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There is a lot that is wrong with the world, and it's important to put a number to it.
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You know, we are often suspicious of numbers.
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They confuse us, and when they are big, they become abstractions that our brains are not
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And yet, if we want the whole truth, and not just a glimpse of it, we need numbers.
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I may feel that gender and caste are India's biggest problems, and you may feel that here
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they are not so bad, but the only legit way for us to try and convince each other is through
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My anecdote versus your anecdote gets us nowhere.
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And no one knows this better than my guest on this episode who shed light on important
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questions and important arguments about caste and gender.
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Her work means that we cannot deny the problem exists, and we can use her data to tackle
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If things are wrong, and you want to set them right, you need the right numbers.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Ashwini Deshpande, the only economist in the world to have been on an
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Ashwini was born to a remarkable family.
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You could make multiple web series on her Azubaz and Ajiz, grandparents who tried to
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reform society and led by example.
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Her dad was a famous playwright and academic, J.P. Deshpande, and her mom was a well-known
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women's rights activist.
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Ashwini could have been a vocalist or a sitar player or a writer, but she took one for the
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team, by which I mean all of us, and became an economist.
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She spent decades doing path-breaking work in caste and gender, among other subjects.
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She's a professor at the Ashoka University and lifetime president of the global Lata
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Okay, fine, I made that last line up, but it's plausible as you'll find out.
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We met a week before this recording at a conference in Goa where she both sang Madan Mohan songs
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as well as gave a presentation on her academic work that blew us away.
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This conversation also contains multitudes, and I'd urge you to see it as part of a larger
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interconnected conversation I've had on these subjects with various other guests.
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In fact, the episode I released two weeks ago with the great Dalit scholar and activist
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Chandrabhan Prasad was actually recorded after this one, but there are threads that intermingle.
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Anyway, recording this was a blast, so listen in.
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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An online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students and vibrant community interaction.
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
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The course costs Rs 10,000 per GST or about $150 and is a monthly thing.
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That's IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just the willingness to work hard
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Ashwini, welcome to the scene in The Unseen.
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It's so fabulous to be here.
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Thank you for inviting me.
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Yeah, no, and I'm sure it is also fabulous to be here.
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So we've been talking about this for a long time.
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And there's also excitement that I get in my DMs from Twitter, when is it out, when
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And I haven't even recorded yet because I posted this video of you singing this beautiful
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song I think by Madan Mohan, you know, at this conference we were at.
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And there has been so much enthusiasm.
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People have got in touch asking about commercial possibilities and so on and so forth, concerts.
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And I have been like, you know, at the Royal Alfred Hall, for example, and I have been
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like, you know, I'm her agent.
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I will take 80% commission, you know, and I'm game with it so we can discuss.
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By Alfred, you mean Albert, obviously.
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No, I deliberately said Alfred because this is what happens in India, no satire is understood.
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Now it will be on fact-checking.
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I'm going to keep my teacher hat aside and no, no, I will ask you in this episode also
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to put the teacher hat on because at the conference where we were, you gave this excellent talk
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where I learned so much.
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You know, I read your book also, which was delightful and a whole bunch of articles,
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not all of which are to do with your field of study.
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So that was a sort of great fun.
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I want to go back to sort of talking about your childhood.
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There's a delightful piece in your book on caste where right at the start you speak about
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your paternal grandparents, Asha Tai and Purshuttam Narar Deshpande.
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And I found that really interesting and I want to dig deeper into that.
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So tell me a little bit about, you know, your memories of them and you know, what were they
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Well, they were absolutely remarkable individuals and actually their love story and true, I
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mean, I'm using the word correctly in the sense that there was a love marriage back
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Their love story should be actually made into a movie or something.
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So my paternal grandfather, who we used to call Anna, Azoba is in Marathi, it's called
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So Anna Azoba and then as we became older, we just called him Anna because everybody
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in the village called him Anna.
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Anna's father settled in this small town village called Rahimathpur, which is in Satara
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district of Western Maharashtra.
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So it's, I don't know, about 200 odd kilometers from Pune.
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And it's, I mean, I'm obviously very fond of it, but otherwise it's pretty nondescript
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It has a very interesting name and it has a very interesting location.
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Anyway, by the time I was born, my grandparents were staying there.
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And till I was 25 years old, every single summer vacation, we used to spend in Maharashtra.
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And of that two month period, the biggest chunk of time was in Rahimathpur, where my
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grandparents were there, my parents, of course, my father's siblings, you know, over the
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years they got married, they had children, then as their families expanded.
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So basically it was a large extended family gathering in Rahimathpur.
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And I, of course, adored my grandparents and I got a sense that they were special as a
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child, but it was partly a sense that, you know, children feel for their grandparents
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because you always think that your parent or your grandparent is the best one in the
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But through my years, you know, through my growing up years, I started getting glimpses
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into how exactly how special they were.
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And it's my lasting regret that I never actually one-on-one really talked to them about their
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Now I'm piecing it together through things that other people have written.
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And let me tell you, since I've mentioned about their love story.
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So basically my grandfather was a medical doctor and he was active in the freedom movement.
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And he got married and gave birth to two sons, my father and another brother, my chacha.
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And during the third childbirth, either exactly during childbirth or shortly after, the third
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child died and his wife died.
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So basically he was a widower with two young boys, two very small boys and active medical
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professional, but also active in the politics, in the anti-British political struggle of
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And in one of these conventions, he met this young woman about 14 or so years younger than
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him and very highly educated for, you know, remarkable for that time city bread.
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She was from Sangli and she was the daughter of this very well-known playwright called
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It's a very, it's a very culturally very important family in Maharashtra.
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She was Sindhu Khadilkar as it happened.
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And she saw this handsome older, slightly older man and she fell in love and she proposed
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And she said, I want to marry you.
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So he said, absolutely not.
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We are, our circumstances are not matched and your parents will never agree.
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I will not agree because I don't, I don't want to put you through this situation where
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you have to take care of two children already.
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And she said, no, absolutely.
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I'm not going to get married, but if I get married, it will be only to you.
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And then my grandfather said, okay, the condition under which, if at all we marry, which first
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of all is not going to happen.
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But if that happens, you have to tell your parents everything truthfully about my condition
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and that I have not asked you to marry me, you know, and she must have said yes.
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So I'm not exactly sure what she said, but basically one day she landed up in Rehmatpur
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all the way from Sanglitu into this small village and she being a city bred, intelligent,
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And by that time, my grandmother, my grandfather was there with his two sons, his father, who
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by then had been paralyzed with a stroke.
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So he lived in a completely paralyzed state for 12 years.
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So there was a paralyzed father, there were two sons and there was a chachi, sorry, bua,
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some aunt of my, of my dadaji, who was a child widow and she was of, you know, she lived
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with him basically with them and acid tongue, you know, and just, you know, very cutting,
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but you know, old style widow with haircut and all, all the rest of it.
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So that was the house and my grandmother said, I'll take it.
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And they married and that must have been, I think 1940 or 42, I'm not exactly sure,
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And then she gave birth to three children who are, you know, my parents are stepchildren.
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But for the longest time, I didn't know that she was my father's stepmother.
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And because A, she was highly progressive, she never discriminated between her own born
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children and the two earlier children.
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She never discriminated between the grandchildren.
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So my father was the eldest in his generation and I'm his oldest daughter.
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So I'm the eldest in the cousin's generation.
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And from my grandmother's point of view, I was the oldest grandchild and so therefore
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the most loved by the time the other grandchildren came along, I was there.
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And it was years later that I discovered that, oh, Sagi Dadini or whatever, I mean, of course,
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it made no sense because I used to call her Moti, which means elder mother.
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And they were, both of them, Anna and Moti were remarkably progressive.
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So one of the things I remember very clearly is that they had taken a position that we
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will not attend any wedding in which dowry is exchanged.
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And I remember once my bua's closest friend, who was almost like a bua, I used to call
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her bua and she was always in and out of our house in Rehmatpur.
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So she was going to get married and obviously dowry was going to be exchanged at that wedding.
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And for Anna and Moti to not go to that wedding is almost like them not going to their own
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daughter's wedding, but they didn't go.
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Because it was a principle stand that we have not exchanged dowry, nobody in our family
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has exchanged dowry and we will not go to a wedding where dowry has been exchanged.
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And my grandmother, after she moved to this small town, in the front part of the house,
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she established a library, the first ever library in Rehmatpur.
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She called it the Hind Vachanallay, Vachanallay is library, Hind is Hindustan, India.
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And I remember it because our house was like their wada, the old style wada with the central
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So you enter, then there is a room at the front and there's a room at the top and then
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you enter into a courtyard and the rest of the house is basically surrounding the courtyard.
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It's that old style, lovely house.
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And the front, on the ground floor was my grandfather's clinic where he would just get
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up in the morning, have breakfast, shower and then go there and the whole day he would
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and just come back for lunch, again go out.
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And on the first floor, above my grandfather's clinic was the Hind Vachanallay, a library
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that my grandmother built, I mean, assembled, not built as in not building the building,
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but basically got books together and she would go from house to house encouraging women and
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children particularly to come there and read and to borrow books.
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And she, you know, she could cook obviously because all women, you know, there was no
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choice, you had to learn to cook and housekeep, et cetera, but she had made it very clear
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that cooking and housekeeping were not going to be her foremost occupations.
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So she was politically active, she was socially active and I remember going with her to people's
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homes and her giving this little, you know, okay, so what have you read?
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Tell me, what did you like about that story?
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Do you want to, it's been a long time that you've been sitting on this book, why haven't
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you finished it, et cetera.
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And because I came from a family where books were read as, you know, that was a default.
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It was amazing for me to see this and she was four feet, 10 inches, so very short, diminutive
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woman with a very sweet, thin voice, getting the breakfast and all done and then just leaving
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the house and going from house to house.
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And that time I remember walking very far away, you know, on the outskirts of the village
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and I would say, oh, is this Rehmatpur still, are we still in Rehmatpur because this is
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So she said, no, this is also Rehmatpur.
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And we would go to this hamlet, which was very poor, you know, markedly poor than obviously
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where we lived and from the rest of Rehmatpur.
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And somehow I never asked her what it was, but she would go into each home, just like
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she used to go into other homes and also asked them to come to our home and enter the house
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and you know, and every time they came, she would give them something, you know, et cetera.
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The significance of all that escaped me.
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I just thought that they were just poorer than some others.
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It was only after she had passed away and when I started working on caste that the penny
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dropped and I suddenly realized that what we had been going to was a Dalit basti, which
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was on the outskirts and the act of going into their homes and the act of her inviting
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them into our home, inside the house, including in the kitchen, giving them food was a very
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quiet but extremely revolutionary act, the significance of which I never understood.
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So they were much like my parents, they never preached or they never said, oh, look, this
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is what we are doing and this is the right thing to do and this is what you must do,
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But how actions leave a sort of impact even and it lasts for years after they've gone
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and every now and then suddenly a memory strikes me of something that she used to do or my
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grandfather used to do and I would say, oh, this is what they were doing, you know, but
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as a kid I didn't know it.
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I had no idea at that time that this is what we were doing, you know, with her.
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Such a beautiful resonance story and I, you know, the line, this is also Rehmatpur, would
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be such a lovely title for a story or a book or whatever and I'm also just very struck
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by that image of medical clinic in the ground floor and then a library just above that.
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It's like you have medicine for the body and medicine for the soul and they're both kind
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So here's sort of, I have a few related questions to, you know, justice and the first of them
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is this, that you mentioned about how you never realized it at the time that the penny
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And one theme that I have been, I have sometimes brought up on my shows as well is do we talk
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to elder people from our family, whether it's our parents or grandparents enough or are
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we trapped within the bounds of whatever the relationship has been laid out as where somebody
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is, you know, like fathers and sons will typically never really talk or exchange emotional content
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or we won't really talk to our grandfathers in that way and talk about their lives and
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And I wonder if, you know, just from, from the, you know, and something for the listeners
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to think about as well, that maybe there is something in doing a little bit more of that
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and seeing them not just in terms of the role that they have in our lives, but as sort of
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I mean, before my father passed, I remember I sat with him and just spoke about his life
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and I recorded two, three hours of that.
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So it's like a small oral history that is there with me, which is almost like a window
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into another person, you know, where you don't see someone as your father, you just seem
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as an individual kind of growing up.
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And in any case, I have a fascination for these oral histories and life stories, as
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you can tell from my podcast.
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So looking back, obviously, you know, if they were still around, you would have sat and
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spoken to them or whatever, but do you feel that is something that we should do more of
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that when we go through life, we get circumscribed in these kinds of roles, whether they are
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familial relationships or whether they are caste barriers or gender barriers or whatever.
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And we think of people in terms of roles and not as, you know, three dimensional people
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with interesting, fascinating lives.
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Is that something you've thought about?
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No, I agree with you that of course we should do that.
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But I have to say one thing about just my particular, the father side of the family
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is that the issue was never that we didn't talk.
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In fact, the Deshpande side of the family and my mother side, you know, sometimes they
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make fun of this, which is that it's a bit too, it talks too much and it's a bit too
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You know, especially with my parents and my brother and I, the four of us that nuclear
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family, we would constantly be arguing, discussing this, that and the other, et cetera.
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I guess I have been incredibly lucky to, certainly in my grandparents' generation, of having
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such incredible grandparents.
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And I'm not just talking about my paternal grandfather, Anna and his wife, but his brothers
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and their wives, you know, that they have all have so many aspects to their personality
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that I'm discovering them literally now, you know, long after they're gone.
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So for example, last year, Nayanjot Lahiri, who's my colleague at Ashoka, well-known historian
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of ancient India, wrote this book on my Anna's brother, my grandfather's brother, who also
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Of course, you know, again, adored him, you know, was very, very close to him.
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He was an archaeologist and he was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India.
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That I knew because he lived in Delhi, unlike Anna who lived in Rehmatpur.
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So I saw this Azoba much more often because just because they were in Delhi.
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And I knew that he was in the Archaeological Survey because often from school, if we had
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to go to their house, you know, we would get picked up, dropped to his office.
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I've spent many afternoons after school in the Archaeological Survey office, which is
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to be next to the National Museum then, I don't know where it is now.
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And I knew that he was a very sort of important archaeologist because the books on archaeology
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in his house, he would travel a lot, people would come to see him, et cetera, et cetera.
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And so I knew, obviously, that he had achieved a fair amount in his life.
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But of all the brothers, he was in some sense, he was a laddoo, I mean, he was the sweetest,
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cutest, most adorable, I mean, they were all adorable, but even in that adorable, a set
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of very adorable people, he was, I guess, the most adorable of them all and very soft
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And so one day Nayanjot stopped me in the corridor and she said, are you, do you know
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So I said, yes, he's my father's uncle, he's my grand uncle.
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And she said, oh, so do you know his family?
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So I said, of course, they are my chachas and you know, my father's first, I'm very,
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Like they are my family in Delhi from the Deshpande side.
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And she said, I want to write a book about him.
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So I said, oh, how nice, et cetera.
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But I thought, you know, because he's a well known archaeologist, so I wasn't surprised.
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And then she proceeded to tell me two episodes about his life that showed him in a light
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that I could not imagine him being.
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So one of them was, both of them actually, were how he stood up to Mrs. Gandhi at the
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peak of her power in India and stopped a demolition or an extension of an archaeological protected
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site where one of them was, in fact, Birla was involved and Birla and Mrs. Gandhi.
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So he stood up to the collective might of Birla and Mrs. Gandhi and stopped that extension,
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which is a story if I'd heard about Anna, I would have believed it.
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Anna was, you know, but about Azoba was in Delhi, he was, I could not imagine him, you
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know, taking this very strong stand and just not budging.
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And he did it in this quiet way and he got it done.
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And then she told me other stories.
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And then she wrote this book.
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And through that book, I learned so much about him.
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For example, from Rehmatpur, this young man went to do a BA in Ardhamagadi.
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I mean, how did he, so Nayanjot kept asking me, how did he think of this language?
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How did he get interested in archaeology?
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But unfortunately, anyone who could have answered that question, they're all gone.
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And so through Nayanjot's book, through her, which is now in the public domain, I learned
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so much about my grand uncle.
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So in our family, the problem has not been that we haven't been close, there have been
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the traditional barriers of authority and, you know, that prevent conversation.
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In fact, if anything, we talk too much to each other.
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But I guess everybody has been so remarkable in their own ways and very self-effacing.
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So there are things that they did or do and we just don't find out, we don't know until
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some other person and they never promoted themselves.
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So a lot of facts are known about other archaeologists of his generation.
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But until this book came along, nobody knew about all these things that my grand uncle
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And Nayanjot said, it's amazing there is no book about him and I'm going to write this
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And she didn't know that I was related to him.
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So obviously it wasn't like she was doing it for a friend's uncle or whatever.
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That was not the motivation.
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But I guess just about the Deshpande's, I think the problem is that there are too many
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achievements, not achievements, I wouldn't say, but there are too many aspects to everybody's
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personality and it's really hard to keep track of who's doing what.
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And with my parents, I feel that regret every single day that I learn about something or
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the other about my mother or my father and I said, oh gosh, I never talked to them about
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I love the way Nayanjot comes to you and asks you, do you know I'm in Deshpande?
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You should just have replied, yes, of course, all Deshpande's are related to each other.
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Do you know Bappi Lahiri?
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And I also have a great title for an incredible web series.
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And I'm quite serious about this.
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This could be a heck of a show, the Azobas, you know, like the Sopranos, like the Sopranos.
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I should tell my brother, I should put this because actually my brother has been more
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systematic about documenting history.
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So I think when, so my father's mother, she unfortunately passed away young.
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So she died in 1990, but my grandfather died much later.
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And there was a time when my brother decided that, okay, now is the time that I need to
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go with my camera to Rehmatpur and get Anna to record.
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So he has actually done a little bit of the oral history project with some members of
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He's recorded some things with my mother, some with Anna, some with my father.
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I guess we all have to put it together.
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But he's been more, I guess by the time we became adults, when we suddenly realized,
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oh, we have these remarkable people in our family who are not just adorable and, you
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know, just lovely because we love them.
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They're more than that.
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They've done, you know, they have significant contributions.
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He became aware of that and he did record.
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My father's, I reposted an essay that my father had done about Rehmatpur recently on Twitter
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on his birthday, birth anniversary.
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It's a lovely, lovely essay about Rehmatpur.
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It came out in Himal, the journal.
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I'll link that from the show notes and more part of your brother.
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I mean, and the idea is that one should not think of oral history is just in terms of
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One should think of just doing oral histories in general with anybody, you know, and anybody
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They can just sit down with somebody in their family who's kind of old or somebody they
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know and just kind of record because it's like ways of life just pass by and you look
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in the history books and the great books of nonfiction and you read about extraordinary
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people, but the textures of everyday life and the lives of ordinary people I think are
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also sort of worth capturing.
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My other question that comes from that is, of course your grandparents were outliers,
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but at the same time, I think it's not entirely unusual that they would be from Maharashtra.
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Like I definitely expect to be more likely that they are from Maharashtra than many other
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states and part of the reason and you've also alluded to this in the past is that there
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is a history of different kinds of reform movements in Maharashtra coming right from
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the Bhakti movement and so on where people have examined caste, people have examined
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gender and all of that.
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So tell me a little bit about that because in a sense, that's also part of your heritage
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It is also part of the air you breathe and I'm sure it's shaped you as well in different
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So tell me a little bit about that and if you would have an idea of who the specific
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inspirations for your grandparents may have been, like obviously the foolish come to mind,
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you know, seems the most obvious sort of analog, but you know, who were the kind of heroes
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that those people would have had back in those, you know, pre-independence days or early days?
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I think for my, maybe I don't know, honestly, that's the short answer, but the long answer
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is probably Gandhiji for my grandparents because I think they were extremely inspired by Gandhi
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and the nationalist movement.
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They were a part of this larger Congress coalition, but they were socialists.
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So all my, in fact, all the three Azobhas and their wives were socialists and in fact,
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there was this sort of a political cultural organization called Rashtra Seva Dal, which
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all my boas were members of and it was, they would dance and they would do plays and things
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So there's always been music and dance and acting in the Deshpande side of my family
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and my father actually broke away from all that when he left Rehmatpur and when he came
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to Baroda, went to Baroda first and then came to Delhi through his, you know, pursuing his
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And he got introduced to Marx I and he delved deeper into A, Phule, et cetera, you know,
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that part of the Maharashtrian literature and the Sant Kavita, the whole Bhakti literature.
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So he was quite an expert, by the way, on that, even though that was not his profession.
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And his sis, one of his sisters was also a very well-known actor.
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So my father had written this commentary on piecing together the Sant Kavita, the Abhangas
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that are very progressive, very radical, take a very anti-caste, gender egalitarian view.
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And my aunt has produced that.
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So it's a lovely program.
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And if it's anywhere online, I'll send you the link for that of Sant Kavita.
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And so in my father's house, I've seen these volumes and my father was a Sanskritist, he
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knew Sanskrit fluently.
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So he read all the texts in the original Sanskrit or Marathi, whichever the language was.
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But he was very, very influenced by the Bhakti poetry.
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So I think the influence of Bhakti, Phule's thought, et cetera, is more in my father.
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And in fact, he ended up writing this play called Satya Shodhak, which turned out to
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be a hit for many reasons, I'll tell you later.
#
So my introduction to Phule, et cetera, came through my father.
#
But through my grandparents, all the Azobas and the Ajjis, it was mainly Gandhi.
#
And then later on, JP, Lohia, et cetera, that stage.
#
And my father's first play, my father was, apart from being a professor in JNU, was also
#
My father's first play, Udvastha Dharmashala, I guess, is one of his most, the most well-known
#
He shows a young professor, and this was written in 73, so it predates the emergency.
#
People think it's about the emergency, but it's not.
#
And it's a young professor who's being interrogated by the university committee for making, you
#
know, communists or whatever.
#
It's like a Makathi-ish scenario being adapted to the Indian situation.
#
And the young professor is a young Marxist, and his father has passed away in the play,
#
and the uncles are socialists.
#
So when the professor goes back to, you know, for the funeral or collect books or something,
#
the uncles throw him out saying, oh, you opposed your father, you never went down the socialist
#
path and you took this other path, et cetera.
#
So people read echoes of some autobiographical thing, but my grandfather and my father never
#
quarreled, and there was never, in that sense, a disagreement.
#
They were always on the best of terms.
#
So that's, those are my father's influences.
#
But I want to just touch to the point that you made earlier about how people are heroes
#
in their ordinary lives, and I want to talk a little bit about my mother's mother.
#
So my mother came from not an extraordinarily radical or progressive family, just a regular
#
And when she was eight years old, her father and her eldest brother, the two earning members
#
of the family, died within six months of each other.
#
And her own mother was not very well educated, she had education only up to class three.
#
So all of a sudden, there was this young widow who was 40 years old with four small children,
#
youngest being eight years old, that was my mother, no source of income.
#
So it was a calamity, and of course, relatives stepped in and friends stepped in, et cetera.
#
But my grandmother was remarkable.
#
And she said that, I'm not going to bring up my children under terms and conditions
#
I want to be independent, I want my children to be independent.
#
And she was very skilled at pretty much everything she did.
#
So she was very skilled at sewing, like she was a good seamstress, but she had never taken
#
tailoring classes or anything like that, she had just learned.
#
And so she took tailoring classes, took a loan, took tailoring classes, and then started
#
stitching clothes for a living.
#
And my oldest aunt enrolled in nursing college, and there she was to be given three saris
#
She kept two, and she would send one sari back to her mother, and my grandmother would
#
cut that sari up and make frocks for my mother and the other sister.
#
And that's how they survived.
#
And it's a heroic tale, and again, I knew it kind of at the background.
#
But as I grew older, and that Ajji, my mother's mother, I always saw her in white, you know,
#
she was always dressed in white, and she was a beautiful woman, but she never wore bindi,
#
she never wore any colored clothes, etc., and I knew that nobody asked her to do it,
#
but that's just how she was.
#
And I remember one long conversation with her in Bombay before she passed away, and
#
she told me the story of her life and how difficult it was to be a widow at 40, and
#
how she stood by her principles, and she brought up her children the way she wanted.
#
I mean, of course, it was very hard, she had to make a few compromises, the children had
#
to, you know, it was not easy at all.
#
But to the best of her ability, she raised her children.
#
So that's another story of a very heroic life, but, you know, sort of more in an everyday
#
context, but how people can be heroes, you know, in an everyday context.
#
So that's the other side.
#
And that I think I've seen in my mother, I've seen in her sisters, you know, very strong,
#
you know, iron willed women would give anybody a run for their money.
#
And they, you know, that's how they were, but they were not, you know, they were not
#
sort of leftists or anything like that, you know, that was not there.
#
My mother eventually became, but not my aunts, but they were remarkable, you know, just regardless
#
of whatever ideology they followed.
#
Yeah, I mean, now I'm thinking that they could be like, you know, if Netflix does Ajobas,
#
Hotstar could do Ajiz, so two competing shows.
#
And I think I'd actually watch Ajiz more, you know, and you mentioned that your grandparents
#
were in the Rashtriya Seva Dal.
#
And I'm thinking, had they been in something called the Lok Seva Dal, then you could have
#
proudly said that all my grandparents were on LSD, but leaving that, you know, getting
#
Tell me more about your mom, for example, because, you know, she was an activist, she
#
was involved in the women's movement.
#
You've spoken about how she won every battle in her life except the last.
#
So tell me a little bit about her and what was your relationship with her and so on.
#
So she became an, people remember her as an activist, but actually that is just the last
#
And I have always said, although, I mean, I've said it to whom I don't know, but I always
#
like to say that she had much more to her personality than the period of activism that
#
defined, I would say, I don't know, she died when she was 72.
#
So maybe the last 20, 25 years that defined her, which is a long enough period.
#
And it's really amazing when you think about her age, when she got into all this activism.
#
So that's the other remarkable thing.
#
But she was this very strong-willed, rebellious young woman.
#
And that Ajji has told me stories about growing up, how strong-willed and she was, when I
#
was growing up, she and I clashed a lot because she was perfect in every way.
#
And her point was, why can't you be that way?
#
And my point was, no, you are perfect, I'm not.
#
And just let's agree to disagree on that question, but our mothers are.
#
So her point is, well, you can do one, two, three, but why can't you do four, five, six?
#
And I'd say, well, you do one, two, three, four, five, six.
#
I'm happy doing one, two, three.
#
So we would clash a lot.
#
And as you probably realize between my parents and us, they always had this very open atmosphere
#
of you can say anything to us and we will say, but it was all very civil and it was
#
They never talked down to us.
#
So we could question them just as they would tell us to do things and they had to justify
#
every single instruction that they gave us.
#
So it wasn't like, do this because I'm telling you to do it, do it because these are the
#
benefits of doing it and so on.
#
So my mother was a tough, toughie.
#
She was really, really tough and she was very disciplined herself.
#
So she would expect that discipline from other people.
#
And as a child growing up, that's never, you know, one always clashes with parents when
#
you're asked to clean your room or whatever, whatever.
#
So, but she was remarkable.
#
I mean, so she married this man, theirs was also a love marriage.
#
So I mean, for me, when I heard the term love marriage, it's very odd because most marriages
#
in my family, starting with my grandparents, I've been loved, so very few have been arranged.
#
So in our family, when there's an arrangement, we say, oh, that's an arranged patch.
#
You know, it's, it's unusual or step into the unknown or somebody's not, some woman
#
is not working as in not every, all women, all women work all the time.
#
Obviously I know that and you know that, but by working, I mean, not working for pay or
#
not going outside the house.
#
When somebody doesn't do that, it becomes unusual, oh, she's, she's not doing anything else because
#
every woman in my family does a million things.
#
And so my mother went to Baroda for her undergrad, because those days Baroda was of course, MSU
#
And in Maharashtra, it was quite common for young people to go to Baroda and my father
#
was also there, but they didn't meet, I mean, they kind of met, but not really met kind
#
So that was not where their love story started.
#
And then she joined the home guards.
#
And so she learned to ride a truck.
#
She learned to ride a fire engine.
#
She's rescued people from, you know, in that crane that goes up to the top floor of a building
#
and rescues children from a building on fire.
#
She could ride a horse.
#
She was a fabulous swimmer and she could cook and clean and keep house and stitch and knit.
#
Yaar ye forest gump wali story ho gayi Matlab, you know, and she would say, you know, I'm
#
going to teach you stitching.
#
I said, no, I'm never going to touch a needle and a thread.
#
She said, but I can do that.
#
I said, you do that and this and whatever else you want to do, I'm just going to do
#
So anyway, so she was in the home guards and she got posted to Delhi as a part of a home
#
So she was, you know, a working woman and my uncle was a bidder was in the government
#
He was part of the early bureaucrats, you know, post-independence and they had a house
#
on Wellesley road, which is now called Zakir Hussain Marg.
#
His son was studying somewhere anyway.
#
So he used to live alone.
#
So she used to live there because it was just convenient to be there.
#
And, and my father had come to Delhi for his MA and that's how they met through a common
#
So they met and they fell in love.
#
And then my father went to Hong Kong because he was a China specialist.
#
He was a, you know, his bread and butter job was a professor of China studies in JNU.
#
So at that time, mainland China was not open for foreign researchers.
#
So he, they went to Hong Kong and I was almost born in Hong Kong because I was going to be
#
born and then my mother's family put pressure, no first child, first child must, you must
#
always come back to the mother's house, et cetera, et cetera.
#
My mother was, I think, quite happy to give birth to me there.
#
So she came back and then I was born, then my brother was born, et cetera.
#
And then JNU didn't exist as an institution then.
#
So in 1970, JNU got established and we, and there was a school of international studies,
#
which was an independent organization that got co-opted into JNU, Lock, Stock and Barrel.
#
And everybody who was in SIS went to JNU, so did my father.
#
And we moved to the JNU campus, I don't know if you've had an occasion to see it, which
#
was at that time completely the outskirts of the city.
#
So everything that you see around the JNU campus now didn't exist.
#
There was no bus service, there was no cars, nobody had a car.
#
And there were 36 families living in this 1000 acre forest area, completely disconnected
#
There were just two JNU buses that connected to the city once in the morning, once in the
#
So it was like living on an island in some sort.
#
And then my mother realized it was going to be very difficult for her to manage doing
#
a job and children and living in that remote place, et cetera.
#
So she stopped working outside for a living, but she did many other things.
#
She learned Braille and started translating children's books in Braille for blind children.
#
So she used to work on a voluntary basis with the blind school, which is near Oberoi Hotel
#
So then she learned macrame and I don't know, any skill that she didn't have, she learned
#
that while we were growing up and she was in JNU.
#
And then she declared one day that she was going to enroll for this five-year BA, MA
#
course, learning French.
#
She told us and my father, we used to have these sort of family.
#
So the rule was everybody must have dinner together, always.
#
And there was no TV in the house, so we had to talk to each other.
#
And there was this All India Radio used to play a national program of classical music
#
that used to be playing on the background.
#
And we would have dinner and all these conversations and all the fights and everything used to
#
take place over dinner.
#
And she declared that she was going to join French.
#
And so we said, aren't you very old and to a child, the parents always very old.
#
So she said, I don't care.
#
And she joined this integrated BA, MA program.
#
So JNU has these five-year integrated language programs.
#
So you join after school and you do three years of, if you do three years, you get a
#
If you do full five years, you get an integrated BA, MA degree.
#
And because she didn't know French, she joined the first year and her classmates were obviously
#
straight out of school.
#
And she was this mother of two children, you know, we were not teenagers yet, but I wasn't
#
a teenager yet, but still, I mean, you know, I must've been 11 or 12, whatever I was.
#
And so her classmates were much younger than her, but she was not self-conscious at all.
#
And she did this five-year French course, you know, and in between my father got a fellowship
#
So we all, family, all of us, we went off to Germany and we went to school there and
#
my mother had broken her, but she learned German there.
#
So she was quite a linguist, you know, apart from Gujarati, Marathi, Hindi and English
#
She knew, was fluent in French and she picked up German when we were there.
#
And even my father was quite a linguist.
#
So they were both, you know, so anyway, we spent time in Germany and we came back.
#
She finished her French masters and then she started doing live translations, you know,
#
interpretations rather.
#
So when your heads of state come and there's this voice that comes through that, she was
#
And as a part of that, in the 1982 NAMM summit, when Fidel Castro had come to India and Indira
#
Gandhi was the prime minister, she got a job there as an interpreter for the French team.
#
And while she was inside the Gyan Bhavan, because it was all very highly security controlled
#
and all that, she found out that Mrs. Gandhi was going to be a press conference, which
#
was only allowed for members with a press card.
#
And obviously she didn't have a press card, but I don't know how she faked her way and
#
she entered that hall and she asked Mrs. Gandhi a very uncomfortable question, which at the
#
moment I can't remember.
#
It was something to do with something that Mrs. Gandhi had done, you know, some authoritarian
#
move till people found out that she was not a journalist.
#
But in that large Gyan Bhavan hall.
#
So she was a gutsy woman like I haven't seen, you know.
#
So this is all her pre-activist phase, by the way.
#
So her pre-activist and of course she was, you know, she taught us swimming.
#
She was cycling, swimming, everything, and she used to drive the car.
#
I mean, we didn't have a car then, but eventually when we got a car, she was the driver.
#
And in fact, in the ration card, Parivarka Mukhiya was my mother.
#
My father said, okay, you just, you know, and my father was a perfect antidote to her
#
He was the most laid back, just sitting in a chair, drawing circles in the air, kind
#
of a guy, and she was the doer and the mover and the shaker.
#
So very remarkable personalities, but very opposed to each other.
#
But you know, both with tremendous influence in their own ways.
#
But when I see parents of today, young people who, you know, with small children, or our
#
students who were kids, whatever, 15 years ago, 16 years ago, there's one thing I realized
#
is that our parents never shielded us from anything.
#
It was never the case that don't read this book, or don't watch this movie, or nobody
#
should say anything that will hurt my child.
#
You know, nowadays when I see parents, it's a very controlled environment that their children
#
And so when they come to university, when they hear things that they've never heard
#
before, like some very, you know, obscurantist or regressive view or something like that,
#
they almost explode because they've never, their parents have protected them so much
#
and our parents never protected us.
#
They never told us, you know, believe in religion or don't believe, eat this or don't eat this,
#
listen to this music or don't listen to that music.
#
The only thing they told us is that you make your choices and you're responsible for the
#
So if it's bad, it's bad.
#
I mean, if the consequence is bad, you have to learn to deal with it because you made
#
You know, so my brother and I, we can't blame other people because we have always been told
#
that whatever is happening to you, maybe other people played a role sometime, but at the
#
end of the day, it's your life.
#
You have to sort it out, you know, just get up and get on with it kind of a thing.
#
So very tough in that, in that way, in a way that I'm not as a parent because I feel like
#
they were, I guess, a little too tough, you know, just throw children at the deep end
#
of the pool and let them swim kind of a thing.
#
So I tend to be a little more protective towards my daughter or I used to be.
#
Now she's an adult in her own right.
#
But, but it taught us things, taught us to be independent, taught us to realize that,
#
you know, at the end of the day, it's your life.
#
If it's going well, it's great.
#
If it's not, then you need to figure out how to fix it, you know.
#
I mean, my parents also had a love marriage, but my mother did not do most of these things
#
Is there a, I'm just thinking of this whole, you know, this press conferencing of her breaking
#
in and asking a question to Indira Gandhiji, was it captured on camera?
#
Like is there a YouTube clip of it?
#
So there were lots of things from that time that should be somewhere.
#
So for example, another, you know, anecdote from my childhood is because my father was
#
I mean, he became a playwright eventually, but you know, when, when, you know, back in
#
I mean, JNU had just gotten established.
#
He was in SIS and so therefore in JNU.
#
But writing, he had started to work on a play, but he was obviously must have been inclined
#
And so he had a lot of friends in the artistic world.
#
And so when we were really small children, all the names that today we think of as big
#
names in the artistic circuit for us, they were so-and-so Maushi, so-and-so Kaka, so-and-so,
#
you know, Kaku and so on.
#
So for example, Sai Paranspe was Sai Maushi.
#
And those days we used to live in Lajpatnagar four, because JNU campus hadn't been built.
#
And Sai Paranspe used to live in Lajpatnagar two, which was across the ring road.
#
And there were two of us and Sai Maushi also had two children.
#
And her daughter is also Ashwini and so am I.
#
So that Ashwini started to be called Vinny because to distinguish between the two Ashwinis.
#
And she used to be married to Arun Zogrekar at that time.
#
So Arun Kaka, Sai Maushi and Vinny and Gautam was their son.
#
They were in, and then there were us, there was us.
#
And so we were in each other's, like the children were in each other's homes all the time.
#
And Sai Paranspe was in the Doordarshan at that time.
#
I don't know exactly what position she held, but she definitely was in charge of the children's
#
But the children's program used to come in the evening, so she was in charge of that.
#
And Vinny and I were used as the default, whatever, like default performance as it were.
#
So whenever she, she kept shooting us, you know, walking to the market, playing, playing
#
with dolls, doing this, doing that, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So you just say, okay, let's shoot now, let's go from here to there.
#
And then I remember, in fact, one thing that I very vividly remember is she had done this
#
film with my parents and me going to the zoo.
#
And apparently I was a very well behaved child.
#
That's what people say.
#
But she wanted to film a badly behaved child.
#
And so she taught me about how to create a tantrum, throw a tantrum when we went to some
#
So we had to rehearse that.
#
And it was tough because I didn't behave like that as a child at that time, but she taught
#
And then I remember doing many takes, my parents walking with me up to that cage.
#
And then I'm like, oh, I want ice cream or whatever it was I was asked to do.
#
And so all those films, I don't know where they are.
#
Somebody has got to find them and put them on YouTube.
#
This is the renowned economist Ashwini Deshpande throwing a tantrum at a cage.
#
In fact, I met Sai Paranth for many years ago as an adult and I asked her, I said, what
#
happened to all those films that you made with Vinny and me?
#
And she said, yeah, I know how we lose, I mean, she also didn't know where those films
#
And earlier you mentioned your mom driving and reminds me of something that happened
#
in the early nineties when Thelma and Louise was going to be released in Saudi Arabia.
#
And of course, women were at that time banned from driving there.
#
I believe that law has just been lifted Thelma.
#
So when films would come, they would cut all scenes of women driving, which is why Thelma
#
and Louise ended up at four minutes.
#
This might well be apocryphal.
#
So tell me now, what were you like as a kid growing up?
#
Like you've given me a really nice sense of the environment at home where you have these
#
independent people around you who are not talking down to you or preaching or being
#
You can talk to them as equals, you can do all of that.
#
At the same time, there are these other strands, like in the sense, I'm guessing that there
#
must be a respect for scholarship and academia because of who your dad was and what he did
#
and also your mom learning all these things.
#
And at the same time, and in every typical Maharashtrian household perhaps, but yours,
#
there must also be this respect for the arts and learning and all that.
#
And in this case, both your parents were sort of creators in different ways.
#
So tell me a little bit about that environment in which you grew up and how that shaped you
#
and what were you like as a kid?
#
So in terms of the artistic connection, it was a very strong one.
#
My father eventually became a playwright, but he must was already starting to work on
#
My sister, my bua, one of my buas, was at that time a student at the National School
#
Are you talking about Sulabha Deshpande?
#
She's now called Jyoti Subhash.
#
And her daughter, in fact, is now making waves, Amruta Subhash, who was in...
#
So Amruta is my cousin.
#
So Amruta's mother, Jyoti, who at that time was Jyoti Deshpande, was a student at NSD.
#
And she was the classmate of Nasir and Om.
#
And they were best buddies.
#
So they would always...
#
That's the other thing.
#
I mean, they would always come to our house because they were in the hostel.
#
They were tired of hostel food and they would call my father Bhaisaab and bhabi.
#
And so they would go in, Bhaisaab, bhabi, bhukh lagi hai.
#
And my mother would always dish out, you know, there's some amazing food for them, et cetera.
#
And of course, at that time, they were not at all well known.
#
Both of them had faces that were not traditionally suited to what a Hindi film hero should look
#
So did you ever think ki ye kaisa actor banenge?
#
No, I had seen them in plays because that was the other thing.
#
So Abraham Alkasi was the director of NSD at that time.
#
And so Rohini Hattangadi, I think, was one bad senior.
#
Jaidev Hattangadi was one bad, there was Manohar Singh, there was Sai Paranspe.
#
So all these theatre people, and my father, by the way, also was a very good actor.
#
So in fact, Sai Paranspe did this remarkably funny play called Ek Tamasha Acha Khasa, in
#
which she took the Tamasha form and made a political satire about the state of the country
#
And my father played the Bhoondu Maharaja in that.
#
She played the Maharani, Sai Paranspe played the Maharani, and Arun Zogdekar was the cunning
#
Mantri, who's basically running the show.
#
And so there was a time when I remember the dialogue.
#
And the Ghashiram Kotwal was being done in Marathi in Maharashtra, and Rajendranath produced
#
And my father was one of the Brahmins, I don't know if you've seen Ghashiram Kotwal, but
#
the wall of Brahmins that's at the back, so he was one of those.
#
So we as kids, and my mother and Jyoti, my aunt, because all the women had to wear nine
#
yad sarees, so they were part of production, doing the costumes and everything.
#
And so an unbelievable number of afternoons after school were spent in this Ghashiram
#
rehearsal, in the green room.
#
And even the other kids in school used to say, don't your parents, aren't they worried
#
about homework and things like that?
#
I said, I don't know, I mean, we just get picked up and we are taken to the rehearsal,
#
because both my parents were there, and we were not rich enough to have nannies or babysitters
#
or maids or anything like that.
#
So we went wherever our parents went.
#
And so it was this bordering on Bohemian kind of childhood with all these theatre wallahs.
#
And then, of course, my father's play started, and Dr. Shriram Lagoo acted in the Marathi
#
So then Dr. Lagoo, his family, and then various Amol Palikkar, et cetera, et cetera, just
#
people who later on we realized were just these very, very creative people.
#
And my mother also was a very good actor.
#
So she used to act in college plays and all, but through my father, she also got an avenue
#
And even on her side, nobody made a career, but my cousins and all her nieces, they've
#
acted in school college plays and society plays and things like that.
#
So there is that creative streak there.
#
But my father's side is the sort of most pronounced.
#
So my father is a playwright, my bua Jyoti is an incredibly gifted actor.
#
You should watch some of her work if you can.
#
For personal reasons, then she quit acting and she went to Maharashtra and she married
#
the man that she had decided to marry, that was Subhash, her husband.
#
And so then Jyoti, Amrita is her daughter.
#
But even my other buas who didn't make a career of the arts, they are incredibly artistically
#
They can all sing, they can all dance, and they are now in their seventies.
#
But if they start dancing, you should see, oh man, they can give the youngsters a run
#
So there's a very, very strong artistic environment.
#
Jyoti, my aunt, is a very good singer.
#
Amrita is a fantastic singer.
#
My grandmother, that's Moti, the Raimathpur grandmother, she could sing really well.
#
So yeah, there's a very, very strong artistic sort of influence.
#
I guess I'm the outlier in that sense.
#
I mean, I have not done anything in the field of the arts in a way that many members of
#
This was true until last week when my tweet with you singing got some 84,000 retweets
#
And perhaps this is a late start to a well-deserved artistic career.
#
No, I linked to the tweet.
#
You can see the 84,000 retweets.
#
So Twitter keeps bringing these numbers down.
#
But clearly, you were also drawn to films and music and singing and all of that.
#
And I'm also fascinated by another side of your father that you have mentioned elsewhere,
#
but we haven't touched upon yet here and I'll ask you to touch upon that is how he was deeply
#
And according to him, there were four kinds of cinema.
#
So I really want to know more about this.
#
So he was a really chilled out guy, as they say today.
#
I mean, literally, it's possible that you enter a room and you don't notice that he's
#
And you think that he's doing nothing, but actually he's thinking about the piece that
#
And bombs could explode in his vicinity, but he would just sit sitting in his chair.
#
Sometimes you would notice and say, Baba, what are you doing?
#
You know, I've said that to him often.
#
And so he would laugh and say, yeah, you know, and all of us, including me are so hyper.
#
I need my room and I need my study and I'm shutting the door and don't come in and da-da-da.
#
And he would just literally like the way I'm sitting now, you can see you do this.
#
And then he would start making circles in the air.
#
And then he would do, then he would get up, walk a little bit and he would have some imaginary
#
argument with somebody and then come back.
#
And then suddenly he would get up, find a surface.
#
Take a piece of paper and write literally without crossing a single word.
#
I don't know, 1500, 2000 words at a stretch, beautiful, clean, elegant writing.
#
So all this while that we thought he was just doing nothing randomly, he was formulating
#
his argument, but it was crystal clear.
#
And you know, his writing is in the public domain, so you can read it for the absolutely
#
brilliant clarity that his mind possessed.
#
What was your question?
#
I got carried away talking about my father.
#
No, I'm very happy to, you know, you can go in any direction you want, I'd love to know.
#
But I'd asked you about the four different kinds of cinema and his love for movies.
#
So yeah, so that's what it was.
#
So he, when we were growing up, Hindi cinema was not something that educated families watched.
#
There's this post liberalization phenomenon where now everybody can watch his Bollywood
#
In our time, most of the people that we knew were not allowed to watch Hindi cinema.
#
The only things films they were allowed was Guddi or Jagriti or, you know, with good message,
#
you know, Deshbhaktika or Bhai Ke Pyar Ka or things like that.
#
Certainly no sexy songs or anything like that.
#
But he would watch because he would say that popular cinema is the pulse of the people.
#
This is what people are thinking.
#
And the way Hindi cinema understands the pulse of the people, no other medium can.
#
And so for example, when Jai Santoshima became a runway hit, he wanted to see it and at that
#
moment the rest of the family drew a line saying, not Jai Santoshima, please, we are
#
And he said, no, Ashwini, I think we have to watch Jai Santoshima.
#
So he and I, because we had heard stories of people going with thalis and doing puja
#
I mean, it was a cult movie, you know, of its time.
#
And he said, we don't have to participate in that, in that sentiment, but we need to
#
understand what that sentiment is about.
#
You know, till his dying day, literally, he would want to watch movies in the theater,
#
not on the TV, because he said, when you see audience interacting with the movie, then
#
you realize the magic that it was having.
#
And of the last films I saw with him was English Winglish in the theater in Pune.
#
And it was, I said, oh, should I get a DVD, should we watch it, he said, no, no, no, let's
#
And that was Sridevi's comeback film, as you know, and when she first enters, when you
#
first see her on the screen, you see her back.
#
And then she turns around and the audience went into raptures and the kind of whistles
#
and the clapping that you saw, I saw then was, I had only seen in Amitabh Bachchan movie
#
And so then Baba said, see, would you have been able to see this if you had watched this
#
This is the influence that Sridevi has.
#
This is why she's India's first and only female superstar, etc, etc.
#
So his point was that there is nothing called a good film or a bad film.
#
Films are either entertain, make you, you know, make you enjoy them.
#
So for him, enjoyment was the key.
#
And so he classified films into four categories.
#
He said the good, good films, which are like the rays and the, you know, the masterpieces
#
world cinema type, you know, then there are the good, bad films.
#
So these are commercial pot boilers, your main one, Monday side show lay would be the
#
best, I guess, good, bad film ever in India.
#
And then there are the bad, good films, which he hated, which is the films with the message
#
artie films, you know, where there's no dialogue for 15 minutes.
#
It's this, you know, this one flower, you keep focusing on that, and nothing is happening.
#
And his point is, you know, manikya, mujhe do ghante mein, mujhe theatre mein bitaye,
#
What did I learn out of this?
#
You know, you can't bore your audience out of the theatres.
#
So that what that's what he called and the preachy ones, you know, message about, you
#
know, secularism or something, some progressive thought, but just boring at the end of the
#
So those were in his view, the bad, good films.
#
And then there were the bad, bad, the C grade, B grade type, which are just bad, I mean,
#
So he said, you must always watch the good, good.
#
And you must always watch the good, bad.
#
And you obviously will never know in advance what is what.
#
So you could end up being, it could be a bad, bad, but that's a risk you have to take.
#
How will you know otherwise what it is?
#
And I remember those days were not days of multiplex, so there were four shows, 12-3,
#
And because we used to live in JNU, it was very far and our school was Sardar Patel,
#
So 9-12 at night was the only show which was possible for us given that we didn't have
#
We lived very far away from, you know, movie theatres, etc.
#
And there was this Priya movie theatre, which was about a 20 to 30 minute walk from our
#
So a very common routine in the Deshpande JNU household was have an early dinner and
#
Go to Priya, wahan pe 9-12, uske pehle there was a Nirula's ka parlour buy ice cream,
#
then go to and watch 9-12, come back home at 12-30 or whatever, but there was no escape
#
from school the next day.
#
So it could not ever be excused ki wo kal rod 9-12 picture dekhi to aaj school nahi jayenge.
#
That was not the thing.
#
So my parents would say, are you willing to get up tomorrow and go to school?
#
And then I remember once going to school and telling my classmates ki kal rad ko 9-12 maham
#
Kurbani is of course Zeenat Aman with her very explicit and just very sensuous portrayal.
#
And my friends said, who did you go with?
#
Didn't your parents object?
#
I said, we went with our parents.
#
But they were never ones for shielding us.
#
Their point is, you make up your minds about how you're going to view these things and
#
how you're going to process the information that you get.
#
You must have the ability to separate the good from the bad, the influences you want
#
And often my father, you know, people would say, you know, how do you allow your children
#
And so his point is, well, I'm hoping that they will grow up to be sensible.
#
But supposing they don't grow up to be sensible, then that's what it is.
#
And that will happen even if I suppress, you know, they will find ways of supposing they
#
turn out to be bigoted or just, you know, have very views that I don't agree with.
#
But that might happen anyway.
#
So by stopping them from reading this book or watching this movie, et cetera, I'm not
#
I mean, I'm not preventing that thing from happening.
#
Whereas this way, you know, and it was the same for everything, for, you know, alcohol,
#
because he knew that there would come a time when we would grow up and we would taste alcohol.
#
I mean, that's, it's never the case that that's never going to happen, right?
#
So how do you deal with that transition?
#
You know, so they were very down to earth in that, in that manner.
#
So there was very, I mean, not that we shared every single, you know, gory detail from our
#
lives with them, obviously not because they were parents, but there were no fundamental
#
secrets between us and them.
#
I mean, not because they'll judge us, no.
#
I mean, it's not cool to tell your parents everything.
#
So that way we didn't tell them everything, but there was no fear that, oh my God, if
#
I tell this to Baba or I they'll say, oh my God, how did you do this or you drank a glass
#
You know, there was never such, there was no fear like that, girlfriends, boyfriends,
#
their point was, you know, all your friends are welcome, whether you're romantically involved
#
And I love the distinction of good, good films, good, bad films, bad, good films and bad,
#
I mean, there can sometimes be a confusion between good, bad and bad, bad.
#
I mean, what is bad, bad?
#
Like I recorded an episode a couple of days back.
#
I don't know when it will release in relation to your, this one, but with J.Arjun Singh
#
and Subrath Mohanty and Subrath gave this delightful story about how he arrived at the
#
And he told me about how he watched a B. Subhash film once, Babbar Subhash, and it's a film
#
So basically in it, there are these two dancers, they go to Amrish Puri, Amrish Puri spots
#
them somewhere, gets a fancy for the woman and invites a couple home and basically murders
#
And their children who later, later grow up to be Mithun Chakravarti and Smita Patil.
#
So apparently at one point these children still played by child actors before they grow
#
up to be whoever are at a beach and the boy is really starving and he's like, and she
#
puts his head on his lap and they don't have food to eat and this is Juhu beach.
#
And she starts singing to him, aayega, aayega, halwa wala aayega.
#
I'll link the song from the show notes.
#
And then eventually one guy comes and like he's a halwa wala, but there is, and I've
#
never seen a halwa wala on Juhu beach, of course, but the twist is that to get the halwa
#
There is something like that.
#
So this little girl tells a little boy, this immortal line, ki zindagi mein ek baad yad
#
rakna, ki agar halwa khaana hai toh naachna parega, dance dance, which Shubrath adopted
#
as a motto for his life and to me represents his profound human truth.
#
And I'm thinking I haven't even seen dance dance, but I have made up my mind ki boss,
#
this is a good bad film.
#
And so, you know, I may have mentioned this earlier to you, like for example, Govinda,
#
And you know, the, especially his later output, the first one, you know, Raja bhaiya and all
#
thoda bot, there were, there were issues with that, but the later ones with all these
#
number ones, you know, and when he teams up with David Dhawan, David Dhawan and Kader
#
Khan, Kader Khan and Nargis aur uske bethe ka naam kya hai?
#
Nargis aur uske bethe ka naam kya hai?
#
Nargis ke bethe ka naam.
#
I mean Nargis and Sanjay Dutt, Sanjay Dutt.
#
So Sanjay Dutt, he is hero number one, jodi number one, hero number one mein Sanjay Dutt
#
nahi hai shayad, jodi number one ek aur ek gyara, I mean ek aur ek gyara, I know every
#
single joke, but I can watch it endless number of times and laugh at the same time.
#
So that's what my father used to say that, look, and he also used to watch and he used
#
to say, how do you, how is it that we laugh so much?
#
Because just because it's just the situational humor and Govinda is a master at that.
#
So you are not, you have to appreciate in terms of the genre that they represent.
#
So he used to always say that, for example, when we go to see Spiderman or Star Wars,
#
do we really think it's a realistic representation of human life?
#
But you suspend disbelief when you go into a Spiderman movie and you watch it and analyze
#
it in terms of its, on its own terms.
#
And he used to get very annoyed by Indian intellectuals who would happily go to a Star
#
Wars or a Spiderman movie, but would make fun of Hindi movies to say they're not realistic.
#
He said, arre bhaiye waha toh jaake dekhte ho tumko unko Oscar bhi mil jata hai.
#
Toh waha kaunsa realism hai, right?
#
And so the point is that, his point was that analyze every art production in terms of its
#
own genre rather than comparing it to a genre which is a wrong thing to do.
#
So like for example, his own play Udhvastadhan Vaishala.
#
It's a political play and it's one of the first political plays in India.
#
That's why it's considered so important.
#
It's a very wordy, difficult, not difficult, but it's heavy, you know, it shakes you up.
#
Now his point is that if you compare my play to, you know, these pot boilers that you see
#
in Maharashtra theatre every evening where, ha ha ha, laugh a minute, you know, double
#
meaning jokes, et cetera.
#
He said, you can't compare the two.
#
I'm not going for that audience also.
#
So if you're analyzing, you can dislike Udhvastadhan Vaishala, that's fine.
#
But then dislike it on its own terms.
#
I mean, say why it's not good in terms of what it's claiming to be, right?
#
And so he had the very healthy respect or a healthy disrespect, whichever way you look
#
at it, for everything and it extended to food.
#
It extended to everything.
#
So his point is try everything.
#
And that's a category error I've committed in my childhood, perhaps my pre-adult years
#
where in my mind, something was really cool and something was not cool, though I'm pleased
#
to report that by the time I hit my 20s, I just started loving Govinda as well.
#
You know, ma toh rasse se jaa raha tha and so on.
#
Aur sarkari khateya private karo.
#
I have appropriated that song to my own purposes as it were.
#
And I think even, you know, somebody like Baba Saigal is incredibly underrated.
#
He's almost like the Govinda of indie pop in terms of, you know, Dil ki gaddi pe aardha
#
junction dabba khaali re.
#
It's like mind blowing.
#
Even the little things he does today on YouTube, extremely underrated because we have this
#
hierarchy of art in our heads.
#
And I always tell my writing students that never be ashamed of reading anything.
#
Anything you read has done something good to capture your attention.
#
And there are lessons to be learned and, you know, never feel ashamed of reading a book.
#
So on that note and on that lesson from your father, which I find so profound that you
#
have to engage with popular art, not just respecting it and seeing it on its own terms,
#
but also understanding that it's a reflection of society.
#
And what I find when I talk to many people on the show who have a similar background
#
to us is that we of course have elite privileged backgrounds, right?
#
And the danger is that we grow up, as I certainly did, in these little bubbles and you think
#
the bubble is a world, right?
#
And outside you have views from windows of exotic things and things happening outside,
#
but you think the bubble is a world and you don't really engage adequately.
#
We are extremely lucky to be located in the place we are because there is such richness
#
and diversity of languages and cultures and food and all of those things.
#
But we are content in our bubbles and it can take a long time, I think, till all the different
#
layers of blindness that you have peel off one by one.
#
And I think one great way of getting outside that bubble and engaging with the world outside
#
is through popular culture, like your dad said, is through, you know, sitting in the
#
stalls when Sridevi turns around and everybody goes nuts.
#
So people throwing coins at the screen when Rajnikanth comes or whatever, so on and so
#
So how much, like, were you ever, like in hindsight, looking back, do you ever feel
#
that there was that element of that bubble or do you feel that you were fortunate in
#
a way to engage outside that bubble because your parents encouraged you to do so and so
#
And if you ought to look at the journey of your life, do you, you know, can you identify
#
things that were perhaps unseen to you at 15, which at 35 you saw very clearly, not
#
just in the personal anecdote domain of, you know, your grandmother going to a place which
#
is also Rematpur, but, you know, in general?
#
So the answer to the bubble question is actually yes and no.
#
So in addition to the influences from within the family, which were multiple and of multiple
#
kinds, and I mean, family and friends of my father's, he lived in this very eclectic,
#
just quite a remarkable circle of acquaintances, we, growing up on the JNU campus that time
#
was a bubble of a different kind.
#
So inside the bubble, there was an amazing amount of freedom and intermingling and intermixing
#
of a kind that you don't see today's middle-class children, I mean, those who are at the same
#
in the same class background as us.
#
So there were 36 families, as I mentioned, there were three hostels and the JNU had acquired
#
this land of 1000 acres, so the rest of it was this jungle.
#
And these, because there was no transportation, there was, you know, there were I think one
#
or two people at cars entirely on the campus, you know, one or two people at television
#
And so the whole inhabited part of the campus was our home, extended home.
#
So my, my, the door to our house, for example, my parents' house was never locked, because
#
it was just, kaun aayega, yahi toh log hain saare, and, you know, Wednesday evenings and
#
Sunday evenings were chitraar, so you had, the one professor who had a TV had no escape
#
because these, all of us, the gaggle of school kids would just descend on his house ki hum
#
And isme, there were, you know, people from different parts of the country, there were
#
Hindus, there were Muslims, there was a Parsi family, and Christians, of course, caste diversity
#
itni nahi thi, baad mein jaake thodi baad, but not much really.
#
But there was, there was diversity along many different dimensions.
#
And it never, it was very natural for us to go to Zia Nasad's house for Eid and them coming
#
to our house for Ganesh Chaturthi.
#
It was, it was just not even, you couldn't even think that there was an issue about that.
#
It was just two festivals at Indian.
#
So it, in a very, it was a bubble.
#
Now I realize that life outside was not like that at all, but it was the best bubble to
#
be living in, you know.
#
But it's not the same kind of bubble that today's middle-class children have, which
#
is very constricted by caste, class, you know, whatever linguistic group that you belong
#
to, you know, religion.
#
So you just meet literally people just like your type.
#
So we actually interacted with a larger variety, within the class background, because if you
#
are a professor in JNU, that already just sort of puts you in a bracket.
#
But within that band, that band itself was diverse along many other dimensions.
#
And we got these influences without thinking about it.
#
So I'll give you an example, for example, in those political views, you know, everybody
#
thinks of JNU as this lefty-lefty place.
#
But there was Professor M.L.
#
Sondhi, who was in the Jansang.
#
In fact, he was the only MP, I think, of the Jansang at that time.
#
His children used to go to the same school as us.
#
They were friends, Shivaji and Vivekanand.
#
Mrs. Sondhi was, you know, Professor Sondhi, I don't remember very well, but Mrs. Sondhi,
#
I still meet, so I remember her very well.
#
She's into classical music.
#
So we often meet at concerts and all that.
#
Never once did my father say, don't play with the children of the Sondhis because he's
#
Never did once the Sondhis say, don't play with GPD's children because they are, you
#
know, this socialist lefty, whatever, anti-RSS, anti, you know, they have a different worldview.
#
It was never an issue, you know.
#
So the parents of the children that we grew up with, they had different political ideologies,
#
they had different orientations, but that never was an issue.
#
Not just with my, not with my parents, with no parents.
#
So there was this remarkable freedom to interact with each other.
#
So only when you grow up later on, you know, then you realize that, oh, so and so was this,
#
But that was never an issue.
#
Whereas today, I can't imagine, you know, children of two families belonging to such
#
diverse political opinions, children being friends and being allowed to, you know, be
#
in and out of each other's homes.
#
But it's a legacy of that time.
#
So even now when I meet Mrs. Sondhi, it's almost like, you know, she's motherly towards
#
me because she's seen me, I'm the same age as her children and it's lovely, you know.
#
But that's the legacy of JNU of that time.
#
I mean, I always say that I have three mothers, you know, and now I have one, two of them,
#
my own mother and the second mother also passed away recently.
#
But all these three women, one was my biological mother, but the other two women were almost
#
like mothers to me on the campus and they really were like mothers, you know.
#
But collectively, the three gave me a motherhood, which was possible only and all three are
#
very different from each other.
#
But that collective motherhood or the collective fatherhood that I enjoyed certainly was special.
#
So, yes, it was a bubble, but not the kind of bubble that we see, not the kind of bubble
#
I realized it was a bubble because when I moved out to the real world, when I left
#
JNU, I said, oh, the real world looks like this.
#
People are so categorized into backgrounds and, you know, who will talk to whom, who
#
do you interact with, et cetera, et cetera.
#
In the JNU of that time, this was not an issue.
#
So to go back to the earlier question, tell me more about yourself growing up in this
#
In the sense you're surrounded by these influences, this kind of environment.
#
Tell me about the importance of music in your life.
#
For example, you mentioned how, you know, one of the things that you and Mrs. Saundi
#
shared in common was classical music.
#
You have written many, many pieces on music, which I will link from the show notes.
#
You have gotten into a famous defense of Lata Mangeshkarji, which somehow became part of
#
an academic debate, which we will also talk about later.
#
But just going back to the young Ashwini, you know, what kind of role did music play
#
And from there, what was sort of your conception of yourself?
#
Because if you're an artistic kid, like you're into music, you've written about both Malik
#
Arjun Mansoor and you've read Ashok Dharanade, you've written about Lata and Asha and so
#
on, you're into all these different kinds of music, both in a sense of experiencing
#
them and thinking about them and so on.
#
And your father being a playwright and all of that, and you being a pretty mean writer
#
yourself, if in the context of what you've studied, one would imagine that you would
#
have been drawn towards being an artist also, being a creator also like that.
#
So how did you sort of, what role did these play in your life and how did you evolve in
#
the directions that you did?
#
So music has always been a very important part of my life.
#
It's a pity that I didn't pursue, now it's one of my biggest regrets about my life.
#
I don't have too many, but this is definitely one, which is that I should have pursued music
#
My parents were tone deaf, they couldn't sing to save their lives, but they were very
#
So the music was always playing in the house and my aunts are amazing singers, so they
#
would sing, so there was always music.
#
And my mother tried very hard to get me to learn and I did learn in fits and starts,
#
but just as she was rebellious, I was rebellious too.
#
So every time she would get me to start on music, I would find some excuse to leave it
#
because the discipline of it, the discipline that it required, I didn't have that, I guess.
#
I've also learned the sitar by the way, I learned the sitar for four years.
#
But again, the thing is that with any art form, initially it's a lot of fun.
#
Then comes a point where it starts to become difficult.
#
Actually, as you become more comfortable with it, that's when it gets more difficult.
#
Because as long as you're not very comfortable, it's fine, you just learn a few things, etc.
#
And at that transition point, you have to commit to regularly practice.
#
And I've given up so many things just at that transition point because I just found
#
I mean, in my head, there were always very valid excuses, but now I recognize them for
#
what they were, basically just excuses saying, I don't have the time for this.
#
And every time I gave up, and I gave up many times, my mother and I would have this huge
#
argument and she would say, you're wasting a talent and all of this and you'll regret
#
I'll regret it when I regret it.
#
I'm not regretting it now, etc.
#
And of course, I regret it now.
#
So I should have learned music systematically and developed not to perform, not that way,
#
but just developed musical ability, which unfortunately I don't have.
#
And I regret that for sure.
#
But having said that, music gives me so much joy that actually I've resumed learning,
#
that it's more just for me to, you know, just for me to enjoy.
#
There's no competition, there's no performance, there's nothing.
#
It's just something I really enjoy.
#
And the thing is that when I was growing up, the only thing I ever wanted to be was a medical
#
I was not into social sciences.
#
I didn't read any nonfiction.
#
I read either fiction or my school books, you know, and I had no other career choice
#
other than being a medical doctor.
#
So my point was also, what's the point of learning and spending so much time on music?
#
Because eventually when I become a doctor, I'm not going to have time to pursue.
#
And then my father would say, no, but Dr. Lagoo, see, he's a medical doctor, but he's
#
And Maharaj in fact has a lot of qualified medical doctors who are very, you know, in
#
theater, has a tradition of medical doctors in theater.
#
And also my namesake, Ashwini Birey Deshpande is a scientist and she has a PhD.
#
And they would say that, no, you could still be a medical doctor and still, you know, excel
#
And I, it's just one of these foolish things you do as a child.
#
But you know, everybody has to learn, make their own mistakes and no point in my telling
#
other people that, oh, because I made this mistake, you should not because everybody
#
has to make, sometimes we make the same mistake through generations and, but yeah, that, so
#
music has been very important is writing on music was completely serendipity.
#
I, I still don't think that I'm an expert on anything, but I've just enjoyed writing
#
these pieces a lot and it's just more my enjoyment that shows through in the pieces rather than
#
any scholarly erudition.
#
I don't claim any erudition at all in these, in these matters, but now in my old age, I
#
have actually realized the virtue of being consistent with, with, with music.
#
And I, you know, I travel a lot and you know, there are long gaps, et cetera, but to the
#
best of my ability, I, I learn a little bit here and there and, you know, so I, I'm trying
#
to develop it as a, if not very regular, but at least as a consistent passion.
#
And that's what it'll remain.
#
Ek toh Ashwini ji, I have to take strong exception to your using the phrase now in my old age,
#
You are, you are the same age as Shah Rukh Khan.
#
He would never use language like that.
#
And also you have berated me at least three, four times in the past because I called you
#
Ashwini ji and because I called you ma'am and you said ki yeh sab mat use karo.
#
So to hear you say words like this is like I am now deeply disillusioned and it's cognitive
#
dissonance is happening.
#
I'm not at all disillusioned.
#
I, and I have to say that I, I really want to see you write more about music because
#
I loved some of your writing on it.
#
I want to read out this first part of your piece on Malik Arjun Mansur where you write
#
quote Malik Arjun Mansur is a man who resides in music.
#
His postal address is Mitunje Banglodharwar, but he actually inhabits a world of music.
#
In the morning, he lives in Todi Asawari, afternoons are spent in the shadows of Saarang.
#
He sits under the canopy of Puriya Marwa in the evening and he spends the nights in the
#
palaces of Yaman Bhoop Bageshri.
#
But these are not my words.
#
This is, this is my translation.
#
This is Pula Deshpande.
#
Which in the original Marathi is beautiful and so the challenge was for me, I, this was
#
a challenging piece for me because Pula Deshpande in those who know, who've read him in Marathi
#
know how he's a master at words, you know, and to convey that impression in any other
#
So this piece actually, I spent time and even though these are not my words in Marathi,
#
that to how do I say it in English, that it conveys exactly the same feeling that Pula
#
did in the Marathi was challenging.
#
So I will take a little bit of the compliment, 10% of the compliment.
#
I loved all your writing on music.
#
There were so many pieces that I read.
#
You were kind enough to send me those links and I linked them all from the show notes.
#
So admit this now appears to be a bit of a faux pas, but these are lovely lines anyway.
#
And often the act of translation is just an act of recreation in a sense.
#
You capture the essence of what somebody said, recreated.
#
It's not a word by word translation.
#
It's not a word by word, but word by word never works across.
#
And so in fact, after I did this, I was so, because Pula is such an icon in Maharashtra.
#
So I was really afraid and Malik Mansurji is another one.
#
And so after I've translated it, I sent the English one to my father and I said, don't
#
read the Marathi, read the English and tell me whether it sounds like Pula writing in
#
And he read it and he said, yes, it does.
#
Then I sent him the Marathi.
#
I said, now you read the Marathi.
#
So then he said, you've done a good job.
#
So I was so happy because it wasn't, you know, you can't translate Pula word by word.
#
So there's a Malik Arjun Mansur story from one of my previous episodes.
#
Episode 250 was done with a good friend of mine called Narayan Shanoi.
#
So Narayan is very much into Malik Arjun Mansur.
#
And he told the story of how when he was sort of that one day, you know, back in the early
#
days of the internet, he was Googling something for about Malik Arjun Mansur and finding some
#
And you know how when you kind of Google something back in those days, a pop-up would come and
#
So basically he, he did a little research on Malik Arjun Mansur and then he went downstairs
#
with his wife for dinner and then she comes up to the room and goes to the computer or
#
waha pe there is a pop-up which is saying browse naked pictures of Malik Arjun Mansur.
#
Tells you something about algorithms of those times.
#
So I have a, I have a tangential question and here I'm kind of thinking aloud about
#
the process of the arts, of learning the arts.
#
And you spoke about how when you start learning music, it's a lot of fun till you reach that
#
stage where there is a tremendous amount of discipline.
#
And I'm actually speculating that once you're past that and you get to a certain level of
#
mastery, the fun begins again and all of that.
#
So is it a little bit like a U-shaped, you've mentioned U-shaped curves in other contexts
#
of employment and education and we'll come to that later.
#
But is this also, do you think a U-shaped curve of a sort that in the beginning of your
#
education, when you know very little, it's a lot of fun.
#
The middle part is really tough, but to make it fun again, you have to put in the yards.
#
I mean, I wouldn't know about the usual because I never got to the other side, but I, I can
#
imagine that it's a U-shape.
#
But what I will say to, you know, that if, if there is a, even an iota of some kind of
#
a natural tie and talent, like, you know, people sing in tune or they can draw or they
#
can write or anything else, which need not be your career, but I think it's tremendous
#
to have that as a, as a part of your life, which always stays with you.
#
And I haven't given too many lessons to my daughter, but this is the one lesson I always
#
tell her that you must have something which you can pursue without being dependent on
#
And that way you will always have something that you look forward to, always, always,
#
you know, and music for me has been that thing, which no matter what else is happening and
#
you know, life goes through ups and downs as it does for everyone, but the music has
#
been this one constant source.
#
And this whole thing about music therapy, I'd learned later that there is a thing called
#
music therapy, but because I had music as a companion always in different ways, it ended
#
up playing that role in, you know, when through different episodes in my life, but it's really
#
So I feel that if anyone has any talent in any dimension, I'm not saying I have talent,
#
but I'm just saying that even if there's an iota of talent, one should sort of hang
#
on to it and develop it in some way, not thinking of making a career because that can also lead
#
to disappointments, but sort of keep working at it, keep it as a second wheel that runs
#
And I love that caveat of yours not thinking of making it a career because I think too
#
often we are socialized to think of the things we do in instrumental terms and therefore
#
if something doesn't appear to be instrumental, it seems like a waste.
#
But I would just say that there have to be things that you do just for their own sake,
#
Just for their own sake and just for your own sake and especially for women.
#
I mean, you know, this is one of the things that I think women, I mean, I'm now digressing
#
a little bit into my research areas, but women are always ridden with guilt when they take
#
time to do something which is exclusively for themselves, you know, and everybody is
#
So the guilt might be very high, it might be very low and sometimes there are women,
#
I realize, who never get to do it because of the pressures.
#
I've been fortunate always to have not had those kinds of pressures.
#
But you know, once a week my music class is just time just for me, you know.
#
And I think I'm really fortunate to be able to carve out that time, but I think it's such
#
an important time and it's such an important activity for just to keep your sanity, to
#
get perspective on life, to sort of calm down and say, okay, you know, it's life is going
#
Otherwise, the rest of it is all, you know, you know, there's some deadline, something
#
is happening, some race here, something, you know, one is constantly, and these days the
#
distractions have increased, I think I'm constantly distracted between phone is pinging, bell
#
is ringing, you know, email is coming, something or the other, in between, you know, time
#
is running out, so I think it's nice to sort of rein life back in and I'm not just saying
#
music could be, it could be painting, it could be writing, it could be a sport, it could
#
be anything that we might be good at, you know.
#
And I think we should definitely, all women, but all people, I think, should have.
#
Yeah, but it's a great point that is so much harder for women because you are expected
#
to always look after the men in your life and look after the house and you know, you
#
almost feel guilty if you have, like all pleasures in a sense can be guilty pleasures and that's
#
a danger for women, certainly.
#
Sparked by something you just mentioned, here's another question, you spoke about all the
#
distractions around you and how it's important for you to carve out that me time.
#
And I think of how when we were growing up, we didn't have so many distractions, smart
#
phones nahi the, TV pe matlab Wednesday, Sunday, Chitraha rahe hai, but it's not like there's
#
a lot on TV, there's one channel, we, you know, some of us fortunate enough to have
#
books around, but you're not going to be reading all the time, that there was a lot of enforced
#
me time, that there was a potential to develop a certain kind of introspection, to develop
#
a certain kind of thairav, life ke rhythm hi wo thi.
#
And today the rhythm of life is so choppy and, and you know, we are always looking at
#
our smartphones and even there, it is not as if we are consuming content in a slow deliberate
#
way, but it's, you know, you're either scrolling up or swiping left to right and just the rhythm
#
of life and therefore perhaps a rhythm of how we think is choppy, choppy, choppy, choppy
#
Now, you know, you have taught people from the generation before this to this generation,
#
you've been a mother yourself and, and of course you've been a kid yourself because
#
otherwise you wouldn't be here.
#
So, so, you know, is this something that you think makes a difference, not just in an old
#
people lamenting about, you know, these life, these days has become like this, young people
#
are like this, but do you think that this changing of the texture of life, you know,
#
can shape a person in a different way and therefore it's incumbent upon all of us, even
#
people of our age who are like, I am certainly, you know, fighting distractions and feeling
#
so often that even for us that we need to take that step back, think about what, you
#
know, the rhythms and textures of our life are and think about what we need to do differently.
#
So what are, what are your thoughts on this?
#
And again, it's not a question of nostalgia.
#
I think in many ways the young people today are smarter.
#
They are able to assimilate information.
#
They are very clear about their boundaries.
#
They are very articulate about what they want and what they don't want.
#
I think as children, we ended up doing a lot of things that we didn't particularly care
#
about, but only because one just had to do it.
#
So when I see my daughter's, a daughter, for example, being, you know, assertive in terms
#
of what she'll do, what she won't, her articulation, you know, I mean that level of articulation
#
I still don't, I forget about when I was her age.
#
So in many ways that's, that's amazing.
#
And that's, that's, that's really good.
#
But the distraction part of it is very serious for, for example, I have switched off notifications
#
for Twitter, Facebook, everything.
#
So now I check it only when I check it and people get really upset saying, Oh, but I
#
tweeted and I gave sent you a direct message.
#
I said, well, I didn't because that's a step that I've taken in my family.
#
We tried to enforce this to the extent possible, no devices on the, on the, at the dining table.
#
That doesn't always happen.
#
Sometimes, you know, somebody is expecting a call or something.
#
The phone toh padha rata hai.
#
The one thing that I have to say during the pandemic, I gave up is watching dinner without
#
Pehle toh hum we used to be eating at the dining table.
#
Once the pandemic came, we would just pick up our plates, sit in, because we have TV in
#
only one room, because we've decided to, that's the TV room.
#
So that the act of watching TV is a deliberate act where you have to get up and move to a
#
So no other room has any television.
#
And that's something that we've decided as a policy to do.
#
Of course, we can always watch on our phones or whatever we most, we don't do that so much.
#
But in the during, when the pandemic started, we said, okay, no, we are going to watch,
#
you know, it's just, we were sitting at the home the whole day.
#
So evenings, it was just easier to pick up your plate, serve yourself and go into the
#
TV room and watch from there.
#
And I have to say we, we've got used to that now.
#
So it's now dinner time, we are watching Netflix or whatever, you know, OTT something.
#
And I have to say the content is so good.
#
And because I don't watch anything during the day, I have now justified it by saying
#
that, look, I mean, this is my only time to watch OTT.
#
I mean, you know, one, that's just, I guess one, one changes with age, but the kind of
#
free time, unfocused time that we had as children is not going to come back at all, ever.
#
And obviously as a person at a personal level, I feel that's unfortunate, but I'm sure
#
that there are many good things that that children today are doing that we didn't do
#
So I'm not going to characterize it in black and white, but I do keep talking to my daughter
#
about the need to disengage from the screen and how much she listens to me, whatever that,
#
I don't know, but I do keep saying it.
#
And does she look at you while you're saying it or she's looking into a phone?
#
So if I see her looking at the phone, I stop talking and I say, I'm not going to talk
#
She realizes now that, so she can't bring her laptop to the dining table, for example,
#
So once in a while, when she was to send an email, she asked me, can I just please bring
#
I need to send this email very urgently.
#
And she has to send it and she has to send it back.
#
So often I say, okay, then finish your email and then come, because I don't want to see
#
the laptop at the dining table to the, I mean, these, these things are not black and white.
#
It's not so strict, but at least these are small attempts that that one makes.
#
I mean, I go to restaurants and you go to this fancy restaurant paying through your
#
nose and families are just on their phones the entire time.
#
And I feel like, why did you come here?
#
And in India, of course it's bad, but in Europe, you should see it's in the U S it's a million
#
I mean, it's very rare to find somebody at a bus stop or at the train station just staring
#
And you mentioned earlier, you spoke about, you know, being in a bubble, but being fortunate
#
to be in that particular bubble.
#
And you spoke about how, you know, it was a texture of your life that you're going for
#
Eid to your friend's house, they are coming for Ganesh Chaturthi or whatever to your house.
#
And it's just a completely normal thing.
#
And that got me to thinking about, again, one of the themes I keep coming back to during
#
the show, the distinction sort of between the abstract and the concrete in our lives.
#
And by and large, what I see is that when we engage with the concrete world, when we
#
are mindful to it, I think there is a quality of experience there that is important and
#
also a quality of empathy that that brings about that I am meeting friends who are different
#
from me and I'm looking them in the eye and we are sharing stories with each other and
#
there's no electronic device there and it is concrete.
#
And I think two ways in which the abstract has impinged upon this.
#
And one is, of course, the age old way of the danger of abstract concepts like nationalism
#
and purity and the other and, you know, historical grievances from the past, which are for all
#
practical purposes, abstractions as well in this current time.
#
And all of these impinge upon us and by and when we start thinking in terms of those abstractions
#
that, oh, he's a Muslim or he's a Dalit or he's Savarna or whatever, that at some level
#
we rob them of their humanity and that becomes a problem.
#
So this is one level in which those abstractions become a problem.
#
And another level in which they become a problem is the thing that you mentioned that when
#
you were kids, you would meet for dinner every day, you, your brother, your parents would
#
all meet and you would talk to each other.
#
And of course, there were no smartphones in this day.
#
And today you might have enforced the rule in your house, but in general, it's tough.
#
Like, you know, I was at a cafe the other day and I didn't look into my phone.
#
I was just looking around and people looked at me like I'm a psychopath, what is he doing?
#
You know, did something terrible happen and he doesn't have a screen?
#
And so even when we are with people in the concrete, we are in the abstract worlds that
#
we are engrossed in, in our smartphones.
#
And I just feel that this is dangerous.
#
Like, look, net-net, I'm not a Luddite.
#
It has transformed my life in unbelievable ways and given me so many more friends through
#
these abstract interactions that begin like that and then we meet.
#
And I love that, you know, you and I are sitting here today because of all this technology
#
But at the same time, you know, I think about this dehumanization and I wonder if that is
#
a cause for the polarization that we increasingly see around us in our discourse, because if
#
we more and more stop thinking of other people as real complex people, you know, with complicated
#
stories and instead think of them as categories of people.
#
And you know, I begin to think that if I disagree with you, that means that you're evil.
#
It's not just a disagreement.
#
And we see so much of this toxic polarization on social media from all sides.
#
So what are your thoughts on this, especially because you teach young people, you know,
#
in a university, which is a liberal arts university.
#
And some have even complained that Ashoka has so much vogue.
#
So I mean, I don't know what the truth of that is.
#
I'm always happy to give the benefit of the doubt to people and not go in for easy stereotyping.
#
But what's your sort of?
#
No, I mean, it's absolutely, I agree with you completely.
#
And that's what I tell, I mean, I try to convey to students, students are like children,
#
you know, children don't really listen to parents.
#
But at least my hope is that, that somewhere something sticks.
#
And the reason I feel a little optimistic and the reason I think that, yes, something
#
sticks because one of the courses I teach is statistics.
#
So that's of course statistics, and that's more technical.
#
But the other course I teach is what is called economics of discrimination.
#
And I give a lot of real life examples.
#
And I see a lot of resistance to what I'm saying in the classroom.
#
But every year from some batch of students that I've taught at the Delhi school or at
#
Ashoka, some student will write saying, Hi, Professor, I was watching this movie and I
#
thought of you because remember you said this in class and this is what that movie showed
#
or this incident happened in my life and remember you had mentioned this about women and this
#
And suddenly it resonates, you know, so I think that it's important to keep talking,
#
you know, to young younger people without sounding like a Luddite or whatever.
#
But it's also true that in general, the spaces where you can have open conversations, which
#
outline, which outline nuances, those spaces are shrinking, I feel, and it's not the left
#
or the right or whatever issue.
#
It's like you have to take black and white positions on everything, you know, and human
#
None of us are black and all white.
#
You know, just the other day, I was watching Choti Sibat again after so many years.
#
And of course, what strikes you is the pre-liberalization in India, etc., etc., all of that.
#
But Vidya Sinha is a working woman in Bombay.
#
You know, we never find out about her family because that's irrelevant to the story.
#
So she's a working woman who's taking a decision about whether to marry Amol Palakir.
#
Eventually they marry, of course, but her courtship is Amol Palakir.
#
And she goes in a bus, she reads a book every time she sits in the bus, she opens a book
#
and starts reading, right?
#
She plays table tennis for her office with Asrani, mixed doubles.
#
And she goes to for chess championships where Asrani is playing, etc.
#
I'd forgotten these little details and then for lunch, they meet in the Samovar cafe and
#
So in a very easygoing manner, she's always in a saree, she's not this Zeenat Aman Parveen
#
Bhabhi westernized kind of a heroine, etc.
#
But at the same time, because Amol Palakir is so diffident, he goes to a life coach who's
#
Ashok Kumar, who teaches how to pataw a girl basically.
#
Now obviously that part of the movie today, it will be canceled immediately because how
#
can you pataw a girl and all of that.
#
And I realized, I appreciate that point of view.
#
But if today we were to cancel Chhoti Sibat because in that the character goes to Ashok
#
Kumar to learn these confidence building tricks, that would be a real pity.
#
Because the film in many ways, the portrayal of Vidyasena is far more progressive than
#
the way in which you see even today in all this liberalized cinema where women are supposed
#
to be, they are very well dressed and all the rest of it.
#
But where do you see characters like this just getting into a bus and opening a book
#
And also struck by the ease with which it was done in the film, her family is not important.
#
She's telling her office mate that, oh, there's this boy who follows me, he's cute.
#
I think he wants me, but he's diffident.
#
And he thinks I don't know, but actually I know, etc.
#
It's all very, very amazing and actually quite progressive.
#
But it has this element of the life coach and how do you characterize Chhoti Sibat?
#
In today's day and age, cancel.
#
That would be the thing.
#
And I think this tendency to pass judgment on things, definitive judgments is so toxic.
#
I mean, I understand the incentive.
#
You go online, you want a sense of community and belonging and being respected.
#
How do you raise your status in that tribe?
#
You do it by signaling your virtue.
#
One of the ways is to purity tests on other people in your tribe.
#
And the other way is just attacking the other side, never engaging with arguments, but
#
And I think this whole, like I would urge my listeners that every time you pass judgment
#
on something, think about the intrinsic motivation of that.
#
Because by passing judgment on that, you are elevating yourself to a higher level, whether
#
that's a higher aesthetic level or a moral level or whatever.
#
It's an act of self aggrandizement.
#
And of course, this doesn't mean that we don't condemn something that should be condemned.
#
Like in terms of values, you see someone behaving really badly.
#
Of course, it's a duty to condemn it.
#
It's your duty to speak out against injustice and all the wrong that you see in the world.
#
But sometimes we take it too far.
#
And I certainly think, and you've written a great article about this as well, which
#
are linked from the show notes.
#
But sometimes we take it too far, like when you're condemning a film for something that
#
happened at a particular point in time.
#
And the point is, one, movies are, art is meant to depict the world as it is, not an
#
idealized version of the world as it should be.
#
So to conflate the two, I think is immature and dangerous.
#
And I think you also, when you do that, you deprive yourself of the joy of a lot of art
#
because you're viewing it just through like one ideological lens and one political lens.
#
And you're not sort of appreciating all the complexities within any good work of art.
#
And I don't remember, Chhoti Sibaat, I must have seen it a decades ago, perhaps.
#
But everything that you're saying makes me think that, yeah, this is a film I would love
#
And there must be so much in it.
#
Just the casual act of a woman opening a book in a bus, like typically a lot of Bollywood
#
people would edit that out because there'll be nothing happening in that scene, right?
#
But just a conscious choice of keeping that scene in to show something about the character,
#
I mean, I had forgotten a lot of this when I saw it again.
#
And of course that came back because I had seen it a couple of times.
#
No, and you know, going back to the sort of the actors in my family, and they say that
#
the challenge of being an actor is to be able to portray roles that are not like yourself.
#
You know, if you only played the extensions of our own personalities on screen, then what
#
And the reason that they are such good actors is because they're able to portray a variety
#
of characters that are very different from the way they are as individuals.
#
And what would you do about creativity if you just model people like clones of some
#
And even on that, there's no agreement.
#
I mean, what you think is ideal, I may not agree with you on that question, right?
#
So I find the lack of nuance, and we see that in academic circles as well, which is everything
#
is black and white, or should be, if not, if it isn't.
#
And I don't understand the disinclination to engage with nuance, because I guess engaging
#
with nuance makes it harder.
#
Because then you have to acknowledge all facets, you have to say, okay, this is a multifaceted
#
I mean, this whole debate on women's labor force participation, for example.
#
It's extremely multifaceted.
#
It's very difficult to give this one explanation that fits all sizes at all times.
#
Yet people are, that's what they like to do, because it makes for bite, news bites type
#
It's a very tricky terrain.
#
It's like a slope, slope, because it's like that line from that Rajkumar says, and I think
#
Jo khut kaanch ke mahalo mein rehte hain, wo dusru pe pathar nahi peka karte hain.
#
Because the minute you start virtue singling and attacking other people, tomorrow you will
#
get attacked for something that you will say.
#
So it's a never ending thing, because people are waiting for an opportunity to get back
#
So it's just best to, I mean, I believe in data very much.
#
So even my pieces on film, et cetera, you will see it's all backed by data.
#
Even the Lata piece is all examples.
#
My point is you're making an argument, give me examples.
#
I'll listen to you if you give me examples.
#
But if you're making an ideological statement without any examples, not interested.
#
Same is true of women's labor force participation or caste discrimination or affirmative action
#
or any problem, you know, if you make assertions without data or examples, then what are you
#
Then you belong on Twitter.
#
Then you belong on Twitter.
#
On that delightful note, let's take a quick commercial break, but you, the listener, kindly
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do not check Twitter during this break.
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Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog, India Uncut,
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about many different things
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because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it.
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Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
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I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substract.com where I will write
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regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
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I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
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So please do head on over to indiancut.substract.com and subscribe.
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Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
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You don't need to go anywhere.
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So subscribe now for free.
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The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substract.com.
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Welcome back to the Seen in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Ashwini Deshpande.
#
Abhi kitna bole aapke baare mein, you know, singer, sitar player, you know, renaissance
#
You've described your father as a renaissance man.
#
So that's where it comes from and so many other things.
#
But let's now, you know, get to that part of the personal journey where we talk about
#
your work and how you got to your work.
#
You mentioned earlier that you wanted to be like a medical doctor.
#
And but and bahaa se aap academics mein aa gayi and became another kind of doctor entirely.
#
Well, pehli baat to ye ki, you know, dil ko behlane ke liye gaale bhi ek khayal achcha
#
Ki mai ye bhi hu, wo bhi apne khayalo mein toh, khayali pulao pakana badi acchi baat hoti
#
I'll encourage everybody.
#
So what kind of daydreams do you have?
#
I cannot talk about that on air, but yeah, you know, I, yeah.
#
You know, I get these emails that are meant for Ashwini Birey Deshpande, the classical
#
singer, and often they are, oh, your concert last night was phenomenal.
#
And I just believe it's about me.
#
You know, so that's the kind of email I would love to receive.
#
So I think ki mere liye likha hoga zarut.
#
But Ashwini ji ko bhi messages aate honge that thank you so much for, you know, your book
#
I learned so much about the economics of discrimination.
#
I will tell you one story and then I'll answer your earlier question, which is that all my
#
life I've been receiving mails about her.
#
And whenever it's about logistics or some, you know, kahan auditorium yeh wo details,
#
I write back to them saying, you have reached the wrong person.
#
So that because I don't want the any mess up in her programs.
#
But whenever it's a random praise about the concert, I take it.
#
I accept the praise about my wonderful concert.
#
But last year during the pandemic, the Hindustan Times was trying to get in touch with me to
#
get me to write an article on women's labor force participation.
#
So I got a call and I think I must have been on zoom or something and I didn't answer it.
#
So I called back and the person, the journalist said, who's this?
#
So I said, Ashwini Deshpande, I believe I got a call from you.
#
So they said, oh, but we've already talked.
#
So I said, no, because I was on a zoom call.
#
They said, but you, you, you know, we wanted an article from you about women's labor was
#
participation and you agreed.
#
So I said, no, I don't, I didn't have that conversation with anyone.
#
And so I said, okay, whatever it is, fine.
#
I mean, I, I don't understand what it didn't occur to me at that time, what might have
#
And I said, okay, maybe this is a mistake.
#
And so I disconnected and about half an hour later, I got a call from the same journalist
#
saying I'm so sorry, there's been a mistake.
#
So apparently they got through to Ashwini Bhede Deshpande and they asked her to write
#
about women and work and all that.
#
And because she's a professional working woman, in addition to being a fabulous artist, she
#
said, oh, but I don't know whether I can write an article on women and work and all that.
#
And she thought maybe they've been, they've asked her to write because she's a scientist
#
The fact that she was mistaken for me was a high point in my life because I really look
#
We are kind of the same age.
#
They call her back and tell her that sorry, ma'am, wrong Ashwini, but in the end I wrote
#
It was for women's day last year.
#
I have met her as in the thing is that not only do we share a name, first name, first
#
names of our parents are identical.
#
And apparently there's some connection between my mother's side of the family and her family,
#
some complicated relationship I'd forgotten right now.
#
But one of the times that we went to her concert, my mother and I went up and my mother introduced
#
herself saying I'm so and so, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And she immediately knew who my mother was.
#
And then I was introduced and I said, oh, my name is also Ashwini.
#
And she's, oh, how nice.
#
So yes, I've met her in that.
#
So her parents are also called Kalindi and Govind.
#
Well, Govind and actually my mother's then story of my mother's name Kalindi is a separate
#
one maybe another time.
#
But my mother was when she was born, she was named Manik.
#
So her parents are named Manik and Govind.
#
So Manik Bide, the well-known singer is her mother.
#
So getting back to your academic journey, I wish we could talk about your journey to
#
becoming a, you know, this is a moment in the episode where both of us should discover
#
with a shock that I invited the wrong Ashwini and I thought I was talking to that one.
#
Tell me about when you gave your first concert and there should be that shock of recognition
#
on both our faces that, oh, my God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I mean, you see, you know, I told
#
you earlier about how I dropped out of music lessons, dance lessons.
#
So my mother, you know, was ever an optimist.
#
And so despite the numerous times I dropped out of classes, she always believed that the
#
next time it will be for keeps.
#
So she enrolled me in vocal music classes, Kathak classes, sitar classes, and I kept
#
dropping out at different times because at the time when it gets really difficult, that's
#
I mean, I say, okay, I don't have the time to do this.
#
So I, when I moved to class 11, of course, I took science and all my classmates who were
#
going for engineering or medicine, that was what everybody in my class was doing.
#
They enrolled for these after school lessons, you know, these coaching classes, such Deva
#
So basically after school, you go straight to coaching class and by the time you get
#
home, it's about 8, 830 at night.
#
So I said, do you have to spend two years like this?
#
So everyone said, yeah, otherwise you can't crack the entrance exam.
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And if you want to get into any decent medical college, you have to do this.
#
So I said, I can't do it.
#
So I went for one or two days and it's madness.
#
You know, there are these tiny rooms full of sweaty students and some boring person
#
who is just giving you questions, you know, like beating you up, basically.
#
So I said, there's no way this is not happening.
#
So I told my parents, I said, if this is the condition for medical exams, I don't want
#
So my parents said, you only decided to take, we didn't tell you, so don't do it, but then
#
figure out what you want to do.
#
I mean, you're free to choose.
#
So in the meantime, I had some dreams of becoming a pure scientist, like a research scientist.
#
So I in my 11th and 12th class projects, I took up some projects which were, so I wanted
#
So I went to PUSA Institute, I developed a project on mutation, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I was interested in genetics.
#
So I thought that that's what I'll do.
#
Then by the time it came to applying for colleges, everyone said, oh, but you know, BSc biology
#
karke kya karogi and you know, it's, there's no value of this degree, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I mean, basically I was not hearing good things about doing a BSc in biology.
#
So I said, then what do I do?
#
I mean, I'm not doing medicine.
#
I'm not going to do BSc in biology.
#
What am I going to do with it?
#
Because I had no social science background, you know, the only thing I studied was fiction
#
or I would do my science work or whatever.
#
So I said, okay, what is the subject that I can do where I can put all this mathematics
#
and everything to use economics?
#
So I got into econ by default.
#
So I've been a little bit on the margin.
#
So I got into econ as a default, then even the kind of economics I do is, you know, not,
#
I haven't had a career path like many of the other economists have been on your show where
#
you go abroad, you do a PhD in a good university, you get into a good department, you go this
#
very high level, heavy level publishing, that route, et cetera.
#
So I haven't really, my career trajectory has not been that.
#
So it's a series of accidents that have basically, that I've landed up where I've landed up.
#
So, you know, when you started doing econ as a subject and I think what happens sometimes
#
where you fall in love with a subject while studying it is that first you start studying
#
it as a subject, that there are all these chapters in textbooks, there are these subjects,
#
learn this, learn that.
#
But then hopefully, you know, there comes that moment where it starts to connect itself
#
to the real world and where you can, like what I, I didn't study economics, but what
#
made me fall in love with economics was when I realized that this is not about numbers
#
and finance and economy and all of that, it's about human behavior.
#
You're studying, you're studying the effects of scarcity, you're studying incentives, you're
#
studying the why people do what they do, and that just applies to everything.
#
And I think that, that, that was like a magical transformation for me to realize that, you
#
know, economics gives me the frames and the tools to understand life, you know.
#
So was there a moment like that for you, like how, how did that process happen where it
#
goes from being a dry subject that you're studying for a degree to something that just
#
shapes the way you look at the world?
#
And I, I don't think very much like a mainstream traditional economist in any case, just at
#
So I have always been a little bit on the margin.
#
So I, I did, you know, you take exams, you learn, you study for the exams, you sort of,
#
you do whatever you do in the exam.
#
So that's one part of the story.
#
My PhD was not on any of this, you know, discrimination, caste, gender, social identity, nothing,
#
I barely knew the contours of, not that I know a lot now, but I know a little bit more
#
than I knew at that time, which was zero.
#
And I, my PhD was on international debt and specifically looking at the debt crisis of
#
And it had very little data, there was a tiny section with some data, but more or less it
#
So it was models and et cetera.
#
So while of course it was about people and all that, but it didn't directly connect with
#
people in, in this very organic way or a real way.
#
And I thought that's what I'll do.
#
I'll just keep writing papers of, you know, that kind, et cetera.
#
And then after I finished my PhD, I started sending out my chapters to journals and I
#
had a book contract from OUP to write a book extending my thesis to look at the Mexican
#
debt crisis, which has, which had just, there was another wave of the Mexican debt default
#
and the negotiations and all that, the details of which I miss are escaping me now, but that
#
And again, another accident happened, which is that one of my papers that had submitted
#
to a journal, one of the referees of that paper was an American economist who got in
#
touch with me to say that I should not be telling you this, but I'm a referee at this
#
journal for this paper that you've sent and I really like it, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And he sent me an email and I obviously had cited his work.
#
So email was very new, there was no Google.
#
So I couldn't Google this person to see what he looked like or whatever.
#
And I was completely taken aback, obviously thrilled that to hear from someone who had
#
cited at a very young age, I mean, that's, that was just a real high.
#
And we started chatting over email.
#
And then he said to me, would you like to come to the U S for a postdoc?
#
Of course, I didn't even know what a postdoc was at that time, because even now in India,
#
postdocs are not very common, but at that time I had zero clue about any of this.
#
And I said, what does it mean?
#
So he told me it could be a two year fellowship, no teaching, et cetera.
#
And long story short, I landed up there with my book contract and I said, you know, I don't
#
have to teach so I can do all this.
#
And then we would talk every now and then he would talk about, oh, so what do you think
#
about the caste system in India?
#
You know, have you looked at gaps between caste groups and all that?
#
And I kept saying, I said, no, that's sociology.
#
Economists in India don't look at all this.
#
And Delhi school at that time was, you know, one of the centers where very pathbreaking
#
work on Indian poverty was coming out.
#
But none of it was differentiated by social identity.
#
So we talked about the poor and the non-poor or the rich and the poor, but not by whether
#
they were male, female, this or that caste or anything.
#
And he said, no, economists and of course, after I went there, I discovered that he was
#
African-American, which I didn't know.
#
And he said, no, I work on racial inequalities and economists in the US work on racial inequalities.
#
It's a very legitimate field of inquiry.
#
And I said, well, not in India.
#
Economist works on caste in India.
#
And I said, there's no data anyway.
#
So what are we talking about here?
#
And so there's this data set called National Family Health Survey, NFHS, which is now in
#
At that time, the second round had come out and he said, you can use this data.
#
Of course, I'd never actually used household survey data.
#
I'd only studied about it in a textbook.
#
And studying about a regression in a textbook is a completely different cup of tea from
#
figuring out how to run anything on the computer in which I had zero skills at that time.
#
But I couldn't admit to him that I had never used household survey data.
#
So I said, yeah, sure, I can look at it.
#
And then I got another student to help and I said, I need to learn some of these packages
#
because I've never used them.
#
So he taught me one, actually a rather difficult package at that time, not data which I use
#
So I picked up some things and eventually I wrote, and then I kept calling my father
#
every week, send me readings, send me this.
#
I don't know what the caste system is, I need to understand it detailed.
#
Knowing about it in a sort of rough way is one thing, but to study any social category
#
So I did a lot of work that is not by economists at all.
#
And so my father really helped me sending references.
#
And I wrote my first paper, which I thought people would say, okay, fine, we knew all
#
this already, so what's new about this paper?
#
I thought that's the kind of reception it will get, but it got the opposite reception.
#
People said, oh, this is new, we didn't know this, et cetera.
#
It was just showing, it was, yeah.
#
So basically the National Family Health Survey data has no income or consumption data or
#
So anything that economists would say, okay, I want to look at incomes, I want to look
#
at wages, but it has data on occupation, education, land ownership, et cetera.
#
So I created an index, like a human development index, and literally the same formula, and
#
I just called it the caste development index.
#
And so I thought it was a very simple paper.
#
And using the CDI, I showed the gap between the upper castes and the Dalits, all India
#
and across states and in each dimension.
#
So I took five variables for the caste development index.
#
And of course you can look at the aggregate index, but you can look at each of those variables
#
And basically I showed that in each of those components, there was a gap between the upper
#
castes in every state of the country and the Dalits, and I quantified that gap.
#
That's all the paper was.
#
But it was a surprise to people to see this at the national level, in the context of the
#
argument that the caste system is, the hierarchies are narrowing, castes are basically vote blocks.
#
So Dalits are no longer as badly off economically speaking as people believe them to be because
#
political parties are vying for their votes.
#
All the narrative about either a complete upturning of the caste hierarchy or certainly
#
... Of course, this was one point in time, so we couldn't say anything about flattening
#
That work I've done later.
#
But this was just taking a snapshot in five indicators of wellbeing.
#
What are the gaps looking like between upper castes and Dalits, bus.
#
And I really didn't think that anybody would read that paper or would find it interesting.
#
So very gingerly I sent it to four or five people, fully expecting to be told that, okay,
#
fine, pat on the back and now go back to doing your work.
#
So I thought I'll go back to my Mexico book.
#
This was just mainly to not have to keep on having that same argument with my mentor.
#
And then he loved the paper and as did some others and I presented it at a few places.
#
And I was a little surprised by the reaction it got.
#
And I said, how could people not know this already?
#
I mean, why is this not common knowledge?
#
It seemed very intuitive to me.
#
And so I wrote that paper and I sent it to a journal, got published.
#
Then somebody said, oh, I'm doing a book.
#
Can you just now look at gender also?
#
I said, oh, come on, give me a break.
#
I just did one paper with cars, now you want me to look at male-female also.
#
Then Sandy said, well, why not?
#
You have the data, just do male-female and just do the same index again and show the
#
So I did four categories, upper-caste men, upper-caste women, Dalit men and Dalit women.
#
And that shows a very interesting hierarchies.
#
That's how I started thinking about gender because for men, upper-caste men are better
#
off than Dalit men across all dimensions.
#
But for women, on material indicators, upper-caste women are better off.
#
But this data set also has a whole lot of mobility and freedom of choice questions.
#
And there, at that time, upper-caste women were not necessarily better off compared to
#
So then I wrote a paper about the trade-off, that women face, but not men.
#
And then I linked a lot to the Brahmanical patriarchy literature.
#
I read Uma Chakravarty, I read a lot of things.
#
Then my mother sent me readings, my father sent me readings, you know, then it just one
#
thing led to the other kind of thing.
#
And the two years that I spent in the US just went, just reading.
#
And because I was not teaching, I had more time and I wrote a few papers and then I never
#
And when I came back, I thought, okay, maybe I'll write the book.
#
But by the time I came back, I was pretty sure that that's not going to happen because
#
then I introduced this course called Economics of Discrimination at the Delhi School, which
#
was interestingly opposed both by my colleagues in the economics department and sociologists.
#
Some of my colleagues felt this is not economics.
#
And sociologists felt economists have no business talking about caste.
#
And what is this reducing caste disparity to a number, you know, 26% don't have land
#
or 32% or whatever, reducing.
#
And what is this category called schedule caste, there's so much heterogeneity within.
#
So by aggregating, you are, you know, essentializing, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I learned new words.
#
I said, okay, fine, I'm not arguing that there's no heterogeneity yet on the aggregate.
#
This category of groups has markedly lower outcomes than that category of individuals.
#
That's all I'm saying, not to deny heterogeneity within each of these categories.
#
And that's something that tells us something.
#
So that's how this agenda started and I never went back to international debt.
#
And now it's literally, I finished one paper and while I'm doing that, there are five others
#
that have already started, which is, I know, not a good way of working, but it's just questions
#
Sometimes it could be a random something somebody posts on Twitter and will give me an idea
#
saying, Oh, this is interesting.
#
I should, I can look at this or something like that, you know, so it's the world is
#
giving you ideas basically.
#
And conversations give you like, today I might come up with, you know, think of, you might
#
ask me something and that can get me set me thinking about something.
#
So then that's now I do work, which I think relates to the lives of people, but it's come
#
very late in my career, but I'm really enjoying it.
#
I mean, I think this is the best part of my academic career.
#
I mean, earlier in the episode, I was thinking that maybe through the course of this episode,
#
I should persuade Ashwini Ji or rather Ashwini as you're a young person to sort of write
#
more about music and, you know, go back to that love, but now just seeing the excitement
#
on your face, you know, I can, I can see how much this work kind of means to you.
#
And I totally get that.
#
When you did that first paper, is it that you thought that it is obvious because everybody
#
of course knows the conclusion that upper cast are much better off than lower cast.
#
But the learning from that, and I'm just thinking aloud here, is that these numbers matter quantifying
#
this stuff matters because not just do you get a snapshot of how things are at a particular
#
point in time, which may even seem obvious.
#
But over time, when you have different data sets from different years and different points,
#
you can actually see social movement and you can actually have a sense of what is working
#
and what is not and the direction that we are going in.
#
And therefore these numbers sort of matter and therefore in a sense, these numbers come
#
to life like a mistake that people who sort of don't engage with numbers and our brains
#
are not wired to tackle big numbers.
#
So they just kind of blank out and it's just abstract.
#
And a mistake that people often make when they think about economics is that, yaar theek
#
hai numbers hai, ye hai, market upar jaara hai, niche jaara hai, graph hai, what is the
#
connection with the real world.
#
But what all of your work does, especially because it is in these two areas, caste and
#
gender is that it illuminates so much that affects real people in the real world.
#
And we can see this all around us.
#
So is that a correct characterization?
#
I think that numbers are very important because all of us are intelligent and can make assertions.
#
All of us see the life world around us and we can make conclusions based upon what we
#
But now that I teach statistics, the importance of correct sampling is more obvious to me
#
than it ever was before because I am now teaching statistics to 18 year olds.
#
And therefore how you sample is supremely important to the conclusions you are going
#
You know, I mean just to illustrate to a very lay person, supposing you have a salad with
#
multiple layers of things like cheese and lettuce and whatever tomatoes and pieces of
#
And you don't mix it, right?
#
And you take a bite out of it.
#
Now depending on how deep your fork has gone in, you will taste only the layers that are
#
And you can draw a conclusion about that.
#
That won't be a wrong conclusion based on what you ate, but it is wrong conclusions
#
So anything that you say about the top two layers would be an incorrect representation
#
of the salad bowl if it is not well mixed.
#
And if your spoonful is not picking up elements of all the layers that are in the salad bowl.
#
And when you sample, I mean obviously whenever we draw conclusions from data, we are not
#
taking a census of 1.6 billion people, otherwise we'll never get any conclusions done.
#
That is why the importance of correct sampling cannot be overemphasized.
#
Otherwise there are impressions and those impressions are fine, you know.
#
I go out in the street and I see somebody doing something and based upon that one person,
#
I'll say something, you know, oh, this person is very hardworking or not or whatever it
#
Now, that is my impression based upon the street outside the studio, which is a valid
#
impression of the street outside the studio.
#
But if I said that my visual impression of the street outside the studio says something
#
about the population of Delhi or India, that would be a wrong conclusion.
#
And now that I teach statistics and basic statistical methods, I always knew this theoretically
#
and obviously that's what I've been working on.
#
That trying to explain this to 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds has brought a clarity in my own
#
thinking about the importance of sampling that I cannot convey to everybody strongly
#
And that's why it really bothers me when I see conclusions that are based upon incorrect
#
And it's not just about choosing a sample, it's about the way you ask a question.
#
Is it a leading question?
#
I mean that even in law, you know, you're not allowed to add leading.
#
So what I'm trying to say is that when we are drawing conclusions about anything, there
#
is a certain rigor, there's a certain scientific method.
#
Just because it's economics or sociology or anthropology doesn't mean the scientific
#
method can be disregarded, right?
#
And so when you do all these things, then the numbers make sense.
#
Numbers make a lot of sense.
#
But you have to use them well.
#
You have to generate them well and use them well, of course.
#
But first, the generation of the numbers, how is the data coming the way it's coming?
#
That is a very important step.
#
And we often don't pay enough attention, as much attention to this fact of generating
#
numbers the right way as we should be doing.
#
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
#
And in fact, I think that if you take a picture of the street outside the studio, it doesn't
#
even tell you much about the street outside the studio.
#
That's a picture at one point in time and things are so dynamic.
#
You are standing in one particular place looking from one particular angle.
#
You know, I used to be a professional poker player for five years between 2010 and 2015.
#
And one of the things that poker taught me, and this is more sort of amplified in poker
#
And poker, of course, is a game of skill, but the quantum of luck is extremely high.
#
So the skill expresses itself only through a large sample size, right?
#
So for us, a realistic sample size had to be really large.
#
You could not tell if somebody had mastered a particular form of the game by looking at
#
say a thousand hands or two thousand hands.
#
You needed a couple of million hands at least before you could safely say that this guy
#
So sometimes, you know, I'll look at, like I look at nutrition studies, 50 people were
#
given keto diet, 50 people were given this diet.
#
And my mental, you know, I have to adjust my biases about sample size because I'm just
#
thinking, what is this?
#
But obviously for different fields.
#
So another question, you mentioned that in the social sciences, you know, that how you
#
generate these numbers matters and the method matters and all that.
#
I was chatting with my mutual friend Shruti Rajgopalan once about experiments in the social
#
sciences and the kind of conclusions that we can draw from them.
#
And she made a very good point and she was citing someone, I forget who, but the point
#
was essentially that, let us say that you want to run an experiment on whether dropping
#
a coin into a particular amount of water will raise, will displace a little water and raise,
#
you know, the level of the water or whatever.
#
Now in a scientific experiment, what you would do is you would have a lab with controlled
#
conditions and you would have a beaker of water and you would measure everything and
#
you would put a coin in there and then you would measure the level again.
#
And the answer you would get is conclusive and you can establish causation and all of
#
So what happens in the social sciences is you are effectively dropping the coin in a
#
massive swimming pool full of hundreds of people jumping in and out and there's a storm
#
overhead and it's raining and that's a result you get and how, you know, the water could
#
go up, it could go down, you can make all kinds of theories about coins and water and
#
it gets incredibly messy, right?
#
So that is something that I sometimes think about that what I see in the social sciences
#
is that the conclusion that people arrive at seems to be determined by the ideologies
#
or the prisms that they bring to the table.
#
You know, where you stand depends on where you sit as that old sort of saying goes.
#
So how do you, this is obviously really broad and you know, the science in the social sciences
#
has progressed a lot and these are dangers that every serious social scientist is kind
#
How do you tackle for something like this?
#
It definitely is hard because as you say, you know, there are what we call confounding
#
factors because many other things are simultaneously changing.
#
So getting at causation in an isolated way is hard and the randomized control trial methodology
#
is precisely trying to do that.
#
But there are other issues with randomized control trials, which is A, just the difficulty
#
B, big picture questions can't be tackled by because you're just waiting one little
#
thing and checking the impact.
#
I'm not going into that debate because that's very well known.
#
So the quest for getting the right causation continues, right?
#
And I don't think there's a magic answer as yet.
#
But I think as social scientists, we must be aware always of pitfalls.
#
We must always, and I think humility helps here, which that's a very important part,
#
I think should be an important part of, is that I may not be seeing the whole picture
#
and that may be out there.
#
So the willingness to learn, the willingness to engage with nuance.
#
The other thing that's apart from the fact how data is generated is, as we were talking
#
about earlier related to social media, which is unwillingness to engage with nuance.
#
So for example, I'll give you an example in the context of the Indian labor force,
#
female labor force participation debate, which is there are two problems.
#
One is labor force participation rate is falling.
#
The other is violence against women in public spaces.
#
Now the numbers are increasing, which is always, there's always a question mark about violence
#
numbers, which is, is it better reporting or is it incidentally, are women empowered
#
enough to report or is it actual incidents going up?
#
And at the end of the day, there's no firm answer to this.
#
However, whatever it is, but the numbers at least are rising.
#
Now both these are very serious problems, but that doesn't mean automatically that
#
So my student, Jeetendra Singh and I, we looked at 146 countries and we got data on violence
#
against women in public spaces and their female labor force participation rates.
#
And violence against women is a problem everywhere, but we don't find a systematic relationship
#
between FLFP and violence against women in public spaces or violence against women.
#
And the one obvious reason for that is that a lot of violence against women takes place
#
People say women are afraid to go out and work because they don't want to be molested,
#
which assumes that at home they will not be molested.
#
I have, and my co-authors have field, you know, field trip after field trip, women telling
#
us we want to leave the home.
#
We don't want to be locked up, you know, inside our home with the husband or father-in-law
#
or whoever, or even mother-in-law sometime, which they may or may not be physical violence,
#
but it's certainly abuse, you know.
#
So if you don't look at violence inside the home, you will always think, oh, it's only
#
violence outside the home, which is of course a serious problem.
#
There's no denying that that's an issue.
#
But does it automatically translate into female labor force participation rates lowering?
#
But if you've already made up your mind that that's an issue, that's it.
#
So I think that there is no harm in acknowledging that the problem is harder to pin down than
#
this one, this or any other simple explanation for that matter.
#
You can take, I mean, you can replace violence against women with something else.
#
Again there'll be a similar issue.
#
So as social scientists, we have to be aware of, if you're working with data, which I
#
think everybody should, but if you're working with data, how that data is generated, how
#
it is used, how best to establish causality and learn from evidence from other disciplines
#
for economists, I would say, learn from evidence from other disciplines in a humble way.
#
So today, for example, economists have discovered social norms, which other disciplines have
#
But now the pendulum has shrunk to the other side, which is when you talk about female
#
labor force participation rate, no economic factor can possibly explain it.
#
It only has to be social norms.
#
If we talk about social norms, why can't we simple demand supply factors?
#
Why aren't Indian women affected by that?
#
They are as rational human beings as any other human beings on the planet.
#
So it's great that economists have broadened their view horizon, but an incorrect reading
#
of social norms is actually dangerous to the analysis of the problem into which many traditional
#
economic factors must enter, I think.
#
That academic disciplines are vast.
#
And there have always been, not just now, there have always been different points of
#
view, controversial conclusions, people disagreeing with each other on the same thing.
#
I think that's healthy.
#
And you mentioned humility, being open to nuance, and especially being open to the notion
#
that a fashionable explanation or the conventional explanation may be wrong.
#
Just look at the data, make sure the data is as good and as generated with as much intellectual
#
honesty as you can manage and then see where it takes you.
#
Now, is there a problem in academia also that there are these fashions in academia, there
#
are these conventions, people think in certain ideological ways through certain prisms.
#
And therefore, the temptation for a young academic looking to move up within the profession
#
is to conform to those or at least not be too much of an outlier.
#
That's absolutely right, not just ideological, but even methods.
#
So methods become fashionable.
#
So if a particular method is fashionable, everybody wants to just join the bandwagon
#
because then you feel, oh, my paper is more likely to be published because if I do this
#
or that, or if I work on this field or that, so fields become fashionable, methods become
#
fashionable, ideologies become fashionable.
#
And I guess because I've been a little bit of an outlier almost in every field, it hasn't
#
bothered me personally that much because I think this is again a legacy of my father
#
where he belonged and didn't belong to any one field or ideology.
#
So the right wing thought of him as too leftist, the left wing thought of him as not left enough,
#
so and so thought of him as not this way, not that way.
#
So he sort of didn't really belong to any club.
#
And when I think about myself, I sort of feel that way a little bit, which is I'm a little
#
bit of an outlier on this.
#
So I haven't gone on this high track publishing, that career path or whatever.
#
So I'm a little unencumbered by this.
#
Of course, it has its own downsides and it has its own risks, but I enjoy doing what
#
And from my mother, I've learned not to be self-conscious, you do what you believe in
#
It's really hard for, because I see young people now, they are so career oriented literally
#
from the day they joined the PhD program.
#
So who you will sit with at a conference table, they will, and I don't blame them because
#
that's the way, it's like you go to a conference, you suss out who's there, et cetera, et cetera.
#
You choose sessions, you choose, and it may be happening unconsciously, not that people
#
are planning it that way actively, but building networks, doing sort of, it's fine.
#
I feel like I've escaped all that and now I'm on the other side of 50.
#
So now it doesn't matter anyway.
#
But it's like, I feel like I've done what has excited me.
#
And as a result, it's a body of work.
#
I wouldn't say, there's this one paper that I did, which has been in AER or Econometrica
#
and it's changed the way the discipline has worked, obviously not, nothing like that.
#
But it's a body of work.
#
And I feel that that body of work, I have enjoyed doing, whether it's made any difference
#
to anyone is not for me to say, but I have enjoyed doing it.
#
And it's sort of coming together in this role of social identity, when you move away from
#
an individual to a group, how does that work in an economic setting?
#
So it's that larger field.
#
And so affirmative, all of that falls in the same sort of broad.
#
These are complicated issues, these are controversial issues.
#
There are no clear answers.
#
I don't have clear answers, but I think that these are exciting problems.
#
And precisely because they are nuanced, I enjoy doing it because I like the challenge
#
of nuance, when you are unable to say something with certainty that this is it.
#
I found a magical solution to this problem, which I guess from a careerist point of view
#
is not the greatest thing, but it's fine.
#
And you know, what you say about both your father and yourself, that you never belonged
#
in this or that is resonant with me as well, because I've always kind of felt that in any
#
domain that I've been in, I'm not mainstream and the elites don't want me at the table.
#
But now I feel now that it makes two of us, maybe the horror, we do belong somewhere.
#
No, no, I'm going to resist that and say, no, no, no.
#
So, you know, one of my dear friends, Ajay Shah, often talks about laments, about laments
#
of fact that a lot of economists and I think this would apply to people in any academic
#
field, especially in the humanities.
#
A lot of economists start playing that academic game where they get trapped in what is essentially
#
an academic circle jerkin, that's my term, not his, where, you know, they are signaling
#
to each other, writing for each other and it's a circular game.
#
They have to publish so much, these are the journals where they publish, you know, isko
#
ten year mela, ye professor ban gaye and it's this whole game and they don't engage enough
#
And as someone who has engaged a lot with the real world in policy domains and so on,
#
Ajay's lament is that I wish there were more brilliant people who actually did this.
#
You know, he sort of talks about so much talent being wasted because you're trapped inside
#
this little game and you're not really kind of engaging with the real world.
#
And in a sense, you've also bucked the trend of being there, like just a very fact that
#
you taught the economics of discrimination in the early 2000s whenever you started the
#
The economists aren't doing that.
#
The sociologists don't want you to teach that everybody is like, what the hell?
#
So you're clearly, you know, you're kind of bucking that trend.
#
So one, do you think that, you know, this is a problem with academia, that people can
#
become the prisoners of domains, that they can enter these silos, silos of specialization
#
and kind of get trapped in that and just play that game all their lives.
#
And if you were to advise sort of young people, maybe young academics, maybe people thinking
#
of a scholarly career, you know, what would you say?
#
I think all careers have their own compulsions.
#
You know, I wouldn't say only academics has it.
#
You know, I mean, you're training to be a cricket player.
#
You know, you have to, there are certain ropes you have to learn, you have to climb, you
#
know, things like that.
#
So succeeding in a career has its own demands.
#
And I wouldn't blame anyone for following the dictates of that demand.
#
You know, I mean, if you have to publish in quality journals, you have to publish in quality
#
I mean, that's the requirement of the profession.
#
I mean, it is cricketers are judged on how well they score in front of packed stadiums.
#
They're not performing in the nets in front of a committee of experts who is forcing
#
but a good cover driver.
#
So cricket was a bad example.
#
But what I'm trying to say is that what it takes to succeed in a particular field, you
#
broadly know that and then you have to follow some of those, the sort of the set pathways
#
and breaking free is, you know, from a career point, unless you just change careers or you
#
are, you know, it's also a question of privilege.
#
I mean, the thing is that if you have inherited money, you have legacy, you know, you can
#
say, okay, I'm going to just discover myself and you know, one year I'll just play jazz
#
Another year I'm just going to, you know, make films on my iPhone or whatever.
#
But that's because somebody is paying for my bread and butter.
#
Now that's a very, very privileged position.
#
But if you have to earn a bread and butter and if you have to publish in an academic
#
institution, then there are certain demands at that institution places.
#
Whether those demands are valid or not is on a different conversation.
#
But as long as there are some rules of the game, in order to succeed at that game, you
#
have to follow the rules of the game.
#
You can always be in the policy world, you know, but there you can make the other point,
#
which is that the policy world also needs to engage with high quality evidence, right?
#
And so how do you make the two meet?
#
And for very young researchers, it'll be hard, I think.
#
Those who are in academics, those who are going to policy, et cetera, that's a different
#
But I guess there comes a time for many economists, when especially, you know, 50 plus, that you
#
willy-nilly starting it.
#
Some people do it more actively, some people do it less.
#
But if you're working on issues that are policy, amenable to policy implications, or actionable
#
policy, then you start sort of engaging with the policy world as well.
#
What do you feel about the inevitable trade-off that we are all confronted with between breadth
#
Like on the one hand, there is a temptation to pick one subject and just go really deep
#
And there is enormous value in that because you might end up going deeper than anyone
#
else has gone and, you know, completely figure out that subject really deeply.
#
The danger in that, of course, is you could pick an obscure subject like, you know, serial
#
prices in Mexico in 1830 and, you know, it has no resonance, there's nothing there.
#
And at the same time, there is a temptation to go broad, that apply frameworks from, say,
#
different disciplines or even within your own discipline.
#
Just keep it broad, build broad narratives, try to come up with grand theories that explain
#
things and all of that.
#
And both of these have the danger.
#
The danger in going too deep is that you're not seeing enough of the big picture.
#
The danger in only trying for the big picture can mean that you get everything wrong because
#
you don't get any of the detail as any specialist could tell you.
#
So how does one sort of manage that trade-off?
#
Because they're both appealing and you could argue that you actually can appeal to more
#
people and get in television studios and all of that by just taking the broad kind of view,
#
I mean, at some point, you need to be broad, at some point, you need to be deep.
#
How do you manage these tensions?
#
But I think on balance, if I have to give a very short answer, my view would be that
#
whatever it is that you say shouldn't be wrong.
#
So if by being broad, you're saying wrong things, I'll say don't be broad.
#
If by going deep, you're saying wrong things, don't go deep.
#
I guess without a specific example in my mind, sometimes you can go broad not by being
#
wrong, but by not being nuanced enough.
#
So that's what I'm saying.
#
So even somebody like you take a very popular author, like bestselling author like Harari,
#
Now, we've all read his books, I mean, I haven't read all of them, but I've read some things
#
and very impressive, very, very nicely written, et cetera, it says millions of copies all
#
Now, I recently read an article, which is a critique of Harari and how he's glossed
#
over some of the nuance to the point of getting it wrong.
#
So one of the dangers of glossing over nuance is that you could end up saying the wrong
#
So I guess my short answer to this would be to not achieve for such a big picture that
#
you're just getting everything wrong.
#
So have a sense of the context, but then go deep into it.
#
So for example, if you're studying, I don't know, the caste system in India, right?
#
Now when I started, I literally, I knew some things from my personal life, et cetera, but
#
I hadn't studied the caste system because I was not, I will, social science was never
#
my domain, you know, I'd always been a science student and I'd never read nonfiction and
#
social science because that was never my, I didn't, I didn't think that I was going
#
And so knowing about personal episodes of, of caste and one's own brush with the caste
#
system in different ways, a totally different thing from knowing what the hell this whole
#
And so I found the broader readings books that my father suggested to me and that I'm
#
None of it is in the papers that I've written, but reading those was extremely useful for
#
me to just situate the whole thing.
#
And even now, every now and then I really miss my father because every now and then
#
I literally want to call him up and say, I want a reading on this particular aspect.
#
And of course he's not there any longer.
#
So I have to just Google and find things on my own.
#
But again, you know, the point that I said about humility is important is because if
#
I had begun by thinking that, okay, I'm, you know, God's gift to humanity on the caste
#
question and I'm going to unveil answers that no scholar before me has ever done.
#
And you know, I'm this very smart person who's now going to tell everybody else, okay, here's
#
what you guys don't know about caste and I'm telling you this.
#
If I had gone into it with that approach, I don't think it would have worked at all.
#
I was bound to get, I mean, not that I, I know a lot now, but I'm, I'm still learning
#
and literally I learn every day.
#
But because I see myself as a student of this, of this, of this field rather than as an expert,
#
it always helps me because when I read something you say, Oh, right.
#
You know, and in this, you know, this is the history, something like that, you know, and
#
that adds up to then finally start becoming a big picture.
#
So you go in depth in order to go in depth, you learn little bits every time.
#
And then it adds up to a big picture.
#
So I would say if you're working on something for the first time, maybe take the depth approach
#
first, do a little bit of in-depth pieces, then sit back and say, okay, I've done five
#
How, how is this picture adding up?
#
Which how, which part, how many pieces of the jigsaw have I connected?
#
So now a little bit of the picture is emerging rather than saying, okay, now I'm just looking
#
at you guys from the sky and I can just see the whole picture.
#
I think that's the problem.
#
And many people fall prey to that, to that tendency, which is that I am looking at you
#
from the sky and I can see something that you can't because you are in the picture.
#
I'm taking an aerial view and I see everything.
#
And so I'm explaining it to you now, something that you can't see.
#
That's where things start to go wrong.
#
And I think there's this human danger also of look, how, how do we understand the world
#
by telling stories about the world to ourselves?
#
And this is tempting and you know, it leads to a certain amount of comfort if we can tell
#
a story about something that explains it to us.
#
So a lot of stories tend to be stories that are too simple and often stories that are
#
So you know, so I completely agree with you that it makes sense to go for depth, some
#
The other, I love your jigsaw puzzle metaphor and the other one that I'd bring in is that
#
when you paint a picture by joining dots and the thing is if you don't have enough dots,
#
exactly, then you know, a horse can appear to be a chair, right?
#
You need enough dots to have a sense of what you're painting a picture of and the more
#
dots you have, the more accurate they will be.
#
And the question for a scholar also will be what if you're trying to paint a picture of
#
10 different things and you don't feel like you have the, you know, can fill enough dots
#
And there's, there's a term called Gelman amnesia.
#
So it's named after the physicist Murray Gelman who once made the observation that when you
#
read a newspaper and there's an article on a subject that you know a lot about, you read
#
that article and you realize it's full of shit, right?
#
But when you read everything else in the newspaper about things that you don't know anything
#
about, you assume that it is correct.
#
So that's Gelman amnesia.
#
You forget that they got that wrong.
#
And I feel that with scholars who are too broad, it can seem like this, that when somebody
#
like a Harari and he was actually the name I had in mind before you mentioned him, that
#
when someone like a Harari tells these beautiful stories that explain everything, I'm like,
#
yeah, man, it explains everything.
#
But if he happens to write about a subject I know, I'll be like, wait a minute, yeh kya
#
So a final question about sort of academics and the academic journey before we dive into
#
both caste and gender, which I want to do because your work is both so detailed and
#
One of my guests, I forget who was, you know, you use a metaphor of the Indian civil services
#
to talk about how there will be people who, you know, for those who don't know, you give
#
the UPSC exam and depending on your rank, you get, you know, foreign service or IAS
#
or IPS and the lower services.
#
And this guest, I think it was, you know, Mahima Vashishthan in a recent episode, who's
#
been a civil servant, made the point about how so many of her seniors in one of the lesser
#
civil services, so to say, would have this resentment, ki yaar, agar mujhe UPSC mein
#
do mark zyada milte iss subject mein, toh aaj mai London mein Indian foreign services
#
And the tragedy and the injustice of that system is that an exam you give sometime in
#
your early twenties determines where you land up at age 59.
#
So it is almost like that one event just sort of changes everything.
#
Now in an academic sense, it strikes me that a lot of what happens is also sort of happenstance
#
Like which university, which foreign university do you happen to go through?
#
Do you happen to make it to a foreign university in the first place?
#
You know, who is your advisor there?
#
Some people can get lucky to get a good PhD advisor.
#
Where do you subsequently work?
#
And anywhere along the journey, it can fall apart.
#
And often it strikes me that this starting point can be something incredibly unfair.
#
This starting point can be ki theek hai, you know, your parents weren't well, you had
#
to be in India to look after them, aap abroad jaani paye, financial circumstances nahi the,
#
aapne yahi pe kuch kar liya locally or no matter how brilliant you were, you are always
#
looked upon as lower on the ladder than somebody who had the benefit of a better education.
#
That's one aspect of it.
#
Another aspect of it is that you could be an Indian scholar who knows a subject in great
#
detail, whose work has rigor, nuance, everything.
#
But somebody from some foreigner from a foreign university will come and turn their orientalist
#
gaze on your subject and mouth wake general, generalities and, you know, say banal things.
#
Sometimes they're wrong.
#
Sometimes they're right with what's a big deal and, and they get all the media attention
#
and the book deals and everything.
#
And you are like, what the fuck, you know, I've all my life on this shit.
#
So what do you sort of feel about this because I meet a lot of brilliant academics who are
#
not big names, who are not there on the ladder, right.
#
And I, and vice versa, right.
#
So what do you feel about this and how, you know, how does one then deal with that resentment
#
or how does one come to terms with ki theek hai jo hai so hai.
#
Yeah, so I didn't go abroad for my PhD for personal reasons.
#
And there is a, I got, I got a super fantastic advisor in the, in the form of Kaushik Basu,
#
who was at that time at the Delhi school.
#
So I really enjoyed my PhD with him.
#
So no regrets at all on that front at all, zero regrets.
#
However, my question was generally, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I understand.
#
So the American system, because of the rigors of coursework, you know, every PhD student
#
has to do two years of coursework.
#
So it just puts you through the grinder in a way that Indian institutions don't do, right.
#
And so you come out on the other side of the grinder in this process form, which is a disadvantage
#
for those of us who did our PhD in India, because we were not put through that kind
#
I got lucky because I had a fantastic advisor and it was really nice.
#
And it's absolutely true that in India, not having a foreign degree is a big disadvantage,
#
you know, within your colleagues and just in the circuit.
#
And even within the U S there are, you know, whether you're in the top 10 universities
#
or not, et cetera, there are all of these issues, but certainly if you've done your
#
PhD from India versus somebody who's done it from the UK or the USA, there, you know,
#
And at the time when I was a student at the Delhi school, you know, about eight to 10
#
people out of class of 150 used to get first divisions.
#
So first division was the big thing, by the way, those days.
#
And in my batch, it was eight, eight of us who got a first division and seven went abroad
#
and I didn't go, you know, so that's how much of an outlier I was even then.
#
And so it's a struggle and there are, it's hard, there are, and I'm sure that others
#
who are in my situation also have faced them at different points.
#
There are frustrations, you get upset sometimes that, oh, you know, somebody just walks away
#
with the limelight and all that, all that, but again, you know, as you've discovered
#
in your conversations with me, I'm a little chilled out in these matters.
#
So there can be a temporary irritation, but it, it, it passes very soon, but I have to
#
mention that by the time I came to Ashoka, you know, it's, it's been very different.
#
Ashoka is really, is very respectful towards the body of work, you know, and I've received
#
huge amounts of love and, you know, support within Ashoka.
#
So from everyone, and so I feel really happy about that.
#
But it's not, there is a disadvantage and this thing of, you know, I will tell you what
#
you're missing in two sentences or three sentences, this tendency is there.
#
This will, I don't think you can, you know, there is a, there are many hierarchies.
#
So within India, there are hierarchies of class and urban location and English education
#
versus not caste, of course, you know, but then there are international hierarchies,
#
Where race plays a factor, where academic location plays a factor, right?
#
So obviously Harvard in the US will rank number one in any of this hierarchy and so on.
#
So and things like that, right?
#
So institutions have brand names and they really make a difference.
#
So an affiliation with a very top branded university department will open doors in a
#
way that a lower branded university department it won't.
#
So once you step outside India, you realize that there are these other hierarchies that
#
play at well, but that's life.
#
You know, there's no point in lamenting them and just feeling, you know, oh, and there's
#
also, I don't think these hierarchies should be used as an excuse to say, oh, the reason
#
I'm really not publishing is because there are all these hierarchies and I can't work.
#
You know, so I will keep publishing.
#
If somebody else saying, oh, she didn't go abroad for a PhD, so I don't think her work
#
They are entitled to their opinion.
#
But I would say engage with my work, not where I got my degree from.
#
If there's anything wrong with my work, point that out.
#
I'm happy to engage, but don't, you know, pedigree is, is, I mean, we, it's very funny.
#
We lament about the caste system in India, but we are very pedigree conscious.
#
So that's, you know, what data does, what different does it make?
#
So don't look at my CVN say, okay, she did a PhD from D school, oh, it will be bad, why?
#
So one has to, I mean, what I'll say to younger people is that if you are working in a good
#
Indian institution, doing your PhD, you know, steal yourself against these tendencies because
#
But discrimination is a fact of life, you know, sometimes we are on the side of sometimes
#
our social identities protect us from that discrimination, which is when we feel great.
#
But there are some times our social identities in another context, we become the victims
#
of discrimination, but then we have to figure out our, you know, we can't make that as an
#
excuse as academics to say, okay, I'm not going to publish anymore because somebody
#
said that, oh, our Indian degrees are not good enough.
#
That has never deterred me from doing what I think is right.
#
And I don't think it should deter anyone else too.
#
Yeah, and one of the lessons I learned from poker was don't sweat what you can't control.
#
You know, what you can control is what you do, what you can control is a process, what
#
you can control is the attitude you bring to your work and that's what really matters.
#
Don't sweat the rest of it.
#
I mean, there have been many situations where, you know, for example, I've gone to an institution
#
and asked for data and I've been told, no, you can't get this data.
#
And the next thing I know is some researcher from XYZ university with the right color of
#
the skin has got that data.
#
I mean, life is unfair sometimes.
#
So how do you deal with that?
#
I mean, you know, how do you deal with that unfairness?
#
Talking about the unfairness of life, let's, you know, move to the subject of something
#
that you've studied deeply for decades almost.
#
I don't know if one could call it decades in the plural, but yeah, I guess you started
#
with caste in the late 90s, so it's decades.
#
So what were the big questions about caste that animated you when you started working
#
on it and you've already described your first paper and all that.
#
And how did those questions evolve and change?
#
So the only question that started this whole journey was, I mean, the question was phrased
#
in the sense of have the gaps between Dalits and upper-caste narrowed.
#
Of course, the first paper was not about narrowing because it was one point in time.
#
But the question was, are they significant?
#
Are they across different indicators and are they across states?
#
That was the first question.
#
So basically it was like taking stock of the material disparities between upper-caste
#
That was what the question was about because there'd been a lot of sociological, ethnographic,
#
will it study kind of literature that talked about power that comes from being used as
#
vote banks, dominant castes that may not necessarily be the upper-castes, middle-castes being dominant
#
castes, some castes that got classified as OBCs.
#
But even some Dalit castes, for example, could become dominant castes in their villages.
#
And there's a lot of churning.
#
Then there was the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment where local bodies were given reservation,
#
So all of that is sort of churning, there's been a churning and there is a rise in representation
#
of Dalits at the local panchayat level, state election, reserve constituencies, chief ministers
#
of states or important ministers in different governments, et cetera.
#
All of that might have led to sort of narrow gaps or insignificant gaps or the persistent
#
disparity may not be a picture of India at that time.
#
And so what the first paper did was just said, no, it is, right?
#
Now why is it that despite all of these things, these things didn't change, et cetera?
#
Then that started the journey, right?
#
And then I had to read about dominant castes, I had to read about what is OBC.
#
So I remember a discussion with my father where I said, I don't understand the controversy
#
about the OBC reservation.
#
Why is it that some people object to some castes being included, but not to other castes?
#
What is this whole thing?
#
So he patiently explained to me the difference between Varna and Jati, which I had read about,
#
but I had not internalized it.
#
And I didn't understand the connection between that distinction and the OBC reservation controversy,
#
which she then verbally explained to me, then he gave me references to read.
#
And that sort of started the thing, and then with my co-author, Rajesh Ramachandran, who
#
used to be my student in Delhi school, but kept in touch, and now we have many papers
#
So we've developed this sort of agenda where we've looked at change over time, we've looked
#
at early childhood, we've looked at education, we've looked at stunting, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So we finished one paper and we start the next.
#
So now we have a result that talks about the effect of untouchability, which is illegal,
#
but prevalent on early childhood outcomes for Delhi children.
#
And so it's like an onion, the more you peel, you discover new things about the system.
#
And with this early childhood and untouchability research, I have realized, I think for the
#
first time with clarity, why the gaps are persistent.
#
Because if the disparity is starting at early childhood, then by the time these children
#
become adults, it's the same system that's getting perpetuated itself.
#
So another argument made about the caste system is that it's a hangover of the past, or it
#
In urban India, how do you know, your caste is my caste, what does anyone know?
#
So in urban India, caste disparity doesn't happen.
#
This was discrimination in the olden days, it's the same hangover we are seeing today.
#
So all of these questions, you can actually examine empirically and you realize that it's
#
being perpetuated, the discrimination based upon caste identity is salient and discrimination
#
based upon that continues today.
#
So take me through some of these questions.
#
For example, the question of past discrimination and versus present discrimination.
#
How do you disentangle that?
#
For example, an argument was made, which you've kind of busted through the various studies
#
and we can go into the weeds of some of that.
#
You know, arguments are sometimes made that okay, you know, there is no discrimination
#
Maybe, maybe there is discrimination earlier, which happens because of, you know, people
#
are born in poor families or they don't get the same kind of education and all that.
#
So they are distinctly unequal by the time they reach the labour market.
#
But labour markets are different and your study showed that no, that is really not the
#
Labour markets also discriminate.
#
For example, I'm just taking like one of the big questions that you've asked.
#
So take me through how you then start disentangling all the other possible causes for, you know,
#
all the other possible explanations for income disparities at the labour market and how do
#
you then arrive at the fact that yes, discrimination has taken place, does take place.
#
And these are the kind of mechanics of it.
#
So take me through some of these studies because I found that work really fascinating.
#
So there is absolutely no doubt that if you look at the early childhood and pre-labour
#
market conditions between upper caste and Dalits on average, there are huge gaps.
#
So by the time individuals enter the labour market, they are already very different in
#
terms of the skill set, in terms of abilities and all that has got to do with social capital,
#
with the background networks, et cetera, et cetera, right?
#
Now the question is, does the labour market perpetuate that discrimination or not?
#
So a very simple study, which is not authored by me, but it was a part of the project that
#
I did a college to work study and this particular study, it's a very famous paper in the AER
#
done for the US by Marianne Bertrand and Sandeel Mullainathan, which the title of that paper
#
is called, Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?
#
What they do is they send resumes to employers.
#
These are called correspondence studies and those resumes control for everything, not
#
just academic scores, but extracurriculars as well.
#
So all the debating, confidence kind of, all the signals that employers look for, the only
#
difference, so these are matched resumes, the only difference is the names are different.
#
So black sounding names and white sounding names and the callback that white sounding
#
names get are far higher than the callbacks and black sounding names get.
#
Diva Pager, a sociologist in the US who died tragically young, she did an even more remarkable
#
study where she said, okay, the reason that blacks might be getting lower callbacks is
#
because there's a stigma of criminality, because incarceration rates for African-Americans
#
are far higher than those for whites.
#
So employers might be reluctant to hire blacks because it's a thing in their mind that we
#
don't want anybody with a criminal background, et cetera.
#
So in her study, she gave, these are all experimental subjects, so she gave the white person a criminal
#
record, that white job applicant has actually served time in jail, a convicted felon, and
#
the black applicant is not a convicted felon, because these are fake resumes.
#
So she attached the stigma of criminality to whites and her experiment shows that attaching
#
the stigma of criminality to whites lowers the callback for whites compared to when they
#
were not shown as being felons, but a white with a criminal record is still likely to
#
get higher callbacks compared to black with no criminal record.
#
If this doesn't show discrimination, because this controls for everything else, right?
#
And there are studies that have been done of this kind for India as well, we did a project
#
And you see the same thing.
#
So you can say, and this is before the interview.
#
So you're not even judging based upon looking at the person and forming some impressions.
#
So stereotypes and the association of, you know, the negative stereotypes about the lids,
#
the stigma of incompetence, that does play a role, right?
#
And so how do you disentangle?
#
So one state way to do is to correspondence studies.
#
The other, when you're looking at data, you of course, you control for all the ability
#
related indicators, and then you see whether there's an extra wage penalty.
#
So there's a method where you can add in all the variables that will explain the wage gap
#
and see whether the wage gap gets artificially eliminated.
#
And if it doesn't, then that's an unexplained part of the wage gap.
#
Now you can argue whether it's all discrimination or not, and the jury is open on that one,
#
but certainly a part of it is discriminatory.
#
And that's the point where I'm saying is look elsewhere.
#
So you have an unobserved wage gap, which is your data is showing you.
#
Now read accounts, you know, so a question that I often get asked in interviews is how
#
long are we going to have this reservation system?
#
You know, and my answer is let's go for one month where there is no story of caste atrocities
#
reported from anywhere in the country.
#
The day we have one month free of caste atrocities, let's end reservation then.
#
So I found these studies interesting because the Delhi study, for example, sent fake resume,
#
looked at English newspapers.
#
So you're already controlling for English and you send fake resumes with stereotypical
#
last names to a whole bunch of employers.
#
And the conclusion was that Dalits are two third less likely as upper class people to
#
I mean, everybody would assume that they were less likely, but two thirds less likely is
#
a good way to kind of quantify it and understand the problem.
#
And the Chennai study was fascinating because it also looked at gender and it found that
#
low caste females were the least likely of all to get a call back, which is of course
#
What I found also interesting was that when you, you know, use the decomposition techniques,
#
you're also thinking of endowment differences.
#
Now endowment differences of course is that because of discrimination of the past or because
#
of, you know, what their backgrounds might have been, Dalits are more likely to be poor,
#
more likely to have a worse education and so on and so forth.
#
They, they, they end up in the job market with, you know, that disadvantage built in
#
and that, that's the endowment difference.
#
And you point out that that's actually narrowing in urban populations and, and you're honest
#
enough to say that it may be affirmative action, which is responsible, but it may not be because
#
it's again the swimming pool thing.
#
Has it been your experience that like, here's the thing.
#
As far as the rural-urban divide is concerned, Ambedkar of course famously said, what is
#
a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism,
#
And one would assume from various different directions that caste would be a far bigger
#
problem in rural areas and in urban areas.
#
And one reason for that would just be that the incentives are different in urban areas.
#
You want to be part of wider economic networks, there is more competition.
#
So perhaps you can't, you know, the cost of discrimination goes up and so on and so forth.
#
At the same time, if affirmative action was working, you'd expect to see a result of that
#
in, you know, in being less of a factor in urban areas as well.
#
So is it generally true that whatever the causes might be, that in general urban areas
#
are slightly better or, you know, what's the scene there?
#
So one difference between rural and urban is that it's harder to identify caste on casual
#
interaction in urban compared to rural because not all last names are caste indicative.
#
Also you take the big metros, you know, people are coming from different parts of the country
#
and people don't easily recognize the caste names, even if they were indicative of caste.
#
But my paper with Catherine Newman, where we do this college to work tracking study,
#
we track students for two years, every six months we were interviewing them and we asked
#
them how their job interviews went, particularly in the private sector where there's no reservation.
#
So there's no place on the form or anything where you are required to declare your caste.
#
And almost every student that we talked to said that one of the first questions, if not
#
the first question that they were asked was, what is your family background?
#
When I first started transcribing interviews and sending them to Catherine for reading,
#
she called me from the US and said, there must be a mistake.
#
She said, listen to it again.
#
So I said, I was there.
#
And so I listened to it again and there was no mistake because I was there in the interview.
#
So she said that in the United States, this question could never be asked because it is
#
about individual merit and ability.
#
The family background is irrelevant, right?
#
But in India, it is a very common assumption to think that the family is a crucible of
#
merit, of individual merit.
#
So you immediately conflate family circumstances with the individual's merit.
#
That is not only caste.
#
We are not saying that in the paper, but caste plays a very big role in it, right?
#
And so in an urban setting where you think caste might not matter, first, this is one
#
mechanism through which employers try to gauge where you are situated.
#
The second thing is when they see some obvious class markers, which they believe, we don't
#
know where this person is.
#
So they'll say, what is your view about the reservation policy?
#
Now this policy doesn't apply to the private sector.
#
They have no business asking this question because they could be my views about anything.
#
What do I feel about Shah Rukh Khan or, you know, Hrithik Roshan for that matter.
#
That's irrelevant to the job interview.
#
Which would be a good question.
#
Which would be a good question.
#
Ask someone, what do you feel about Shah Rukh Khan?
#
If they say they like Shah Rukh Khan, okay, reject.
#
And the minute they found somebody defending the reservation policy, they took that as
#
a confirmation of their suspicion that this person was Dalit.
#
And sometimes they just asked openly, Apki caste kya hai?
#
Now we asked our respondents, how did you react to this question when you were asked
#
about the family background?
#
What do you think they were trying to get at?
#
And the amazing thing is that our upper caste respondents and our Dalit respondents responded
#
in completely opposite ways.
#
Upper caste respondents said it was just a breaking the ice kind of a question.
#
It's just like you, how you start.
#
You talk about the weather or something like that.
#
Because they had, they had family backgrounds that they were proud of.
#
Whereas every Dalit respondent in our study said, no, this was a question.
#
It was a trick question.
#
It was a question that they were using to catch us.
#
This is about the people who went to job interviews.
#
Now a lot of private sector jobs in India are not advertised.
#
They are through networks.
#
And I have another study for Delhi, which a paper, it's not published yet, but I did
#
some field work in Delhi.
#
And there we found that, I mean, we mapped, you know, who do you get the job information
#
from, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And you find that Dalit students have very smaller and poorer quality networks in terms
#
of who they are likely to know.
#
So even if you have the same education, even if you're equally bright, your ability to
#
even find out about positions in the private sector are heavily circumscribed by your caste
#
So in urban India, it plays out differently, but it does play out.
#
And marriage and all, it's open.
#
Even my students, when they say, oh, we, caste is ended, there's no caste, et cetera, I say,
#
how are you going to get married?
#
You know, so they don't see any contradiction in that, in that, in those two statements.
#
But my point is that in rural India, it gets replicated in a particular way through knowledge,
#
through caste-based occupations, urban India, proportion of caste-based occupations is low,
#
non-caste-based is higher.
#
And in principle, every occupation is open to everybody.
#
But there is a very strong overlap of status and caste, not caste-based occupation, because
#
how many Brahmins are you going to find in Delhi who are priests in temples?
#
So obviously they're not doing their caste-based occupation.
#
But if you see very privileged occupations, which caste groups are occupying those?
#
How much has been the churning?
#
How much has the deck reshuffled?
#
That's the question we should ask about cities.
#
Because sociologists, what they do is they say, oh, you know, the link between caste-based
#
occupations and birth is broken in urban India.
#
Because caste-based occupations, think about the occupations that are listed in the caste
#
Think about a modern economy.
#
You are trying to superimpose a modern occupational structure on the caste-based, the birth-based
#
occupations that were like thousands of years ago.
#
There is bound to be a break, right?
#
But we have to reframe the question.
#
We have to talk about now status, privilege and caste rather than caste-based occupation
#
That's not the right question to ask anymore, I don't think.
#
But also even on the sort of priests and temples questions, I mean, you are right that there
#
are not many Brahmins in Delhi who are priests and temples, but I think all the priests in
#
In fact, in Grammar of Caste, I exactly say that, which is, ask it the other way around.
#
How many non-Brahmins are priests and temples?
#
So, the bit about family networks is true, it's so unseen that people are getting jobs
#
through different networks and those networks will often be based around whatever community
#
you're born into and so on and so forth.
#
And that added layer is important.
#
What you just pointed out about how upper caste people in interviews, they won't even
#
think as caste if somebody asks them, what's your caste or even what's your last name?
#
A question like what's your last name means absolutely nothing to me.
#
I will just say my last name.
#
But if you are Dalit, it means a world because there is that added layer which is unseen
#
So here's, you know, like one of the really influential early books in the economics of
#
discrimination was of course a book, The Economics of Description by Gary Becker in 1957.
#
I'll briefly summarize for the listeners the point that he makes, which is an influential
#
point and one that makes a lot of sense, is that the cost of discrimination is not just
#
borne by the person discriminated against, but also by the discriminator.
#
Let us say that you are a company which pays Brahmins 10 rupees and Dalits 8 rupees to
#
For example, if you discriminate, somebody who doesn't discriminate because of the market
#
value of labor is actually getting cheaper labor.
#
And in fact is, I would argue, even getting a better workforce because today we know there
#
are studies which showed that the best indicator of good decision making is neither intelligence
#
nor education, but diversity in the room.
#
So diversity is a quality to aspire for, for its own sake, which is not something which
#
there would have been studies in 1957 on.
#
So whoever is discriminating is therefore also suffering the cost of that.
#
So if, and this is a big if, if you have a competitive marketplace where there is competition,
#
then anyone who discriminates automatically is at a disadvantage.
#
Now this doesn't mean that nobody will discriminate.
#
Some people might want to do what I think in the literature is called taste based discrimination
#
where they decide that they want to discriminate anyway because their personal values are like
#
that or whatever, but they bear a cost for it, which is very much as it should be.
#
But the theory there would be that as you have a more flourishing economy, larger economic
#
networks as you would in cities, for example, and more competition, then you would have
#
caste based discrimination or indeed discrimination of any kind go down because that discrimination
#
Now obviously in India, this hasn't played out fully yet because our markets are still
#
not as open as should be.
#
You don't have those levels of competition.
#
We do have, you know, caste based discrimination, I would argue would be less in the cities
#
and in villages, but we haven't solved, come anywhere close to solving the problem.
#
And it's just a muddy swimming pool, for example.
#
So how does one sort of, what was your engagement, for example, with Becker's work?
#
And did you feel that in a sense it's really because you can't disentangle all the different
#
things that are happening, you know, how useful was it to use, you know, as a frame or as
#
one possible frame in terms of looking at what is happening in our cities?
#
So Becker talks about discrimination that exists in the marketplace, which is different
#
from a like or a dislike.
#
So his point is that when does a dislike become discrimination, which is when you're willing
#
So you're willing to take a cut in your income to have the ability to discriminate, right?
#
So that's the point that you were making, which is discriminating is discrimination
#
is costly to the discriminator as well.
#
And I find that element of Becker's theory very powerful.
#
And you know, the other theory I teach is by Kenneth Arrow, which is statistical discrimination
#
and both Arrow and Becker, you know, of the economists of that time with very few two,
#
three equations, they beautifully summarize, which today's authors might take, you know,
#
very fancy looking many, many equations, etc.
#
So I find both the theories very illuminating and insightful.
#
However, I don't think anywhere in the world with the increase in the spread of markets
#
has discrimination come down.
#
So I think it boils down to the question of how do we make sure that discrimination is
#
I mean, it must make a real, we have to have incentives such that it should be very difficult
#
or it should be very costly for a person to exercise discrimination in the marketplace.
#
Likes and dislikes you cannot control, people will always have them, right?
#
But in certain settings, discrimination is more costly than in other settings, right?
#
So for example, one of the things in India is that we don't have a broad based anti-discrimination
#
We have the prevention of atrocities acts against SCSD that addresses an important part
#
of the problem, which is hate crimes, which are targeted against certain communities for
#
But the burden of proof is very high under that act.
#
And also the whole system needs to be sort of militates against a conviction because
#
the police will not register a report, etc., etc., the whole thing.
#
So while it's an important act, it doesn't cover microaggressions, it doesn't cover daily
#
acts of discrimination, it's not a broad based anti-discriminatory law.
#
And so there is, I mean, our legal system, that's another problem.
#
But my point is that even as just even in principle, there is no anti-discrimination
#
law, whether it's about caste or gender or disability or anything else for that matter.
#
So there is no legal framework that makes discrimination costly, right?
#
Now even in the United States, the person that I mentioned earlier, Sandy Darity, William
#
Darity Jr., who's a Duke, he has been campaigning in the US along with others.
#
Look at what he calls a DOS, American Descendants of Slavery, not of slaves, not that individuals
#
have to be descendants of slaves, but African Americans today are descendants of the system
#
And he has, you know, he has a lot of statistics about how, you know, whether you take the
#
median wealth gap, education, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And it's not about education as many economists argue in the US context, which is that blacks
#
are less educated, that explains everything.
#
So even whites with no college education earn more than blacks with college education, for
#
example, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So he has a whole bunch of things.
#
So his point is that what can be done in the US to address the wealth gap between whites
#
and American descendants of slavery, a DOS community.
#
And so, you know, my point is that maybe the market won't fix this problem in itself, you
#
And what the best interventions are, you know, that question is open, we can all discuss
#
Reservations is a very tiny, tiny, tiny little tool, which is chipping away at one tiny part
#
But given in the absence of anything else, I think it should stay.
#
But I think we should continue to debate about what is it that's going to make a dent.
#
But prior to that comes the recognition.
#
As long as we deny that the problem is big, we are never going to get at the solutions.
#
So a couple of points to what you said, as far as the question of market solving discrimination
#
in the way that Becca suggested would happen, I would say that, you know, nothing is a panacea,
#
We all have discrimination and it's the same swimming pool problem that in places where
#
you have flourishing competitive marketplaces, but discrimination still exists, you don't
#
know the counterfactual.
#
What if the markets were less free?
#
Would there have been, you know, more or less discrimination?
#
So it just becomes a question of what, you know, what prism you go in with when you address
#
And the other sort of position I have or bias I have or preference that I have is just of
#
being extremely wary of coercive state solutions for.
#
I just think that an anti-discrimination law would just be, you know, would just be posturing.
#
It would, you know, the intention would be great.
#
The outcome would be absolutely nothing wherever, you know, the state has tried to like, I think
#
a lot of social problems need to be solved by society and the state should of course
#
step in when the rights of people are being infringed.
#
But when you try to do social engineering through state coercion, I'm not sure it works.
#
For example, we had, you know, everybody agrees that there should be maternity leave.
#
But when you had that recent maternity leave act, it hurt women more than it helped them
#
because employment went down.
#
And I'll link to pieces that kind of showed that which I had commissioned for Prakriti
#
by Devika Kher and Suman Joshi.
#
And so I'm sort of wary of coercive approaches kind of by the state.
#
I think these are deep, deep social problems, which at some point, you know, and like you
#
said, it's muddy, we don't know what the solutions are.
#
But just to sort of underscore, like I found what you've written about Arrow and Arrow's
#
work on statistical discrimination also to be illuminative of the way social pressures
#
work out to make a situation worse.
#
So I'll quickly sum that up for my listeners and you can tell me if I've missed a nuance
#
And he basically talks about how, you know, there can be these self-fulfilling prophecies
#
in play, where if you're a Dalit or a woman, you just assume that certain professions are
#
And because you assume that they are close to you because of social prejudices which
#
are obviously there, you don't pursue those fields and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
#
For example, in the case of gender, you could say that women are socialized to believe ki
#
aap humanities paro, languages paro, stem mat karo, and therefore you have less women
#
going in for that, though increasingly thankfully in recent times more and more, but otherwise
#
you have less women going in for that, which becomes an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy
#
and the kind of statistical discrimination which Arrow talks about.
#
And this can also result in disparities in the labor market, which are not happening
#
directly because of discrimination at the time, but it's just the way that whole game
#
So first I'll push back, I completely agree on the state should not be able to exercise
#
But I'll push back a little bit about the role of legislation that's coming from the
#
So for example, in the constituent assembly debates, Ambedkar was of the view that the
#
approach suggested by Gandhi, which is a change of heart, abolish untouchability by doing
#
the work that, so clean your own toilets, intermarry, et cetera, that relies too much
#
on the individual initiative.
#
And that's never going to happen because he felt that untouchability was an integral part
#
Whereas Gandhi thought that untouchability is a part of the caste system.
#
That's not good, but the rest of the caste system is fine.
#
And Ambedkar questioned that.
#
And his point is that unless you make it mandatory, it's not going to happen.
#
And today the reason that India has, whatever the magnitude of that, and obviously not enough,
#
but today the reason that India has a Dalit middle class that's vocal, that's active,
#
we see all these autobiographies coming out.
#
It's not by no means enough and the problem is much larger than that.
#
But this has happened because of the compulsory affirmative action.
#
In Scandinavia, the fact that you now see women in government and in corporate boardrooms,
#
it's completely normal to see women now as ministers, as important spokesperson.
#
It has come because of a gender quota.
#
So my point is that I'm not saying that the state has to step in and solve every problem
#
And also there's a problem of endogeneity.
#
The state machinery that is supposed to implement reservations, for example, is itself very
#
personal, are themselves very, very caste conscious.
#
So they find all ways of scuttling that program and jeopardizing the...
#
And so that's always an issue.
#
So what do you do when the problem is endogenous to the state?
#
So that's always an issue.
#
But sometimes when the problem is very deep-rooted and unlikely to be solved by individual change
#
of heart, I feel there's a case to be made for a top-down legislative kind of a measure
#
with the full checks and balances put in about coercion not being used, et cetera.
#
The main problem is that this endogeneity of the state shows up here is that reservation
#
is there, you have to do it constitution.
#
People couldn't be bothered about whether it's working, whether there's...
#
I've tried to collect data on this question.
#
You will not believe that there's no website anywhere in the government, all the websites,
#
that just tells you the progress of SESTC is reserved through different ministries,
#
through different bodies over time.
#
I've tried to collect data from here, there, everywhere, so I have an incomplete database.
#
But if it's such an important policy, why isn't there data on this?
#
Do we know whether there's 22.5% reservation at the national level?
#
When I did this paper on Indian railways where we collected data from the railways, there
#
we discovered that if you look at over time and across zones, we don't have 22.5% reservation
#
in all the four levels of Indian railway services.
#
Are we solving that problem anywhere?
#
I don't hear any discussion about it.
#
Whereas if you go to the Safai Karamcharis and the lowest level, it's much higher than
#
So if you look at only Safai Karamcharis, which is a separate category of workers, it's
#
I don't see any march on the street today to say, abolish inequality in jobs for Safai
#
All cars must be equally represented.
#
I mean, we have to think of how deep-rooted and structural these problems are, and then
#
think about whether individual initiative will change this, or even if you talk the
#
language of incentives, what is it that will shift incentives?
#
That's the question that I'm asking.
#
I mean, I'm not a legal expert, so I don't know what the contours of the anti-discriminatory
#
law are going to be, and maybe that's... I think it's needed anyway, regardless of anything
#
Whether that will solve the problem or not, okay, maybe not.
#
But how would you change the incentives such that people find it costly to discriminate
#
along these... It's an open question, and I would encourage everybody to think about
#
Yeah, and on the Gandhi-Ambedkar debates, as they were, I agree with both of them on
#
different aspects of the problem.
#
I completely agree with Ambedkar about the toxicity of caste, and in fact, caste is not
#
the only thing wrong with Hinduism, but there is just a lot that is toxic.
#
So there, I'm completely with him.
#
I think a lot of the things that Gandhi said on caste were just virtue signaling and waffling
#
and not going far enough, honestly.
#
However, where I am more sympathetic towards Gandhi, and this is, of course, with the benefit
#
of hindsight, is on the means adopted to get there, where Gandhi's point was that real
#
social change comes from the bottom up, and that's where it's long-lasting.
#
And if you do something top-down, it'll just be on the surface.
#
And I think Ambedkar realized this when he spoke of the constitution being just a top
#
soil, you know, and that the ground underneath, as we saw from his quote on Villages earlier,
#
But I mean, there was nothing he could do.
#
This was the best that he could do at the time.
#
Social change can take decades.
#
So I understand where that's coming from.
#
And honestly, when I spoke of a top-down intervention, I wasn't even thinking of affirmative action.
#
I was thinking of more anti-discrimination law, which, in my mind, in practice, on the
#
ground would achieve nothing.
#
It might even create perverse incentives of different types.
#
And it would just give activists the satisfaction of being able to say, ki haan hum ne kuch
#
It's really in the category, in my mind, of saying that we must do something.
#
Therefore, let's do it.
#
You know, so I'm going to be a bit cynical about state-led.
#
But we can agree to disagree.
#
I'm just saying that we need to collectively think about what is it that will make it costly
#
for people to discriminate.
#
I think that's the real question.
#
And so I think that's the question that we...
#
But before we do that, we have to recognize and admit that discrimination is a current
#
So there's not that much agreement on it.
#
So I'll tell you about another paper of mine, which I did with Dean Spears, where we looked
#
Now in social psychology, there is a phenomenon called the identified victim effect, which
#
is when you get these charity donations, they always show you a picture of a little girl
#
or something and will give your name.
#
That Sarita in Muzaffarpur, Bihar is, you know, can't go to school, please donate for
#
And in social psychology literature, experiment after experiment in a variety of cultural
#
settings has found that an identified victim, which is you put a name and a face, always
#
gets greater charity than a statistical cause.
#
You could just translate all this to say, so many million girls in Bihar are lacking
#
education, please donate to a charity which is working for their cause.
#
As opposed to Sarita in Bihar is...
#
So Sarita in Bihar ad will get more charitable donations than a generic charity.
#
So what we did was we took, we did three experiments, Apakast Hindus, Dalit Hindus, OBCs and Muslims.
#
And then we had a named ad and a statistical ad.
#
And we found that for all other categories, the named ad got higher donations than the
#
statistical ad, which proves the identified victim effect.
#
But for Dalits, it was opposite.
#
So the charity, the generics, the statistical charity got more donation than a named Dalit
#
So when we first sent it with just one experiment to the referee, they said, how do you know
#
that people are recognizing this as a Dalit name?
#
It could just be some name that they picked up.
#
And we had four names for each category.
#
So it wasn't linked to any one name, it was all four names aggregated.
#
Then we did a two-stage experiment where we first gave names and said, tick, write the
#
caste you think they belong to.
#
And then for every category, we gave 20 names and we booked the five most recognized names.
#
And then using those names, we ran the experiment again and the result went through.
#
And this links with a larger literature in the social psychology field, which believes,
#
and we are seeing some of it play out today in India's context, where some victims are
#
seen as deserving of sympathy and other victims are seen as deserving the fate that they got.
#
In other words, they generate disgust or they generate anger.
#
So certain victims get a lot of sympathy for their situation.
#
Another person in exactly the same situation, even worse, will not get that sympathy.
#
And that depends on which group that person belongs to.
#
So is the group worthy of sympathy or not?
#
And that is what that paper is about, you know, and we are seeing that being played
#
I completely agree with you.
#
And maybe it's just a selection bias of the circles that I move in, but I can't think
#
of anyone who really denies that there is a caste problem in India, right?
#
It is our deepest problem.
#
I mean, even for example, nobody denies it, but is it, is it just something, you know,
#
there was big gaps in the past and we are sort of narrowing and getting better.
#
And so eventually it's just a question of when we achieve convergence or is it that
#
there's divergence going on right now?
#
On that, there is this.
#
Because my sense is that the modern bigots, which we see around us are actually happy
#
to boast about caste discrimination.
#
For example, when, you know, Bilkis Banu's rapist and the killers of a family were released,
#
you know, there was a BJP MP or MLA or whatever saying those things on air about how, oh,
#
they are Brahmin, so they can't be bad.
#
So they kind of seem to wear their casteism on their sleeves.
#
So, you know, I'm talking about academic circles, fair enough.
#
And just to sort of get back, I completely agree that, you know, that people who decry
#
some solutions have to then come up with the solutions.
#
My is that, you know, just looking through history, that coercive state solutions don't
#
And I think the incentives have to change and they have to change from within society.
#
And I think if we had a faster growing economy, more urbanization, the incentives would change
#
in the direction that I think Becker broadly says that they would.
#
But, you know, it's a swimming pool problem, you know, is it happening because of this
#
So my final question on this on the subject before we go on to talking about gender, Thomas
#
Saville, who's of course African American economist, written many great books, which
#
I love, wrote this influential book in early 2000s, Affirmative Action Around the World,
#
where he looked at affirmative action in a number of different cities.
#
And what he essentially concluded was that in the city, in the countries that he looked
#
at, he couldn't find any beneficial effect of it on the groups under question, obviously
#
individuals who receive affirmative action will benefit.
#
But on the groups themselves, he couldn't find any long term sort of impact.
#
And one could argue that this is again the swimming pool problem.
#
Like, how do you disentangle?
#
There are no counterfactuals.
#
All of that I understand that.
#
And a couple of the points he made about it was that among many points and a couple of
#
the points he made was that number one, the benefits of course, went to those who were
#
more relatively more privileged among the groups in question.
#
So that's a creamy layer argument.
#
And the other point was one of group polarization.
#
And in your book itself, I'll quote this para by you, where at one point you write, quote,
#
What is often loosely called a quota mentality can be interpreted to engender a certain brand
#
of identity politics, which draws sustenance from the existence of caste-based fissures.
#
The proponents of this brand of identity politics, for example, the current chief minister of
#
UP and leader of the Bahujan Samajpati Mayawati, would much rather keep caste divisions alive
#
as it justifies their existence.
#
Quotas then become a tool for mobilizing their constituency rather than an instrument of
#
genuine empowerment of Dalits.
#
This brand of identity politics is therefore inimical to the idea of annihilation of caste.
#
And though the leadership might use Ambedkar's iconic value to further its case, its actual
#
practices are antithetical to Ambedkar's vision and goal of a caste-less society.
#
And this was written, I think, in 2010.
#
So obviously, when you're referring to UPCM and all that, it's sort of from that time.
#
But this is the other criticism that is sometimes made against reservations and it's twofold.
#
And one is that while the constitution says that we will treat everyone equally, this
#
solidifies these differences of identity.
#
And can that be a good thing?
#
Can that lead to more polarization?
#
And the second is that reservations can then become a political tool, which are used for
#
political purposes where the original function is kind of forgotten.
#
And you yourself have pointed out that many of the OBCs have mobilized it, like the Jats
#
of Haryana, the Marathas of Maharashtra, the Patels of Gujarat, are actually relatively
#
And it could be argued that they don't need affirmative action at all.
#
Certainly they might, you know, so how does one kind of look at these?
#
I mean, these are doubt that the para I quoted, of course, is something that, you know, you
#
were in a sense sort of summarizing a certain approach to it.
#
But your overall conclusion was that quotas are needed.
#
You know, they may make little difference, but they do make a difference.
#
So you know, what's your feeling on all of this?
#
So let me start with the second question.
#
So just FYI, the Marathas, Jats and Patels have not yet been included in the OBC category.
#
And our paper, one of my papers with Rajesh, we look at the justification of that demand
#
and we find no justification in that.
#
So first of all, I would make a big distinction between OBCs and SCs, administratively speaking,
#
because even in terms of the stigmatization that comes from untouchability, OBCs have
#
So socio-economic deprivation is just is one thing.
#
I don't think reservation should be used to solve that problem.
#
Socio-economic deprivation of any section of the population is bad and we have to find
#
other solutions for it.
#
And growth, of course, is one of the mechanisms, but we can think of other things as well.
#
So I think the OBC problem and the SC problem, first of all, have to be separated.
#
And I've said that the entire time.
#
For Dalits, the issue is the stigma of untouchability.
#
And unfortunately, untouchability pervades the mindset of people.
#
Even today, just recently, the Rajasthan teacher boy drinking water, that episode happened.
#
Every day there's something or the other.
#
So I think that Dalits and OBC reservation, I've never seen that in the same bracket.
#
And I think that the problem is that reservation as a tool has become overextended.
#
So anybody who has socio-economic deprivation, give reservation.
#
I think reservations was intended to be used for a group that suffers historical stigma
#
due to birth in a particular caste.
#
And I still think that should be the focus of reservations.
#
So one thing, the second thing about solidifying caste identities is look at the counterfactual.
#
There are many, many, many, many arenas where reservation has placed no role.
#
You look at the entire private sector, you look at the MSME sector, you look at any type
#
Now if we were to find evidence that forget about government jobs where reservation matters
#
or government education where reservation matters, look at everything else.
#
What is the evidence on the convergence or divergence between upper caste and Dalits?
#
And I'm not bringing OBC into the picture, just upper caste and Dalits.
#
Has it been reducing in areas where reservation doesn't matter?
#
Because that's the only counterfactual I can think of.
#
There is a swimming pool problem here, but there is one section where there's reservation,
#
So do we see two opposite trends?
#
In fact, the opposite, if anything, the small tiny part of our economy where there is reservation
#
has lower gaps between upper caste and Dalits than the arena where there's no reservation.
#
The creamy layer question, that's a question that's often asked.
#
Anybody who goes into higher education in India is in the creamy layer of any caste.
#
We never make that argument about anyone else.
#
Saying that so many generations preceding this person have gotten into college admissions
#
or maybe this person should not get priority.
#
Do we make that argument anywhere?
#
In fact, if we are advantaged because of our social capital, inherited legacy of just many,
#
many, many generations who are educated, who have access to knowledge, access to books,
#
We are not particularly bothered about inequality there or we never make this argument that
#
a particular benefit should be toned down or withheld because poorer Brahmins need to
#
go or poorer upper caste need to get in.
#
We'll never make that argument about upper caste.
#
I just don't understand where by stricture Dalits were denied education for centuries.
#
The generation of Dalit families that have education goes back three, maximum four in
#
You're comparing that to literally an unending chain of educational privilege.
#
In my view, reservation should be targeted towards the most needy.
#
In my book, that's Dalits, identity politics is a different question.
#
We can talk about that later, but I'm not an expert on that question.
#
I'm not a political scientist, but that's a slightly separate question from an objective
#
reality and what you do.
#
Think of a circular racetrack.
#
If an accident of birth puts you in the outermost ring of the circular racetrack and an accident
#
of birth puts me in the innermost ring and we are both given the same time to win the
#
race and we have similar abilities, who's winning?
#
Just because I happen to be born, I happen to be placed by an accident of birth on the
#
I have the shortest distance to run.
#
In sports, we very easily adjust for that by giving the outermost person an advantage.
#
Just a little bit of an advantage in the beginning.
#
I'm not talking about equality of outcomes.
#
I think my focus is on equality of opportunity.
#
Options will be unequal and as long as they are not unequal on account of birth, I think
#
that's really the question we need to think about.
#
I agree with you entirely on the importance of equality of opportunity and I think we'd
#
both agree that caste is really the most toxic thing about our society.
#
We're going to talk about gender next, so that definitely kind of competes with it.
#
What I'd urge everyone listening to do is no matter what you feel the possible solutions
#
for this problem are, as long as you accept that this is a problem, you need to know the
#
extent of the problem and the contours of the problem and the nuances of the problem
#
and the best way of doing that is by engaging with the literature on it and you are absolutely
#
the pioneer on that obviously.
#
So please read Ashwini Deshpande's books and many, many papers which cast so much illumination
#
on this because we need to sort of understand the extent of the problem till we can argue
#
from our ivory towers what should we do.
#
Let's talk about gender now, so for many years you did this pioneering work on caste and
#
obviously part of doing this work also showed you that added layer of gender as you've pointed
#
out that yeah Dalits get the worst of it but female Dalits are even worse off.
#
So at what point did your attention shift to gender as a subject to study and now of
#
course you've written about it, you have serious insights, I'll link to talks you've given
#
on the subject on YouTube also from the show notes.
#
Could you tell me a little bit about…
#
Yeah, so I don't, I mean I did those couple of maybe two or three, I can't remember but
#
I did a few early papers where looking at caste, gender, etc, etc but it wasn't any
#
systematic set of work and I think from about 2013-14 two, three things came together as
#
the case I guess with my life, purely accidentally things happened.
#
One of those was Vijendra Rao who is known as Biju Rao who is in the World Bank.
#
He approached me and asked if I would be interested in doing an evaluation of the World Bank supported
#
program in Maharashtra on the self-help groups and I just said yes because I thought it will
#
be a good opportunity for me to visit rural Maharashtra other than Raimathpur and my father
#
was alive at that time so I thought it will be very nice for me to just visit him every
#
time I go to Maharashtra I can just visit my father.
#
Also just to bring, to establish a better connection so I agreed and we chose ten, I
#
mean Biju was not a part of that study but I chose ten poorest districts in Maharashtra
#
which of course was not really in western Maharashtra, most of it was eastern and there's
#
Nandurbar and all that.
#
Again a part of Maharashtra that never been to, in fact I went to Garchiroli which is
#
a Naqshil, where the Naqshilite problem is particularly severe so that was a sort of
#
Naqshilite territory so it just gave me an entry point into a completely different world
#
that I had not encountered before and so I was excited by that.
#
So that fieldwork we sampled 10,000 households across ten poorest districts in Maharashtra
#
and that's got me thinking about livelihoods, women getting together.
#
These are very poor women who organize themselves in self-help groups and meet once a week and
#
save small amounts till they become bigger and there's a village organization then they
#
get some money from the government etc and then they can form federations etc.
#
So the whole structure, when I went into it, I was very skeptical about this program and
#
I felt like the government is not giving them jobs or jobs are not getting generated in
#
rural India and this is just a little, you do something and you get these women together
#
and it's just, it's not a very effective program.
#
That was my understanding and I thought that the mobilization also was just formal and
#
it didn't have any substantive effect on women's lives but I went, that was my prior.
#
Of course I didn't say that to anyone, it was just in my thought and what I saw on the
#
field completely changed my view about it.
#
I mean it is, it was, I mean there were points where I had tears in my eyes looking at the
#
conditions of these women but they resolved to meet once a week and save 10 rupees per
#
week which in 2013, I mean 10 rupees is a small amount for us anytime but for them it
#
was a fairly substantial amount and often they would say, I would say where do you save
#
these 10 rupees from and they would say we cut down milk in our tea, not for the husband
#
but for themselves to save these 10 rupees and the data, I have another paper about can
#
weak ties create social capital because these are non-kinship based groups.
#
These are women that you don't know otherwise and you're engaging with them.
#
Anyway, there's a whole thing on the SAG movement etc and while in our sample we didn't find
#
a huge effect on livelihoods but it showed me something about the willingness of women
#
to leave their homes, to go out, to meet other women, to engage with the village officials,
#
their propensity to engage with the Gram Panchayat, to ask for the ration shop to be opened if
#
I mean their overall collective action propensity is markedly better if they are members of
#
SAGs compared to when they are not and we've done a bunch of things to eliminate all these
#
swimming pool issues etc.
#
And our sample is big enough that we have the power to do that and that really got me
#
thinking or looking at the social norms issue very differently.
#
These are women that they don't have to mobilize in these SAGs.
#
It's not making an immediate difference to their livelihoods but it is a I think a problem
#
with jobs creation which is that there aren't avenues of employment in rural India.
#
These are women burdened by domestic work yet they want to find the time, that one time.
#
This whole assumption that women don't want to leave their homes, I don't know where it's
#
coming from but it's become such a pervasive assumption, I've never seen it, never ever.
#
Women want to leave their homes, honestly believe me.
#
Anyway, so this sort of got me thinking and then of course there was this paper that happened
#
and then there was Professor Naila Kabir, she's at LSE.
#
She asked me if I would partner with her on a paper on West Bengal because she's an expert,
#
she's originally Bangladeshi and so she's done a bunch of work on Bangladesh and so
#
we thought if you look at the West Bengal Bangladesh comparison, it will give us a nice
#
insight because the cultural factors are counter-intuitive there because Bangladesh is Islamic and West
#
Bengal is majority not Islamic and a very popular but erroneous view in this literature
#
is that Islam is a constraint to female labour force participation but if that were the case
#
then Bangladesh should have been lower than West Bengal but we don't find that.
#
In fact, not just labour force participation but fertility rates, adoption of contraceptives
#
is higher in Bangladesh than in West Bengal, so talk about cultural stereotypes completely
#
playing out differently actually in the real world, anyway.
#
So because I'd done this field work in Maharashtra, I'd sort of suddenly encountered questions
#
that I had not encountered before in my mind.
#
I agreed and she was applying for funding and I became a co-applicant and we got funding
#
and we did field work in West Bengal and so there's a quantitative component to it which
#
I have worked on and there's a qualitative component to it which Naila is working on
#
because she does more qualitative work which are interviews with women trying to understand
#
the role of constraints and the role of what is it that's preventing them from working,
#
is it just that there's not work available, is it domestic chores, at least in the quantitative
#
section we find that it's really the disproportionate burden of women being responsible for domestic
#
work, not childcare, it's cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, things like that and I know
#
that you have international listeners so I just want to say one thing which is that one
#
big difference between South Asia and other countries in the world is that these tasks
#
are done in South Asian homes every day and several times a day.
#
In most South Asian homes, fresh meals or hot meals are cooked at least twice if not
#
thrice because our homes are not air conditioned and insulated, we clean our homes every day,
#
clothes get washed every day because we don't have washing machines, we don't store dirty
#
clothes, many people are too poor to have those many clothes that they can go for a
#
week without, so washing clothes gets done every day, dishes get done every day several
#
times a day, cooking gets done every day, cleaning gets done every day, these are tasks
#
that in the West either don't get done every day or don't get frequently done in a day
#
and there are dishwashers, washing machines, etc.
#
So these elements add a particularly heavy level of domestic chores to women in South
#
Asia that you don't find in other parts and the cultural norm that is a real victim is
#
not Islam, not veiling, we asked about the practice of veiling, it isn't that, it is
#
the disproportionate responsibility of being responsible for domestic chores which is women
#
and that is a real supply side constraint that needs to be fixed, the demand side constraint
#
is that in rural India the rate of job creation is very low, the agricultural technology has
#
displaced female labour more than male labour in agriculture and whenever there is a shock
#
like a drought, my colleague Kanika Mahajan has a paper on drought, I have a paper on
#
demonetisation, I have another paper on Covid, whenever there is a shock, unanticipated
#
external shock, exogenous shock, it hurts female employment more than it does male.
#
So I think we have to contextualise the role of cultural norms and the role of just plain
#
demand supply side factors, now you can say everything is cultural norms, if it is labour
#
market discrimination that's also cultural norms, if you take that view then every society
#
is governed by regressive cultural norms which is an argument obviously nobody makes.
#
So I think that there is something called economic discrimination and I think India
#
has it too, Indian women are just as ready to move out of their homes as other women
#
are elsewhere in the world, what is it that's tying them down?
#
Two things, not enough jobs in rural India and be domestic chores.
#
So this is the twin problem that we have to solve, childcare or the elderly care, even
#
I've looked at the time use survey data in 2019, for rural women that is not the major
#
constraint because of the way children are brought up in rural India, they are not individually
#
supervised in a way that you think in a sort of a western nuclear family set up.
#
And the decline in female labour force participation rates has been in rural India, urban India
#
has always been low but it's stagnant, hasn't changed.
#
Final point on this is that many of us have argued that the proportion of women in economically
#
active work has not declined but the amount of work they are doing is declined and that
#
gets picked up in the measurement issue.
#
And there's a researcher called Nicholas Lee who's at Ryerson University in Canada, he's
#
analysed the time use survey data for 2019 and the pilot survey which was done in 1998,
#
there are six states there, he's looked at the same six states in 2019 and he finds exactly
#
the same thing, that the proportion of women who are economically active is the same but
#
the hours they work have declined drastically in 2019 compared to 1998.
#
And finally, my paper with my student Jeetendra Singh, we use longitudinal data and we show
#
that literally every four months women are entering and exiting employment over frequent
#
intervals, four month intervals are too short for social norms to change.
#
So they suddenly don't become favourable and women go out, suddenly become unfavourable
#
women come in, that can't be it.
#
And we've accounted for all other explanations.
#
So when you put, these are the dots that we were talking about earlier, now when you put
#
all these dots and start joining them, the picture that emerges is that yes, there is
#
a problem of domestic chores, but that can be solved.
#
Other countries in the world have provided for providing these services out of the home,
#
whether it's childcare, whether it's free good canteens, China set up canteens at every
#
workplace so that women and men didn't have to cook at home in the morning before going
#
There can be a number of initiatives that can be done even in rural India that can solve
#
for these issues, provided we again realise that it's solvable, actionable policies and
#
not mindsets that are keeping women out of the labour force.
#
I want to double click into a bunch of these, but before that, elaborate a bit on one nuance
#
which you have pointed out in your writing and in the talks that you've given, which
#
is that we need to think of the low level of women in the work, women working in the
#
workforce and the decline as two separate issues.
#
So just elaborate on what that difference is and why that difference is important in
#
thinking about the issue.
#
So the low level, I think is related to the domestic chores issue and the fact, two things,
#
one is domestic chores.
#
The other thing that I didn't mention is that rural India has family owned enterprises that
#
It can be farming, fishing, orchards, basket making, good making, achar making, selling
#
Now, all of these enterprises run on the backs of free labour provided by the women in the
#
household, including children.
#
Now, these women do not distinguish between their work on the economic enterprise and
#
their work, which is in the purely domestic sphere.
#
For them, it's all housework and they are not seen as workers on the economic enterprise
#
neither by their families nor by the enumerator who comes and is asking about who's working
#
in this household, et cetera.
#
And so this slips through the cracks of the statistical system.
#
Because they don't get recognized as workers, they don't have any share in the earnings
#
of the family enterprise and they can't go to a bank and say, oh, we have this family
#
enterprise and I'm going to, whereas the husband can go because he's recognized as an owner
#
and worker of that family enterprise.
#
And so while recognizing them as workers doesn't mean that they will get automatically an equal
#
share or in the income or increase their save in decision making, but that's a first step.
#
So that's a low level argument, which is the A, measurement, which is that there are these
#
women who are active on economic work, not getting counted.
#
So that's the low level argument.
#
The other is domestic chores, which is if hypothetically work was available, you can't
#
access it because of this overwhelming responsibility of domestic chores.
#
So that's a level argument.
#
The decline, that's where the technology change, the fact that men migrate out to cities.
#
The women are doing predominantly the agricultural work or whatever the family enterprise is,
#
but they're working fewer hours in other types of work that gets counted because work is
#
fractured and not available on a long-term basis, like a contracting work, for example.
#
They might work 10 days instead of 30, which is what is needed to show up in the data as
#
And that, if you look at the NSS data from 2004, it's very clear decline for men also
#
a little bit, but for women strikingly more.
#
So I think that while overall it's the same problem, I mean, it's not two separate problems,
#
but when we analyze them, we have to look at the reasons for the low level, differentially
#
from the reasons for just the other day, there's another paper that actually I'll be presenting
#
next week, a new paper, where we looked at SHG membership mobilization, which is increasing
#
and labor force participation rate, which is decreasing and how the two are connected.
#
So that paper I'm presenting for the first time next week.
#
And for that paper, to put a graph in that paper, I was looking at LFPRs in 2000s.
#
India was at about 40 some percent there, Italy was at about 50%.
#
So not a big gap, but after 2000s, India has gone down and Italy has gone up.
#
Turkey, not that much difference in 2000 between India and, so the level effect, but the trajectory
#
has been in the opposite direction.
#
So if you look at 2000s, India was low, but not so dramatically low.
#
So again, the social norm story will miss that element, because they're so dramatically
#
India is so much closer to some of the European countries, admittedly not to Scandinavia
#
But, you know, so that's the thing.
#
And so we have to analyze the decline, because obviously something is happening in the last
#
15 years that's led to the decline and that we should fix that.
#
And then we have to go back to the problem of increasing the levels too, right?
#
Because even at its peak, it was like 30 to 40%, which is not a great LFPR figure, right?
#
But if we start working on the decline first, maybe we'll come to a point where we can think
#
See I think this is an exact example of how an economist can use data in a bad way.
#
Now a bad economist could take the data point you just gave and conclude that what has happened
#
is that women from India have gone to Italy and started working there, which explains
#
Yeh aisa bhi kaha sakte hain hai, yeh aisa bhi kaha sakte hain hai.
#
So you know, I've done episodes on sort of a female labor force participation with Namita
#
Bhandare, Vishrayana Bhattacharya earlier in the year and an extremely popular episode.
#
I'll link them from the show notes.
#
And you know what you said about, you know, women working in family owned enterprises
#
and that not being recognized is resonant because a recent guest of mine on the show
#
Vinay Singhal, he grew up in a village in Haryana and he speaks about how his father
#
used to run this kirana store and a little business, I think distributing grain or whatever.
#
And his mother would cook for all the workers.
#
So you know, she would never be recognized as part of the business, never get kind of
#
I mean, obviously she's not getting, you know, recognized for all the unpaid work she
#
does even, but that's kind of how it is.
#
I want another fascinating phenomenon that you've written about, which I'll ask you
#
to elaborate upon is what we discussed earlier, the U shaped relationship between education
#
and employment and the implications of that.
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
So I think overall, if you look at from the two thousands education levels of Indian women
#
have drastically risen and not just in primary secondary, but also tertiary.
#
So for example, in colleges where we, you know, the spaces that we inhabit, it's not
#
at all unusual to find a 50 50 or even a 60 40 classroom where 60% is female and 40% is
#
male, including in subjects like economics and STEM, et cetera.
#
So in India, actually women's enrollment in tertiary education has dramatically increased
#
and male female education gaps in terms of levels of education have dramatically decreased.
#
The problem is that the highly educated women, which is, you know, PG and above, or illiterate
#
women, the two ends of the spectrum, they work, you know, illiterate women, partly it's
#
obviously a class issue.
#
So they will work whatever informal work, daily wage work, whatever it is.
#
Their income is, you know, every day is a question of survival.
#
So you'll do something to get by highly, highly educated women.
#
There is a market, you know, and, and highly educated women, labor force participation
#
is also high, which is by the way contradicts that famous income effect argument in which
#
So, but the middle level, some of it could be that they're still in school, but even
#
when you take women 20 and above, which is unlikely that they're going to be in school,
#
the issue is that job opportunities for girls who finish class eight or 10 or 12, even when
#
you think about it in cities, there aren't those kinds of job opportunities.
#
You know, so think about say a mobile repair shop.
#
Have you ever seen a woman sitting in a mobile repair shop and doing it?
#
You know, why couldn't she do it?
#
Nowadays I find this, I think DLF, one of the courier companies uses women to deliver
#
And why is it that city women can't do that?
#
And obviously DLF has taken a view.
#
They can be a whole bunch of other jobs that middle level education, women with middle
#
level education can, can reasonably do provided we fix the infrastructure.
#
So recently I used this company called blue smart to go to the airport and there was a
#
female driver and I was very intrigued.
#
So I talked to her a lot about it.
#
And so she was saying that in Delhi is very difficult to get toilets to stop in the middle
#
for the women in public to go to, you know, because in Gurgaon they are non-existent.
#
In Delhi, at least some petrol pumps have female toilets.
#
Noida apparently is very good.
#
So literally every kilometer she says that we can find, you know, toilets for women.
#
Now that would be already a big, big disincentive discouragement for female drivers.
#
I mean, you're on the road the whole day.
#
You know, you need a space where you can use the washroom, right?
#
It needs a mindset to draw women into occupations that can be done with this middle level of
#
And recently I've got, you know, big ish grant from the Gates foundation to precisely pilot
#
with the private sector to work out initiatives that a pull women into the labor force, but
#
also allow them to become self-employed entrepreneurs, not just in the traditional beauty parlor,
#
tailor, cook sector, but other things as well, because women are getting more and more educated
#
and they can do other things.
#
It's partly a question of mindset, partly a question of networks.
#
And I don't know how much we'll be able to do, but we are partnering with big private
#
sector employers to see what solutions can be found because I do definitely believe that
#
the problem is solvable.
#
And I do believe that it's a demand side problem more than I think, okay, let me rephrase that.
#
I think that if you make big changes on the demand side, supply side will adjust itself.
#
I don't think, you know, talking about the mindset thing that we talked about earlier,
#
if you wait for mindsets to change inside families without any changes in the external
#
economic conditions, that's not going to happen.
#
So as opportunities become available, women start leaving the house, families will have
#
to adjust, you know, to that situation as they did everywhere else.
#
I mean, even developed countries today, take Britain, for example, it didn't have the labor
#
force participation rate of women that it has today.
#
It didn't have that in the, you know, early decades of the 20th century.
#
Women did stay at home and they were, you know, homemakers, caregivers, etc, etc.
#
But family dynamics changed as women exited.
#
That's the causation, not that first family dynamics changed, then women exited, it hasn't
#
And I think I'm pretty sure India will be the same.
#
And just to clarify for the listener who may not be familiar with some of these terms,
#
what you mean by supply side issues are things like marriage, motherhood, maybe there are
#
those conservative norms at home.
#
So these are all supply side means anything that affects women's supply of their own labor
#
And your point is that women want to go out and work, right, partly because of how their
#
homes are and, you know, they've got, they have aspirations and which human being doesn't.
#
So you solve the demand side, you kind of solve the, you know, the big side of that
#
So here's another question long back with three women guests, I had done an episode
#
called Metrics of Empowerment, where the question I threw at them was that if we are to kind
#
of get a sense of how far women are progressing or have progressed, what are those metrics
#
And these ranged from serious ones like I put forth and I'd written a column on it many
#
years back, which got me a lot of flack where I said that rising divorce rates are fantastic
#
because I indicated more and more women are getting empowered to get out of toxic relationships,
#
you know, and I don't remember, you know, my guests were Devika, Hamsini, Nidhi.
#
I don't remember what specific metrics they came up with.
#
I think one of them was an increase in men using grocery apps, you know, so things like
#
a little out of the box and all that.
#
So if I can, and I can't honestly think of anyone better than you to answer this because
#
you are both an expert in the subject as well as someone who thinks out of the box.
#
So what are some sort of conventional and unconventional metrics that you can look at
#
to say that yes, this is good.
#
So, you know, this is a very contested area about how do you measure empowerment.
#
And my first point that I'll make is that it's a process.
#
It's not a goalpost that you've reached, you know.
#
So I think the first mindset is that it's an ongoing process and it's an ongoing process
#
everywhere in the world.
#
There's progress on some indicators, there's not as much progress on other indicators.
#
So first things first, you know, a very simple and which I always ask in my interviews, in
#
my field work, is do you own a smartphone which you use yourself?
#
It's not like there's a smartphone in the house which occasionally I get to use.
#
Earlier I used to ask, do you wear a watch, but aaj kal ghaadi koi nahi pehanta.
#
But earlier wearing a watch was, I thought a very nice way of, because if the woman is
#
wearing a watch, that means there's something time bound that she needs to pay attention
#
to, you know, and domestic work is not time bound in the same way.
#
It is, I mean, roughly speaking.
#
Husband ke liye husband ko roti time peh chahiye.
#
Nahi nahi, itna koi 10 bhaj, I mean, come on.
#
Itna nahi hai, wo toh ghaadi ghar me bhi lagi rati hai.
#
But if she's wearing a watch, that means she's either catching a bus or she's going somewhere
#
and she needs to be back at a particular time.
#
You know, this indicates some involvement in an activity that she needs to keep track
#
of so that, because ghar ka kaam toh karna hi hai, chahe tum bahar kaam karo na karo,
#
ghar ka toh karna hi karna hai, right?
#
So that's one good question.
#
The smartphone one is another one.
#
This grocery happen is nice, I like that thing.
#
But you know, all these empowerment questions also I find, in fact, I was just talking to
#
two very young researchers the other day and one of the questions that all these questionnaires
#
have is, do you go to, and then there is a list of places and then answers are alone
#
with husband, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And one of them, when they change it to the Indian format, they ask, do you go to the
#
village fair slash something, something, something, and then alone, right?
#
And most women say no to that.
#
And my point is that women don't want to go alone to that, not because they're afraid.
#
The whole activity is a social activity, mele mein jaana, chodiyan kharidna, jhule pe batna,
#
mehendi lagwana, all of these are social activities and women look forward to that.
#
Saheli ke saath bhi jaa sakti hai.
#
Saheli ke saath bhi jaa sakti hai.
#
So in the West, in a way that going alone is seen as empowerment, it can be and in certain
#
contexts it is, but doing a leisure activity with other people in South Asia is not lack
#
In fact, one of the things we saw in the SHG groups also, women love the fact, you know,
#
I have so many videos of them singing and just, you know, that one hour that they spend
#
together, they like it genuinely, you know, to be with other people.
#
So you know, sometimes when we think of, I don't think we should look for these global
#
metrics of empowerment.
#
I know that there's a quest to do that because of comparability issues, but I think that
#
some sensitivity to context and to nuance.
#
And the number of times I've seen this answer saying, oh, you know, Indian women don't go
#
Arey papa, we don't want to go to the mela alone.
#
The whole point about the mela is to have fun there.
#
And we want to go with our friends, you know, it's not lack of empowerment.
#
I think the danger here is also what economists called isomorphic mimicry.
#
You know, I'd done an episode on this Vishruti and Alex, ki aap foreign se policy laakey
#
India me thapa dete ho aur sochte ho ki kaam karega.
#
This seems to me like a foreign kind of mindset, which you bring here and you assume that it
#
But the point is like this nuance, we don't want to go to the mela alone.
#
Yeah, I mean, the question, if it had been, if you wanted to go alone, would you be able
#
Yeah, that's a different thing.
#
I mean, if I suppose I really want to go to the mela alone, I should be allowed to do
#
But if I don't ever go to a mela and you know, just take myself me as an example, obviously
#
I am quote unquote empowered enough to go anywhere alone, you know, but somehow it's
#
in my head that when I watch a movie, particularly Hindi movie, I don't want to go alone.
#
So I always look for companion, not because I can't obviously I can, but the whole fun
#
of going to a Hindi movie is to be with somebody and I usually look for someone who would,
#
you know, so, you know, often nowadays, my daughter is my companion earlier, you know,
#
friends or whatever, but the whole point of it is the fun of it, right?
#
So I always tell students that whenever you do make up questionnaire, first apply it to
#
yourself and answer your quest, all the questions yourself, and then see whether the conclusions
#
that it's drawing about you, you like those conclusions or not, or making major financial
#
I've never made a major financial purchase alone.
#
If I buy a TV or a fridge or a gold bangle or property, all of which I've bought, but
#
I want to consult my husband, I want to consult my family.
#
And even I don't do it.
#
I mean, these are decisions you take together together, right, because you are a family
#
unit and the many of these are family things to enjoy us, you know.
#
So I just feel like we need to be more sensitive to questions and, you know, how they are framed
#
and how the question is framed will determine your answer, you know.
#
So when you say alone, zero, okay, not empowered, you know, and people aggregate these zeros
#
and ones and the more the number of zeros are, that's what I was telling.
#
I said, please count alone and with husband because I understand that there is a power
#
dynamic between husband and wife.
#
But otherwise, you know, if you just do this, otherwise there'll be so many zeros because
#
there are some activities that we do do together.
#
I don't think it's necessarily lack of empowerment.
#
And what you just said about how you advise your researchers, keep, you know, answer it
#
Don't just, you know, don't just take boxes, don't just blindly put the survey out there.
#
That gets me to again thinking aloud about how in so many professions, especially in
#
corporate setups, most people are going through the motions.
#
They don't care deeply.
#
In fact, you know, because of incentives, you're likely to find the higher up you go
#
in a company or a startup, the more the person is likely to care because skin in the game
#
and there's more at stake and all of that.
#
But most people are going through the motions.
#
Most people are ticking boxes.
#
Most people are showing up for work.
#
It's the same old grind.
#
What's the scene in academia like, you know, I just from my conversation with you, I can
#
see how animated you are by these questions and you're thinking about every aspect of
#
And I'm sure you're the kind of person who's like dreaming of conducting surveys and papers
#
when you're asleep in REM sleep, but in general, when you, when you look at your colleagues
#
and your associates and all that, do you feel that there is a similar phenomenon playing
#
out there that many people once they get into that particular kind of academic groove, they're
#
just doing the thing that passion and engagement, I mean, what's the scene there?
#
I think it's a mixed bag.
#
I think it'll be hard to sort of generalize.
#
It depends a lot on location where you are, the right institutional setting, you know.
#
And again, coming back to Ashoka, I have to say that Ashoka gives a very enabling environment.
#
We have a very young department, large and young department.
#
And I really love the energy because all these young people are there, you know, doing different
#
things and some are working on theories, some are working on data, but there's a lot of
#
excitement and there's a lot of, you know, what is the word I'm looking for, vibrancy.
#
That may not be the case elsewhere.
#
And I think public institutions are going, going through a period of crisis in, for many
#
different reasons and in many different ways.
#
But I think the, once people start to lose that intellectual curiosity and excitement,
#
I think that's where the death knell, you know, like that begins the death of the, because
#
at the end of the day in academics, I mean, publishing, of course, it's important.
#
I mean, I also would like to publish as much as I can.
#
You publish so many papers.
#
I have not spoken to a guest who has the same frequency of paper, like you do.
#
It's like another woman makes roti and you roll the paper.
#
You interview Kartik, they are publishing in like a thousand big, big, big journals.
#
Yes, Kartik is also an outlier.
#
Anyway, he's in a different league altogether.
#
Yes, he talks to the state secretary, he publishes a journal there too.
#
What I'm trying to say is that I think that as a country, I think we really need to pay
#
attention to this problem a great deal more than we do, which is to maintain that level
#
of energy and vibrancy in institutes of higher education.
#
And I think the freedom of thought, I mean, the whole academic quest is about, okay, here's
#
Maybe it'll lead to something.
#
But let me just be unencumbered and let me think of possibilities without somebody seeing
#
an agenda in my work or, why is she working on stunting?
#
Is it some hidden agenda?
#
I have some data, I notice a problem, I'm working on it.
#
And I think that all of us who, most of us, I would say, who analyze using data, Indian
#
problems, I think all too with a view to make things better.
#
I don't think the attention of academics, broadly speaking, is to run any country down.
#
Like all of us, certainly Indians living in India, Indians living abroad as well who work
#
They're trying to find solutions in their own ways, in different ways, often they disagree
#
But as a collective, I think the academic enterprise, as a collective, is not trying
#
to run down the country at all.
#
So I think that universities are and should remain, I mean, in an ideal world, universities
#
are and should remain spaces of free thought, free inquiry, disagreement, debate, healthy.
#
That's what universities, I mean, I'm a university child, really.
#
Because my entire life I've been associated with some university or the other, first as
#
a child of a professor, then as a teacher myself.
#
So that's the context I know the best.
#
Do you say this because you worry that that is not the case or it is in threat?
#
We have like 20 minutes of time left and you've been very generous with your time so far.
#
And as far as your work is concerned, I'd just encourage all my listeners to just go
#
out and engage with it directly.
#
I mean, if we start talking about each of those subjects, like 10-10 hours of episodes
#
will be done and surely we will meet again and talk again on the show as you've so kindly
#
So a few final questions.
#
When was the last time you went to a Mela?
#
Like what do you enjoy doing in your free time?
#
When did you go to the Mela?
#
Well, when I used to go to Rehmatpur, you know, to the village, every Thursday was the
#
So we used to go and wear kanch ki chuniya and there used to be special stalls and my
#
grandfather would take very sweetly and would buy.
#
But yeah, I really haven't been to a Mela.
#
I wish I had more free time than I do, but my sort of most favourite things to do, one
#
is I love watching movies, you know, so I would love to go for a movie whenever, always
#
Aaj kal toh khar OTT aage aaya hai, so you know, that's another leisure activity that
#
I go to concerts as I mean, quite, I mean, well, not enough.
#
I would like to go to more concerts than I can go to actually, but I listen to Hindustani
#
vocal music is my, between Hindustani and Karnataka, it's Hindustani, between vocal
#
and instrumental, it's vocal.
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This is my like one of my most favourite genres of music, but I like instrumental as well.
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So I mean, Hindustani music, I really, really enjoy.
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So I go to concerts whenever I can, again, less so now than I used to go earlier.
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Theatre has really gone down since my parents left Delhi, because earlier with them, because
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my father would be always going to the theatre, we would just go along with him.
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I wish I could watch more theatre than I do.
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Theatre and dance has gone down.
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I used to watch a lot of dance and theatre, that's gone down, but music I still sort
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I mean, I read, not enough again, not enough time to read.
#
I feel I'm so tired by the evening that do thin page padke, I'm trying to sort of dozing
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But I'm trying to read.
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I picked up a Hindi book after a really long time, Red Samadhi, bade saalo baad Hindi pad rahi
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hoon, bahot saalo baad.
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And I didn't realise that it's a difficult book to read.
#
You know, it's not written in the usual full, full sentences type.
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So I'm slightly a little bit reading aloud every now and then, but I'm really enjoying
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Marathi reading has more or less come to a standstill, but I'm an optimist.
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I always think things will change drastically.
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So I have that on my to-do list, pata nahi kabhi hoga ke nahi hoga.
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Otherwise we travel a lot as a family and we're fond of going to places, we go for walks.
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So I value leisure a lot.
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And now I'm at a stage where I'm lucky enough that I can outsell some of the domestic work
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and I have a family that's very supportive.
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So a lot of the domestic, when we were younger, things were different.
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So that does leave me for leisure time.
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That does leave leisure time.
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And then I'm, you know, when I can, I take music lessons once a week.
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So I don't do everyday cooking now, lucky enough to have reached that stage, but I do
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I try different cuisines.
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What's your finest dish?
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You'll have to ask my family.
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I bake a lot, you know, so I...
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I would say, I think so, because I do a lot of different cakes and different types of
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not a big bread expert, but I would say cakes and pies.
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Does baking play into the mathematical mindset because, I mean, obviously you have the mathematical
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mindset or baking meh jo log stereotype banaate hai, I cook, but I don't bake in my case
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because baking meh everything is precision, precision numbers, itne minute, yeh measure,
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yeh measure, wo measure, while I just like to kind of play around and mess around.
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So is there something to that stereotype?
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I don't know whether it's my, I mean, first I don't know whether I have a mathematical
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mind and secondly, I don't know whether it's that, but it's, I like the precision of baking.
#
And I think that it forces you to pay attention, whereas I do a lot of Indian cooking and different
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Maharashtrian, obviously, and my husband is Bengali, so I tried dabble a little bit idhar-udhar
#
in Bengali cuisine as well.
#
And I've learned other states of India as well.
#
But that's, you know, it's like Hindustani Gana, which is andazey se, you know, you sort
#
of develop a raga, you develop a dish, it's kind of, and many people have drawn this analogy
#
between Indian cooking and Indian music.
#
Baking is very precise, it has to be, you have to pay attention much more in baking
#
than you do in Indian cooking.
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When you look back on your life, what makes you proud?
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Oh gosh, hard to answer.
#
I mean, I guess none, none of it is, it's almost turned out the way because I, you know,
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I thought I was going to be a doctor.
#
So in a way, nothing has turned out, I didn't plan too much to be honest.
#
So things just kept happening and you know, it's that I have two ruffy songs that are
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my motto songs in my life.
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And one of them is, main zindagi ka saath nivhata chala gaya.
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So it's jo mil gaya ussi ko mukadar samajh liya, jo kho gaya main usko bhulata chala
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So I think that attitude helps one to adjust, you know, to whatever life.
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I think I'm, I think I like the work that I do.
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I like the fact that there's a body of work now at this age where I feel like I have begun
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to understand a little bit some of the problems.
#
I'll still say I'm on the surface, but I think it's nice to feel, okay, okay, now I'm beginning
#
to see a little bit of the jigsaw coming together.
#
Many more dots, many more dots than anybody else, but you know, that feeling is nice.
#
I'm very proud of my daughter.
#
So you know, it's nice to see her as an adult and nice to interact with her as an adult.
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I don't know how much of that is due to me or whether, you know, despite me, she's turned
#
out to be the way she is, but whatever it is, it's just nice to have that.
#
Yeah, I think overall, like, you know, just fortunate to have been born into the family
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that I have born into, fortunate to have married into the family that I'm married.
#
So, you know, many, many strokes of luck, whether all this is to be proud of or not,
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I don't know whether I've answered your question.
#
When you wake up in the morning, what do you look forward to the most?
#
Like what brings you just happiness of being in the moment?
#
So I listen to something in the morning and it can be anything.
#
I just very temperamental, I mean, I'm not very consistent about whatever, but I do think
#
of the music I'm going to listen to, not in a very conscious way, not in the very sort
#
of list making way, but it's just like, otherwise actually now one has reached a stage where
#
there's lots of lots of chota chota chota work that needs to be done, you know, managing
#
projects or some administrative work related to SIDA, the center that is at Ashoka or some
#
So there's a lot of this sort of admin type, admin-y type work, which is not my most favorite
#
to be honest, but it has to be done.
#
So the volume of email, you know, I wake up, there's a volume of emails to write to.
#
So there is, but I realized that it comes with, you know, you can't be choosy about
#
this, I mean, you are where you are and so all this is a part of the territory.
#
But you know, if I end the day on, okay, I wrote these paragraphs or I finished this
#
part of the paper, or I just even wrote a popular article or whatever, I feel really
#
So when I get original writing done, those are my best days.
#
I feel like we have a lot to talk about.
#
But I wanted to talk about your husband for that matter and you know, how you've influenced
#
I wanted to talk about your Lata Mangeshkar debate with an academic in question and we
#
leave all of that for the next episode, unless you want to talk about any of them briefly
#
and now, but the final question I'll end on, which I ask all my guests is tell us about
#
in your case, songs, music, books, films, OTT shows, whatever stuff that you love that
#
just mean a lot to you.
#
And they may or may not have anything to do with your work.
#
But just what do you feel emotionally close to?
#
It's a really tough question to answer, partly because I watch so much that I forget what
#
But I think in terms of movies that I've watched recently, which really moved me, one was this
#
Marathi film called Disciple, which is made by Chaitanya Tamani, the same person who made
#
Quote also, I really, really liked.
#
Quote was a masterpiece.
#
And I've watched it several times.
#
I recommend it to my students in economics of discrimination.
#
Disciple is in sunny music, beautiful, beautiful film.
#
OTT, we tend to watch a lot of crime thrillers.
#
So very much into murder mysteries and all that.
#
So Line of Duty, for example, is a show that we watched recently.
#
Not all episodes are available here, but in England, we watched it.
#
Fabulous, fabulous show, Line of Duty.
#
I'd missed Downton Abbey completely when it had first come.
#
And I wasn't particularly keen because it was a period drama, et cetera, who cares about
#
the British aristocracy.
#
But when we started watching it through the pandemic, I realized that that's just the
#
But there's so much more going on in that show.
#
Bridgerton, oh my God, Bridgerton season two was my Hindi movie lover's delight.
#
People criticize Hindi movies for being suggestive and they would show two flowers meeting each
#
Bridgerton is completely that, by the way, Bridgerton season two.
#
But as I say, we've perfected that art of just the suggestive.
#
But the power of a suggestive romance where very little actually happens and you hold
#
the tension till the end.
#
For years, Hindi movies have been ridiculed for doing this.
#
And Bridgerton has shown the power of how fabulous that chemistry and that anticipation
#
and the climax can be when that happens.
#
A lot of crime shows actually, Shetland, Line of Duty, then The Good Wife, Good, what is
#
I think I'm thinking of Damon Galgit.
#
Good Wife and then Christine Baranski stars in the, it's not a sequel to The Good Wife,
#
but a lot of the characters of The Good Wife come into the, that's much more political
#
actually, by the way, it's sort of anti-Trump and it's a kind of a continuum.
#
I mean, there's the same characters.
#
So Good Wife and Good Fight, both of which I liked.
#
Then there was this Japanese show, Japanese BBC collaboration, Hajigiri, that we liked.
#
I'm just randomly trying to remember what I liked.
#
Songs though, you know, the one big tragedy of this sort of globalized Hindi movie format
#
is that music has gone out of Hindi films.
#
So Gangubai Kathiawadi was so nice because it had songs, you know, real, real tragedy.
#
I mean, Hindi film songs used to be such a fabulous genre, but anyway, there's enough
#
of an archive there that one can keep on listening to.
#
So I listen to podcasts on Hindi films as well, but I also listen to just songs.
#
And can I trouble you to sing something as you did for my good-of-follows?
#
Oh my God, after five hours, six hours of talking.
#
Just something soothing that you like, something that...
#
So even though Lata, I'm a big fan of Lata Mgeshkar, as you know, I don't sing a lot
#
of her songs because they are very difficult to sing.
#
So the song that I sang there was Asha Bhosle's song.
#
But let me try to sing.
#
Chhupalo yun dil mein pyaar mera, ke jaise mandir mein lau diye ki.
#
Chhupalo yun dil mein pyaar mera, ke jaise mandir mein lau diye ki.
#
Tum apne charnon mein rakhlo mujhko, tumhare charnon ka phool hoon mein,
#
main sar jhukaye khadi hoon preetam, ke jaise mandir mein lau diye ki.
#
Chhupalo yun dil mein pyaar mera, ke jaise mandir mein lau diye ki.
#
But if you were going to make me sing, you should have done it in the beginning, not
#
I'll remember that for next time.
#
Phir paanch gante baas gaana hi chalega.
#
I think I should get you and Kartik together because he's also a singer and he loves Antakshari.
#
I haven't heard him sing, you know.
#
I should listen to his episodes where he's...
#
The second episode he did with me on healthcare, he kind of sings at the end.
#
And then I made him promise that we'll do an Antakshari next time.
#
But this third time when he came on, he was recovering from COVID, his throat was messed
#
So I think we should do an in-person Antakshari at some point in time and make you both come
#
to my home studio in Bombay and just have a blast.
#
Ashwini, thank you so much.
#
I'm so fortunate and honored that you gave me so much of your time and shared so many
#
Thanks a lot for having me again on the show.
#
I enjoy your podcast, as you know.
#
It's been fabulous, thanks.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, check out the show notes, enter rabbit holes
#
Do go to your nearest bookstore online or offline and pick up the books Ashwini has written.
#
You can follow Ashwini on Twitter at A-S-H-W Deshpande, Ashw Deshpande, I'll also link
#
it from the show notes, A-S-H-W Deshpande.
#
I'm sure she's trolling us with this Twitter handle because it's just so hard to say, but
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And you can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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