, I got tired of myself, but I also did a lot of research and I kept finding
#
just fascinating things and I wanted to put in all these fascinating things.
#
So basically, you get this kind of car crash with all of those elements happening at once
#
and then trying to make a useful book out of it all.
#
And you know, I think the slightly car crash element, at one stage I thought this is a
#
bit of a complicated mess to inflict on the reader, but also a city like Cairo is a bit
#
You know, it is a clash and it is a bit of the personal and a bit of the historical and
#
And you know, if you don't understand this part, reach for Wikipedia.
#
And if you like this bit, you know, find out more somewhere else.
#
And I didn't want to stick myself into it too, too closely, but there were some little
#
personal anecdotes that I thought were so telling that they really had to, you know,
#
couldn't avoid putting them in, you know, stories that are just really strong.
#
So it's got all of that.
#
And in the end, you know, it's not a history of Cairo, it's actually a portrait more than
#
So like a portrait, it's got layers and, you know, perspective and, you know, it accumulated
#
over many sittings, so to speak.
#
And mentioning layers, you know, I love this quote from your book, which actually, I wouldn't
#
call this a moan, I'd call it a lament and a lament that one can share, you know, about,
#
you know, you have a lament about Cairo, I can have a lament about something in my local
#
this thing and we could just, but here's a quote.
#
I grew wary of exploring the city, each successive visit to its old core, the zone of grand medieval
#
mosques and palaces and bazaars brought fresh evidence of further decay, marble buckled
#
of walls, ancient minarets toppled into neighbouring houses and in the markets, plastic shoes and
#
pharaonic t-shirts replaced camel hide slippers and satin caftans.
#
Strolling one day downtown in what used to be the European quarter, I discovered one
#
favourite cafe transformed into a tawdry jeans outlet and another replaced by a burger bar
#
called Madonna's, the national hotel whose crusty broken-keat piano bar had once boasted
#
a preposterous coterie of Second World War vintage prostitutes was bought and torn down
#
by an Islamic investment company when its pyramid scheme went bust, the site remained
#
And it seems to me that, you know, if one was to write about Mumbai, for example, right,
#
one would be the Mumbai that I see around me and that I've experienced and no doubt
#
as I dive further into it, because I'm writing about it and looking with a different kind
#
of gaze, I'd notice things which were unseen to me but which are now there when I see it.
#
But a lot of what you're forced to do when you write about such a historical city is
#
that you are sort of creating a lot of layers from imagination, not in a sense of making
#
them up, but reading history and you're having to imagine these layers and kind of superimpose
#
them on what is kind of there so you can look at an obelix at a particular place and you
#
can know, oh, this is a history and this is what happened to it in 1300 and this is what
#
happened to it in 600 and so on and so forth.
#
So does that deepen your understanding of the city or is that romanticizing it too much
#
in the sense do you then just, you know, having written the thing, come down to ground and
#
it is still the city that it is where you're living or are you left with a greater appreciation
#
than the you who did not write that book in a parallel universe would have been left with?
#
I mean, you know, it depends on your experience.
#
It just happened that I did a degree in Islamic history.
#
I also used to do guided tours of the old city in Cairo.
#
I just spent, you know, years and years walking all over the city and back streets and new
#
people in every neighborhood and, you know, I just really, really, really knew the city
#
And so the historical side, you know, I just had accumulated a lot of knowledge of that.
#
So it's kind of second nature.
#
It wasn't like something, you know, that I chose to add that as a dimension to this book.
#
It's actually part of your knowledge of the place.
#
You just, you know, you know that what used to stand on that corner was different from
#
what's there now and it becomes part of the fabric as far as you experience it.
#
And you know, if you're writing a book about a place, you want to convey some of that,
#
you know, texture and depth of knowledge.
#
You know, it's not as if somebody who isn't aware of all that background won't have equally
#
strong experience of a place and, you know, and equally valid, you know, obviously.
#
But I don't know, I think there's a, then perhaps they wouldn't be inspired to write
#
a book about it, you know, or they would write a different kind of book, you know.
#
You know, Sukhatu Mehta's book about this, about Mumbai, doesn't go into the history
#
You know, that's not his interest.
#
He's, you know, so, you know, depends what's your approach.
#
Also, I mean, you know, to, you know, toot a little horn for Cairo.
#
I mean, you know, Mumbai is what, 200 years old, you know, I mean, this is just nothing.
#
It's like spring chicken of a city compared to, yeah.
#
You have another great line which indicates this, where you said, quote, tombs crumbled,
#
and this is, you're describing what happened after the Ottomans came and took over, and
#
you write, quote, tombs crumbled in the outlying parts of the city of the dead, the ruins merged
#
with the gray refuse heaps that now smothered long abandoned quarters of Misra al-Fustat.
#
So, which is another great way of saying it.
#
Let's take a quick sort of commercial break now, and at the other end of the break, we'll
#
talk more about Cairo, and then we'll get to talking about India as well, and perhaps
#
I can persuade you to read some of this kinky non-kinky book that you've written.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing.
#
An online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
#
They have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community
#
In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
#
about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST, or about $150, and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
That's indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just the willingness to work hard
#
and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Max Roddenbeck about his life, about his work, and right now about
#
So going back to this book, once you sort of start writing it, typically I think what
#
happens is when you conceive of writing your first book, initially there is that excitement
#
that, oh, I'm going to write a book, and you're animated with the force of the idea.
#
And then there is also a moment of panic, because you're like, what have I taken on?
#
And you might even have the sort of imposter syndrome that, you know, it's a good idea,
#
Am I good enough to execute this idea, as it were?
#
So what was it like you kind of, you know, dipping into the book?
#
Did you just sort of go into it with the confidence of you saying that, yeah, you know, I have
#
an idea, let's just start, all of that?
#
And how did you then build those processes where, you know, did you have a set writing
#
What did you do for research?
#
These are the days before the internet, so you've got to, you know, look for physical
#
objects called books or papers or whatever to actually do your research.
#
So how did all of that work out?
#
It's kind of, to tell the truth, all of the above, you know, all of the doubts, all of
#
the anxieties, all of the missteps, the wrong roads taken, everything, and it took four
#
years to do that book, of which about, you know, two years, a year and a half, two years
#
And I had access to a really good library in Cairo.
#
And I also had, I had my own collection of stuff and my own family had some books and
#
things that were interesting.
#
And also I had a lot of friends who were well informed.
#
So I had no shortage of sources, but I did a lot of library research for that book because
#
it covers, you know, 5,000 years.
#
So there's, you know, pharaonic history, there's Roman history, Greek history, Arab history,
#
Turkish history, it's all sort of piles into Cairo.
#
So there was a great deal of that.
#
And I did a, I just kind of came up with my own research method, which I subsequently
#
discovered that other people do very much the same kind of thing, which was that I did
#
a lot of note taking on note cards, I mean, just on big note cards.
#
So you know, I'd read a book and, you know, take notes from that book and that would fill
#
up five note cards or three note cards or just one note card or maybe just one sentence,
#
you know, a quote or something like that.
#
And I, in the end, I numbered all the note cards and I had, you know, hundreds of them.
#
And then I, when I was actually writing like a chapter, I numbered all the note cards.
#
And then when I'd find a theme, I made an index for myself.
#
So you know, so for example, laments about the past, and then I would find laments about
#
the past from the pharaonic era and the, you know, Turkish occupation and the, you know,
#
And, you know, so I'd find them from all these different parts of history.
#
So I made a kind of index for myself.
#
And when I was doing it like a chapter outline, I would just list the different numbers of
#
cards that I'd be using.
#
And that actually worked quite well.
#
That's all pre, you know, computer, you can do that all on, you know, with a program now.
#
But it still works quite well to have, and I was actually interested, it was just a couple
#
of years ago, I was listening to some very famous successful writer, I think it was Larry
#
Wright, you know, he's written a pile of great books about many things, including about COVID,
#
I think, more most recently, and he was describing a method that he uses nonfiction books, that
#
is very similar, actually.
#
So but there was a great deal of hit or miss in terms of the roller coaster of writing
#
a book, you start off and you think, Oh, my God, I sound like I sound like such an idiot.
#
And I actually did a nearly complete draft of my book and then showed showed it to a
#
friend of mine, a publisher, who was actually sort of cruel and kind enough to say, you
#
know, something, this is going the wrong way, you know, start over, basically, which was
#
a really hard message to swallow.
#
Because I'd spent a year writing, you know, something like that.
#
And I actually followed his advice and did that and it did make a big difference.
#
I also have to say that there was a period when I was the sort of doing the most of the
#
actual writing, when we were living in Tunisia, and I was not doing much work, my it was my
#
wife who was actually making the income earning the bread and butter.
#
So I had the luxury of actually just working on this book.
#
And that makes a huge difference, I have to say, I mean, you know, I mean, you know, good
#
literature is wonderful.
#
But you know, earning a living is also necessity.
#
So I did have that luxury for at least a year when I could actually take time off to writing
#
And when I say took four years, the other three years, I also had to work at the same
#
time and, you know, and you just have to be very disciplined, which I'm generally not
#
actually, but you know, you learn to be.
#
Yeah, and it's that method called Zettelkasten, your way of taking notes, because there's
#
a very similar method, I think, where, you know, evolved in Germany, where people have
#
this card system and categorization system.
#
And that was, in fact, the inspiration for the software I use, which is called Roam Research,
#
which is exactly like kind of data where you have your nested entries and your bidirectional
#
linking and all of that.
#
So I just invented it myself, frankly.
#
So you can call it the Max version, if you like, you know.
#
Max Kasten, as it were.
#
So at this point, when you're sort of writing about Egypt, and the historical chapters are
#
incredible and there are so many great sort of excerpts from them, I was particularly
#
interested really in the last few decades.
#
Of course, your book came out in the late 90s and 98, I think, right?
#
And I was interested perhaps in the five or six decades before that, because it struck
#
me at every level that what is happening in Egyptian society and Egyptian politics also
#
informs how one can think about societies elsewhere and politics elsewhere and all of
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, what was, how did Egypt evolve as a society through
#
those years, through those decades, because, you know, on the one hand, you have the world
#
sort of modernizing and opening up and all of that.
#
On the other hand, you have sort of the rise of fundamentalists as well, Islamists, as
#
And that's changing fashion, that's leading to, you know, like, this is great passage
#
I'll read out, which, you know, which is so absurd that it is something that I can imagine
#
happening right here, though it is, you know, where the passage goes, quote, more often
#
though it was a killjoy fanaticism of some fundamentalists that provoked laughs.
#
And this ridicule probably damaged their cause more than police muscle.
#
One preacher declared that zucchini should be outlawed because of its suggestive shape.
#
Another fatwa from an Islamist gang appeared in the papers and now you're quoting the fatwa.
#
The Cairo Tower is against religion and Islamic Sharia law.
#
It must be destroyed as its shape and construction amid greenery could excite Egyptian women.
#
That quote stops and now you continue.
#
But after the outspoken secularist Farhad Fodha made fun of such nonsense in a debate
#
at the Cairo Book Fair, he was assassinated.
#
And this seems at one level to what we saw in Bangladesh also, where you had a bunch
#
of rationalists and a couple of atheist bloggers are used to enjoy reading and they were kind
#
And you see this kind of fundamentalism on the rise in India as well.
#
So it doesn't matter what the source of the fundamental fundamentalism is, whether it's
#
Islamism or whether it's a mistaken notion of what Hinduism is.
#
Right, so what are the sort of pulls and pressures out here?
#
Because on the one hand, it seems to me that, you know, in Cairo, you have a similar thing
#
to what you have in Delhi, which is you have a set of elites and you have sort of a set
#
of non-elites and they're living in different worlds.
#
And you could argue that the elites are, you know, living in more of a bubble.
#
But, you know, so what impact does that have on society?
#
Yeah, this is a fantastically huge and wobbly question.
#
I mean, you've asked me to describe five decades of social history of a place like Cairo.
#
It's, you know, it's changed radically and it's gone through a lot of things.
#
Every big city, you know, every great city is a kind of mirror to the whole world.
#
I mean, you know, you could sit in a place like Cairo and really understand giant changes
#
Of course, they have their particularities and they go in their own ways, but of course,
#
And I mean, you know, one of the reasons why I felt so at home in India is that there's
#
so much that is so parallel to what's happened in a place like Egypt.
#
And of course, one of the most striking things that happened in Egypt over the last five
#
or six decades has been the role of kind of religion in public life, where, you know,
#
you had a country that was really very largely secularized in the 1950s.
#
You know, if you just take as one indicator what people wear, clothes is a boring thing
#
and everyone goes on about the veil, blah, blah, blah.
#
I find it very tiresome to tell the truth.
#
But in the 1950s, the veil was absolutely out in Egypt.
#
It was just not a thing.
#
You know, it just wasn't a thing.
#
I mean, people did not wear these things.
#
It was gone and had been gone for some time in Egyptian cinema.
#
There was just no one wore a veil.
#
You'd go to the beach and people would be in bathing suits and this was not an issue.
#
You know, it just wasn't a thing.
#
Particularly among urban educated people, it just was gone.
#
In the countryside, of course, more conservative, et cetera, et cetera, conservative about marriage,
#
But there wasn't such a religious heaviness about things.
#
And that in Egypt, you know, that changed radically in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and kind
#
of peaked in a phase of, you know, Islamic kind of extremism.
#
But it wasn't just the extremist end, it kind of affected all of society and people became
#
much more obviously outspokenly pious and you suddenly had to start speaking in a more
#
pious sounding way than, you know, behaving in a more obviously, you know, quote unquote
#
And it wasn't just Muslims.
#
Also, Egypt has a very large Christian minority.
#
Same thing happened to Egyptian Christians.
#
They suddenly all began attending church all over again, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And for someone who's rather secular myself, this was all rather disturbing and tiresome,
#
I have to say, and also violent, which is, you know, adds to the misery.
#
But all these trends are, you know, they've happened in other places.
#
You know, coming to India, there are, you know, immediate parallels.
#
India hasn't gone to the kind of extremes of kind of religiosity that Egypt went through,
#
which really got very silly about, you know, suggestiveness of a vegetable is really beyond.
#
But there are some very silly elements in India as well.
#
One thing that is striking, though, is that some of the organized sort of political religious
#
groups, whether one is Muslim or one is Hindu, and I have a lot of experience of both.
#
I've written about both extensively and met a lot of people from both, is how remarkably
#
I mean, they're the same kind of people, the same social class, the same grudge, same exactly
#
the same grudges against many, many, many different things.
#
And if you go back to the origins of, say, Muslim Brotherhood or RSS, they date from
#
precisely the same decade.
#
It's the same kind of people of the same social class, provincial, you know, often first-generation
#
engineer doctor, get very fired up.
#
They're answering the same questions, you know, why did these ghastly, you know, British
#
invade our country and why were we weak at the time, and finding answers that are strikingly
#
You know, we must go back to our original, you know, we must unite, we must be proud
#
of our, you know, religion, et cetera, et cetera.
#
I mean, you know, there's just, the parallels are glaring, including organizational structure,
#
the way they managed to escape the pressure of the state by kind of hiding underground,
#
the way they multiplied different organizations, trade unions, et cetera, et cetera, women's
#
groups, blah, blah, blah, farmers unions.
#
There is a parallel between the Muslim Brotherhood and the RSS, which is just, you know, unmistakable
#
for those who've seen both.
#
Very few people have actually watched both happen, and that's sort of, that's something
#
And process of kind of the way a kind of neo version of religion seeps into things is something
#
that I've witnessed at firsthand.
#
And it's, I think it's for the same causes, actually, is that, you know, as society is
#
urbanized very quickly, and as you say, they're elites living in their bubble, and there are
#
people who want to join the elite, but they know they're not going to join the elite.
#
They're not going to suddenly be, you know, cosmopolitan, international, you know, since
#
Stephen's graduates, you know, who go on to man large international corporations, and
#
it's not going to happen.
#
So they'd like to find pride in what they already have, which is all perfectly understandable.
#
But then there are people willing, who exploit this kind of grudge and ambition for political
#
And you get, you know, groups that look very similar and, you know, aim for power, basically,
#
And the possibility of taking over power becomes very attractive, you know.
#
So we went through all of that in Egypt, you know, exactly that sort of thing.
#
And then often what happens is you get splinters, and then out of these kind of mainstream groups
#
that have often led by perfectly middle-class people, you get much more fanatical groups
#
that cause the real damage.
#
But in the process, though, you get what happened in Egypt was, and I think, you know, to some
#
extent, it's similar in Egypt, newly urbanized people who are uprooted from their village.
#
They've lost their social context in many ways.
#
They want to find a new context, and they want to feel a certain pride in their identity.
#
And you know, so they grasp onto some notion of religious tradition, which is often surprisingly,
#
you know, in the case of Egypt, it's in some ways not a very authentic tradition.
#
It's a reinvented tradition, you know, whose aims are largely political, actually.
#
So a lot of Islamism in the world is less of a return to Islam than it is just a sort
#
of grab for power, actually, of one kind or another, for the powerless, people who feel
#
powerless, people who feel impotent.
#
And actually impotence, the sexual side, has a lot to do with the whole story, to tell
#
Anyway, that's a very convoluted answer to your equally convoluted question that was
#
actually leading in slightly different directions, probably.
#
Yeah, I'll double-click on different aspects of it.
#
Now, I was reading your essay on Syed Qutb in NYRB, and there I came across two quotes
#
by him in 1938 and 1959, respectively, and I was struck by the contrast between the quotes.
#
And the first of those is, and this is Syed Qutb's words, quote, religion, religion.
#
This is a battle cry of the feeble and the weak person who defends himself with it whenever
#
the current threatens to sweep him away, stop quote.
#
And the other one in 1959 says, quote, humanity will see no tranquillity or accord, nor can
#
peace, progress, or material and spiritual advances be made without total recourse to
#
So on the one hand, it seems that during this time, there is some kind of radicalization
#
Now, the question that I have with regard to this, and the question is both about India
#
and Egypt, and you can focus on whatever aspect of it, is that in India, what I have increasingly
#
come to conclude is that this became, to a certain extent, a question of supply and demand.
#
In the marketplace of bigotry, so to say, the supply was only there because the demand
#
The society was sort of like this, you know, one book which talks about it superbly is
#
Akshay Mukul's book on the Gita Press, and I did an episode with him.
#
And what one realizes from that book is that these strains of bigotry were always there
#
in India, and they were subdued for a while, but they were sort of there.
#
And what we have in modern times is a situation where, because of a bunch of different reasons,
#
our incentives are driving us to the extremes, right?
#
So on social media, one way that polarization happens and we are being driven to the extremes
#
is that once you go on social media, you find your tribe, so to say, your incentive is to
#
raise your status within the tribe, and you can do this within your tribe, and you can
#
do this by becoming shiller than the next guy, by attacking people on the other side
#
and never engaging with their arguments, just attacking them, or attacking people on your
#
own side for purity, for imposing purity tests on them.
#
And what then happens is that on either side, the left and the right, and in this case we
#
are talking, of course, about religious fundamentalists, you are driven to extremes.
#
Like recently there was that congregation, the Hindu Mahasa Mela, where a bunch of supposedly
#
holy men gave those really extreme speeches, basically calling for genocide.
#
And my sense was that what happened there was this incentive playing itself out.
#
If it was one person talking to a crowd, that one person may not have been so extreme, but
#
they are competing with each other to rouse passions.
#
So they are all going one beyond the next.
#
And then once you take that public position, you are sort of driven firmly there.
#
And the only way you can keep competing is by getting even more extreme, and God knows
#
So now in the context of Egypt, does the same thing hold true?
#
That you had these strains in society, the demand was there, that is why the supply kind
#
Maybe if society was different, maybe if it was much more moderate.
#
Qutb, who is, of course, in a sense, a founding father of modern Islamism, and so on and so
#
forth, might himself have gone in a different direction if that market wasn't there, so
#
So one, the question is in the context of Egypt, and two, what do you think about the
#
Indian context also, what I just said?
#
You know, I think you are absolutely right, there is a marketplace out there, and it is
#
I am not sort of sure if it is the demand, so much that the demand is already there in
#
terms of the bigotry, this sort of pre-existing bigotry.
#
I mean, that is certainly true, but I think a lot of it is sort of market creation by
#
the people who are selling these goods, they create the market for themselves, and as you
#
say, the incentive is to raise the ante, and this can go on ad absurdum, that is why my
#
experience of the Middle East does make me worried about India, because India is not
#
at that stage yet, but one has watched this phenomenon exactly as you say, it is like
#
an auction, raising the ante, raising the voice, raising the level of extremism, and
#
how this played out with the Islamist fundamentalism is pretty horrific, because it kept ratcheting
#
up from one version of extremism to something you could not imagine it could be more extreme,
#
well then it is more extreme, and then it is even more extreme, and then even more extreme.
#
Of course, this takes things way beyond the realm of your average person, your average
#
Muslim for example, has nothing to do with this Islamic state madness, and it is something
#
that I wrote about in the New York Review of Books quite early on actually, right after
#
9-11, I did a lot of writing about criticism of the Western response to 9-11, is that they
#
did not understand that a lot of what is going on is actually, marketplace is a good analogy,
#
it is a form of advertising, your extremism is your advertising, we are this angry, therefore
#
we will do such and such, we are this mad, we are this committed, it is a way of showing
#
off your level of commitment and anger, and unfortunately that is the kind of thing that
#
you are getting now the beginnings of in India with some of the kinds of speech and the sort
#
of rather frightening raising of the ante, we are this angry, we are this determined,
#
it is attitudinal, but it is hard to resist that, how do you counter that, and it does
#
become inspiring for a lot of frustrated young guys mostly, who want to do something meaningful,
#
want to be something, want to get somewhere, and do not see many possibilities quite realistically
#
in the current set up, so there are foot soldiers who swallow this stuff, so that is a bit disturbing.
#
I did an episode recently with Mukulika Banerjee, which will release after we are recording
#
this, it will release tomorrow, we are recording this the day before it releases, but she wrote
#
this great book called The Pathan Unarmed, and her, the central question she asked herself
#
as a young PhD student in 1988, when Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan died, Khan Abdul Ghaffar
#
Khan of course known as Frontier Gandhi in India also led this massive non-violent movement
#
in the north-west frontier province of Pashtunistan, and his folks were called the Khudai Khidmatgarh
#
or Servants of God, and Mukulika's question was this, that how can this incredible non-violent
#
movement arise from a society which was stereotyped as being fundamentally violent and macho and
#
all of that, so one, the Pashtuns who was…
#
Martial races and all that nonsense, so one, the Pashtuns are stereotyped like that, two,
#
Islam is stereotyped like that as having violence in its DNA, and so she went there, lived there
#
for a long time among the tribes, came back, took 10 years, wrote a book, stunning book,
#
and it's oddly not available on Amazon, but pirated copies are easy to find, and the conclusion
#
was that the non-violence did not emerge from Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan getting inspired by
#
Gandhi, and it did not come from the west, it was not a western import, like people say
#
liberalism is a western import, even Nehru said that while striking down free speech
#
with the first amendment, but it's not, her conclusion was that it came out of the fundamental
#
tenets of Islam itself, it came out of the community, it came from within, that is what
#
they were like, and to me it's an extremely powerful antidote to the stereotypical notion
#
that kind of goes around, and two thoughts here, and one thought is that what we see
#
on social media in a sense has a mirror in the real world as well, which is not surprising
#
obviously, but social media amplifies everything, whereas in social media if you look at the
#
discourse on Twitter and all the shouting and everything, you have vocal minorities
#
that are really extreme, but the silent majority is not extreme at all, they are chilled out
#
and reasonable and so on and so forth, and one I would imagine that's obviously the case
#
in the real world as well, and that's sort of number one, and number two, that it is
#
far easier to rouse people and to build advertising campaigns with a rhetoric of hate than a rhetoric
#
of nonviolence and love, like Carl Schmitt famously said that in politics you need an
#
enemy, you need another, so it's far easier to rouse people with anger than to rouse people
#
with love, and it's unfortunate but that is sort of the way it seems to me.
#
So one, what do you think about that and two, you said that your experience of the Middle
#
East makes you worried about India, and you already elaborated why that is, that the extremism
#
just keeps getting ratcheted up and all that, but I'd like you to elaborate nevertheless
#
because I think what I see in India today is the extremism is getting ratcheted up,
#
and you've seen it ratcheted up like this to a particular level and then you've seen
#
it go far beyond, so if you can elaborate a little bit more on what makes you worried
#
No, unquestionably the rhetoric of hate is what rouses people, and I think there's also
#
the sort of environment is really important in the context in which this rhetoric of hate
#
sort of gets implanted.
#
I think a key ingredient is that people are in a state of confusion, you live in a confusing
#
world and a slightly menacing world, and if someone can tell you that your problems are
#
because of something or someone, then that's great, a simple message like that, blame it
#
on someone, blame it on something, and unfortunately I think also not at the sort of national level
#
but at the kind of village level of bigotry and hate speech, there's confusion, there's
#
fear of the future, and there's also greed and envy, one should not forget those qualities.
#
It's something that I've seen in a place like Egypt, the conflict is between a 90% Muslim
#
majority and a 10% Christian minority, and some of the villages where I've seen this
#
play out in very much the same way you have here in India, I mean really similar, just
#
the same sort of textbook, there's a provocation, there's a clash, who gets punished, it's the
#
minority basically, in the end the one who loses, it's the minority, and then very often
#
what you find out is in the end or an underlying factor is that there is property involved,
#
land involved, assets involved, that end up getting taken over, and there's actually an
#
element of social pressure in some circumstances where it's actually the resources are limited
#
and there's too much fight, too much struggle over the same limited resources, and you can
#
find that even in urban slums for example, when pressure is built, it can break out in
#
something communal, and of course when there are people out there, they're willing to exploit
#
all these fissures and problems and envies and jealousies and worries and fears and turn
#
it all into one message of let's go and clobber those guys because they are who they are,
#
you get bad results, and I'm afraid it's kind of universal, and that's nothing new, it's
#
nothing new about that at all, and of course even in India it's been playing out for years,
#
I mean there's a kind of pattern to these communal things that goes back decades, centuries,
#
God knows how long, a very long time, but there's fertile ground in particular times
#
that may be, the ground may be more fertile at particular times than at others, and there
#
may be for one reason or another less pushback from saner voices at one time or another,
#
and of course one of the things that's slightly worrying about India right now is that there's
#
a lot that's enabling and not enough that's pushing back against the kind of worst instincts,
#
I mean that's one's impression, and opening the newspaper and reading it every day can
#
be very dismaying, there's just something so unnecessary about the level of hate speech
#
is one way one thing to call it, or just sort of general disrespect, lack of curiosity even
#
or attempt to explain but just blame, blame, blame, it's not a very healthy level of national
#
conversation right now. And let's also sort of talk about the other
#
sort of commonality that I found, which is that whole disjunction between the elites
#
and the people, and in your book you write quote, Cairo's establishment is used to imposing
#
its own image on the rest of Egypt. The critic Lewis Abad neatly expressed the city intellectual's
#
attitude to commoners 30 years ago when he declared it their duty to rescue their fellows
#
from what he called quote, the hellish ghostness lurking around them like a cowl waiting to
#
ambush them and swallow them up, and his quote stops here, you continue, what Abad had in
#
mind was what he saw as a need to guide tradition bound Egyptians to more modern secular notions
#
of citizenship, yet his sense of mission and his fear of the ignorant mob reflected a sense
#
of distance from the masses that was little different from that assumed by Memphite nobles
#
or medieval Mamluks, and later you write, the apathy of the wider public brings Cairo's
#
fractious sinking elite together in a shared sense of alienation. Secularists feel alienated
#
from the religious discourse that is still the mainstream of popular expression. Religious
#
radicals feel alienated from the Western influence they see as steadily encroaching on their
#
Islamic heritage. The one group is accused of aping the West, the other of trying to
#
recreate the past. Between these two extremes, other kinds of tensions surface, the struggle
#
between the entrenched father-nose belt generation and younger voices clamouring for the oxygen
#
of free debate, stop quote. And the sort of, the younger voices clamouring for the oxygen
#
of free debate is perhaps not something that necessarily holds in India's case, like I
#
had an episode with Mini S who'd done some fantastic data journalism that showed that
#
young people are actually more bigoted than younger people in India today, so, than older
#
people in India today, so that's kind of tragic. But given that, you know, just by landing
#
up in Delhi, you become one of Delhi's elites, you're one among them, they are the people
#
you're meeting every day and chatting with and all of that. They are sort of your interlocutors
#
in that sense. So you've perhaps seen a little picture of this from the inside. So what is
#
sort of your sense of, your sense of this?
#
Gosh, I have so many different impressions. First thing I'd like to say is that, yeah,
#
I was very privileged to sort of land in the Delhi elite, which is actually full of wonderful
#
people. I mean, it's been a great, fantastic pleasure of being in India. It's just the
#
quality of conversation and intellect that one comes across here is just mind blowing.
#
It's fantastic. It's truly one of the great things about India. It's been constantly stimulating
#
and people are in, you know, fantastically engaged, curious, you know, also committed,
#
caring, you know, but it is a frothy top of society. And it's not to say that one has
#
to be at the top of society to be all of those wonderful things, brilliant people at every
#
level of society. But, you know, the sort of chattering classes of Delhi, it's a very,
#
you know, engaging kind of world to been had the pleasure and privilege to be part of for
#
some time. But yes, trying to bring, you know, messages of tolerance and so on to a wider
#
public is very difficult. You often feel like, you know, you're struggling against a huge
#
tide and, you know, there are failings. This happened in Egypt just as in India in a slightly
#
different way. But this kind of, you know, secular elite that took over these newly independent
#
fresh countries back in the 1950s and 60s, a lot of very idealistic people, a lot of
#
people from the left, they were in both countries, economically rather catastrophic guidance
#
and, you know, at least sort of slowed things down, held them back in ways that were unfortunate
#
for both Egypt and India, very similar, you know, parallels, you know, the great friendship
#
between Nehru and Nasser is tells you all you need to know, both interesting, amazing,
#
but flawed people. Nasser had one extra flaw, which is that he was also rather cruel, which
#
that was not a failing of Nehru at it, by any means, he was a very humane person. But
#
yes, yeah, yeah, the sort of failing of that, that, you know, post independence elite was
#
despite efforts, you know, was not to sort of spread the word, you know, I mean, there's
#
been a failure of education big time in both countries. In Egypt, in some ways, it's even
#
more obvious because the government introduced universal education kind of overnight. And
#
suddenly every school, every classroom had 200 kids in it. And it was just like out of
#
hand, you know, just that you couldn't possibly get all the universities became free public
#
universities. Great, but you know, suddenly Cairo University, which had been an excellent
#
and rather elite institution, suddenly had a 200,000 students and a degree became worthless,
#
you know, in the real marketplace. So there's a kind of degrading of quality at the expense
#
of quantity. You know, it's been a different trajectory in India, but the outcome has been
#
in some ways the same that you get an elite that's successful at replicating itself and
#
producing more brilliant people from the elite in India. Unfortunately, it's also often cast
#
associated to, you know, replication, but there's been a fairly broad failure to bring
#
up enough people. And even this terminology is, is, is contentious. They bring up, you
#
know, raise up. I sound like, you know, Louis Howard there, you know, we were just criticizing
#
Egyptian historian, but, but at least to sort of make society feel inclusive to more people,
#
to give people as prospects and to widen their horizons, make them think about a broader
#
picture than just who is my immediate enemy? You know, who should I blame things on? You
#
know, unfortunately, they're just all too many people who are still kind of see appear
#
to be trapped in that, that way of thinking.
#
I agree about that failure entirely. You know, I have consistently held that, you know, we
#
had a liberal elite kind of trying to shape and a country where society was fundamentally
#
liberal and the way to change that was from the bottom up, as Gandhi said, and a top-down
#
imposition simply wouldn't work. And I think that's kind of been the big failing. And what
#
I wonder therefore is that in a poor country, is there a precedent of society ever being
#
liberal in the sense that we would, you know, mean the word. I mean, I'm just thinking
#
aloud here, but my thing is that, you know, you can't expect shared values of liberalism
#
in a country that is by and large torn apart by scarcity and is as desperately poor as
#
we are. But if the scarcity was less, if poverty was eliminated, for example, then shared interests
#
could at least ensure a certain kind of liberal behavior because the current order would then
#
be working in your favor and you would not be needing an other or an enemy to blame for
#
your woes or your troubles or whatever. And again, I'm just sort of thinking aloud that
#
it's too much to lament that society doesn't share our values. I think, you know, there
#
is this old saw about how the best foreign policy is economic growth. And it seems to
#
me that if you want a more liberal society also, economic growth has to kind of be the
#
way forward towards that. And both India and Egypt, of course, failed miserably in the
#
early years. And sadly, even with the change in dispensation today, you still have that
#
same kind of status mindset which sort of continues. You know, we had this golden 20-year
#
period between 1991 and 2011, and I've done episodes on this which are linked from the
#
show notes. But again, you know, statism, top-down thinking, all of it sort of continues
#
with this added poison of hatred and bigotry. What would your reaction be to that? Like,
#
how important would something like a flourishing economy be towards bringing about a liberal
#
society? And obviously, it would not be the case that a flourishing economy will give
#
you a liberal society. Not at all. There are enough counter examples. But would you agree
#
that it might be a necessary but not sufficient condition?
#
Yeah, I think absolutely. You know, I mean, it helps to create a kind of virtuous circle,
#
having a better economy, more, you know, better horizons for people, better prospects, you
#
know, a better sort of future, a more positive view of the future, things will get better,
#
you know, that keeping that sustained over time definitely creates a, you know, a sort
#
of virtuous circle. But simply being prosperous doesn't do that doesn't cut the ice. I mean,
#
look at the United States these days, rich, rich country don't get richer, but so polarized
#
and actually rather violent. And, you know, liberalism is besieged and not in great shape
#
in the US, you know, for a variety of reasons. But, you know, that's a kind of fairly easy
#
thing to hold up and say, it doesn't work, that doesn't necessarily work. But absolutely
#
prosperity helps. I mean, timing is also useful. I mean, you know, countries that became prosperous
#
during a time of peace and there's a kind of, you know, there's a lot of European countries,
#
there was a sort of organic change that happened from 1950s, 1960s, a place like Italy just
#
kind of rose, you know, to become a fairly or Spain, a very good example, you know, it's
#
now a very liberal, you know, kind of society, but it was previously under fascist government,
#
you know, until the 1970s. And prosperity certainly helped pave the way towards something
#
else. But there was also in Europe, the big difference there is this is also the power
#
of example. I mean, you know, and also the power of experience, you know, I mean, a lot
#
of those countries went through pretty terrible wars. I mean, you know, and they kind of shocked
#
into knowing what to avoid. And, you know, that's one of the things that, you know, being
#
a sort of European type person in India today, you see a lot of the things that the mistakes
#
that were made in Europe before that you see them happening here now. And one has a kind
#
of historical memory of that, that I think a lot of Indians don't have and may not recognize
#
the same symptoms. So yeah, and you know, liberalism is under threat everywhere in the
#
world right now, actually. So I think we may be, you know, we're in for a rough time everywhere
#
the next few decades, there has been this, you know, as you say, the arc of history has
#
looked like we're all heading to a kinder place for, and that certainly held true or
#
has held true for, you know, the last several centuries, broadly speaking, with few minor
#
interruptions, holocausts, now and then very unfortunate events of one kind or another.
#
But broadly speaking, we are in a more humane zone now than we were before. And that even
#
that, that's still true in many ways. I mean, you know, for example, when one sees in India,
#
the last few months, there have been a lot of very unfortunate kind of communal riots
#
and it's gotten people on edge. And I've heard a lot of friends who are very despairing.
#
And I wasn't in India 20 years ago, but I mean, you know, India's seen darker things
#
frankly, actually, I mean, so, you know, and the fact that we're all, you know, on edge
#
about incidents that so far have caused really relatively little loss of life. I mean, I
#
want to put these things in kind of, you know, you know, metrics like that. But, you know,
#
it's not so long ago when there were riots in India's capital where 4,000 people were
#
killed, you know, I mean, so we're not there right now, which is a good thing.
#
So my next question is again about something, you know, so much of your book about Cairo,
#
I'd read a part and I'd say that, hey, this is just like India. Like, what is this about?
#
You know, long before coming to India, Max has written a book about India. And part of
#
that is, you know, one part that struck me was about A, the general apathy of the people
#
towards governance and B, then that phenomenon of society stepping in to fill the gaps led
#
by government. And there's a really nice sort of historical account where you talk of, you
#
know, what happened in Egypt in 1065-72, those seven years when there was a seven-year dearth
#
as it were, where you wrote quote, and I'll tell you, and it will be obvious to the listener
#
why it's sort of relevant where you write, the Nile's capriciousness was indiscriminate,
#
however, the Fatimid Caliph himself suffered from the calamitous seven-year dearth of 1065-72.
#
In those years, the city succumbed to panic. Bread, say the chronicles, was auctioned
#
at an unbelievable 12 dinars a loaf, a price so far beyond the reach of the poor that some
#
were said to have resorted to fitting meat hooks to ropes so as to fish unlucky pedestrians
#
of the street and eat them. The historian, Al Makrizi, says the Caliph, Al Musansir,
#
was forced to sell precious objects, furniture, horses, arms, and eventually all the movable
#
contents of his palace. When he was reduced at last to squatting on a mat on the floor
#
of his throne room and living of charity, the women of his court fled. The Shiite princess
#
set off for the rival Abbasid city of Baghdad, their hair disheveled, howling with hunger,
#
only to fall outside the walls of Cairo and die of starvation. Al Musansir's humiliation
#
now touched bottom. The Caliph was forced to pawn ornaments from the tombs of his ancestors.
#
And then you continue. Al Musansir's possessions cannot have brought in very much. Al Makrizi,
#
who as a Sunni cleric admittedly had it in for Egypt's former Shiite masters, tells
#
us that at the height of the famine, a wealthy widow pawned a necklace that had cost a thousand
#
denars. All it fetched was a sack of flour. The unlucky lady hired guards to defend her
#
pathetic prize. But even so, a mob attacked them outside the city gates and relieved her
#
of all but a fistful. This she made into a biscuit, which she carried to the door of
#
the Caliph's palace. People of Cairo, she shouted to the crowd that gathered. Blessings
#
on our master, Al Musansir. Providence has proven the goodness of his rule, since I have
#
bought this biscuit for a thousand denars. The poor lady's scarring sarcasm, and her
#
tone is still typical of Cairoan protests, was to no avail. There was no uprising. The
#
Caliph, rescued by the arrival of his army from Syria, went on to rule for another 25
#
years. Stop quote. Which indicates that, you know, the lack of accountability in terms
#
of governance from like way back when. And then you sort of talk about the modern apathy
#
and you write, quote, garbage provides an instructive example. Visitors often wonder
#
why Cairo is so dirty. Some say the length of Egypt's history has so veered its people
#
that they don't see the point in removing detritus when it will only reappear. Stop
#
quote. And then you have this long section on how, you know, private collectors called
#
the Zabalin eventually take care of the garbage and, you know, an industry runs into an industry
#
forms where you have thousands of little workshops. They're using these recycled raw materials.
#
They're making plastic flip flops, car parts, television antennae. You know, you write about
#
how discarded clothes become multicolored, rag rags and so on. And so there's an incredible
#
amount of innovation within society itself. And it is stepping into these gaps. And it
#
seems like the state and the society are on two kind of parallel tracks that, you know,
#
to use sort of James Buchanan's formulation, you know, the state can either be, you know,
#
productive and protective or it can be predatory. And here the state is just predatory and it's,
#
you know, and society functions despite the state. And it seems identical in India. So
#
my question to you is everything that I quoted you wrote in 1998 or your book was published
#
in, has it changed? Is there hope? Because what can often happen is that you can just
#
get into this trap where we become apathetic about governance and we don't demand more
#
from our rulers as it were, you know, technically they should, the state should serve us, but
#
they rule us and we are subjects and not citizens. So, you know, we just become apathetic. We
#
stop demanding and we kind of work within the gaps. So how is it in Cairo today, for
#
example, and is there anywhere in the world from your studies where, you know, that a
#
positive direction in a movement in a positive direction is possible?
#
Yeah, I think this distinction you make between subjects and citizens is very important and
#
very significant. It does really define a lot of different countries actually. And it's
#
absolutely true of Egypt and unfortunately it has not changed. And I think one of the
#
things that's slightly different about India is that it's generally true subjects and citizens,
#
but there's, I think there's an elite in India who are actually citizens, you know, but you
#
have to belong to that elite to be a proper citizen. You know, there's kind of levels
#
of citizenship in India. It's a more open democratic country. Egypt is truly closed.
#
I mean, the number of people who are actual sort of citizens is rather small. Almost everyone
#
is a subject. It's very capricious. But, you know, one of the things that often struck
#
me about a place like Egypt and India is not dissimilar is that these are, you know, some
#
of what we consider to be norms of, you know, politics and citizenship and so on and so
#
forth are actually largely based on Western countries and their, the enlightenment, post
#
enlightenment kind of creations of, you know, Western societies, including all of their
#
ghastly wars and, you know, colonization, all that stuff, who now have citizens that
#
enjoy a fair amount of both freedom and actual personal responsibility and so on and where
#
the word citizen and citizenship actually, you know, has some, carries some strong meaning.
#
But those are the exceptions. You know, those kinds of countries are the exceptions. Places
#
like Egypt or India are much more normal and in the world, I think. And also, you know,
#
they have a longer historical experience. And I've always found that people in Egypt,
#
who I know a bit better, and I'm sure it's exactly the same in India, are actually extremely
#
rational actors. And if they don't expect much from government, they have little reason
#
to expect much from government. And, you know, of course it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
#
So you don't expect much, so you don't demand much. And that's not a good thing. Actually,
#
it's better to be a demanding, whiny, you know, annoying citizen or annoying part of
#
the society, and then you might affect change. But if it's in your historical experience,
#
and this is absolutely the case in Egypt, that protest doesn't work, then, you know,
#
that's for a good reason. And unfortunately, I mean, some, an experience that I've lived
#
through very, very closely, you know, day by day, which was the Arab Spring 2011, when
#
Egyptians rose up and overthrew their president. Well, that's one of the very few occasions
#
in, you know, hundreds of years, millennia. You know, often there have been many uprisings,
#
as for example, when this charming lady stood up in front of the caliph, you know, a thousand
#
years ago, and, you know, insulted him for making a biscuit cost so much. But, you know,
#
in the uprising Cairo 2011, millions of people in the street, and they did succeed in toppling
#
the president, but they did not topple the system. And the system came back, has come
#
back with a vengeance and reinstated, you know, very much the same order of things in
#
which you are not really a Pukka citizen. You know, you are the subject of us, the generals,
#
and that's just how it is and how it will remain. So unfortunately, you know, the being
#
in the middle of that uprising was a thrilling thing, because it's a lot of people of my
#
generation and a lot of the best talent in Egypt and the people with the most imagination,
#
most biggest dreams, the people who really burn to do something better for their country
#
to see a better future. They're the ones whose illusions were smashed the most thoroughly.
#
And it was just such a completely depressing moment to see them sort of smacked down and
#
pushed back into having to accept that they, you know, are going to be run by a bunch of
#
guys in uniform, as has been the case for most of the 5,000 years of Egypt's history,
#
you know. So these lessons are real, you know, if people are skeptical about the capacity
#
to effect change, it's for a historically earned reason. And that's particularly true
#
in Egypt. India is a little bit different. I mean, you know, India has been a functioning
#
democracy to its great, great, great credit for several generations now. You know, there's
#
been change again and again and again. But I'm afraid that even so, when you go out to
#
your very average, you know, working folks, you know, in a small rural town, they don't
#
hold up immense hope for big change, you know, incremental change. And a lot of the sort
#
of voting pattern is about what's good for me, you know, in a very transactional way.
#
And that is absolutely logical and reasonable way to look at things.
#
Yeah, and you know, the two deeper problems, like I often say that India has really three
#
problems the way I see it right now. And the first problem is subjective, and it's a proximate
#
problem. And it reflects my feelings, which where I feel the party in power is a problem,
#
obviously. But the two deeper problems which have nothing to do with the party in power
#
are number one, the oppressive state, which is the system of government that we have,
#
which is designed to rule and not to serve. And therefore, by default turns us into subjects
#
and not citizens. And it's, you know, really, you know, adapted from the colonial state
#
in that sense. That's number one. And number two is society itself, the way that it is
#
and what we discussed. And these seem to be almost insurmountable problems in different
#
ways. Now, even if let us say that we have, you know, a change in dispensation and economic
#
growth and gradually, you know, let's say, over some span of time, no matter how long
#
poverty disappears, incentives change, people have less incentive to discriminate or to
#
hate each other or whatever. And we enter this virtuous cycle of positive sum games.
#
Even in that kind of best case scenario, which would take decades, you can do something about
#
society, perhaps societies can become more liberal on certain margins we already have,
#
like, you know, 377, the logins gay sex being abolished, you know, had that happened 20
#
years ago, you know, it would not have been greeted with so much applause and relief as
#
it now has been. So on some margins, we've done better, but on some margins, we haven't.
#
But I don't know what can really be done about this incredibly oppressive state with this
#
top down way of functioning like there's a beautiful passage again about Cairo. But again,
#
you know, reminded me of how India used to be. And, you know, fundamentally, it remains
#
like this in principle, though not to the 16th. And you write quote, after 5000 years
#
of civilisation, Egypt's political system remains pyramid shaped. Cairo sits indomitably
#
at the pinnacle. Its ministry of irrigation decides which farmer gets how much water for
#
its crops. Its ministry of religious affairs chooses who is to deliver sermons in which
#
mosques and what they are to say. Its ministry of the interior picks the mayors for all Egypt's
#
4000 villages. The president who resides there appoints a governor of all 26 provinces and
#
the heads of all 12 national universities, four of which naturally are in Cairo. Until
#
the last century, all farmland in Egypt belonged in theory to the country's rulers. The lion's
#
share of profit from the world's richest land was sucked into the capital. Even today, the
#
farmland is nearly all privately owned. The state retains title to the 96% of Egypt, which
#
is desert, stop quote. And this centralising impulse is something that kind of remains
#
in India. There's no way for it to go. Obviously, we should be a far more federal society. Government
#
should be as local as possible. I've had many episodes talking about, you know, why this
#
is the, why things are the way they are and lamenting why it's unlikely to do anything
#
about it simply because of incentives. So people who can change the system benefit from
#
it way too much for it to ever be rational for it to change. So now again, when we talk
#
about the state, what are your thoughts? Like, you know, is it better in Egypt since the
#
24 years that your book came out? And do you see progress being possible in the right direction?
#
Has it happened anywhere that a state has voluntarily given up control?
#
Yeah, I think it has. I think before answering the rest of your question, there's just a
#
little historical point that I think is interesting because it's relevant to both Egypt and India.
#
You know, of course, we can blame a lot on the Raj and, you know, we can say that the
#
Indian government as it is now is very much inherited from the Raj with the same sees
#
itself playing the same role in a peculiar way. But I think it was something that people
#
often skip over is that, you know, places like Egypt and India both attained gained
#
their sort of full mastery of themselves right after World War II. But during World War II,
#
the British in both countries had imposed draconian rule. You know, it was a particularly
#
heavy kind of rule. This is why you have sedition laws. This is why you have a lot of these
#
laws are actually put in place for running a country in wartime, you know, and there
#
wasn't enough time after the war to undo them. You know, in a place like Britain, they all
#
got undone eventually and you get to the 1950s and 60s and it becomes a happy liberal country.
#
But a place like Egypt and India, they're still frozen in many ways legally in World
#
War II, which is a rather, I mean, if you look at it that way, that's one of the reasons
#
why you have such overweening states. They were, they've got wartime powers, you know,
#
actively what would be wartime powers in a normal country. And of course, they don't
#
want to let them go, you know, and I think, you know, there are countries that have broken
#
out of having such an overweening state that is often disdainful of its own people. You
#
know, it's useful to have countervailing institutions. In Egypt, those have now been broken and really
#
hardly exist anymore. And it's even more so now than it was before the under the, you
#
know, at the time of Mubarak, who was overthrown in the Arab Spring in 2011. I mean, there
#
is, there is no independent judiciary. There is hardly any independent press. These things
#
just don't exist. In India, I think the judiciary is particularly important and capable of having
#
an influence and changing the shape of things, but it doesn't do so. And I think the main
#
reason for that is that the way that it's shaped the courts and justice system in India
#
is it's become a sort of corporate institution, which is its primary function is to look after
#
its own people and to replicate itself, you know, to get more people like itself into
#
positions as judges and so on. And in Egypt, it's actually quite rather similar. You know,
#
in fact, the legal profession is all dominated by sons of judges, daughters of judges who
#
end up being judges. And, you know, it's kind of, it's a cycle and this ends up being kind
#
of class of people that run that. And they present no challenge to the state because
#
they get what they want out of it. They've got their, you know, retirement benefits and
#
their villas and their, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, you need slightly
#
independent institutions to challenge the centrality of the state. But, you know, I
#
think there are countries that have moved away from similar overweening states, many
#
countries that have broken free of different degrees of fascism. Some countries have broken
#
free to some extent and then fallen back into it. I think of Turkey, for example, another
#
country I know very well. You know, Turkey has gone in and out of sort of slightly liberal
#
phases and then the military has come in and clamped down. And then it's faded out again.
#
And for example, Erdogan, when he first came into power, this is in 2002, the current Turkish
#
president, he's now in his 20th year in power. When he first came in, he was celebrated by
#
liberals because he took down the generals, put them back in their box and put them in
#
their places, instituted a lot of freedoms. And then over the next 20 years, he proceeded
#
to take them all away again. So it can kind of go one way or another. You know, poor Turkey
#
finds itself back to where it was, you know, decades ago in terms of personal freedom and
#
political freedom. But other countries have successfully, you know, there have been waves
#
of things like that. You know, if you're old enough to be around, you know, you can remember
#
waves of when the countries of Southern Europe were largely fascist dictatorships, there
#
was a fascist dictatorship in Greece, there was one in Spain, there was one in Portugal.
#
They all fell like nine pins in the space of a few years. And needless to say, Latin
#
America is another place, which used to be almost entirely military dictatorships. And
#
in the space of another single decade, like the 1980s, they were all knocked down and
#
changed into something else. You know, I'm not advocating for revolution in a place like
#
India. I don't think India needs a revolution of that kind. But, you know, these things
#
can change their shape. And, you know, I think there's a, it's possible that India will kind
#
of naturally change a little bit because, you know, some of the processes that India
#
is now undergoing that are painful and difficult, you know, and as you say, they're even from
#
the spectrum of sort of liberal reform. Good things happen in India right now. You know,
#
it's not all the dark picture at all, as you say, you know, rights for, you know, gay people.
#
This has been a hugely changed, changed, fundamentally changed people's lives for the better, I think,
#
you know, millions of people in India. But, you know, I think some of the, you know, the
#
relation between people in the state that becomes disembodied partly is the fact that
#
people don't pay taxes. Your average person pays GST and some sales taxes here and then,
#
but isn't actually taxed and in fact gets a lot of freebies out of the government. So
#
you create a relationship between the state and government that's not actually a very
#
healthy one. You as a citizen are not paying taxes actually. I mean, the middle class pays
#
taxes and actually demands something from the state. And these are, when I say there
#
are different categories of citizens, you know, taxpaying Indian citizens do demand
#
stuff and often do get it actually, but the proportion of taxpaying people in India is
#
rather small and therefore they have nothing to demand back. And actually that's true in
#
Egypt as well. You know, the government gets most of its revenue from other stuff. It gets
#
its revenue from, you know, oil, from the Suez Canal, from what they call rents rather
#
than from income tax. So, you know, whereas in most, you know, slightly democracies that
#
function with a higher degree of citizenship, there's more of an economic relationship
#
of interdependence between the state and its people. You know, you as an American person,
#
you pay taxes and God damn it, you then demand, you know, what you deserve back from the government
#
for what you paid. And if you don't get what you like, you refuse to pay taxes, you know.
#
So that's, that's been going on since the American war of independence, which was,
#
it was all about taxes on. So that's, that's an old, old story. And, but I think that's,
#
that's one realm where India, as it becomes more formalized, the economy becomes more
#
formalized, which is a painful process and it's being pushed hard by current government. And,
#
you know, it's probably, you know, the future will be more like that. It's very painful for a lot
#
of people in India that have lived, you know, forever in the so-called informal economy,
#
but it's probably an inevitable direction. But ultimately it might end up with a, with a more
#
balance between, you know, those who are paying the government and demanding its services at
#
the same time. That's a convoluted and long-term kind of change, but that's the, that's the sort
#
of, you know, incremental change that might actually, you know, improve the quality of
#
citizenship in a place like India, which has happened in other places.
#
I'll push back a little bit on the taxes thing in the sense that I think every Indian pays taxes.
#
Now the indirect taxes do actually amount to a lot in a poor person's life. I mean,
#
inflation is a tax on the poor, basically. So the poor are being taxed in ways that might be
#
unseen to them, but I would not for a moment say that no one pays taxes because, you know,
#
just the ripple effect of high fuel prices, for example, is kind of huge.
#
Yeah, I don't disagree with you, but I mean, you don't pay taxes in the context of here's your,
#
you know, I'm sending you my check at the end of the year for your percentage of my, you know what
#
I mean? It's slightly different than just being sucked dry by fuel prices day after day when you
#
don't have, you know, there's no exchange, if you see what I mean. It's a one way, you know, process.
#
Yeah, it's unseen and normalized. So after you wrote your book, what happened then? Like,
#
at that point, what is your conception of yourself? You're a few years into a career in journalism.
#
Where were you working at that time? And, you know, now you've written a book. Do you think
#
of yourself as an author? You're going to write more books? Or are you just, what a relief,
#
it's over. Now I'm back to journalism. Tell me a little bit more about that. And then how
#
eventually you got to be, you know, the, the head of the Middle East Bureau for the economist.
#
Well, you know, it's kind of strange that these changes in your life often happen in a big,
#
big lump. So, you know, when it rains, it pours. So I, my book came out in, I think 1998. And then
#
in very, very quick succession, you know, my wife and we had our first child. So suddenly,
#
I'm a father, more responsibility. And very soon after that, I actually got offered a job by the
#
economist as a proper, you know, pocket job with a, you know, proper salary, budget, travel budget.
#
And they offered me a job. I'd been writing for them as a, as a stringer and actually what they
#
call a sort of super stringer. I was actually on a, you know, not a full salary, but, but kind of,
#
what do you call it? Stipend. Yeah. Sort of salary monthly stipend for several years. And they just
#
took me on staff. So this all happened in a very short space of time. So Cairo came out, the book
#
came out, child and offer of a proper job. So it was kind of no brainer to get a proper job that
#
would pay for, you know, bringing up my child. And it was also a very nice job because I was made
#
a Middle East bureau chief, you know, and suddenly I was offered a job with all the, all the goodies
#
with a travel budget and so on and given a big geographical space. So I was suddenly covering
#
22 countries. And for some time I was doing it, you know, we have other stringers and various
#
other people, but the economist was very understaffed in the Middle East. And so I had to,
#
you know, I spent then from, from 2000 until 2015 kept that job, but I had 22 countries to travel
#
and really went the length back and forth from Morocco to Iran, dozens of times, you know,
#
spent a lot of time in places like Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, you know, and covered, you
#
know, really major events after nine 11, of course, and then the invasion of Iraq, uprisings all over
#
the place, Iranian politics, you know, Algeria, and then eventually the whole Arab spring business,
#
which went on and on and on. And that was, that was just a colossal story. I was actually, the
#
Arab spring erupted in 2011. By 2010, I'd had this, this job as Middle East bureau chief,
#
which is fascinating and great for 10 years. And I was just beginning to feel like, gotta move on,
#
do something else. It's tiring. It's this, and then this huge story breaks up with where the whole
#
region erupts in one giant revolution. And of course, I couldn't, you know, abandon ship right
#
at that point. And you saw it coming, right? I saw it coming in Egypt. I mean, I, you know,
#
I have to just, you know, briefly wave my little flag from for a moment. I mean, I was one of the
#
very few people who actually wrote an article saying something about to happen. I mean, we
#
actually had a cover story in June of 2010 with a rather nice cover. It was a picture of Egyptian
#
president Mubarak as the kind of Pharaoh sinking in the sand. And it was just saying that something's
#
about to happen. This younger generation is not going to put up with more of this stuff. And I can
#
see the mood in Egypt is ready for some, some, without being very specific, some major change.
#
And that did prove to be totally prescient. Yeah. Yeah. Although no one could have predicted the way
#
things actually worked out, but it was clear to, you know, having been around the Arab world for
#
the previous 10 years, people were just so fed up with these, you know, reptilian old farts who are
#
running the whole region. And, you know, they were all ripe to be overthrown. These were incredible
#
times to cover the Middle East because so much was happening. And a lot of the coverage that one
#
sees from elsewhere is sort of very basic or very kind of simplistic. Like there's this excellent
#
sort of, again, one of your essays in NYRB where you wrote about the indifference to when bin Laden
#
died. And, you know, reading it now, it was sort of a revelation to me what you kind of wrote about
#
because I didn't have any sense of this from the media at the time. And what you wrote was, quote,
#
long before the choppers dropped into Abbottabad, Osama bin Laden himself had faded from relevance.
#
His messages to the world had grown fewer and increasingly divorced from the concerns of
#
ordinary Muslims. The last audio tape attributed to him released in November singled out France
#
for attack because of his strictures in the whale. Earlier last year he had blamed the West for
#
global warming, blasted Pakistan's efforts at relief following deadly floods, and railed against
#
cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad five years after the images first provoked Muslim
#
protest. Few bothered to listen to such predictable bluster. Bin Laden's words failed to rate highly
#
even in the jihadist own patch of cyberspace, which tends to be dominated by techie talk on
#
weapons and tactics or equally arcane exegesis of musty Islamic texts. And then you sort of
#
continue to write, later you write, 10 years later such heroic posturing looks rather dated to a
#
younger Arab generation that, in places like Tunis, Cairo, Muscat, and even Riyadh, is highly
#
urbanized, increasingly sophisticated about the ways of the world, and impatient for gains in the
#
here and now, stop quote. And this reminded me of something I read in a local context about
#
Kashmir, where the author David Devdas has a book called The Generation of Rage in Kashmir. And his
#
central thesis is that, you know, by the middle of the auties, there was this new generation of
#
young people in Kashmir, who were beginning to, you know, not care about the fissures of the past,
#
they were aspirational, they wanted to be part of the mainstream, they wanted to be engineers and
#
entrepreneurs, and all of those things. And yet, you know, a brutal state used to rent seeking,
#
used to being predatory, didn't allow them to do that. And the violence from the state continued,
#
and eventually, you know, Kashmir descended back into hell. And that seems to me such an
#
incredibly great tragedy. And I'll link the book from the show notes, you should all read it. And
#
so, you know, and in India, certainly that was sort of an opportunity lost. But give me a sense of,
#
you know, where the Middle East is today, because I have heard from friends who live and work in the
#
UAE, including for the government who sort of have dealings with Saudi Arabia, for example,
#
that they're all conscious of sort of changing with the times. So one, of course, has reason to be
#
skeptical about Saudi Arabia in that context. But there is that sense that look, the oil bonanza
#
won't last forever. And what comes after it, and all of that. So it's easy to sort of, you know,
#
give into simplistic narratives of one type or the other. But give me a deeper sense of what's
#
kind of happening in society there. And I would assume that whatever the state is, a state is
#
lagging behind society. So kind of give me a sense of that. Well, you know, I think, like in the rest
#
of the world, maybe the key word is fragmentation. You know, I mean, there's there's always much more
#
variety from one country to another in the Middle East than is given credit, it is sort of lumped
#
together as one space, you know, West Asia is how it's seen from this perspective, sometimes. And of
#
course, the Gulf is radically different from other parts of the Middle East, you know, the Middle
#
East contains Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world. And, you know, places like Qatar,
#
the richest country on the planet. So there's a tremendous variety there. But fragmentation is
#
the key, I think. And the the societal changes that are extremely important, of course, what's
#
happening in Saudi Arabia is very, very important. Because Saudi Arabia was the kind of in some ways,
#
you know, justifiably, sometimes over exaggerated, with sort of heart of darkness, you know, that's
#
where there was this sort of, you know, the most, you know, to use crude terminology, sort of
#
backwards versions of Islam was given money and respectability and power, and largely in a really
#
creepy bargain between the ruling family and the, you know, the clergy was just basically, as one
#
prince once directly told me, he said, we're buying an insurance policy, you know, quite
#
straightforward. So they just threw money at the most radical loonies for years. And so Saudi
#
Arabia in that guise was a real danger to menace to the world, actually, you know, and, you know,
#
the outcome was people like bin Laden, you know, this is where they came from. So under the current
#
king who has, you know, obviously goes without saying, I, you know, I was a personal friend of
#
one of his well known victims, you know, has his dark side, but the things that he's changed in
#
Saudi society are quite extraordinary. I mean, you know, he's wrenched Saudi society towards
#
something quite different, radically different. I mean, much more in tune with where a lot of
#
Saudis already were, by the way, you know, it's not like they're being, you know, kicking and
#
screaming. A lot of urban Saudi youth were already in a zone that was much closer to, you know, MTV
#
and sort of the world of global internet and Netflix or whatever, you know, than to what was
#
going on officially in Saudi Arabia. So that change in Saudi Arabia where you have, you know, raves
#
going on until six in the morning in Riyadh with thousands of people attending, sponsored by the
#
government. This is a Saudi Arabia that's radically different and will have a big impact because they
#
had a sort of radiating impact across the region, but fragmentation elsewhere and uncertainty, you
#
know, what's the sort of what's next and kind of divorce from politics and, and sort of there's
#
also at the same time in the Middle East, there's a kind of collapse of the old system. There was
#
some kind of a very tiresome, stupid old order, which existed before the Arab Spring with these
#
annual meetings of Arab summit meetings, a bunch of dictators get together and sort of jamboree,
#
you know, there was sort of tired hackneyed themes of Arab unity and this and that. And
#
all of this is just gone. You know, it's finished and each country is looking after its own in itself
#
now. So it's as a region, much more fragmented. And I think society is more fragmented and politics
#
more, more fragmented. It's not a very happy region right now. They've just come through this
#
trauma, the whole Arab Spring, which ended being crushed everywhere, you know, these tremendous
#
hopes raised all over the region, and then absolutely dashed and crushed. It was, you know,
#
terrible roller coaster and has left a whole generation just kind of exhausted emotionally
#
exhausted and just, just, just wiped out and created a whole bunch of exiles and left a lot
#
of people dead also needless to say, and a lot of countries shattered and a place like, you know,
#
Syria, I don't know, you know, how long, how many generations what it will take to bring back
#
Syria to the world. So it's not a pretty picture. I mean, that's the long and short of it. And what's
#
also strange is how little changes we've all known that the oil is running out in the Gulf
#
forever. And yet, you know, something like Ukraine happens, the price of oil goes back
#
up. And all those guys are back in business big time, you know, making a lot of money out of
#
the world oil price. So I remember often being told by oil people in places like Saudi Arabia,
#
they would say, you know, our money isn't running out anytime soon and actually mark my words,
#
then they turn out to be right. So let's kind of come to India now,
#
but before we come to India, just, just some questions about the economists that one would
#
ask that is it, is it that one tends to ask that is it an issue, for example, that there are no
#
bylines, you know, that there is a particular uniform style that you're supposed to have. So,
#
you know, is that something that takes adjusting to, you know, how does that kind of work?
#
Well, I, again, I go back to my old oozing method, I kind of used into the economy. So,
#
you know, I started writing it for such a long time ago that no one ever edited my stuff for
#
economist style ever, ever. I mean, there is an economist style book, but it's mostly about
#
little things like don't use this word, don't use that, put your comma here. It's, you know,
#
there's nothing. And so it's a style that just kind of takes it, it creates itself in a way,
#
by format, by, you know, having particular lengths of articles where you have to get
#
certain amount of information across. And, you know, a certain audience that you're trying to
#
reach, they're pretty well educated. So you're not going to dumb it down too much. So that's
#
what drives the style, you know, and it's true that a lot of, you know, top economist writers
#
and editors have all gone to the same, you know, the same public school in the same Oxford College.
#
That's not untrue. But it isn't a house style and it isn't drummed into people at all. It just kind
#
of, you know, percolates and happens. And as for anonymity, yeah, it's difficult and it depends who
#
you are. And I've known people who've joined the economist and then unjoined, moved on to other
#
things precisely because of the lack of a byline, you know, people who are ambitious, personally
#
ambitious, but there's, there are advantages and disadvantages always. I mean, you could,
#
you know, having no byline means you could sort of hide behind the institution, but it also means
#
that like, for example, being an economist correspondent, you often get quite good access,
#
you know, and when I had to cover a lot of different countries, I found I get good access
#
in a lot of different places and I didn't have to have a personal reputation. I was there because
#
I got good access because I was representing a respectable institution, you know, that people
#
wanted to talk to. So it definitely works both ways. Yeah. And I mean, it's a bit old fashioned
#
and that is changing, of course, under the pressure of things like social media. So
#
nearly all of my colleagues now have some kind of social media, you know, kind of a shop window
#
for themselves of one kind. And I'm actually very ancient and antediluvian and stupid by not pushing,
#
promoting, you know, my own stuff in The Economist, which I, you know, probably should do. It just
#
kind of goes against the grain somehow, but I think I belong to the, you know, donkey class of
#
transport, you know, in not doing more to push my own stuff on social media.
#
So we're back to donkeys. No, but I mean, as long as your kinky non-kinky book has your byline on
#
it, I think you'll kind of be fine. What about, what about the house point of view? Like when I,
#
like I used to read The Economist voraciously in the 90s and 2000s, and I found that I agreed with
#
it on most things. But the thing is that the very fact that I agreed with it on most things shows
#
that there is a particular house point of view, which is for, you know, free markets or free society,
#
all of that. So is there sort of, has that ever changed? Has there kind of been pressure to sort
#
of stick to that house point of view, or is it in the selection process that you hire people who
#
are like that? And has it changed with time? And especially in these times, where, you know,
#
wokeness seems to be taking over newsrooms elsewhere, like in The New York Times, whose
#
journalism has deteriorated sharply in my view, you know, are there also all of these political
#
pressures that come in? Less than one would think. I mean, the political spectrum itself
#
changes more than The Economist changes. You know, I mean, I'm constantly surprised, it's happened
#
to me many times in India, people say, Oh, The Economist, why do you write for that leftist
#
newspaper? It's described as leftist. A lot of people think The Economist is a leftist magazine,
#
which is, you know, laughable to many people who were reading The Economist in like the 90s,
#
and so on and so forth. And actually, The Economist has, you know, we've shifted a little bit,
#
certainly over time. But I mean, considering that The Economist was founded in 1843, with basically,
#
you know, the ideas of economic liberalism, free trade, you know, progress, etc, etc. It's changed
#
remarkably little, actually. And what you find is the political spectrum changes around it. And we
#
find ourselves sometimes a bit left of center, sometimes a bit right of center, but the center
#
point is what is moving, you know. But in my time with The Economist is true in the 90s,
#
partly because of Bill Clinton in the US, there's a tendency to be slightly contrarian, you know,
#
there was like a kind of annoyance with the comfort of the Democrats in Washington in power
#
under Bill Clinton. So The Economist went a little bit slightly to the right as a counteraction to
#
how comfortable the American, you know, Democrats were in power, I think, and also as a counteraction
#
to Labour Party Britain. So often, I think, you know, The Economist is critical of whoever's in
#
power. And so the position of the paper can appear to be, you know, somewhere else in the spectrum,
#
because we're being, we're criticizing whoever's in power, you know, who comes from a left party
#
or right party. So that does change things. But we did go, you know, there is argument inside The
#
Economist. And during the time that I've been there, you know, in my own opinion, we've done
#
some really stupid things, you know, like, you know, there was a big argument about the invasion
#
of Iraq. And I argued strongly, I was Middle East, you know, bureau chief at the time,
#
I argued strongly against the American invasion of Iraq, I thought it was the most, you know,
#
it was bad idea in so many ways, then had a big argument with our editor in chief, but I was
#
basically overruled. You know, I was one of the few people on the editorial side of the paper that
#
actually stood up, made some noise about that. Although it's interesting that when you actually
#
talk to other people, they agree, they agreed that it was a bad idea, but didn't want to say
#
anything about it. So there's a lot of democracy inside The Economist, but in the end decisions
#
about, you know, the political direction, it's a fairly small number of people, you know, fairly
#
senior editors who are making those decisions. After the kind of Iraq debacle, there was a little
#
bit of a change in direction for The Economist. And it went a little bit more to the left when George
#
Bush was in office, I think. And then I think during the Trump years, you know, and in the under
#
the influence of Brexit, The Economist may have appeared to be left wing, because it found it
#
impossible to agree with Trump on almost anything. And The Economist on rational grounds found
#
Brexit to be just plain stupid. So that's made it look sort of left leaning, just because of those
#
larger issues. But I don't think that, you know, it's really actually changed that much.
#
Yeah, and I think like certainly in India, like you mentioned people, some people think of The
#
Economist as a leftist magazine. And I think the whole spectrum of left and right simply doesn't
#
work for India. I think it's become reflexive here, that if you speak against a regime in power,
#
you are called a leftist. But the point is that if you look at the economic policies of the regime
#
in power, they are leftists, they are identical to the previous status policies of the previous
#
guys, right? You know, Modi, you know, Modi has kind of gone the way of Nehru's top down thinking,
#
borrowed the authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi, and, you know, certainly is kind of what maybe
#
Sanjay Gandhi would have been had he kind of lived. So it's reflexive. And even in the context of
#
Trump, like, you know, Trump actually went against almost every tenet of the Republican Party when he
#
did what he did. So left and right doesn't really apply. You look at Trump's economic policies, and
#
I mean, his aversion to free trade is almost identical to Bernie Sanders, you know, so to call
#
an opponent of that leftist is completely absurd. So this whole left right spectrum really doesn't
#
work for me. And I wish more people like me would just look at, you know, who's on the side of
#
freedom and who's not. And of course, you will find that nobody is on the side of freedom, but except,
#
you know, a few of us. So began a little bit of trivia for my listeners, which again, I was a
#
sort of TIL for me, where you point out that India's first ever budget speech was delivered
#
by the gentleman who founded The Economist. You know, and you're I'll quote this bit where you
#
write quote, this this year also marks the 161st anniversary of India's first ever budget speech.
#
It was delivered in 1860 in Calcutta, as Kolkata was then known by James Wilson, a Scottish
#
businessman, banker and politician who 17 years earlier in London happened to have founded The
#
Economist. The British colonial authorities had appointed him to restore order to their shambolic
#
finances. The hard work took a toll. Just eight months after leaving he died, as his tombstone
#
in Kolkata explains, from the combined efforts of climate, anxiety, and labor, stop quote. And I'm
#
sort of struck by the fact that, you know, he founded The Economist and India killed him.
#
It is sad, but I mean, you know, frankly, the life expectancy of most of those, you know, colonial
#
officials in the in that at that time was very short, you know, I mean, he sounds like an amazing
#
person. But, but to go back to what you were saying about left and right, I think you're
#
completely right. These are these are term this terminology dates back to the French Revolution.
#
It has not much to do with the current reality. And I'm not sure how long I mean,
#
if it really ever had much to do with India's real, you know, actual realities. You know,
#
it's something that, you know, that was replicated by the Communist Party, which
#
found it a useful way to describe itself. But I don't know what it means really, in terms of
#
India today. And I think what you say is quite right, the spectrum should be rather different.
#
You know, we should be thinking about things in rather in a very different way, actually.
#
And it's kind of suffocating. And it's a bit sad. And I imagine you sort of share this feeling that,
#
you know, one can be socially very, very liberal, but economically, you know, right wing, you know,
#
extreme right wing, and there shouldn't necessarily be any contradiction, you know, you can believe in
#
free, absolutely free, free markets, but also believe in huge amount of social responsibility,
#
which is fine, you know, why not?
#
No, I mean, the way I saw my beliefs is that two consenting adults should be free to do whatever
#
whatever they want with each other, as long as they harm no one else, whether it is in a bedroom
#
or the marketplace. And you'll find one set of people saying, No, no, we want to control what
#
you do in the bedroom. And another set of people saying, No, no, we want to control what you do in
#
the marketplace. And the point is, it's just a question of rights. If I want to trade with
#
you in some way, why should anyone stop me? It's a positive some game between us, you're reducing
#
the value in both our lives, by kind of getting in the way. So, but
#
in a place like India, in some ways, the thing to look at is not left, right, not politics, it's
#
who who is in charge of the real estate of Delhi real estate, and who's who's in power in the in
#
the clubs, you know, I mean, who's who's running who's a member of the gymkhana and golf club,
#
etc, etc. And who's got what which, which particular bungalow in Delhi. And what you find is that,
#
you know, at one stage, they're all a bunch of, you know, gore gore creeps, and then there are a
#
bunch of Congress wallows. And now it's a different bunch who are taking exactly the same privileges.
#
And, you know, once you get into your nice position, why should you change anything?
#
Yeah, the state is a state, once you're a subject, you're a subject. So, so tell me about,
#
you know, India, like you had this incredible period of time as head of the Middle East Bureau,
#
where you covered such eventful times, right? And then you so why India, what made you come here?
#
Well, I desperately needed to change for one thing, and I wanted to do something was a radical
#
change. I was feeling quite burned out. It was partly, you know, personal disappointment with
#
just the collapse of not that I'm a great revolutionary, just I knew an awful lot of,
#
you know, personal engagement with people who are in prison, exile, torture, dead, you know,
#
you name it. I mean, it was just really very tough. Those last few years, sort of terrible
#
disappointment. So I want to have a challenge that was completely new, something absolutely
#
different. And I really knew very little about India. I mean, you know, just new,
#
new general knowledge stuff. And, but I had been to India a couple of times, I was invited to the
#
Jaipur Literary Festival a couple of times, one wants to present, you know, my Cairo book, in fact,
#
and we had such a good time. It was such a welcoming atmosphere. It was magical, fun,
#
engaging, brilliant people, great setting. It was just seductive, actually. So India did its full
#
like seductive trick. And so when the opportunity came to do India Bureau, I was really, really
#
interested. And luckily, my, you know, my wife felt the same way. And, you know, also, you know,
#
for a lot of, you know, Western type people, the notion of India may seem like a, you know,
#
difficult one, hardship posts, you know, hot steamy country with tropical diseases and poverty,
#
and, you know, that sort of thing. But frankly, coming from where we were coming from, it seemed
#
rather tidy and orderly and shaped up and compared to, you know, turmoil and revolution
#
in Cairo. So that that was never a particular obstacle. And I have absolutely no regrets.
#
India has been fascinating. And I mean, you know, being one of the big rewards of being a journalist,
#
and one of the reasons why I've remained a correspondent and haven't turned into a, you know,
#
an editor sitting in a cozy desk in London, which is what nearly all of my contemporaries are now,
#
is that I enjoy the the kind of phase of being a really stupid person in a completely new place
#
and having to get on a really sharp learning curve to find out stuff. So my first year in India,
#
I hope my, you know, my coverage wasn't too painful, but I was really pretty stupid. I
#
didn't understand what was going on. I got up to speed fairly quickly to adequate speed. But
#
it's been such a long kind of curve to understand more and more about India. But I've just enjoyed
#
the learning process has been, you know, really quite wonderful, just to understand a place that's
#
really, in many ways, so unique and deep, actually, you know, and varied as India. It's been fantastic,
#
you know, just sort of mind exercise, great stuff. You know, like you said, that whole approach,
#
which I love, which is a great approach that, you know, of a stupid person trying to figure
#
things out, because India is so incredibly complex. So the challenge is when you come,
#
you know, who do you look to as your first guides to what this country is about? Who do you talk to?
#
Because, you know, the danger there is that, you know, a sort of self-selected group of people you
#
have access to, you know, in Latins, Delhi, per se can take you in one direction. And then what
#
do you do? You know, where do you go? What kind of stories do you look at? What do you decide to even
#
focus on? Like you've done a bunch of wonderful stories. You've done a story on the North-South
#
divide, for example, on, you know, MK Stalin raising that spoonful of rice. And, you know,
#
talking about her carbon dating shows that Tamil Nadu is older than the rest of the
#
Tamil civilization is older than the rest of India, and so on and so forth. You've done stories on
#
political corruption. For example, the Rajya Sabha election of Subhash Chandra, where he beat the
#
Congress candidate RK Anand, because 13 of the Congress party members marked their ballot paper
#
with the wrong kind of ink. And then the question is, is it deliberate? Is it corruption? And you
#
also did a great story on, you know, witches being sort of persecuted in modern day India,
#
or Dions, as they are called. And you had a very moving story about a lady that happened to a Dalit
#
woman that happened to. So, you know, how did you then figure out from this really amorphous mass
#
of a million possible stories, that what are the things I want to kind of focus on and work on and
#
so on and so forth? And what was, you know, from an economist point of view, what was your brief
#
from them? Like, did you, how much time would you get to work on a story? Were you, did you have
#
freedom to just pick anything you want? What was that? You know, give me the inside dope.
#
Basically, it's a complete, you're absolutely right, it's a total embarrassment of riches.
#
There's too much, I mean, it's just, and it's, you know, I just wallow in the amount of possible
#
stories, you know, it is, as I was at Sanan Rushdie, a sea of stories, you know, I mean,
#
in India is just a fountain, gushing fountain of amazing stories and material for journalists.
#
And it's just, it's actually embarrassingly too much. And, you know, it's embarrassing how little
#
one you can actually grasp hold of. And of course, I have, you know, huge handicaps,
#
which is that I don't speak Indian languages, you know, and don't have, you know, social network
#
background, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So one is dealing with a rather limited, you know,
#
it's like looking through a porthole at the ocean. So, you know, and it's handicapped. And so there's
#
a certain amount of randomness in what's pulled out of this great sea of stuff to choose to write
#
about. In terms of direction from London, I basically, I've had almost none, zero. I mean,
#
almost complete freedom to what I want to, really no direction, you know, occasionally a bit of push,
#
you know, on the editorial side or something like that. If they, if my,
#
if editors none want to write an opinion piece or something like that, it goes in one direction.
#
Sometimes there's a, it might be a tiny bit of friction about, you know, I don't think we
#
should put it that way, or that's a bad thing to emphasize or, you know, but there's, there's
#
basically been no real tension on that. And the difficulty, I mean, we are, you know, we don't
#
actually have that much space. That's the, that's the big problem. As a, as a paper, we don't have
#
that much space. Our resources are really quite limited. We're kind of quite small on the ground
#
as the economist in India. So you have to pick and choose what to write about. And, you know, to,
#
to kind of regret of mine is that that means that you often can't do the really good human
#
interest stories because there's also, there's always the big political picture that has to be
#
covered. You know, our readers want to know what's kind of the big picture of what's going on.
#
And although they may love to read other stuff, you know, about some personal thing or some,
#
you know, digressive story, which has a lot of, you know, sort of tactile, you know, quality to it.
#
But we also have to cover, you know, big stuff like elections or interest rate rises or, you know,
#
the, the big, big economic trends and so on and so forth. And there just isn't enough space to do
#
both really adequately, I find. So I, you know, unfortunately, I find that we often write more
#
about elections than I would really like to, but you kind of have to, because, you know,
#
people want to know which way things are going. And, you know, our global audience
#
isn't that close to India. And the other thing is that a lot of the really wonderful stories in India
#
require a bit of knowledge about India. That's really hard to deliver in an 800 word,
#
as you were yourself was saying, you know, you can't give enough background to explain everything.
#
So for example, this story about which witches and which burning, you know, I had to just fit
#
in around the edges, some of the sort of statistical problems of witch burning and why is it a problem,
#
but focus really on just, you know, one person's story, very many. And in order to get an adequate
#
explanation, even in a sketchy way of, of, of the sort of structure of a village society, let alone,
#
you know, a district, a state, a country, India is just so, you know, so complicated. It is,
#
it is hard to explain India to the outside world. And that's been, it's been a, it's been a challenge
#
to do that in a pretty limited format. So I'm sort of, I'm, I'm proud of having done that,
#
but I feel like I've missed a lot of really good stories. And some of my Western colleagues who
#
have more resources here, more reporters, different formats with bigger space, you know,
#
have been able to do more, some more exciting stories than I have, but it's a, which is great.
#
And you'd also have to, you know, being part of the economist here would also carry this sort of
#
double-edged sword that on the one hand, because of, you know, how big your brand is and how
#
seriously it's taken, your access, like you mentioned earlier, would probably go up. I'm
#
imagining that more people will talk to you than otherwise would. But the flip side of that is
#
that if, if your coverage is perceived to be negative, then that access might even go down.
#
They might get too sensitive. For example, your coverage of the COVID numbers, you know,
#
that's as we are recording that is being debated, but you guys wrote about it more than a year ago
#
about, you know, how sort of off the mark they were and how they were so much more than the
#
official estimates, which, you know, so, so tell me sort of a little bit about that,
#
that what are the particular challenges of being part of the economist under a regime or, you know,
#
with a regime in power that is so sensitive. And that's one bizarre thing about, it's almost
#
this post-colonial mentality that I think Indians tend to care too much about what white people
#
think, you know, which is in a sense, it's a good thing because, you know, one reason Indira Gandhi
#
supposedly called of the emergency was that, you know, the New York Times was writing bad things
#
about her and she really wanted to be regarded well by them. And of course she was delusional
#
enough to think that she would win the election. So she called for that. And it's clearly something
#
that Modi also cares about. I think some of the other people in the government, like the Amit
#
Shahs and Adityanaths of the world may not give a shit, but Modi clearly does because, you know,
#
he sort of wants to be perceived well by the world and not just by India. So what are your thoughts
#
on that? Yeah, well, in some ways I've been lucky because, you know, I've been quite critical of
#
this government. I mean, we haven't shied from, you know, pretty head on criticism of the government.
#
Compared to a lot of other journalists, I have not suffered too badly in return. Again,
#
the anonymity helps for that, you know. For example, I don't get trolled so much on Twitter
#
because people don't recognize what this name, you know, my personal name isn't particularly
#
associated with my job, you know, which is fine. And also they don't even know whether an article
#
in The Economist was written by me. It might have been written by someone else. Anyway, so I managed
#
to escape the vast trolling that a lot of my colleagues get subjected to. A good policy would
#
be blame it on Alex. Exactly, blame it on my dear colleagues. Yeah, so that's one advantage.
#
But it is true. I mean, this current government is very prickly about the press. They don't seem
#
to have quite understand how the press works, to tell the truth. And what's odd is that instead of
#
trying to figure out how the press works, or getting advice about how the press works,
#
they seem to have taken the approach of, well, we have to teach the press how we work. And it's
#
kind of a bit the attitude of, you know, the guys from out of town who've come into Delhi,
#
and they've been used to doing things a certain way out of town, and think you can do the same
#
things the same way in the big capital, where, you know, there's, I think there's a kind of comfort
#
zone with this government, which is that they expect the press to say what they want the press
#
to say, you know, that that's your job is to relate things and just, you know, tell the news,
#
basically, tell people what we're telling you. And it's all very one way, it's unidirectional.
#
But the idea that the role of the press is to constantly challenge doesn't seem to be very
#
well accepted. So there's bound to be friction. And, you know, that friction seems to be certainly
#
growing, which is dismaying. I mean, you know, when I first came here, there was, back in 2016,
#
you could still, there was a kind of, there was much more of a strong pulse to the Indian press,
#
whether television or whatever, there was a, now you find that pulse feels rather weak.
#
It's not to say that there's not, there's plenty of, you know, variety, and so on and so forth. But
#
often it's, you have to seek it out in your own bubble, and you know, it's not reverberating
#
beyond, you know, a small circle, which is a shame because there's so much journalistic talent and
#
the stories are amazing. And you've also got governments at every level in this country that
#
need to be exposed to, you know, criticism and, you know, it's that, there's nothing healthier
#
for society than getting this stuff out there. And I just, as I said before, I find the conversation
#
is getting increasingly stilted. And, you know, the polarization is also not healthy. As you say,
#
it's kind of, you're either with us or against us. And if you say anything that is any form of
#
criticism, then you must be against us in every way. And it's just not true. No, I mean, I'm
#
perfectly happy to accept it. Some things are a good idea and some things are a bad idea and take
#
them at face value and so on. So, you know, I wish, I wish those, the atmosphere was slightly less
#
tendentious right now. I think everyone should chill out actually. Everyone should chill out
#
is such great advice. You know, in Indira Gandhi's time, there was this famous quote,
#
I forget by whom, but he said that referring to the media and said the media was asked to bend
#
and it chose to crawl. And you see a similar thing sort of happening now, you know, and there are a
#
few outliers, but you're right that, you know, do those outliers really reach beyond our bubble?
#
We don't know. And certainly they don't reverberate. And I like that word you use,
#
maybe don't reverberate as widely as other outlets do. And my question here is this,
#
that we can think of journalism in two ways. We can think of journalism as providing something
#
that people want in a marketplace of supply and demand, where people want information and
#
perspective and all of that. And journalism is doing that, but it is fundamentally a marketplace
#
and therefore dependent on demand. And when you live in an age of narrative battles,
#
and the demand is for a particular kind of narrative, then you kind of get caught up in
#
that. Or even if there was demand for both kinds of narratives, it still be narratives. And
#
you know, you can't be slave to a narrative or a tribal way of looking at the world. So that's one
#
way of looking at it, that look, there is a marketplace of supply and demand. You have to
#
follow the bottom line. How are we going to pay our journalists if we don't make money? We only
#
make money by catering to that. The other view would be that in any democracy, journalism plays
#
that crucial role. It is an institution by itself, you know, where you are sort of afflicting the
#
comforted and comforting the afflicted as the saying goes, speaking truth to power. And as
#
you mentioned, the economist also sort of has a tendency of doing exactly that. But then the
#
question comes up that how is this sustainable? And now my idealistic belief is that there are
#
enough people who value this aspect of journalism for journalism to be viable on its own. And it's
#
just a question of sort of crossing that gap, figuring out how to, you know, get past the
#
friction of actually supporting this kind of journalism ourselves. Like what I see happening
#
more and more in the creator economy is that your middlemen are fading away. The mainstream is fading
#
away. You no longer have to be dependent on platforms. Creators are able to, you know,
#
monetize the regard that their consumers have for them directly from the consumers without having
#
to go through platforms, without having to go through, you know, the extremely inefficient
#
means of advertising, accumulate eyeballs, sell ads. And that's happening directly.
#
In the long term, do you see something like that as possible for journalism or are we being too
#
idealistic? Because the point here is that I believe in my way that it is enough people will
#
surely want this kind of journalism to sort of support it, which is why I keep urging people
#
that, you know, support News Minute, support Alt News, support News Laundry, support Scroll
#
Wires, just support all of these people, whether you agree with them on specifics or not, it
#
doesn't matter. Support them because they need to exist. What's your outlook on journalism in a
#
country like India, the way things are going? Yeah, I would go back to the first part of what
#
you were saying about the journalism's role as a creator of narratives. I mean, that's probably
#
true. But I think actually in a sort of really healthy sort of working democracy, the narratives
#
are created by the politicians, actually. I mean, journalists, you know, hold up the mirror,
#
you know, question, but the actual story narrative is created by politicians. And that is a big
#
failing in India right now. There isn't a proper counter narrative to the dominant narrative.
#
That's, and that's a failing of politicians, more than a failing of the press, you know,
#
you know, if there were a formidable counter narrative. I'd actually argue that the root
#
cause of that is not the politicians or the press, it's the people, because the politicians
#
are responding to demand. If there is no demand for a counter narrative, then there won't be one.
#
It's, or if there is no market for it, you may be right, you may be right. But you kind of create
#
your market. So you sell a new product, you introduce a new product and put it on the market,
#
you know, there is no new product being introduced. I don't see it out there. You know,
#
I mean, you know, it's a failing of, you know, Congress Party big time, and other politicians
#
too, who are too localized. No one is thinking in terms of a big narrative, you know, so you've got
#
one big narrative that dominates because it's compelling and large, and it brings a lot of
#
people in and, you know, there's nothing that pushes back against that in a systematic sort of,
#
you know, way that captures the imagination of a lot of people. And that is a failing of politicians,
#
you know, it's a failure to, you know, sell a product, you know, they don't have a product
#
out there that anyone wants to buy. And it's not just India, by the way, I mean, it's happening in
#
other places. I mean, it's happening right now in front of our eyes in the United States with the
#
Democratic Party, which really doesn't have a product that's, you know, it can say what it
#
isn't, but it's hard to say what it is, you know. So that's one side of that. The other part of
#
what you're suggesting, I think you're quite right. I mean, you know, there's been, there's a
#
shifting of the model for journalism, partly, you know, because of technology, et cetera, et cetera,
#
digital world that we live in. And, you know, it has, again, dangers, opportunities, the opportunity
#
of selling stuff directly and getting really talented people out there. And it's true. I mean,
#
you know, you see the success of people who are simply successful because they're just bloody
#
talented, you know, getting rewarded for that. You know, one of them is this guy called Amit
#
Varma. I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but, you know, but, but there's the transitional
#
moment is very difficult. And, you know, it's something like the, the economist, big mainstream
#
Western corporates, you know, outfit, we had a very hard time, you know, there was like a period
#
about, I can't remember when it was six years ago, when our entire model collapsed, you know, of, of
#
selling, of getting most of our income from advertising, literally it collapsed in one week.
#
Three major advertisers just dropped magazine advertising. Why? Because they moved it all to
#
digital, just like that. And not even without even consulting each other. This is like the
#
zeitgeist acting, you know, are like three major major advertisers. So advertising revenue is just
#
like vanished overnight. It was quite bizarre. And this happened to print media all over the world,
#
you know, and to bounce back from something like that is really difficult, you know, but years later,
#
the entire model has changed. The whole revenue model is completely different. It's all based on
#
subscriptions. And what you have to do is opt for a different kind of subscriber experience,
#
different modules, different ways of approaching different ways of receiving information. So it's
#
now an app, it's now this, it's a, you know, you've got podcasts, you get, you know, it's a whole
#
different range of stuff. That's a, you know, different platforms. And so that is definitely
#
the, the, not just the future, it's already happened. And, but, you know, there'll be winners
#
and losers and losers in all of this. But ultimately, as you say, it also, you need to be,
#
there needs to be market out there that's willing to pay for it. And that will always be there. But
#
it takes, there's this transitional moment, you have to change people's habits, you know,
#
how much do you want to pay for it? You know, you know, I remember in a place like Egypt,
#
most of the, a lot of the big newspapers are actually government owned newspapers,
#
they're just completely government owned. And they were being sold at the equivalent of like,
#
you know, one rupee, two rupees a copy. So everyone buys this stuff. As soon as that kind of subsidy
#
went there, there, you know, their actual circulation dropped from, you know, millions down
#
to tens of thousands. So, and that was before the sort of digital competition or age, it's just a
#
matter of, you know, what is the sort of model. And, but, you know, I think, I think one would
#
like to see a media, you know, sector in general, a press, which is financially independent and
#
secure, you know, whatever that takes. I think it's just really, really, really, really important.
#
You know, the model that's working now in the US actually is kind of, it's working, but not so sure
#
how great it is, but basically a lot of the big biggest, you know, press outfits are now just owned
#
by, owned by billionaires who run them as vanity projects. You know, it keeps all of my journalist
#
colleagues in, in, in business, which is great. And a lot of them do absolutely wonderful work.
#
And, you know, I congratulate billionaires for buying newspapers or magazines or whatever they
#
do. I think it's a great thing, but, and a lot of these, some of these billionaires are determined
#
to keep things independent and that's all great and good. But, you know, one would like to see
#
the press be as secure as it was, you know, you think back to like the 1970s in America,
#
when the Washington Post took on the Pentagon, you know, that's pretty impressive actually,
#
you know, and I don't think we're, it's, it's in some ways, it's less easy to imagine that happening
#
now, you know, America still has a very strong, you know, and, and fairly independent press,
#
but a lot of countries, India is not alone in, in finding a fading strength. I mean, a lot of
#
European countries, France is an example, for example, there's, there's just been a lot of
#
concentration lately, which has got people very worried about how, how independent the press
#
actually is. So, you know, before we kind of wind this up, and it's been so generous of you to
#
give me so much of your time and there is more important work to be done, especially in journalism.
#
So tell me, you, you've been in India for, you know, since 2016 and you're now leaving and best
#
of luck with, you know, moving forward, but what are the lessons that you've learned about India?
#
Because it is quite likely once again, to go back to the question I asked at the start of this,
#
this episode, that there are things that people like me or that my listeners, we might take for
#
granted because we are here, that, you know, in the daily drip, drip, drip of whatever is happening,
#
we don't notice that shit, it's normalized. But what are the big lessons? What do you know now
#
about India that you did not know, you know, when you came here?
#
Oh, that's a huge question. That takes the thought, you know, I mean, I think, you know,
#
one of the things that I know is just the complexity and scale of India, you know, it's just,
#
it's very hard to get your head around that unless you've actually been here, you know,
#
and what an achievement, you know, just, you know, keeping going is an incredible achievement,
#
you know, to just keep this country together at all is pretty fantastic, actually. And so I think
#
that's, that's a big thing. And, you know, also just the something I mentioned before, just the
#
the kind of quality of people talent, just just the sheer talent that is, you know, bursting out
#
of this place is quite spectacular. And I don't know, it's hard to categorize or anything like
#
that. But it's just it's there. And this is what's going to take India, you know, through all kinds
#
of difficulties, but then also just against scale, scale of challenges, you know, just, you know,
#
I can see why, you know, sometimes you say, why doesn't, why don't people fix this? Why
#
don't people fix that? You know, it's very easy to throw these throughout these questions. And
#
at the same time, you just see the challenges are immense. And I can perfectly understand why
#
people would simply throw up your hands in despair and say, you know, ah, you know, it's too
#
complicated. You know, something else that is not really visible to the outside is the this the
#
amount of, you know, dedicated self sacrifice. And, you know, that is made by some individuals,
#
which is just absolutely extraordinary. I mean, certain people have just done amazing things to
#
to make other people's lives better. I mean, I rarely seen a country where really small number
#
of people I'm not going to name names, because it's not not a point. And it's not an exercise in,
#
you know, casting praise in particular. But I just have met here several individuals who
#
just made a difference to millions of people's lives, you know, tens of millions of people's
#
lives in a way that's just like, you know, quite mind blowing. Can you actually take names? No.
#
Well, okay. I'd rather not. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's, that's one of the things that
#
isn't not so, so visible. And, you know, I think, yeah, maybe I'll just stop stop with that.
#
Well, yeah, that's good. So okay, the final question, you know, if you've heard the show,
#
so you'll kind of already know what it is. Actually, I'll ask you two final questions,
#
because both of these are traditional final questions, though I don't ask them both together.
#
And the first first one is, when you think of India, what gives you hope and what gives
#
you despair looking ahead, maybe 10 years, 15 years? I think I'll just start with despair,
#
because I'd rather end with, you know, conclude with the despair. I really, I mean,
#
and again, this is going to sound really trite, actually, I really worry about the environment.
#
I mean, you know, I mean, it is India's on its way towards something really very disastrous. And
#
I think despite a lot of, you know, government noise and propaganda, I don't think the scale of
#
the trouble has been grasped at all, strongly enough. And I think India really has to do better
#
at cleaning up its act, you know, water, air, it's got to be absolutely top priority. And,
#
you know, I find it sort of annoying that there's a lot of finger pointing, oh, you know, India didn't
#
cause world pollution or global warming, therefore we can pollute as much as we like. No, it's a
#
current burning problem for Indians today, you know, in the health of your own citizens right now,
#
desperately so, you know, to do something really radical about the environment. So that's something
#
that frightens me, actually, because, you know, I fear if things go along the current trajectory,
#
in 10 years, India is going to look like the world's, you know, major outlier, in terms of
#
how, you know, dangerous India is for itself and to the world environmentally. So that's something
#
that I worry about. And, you know, the other thing is the politics, you know, the politics of
#
divisiveness, which may earn immediate electoral gains, but is terribly dangerous. And also just,
#
I mean, from an objective point of view, just stupid, you know, in India has the world's
#
largest minority, you know, it has 200 million Muslims and all kinds of other minorities,
#
many, many different shapes and kinds, some religious, some, you know, whatever. I mean,
#
India has it all, but just tops, you know, take it from the top 200 million Muslims, the world's
#
largest minority. It just seems a terribly bad idea to make so many people unhappy, which is
#
what's happening right now. You know, it's a bad policy, you know, it's just, it doesn't lead
#
anywhere good. And, you know, I think it should just stop for one reason or another. And I can't
#
see what the logic is behind people who think it's a good idea. You know, I mean, it's just going to
#
be destructive for India. If you simply be, you know, if I were some kind of slave, slave trading
#
person, and I saw 200 million people and think of the talent that's out there, you know, that
#
should be harnessed for India. You know, it shouldn't be turned into a bunch of angry people
#
who either want to leave the country as quite a few Muslim friends of mine want to do at this stage,
#
or don't feel like equal citizens and are perpetually stirred up and some of whom might
#
turn to, you know, violence potentially. Anyway, so that certainly worries me. And I mean, those are
#
two big things. Is that, is that enough bad stuff for this area? I think, I think it kind of covers
#
everything. What would hope? Yeah. Well, hope, you know, to go back to talent, talent part, I think,
#
you know, you look at something like the, you know, the, the startup ecosystem in India, it's
#
bloody impressive, you know, and these people are just burning with talent and, and actually being
#
given the scope to do stuff as well, which is a very good thing. It helps that the government is
#
largely out of the way, frankly. I mean, that's one of the reasons why that whole end of, of India
#
is working so well is precisely because the government hasn't found, found ways to stick
#
its fingers in. And I hope it doesn't actually. So I think that's very good. And you know, some of
#
this, this stuff that, you know, the, the whole digital ecosystem in general is, is, is quite a
#
good thing for India. And it's, it will allow India to leapfrog other countries. It is doing much
#
better in this than many, many other countries at the same level of, of development. And I think,
#
you know, there's, there's also in many realms, India starts from a point where there's an immense
#
upside for change. For example, agriculture, you know, the potential change in productivity in,
#
in what you could be doing, uh, agriculturally in India is immense given the right mix of things.
#
I also think one of the things that makes me hopeful, I don't know if it's hopeful or
#
despairing, there are structures in India that the change to which, you know, changing them would
#
not be difficult, would actually require minimal effort and could have immensely beneficial effects.
#
One of them is the judicial system courts and the whole judiciary. This is really terrible drag
#
on so many things in India, the whole criminal justice system, the fact that you have now 76%
#
of people in prison are under trial. This is a scandal. It's an immense scandal. And what a
#
waste of time and talent, you know, if you just think of the waste put into it, simply get rid
#
of that. It isn't difficult. It really isn't difficult. You just need more judges. It's really
#
very simple. I mean, in terms of sort of like how much percent of GDP needs to be spent to
#
get this thing done, it's minuscule, you know, so just do it. And I think also, uh, the same thing
#
goes in a way for the educational sector. Just open it up, just do it. You know, uh, you know,
#
the, the fact that it takes a war in Ukraine to expose the fact that there are 40,000 Indian
#
medical students in this, you know, uh, snowy bit of Eastern Europe, uh, you know, I mean, why?
#
It's just, it makes no sense at all. I think the number of Indian students are brought is not 2
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million. And it's our failure, which is great for, uh, uh, the world's, uh, institutions, but,
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you know, these people could be, uh, learning in India. So, uh, you know, for example, so I,
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I think that to make me hopeful is there simple solutions that would really make, you know,
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to use the word reverberate widely, you know, I can see them very easily done. And I just,
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you know, I wish they'd simply be done, uh, but I'm hopeful that they will be done.
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Yeah. I mean, and I've, I've had episodes on a bunch of these agriculture education and all of
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those, which are linked from the show notes. My final question is, you know, if you had to
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recommend books, music, films that you absolutely love, that you feel that, you know, you love it
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so much, you want to share it with the world. What would those be? Gosh, I, you know, I'd
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forgotten that you asked this question and, you know, I should have prepared myself better.
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I find myself stumped. I have such a weird collection of things that I think are wonderful.
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You know, for example, one, one, one book that often comes up in my thoughts when I, when,
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when people ask me this is an Icelandic saga called Njáls saga. I don't know if you've ever
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read this. It's an amazing book. It's written, it's in the, written in the, I think 12th century
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or something like that. And it takes place in the, like the 10th century. And in fact,
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a lot of current day Icelanders are descended from the same characters and they know they're
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great, great, great, you know, actually related to these people, but it's a story of a kind of
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brutal crime and then a trial and it reads like a sort of, you know, you know, docu drama or
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something like that. It's quite fantastic about this legal system. And, you know, so it's a kind
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of courtroom drama set in 10th century Iceland, which is wonderful. So that's just something that
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quite randomly comes to my mind. Another thing that I've really enjoyed reading, these are things
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I read a long time ago. One of them is Balzac, the French novelist, short story writer, because
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he's just has a wonderful human touch. It's all set in like, you know, early 19th century Paris.
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What's interesting is that he talks about things like, you know, how much money people get paid,
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you know, and how they live, you know, the actual sort of like, you get, you get a real,
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really tactile sense of how people actually lived. It's not some historical setting all
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about romance. No, it's about real, real issues. And the stories are things that could happen
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today. So that's, that's quite... Balzac died of drinking too much coffee,
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by the way. Oh, really?
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Apparently. Yeah. Yeah. He wrote an essay about his addiction for coffee and he got
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so addicted to it that no amount of coffee could satisfy him. So eventually he'd just
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crush the coffee beans and have them raw. So he got a whole, he got a sort of hole in his
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stomach from too much acidity or something like that.
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But it's kind of too much coffee. And both you and I have been, you know, we drank coffee in
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the break and all of that. So be careful. Okay. I'll stay away from crushing beans.
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I'm trying to think of the other, other bits of sort of culture gone.
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We were asking about books, music, films, whatever. I mean, these are not mandatory.
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Yes. No, no, I'm just trying to think. I think in films, I've seen so many great films
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and, you know, there's, there's one, there's one movie that in the last few years,
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several years ago that I actually watched it once and then immediately watched it all over again,
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like the whole thing from the beginning, which was the, the lives of others.
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Wonderful. Amazing movie. That was just, it's just so the quality is just fantastic. And so,
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so, so real, I think that was very good. And I have a certain fondness for,
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for some Turkish movies. These really, with very long takes, pretty fantastic. There was one called
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YOL, I think it was really very kind of dark and deep movie. And I don't know music. I have a
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particular liking for this Brazilian guitarist who I think, I'm not even sure if he's still alive,
#
but his name is Baden Powell, as a Biden Powell, like the founder of the Boy Scouts,
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but he's really fantastic. He's been playing since the 1960s. It's kind of Brazilian jazz.
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He's absolutely spectacular. Recommend absolutely anything that he's done.
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And the amusingly, the sort of racy thriller that I wrote during the lockdown, I wrote the thriller
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in between seasons of a French television serial that I watched the first part the year before.
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And then there was like a break and I kind of forgot about it entirely. And then I wrote my
#
own thriller and then I watched the final season right after finishing my thriller. And I just
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suddenly realized how ridiculously influenced I was by this French TV serial, which is, I had no
#
awareness of this when I was actually writing the thriller. And only afterwards I realized that it
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was a strongly, it was called Le Bureau. I don't know if you've seen that. It's quite gripping.
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It's a sort of spy thriller set in the Middle East between Paris and the Middle East. It's
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extremely realistic and really super acting and just very gripping, wonderful story.
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Well, so Max, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure and thank you so much for coming and
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spending so many hours sharing time. It's been an ambition of mine to come and spend time with you
#
and I'm so glad to have been able to achieve it. It's the high point of six years in India.
#
Wait, don't go anywhere. This episode isn't over.
#
Max is one of the great storytellers of our times and he's going to tell us a few stories now.
#
Elevator story number one. In the building that we lived in in downtown Cairo, it was a sort of
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narrow, tall building, but quite old. It was like from 1932, beautiful art deco building actually,
#
rather wonderful. But we lived on the very top floor and the elevator was often on the
#
blink and so we got very involved in our elevator. It turned out there were lots of stories about
#
this elevator. It wasn't just the fact that it was on the blink when we were there, but there was a
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guy who had lived in the same apartment that I lived in a few years earlier who was a professor
#
at the American University in Cairo and his name was Dr. Gene Pippen. He was a professor of English
#
literature. He was a bit of a boozer, drank a lot of alcohol, beer particularly. He was very fat
#
and one day he got into the lift at the top floor and was taking it down and something snapped and
#
the whole cabin of the elevator descended very fast to the bottom of the floor, terrifyingly fast.
#
It wasn't quite a crash, but it was just a very quick descent.
#
So Gene Pippen in the elevator, probably slightly drunk, fell to the bottom and as he reached the
#
bottom floor, the chokidar, the watchman of the building was standing there who was this wonderful
#
old Nubian man and he was standing there and he heard the sound of the collapsing elevator
#
and he saw this falling cabin of the elevator and he saw it fall right past the ground floor
#
where he was standing. Gene Pippen inside the elevator saw the chokidar standing outside and
#
as he fell past the ground floor landing, the elevator actually came to a rest at the bottom.
#
Boom! And the guy inside was okay, Gene Pippen was all right, but he could just see through the
#
top of the door of the elevator and what he saw was the bowab or chokidar, all this old Nubian man,
#
have a heart attack and fall dead on the ground having watched the elevator fall past him.
#
It's such a cinematic kind of scene. So as the elevator falls past the bowab,
#
the bowab falls with it and hits the ground. Exactly. The guy in the elevator was fine,
#
but the person watching it had a heart attack at watching this thing fall past him.
#
Elevator story number two. There was a French executive working for a company in Cairo who
#
was very particular about his health, which was not good. He had a heart condition and he had very
#
expensive insurance. And lo and behold, when he was working in Cairo, he fell seriously ill and
#
insisted on being taken to the best possible hospital in Cairo, which at the time was the
#
military hospital, which has a nice view of the Nile, insisted on being taken to the military
#
hospital. He was taken to the military hospital. He insisted that his cardiologist be flown in from
#
Paris and his cardiologist was flown in from Paris to look after him. The cardiologist came,
#
examined the patient and determined that he was not in any condition to himself be flown out of
#
Egypt to Paris. No, he needed an operation right then in Cairo. And so this French executive was
#
sedated, put on a gurney, wheeled down the corridor in this best hospital in Cairo and
#
sent down the corridor to be taken to the operating floor, which was on the floor above,
#
and wheeled down to the end of the corridor and into the elevator and pushed into the elevator.
#
Unfortunately, the elevator wasn't there. It was an empty shaft and he plummeted to his death at
#
the bottom of the elevator shaft because the elevator was broken. This is a shocking story,
#
but why am I smiling? And what you also mentioned was that people react so differently to this
#
particular story. Tell me a little bit about. Yeah, well, I've had friends who just cackle
#
with laughter over this story. I have one friend in Cairo who just said, tell me that story again.
#
I love that story. Just say it again. And other people hear this story and think, oh, that's
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bleak and sad. But I'm afraid they've heard an awful lot of sort of slightly black stories about
#
medicine in Cairo. So that's the sort of thing that kept gossip moving.
#
Bus story number one. Yeah, I was once on a bus in Cairo, a sort of public bus, just a normal
#
transport bus, and they have front doors and back doors. It was quite crowded, but unusually it
#
wasn't so crowded that the aisle was actually open. And we stopped at one stop and a guy got on the
#
front and it turned out he was selling combs. That's why he got on the bus. So he was selling
#
combs and he was selling combs at a particular price. I can't remember exactly what it was.
#
It was sort of one comb for 80 piasters. And he was calling out as he was standing in the front
#
of the bus, comb for 80 piasters, bargain of your lifetime, comb for 80 piasters.
#
And the next stop along, someone got in at the back door of the bus and lo and behold,
#
it was another comb seller. And the guy who got on the back of the bus was shouting out,
#
a comb for 75 piasters. And so there was this kind of bidding that happened between these two comb
#
sellers, one from the front of the bus, one from the back of the bus. And they were calling out
#
different numbers and they began to overhear each other. And as they got closer to each other,
#
they realized that one guy was undercutting the other guy. So instead of being one for 75 piasters,
#
it was like, I sell them two for one pound. And the other guy said, no, I sell them two for 80
#
piasters. And they got closer and closer to each other and the price got more and more competitive.
#
And passengers on the bus who would never have imagined that they might possibly want one comb
#
or two or three were suddenly buying five combs because they were getting these fantastic bargains.
#
And the bargains kept getting better and these two guys kept getting more aggressive and shouting
#
at each other. And suddenly what they were shouting at each other, instead of shouting different
#
numbers, they were shouting insults at each other. They met in the center of the bus just where I
#
was sitting and it turned into a fight and they started hitting each other. And meanwhile, lots
#
of combs had been sold, of course, they started hitting each other. The bus conductor to break
#
up this fight sort of pushed them apart, pushed them to the back of the bus, told them, you've got
#
to leave the bus. Everyone intervened and said, no, don't hit each other. No, no, no, no, no, no.
#
And they were pushed off the bus, forced to leave the bus. And as they left the bus and the bus moved
#
on, I looked out the window of the bus and looked back and I saw these two guys and they high-fived
#
each other and cackled with laughter. They just made a killing selling these combs at like five
#
times their value because they made such a show of this bargain. Such a fantastic behavioral economics
#
lesson. And it's like the anchoring effect for one thing. And just the way you're kind of shifting
#
incentives and making it seem irresistible, you have to buy. Exactly. But that was just one of
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a million little street scenes. And it's amazing how elaborate and clever their little show was
#
and worked so well. And in fact, I think even some of the people who had spent too much
#
for these combs were impressed by the show.
#
Hashish story number one. There are lots of Hashish stories, but Hashish story number one,
#
there was a group of Hashashin as Hashish smokers are known. And they used to meet every single
#
night, night after night. Every night they'd do the same thing. They'd sit together, they'd smoke
#
Hashish, they'd tell jokes. So this had gone on for years. Every day they'd work and work and then
#
at night they'd meet and they'd sit together, hang out, tell jokes. And it got to the point where
#
they'd all heard all each other's jokes again and again and again. So they had a solution. They
#
decided they would just simply number the jokes. So there was like joke number 74. Someone would
#
say 74. And the rest of them would chuckle a little bit and say, yeah, remember that one,
#
that was a good one. Maybe someone would say 85. And everyone would giggle a little bit and say,
#
hey, that's cool. That's really cool. One night they were sitting together and someone said 196.
#
And they all chuckled a little bit, but one of them just sat there and he just laughed and laughed.
#
And he wouldn't stop laughing. He's slapping his thighs, going ha ha ha 196.
#
All the rest of them got to think this was rather peculiar. And
#
you know, finally when this guy sort of fell silent, they said, hey, Mahmoud,
#
what is it about 196? What's so special about 196? And he said, never heard that one before.
#
Taxi story. I took one taxi in Cairo. It was a very old Skoda. At the time, this dates back
#
to like the 1980s. The Skoda was not a good car. It did not belong to Volkswagen. It was still a
#
sort of check behind the Iron Curtain kind of car. It was not great. And the engine was actually in
#
the back of the car. And we were driving along beside the Nile, putt, putt, putt, putt, putt,
#
putt, putt. And suddenly there was an almighty crash, absolutely colossal crash. And the car
#
is kind of screeched and skidded to the side of the road. And the driver, I was like shocked and
#
frightened and didn't know what had happened. And I kind of watched the driver and the driver's head
#
fell forward onto his hand and he sort of clutched his head in his hand. And he said, Danny, Danny,
#
which means again, again. And I said, what is it again? What happened again? He said,
#
the engine dropped out again. It was literally the whole engine had fallen out of the car.
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Thank you, Max. You're welcome.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hop on over to your nearest bookstore online or offline
#
and pick up Cairo, the city victorious by Max Rodenbeck. Also check out the show notes for
#
other links to his work. Enter rabbit holes at will. You can follow Max on Twitter at Max
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Rodenbeck. One word. You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse
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past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support
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the production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
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