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The philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote an essay called What is it like to be a bat?
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One of the arguments in that essay was that even if a human could try and imagine what
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it was like to be a bat by taking the bat's point of view, it is impossible to know what
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it is like for a bat to be a bat.
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If you wrote an essay called What is it like to be a woman?
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Men would be in a similar situation.
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Our powers of empathy and imagination can only get us so far.
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We are mostly blind to the many ways in which women have to adapt to live in a world designed
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And so much have we normalized this, that even many women take it for granted.
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What is it like to be a woman in a world where hotel rooms don't have latches on the inside,
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where offices don't have enough women's toilets, where workplaces don't account for periods
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or pregnancies, where the men are all Raja Betas and the women are grocery lists trapped
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in human bodies as my guest today wrote, where you aren't taken seriously, you are interrupted
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all the time and Fufaji is a bigot.
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All these extra layers of life that men just don't have to deal with, they need to be documented.
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Someone needs to write about what it's like to be womaning in India.
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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 Maima Vasisht, a former civil servant who runs a phenomenal newsletter,
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Maima did my writing course a couple of years ago and at the end of the course asked for
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We did a Zoom call and she told me about an idea she had for a book to write about those
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aspects of women's lives that men had no clue about.
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I suggested that the best way to get the ball rolling was not to write a book straight away
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for that can be a daunting project, but to start a weekly newsletter.
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So she did and Womaning in India has now gathered a cult following.
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She's built a tremendous body of work documenting what women go through in the workplace, in
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public spaces, in their homes and in their own heads.
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She's spoken to countless women across this country, gathered their stories and illuminated
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a world that many men, even well-meaning men, would have been clueless about.
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So I figured I'd get her on the show to talk about her life, her work and Womaning in India.
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But first, let's go to a unique kind of commercial break, Capital Gyan by Deepak Shenoy.
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This is like a show within a commercial from the kind sponsors of this episode, Capital
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When my father passed away, he left my mother shares over 30 different companies.
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When I look at them now, 23 of these companies are dead or defunct.
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Only 7 have given us a positive return.
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But these 7 have returned 40 times in the entire investment.
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That's a yearly return of 20% plus over 20 years from just one-fourth of the stocks.
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Peter Lynch has said that booking profits on your winners to act to your losers is like
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pulling out the flowers and watering the weeds.
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Letting your winners run and not regretting your losers is one of the hallmarks of great
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I'm Deepak Shenoy, CEO at Capital Mind.
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In our portfolio management service, we use both quantitative and qualitative measures
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to manage our portfolios, which gives us the confidence to hold on to our winners.
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Learn more about us at cm.social slash scene unseen.
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Worry less about your money and make it work for you, cm.social slash scene unseen.
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Hey, I want to repeat that URL, cm.social slash scene unseen.
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Deepak has been a guest on my podcast and he handles my money as well.
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My actions are the best endorsement.
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Mahima, welcome to the scene and the unseen.
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I'm so glad to have you on.
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I'm so glad you agreed.
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I spent last night and today morning kind of going through your newsletter also.
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And while in the past, I've expressed my admiration, you know, I admire it so much
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that week after week, you can just have the discipline to sit down and put it out, especially
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because it's not just you sitting and writing, you're talking to people and you're constructing
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And I really love that.
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But while I was aware that okay, it's very consistent.
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It was only when I reread all the posts and I was taking notes that I thought that this
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is really a formidable body of work.
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So you should be so proud.
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Let's sort of start by talking about, by now, you know, the template of the show.
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So let's start by talking about sort of your personal journey, which is, you know, a really
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unconventional sort of route that you've taken to where you are, where you've done your
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engineering, you've done your MBA, you joined the civil services.
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And now while you are, of course, you know, working with the Swachh Bharat program and
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But at the same time, this newsletter is outstanding.
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So you're part of the creator economy, in a sense, our podcast.
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But take me back to where were you born?
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Yeah, I've listened to a lot of episodes of your podcast and always wondered that how
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are people's lives so interesting?
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Like people are reading books in, in beside rivers flowing behind their homes and all.
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And I've always felt like my upbringing was very, very average by those standards.
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But, but we'll go there anyway.
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So I am basically from a partition refugee family.
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My paternal grandparents were children or young adults when partition happened.
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And so both of my dada and dadi have, they've told us stories about how they went through
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My grandfather was in Xavier's Mumbai when partition happened and he was studying engineering
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And so his family was stuck beside, beyond the border and he was here in India.
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And so there was all of that anxiety in those days with no communication channel, whether
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your loved ones are even okay, whether they're even alive.
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My grandmother had this very, very, that in Hindi, she was one of 14 siblings.
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They were all children.
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They had a house in Lahore and there was a warehouse like go down under their house.
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And they used to store wheat and rice and things like that.
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So how they as children hid inside those huge containers because the houses were being,
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homes were being raided and there were riots in the streets, of course, and Hindus were
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Muslims are not safe here.
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And so they hid in those gigantic containers for a week, 10 days.
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And they lived on eating those raw grains of wheat and rice.
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That's how they survived it.
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And then, you know, suddenly news would come, ke ek train ja rahi hai, chalo.
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And aadi raat ko, some children are going in one batch, some are going in the other.
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And again, you don't know whether you're being separated from your siblings.
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You don't know whether you'll even see them again.
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So, so very, very shocking, disturbing stories from there.
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Then they came to Delhi and they settled here in a refugee colony.
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I believe my grandmother was elsewhere and later when she got married, she moved in obviously
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And my great grandmother was the matriarch of the family at the time.
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I remember my dad still tells me the story of how at that time, you know, these refugee
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colonies were being offered and unko koi, I don't know, defense colony, or kahin Kalka
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ji kahin pe de, she was getting a house.
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And at that time Delhi mein, it was like she literally refused that housing, bahan jangal
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mein jaake kaun rahega.
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And today my dad is like, if she had said yes that time, our lives would have been very
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But anyway, so then she moved here with my grandfather who had one sibling, my grandmother
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And then they got married, they had four sons, one of third one was my father.
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My mother's side again, four siblings, third one was my mother.
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My mom's side is another interesting story of great struggle, I think.
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So my mom's mother was again one of just two siblings, because my mom's grandfather passed
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away very soon after his marriage to my great grandmother on that side, my great nani on
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And I think it was a Spanish flu or something at that time, which took a lot of lives and
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many young adults passed away suddenly.
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And so many families were left with no parents or single parents.
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And so my great nani was suddenly widowed at a very young age.
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She had two children and she self-educated herself and became actually a school principal,
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which at that time did not take like a huge amount of education, but even with basic education,
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And so she was a self-made woman in that era, a woman who was in a job earning and raising
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a family on her own, which was very, very admirable.
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And then my nani had actually had nine children, which I found out much later in life, that
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my mom had had five siblings who never made it beyond the first year of their life.
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So I mean, when I think about it, I can't imagine how a parent, a mother says, especially
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goes on after losing five children and then going on to have more children.
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But that was, I guess, the way of those times, you know, it was just a fact of life that
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some children will not make it.
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Small, very common diseases like diarrhea and all, which today are utterly preventable.
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You take ORS, you'll be fine.
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At that time, children would actually lose lives and parents would lose children to that.
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Anyway, so then somehow luckily after number six, she had four children who made it.
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And then my mom was the third of those four.
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So I much later in life found out that my mom was actually number seven, eight, yes.
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We'll have to edit this.
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So much later in life, I found out my mom was not the third child, she was actually
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the eighth child in that family.
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So yeah, then my parents, my dad, I think had his initial years of his education in
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And then they moved to move back to Delhi, because my dadaji was an engineer and he used
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to work in these repair of theatre equipment.
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So there was a lot of traveling because at that time in India, there were only so many
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the single screening, obviously, and there were very few of those.
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So he used to travel a lot, be on tour a lot.
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And so my dadi used to stay in Delhi at home with her, with the four boys.
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I think both my parents had very humble beginnings that way, government school main padhe hain
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dono and Hindi medium, they tell me stories of, you know, sitting on the floor in a broken
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tent aur waha pe padhai chal rahi hai and teachers are obviously not interested and
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very few who would actually have a stake in teaching at all, mostly just going through
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But then they were both of them had this very strong work ethic and this strong desire to
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So they kind of again were self taught in a way my father ended up doing an MA in English,
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having come from a Hindi medium school, almost overnight taught himself English by reading
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Like that's how he would tell me that he would read a sentence and then come across
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four new words in that sentence and then go back to the dictionary and look up their meaning
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and then read the next sentence.
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So that's an intense amount of work to put into learning a language.
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But that's how he did it.
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And he went on to do an MA in English.
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My mom also did a masters later in life and was a BA when they got married.
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They got married in 1985 and that's the year later that year I was born.
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And then two years later, I had a younger brother.
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I don't remember much from my early years, but I mostly grew up in Delhi.
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And my parents were, like I said, you know, great love for education and despite humble
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beginnings and both of them were bankers for most of my life.
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They were in public sector banks and again transferable jobs.
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So we used to change schools a lot even within Delhi.
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So in my life, in the 12 years of schooling, I've changed 10 schools.
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So that's a significant amount of nomadic lifestyle to have.
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But that was, I think it was good in hindsight and it was a little tough at that time maybe,
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I mean, it made me very comfortable and adjustable.
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I would make friends easily.
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I would settle in new circumstances easily.
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And they used to, I mean, we went to the best of the schools, my brother and I.
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My parents again, like I said, love for education.
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So that was very important to them.
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It was a very important ethic that they built into us also that, you know, one is a love
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for education and the other thing that they probably didn't teach us consciously, but
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we picked up was value for money because somehow I don't, they never said it to us.
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But at least for me, I imbibed it quite early in life that they are not, it's not easy
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for them to send me to the school.
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They are making sacrifices and the least I can do is study well.
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So I used to be like class topper all through school and everything, very, very boring,
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typical Delhi type story.
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And we used to have all these holidays, these classes, so we also became a bit of jack of
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all trades, we learned a bit of dancing, a bit of Bharatnatyam, a bit of Kathak, a bit
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of singing, a bit of painting, a bit of this and that, like we would be shunted out of
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the house during summer, go, get out of here, learn that, join that class.
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So kind of picked up a lot of things alongside education, alongside academics early in life.
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And then I think the big, I mean, must have been skipping a lot of things here, but I
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think the next big milestone happened in our lives when I was in 10th standard.
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I mean, Delhi, it starts ke 9th ke baad niche khelne jana bandh, dost wo kam karo, padhai
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pe dehan do, board exam ka saal aa raha hai, so 9th me 10th ki thayari karo, 10th me board
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likko, phir 11th me 12th ki thayari karo, phir 12th me board likko, so that is basically.
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And the story you were told was ke beta yeh 2 saal padh liya na, toh phir life set hai.
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Of course, that story carries on, okay, yeh education, yeh entrance kar liya toh life
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set hai, phir wo exam likh liya toh life set hai, wo chalta raha tha hai, but ussame obviously
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you are children and you fall for this, fall for this pitch.
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So we, so I was like very hardcore 10th his like bhaiya yahi hai, life ka do or die year.
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And in that year, my mom's bank me some leadership change happened.
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And until that time, they had a policy of not transferring women because they were like
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working mothers have it tough enough as it is, let's not make life worse for them, already
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the husbands are moving around and they have to adjust with that.
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And a lot of years, I grew up with my dad living in some village in UP, and then commuting
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every week to come see us, aisa hota tha baoth.
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So my mom was like the one fixture, ke theek hai, she is going to be in Delhi, she is going
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to be in this house, so we don't have to change schools as often.
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But then that year when I was in 10th, there was a leadership change in her organization
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and the man who came in was, was for some reason had a bone to pick with the men and
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he said that transfer all the women, bahut ho hiya, baithi ho hiya kap, ek hi jaga pe.
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So usne utha ke sabko, and not even like transfer them locally from one daily office to another
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or within departments, no transfer them to other cities where they have never been and
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don't want to go, so my mom was transferred to Ahmedabad.
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So suddenly like I said, humara pura plan tha na, ke 9th to 12th ghar mein cable TV
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kat jayega, baith ki padhai karne hai, and then the plan got disrupted in the most crucial
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So my dad to his credit at the time said that, you know, this is a crucial year for Mahima's
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education and we need to keep the family together because earlier we went by ourselves and it
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was a huge struggle for my mother to manage the new house, new culture, bachon ke nahi
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school, her own new office, her own office ka dynamics and politics.
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It was just too much for her to do it by herself and she would every day tell him, when are
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And so to his huge credit, he took VRS in a year that was like quite early in his career
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So people would tell him, oh, you're making the biggest mistake of your life.
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And he was like, no, my family needs me.
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And he prioritized that again, a very, very, very modern take for a decision for a man
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to take at that time that I will quit my job and my wife will continue to earn because
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she doesn't have the option of VRS right now.
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So she would have to resign and just sit at home with no pay, I will at least get a pension.
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So, and I'll do something of my own.
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So he did that, which was massive, a huge sacrifice for which I'm indebted forever
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because again, something that could have changed the direction of our lives completely.
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So he came and joined us in Ahmedabad and I suffered a lot in terms of academics and
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to the extent that a 10 standard child can suffer basically, huge culture shift, children
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in my school suddenly speaking Gujarati and telling me I have a Punjabi accent, which
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until that time, no one had pointed out because, well, I guess all of us had Punjabi accents,
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so no one points it out.
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But then when I go there, they say, oh, the way you say this thing, this is very Punjabi,
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this is very Delhi type.
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So I would be very conscious about the way I speak.
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I was the new kid in a class in a school where 10 standard was the last class.
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So those kids were studying with KG and I am suddenly middle of the year, air dropped
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into this classroom where nobody knows me and nobody cares at this stage of their life
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for to make new friends.
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So very difficult adjustment.
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And I was this cocky class toppers teacher's pet in Delhi school and so Delhi made my school
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So I was like completely out of my comfort zone.
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My marks plummeted and like I said, again, the most life defining crucial do or die year
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And my brother was having his own set of issues, getting bullied by the boys in his class.
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And so we had a very difficult adjustment that year.
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That year also, there was floods in Gujarat, in Ahmedabad.
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And our school was in a low lying area.
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So I remember school ka poora ground floor tak paani phar gaya.
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We were all moved to the first floor and then first floor me paani pharne lagaya.
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So then some army people came and umko rassi baand ke nikaal ke leke gaye and we were evacuated.
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So that was my first brush with with natural disasters.
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So anyway, a lot of stuff happened and and by by God's grace or hard work, parents blessings
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everything I actually ended up topping West India that year.
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From going from like 68 percent marks ho gaye se mere, I was this always 95 se upar rhayna
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90 bhi nahi 95 se upar rhayna chahiye.
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Maths mein 25, main se 24 and a half kyun hai, half mark kahan kata.
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That was the big big pain points of my life for those until that year.
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And that year I came down to like academics mein kahin nahi, all everything changed suddenly
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and which was again in hindsight, I think it was a change that I needed.
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It was a reality check that I needed.
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Like I said, I was getting rather comfortable and cocky in Delhi.
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Toh 10th hua, phir then 11th mein changed into state board, Gujarat board, went there
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for 10 days and decided ke ye toh bhai, these textbooks are like 100 pages and I'm not going
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to and this is not okay, I'm not going to fit in here.
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So then I came back into central board, Kendra Vidyalaya, then 12th mein ek aur school badla,
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did a bit of IIT prep over there, which again Ahmedabad had no coaching classes or anything
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So there was this one class and I remember I went, I joined there, wo nahi nahi khuli
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thi and I went there first day, I sat next to a boy and I was like, you know, looking
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for validation, have I come to the right place even?
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So I asked this guy that, you know, what do you know about this class?
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This and then he was like, this is the best class in Ahmedabad.
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He said, don't you know, Mahima Vashisht comes to this class and I was like, what?
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Because I topped West India, akbar agar mein naam chab gaya tha mera and then somehow word
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travel that I joined this class.
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And then I realized that people are here because I am here, I don't know why I am here.
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So we are all in one boat, sink or swim and basically we sank, that boat sank because
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Like I cleared and I got some like 6000 rank or something, which at that time would have
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given you mining engineering in one bahut door ka koi college and so that was not it.
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And then I also gave AIEEE, I also gave medical because I had bio also.
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Lot of har jaga har par maara and finally I got into AIEEE exam ushi se start hua tha
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the all India engineering entrance examination.
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And until then that year you had to apply separately to every college you wanted to
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So if you, there are 50 colleges, big big league colleges, you have to fill 50 application
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forms and write 50 exams.
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So thankfully from my year only it had started and I wrote that exam and I got into an NIT,
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National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra.
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Usse upar rank mein the hai uss samay bhi and NIT Surat was local for us Gujarat mein.
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And NIT Allahabad I remember was one of the highest ranked and I could have with my marks
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and rank I could have gotten into it and I remember my parents we went to that counseling
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center jaha pe yeh diya jata hai, yeh branch aur yeh NIT mil raha hai.
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And waha jaake we had applied and the counseling center guy told us ke dekho, NIT Allahabad
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is good, but ladkiyon ke liye theek nahi hai, waha pe pathar chalte hain, waha pe bache
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exam hall mein chhuri leke aajate hain.
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So that was enough for my parents, okay good career but thanks, no thanks.
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So they put me in the next best at the time which was NIT Kurukshetra.
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So then I went for the first time left my home and lot of rona dhona in the train I
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remember to Kurukshetra and then my dad took me there, dropped me off, got me a hostel
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room and everything and then four years of engineering happened there where it was nice,
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it was very nice at that time at least because academically I was good, I was sorted because
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I had had all this rigorous background of studying and I was good at cracking exams.
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So aaj aate the achche number, I used to be again topper-wopper in all semesters but more
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than that what I really liked about that experience was the kind of grooming that it was for my
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personality I joined a lot of, I was the chief editor of the college magazine, technical
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society mein executive member, madlab aisa extra curricular bahut kuch, I used to play
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sports, I used to be cultural events kuch na kuch.
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So I was always busy, I was always up to something and it was again at that time very uncharacteristic
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for a girl to be this active in these things because it was you know quizzing is boys ka
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area, literature and debate club is boys ka area, magazine likhna is boys ka area and
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so I was this outsider who was, they would select girls in these clubs but mostly it
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was seen as eye-candy, ke chalo thodi ladkiya bhi leki aata hai club mein and then by the
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time of, by the senior years most girls would peter out in participation because there was
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no really no support from the organization, from the institution or from the culture within
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It was not very friendly for girls.
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So I remember there was, we used to have a girls hostel and usme girls timing was like
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4.30 ko lectures khatam huye 5.30 tak aapko andar hona hai.
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So basically you had one hour to go eat a samosa in the canteen and enjoy a campus life
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And for boys obviously puri raat campus mein yahaan pe daru leke pi ke padhe huye hai
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and they are like living it up there.
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Not that daru is the measure of living it up but the access to that public space, after
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hours to go sit outside college library and you know have all those memories, build those
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memories which people look back on.
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We got no such chances because we were sheep, cattle herded into the hostel at sundown.
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So summers ke time thoda zyada time milta tha winters mein to bus class khatam huye
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gante ke andar sunset ho jayega aap chalo bhaago.
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That I felt it was very restrictive and in hindsight it was quite misogynistic because
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the wardens and their attitude was ke yeh jagah safe nahi hai ladkiyon ke liye, Haryana
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hai, yahaan pe ladkiyon chheer dete hain, yahaan pe ladkiyon ko utha ke le jate hain, hum
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aapko nahi jaane de sakte bhaar, aapki betiyan humari zimmedaari hain and they would tell
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our parents ki aap socho main inki parent ki tarah soch rahi hu, agar meri beti hoti
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And I was like well we are living on campus, this is your area, if you are not able to
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protect a student in this area, that's on you, that's not on the student, you cannot
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penalize the student because she happens to be a girl.
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But anyway at that time we didn't have such voice and khudi apne andar itni internalized
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misogyny thi ke hum accept bhi kalete hai, yeh aap bhai yahi sayi hai, aasi life hai.
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So I remember for college magazine printing agara karane ke liye I used to go aadhi raatko
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printer ki shop pe and tell yaha pe ki Karnal mein meri maasi hai, wo bimaar hai, mujh unke
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dekhne jaana hai, aise karke I used to write these applications, get it signed by a friend
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as my aunt or local garden or something and then give it to the warden and the warden also
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often would see through it, she would be like, haan mujhe pata hai yeh kaunsi maasi hai, Karnal
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mujhe baar baar bimaar hoti hai.
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You have a maasi in Karnal?
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I am the one in Karnal, it was just the nearest town.
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So anyway, I mean, she, I think she thought I was going out with a boy or something, which
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was where their mind always went.
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So there was a lot of slut shaming, unneedlessly, ke aap, matlab literally I was a student going
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out to participate in an extracurricular college campus activity, which was benefiting me,
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It is a part of the kind of all round development that you should be offering your students,
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you should be encouraging in your students, but instead you are penalizing them, you are
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slut shaming them, you are telling them ki aadhi raat ko ladkiya andehre mein jaake kya
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karti hai, ladko ke saath hume pata hai.
#
This is literally a line that the chief warden has told me.
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That was the kind of atmosphere where you had to really, this is also the reason why
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most girls would peter out of clubs and societies and all right.
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For me, it was just a passion and I was, I found a lot of meaning and joy in that.
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So I used to, I used to find my ways around it.
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So that, all that happened, four years of college went out that way.
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In hindsight, again, much more misogyny that I see there now than I saw at that time, which
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was probably good for my mental health that I didn't see it that time, otherwise kranti
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kaari ban jaate hum, chaar saal tak main more chai nikalti rehti.
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The atmosphere in Gurukshetra was also very, I mean, it had all sorts of other issues also.
#
There's a lot of toxic masculinity also, literally there were boys in our college who would go
#
out in the evening on bikes and maladki jaariya peechhe sa uske baal kheechke chale gaye,
#
pen chhen liya, knock off her books or something, you know, just like it was, humblest words
#
like eve teasing are used for it, it is sexual harassment.
#
And that was very common on campus.
#
More from the boys who would come from outside than the boys from within campus, but everyone
#
had access and everyone, Kurukshetra University is like a thousand acre campus in which 300
#
acres is NIT Kurukshetra within the campus.
#
So Kurukshetra University, KU bolte se, KU ke ladke andar aate the, KU ke ladko ko humare
#
naam details phone number pata hote the, like men we've never met, don't know that they
#
exist, they know everything about our lives.
#
So that was the extent of scrutiny that girls would be under in that surrounding.
#
And there was, like I said, a lot of toxic masculinity in our third year, I think I was
#
in third year when there was an incident of violence between boys.
#
So there were gangs of boys there and one gang beat up the other gang or somebody brought
#
a hockey stick and somebody brought a fawda spade.
#
And so this became famous as the fawda incident on campus, ke ek ladke ne dukse ladke ka
#
sar khol diya, fawda marke.
#
And basically that boy, I think he later survived, but he had some lifelong paralysis or some
#
issue obviously, like literally his head was cracked open by another student.
#
So that was the extent of stuff that the boys on campus were dealing.
#
So credit to them also where it belongs.
#
And we, I remember there was a long break, suddenly humare chutiyan kar di gayi, we were
#
sent home and some boys went underground and they had parents who were Haryana ka IPS officer,
#
uska father hai and then somehow he was bailed out, the guy who did this and all of that
#
weird parallel universe also existed while I was working on my magazines and clubs and
#
little cute little things.
#
That was a context and general scene in which Kurukshetra happened.
#
Towards the end, in my final year, I got placed into campus placement, say I got two jobs,
#
but then I also wrote CAT in that year.
#
And again, it was very unlikely that I would have cleared it because no coaching class
#
So I did this, a distance wala mock test thing, time ka ussam hota tha, and a lot of my batchmates
#
used to had just given up on studies and extracurriculars in the final year, ke rose train leke weekend
#
pe Delhi jaake career launcher ki class mein padhai karke aayenge.
#
And I was here till the last day running around organizing fests and everything in college
#
as the final year student, was still not given that legitimacy because I was a girl, we'll
#
come back to that later.
#
But there was in the final year, I used to go, I used to do this distance thing for mock
#
And then I was the surprise candidate who cleared CAT.
#
And then toh phir isliye I didn't join any job and I went on to IIM Bangalore after that,
#
IIM Bangalore was a whole other universe because like I said, Kurukshetra mein academically
#
I was very, very comfortable.
#
By the end of it, I had a 9.9 CGP out of 10, which was, log sunte hain toh aake fart jaati hain,
#
but for me, I feel like, I was actually not that hard because like I said, I had become
#
quite good at cracking the Indian education system.
#
Toh mujhe pada tha exam mein kaisa poochenge, how to do smart prep the night before the
#
And then the night after the exam, I would press a reset button, so today I cannot tell
#
you what a microprocessor is with a gun to my head.
#
So that was, I am an electronics engineer by the way, so that's quite shameful to admit.
#
I went into IIM Bangalore after that.
#
Waha pe it was a whole other academic comfort se coming there was a very different experience
#
because waha pe sara ek topper the, waha pe toh ye tha ki bhai patar feko topper ko
#
So it was, everybody there was exceptional people academically at least, but probably
#
So we were a batch of 249 people out of which 227 were engineers.
#
So we all, different degrees of genius, but all thinking the same way, sab ka dimaag train
#
ki tarah ek hi line pe chalta hai.
#
So I think there were like less than 20 or so people from arts and ye sab background
#
who were just brought in for diversity uss samay hi hota tha ki iss cheez ke marks zyada
#
Ki agar aapne CAT kar liya aur aapka arts background hai, toh wo aapko zyada marks
#
denge interviewer kyuki they want that diversity on campus.
#
But obviously we were not doing a good enough job of diversity because we are still very
#
So I would actually love interacting with those students who came from different backgrounds
#
because they brought a very different way of thinking to things.
#
And I was a fresher, what is called a fresher, which is that no work experience, directly
#
engineering ke baad MBA.
#
So I also got a lot of different life perspectives from my batch mates who had work experience
#
because they would have this attitude of ye sab se kuch fark nahi padta hai, humne dekha
#
Whereas the freshers like us were like, are marks, are exam, are here.
#
So I kind of evolved beyond that because I surrounded myself with friends who didn't
#
care as much about academics and about all of that.
#
So we did decently well, possibly okay in IIM, I was no gold medalist there.
#
I went on student exchange while there in my, there were 2 saal mein, there are 3 trimesters,
#
so sorry, 6 trimesters.
#
So 5th trimester is a student exchange program, which I did in Germany, in college, B school
#
So for me, that was the highlight of my MBA, I got to travel abroad and live in another
#
country in a rented apartment with other students and hum log, we were like the only 16 Indians
#
in a 100 km radius around there, so hum log milke chole chawal bana rahe hai, to get a
#
taste of our food and learnt how to cook, learnt how to manage a household to the extent
#
And I did a lot of travelling, I travelled to like some 11 countries.
#
So again, academics was the last thing on our mind, ke ye to hoi jaayega.
#
And I remember humara jab exam hua tha waha tha, the Indian students were leaving so fast
#
because we have been conditioned to game the education system so well that the poor Germans,
#
agar 3 maina pehle project diya hai, toh wo log 3 maine ka ek wo banayenge, poora timeline
#
chart ke pehle hafta hum ye karenge, 2nd hafta we will visualize, 3rd hafta we will find
#
data, 4th hafta we will do primary research, and Indians are like ke deadline kab hai, ek
#
raat pehle baithenge, night out maarenga ho jayega.
#
Sounds just like me, I gotta tell you.
#
I know, you did that right, like last night bed ke womaning padha hai poora.
#
Siddhi si baat hai, kya kare.
#
Toh humara culture wo hai, toh we kind of were like, all of us were the worst project partners,
#
it became like a racist thing, almost ki Indians ko project partner mat banao, they'll turn
#
up one night before the thing, whereas those German, French, even Chinese sincere students
#
are there slogging for 3 months, aur hum ek raat pehle prakat hoke bolenge, chalo, batau
#
Anyway, so we were, the joke was that on that day when we were all writing the exam, the
#
Indian students were leaving so fast that the examiner stopped one of us and was like
#
show me your wallet, and you have definitely cheated, how are you leaving so fast?
#
And he was like, I haven't, like literally, I know the answers, jutta mujhe pata, surfay
#
surfay, main lik diya hai, aur mujhe pata main pass ho jaunga ite mein.
#
And pretty much that was the attitude of all of us there, satisfying to the worst level,
#
in the worst way possible.
#
So yeah, the education and all was secondary there, but the cross-cultural experience
#
was very, very, was very interesting and I think that contributed much more to our growth.
#
Let's double click on a few things and then we'll rejoin this journey.
#
So a whole bunch of things to double click on, I want to go back to when you were talking
#
at the start about how you learnt about, you know, the experiences of your grandparents
#
during partition and all of that and how they came over and what they went through.
#
And I've also sort of been thinking for a long time, and it's a thought that came up
#
again when I read your post, is that women always have this sort of extra layer of obstacles
#
to overcome, to get to whatever they are doing.
#
I remember I'd done this episode I really enjoyed with Kavita Rao, who'd written about
#
the lady doctors of the 19th century.
#
And some of the stories that are stunning, like the one that moved me a lot and I keep
#
going back to is that of Hemabati Sen, who was born in this village somewhere in what
#
was then Bangladesh in the 1840s or 1850s, right?
#
She was married off to a middle-aged widower at the age of nine.
#
During the day she would play with his children, during the night she would forget what happened,
#
but basically she would wake up naked and bleeding, right?
#
This went on for a couple of years until her husband died, his parents died, her parents
#
died, so she's 11 years old, and her family basically kicks her out on the street and
#
So parents are dead, both sets of parents, husband is dead, you'd imagine life is over,
#
she's 11 years old, no money, village in Bangladesh, right, 1850s.
#
She makes her way from there to be one of India's first lady doctors, and she achieves
#
positions of eminence in terms of the first woman head of a guild or whatever, I forgot
#
She writes a diary about her life, and after she dies, that diary is lost in a trunk, which
#
isn't opened for 85 years, and then in the 1990s or the early 2000s somebody opens it
#
and it's published as a memoirs of Hemapati Singh, you can read it online.
#
And not just this story, because one story can be an outlier, but reading about the lady
#
doctors of the 1900s, what struck me was that to be a lady doctor at all, forget how good
#
a doctor, forget what you've achieved, just to be a lady doctor, you had to be ridiculously
#
You had to have immense character, immense strength, you had to have overcome a lot.
#
While to be a male doctor, you simply had to be born into privilege, basically.
#
Right time, right place, good things happen, you kind of get there, you could be mediocre.
#
Similarly, in your stories, what you've written in your newsletter is, at time and again,
#
I was reading stories of ordinary women, who on the face of it seem ordinary, that their
#
lives are ordinary, nothing special about them, normal job karte hai, ek du bache hai,
#
ghar chalaate hai, whatever.
#
But then you go into, one, you go into their interior lives to a fair extent, and two,
#
you make us realize that their existence isn't so ordinary, that they have so many more odds
#
to beat than a comparable male.
#
So just going, you know, circling back to your grandparents, for example, and thinking
#
aloud over there, how did they cope?
#
And is it that the women coped differently, or coped better, or, you know, they could
#
kind of, they carried that burden in a different way?
#
Were there different kinds of denial that might have set in for the men or the women?
#
Because one common way that I can just think for men to deal with it is a certain kind
#
of macho denial, you know, and some of that could also, you know, involve just running
#
away from what just happened, or, you know, not facing up to that.
#
So I'm just sort of, I see this, you know, I'm applying this thread that I've seen go
#
through and, you know, so my question, therefore, is that now looking back in hindsight, do
#
you feel that the women coped with it differently?
#
Do you feel that some of that toughness also rubbed off on you?
#
Because even a little thing like, you know, inventing a Masi in Karnal to kind of get
#
out is also a way of fighting back, of thinking, no, I won't take it, I have to go, I have
#
Did some of it rub off from there as well?
#
So what are your sort of observations on that broad subject?
#
And how much of it, you know, could you see in this particular instance of your grandparents
#
and your parents and what they kind of, you know, go through to just to just live their
#
lives like even your mother getting transferred like that, obviously, that boss in Delhi would
#
have been some toxic asshole.
#
So you know, so what are your observations now looking back?
#
Two things, one, I obviously come from strong women, which is now clear to me in hindsight,
#
which was not a recurring, you know, undercurrent of my life that every day I'm waking up and
#
thinking, wow, what strong women around me, but I mean, strong women was not even a thing
#
that was even recognized or let alone celebrated in the time that we grew up in.
#
And I mean, let alone the time before that, it wasn't even a thing.
#
It was just a given that, yes, my dadaji will travel across the country going to all these
#
theaters and I imagine having a good circle of friends and to meet in every city and hang
#
Meanwhile, my dadi is at home raising these four boys by herself.
#
And my dad tells me stories of how, you know, she would have to take, literally, the moviemen
#
show that a woman goes to her father-in-law and asks him to give her some grains and he
#
tells her to settle her account first and then that filmy scenes that they show in old
#
movies, that's what their life was like, like she would, by the time my dadaji would
#
come back from tour and he's not in a salary job that every month money is coming into
#
So, by the time he would come back from tour, that's when he would bring the money.
#
But by the time the stocks in the house were at zero, ghee khatam hai, tel khatam hai,
#
chawal khatam hai, dhaan khatam hai, sab kuch.
#
And basically they are living in debt of all the local sahukars and all.
#
And so my grandmother was dealing with all of that.
#
Then my grandfather would come and settle all the debts and then suddenly they would
#
live a very happy life until the next tour began.
#
Obviously, a very strong woman who was practically single parenting her children while the husband
#
Again, like I said, talked about my nani giving birth to child after child, despite losing
#
children, immense amount of pain, trauma, grief, I can't even imagine what all she
#
My parnani who lost her husband so young and then goes on to become a school principal
#
and raise her children by herself, doesn't remarry and is a strong independent woman
#
My pardadi also was widowed early and she also was like, she raised my dada and his
#
sister herself for the most part.
#
These are all obviously I come from a stock of strengths, of strong women.
#
My mother's life, when I think about it, I think I was a very thankless child when
#
I was growing up, as most children are, which is, I guess, understandable, forgivable up
#
But I was very thankless in hindsight and I didn't appreciate the life she led.
#
She would literally get up at 5 a.m., bachon ka khana, husband ka khana, dabba office
#
ka, apna dabba office ka, then my dad is waking up later and having his morning tea
#
and then bachon ko soobe, malhab, I would sleep while brushing my teeth, then I would
#
sleep in the loo, then I would sleep in the bathroom.
#
So she had to come and wake me up 20 times in the morning within the span of one hour.
#
So again, in hindsight, now I know what a thankless and useless liability of a child
#
But at the time, it feels like natural ke haan ye, toh mummy ka kaam hai, mummy kar rahi
#
But now when you think about it, she's also a working woman.
#
She's also doing her job, going to office, dealing with colleagues and everything.
#
And then shaam ko ghar aari hain, again, raat ko dinner vegar bana rahi hain lagi hain.
#
And raat ko baara baje tak she's on her feet in the kitchen, helping.
#
We had a bit of domestic help, but it wasn't, I mean, there were still these notions of
#
which, in my parents' house, it's still true ke mummy ke haan ka khana hi banega.
#
Toh haan theek hai, there'll be help, but ultimately khana toh mummy ke haan ka banega.
#
Roti hain toh garam garam honi chahiye, utarti utarti roti, those concepts are still there.
#
So she was living in that reality, and I mean, I don't think she was even feeling oppressed
#
Again, in that age, these were all accepted as facts of life, ki this is how life is.
#
And so her generation particularly, I felt, was very sandwiched because up until then,
#
women were mostly housewives.
#
I mean, not to take credit away from stay at home mothers who have an incredibly challenging
#
life of their own, but this was one generation where women said, no, I also want to work.
#
And society said, okay, go and work, but not at the cost of everything else you were already
#
So in my generation, I am my work, or my womaning or whatever I choose to do in my life is the
#
And then my house is still a lot of it is still on me, but I'm not physically standing
#
in the kitchen cooking rotis every day.
#
So in our generation, we have been offloaded some of that burden, at least the physical
#
part, if the mental load is still large, but the physical part of that labor is off our
#
generation, at least in our social economic band.
#
So hamare liye that burden has been reduced.
#
And one generation above their burden of going to office was not there.
#
But this generation in the middle, my mom's generation, and my mother-in-law's generation,
#
and all of our moms, they had to do this double whammy, ke bahar jao kaam karne, but you have
#
to earn that right, but by also not letting anything slip at home.
#
So you're doing the job of the last generation also in the next generation also and together
#
as one person, which is to me inhuman.
#
Like when I think about it now, I feel like my mom's life, I can never live that life.
#
And we were thankless at that time about it.
#
But now when I think about it, yes, I do come from strong women and, and it's a pity that
#
we did not celebrate this sooner and did not recognize them and not just celebrate them,
#
but you know, make their life a little easier than it was, it was much harder than it needed
#
So my next question again, sort of goes back to something you said, and in fact goes back
#
to something I used to observe about my father, and it kind of made me amused and simultaneously
#
ashamed at myself for being amused, which is that, you know, and he was of course, lived
#
a privileged life in the sense, IAS officer, all of that.
#
In his old age, I remember whenever he'd visit me in Bombay, I'd take him to the Marriott
#
for breakfast because he loved the buffet spread there, and he would eat everything.
#
He would try every single thing, right?
#
If anybody's offering anything for free, he wants it.
#
And I found it amusing.
#
And obviously, at the same time, the rational explanation for it is that our parents grew
#
up in times of relative scarcity, you know, kuch bhi asaan nahi tha, you know, there wasn't
#
an abundance of anything.
#
So you valued whatever you got, and you had this culture of never wasting anything.
#
You know, that old cliche of people are starving in China, so finish what you got, right?
#
There's a lyric from a John Lennon song also.
#
Was it Working Class Hero?
#
So it came from that sort of scarcity mindset, whereas we can take all of that stuff for
#
And if I'm not finishing my food, I can, you know, I can get all rational and say, are
#
sunk cost fallacy in this and that, we can get into that stuff, right?
#
And you point out, and this is something that many guests of mine have spoken about with
#
regard to their parents and their grandparents, that hunger for education, ki education kanna
#
hai, you know, both your parents were so educated, you know, they kind of instilled that in you
#
as well, that it meant a big deal, ki class mein topper banna hai, 90 nahi chalega, 95
#
chahiye, mera aadha maa kahan gaya, right?
#
And you start caring about this stuff.
#
And I'm again tying it in with another observation I made recently, where I was at a conference
#
organized by some investors who are investing in very unconventional ways in people around
#
And they brought together a whole bunch of entrepreneurs, including people who were like
#
And my observation there was that number ones, these young people are mind blowing, they're
#
But number two, and this is something I strongly believe, is that real change in India, in
#
any field, you know, will come from the small towns, it will come from hungry young people
#
in small towns, because they want it more, they have a better work ethic, and they have
#
bigger dreams, they're not constrained as much by conventional thinking.
#
And I'm just tying all of this together, and wondering if it is therefore, that background
#
at last really plays a big part, that if you grow up with a certain kind of scarcity, you
#
don't take it for granted.
#
We don't have a scarcity of information out there, there's an abundance of it.
#
But we take it for granted by spending all our time on Twitter and you know, doing other
#
matar gasthi or whatever it is, right?
#
We are not taking advantage of that.
#
If you gave the internet to our parents, I think matlab chaar din mein toh daddy poora
#
internet pad lete, you know, because that hunger was there which came from scarcity.
#
So what are your sort of thoughts on this, in the sense that you came from a background
#
where you didn't take this stuff for granted, right?
#
You had to work for it.
#
You know, even when you had one bad year in school, you just, you know, got down to it,
#
topped West Zone or whatever you topped the next year, you kind of got it done.
#
So in your observation through your own life, and perhaps even through doing this newsletter,
#
you've met so many people of varied backgrounds and all of that, how much would you say this
#
matters that, you know, your background matters, your class matters, all of this really shapes
#
who you are and what you are, like if you were born in a really rich family and you
#
were chilling and doing holidays in Switzerland, I suspect you would have been a very different
#
So, so what are sort of your thoughts on this?
#
Because you meet and talk to many, many more people than I do, you know, from much more
#
I mean, I don't know exactly how to answer that.
#
But my thoughts on generally background is that, yeah, we are all a product of our background,
#
our experiences to a very large extent.
#
Yes, there is free will and choice in there.
#
But there's also a lot of, like I said, when I was talking about our IIM batch, 249
#
You could see that there is a way of thinking that all of these children have, all of these
#
students have as compared to the others.
#
So even and you could say that we were all from different towns and different backgrounds
#
and economically, socially, everywhere.
#
But still, there was a way that we were all conditioned in thinking by virtue of just
#
those four years of our education.
#
So obviously, when you talk about your entire life and all the generations that came before
#
you, it has an undeniable effect on who you turn out to be as a person.
#
You know, I mean, one of the things that one of the reasons I was thinking that this might
#
be the most intellectually low IQ episode of Seen and the Unseen is because I am a Bollywood
#
Like I'm coming with that level of intellectual analysis.
#
So for I'm sure you've had guests who would be able to quote research papers on this from
#
international research, white papers and intelligent things like that.
#
And like, when you were talking was coming coffee with current, because I was thinking
#
of all of these, you know, star kids and Joe, the entire nepotism debate and the star kids
#
that come on that show and Karan Johar himself, you see a very, I mean, I love the show, I
#
watch it as soon as an episode drops, but it's entertaining to me because also sometimes
#
you see how out of touch with reality people can get when they are born into privilege.
#
And, you know, there's also sometimes a lack of extreme lack of self-awareness.
#
Like if you read Karan Johar's book, which again be the lowest IQ show note ever, but
#
if you read his book now, you'll see like there's so much contradiction of himself
#
in within one paragraph, there is like self-awareness, so when you're born in that level of privilege
#
and cushion, it obviously doesn't push you to question yourself or your place in society
#
or where you're headed beyond a point.
#
And now as a parent, actually, that's a real concern that my husband and I have about
#
our child, because we feel like this child is born in full privilege, right?
#
Like we had what you could still call a middle-class upbringing.
#
Now we are not middle-class, now we are maybe top 1% or even 0.1% of society with IM education
#
and civil services and all that privilege background.
#
This child, our child is born into privilege.
#
How do we give him a taste of reality?
#
Obviously, you want comforts for your child, but at the same time, you don't want him
#
to be so cushioned that he grows up in living in a fairyland that has no connection to reality.
#
We want him to grow up to be a contributive citizen of society.
#
So I'm going to, as I tend to do, double-click on that as well.
#
But before I do, I just want to point out that you have written one of the great posts
#
about imposter syndrome on womaning in India.
#
And now you are coming here and saying, I'm so this, I'm so that, lowering the IQ and
#
This is absolutely, I think, ridiculous.
#
In fact, this is one of those episodes I'm excited for people to listen to because they'll
#
discover your wonderful newsletter through it.
#
And the other thing regarding what you said about Mr. Johar's book, which will of course
#
be in the show notes, is that having done my course, you will also recall how I tell
#
all the participants that there should be no hierarchy of books in your head.
#
That this is high literature and this is nonsense and all of that.
#
I really feel strongly about that.
#
I think anything that you enjoy reading, you should read.
#
You should not be hard on yourself that these are not intellectual people and all of that.
#
But apart from that, I'm fascinated by what you just said about like number one, when
#
you through your newsletter, you've also like one of the things we've discussed about it
#
in the past and one of the things I like about it is how you infused just the right amount
#
So there are your own stories, there is your own life, makes it so much more relatable.
#
And there is also that quality of self-reflection, which I really like.
#
And it's interesting that you're bringing this self-reflection to your parenting by
#
consciously asking, as you just did, that how can we make sure that our kid, even though
#
he's born to privilege, doesn't pick up the bad attitude that people born to privilege
#
So how have you thought about this in concrete terms?
#
Like, how is your parenting going to be shaped by this?
#
So there is a lot of insulation that privileged kids grow up in, right?
#
Like, so we live in a gated colony and there's a slum right behind that colony, but it's
#
And the residents of the colony, we like to pretend that it doesn't exist.
#
There's a WhatsApp group of the colony RWA and often the topics being discussed, there
#
are, my cleaning lady is asking for 500 rupees more, how dare they?
#
And there's so much rage against someone who's coming from a much more underprivileged background
#
And for her, 500 rupees means the world.
#
For you, it's not even a coffee.
#
So I mean, it's very disturbing to see that level of disconnection with reality and empathy.
#
So for me, it's very important that my child has that empathy and is aware of what privilege
#
is and is very, very conscious of his own.
#
I mean, already he's just three and I already have explained the word lucky to him, that
#
you're lucky because see, I showed him the other day a lady on a wheelchair and I told
#
him that see that lady, she's on a chair with wheels.
#
I said, because she can't walk.
#
See how lucky we are because we can.
#
So you know, small things like that.
#
But I feel even at this early age, I'm talking to him about how lucky he is because he needs
#
to be very conscious, especially as a male child born to such privilege, that he needs
#
to be conscious at every step.
#
One thing I really detest is when people give all of the credit for their achievements to
#
I'm here because of my own hard work.
#
I mean, for a privileged person to say that, it's very tone deaf and black self-awareness
#
because like, for example, even talking about myself, I am here not today on this great
#
show of yours, not because of my hard work only, but also because of all of these generations
#
that came before me and my parents valued my education and the kind of upbringing I
#
had, the kind of experiences I was privileged to have, right?
#
So if you lose that perspective of the debt that you owe to so many people, many of them
#
you've never even seen, many of them didn't even live in the same time as you did.
#
But this is all the history behind where you are today.
#
And that's important for him to realize.
#
And the other is also more exposure to the real world.
#
Like last week was his birthday and we celebrated in a shelter for rescue animals.
#
So he loved feeding the goat and feeding the donkey and feeding the duck.
#
And obviously, little kids love animals and there's a beautiful shelter called Banyard
#
But I chose to take him there instead of throwing him a lavish poolside party like many of his
#
peers are already getting because I thought this keeps him more grounded and in touch
#
At least right now, he doesn't have any notions of what a birthday party should look like.
#
But these are experiences that I want him to have and obviously, he's still a toddler.
#
So you still protect him from many of the harsher realities of life.
#
But as he grows up, more and more of these realities need to be introduced to him in
#
a way that makes him a more empathetic person.
#
So that's my take on parenting.
#
I also want to circle back to what you said about imposter syndrome.
#
Just to increase the IQ of the show notes that I leave behind, there is a test by Professor
#
Pauline Chance, who was the person who coined the term imposter syndrome.
#
Obviously, a woman did it.
#
And obviously, she did it because she saw other women.
#
That's how she even arrived at the realization that is there a problem with the way we are
#
So she asked that question, thankfully, and she came up with a test to diagnose imposter
#
And we can link to that test, and I would urge all your listeners, especially women,
#
It's a test on which you score from 0 to 100.
#
And the higher your score, the higher is your imposter syndrome.
#
And you'll have questions like, do you often think that you don't deserve to be where
#
Like, I am literally right now very in all honesty been thinking since you invited me
#
that I don't deserve to be on the show, why is he inviting me?
#
What will I say that will add any value?
#
This is, I know that maybe at some intellectual level, I know that it's not true, but the
#
I'm programmed to think that it is the way that it is.
#
And I was while writing this piece on imposter syndrome that you talked about, one of the
#
women who had interviewed for the piece, I told her, hey, do me a favor, just take this
#
test because I took the test.
#
And I said, tell me what is your score?
#
Because I'm covering your story.
#
I want to know how much of imposter syndrome do you actually have?
#
And she said, yeah, I have like, the test says I have like a significant amount of imposter
#
My score is 35 out of 100.
#
So you had much more of it.
#
My score is 88 out of 100 on imposter syndrome.
#
So that's how that's how badly I have held myself back.
#
So I am sorry for all of the self-deprecatory things I've said so far.
#
And I'm going to continue saying, but it's conditioning.
#
It's a lot of unlearning that I consciously keep trying to do, but it still comes out
#
I had a guest at home and I forget who it is, maybe Shruti Jagirdar, because she's the
#
last person I recorded with at home or maybe before that, but it was a woman.
#
And that woman before the episode pointed out something to me, which was very true.
#
She said that a lot of your great episodes are with women.
#
And they always start by saying, patani mujhe kyu bolaya hai.
#
You know, so the imposter syndrome is really like a woman problem.
#
And I'm going to now double click on the imposter syndrome.
#
But before doing that, I'm very impressed by the awareness which you bring to your parenting.
#
And I almost feel like I have a stake in this because I know both you and your husband very
#
He's been my good friend for much longer.
#
But one of the great books of social science of the last century was this book called The
#
Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris.
#
And it was very controversial because it showed with great data and all of that, that the
#
impression that people have that kids are shaped by their parents a lot is actually
#
That the influence that parents have on what their kid turns out to be is minuscule and
#
the far greater influences is of their peers.
#
You know, so when you said that for, you know, your son's friends already having pool parties
#
thrown for them and all of that, you know, that kind of came to mind.
#
But I hope in your case, you guys are influential enough to protect him from that.
#
And there's a contradictory thought here and they're both true in the different domains
#
and one is a role of luck.
#
Like one of the things my time as a professional poker player taught me is that we underestimate
#
the role of luck in our lives.
#
Like poker is of course a game of skill, but the quantum of luck is very high.
#
So you need a huge sample size of events for your skill to express itself.
#
And similarly in life, and I've written about this quite often, we underestimate the role
#
of luck to the extent that exactly what you said happens that good things happen to people,
#
they give credit for it to themselves and they allow themselves to get arrogant and
#
bad things happen to people and they allow it to affect their self-esteem and they get
#
themselves down and they suffer from imposter syndrome and so on and so forth.
#
And we should sort of watch out for that and sort of try to be equanimous.
#
I think this understanding of luck and probability almost takes you into a Buddhist direction
#
where you're kind of, you know, you leave your emotions out of it and you're equanimous,
#
which is I guess a sort of a good way to be.
#
And I would imagine that these different directions you go in when you ignore luck, there's a
#
role of gender to it also.
#
It's a men who are more likely to look at the good that happens to them and get arrogant
#
and it's a women who are more likely to have that confidence gap.
#
You know, there was this great article in the Atlantic called the confidence gap, which
#
also are linked to which, you know, reference to a number of these studies showing that,
#
you know, women will not apply for jobs that they absolutely deserve.
#
You know, you in your piece and on the imposter syndrome, you quoted this lady called Archana.
#
So I'll just quote that bit and these are her words because I think they're very sort
#
of they apply to a lot of people where, you know, a global role was advertised in her
#
company and she said, quote, even though the whole world was telling me to apply for it,
#
I wasn't sure I was ready.
#
I'm getting it because I'm a woman logic.
#
I didn't want people to question why was I given this role.
#
So I ended up not applying for it at all when the position was finally filled.
#
I was shocked to discover that a man who had far less relevant experience in me had been
#
The HR leader later told me in confidence that out of the pool of candidates who were
#
considering for the position, I was the only one who everybody unanimously thought could
#
And you've got sort of other examples of this as well, including people like Maya Angelou
#
once saying, quote, I have written 11 books, but each time I think, oh, they're going to
#
I've run a game on everybody and they're going to find me out.
#
And Einstein says a similar thing.
#
And this is also known in psychology as a Dunning-Kruger effect, right?
#
That I mean, there are two sides to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
#
One side is, you know, people tend to think they are better at something than they actually
#
Like, for example, Lake Wobegon is a famous example of that Lake Wobegon is a fictional
#
town created by the novelist Garrison Keeler, where everybody thinks they're better than
#
average, which can obviously not be the case, right?
#
So yeah, it's a very man thing, right?
#
And so there's a term for it called the Lake Wobegon effect, where everybody thinks they
#
are better than average.
#
So every driver will tell you he's a better driver than average, though obviously it's
#
And in this case, I'm using the male pronoun deliberately, you know, but the converse of
#
that is that people who are experts will often downplay their expertise because it is so
#
easy to them that they will think what is a big deal, koi bhi karlega, which in a sense
#
I think you're also doing because what you've done with this newsletter writing 70 something
#
posts week after week, week after week, it's a stunning act of discipline and you know,
#
it's so consistent and it's so consistently good and you're completely underplaying that
#
like it's easy, which anyone can tell you it's not.
#
So you know, you said your score was 85, 88, which means very high in poster syndrome.
#
Almost reached my 95 wala target.
#
So thank God 95 nahi tha.
#
So how do you fight this in yourself?
#
Because if you're saying it was 88, it was 88 after you knew that there is such a thing,
#
you knew there was a trap, but you still fell into it.
#
So I was literally writing a piece on it.
#
I was researching it for my piece.
#
I was interviewing women and beating them ke tumne apne baare mein itna chota kyu socha.
#
Why did you belittle your own accomplishments, your achievements, your capacity so much?
#
Why do you think so little of yourself?
#
Mai ye baate kar rahi thi phone pe baaki aurta se.
#
And then I took the test myself in all consciousness ki ye test is designed to highlight this.
#
But then I tried to be as honest as I could and I thought back to actual decisions I've
#
taken in my life and how I thought about myself, my abilities, potentials when I took those
#
decisions, how I felt when I was given an honor, how I felt when I met with failure.
#
And I wrote it in all honesty and I was, I thought haan achha high score aayega, but
#
this was like beyond my wildest imagination that it's really bad.
#
Has it changed you in the sense that do you now tell yourself to watch out for it?
#
Do you stop holding yourself back from doing whatever you want to do?
#
Two things have changed.
#
One, which is something I've written in the piece is about compliments.
#
When people tell me that you're like, like you've been showering me with these kind
#
compliments about the work I've done.
#
My earlier pre-writing movement, my instinct was to deny and argue back and no, no, Amit,
#
Anyone can write it and see so many people write newsletters and sub stack ke numbers
#
dekho kitne writers hai ye wo.
#
I would have argued back.
#
Now I hold that argument, it's still in my mind, but I force myself to say thank you.
#
I know it sounds very normal and what's the big deal in it, but I suppose women and even
#
men who suffer from severe crippling imposter syndrome will realize that that's a big step
#
to just graciously accept a compliment.
#
That's one change that I have forced myself, I've consciously made and succeeded in making
#
And the second, second was about how after you said, do you, are you able to go for things
#
that has happened a lot more after motherhood, because I feel like motherhood kind of is
#
a transformative experience.
#
That's an understatement for sure.
#
But also for me, at least it gave me the perspective of how little things matter that we think
#
so much about and when you become responsible for another human life is when you feel that
#
everything else that I worry about was so inconsequential.
#
After becoming a mother, when people would talk to me about mera boss, mera deadline,
#
mera office, I'd be like yeh kya bekar theez ho pe log tension le rahe hain.
#
My own things that would hold me back, which would seem like big things in the past.
#
Now I've become a lot more pragmatic about it and you know, universe is very large, life
#
is very long, we are a speck in the universe, it doesn't really matter whether I come on
#
a podcast or what be in the larger scheme of things.
#
So let me accept if a friend is inviting me and I know I might feel this primal urge that
#
I don't deserve to be here, but forget it, it's okay.
#
Plenty of undeserving people get what they don't deserve, maybe I do deserve it, maybe
#
I don't, either way it doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things.
#
So that kind of attitude of doesn't really matter in the larger scheme of things and
#
what really matters is I am responsible for a life, for an individual and that is going
#
to be probably my biggest contribution.
#
That kind of also gives you a lot more grounding and you tend to be more, for me at least it
#
has made me more adventurous in the decisions I take.
#
In your experience, how important are circles of female solidarity and female friendship
#
Because my assumption is that if people are chronically under confident, then it really
#
helps if somebody tells you, you know, you're so good, you are the expert in this, you deserve
#
this, you go for it and men don't tell women that, right?
#
Men take women in their lives for granted, even for all the care work that women do.
#
For example, men won't express it, you know, the food is great or, you know, thank you
#
for this or whatever, they kind of take it for granted.
#
So it therefore at one level and this is something, you know, I didn't recorded an episode yesterday
#
with Alice Evans and she was also speaking about this through countries that these networks
#
then become really important networks of female solidarity and friendship.
#
And one way in which it strikes me that it certainly would is just in terms of giving
#
each other courage and helping you beat this confidence gap.
#
Yeah, so that has been a learning over decades for me, because, like I said, I was a full
#
on misogynist when I was young, as I mean, in school I was like a proper tomboy.
#
I've written about this also, there are some things, I'm like Anjali Kadhai, I'm not like
#
those stupid girls with whom you hang out.
#
So that was my ethos also.
#
I was like a very common undercurrent of the average young psyche in the 90s, you know,
#
girls are stupid, they talk about fashion and they are always gossiping and I'm above
#
And so I was, I genuinely had more male friends in school, because I used to look down upon
#
women and friendships with women and I used to think that women are a lot, there's a lot
#
of politics, there's backstabbing, there's all this stuff happening, which is too much
#
Men are simpler and boys have nothing going on in their brains beyond what they are doing
#
Easier to deal with them and I used to genuinely feel that male friendships are better and
#
stronger because I would see them lasting over years, right?
#
Like our fathers would still be friends with their childhood male friends, but our mothers,
#
you would never hear of ke meri school mein wo friend thi, meri college mein wo friend
#
Now later in life, I realized that that was also a privilege that men had, right, to stay
#
in touch with their peers and their friends and women were often married off into separate
#
families, surname change, often name also change in the absence of a social network.
#
How will they even stay in touch?
#
And they are so busy with everyday life, like I've told you my mom's daily routine, where
#
is the space in that for friendships?
#
So all of those were things that I didn't see at that time, and I had these notions
#
about male friendships versus female friendships.
#
But over the years, I have realized that it's actually the other way around.
#
Female friendships, when with the right people who are, you know, who have that realization
#
of how the world is designed to hold us back and we are on our own, we have to build each
#
So when you have that kind of a positive female friendship, it can be the best thing that
#
you do in your life, just talking to that friend.
#
And like I told you, I used to beat up other women, ke tum kyu apne baare mein itna chota
#
sochro, and I would not say that to myself ever, because I am thinking, myself thinking
#
So then my friend will come and beat me on that, ke tum kyu apne baare mein itna chota
#
So I mean, the standard trope is talk to yourself the way you would talk to your best friend.
#
But we are not able to do that because we are, as you quoted from the post, we are conditioned
#
So that's why I think in that context, female friendships, especially with women who have
#
that perspective of building each other up, that sort of a female friendship can just
#
be a huge, huge boost and support in your life.
#
And you also have these shared experiences.
#
So that was the whole reason I started writing Womaning when I realized that many things
#
I was experiencing were not unique to me.
#
Because up until then, I thought gye mere saath hi ho raha hai, jo ho raha hai.
#
And because I have this great, unique, trajectory in life that all of the things that I have
#
done, which half of them we covered, and my career toh bhi start bhi nahi ho raha hai,
#
all of that, which I have done, that is the reason why I am having these experiences at
#
work, with the family and everything.
#
But then when you start talking to other women, you realize that a lot of these are shared
#
experiences and a lot of them are not because I am who I am, but because I am a woman.
#
And when you see that undercurrent and that thread, that's the whole reason I started
#
Because I was like, this thread needs to be made more obvious to men and women both.
#
Because women need to realize that my challenges are not unique to me and they are not something
#
that's happening to me because of something I did.
#
This is a gender-wide thing.
#
And men need to realize, be more conscious of them for obvious reasons too.
#
Yeah, and one point you kind of made here is worth underscoring, which is about, you
#
know, men staying in touch, women not staying in touch, but that's because women get so
#
fundamentally uprooted in our country so often during marriage.
#
Like one of the finest books I've read in the last decade is called India Moving by
#
And it's about the history of internal migration in India.
#
And the big TIL there is that most internal migration happens in India because a woman
#
gets married and she's leaving her home and she's going somewhere else.
#
And it is a complete uprooting.
#
Sometimes of course it's a different city, different state, but even if it is not, it's
#
a different milieu, it's a different house, it's different expectations.
#
It's almost like you've gone from, you know, one oppressive environment to another no matter
#
And your surname changes and in many cases your name changes.
#
So you're just a whole different person.
#
The person who existed one week back before your marriage doesn't exist anymore.
#
Fattak, your entire existence is wiped off.
#
So I mean, how do you expect your friendships to work?
#
Your identity is not working.
#
Let's go back to your childhood and we'll do your full biography.
#
I thought I was actually talking too much and I don't want to break records on biography.
#
No one can talk too much for the same reason that no one is boring.
#
I mean, all lives are so fascinating earlier, you know, while talking about your childhood,
#
you mentioned, and just now again, you mentioned that you weren't aware of these undercurrents
#
of misogyny for a long time, that your mother would do all of this and you would say, ha
#
ye to ma hai, sku to kar nahi hai, she's got to wake me up five times.
#
You know, even though she's got so much going on.
#
And equally in college, you said that again, you weren't aware of this.
#
Tell me about that process of awareness, like how did you start becoming aware?
#
One, how did you start becoming aware?
#
And two, how did you then start putting a frame to it?
#
You know, this is the way the world is and, you know, figuring out how to think about
#
it in terms of, you know, whether it's a certain kind of feminist thinker or writer who began
#
to influence you first, how did that evolution sort of happen in your own life?
#
This is a black box for me too.
#
I've thought about this a lot often, when was that time?
#
Is there any one moment in which I suddenly had a coin dropping moment, oh, this is how
#
And now I see everything from that lens, like people close to me accuse me, you know, with
#
a person with a hammer to whom everything is a nail now, that's how you are with gender.
#
And maybe that's, I am guilty of that to some extent, but it is so overarching and
#
just only present this lens.
#
But I don't know a particular moment, I think the explanation I've come to is that it was,
#
I was just a part of a larger cultural shift that happened at some point in the 2000s and
#
early 2010s, which is that we started recognizing some of these things that we had taken, accepted
#
at face value, to be not the way the world necessarily should be and there's something
#
So, I think Mrinalji spoke about this during her interview with you and she said that aesa
#
lagta tha ke kuch galat ho raha hai, par pata nahi tha kya hai.
#
So I had that feeling my entire childhood, even though, like I said, I was a misogynist
#
myself and I was guilty of all of these tropes, believing them, following them, propagating
#
them, but I also had this nagging feeling, especially because I grew up with a brother.
#
So I would see very stark differences in the way everybody and the world treated him, not
#
just my family, but the institutions around us, the society, public spaces, friends, everything.
#
And this difference became much more stark as we grew older because as kids you're still,
#
I mean, at least credit to my parents, they never did any discrimination ki ladki hai,
#
toh isko do roti kam di jayenge, that didn't happen in my house at all.
#
It was the other way around, I think I was quite pampered by my dad.
#
But there was a difference, ke haan, tum iti zor se mat haso, aese ladkiya nahi hasti hain.
#
Aur you know, I remember one memory of hum kahin, bus mein kahin jayal the hai and I stood
#
up and immediately I was told ke bat jao, peeche wale sab dekhenge, ladkiya aise khadi nahi
#
And it was for me, it was such a weird thing, ke ladkiya ka kya isme khade honne, I just
#
want to stretch, I'm standing, but then suddenly it is, there is a new lens that you're introduced
#
to that this is the way the world is going to see you and so you better not cross the
#
So those faint lines started becoming more clear as I grew older.
#
When we went to college suddenly, like I said, I always had more male friends than female
#
friends all through school, but suddenly there was a different lens with which my male friendships
#
were seen when I, once I entered college, because there were a lot of romantic relationships
#
happening in batch mates and all.
#
So my mom always used to call me koi hai kya, kaun hai kya hai and if I mention a boy's
#
name in passing, then suddenly she wants to double click on that as you say, let's double
#
So I mean, those things never happened with my brother.
#
So going out with friends, something simple for him, very, a thing that he didn't have
#
to think about twice, I had to, I had to think about the way I would formulate that application
#
to my parents, ke isto raha se bolenge, saath mein ye jaari hai, wo ja raha hai, to ite
#
baje wapis aayenge, ye mode of transport hai.
#
So even beyond that, like sometimes I wouldn't even bother because I would in my mind be
#
like, ye toh is not outside the realm of possibility for me, like kurukshetra se Shimla ki trip
#
ban rahi hai, friends ki, bhul jao.
#
I'm sorry, I'm out even before I ask anybody else.
#
I know this is not within my realm of possibilities.
#
So there were things like this which, especially between me and my brother, because that was
#
one male figure that I had seen my whole life and us being treated the same our whole life
#
and then suddenly now us being treated differently.
#
So I think that niggling thing behind my mind of kuchh galat hai started becoming more and
#
more concrete with age, ke kuchh zyada hi galat hai.
#
And then over time, I think culturally also, like I said, our society, the f-word feminism
#
was introduced, movies mein thoda dikhne laga, ke haan, wo ladkiyaan jo peeche show piece
#
hoti thi aur ek wo bachao, bachao, bachao, victim ho gyi aur hero ake se bacha lega,
#
that's ek gaane mein dance kar degi, so that's the extent of female representation we saw
#
in pop culture that began to be questioned and there were movies that shifted the narrative.
#
So slowly, I think culturally also, the environment was conducive and that's how it was a very,
#
So I cannot think of any one trigger that led to it.
#
And what was your conception of yourself through this period in the sense ki pehle to apne
#
engineering kar liya, after topping class, uske baad MBA kar liya, but are you kind of
#
going with the flow and because you're always excelling in academics, you're just taking
#
the most obvious next step that everybody takes, kyunki 12 ke baad to engineering main
#
option hoti hai, uske baad MBA is such a great option, you got into IIM, Bangalore and so
#
But were you sort of going with that flow or was there a plan that, or did you think
#
about it and think about these are the things I'm interested in, these are the things I
#
want to do, this is the kind of life I want to live.
#
So tell me about that sort of evolution in your thinking and your understanding of yourself.
#
Yeah, so at least in the early stages, there was zero thought.
#
The only thought which I've mentioned before is the ethic of my parents have worked very
#
hard to give me an education.
#
And so I have one job in life, everything else is provided for me, I have one job which
#
So I'm going to do it well, because this is the least I can do to justify my parents'
#
efforts and sacrifices.
#
So that kind of sailed me through school.
#
And like you said, uske baad doctor-engineer do options hoti hai, biome mujhe pasand nahi
#
aati thi to, ho gaya, physics, chemistry, maths, chalo engineer.
#
Uske baad bhi it was again MBA was a very obvious and aspirational route for everyone.
#
I did get a job, but I also got MBA.
#
So nahi hota toh job kar lete, ho gaya toh kar liya, again it was a very going with
#
the flow decision, which is just popular wisdom, parents' wisdom, sab log yeh kar rahe hain,
#
achchi cheez hai, kar ho.
#
Even the choice of my branch, electronics and communication, I had no particular love
#
for that direction, nor do I even today, but sadly.
#
But that was just a very natural decision, ke best hoti hai, electronics aur computer
#
science do best hai, unme se ek le lo.
#
Toh jo mil jayega, acche college mein le liya, it was not a very conscious decision on my
#
I think the step where I started thod asa taking conscious decisions was around the
#
end of MBA, when the kind of job I went for.
#
But until that point, it was following the flow.
#
And that said, to this day, I tell people, because when you look back at my CV, it looks
#
very wah kya, what decisive steps have been taken at various junctures.
#
But when people ask me for guidance, I'm like, they go for me, even today, I don't have
#
a plan for this is what I want to do with my life.
#
But for me, what has always worked is that the next step has been somehow clear to me,
#
that either it has been, this is what I don't want to do.
#
So ye mujhe nahi karna hai, toh therefore the other alternative is jo mujhe karna hai.
#
Or it is that this is one thing that I really want, like womaning was something that was
#
not a push from anywhere, it was a pull from inside me, it was literally something that
#
was bursting to come out.
#
So that was a decision made that way.
#
But it was only the first step that was clear to me.
#
Even that, until your course, as we'll discuss later, when you shifted it in my mind from
#
a book to a newsletter, until that time even that wasn't clear.
#
So always it's been the first step, or rather the next step that has been clear to me.
#
Beyond that, I can't see the road where it is going.
#
But that much clarity and just the courage to take that step, which often that itself
#
is something denied to women and to a person who comes from a certain comfort ki aap to
#
I am, sab ho gaya, aap kaun chhod ke jaate, itti high paying job into government.
#
So things like that, there are obstacles even in that taking one step.
#
So those I've managed to overcome and those have been decisive steps.
#
Yeah, during the writing course, I like quoting the novelist Real Doctor Who, who when speaking
#
of writing a book says it's okay to drive by the headlights, you know, you can make
#
the whole journey that way.
#
And I think that's sort of my philosophy to life as well, or at least my express philosophy,
#
because I don't actually live it myself and I don't really lead by example.
#
But the philosophy being have a bias for action, you know, don't try to plan everything out
#
in your head ki pehle hiya hoga, fir wo hoga, fir wo hoga.
#
Just have a bias for action.
#
Just go out there, do something, you know, just just keep at it.
#
And I think that's what you've sort of done so well.
#
So when you sent me a note about the kind of things you could talk about, I noticed
#
these two really interesting bullet points, which are life lessons from engineering in
#
the Haryana hinterlands and life lessons from IEM Bangalore.
#
So we've kind of spoken about both of these places in general.
#
But I'm intrigued by the term you use life lessons, like, how would you kind of sum it
#
up in terms of what were your life lessons from these two places and perhaps your lessons
#
Yeah, so I think both of these places shaped me, I mean, rather than taking away a lesson
#
outside of me, it was things that change inside me.
#
So like I said, academically, coming from a very strong background, I was very confident
#
But I think my personality as a whole had not developed.
#
And to some extent, it is also because 9 to 12, cable TV is off and playing is off.
#
So that makes your personality a bit unidimensional, of course.
#
So that I think I really came into my own and I blossomed in Kurukshetra, despite all
#
the forces that impeded a woman from doing that on that campus.
#
What I did, I kind of developed a lot more confidence in my abilities and organizational
#
abilities, managerial abilities, leadership abilities, things that I could pull together,
#
juniors of college inspire them and motivate them to achieve a goal, organize a festival
#
or whatever it was, publish a magazine.
#
So I think for me, Kurukshetra, the biggest thing I learned from engineering was not engineering,
#
So for me, it was a personality development course plus plus.
#
That was my engineering.
#
So that was not a lesson, but the way it changed me.
#
And then I think in IIM, there was a lot of humility that came with it, because like I
#
said, pattar fekko topper pettal ko lagayega, so that is the environment you are in.
#
And I remember in Ahmedabad, we used to actually live behind IIM Ahmedabad campus and waha
#
pe we were like young students aur aise afwa hoti thi ki pata hai, IIM ke bache raat ko
#
2 ganta soote hain, pata hai wo kitna padhai karte hain.
#
And then suddenly I am on that side and I am like merko toh neendh aati hai, mein kya
#
And then you genuinely see these people who are way above average, like they are another
#
The amount of discipline they have, the kind of academic drive in them.
#
And then you realize that, oh, I've always thought of myself as an academically accomplished
#
person, but I actually don't share this drive.
#
So there were things that to be inspired from, there were also a lot of lessons of what not
#
So there's a lot of, and I'm sure my IIM peers who might be listening will agree with
#
There's a lot of cutthroat competition, materialism, a lot of, life is a zero-sum game.
#
That's a huge thing that's kind of drilled into you by the IIM culture.
#
That there is a, humari campus me bolte they something called RG Giri.
#
So there's a RG is relative grading.
#
So that's a system where you and I write one exam, you score higher than me, that effectively
#
So it's not just that you got 10 on 10 and I got nine on 10.
#
It's also that my nine becomes 8.5 because you got 10.
#
So, I mean, suppose you, so the higher you score as my peer, the worse it is for me.
#
That feels like such a toxic system because you're not trying to become good.
#
You're trying to be better than others, which is just sounds so ugly to me.
#
And it also, it also initiates this crab mentality, right?
#
Like your welfare is worse for me.
#
So our incentives are aligned so that I want you to do worse in life.
#
I want to pull you down.
#
If I see you succeeding, I want to put hurdles in your path.
#
So it also kind of conditions you in a very toxic kind of mindset.
#
I was luckily never able to learn any of those tricks, but I did see a lot of that.
#
Like it was, it was sometimes tragic to the extent that people had imbibed these values
#
and were able to live them.
#
Like I don't know if this will be worth hearing, but there was a story that comes to mind,
#
which is there was this group of topper guys, okay.
#
There would be class projects and Jesse bolted a project group of five.
#
There would be these guys who will make eye contact across the classroom and who ugly
#
half a second may group bunched out a tonka hum toppers and we are going to stick together
#
because our group will do the best.
#
And then there for RG Giri, the others will do worse off and we'll be the best fine to
#
make groups with your friends.
#
But there was a lens to it.
#
It was not a lens of compatibility or friendship.
#
It was a lens of success who's going to help me succeed the most.
#
And then there were these students who would inevitably always be left behind at the end
#
and who would not be accepted in any of the groups.
#
And it was often very heartbreaking.
#
They would send emails later on the class group ke koi group mein jaga hai kya I'm still
#
looking and it was always the same kids.
#
I remember there was one classmate batch mate.
#
He was differently abled and he was always one of the last to be picked.
#
And then I remember one course we had was business law and in which it was all about
#
And I used to doze off the second that professor would start talking, but usme yahi hua.
#
Group bana, the professor said groups of X and immediately this I was sitting right
#
behind one of the topper kids junka eye contact mein group ban jata tha.
#
And that guy turns to his fellow topper guy and he says ke is group mein usko lete hain.
#
The student who was always left behind because wo barrister tha pehle.
#
Toh isme hume uske hone se advantage hoga.
#
And I just I just felt so ewe at that time I was like ke yaar this is one guy you systemically
#
Even I'm guilty of it to some extent because I'm making friends with my groups and my friends
#
and this guy is being left behind by all of us as a group.
#
Every time, year after year, subject after subject, class after class.
#
And this one time because he is useful to you, you immediately want to go get him first
#
because you know that you all are IITians and you don't have that legal background.
#
So for me it was very these were lessons of what not to do with life also.
#
I mean and I remember a few years later I met a batchmate who was a good friend on campus
#
and many of my batchmates have gone on to do extremely well for themselves and a lot
#
of well-deserved success.
#
Many are entrepreneurs of unicorn startups today and people have bungalows with indoor
#
heated pools I'm told to which I'm never invited but people have done really well for
#
I've consulted a therapist myself and one of the things my therapist has also told me
#
is that because I live in Gurgaon she said that lot of people who consult me in Gurgaon
#
are from these very high net worth backgrounds.
#
And many of them are deeply depressed today because they find no purpose in what they
#
are doing because they've spent so many years of their life chasing material wealth
#
So nothing against people who do want money.
#
I think it's a very you can do a lot of good for the world when you have a lot of money.
#
But also one of the things that I am taught me about what not to do is that chase.
#
I saw it very early and I figured out very early that's not the path for me.
#
So that way it kind of strongly molded the person I am.
#
Yeah the zero sum mentality is weird to me because the real world is a positive something
#
So you would imagine ki MBA sikhara hai toh wo mentality sikhayenge incentives alag
#
But if this sounds like incredibly toxic to me and on the point of money and happiness
#
and again if I misremember please forgive me but I think Arthur Brooks had once written
#
an essay on this where he pointed out that when people surveyed the happiness of the
#
USA he was talking about America when people surveyed the happiness of the USA and I think
#
it was of men in USA if I remember correctly but it certainly applies in my mind best there.
#
What they found was that you have this curve where you go gradually downwards in terms
#
of happiness until your mid 40s or late 40s and then you suddenly start becoming much
#
And his explanation for this is that that is around the time you realize that all your
#
life you felt you behaved as if your happiness is contingent on money.
#
And by that time mid 40s late 40s you have made all the money in the world and you haven't
#
been happy and then you realize this is not where happiness lies and it lies wherever
#
then it is for people to define it for themselves where happiness lies but at least they know
#
what not to do as you said.
#
And then they turn elsewhere and then true happiness kind of comes and I am of course
#
in my late 40s but I have never really made much money.
#
Heated indoor swimming pool, mere paas hota toh mein gharipon pe baad deta mein kya karunga
#
heated indoor swimming pool.
#
But yeah I mean so that's again the fact that there is no correlation between money and
#
happiness toh toh pata hi hai.
#
But it is kind of sad if these sort of mindsets are being propagated.
#
So after you finished your MBA, you know you eventually landed up in the civil services
#
but take me through that journey of your deciding ki kya karna hai aur waha pe kyu gaye like
#
did you decide while doing your MBA that you know you want to go for the civil services
#
or was the civil services always an attractive option you know like when I was growing up
#
it was always doctor medical toh hai hi but IES ka exam doh that is the biggest prestige
#
and obviously I grew up in the 70s and 80s where you know the state was all powerful
#
so even more so there, private sector toh zyada tha hi nahi.
#
And me being a rebel and my father already being in the IES, I was like ki mujhe nahi
#
karna, main toh writer banunga, main attic mein staff karunga and then I will make a lot
#
of money and have an indoor swimming pool when my books do well, none of that happened.
#
But so what was your sort of journey like in that regard?
#
Yeah, so UPSC karna hai was never a target in life, ke ye toh karna hai aur even that
#
early prestige that you spoke about had kind of I think dwindled a bit by the late 2000s
#
is when I finished my MBA.
#
And at that time the two done thing was Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, BCG, in mein jao, day zero
#
placement that was a thing in IMK, there was a placement season and day zero is when the
#
best firms with the best money and the international postings will come, then day ones mein thoda
#
sa desi firms will come, then day 2-3 pe aayo toh you are the leftovers.
#
That was the, it was a very strong hierarchy like that and there was a summer placement
#
at the end of one year, first semester actually, at the end of the first semester itself there
#
was a summer placement for the end of one year wala summer break mein jaa ke aap do
#
maina internship karte ho, toh wo internship mein where you got placed kind of seals your
#
fate in terms of where your life will head is at least that was a popular notion and
#
also that also seals how your peers see you.
#
So your peers are also all trained to see you as ye day zero person hai, ye day one
#
person hai, ye day two person hai and that's the caste system in which we will also make
#
our friendships now, like I said you know wo jo eye contact groups ban raha hai wo day
#
zero ke ladko ke beech me ban raha hai.
#
This was interesting because of my 9.9 cgp hai no, I got an interview call from pretty
#
much every company that was coming on day zero, so I must have given 20 interviews in
#
one day, it is a crazy process like there are these people with headsets walking all
#
around ke, my mava sister is out of the McKinsey interview, now she is next heading towards
#
first floor Goldman Sachs ke room mein and like you are being shunted from room to room
#
and for me it was all very blinding and I was very thrown by it, I was very, I mean
#
I was totally out of place, I was one of those people who were seen as the biggest promising
#
candidates at the beginning of that day and by the end of that day I had failed all the
#
interviews, like 20 interviews in a row I had failed, I mean you can imagine self esteem
#
kaan niche pataal log mein jake girti ansaan ki ke, like at the beginning people are seeing
#
you as the rising star of tomorrow and at the end they are like iske taraf dekho mat
#
They didn't deserve you.
#
No, so by that time I was like ke, I mean don't even look at her, she is panauti, iske
#
taraf dekho ke tumhara marks kam ho jayen, tumhara chances kam ho jayen.
#
So I got placed on what was called day 0.5, they came up with a new thing, which was ke
#
like the second day ki subha subha, there were some leftover Indian firms but were offering
#
international posting, so I got into ICICI in London, ICICI was a very tame compared
#
to all the formidable brands that came the day before, but it was a posting in London.
#
So I often would say that I am the poorest intern living in London, because I literally
#
had to mouth existence given the daily allowance I was getting from them.
#
But my peers who were all other in the fancy firms of London were all living it up while
#
I was like ke ye sandwich khaya jaye ke na khaya jaye, 2 pound ka hai, always converting
#
But yeah, so it was like a semi respectable post internship that I got.
#
And again, at that time, it was heartbreaking and shattered your self esteem, like I said,
#
it was very, very depressing that experience.
#
But again, in hindsight, I think, like you said, you know, your life would be so different
#
if you're born in privilege.
#
I think my life would also have been very different if on that day I had cracked an
#
So that extreme string of many, many failures was actually, I think, good in the long run,
#
because it gave me some distance from the whole craziness that was going on in that
#
And then that also kind of shaped the friends I made later.
#
And hum sab day one wale chote log apni apni friendships banata the.
#
So we would and that kind of gave me a lot more reality check of this is what real people
#
There are normal people also on this campus, not everyone is success crazy.
#
So we were talking about UPSC, I'm sorry.
#
So then uske baad by the time the final placements ka time aaya, it so happened that we were
#
also the recession year.
#
So the subprime crisis hit in 2009 and 2008 ish and 2009 was the year of my final placements.
#
So basically it was like campus pe sanata, day zero pe chaar firms aayi hai, kyunki baaki
#
to logon ko Lehman Brothers se pre-PPO holtate, pre-placement offer, ki aapne summer internship
#
itti achchi kari ki we are giving you a job right now.
#
So logon ko Lehman Brothers se PPO aaya hai, unhone partiyan di, saara saal ash kiya aur
#
that day they are realizing it doesn't exist anymore.
#
So it was a huge shock for our campus and for like all the IMs were struggling and placements
#
were down for everybody.
#
And for me it was, I thought theek hai anyway apna to hona nahi tha, badi firms mein toh
#
kya hi fark parthe hai.
#
But for me by that time I had kind of made up my mind that I want to join a smaller firm
#
where first of all like we said na headlight fallacy ke itna hi dikh raha hai, toh kya
#
nahi karne hi dikh raha hai, toh finance nahi karna tha, yeh dikh raha tha.
#
Because like people from investment banks would come in their placement talks and tell
#
us with great pride about how I used to work 22 hours a day and I slept on a couch in my
#
office on the 36th floor in New York on so and so avenue and I would be like good for
#
you man, I don't want that life for myself.
#
So finance nahi karna hai, itna clear tha, so I was like thoda the other option is consulting,
#
jaise doctor aur engineer hota hai na, waise hai finance aur consulting hota hai.
#
So then I thought theek hai consulting mein kain try karenge maybe in a smaller firm because
#
like I said bade wale mein toh apna chance hi nahi hai.
#
So then I got into this small firm which was, I mean they were I think they had 13 employees
#
at that time and it was the first time they were hiring from IMs and we were brought in
#
7 of us were hired from IM, Ahmedabad and Bangalore.
#
By the 6th month of joining that company 6 of them had left, 7 meise, and I was the only
#
I think it was a lot also to do with the culture because many of my peers had prior work experience
#
so they came with an expectation of what a company should be like how it should be run.
#
Whereas this was a very small firm and it was very individual driven so the founder,
#
his thoughts, his philosophies were how the company operated and everyone had to basically
#
accept that his way is the right way and the other way is exit.
#
So by 6th month I realized everybody else had left and they had also the firm had decided
#
that IM people ka culture is not for us, yellow bot, they had their own rationale for why
#
people quit and the people who quit are still friends, they had their own rationale for
#
Anyway, I persevered because I somehow found a middle ground where I was not accepting
#
complete devotion either but also not so uncomfortable that I had to move out.
#
It also helped being a fresher because I had no prior experience so there was no baseline
#
with which to compare what a working culture in a professional organization should be.
#
So 3 years I stayed in that firm and my client was State Bank of India.
#
I can say that was now made public, so there was a project we were doing there called Citizen
#
SBI which was how do you, there are I think 2 lakh employees in State Bank of India and
#
how do you make them all feel like citizens of State Bank of India, how do you make them
#
think like contributors, not just like people clocking in and clocking out but find purpose
#
in their work and therefore help communities around them.
#
So great idea and I was in what they call the business modeling team which meant you
#
should travel across the country and take pilot projects in various communities with
#
the SBI branch at the center.
#
So I traveled to some tapioca farmers in Salem, some petani saree weavers in Nasik, some stone
#
carvers in Konark in Odisha.
#
So across the country I would travel to these communities, talk to these people, figure
#
out what is their value chain, where is the gap, can it be filled with finance or can
#
it be filled with skill development.
#
So like stone carvers for example, their big problem is that all the men have migrated
#
to Rajasthan for carving and all the women or unskilled people are left behind and they
#
have to manage somehow and there's a lot of problems, migration, poverty.
#
So there was a skill development initiative needed there, so SBI did a partnership with
#
NABARD and said we will do this here and there were different inputs that were given but
#
state bank kind of was for the first time thinking from the perspective of the community.
#
So it was not a typical sales methodology of the calls we get, madam card le lo, madam
#
So it wasn't like that, so I got to see a glimpse of real India for the first time.
#
So far I've only seen this IIT, IIM ka posh world and their own first world problems.
#
So for the first time I'm seeing what real India looks like, what the problems of real
#
people of India are and I realized that just a financial institution has this immense potential
#
to change their lives and I would see that there's like legitimate, tangible transformation
#
happening in their lives and their quality of living in their income because of small
#
small initiatives that we made like a training program, zarasa.
#
To us it's nothing and to them it's the difference between two very different standards
#
So my mom and dad had mentioned UPSC before after MBA or around that time but I kind of
#
dismissed it at that time as you know like you said old world thinking ke haan aapke
#
zamanin mein sarkari hota tha, ab nahi hota hai.
#
And the joke was that somebody from our campus got placed in McKinsey and he told his father
#
and father said kya hua Punjab National Bank hire nahi kar raha tha.
#
So that was a joke ke our parents generation doesn't understand what our aspirations are.
#
So we were kind of all trained to ignore it.
#
So UPSC ka, they had put it on the table but I had never given it much thought until I
#
I had this experience and then I realized that my dad would tell me that he was also
#
a public sector banker and how the collector would hold meetings of 20 bankers, 20 banks
#
in front of him or her and tell them ke aap yaha pe yeh karenge, aap waha pe wo karenge,
#
aap uss community ko loan denge, aap yeh cheez mein help karenge, yaha pe disaster
#
hoge, yaha relief mein aap funding karenge.
#
So then I realized that oh my god there is an organization behind these financial institutions
#
which has even more of a transformative power.
#
So for me that was the point where I suddenly realized that this is something worth trying
#
I was told when I started applying ke haan bahut lamba process hota hai, it is UPSC is
#
a very long, one year long exam and very few people clear it.
#
And I was working already, like people sit at home for years and years and prepare for
#
it and go to coaching classes and live away from home and coaching centers.
#
But here I am like doing a full time job, traveling around the place and also thinking
#
So reality check shuru se tha, many people had told me ke bahut kam chance hai, but try
#
kar lo kya harz hai, ek ba try kar le na nahi hoga, agle saal achche se de dena.
#
So that was the attitude going in.
#
And so the format of UPSC for those who don't know, I will just explain is, one there is
#
a multiple choice screening test which happens, in my time it used to happen somewhere around
#
Then around August-September me uska result aayega, October-November me there will be
#
Mains exam is 9 written papers of 3 hours each.
#
I don't want to go into details of what all, but general studies, selective subjects,
#
language subjects, kar kar ke 9 papers, 27 gante ke exams over a week or 2 weeks.
#
And wo clear hua to, screening clear hua to mains, and mains clear hua to next year
#
around the same time, March agara mein aapka interview call.
#
Aur phir wo bhi clear hua to you are in, otherwise agle June mein phirse screening likha ho.
#
So that's the cycle which many people are in and often aspirants end up spending 5,
#
6, 7 years in that cycle.
#
So for me it was a very clear thing ki I didn't want to write it again and again, I felt like
#
these are my formative youth years, I don't want to spend them preparing for some exam
#
that nobody gets through.
#
I'm going to give it one shot, hua to hua nahi hua to, thank you bye bye.
#
So luckily for me main ne kuch prepare nahi kiya tha, but uske saal there was a thing
#
introduced called CSAT which is Civil Services Aptitude Test, which is a cat ka bacha test.
#
So because main ne cat kiya hua tha, that exam was very easy for me and I sailed through.
#
And later if you look back around that time 2012, there were a lot of protests that this
#
CSAT gives an advantage to people like me essentially, people who have had the privilege
#
of coaching in CAT and MBA and all that and engineers, because most of Indian students
#
And for them cracking a logical aptitude data reasoning exam is much harder.
#
And so anyway, there was a whole protest about that.
#
But I was in that lucky year which skimmed through because of that.
#
So ho gaya hai and then I got a call for my mains, that was around August and I was like
#
yaar do main ne mein exam hai and these are these 27 hours of paper that I have to write
#
with, I have zero knowledge right now.
#
I mean you have no need to know things like public administration, constitution of India,
#
freedom struggle of India, wo sab was the farthest things from my mind, I was living
#
So I thought ke do maina I will just take sab article and again thankfully small company,
#
very personalized culture.
#
So I told my boss that aisa aisa hua hai, I have gotten through this exam, I want to give
#
it one serious attempt, nahi hua toh I am coming back to you, can I take two months off.
#
So they were kind enough to say, haan theke jao, jee lo apni zindagi.
#
So I came to Delhi and I, so I used to work in Bombay by the way all these three years.
#
So I came to Delhi and ghar pe baith ke padhai vadaayi shuru kari, thoda bhot pata kiya
#
coaching centers and people are like, this was in 2011 and people are like, achha aapko
#
2013 ki preparation kar diye hai na, aayi hai aayi hai ye enrolment, nahi mujhe, do mainne
#
baad 11 ke exam ki, they were like, ho hi nahi sakta madame.
#
People were just on my face told me kiya I don't want to steal your money and then give
#
you false hope, nahi ho sakta.
#
And then some people did make efforts to steal my money and said ek lakh rupee de do kar
#
So either way kuch nahi chal ratha hai.
#
And then I found out there was this group circle of fellow aspirants, all of them studying
#
together and doing group study somewhere in Noida.
#
So I started, rose apna scooty utha gaya soobhe ghar se, waha gaye 2-3 gata suna, kya
#
baathe chal raha hai, achha, mahatma gandhi, champaran satta hai, abhi ye baathe chal raha
#
hai, chalo thoda bhot sun liya and then take borrowed notes from people and someone gave
#
a photocopy of some coaching class ka notes and wo sab padh liya.
#
The two subjects I had to take, I chose public administration and sociology, which was a
#
very idealistic move on my part because I thought I ideally could have taken an engineering
#
or logical reasoning subject which would have given me an edge, but I was like ke dekho
#
hona toh hai nahi, toh why waste time reading stuff that I already know, let me learn something
#
new about the country, this is a good opportunity to do that.
#
I'll go back to my job with some value added.
#
So that's why I took these two subjects and then I took one idhar-udhar se photocopy notes,
#
police act of 1861 mein kya hua tha, usmein uske flaws kya hain aur future mein kya reforms
#
are necessary, so and so committee this saal mein baat ki unki ye recommendations the,
#
over 200 years all the recommendations that have been given and ignored by government
#
of India sab padha, things like that, very very hardcore stuff which normal people, engineers,
#
MBS don't know this stuff, I didn't, so wo sab I got very familiarized with all that,
#
I think my writing really helped because my writing skills are decent and I am able to
#
express complicated thoughts, process them into simpler words and churn out a very understandable,
#
comprehensible presentation of it, so that really helped I think with me, that was my
#
biggest strength, so somehow I cleared mains and that was very shocking to everyone including
#
myself ki iska kaise ho gaya ye toh abhi toh aayi thi and then I remember I had had a minor
#
surgery on my leg and I was like, wo karke I was bed ridden and wheelchair chal rahi
#
thi ek hafta tak and I was, tab khabar aayi that you've cleared and I was like dazed
#
and I said achcha and then I passed out again because I was under lot of pain medication
#
and then I woke up and I was like I had this weird dream and my parents are like nahi sahi
#
bhi hua hai, it wasn't a dream, so then within a month I had that interview, so I took thoda
#
extension of that leave for my surgery and gave the interview and it was a very, I mean
#
luckily I had heard all these horror stories about stress interviews and all, wo bahut
#
interview aur utke bheech me chala jaata hai, tum pe chillaane lagta hai, aisa kuch nahi
#
hua, they were very civil and nice and we had a good conversation about my academics,
#
my IIM experience, going to Germany, ye sab baate baate hui, thoda bahut aaj ki newspaper
#
se ye pada, wo cheez ka reform batau, uske baar mein tumhara hai, some textbook questions
#
that are there, for the most part I did well I thought and actually I did quite well because
#
ultimately I cleared it and when the mark sheet came I realized that I had only just
#
made it through the mains exam with a very small margin but my interview went really
#
exceedingly well which is why I finally made it to the cutoff.
#
So interview mein I might have been among the toppers in the country but because mains
#
was very bare minimum passable marks, so my rank was I think some 601 or something and
#
there is only 1000 civil servants selected in a year out of by the way 6 lakh applicants
#
So I was selected and I got into this animal called the Indian Information Service which
#
I had never heard about, nobody's heard about it, let's be honest, I'll give one toffee
#
to any listener of Seen and the Unseen who writes back saying mainin mujhe pata tha iswar
#
Aap kitne toffee doge, mere listeners ko kaafi kuch pata hai, especially those who've done
#
my course and rewritten that press release I used to give you guys to rewrite from the
#
Indian Information Services itself.
#
I'm so grateful it wasn't one of my press releases that you were giving us an example
#
I mean just for the benefit of my listeners to give an example of what a bad sentence
#
is and what a bad paragraph is, you know in my course I take examples from a particular
#
press release written by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and it so happens that you
#
also worked there and wrote press releases for them.
#
I did, I did and when you gave us that assignment I was like link kholo jaldi se meri toh nahi
#
press release which is being shared as an example of bad writing and people are going
#
to rewrite it and luckily it wasn't and it was a very good example of bad writing I have
#
So, I got into this service and then it was, kiyaar hua toh hai nahi hai, aayi hai, is
#
kya farq padta hai, jay nahi dete hain, jaah nahi dete hain and then people advised ki
#
hai nahi dekho try toh karlo, ik baar join toh karlo, let's see, nahi hua toh chot dena
#
and ho gaya, if you find it good it can be life changing which it obviously is and the,
#
I did a little bit of digging into it and found out what the service does in the first
#
place, hi hota kya hai and I thought that basically it's a service that handles all
#
the media of the government which is Doordarshan News, All India Radio, DAVP which is an organization
#
now called I think BOC which is now an organization which does all this chaapowing of government
#
ads which you see all over, a bit of community radio or wo sab grassroots communication also
#
and press releases, of course PIB, so Press Information Bureau is the PR agency of Government
#
of India in a way and that's the agency which organizes press conferences with ministers
#
and you write press releases for your ministry and that's how the media gets to know what
#
your ministry or what the government is doing.
#
So, ek potential, one thing that really attracted me for this service was that making people
#
aware of their rights, the grassroots communication which was a very small part of it was the
#
one that attracted me the most because I felt like as an Indian, I don't know what are
#
the schemes that the government has and of course I'm privileged enough to not need
#
many of those benefits also, but even people who do need those benefits genuinely are often
#
not aware that these are the things that are our rights and we can demand these rights
#
from the government kya aame ghar mein shauchale chahiye, hona chahiye, we need it, we want
#
it, it is our right, something like this people don't have the awareness to even let alone
#
demand the agency to demand the right, not even the awareness to know the right.
#
So for me that was the big hook and attraction of this service that I can generate public
#
awareness about rights of citizens and so I thought, kya kar letein join and that's
#
I mean that's the long answer to your short question about how UPSC happened.
#
I mean I won't call it a long answer because it's a long journey, I mean the journey is
#
So how was it in the civil services, like once you are actually in the machinery, you
#
know did you feel frustrated that it's not making as much of a difference as it can or
#
did you feel proud of the difference that you were making and what is it that then prompted
#
you to kind of look elsewhere and eventually kind of quit the civil services?
#
So this is another very long story.
#
So basically I get in, September of 2012 is when the training started.
#
So first you have to do a three month foundational course training which every service has to
#
do and after that depending on what service you are, you do a specialized training.
#
So there's IAS, IFS, IPS, un sabki apni-apni academy hai, apni-apni training ho rahi hai.
#
But shuru mein everyone congregates in one academy, used to congregate in one academy
#
which was the Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy in Mussoorie.
#
Now as the batch, that was when the batch sizes were 200-300 people, your dad's time
#
Now as the batch sizes have grown, they are not able to fit everyone in Mussoorie.
#
IAS, IPS, IFS wahan jayenge, pahad mein padne, baaki room jaan girenge maa girenge.
#
There is an academy called National Academy of Direct Taxes which is the specialized academy
#
for IRS, Income Tax Service and wahan pe they used to do foundation course for some other
#
leftover services which included mine and lot of my batch mates were from Forest Service
#
which was very interesting because they are the only service which has a different exam.
#
All the rest of us came from one exam, UPSC ka.
#
So Forest Service people, a lot of batch mates were from the North East and it was a good
#
experience that way, 3 months we spent together and it's very intensive, they will take you
#
on a trek to the Himalayas and then they do one Bharat Darshan, I have travelled to Andaman
#
and Leh Ladakh, everything happening in one month you are travelling here to there.
#
So it was very intensive and very interesting.
#
And then, but yeah there was one thing that was disillusioning right from the beginning
#
which is when I came in and I came in with these naïve idealistic notions of the why
#
would be the same for everyone, that why is to serve your country, to do better for society.
#
For me that was the most obvious answer, when I come in I realized that I am a very small
#
minority, the people who have come in with that perspective.
#
So a lot of people have come in for power, a lot of people have come in for prestige,
#
some people have come for corruption, so some people have come just for, aap hum unko dikhayenge,
#
jino ne hume o press kiya.
#
And I mean at the outset, obviously there is this judgmental lens which I am already
#
bringing in right, that my way was better than their way, but when you talk to people
#
and you hear their life stories, you realize that you asked me earlier about how our upbringing
#
shapes us, and this is a very stark example of it, and I think we have discussed this
#
before offline, which is like one of my batchmates told me that he is from what is called the
#
backward caste, and he said that in our village we were always treated as untouchables, our
#
mother did not get food, we were raised with so much difficulty, and these caste people
#
used to suppress us, and now we will show them, now we will suppress them, now I will
#
go to the village in a red light vehicle and I will show them.
#
So I mean, like I am saying, from a very urban and this idealistic mindset of all is good
#
with the world, it seems very shady ke aap yahan pe power aur dabane ek dusre ko aayon,
#
ye petty politics karne aayon, desh ki seva karo.
#
But when you get to know their stories, you realize that, well, if you were born in that
#
place, you might also have grown up thinking like this.
#
So it's all logical, but it's also unfortunate.
#
So there was a lot of this thing about, arey aaye aise ko laal batti ki gaadi milti, hme
#
kyun nahi milti hai, hum iss service mein hai, hum bhi to ye kar rahe hain, hum itne senior
#
officer hain, humara, jab hum office aayenge to humara dabba uthane ke liye ek peon aana
#
chahiye niche, hume gaadi ka darwaza koi aur kholega, hum kyu kholenge, hum desh ke civil
#
So, I mean, there's a lot of that, which is the overwhelming majority.
#
Is it literally at that kind of comical level that I want someone to pick up my tiffin box,
#
I want someone to open the door of my car?
#
Yeah, those are like real, very tangible, not just benefits, but reasons why people
#
That I don't want a job where, hoga Mackenzie bahut bada karod pati, par wo toh khud apna
#
darwaza kholta gaadi ka, mera darwaza koi aur kholega aake, chahiye I'm earning 10%
#
of what that person does.
#
Yeah, but for the majority of India, that is the aspiration still.
#
And even dowry, for example, is a big motivator, ke dowry ka rate card hota hai aadmiyon ka,
#
aapko shayad pata hoga.
#
Even in IIM, my male batchmates would discuss it, ke IITN ho gayi, ek karor dowry ho gayi,
#
ab IIM bhi karliye, ab 2 karor dowry ho gayi, ab iske upar civil service karlo toh sochlo
#
Aur phir politician ki beti se shadi karlo, phir wahan pukha jao, baadme mantri ban jao
#
gayi, toh phir life toh take off kar gayi ekdum.
#
So all of these are life plans that people come in with, and genuine, serious life plans.
#
It's not comical to them.
#
People live these lives and people see real value in it.
#
And again, from their perspective, it makes a bit of sense also, as unfortunate as it
#
So, yeah, that's also where I met Salil, my husband, because he was in income tax doing
#
his specialized training there, two years senior to me.
#
And I think I was talking to him last night about what I'll tell you about how we met,
#
and I said that, you know what, whether we like it or not, we bonded a lot over this
#
solitude that we both felt, you know, that we are like these, I don't want to make it
#
sound too dramatic, but we are these few hand-picked people, you can count them on fingertips,
#
who have genuinely come here with that perspective, who want to learn, who want to listen in class,
#
that how can I contribute in my service in the future, who are not here, that come on,
#
bunk the class, now it's done.
#
So, you know, that clearing of UPSE, the big difference is, there is a small group of people
#
who see it as the beginning of their journey, but there's an overwhelming majority who sees
#
that as the culmination.
#
Now, we don't need to read anything, we don't need any hard work.
#
This is what we were aiming for.
#
This is why we slogged for five years, seven years at home.
#
And finally, we've made it in life and this is it, the full stop of life is done.
#
Now, we have to enjoy ahead.
#
So as I'm sorry, I'm sure I sound very ungrateful to the environment.
#
This is a great frame of looking at it, you know, for some people it's a start, for some
#
people it's the end, or you could say for some people it's a means to an end, you know,
#
you wanted it because you want to make India better, while for some people it's an end
#
They wanted, ki gari ka darwaza bhi koi kholega.
#
So, you know, Mr. I think you've interviewed Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan, so the only function
#
where I was invited for felicitations, because I was in Bombay and there was a college in
#
Pune for governance ka kuch college tha, and they said, ki jo Bombay-Pune area se jin
#
logne kiya hai, unko bulayenge.
#
I mean, by the way, in real India, logon ke peyar doodh se dhote hain aur unki puja
#
karte hain, unki aarti utarte hain, badi-badi rallies hain nikalte hain ki humar ladke ne
#
Anyway, I was obviously a very urban, lost in crores of people in Mumbai, one of them,
#
so I was surprised that somebody even knew that I lived in Bombay and invited me to this
#
And he was there to kind of welcome the youngsters joining the service, and he gave an address
#
there, which to this day I remember, he said, there are three things that you need as a
#
One is integrity, which is basic.
#
He's like, this is hygiene.
#
So, don't go out to being very proud about, mai bahut imaandar officer hoon, yeh aapke
#
And he's like, I know plenty of imaandar officers jo apna dabba leke office jaate hain, khaana
#
khaate hain aur ghar aajate hain, toh kuch kaam nahi kiya, toh imaandari ka kya, you're
#
gadoing a huge hand of it.
#
Of course, many people don't even meet that criteria, but that is for you, it should be
#
It should not be something to feel pride in.
#
Second is competence, which is often very badly lacking, and I want to circle back
#
to that, which is the point I sent to you about the problem with UPSC and therefore
#
Anyway, second is competence, that you should be able to do your job or be willing to pick
#
up the skills needed to do it.
#
And third was the willingness to contribute.
#
So you can be very competent and honest, but still not make an effort.
#
Because like I said, this job is incentivized to be a culmination.
#
Because you'll meet 60-year-old, 65-year-old, 70-year-old men who still remember, kiye 35
#
saar pehle maine public administration ka exam likha tha, usme mere itne number aayi
#
hoti, agar iski jaga 2 marka zyada aayi hoti, toh mera rank hi hoti, aur mujhe ye service
#
mili hoti, aur usme ye carder mila hoti.
#
It's insane to me that I have met 60, 65-year-old men who remember their scores from UPSC.
#
I have forgotten my score, but people remember and wo bhi sectional ek subject ke wo wale
#
paper mein ye mark aayi hoti, toh life mein ye impact.
#
Because counterfactual is so big, ki koi banda matlab ki is writing press releases,
#
but a little difference, he could have been in the IFS, he could have been chilling in
#
So, this is not the fault of the people in the system, it's the fault of the system.
#
So those marks in that one exam basically seal your fate till retirement.
#
So unless you do something to change your trajectory, like foolish people like me do,
#
but if you don't do that, your trajectory is pretty much decided now for the rest of
#
So depending on your retirement age, at what position you'll retire, what money you'll
#
be making at that age, you can all predict everything on day one in the academy when
#
you're in your training.
#
So because all of that is figured out, and there's going to be time-bound promotions.
#
Unless you murder somebody, you will not be fired.
#
Unless you're too honest, you might be fired.
#
Unless you get caught murdering somebody, murder someone toh theek hai na, iske kya
#
Good point, very good important clarification, unless you get caught.
#
There was a guy who sexually harassed a girl in my batch, and people saw it also, like
#
she was sleeping, we were on our way to the trek, and he came and he grabbed her from
#
behind while she was sleeping.
#
And it was sexual harassment, there are eye witnesses, his own batch mates know it.
#
The girl felt it, woke up, caught him red-handed, no action was taken.
#
Who's going to do so much paperwork, for the next 20 years we're going to be called here
#
Even the girl is like, my whole career will be made here, to testify about this.
#
So now that person is a civil servant in Government of India, getting his box picked by somebody.
#
So I mean, that's the way the system is designed, it is designed for you to be complacent and
#
not want to grow, not want to contribute.
#
So that was what Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan had said, those three things which I still remember
#
to this day, that model of his.
#
And I often look at people from that lens also, and I find that one of the three, or
#
sometimes more than one of the three, are lacking in many officers, sadly.
#
Yeah, JP is one of the wisest people I've met, I did a great episode with him, episode
#
149, and just one of the wisest people.
#
But the question I'd therefore throw at you, and I don't remember if I've asked him this,
#
but perhaps I will next time, but the question I'd throw at you then is that, okay, agreed
#
that these are basic things, that you need integrity, you need to build the ability and
#
the skill, and you need to have the willingness.
#
But all of these, in my view, depend on incentives.
#
If the system is designed well, if it is structurally what it should be, then all three of these
#
will flow automatically into every single person, because you'll be incentivized to
#
And right now it clearly isn't, like A, there is too much power, which, you know, your incentives
#
are therefore for rent seeking, for corruption, for using that power for your own benefit.
#
There's too little accountability to kind of stop that, and these are just very broad
#
observations I'm making from the outside.
#
But having actually been an insider within the system and thought about it the way you
#
have, you know, what would you say are the fundamental structural things that are wrong
#
with the system the way it is, and, you know, what are the key things you would change in
#
Yeah, so I didn't stay long enough in the system to do an analysis beyond what I have
#
But I'll tell you what I have so far.
#
First step itself is the exam is wrong.
#
One exam for 23 or something services, right?
#
So you are all writing the same exam.
#
All of you have the same dream, which is IAS, collector banne, laal batti, gaun mein jaake
#
mai baap banenge, log humare payar pakdenge, hum unko relief denge.
#
And for various other things, somebody wants to contribute as a collector, somebody wants
#
to have their dabba picked as a collector, doors open.
#
But for various reasons, everyone wants IAS, right?
#
Or some people want IFS, which is for London main, wine peenge.
#
So again, not to belittle people's drivers, they are genuine, very good civil servants
#
I know who have great reasons for wanting these things.
#
I was one of them, I wanted IAS for that reason contribution.
#
But you have these 25 other services, which nobody else is thinking about, which all of
#
these people who want one service are going to fall into one of those buckets.
#
So shuru mein hi us job mein ek insan aara hai, jisse wo job chahiye hi nahi thi, for
#
whom that job was never a dream, it was never a priority.
#
Second, because it was never a dream, they're not something that they wanted, they're often
#
also not suited for that job.
#
So you'll have all sorts of people randomly falling in all different buckets.
#
And it's a lot of chance, right, on that day.
#
Like I know a senior of mine who likes to say ke usdin examiner ghar pe jagda karke
#
aaya tha aur uski gobi kachi bani thi aur uski upar fan nahi chal raha hai, isli tumhare
#
marks ka maa gaya hai, kyunki wo gussa hai main usne check kiya tumhara paper.
#
Aur tumhara dosre peer ka, kisi tumhara peer ne ganda paper likha, but uska exam paper
#
went to an evaluator who was in a great mood sitting in an air-conditioned room eating
#
a pizza, so he's happy and he gave good marks.
#
So it's a very, very luck-based system, right, which is fair, it's a large-scale exam, there
#
will be an element of luck, like you said, in everything in life there is.
#
But you have this luck-based system se people randomly falling in random buckets, right.
#
And so now an accountant falls in the bucket of police officer, where a person who didn't
#
want that job is not designed for that job, physically, mentally, and is just not geared
#
up for the requirements of being a police officer, is randomly put in that role now.
#
There were people in my service who didn't know what email is, and they are now supposed
#
to communicate for the government of India.
#
Like I used to literally after hours teach extra classes to my peers, ke chalo, bhaiyoh
#
mehna thodi baat jao, ek email sikha deti hai, aapko ek cheez hoti hai, kyunki you are
#
going to go and handle communication for this country, as my contribution at this stage,
#
I can't do much, but at least I can educate my peers about something.
#
So these are people who never wanted to write, who have no interest to this day in writing,
#
But I was luckily someone who had a communication mindset, who fell accidentally in this bucket.
#
But plenty of people who had no inclination or desire to do this with their lives have
#
fallen into this bucket.
#
So that's why I said the Forest Service peers were a great experience for me because
#
they were people who wanted Forest Service, they were zoology, biology, graduates.
#
They were people from the North East who had grown up in forests and knew that economy
#
of a forest, how that value chain works, how those communities function, what is the importance
#
of protecting wildlife, what is the difference between a sandalwood tree and a neem tree,
#
which a person like me has no idea.
#
But I will never accidentally fall in the forest bucket because I didn't write that
#
They have fallen into that well because they consciously chose to write that exam.
#
So the first thing that I think this country needs to change big time is have separate
#
exams for each service.
#
If you are a person who wants to do asset liability, taxation, you should write the
#
If you're an English graduate, then don't write that IRS exam, you're not suited for
#
You don't even want to do it.
#
You won't be happy doing it and you'll do a bad job.
#
So that's number one to me.
#
Biggest flaw is this one gateway for multiple entries and which is why people other than
#
the IRS, most people are spending their life in grief and what ifs.
#
What if I had got two marks more in geography paper, then I would be there, not here.
#
And it's unfair to that office that a person who has no inclination of being there, who
#
doesn't take pride in that office and who doesn't take the potential of that office
#
and the responsibilities of that office seriously is sitting in that office for the next 30
#
years, mind you, with no way of moving away.
#
Kipping forward to the reason I quit was also this, because I would see seniors who were
#
30 years, 35 years senior to me and still talking about marks.
#
There was, I remember, there was an INB secretary's farewell, this is the other thing, that the
#
secretary will become an IIS.
#
So an IIS person who has spent their life in the INB ministry will never rise to the
#
secretary of that ministry.
#
The secretary will be someone who's come from rural development, agriculture ministry.
#
So generalist over specialist always.
#
So it's not even about, that's not the length, the length is IIS over everything, right?
#
So that supremacy, that lobby has been very tightly controlled and will probably not change
#
in our lifetimes even, I have low hopes.
#
But that needs to change.
#
You need to have people who are specialists working in those roles and rising to the top
#
in those roles so that they know the issues at the bottom.
#
Anyway, so this INB secretary who was an IIS was retiring and I was one of the officers
#
in the ministry, so I was called for the farewell.
#
So there was a lunch and then sir was asked to make a speech and in his speech he was
#
basically like, he starts with those words of inspiration, the random stuff, but a usual
#
stuff but then ultimately after a while I realized this is a consolation speech he's
#
giving us because he's telling us that you should have pride in what you do, you should
#
not take it to heart, that you didn't make it and I was like make it rare for a second
#
and then I realized he's talking still about, oh you didn't get good marks there, so
#
this man is remembering those marks even on the day of his retirement.
#
And even as an IIS he's giving us consolation and I see my seniors with their heads hanging,
#
taking that consolation and thinking, yes, it was very bad with us, but you're right,
#
maybe we should take heart in this.
#
So people who are living with such deep regret should not be in these offices, they are doing
#
an injustice, a disservice to the office.
#
And so I would see that, I mean I tried a lot to make change happen, tried a lot to
#
reform things, but then reform would happen when it would come from the top.
#
Like 2014 Modi government comes and says, social media karna hai toh suddenly sabko
#
Usse pehle I was putting proposal pe proposal that we should have a more active presence
#
on social media, nothing, no change, ye tum bachon ka kuch khel hai, we are not interested,
#
you youngsters only know we don't know what this is.
#
And fair point, you don't know, but that's not a good enough reason to not do something
#
that is useful for the service for the country.
#
But then when it came from the top, it happened and overnight everyone was on Twitter.
#
So that's when I realized kiyaar, I'm just spending a lot of my productive years and
#
energy and effort and passion into just pushing against a wall that's not going to move because
#
So the job I was also in, after my training ended, I was around that time was May 2014.
#
And during my training itself, I had done these on-the-job training rotations.
#
And in DDNews, I had launched a campaign on sustainable urban transport, like from scratch
#
I read up on the subject, I went and interviewed experts, and I would take a camera team with
#
me to shoot their interviews.
#
And then I got funding allocated from DDNews to ke ye karenge chaar hafta ka campaign.
#
I personally got like Rahul Bose ko phone kar kakke uska kahan se manager ka number
#
dhunke got him as our host for the show, got all these experts from various fields talking
#
about non-motorized transport, need for bicycle tracks on our roads, need for more buses instead
#
of more metros, how highways are not going to solve the problem of traffic jams because
#
that is like trying to put out a fire with petrol.
#
So all of these concepts, which are not obvious to most of us, I educated myself on them.
#
And then I worked on designing a campaign.
#
And that caught the eye of one of my seniors who was once the new government came in 2014,
#
he was posted in the PMO.
#
So he said that I want these two, three young officers in my team.
#
So I was one of those people handpicked for this thing.
#
And then I got posted in PIB in Prime Minister's office.
#
So basically handling PMO's publicity for PIB.
#
So those press releases I would write would be, Shri Narendra Modi went today to Madison
#
Square Garden and delivered an address.
#
So it was obviously a very, very prestigious job and arguably the best job you can have
#
actually the best job you can have at that age and stage of your career in that service
#
was what I got right out of Academy.
#
Actually I wasn't even allowed to finish Academy, they said, we are picking you out
#
Karne to baaki training poori, tum aajo bahar.
#
So I was pulled out of the Academy middle of my training and picked up for this.
#
So it was a huge honor, obviously, very, very prestigious and well, over time, what started
#
happening was that we used to have this very hectic lifestyle, you know, get up at 4am,
#
3am, kyunki 4am tak office pauchna hota hai and then you make a media report for the Prime
#
Ke subhe jab wo uthenge to wo kitni akwariye ek insan padega, unke paas time nahi hai.
#
So I would read 20 newspapers, Hindi, English, vernacular, put together news that is being
#
written about the government, about the Prime Minister, about so and so ministry, about
#
yesterday's event that happened, what people are saying about his speech, things like that,
#
like make a full digest that goes to the PM and with their morning chai, the Prime Minister
#
So this has been happening forever, it's not new to this government, but I was like in
#
It's a physical digest of everything.
#
No, it's a like a it's a word document, you write like 20 pages and then they print it
#
out and serve it to him with his morning chai.
#
So you've got to be there at four in the morning doing this.
#
So by the time he wakes up, it has to be ready.
#
So that was like a very and shift based system.
#
So there is that morning shift, then there's a day shift and then there's a evening shift.
#
And then with this PM, he did a lot of international travel.
#
So sometimes you're up at 2am tweeting about something because he's talking in Madison
#
Did you write his tweets?
#
PIB underscore India jo handle hai, uspar se.
#
I was not in the PM, I was in PIB handling PMO publicity.
#
Some distance was there for better or for worse.
#
I had that job and so that job, the analogy I use is like, you know, if you had a nuclear
#
power button, nuclear bomb ka button, and you had to pick a person to be in charge of
#
that button, you would pick probably the best person you can think of the most competent
#
But think about now their life, what is their job description?
#
It is very high stress, there is no scope to make a mistake, there has to be immediate
#
action to any issues that come up.
#
But ultimately, they're just sitting and looking at a button, right?
#
So their life is going to be boring.
#
I would love that job because I would decide mentally and then say, I'm never pressing
#
Sometimes the button gets pressed, then you have to quickly unpress it, something like
#
There is quick action required on multiple fronts.
#
It's not a job where you sit and read a book.
#
It is a job which is hectic, but it has the ultimate nuance of it is that you are in charge
#
of not letting disaster happen here, right?
#
So speed and accuracy were two things that were needed in that job.
#
So obviously, they picked the best people they could think of for that job.
#
But at the end of the day, the job for me was very, very passive.
#
Like there was a speech, did you see what was written in that speech?
#
They put in the tweet, issued the press release, got the seniors to do the vetting, there's
#
a process to be followed.
#
So after a point, it becomes a job that you can pretty much do on autopilot.
#
So over time, I felt like I'm not really, there's no challenge to it beyond the point.
#
My brain is not developing, I'm not learning anything new.
#
It's the same thing that I have to do over and over again.
#
There is zero scope for mistakes.
#
It's always urgent because always right now PM is making a statement at 8 p.m.
#
So it's very high stress.
#
It is any hour of day or night, 24-7, he's working, so you're working.
#
And then ultimately, you're not really learning anything new beyond a point.
#
So I mean, I would get highs are there that sometimes a call would come from PM, that
#
PM read your report and was praising you, that this is very well written, this is what
#
So then you get a high that wow, Modi ji praised me personally, I wrote something that was
#
I was in the same room as him often because of events and all, but not one-to-one, never
#
But events, every event that he did in Delhi, we would have to attend and immediately again
#
write press releases and do media management and all.
#
But anyway, so it was a very, very, like I said, prestigious and honor to be given that
#
But ultimately, I felt like I was mentally decaying.
#
And also in parallel was this thing happening of me trying to keep my brain alive by pushing
#
for these reforms in the system, which I said were going nowhere.
#
Because I saw that self-esteem is so low of the service itself.
#
And that's true of many services which are not IAS.
#
Some people have like, I think IRS, IT has a little, police obviously has pride.
#
But beyond a point, other services often feel like we are the word that is used, IAS allied
#
That itself shows a little bit of, you know, low self-esteem.
#
It's like people who live in Juhu Varsava, Link Road, which is actually Andheri, they'll
#
say we live in upper Juhu.
#
So it's like allied Juhu, you could say.
#
So I mean, that, so that that itself shows that there is lack of pride in what you are,
#
where you are, and that shows in all your work also.
#
So ultimately, there was like a corridor in Shastri Bhavan, and I could see my future for
#
the next 30 years that I am in this room first, then I will go to the next room, then to the
#
next room, and then to the end of the corridor, there is the Mahal of the senior boss, my life
#
So it was like very, very depressing, that thought.
#
And there are some, there are some interns will come to you saying, let us reform the
#
services like this, and you will be like, if I had scored two marks more in Geography,
#
then I wouldn't be in this room, and I wouldn't have heard about that stupid person who says
#
that the world will change by tweeting.
#
So anyway, so yeah, I mean, all of those factors kind of combined, and I felt like it was not
#
the best place for me anymore.
#
And the interesting thing is that when I decided to quit, most of my seniors were very supportive
#
They were even enthusiastic of it.
#
Some of them would even message me to this day, some of them messaged me that you took
#
such a courageous step that we could never take, and I wish it at your age I had done
#
And then I had, of course, an exit interview with our MOS who was Mr. Rajwadasingh Rathod,
#
and then the minister, Mr. Arun Jaitley, he signs off finally on your resignation.
#
And then after that, bye bye.
#
There were some people also who got very offended by my decision.
#
And again, I felt like that showed a bit of low self-esteem when you are offended by somebody
#
else's life decision about themselves that, you know, it's like, if I say that I, Amit,
#
I started a podcast, now I'm ending it and you feel offended, how can you end a podcast
#
What does that say about me?
#
Are you saying that my life choice is wrong?
#
You know, that's the sort of place that this comes from.
#
So I've had also seniors who would make me sit in their room and not sign my file, because
#
I used to physically go with the file that I have to leave because I have another job
#
And please sign this, I used to physically go from office to office with my resignation
#
So I used to get these two extreme opposite reactions.
#
One was so much pride, full support, I wish I had done this.
#
And the other was how dare you, how dare you, what do you think of yourself?
#
And you know, like really personal stuff, like I'm like, sir, just sign the file, I've
#
never met you before, I don't intend to meet you again.
#
Why do I matter to your life so much?
#
I'm a mucki, just, hand out, get out of the room.
#
Sometimes I feel like what must be going on in their mind?
#
What are the sort of narratives brewing in their mind that they can react the way they
#
So we've sort of reached, you know, a critical turning point in your life where you turn
#
your back on the evil Indian state.
#
I know I probably come across as really ungrateful and listening to this who are feeling like
#
I'm saying this, I'm saying this, and what I'm saying is whatever my judgment on the
#
state is, I never extend that judgment to the people working within it.
#
I still have many good friends, Salil included, who are part of the Indian state.
#
And they're wonderful people.
#
But the state is what it is.
#
But you know, let's take a short break on this and after the break, we'll talk about
#
writing and womaning, the two big W's.
#
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.
#
We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students, and vibrant community
#
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.
#
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 and The Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with the famous Mahima Vashisht.
#
Once upon a time, you'll remember people joined coaching classes because Mahima Vashisht
#
Abhi log scene and scene sunenge Mahima Vashisht yahan aati hai.
#
So you sort of left government for the reasons you sort of described with great eloquence.
#
And after that, before you kind of came to where you are, you spent a few years working
#
with Swachh Bharat as well.
#
So tell me about how you kind of got into that, what that journey was like and so on
#
So like I said, I joined the government with a certain contributive aim in mind and I was
#
somehow feeling that it was not getting fulfilled.
#
So at least the results were not proportionate to the efforts and it seemed at some point
#
that my efforts were actually meaningless in the larger scheme of things.
#
The country was going where it would go, it's not like the civil services were going to
#
lose out on a big thing if Mahima Vashisht was there or not.
#
So with that, again, the same aim in mind of having an impact, I decided that maybe
#
I'll try my luck in the development sector.
#
And fortunately, around the time when I was contemplating and going through that inner
#
turmoil of to stay or not to stay, I also started talking to friends and peers about
#
the development sector and I found out that Tata Trusts had just been rebranded as Tata
#
So earlier there were these Jamshedji Trusts, JRD Trusts, some 20-25 trusts left by various
#
people in the Tata lineage.
#
And Mr. Ratan Tata had now recently co-branded them as one umbrella Tata Trusts as the brand
#
and everything is underage.
#
So there was a lot of reorganization happening because each trust had its own mandate, its
#
own leadership and people were brought together, a lot of change management happening inside.
#
And they wanted to bring some young blood also.
#
So they were looking for people to hire.
#
And coming from a government background also gave me a certain edge.
#
So I was offered a position in that team.
#
So I literally just, I think my resignation got accepted on 30th November and 1st December
#
So for a few months I was still figuring out my place, I was working with some dual leadership,
#
one boss in Delhi, one boss in Bombay, it was working, not working, kuch kuch.
#
Then one day the CEO of Trusts called me and he said that there is a new leadership in
#
the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation and they work on Swachh Bharat Mission and
#
they are looking for, essentially there was a new secretary and he's been brought as
#
He's not come up the IAS ladder, although he was ex-IS, he left, went out and worked
#
in the World Bank in the US and various other countries.
#
And now he's been brought in laterally to lead the Swachh Bharat Mission.
#
And he, because for him coming back to the government is a change, he wants people to
#
come manage his office and help him set things up.
#
So go and help them for a week or two because you are familiar with the government system
#
and then you can come back and resume what you're doing here.
#
So I went, three of us were asked to go and he said, he had said, I want some youngsters
#
and one was a very young colleague, another was a fresh IM graduate and third was, I was
#
the senior most in that team.
#
And the three of us went and we sent our CV and everything to him and I was very impressed
#
that this was a secretary who replies to email first of all, literally a secretary who checks
#
his own email is a very rare species in Government of India.
#
And I remember I emailed him at night and within half an hour, I got a response from
#
him and he had clearly like got it on his phone, which is an accomplishment again, email
#
on their phone, not have a PS who are sitting outside the room and bring a printout on Monday,
#
sir, this email is not that, so very impressed.
#
And then so we went in and so he was a career sanitation person because he had worked in
#
the World Bank as in the sanitation sector and then he was clearly very knowledgeable
#
about the sector and he had very clear ideas on where he wanted to take things.
#
And basically Swajh Bihar Mission was, as we know, launched on 2nd October 2014 and
#
this is happening in March 2016.
#
And by this time, if you look at the data, the coverage hasn't moved much.
#
So the sanitation coverage of India at the time of independence was like 1%.
#
So 1% of Indians use the toilet and had access to a toilet even.
#
Then over the years, still various sanitation programs happened in the country, Nirmal Bharat
#
Abhiyan, total sanitation campaign, and over the years, coverage had come up only to 38%
#
as of Swajh Bharat launch.
#
So now the mandate given by the Prime Minister is, in 5 years, ODF India, which is open defecation
#
free India, and they'd set themselves a very high bar of 100% coverage.
#
So I mean, in some countries, ODF, open defecation free, is also defined when you achieve 70%
#
coverage that, okay, not enough people are anymore going out in the open to cause serious
#
risk of diseases and infectious diseases.
#
So this is the, some threshold they decide, everybody agrees on, that yes, if it reaches
#
here, then we'll call it ODF.
#
In India, they went full, that we'll see, 100%.
#
What 100%, we'll do 110%.
#
So while writing the policy, we get very ambitious, and the mission has been launched, we'll call
#
it a mission, not a scheme, right?
#
So these things, and at that time, we came in full force and said 100%, and now we are
#
from 38, we have not even reached 50 yet, we have passed 10 years, so that was the condition
#
in which he had taken over.
#
And Mr. Parmeshan Iyer, by the way, his name I should have taken before.
#
So he was very clear that I am going to meet this target, and the career bureaucrats before
#
me have not taken this seriously, because they've been like, first of all, sanitation
#
So we are sitting here in Delhi, when the state has to do it, we'll do it.
#
When the funding request comes, we'll sign the file, so our work is done.
#
So that was the attitude before him, which is why we were where we were.
#
So his thing was that no, I have been brought in on a contract, this is my aim, even if
#
my contract gets extended, I want ODF India on October 2, 2019, I have to do it.
#
So then, and he wanted his team to have the same enthusiasm, which is why he brought in
#
fresh blood from outside, because he was like, the current setup is of that mentality, and
#
so he did a lot of transfers and brought in new people in the government service also.
#
And so over the years, then he was very, we were quite aggressive, and like, we would
#
call up collectors and be like, this should be on percent, this should be on percent,
#
and I was working a lot more on the communication side of things, because I had that background
#
of government communication.
#
So I worked a lot on campaigns for Swajh Bharat Mission.
#
So you might have seen Darwaza Bandh, Amitabh Bachchan ka campaign, which is about ke toilet
#
ka darwaza bandh karo essentially.
#
And there was a bit of gender that I had brought in in that lens that I brought in there also.
#
So there was, there is this instance that I want to highlight to kind of like give an
#
example of the kind of work I was trying to do.
#
So Nirmal Bharat mein there were these ads, right, ek Vidya Balan ka ad hota tha.
#
By the way, full love, I'm a big fan of Vidya Balan, but wo jo ad tha, that had some issues.
#
Toh ad mein, she was a school teacher type, chashme wali lady, who goes into a village,
#
and typical government ad ke gaun wali bebkuf hota hai, aur shahar wali aapke unko samjhata
#
hai, ki jeevan aise jeena chahiye tum hai.
#
Right, we will impart our urban wisdom and teach them how to live their life.
#
So that was the typical model which all government ads have followed, usme bhi aayi tha.
#
And then this ad is called Dulhan ki Vidai, asa kuch naam hai iska.
#
So the ad mein kya hai, ek shaadi ho rhi hai, aur dulha dulhan baithe hua hai, mandap mein,
#
saas baithi hai side mein, ladke ki ma, and ladki bolti mujhe paani peena hai.
#
Toh koi paani ka glass laata hai, aur wo ghungat pehna hua hai usne, lamba, toh ghungat utha
#
And then the saas is immediately like ishara karti ki niche karo, ghungat niche.
#
And then Vidya wali notices this with a critical eye.
#
And then later, she says ke bahu ko shauchale jaana hai.
#
Toh saas bolti ki shauchale kahan humare hain, toh hum aisi bahar jaate hain.
#
Toh wo bolti ki bahu phir toh tum ghungat bhi khol do, kyunki ek taraf toh inko tumhara
#
paani peene ke ghungat uthaana bhi gawara nahi hai, dosri taraf ye chaate hain ki tum
#
bahar jaake khule mein shauch karo.
#
Toh that ad is supposed to say use a toilet obviously, but it's also in a way saying
#
that orto ka ghungat pehna hai is fair, as long as there's a toilet at home, rakko one
#
hai ghungat, bandi bana ke.
#
So it's not thinking that, but it is unintentionally saying that.
#
So for me, a big part of it was also that there is this entire narrative about women
#
The victimhood of women, humari matan aur bhenon ko toilet nahi milta hai, bichari subhe
#
tak rokke rakti hain, bahot peeda hoti hain, bahot dukh milta hain, unki izzat hume bachani
#
So this matan aur bhenon narrative really irritates me first of all, because you should
#
respect people because they are people, not because you have relatives of that gender.
#
Everybody says, ki is aadmi ka murder hone se rakho, kyunki humare bhaiyon aur bapon
#
But orto kyaar mein is always matan aur bhenon narrative.
#
So that was the one thing that I didn't like and also there was painting of women as these
#
passive victims who are sitting at home waiting to be rescued by the men.
#
So I mean, my sense was that rural women have far more agency and they are able to even
#
lead this movement because their incentives are aligned, it is in their interest.
#
They don't want to go out and get assaulted by men in the dark in the fields because they
#
And there's all sorts of things, there's animal attacks, there's children being kidnapped.
#
I think there was that rape in one UP ka district where these girls had gone out basically for
#
It became a very, there were these very violent images that came out also later about their
#
bodies were hung from a tree or something.
#
Sonia Fulero wrote a book about it called The Good Girls and I had an episode with her
#
So obviously it is in the interest of women, in greater interest of women because they
#
stand much more to lose their suffering much more.
#
But that doesn't mean that they are going to be passive victims sitting at home waiting
#
to be rescued by their men.
#
They can also lead this movement mostly because also they are mothers and they know that when
#
their children fall ill, how it affects their children and at this point as a mother you
#
have this drive, this agency to protect your child.
#
And if nothing else, not to protect themselves, at least to protect their children, they will
#
want toilets and they can become champions of the movement.
#
So that was the lens with which I wanted to communicate about Saj Bharat.
#
And so we got Anushka Sharma as the brand ambassador.
#
So while everybody was very gung-ho about Amitabh Bachchan, very, very cool of Mr. Bachchan,
#
he did it for free as he does with most government campaigns and every brand ambassador does
#
So, but, but then I wanted one woman ambassador who talks about this message also.
#
And so there's an ad of Darwaza Ban campaign featuring Anushka Sharma where you show you
#
see women who are, you know, gairaing around a man who's going with the mug outside in
#
And there's these wives who have chained the mugs to the toilet.
#
So the man tries to yank the mug away to go to the fields and he's not able to and then
#
two men look at each other that both our wives have chained and they're saying, please go
#
Because we were also finding the data was showing that even once you build a toilet,
#
it is the able-bodied young men who are the last to adopt.
#
The senior citizens will adopt, the differently abled will adopt, children will do it, women
#
will do it, but the young men are the problem area.
#
So I said women are not the problem, men are here the problem, so let's, let's target
#
men as, as the, the target segment, which needs to change their behavior instead of
#
saying bichari aurat ki izad bachalo.
#
Because that messaging also means you build a toilet and then you go out in the jungle
#
because you built it for your wife, not for yourself, right?
#
And open defecation is one thing which affects everyone.
#
It's not that I went out in the field and so only my health is affected because ultimately
#
it's going to spread diseases, which will come to everyone's house.
#
So it's a community-wide effort.
#
If even one person is going out, that was the message, at least we said behind a hundred
#
percent coverage that even if one person goes out, your health is affected.
#
And then there was a lot of learning around this sector.
#
I remember like the openness with which in that ministry, we used to say the word tatti
#
after a while, for the first time I remember this was this expert brought in who would
#
keep saying the word tatti tatti and I was giggling behind, I had to stand behind a colleague
#
because I couldn't stop giggling and I thought it was unprofessional.
#
But then again, no one's heard of this talk in a boardroom setting.
#
But it was, it was a lot of fun.
#
It was a lot of learning about again, you know, real issues of real India and how these
#
issues are cross-cutting.
#
They affect your family health, your finances, because for a poor family, if a person who's
#
earning falls ill X times a year, that much time of income doesn't come in, plus expenses
#
of health care, women's agency to go out and work is limited if children are constantly
#
falling ill in the house.
#
So all of these things are interlinked with one little cause, which seems very banal at
#
the outset that make a toilet.
#
So it was, it was a great learning experience, five years.
#
So I was there till 2020 and yeah, I mean, we declared India ODF and all the reality
#
is obviously different.
#
I mean, the National Family Health Survey recently came out and said it's not ODF, but that's
#
I think a lot of the mission gets a lot of flack for this because we trapped ourselves
#
into the narrative of ODF India Karna Hai, but that's not really the point.
#
The point is that nowhere in the history of mankind, of humankind, has there been a government
#
program that has led to this much change in sanitation coverage of this many number of
#
So at the time we began 650 million people, Indians would go out and defecate in the open
#
and basically one billion in the world.
#
So every second person defecating outside in the morning was an Indian.
#
So that was the extent of the problem at that time.
#
And even if we've not solved it 100%, we've solved it 70%, 80%, it's a, it's a something
#
It's something to be celebrated.
#
So the narrative of 100% versus other well, not 100% is a, is not the point which should
#
be debated, but it is worth celebrating.
#
I mean, whatever is your politics.
#
And I also have opinions on the politics of this government, but this, this mission has
#
been an unqualified success in my view.
#
If you look at it that way about the number of lies it has touched and improved forever.
#
And one, you know, even if one opposes ODL, we can still support ODF, ODL being our audio
#
You looked sort of, you looked a little stunned there.
#
But you know, it's also worth underscoring that that little point you made that, you
#
know, open defecation affects everyone and an illness can be of great consequence to
#
And I don't think we city elites really understand how devastating a small illness can be.
#
You know, I think economists use a term, I think welfare shocks, that essentially, you
#
know, an illness can lead to a welfare shock in the sense that you can actually fall back
#
into poverty and then coming out can take another generation.
#
You know, a slow movement upwards can suddenly reverse so hard.
#
And you know, just so many people in cities, honestly, if they have a medical emergency,
#
even they themselves will go broke in a day, right?
#
So when you think of the poorest of the poor, it's just way worse, it can be devastating
#
and something like this has a great impact.
#
I'd done an episode on Swachh Bharat India a long time back with Shruti Rajgopalan where
#
the fundamental point she was making is that some of it was posturing in the sense that
#
sure you build the toilets and you put the commodes and you do whatever, but the underlying
#
drainage system wasn't there.
#
And because the underlying drainage system wasn't there, the caste system got perpetuated
#
because you would inevitably have people from the lower caste force to then come and take
#
And therefore, a lot of the change was cosmetic because people still kept going out.
#
I think this episode would have been in 2018 or something.
#
So possibly, you know, you were there till 2020.
#
So maybe you guys managed to, you know, do something about the deeper underlying issues.
#
So first of all, there is no sewage network in the rural area.
#
It's too sparsely populated to justify the cost of laying down sewage pipelines.
#
And it's too dynamic because new households are coming up every now and then when one
#
family, two sons separated, two houses were built suddenly, right?
#
So it's a moving target.
#
So making sewage system is impractical in most rural parts of India.
#
So what we did have was a twin pit toilet system, which is that under the toilet only
#
under the ground, there is a system and the system is that there are two pits.
#
So first all the waste flows into one pit.
#
It fills up and the pit has a bottom.
#
You kind of just call your mystery and switch the drainage to the other pit.
#
And that one pit fills up takes five years.
#
And then the second pit filling up will take five years.
#
This first pit would have leached down into the ground and would have composted and in
#
an ideal well-constructed twin pit toilet, that compost will become like manure, which
#
you can use in the fields.
#
So anyone can empty it.
#
And in fact, we went to several places.
#
We've got our minister at the time Mr. Narendra Singh Tomar, Akshay Kumar, the CAG of the
#
time, my boss, the secretary himself, all of them, we've got these iconic people to
#
go into a pit, pick out that waste with their hands.
#
And just to showcase that it is safe and it can be handled.
#
And we even did an ad about that featuring Akshay Kumar and Bhumi Pednekar later after
#
the toilet movie came out.
#
So just to highlight this, that this waste is safe to handle.
#
So that's the, like I said, it's an ideally constructed, correctly constructed twin pit,
#
which I agree sometimes the pit is not correctly constructed or people will just construct
#
So there's technical issues with it, but theoretically that model exists and was the
#
one that we at least pushed from Delhi and most states did adopt it, if not all.
#
The second question was about caste.
#
Caste is a very real problem that cannot be disentangled from sanitation.
#
And it's even worse in urban areas where you see manual scavengers going inside these
#
septic tanks and not coming back.
#
There were so many deaths of sanitation workers in Delhi alone in the recent past.
#
So obviously caste is not an issue that you can ever disassociate from it.
#
Having said that, there were critics that, academicians who we worked with at the time
#
and we would consult them, but often found their way of doing things to be very idealistic.
#
So the purest view is, first you solve caste, then you solve sanitation.
#
That is the purest way of approaching it, ke pehle caste system hatao aur yeh bolo ki
#
koi bhi toilet saaf karega, uske baad toilets banao.
#
So that anyone is actually, you know, the way Shruti has perceived the toilets to be
#
So this was not at all her position because you have to tackle all problems simultaneously
#
and obviously you're not solving caste in a hurry.
#
So that's what, I mean, I haven't heard that episode, so I don't know Shruti's position,
#
but she's right about caste being deeply entangled with it.
#
But the purest view of caste system ko jab takh solve nahi karega, tab takh India ODF
#
nahi ho sakta, was like we don't have 200 years to wait around to do that.
#
So we were like, ke dekho, we have a limited frame window, paanch me se bhi 3 saal bache
#
hai, and we have to do this.
#
At least construct the infrastructure for it and do a certain amount of behavior change
#
communication to change people's behavior and encourage use of these toilets.
#
And beyond that, I think problems like caste are going to get solved in as we develop,
#
as we get more educated as a society, it's going to happen in its course of time and
#
hopefully we'll have some accelerators along the way.
#
But it was not something that was in our area of control or could have been practically
#
been impacted by Swachh Bharat.
#
If David Lynch was making a TV series in India today, what would he call it?
#
Oh, he made a famous iconic series called Twin Peaks in 1990.
#
That I should, you know, not do any more of these in this episode.
#
Itne involved jokes are lost on me yaar, tum crack a DDLJ joke, I'll get it.
#
I'll do my best to come up with a DDLJ joke by the end of this episode.
#
Let's talk about your writing.
#
So you've mentioned earlier that our third standard say I've daily diary licti thi, journaling
#
karti thi, wo sab karti thi.
#
You know, your first published essay was in the fourth standard and it was about fake
#
news or advertising and lies and so on.
#
So you know, so tell me a little bit about your writing journey.
#
Like what drew you to writing?
#
Did you always want to be a writer?
#
What kind of writer did you want to be?
#
And you know, how fundamental was that a part of what you wanted out of yourself?
#
Like, did you always see yourself at least in part as a writer?
#
So yeah, I told you beforehand about my earliest memories of writing and third standard, maari
#
ek English teacher thi, she used to compulsorily roz ek page diary likhni hai.
#
And I was as the class topper designated, the class monitor jisse baagiyon ki diary
#
I was like yaar, inzat bhi baat saa jaati hai, I used to have like a lot of, I think that
#
teacher gave me a lot of anxiety because mai aad raat ko otke chekh karti thi, maine likhi
#
And I was like, it was a problem, serious problem.
#
But anyway, so that was my first introduction to disciplined daily writing.
#
And like you said, fourth standard, I got published and I was very proud ke school magazine
#
mein, there was a thing about how, it was a very cute essay, I came across it recently,
#
that's why I still remember it, which was about how, you know, mummy says we should
#
not tell a lie, but then how is Colgate also number one toothpaste and close up also number
#
As a child, I'm seeing on TV, various guys are saying I'm number one, koi toh jhoot bol
#
Toh yeh kya chal raha hai bado ki duniya mein.
#
So it was very cute, I mean, I used to get these chota-chota encouragements, I think
#
from my environment about haa, acchi angrezi hai, accha likhti hai bachi.
#
And then cut directly to college where all those magazines and all those things happened.
#
I was a chief editor of an official magazine and an unofficial magazine.
#
Toh lot of work about collecting not only writing yourself, but also editing other people's
#
work and encouraging others to write.
#
So there was a bit of element of that as well.
#
And that was in my memory, it was one of the most fun highlights of my college life.
#
So there was a bit of attraction to writing at that point.
#
And soon after I left, I think that was when the blogging culture had reached us, which
#
is when I set up my first blog.
#
And then I wrote probably 100 posts in 10 years.
#
It was that intermittent, ikna rukh-rukhe kabhi-kabhi kuchh idea aaya toh likha, aur
#
when I've like I've traveled or I've seen something.
#
Sounds like my newsletter now.
#
You are being very productive other than that, right, creatively.
#
I was doing nothing else.
#
I was doing my padhai, likhai, job, job, yeh sab.
#
So there was not, I mean, I used to feel like when the inspiration strikes, I'm able to
#
And sometimes in the middle of the night, an idea will come and I'll get up and write
#
and go back to sleep and it will be excellent.
#
At least from that lens, today I see them in cringe.
#
But at that time, it used to be like, aacha likha hai.
#
But it was very, very few and far between those writing forays.
#
And then it was never the thing ke haan mujhe writer banna hai, like you had probably, ki
#
nahi hai, nahi hai, naukri chod ke writing karungi, asa nahi tha kabhi.
#
Like I said, wo middle class work aata hai ki yaana hai, naukri toh chahiye hai, salary
#
But yeh ek cheez hai jo mujhe, which gives me true joy.
#
I mean, it's just like unadulterated joy.
#
I'm getting nothing else out of this.
#
And but I like writing.
#
I like it when other people like my writing and when people find it funny or people say
#
it moved them or it taught them something that they made them think in a way that they
#
thought before. And then in parallel, I was having this whole gender evolution also, right, like
#
coming to those realizations that kuch toh galat hai, bahut kuch galat hai, sab kuch galat hai.
#
So that was happening separately. But then at some point, I think the two got combined and then
#
womaning is what happened after that. In your notes, you've mentioned that we met many years
#
ago at Nilanjana Roy, who's been a guest on the show, Nilanjana and her husband Didi's house.
#
Yeah. And I gave you some rude writing advice. Now I have no memory of this, except that I must
#
have said something and you later remembered it. So maine kya bolata, kya hua tha? Ye tha, so I was
#
there as, I was there as Salil's plus one, right? Like I was just a person who didn't belong. I felt
#
like I was just, kya mein kahan a gaye hoon, ye kya baathe chal rahi hai, log French and Latin me baat
#
kar rahi hai, for all I can understand. Because there's like really very, I mean, refined cultured
#
people talking about books and authors that I have never heard of. I felt very, very pedestrian
#
there, which I was obviously, still am. But so I think I had read your book long back, my friend
#
Chancho, and then I was like a little kya, hey, oh, Amit Tharp is coming there and Salil was like,
#
yeah, he's my friend. And I was most impressed that my husband is friends with such illustrious
#
people. And so then he said, come, I'll introduce you. And we came over to you and I, something we
#
got talking about government work, which both of us were babus at the time. So we were talking
#
about my work and all. And then I said that I've read your book and I said something like, I also
#
like to write, I want to write. And so you asked me first, you said, so why don't you? I was like,
#
so offended, how dare he? Aisey ka bolta hai? Why don't you? Because it was really truly the most
#
pragmatic advice. And that's to this day, the advice I would give to other people who would come
#
to me and say that you write womaning and I also want to write. The very, the truest and purest
#
advice is why don't you? Because writing is just that, right? It's a verb. It's, being a writer is
#
like not a noun. It's a verb. It's a thing of doing. I did this class before yours, a course in which
#
somebody said that writer is the one profession to which most of the people that claim they belong
#
to that profession don't actually practice it. Right? Many people will say I'm a writer, but
#
they don't actually do the verb of writing. And that's where the entire secret of good writing
#
or any writing is that you have to sit, park your tashreef in a chair and do it. So that was, I mean,
#
basically I was not doing it and you told me to do it. Obviously it was, it was not offensive as
#
much as it was very, very pure. And I felt like, yeah, he's right. Why, what is stopping me?
#
You know, now that you mention it and I can see why I might have said that,
#
but it is rude. Just, just looking back because I think it's, it's, it's something you can say
#
from a position of privilege where I was a master of my own time. I can make that routine. You know,
#
other people necessarily can't, lives are complicated. You know, one of the struggles
#
that writers face, especially women face when they are juggling so much,
#
is ki time kahan se banaye, mind space kahan se banaye. You know, you have so many things going
#
on that you just don't have that. And taking that into account, this is not something I should have
#
said. So, you know, today. No, no, no. But it was true, right? Say, if I'm aspiring to be a writer,
#
then it is the purest advice there is. Of course there is context and I had a whole other life.
#
It was a very high stress job with the PMR at that time and all, but such hai, such toh
#
such hai. Yeah. And in case any listeners are surprised that you mentioned the book of mine
#
and why don't I talk about it? I wrote this book in six weeks in 2009 and I should never have
#
published it. I think I embarrassed myself, but unfortunately I showed it to publisher friends and
#
there was a bidding war and it kind of, it happened. I got carried away in the moment,
#
not close enough to sort of see the wood for the trees. And I always keep saying that I will redeem
#
myself one day, which I promise you I will. But that's not really something that I'm particularly
#
thrilled about. But no, it was a fun book. I liked it a lot. Even now, sometimes I see a chipkali
#
and I think of my friends. There's a chipkali in the book. Let's kind of talk about womaning then.
#
You mentioned that these separate things are coming together and that one is that you're thinking of
#
all of these issues, right? And on the other hand, you're a writer, you write, you like writing.
#
However, your track record of writing is a hundred posts in 10 years, right? So how is
#
it coming together in your mind? Is it like one of these thoughts or, you know, how does,
#
when does it start to fructify and become a concrete thing? And when does that earths
#
get so much that, you know, the verb takes over from the possibility of the noun in terms of
#
writing and writer. Yeah. So for womaning, the idea came to me at a very particular moment, which I
#
have identified and remember. So I was Swachh Bharat mein in our office. We would do a lot of,
#
like I said, travel to districts and all. And a couple of us had gone out to various parts of
#
the country and we had converged back in Delhi to report our findings and all. And so we were
#
all having lunch and informal conversation was happening, ke kya kya kiyate dekha kahan rahe,
#
kya sa rahe ho. And then I had said, I think at that point, that I was put up in, it was a small
#
town and I was put up in a hotel room where, you know, there is an auto lock in the door. So it's
#
not a kundi. It's a lock that just with the, you turn a knob and that's a lock. Basically, that
#
means it's a lock that can also be opened from outside. The kundi is the only thing, the latch
#
is the only thing that is a hardware between you and a person outside who has the master key.
#
So I said, I was, I was a bit terrified because the hotel was not the most unshady ones out there.
#
And the staff was, I was a little concerned for safety. And so raat ko main, maybe I overreacted,
#
but main raat ko table ek furniture de darwaza ki against laga ke soyi. Ke agar koi room me
#
ghusega to at least I'll wake up with the noise. And I thought that I was like, you know, I've said
#
before that women think that these experiences are unique to us. And I thought I was the only
#
paranoid person out there doing such a thing. But then there was another woman at that lunch table
#
and who said, arey ye same thing happened with me also. I also do this. Often I go to, whenever
#
I'm traveling to these chota small town mein chota hotel where safety is not a big guarantee.
#
I also do this mujhe bhi kundi pasand hai. Agar kundi naho toh I am also stressed the entire night.
#
I can't sleep. And sometimes I put furniture, sometimes I just don't sleep and things like that.
#
And then ek ek karke 2-3 women said, oh me too, me too. And then there was this one guy who was
#
there and he was like, did you guys like plan this beforehand? Is this a prank on me? Because what
#
are you all even talking about? I can't relate at all to this. If never this thought has never
#
crossed my mind. For me, somehow that moment was a, I mean, obviously there's the history behind it.
#
But that is when the coin dropped in my mind. Is the expression coin dropped or what? Pin dropped,
#
something dropped in my mind. Listen as we get it. It doesn't matter. So kuch chamka mere ko. Light bulb chamka.
#
Basically, haan kuch chamka. Toh chamka yeh ke there is this whole life that women are living
#
and we are living so close to each other. We are sometimes husband and wife cohabiting
#
and we're father, daughter, brother, sister living together in the same house,
#
having such starkly different life experiences or colleagues working in the same office.
#
Having it not different experiences that women are seeing a whole different side of the world that
#
men are just not seeing. And even the most well-intentioned men out there who are like,
#
oh women, full support, feminist, even those men are often just unaware of it. It's by no fault of
#
their own. They've not had that experience and they're unaware. So for me, that was a bulb moment
#
that I felt ke ispe likhna chahiye. I should just talk to women and get these stories about things
#
that women experience and it's very common between us and which men probably haven't thought of.
#
And so for me, because I had thought about feminism and I mean, I don't like to use that word
#
because that word now means different things to different people. And many people are all
#
actually aligned to the thought of it, but just don't like the word because they interpret it
#
differently. But either way, I had thought about writing about gender a lot. And I used to think,
#
you know, people write either about data, which is not my forte. I'm not a data scientist and I
#
don't, not the most knowledgeable person on that front. Some people like opinion, write opinion
#
pieces, but opinion me hi ho jata nahi ki ye toh is ladki ka opinion hai. I disagree. But baat
#
wahi khatam. So that's why for me, it was that ek toh meri apni writing mein, I feel like I'm
#
more of a storyteller than a very concrete opinion writer. And otherwise also, I find that stories
#
are much more powerful. So there was this documentary, it's on Netflix, Inside Bill's Brain
#
about Bill Gates. Usmein, there's one of the, there are these four episodes, I think, usmein
#
ek episode mein Bill Gates and Melinda, now Melinda French Gates, they're together talking about
#
an issue. I think it was malaria in African kids. I'd forget the exact issue. But basically,
#
what they were saying was that Bill Gates would see data, ke so many thousands of children losing
#
their lives to malaria or diarrhea or whatever it was, and he would get moved by the data.
#
But Melinda would say that for me, the numbers weren't so real until I traveled to Africa and
#
I've met one mother who had lost one child. And for me, that moved me so much that it ultimately
#
led to the setup of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So for me, that was another Chamko
#
bulb light bulb moment because I felt like stories have so much more power than data, even though
#
objectively thousands of children dying is worse than one child. But for a human being, for most
#
of us, stories are what move us much more than data does. And so that was the, I decided at that
#
point, it suddenly became quite clear to me the kind of writing I'll do, the way I will build
#
these stories and these arguments, how I'll pick a theme about a subject that's not obvious to men,
#
but is a lived experience of a majority of women. And then I'll interview women and real women's
#
real stories I'll write. And that's how I will build that argument. It was not my personal
#
opinion. This is the lived experience of these many women, which by the way, if now you talk to
#
the woman sitting next to you, maybe she'll also conquer. So that I felt might move the needle,
#
at least when it came to individual opinions. Yeah. And the importance of storytelling is,
#
you know, really it's a difference that I keep talking about, you know, even in my writing class
#
or even generally it's a difference between the abstract and the concrete. So, you know,
#
in Bill Gates' case or in anybody's case, large numbers are abstract, you know, whereas actually
#
a particular story of a particular person is concrete and that has a far greater impact.
#
Your mirror neurons line up as it were in your head and a much better chance of sort of empathy
#
and kind of relating. And, you know, what you speak about the kundi and, you know, kundi not
#
being there. I remember the first person who mentioned this to me was I'd done an episode on
#
MeToo around the time MeToo happened with Supriya Nair and Nikita Saxena. And Nikita, of course,
#
was a caravan journalist who would go around the country everywhere. And she pointed this out,
#
that men just completely sort of take it for granted. It's not something they would even look
#
for, but for every woman it's a real thing. It's part of that layer, that added layer of concern
#
that women carry around with them, which men simply don't see. Like I can go for a walk at
#
midnight or I can enter a crowded lift without having to look around or I can, you know, check
#
into a hotel without caring about whether the kundi is there. But women carried these layers.
#
In fact, when I was going through your posts, I was kind of putting them in different kinds
#
of categories. And one of those categories was what only women go through, you know,
#
and these are all things that are part of this layer, you know. So in a post where you actually
#
wrote about this kundi incident, you also quoted someone called Natasha who wrote, quote,
#
Every time I enter any public space, I look at the escape routes. I first look at what in the
#
environment I can use as a weapon in case I'm attacked. I'm mentally prepared all the time.
#
I have told this to male friends and men just don't understand it. But in our heads,
#
we women are constantly plotting how we can use a metal water bottle we are carrying for self
#
defense. Like Shruti did reference to someone else. We are mentally practicing how to use it
#
in case we get attacked. Stop quote. And the thing is, I think if you're a man and listening
#
to this and you think, oh, these are just some women to whom bad things have happened. They're
#
really not. It's every woman, you know, that you have to learn to think about things in a way that
#
men simply don't. And this percolates along other fault lines. You know, it's there in cast as well.
#
You know, if somebody asked me what my surname is after I say, Hi, I'm Amit. I don't even think
#
twice about it. You know, for someone who is, you know, not of the same cast, there is that added
#
layer of hostility and weariness that kind of that you sense from the other person. So it's
#
interesting just to, you know, think of the kind of life we live in India, think of all the different
#
fault lines, and all the different layers that are therefore invisible to us. But to get back to your
#
narrative, you know, you've thought that you want to tell the stories of women to kind of make all
#
of these connections, but you're thinking of it at that point as a book. So this idea was probably
#
I carried it around for two years or maybe three years. Because soon after this idea came to me,
#
I was pregnant with this idea and then pregnant with an actual child. So that that kind of took
#
over. And then we had our baby and then COVID happened around the same time, then some I mean,
#
this idea was constantly with me, I would often go back and think about it. But I was thinking
#
about it like a book. And as I mean, I'm no imposter syndrome here, genuinely, I'm a very
#
undisciplined person, because I need a deadline or something to work towards. Otherwise, I don't,
#
I don't off my own volition will not sit down to do something without an answerability or deadlines
#
is programmed that way by our education system. So for that reason, I think I never wrote a word
#
about it. I mean, I would talk to women and I would note down their stories on my phone in an
#
app ever note, I would write them sometimes on on the laptop and paste them there. And then,
#
but I had these disparate collection of stories over several months and years of talking to women,
#
but I hadn't actually sat down to, you know, start writing the book. And then around somewhere,
#
I think in September cohort, I was in in your course. And so the the course was great, of course,
#
but at the end of the course, I think the conversation that I, you and I had was for me,
#
the big decisive moment. After the course ended, I told you that, you know, I have this book idea
#
and can we discuss it? And then you had a zoom call and I told you the idea. And I also had a
#
lot of concerns, I remember at that time about writing it as a privileged woman, because,
#
you know, what if people say that you're, if I don't write about women who are suffering from
#
many other and much more devastating challenges like poverty and caste and all of that, if I
#
don't write about them, then this is a first world woman problem. If I write about them,
#
then people say you are appropriating. You don't know what you're writing about, which I truly
#
don't. I've had all of these concerns and questions in my mind. And I remember that conversation with
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you was very clarifying for me because you said, you know, you write what you think about what you
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know about and what you feel happy, confident writing and don't worry about all of this
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criticism. I'd imagine too many layers of criticism in my mind. So for me, it was quite
#
freeing to let go of that. But for now, let me just write what I feel strongly about. Like these
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things are my lived experiences. So at least that I can, that's where I can start. And it's not like
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there's a hierarchy of problems, right? Because you have a problem, which is a quote unquote first
#
world problem. So it's not a problem anymore. Like if you are not able to sleep through the night,
#
because you're worried about your safety in a place where you've paid good money to stay be
#
and be safe, then that's a legitimate real problem. Even if you're not starving and even if you're,
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you don't have any of the other multiple multitudes of problems that women, other women suffer from,
#
it doesn't diminish that you are still facing a challenge that's unfair. And it's totally because
#
of your gender. So that was freeing. And then you also, the biggest thing was that you said, write
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it as a newsletter, which I'd never considered up till that point. And then you said that, you know,
#
because you're not also not the challenge, the challenge of not having the self-discipline to
#
write a chapter a day or a chapter a week, just put yourself, give yourself a weekly deadline,
#
and then I was like, yeah, weekly or fortnightly. But then you said that, you know, you will,
#
before you realize it, you'll have a body of work behind you. And then somebody who discovers you
#
two years down the line can actually go back and click into the stuff you've written along the way.
#
And that in itself is a, is an achievement to have that body of work. And then later, if you want to
#
make it a book. So for me, that was a tipping point where I said, and I think even after,
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if anyone goes and sees my first welcome post, it begins, the publishing date is October 3rd,
#
or something. But it came out in December. It came out in December. So the first thing I
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written is that there is a two month gap in the date on this piece and the actual publishing of
#
this piece, because I put it out and then I didn't put it out there. I mean, I published it very
#
locally as a private thing. That's why the publishing date is two months behind. So it took me two
#
months to kind of, you know, gather the courage to do it and feel like, yeah, there's something I
#
could pull off. And so on my birthday, 4th December, and 2020 was when I kind of went
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public. And then I got like 100 subscribers on day one. And I was very shocked that damn people
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have actual faith in me. Now I had better turn up the next Friday. At the time I used to publish
#
on Fridays. Now I publish Mondays. But so that's where it started. And now I have a weekly deadline
#
to work towards. So there's really no getting around it. I do have to write, which is thanks
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to you. I have actually built up a significant body of work.
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No, it's a, it's a impressive body of work. And it really impresses me is that even though
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you took that couple of months to get down to it, once you got down to it, you were so regular,
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you know, clockwork pe aata tha, ki iska to aana hi hai, whatever day you decided you changed
#
that later, but iska to aana hi hai, which was impressive to me because it wasn't just someone
#
sitting down and writing their own thoughts. A lot of work went into it in terms of research,
#
in terms of speaking to people and all of that. Tell me a little bit about your work ethic during
#
this period and how you manage this. Like, there's this author called Mason Curry who'd
#
once come out with a book called Daily Rituals, where he spoke to writers about their work
#
habits and their work ethics and all that. And he was criticized correctly that boss,
#
it's all men. You know, men ke liye toh alag hai. Men toh apna sab kar sakte hai. And you know,
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there'll be clockwork creatures in the background providing them the food and providing them
#
everything and kind of taking care of all that. What about women? And then Curry to his credit
#
came out with a book called I think Women Artists at Work or whatever. I'll kind of put that up.
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So I'm curious about how you then manage to get all the writing done, given that at the same time
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there is baby, there is house, there is family, there is, you know, everything else is kind of
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also happening. How do you then find that mind space, find the discipline? So what were the
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methods that you kind of, what were those early weeks like when you were kind of finding a groove,
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just may you can write and you can bring it out on time. Yeah. So like I said, I had these
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disparate stories collected in on a note taking app, which, which were the first body that I tapped
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into. Okay, let's look at three or four and figure out what is the most compelling one to me right
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now. And my first post was about modernity discrimination, because I was literally a new
#
mother at that point. And I had just been talking to your, you know, when you become a mother,
#
somebody, some kind of woman will add you to a mom's group. And that's where you'll discuss all
#
your problems. They go breastfeeding, bachche ko ye ho gaya, rash ho gaya, kya karna hai, iske le
#
bukhaar ho gaya, kya karna hai, the kid is eating, not eating, sleeping, not sleeping, all your early
#
new mother concerns, which there's always something going terribly wrong in your life that is making
#
you question your worth as a human being. So that tapping into that group and community at that time
#
can be a huge source of comfort and support. I mean, I don't know how moms did it before this
#
technology was available. So that became my starting point, because we would talk there
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also about joining back work and how many moms would feel that, you know, I'm not getting the
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same position, the same kind of projects are not coming my way, or my organization has said,
#
some people will let go also some women after becoming a mother that you can't keep up with
#
those deadlines and all that. Like people would decide on your behalf, even if you are ready to
#
put in the work to meet the deadlines and do the stressful work, which should not be imposed on
#
people. But even if you volunteer to do it, people will decide on your behalf that you no longer can.
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So bye. Toh India mein there is no law against maternity discrimination. That was the first piece
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I wrote. And that had only stories of two women. And I kind of tried the way of, if you read that
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post, they go in parallel and then later I talk about how their experiences were different, yet
#
similar and blah, blah, blah, the laws in US law in India. Then the second one was, I think about
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body shaming, which another issue very close to heart, very personally felt. And then the moment
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I, that one, I didn't have many backup of many stories, but I just asked a couple of friends and
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when you talk to the first five women, you'll have five stories about body shaming. It's that
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universal among women. So it was, so shuru mein, it was my group of friends and my direct circle.
#
But soon as, as womaning grew and as it became a little more popular among people, more subscribers,
#
more readers, more on these moms groups, women are talking about it. Then I started getting also
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stories from women I didn't originally know. My process was, and this is the book that you've
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mentioned, I've read the book, the man's habit, the male artist's habit is, hum uthenge sube,
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phir ek naashta, phir ek coffee, phir ek stroll by the lake, phir shaam ko do ghanta likhenge,
#
phir uske baad drinks at the local pub, phir ye, phir, matlab, phir walk, hiking on the mountain.
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And ye sabse inspiration. Aur baad mein aap unko google karo, they have 14 bache hain uske.
#
Kaun paal rahe ho 14 bache, right? So no one is talking about that in the successful habits of
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these successful men. So there are, and then when you actually read up, there are some of these men
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were beasts, they were monsters, the kind of things they did to their wives, to their partners,
#
the kind of privileges they had, like unko bhai isi type ka khaana ite baje chahiye, aur unke
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saamne khaana present ho raha hai, aur bache paal rahi hai wo, saath mein matlab, she's managing
#
the household and you'll say no support stuff because bache ko maa ka pyaar milna chahiye,
#
all beastly things these men have done. And we celebrate so many of them today. And you go back
#
and you read about them, you realize. So this was Leo Tolstoy who I discovered, accidentally on the
#
internet I was writing a piece on breastfeeding. And a book had come out recently about his,
#
someone had found an account of his wife Sophia Tolstoy and her diary or something had been made
#
public. And in that I read about how he had these 13-14 kids and he used to force her to breastfeed
#
all the children and at one time she was suffering from some postpartum issue because of which she
#
was not able to. In his old days, there were a lot of women in the village and they breastfeed
#
each other's children also because they're all at the same age and it was an accepted done thing.
#
So I think at that time there was a driver's wife or some domestic help they had who also had a baby
#
the same age. And so Sophia Tolstoy wanted to ask that, request that woman to breastfeed the baby.
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And Leo Tolstoy said, no, you will not do it and you have to do it yourself. And then ultimately I
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think that lady ended up feeding their child and he wrote a very cruel play about his wife mocking
#
her and called his son as the outcast or orphan or something was raised by somebody else. Like
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there was very lot of toxicity there. I just want to make one point about Tolstoy that he
#
was one of the great virtue signallers of his time. He used to talk a lot of spiritual things,
#
spread knowledge, Gandhi also was impressed by him. And one thing that I consistently say today
#
in light of all the vogue virtue signalling that goes on on Twitter also is that those who
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signal the most virtue possess the least. And I think Tolstoy is a classic example of that,
#
but sorry, my pet rant out of the way. Yeah, no, even Einstein, I recently read about him
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and I had written about him in that imposter's note and I'm going to go back and delete that
#
man's name because now I'm upset. What did he do? His wife had helped him a lot in his research,
#
apparently, in all of this relativity shit that we consider him a god for. He basically did not
#
quote her, give her credit in the paper they wrote together, to which research she had contributed
#
a lot. And there was, I read an article which was comparing him and Peerre Curie, who, Madam Curie
#
and her husband, they did this research together. And then when he was nominated for a Nobel,
#
he said that my wife will also get it. She has been an equal partner in this research.
#
And that's why we know Marie Curie's name, right? And growing up for me as a child, that was the
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single one female scientist I could have named. And to this day, I don't know if many people can
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name a second one. By the way, on Twitter, I saw this delightful tweet, which also is a great
#
example of mansplaining, which you've written about, where this woman tweeted about how she
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once said that she was a great granddaughter of Marie Curie. And the man with her said,
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no, no, you're pronouncing it wrong. It's Mariah Carey. We digressed a lot. I'm sorry. We were
#
talking about developing habits. You were talking about male writers habits and therefore your own.
#
Right. So now coming to my own, there was, it was, yeah, I had a small new baby. There was a
#
pandemic and my husband was being forced by the government to go to office, thus exposing us and
#
giving me nightmares and a lot of stress. And I had a job. I used to work with the World Bank
#
at the time. Luckily, my boss was in the US, so I used to work at night. So I had actually engineered
#
it that way, that at least for the day, I'm free for caregiving. And at night I'll do a few hours
#
of the work. And then after that, weekend pay or sometimes do these quick calls. And by the way,
#
many women I'm interviewing are also mothers. So they are just as busy as I am. So it was always
#
a huge scheduling challenge. So actually not a very small percentage, but a limited percentage
#
of the stories I've got written about have actually been phone conversations that I've even had with
#
them. It wasn't possible to meet during the pandemic, but even conversations have been very
#
few. Most of them have been either chats or I've asked them to send me voice notes with, I send
#
them questions and later they send voice notes as answers because I can't even expect a mother to
#
type out an answer and send me. So women are busy on both sides of that relationship, the person
#
who's interviewing and the interviewer. So that was how I would pull together these stories. I
#
would decide on a theme for the week and publicly put out a call for stories that were harder to
#
find. Like when I wrote about domestic violence and all, there's not a lot of women who will come
#
out on a WhatsApp group with 200 other women and say, hi, I was abused. So there I would put out
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a call on Twitter or something so that people can privately reach out to me. But some of these like
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imposter syndrome, the kundi thing, these things women are quite comfortable discussing in the
#
open. And you know, nobody really, like you said, men take them for granted, right? And men don't
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even listen to these stories. So women are actually, when you are approaching it with good
#
faith and they trust you, they are quite open. And I feel like women's conversations are far
#
richer than men's conversations. Men will usually gather and even with their father and brother and
#
best friend, they'll talk about sports and politics and banal stuff, which has no consequence really
#
to your life immediately. But men often have very, I find surface conversations, which is a pity
#
because women's conversations are really rich and really, I mean, they open up and they trust
#
and they share quite freely. I want to double click on this because it's something I'm genuinely
#
curious about in the sense that many people have told me that this year, especially my episodes
#
with women are what they have found the most memorable in, you know, whether it's Shriyana
#
or Minalji or Nilanjana or Urvashi or Mukulika and so on and so forth. Whereas the episodes with men
#
are all great, you know, they're engaging in good faith, they're, you know, sharing a lot of insights,
#
but not that same level. And I kind of feel that there is something there that in many of these
#
episodes where I've just sat and spoken to a woman for five hours, there is, you know, these people
#
have left the filter, just spoken with such raw honesty and gone really deep and all of that. And
#
I'm trying to figure out why this is because what you say about conversations is also, of course,
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quite true. Most of the time, you know, men are kind of are talking about sports and whatever and
#
all of that, like you pointed out, the conversations can stay shallow. And I'm just thinking aloud here,
#
but I'd love to sort of ask you to sort of elaborate not just on the what of it,
#
but also the why of it. Why do you think that happens? Do you think that one thing that
#
constrains that kind of deep conversation between men is sort of this fear of intimacy?
#
You know, that macho thing that, you know, you will never show your emotion, you will never show your
#
vulnerability. And I think part of any honest conversation between two people is when you let
#
that guard down and you're willing to show your vulnerability and you're willing to show when you
#
move by something or when you don't know something or you're feeling lost and confused and you're
#
willing to express that and men don't do that enough. So I'm just thinking aloud that maybe
#
that's one possible reason. But if you had to look at the why of it, what would you sort of?
#
Yeah, so it's a bit on both sides. And like I always say, you know, gender issues are not a
#
men versus women issue. They are actually all of us are affected by them. You're rightly saying that
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I think men are conditioned from an early age to, you know, hide their emotions, boys don't cry
#
and those things. So they're taught that it is weakness to show vulnerability, it is weakness to
#
show and to accept your flaws or to discuss your failings. And so there is this unnecessary
#
burden in the modern age, which is put on men of men are no longer sole breadwinners in most
#
families in this strata, at least. And yet they have this burden of I have to be the stoic
#
supporter and carry this burden all by myself. They don't have to really, we can all be human
#
beings with each other at this point, at least in families where there's otherwise financially
#
secure security is there both are equal partners in terms of who's bringing in the dough and things
#
like that. Even in relationships where the wife is a stay at home wife or mother, even in those
#
relationships, I'm saying that there is equal vulnerability that can be shown by both partners.
#
It's not necessary anymore, but we are still somehow teaching our boys those problematic values
#
and forcing them to hold up themselves to this unreal standard. So that's definitely a problem
#
that affects men. And then I think on the women's side, there is a lot of feeling of not being heard
#
enough in your own marriages, in your own homes, by your own family. So that that also leads to
#
women opening up more easily when they are given the chance because we are taught we are silenced
#
right from an early age. Like I said, you know, like achchi ladkya zor se nahi hasti, achchi ladkya zyada
#
nahi bolti. So these things are taught to us from a very early stage. And so we have bottled up a lot.
#
And there is there is obviously much more disadvantage and discrimination that we are
#
facing. And we have nowhere to voice it, at least not in our immediate relationships in most cases.
#
So that's another reason why women kind of open up quite freely and with with each other. And that
#
is not new even, you know, I mean, even in I think my grandmom's generation, I have known aunts and
#
all having this delicious conversation, which you would just want to be a fly on the wall and
#
drink it all up, kya achcha ye bhi hota tha, family me hume ye pata hi nahi tha, like stuff like that.
#
And men are talking about OLD and and sorry, what was it, ODL and all those things. So there,
#
that's what it's it's it's that difference has been there forever of women's conversation being
#
more rich. And it's a it's a issue, I think, on both sides. So tell me about how you sort of arrived
#
at your voice for the newsletter, because one of the things I really like about it, and I think I
#
mentioned this at the start when you asked for my feedback, is one, of course, is a personal tone,
#
which makes the reader relate to what you're talking about. But also, you've managed to find
#
just the right balance of lightness and seriousness within that. And part of how you do this is also
#
by using memes creatively. See, if you've written a book, you won't have been able to use GIFs in
#
it and all that. Yeah. And there is a danger of overdoing that. But in your case, it's just the
#
right light touch. You put it there, but you put it there in such a way that it kind of makes you
#
smile, but it doesn't trivialize the subject. And then you're kind of going on with it. So how did
#
you sort of arrive at this voice? What was your thinking behind it? Like how intentional was it?
#
So one thing was that humor has always been a part of my life. Growing up, my dad was a very funny
#
guy. He used to be laughing a lot. My brother is probably the funniest person I know. So there was
#
always humor as a coping mechanism, as a defense mechanism. There is a lot of humor in the family,
#
in my personality. I mean, probably not the most world-class jokes, but it is...
#
Yeah, you can say it's humor may be imposter syndrome.
#
I know it's terrible. So much unlearning needed. Anyway, so humor has always been a big part of my
#
life. So for me, that was also important. I like it when people say that, you know, your writing made
#
me laugh or even chuckle or even smile. And these are, like we discussed, these are difficult topics,
#
sometimes heavy topics. And I also want my audience to keep wanting to come back. And,
#
you know, I myself read so many writings about gender, which make you feel depressed and make
#
you feel sad and hopeless about life. And you don't want to go back there. There are serious
#
issues and people have tackled them in serious voices. And as a person with a taste that prefers
#
lightness and prefers entertainment, for me, I have not been able to watch a certain movie,
#
for example, if it's very serious and very, very stark in your face, horrible realities of life.
#
I am not able to consume that. And I find that it disturbs my mental balance, sanity and everything.
#
So I didn't want to inflict that on my readers, even though I'm talking about
#
difficult subjects. So that was a definite choice there, that it has to be funny, but again,
#
with the right balance of somehow in a way that doesn't trivialize it. And then Bollywood,
#
like I said, I'm a fan, it's been a part of a constant backdrop to my life growing up. So
#
that is what came naturally to me. And, you know, everyone says that, I think you also said that in
#
your writing course that don't look for the thing that you'll be the first person to write, you know,
#
that I'll be the one who'll introduce this to humanity. As I wait, you'll never find any subject
#
to write about because everything has been touched upon by someone or the other. But you are the only
#
you in the world. So your experiences, your lived experiences, your personality is what you bring to
#
it. So for me, it was also a conscious choice that I should write in a way that I talk to a friend.
#
I should write in the way that I normally would interact with people that's bringing my personality
#
to it. And so this was the most entertaining way that I could come up with. And it does evolve
#
with time. Sometimes there are very serious topics which I just cannot at all introduce any humor in.
#
Like I've written about domestic violence, miscarriages, abortions, these are not subjects
#
in which you can bring in Bollywood gifs. But for the most part, other subjects, which are a part
#
of everyday life, there is a lot of satire, sarcasm, gifs, memes, and people have appreciated a lot.
#
Like my readers, when they write back to me, they say that, you know, I love the way you highlight
#
these things and I want to, and it makes me want to keep coming back for more. And that's basically
#
mission accomplished, right? That a person did not feel turned off by the gruesome realities of life
#
and wants to actually read more about it. And sort of like the... That's what this is.
#
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I just love the way you, you know, start so many posts just by saying,
#
hello, which is sort of, so immediately one hears your voice and then, you know, it just kind of
#
flows naturally. And there's a lot of humor in it also. Maybe at some point, as we talk about the
#
individual subjects, I'll quote some of it. Now, before we get to talking about some of the
#
subjects you've tackled, and I actually very deliberately want to go subject by subject and
#
talk about a whole bunch of them, because I think that many of them will be eye-opening for many
#
people or something that all of them merit being spoken about. And, you know, I figured that to you,
#
they might seem, hey, the, you know, normal and the stuff of everyday life and what's a big deal
#
about it. But I just feel it all best talking about because what they have in common is that
#
it is both something that is in front of us and yet we do not see it. So for that reason alone.
#
But before we go there, one sort of final meta question in terms of how has the response
#
to womaning in India been from people? How has the response been from women? And I would imagine
#
there are two kinds of responses from men. So, you know, tell me a little bit about these responses
#
and, you know, how they've come your way, what they've meant to you. Okay, so I think we discussed
#
this yesterday when we were talking about what we'll talk about. And I said that there's a whole
#
unseen part of womaning that we should talk about, which is what is not published out there, what
#
happens after I put out a piece. And it's always like my favorite time is right after I've put a
#
piece out because that's when the responses start coming in and somebody will write a long email
#
back to me, somebody will send me a WhatsApp message, somebody will retweet on Twitter with
#
a comment of their own. And often sometimes it's even happened that, you know, I've put out a piece
#
with five stories and then the most dark story has come back as feedback to me that, oh, you know,
#
this happened to me too. And by the way, here's what happened. And I was like, my God, this is
#
the story which should have been the centerpiece of what I wrote. And so I love the feedback I
#
get because it's often very personal. It's not just that thumbs up. It's not just that. It's
#
very, very personal. It's that, you know, this happened to me in my life. My mother-in-law said
#
this. My father said that. My boss said this in my colleague did that. And people, especially
#
women will connect with real examples from their life. And you mentioned men have two types of
#
responses. Actually men have one type of response and women have two. I was surprised for me as
#
well. So men will, the one response I get is appreciation from men because the rest of the
#
men will ignore it. It's very easy to ignore things, right? When you are living in a privileged life.
#
Like we spoke about caste. Now I used to really pride myself for a long part of my life that
#
I don't even know what caste I belong to. Such a matter of pride. See how uncaste I am.
#
But then later I realized that it's a privilege that is available only to upper caste people that
#
or forward caste people that you don't know what caste you are. If you are from a backward caste,
#
you will be made aware of your caste by the world, right? So just the fact that you don't know what
#
caste you are, defines, shows what caste you are. And it's a privilege. And there's so much happening
#
around me at all times, which has to do with caste, which I don't even see because my privilege has
#
made my life a smooth highway. Why should I think about the Uvadh Khabar Rasta on the side, right?
#
And that's how I also think about what it must be like for men. So even like I said, the most
#
well-meaning men, their life is so comfortable with all these privilege that they don't even
#
know they have. What is the incentive? Why should they worry about other people living a more
#
difficult life? Of course, yes, one incentive is that these other people are your own wife,
#
your own mother, daughter, our mother and sister. But other than that, if you just think about it
#
as the comfort of privilege, it happens to all of us and we are all guilty of it. All of us who are
#
privileged on one axis or the other. So men will either ignore or because they are too privileged
#
and why should they care about a woman writer or the ones who read are genuinely, they send me
#
things like, you know, this is an education. I look forward to it every week. Every week,
#
you make me aware of something that I never thought about. And they've been super supportive.
#
There's a friend who is a CEO running his own firm now. And he read the post I wrote about lack
#
of women friendly infrastructure in workplaces. And he said, I am installing sanitary pad vending
#
machines in my office toilet. As soon as I finished reading this post, I was like,
#
I'm doing this right now. So, you know, I've had such tangible impact from my readers and
#
male readers have been nothing but kind because those who are unkind will not read.
#
Women on the other hand have had a polar opposite response. So one is, of course,
#
a vast majority of women who support it, who love it, who say that, you know, it felt like you were
#
speaking my words. This is what I always wanted to say. It was like reading my own inner voice.
#
And I'm so happy you gave voice to this particular thing, because this really bothered me. And like
#
I said, a lot of personal stories and very rich love that I get from them. And then there are women
#
who are offended, like violently offended by it. I've had women shout at me on the phone,
#
that what are you doing? What do you want to write? What are you doing? You are corrupting
#
the minds of people. And I've had women like shout at me and I've had visceral violent responses to
#
womaning. And I've always wondered that, you know, going in even I thought like you'd said just now
#
that men might hate it, but most women will like it. But then when I thought about it deeper, I
#
thought, you know, these are often women who have lived for years and decades in that restricted
#
lifestyle and in that prison of gender roles, that I am a woman, it is my job to stand up on
#
Diwali and fry pakodas for everyone or whatever. The XYZ gender role has been a part of their
#
identity for so many decades and they've lived it for so many decades that now if you question it,
#
it makes them feel like I lived my life wrong, or I could have lived it better. Or, you know,
#
this piece of writing is highlighting something that has gone terribly wrong with my life and I
#
don't want to pull on that thread. So that's why women often have a very visceral response. So my
#
strongest, harshest critics have been women, not men. That's very strange. So like, how do they get
#
in touch with you? Like when you mentioned that someone shouted at you on the phone?
#
Where does this interaction start? Do they kind of cold call you or just connect with you or the
#
blue just to tell you that they hated it so much? No, so the cold hatred comes from via email or
#
something. Sometimes angry mails will come. But this phone call shouting happened because I was
#
actually talking to a lady about some other story. And then she said she was in her late 50s or 60s,
#
early 60s. And she said that one issue that nobody talks about is late age care and how
#
women are made responsible for caregiving for their in-laws, but not their parents.
#
So at a very senior age, when a person is bedridden, has to be cleaned, has to be bathed,
#
you have to do like very, very intimate care for that person. At that age, it will not be the son
#
who will be asked to do that. It will be the daughter-in-law. Even though if you think about
#
it, our parents have cleaned our poop when we were kids, we should be the ones doing it for them when
#
we grow up. But no, the men will not be asked to do it. Their wives will be asked to do it.
#
And conversely, the wives are not often allowed to do it for their own parents,
#
because their daughter-in-law will do it. So this was a subject I hadn't thought of because
#
stage of life. I have not reached that stage of life where you're caregiving for your parents.
#
But I was like, oh, wow, this is insightful. I've never thought of this. But I don't have
#
enough friends in that age group either who are at that stage of life. So can you introduce me
#
to some people, some more women who will tell me more stories about this and I'll build a
#
piece around it. So then she gave me numbers of some women and she said so-and-so is doing for
#
her in-law, so-and-so has her own mother is in an old age home, but she's doing it for her father-in-law
#
or something like that. So she gave me a couple of numbers and one of the numbers I called and
#
that lady thought that somehow there was a miscommunication. She thought I am calling to
#
write a very positive story about what a great daughter-in-law she is. But when I asked her,
#
I said, do you not feel that you have the right to caregiving for your mother or should your
#
husband be the one contributing towards caregiving for your in-laws? At least contributing if not
#
doing it himself. There's no shame in caring for your parents-in-law, but why only one gender?
#
So then I think the line of questioning was something I assumed she was expecting because
#
there was an interlocutor between us who had told me that this person is at the same stage
#
of life, but I suppose there was a miscommunication. So she did not at all agree with the point of view
#
that I was coming to it with. So she was like, you have an agenda against women and against
#
culture and society and so she scolded me a lot on the phone. So I said, sorry, ma'am,
#
you had some miscommunication. It's okay. I'm sorry. I hurt your feelings. I think we'll drop it here.
#
Then I cut the call and then she sent me a lot of abusive messages on WhatsApp. I mean, see,
#
that's what I'm talking about. There are threats that people don't want you to pull at in their
#
life. It's like the boss who got upset with me because I quit the service because he's in the
#
service, right? He felt like it is a criticism. It's a statement I'm making on his life choices.
#
Yeah. I remember once I'd written this column about how it is immoral to have children,
#
right? Partly meant to be provocative, but the argument of course is flawless. The argument
#
basically being that you should not do something to people without their consent and it is wrong
#
to cause people pain or to kill them. Basically when you're having kids, you are guaranteeing
#
that they will feel pain and they will die and there is no way of taking their consent and
#
therefore it's wrong. So that was my provocative argument and I've never got trolled by anyone.
#
I've been trolled by the right. I've been trolled by the left. I've been trolled by Shah Rukh Khan
#
fans. I've been trolled on religious grounds. No one has told me like parents suddenly came out
#
and told me. Yeah. And I was just thinking that, hey, why are you taking it so personally?
#
People make choices and which is also by the way something that you've kind of written about
#
elsewhere and we'll kind of come to that. So like I was sort of looking at all your posts and
#
they seem to be fitting in a bunch of broad categories like women having to conform to
#
stereotypes, women living in a world designed for men, violence and women, what only women go
#
through, women hobbling themselves and so on and so forth. You mentioned that the way that you
#
prefer to think about them is what women go through in offices, what women go through in public spaces,
#
what women go through at home. So which of these categories should we sort of start talking about
#
and addressing? Yeah. And the fourth is your own image, self-image. Your own self-image and
#
your interior. We also like imposter syndrome is the best example, right? The way we think about
#
ourselves is also colored by gender. Yeah. Let's start with workplace. Let's start with workplace.
#
You have a great post which asks the question, can women even do jobs? And so tell me a little
#
bit about the stereotypes that kind of apply here about the kind of jobs that women can do or can't
#
do. And once they do have a job, what they are expected to, you know, what is their role,
#
what their role typically becomes within offices? Yeah. So what kind of jobs women have,
#
we have the same kind of jobs that men do, right? But there is a well-documented phenomena called
#
the brilliance bias, which is that when I ask you to think of 10 brilliant people, you'll probably
#
name nine men and most people will name 10 men because we think that brilliance is a very male
#
trait. And for reasons that we've discussed before, like nobody knows the name of Einstein's wife.
#
She was as brilliant as he was, but brilliance bias, we think that Einstein is the history has
#
also taught us that Einstein was there. The history is paved by great big men, right? So
#
therefore there is an assumption when a man does a job that he is competent to do that job, fair or
#
unfair. And there is, but when a woman is in the same position and has come to it through the same
#
channel, by the way, having overcome many hurdles, which are unseen, she's constantly expected to
#
prove her competence to do that job. So this happens especially in STEM, where brilliance bias
#
is the most in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, where it's a male-dominated field.
#
And over and over women are asked, can you do this? Are you able to do this? I've spoken to
#
women who are senior data scientists in big companies, Google and all, and who've had
#
youngsters come up to them and explain what is HTTP. Young men will come and be like,
#
you won't know, I'll tell you. Like that. So it's not even, it's a cross hierarchy, like it's not
#
even that you will respect a person because they're more senior to you, because she's a woman,
#
you'll assume that she doesn't know what she's doing or she's here because of some other reasons,
#
not because of her competence. So that's a pain point that women have in many different aspects
#
of their jobs reiterated that it's assumed that I don't know how to do my job. And this plays out
#
in many ways. So one very interesting thing that a woman told me, which I'm yet to write about is
#
failure, the permission to fail. Men have the permission to fail over and over again,
#
and will be given many more chances to fail than a woman. If as a woman, you fail once,
#
immediately you will be labeled, because her child failed, because her wedding failed,
#
because she's single, that's why she failed, anything can happen. And somehow it will be,
#
that failure will be associated with you for life. So women don't have that much scope to fail.
#
Women also don't have access to mentors at work for this reason, because either male mentors are
#
creepy themselves, or there is an assumption that there's something creepy going on between a male
#
mentor and female mentee. Even if it's completely harmless between them, people will perceive it
#
in a very different way than that relationship between two men. What you spoke about, what kind
#
of jobs they end up doing. So that's a post I wrote about, are you the office mom? So this has
#
happened to me, it has happened to many women, that lunch time is over, so give Maima the menu,
#
she will order. Women are better at this. And okay, so and so, do you want to organize something,
#
get together? Or outing? Come on, Maima, you do it, ladies are better at this, creative stuff,
#
you guys are creative. So it will be wrapped up in a compliment, but it is ultimately that
#
this is not a job good enough for us to do, so you be the office mom. And so women are often taking
#
notes at meetings, women will be the one running a PPT, I have done a lot of down-down-down-button
#
press work as well. I did it in PMO, I did it in front of the Prime Minister as well, I pressed
#
down-button. So like this is often the task for which women are chosen, that we make good
#
secretaries according to. And you can be at any level of seniority or professional achievement,
#
these tasks will come to women. Another is being heard in meetings. So another thing that has also
#
personally happened to me, and I've written a post about it, that people, and not just men,
#
people suffer from selective deafness. So the chair of a meeting, whether it is a man or a woman,
#
will give more weightage and attention to a man speaking than he or she does to a woman speaking.
#
So it's happened to me that I've been talking and somebody will interrupt me suddenly and talk over
#
me and the entire room's attention shifts to that person very seamlessly, as if it makes me question
#
was I even talking, did I imagine that I was talking. People have repeated what I've said,
#
sometimes they are waiting more with a little creativity and they are given credit for
#
the idea that I had proposed. I had a colleague to whom I actually had a conversation with,
#
he was a nice guy, but he used to interrupt me a lot and talk over me. So because he was a nice guy,
#
I thought, let me try having a rational conversation. So outside the meeting room once I told him that,
#
listen, you know, you do this. And he was like, no, I don't do this. What are you doing? Very full
#
denial. And then next time I was talking in a meeting and he did this. And then I just looked
#
at him and I gave him a smile. And the horror that descended on his face, because then he realized
#
that, oh my God, I was actually doing this to her. And people are doing it unconsciously. Like by now,
#
we are conditioned to tune out a female sound meter. This is programmed in us, we are conditioned
#
to accept this, both men and women. So it's all these ways in which it plays out, these biases
#
about women's incompetence. Yeah, I'm going to quote you a little bit. In one of your posts,
#
you've spoken about, you know, how men are so much more assertive and how women are not even
#
allowed to be assertive. In the sense that you write quote, men negotiate their roles all the
#
time. Such men are called driven and focused and go getters. But I personally experienced what
#
happens when a woman tries the same. You are either too meek or too aggressive. I don't know
#
any woman who has managed to hit that mythical sweet spot between the two. Stop quote. And later
#
on in your post about selective deafness in meetings, you gave the moral of the story as
#
quote, a woman who is quiet is incompetent. A woman who speaks up is a fearsome terror.
#
There is no middle ground available. Stop quote. And you also quoted someone called Pallavi,
#
who is giving her suggestion for how to deal with this. And her suggestion is that whenever you have
#
a suggestion, frame it as a question. So she says, quote, I started phrasing my opinions as questions
#
to get heard. I would intentionally sound stupid to make my point. For example, if I found a big
#
gap in their balance sheet or profit and loss statement, instead of saying that is wrong,
#
I would say, why do we put it that way? And in the process of answering my stupid question,
#
they would realize their mistake and figure out what they needed to do to correct it.
#
Six months of this led to them making enormous changes, putting me in charge of reviews and
#
making sure I was part of every boardroom meeting. Stop quote. And at least she got her due in terms
#
of, you know, her critical thinking recognized and being part of every boardroom meeting.
#
But in general, you know, we've spoken about that added layer, which comes in when women
#
are experiencing the world. But is there also an added layer which women have to use when they are
#
deciding how to interact with the world? For example, if I am saying something to anybody
#
in a meeting or with a friend or whatever, I won't have to think about how will this go down?
#
How will I be perceived? Will I be perceived as too forward or too demanding or whatever?
#
I don't need to think like that. I just say it. Is that a layer also that women always have with
#
them? You have to actually think about how your words will be perceived, not just what you are
#
saying. I mean, I think I spend more time thinking about how I'll be perceived than the content of
#
what I have to say. I'm usually quite clear on what my opinion is on things. But the packaging
#
is where most of my energy goes. And that's true of most women. Like you gave the example of Pallavi.
#
Yeah, I mean, it's a success story in one way, but to me, it's also extremely unfortunate that
#
somebody has to package their intelligent points as stupid questions in order to be heard. Because
#
so much energy goes in this shit, where she could be doing something more productive for her.
#
Yeah, I mean, I used to compare at one point, again, when this penny dropped, that is the
#
expression. So when this penny dropped for me was a moment when I suddenly realized that me and I
#
had a male colleague, we used to work at the same level. And I realized the kind of emails we write
#
are so different. Like, so suppose you are my colleague, and you have to say a meeting is
#
postponed, you will write dear so and so this meeting is postponed to 530pm. Best Amit. That's
#
the kind of email that my colleague used to write. I would write dear sir, due to some unfortunate
#
and unforeseen circumstances and technical issues we are facing. I apologize that this meeting has
#
been postponed. It is now going to be scheduled at this time. I will keep you updated if there's a
#
change. I apologize once again for the inconvenience. Warm regards. I always use warm because you have
#
to just regards also rude. Warm regards. So that's how I write emails. It's such a waste of my time
#
and effort and energy and creative writing for such a simple message. And I would see his messages
#
I would be like, yeah, as I email Malik don't I'll become famous within one week this person
#
writes rude emails. And this again has been shown social experiments have been done. There have been
#
people I think there was an experiment where woman wrote some emails as a man or a man wrote
#
emails as a woman and they were perceived very differently and they were shocked by how a person
#
who's perceived to be a woman people take offense much quicker and will try to talk down to them
#
explain simple things to them like they're dumb. And when you perceive it's a man suddenly the
#
respect goes up. So these are all well documented phenomena that we all experience and it's a huge
#
waste of our time effort energy. But I have to do it in order to be seen as someone worthy of
#
being listened to by people. Yeah. And the phenomenon you've pointed out in meetings that
#
women are always getting interrupted. It's like you said nothing at all. You'll say X and then
#
some guy will say X and he'll get the tallies for it. And I've noticed this even in panel
#
discussions like the next time you're on YouTube and you're watching some panel discussion and
#
there's a male moderator just keep an eye on who he's interrupting and how much. Oh yeah. And some
#
people will of course interrupt everybody but in general women get just interrupted so much more.
#
Absolutely. You know I have that lens so I do see that. First of all most panels are manels
#
because they'll be only men. And when there is one lone woman she'll definitely get the
#
least air time on the panel irrespective of how senior or how much of an expert she is in that
#
subject matter the least air time on the panel will go to the woman because everyone is always
#
talking over her and interrupting her. Tell me also about physical spaces because to me one of
#
the best metaphors for how we live in a world designed by men for men is air conditioning.
#
And you've also written a post about it. I'd written about it three or four years ago I think
#
when Me Too happened. You know how air conditioning was designed in the 1950s and 60s when all
#
offices were occupied mostly by men. And so it kept the male body temperature into account and
#
that too assuming that men are wearing suits or 21 degrees was like the default. Now the truth is
#
that it's too cold for women. Women feel cold at 21. You know they need something warmer and yet
#
the default is that you know every office today will be too cold for women because it's set at
#
that quote unquote male temperature. And therefore one thing that you point out is very common for
#
women to have is they'll have something called an office sweater because they know that there's no
#
way out. They've got to kind of deal with that. And you've also pointed out that this is also true
#
when it comes to having women's toilets and not just to say in Bihar where you point out
#
this particular place where there were seven women in an office of 300 but even in Kerala
#
where there were 100 women out of a staff of 300 and even there there's one ladies toilet as
#
compared to eight or ten ladies toilets. And you've also pointed out this another example which
#
another of the people who spoke to you gave that she was in this place where you know there were
#
enough women but there were only two toilets on the floor. It was an office in a five-star hotel
#
and there were both gents toilets. So she spoke to her boss and her boss said okay it's fair enough
#
one ladies toilet. And one people spread a rumor that she was having an affair with the boss because
#
why else would he agree to this. And two these guys would slink in after office hours and they
#
would pee all over the women's toilet because they were just so angry. And so these are really
#
two separate questions and one is that just in terms of workplaces do you see a growing awareness
#
or are women just saying that this is not a fight worth fighting we'll just satisfy.
#
You know even in your post on pregnancy you wrote about you know to punish a woman for being
#
pregnant she was actually put on a floor where there is no toilet she will have to go downstairs
#
because they want to make life uncomfortable for her because she leaves. So in workplaces do you
#
see the general attitude of the women being that okay we'll manage you know and you carry that
#
layer where whenever you enter a place you're quickly eyeing out where is the nearest toilet
#
when you need it. And that's one question and the second one is what is with this male anger.
#
You know that story I found it so disturbing that people are going after office hours and they're
#
peeing all over the women's toilet because they're upset that women have a toilet. I know right it's
#
like monkeys flinging feces at each other. Kindly tell me about this what is this monkeys. Monkeys
#
and they're angry they they shit in their hands and flee and they'll fling feces at each other
#
and they're angry. Why do you think that is? That is a primal instinct which these men are also
#
following. Let's see all over the toilet that we don't like. A how do women cope and B why are men
#
so angry? Like you know which is why I thought when I asked you that question earlier about the
#
reactions to womaning I thought that there will be two kinds of anger. As you're pointing out that
#
angry kind probably doesn't read or perhaps even can't read you know but in general there is this
#
anger. So yeah 100 percent. So first part is about women how do they cope. I think most women suffer
#
in silence that is the majority reaction. Very few women are like me who will make a nuisance of
#
themselves and and the lady in my story who went and told at least had the guts to go and talk to
#
the boss about it. So first of all most senior professionals are male glass ceiling. Because
#
they are men they are incapable of thinking about these things because who has the time to
#
profit loss market share. Okay who's going to sit and think about is my do my employees have
#
enough women toilets and what are the facilities in these toilets. No one has time to think about it.
#
So mostly the bosses are men and so they don't have even it's a complete blind spot for them and
#
most women who are working at these lower level positions don't have the voice or the agency or
#
the courage to talk about it you know. The word toilet is not something that women will use very
#
freely around men anyway because of all the cultural filters that we have. Like I am the only
#
person here probably who's talking this much about toilet. You use the word dirty on my show which I
#
think is a first. Thank you for that. Yeah so that's what so that I mean this is this is very
#
shocking for most people. So in cultured society women are not able to voice these
#
demands or expectations and women are also in our own way conditioned to accept this as the
#
lot of life not question it. This is how women I think for the vast majority of women cope like
#
this because often they are working at a junior level compared to men and culturally they have
#
been trained to be quiet. So most women suffer in silence. Why is there anger in men? I think
#
womaning would also make more men angry if it had a tangible impact on their life right. So I don't
#
think a newsletter passively sitting on the internet is really making any tangible difference
#
to their life but if it did then they would be angry too. I know a friend of mine who's been an
#
active supporter and she's many of these stories like all the names are changed by the way the
#
names you're taking are not the real names of the women. So you've already spoken one or two of her
#
stories so she has been an active supporter and she reads it regularly and she shows it to her
#
husband also sometimes that yeh meri kaani hai kabhi kabhi when it's a professional story personal
#
nahi batati hai. So recently she was telling me that she was having a fight with her husband about
#
some gender roles in the house that she was constantly caregiving for both children and
#
she had a trip opportunity coming up and for foreign something travel and he said no you're
#
not going who's going to take care of the kids and all and they had like a serious fight about it
#
and at one point he said ke yeh sab tum yeh womaning padke seekh rahi ho na.
#
So for me it was a matter of great pride that it is a man is seeing this as something that empowered
#
a woman enough to question the inhuman conditions he is enforcing on his wife but also that is the
#
only place where it had as soon as it started having a real impact on his real life that's when
#
he got upset with it and violently upset with it anything that actually will take away some
#
of your male privilege will hurt you that is a point where and and again people seeing this as
#
a zero-sum game right like here it is a zero-sum game there are only two toilets toh agar ek toilet
#
ladies ban gaya toh mera ek toilet kam ho gaya as a man toh I am angry ke unko kyun de di orto ko
#
otha ke mera toilet toh therefore seeing not seeing it as a larger thing where women have been
#
suffering for so many years I am the one who was occupying their rightful toilet and now it's only
#
going back to the person who it truly belonged to that's not how they'll see it they'll see it as
#
I've for the last five years been peeing in this toilet suddenly who are you to tell me I can't
#
anymore so let me fling some feces at you. I love that line unko kyun de diya mera toilet otha ke
#
which is quote of the episode what you also kind of point out is how and this is again something
#
men will kind of miss or just take for granted how there's a boys club in every office and it
#
stops women from kind of getting ahead like there was a 2020 howard study you've cited
#
which says quote over a four-year period male employees assigned a male manager were promoted
#
faster than their female counterparts with no observable difference in performance
#
women in turn were promoted at the same rate whether assigned to a male manager or female
#
manager male employees benefited from the higher rates of social interactions with their male
#
managers top code and this might mean you know after work you're going out for a drink with your
#
male colleagues which women sometimes can't do because hey they got to get back home there's
#
food to cook the all that other stuff is happening or they may not even want to you know it can just
#
manifest in working late in office where the woman will be like but the men will stay till
#
nine ten o'clock yeah and you know I think one of the people you spoke to commented on the actually
#
the same amount of work is getting done men are just stretching it out it's like Parkinson's law
#
right work expands to fill the time available you know so I remember
#
and that obviously leads to a bonding among all the people who are there and
#
all that shit is happening so how does one look at this because then what happens here in a sense
#
is that all the men have the potential to form this closely knit community of people who are
#
doing all of these things together and all the women individually are kind of outside of this
#
yeah right how does that pervert workplaces and how are there ways out of it because these are all
#
individual choices you know I can well you know if you ask a guy he'll say that listen I'll go
#
out drinking with whoever I choose right you know no one is stopping her from coming so these are
#
all individual choices and yet collectively there's a massive problem for everybody so you
#
know what are what are sort of your thoughts yeah so you've summarized the problem perfectly that
#
it is a close-knit boys club and men given that incentives are aligned to it that by staying late
#
at office or going out for drinks after work I am getting that exclusive access to my boss and I am
#
able to be party to big decisions being taken where after hours when women have all gone home
#
so why shouldn't I capitalize on that so I again this is you know we talked about how earlier
#
you have a problem with government system but not the people in that system so same here I
#
have a problem with the system not the men and women in it because like you said these are
#
individual choices that they are making based on their life conditions and we can't say that
#
toilets will be made when caste system ends so we can't say that first end gender discrimination
#
then we will do something about boys club so we can't say that let the women first become equal
#
partners to their husband and let their husbands take care of their children so the woman can come
#
here and have a drink with us as colleagues that's not going to happen anytime soon so I think the
#
simpler solution and that's why I started with workplaces because it has a little more simpler
#
solutions that simpler problems to solve this is on the boss basically if you are the if you are
#
taking important decisions about the about strategies and professional decisions are being
#
made outside the office hours or the office space on a sutta break or over drinks later or over the
#
pool table if professional decisions are being taken in these settings then that is a toxic
#
workplace for a woman to be in because you are telling you're creating a system where an employee
#
has no choice but to stay after hours and that could even be a man it could be a man who says I
#
do want to go back home to my kids or even to watch tv after hours and I don't want to sit here up
#
beyond 6 pm or beyond working hours so you have created an incentive system where people are
#
forced to make these choices so men and women they're all reacting to the best of their own
#
own respective limitations and circumstances but the simple solution to this is that the
#
that bosses need to reflect on this and and see that are we really giving an undue advantage
#
to a colleague who's able to go to stay longer or hang out after hours and there is up to a certain
#
limit it is team building beyond which it is a boys club so you know things like meet on
#
a meeting after hours why not meet on a dedicate an afternoon and invite families let people bring
#
their kids and their spouses it's a much more wholesome environment where women can also
#
participate and you can do team building in a more healthier environment more equitable environment
#
so there are small steps like this many of which I've mentioned in the post also
#
but it's right now at least at the workplace these biases are relatively easier sorted out
#
but it needs that amount of reflection from the CEOs organizations bosses yeah and the key point
#
is that it's actually in the self-interest of the bosses and the CEOs to take this into account like
#
I keep referring to this study which I discovered through Philip Tetlock's book super forecasting
#
where he points out that when a group is making a decision the most important factor in the quality
#
of the decision is not the education or the intelligence of the people involved it is a
#
diversity the more diverse a group you get you will get better decisions which when you think
#
about it is so obvious that it even seems banal that obviously you have different viewpoints
#
colliding you're more likely to reach a good decision so it is therefore in the interest of
#
bosses to build diverse workplaces and I think there was a study in the US a while back a few
#
years ago which also showed that companies which discriminate do worse in the market so purely from
#
a from a position of self-interest you want a diverse workplace and in this particular context
#
that means involving the women as deeply in decision making as a manner involved and a boys
#
club really gets in the way of that because then you're kind of shutting the women out but
#
you know how you get to those solutions becomes something you know it's complicated as you've
#
pointed out another point that you mentioned in the context of offices is the different ways in
#
which we treat maternity and paternity okay maternities it's understood that even if it's
#
fought but it's understood that women need to go they need to spend time with their kids and all
#
of that but paternity leave even when it is there on the rolls you know men are frowned upon if they
#
actually take it I think you quoted someone who mentioned that people in his office when he took
#
paternity leave they told him quote you will understand at the time of appraisal that you
#
shouldn't have taken it stop quote the expectation being ki theek hai sunday ko bachcha hua hai lekin
#
wednesday ko aap office aaja ho log congratulation bolenge aur phir aap meeting pe lag jao
#
kyunki ghar pe koi hai jo sambhal rahe hain right sambhal rahe hain I'm sorry my this is not
#
it's a Bengali thing it's a Bengali thing yeah I blame my half Bengali thing for this and you know
#
so yeah tell me a little bit about this because you know there are many men who now take fatherhood
#
seriously hopefully and who who want to participate you know like one of the men you interviewed who
#
said I wanted to be with my child that is reason enough you know but you know how are attitudes
#
towards this evolving and if it does hurt careers if your bosses are going to feel that hey this guy
#
is not committed enough you know why is he going back home wife to her so does it then create a
#
disincentive towards that kind of caring parenthood if your office environment is kind of like this
#
and does one see does one see a drift towards change and this is perhaps a separate question
#
so you can take it after this but in the office context does one see a drift towards change
#
you know in a longer-term thing even if it's slow you know is a change happening
#
yeah so before I talk about the professional side of what men face at the workplace I want to also
#
talk underscore the importance of paternity leave on the personal front so yes India is has a very
#
progressive maternity leave policy six months compulsory leave which is by global standards
#
one of the best so we've done well on that front at least we are giving women the time they need
#
at least we are giving women the time to recuperate after childbirth and get into I'll actually
#
interject and point out that as Prakriti editor I'd commission a bunch of pieces on this Devika
#
Kaer Suman Joshi a bunch of different people have written pieces and the maternity law that we have
#
in India has actually hurt women more than helped them as a lot of well-intentioned laws do in the
#
sense that women's employment has certainly gone down because of it and this is something we
#
predicted before it happened because you're changing the incentives so the intentions were
#
great the outcomes have been bad and I still feel that while it's a problem you absolutely have to
#
address a law is such a blunt weapon and can backfire so spectacularly as seems to have happened
#
in this case but I'm sorry carry on yeah and also the the solution I want to propose also addresses
#
that problem and I agree with you that the law has been very blunt but also I mean it's it's
#
if we think of it as a baby steps evolution so first thing at least give women time to recuperate
#
and uh at least six months of breastfeeding for the infant is good and so on and so forth so for
#
all these reasons good to bond with the babies but I also think that that is exactly where
#
it is lies the genesis of gender roles in a marriage and in a and therefore later in a household
#
and honestly if you had to tell me that maima you can change one thing in the world I would say
#
change this may give all men equal and compulsory paternity leave so first of all compulsory makes
#
it uh not no longer voluntary like right now there is it is suggested and then the boss will
#
give them key of appraisal and then make you come to office anyway or sometimes the man anyway
#
doesn't want to go so he will he will use the boss as an excuse the reason why I think one
#
one thing I would change in the world is compulsory paternity leave my bigger reason is
#
personal not professional which is that I feel that up to a marriage know without children
#
it is relatively still possible to maintain an equal marriage in the relatively equal relationship
#
where both partners have their own personal space professional space have their own identities
#
their own and then pursuing their things in life growing together love blah blah the critical point
#
at which beyond which gender roles take over and and in my opinion 99.99 percent of marriages
#
in India are unequal and I'm just leaving 0.01 percent for so that people don't get angry at me
#
because not all marriages hashtag not all marriages so easily but otherwise it's it's I have never
#
met a any couple which has an equal marriage including my own and that happens the critical
#
point is when you have your first baby because when the after having a baby is a transformative
#
experience for the primary caregiver I'm not saying mother I'm saying primary caregiver
#
whoever is bonding with a baby in their infancy their brain goes through biological chemical changes
#
they become much more aware of all the you know primal risks to the baby safety we are all
#
animalistic programming which is that when you're caring for an infant you're always on the lookout
#
for what all can hurt them which is how in my house you'll find no sharp edges anywhere like
#
fully baby-proofed and I walk into a room and now my brain automatically goes to all the sharp edges
#
where a child can get hurt even if there's no child in the room so that's that's the kind of
#
reprogramming that your brain goes through in those early months and there's a bonding with a
#
child and then there's an awareness of all the mental load that goes with the child which is
#
there's all of these small small things which add up and over time in the mother's mind because
#
mothers are the primary caregivers in hundred percent of Indian marriages in the mother's mind
#
all of this reprogramming has happened and the father is not around when this is happening
#
because there is no compulsory paternity leave and if it is it's government gives 15 days which it's
#
which is I think the best right now because private sector me too I've heard of men who
#
were doing emailing from the hospital also so even monday to sunday co baby or wednesday co
#
office be nice literally on the day they are working so it's it's it's much worse in private
#
sector and but also there in every sector so making it compulsory forces the man to be there
#
even if it is I'm not saying that all men need to be forced to be around their kid
#
but many men will think of it as yes fatherhood is important to me but also at the same time
#
their primary identity in their mind is that I am general manager so and so I am senior associate
#
so and so I am vice president so and so that is to my mind most men have their primary identity as
#
that whereas for me as a woman I also had that primary identity until three years back and then
#
my brain got reprogrammed and today my primary identity is that I'm a mother if you ask me who
#
are you first thing I will think of is that so that that identity shift does not happen in men
#
because they are not around in those initial crucial months and I think if they were around
#
for that period of for that period then even the most hardened of men would actually come to see
#
life from the from the perspective of a caregiver which is how women see it and it would equalize
#
so much it would solve so many problems and coming to what you said about how policy has
#
unintentionally disadvantaged women if you made it compulsory for men also then that disadvantage
#
and mismatch goes right now the company has no added advantage in hiring a man over a woman
#
because there is another aspect that once I wrote this post HR head of one of the biggest startups in
#
India actually discovered it after I wrote this because he had written a book about it and then
#
he wrote to me and we did a call and he said that I want to talk to you about this and drill down
#
and his thing was that Indian government has forced it on companies and it is it is unviable
#
for many companies to give you full salary for six months and in many other countries the
#
government subsidizes it or you have between a couple you have one year of leave we can divide
#
it but the government will subsidize our firms for taking it so there are many models of making
#
it more doable and practical and viable but at the end of the day I feel very strongly that
#
compulsory and equal paternity leave for men and it has to be the lever I feel very strongly about
#
the social problem you're describing obviously but I feel equally strongly that a course if
#
the coercive hand of the state will not solve it it will make it worse like first of all the reason
#
the maternity law backfired so spectacularly is for many firms is simply they're not viable
#
if you're a five person firm and you're hiring a sixth person yeah you know it is not rational
#
to hire someone who could then just go off on a paid leave for six months you can't afford it your
#
company could go down if something like that happens now it is unfortunate but it is rational
#
and I think Tim Lee's had once forecast at the time this law came out that it would lead to a
#
loss of between eight to eleven lakh jobs for women so forgive me if I get the figure wrong
#
but I'll link to those pieces by Devika and Suman in the show notes and the problem that would then
#
happen if you may you're saying that make it make a compulsory paternity leave for men as well
#
which would solve the problem it actually wouldn't because then it would create a bias for hiring
#
unmarried men with whom this danger wouldn't be there like honestly any you know there are a lot
#
of social problems which can only be solved through voluntary means through social action
#
you bring the coercive hand of the state in it leads to all kinds of perverse outcomes
#
as has happened with the maternity leave act which has really harmed women you know you might think
#
intention is great you're guaranteeing something that every woman should be entitled to but the
#
point is she's not getting that job in the first place you know so you have to look at outcome and
#
not intentions which in my view is you know the most common mistake people make about public policy
#
no fair point only one response is that why would there be a bias for single men because
#
single men can also get married and have a baby just as a single woman is probabilistic thinking
#
a single man is less likely to be a father say within a short term period if he's single first
#
he has to get married then he'll have kids that's true of a single woman also right or single woman
#
also first has to get married and then have kids yeah i would imagine there would be more of a bias
#
against a newly married woman than against a single woman which is true even today but i'm
#
saying that between a single man and a single woman there would be not much difference yeah but
#
i'm saying why do you want to and let me also tell you also yeah i agree with you that coercive hand
#
of the state is not the answer no i'll tell you what the answer would be in my view yeah the
#
answer would be is what i would like to see like i always believe that the best regulation is
#
competition it doesn't come from the coercive hand of the state so what i would love to see is
#
companies competing yeah where companies can reach out and say we want the best talent if you're a
#
woman we'll give you six months maternity leave let somebody else say we'll give you eight months
#
let somebody say keep paternity leave six months we'll give you let them compete on that front
#
but before they compete on that front what is important is that those things six months
#
paternity leave etc etc become attractive enough for society at large for it to be viable for
#
companies to compete on that front and for that you need a change in social attitudes which
#
happens at a glacial pace which society might even go backwards sometimes but the point is
#
of course the hand of the state won't get this so that is just my sort of little no i don't know
#
about that because i was about to say what you said about competition because there are all these
#
gender rankings these days you know i mean and many companies will proudly put it on their website
#
ranked number one in so and so gender ranking great workplace for women so that is already
#
happening to some extent but it is in all of these you know tier one tier two polished companies where
#
white color office or ac under but what about the women who are working say in a public sector bank
#
or in a machine i agree with you but i'm saying that the coercive hand of the state is will make
#
their lives worse it's not even a partial solution it is not a solution at all it literally makes a
#
problem worse and i don't just mean in this context from maternity leave or whatever in literally
#
anything where the where the state passes regulation with a good intention you really need to look at
#
the outcomes i mean india's for example been hobbled so long by bad labor laws which are meant
#
to protect labor but have exactly the opposite impact uh and and we've suffered so deeply for
#
that you know and so on and so forth but that's a minor point i mean i uh you know solutions are a
#
different matter but i totally agree with you on the extent of the problem and if men were forced
#
to look after their kids for the first six months uh you know one would hope that at least some of
#
the blindness and the unseen nature of what it involves would go away yeah so i mean uh there
#
is no perfect answer right now on how it should be done because like you're saying the self-voluntary
#
thing will happen like it's like saying caste system so it's also that that difference is there
#
like for me personally i just became a mother three years back and if this law was not there
#
maybe like the u.s i would have been forced to come with my surgery stitches still unhealed and
#
come into work and sit at a desk crying because i'm still undergoing postpartum depression and my
#
baby is one week old baby is being handled by someone else that real impact my life it has
#
made my life tangibly better even though i agree with you that in the long run it has hurt women
#
professionally yeah i mean that's unseen right all the women who didn't have a job to begin with
#
because they never got hired because because it's perverted the incentives i totally agree with you
#
on the desirability of it but can it be enforced by the state is a yeah that's what so the way we
#
do it is different but i think my point and that i've made in the piece also is i'm not taking a
#
stand on how it should be done but this is something that will solve a huge amount of
#
gender issues not just at the workplace but also in our private lives yeah i i couldn't agree more
#
so let's let's now go to the other domain where women are kind of also stuck and there's there's
#
no getting away from it which is a domain of the home right and this is also where stereotypes
#
about what roles are can be particularly pernicious and you've written a great post which also became
#
incredibly viral i think it's one of your most popular posts called the raja beta syndrome
#
so tell me about raja beta what is raja beta so raja beta syndrome was one of those posts which i
#
wrote thinking ke yeh toh bahut obvious hai like you said you know yeh toh sabko pata hai isme kya hiye
#
as literally it was like a slow viewer quick at womaning and i wrote that post like yeh kahania toh sabko
#
pata hai chalo yeh lik dete hai is baar and and and somehow it it just caught on and and to this day i
#
get screenshots from people that you know i'm on so and so whatsapp group and randomly someone's
#
posted your raja beta piece there and i'll be like yeh abhi tak ghum raha hai but it has it took a life
#
of its own so raja beta syndrome is essentially that in the indian average indian family we will
#
treat our boys as royalty right from the day they're born and even before they're born we
#
are doing gender selection of children infants and fetuses but even the the and and and during
#
childhood obviously partial treatment to the son but the the interesting bit is that even after
#
they grow into adults we are continue to treat our sons like rajas and princes actually raj kumar
#
so and and and then it's a very common in the hindi belt at least for thing for
#
parents especially mothers to say yeh mera raja beta hai and that's how you show love
#
larger beta larger so so that's that's how many north indian parents and mothers especially will
#
show love to the child and tik hai for jab tak wo beta chota sa beta hai tik hai ab banao raja beta hai
#
and there is obviously no rani beti but fir bhi ab banao ab tik hai it's a it's a child ultimately
#
and it's getting love it's sad that the other child is not getting as much love but children
#
all children receive and deserve love so tik hai up to that point it's fine but the funny thing is
#
when you grow up and you're a 40 year old man and 60 year old man you're still the raja beta of the
#
house that's where it gets funny so this this piece is a compilation of many stories from women
#
about how many of them are in quote unquote equal marriages where the man is also doing the dishes
#
the man is also helping in the kitchen and couple especially before children like i said it is
#
possible to have some semblance of equality or equity and chal riya life waisey but suddenly
#
saasasur aake rahe na shiroinge and women have been said that you we've visibly see a difference
#
in our husbands that they just turn into some other creatures and they turn into this creature
#
called raja beta which is ke paani ka glass utha kar ke kitchen mein hi rakhna hai so there's a story
#
there about how there's this couple settled in london and she's the wife is working at her desk
#
and she tells the husband ke can you just refill my glass of water and he does it and the mother-in-law
#
who's visiting them is horrified and next time she's keeping an eye on that glass ke kab iska
#
paani thoda kamo and runs and picks up that glass and goes back to the kitchen to refill it ke kahin
#
mere raja beta ko ungli na uthaani par jaaye should not have to lift a finger and so similarly ke
#
bartan karte huye achha nahi lagta beta karta hua mai kar dungi so mothers-in-law are most guilty of
#
this don't disturb him i will do this there's a story of a mother whose breastfeeding mother
#
just gone back to work so life is as stressful as it can be and she says i come back home and
#
my mother-in-law is in the already in the kitchen the husband has reached before but he's watching
#
tv and mother-in-law has already got a list of chores ready for me when i still have to feed the
#
baby i still have come back after a long commute from work this fellow sitting at home working
#
from home and watching tv and if i if i try to involve him also in the chores she'll come and
#
physically body block me that nahi nahi usko disturb mat karo wo aaraam kar raha hai physically
#
body block me yeah that that happens so i mean so that's those were the stories that i got from
#
many women and i put them together and i used just from the movie Mughal-e-Azam and and how
#
you know dhileep kumar ki around sab log dance chal raha hai pyaar kiya toh darna kiya sab log usko
#
ake wo anarkali usko gulab deti hai aur raj mata is looking at him with those heart shaped eyes
#
and so that's that's pretty much how it plays out in most indian houses and it really struck a chord
#
like i said for me it was a very obvious almost banal thing that i wrote but then when i wrote
#
put it out women were like this and so to this day it's being circulated i keep getting messages
#
of people who just discovered it and loved it in fact one of your gifs there has this caption of
#
raj mata ji looking really upset and i love the caption uh which is raj mata when raja beta
#
accidentally does a chore and you've also sort of pointed out something that i found really amusing
#
that a couple of the women were i think talking about how normally my husband helps out but when
#
his parents come he will try to hide that he's helping out yeah you know which is a very
#
interesting kind of preference falsification because preference falsification is when you feel
#
one way but the general norm is something else so you don't show it right and normally the way
#
preference falsification plays out is that you feel something uh regressive right like but because
#
you're not supposed to say these things in a polite society you don't say it yeah you know
#
unless a switch is flicked or something and here is like the other way around that the guy actually
#
feels something progressive he feels he should help his wife but he's scared to kind of act out
#
on it in front of his mother which which or his parents or whatever which is right so preference
#
falsification is about hiding shameful feelings yeah and so that's the point i'm trying to make
#
that wanting to be an equal husband to your wife is a shameful feeling to this day another sort of
#
stereotype which hobbles women at home is the pressure to make babies right like uh you have
#
a post about this as well about how so many women are just looked as at as childbearing vessels
#
that if you haven't had a child it's a problem uh you know random uncles you meet once in eight
#
years will be saying when is the good news beta and so on and so forth at some point uh you know
#
one of your i think uh was it you you're writing about yourself or one of your guests where good
#
things happen at this gathering and everybody's congratulating you and all and then this auntie
#
lady type calls you to the side and instead of congratulating you about how well your career is
#
going she says yes that was me that was you yeah so tell me a little bit about how these pressures
#
play out because like one of the themes i've been exploring in past episodes is uh this distinction
#
between thick and thin desires where thick desires are desires which are kind of intrinsic to you
#
but thin desires are mimetic desires so they are mimetic desires in the sense that you want
#
something because somebody else wants it or it seems like something that uh is you start desiring
#
it not for rational reasons of your own but because it seems something like that so i could
#
want a mercedes c class and that's a thin desire because it's not intrinsic or i think the most
#
common thin desire would be people wanting to get married and have kids right and they may not
#
intrinsically crave the companionship or any of the things that are beautiful about marriage or
#
they may not crave parenthood or they may not even want to be parents but it's just the way
#
that life unfolds and therefore you're supposed to do it and is this a sort of chakra view that
#
women are then trapped in that once you enter the flow of things it's incredibly hard to get out so
#
even if you're in a uh you know relatively modern marriage where you and your partner can decide
#
but despite that those pressures are sort of there it's just this constant din in your head
#
it yeah no so those are definitely there and they are expressed much more strongly or in
#
enforced uh much more strongly on women than on men so yeah there is a thing timeline about
#
you have to be married by this age and again that timeline is much more flexible for men than for
#
women not just for biological reasons but also social reasons so a 40 year old man is still
#
obviously our single son but uh but a 30 year old single woman is just the worst thing that has
#
happened to our parents ever so that's that's i've also been on the receiving side of it because by
#
punjabi standards i'm married late and so my single status was like a societal issue being
#
discussed of a large social gatherings and so i mean again credit to my parents that they didn't
#
let a lot of that pressure transfer to me and i also very consciously was living as across
#
halfway across the country to avoid that but it is it is real these this is it was not a big desire
#
for me in my life at that point of time but it was just something that you thin desire is something
#
that you want because you're supposed to want it essentially so it was that you should want to get
#
married because you should want to get married there's no better reason for it and uh and in
#
that rush for these thin desires we also ignore the quality aspect of it but that it should be
#
a good marriage is not something that's on the agenda it has to be a marriage that is all that
#
we want right from women and overtime even our standards of the kind of guy will keep falling
#
because it's actually getting worse as you're aging because your prospects will be much thinner
#
and many points in my life i've been told that i will not be able to find a husband while i was
#
single for various reasons uh so so yeah this is this this pressure is real on women and the
#
pressure similarly to have kids is very real and and i think i've given an example of a woman who
#
was in an abusive marriage also who was being forced to have a child so that's another very
#
classic indian thing that you are in already in a toxic relationship which which needs to end which
#
deserves to end which should be ended and instead uh the solution that society chip cows on it is
#
and is not going to solve a bad marriage it's going to make things worse because is a
#
huge amount of responsibility and you should not bring a child into a marriage that is already
#
already disturbed in any way i mean i i personally feel there should be an entrance exam before
#
having kids i mean the kind of uh screwed up situations in which i have seen kids being
#
brought into is criminal so i don't agree with you that having kids is immoral but it is immoral to
#
have kids in such situations when you're not ready which i think exactly actually the i i love this
#
poem by philip larkin so i'm just going to read it out here it's called this be the worst they
#
fuck you up your mom and dad they may not mean to but they do they fill you with the faults they had
#
and add some extra just for you but they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old style
#
hats and coats who half the time were soppy stern and half at one another's throats man hands on
#
misery to man it deepens like a coastal shelf get out as early as you can and don't have any kids
#
yourself stop quote and i i love these lines also just as poetry man hands on misery to man it
#
deepens like a coastal shelf what a lovely line uh let's sort of talk about uh you know another
#
aspect that i think is unseen to most people and perhaps often women may not also think about it
#
in these terms which is mental load which is an invisible labor of managing a household now i'll
#
quote these lovely lines because you know you might be modest about this but a lot of your
#
writing really sparkles and um uh these lines are from the end of your post on this where you write
#
quote men can i tell you a secret if you think that the romance in your life has dwindled after
#
a few years of marriage it might be because your wife is now basically a grocery list trapped in
#
the body of a woman try taking some of the mental load off her brain and behold as she begins to
#
turn human again uh stop quote and then you point out that your husband just installed a grocery app
#
on his phone and you love him more than ever but uh elaborate on this a bit a grocery list trapped
#
in the body of a woman yeah you know elaborate on this because i you know someone like me when i'm
#
working on something during the day i have the luxury of locking myself in my room and thinking
#
of nothing but whatever it is that i'm working on women can never do that yeah right mostly
#
uh tell me a little bit about why yeah i think i've heard in one of your episodes you criticizing
#
people who criticize gal newport the deep work thing and people people like me basically you say
#
that deep work are privileges available only to men no i say that myself but i think criticizing
#
cal newport for it is not fair because newport actually for those who've read the book he talks
#
about four models of work and that deep work thing where you lock yourself up for a long period of
#
time is one of those four models of work there are other models of work which uh you know the
#
the way walter isaacson for example does it switching on and off is what women are basically
#
doing all the time so i don't think so i think people attack a strawman version of the book
#
otherwise as i said earlier i agree that uh you know um that women have it much harder and even
#
some men have it much harder that you cannot uh you may not always have the luck and the privilege
#
to set aside large chunks of time but that's not what newport is saying newport is laying out of a
#
bouquet of options but sorry carry on yeah so i mean i i find most of male self-help and
#
productivity hacks and tips to be very have to have that carry that blind spot with them that
#
they're designed by men and for men and it's not things that women can ever conceivably do because
#
again of the gender roles that we have and the an extra amount of responsibility that is thrust on
#
women um so so yeah how what it means to be a walking grocery list so i'm a walking grocery
#
list and uh the the um another analogy that my husband and i often use is tabs like on a browser
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at any point of time like i have got like 250 tabs open in my mind it's equivalent of how much
#
stress it is when you have 250 tabs open on your browser that's how many things i'm thinking of
#
at any given point of time i think this conversation with you is the probably the longest break that i
#
have taken away from childcare in probably forever since i had a kid so i mean even now there are
#
things that i'm thinking of which are happening behind uh i mean what's happening with the baby
#
and this is how my brain goes and i just go on and on and on and this is how many most women
#
will think so sometimes i mean i'm looking like my system is going to crash and i have to tell
#
salil that listen too many tabs not able to function anymore and then he'll say okay let's
#
sit down and we'll write it down or something but but the fact of the matter is these tabs are not
#
open in his mind i mean as much eager and and genuine uh partner that he wants to be these tabs
#
are not are only there in my mind and and then there are many um this is again well-documented
#
phenomena and men have many uh rational excuses explanations for it oh you have higher standards
#
and that's why you have these tabs like most of the things you're thinking of don't actually need
#
to be done but then when they're not done is when you realize the the fallout of it so so much work
#
that you're doing is preemptive and it is again therefore unseen you know because those women who
#
never had those jobs you don't know about them so similarly all those accidents that didn't happen
#
because i baby proofed the house are things that we don't know about at all because how many times
#
he bumped his head on the edge of a baby proof table is not something that we are keeping count
#
of so these are things that mental load that that is only there on women because physical load to
#
a lot of extent the more evolved of partners are able to share so like even in my household laundry
#
or things that the chores that we are still doing that we don't have a help for chores are
#
equally distributed between us even the time that we spend with our child is now that i'm also
#
after covid doing full-time work he's is relatively fair division not equal but equitable
#
but this is one place where there is no semblance of equalities like 99 percent is only one percent
#
there and so so and it's all sorts of labor you know it's also about
#
so you know these things also it's also emotional labor it's also that so and so helped us at that
#
time now we should go there about to have a baby we should go help them with this thing all of these
#
burdens managing relationships keeping the house all running even when you do have staff the staff
#
wants to come because i have this issue now you have to plan your house around that
#
things are running out of food in the kitchen you have to do this and so this is what i've written
#
about in the piece also and this is the i think the second most popular piece after raja beta
#
because again it struck a chord with so many women like women wrote to me after this that my husband
#
is vp finance in one of the biggest firms in india and yet he's not able to manage
#
so am i supposed to believe that he's incompetent and he's not able to do this obviously he's able
#
to do this he's intelligent enough to do it it's just a matter of why should i why should i step
#
up and so over time then one person gets stuck with that role and then that person also gets
#
stuck in their mind about the way it is to be done so you know like your podcast how you edit it how
#
you design it something you've been doing for so long that now it might not even be easy for you
#
to delegate some key aspect of it or if i come and do it for you you might not like it the way
#
i've done it and so that also happens so it then even when men try to help sometimes women will
#
push back and it happens to me also i sometimes i'll say you're doing it all wrong let me do it
#
myself so now i will do it i have to do everything myself and then we'll have a discussion about it
#
and i'll realize that you know i'm right now gatekeeping something that i don't really have
#
to and i need to consciously let go of this because i've been doing it for so long and i've
#
become set in the way that i do it and therefore the man feels not worth the trouble let her handle
#
it but that in the long run breeds this resentment and this gap the chasm between us of how many
#
tabs are open in whose mind well and that metaphor of tabs open is really quite you know hits home
#
because you know what happens when chrome crashes and everything just sort of freezes right there
#
you've got another great post called fabulous lives of indian housewives which i'm sure is also
#
extremely popular where you quote someone called anu who says something that speaks exactly to what
#
you were just saying where she says quote it angers me that for ages men have been chilling
#
and by chilling i mean having a normal intellectually stimulating adult day
#
at work and also coming home to their wives expecting to be pampered all the while the
#
really hard physical and mental labor was done by the wife staying back at home i come to my
#
office and feel incredibly grateful to have a place to poop in peace i have nothing but respect
#
for stay at home mothers now stop code and this also underscores how you know some people might
#
think of it as a dichotomy between women who have chosen to work and who go to office and all of
#
that and stay at home mothers as if stay at home mothers are not doing anything and people will
#
think of stay at home mothers and they'll say they'll be like okay you're taking care of the house or
#
cooking food like but otherwise it's chill you know but it's not like that at all it is an
#
incredibly arduous amount of work and worst of all it is the kind of work where you can't really
#
you can't really focus on anything and get deep work done as it were you know in fact if you read
#
newport's book you'll find that he has nothing but sympathy for this he describes this kind of
#
situation where people are constantly forced to be in a state of shallow work and really being in
#
a state of shallow concentration is something that is good only for managers who are scheduling
#
meeting after meeting after meeting but to get any meaningful work done you need to figure out
#
a way to get deep work so you know so often progressive people will almost in a sense even
#
women kind of look down on housewives and housewifery as it were and will think oh okay if
#
you're a modern woman you have to work but the point is work is work life is stuff you know
#
something so tell me a little bit about this and about how mindsets around this uh revolve
#
yeah so i mean like you said it's not only that a woman working at home first of all i love this
#
line uh from the book invisible women which says that working woman is a tautology it means that
#
it's unnecessary to add the word working because every woman is working so it's only that some
#
women are being paid for that work and some are not so there's literally just no woman who's not
#
working even a stay at home mother is a working mother and that for me was a very powerful
#
statement and it really makes sense because especially now i have seen been at home for
#
two years for the pandemic before that on my maternity leave and i've realized how hard it is
#
and i completely agree with anu there that you know now that i go go to and go to a workplace
#
it's it's really recreation for me it is relaxation like as a mother who is at home
#
you genuinely don't have time to poop in peace because there's always the door is open the child
#
because you're worried the child will go and put their finger in electric socket or something
#
so often children are inside the bathroom when you are pooping you don't get time to comb your hair
#
you barely get time to take a shower sometimes you don't remember if you brushed your teeth
#
this morning or not so that's the amount of stress that work is and it is a work which comes with no
#
pucks no compensation and no breaks right like if i have a very very stressful work also there is
#
a weekend to look forward to there is an evening where i clock out something to look forward to
#
but as a mother stay at home mother there is no break there will never be a day when you get
#
unless your partner is kind enough to take them out of the house for a few hours
#
but other than that it's a 24-7 job so it's much more stressful and i mean
#
i've quoted anu here because anu and i used to work together when we were both single and living
#
in bombay we worked together in the same company and we were taking a walk somewhere around our
#
office one day and we saw a woman at a window and so i began this piece with that and anu was like
#
that one day i will become that woman this is my aspiration that woman who will put on a face mask
#
sit on a pot and drink tea and look outside during the day that look these donkeys are going to office
#
that was the i mean that was a running joke between us that our life's aspiration is to sit at home and
#
drink tea and put on a face mask but now i mean now that we are both mothers we realize how blind
#
that image of a stay at home mother is and that's how unfair it is and how far away from reality
#
that perception is that's actually the hardest job there is and you've pointed out that one of the
#
things that really irritates you is when people idolize or romanticize the sacrifices that women
#
make oh yes you know i think you reproduced that that advertisement in your post or it was a fake
#
news while a meme that a woman with an oxygen cylinder on or whatever covid mask was gone is
#
also cooking meal for the family and all that and you'll have these classic memes of superwoman with
#
eight hands doing everything at once and your point is that you know in a sense you're trying
#
to glorify the woman who does everything but your point is no don't romanticize that it's terrible
#
you know the the man who took the picture should really be doing all the work right so uh tell me
#
a little bit about this because this seems to me to be particularly dangerous because the moment
#
you romanticize it you make it a thin desire for many women that i want to be a superwoman
#
and you make it something that men also then expect from their wives right so tell me a little
#
bit about this exactly and that wasn't fake news that was a real photograph of his mother that a
#
man had put up and his mother yeah i thought i was actually i thought it came out later that
#
okay maybe i'm maybe i'm confusing it with some other okay i was also googling that image later
#
to write this piece maybe again i also might have maybe i'm mixing it up with some other picture
#
but yeah so this was at least as far as the world knew it at the time and the discourse around it
#
was this is a real picture of a mother who is an aged senior lady who's on an oxygen concentrator
#
during covid second wave where people are dying and oxygen are going low and she's standing in
#
the kitchen making round rotis for her son and this useless son who's presumably healthy and not
#
hooked up to a cylinder is standing in the kitchen instead of taking over from his mother is taking
#
her photo and uploads it on social media saying and that's what that's what drew so much flak and
#
and i'm glad we live in a time where it draws flak and people are forced to reconsider these things
#
but that's the trope of mother india and you know i mean i used to i still joke that you know mother's
#
day should be called happy martyr's day because we just love turning our mothers into martyrs
#
and even today on women's day and all you'll see linkedin pay these professionally accomplished
#
men are putting up posts of i want to take this day to thank my wife she gave up her career and
#
raised our child and i went out and she wanted to work but she couldn't work because she supported
#
my like shame on you this is not something to be proud of you you killed your wife's dreams and then
#
you're now showing it off and tomorrow i social media post weakness oh yeah oh yeah compensation
#
too proud of my wife why don't you ask her if she's proud of you exactly yeah let's let's hear the
#
other side also so i mean that's that's my problem with it and i think in the beginning also i used
#
the word celebrated and i said no we should celebrate is the wrong word we should say acknowledged
#
because women doing everything is not something to be celebrated it's something for us to be
#
ashamed of as a society that we are forcing our women to do cooking cleaning
#
ghar ka saman bahar ka then office bhi jao wo bhi sambhalo aur uske baad wahan pe boys club se bhi
#
mar kao idhar ghar mein patiks ke liye rotiyaan gol banao so i mean if we are truly putting this
#
much burden on women that every mother's day you see or every women's day you see that woman with
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eight hands ek hat mein tawa ek hat mein bacha ek hat mein laptop ek hat mein press ironing to wo
#
wo image jo hai that's that's a matter of shame and i feel that's what the women also who who i
#
interviewed for this piece were were echoing like one of them said that uh someone put up in her
#
office put up a thing outside her door superwoman because she was a working mother of two and blah
#
blah so she was like ye hatao i don't want to be a superwoman let me be just a woman i want to be
#
human it's a privilege it's a my right to be left alone to be human and you are not giving me that
#
right you're forcing the superwoman down my throat not just the person who's put up the board society
#
family everyone and by putting raising me holding me to these high standards you're getting away
#
with murder you're getting away with not caregiving for your children taking care of your house
#
and and pulling your weight at either the workplace or at home and so don't don't make
#
us super we are quite happy being human and let us just be human that's basically what the entire
#
her movement is about let women be human i'm happy to wear a t-shirt
#
there's a larger question in the same post about fabulous lives of indian housewives you quote
#
someone called mita who is separated from her husband and you quote her as saying quote i have
#
never slept better in my life right elsewhere you talk about how divorces are going up and i think
#
12 years or 13 years ago i'd got a bit of lack when i wrote a column saying that rising divorce
#
rates in india is something we should celebrate it means that more and more women are being
#
empowered to get out of toxic marriages right you've also written post like there's one post
#
called the great indian dhakosla you've written a very powerful post on domestic violence as well
#
and this leads me to this larger sort of question about the institution of marriage itself i think
#
that the way the institution of marriage is conceived that conception is toxic right because
#
men and women are kind of fixed in their roles in a way that you have you know outlined here how men
#
are the raja betas and the women are fixed and trapped and imprisoned in models of lives which
#
which completely destroy them like you know their lives are just taken away from them by these roles
#
that they're force-fitted into and i'm just thinking that and my point is not at all that
#
people should not get married i've already said people shouldn't have kids my point is not at all
#
that people don't get married marriage can marriage can be beautiful when you marry someone who's
#
your friend you've got companionship if you choose to have a family together there's lots
#
that beautiful about it but the conception of marriage as it is today seems to me to be toxic
#
and one-sidedly toxic i think it also in a small way harms men by trapping them in these stereotypes
#
which can hurt them also but it is almost completely one-sidedly toxic it it destroys women's
#
lives right so do you think in a thought experiment as society keeps changing over decades and perhaps
#
centuries that this institution will appear unnecessary that it is it can become possible
#
for men and women to associate with each other to have the kind of relationships they want to
#
have with each other by mutual consent with agreed upon roles and demarcations
#
without this actual institution and all the negativity that it carries
#
yeah so i wrote this post in february of this year which i celebrated as valentine's month and
#
four weeks i wrote four posts about dating and different stages of life different modes of dating
#
one of them was about dating in your 40s 50s and 60s and that is the one that that that i love the
#
most i think the biggest scam in society today is that women are young women and girls are
#
conditioned to see marriage as an achievement or a trophy and so you'll have these tropes
#
and based on reality that the woman is chasing the man for when will my boyfriend propose to me
#
and the man is like commitment-phobic and running away from it i've had that experience myself
#
i'm plenty of commitment-phobic men but it's it's now in hindsight i'm like what is wrong with us
#
for chasing this institution which is so disadvantages to us like you said unidirectionally
#
toxic right so i mean it makes and and there's a lot of research about it about how married women
#
have a shorter lifespan than unmarried women married men have a longer lifespan than unmarried
#
men so it's obvious who the institution of marriage is benefiting more in terms of happiness
#
longevity health all all dimensions it's obvious that marriage is better for men than it is for
#
women and so the trope should be that men should be chasing women around the street
#
that please marry me whereas they do they do that's also a problem that's a whole other
#
problem but i'm saying between consensual relationships one common trope is that
#
a woman has to marry and a man has to not at least in the young age that's why i love that
#
post about dating in your 40s 50s 60s because so one very interesting and one of my favorite
#
insights that i got interviewing women who are dating at that age was that by this age most of
#
us have had one marriage at least right so the men are also divorced or widowed women are also
#
divorced or widowed only few are single at that age so after having had one experience of marriage
#
all the women have figured out that brother this is not a trap i want to fall into i don't want to
#
be someone's mother again like that's what indian men are looking for in their wives is mother
#
so i don't want to be my partner's mother so she said that at this stage of life and the reverse
#
has happened for the men because they realized how comfortable and luxurious their life was when they
#
had this person doing invisible caregiving work for their family and them and somewhere in the
#
background magically chai ke cups are being produced and food is appearing on the table and
#
you don't have to worry about kitchen mein chawal khatam because somebody else is thinking about it
#
all the time so men have figured out the comforts of marriage and women have figured out the traps
#
of it and so at that age she told me that it's ulta like i every man i date is looking to set
#
so quote unquote settle down and wants to immediately get married and women are like sorry casual
#
so it's amazing i loved it that at least now slowly uh even after having had a bad experience
#
at least at some stage and age you are we are all becoming conscious of this and the right gender is
#
chasing that institution and the right one is running away from it finally that's a great
#
insight and i hope some of these older women can act as a cool aunt for their younger nieces and
#
so on and tell them ki bachho just chill koi jaldi nahi hai exactly let's let's you know talk about
#
like like we spoken in the context of offices and air conditioners and toilets how the world is sort
#
of designed by men for men and uh so on and so forth and another instance of this is the health
#
of women like at one point you you talk about how women are often blindsided by uh biology you know
#
you talk about the problems of menstruation but i was struck by this quote here where you write
#
quote according to the guardian in the uk and this is a guardian's words in the uk less than
#
2.5 percent of publicly funded research is dedicated solely to reproductive health despite the
#
fact that one in three women suffers from a reproductive or gynecological sorry my
#
pronunciations are bad health problem there is five times more research into erectile dysfunction
#
which affects 19 percent of men than into premenstrual syndrome which affects 90 percent
#
of men stop code right and you've also pointed out about how uh you know there'll be so much
#
more research into say type 2 diabetes because so you know men also have it as opposed to something
#
like picos right so sort of tell me a little bit about this therefore and also specifically
#
about how uh menstruation isn't taken seriously enough especially by men who just you know who'll
#
brush it off and say oh it's that time of the month again or she's pmsing again or whatever
#
but for women it is such a huge uh issue that impacts a life in such a big way yeah so i had
#
this uh friend a flatmate i used to live with when i first moved to gombe and she used to have
#
very very painful periods like uh i was fortunate enough that periods for everyone there there is
#
discomfort but it was not like crippling for her it was she had to take two months two days off a
#
month and that was basically the extent of only we got so every month her only would go for this
#
because she would literally be bound on the bed and i would often come home to see her crying
#
and once or twice she told me and we used to live on the 11th floor and she told me i want to throw
#
myself off out of this window to just to end this misery and i was i was i would be genuinely very
#
scared for her and her safety her health and i have so many times we've discussed we should see
#
a doctor and no doctor was able to say anything that's basically the the response she would get
#
some would say that will solve it today she has a kid and it hasn't solved it so by the way so
#
and much later in life i came across a post about i think it's called endometriosis which is that
#
menstruation cycle is the endometrial wall shedding itself and that process of that shedding
#
is sometimes exceptionally painful and it's like a pain that most people will not be able to
#
tolerate i mean it's it's very high grade pain and people are women are not only going through
#
it but they are coming to work doing working alongside men performing equally well sometimes
#
better than them while bearing that pain and and there is nothing that the medical science
#
is doing to address it so endometriosis is one of the many conditions like you said polycystic
#
ovarian syndrome endometriosis most types of cancers that affect only women all of this is
#
like very very exceptionally poorly funded so even when the covid vaccine came out i went for
#
the vaccine and they asked me are you still feeding your baby and i wasn't at the time so
#
i could get the vaccine but if you were feeding your child just the jury is out we don't know
#
whether you can take it or not we don't know pregnant women cannot take it and lactating women
#
also no we will not suggest why because you have not done any research on it
#
covid vaccine was made in a very crunch situation but almost all almost completely all of medical
#
science is tuned towards the needs of men even when it is recreational needs like
#
erectile dysfunction not to diminish what kind of condition that must be but again it's just about
#
numbers like i 19 percent versus 90 percent correct so 90 percent like almost every woman you'll talk
#
to has a story about pms which is painful which is debilitating and men i don't know how many men
#
will even admit to it but that's not a very common condition so there is this definite big gap in
#
just medical funding the second thing that is that that that i want to talk about i've written a
#
couple of pieces about it is also the medical response the response of the medical community
#
to women women's pain and women's needs so i've written a piece about how how they'll the men are
#
seen as you know brave and putting up a brave face where women are women are hysterical so brave men
#
and hysterical women that's the name of the piece that when a man says and when a woman says
#
has a low pain threshold whereas the fact is that women will go through pain which is often much
#
worse than anything men will ever experience so like the pain of delivery for instance is worse
#
than the pain of losing a limb so if i chopped off a person's arm it would hurt them less than it
#
hurts to deliver a baby and almost every woman does it in her life or at least everyone who's
#
having a vaginal birth will do it and so that this this there is not enough pain relief for
#
women in fact i've written a piece on obstetric violence which is just horrifying stuff that is
#
done to women who are during labor my friend who's a doctor she told me
#
that in districts in the hospital they used to lay four women on steel beds at the same time
#
that they would get hurt they'll just strip off their clothes and in that indignified position
#
they'll say come on start pushing and my friend she said i was doing an apce otomy which is a
#
scary thing that is done during labor and she said that i was giving her anesthesia because it's a
#
cut you have to put in the vagina and she said before cutting i was giving her an anesthesia
#
injection and the nurse came and said ma'am why are you wasting the injection on this it's already
#
so painful let it be a little more and i've spoken to women who have been a friend of mine she was a
#
nurse practitioner and she said that i've seen women being slapped during labor that why are you shouting
#
slapped somebody seen uh somebody was slut shamed during her labor that while having sex it was a lot
#
of fun now you know how much it hurts so you know things like this it's inhuman it's unimaginable
#
that this is the way we are treating women for our mothers and sisters who we respect so much
#
in our speeches when she is becoming a mother at that time we treat her like like vermin there is
#
there are stories now and in india it is not as well documented i've read papers about it in the
#
u.s where there is better documentation of it of a doctor who tied a woman's legs together so she
#
couldn't deliver a baby so he could go take his lunch break okay i want to have a good lunch just
#
so she doesn't deliver while i'm away tie her legs together so i mean it's it's just it's criminal
#
inhuman animals would not behave like this i mean i don't want to insult animals by calling this
#
animalistic behavior so it's that's the kind of caregiving that we give to women and i was i
#
myself had a very very difficult birth because of the because my caregiver my my doctor saw me as a
#
baby carrying vessel like i've written so it was okay
#
and so i mean the standing joke between many moms is that if men were supposed to give birth or have
#
periods we would have five star lounges all over the place
#
like that those are the facilities we would provide if men were going through these things
#
but because it is women going through them we are treated as just i mean as as vermin like i said
#
is meaningless to us and in fact it's well deserved because you're a woman and this is your lot
#
and not just these contexts other contexts like in that post-brave man and hysterical woman you
#
quote someone called shefali talking about how what happened to her after an operation where
#
she says quote it was a complicated surgery and i suffered from extreme headaches during recovery
#
when i told my neurologist to give me something for the pain she addressed my parents instead of
#
me tell your daughter she has to bear children what is this pain in comparison we later discovered
#
that my brain had actual swelling post surgery which caused the severe headaches i kept begging
#
for painkillers but my own doctor made light of the pain stop quote and i was struck that that
#
neurologist is a she you know still there is this sort of this way of thinking that woman's pain
#
doesn't matter and it's you know so on and so forth and and i absolutely loved this quote in
#
your earlier post on menstruation as well you've quoted melissa mckeven you know and people keep
#
joking about pms for example and how women behave and all that and there's this lovely quote by
#
melissa mckeven i'll read out quote let's put this shit to bed right now women don't lose their minds
#
when they have period related irritability it doesn't lower their ability to reason it lowers
#
their patience and hence tolerance for bullshit if an issue comes up a lot during that time of the
#
month that doesn't mean she only cares about it once a month it means she's bothered by it all the
#
time and lacks the capacity once a month to shove it down and bury it beneath six gulps of willful
#
silence stop quote and so sort of expressive there let's let's talk about safety for example
#
you know and uh you know earlier i had uh you know quoted natasha who you spoke to in your post
#
about should we lock up all the women where she spoke about the paranoia or what men would call
#
paranoia that every time she enters a public space she's looking she's making sure where is the exit
#
route uh where can i escape what do i have to defend myself with and at one point um uh you
#
write quote no matter who the fault lies with it is a woman's freedom that gets curtailed and that
#
has conditioned us to be wary to the point of paranoia stop quote and kavita krishnan wrote a
#
great book called fearless freedom about this she was on my show as well and here's the thing and
#
i'm going to circle back to something that you mentioned about your engineering college in
#
kurukshetra right that um women weren't supposed to go out that 4 30 classes are over so you have to
#
stay in the hostel till 5 30 you know you manage to uh fashion out of thin air and aunt in karnal
#
but otherwise that's generally where you're stuck and i was chatting with alice evans yesterday
#
and i don't know and she's of course a researcher on gender and i don't know whether this episode
#
will come before that or what the order will be but she pointed to uh what um she calls a
#
honor income trade-off right where uh she's looking into the question of why don't more women work
#
in the subcontinent that question gets complicated elsewhere in the world if your economic
#
opportunities go up for women and the incentives go in that direction then more women can work
#
but over here there is an honor uh income trade-off in the sense that it is not only the income there
#
is a drive towards female seclusion that families believe that their honor can get sullied if the
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woman goes out because she could get abducted or raped or have an affair or whatever and to
#
protect their honor that they have this drive towards female seclusion and alice was pointing
#
to this study by two fine economists whom i also bumped into recently at a conference vidya maham
#
re and uh somya danraj uh and alice told me about this so this is secondhand i haven't read that
#
study myself yet because the recording just happened yesterday but the study apparently
#
talks about this factory which employs women but which kind of herds them to the factory in
#
in in a very protective sort of environment there are strict timings and then it deposits
#
them back safely at home and in a sense this is supposed to be a feature not a bug because
#
in the families of those women can feel safe so the urge to female seclusion therefore doesn't
#
become such a big factor and in that honor income trade-off the honor is less of a worry because
#
the factory is you know uh taking the women in such a cloistered way in and out of the factory
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and therefore the income part plays more of a part in the women actually work now i was thinking
#
you know this came to mind when you spoke of the hostel in uh kurukshetra therefore being able to
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tell the parents of young girls that your girls are safe here so on the one hand i agree with you
#
that the rule is deeply misogynistic that the men can lie around drinking in campus all night
#
but the women have to be there by 5 30 obviously misogynistic but the problem that it is solving
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for is also a misogynistic problem the honor income trade-off for which many parents may say
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ki meri beti college nahi jayegi but then if you tell her ki theek hai aapki beti ko jaane do
#
wo safe hai aise rules hai usko theek se rakhenge and then they might agree and the larger point
#
which i am therefore coming at is that i think sometimes what happens is we see a problem
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and we want a utopian solution where everything just disappears so the ideal world that i want
#
to live in is where the rule of law is enforced where college authorities police they all do
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their job women are safe and men and women at any point of night can go out and do whatever the
#
hell they want but there would be an argument that you are not going to get there overnight
#
that there are compromises and trade-offs that you make on the way there so in isolation something
#
like this that seems misogynistic is actually making the other deeper problem the honor income
#
trade-off which has women cooped up at home it's actually helping and at least making baby steps
#
towards progress so how do we think about this because a lot of what we see in our society is
#
regressive but is it also something we should do that we should look at the trend across time
#
and see if things are getting better so i'm kind of thinking aloud because this thought was sparked
#
off by what you mentioned earlier there and my conversation with alice yesterday but i think you
#
get the drift and the drift and and the broad question is how should we think about progress
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that i utopian final stage of progress is that everyone is free to do whatever they want
#
right you want to work you work you don't want to work you sit at home and applies to both men and
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women as long as financially things are taken care of so that's the end stage of course but i see
#
the honor income trade-off and it reminded me of a story while you were talking about how this
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building may somebody i know guard was spreading a rumor
#
in this flat and then then people like somebody questioned further and then he was like
#
but again like you're saying you know the mindset is
#
okay okay family honor is being saluted because the girl is going out to work at night
#
and the other point about public safety that i have made in that piece that you're referring to
#
is also not so much about the end stage of streets are safe for everybody it's also about while the
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streets are unsafe who are we holding responsible for the mishaps that are going down the crimes
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that are going down are we holding the perpetrators of those crime responsible or the victims so if a
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woman is getting assaulted on the street are we asking her
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if you were drunk then you were asking for it so that that's basically the question that i have
#
raised in that piece and it's it's the book that i've referred to which we can also link is called
#
why loiter which is a whole movement not about let's make streets safer for women as much as
#
even before that let's at least accept that on our unsafe street women's are it's unsafe for women
#
but the solution is not to lock up the women it is to do something about that safety question and if
#
something happens give women the right to make these quote unquote mistakes you say that it was
#
a mistake because you got assaulted when you went there first of all she didn't make the mistake
#
he committed a crime so let's get that clear first because the headlines will always say woman raped
#
in noida at night it'll never say man raped woman at night that's never the headline so let's first
#
turn the narrative around and hold the perpetrator responsible for the lack of safety and the crime
#
and second let's allow women the right to make these quote unquote mistakes
#
you're adults you are making choices keeping your own safety and your other parameters in mind
#
so let's at least give women the right to do that if a man gets mugged at night
#
no one asks these questions to a man but they'll say that area is unsafe
#
then then we'll be upset with the perpetrators so why is it that we are upset with the victim when it's a crime against a woman
#
yeah you'd made a great post on this called the burden of language and and the quote that I like to
#
give to illustrate how language matters so much is by Jackson Katz and what Katz had said was quote
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we talk about how many women were raped last year not about how many men raped women we talk about
#
how many girls in the school district were harassed last year not about how many boys harassed girls
#
we talk about how many teenage girls got pregnant in the state of vermont last year rather than how
#
many men and teenage boys got girls pregnant so you can see how the effect of this passive voice
#
has a political effect it shifts the focus of men and boys and onto girls and women even the term
#
violence against women is problematic it's a passive construction there's no active agent in
#
the sentence it's a bad thing that happens to women it's a bad thing that happens to women
#
but when you look at that term violence against women nobody is doing it to them it just happens
#
men aren't even a part of it stop quote and in the episode that I did with Shrena Bhattacharya
#
the loneliness of the Indian woman she pointed out about how women will often say something like
#
meri shaadi ho rahi hai they won't say mai shaadi kar rahi ho you know and the first sentence lacks
#
agency meri shaadi ho rahi hai and the second sentence mai shaadi kar rahi ho is a little better
#
and it's just a way in which uh language matters by the way this Jackson Katz quote was pointed
#
out to me by one of your fellow writing course participants Rita Mishra and yeah so I completely
#
agree no in in just going back to the progress question and again I'm thinking aloud like you've
#
written another great post about how when when a man says something like oh I allow my wife to work
#
right and obviously that's such a patriarchal asshole way of saying that it's like you know
#
that she's your property and you have to allow her to work but the other way of thinking about it
#
is at least a woman is working right you take baby steps you take one step at a time
#
that perhaps that's sure his uh his tone his approach that I'm allowing her to work is a problem
#
but it is a much bigger problem when she was actually literally not being allowed to work
#
and perhaps you have to take baby steps to kind of go ahead yeah but then where do we stop
#
he's the her parents also did her did her a favor by allowing her to be born no
#
so then kitna niche girayenge bar ko so it's about I mean ideally as we evolve as a society
#
the bar should be should be going higher yeah absolutely absolutely what I'm saying is that
#
there are gradations to this I mean so let me turn that question about progress around and say that
#
what is your sense of how much progress women have then made you know what your newsletter does so
#
well is that it tells you right on so many margins things really suck things are really bad and we
#
are in full agreement about all of that has there been progress is that progress is there a trend
#
line that you can see uh to this I mean just looking at me too for example at one level I
#
was pretty optimistic that things will change perhaps too optimistic because I thought this
#
at least changes the incentives for men even if men don't start behaving better deeply from inside
#
at least it changes their incentives now I don't know how much of that is really true
#
MJ Akbar is still getting invited to uh literature festivals Tarun Tejpal is still
#
a social cat fly on the circuits and of course you have a great post about Mr Tejpal also
#
you know so uh what is your sense of the progress that has happened and the progress that is
#
happening because the older feminists have spoken to uh on this show in the past from
#
Kavita Krishnan to Manjima Bhattacharya and so on we'll say that there has been progress it is slow
#
but let's appreciate that there has been progress and things will not suddenly change overnight
#
right so what what's what's your sense as uh you know um a younger feminist and then maybe a
#
generation down though I know you don't use that word of course no I mean by the way it's no
#
personal aversion to the word I totally identify as a feminist but I'm just saying that it word
#
means different things to different people and therefore it's not useful yeah yeah if if the
#
same word has different means to different people then it loses its utility in conveying meaning
#
which is the purpose of words so sadly that has happened to this world so easily I avoid it
#
personally I have no aversion to it I think I'm optimistic about the future um I have at least
#
two uh young readers who have written to me one was 12 and one is 13 and uh the 13 year old wrote
#
to me after the Tarun Tejpal post incidentally and I was horrified because at that point I had
#
no idea that I had an audience teenage audience out there and the Tarun Tejpal post is is is stark
#
I mean it it talks in graphic detail about the crime that happened against the woman and exactly
#
what transpired that night because it is important to uh interpret those facts are important to
#
interpret the judgment because at every point there is a crime happening against the woman
#
and at every point the judgment is uh putting the blame on the woman for all the crimes happening
#
against her so I'd written that post and it was quite uh uh out there in explicit in the language
#
and and the exact nature of the crime that happened and then I was horrified that a 13
#
year old read it and was feeling personally responsible for should I be censoring these
#
things uh but then the the message she sent me was was I mean it was so moving she said that
#
uh ma'am I read your post and I it was so enlightening for me there is rape culture and
#
women are being raped and victimized and then our legal system is not able to give justice and it
#
was just I mean at 13 I had none of these ideas I could not use this these words this language
#
not that I felt uh not empowered enough to use them but that language was not in my mind at all
#
I would not was not thinking about these issues I would certainly not have been able to articulate
#
them as well as she did and so that um then the other 12 year old reader I'm talking about is
#
the daughter of one of our batch mates in the clear writing cohort and he told me that she
#
every uh monday she waits for the post and she sits and refreshes
#
aaya ki nahi aaya ki nahi aaya so then I was like yaar usko subscribe kar aado usko
#
bohot jaega main box mein and then he said then she sits and waits for that post and then she
#
reads it and then uh saturday ko she makes us sit down ke mummi papa baitho ab hum iss hafta ki
#
womaning post kya rahe hain baat karenge ke hum ab ke maima aunty ne kya likha hai aur kya wo
#
humare ghar mein ho raha hai and what can we do better this is amazing right and and then I mean
#
I wrote that post about the subtle sexism we are teaching our children and in that post she sent
#
me personally through her dad she sent me photos of her textbooks which bothered her and it is
#
amazing to me that wo fourth standard mein thi aur uski textbook mein you look at doctor scientist
#
engineer judge all are men nurse secretary teacher these are women and she was she saw this and then
#
fourth standard she was upset by this enough to tell her dad that why why are women shown only in
#
these roles and not in those roles and can I not become a doctor when I grow up can I not become a
#
judge when I grow up and I am upset that these are the messages coming to women and who is the
#
author of this book I will write a letter to them act in fourth standard it blew my mind that this
#
happened to any individual in this country and therefore that makes me optimistic about the
#
future I know these are uh uh so I know this is anecdotal evidence and these are not like stark
#
figures across the country kind of patterns but I mean I am I am I am amazed that even once a child
#
exists in this country and I am sure it is not just one child and therefore the discourse is what
#
gives me hope the fact that there was a me too movement I know it did not lead to the perfect
#
kind of results that we wanted from it or might have hoped for but the fact that those conversations
#
are happening the fact that we recognize there is a glass ceiling the fact that on linkedin uc
#
diversity hires for coders and women can only apply for this position I like it I love all of that
#
that there is I know in our panchayat iraj system we have a woman sarpanj reservation and it leads
#
to sarpanj patis who are controlling things from behind the woman and she is cutting aloo sabzi at
#
home whereas he's signing all the papers for all the decisions to be taken in the panchayat office
#
but even then the fact that we are having these conversations and young women of tomorrow are able
#
to articulate these thoughts are able to analyze these things or are even incensed or offended by
#
the fact that this stuff is happening around us gives me a lot of hope and the second thing was
#
what I said earlier about there should be an entrance exam for having kids because you often
#
say that change happens one funeral at a time but I think change also happens one birth at a time
#
however immoral you might think it is and I think that if we are all able to have raised the
#
change makers of tomorrow then we've done good jobs as parents and so upbringing is a huge that's
#
why I feel like it's clear there should be an entrance exam because you should not bring up
#
another person who's going to perpetuate the same crap that we've been doing.
#
If the entrance exam is done, who will do it? The state will do it. Who is running the state?
#
The entrance exam will be selecting for sanskari parents quote unquote not for progressive parents.
#
Make it privatized sir, make it private.
#
That's my line, you're stealing my line. Yeah this is very inspiring and I would not dismiss
#
that young girl who reads you as anecdotal evidence anecdotes are people too and that
#
panchayat thing actually illustrates exactly what I mean that you know that even if the
#
Sarpanchpati is kind of doing everything and she's cutting this thing I think we have sort of enough
#
data and I think Kartik Mundhidharan was talking about it in his episode with me if I remember
#
that has actually helped that has actually helped it's moved the bar a little bit it will not take
#
you to a utopian perfect solution but it is better than nothing it's moved the bar a little bit and
#
that's what is important. I've just taken a lot of your time and I know being a responsible parent
#
you'll be wishing to rush back home so just three final questions the digressions may occur.
#
Third last question you once told a Bollywood superstar that his movies are mythogenistic
#
kindly elaborate. Oh man I have to really filter what all names I take here.
#
So let's think about a fictitious sector that I worked in anyone who has heard this podcast knows
#
what I'm talking about. Please don't put words in my mouth. Okay no words in your mouth. So there is a
#
there is a fictitious sector that I worked in there was a very popular Bollywood movie which was made
#
around this sector. Okay right it was the biggest hit of that year and it was a movie made to raise
#
awareness about the sector that I work in. So we were called in to give technical consultation on
#
this movie that you know just check it technology and all of that that we show in the movie before
#
so I was on the panel of people going to Mumbai and to the stars home or studio to review the
#
movie and before I went only one of the seniors at my workplace who knew my perversions took me
#
aside and warned me Mahima none of your gender things there okay. None of your gender things. Only
#
technical nothing gender okay and I was like yes sir yours obediently. So we went there this star
#
is also known for his discipline so he wakes up at 4 a.m and works out and everything right so
#
we also had to get up at 4 a.m to meet him because by 5 a.m he's done with his workout and we have to
#
we have to go reach his studio by 5 so 5 a.m we reach there and then they show us the movie and
#
we're sitting in the same room and he's we're sitting in a u-shape and he's sitting across from
#
me right in front of the screen and so the movie plays and the first half it's like a semi-edited
#
version it is called rushes okay full editing nahi huye kahin kahin sound is off kuch kuch parts
#
nikaal diya jayenge and all that but broadly you can see like 90 percent movies there so he shows
#
it to us and first half is over by the time of the first half nothing technical has happened so far
#
in this fictitious sector that relates to us so really there's no feedback for us to give
#
but at the time of interval pause liya and he looks he looks around he says that
#
what did you all think of it any initial thoughts and then because i'm sitting right across from him
#
he looks at me and says let's start with the lady now if you see the first half of this film
#
it's basically the love story in the first half the boy is quoting the girl and when i say quoting
#
what i mean is that she is a student he is a cycle repair wala probably 20 years elder to her even in
#
the fictitious world of the film and is chasing her around with his mobile phone taking pictures
#
of her and videos of her without her consent at one point he prints out a photo of her on a large
#
hoarding for his cycle shop ka ad and that's supposed to show his love for her like she takes
#
a train from one small town to another to go study to her college wo train mein roz sube uske piche
#
chadta hai aur shaam ko cycle pe uska picha karta hua ghar tak usse max creepy max creepy right now
#
now womaning lady is in this room and has been asked to give feedback and so far nothing technical
#
has happened only this much has happened so and when and i'm all this time i'm thinking damn
#
mutse koi puche na, just don't ask me what i think about this don't ask me because i cannot hold back
#
this is exactly what is wrong with our films you know exactly that that the woman has no agency
#
what you're showing is essentially sexual harassment and because it's your beautiful lovable loved
#
most loved star of india is doing it and he's a six foot tall fair-skinned beautiful man so it looks
#
like love to us but if the same thing was being done by an actual cycle alla to your daughter
#
you would be incensed and you would want him in jail today right so but because it is this
#
packaging so we are calling it love and i was like mutse koi puche na bas because i can feel
#
the senior sitting next to me who told me none of your gender things and and i'm like yeh meri
#
naukri aaj jayegi and at that moment the superstar looks at me and says let's start with the lady
#
so i'm like that um yeah great film mr so and so uh my only small peeve with it is why can't
#
we show a man and a woman falling in love in a hindi movie without the man stalking the woman
#
and that line i said and i was like ho gaya mera, ab mai chopa ab mujhe ab meri naukri jaariye
#
but how many times do you get to face the bigger country's biggest star and tell him exactly what
#
is wrong in most of the not just our country's biggest star but arguably canada's biggest star
#
also but continue continue no comments so um yeah so then so to my surprise this man is horrified
#
that i said this he's not even horrified he's surprised that i said this he's taken completely
#
aback and i thought that you know he has a wife who's a very famous feminist by the way she's
#
writing columns after columns about women's empowerment agency everything i mean stars
#
they might seem shallow or whatever to us i'm sure they're extremely intelligent people they've
#
you don't get that rich and popular and successful without having a serious amount of intelligence
#
so i thought ke isko pata hai and he's going to tell me that you know karna padta hai or whatever
#
or whatever rationalization is there in his mind it will be something reasonable but then he's shocked
#
that i said this and he gets offended and he says stalking, aap isko stalking kyaati hain
#
so i was like ke haa matlab without her consent you're taking her photographs so he's like
#
kyun aapki koi photo khichta aapko aacha nahi lagta hai
#
not without my consent sorry so he's like hum jate shooting karne sab humari photo khichta hain
#
and i was just like stunned into silence that this man really thinks that a public figure's photo
#
being taken in a public setting is the same as a man stalking a woman without her consent like this
#
through the streets of Mathura or wherever they are so i was like yeah i was just i was silent
#
after that because i was like i've done enough damage to my career at this point let's start
#
putting a cv on linkedin i'm John Hawkins and i leave because i can sense the guy sitting next
#
to me is looking daggers at me and then we went around the room and our star is very upset and
#
muh phoola ho ekdham and he's pouting and everybody else is trying to overcompensate
#
for the damage i have done nai nai sir kitni acchi movie what a great movie this is amazing
#
is going to be the blockbuster and a couple of them even went a step ahead to counter what i had
#
said that that you know what i disagree with what she's saying because pyaar aise hi hota hai asli
#
india mein aise hi hota hai inko ye Delhi Mumbai ki ladkiyon ko lagta hoga but asli india mein aise hi hota hai
#
main ne apni bevi ko aise hi unka college ki aad peechha karta tha humara pyaar bhi aise hi hua tha
#
like to this extent i was genuinely thinking that some of them are fathers of daughters and
#
aur kuch nahi tha matan bhenu vehtiyon ke liye soch lo like if would you like it if your local
#
cycle repair shop guy is chasing your daughter across the street taking her photos or anybody
#
you know i know i know i'm bringing a unnecessary class angle to it i know but i'm just saying that
#
that's the setting that is shown in the movie yeah or you know even the poshest guy comes in
#
a mercedes class and takes a photo of your child without her consent you you would be incensed but
#
because it is the handsome tall man in the room the powerful alpha male in the room you are all
#
agreeing with him and then i was like in my mind i'm already thinking of the next job
#
i have to do but luckily in the room there was this senior lady and she was at a joint secretary
#
level at that time and now probably going to become a secretary soon and she said that
#
um we might disagree with what maima said but that is the way that the women of the future think
#
and i think we should respect that so that's all she said she was very she's like a the most one
#
of the most graceful women i know and that kind of shut everybody up somehow because a woman with
#
some authority had said it and uh obviously the our hero was upset all through didn't eat breakfast
#
would have gone home and fought with his wife and he would he would have said do you know
#
she said this and his wife would have said she is right and then they would have fought and god
#
knows so there were articles written about how this film glorifies uh is talking and then i kind
#
of quietly sent that link to the senior right now gender without comment shared without comment and
#
got no response in from that side but don't do your gender thing okay so my second last question
#
and this is like one of the pointers that you sent me in that brief list of things that you wanted
#
to talk about so i'll go back to that and this pointer says how amit varma causes strife in my
#
marriage and this is where it comes at conversations with women are far richer i can promise you can
#
call here for 10 episodes this will not come up but i'm telling you right now so last two uh two
#
weeks back i released the first episode of my podcast which we were discussing before this the
#
technicalities of my by mike and everything so i released the first episode and a lot of people
#
like heard it and uh immediately on that group a comment came on our group where these writing
#
students are there that one of them said that i have just had a baby a month back and that episode
#
that my podcast episode is about breastfeeding and how there is this unreasonable pressure on
#
women that you have to be mother dairy and then you have to do exactly for this many days
#
or you are an unworthy mother what is this creepiness why are you still feeding a child
#
who is of x age so i called on my podcast these two women one of them she and i were both not able
#
to breastfeed beyond a point and the other one is still breastfeeding her two and a half year old so
#
we were all talking about the that again you know there's no middle ground there is no one is eating
#
the sweet spot of everyone's approval when it comes to these things and so one of the women on
#
our group said that i just had a baby and in the last one month since i've had a baby i felt like a
#
monster who is not able to do something that come seems to come so easily to all other women
#
and thank you for finally talking about this since the first time in a month that i've smiled
#
and i found that so heartwarming i felt again you know mission accomplished really feeling
#
that's all we were doing for this if it is serving this purpose it's i've done my job
#
so in the evening Salil comes home and i'm like okay did you like it how it was it he's like
#
no i'm still listening to scene and the unseen and i'm like i made a podcast today it's the first episode
#
you're listening to i understand the rest of the world i am putting it out on a monday i can't
#
compete with scene and the unseen but you listen and he's like uh no no i'm its guest this time
#
she's from my school and i was like she's in the podcast i'm like your wife is in this podcast
#
can you prioritize please and and then on the flip side also it happens that sometimes he'll
#
recommend a book to me like like rukmini's book he would i would be watching crap on netflix and
#
he would come and put shove that book under my nose this you are womaning you need to read this
#
and then i was like yeah i'm too tired right now we we mental load sara off karke main tabs thodi
#
der hibernation me daalke i'm right now wedging so don't come into my wedge time and yeah i know
#
your books your taste is very intellectual and all so but then i listened to your episode with
#
rukmini and i was like yeh book to padni padegi yeah this is a great book i know right so so then
#
he gets very upset ke maine kaha tha toh kuch nahi aur amitne kaha hai toh padni hai so there's a lot of
#
strife that you cause i'm so sorry ab mai kya karo mai podcast rok doon fe rok bhi diya
#
aapke karen toh aur strife hoga na nah nah nah mat rok hum lal lenge hum log sort out kar lenge
#
that's so sweet of you guys and i'm very honored uh and uh humbled but please don't strife on my
#
behalf if i may turn it into a verb final question so uh you know for my listeners what would you
#
like to recommend that they read or they listen to or they watch or they you know any arts that
#
give you great joy so um there's a lovely book called how to be successful without hurting men's
#
feelings it's a it's a wonderful book is a collection of couple of comics by sarah cooper
#
and i mean i i've i think a couple of clips of this book have gone viral online about uh you
#
know how a woman says something and the man ignores then she puts a mustache on her face
#
and says the same thing and then they're like what a great idea so it's a it's a hilarious book and
#
it's talking about everything that we discussed about women not being taken seriously at work
#
then invisible women which i've already quoted from uh in this in this episode so far
#
by caroline criado peres yes um there is a book called untamed by glennan doyle
#
um so glennan doyle is a has published books in the past as well but this book has come out after
#
uh big changes in her life so she was earlier a drug addict and then she got married she had a
#
baby and immediately the day she found out she was pregnant she quit drugs and before that it was like
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beyond control it was damaging her life seriously and then then she had i think now she has two
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or three kids um after a while she also figured out that her marriage was no longer working
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and then she fell in love with another woman and is now married to her and and and all through this
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journey she also was very very religious very strong christian ethic and i think in some ways
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she still is but uh it comes from a very modern take on that religion and uh i i loved it as
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reading it as a as a woman and as a mother especially like i love this uh couple of
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excerpts from it which i would take photos of and share on these mom's groups that i want
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one of which was about how she said that i was raising my i think she has two daughters and
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one son and she said i was raising my daughters to be strong women and you know i walking down
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the street i was i would point to a random woman and say what do you think she is maybe she's a
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ceo maybe she's a engineer maybe she's a doctor and you know to just to make them think of women as
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not in those traditional domestic roles but also as beyond that and people who can accomplish
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anything but then she thought that one day her son said something very regressive and she said
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that i realized that i don't need to just build strong women for the future but also men who are
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ready for that for those women so i i realized that as a mother i had been failing my son on
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that account and so then she said that now when i walked down the street with my son i point to men
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and say what do you think he's maybe he's a very loving father maybe he makes great pasta for dinner
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you know things like that which is again not the traditional roles that you would see men in but to
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make him think of other men like that so he also starts seeing himself as though as those as valid
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roles that he could grow into so that's a book i wanted to recommend there's another book called
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shrill by lindy west so the reason i read this book it's a very angry book and a very funny book
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too but so the reason i read this book was somebody quoted a line to it which spoke to me which was
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that feminism is about realizing that everything you love hates you back that's the perfect summary
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of my relationship with bollywood right i love bollywood i can still to this day sit and watch
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any old 90s regressive movie i will find all the regressive shit in it but i'll still enjoy it
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because i'm programmed to love it now and i know it hates me as a woman right like i'm still waiting
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for the ddlj joke by the way another thing that i wanted to recommend was uh another book is uh
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steal like an artist then there's another call show your work and third one called keep going all
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three are by austin cleon which are basically books that anyone who wants to write and wants
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to be any kind of creator or artist should just keep on their table at all times they're very
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very small books thin short books very easily accessible so it's it's it's these are three
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beautiful books that i i keep very accessible at hand um i also wanted to recommend a couple of
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stand-up comedians because i i follow stand-up comedy like anything i've also dabbled in it
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quite unsuccessfully but a bit um one is hannah gatsby uh one is tig notaro no and among men
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there's james a caster and uh indian side pay there's a guy called karunesh talwar uh all four
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of them excellent and amazing for different reasons which we can discuss another time but
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if you haven't heard of them please look them up and if you enjoy some stand-up comedy this is
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they to me sound like the voice of the future we didn't even talk about your stand-up comedy
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are you doing are you going to try again i don't know maybe maybe not at one point you wanted to
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right you did some gigs i did some gigs yes yes and um so i in fact uh one of them was in cp in
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central park and it was um i was told by the organizers there that there was an audience
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of 5000 people which i don't think was there at one time i think they just did a total count
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over the evening but they are a series of artists and for me that memory is very great because
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whatever i did i'm sure i will cringe at it today and by the way open challenge to all your
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listeners is somewhere in one corner of the internet i know how to find it but
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it's very hard to find because the people i did it for were kind enough to not give me any credits
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so there is you can't find it by my name probably anyway so that that thing i did and as i was getting
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off stage uh the late miss kamila kamala bhasin was there she was one of the organizers of that
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event and she came up to me and congratulated me and shook my hand i was like surreal because it was
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probably the third or fourth performance i was doing and i was like please what are you even
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saying kamla ji like you are the og and she was like nahi nahi hum toh kuch nahi hain aap artist hain
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aap log ho ghi hain kal ki hawaaz and it was just is very touching and it was very surreal maybe i'll
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get back to it someday don't know right now yeah yeah i would love to see that but in the meantime
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mahima keep doing what you're doing more power to womaning and anything else you do and thank you
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so much for giving me so much of your time today thank you thank you for having me
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
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you can follow mahima's newsletter womaning at india at womaning.substack.com you can follow
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mahima on twitter at mahima vashisht you can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t b a r m a you
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can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
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