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In the online writing course I teach, I often talk about the importance of regular writing.
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I think of the ability to write as akin to a muscle.
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If you want to develop your muscles to build your body, you have to work out regularly.
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Similarly, if you want to develop your writing muscle, you have to build a habit of reading
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And one nuance here that I'm beginning to appreciate more and more is that your writing
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habit will not only change your writing, it will change you as a person.
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The more we write, the better we understand the world and the more we understand ourselves.
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Writing in a sense can be like therapy even.
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This is especially so if it takes a form of journaling.
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Previous guests on this show, like Amitav Kumar and Samarth Bansal, have spoken about
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how journaling changed who they were, made them more self-aware and reflective.
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And my guest today, by writing about her life, her parenting, her relationships, has also
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shown us a power of turning our gaze inwards.
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It's hard to do because it can mean abandoning the comfort of our self-delusions.
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It can mean confronting all that is ugly about us.
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But it can be so, so rewarding.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Natasha Badwar, who started off as a cinematographer in the first wave
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of Indian satellite television, established herself there and then left it to reinvent
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herself as a writer of personal essays.
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A mother of three daughters, she started writing about parenting, first on a blog and then
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in a celebrated column for Mint Lounge.
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Her first book was a wonderful collection of essays called My Daughter's Mum.
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I recorded an early episode with her about this book a few years ago.
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This was back in the day when my episodes were half in our miniatures, which is ironic
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because someone as self-reflective as Natasha is perfect for the current format of the show,
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which is akin to oral history and is more about people than subjects.
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Since we last recorded, she's published another fine book, Immortal for a Moment, shifted
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her column from Lounge to the Tribune, started a newsletter on Substack and she also now
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teaches a memoir writing course.
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Her personal essays are more than just personal.
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Franz Kafka once described literature as an axe for the frozen sea within us.
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By writing about her own life and relationships, Natasha reveals deeper truths about all of
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us, about our lives and relationships.
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Even when she writes about parenting, which I have zero interest in, I keep finding nuggets
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of wisdom which force me to think about my own self.
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Her writing also tells us a lot about the society around us.
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She talks about mental health issues, especially of children, and how we often, quote, do not
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name the estrangement we feel, stop quote.
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She writes about how so much of what would qualify as child abuse is normalized in our
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She talks about her decision to unschool her children and why our education systems are
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She speaks about her search for home.
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She speaks about how every marriage is a work in progress and the different ways in which
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our society is broken today.
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Most of all, she speaks about the value of living an examined life.
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I learnt a lot from this episode, which is one of my favorites, and I'm sure you'll
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Before we begin though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing.
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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
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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about the craft and practice of clear writing.
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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 rupees 10,000 plus GST, or about $150, and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash clear writing.
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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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Natasha, welcome to the Seen in the Unseen.
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It's wonderful to be back.
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Yeah, it's wonderful to have you back because the show was very different when we last recorded
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where the conception of the show was shorter conversations.
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So the name of our episode was Parenthood.
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And I've kind of moved on to much longer episodes where I'm not so interested in subjects per
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se, but more on people, you know, and since I now do five, six hour conversations, I thought
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you are like literally, you know, a tailor-made guest for the show because one of the things
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that you do so well is self-reflection and which is, you know, all your writing is just
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so powerful for that reason.
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And I think that's why people who read you also feel that strong connection because by
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writing about yourself, I think you're writing about all of us.
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But anyway, I could go on with the praise, but let's, you know, we're sitting here in
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To begin with, let's catch up.
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You know, how have the COVID years been for you?
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Like what have you been doing?
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How have the COVID years been?
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How have things progressed?
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COVID's been such a shock.
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And I think we're still in it.
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We really haven't had the time to process the first lockdown, which was all about the
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huge, you know, the hunger crisis and the migration in India and civil societies suddenly
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waking up in nearly a state of panic and trying to help people who are out there on the streets
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and in many ways also coming together.
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And then of course, when we thought it was all over, we were hit by the second wave.
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And second waves just left us with the collective trauma that will take years to process.
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And I think that it has touched all of us in terms of the kind of choices that we've
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been making in terms of what it's doing to the way we work, the way we look at our relationships,
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the way we are connected to the generation before us and the one next to us.
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I think it's shaping us in many ways.
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So for me, it's been extremely significant.
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Like many other people had not had so much time to be at home ever before, to be stuck
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with each other in the way that we were, to be able to understand the good and the bad
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and the ugly of it also.
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But at the same time, it slowed us down to some extent.
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The tragedies, the deaths, the hunger, all of that, I hope that we stay with this time
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a little longer and don't just kind of erase it all and try to get back to a normal life.
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I don't think that normal is ever going to come back.
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So there's a weird thing that's been happening to me in the last few days, which could be
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an interesting metaphor for this, where, you know, I'm here in Delhi recording 12 episodes
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in 12 days, kind of a foolhardy venture.
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I've done nine before this.
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And the average runtime has been four and a half to five hours, there's been one which
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And during these episodes, sitting exactly as we are now, this weird thing would happen
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in the second half of some of the recordings, where I felt as if the face of the guest has
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changed, where I would see something else than what it was earlier.
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And I would wonder that why is this person looking so different?
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And you know, that if I met them outside, would I now recognize them?
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And sometimes I'd feel that I wouldn't recognize them at all.
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Or sometimes I'd feel that I was seeing the wrong thing earlier.
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And it's really purely a visual sort of illusion, where the quality of the face just seems like
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Like, you know, I did an episode with Mahima Vashisht, a friend of mine, and at one point,
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her face suddenly started looking just like Pallavi Joshi's, and I was, and she doesn't
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And I was wondering what kind of optical illusion is this?
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And I did an episode with Pratap Bhanumaita, and his face seemed to sort of become softer
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and gentler, and which of course goes with the person that he is, he's a very soft and
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But it just had this sort of different quality to it.
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And I'm speaking at an optical level.
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But I'm just wondering, thinking aloud, that when you're at home, and you're forced to
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spend time with all of these people, and you know them so well, right, they are your family,
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you know them so well, are there moments where it feels like you're looking at something
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Are there moments where you feel like you've seen something you haven't seen before?
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That I mean, at one level, there is that sense that we are always destined to be strangers
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to one another, we figure out little parts of the puzzle now and then, and that gives
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us an illusion of knowing the other, but we never truly can.
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But was there any of that, because of the enforced physical closeness that happened
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I would say that, particularly within the family, we surprised each other.
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You know, it had been a really hectic time before the lockdown was announced, I'd been
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very busy with the Karvani Mohabbat campaign, we were traveling, we were making films, the
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anti-CA protests had, you know, we had participated in them rather robustly in Delhi, traveling
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with them, then the Delhi violence had happened, we were involved in rehabilitation, and suddenly,
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you know, we're setting up refugee camps, and the next day, lockdown.
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So my children had not seen me at home for a long time, I'd been very busy.
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And now I was home all the time, except that because of the huge hunger crisis, and because
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of the way that people were on the streets without any food, people had also started
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connecting with each other and mobilizing the distribution of food.
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And I found that I was now working very feverishly, but from home.
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And I thought I was doing my children a favor.
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I, you know, I was, I thought, you know, I'm there, and they were like, it took a while,
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it took a while, but my oldest daughter, she called me out.
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She said, you're not there at all, we miss you.
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You know, and I realized that I didn't know how to be at home.
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That we had to, you know, we had to then, we stumbled upon things, a group of cats came
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to our house, we began to take care of them, one had babies, we began to take care of those.
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And somehow my life with my daughters began to center around the cats and dogs that we
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had begun to feed, nurturing them, nurtured us.
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He was at home in his village with his father.
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And in the beginning, we were really relieved that he was stuck there, because we would
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have been so worried about his 90 year old father being alone.
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But it was more than a month before we saw each other again.
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And these had been months where we had suddenly seen too much of life, we had seen things
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that we were not quite sure how to, how to process, there was so much fear and panic
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I think we were also a little bit in denial.
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We were, you know, all the breads that were being baked and the pasta that was being eaten.
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We kind of tried to keep it light and celebratory, but there was a sense of panic about what
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was going to happen to the world.
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I mean, countries had gone into lockdown.
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The news was bad every day.
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So when I had that experience, quite literally when my husband came back home and now he
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had come via road through many districts, so he was exposed.
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You know, we had to isolate him according to those times, the norms of those times.
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And we were looking, we were looking at each other as if we were not quite sure who the
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I mean, I remember evening after evening, I'm sitting just outside the door and eating
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while he's eating on his bed.
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And he's telling his friends, I'm spending more time with my wife than I've ever spent
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while I'm isolating in the house.
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So it did bring out different sides of us.
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And I'm not surprised you're having this experience in these long conversations, because
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at some point our masks fall and our faces do change.
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At some point we are not in a safe environment, we are not so cautious anymore.
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And then we have to kind of recognize each other in a new way.
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And I think, but I did experience that, particularly with my growing children.
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In my head, they were much younger than they had become.
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They had to knock it into my head that, you know, that I needed to have different expectations
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And they had different expectations from me.
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And often we have a mask, not just for the world, but also for ourselves, we are always
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sort of there's a persona we've built up even for ourselves.
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And sometimes there's a crack and the light slips through, as it were.
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That's something that you more than anyone else, you've always been examining that through
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all your writing and your personal essays and all of that.
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But during this time, were there moments like that and what are they like where when you
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see yourself through somebody else's eyes and you see something that you know is true,
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but you were just ignoring it.
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You know, I really feel that it's a privilege to be surrounded by people, to know people
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It really is a privilege.
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And my daughter at one point said to me, every time I talk to you about something I'm feeling,
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you make it about yourself.
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And I was like, whoa, now this is what I know not to do.
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And yet if she's saying it, she's feeling it.
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And and I wondered what I was doing.
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And and I realized I, you know, when I'm when I'm nervous with my own child, I have no tools
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and I quickly begin to tell her my story or I quickly begin to tell her what I had done
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in this time of my life.
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And her context was completely different.
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And she had to tell me that I would I wouldn't imagine that I would make that mistake.
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I wouldn't imagine that I with all my awareness and, you know, all my reading on mental health
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and all my work in the field would would need to do that.
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But she did and it's it's it's really quite beautiful because it slows you down.
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It stops you in your tracks.
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In the in the middle of twenty twenty, I had stopped writing the column for Mint Lounge.
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And also I had not been writing so much about parenting or children because they were in
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their middle teens and we were kind of reassessing things.
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But Kartika VK from Westland, she called me and she said, we'd like to commission essays
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and I want you to write two essays on parenting.
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And in the middle of, you know, just this post lockdown world where mobility is still
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quite strapped, I had to write this essay and this is what these were the conversations
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I was having with my daughter.
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And it was a moment of reckoning.
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It was a moment of recognizing that they are actually much older, much more mature and
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very different from where I have frozen them in my imagination.
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And of course, all of those moments in relationships will be like hiccups.
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They do sometimes momentarily feel like failures, but that's because we also build up expectations
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from relationships to such an extent.
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And similarly, I think many couples also went through this where it was such a different
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way of being married, that you were in the same space all the time, that you had to kind
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of wonder if you would marry him now.
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If you had a choice, would you still choose each other now that you were looking at each
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other so closely so many years into your original marriage?
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And I think it was a gift in some ways to reassess, to decide to change your patterns
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And when you talk about it as a privilege and a gift and that is so true and it's also
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rare because one thing that I observe more and more around me is that people kind of
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get stuck in the grooves that they are in, whether it is of their work or whether it
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is in their relationships.
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So you adopt a particular role which may more or less conform to the social expectation
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or it may not or it could be whatever, but you get stuck in those grooves and the other
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person becomes a fixed point in your head, a fixed thing in your head.
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Like you mentioned that your kids were frozen in your imagination till you kind of snapped
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And then we go along those grooves and being completely alone because you're just in those
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Other people are sort of instrumental to you, they're performing roles in your life and
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you're performing roles in their lives, but you're never really coming out and taking
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that moment and stopping and kind of talking, which can be so valuable.
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And it seems that your act of spending all these years writing your column, writing about
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all of this is something that therefore within your family, kind of make sure that everybody,
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all of you never really get trapped in those grooves because there's always that examination.
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There's always on the part of everyone else awareness that you're watching them, ki hum
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to content ban gaye, I suppose might well be a legitimate complaint.
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But I guess the sort of that self aware gaze you bring to yourself in the family where
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you take a step out, everyone I guess would kind of be forced to do that.
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And I agree that it's a blessing, but do you think that we are sort of wired to actually
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just be in grooves because life is easier?
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You know, you don't always have to reevaluate stuff.
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You don't have to work at relationships, right?
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You don't have to face deep truths about yourself.
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If a daughter tells you you're making everything about yourself, instead of having to think
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about it, you can just snap back and say, just finish your homework.
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You know, and I think most people are in those kinds of grooves.
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And I think that is natural to us.
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And I'm just thinking aloud.
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It seems to me that that's a great human and social tragedy.
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What are your sort of thoughts on that?
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I would definitely second you on using the word tragedy.
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I don't know whether we are wired or not.
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I don't think we are wired.
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We would not have, you know, such a large scale mental health, unspoken, unacknowledged
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mental health crisis in every family, literally in every family, in every workplace, in every
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school space, every institution that we are connected to.
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And in a way, the pandemic has exacerbated all of this.
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You know, there was a lot that we were kind of pretending that things in the groove are
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It's those who are not fitting in with that pace.
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They need some fixing and we've got some and we are finding that more and more people are
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They are not coping with coming back.
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They're not coping with being at home.
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They're not coping with each other.
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And I think that we do not, we do not name the estrangement that we feel and that we
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You have a safe personal conversation with anybody and one after the other stories begin
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And now I think more so in the post 2020, we are able to call it anxiety, call it panic,
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call it depression, you know, rather than just I'm in a low phase or I'm, you know,
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I'm just going through tough times or something like that.
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It is because we insist on the grooves that it doesn't work for us.
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And I mean, I'm doing these, you know, just like that Amit, I started the memoir workshops.
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I announced the first one with the help of Arpita of Yoda Press.
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And last year, November, December, we did the first one and it's just been so popular
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and so much, you know, there's such a waiting list that I'm now concluding the seventh of
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the workshops in eight months.
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And what are the, I mean, first of all, I had no idea that that many people wanted to
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write their own stories, wanted a place where they could tell their own stories.
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And when they do begin to tell their stories, we're all telling the same stories.
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We are all remembering the grandmother who died unacknowledged, who kept the family together,
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whose mental health was not taken care of, or, you know, the young people in the family
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who have specific needs that schooling ignores, that makes you put labels on them.
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But you recognize that actually you're just wasting a beautiful life by not acknowledging
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So I feel that it's actually a disaster.
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It's a tragedy that we have believed in the grooves.
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And this whole collapse of governance, collapse of education, collapse of workplace ethic
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is taking place because it never worked.
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And a little maladjustment, a little push, and it just seems to have all come apart.
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And we hear so much now about young people don't want to work.
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Young people have attitude.
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And I think that what they're showing us is that they do not accept the systems that we
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They, you know, they, they have the, for the first time, many of them have the privilege
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to make choices and they're choosing to do that.
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And we need to read the writing on the wall in most cases.
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Well, and just speaking of the hunger for learning and the hunger for writing, like
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for my writing course, which I started when COVID started really, I've had some 1900 students
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so far, and perhaps it'll go to 2000 by the time the episode has, and, and there is sort
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And, you know, I think a lot of stereotypes about young people come about because you
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only see shrill, angry young people on Twitter.
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But from the wider interactions that I've had, you know, I would say that any stereotype
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I would come up with for young people is overwhelmingly positive, you know, much more aware, much
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There's, you know, so you can't kind of look at one particular breed and kind of judge.
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I want to sort of double click on what you spoke about the explosion in mental health
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issues, which we don't recognize, you know, whether it is in the home or in the workplace
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or in the schools or whatever, because this is not spoken of, right?
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The common impression indeed is that, I mean, I've even heard people say that, hey, this
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is just young people whining, they're making too much or whatever, all of that nonsense.
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But if you even look at basic statistics, like one of my previous guests this week,
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I think Samat Bansal was talking about the rising rate of suicides among housewives,
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for example, as just one indicator.
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And those are very blunt tools, those kind of stats.
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But there clearly is a problem.
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And there clearly is, you know, its roots lie somewhere within our modern society in
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So can you elaborate on that, that what is the extent of the problem?
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How did you discover that, you know, this is happening and, you know, what do you think
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of what can be done about it?
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What are the things that make it worse and so on and so forth?
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I think, and I'm speaking simply from observation, from constantly reading about it, from reading,
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you know, new papers in psychology and psychiatry and from following, practicing psychotherapists.
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In a way, it's my special interest.
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I've kind of been reading about mental health since I was a child.
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And I feel very strongly that I would say that there are as many mental health issues
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as there are physical health issues.
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We have so many hospitals and we have so many doctors and we have this one small department
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We'll have one psychologist in ten neighborhoods when we will have ten doctors in one neighborhood.
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And we are seeing a growing awareness.
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We are seeing that schools and offices and particularly universities are creating, you
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know, whole departments and counseling centers where people can go and seek help.
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But what we are not changing enough is the conversation around it.
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We are continuing to see somebody whose, you know, mental health may be flaring up to the
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point that they don't seem to be normal anymore or they don't seem to be functioning anymore.
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It's only those people who are being isolated and we're trying to fix them in some way.
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Just from, you know, my experience of being in school, so I was in what was at that time
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the most popular, the most sought after school brand in Delhi, Delhi Public School, RK Puram.
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There were very bright kids.
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I mean, first of all, there were too many kids.
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We were like in the thousands.
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There were in class 12, we were 12 sections and now there are 24 or even more sections
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It's a huge schooling factory.
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So there was a lot of really good teaching, but there was also a lot of very abusive teaching.
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There were very smart kids who were doing very well.
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There was a lot of violence.
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There was a lot of bullying.
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There was a lot of fun also, but within all of that, there was still some kind of support
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system that held us through, that took us through.
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When my children have been through schooling, I did realize as soon as my first child was
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ready for school that I nearly had a kind of a galloping sense of panic in me because
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I hadn't thought about everything that was not okay with school, but it had stayed in
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my body and I had this huge sense of what not to do, but not necessarily what one could
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So anyway, we thought we were really aware and we were making very, very careful choices.
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We moved out of the city, we went to a quiet neighborhood, we chose a small school.
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We made choices, we remained flexible about it, trying to get the best that we could.
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But my children's experience of school, the kind of bullying that they report, the kind
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of Islamophobia that they report, the kind of skewed gender behavior and preferential
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treatment that they continue to report in the 21st century in the finest, most expensive
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And also the kind of self-harm that children are doing in literally every classroom.
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So from talking to young people, they are reporting a distress level in themselves and
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in their peers of a magnitude that schools are not equipped to deal with.
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And because we've been very invested in this, I have three children in school, I had them
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in school till about three years ago, we've been talking to the best educators.
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And finally, when my children quit school three years ago, this very, very fine elderly
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principal of the school, she looked at the child, she looked at us, she knew us.
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She said, you're doing the best thing that you can, we cannot fix the problem.
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We know it exists, but we cannot fix the problem.
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So protect your child from it if your child is reporting this as a problem.
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And she actually gave me the names of unschoolers and other people and sent us off with her
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So talking about a level of awareness that is there, but a lack of tools, a lack of holistic
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kind of reactiveness from institutions about how to fix it, how to acknowledge that it's
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actually really quite bad.
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And in a way to acknowledge it, Amit, we will have to re-examine hierarchies, we will have
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to re-look at how do we talk to men in power, how do we empower women in the workplace,
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because all of that is playing out in the school as well.
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And that then becomes a much larger conversation.
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So lots to double click on, and I'll begin with what this lady told you, we cannot fix
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What was she referring to?
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Can you dig a little deeper?
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So let's say we're talking about 12 and a half year old who's in grade seven.
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And in the same year, she's gone on a school trip, and while the company that has taken
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them has been completely vetted, they've made these fancy presentations to the school,
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to the parents, all the safety gear has been taken care of, all the overtly everything
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is supposed to be safe for your child.
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But what is her experience when a group of boys and girls are without a structure, suddenly
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out there in the mountains staying in tents, there are coaches who are talking in a certain
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way to the young women, they're referring to them as you're my princess, you don't
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have to run, I'll save you from this.
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Now here's a very athletic girl, she wants to run, she's faster than the boys, she also
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wants to get the medal, but suddenly young girls are being singled out, they're being
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sexualized in a way that they don't have a language to call out yet.
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But there are also women teachers, they can see it, but they don't know how to address
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So they come back, all the children talk to their parents, the parents are up in arms,
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I literally had to quit the WhatsApp group at that time because it was on fire.
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And I was like, this is not going to help, we are just screaming our heads off.
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So we try to address it with the school.
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We know it's a problem, yes, we're talking to them, I can't believe this happened.
#
We don't really have the training, the system, the wherewithal to address it.
#
You've got football for girls, but you've got a coach who decides, oh, there are only
#
three or four girls, let them play with younger boys.
#
You've got younger boys who are like, why should we play with girls?
#
So all of this, I mean, it's common gender socializing, playing out in the play field,
#
but people in authority do not know or do not care to address it.
#
So how is an average Indian girl who knows about equality, who knows about justice, she
#
doesn't have to read it anywhere.
#
She knows her capabilities, but suddenly she's in a world, which has been her safe world,
#
that is diminishing her because she's a girl and at multiple levels.
#
So teachers don't know how to deal with bullying and aggression in the classroom.
#
They look at some of the more aggressive children, they could be girls or boys, and they don't
#
know how to address this.
#
So we're always telling the sensitive kid, don't take it to heart, don't sit with him.
#
We're always trying to fix the one who doesn't need fixing.
#
And so I escalate to the class teacher, we escalate to the teacher above that, we finally
#
go to the principal, and they don't know what to do.
#
And I'm not blaming them because it's really, I mean, at the same time, playing out everywhere,
#
I mean, we had the Me Too movement blowing up right after that.
#
And look at the extent of the filth that came out.
#
And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
#
Look at the backlash against the women who spoke up and the kind of cases they are still
#
continuing to fight, we're seeing what's happened in the West as well as in India.
#
So the world is much slower to change and much more resistant and the kind of literally
#
the backlash that people are having to live with is problematic.
#
It's the same thing if you belong to a minority, you're just going to have to swallow your
#
humiliation on a daily basis, because we don't know how to question those in authority.
#
And somewhere we have to begin to chip at it, you know, those of us who feel strongly
#
about it, we have to take the risks and find ways to, creative ways, not necessarily ways
#
that put us in danger, through storytelling, through filmmaking, through solidarities with
#
those who are risking more than we are, things need to happen.
#
And in a way, our schools and our workplace institutions are allying more and more with
#
those in authority who have fascist tendencies, who want to take the world back into a much
#
more patriarchal, you know, set up.
#
So instead of kind of going forward as we thought the world would go, it really wasn't
#
in my immature imagination that we would be dealing with this kind of regression in the
#
social and political space.
#
And that's affecting families as well.
#
Yeah, I mean, I agree, we all, you know, I grew up thinking the arc of history will bend
#
towards a good place, you know, more freedom, more justice, more whatever.
#
And the last few years kind of make you question that and make you question whether you build
#
that narrative based on a really small sample size, you know, there are only so many years
#
that we have actually, you know, should we make assumptions about the future from that.
#
I'll continue digging into this subject in the sense that you've spoken about what's
#
going wrong at the school.
#
And that's, of course, a reflection of what is already wrong in society in terms of the
#
perpetuation of these structures and these grooves, as it were.
#
Let's broaden it a little bit and talk about beyond the school, just society and the way
#
kids grow up today in the sense that Jonathan Haight once pointed out how the mental health
#
problems among teenage girls specifically over the last 10 years.
#
And the point that he was making is that it was more a problem with girls than with boys.
#
You know, once upon a time, people used to worry that boys are playing too many video
#
games and they'll become violent and they'll become this.
#
But it didn't really make much of a difference if anything had helped boys with problem solving
#
But with girls, what social media did was it put them in this competitive, performative
#
space where, you know, a generation of girls earlier, perhaps when you grew up, you'll
#
have girls just talking to each other about normal things and chilling out and being themselves,
#
building their own little safe spaces, as it were.
#
But the contention runs that because of social media, because of what Instagram has become
#
and Instagram shows the best version of everyone, right, the version they want to put out.
#
And your real self has to compete with the imagined self of everybody else.
#
And that leads to enormous amounts of pressure, enormous amounts of anxiety.
#
And that whole classic anxiety of somehow fitting into a world which is really a world
#
of, you know, imagined and constructed selves can be a huge problem.
#
And I think Facebook many years ago suppressed a study which showed that teenage suicide
#
rates among girls were rising and it was partly because of, you know, social media and FBE
#
So what's your observation on this?
#
Because the challenges of girls growing up today at the time your daughters are, are
#
in some ways you have the same damn issues that you did when you were a kid, the patriarchy
#
and the fixed roles, they have to move on and the condescension and all of that.
#
But there are also these newer tougher challenges.
#
I absolutely agree with you, there are newer tougher challenges.
#
I'm also happy to report that in my observation these are newer, tougher, smarter girls.
#
And I see a lot of them resisting the pressure as well.
#
But the fact that the pressure exists, the fact that if you fit in, you're masking to
#
the extent that you are no longer in touch with your authentic self.
#
If you don't fit in, you are not sure whether you're doing the right thing, you're too young.
#
You're too young to be able to feel okay despite the fact that, you know, you are skipping
#
out on the parties and not dressed the way the others are, not being able to talk the
#
other ways, the others, or don't want to behave in the way that your peers may be.
#
And I really saw this conundrum play out in my family.
#
When we shifted from a neighborhood school to a much bigger school, closer to the city,
#
you know, we thought we were choosing a more liberal education, a more liberal education
#
But who are the children and the families who are coming to these schools?
#
We are all consuming the same shallow media, whether it is social media, mainstream media,
#
you know, all the stuff that's coming in through our phones and on our OTT channels.
#
And because in many ways, you know, we are the first and second generations that are
#
experiencing this, I do feel that many of us are completely overwhelmed with choices.
#
So I, you know, I even wrote this article that was in many ways a little viral but also
#
very contentious, where I wrote about raising our three children in a home without television
#
and keeping mainstream media entirely out of our home.
#
There were no screens for them till they had all crossed the age of 12.
#
And you know, and everybody was like, but how can you and you're depriving them and
#
how dare you and stuff like that.
#
But so when they were very little, we didn't have anything streaming.
#
We watched films, but we chose what we would watch.
#
We would get a DVD, watch it.
#
And then when they kind of began to, you know, they crossed adolescence, they began to have
#
access to the internet and they began to make those choices.
#
And they also moved to a big school where they came, you know, where they were surrounded
#
by children who were literally staying up all night watching American series and coming
#
into school and talking about them the next day.
#
They were wired enough to be able to do that.
#
My observation is that because they had grown up without it being normal to constantly have
#
things unfiltered, be playing around you because they had taken, you know, been through a slowish
#
process where we were making active choices of what we want and what we don't want.
#
They, they did feel a dissonance when they came into a world where you were supposed
#
to know things, not because they were good, but because they were the popular choice of
#
the time, because that's what was trending.
#
And so our middle daughter, who's the first child who really alerted an alarm, you know,
#
raised the alarm in a sense.
#
I'm just going to narrate this incident as an example.
#
She's been in this new school for a year and we went to attend a wedding and it was in
#
a very fancy hotel in Delhi, not a place that we often go to.
#
And just these two older daughters of mine, they began to suddenly put a lot of distance
#
between themselves and us.
#
They were walking much further away.
#
And my husband calls out to them and says, why are you walking so far away?
#
And she turns around and says, I don't want to be seen with you.
#
And he was like, what, what, what, what, what?
#
And she just turned to him and she said, that's how children in my school talk.
#
Now either I can be like them or I can be like you, give me a choice.
#
And it was, it was like, really it's a moment that stayed with me in a, in her own way.
#
She's articulating that either I can be cool like them or I can be this slow, small town
#
family on the corner of Delhi.
#
Like you give, I can't belong to both, I'm confused.
#
And I mean, the fact that she could say it, the fact that I could hear it, the fact that
#
we could process it helped us to make, to finally make the choice to actually keep the
#
internet and let the school go, you know, to, to, to, to say no to all the extra pressures
#
that came with mainstream schooling.
#
And it's not made life easier for my children.
#
I'm not saying we've got a magic key that, you know, that has, that, that works.
#
It's a longish process.
#
We are learning on the go and, and so are they.
#
But at least they are able to see something toxic and say, I don't have to participate
#
You know, even if it means that I am going to be isolated or I'm not going to have the
#
same friend circle in the same network.
#
And it sure, it, it also triggers a kind of anxiety in them, but, but at least they're
#
able to make informed choices.
#
I'm not sure I answered your question.
#
No, I mean, as questions aren't meant to really even be answered, they're just meant to lead
#
to things and lead here and there and all of that, which is always the way it should
#
And you did kind of answer my question, I guess, I mean, in terms of at least how you
#
guys have fought in your own way to, you know, protect your kids from that and get them out
#
of that kind of toxic situations.
#
And you are of course, unschooling your kids, which is fascinating to me.
#
So I want to dig in a little bit into that in the sense that as we were speaking before,
#
you know, the recording, I've always sort of believed that just the way that we think
#
about schooling is fundamentally wrong and broken.
#
This current system was designed in the early 19th century to turn out workers for the industrial
#
So you have, you know, kids of the same age studying together, studying the same bunch
#
of subjects, everything proceeds in a particular way.
#
And it was perhaps okay for that time and for that purpose, and even that can be argued.
#
But today, it doesn't seem to really do anything for the kids, you know, a lot of their education
#
really comes from outside, either through living life or through the internet or a lot
#
of the useful things they learn come from outside.
#
There is a lot of toxicity even within schools as well.
#
And in a sense, a real purpose of a school in society is as a daycare center, where,
#
you know, the parents are doing whatever they're doing, and the kids have to be there somewhere
#
And so schools are a purpose for that, you know, education is just sort of the mask we
#
And that also indicates that if schools are daycare centers, that most parents don't,
#
they've had the kid, but they don't want to be involved beyond a point, right?
#
It's too much for them.
#
The pressure and all of that, that, you know, comes along with that.
#
You know, so when you look at the schooling system, when did you start, you know, thinking
#
about how flawed and how broken it is?
#
And you've described some of the ways in which it is broken.
#
And then when you began to think of alternatives for your own kids, you know, like I imagine
#
initially, there must have been the sense of fear, this great unknown, that if they
#
don't go to that particular setup, that structure that has been set, you know, what will it
#
do in terms of socializing?
#
What will it do in terms of whatever they have to do later in life in terms of college
#
and education and credentials and all of that?
#
So take me through your processes of, you know, how your thinking on this evolved right
#
from the start where you started saying that, no, this is wrong, to the point where you
#
said that I am taking my daughters out of this and so on.
#
I used to say, when I finally came out of my own school, I was in many ways full of
#
rage for the system that marginalized a majority of the children in every class, literally.
#
You know, you have a class of 50 and 10 are managing, 20 are floating in their own way
#
and 20 are just miserable.
#
And I did well in school, I participated in everything, but I remember coming out of there
#
and saying, you know, it made me by breaking me.
#
I had something like that in my head and I developed a very, I was very young for these
#
kind of thoughts, but in retrospect, I can see that I had, you know, the whole, the big
#
deal about my school was that it was the brand, the name of the school because it was supposed
#
to be good, you had to be in it and it didn't feel good.
#
I'd gone from a small school that felt like heaven and this felt like hell really.
#
So when I had to choose a college, I said, I'm not going to go for the brands and you
#
came out of school like mine with the kind of marks we had, you could go to Stephens
#
if you wanted to, you could certainly go to Hindu and I went to Indraprat College.
#
I consciously decided not to go to LSR and not to go to Stephens and to go to IP, which
#
was famously called the Behanji College of that time.
#
And in IP, it was such a novelty to see a DPS RKP kid come in that people came to see
#
She's the one who, because there was only one of one person from my school who had gone
#
to that, but I chose to study psychology and because, you know, I had kind of figured out
#
what I needed and what I didn't need.
#
I couldn't articulate it like that, but I can look back and kind of tell that.
#
So when our first child, Seher was born, I was the idea of homeschooling is something
#
That I didn't know whether I could do it.
#
I didn't have the confidence.
#
I didn't know how to do it.
#
I wasn't connected to anyone else and we were too early in our marriage to know, you
#
know, where we stood on very important topics like this.
#
And also we come from very different backgrounds.
#
My husband's favorite line in every school admission would be, it doesn't matter to me
#
whether you take my kid or not, I can always put her in the village school.
#
I went to the village school.
#
You know, I'm not intimidated by the big city and he would drop this line and everybody
#
would kind of want to take his kid because I mean, there was one interview in which they
#
looked at me and said, where did you find him?
#
I'm glad you're impressed.
#
So I was thinking about homeschooling at that time.
#
I was also thinking about, I had friends who were running a school for tribal children
#
in a village in Madhya Pradesh and raising their own children there.
#
And we took our little children and went there with the idea that maybe we can live there.
#
But my husband and I looked at each other from a distance and said, I don't think we
#
can live with each other over here.
#
This is, you know, it would have, we were not ready for that.
#
So they did go to school in the way and I remember I was just reading on my phone, there's
#
a note that my daughter's written in 2015 in which she's made a list of ways in which
#
our family is different from other families.
#
And the top thing she's written is, our parents say go out and play, you don't have to study.
#
Other parents say study, study, study.
#
So we were, I guess, that was the message we were trying to give them, that you don't
#
have to take anything too seriously, if you don't want to go, you don't have to go.
#
This is not something that we are going to internalize as this great hierarchical thing
#
that we have to go out to.
#
But yeah, and I, you know, when I began to write my column, I know school used to turn
#
up, the subject of schooling used to turn up consistently.
#
Coincidence or not, Amit, literally 2014 onwards schools have changed.
#
The manner in which, you know, those in authority in school speak, the manner in which they
#
lay down rules, in which they marginalize some holidays versus other holidays.
#
You know, it's very much like the governance of this country, where you can just lay down
#
a rule, no questions asked and karna hai, toh karo varna hai, you can find your own way.
#
It was more participative before.
#
And yeah, to answer your question, we came to a point where we felt that we had tried
#
every option that was available to us from alternate schooling, from slow schooling,
#
from very involved participatory, you know, schooling in which we were volunteering in
#
the schools, everything.
#
And I guess because the children were older, because we were older as a couple, we then
#
began to connect with community of unschoolers and homeschoolers in this country, which is
#
a fairly decent number of people spread across and many, many people who were much older
#
than us, who'd been doing, you know, making these choices for decades.
#
So we had examples of people who we could meet, there's Manish Jain and this organization
#
in Udaipur, there is Swaraj University that's also in Udaipur.
#
And we met Claude Alvarez from Goa, he's a passionate speaker about unschooling.
#
We met many families from Pune and Bangalore and Chennai and we found, so we found a tribe
#
Here are people like us from disparate backgrounds, who've tried things, who have made choices.
#
And here are these wonderful young people, older than our kids or the same age as our
#
kids, who are doing very well.
#
So I guess we had matured as parents and it became an emergency literally for the children.
#
So when we offered them the choice, two of them took it.
#
The younger was in a slower Waldorf school, she said, I like my school.
#
Two years later, she said, I think they've forgotten how to be Waldorf.
#
So I'm coming home and she came back.
#
And being connected with other families like us, that's been amazing.
#
It's been an amazing journey.
#
So not a week goes by where we are not in some way either speaking to a younger family
#
who is considering not sending their children to school or speaking to an older family or
#
our own peers and discussing all the options.
#
And because we are also in this prime of the internet age in some way, there are just so
#
many options that you can choose, so long as you've got some confidence in yourself.
#
And you also need the confidence to make mistakes.
#
You're not just handing over to a brand name and saying, when they come out of that side
#
of the pipe, they should be employable or something like that.
#
So I'll go back to something you mentioned about your own experience in school, where
#
you said that you were full of rage, that if you had a class of 50 people, you'd have
#
10 who would be perfectly fine, 20 who would float along, and 20 who would be miserable.
#
So can you drill down on that a bit and talk about that experience and why the rage and
#
Because like when I think back on my schooling years, I hated school, but a lot of my angst
#
was a typical angst that teenage boys will feel, the whole rebel without a cause thing.
#
One of my songs that kind of defines that period for me was unsatisfied by the replacements.
#
I'll link it from the show notes.
#
That was exactly my vibe, but there was no reason for it.
#
It was just that teenage boys tend to be rebellious, they tend to be angry, all of that.
#
It was almost like a fashionable thing.
#
But I would imagine that, you know, A, the experience can be much worse for everybody
#
and B, the experience is always much worse for girls, that the world they're living in
#
is a different world from what the boys experience, right?
#
And I'm wondering like how much of your rage and anger just had to do with those layers
#
that come only because of gender?
#
And how much of it was just because bad aspects of the schooling that I might not have noticed
#
Things are bad for girls in very peculiar, particular ways.
#
That is not always acknowledged.
#
I'm not sure they're worse off.
#
I'm not sure that, I feel that even though boys will not typically self-harm, they will
#
You know, they will get into a different kind of violence.
#
Their self-harm will not involve cutting themselves, but substance abuse is self-harm.
#
And I think I really do worry, I worry for the boys and I worry for the men.
#
And but to come back to my own experience, you know, I started with a, I went to school
#
first in Rachi and of course, so there was one Loretto convent and one St. Xavier's.
#
And it was, you know, that's what you were supposed to do.
#
So I went to Loretto convent and I remember the name of my nursery teacher.
#
And she was, she was much admired by the parents, but she just believed in corporal punishment.
#
She had a cane and you know, this is the late seventies.
#
And there were some children who would not get instructions, did not understand English
#
in the way that children from a different kind of family would understand.
#
And they were the ones being caned and this is a girl's school.
#
You know, it's not behavioral, oppositional behavior, particularly that the child is displaying.
#
It's just a child who didn't understand homework or didn't, can't make the line like you asked
#
her to make it or came back late from lunch or, you know, spilled something.
#
And I have not forgotten the pain of witnessing other children being humiliated, you know,
#
wanting this beating to stop and, you know, and just that act, Amit, where we make the
#
child participate in the violence, you know, we say put out your hand and when they can't
#
put out their hand, we keep yelling till they voluntarily put out their little palm.
#
And if they take it back, then they are abused.
#
So you, it's, it really is child abuse.
#
You know, when you look at it and it's normalized that so my, my, my brain as a child could
#
understand that there were some people in the family who were cruel, that there were
#
some men in the family who had age issues, but a school was supposed to be a safe space.
#
You were sent there with trust, you wore this uniform to become a better person and then
#
for that to be violated.
#
Then we moved to Calcutta and I was in school there for three or four years, we came to
#
Delhi and I went to a school very close to where we are recording right now, which was
#
a new school, very, it was set up by the founders and the founders of that school had all come
#
from modern school, Bharat Kamba with this dream of starting a child friendly school
#
and by luck, my younger brother and I, we landed there because we were late into the
#
city and this was a new school they took us.
#
They even gave us a double promotion because we were smart little kids, they said, you're
#
good enough to go to the next class.
#
They were very loving, but they were not the top brand.
#
So my parents, you know, middle class, upwardly mobile, putting all their investment into
#
the idea of giving us the best education put me in this large school.
#
Now that I look back at it, being in a class of 50, 11 year olds and 12 year olds, being
#
with teachers who could not cope with the workload, they could not cope with the kind
#
of syllabus that they had to cover with the kind of PTMs that were expected of them.
#
So the only way they had to control us was punishment, yelling, abuse.
#
It was par for the course.
#
It still is, you know, India hasn't changed in that sense, the world hasn't changed in
#
At 11 and 12, I can only look back and say, I gave up, you know.
#
So I was seriously suicidal at 12.
#
And so I look back and I wonder what would make a 12 year old, make a serious suicide
#
And I guess the sense that that child had was, this is such a cruel place.
#
I don't want to be here.
#
This is the last step for my parents.
#
I can't negotiate with them.
#
They've put their all into this.
#
Something made me invisible in the family.
#
Perhaps I was a middle child, perhaps my parents were too caught up with the big city and all
#
its own demands on them as a service class family, a single income family.
#
But something made me feel that it wouldn't matter to the world if I ceased to exist.
#
And of course, nothing could be far from the truth and I'm just lucky to have survived
#
and therefore witnessed what would have happened to these people if they had lost their daughter.
#
You know, I was witness to my parents' shock, their mourning, their incredible sense of
#
loss that there was actually a child in the family.
#
So much on the brink and they couldn't, that they hadn't seen it.
#
So personally for me, it was a turning point in the sense that I decided when I was coming
#
back to life that I was never going to make this mistake again.
#
And it has, it kind of gave me not only an emotional strength, I think I could say some
#
kind of a spiritual strength, you know, that there's a reason you're alive.
#
There's no way, you know, there is a purpose.
#
You wouldn't have come back if it hadn't been for that.
#
So it carried me through.
#
But it also gave me a kind of an outsider's view of the world that I had kind of departed
#
from in a sense, you know, I came back to school after a year because I had disabilities
#
and you know, my surgeries took a very long time to heal.
#
And now I was a special kid, so no pressure would be put on me.
#
I didn't have to take exams for some time.
#
Everybody kind, in a way I kind of made, the world made some space for me.
#
And I then began to feel more like a witness to what's happening around.
#
And of course the rest of the years, one continued to watch the same things that there are some
#
children who are completely, you know, kind of falling through the cracks, they're being
#
bullied for being fat, for being short, for not being able to speak in a certain accent,
#
for belonging to a certain social class.
#
And yeah, so I did come back while I earlier felt completely helpless, that I wanted to
#
help somebody who was feeling humiliated in class and I had no tools.
#
When I came back, I felt that I could reach out to this person, that, you know, that that's
#
And that's literally how I spent the rest of the four years in my school, kind of being
#
a little bit on the margin, but being okay with that.
#
And that is what came back to me when the parenting years started, particularly when
#
the schooling years started.
#
You know, how much has the world changed?
#
And I did go into the whole system with the expectation that all that primitive stuff
#
is over, but that's not what I discovered.
#
And when this incident happened, what was it like to try and figure out the why, like
#
both for you and your parents, like how do you figure out the why?
#
Because for your parents, I can imagine it would have come like a bolt from the blue.
#
They would have had no idea.
#
How do you come to terms with why, you know, how do they come to terms with why their little
#
And what should they do about it?
#
Because as a parent, you want to be able to control that.
#
And for you, you know, in that moment when you come out of it, how do you process that
#
in terms of why I tried that and why I won't try that again?
#
One of the big kind of awakening things that I experienced while I was still very much
#
in pain and in hospital between surgeries even was that my parents were not as invincible
#
as I had imagined them.
#
They were not able to cope with the hospital system.
#
They didn't know what was happening.
#
They didn't know what was the right thing to do.
#
They had two other children who had to keep going to school or who, you know, needed some
#
kind of daycare while they were here.
#
I saw how the world functioned in a, also in a very positive way.
#
Extended family turned up, people moved, you know, they came from wherever they were.
#
They took trains and flights and they would just turn up in my hospital room in solidarity
#
So one was that, you know, I could understand what the doctors were saying better than my
#
father was being able to process it.
#
And I was listening to all the conversations about the bills and, you know, how the house
#
is going to, how the other, my younger brother is 10 years old.
#
He's like, you know, he's not even like awakened into a human hood yet.
#
He's just a little brat who's looking for a place to play all the time.
#
So I, you know, I'm kind of witnessing them in this kind of distress.
#
And what I, what I held against them earlier, that they were not mindful, they were not
#
paying attention, they were not aware.
#
You know, I kind of realized how helpless they were, how much they were, didn't really
#
belong to the city, they're both first generation, you know, urban dwellers.
#
And on their part, while they were handling all the logistics, they really didn't have
#
the capacity to understand it as a mental health issue or to know what to do about it.
#
There was such a, such a massive stigma attached to a suicide attempt by a young child that
#
actually the community, the family, everybody rallied around them to not talk about it,
#
to just invisibilize that, to never bring it up.
#
And they needed their own coping mechanisms, so they were doing a havan and they were calling
#
a pandit and, you know, my mother was reading her Guru Granth Sahib all the time and also
#
giving it to me to read and so while I, I mean, over time I realized that this is this,
#
you know, that I accepted them as they are and kind of took it upon myself to go on this
#
journey by myself in a sense.
#
And that shift in how I understood these adults around me, that was huge because as a child
#
you can make the mistake and I think it's not a mistake from the child's perspective.
#
The parents have all the power and you're completely powerless and in a sense you're
#
growing up years reveal, you know, that that shifts.
#
And for me, that shift, I also realized how traumatic it was for them.
#
It was my father's hair grayed in a month's time, you know, so from a young 40 year old
#
he was suddenly looking like an older man, my mother's body went into shock.
#
And so that ridiculous idea that I don't matter completely shifted, you know, that I would
#
never want to do that to them, I mean, that kind of became a reality.
#
And while my mother and my father did not have a language to talk to me about it, it's
#
also true that in that world there was no support system that could help them to find
#
If they wanted to find a child counselor, they couldn't, you know, there wasn't one,
#
there was no family counseling.
#
Even in the hospital itself, it was the pastor who's coming in blessing the family, beyond
#
that there were no tools in a sense.
#
But you know, many years later, my daughter turned 12 and she became quite anxious and
#
unable to deal with school, which we've spoken about before.
#
And my mother looked at her and she looked at me and she said, nobody can help this child
#
Nobody is better equipped to understand what Alisa is going through than you are.
#
And I realized in that moment that, you know, that all these years later, my mother's memory
#
of myself as a 12 year old is just as vivid.
#
And she sees me as the woman who has grown from that moment of giving up.
#
So in these big and small ways, yeah, it's been something that kind of turned around
#
and became like a gift to the family.
#
And it seems like what you describe of seeing your parents in a new way, that it humanized
#
them for you in the sense that I think, especially when we are kids, our parents are what they
#
You know, in that groove and to see them like that, somebody's hair is graying, somebody,
#
you know, to see them vulnerable, to see them unable to cope.
#
And I think a lot of people don't see their parents like that ever through their lives
#
and for it to happen at 12.
#
And then later when you are a parent, you know, what do you do to break that in the
#
sense that like, of course, your daughters would be more aware of you as a person than
#
you perhaps were until that incident.
#
But do you, you know, at some level, the relationship is going, you know, settles into these grooves
#
and how do you snap out?
#
How do you like as a mother, do you sometimes sing that I must not be vulnerable in front
#
of them or I can't show this side of myself or, you know, if I am telling them to be disciplined
#
in a particular way, I have to be that person and be disciplined like there's one moving
#
story from one of your essays where at one point you are with your parents and you think
#
your father was a stern man and you want to impress him that you are also a disciplinarian
#
and you raise your voice to one of the kids and the next day your mom calls you and says,
#
you know, your father, he was saying, don't do that.
#
You don't know what kind of, you know, scars they can cause.
#
So you know, so what was that?
#
You know, how do these play into each other?
#
So I'm, I, I try to be very mindful of that.
#
And I think it's a bit of a, it's, you know, it's a scale that keeps moving back and forth.
#
They're in that time where, you know, sometimes they feel so, so lost and defeated themselves
#
that they, they will, they will say, nothing's going to come out of this.
#
I'll never be able to cope.
#
I, you know, I'll never get, and you have to let them be in that moment.
#
But you also, I guess that's where I bring myself into the picture too soon.
#
You know, you also want to share that, look, I felt exactly like that and I found a way
#
I do, I, I show my vulnerable side to my children a lot.
#
Sometimes my friends tell me that, that, that I should go a little slow and not, not be
#
But my experience with them, Amit, is that there really isn't anything I can hide from
#
And you know, particularly when they were younger, they were really attuned to one's
#
mood and it's, I did, I did spend the early years being very strong and always kind of
#
trying to seem like I'm okay when I'm holding a child, when I'm in front of a child.
#
But in retrospect, I think they can always tell.
#
And they tell me, they, they tell me, you know, they, so we've got, because I've been
#
a very keen photographer, you know, we've got a very rich family album that we often
#
go over and they'll, they'll look at my phone, they'll look at my computer and they'll be
#
this beautiful, happy picture from a moment and they'll tell me, you know, I was really
#
scared that day and I'll be like, I didn't know that.
#
But if I remember what else was happening, then I, then I'm able to put together that,
#
yeah, so there was some chaos and I'm putting on this smile and so is the child.
#
But she remembers that she was not feeling okay in that moment.
#
And sometimes it's very shocking for me because again, you can very quickly begin to feel
#
And you know, I thought it was okay, but it was not okay, et cetera, but there's no reason
#
It's really a reminder that, you know, that it's not, there is no binary of we were happy
#
or we were not happy or we are doing okay or we are not doing okay.
#
We are literally simultaneously constantly moving between, between different states.
#
We are anxious, but we're also, you know, fine at the same time.
#
And we just need to be capacious enough to be able to name both and to be comfortable
#
with the idea that both exist.
#
That's a very intriguing phrase, capacious enough to be able to name both.
#
And even earlier in different contexts, you've spoken about how as a kid, you may not have
#
had the language to put a word to something or when you're talking about what things might
#
be in your daughter's school, you're saying sometimes kids go through these things, but
#
they don't have the vocabulary to express what is kind of going on.
#
Like how much of a role do you think parents should play or how important rather is, is
#
having that vocabulary, having those kind of frames, you know, you obviously, you don't
#
want to sit with your kids and tell them about the big bad world and all the ways in which
#
it is big and bad when they're like seven years old.
#
But at the same time, you don't want them beveled or not able to understand something,
#
not able to process something, you know.
#
So how does this happen?
#
Like I imagine to a large extent in your own case, you learn by living.
#
Things happen, you figure them out, you think about them later.
#
In retrospect, you can put frames on things and understand them.
#
But when it's your kids, I guess there is that dual imperative that on the one hand,
#
you want them to be better prepared than you were, to understand better than you were.
#
But on the other hand, you don't just, you know, you know that sometimes you just got
#
to be spontaneous, go through life.
#
You can't control everything.
#
So all of these are, you know, the fallacies of control in a sense that you want to protect
#
I won't let what happened to me happen to them, man, you have no idea what will happen
#
You want to prepare them better.
#
You have no idea what they're going to choose, you know, to go towards.
#
And also how, while children tend to be remarkably similar, you know, what needs to be underlined
#
even more is how individualistic each one is, how we are different and how much we change
#
And so our relationships constantly need to make space for that.
#
And mine are forever surprising me in a sense with, you know, being sometimes understanding
#
things beyond their years, but then at other times not being able to cope in a way that
#
I would think is, you know, much that they should be able to at this age.
#
And it kind of makes you realize that they live in a world that you don't live in, that
#
you, you know, that you can, you're familiar with, you can get to know it.
#
But what is it that they are experiencing constantly when my daughter opens the same
#
What is it that speaks to her from it?
#
What is it that she catches from an adult conversation?
#
What is it that she brings back from something that she's heard outside the house?
#
And how it sits in her psyche is you just, you really need to be open to discovering
#
how these things play out.
#
And I think that that is perhaps a subconscious reason why I have been such a documentator
#
of everything, you know, of things we experience, of things they say, of, yeah.
#
And I'm, I mean, so when I go back to read some of the things that they've said when
#
they were very little, when we didn't take them seriously, if somebody said, oh, I dreamt
#
of this, or I imagine a world in which something can happen.
#
But I'll just give you another example.
#
I just read in a journal, my four or five year old is saying, you know, heaven is a
#
place where once you go there, you don't age.
#
So you just remain like that forever.
#
So actually she, I know you'll die before me, but when I reach there, I'll find you
#
and we'll be, we'll be together.
#
And then she goes on to say, I will invent a video game and then I will put you in that
#
video game and I, and you will be able to find, you'll have to find a treasure, which
#
you will, and then all your problems will be solved.
#
And I was just reading it like many years later and thinking, this little child is imagining
#
me as a person who's looking for some treasure that will solve my problems.
#
And she's trying to solve it for me by, so it's just like, it makes me kind of think
#
that while you're going about your job, keeping your face, you know, trying to keep it, trying
#
to keep your stress from your children, they probably know better than you what your state
#
of mind is, that you're probably hiding it from yourself in a way that it can't be hidden
#
from a child who's connected to you.
#
And because I suppose they're so, I wouldn't, I wouldn't just say dependent on you.
#
It's also because they love you so much.
#
They want to protect you as much as you want to protect them.
#
And we don't always dignify that.
#
You know, they try to be as clued into you as you are to them.
#
And just being with them in that sense, not, you don't necessarily need to do a course
#
in how do you talk to your child about good touch, bad touch, or, you know, strangers
#
and who to talk to and who not to talk to and stuff like that.
#
None of those things really, I mean, it's good to know those things as concepts to be
#
aware of them, but how they will all play out, when they will play out, what you will
#
learn from your child is actually going to be much more surprising than what you are
#
going to give to your child.
#
And I, one of the things I realized Amit was that the world doesn't feel safe to children.
#
You know, that idea that we have that he is the free child who is unaware of what can
#
happen to children, they're either just imbibing our anxieties as they are, or they are, you
#
know, they are actually growing up in a noisier, more chaotic, louder world.
#
And I mean, if you just pay attention to 20 minutes of television in anybody's house,
#
you'll get a sense of why.
#
I mean, if that's the idea of the outside world, it's not a surprise that they don't
#
First of all, I have to say, I'm pretty stunned by that journal entry because just for a four
#
or five year old girl at a conceptual level to think of death in that way, or that we'll
#
stay the same age or that treasure hunt thing is pretty mind blowing to me.
#
And I'm also struck by what you said about how parents think they can control more than
#
There was this sort of seminal book of social science, which came out in the 1990s called
#
The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, where she essentially spoke about how her
#
study showed that kids were most influenced not by her parents, but by her peers, that
#
the influence of parents was vastly overstated in popular culture.
#
And that mostly it was peers and there was just a limited amount of difference that parents
#
could make, while at the same time, it strikes me that parents can make a lot of difference
#
in just the sense that I would imagine that your daughters have a greater sense of self
#
awareness and questioning than they would if they weren't your daughters.
#
Because that just seems to be what they see in you and you must be their primary role
#
model in a sense, and it must then become a natural way that you're always thinking
#
at that one extra level.
#
I mean, the very act of journaling is something you would have encouraged and what is journaling
#
but a way of examining yourself and shaping yourself?
#
I mean, your comments are making me think that I'm also kind of now reflecting on the
#
same incident that she told me this story and then she probably saw me write it and
#
she probably knows it's in my phone.
#
She probably knows where she can read something that she would have said 10 years ago.
#
And I guess at least what it gives the child is a sense of being important, of what I say
#
and what I feel and what I imagine matters because it matters to my mother.
#
And perhaps that's what I'm trying to reverse in how I felt when I was a 12-year-old that
#
I could vanish from this family and it won't make a difference to anyone.
#
It was absolutely wrong in my imagination, but I did feel like that.
#
The child felt like that and I don't want to make that mistake raising a child.
#
And hopefully that has been the outcome of what I've been writing and sharing.
#
I note that the two things that surprise me, ever since my books came out, particularly
#
since my books came out, but even before that, a question that comes constantly, because
#
I have written about the family as we are growing up and children as we're growing up
#
and I'm using our names and nothing is camouflaged in any way.
#
So a question that comes is what about privacy and what will they feel about this when they
#
grow up and have you thought about that and do you have the right to tell this story?
#
And of course it's a question that kind of alerts me, but it's not a question that I'm
#
not already very alert to as the adult who's kind of taking control of the narrative, of
#
the public narrative, which does influence the private space.
#
But so while it's for me to constantly be aware of it, two things that have answered
#
the question for me in some way is that when I actually slowed down on writing about them
#
because they had become teenagers, because they were, not only were they reading everything
#
which they'd been doing for years, but now their friends or random strangers would come
#
up to them, talk about it.
#
And I felt that I need to minimize this to some extent or I need to be very careful of
#
And also they're changing so much that I don't want to write something till I know what's
#
So therefore the gaps are longer.
#
And my oldest daughter, she came to me during the first lockdown in the pandemic years.
#
She said, write about me.
#
She said, I want to see you write about me because I want to know what you're thinking.
#
And I realized that in that sense, it mattered to her that it wasn't just me creating content.
#
It felt so real and authentic to her that it mattered to her that she was not reflecting
#
in my thoughts and my expression.
#
And the other thing is this ritual that my, again, something that started in the pandemic
#
years, but the middle and the younger daughter, they have a daily ritual.
#
They don't have phones yet, but they will come one time in the day, take my phone, open
#
my Facebook, go to Memories and read Facebook updates that may feature them.
#
And then they will laugh.
#
They'll show it to each other.
#
They'll come to me and say, what do you think this means?
#
They'll show me something I may have written about myself and forgotten about, but it's
#
something that they enjoy.
#
So it's like they're kind of referring to the history of the family via the updates.
#
And so that kind of, to some extent, answers the question of, do they mind?
#
And yeah, so I never really have had a doubt because I process things to such an extreme
#
extent before they go out into the public domain.
#
I do kind of do a lot of work before it goes out.
#
I delayed the books for them to be a certain age.
#
I delayed my third book for them to cross a certain age.
#
So I mean, I am actually doing a lot of homework in my head, but it's also nice to see how
#
And it strikes me that when your elder daughter came to you and said, write about me.
#
I want to know what you're thinking.
#
It seems as much sparked by concern for you as anything else, that the sense that maybe
#
it'll help you to write about her and to write about whatever.
#
And earlier we were speaking about, you mentioned therapy at one point, to what extent is writing
#
like therapy in the sense that it helps you make sense of yourself and it helps you make
#
Like, you know, earlier you mentioned that when we were talking about mental health,
#
you mentioned how there are so many hospitals all around you for physical health, but mental
#
health, no one takes that seriously and it is as big a problem.
#
And I guess one reason for that would be the title of the show, right?
#
Physical health, what happens to your body is a scene.
#
Mental health, what's happening in your mind is the unseen.
#
And you know, and I had sort of had occasion to think about this recently because I started
#
doing pretty dramatic things for my physical health in the sense that I realized at one
#
point that all of us make so much of an effort to understand the world as intellectuals and
#
writers, but we don't know our own bodies.
#
And the trigger for this was one of my good friends said, why don't you get a continuous
#
glucose monitor, a CGM, which I got the data from that was so alarming that I just changed
#
everything about my life.
#
And I became so much more aware of what I was putting in my body and how I was harming
#
myself by say not sleeping enough or being too sedentary and all of that.
#
And it's good to have that CGM for the body.
#
But where is the CGM for the soul as it were, if one can get metaphorical, how does one
#
How can I examine my own mind and see what's going right and see what's going wrong?
#
Because the tendency is always to be self delusional about everything.
#
So again, tying back to that whole thing of, you know, writing a therapy is writing one
#
way of doing that is writing one way of always looking within yourself and figuring out what's
#
going right and what's going wrong.
#
And even apart from that, in a larger sense, what is the CGM for the soul?
#
Yeah, so I would absolutely I would say yes to that writing can be that.
#
And then I and I feel that, you know, actually, a college journaling, college memoir writing,
#
call it personal writing, I think that it has a very important place in civilization.
#
It's a it's something that, you know, we only kind of dignified very famous people with
#
writing autobiographies you you you that that mattered because we wanted to be like them.
#
But we only wanted to be like them because they had become famous or rich, or they were
#
But what when we when we say that nobody wants to read your diary, or nobody wants to know
#
your story, or why does your story matter?
#
In a way, what we are repeating is, you know, caste class racial hierarchies, right, we
#
are saying the white man's story matters, the brown person's doesn't, the man's story
#
matters, the woman's doesn't.
#
The adults matters, the child's doesn't.
#
And you know, who are you, you're just an ordinary person.
#
But no life is ordinary, right.
#
And nobody has become anything without at some point being ordinary, you you have built
#
on your ordinariness and and discovered your extraordinary or it has been recognized by
#
the outer world as extraordinary and you've been rewarded for it.
#
And I just I feel that that this is something that it's like a magic pill that nearly everybody
#
And those of us who are unable to tell our stories are suffering for it.
#
And it reminds me of your comment about girls have it tougher.
#
I feel that men also have it really tough because they are not able to tell their story
#
because they are they are never, you know, they don't have that circle, even even that
#
circle of friends in which somebody will just listen to what you feel or what you experienced
#
or what happened to you, you know, even it's it's rare for men's friendships to support
#
them in the way that sometimes, you know, socially women are able to often offer each
#
But to just to come back to writing his therapy, I feel very strongly that that this is something
#
that we need to build on as as a civilization, literally, that we need to introduce it into
#
We need to introduce it into our university experience.
#
Where have I come from?
#
And so many of us wait for so long or wait for some kind of dramatic near death experience
#
before we pay attention to, you know, what what shapes me and what is it that I can therefore
#
How can I make my existence significant?
#
And it doesn't have to be in a in a much larger you don't have to influence the outcome of
#
But you know, you you do influence those who are around you with every choice that you
#
make, whether it's about planting a tree or feeding a cat, or just being kind to your
#
I mean, there are just so many ways in which the human this this pinnacle of of the biological
#
world can actually change things around us.
#
And I and so so I I really strongly feel that it's very important for us to have spaces.
#
We don't have to publish books, and we don't necessarily have to maintain years of blogs.
#
But spaces in which we tell each other our stories and discover how much we have in common
#
and discover our strengths.
#
It's literally the same story that has your worst mistakes, as well as embodies your best
#
You know, I can cloud my suicide attempt at 12 and a half in layers of shame and and write
#
it off as the worst thing I did, or I can also look at the same story and see what why
#
would why would a child, you know, what made a child come to that point?
#
And then and then what is it that that sustained us after that?
#
And there's so much there's so much to learn from it and therefore then to share with others.
#
And yeah, so so that that's really what I've also now learned from doing the memoir workshops.
#
Because I didn't know these people existed, the ones who are coming and who are writing
#
and they're damn good writers.
#
There'll be many more who will come and I'm struck by what you you know, about how men
#
also would be so much helped by journaling, obviously, and, you know, you go through different
#
But I think one thing about men is that we are socialized to believe that being vulnerable
#
is to be unmanly, right?
#
So even in our conversations with each other, we don't show that vulnerable side, you know,
#
if we tear up while watching a movie in a theater, we'll figure out the most surreptitious
#
way so no one notices that a tear is kind of dripping down.
#
And what you just said about journaling and I keep telling all my writing students obviously
#
that you must journal it's it's you know, even if you're never going to publish it,
#
even if you write a couple of hundred words a day, no matter what it is, that it's so
#
There was a very resonant episode with Amitav Kumar, where, you know, he'd published a journal
#
as it were the blue book, beautiful book.
#
And he'd spoken about the value of journaling and just sort of, you know, being a way to
#
shape yourself, you know, if in one parallel universe, I journal for the next two years
#
and another one I don't, I am literally two different people, you know, and if you want
#
to be the best version of yourself, the most clear eyed version of yourself, journaling
#
And perhaps the answer to that question, where is the CGM for the soul?
#
The answer is it's a journal.
#
So on that note, let's take a quick commercial break and we'll continue talking on the other
#
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
#
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.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com where I will write
#
regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene on the Unseen, I'm chatting with Natasha Badwar about her life
#
and her work and all her insights on various subjects, not just parenting, but also humaning.
#
Is there a word like humaning?
#
You can create a word called humaning.
#
So yeah, we are all humaning.
#
So take me back to sort of your childhood then.
#
You know, at one point, there's a sort of an interesting para by you, which I'll read
#
out where you say, it was a very dissonant world for me.
#
I admired my mother, but I wanted to be like my father.
#
I wanted credit for my intelligence.
#
I wanted to be a part of a larger world that all men seem to slip into with ease.
#
I wanted to become somebody unlike my mother who apparently was a nobody.
#
Which is, you know, I guess a pretty accurate description of how the world is set up in
#
terms of how families are structured and you know, what really goes on and the scene and
#
So tell me a little bit about your childhood, about your parents, both your mom and your
#
dad, you know, what was it like?
#
Where did you, you've already spoken a bit about school, but apart from that.
#
Something interesting about both my parents is that they were both four years old in 1947
#
and that they were both born in Lahore.
#
So they're midnight stoddlers.
#
And, but my mother was a refugee.
#
My father was only born in Lahore.
#
My grandparents were in India and remained in India on the Indian side.
#
So they didn't go through the trauma of partition.
#
My mother's family is a Punjabi family who had to move under very traumatic circumstances,
#
leave behind a fairly affluent rural life and rebuild in Delhi and then Amritsar and
#
then back in Delhi again.
#
I think my, my maternal grandparents ultimately died young because of the aftermath.
#
They did manage to settle their children as, as we say in Indian families and the daughters
#
were married and the sons were, had a business to work with.
#
But they, but there was, there was trauma in the family, which I find very interesting
#
in the sense that nobody talks about it.
#
So you mentioned in one of your essays that your mother Sudha, she was a fifth daughter
#
and the sixth child of her parents and there were eight siblings.
#
In fact, the sister, she was closest to had killed herself in early twenties and name
#
Tell me a little bit about what you sort of, what was their sense of family in the sense
#
were they always relatives around, were these much larger families than you would find today?
#
So what was that sort of a family environment which was there when you grew up?
#
And you also mentioned that your, you know, your mother would talk to you about a sister.
#
What are the other kinds of conversations that you would have with both your parents?
#
My mother remembers her growing up years very fondly.
#
She has no pre-partition memory.
#
She has heard stories from her own family, but she remembers those growing up years of
#
all of them being in a house in Amritsar, of her mother being this very extremely talented
#
woman who was milking the cows, cooking on the tandoor, embroidering everything in the
#
house and raising these amazing children.
#
At the same time, her father was a gifted entrepreneur.
#
What we would call today a serial entrepreneur.
#
At one point he did well enough to go to Germany, buy a Mercedes and come back to Delhi driving
#
So quite an adventurer, but he did pass on in his fifties.
#
And so mom remembers it all very fondly.
#
She remembers a large family.
#
In fact, what I find quite amusing and interesting is when my husband who also grew up in a large
#
extended family in a village where these brothers are living together and they have visiting
#
relatives throughout summer every year.
#
So when my husband and my mother sit and chat, they have so much in common and I who grew
#
up in a city will just kind of sit on the margin and hear the two of them exchanging
#
notes on their cows and their animals and their farms and the things they grew and what
#
And it makes me wonder.
#
It makes me wonder how I went and found someone who would match with my mother in this way.
#
So yeah, so this would be our, in popular terms, we would call this a family that did
#
very well despite adverse circumstances, that survived well.
#
That is a well to do Punjabi family who found their feet.
#
What we all saw and what we all lived through was also alcoholism, addiction, preferential
#
treatment towards the brothers over the sisters.
#
My mother hates to phrase it like that.
#
She won't do it, but I need to.
#
I need to because I didn't want as a child, as I wrote in that essay, I didn't want as
#
a child to grow up to enter a marriage in which I had to minimize myself to fit in as
#
I saw my mother having to do.
#
My mother is as capable as my father.
#
She's very smart, very bright, but she has to be careful around the male egos in the
#
She plays her role good naturedly, but it was not something that I could emulate as
#
an Indian woman of the 70s who grew up in the 70s.
#
And I just want to, as an aside, Amit, share with you that one of the films that came out
#
when I was a very little child, the first one I remember seeing is Sholay.
#
And there's Hema Malini and her tanga.
#
And there are all the rescue scenes, you know, that despite the fact that she's playing the
#
dumb ballet in the beginning, she's an independent woman.
#
She's growing up with her aunt without any parents.
#
She knows how to control a horse.
#
The whole village is dependent on her for commuting and, you know, she does these amazing
#
rescue acts when required.
#
And you know, so that's the world I grew up in, that's the woman I saw on the screen.
#
And this other film that came out around that time was Bobby.
#
And while I didn't see Bobby as a very young child, I saw it later, much later.
#
I remember one of the early scenes when Dimple Kapadia stands in a doorway, I think, with
#
her hand on her waist and says, ikkeeswi shatabdi ki ladki hu mein.
#
And you know, and my little brain is going 21st century.
#
So if she's the 21st century, then so am I.
#
And therefore, this is the kind of woman, this is the kind of assertiveness, the kind
#
of agency that I can have.
#
And those are, you know, just some early decisions that one took.
#
It estranged me from my mother for many years.
#
But I can say that over the years, as I grew more aware and more mature and also read good
#
fiction and nonfiction and became aware of feminist ideas, I began to see her as the
#
gifted person she is and not as a person who may have chosen the roles that are thrust
#
You know, I began to see what else she's doing to express her individuality and how much
#
I can gain from actually choosing my mother as my role model.
#
It took me many years, it took me decades, but I got there.
#
And I think that that's to be fair, being a kind of a personal mental health journey
#
I cannot imagine a worse estrangement for anybody than to not be able to identify with
#
the parents who care for you.
#
Because then you're kind of lost in the world, you're just kind of looking for something
#
else to attach yourself to, and you don't necessarily have the best healthy boundaries
#
when you're in that kind of state of mind.
#
My father is a very interesting man.
#
He grew up in a very authoritarian home.
#
My grandfather, who was interestingly very, very kind to me, he was my grandfather.
#
I was the chosen granddaughter in a sense, I was favored over, in terms of affection,
#
in terms of his show of affection, I was favored over the boys, the grandsons.
#
But Dadaji raised three boys and he raised them very, very strictly to the extent that
#
they would hide when he came home.
#
And also my grandmother was very ill and not able to withstand what partition had done
#
to her family in many ways.
#
So Papa became an engineer, got a scholarship to study, and joined the steel industry.
#
And in that, I think that that truly liberated my parents in a very interesting way.
#
In that his, when they got married, he was in Bhilai.
#
And in Bhilai, they were no longer of their village, no longer of their community.
#
They belonged to this community of young engineers and their spouses who had come from all over
#
the country, who became friends, who kind of offered support and solidarity and friendship
#
and happiness and laughter to each other.
#
And I think it freed all of them in a very interesting way from the baggage of their
#
And there was also, I guess, they were building the nation in a sense, literally.
#
He was part of Steel Authority of India in the beginning, then he moved on to be a design
#
engineer in Mekong, so he came to Raji.
#
And he's been an engineer all his life, he's still working in his late 70s.
#
So he's a workaholic, clearly, he cannot stop.
#
The lockdown made him stop, and he felt so miserable that he said, I know what I'm going
#
to feel like if or when I retire.
#
So I have decided that I'm not going to retire.
#
I will work till the very end.
#
And we have learned reluctantly as his adult children to honor his need, in a sense.
#
So yeah, I come from these two ordinary Indians who were part of the building of this nation
#
So both of them are first generation English speakers, none of them speak it very fluently.
#
So for them to raise children in Belai, in Raji, in Calcutta, the whole idea was to raise
#
this modern generation of Indians who would be global citizens.
#
And they made the choices that were available to them, standing in long queues to make sure
#
that we got admission in good schools, saving and scrounging to pay the fees when they chose
#
schools that had the highest fee, et cetera.
#
For a very long time, when I grew up and I kind of joined some of the civil society movements,
#
when I was in college, the Narmada Bachao Andolan was at its peak just around the 90s,
#
And here was, my parents are raising these three children, yeh doctor banega, yeh engineer
#
banega, yeh teacher banegi, so she can raise children on the side, et cetera.
#
But because of our education, because of what we were exposed to in a rapidly changing India,
#
because this was a post-emergency, post-Naxalite movement world, we were aware of the fact
#
that the youth is very powerful, that you can resist, you can exercise dissent, you
#
can have a new imagination, now you're no longer building the nation, you are asking
#
some very important questions about the environment and about indigenous people.
#
So I was drawn to the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and one of the first questions that one of
#
the activists asked me at that point, they said something about all the problems of this
#
country are because of the middle class.
#
And I remember thinking, my father is middle class, what has he done?
#
What has he done wrong that these people are blaming someone like him for?
#
And it took me a very long time to make the connections about what we blame the middle
#
class in a very generalized form for.
#
So I want to dive deeper into each of these people you mentioned.
#
But first I want to ask about your nani, like you've got this quote in one of your essays
#
about how your nani shifted from Lahore to Amritsar, and you write quote, it took years,
#
decades, generations for them to feel at home again.
#
And I noticed that in right at the start of your first book, you have this biographical
#
line, which says Natasha Badwar was born in Ranchi, grew up in Kolkata and refused to
#
accept Delhi as home for the next three decades.
#
So I want to sort of ask you to talk a little bit about what did you mean by your nani and
#
presumably other members of the family as well, not feeling at home for the longest
#
time, and the concept of home as well.
#
Like I read elsewhere that one of your husband's favorite books is Ada Gaon by Raheem Asoom
#
Raza, which is also a little bit about this, right, about coming to terms with what home
#
So, you know, tell me a little bit about this, that, you know, what is home?
#
You had another essay about it later, you know, within your nuclear family as it were,
#
where you're talking about the concept of home and about your husband can really just
#
chill anywhere, but it's not quite like that for you and how you've, you know, eventually
#
learned to come to terms with what home could be for you.
#
So take me a little bit through this journey of thinking about it, because, you know, I
#
think particularly for that generation, and my father also was born in Lahore, so that
#
means, so that's like a lot of Lahore bornies as it were.
#
So that notion of home and feeling that you belong in a particular place is really interesting
#
to me, especially for the generation of our parents and even for us in just, yeah, even
#
So what I know of my nani from my mother, and my mother is quite a storyteller, particularly
#
of those childhood years that are just, if she doesn't tell anyone, then they don't
#
So her daughter becomes her witness in that sense.
#
But they come from, I actually grew up, went to Lahore and looked for the place and it
#
was, the village has now been, you know, kind of taken in by the city.
#
So they came from a large village home, they were landowners, my nana and nani, and my
#
mother describes my nani as somebody who was, you know, when the marriage proposal came,
#
then she was chosen because she was such a talented young girl.
#
She could do everything herself.
#
And in my maternal grandparents' home is the charkha that my nani used, is this contraption,
#
I forget what it's called, in which she made butter out of milk.
#
And what they did when they came, she was actually expecting, my aunt was born in September
#
47 and my grandfather brought his pregnant wife over first to Shimla in July or August
#
to make sure that she was safe and then brought the rest of the children and the extended
#
family across the border when they knew that they would have to shift.
#
So in the course of the years where they first lived in a small place in Delhi, then they
#
moved to Amritsar where he started a transporter's business.
#
He had trucks and then later he had buses.
#
And then they came back to Delhi and bought a large piece of land on the outskirts of
#
They call that, they refer to that home as border because it's the Delhi-Gaziabad border,
#
she said, jab hum border jaate the.
#
And in that home, I think the way it's described to me by my mother, she recreated her village
#
It was for, after years it was a big enough plot, a small house, they kept their own cows,
#
she built a tandoor with her own hands.
#
She would make chapatis with the house help in that tandoor every day and this battery
#
of sons and daughters and extended family and in-laws that Nani served.
#
So Nani is a bit of a superhero.
#
My mom's retelling as well as in my imagination, I only knew her as an old woman and as somebody
#
who rarely got out of bed, she wore white because Nana had passed on by then.
#
And I think a lot of us remember these grandmothers who wore white muslin and had very soft hands.
#
I also grew up visiting my father's parents in Punjab.
#
And in almost every summer vacation we would visit them and every two years we would visit
#
them in a new place because Dadaji was a postmaster.
#
He worked in the post office and for us as little children, he was a very important man
#
because wherever he was posted, he was the top boss in the post office.
#
He had a house next to the post office.
#
He had people who worked for him.
#
So towns like Faghwara, Malirkotla, Barnala and then finally Jalandhar were like home
#
Those were places we used to visit.
#
Also Dadi, Dadi's home, her maternal home was a very small village called Makhu.
#
And they had migrated, they were refugees from the Pakistan side of Punjab.
#
And they later after 1984 left their village again and came to Delhi and settled on the
#
outskirts of Delhi in a more rural place.
#
So being uprooted, losing home, building home, perhaps these are themes that kind of run
#
in the family in a sense.
#
My grandfather's village, which would be the village from where we originated as the
#
Badwar family, is a village called Khemkaran.
#
And Khemkaran is in the history books because it's the site of the largest tank war in
#
1971 or maybe earlier, the Indo-Pak war, not 71, the Indo-Pak war.
#
There's a film with Devanand in it in which he's part of the tank war and it's taking
#
So Khemkaran barely exists anymore because it was, while it survived on this side of
#
India, it was too close to the border to survive the war.
#
I never felt an affiliation to go to Khemkaran or not, but in my late 20s I was working closely
#
with a sociologist and he asked me once over dinner, where are you from?
#
And I mentioned Khemkaran and he said, so what is it like?
#
And I said, I've never been there.
#
And he's an Englishman who had spent his life studying Indian communities.
#
And he was quite shocked that he was meeting an adult who was a media person who was not
#
curious about the village that she had come from.
#
And it gave me food for thought.
#
It made me look for the answer to the question of why I was not curious about Khemkaran per
#
And over the years I realized maybe I identify stronger with my grandmothers than with my
#
grandfather and with the non-Bhadwars of the Bhadwar clan than the Bhadwar men in a sense.
#
And that's fine as well.
#
When I met my husband, who's from a village in East UP and grew up in a very interesting
#
town called Jaunpur, but his village home is actually a village continues.
#
It's still a village in Ghazipur.
#
One of the vaguely attractive things, vague seeming things that I was attracted to was
#
the fact that being with him would give me a village and it would give my children a
#
And it's a very strange and convoluted kind of thing.
#
It doesn't rationally make sense, but somehow you want to give them the childhood that you
#
And because of the very oppressive, patriarchal ways of both sides of my Punjabi family and
#
possibly because of the violence and the addiction that was not spoken about, I really didn't
#
want to ever go back and look for home in that part.
#
I kind of wanted to create a new home, not so consciously, but perhaps in a subconscious
#
way, which is why even when I began to volunteer with the Narmada Bachao Andolan and went to
#
work in a tribal area in Madhya Pradesh, I spent some very significant months between
#
my 20th birthday and my 21st birthday in a remote tribal village in Jhabua.
#
For the next few years, if someone asked me, where are you from, I would say Jhabua.
#
I would say Madhya Pradesh.
#
I didn't want to belong where I was technically from, but I was trying to imagine a new home.
#
And my husband's favorite story is that I tricked him because when he asked me, but
#
I said, no, I'm from, I'm a Bihari, I'm from Ranchi, which is true.
#
I am from Ranchi and when we visited our relatives in Delhi and Punjab as children up to the
#
age of 10, they would, you know, perjuratively call us Biharis.
#
They would say, Bihari aagaye, Bihari aagaye, ye chawal khate hain, which was like a bitter
#
joke in a Punjabi family because we would look for rice when there was only roti.
#
Chawal better than roti.
#
I mean, they're both carbs, but still on a relative scale, chawal better than roti, but
#
And, and we had, we had an accent, we said ek toh, doh toh, teen toh and it made me,
#
you know, almost, it made me more loyal to my accent, to my home, to the idea that, yeah,
#
I'm born in Ranchi and I am from Ranchi and who even wants to be from Punjab?
#
Yeah, so it's kind of a shifting concept.
#
Delhi was very hard for me to accept as home when, for my mother, it was a homecoming.
#
For my father, it was the ultimate upward mobility because what better can you do if
#
you, you know, as an engineer than having a private sector job after all those years
#
in the government sector in Delhi where ultimately he buys a DDA flat and he sends his children
#
to public school and, you know, for, for him, it was a kind of a culmination of all the
#
hard work he had put in.
#
But for me, it was the loss of a childhood.
#
And my brothers didn't experience it like that.
#
So I suppose it somehow connects to the uniqueness of who we are as children.
#
And maybe Amit, in a way, childhood is home and when, when I imagined raising my children
#
in Delhi, you know, I wondered where is the home, which is the home that I will take them
#
And I was, I continue to be very excited about what I now very openly call my village home,
#
which is my husband's home, you know, we've been together for 20 years.
#
I still stick out, I mean, I will always stick out in that village, but, but it is my home.
#
It is what I want to accept as my home and, and of course it is now my children's home.
#
So there's no question about it.
#
And I guess that is in a long winded meandering way about one search for a place where you
#
can belong, where you can feel rooted, where you feel accepted as you are without, you
#
know, where they are happy to see you just as you, not because of what you're doing in
#
your career or what's in your, you know, what's your bank balance or whether you're famous
#
or you know, what your social media followers are.
#
It's just a place where you go and everybody's just always happy to see that you have come.
#
But I must add that the pandemic being locked down in our home in Greater Noida, which again
#
I didn't want to belong to, I was very resistant about, that corner of the world where we were
#
together and where we kind of began to, where a community of cats adopted us and now we
#
have two dogs as well, became the place where we, I felt for the first time that I grew
#
roots and, and it is, it is for my husband, it's a temporary home.
#
He still imagines where he will retire, what he will build, maybe in the mountains, maybe
#
in Auroville, but his children are born in this house.
#
So now they're like, you can go where you want, but we are here.
#
So it's, it's interesting and, and it's, it's joyous to see how each generation actually
#
defines their own sense of home.
#
And maybe for younger generations, and I'm thinking aloud, maybe for younger generations,
#
part of their concept of, I mean, the concept of home might be more nebulous because part
#
of their growing up is also on the internet and in all these virtual spaces and the geography
#
doesn't matter so much, but you know, for your kids to one day be asked, where are you
#
And for them to have to say Greater Noida doesn't sound exactly madly appealing to me.
#
So now I have a question about one of the badwars, which is your dadaji, right?
#
And at one point you write about one, he's the only grandparent you really got to know.
#
He lived till 90 and you were both sort of loving and confrontational.
#
And I'll ask you to elaborate on that.
#
But first, you know, you point out that when he got to know that you were going to marry
#
a Muslim, Afzal, he was very upset about it.
#
And you write quote, Dadaji took the news of my decision to marry Afzal, a Muslim from
#
Uttar Pradesh, very badly.
#
For a few days, he seemed to lose his grip on reality.
#
He began to hallucinate and became paranoid.
#
We did not know whether he would recover, but he did.
#
When he met my in-laws, eventually he was gracious, soaking in conversations in Urdu
#
with my father-in-law and Afzal.
#
When our youngest child, Naseem, was born, he called out to her each time we visited
#
and glowed with happiness when she responded to him.
#
And I'm just thinking here of that original reaction of his being so natural because these
#
people must have carried with them these unspoken, perhaps invisible scars from what happened
#
And you know, a lot of stories are here about people from that time and somewhere hidden
#
in some subterranean way.
#
You know, the scar is there, those memories are there.
#
You know, any other generation, say a generation after that, you know, like your kids, for
#
example, would not, you know, their grandparents would have lived normal lives relatively.
#
But these, your kids' grandparents, but your grandparents were uprooted and that was part
#
of what you saw and you only got glimpses of it.
#
And I'm guessing this was a glimpse.
#
So when you see like how much of a psychic scar was partitioned, not just on that generation,
#
but on our culture in the sense that we can today see the religious polarization around
#
I mean, it's not even that, to just call it by its name, there is this vicious anti-Muslim
#
politics that is destroying our society, right?
#
And the question is that are these fissures that, you know, go back decades and hundreds
#
of years or is partition still a big part of it, especially in the north?
#
You know, nebulous question, but how does memory play a part in all of this, perhaps
#
even a collective memory because that generation is really, you know, old and whatever.
#
But you see young people everywhere, seething with so much rage directed at the other when
#
they can't have any memory of what went on, you know, they watch Hindi films all the time
#
with Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So what's sort of going on here?
#
I do agree that partition is its scar on our psyche, but I don't believe, Amit, that what
#
we are living through in terms of this very vicious anti-Muslim sentiment in Indian society
#
at this moment, not only sentiment, but acts at this moment in time are connected to the
#
tragedy of the partition.
#
My grandfather who did, who was alive when Afzal and I decided to get married is not,
#
you know, he did not suffer the blow of partition at a personal level.
#
My mother who did is a natural liberal.
#
She knew Afzal from the day I knew him.
#
She liked him from the day I liked him.
#
She loved him from the day I loved him.
#
She has a natural connection to him.
#
So do many other members of my family who are, you know, while there are some people
#
who are not able to get over the loss and do hold a grudge against a community that
#
would have perpetrated violence on members of their family.
#
At the same time, there are enough partition survivors who mourn the loss of the social
#
fabric that was actually very syncretic and very supportive of them.
#
So on my mother's side, the stories that we hear again and again is how when my grandfather
#
went back, and he went back many times, and, you know, like most people who cross the borders
#
they didn't realize for a very long time that very soon would come a day when the border
#
They were not anticipating the wars.
#
So they were actually thinking, okay, we have to live here, but we can go back and forth.
#
So my grandfather went back and he went back a couple of times, and he was always received
#
with great hospitality, people, his neighbors, his, you know, people who worked on his farm.
#
They would cry when they met him, they would host him, they had kept with great protection
#
the things that he had left behind and given them to him when he went to pick them up.
#
So he suffered loss, but he didn't have any rancor against people.
#
He saw it as a political act.
#
He was able to see it like that.
#
And what we see in our society today, what we are, you know, what a lot of young people
#
are beginning to subscribe to is I don't think we can blame the violence of partition for
#
This is a systematic work done by the RSS and by the Hindu right wing over years.
#
And my grandfather's reaction to, you know, his granddaughter choosing to marry a Muslim
#
came from his affiliation with the RSS, not from his memories.
#
And my brother told me, my older brother once told me that, you know, when I was, he lives
#
in the US, he went there as a doctor to study further and settled there.
#
And when I met him after that, the first time he told me, you know what Papa said to me
#
when I was at the airport and he said, listen, you'll meet people and you'll make choices.
#
Just make sure it's not a Muslim.
#
And I was like, really, I mean, it was not something that had ever been articulated in
#
We had never heard our father.
#
He had never said anything like this in our home and, but he said it to his son.
#
And interestingly, he never said it to me.
#
Of course, I am the special child of the family.
#
It is, that's also part of the truth, but it alerted me to this code.
#
And I think that when Dadaji reacted, Dadaji had earlier, when he had discovered that I
#
had a friend, a male friend, his first question was what caste is he?
#
And I was like, goodness gracious me, it's the 1990s, are we still asking caste?
#
I was blind to how much, how relevant this question still was and continues to be.
#
I had just grown up in this kind of bubble that young people often do, where they believe
#
what is in their textbooks and they believe what is in their inspirational stories that
#
they have read or what the leaders are saying.
#
So his, it was more of a patriarchal, you know, keep the family within the caste class structure reaction.
#
And even when the anti-CAA protest started, I remember my mother was very upset.
#
And this is not a political woman.
#
This is not a woman who is reading a lot or keeping, she is not a drawing room commentator
#
But it hurt her enough to say to me, what is going on?
#
This is too much, yeh zyada ho kya?
#
And this was a natural reaction of a person.
#
So I think that, I often wonder what it is, what are the influences that take us towards
#
liberal choices and we are other people towards these very exclusionary ideas.
#
I'm in partition as a psychic fisher, which is a contributing factor.
#
I think we've been an illiberal society for the longest time.
#
I'd done this episode with Akshay Mukul on the Geeta Press and all of these issues that
#
seem so toxic today, love jihad, cow slaughter, all of these, these were live political issues
#
And yet there is also the other side.
#
Like I did an episode with Mukulika Banerjee, I don't know if you heard that, where she
#
speaks about how she spent some time in Pakistan because she was, you know, writing a book
#
on the Khudai Khidmatgarh.
#
And obviously the Khudai Khidmatgarh had died down soon after partition, but she was looking
#
for survivors and going from village to village to try and find people who still survived.
#
So all through rural northwest frontier province.
#
And she realized as she set out on those journeys that over there, the food that was really
#
But every house would have one chicken and chickens were really expensive, but every
#
house would have one chicken for a special guest if a special guest ever wanted it.
#
And every time she would land up, you know, just out of basic Mehmanawazi, they would
#
And she felt guilty that they are spending so much money and she didn't want that.
#
So she started eating beef.
#
And then she speaks about how she went home and she told her mother this.
#
And her mother thought for a while and said, beta, yeh toh karna hi tha, yeh toh insaniyat
#
And I suppose that many of us, we could be religious, but there is also that strain that,
#
you know, you have that empathy for everyone around you.
#
You have that sense of living together.
#
And I'm reminded of this by a story I read about Ehsan Jafri, which also ties in with
#
one of the essays that you wrote in your first book and you put on your newsletter recently.
#
And the story about Ehsan Jafri is that he suffered through riots in the 60s or early
#
70s or whatever, but he refused to shift to a Muslim only area.
#
He said, I will not go to a ghetto.
#
He said, that is not the India I believe in.
#
In the India I believe in, we can all live together.
#
And we know what happened to him.
#
And you wrote this essay about how you tried to book a hotel for your husband in Amritsar.
#
And you had a perfectly nice conversation with the people who ran this guest house or
#
gave out the house on rent and whatever, till they discovered that your husband's name was
#
Muslim and you were booking it for him.
#
And you got really offended when, you know, they just changed their tone completely.
#
And your thing was that forget it, we'll just find another place.
#
But your husband said that, no, I want to talk to them.
#
You know, they've probably never met someone like me.
#
And you mentioned how he was from a school where he was the only one like that.
#
People would come to look at him to see what he looks like.
#
But then they all became friends.
#
And he said, no, it's important for them to meet me.
#
And what I find here is this common belief between Ehsan Jafri, between your husband,
#
between millions of Muslims who made the choice in partition to stay in India, to embrace
#
a particular vision of what this country is like.
#
And I find that very moving because I now wonder if in a sense either they were wrong
#
or they have been betrayed because my sense growing up in the elite bubble that I did,
#
the elite English speaking bubble, is that by and large we are tolerant, by and large
#
we are liberal, by and large we are secular, right?
#
And today I'm beginning to feel that, no, I was just mistaken all along.
#
This is a delusion, right?
#
By and large, we were a bigoted hateful society all along.
#
And place where we are today, we were bound to come here at some point or the other.
#
So I feel that I might of course be veering too much towards the pessimistic because that's
#
But what is your sense of this?
#
You know, how do you process all of this?
#
I'm kind of looking forward to answering your question because I process this all the time.
#
You know, I just kind of, by choosing to marry, even more than that, by having children in
#
an interfaith marriage, children with, you know, growing up in these times, it becomes
#
literally a question that you have to process every day, including the question of are we
#
delusional about the fact that we are safe?
#
You know, we don't live in a Muslim majority area, we are the only interfaith marriage
#
in a predominantly BJP voting locality.
#
And when push comes to shove, what happened to Ehsan Jafri can happen in my street to
#
And we've seen enough of this playing out in front of our lives, starting from 47.
#
Neighbours were the most viciously violent towards each other in that time as well.
#
And neighbours were the ones who reached out to save each other as well.
#
I feel, and I do actually get a lot, I am influenced a lot by what my husband shares.
#
Because far more than me, I mean, I have not really experienced anything in comparison
#
to his lived experience throughout his life.
#
I feel that we are just on a spectrum.
#
We have the capability to be very bigoted, we also at the same time can be extremely
#
compassionate and hospitable towards the same people that we can exclude with our bigotry.
#
We also have the capacity for extreme violence.
#
Our best friends can be the people who will point out our home to the mob when the moment
#
They can be the people whose home will be my refuge if the mob comes.
#
I don't know which way it will go because from just reading the stories of what my mother's
#
generation has lived through and what 2002 Gujarat has lived to, it can go either ways.
#
And therefore I don't feel defeated or pessimistic.
#
I feel that we have the capacity to influence how the other person reacts.
#
I was in Delhi in 1984 when the riots broke out and I lived in a third floor flat from
#
We saw the fires being lit, we saw the mobs.
#
It literally, I have witnessed those riots.
#
So I know that in that moment there is not very much that one can do.
#
But I know that many of the people who participate in riots are people who have done good things
#
before that and people who go on to do good things after that.
#
And we really are a very strange kind of species that just has the capacity for both within
#
When I was, I mean the RSS, even the Muslim right wing organizations, the student organizations,
#
these are groups and communities that have also been in the forefront of rehabilitation
#
efforts, when there have been earthquakes, when there are floods, when there is a disaster
#
And we have known to rely on them.
#
They have been very important in terms of civil society groups as well.
#
So we certainly look like we are on a very fast kind of decline towards chaos and violence
#
There are enough warning bells and we need to heed them.
#
But what is it that one does when one sees a fire igniting or when you see a small fire
#
There is a long time when you do have the power and the ability and the influence to
#
be able to do something about it.
#
And I think that people like you and me are, we have the privilege in every which way to
#
be able to influence our times in some way, to be able to influence the same people who
#
are likely to engage in very bigoted or very violent behavior.
#
And this is really a time when all of our energy should be, in a sense, ignited.
#
And that story that I wrote about him not getting a room in Amritsar because he's a
#
Muslim and then his insistence on having a cup of tea with that couple, I sat on it for
#
a year and a half before I wrote it.
#
I did not know, it took me time to process what it was and it took me time to get over
#
my own feeling of protectiveness towards him.
#
I was also more offended because she's a Punjabi and so am I.
#
I mean, Amritsar is my mother's city.
#
I mean, how dare you do this to me.
#
So some of it is kind of almost personal in that sense.
#
But I didn't have an idea of what it would mean to write that story.
#
It just stayed with me, it lingered in my head that this is a moment that says something
#
And a lot of people ask me what happened.
#
I didn't write about what happened.
#
He did have tea, he went over, he called them, he said, I will come over for tea.
#
They were just elderly and vulnerable and confused.
#
And in that moment, he didn't hold a grudge against them.
#
They were uncomfortable, but he could no longer hold a grudge because they were also old.
#
And they didn't have the support of a society or an administration if they did something
#
that put them out of their comfort zone.
#
So yeah, I couldn't write it because it just made me very sad.
#
I love this quote where you quote your middle daughter, Aliza, and she says, quote, I'm
#
a Muslim, a Hindu, an Indian, and I love Harry Potter, which is such a perfect sort of illustration
#
of the multitudes we contain and carry within us.
#
But equally, the counterpoint to that was a story you told of how you went with your
#
daughters to this hairstylist.
#
And the hairstylist asked them that, what are you, you know, you're Muslim, right?
#
And one of your daughters said, no, no, I'm a Muslim and a Hindu.
#
And the hairstylist was, no, no, you have to be one or the other.
#
You can't be both, right?
#
Which is, which is tragic, and I'd say that perhaps in this country, we are getting to
#
a point where the majority point of view is probably the hairstylist point of view.
#
But leaving that aside and going back in time again, we've spoken about a couple of your
#
Let's speak about your mom, because there are two very interesting places where you
#
mention her and you write about her.
#
And one of them is where, you know, your daughters are sitting at the table with you and they
#
are sort of discussing, I think, what they'll be like 20 years later or something like that.
#
And all the daughters say, oh, we will be the same.
#
And then one of them says, but mommy will be like Nani.
#
And then they all look at you and you can tell that they're looking at you and thinking
#
that she's not like Nani.
#
She's completely different.
#
And you go on to elaborate on why.
#
And in another place, you write, quote, the first time I saw my mother, when I looked
#
into a mirror, it startled me.
#
I was getting ready for my wedding.
#
My friend Rina had tied up my hair and done my makeup.
#
Oh, my God, it was my mother looking back at me, my mother from a wedding album.
#
How was it even possible?
#
We weren't supposed to be alike.
#
You know, tell me a bit about this, because I see this conflict.
#
I see how when we are growing up, we might sometimes resent our parents, not want to
#
be like them and so on and so forth.
#
But as we grow older, we understand them so much better.
#
And as we grow older, it's possible for us to turn into them.
#
I think that for many people is a great fear.
#
In fact, I think Ramanujan has a great poem about how he looks into the mirror and sees
#
his father staring back at him.
#
So tell me a little bit about your relationship with your mother.
#
When did you start talking?
#
What was the nature of the conversations?
#
Like at one point after your book was out, you mentioned how she read the book and she
#
told you, I never knew you could think so much.
#
Which sort of indicates that earlier in your relationship, you were both on grooves where
#
she's a mother and you're a kid and you're the kid and she's a mother and you're both
#
And it takes something for you to look at each other as people again.
#
Perhaps with you, it was that incident when you were 12 and you see your parents vulnerable
#
and broken and you know, you see that.
#
But tell me a little bit about how this evolved, how you started relating to each other in
#
So yeah, like I shared earlier, because my mother didn't work, because my grandfather,
#
he had a charming, attractive personality.
#
My father doted on me, you know, as a young child.
#
And both of them had this feature where they were not able to love the boys.
#
They were not able to be affectionate to the boys, but they could be soft.
#
And so Papa only has one daughter and my grandfather only had one granddaughter.
#
And I got, I got, you know, I got access to the softer side of them.
#
My father did better, but my grandfather was never able to be soft with his wife.
#
He was always, he always had to be authoritarian and he always had to be.
#
But in that kind of dynamic, family dynamic, I saw my mother as a worker.
#
You know, as somebody who was always doing things, she rarely had time to be with the
#
And when she did, I now understand that she needed to spend a lot of, she spent more time
#
with my elder brother because he was more vulnerable than us, because he got the brunt
#
of my father's anger and, and she was protecting him.
#
But I resented that as a child, I felt neglected by her.
#
And because I wanted to be part of larger society, I, you know, I wanted to be seen
#
as a person, not just as a mother, wife, housemaker.
#
And my mother never articulated any of these things to me.
#
I did kind of distance myself from her psychologically over time.
#
She wouldn't take care of herself.
#
She was always wonderfully turned out in social occasions, but at home she didn't have the
#
resources for self care.
#
And you know, as this smart school going kid, I didn't identify with her in that sense.
#
I could say just in simply in one sentence that my mother always toned herself down.
#
She would diminish herself to save herself from being demeaned by somebody else.
#
And I didn't, I, because she didn't share it with me, she didn't articulate it with
#
I didn't have any tools to see that till I was really grown up and at a distance from
#
I did have many years of, you know, estrangement, but also tremendous guilt.
#
I was guilt that I could not be the daughter she wanted me to be because I had other dreams
#
I just couldn't be the woman that she could show off at a wedding as the newly eligible,
#
you know, for marriage person.
#
I was not going to play that role.
#
Of course, you can, you know, when you look back, everything you are is because your parents
#
didn't stop you from becoming that.
#
And you have to give them credit for that.
#
We know, we know that parents have the power to do that.
#
And we see that in other people's families.
#
When we look at someone and we say, why does she not break free?
#
You realize how strong those chains are.
#
Clearly they were not anybody holding me back.
#
Even if they were not saying, Ja Simran Ja, the fact that Simran was going and coming
#
according to her own wish meant that, you know, that there was a permission to do that.
#
This moment when I looked in the mirror and saw my mother because I'm done up in the same
#
I've never been dressed up like this before.
#
I've never worn jewelry before.
#
My hair has never been parted in this way.
#
I've never got a dupatta with gold on my head before and then suddenly that moment that,
#
God, you are her daughter.
#
And also it is only subsequently that I seriously begin to set up home.
#
I find that I need some skills to be able to, you know, manage people who work in my
#
home, to be able to manage time and resources so that when people turn up, the kitchen is
#
But more than anything, it's when my third child is born.
#
I actually went home to my mother.
#
I opened her jewelry kit.
#
I took out the two rings that she had worn all her life, that I kind of, that was the
#
image of my mother's hand for us.
#
We could recognize my mother's hand because she was wearing these two rings throughout
#
I took them out and I wore them and I looked at them because now I needed the strength
#
that this woman had, that I had never recognized.
#
What does it take to raise three independent children in the kind of circumstances in which
#
she is, you know, through the best years of her life diminishing herself for fear of offending
#
other people or just being forever correct, forever obedient, forever available to other
#
people so that everything is smooth and her children are safe.
#
So it really did take my own journey as an adult, as a parent, as a person who finally
#
began to build a home independently to see that I needed all of my mother's strength
#
and all of her skills to be able to do even what she had done, live alone, do it better
#
than her as I had always imagined myself.
#
So this diminishment of herself, was it like a conscious strategy in the sense that this
#
is the best way for me to get by in these times, in these circumstances, or is it something
#
that women happened, allowed to happen to themselves without even thinking about it?
#
So you might never think that, oh my God, I want to do something else.
#
I wish my life was different and this is so oppressive.
#
Or do you simply get into your groove and you play your role and maybe somewhere there's
#
an unexpressed sadness and you don't know why it's there and you don't think about it
#
and you hide it from yourself.
#
You know, give me a sense of your mother's interior life in the sense that you would,
#
I'm guessing never have sensed it at the time, but subsequently you could have gotten a sense
#
of it just by sort of following in her tracks, but in a different time, like when it comes
#
to having three kids, like did your conversations change, especially after that phase where
#
she says, I never knew you could think so much and then you're both mothers and I guess
#
you're both talking to each other.
#
Did the conversations change?
#
What glimpses did you get of her through that?
#
It's a very interesting question.
#
Do women do this consciously or do they just kind of, you know, do they think I have to
#
do this to survive or do they just kind of do it?
#
You know, one of my, I have a very young friend, she's probably just touching 30, newly married
#
and the other day in a conversation, I mean, even before a conversation could start, she
#
broke down a little bit and she said, no one asked me to become small, but I did it myself.
#
She said, no one asked me to serve him.
#
No one asked me to put him first.
#
I'm just doing it myself and because she's truly a ikki swishatabdiki ladki, she has
#
She, you know, she's two generations ahead of me and yet she is, so she's in a space
#
where she's trying to figure out how much of it is her choice because to reject, you
#
know, a corporate job or a nine to five is also in many ways a choice of self-care.
#
But when you reject that and what is the groove that you choose and what is the groove that
#
without choosing you kind of fall into and then what do you do?
#
How do you stay in it and not stay in it?
#
Because we are also at the same time in love, building a home, building a family, imagining
#
what it will take to sustain our love relationships for life as we would like them to be.
#
And yet you don't want, you know, all the unspoken hierarchies of patriarchy to land
#
on your shoulder and enforce you into something that you didn't want to choose.
#
So how come you're playing that role?
#
So to some extent, it's a little, it's a combination of all these things.
#
You do internalize a lot of pressure.
#
You do also want the rewards of the happy married life or the, you know, the couple
#
who look like they're with it.
#
You don't want to be in conflict with each other all the time.
#
And a lot of these reasons play into some of the choices you make.
#
What I find very liberating about having my mother, Sudha as my mother, is that once we
#
came into our teen years and then later, you know, when we were all in our twenties and
#
all independent as young adults, we began to see our mother spend more and more time
#
outside the company of children and her husband.
#
And you know, not so, she had far more time because she didn't have to make tiffins for
#
us or iron our clothes or, you know, organize anything for us.
#
And then we see the side of her as a friend.
#
We see the side of her who spends more time with her siblings.
#
We see the side of her who is supporting other people in the community that she lives in.
#
And then I look at my mother and I say, how come I never met this woman before?
#
Because she's a great friend.
#
She's a very resourceful person.
#
She laughs really loudly.
#
She's a great conversationalist, but none of that is something that I have witnessed
#
And then you realize that, you know, she never really told, you know, she didn't really allow
#
And Amit, because we're spending time on this, I'll just share this with you.
#
One of the big conflicts I had growing up is my father, my father, you know, he's your
#
regular Indian male and father.
#
So he, there are episodes of rage.
#
He expresses anger very easily.
#
He's the only one who has the permission to express anger in the family.
#
And Papa would, whether it was about marks or about being late for something or just
#
not being absolutely perfect in front of guests, Papa would lose his temper every now and then.
#
And as a teenager growing up, I would both be confrontational as well as be deeply hurt.
#
By this, I would internalize it.
#
I would, you know, moan for days, not speak to anyone, not come to the dinner table.
#
I would act out as the daughter, you know, a non-submissive daughter of an angry father.
#
And one of the things my mother used to say to me a lot was, why do you take him seriously?
#
Why do you let his words get to you?
#
And I'd be like, what do you mean?
#
How can I not take him seriously?
#
And it has taken me two decades to finally understand what she meant.
#
And I wish I could convince my children of the same thing.
#
But I know that they will also learn in their own time.
#
I get it that if somebody is in a rage, you separate yourself from his expression.
#
You do not at that moment stick yourself into what you think is your primary relationship
#
You can change the situation by walking away.
#
All she was able to say to me was, don't let it get to you.
#
And I'd be like, maybe you can cope, but I'm too sensitive.
#
And then I would just kind of stand in it and frustrate her by stewing in the juices
#
of my anger and my grief.
#
But now I understand what a fantastic coping mechanism, what a psychologist would probably
#
have a nice fancy name for it, a nice technique of separate yourself.
#
You can't change his reaction, but you can change your own reaction.
#
It would be one of the things the Buddha said or something, which is something that she
#
And of course, you learn when you learn.
#
But now I understand that the reason she's such a fabulous old woman with more energy
#
than I have ever had in my life, that she's able to be available to each of her grandchildren.
#
She is able to be available to her daughter-in-laws, to her daughter, to her friends and siblings
#
is because she was able to protect her core.
#
And she had somehow the inherited wisdom perhaps or her own innate wisdom to bide her time.
#
And there's something to learn from it.
#
I mean, I can imagine young people today saying, bide my time.
#
But what choice did you have back then, right?
#
You have to, you're kind of imprisoned where you are and you just kind of make the best
#
And, and you know, in many other, in many other kind of contexts, we would see it as
#
You know, in a corporate context, we would understand it in a two-party system, we would
#
You know, you don't have the tools or the resources right now.
#
If you attack, you will be destroyed.
#
So you do bide your time and that's a smart thing to do.
#
You know, there will be a time when this, when your adversary will be diminished by age,
#
by, you know, other loss of resources and, and you must save yourself for that time.
#
It's probably what nature also does and, and, you know, it's not a weakness, it's, it's
#
And does another kind of strength come from the solidarity of women that, you know, the
#
sisterhood of women as it were, that you can speak to other women and you, you, even if
#
you don't talk about these things overtly, there is that shared experience and therefore
#
this innate understanding of what you're going through and you can stand by each other.
#
Like I recently did an episode with Farah Bashir, I don't know if it will release after
#
this or before this, but she spoke about her experience of growing up in Kashmir and in
#
what was essentially when she was a kid, what was essentially a conflict zone.
#
There was constant curfew, there were bunkers outside houses, it was a mess.
#
But what we kind of speculated on was that there is a great scope for a very strong female
#
solidarity between different women because all of you get each other.
#
But a similar thing is not possible for men because men are never opening themselves up
#
to other men in that way.
#
You are never expressing your vulnerability, you are never expressing how emasculated you
#
might feel where in a conflict zone you know that you can't protect anyone really, you
#
are as much victim as anyone else and all of those things.
#
And I guess that this sort of solidarity, this sort of sisterhood and the role of female
#
friendships would be even more important in your mother's time, of course, and perhaps
#
can cut through generations because you and her can be friends now, but would also be
#
important for you in your own life that there are people who just get you and there are
#
also male people who will never get you, right, and you have to kind of work your way around
#
So what are your thoughts on this?
#
There are female solidarities and you know even a lot of those know how to stay invisible
#
because if they become visible, patriarchy will intervene and you know you will be told
#
I don't like that friend of yours, she talks too loudly, why do you have to spend so much
#
time with so and so, you know, what's it, just casual negative comments like that.
#
And all through my mother's years in Bhilai, in Ranchi, in Calcutta, in Delhi, through
#
our various homes, there are two kind of relationships that I have seen her create constantly, both
#
of which mildly irritate my father and both of which I have judged as well.
#
One of them is always the friendship with the women in the neighborhood and it takes
#
her no time and clearly it takes the other women no time to very quickly exchange notes,
#
see where the other person is, you know, where are your children, where is your husband,
#
how are the in-laws, how far are your parents and siblings.
#
I guess, I mean, like I said, she's a natural liberal, her closest friends were South Indian
#
women in Ranchi who didn't speak Hindi so well, but you know, they were supporting each
#
other with their little children and their kitchens to manage in this kind of amazing
#
way, they continue to be in touch.
#
She's had friends from across communities in India, wherever we have lived, she has
#
instantly made friends.
#
The other is with working class people.
#
So the sabziwala, the andawala, the domestic worker, my mother has a natural affinity.
#
I mean it always surprises us because of course we are snobs and you know, we've been silly
#
and self-absorbed in our growing up years.
#
But very quickly she knows which village this person is from, you know, whether the family
#
is here or there, how is he supporting them, what are the other jobs he or she is doing.
#
So when the sabziwala needs a loan, when my father's old scooter needs to be sold off,
#
when the garage needs to be given off to a tailor who has no other means, when the maid's
#
daughter needs an abortion, when somebody else is facing domestic violence, has a small
#
child, needs an Aadhaar card, my mother is the hub.
#
She's a little civil society office where her doors are always open, her heart is always
#
open and her whatever resources she has even monetarily, she will open to them and sometimes
#
she will tell me in a low voice, your father doesn't even know how many loans I have given
#
that will never come back.
#
But that's how I manage, he will not approve, but she is managing out of the household.
#
And that then when I see the trajectory of my career and my choices and my repeated kind
#
of interaction with NGOs or with civil society groups or with activist groups, then I realize
#
whose daughter I am, that connection gets made, that we may not have seen it with our
#
open eyes, but this is what we have witnessed through the years, that whoever is interacting
#
with the family is getting some kind of support from her and therefore a kind of natural affinity
#
for the weak, despite whatever her own limitations might be.
#
I don't know what it is about my mother that makes her such a heroine with my children,
#
but it does surprise me.
#
I don't know what they know about her, I don't know what they innately feel from her about
#
I mean, they know her as a much older person than we have known her and we feel like she
#
doesn't make Gulab Jamun anymore, she doesn't bake anymore, she doesn't make butter chicken
#
So my children have missed some of the best years of the great mother and yet for them
#
she is the perfect person in a sense and so was their Dadi, who was also kind of running
#
this family empire in her quiet way, sitting in one place and just making sure that all
#
the children are fed and everybody is safe and unlike their parents never having a meltdown.
#
So I suppose hopefully we will get there too.
#
Maybe parents are just a means for grandparents to finally enjoy children.
#
In the sense I guess when you are a parent there is just too much pressure, there is
#
so much going on, you are going to have meltdowns, you have got a million thoughts in your head
#
but when you are a grandparent you are like chill, so no wonder the grandkids would like
#
you and for the grandkids also, you are the sort of cool elder figure but someone who
#
won't bark orders at them or tell them to go clean your room and all of that.
#
And that kind of loving nurturance, consistently loving nurturance, I guess parents are destined
#
not to be able to do it and this reminds me of something that I used to feel a lot about
#
raising our third child.
#
I would often feel when she was very little that with her I am like a grandparent because
#
I have given up my delusion of control, I am no longer trying to shape her into this
#
perfect little human being, she and I can just lie on the floor, make jigsaw puzzles,
#
walk through the park, feed the dogs, we really are much more chill because I have been there
#
done that with the older kids.
#
So your first two kids were really practice, you really got there with the third kid.
#
So I will come back to your career and everything that we are doing and I don't want to stick
#
too much with your family or birth as it were but I was intrigued by a couple of things
#
that you wrote about your brothers Bhai and Manu as you call them and one of them is really
#
interesting and I want you to elaborate on it where you say quote, Bhai who is older
#
is a novel I might write one day, Manu our funny serious kid brother is my collection
#
What do you mean, it's so fascinating to me one person being like a novel the other person
#
being like short stories.
#
With Manu who is my younger brother it's been a very easy relationship, I mean if we fought
#
it's you know just fighting like children like tu merko kitna maar sakta hai, dikha
#
hai then we are beating each other up or some such thing.
#
But it's been, he really is, he is the sister I never had, you know we are very close and
#
we are very supportive of each other in a very quiet way and every time my executive
#
functioning fails I don't know what SIP to buy, I don't know what to do with this money
#
in my savings account or I need to fill a form or I need to send a proposal I'll just
#
land up in his office or send him an email I'll just hand over my work he'll do it.
#
If I have to buy a new phone I just have to tell him and it will appear.
#
Bhai and I had a very conflicted relationship for some time, we are now very close and it
#
was very difficult to tell the story and that's why I imagined that when I do discover what
#
the story is it will be a novel because it will span over time, it will have so many
#
characters, it will have so many meandering arcs, there will be so many other things that
#
For years we lived lives that were, that did not interact with each other, we've had many
#
of these long interludes where we haven't been in touch in an everyday way and yet when
#
I wrote this Bhai and I had not got back in touch in the way that we now have, for the
#
last five or six years he's been going through a very difficult divorce, a very painful custody
#
battle and finally because of the only person he was talking to in this time is me, it's
#
like a homecoming in a sense and I guess looking back because of the home in which we were
#
growing up where Dadaji could have a meltdown anytime, where Papa could go into a rage at
#
any point Bhai and I were fighting for the same resources and we were both too deprived
#
in a sense perhaps for the same things and the same mother was stretched over us, I needed
#
protection, he needed protection, I think she chose rightly by choosing him over me
#
for a very long time because I can't imagine him not having even that but so we, I mean
#
I used to call him my other brother, everyone knew I had a brother, everyone knew Mannu,
#
all my friends would know Mannu and then they'd say there's another brother, he's my other
#
brother and we literally had othered each other from our lives but the connection is
#
very strong and in one of his therapy sessions, he won't mind me sharing this, when he was
#
trying to figure out how to cope with his divorce and with having very young children,
#
his therapist is talking to him about his childhood and it comes out that his sister's
#
suicide attempt is the one big trauma that he is stuck with, that he has never spoken
#
about, he has never processed but he's holding on to the fear of what might have happened
#
and that makes him, that kind of, so his therapist kind of takes him back to the most vulnerable
#
moment in his life and begins to work from there which makes him call me and then we
#
have conversations, I mean there's been a couple of years in between where we have spoken
#
every day for hours and it's quite convenient because it's the end of his day in San Francisco
#
and it's the beginning of mine and we can just do, before my day starts we can spend
#
time with each other and because we've spoken so much about childhood and parents, he'll
#
often say to me, did we grow up in the same house because while I have coped by holding
#
on to every memory so that I can process it when I am more capable, he has coped by forgetting
#
everything or most of it and sometimes I have to remind him or he'll call me after reading
#
a column and he'll say, did we have the same mother, if she said this to you why didn't
#
she say this to me, it would have been very useful if she had said this to me and so it's
#
in our late 40s we have been able to reconnect and therein perhaps is a very complex story
#
that would become a novel.
#
And what you said about remembering things differently, you also have a quote in your
#
book where you write about your brothers, we are oral historians of each other's lives
#
and when I read that I thought okay but they are different oral histories because that's
#
just the nature of memory like one of the fascinating things I've learned about memory
#
is the way it works in the brain is that the first time we remember something we are remembering
#
the event, the next time we are remembering the remembering of it, so to remember something
#
for a long time is really like a game of Chinese whispers and for two separate people you can
#
have the same starting point and even that same starting point of course you're looking
#
at it from different vantage points but then it just becomes something different which
#
goes back to earlier think of how we can never truly know anyone else because really what
#
you feel is shared may not be shared after all but leaving that random thought aside.
#
Let's go back to your career where you know what was through all of this we've spoken
#
about all these relationships, all of these people, what was your conception of yourself
#
developing out to be like even if you had decided that you're going to avoid the trap
#
your mother fell into for example and you know not have to make those kind of compromises,
#
what do you see yourself doing in future?
#
How much of what you went on to do was a natural intentional pathway and how much was just
#
one thing happened after another and you got there?
#
Some things have been very intentional in the initial moment you know so when I had
#
completed my MA in mass communication and this is 1995 the golden year of private news
#
in this country, Aaj Tak and The News Tonight are these two shows that have just started
#
on Doordarshan half an hour show a day and there are no trained video journalists in
#
the country because we outside of Doordarshan there was no news coverage, video coverage
#
So it was golden in the sense that we had jobs before we even completed our MA, half
#
my class had jobs, Barkha Dutt is my classmate from Jamia and she went and joined NDTV.
#
She went on a shoot, this is Feb 95 or Jan 95, she went on a shoot, she worked with a
#
camera person, she felt like she was not being taken seriously, she came running to my house
#
in the evening and she said we have to make your CV, she writes it out, we go to the market,
#
we get it typed because this is pre-printer and pre-computer, we get it typed on a typewriter
#
the next day she gives it in at work so that she has some, but she has a friend on the
#
news floor and then you know because we had worked together quite closely as students.
#
So I was a somewhat oppositional kind of young person at that time, I wanted, I looked at
#
everything that I was not supposed to do and asked the question why and I would not take
#
a no for an answer unless it could be proven that the no is what I had to live with.
#
So I enjoyed my two and a half years of mass communication a lot and I, when I first worked
#
with cameras, the still cameras as well as the film cameras, I never saw myself as a
#
person who was interested in technology, but this was the first technology that I just
#
felt like it was a part of me, I just took to it and it worked for me.
#
It would obey what I wanted to say, I used to feel like I couldn't learn to drive, I
#
was not a great cyclist, but this thing worked for me.
#
So I said to myself I want to be a camera person and everybody said well of course you
#
can't be women, why don't you become an editor, why don't you become a reporter, you write
#
so well, you can do this and I said no I want to be a camera person and either somebody
#
will hire me as that or I will not join this industry.
#
And my first interview with a wildlife filmmaker was a disaster and my second one was with
#
Pranoy and Radhika and when they asked me if I could do it I said I don't know, I've
#
never done it and they said well would you like to start and I said yes.
#
So it was a very intentional choice to become a camera person, to choose to become a camera
#
person, then I had to honour my choice and whatever hard work and dedication and struggle
#
and the acquisition of a thick skin it took to last in the field, to work in a department
#
of only men, in a department of all male camera assistants, all male equipment and charges
#
and a large number of male reporters, whatever it took, it was a good time, there was a lot
#
of support within the organisation.
#
One thing happened after the other in the sense that I thought I would work for a couple
#
of years and then find more meaningful work but I worked in NDTV for 13 years because
#
it just always continued for those 13 years to be meaningful.
#
Whatever we demanded in terms of meaning we were able to get within the workplace, if
#
we said I don't want to cover politicians, I want to do feature stories, you could do
#
it, if you said I want travel, you could do it, if you said I want to do longer documentary,
#
you did it, I had children, I became an editor for some time.
#
So yeah it worked and eventually because I had done a little bit of everything over the
#
years I became the head of training in the organisation and so it was both intentional
#
as well as good luck, fate, a good time to be a good professional in a sense.
#
I would say my second career run has been of becoming a columnist and then kind of becoming
#
an author with my books.
#
That has been, I didn't imagine this happening and this time I didn't have a friend writing
#
a CV for me and sending it off to a newspaper.
#
So I was quite diffident about making any move by myself but the internet was a wonderful
#
and generous place, if you wrote consistently on it sooner or later you built a network.
#
And of course I got read by Roger Ebert which was an amazing twist of fate and then when
#
he began to kind of amplify what I was writing, when he began to praise it, it caught the
#
notice of journalists in India and that's how I began to write columns in the Indian
#
Express and then the Mint Lounge.
#
After that it became very intentional in that sense, I didn't know how long I could write,
#
I didn't know how long I would be allowed to write, what I had chosen to write.
#
But by that time because I had been through three pregnancies, my third pregnancy was
#
another instance of a near-death experience, of nearly losing both me and the baby and
#
So jokingly I call it my third eye opened and then I couldn't close it.
#
You could just see things that you didn't see earlier and now you couldn't do anything
#
about it, you could see through people, you could see patterns, you could make connections
#
and there was no going back from there.
#
But with the Lounge column, Amit, it kind of became like what you said about the podcast
#
when we were chatting a little bit earlier, it became a labor of love.
#
It became something where I set the standard, I set the challenge level, I allowed my inner
#
voice to guide me towards what would come out next without getting into what will be
#
viral, what will not be, what's more acceptable, what's likely to sell more, without any of
#
And I think that just like your experience, the reason it worked, the reason it became
#
resonant was because it stayed authentic to myself.
#
And perhaps that's all you need to do, but it takes a longish journey before you can
#
come to that point where you can identify or give voice to the authentic within you
#
I think it took us long journeys to get to just having the courage to be authentic and
#
then after that realizing that it actually works.
#
And I try to save my writing students that journey by just telling them that, look, this
#
is the one thing that you possess, that if you think about what is the one thing you
#
possess that the other 7 billion people on the planet don't possess, it's you.
#
That's the only thing that makes you stand out.
#
And part of it is that if you're authentic to yourself, only you can be you and it comes
#
out and the other part of it, the other aspect of it is that we are all on more or less the
#
same kind of journey in different ways, at different parts to write about that with honesty
#
makes everybody relate to you.
#
I can relate to so many of your columns about parenthood, even though I'm not a parent and
#
I have no interest in becoming one and I hate kids, but I can still relate to so much of
#
it because it's turning the gaze inwards.
#
In fact, this is, you know, I was reading a bunch of Roger Ebert's film reviews recently
#
and of all film reviewers, he is closest to my heart because he would cut through, you
#
know, all the superfluous stuff and he would get to the heart of a film and the heart of
#
a good film always is how it reaches the heart of the human experience.
#
So films that I love, I sometimes discovered them through Ebert and sometimes I'd go back
#
and read what say Ebert has written about Decalogue or Goodbye Solo or a lot of other
#
great films and it is so moving, you know, even without watching, even if you haven't
#
seen the film in question, it is so moving and I can guess how that would have attracted
#
him to your writing to begin with because it is that same unflinching gaze where you
#
are clearly at that moment, not second guessing the audience, ki logon ko kya chahiye, how
#
How can I, you know, you're just putting yourself out there in that act of honesty and I'll
#
come back to the craft of writing in the column a bit later towards the end of the episode,
#
but to kind of go back to the chronological arc and to get back to the subject of relationships.
#
Tell me also about how you met your husband as it were because it seemed, because it's
#
a very interesting sort of unconventional story, not just in the backgrounds being different
#
and all of that, but that for the longest time, you didn't really, you didn't, you
#
know, decide that you were going to get married, you know, it's one of those things that kind
#
You sort of, you speak about how you, you know, broke up many times and got together
#
again and at one point you wrote, quote, neither of us knew how to be married, stop quote.
#
And this whole process of kind of understanding each other, discovering how to be married
#
and then figuring out that within that you're almost like strangers and then discovering
#
each other again and negotiating and renegotiating all of those is sort of a fascinating kind
#
of process and it comes before parenthood, which is of course a great adventure of your
#
life from what, you know, from what I can see from the outside.
#
But tell me a little bit about how you met him and you know, all of that.
#
So we ran into each other in a friend's home, no, in his home, to be honest, two of my colleagues
#
in NDTV and Avsel were housemates.
#
So these three young men had a flat in Noida.
#
And what happens when you're young people and you have a whole flat to yourself, you
#
are hosting a party after party, get together after get together.
#
It's the place where people hang out because no one else, you know, in that age group,
#
not many people have an independent home.
#
And we're all always looking for places to hang out.
#
At least in the late 90s, there were not that many coffee shops and other public places.
#
And of course a home is always a home.
#
So it was a place, their flat was a place where a lot of NDTV parties would take place,
#
you know, this whole group of friends and colleagues who worked on a morning show called
#
Good Morning India, who were part of the camera department, who were part of the news department.
#
We were all the same age group.
#
We had a lot of energy that news television hadn't entirely taken out of us.
#
So we would party there.
#
And in one of those places, one of those events, I walked into his house.
#
I knew there was a third person in that house.
#
I had heard of someone called Mirza.
#
I had in my imagination, I saw a certain kind of man and I met him.
#
And I write a lot of what I call marriage columns.
#
And so in my head, I call it a marriage column because it kind of comes every three or four
#
months, and I'm in a sense answering the same question, what's a girl like me doing with
#
You know, considering that there were going to be so many social and familial barriers,
#
what was it that made us?
#
And there are such stark differences.
#
He speaks a different language.
#
He comes from a different family background.
#
Why did we kind of just stick around for so long?
#
And I'm forever trying to answer that question.
#
And recently, one day I wrote in my notes app, said my ADHD was attracted to his ADHD.
#
Because also post-pandemic, a lot of us are getting more in touch with our anxieties and
#
with our own neurodiversity, we are beginning to recognize it, find a language for it.
#
I think that post lockdown pandemic COVID, a lot of it has become exaggerated enough
#
for it to be more visible to us.
#
Yeah, so that was my latest theory, that it's our neurodiversity that kind of complemented
#
I have no idea what you mean by neurodiversity.
#
It refers to being on the, you know, that all of us are on a spectrum.
#
On the one side is being neurotypical and on the other side is being neurodivergent.
#
The conditions of having attention deficit, you know, being attention deficit, of being
#
hyperactive, of having autism, of having social anxiety, all of these in some combination
#
or the other position, our position on the spectrum.
#
And so that is what makes some of us more sensitive than other people.
#
That is it what makes some of us find it so hard to fit in.
#
That's what makes some of us partyphobes, some of us become, you know, find it difficult
#
to do simple things when we can do complex things very easily.
#
And some of those connections recently I've been kind of making for myself, for my children
#
And now he's reading a book on ADHD himself and saying, hmm, this is me.
#
So our energy levels, I suppose, in some ways, and also I guess if you put it in very simple
#
terms, he was on the margin, not really fitting in.
#
I was on the margin, not really fitting in.
#
And then you kind of gravitate towards each other because you find that although you belong
#
very strongly to a certain social group, you don't necessarily identify with the role playing
#
that is required of you.
#
And so while he comes from a very traditional, patriarchal, Muslim home, he's the only son
#
of a very important father, he was rejecting all of the expectations that were placed on
#
him as the heir of his father, as the only son of his mother, as somebody who would study
#
in a certain way, go abroad in a certain way, become upwardly mobile in a certain way.
#
And he just wanted to be free and he was kind of practicing that very free life.
#
And in a sense, when I had chosen to be a camera person, when I had chosen to be part
#
of this very cool NDTV gang, but I was the girl in the baseball cap and Levi's jeans
#
and trekking shoes because I had to carry heavy equipment every day and I would end
#
the day being exhausted and not at all attractive looking by that time.
#
But that was a choice that spoke to me.
#
And I was not doing the traditional role playing of a 23 year old or 24 year old, urban kid
#
with urban person with my kind of background.
#
And somewhere I think being unconventional in our own ways, wanting to live a little
#
more authentically kind of attracted us to each other.
#
One of the first plans we made together was to be part of a group that was going to drive
#
from Delhi all the way to Spain because we knew someone in Pakistan and we knew someone
#
in Turkey and then we knew someone in Spain and therefore we were going to, you know,
#
and we would have these meetings and we would make these plans.
#
And I even told my mother I was going to do that and she was like, okay.
#
So yeah, you know, big dreams, crazy dreams, being happy to think about unattainable things.
#
These are the kind of things that attracted us to each other's company.
#
We didn't know how to be married because we didn't want to be married.
#
In the, you know, we didn't want to be, we didn't have that very conventional idea of
#
ghar banayenge, savings honge, you know, bache honge, school jayenge.
#
We didn't want to live in that kind of mold.
#
And that was very freeing and so we would just do fun things together.
#
And we didn't take the idea of marrying or being together for life seriously.
#
He certainly didn't take it seriously because he was quite convinced that he could not break
#
Of course, we discovered later on that his mother was extremely happy to meet me.
#
And her heart was actually reassured because she had worried about how her son, you know,
#
she was actually very reassured to meet me.
#
She said, oh, you're another one of the same mold and now you guys are fine.
#
You'll be fine together because, you know, you're not the kind of wife who needs taking
#
care of which my son might fail at and stuff like that.
#
So yeah, it kind of worked for us and continues to.
#
The same things that attract us to each other also become the reason for our conflicts.
#
The same high energy, the same constantly embracing new projects and running off in
#
whatever direction our interests take us.
#
You know, it can be quite chaotic, but it keeps us alive and it keeps us happy.
#
And I guess the one thing we discovered about each other early was that we could be quite
#
supportive of the other person's eccentricity or unconventionality or dreams.
#
I mean, you can and that I think we've been able to honor.
#
I'm struck by what you said about, you know, one possible reason for the attraction being
#
both of you on the margins.
#
I was telling a friend recently that sometimes if you feel you don't belong somewhere rather
#
than try to fit in, just look for other misfits, which is perhaps what you guys did.
#
Another thing I'm struck by is that on the one hand, you know, you seem really sort of
#
a misfit and someone who doesn't particularly care about, you know, compromising too much
#
to be part of this or that or whatever you're living an independent life, you're wearing
#
trekking shoes and carrying heavy cameras around.
#
But once you do get together with him, it's so important to you that you fit into his
#
family that you make a good impression that his family is your family and that his village
#
And you've, you know, written different essays about all of that.
#
You speak about how you first met his parents in a South Indian restaurant, in a Delhi marketplace,
#
in, you know, your Christmas cotton suit and a bandhani dupatta and all of that.
#
And you really want to make an impression.
#
And though the initial impression is mixed after that, you know, everything sort of works
#
And there are these really intriguing lines where you write, some episodes carry a haze
#
that are labeled as cultural confusion.
#
The more we got to know each other's families, the more we discovered how different they
#
were from the version we had reported to each other, stop quote.
#
And this goes back to the point you made earlier about memory, how we can remember different
#
But it also goes, like you've pointed out how you would tell him things about his mother
#
and he was like, I didn't know that, right?
#
And how he got along so well with your mom and you were like, like, what the fuck?
#
Why are you leaving me out of this, right?
#
What was that urge which made you want to have a family?
#
This other family, what was that urge which made you adopt his village is basically your
#
village and your kid's village and all of that.
#
So that's interesting because, you know, I mean, we all contain multitudes, of course,
#
but tell me a bit about this.
#
And was this something you discovered in yourself over time or did it just come so organically
#
and naturally that, you know?
#
That's not a line I remembered, but it's a very interesting line we discovered that the
#
versions of that each other's families were different from the versions that we had reported
#
Yeah, that truly was a fabulous honeymoon period.
#
I had reported, I had told him many stories about my other brother and what an evil person
#
And then he met my brother when he came and he was like, my God, he's such a wonderful
#
And look at you, you know, how you, I can't believe you spoke like this about him.
#
So of course it took him many years to get, he's still, it's interesting how he defends
#
my family when he feels that I am being too harsh.
#
And the worst disagreements he and I have are when I feel that he's judging his family
#
too harsh and he's, you know, he's not letting up when he really needs to.
#
And sometimes I'll step back and say, why are we fighting with each other about this?
#
Oh, you know, why are we disagreeing so hard about whether he's okay or not?
#
And I'll usually be defending him.
#
So there is, of course, where we are positioned as young single people, we are freshly free
#
of our families and therefore, you know, our rants are at their kind of peak in a sense.
#
And we haven't faced any of the, what they say, so none of the conflicts of actually
#
living a complex adult life have, you know, we have not really kind of lived that yet.
#
But also there is so much about how you tend to judge people who are close to you and how
#
much you tend to take them literally.
#
And just like, I mean, when we did actually decide that we want, that we were going to
#
get married and we made very elaborate plans of how we would have to leave the city and
#
maybe even the country and because nobody was going to agree and we would have to go
#
very far away to survive the, you know, the, and what, what happened was absolutely the
#
We were at our immediate parents were just waiting for the day that we would break the
#
They were completely out of patience.
#
They just wanted us to figure it out and get on with it in a sense.
#
So we were surprised to the point of shock to discover how keen his family was to have
#
me as his wife and how keen my family was to have him formally as their son-in-law and,
#
you know, and how much they, they were celebrating it.
#
So they clearly knew more about us and then what would, you know, what was good for us
#
than we were giving them credit for in a sense.
#
His mother was in a very, very beautiful surprise for me, Ammi.
#
I made a lot of concessions to make it easier for Ammi because I was going by his version
#
of how, you know, she's a certain generation, a certain age, has a certain set of expectations.
#
So I'm tiptoeing around her and, you know, trying to be, I would speak to her in, this
#
I would speak to her in Hindi, but, you know, she's an Urdu speaking woman.
#
And when I said, meri saheli aane wali hai, wo Nikat pauch gayi hai, and Afzal was like,
#
please speak in English, this is ghastly, you know, can you say, Saheli and Nikat being
#
Yeah, can you, you know, he would say, inki dost aane wali hai, wo pas pauch gayi hai.
#
And I was just literally translating everything.
#
And what was coming out of my mouth when I tried to translate every word, after years
#
of being comfortable with English, was my textbook Hindi.
#
And that just didn't, that sat so badly in this very accomplished Urdu speaking family.
#
And he would be embarrassed and say, just speak in English, you know, when you can't
#
find a word, please don't translate it.
#
But also, you know, she came and stayed with us for a while and I would dress differently
#
to go to work at the cost of being mocked by all my colleagues, ki, you know, look at
#
her as soon as she got married, our girl in baseball cap and Levi's jeans is coming in
#
salwar kameez every day, but I got tired of it.
#
And I think in the second month, I came out of my room in trousers and a blouse and my
#
mother-in-law looks at me and she says, you look so good like this.
#
And I was like, okay, point taken.
#
She's just like what, you know, all she was trying, she didn't know how to tell me that
#
you don't have to change in any way, just for me, just calm down and relax and be who
#
And the first time we had guests over suddenly, and I went into the kitchen and tried to clumsily
#
put together some kebabs.
#
She walked into the kitchen and she was like my mother-in-law.
#
My mother-in-law was like my grandmother in a sense, because she was always dressed in
#
white muslins and kept her head covered like my nanny used to.
#
So she came into the kitchen and she was as clumsy as me with the kebabs.
#
And she said, you know, I've never cooked in my life and it's okay.
#
You don't have to do it, do it either.
#
And then we just giggled a bit, you know, this nearly 80 year old woman and me, adult
#
clumsy bahu and calm down about it.
#
So yeah, she was really amazing.
#
I think that Afzal actually, I had expected him to be very nervous.
#
At one point I told him, I won't marry you because you won't talk to me when we go to
#
And he was like, what does that mean?
#
And in my head what I meant was that you will become, you know, because I know the environment
#
there is different and then you will not be my friend.
#
You will begin to play a role.
#
And she's the one who far more than him or me actually foresaw the pressures that we
#
would feel and ease them for us.
#
And when our first daughter was born, we had three daughters over the years.
#
She's the one who she stood, you know, like in the front line.
#
And she was like, anybody say anything rude about my granddaughters, you talk to me first.
#
Nobody is going to hurt them or say anything bad about this whole gender drama.
#
And it was immensely protective of me.
#
And really it was like an antidote to what my own village and my own kind of family background
#
had prepared me for in a sense.
#
And what is also lovely here is that she's actually, you know, anticipating in advance
#
the way that you're feeling and reacting to that.
#
And it's okay, you don't have to cook or you look so great in those jeans and so on and
#
And I imagine the reason you and Afzal might have seen her differently is that in his memory,
#
he would remember her as she would have been as a younger person, a younger mother, perhaps
#
stricter or less chilled out.
#
And I guess age kind of changes you like that.
#
And also it's the same thing as Sudha in a sense, you know, that innate wisdom of knowing
#
what is good for this other person, never kind of spelling it out and saying you can
#
But knowing that if my son is in love, then this is what will sustain him.
#
And that's, you know, that's what I want as a mother for him.
#
You've written many columns about marriage and they're very interesting and I hope young
#
And I was struck especially by this para in this piece you've written called A Welcome
#
Note for New Husbands and Wives.
#
And the para goes, quote, do not be in a hurry to become one of these, a husband or a wife.
#
Change your mind many times.
#
Be suspicious of prefabricated labels and roles.
#
Be prepared to be inventive.
#
Even when you do get married, do not go running towards the quicksand.
#
Go down, amble around, check out the new terrain at your own pace.
#
Participate in the costume drama that Indian marriages are, but see yourself as an intern.
#
Be a part timer in the beginning if you need to.
#
Hold on to all your other commitments and loves.
#
Love more than just people, stop quote, which is such a lovely para and I hope many young
#
And you also sort of have another piece called Good Marriage is a Terrible Burden, you know,
#
where you talk about how it involves fighting.
#
It involves letting go of fights.
#
You don't have to keep up an appearance that we are the ideal couple.
#
Sometimes you just have to express yourself and it's okay to do so.
#
And at one point, you quote this lovely phrase used by a therapist to you, the housekeeping
#
of your marriage, right?
#
So take me a little bit through all of this because somehow in Indian culture, in Indian
#
society, you know, there are these grooves that everyone goes down upon and I'm just
#
using that phrase again and again today for some reason that, you know, it's kind of understood.
#
You're going to get married and you're going to have kids and, you know, and this is what
#
a marriage should be like and this is a husband's role and this is a wife's role.
#
And what you describe in great detail is that no, man, it's problematic, it's messy, but
#
you have to take, bring the same intentionality towards it that you take towards anything
#
You could be intentional about an aspect of your career, about learning something, about
#
And a relationship is not a thing that just is what it is.
#
You have to work and shape it the way you want.
#
So tell me a little bit about how you're thinking on this evolved and what your experiences
#
I think what helped was our wariness, you know, towards the idea at all, not wanting
#
to have, to fall into the conventional roles.
#
At one point, our therapist had to hold our hand and actually remind us that we had been
#
so wary that we had become distant and that, you know, when he says, do you call him your
#
And he said, maybe you should.
#
You guys are not being able to support each other in the way that you need to now that
#
So don't not ask him for help.
#
You know, you're isolating yourself and then you're feeling disappointed in each other.
#
So he was kind of helping us to get closer to each other.
#
The wariness, it's useful for us because it's so mutual.
#
You know, neither he nor I want to change the other person, neither he nor I want to
#
become a lesser version of ourselves.
#
And yet having children together and wielding, you know, the extended families as they have
#
been has also taught us that, you know, take it slow, you're not going to realize everything
#
There's a time for everything.
#
And it's all right if for this particular event you need to be quieter or dressed in
#
a certain way or, you know, or just play a little bit of a role.
#
It's not that big a deal.
#
But in the spaces in which you are together, remember to, that's where the housekeeping
#
She actually said to us, she said, come back every year for the housekeeping of your marriage.
#
You know, meet each other as separate individuals again and, and see what it is that you want
#
to say to each other that everyday spaces don't often give us the space to do.
#
And it was very useful because nothing in our culture ever says that to us, no?
#
Now there's no going back.
#
I mean, it's not like if you're having an open conversation about expectations, you
#
are rethinking the marriage.
#
It's not like you're letting go of the relationship, but it's just, it's as if all those spaces
#
And that's what does us in, in a sense.
#
That's where, you know, it doesn't work or it only works for one of the two who's kind
#
of getting away with all the goodies while he or she, the other one is left with almost,
#
you know, is feeling depleted over the years.
#
And so, yeah, I mean, having access to therapists, having met them independently when we were
#
not married, when we were wondering whether we should marry, when we were trying to figure
#
out our own individual issues of growing up and then being able to go back again and again
#
in a safe way has been something that has, that has been very, very supportive for us.
#
And it also strikes me that a spouse is a moving target in the sense that we change
#
Like I look back on who I was 20 years ago and I was a completely different person.
#
I think that's true of pretty much everybody to some degree or the other.
#
And the danger is that you can end up with the fixed image of someone in your head.
#
This is a person I married or whatever.
#
And that fixed image will then come with fixed expectations.
#
And it's not always like that.
#
Like I think in the same way that, for example, your husband had a particular image of his
#
mother, which is not the person you met.
#
And similarly, you had a particular image of your brother who was perhaps not the person
#
And there's a danger that you can have an image of each other and that can get ossified.
#
And it strikes me that this whole act of intentionality, of doing this housekeeping really kind of
#
So you know, there's a great column of yours, which I won't quote from at length.
#
I'll just sort of link to it where you speak about five things to learn about marriage
#
and I'll quickly read them out.
#
And if listeners are intrigued, they can just go and read the full thing, but I found great
#
wisdom in them, especially number five.
#
Number one is learn to fight, then learn to feel at home, then learn not to be offended,
#
learn to be a gracious host, and finally drink tea and do nothing.
#
You want to elaborate on the last one?
#
I learned this from him entirely.
#
And the column is called five things to learn from your spouse, right?
#
So drink tea and do nothing was a great, great and very shocking kind of lesson to learn.
#
It also became one of the many reasons that I kind of added to why did we get together.
#
So I come from this insecure, middle-class, workaholic family where what my father tried
#
to embed in us was kind of almost a slavish mentality, you know, that there will always
#
be a boss and you have to be the best worker possible.
#
And that's how he has lived his life.
#
But that was, you know, that's the great thing about new generations, right?
#
They completely reject the premise in the first place and it's because of the privileges
#
that you have given them to your own children that they are able to dream of a completely
#
So it can be a little bit of a shock for parents that, you know, you use the education I wanted
#
you to use in this way to become a social activist.
#
That was not what I wanted from you or a camera person.
#
But that's what children do.
#
And that's a great thing.
#
That's a great thing that every new generation does.
#
But so just to come back to the point, what always being busy, always working hard, getting
#
up in the morning and having a sense of purpose and just always being kind of focused on something
#
too that has outcomes is something that I kind of come from that background.
#
And for a man who's grown up in a landowning family in a village and, you know, from a
#
certain privileged background and yet a small town life and a village life, to have these
#
moments where you honor each other, you honor each other's presence in your life by just
#
being together and not necessarily having anything to do, but just being in each other's
#
And that, you know, in the larger scheme of things is a way in which people stay connected.
#
It's a way in which people are able to give support to each other.
#
And sometimes when there's no language in which we can celebrate or grieve or share,
#
just that those moments of quiet and that shared cup of tea is, I would say, even a
#
I'd never had tea before I got married to him.
#
Having tea was a waste of time.
#
And so I really, I had no patience for anything of the sort.
#
But living with him, I'd known him for years, but living with him meant that the morning
#
started with a slow cup of tea.
#
You came together in the evening with another cup of tea.
#
Sometimes after breakfast you had, you know, you added tea.
#
If somebody came over, there had to be tea.
#
And you didn't have to achieve anything, you know.
#
So now we've got these spaces where the phone is away, the computer is in the other room.
#
You're not attending to anything in particular, but it's a moment to relish with each other.
#
And I've learned the, I've learned the gift of it in a sense.
#
And our children have, we've been able, it's one of the things we've been able to do in
#
the family that whatever happens, we are together at mealtime.
#
Sometimes he's not at home and I'll ask one of the children who's going to make me tea
#
and one of them will make me tea.
#
And it's just a place where wherever you are in your separate spaces, even if you're in
#
the same home, you gather for a moment.
#
So it's a little bit of what therapists would call circle time or, you know, a listening
#
circle or something like that where you're not looking for an outcome, you're just looking
#
And some of these things are kind of worth nurturing.
#
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not much of a tea drinker, in fact, I don't like tea, but I'm more of
#
But as a metaphor for a certain state of mind, a certain kind of terror, it really works
#
nicely for me to disconnect from the world and just, you know, do your thing, except
#
that I find that you can disconnect from the world in terms of actually doing something.
#
So I may not be writing something or, you know, working on an episode or working on
#
But the mind is, there are still crazy monkeys gambling around in the mind, right?
#
So how does one sort of deal with that?
#
Because I think to do the kind of work that you do when you write your essays or whatever,
#
you know, I'm guessing that you need to have that quiet space where you can sit down and
#
That's far harder for a woman than for a man, obviously.
#
And you know, I get a glimpse of that where at one point, your husband says, I have to
#
And you say, yeah, let's go.
#
And then suddenly you realize that he's including the children in the plan.
#
Why are you doing this?
#
You know, it's a, you know, I'll have to look after them and there'll be so much work.
#
And that work would have been more or less done by you, no matter how progressive the
#
So for women to find that, that kind of quiet space was long periods of what Cal Newport
#
calls deep work is much harder.
#
So what are the kind of mechanisms you deal with and you've seen other women deal with
#
where you actually have that time to yourself and that luck, because, you know, there's
#
a house, there's a husband, there are three kids.
#
How have you sort of managed to sort of figure that out?
#
One that I really had to give up on perfectionism.
#
And that was my, it was a much needed lesson, you know, especially when I began to work
#
It's much simpler in the office because someone else has watered the plants and kept everything
#
clean and there's this quiet army that comes at night and everything's in place and you
#
But you start working from home and you don't have that quiet army or that quiet army looks
#
at you and says instructions for the day and stuff, plus your growing children, plus an
#
extended family from, but definitely his side where there's no boundaries.
#
Anybody can come turn up any time, any kind of plants can happen.
#
So it took me a while and I've kind of damaged a few psyches on the way, but to give up on
#
the idea of everything being perfect, looking perfect.
#
And that being a reflection of my efficiency and my aesthetic, you know.
#
So now I've come a very long way.
#
If I've got a quick Zoom meeting, I'll just look at the background, whatever is behind
#
me, I will throw behind the computer, have a neat background, do my meeting later on.
#
I'll put it in the other side.
#
So giving up on this idea, which is also a housemaker's burden, how is her house looking
#
and I just, socialization teaches you, certainly your mother teaches you, sasural mein yeh
#
na bolay ki maa ne sikhaya nahi kind of line.
#
And you internalize yourself also, I am this person whose house is just so perfect all
#
That was an idea that I had to give up both to be able to have a compassionate relationship
#
with my children, whose job it is literally definition of their existence is to keep things
#
not in their place, but all over the floor, et cetera.
#
That's what it means to be a child in a home.
#
So for that sake and for the sake of being able to have a mind, space and energy to be
#
with my work, which is very, very important to me as it is to everyone.
#
Another is that I've really been enabled by my family, naturally by my children.
#
So if I say mama has to do this and I need your help and you know, so they'll do it.
#
They're very, very sensitive to my needs.
#
When I have learned to express them, I had to learn to express them, I had to learn to
#
ask for help and they are always there.
#
And then by Afzal, because we live these very different work lives, we do find, we constantly
#
find that both of us or either of us has started a new project that the other person has no
#
idea about because he's also traveling a lot.
#
So suddenly he'll be doing something and I'll be like, you forgot to tell me and he'll
#
be like, didn't I tell you and it's already too far gone and now it's going to affect
#
my life and we have to figure it out.
#
So when I started writing my column, he was not at home when I, I mean, many, many of
#
the things, I think we've remained loyal to the idea of enabling the other person to
#
do what they need to do.
#
And he, more than me, almost has a, I don't know what other term to use because I'm not
#
familiar with any other idea of paternalistic pride in what I do.
#
I mean, I almost feel like it's my father beaming over me, when he'll read something
#
and he'll like it or he'll want to celebrate something that I've done well or I have completed
#
or you know, so certainly there is a, there is, that is a, that's a huge thing.
#
And I think it's also been helped by the nature of my writing.
#
I mean, just in the same way that my mother was able to read it and say, and suddenly
#
she was able to understand years of her daughter's inexplicable anxieties or needs, when she
#
understood that, oh, this is how she's processing things and therefore she had these needs.
#
For him also, I think somehow we almost communicate with each other via writing in a sense.
#
You know, there is a little bit of a homage to the relationship, to the family, what's
#
in all, with full honesty, but a desire to make sense of how we can be so much in love
#
and yet so much in conflict.
#
And somehow writing it down kind of helps to communicate things that are otherwise not
#
so easy to bring up over tea.
#
One of the interesting things about, you know, your narrative, your story, is that you mentioned
#
that Afzal didn't really want kids, that he was chill, he was like, nah, I'm not gonna
#
And you on the other hand, like when I think of you and correct me if I'm wrong in this
#
characterization, but you seem someone driven by parenthood.
#
It is not something that happened along the way or that happened in the routine course
#
of things, but you're driven by it.
#
It was your labor of love before your columns, perhaps, and you went into it with great determination
#
and intentionality and enthusiasm and all of that.
#
So take me through sort of this process of discovering in yourself someone who wanted
#
to be a mother and, you know, and persuading Afzal to cooperate in this project.
#
Yeah, didn't take a lot of persuasion.
#
Yeah, I can certainly say that this, it's almost, you know, in one of my workshops,
#
we were making a list of creative desires and some people wrote raising a child.
#
And I think it's a pretty accurate, you know, description.
#
It is a talent that takes nurturing, and it's also a desire.
#
It's, you know, one of the things we can build, can create, can do, you know, just like we
#
create other works of art, is, you know, is another human being with all humility and
#
mindfulness of one's limitations and their individuality.
#
But it does, it is, there is a creativity to it.
#
I just, I always had it, but I also remember that the first time I had a breakup, I must
#
have been 19 or 20, serious heartbreak.
#
And one of the first thoughts in my mind is, I'll have a child one day.
#
And perhaps because of this lingering sense of not belonging, this sense of not fitting
#
in, perhaps a hope that one, that's where one will find home.
#
That is a relationship that will root me or give me the purpose that I seemed to not have
#
in a natural way otherwise.
#
And even when Afzal and I broke up very seriously, one of the last times that we did, and we
#
moved countries and we were never going to meet again or cross continents, et cetera.
#
You know, when I thought, okay, what next?
#
And I thought, okay, I'll take a few years and then I'll adopt a child.
#
You know, that the child remained that I will, and then I thought of Sudha.
#
I know that I can't do this without her.
#
This time she'll get it right.
#
With or without her husband, I can't do this without her, that I had figured out.
#
And then it's true that she was there for me throughout.
#
So it's a recurring image and a recurring thought that I always kind of had.
#
Did I have to convince him?
#
We just got pregnant with our first child and there was no looking back.
#
It was just, yeah, I mean, that's the way his decisions get taken.
#
He's like, it's a hard no, and then suddenly it's a yes.
#
Never going to get pets.
#
Okay, let's get a dog and a cat together.
#
We're never going to move.
#
So yeah, I mean, that's how we got married also.
#
But once our first child was born, he was fascinated.
#
He was holding her I think on the fifth or the sixth day and he was like, I feel like
#
I'm holding a little Natasha in my hand.
#
And I thought what an amazing expression of love is that he's feeling love for her because
#
he thinks he's holding me, a version of me.
#
But there's been no looking back.
#
I was a little bit in shock when we were pregnant for the second time.
#
I felt like I didn't have enough time.
#
I just wanted to be with this child.
#
But for him it was like, well.
#
And then yeah, we got pregnant the third time and then we were mindful about not getting
#
But yeah, it was, it just kind of flowed.
#
One of the things you write in one of your early columns is about how it was so incredibly
#
far from what you expected, that you know, you at one point where you know, she'd be
#
crying and all of that.
#
You point out how, you know, your husband, your mother and you had a handy checklist
#
to figure out why the baby might be crying like a checklist manifesto.
#
And you write quote, it went like this, one is she hungry, two needs to be burped, three
#
has a wet nappy, four wants to be rocked to sleep, five is a nose blocked, six back to
#
square one, stop quote.
#
And it almost seems like, you know, it's that panic sets in at that point.
#
And then you write these beautiful lines where you write quote, I now know that parenting
#
is not just about creation, creation comes later.
#
It is about destruction first, the soundless collapse of your own ego, saying goodbye to
#
the self that you were before the first pregnancy, redefining an identity, stop quote.
#
So tell me a bit about this soundless collapse of the ego, like does it panic you?
#
Do you have a, say, buyer's regret or mother's regret at some points where you think that
#
shit I didn't know it would be like this, what have I gotten myself into?
#
So tell me a little bit about like that, because about what it was like, because I'm imagining
#
that once parenthood is upon you, and especially for a mother, once motherhood is upon you,
#
everything is changed forever.
#
There's no, you know, it's just changed forever.
#
It's a fork in the road and it is what it is.
#
To all new mothers, I want to say yes and no.
#
It does change forever and then it comes back and that's the amazing thing about this second
#
life or the multiple lives that you kind of come back to.
#
And I can say that with great confidence because I'm living that now.
#
You know, I feel like I have this huge creative energy and I'm able to literally do so much
#
more than I had ever done before.
#
And I hadn't imagined that I would recreate myself, but to go back to the soundless collapse
#
of one's ego, it would make me cry, you know, in despair, but not in remorse.
#
And I know from reading other women's testimonials, I know from my friends' experiences that not
#
everybody is ready for it and a lot of women are not able to cope, particularly in the
#
I did have a really difficult time, which is natural.
#
It's called nani yada jana, you know, literally.
#
And your nani used to come in your dreams, as you mentioned some day.
#
You're thinking if one child has done me in like this, now imagine nani in her ninth pregnancy
#
and all her children in, you know, under threat of life and she's carrying on.
#
So, yeah, take it slow.
#
This has been done before.
#
But I'm glad I wrote all this because it's very important to be realistic because it
#
is absolutely true that mothers forget everything.
#
They literally, I mean, there's no way they would have the second or third child if they
#
remembered how hard it was.
#
They forget everything and then that's very, that's not good to the women who are coming
#
after you and saying, well, nobody told me and you're like, well, you know, I tried.
#
But there was never, I mean, I just prepared myself really well for it.
#
The ego thing was also, you know, you're so competent.
#
My first child is born and I'm 32 years old and I'm almost peaking in my broadcast television
#
There's nothing I can't do.
#
I can carry two cameras across the oceans and, you know, film all kinds of things.
#
I can set up equipment and I'm helpless in the face of this baby and these engorged breasts
#
and I, you know, I'm just, my body is not cooperating.
#
I don't have the skills.
#
So that kind of going from hero to zero is, it's part of the process and you really kind
#
of need to accept it, but also surround yourself with as much support as you can in a sense.
#
And over a period of time, like I imagine a kid comes out and it's a project.
#
Like you said earlier, it's an act of creation.
#
It's a creative activity.
#
So it's out there, but the thing is, it's more than a project.
#
It's its own project in certain senses, you'll become its project at one point in time, you
#
know, and through this time you're writing about them repeatedly, but, and that writing
#
is useful to remembering, like something that you said in our last episode, which I remember
#
is that, you know, what the act of writing about your kids did is that if something happened
#
to one of them when she was say 13, you would know from your notes that, Hey, she felt the
#
same way when she was six or she felt the same way when she was two and you might otherwise
#
And it helps you kind of get a sense of that or get a narrative of that.
#
So this sort of examination that you're doing, how, what was that process like when you begin
#
to understand that aspect of there being persons and not projects that they have an interior
#
You know, at one point you wrote about one of your kids snapping back at you when you
#
Which took you by surprise.
#
You're like, what, you know, because that's not what kids do.
#
And you know, at different points in time, you're sort of surprised by how kids sort
#
of, you know, react to the world.
#
Like you write about Aliza at one point, quote, she would also celebrate the world as if it
#
had just been invented, right?
#
Which is also charming in the sense that it also can make us reflect on our own jadedness
#
when we see that look of magical recognition in someone's eyes or magical curiosity.
#
So what has that process been like through the years that these are not just your kids,
#
they are people, they've got interior lives of their own, they look at the world differently
#
than you would imagine, and sometimes they open your eyes to yourself in a way that you
#
would not have imagined.
#
I mean, you've put it so well.
#
That realization that they have interior lives, that really came to me with our second child.
#
I was pretty happily delusional about the fact that with my first born, who was this
#
absolutely perfect baby, we had conversations all the time, even before she could talk.
#
We were just always with each other.
#
And so it was easy for me to believe that she was an extension of me.
#
And my second child didn't look like me, didn't eat like me, and really had a mind of her
#
own, a very distinct needs, desires, expression from the beginning.
#
And sometimes I would look at her and wonder how, what was going on.
#
There was almost like sometimes not recognition in my eyes, but it was also an early initiation
#
into you're not raising her, she's raising herself as well.
#
And you might need to rethink a lot of your ideas.
#
And I found that to be a really, really wonderful journey of unlearning.
#
And I'm glad that my children challenged me by being different, challenged me by having
#
a meltdown if they couldn't explain to me what was not okay with them.
#
And by the third time, I was, like I said before, quite mellowed and I just followed
#
I just allowed her to lead because she was so good at being a child, she was so perfect.
#
You feed her, you dress her, and then she follows her path and you just have to go down
#
There's a film in which she's walking down the road and I'm just literally photographing
#
her as she goes, like a feral cat, she's sitting here, she's sitting there, she's got food
#
on her face, but she's absolutely at peace.
#
And I reached that place with her.
#
The wonderful thing, Amit, is that you're going to relive it again and again and again.
#
The same child at 14 is writing in an essay, even those closest to me don't realize that
#
I am not the same person that I was earlier.
#
So you've got to catch up.
#
It's just constantly there will be a new person.
#
And just like my mother is always trying to catch up with me, she'll often tell me, mujhe
#
to Instagram se pata chalta hai ki ab tu kya kar rahi.
#
Or so and so told me that you are now doing this project.
#
And similarly, I mean, I'm not going to have any other privilege.
#
I'm also going to be following our children.
#
And they make you realize that again and again, because I am overconfident.
#
So every now and then I feel like I've caught up.
#
Now we are on the same page and then they're on their own meandering route.
#
So their teenage years have been very interesting and I'm sure they will continue to be for
#
And then in that sense, I'll just add that the unschooling life works for us.
#
Because whichever way our interior life is going, we are still close by and able to find,
#
you know, however much we may drift away from each other, we are able to connect again and
#
again because we're there.
#
This act of sort of like whenever we discover something new, and I guess being a parent
#
is you're always once you figure out your kids aren't playthings, you're discovering
#
them anew at different points in time, like you said.
#
And the typical way of trying to understand something new is with reference to the old.
#
And one thing that might crop up the one danger of that is that you become the center of everything
#
like one of your daughters warned you that it's not about you, you know.
#
And that's a natural way of trying to understand that somebody is melancholy at 12 when you
#
obviously your mind will go back to when you were melancholy at 12, you know, you'll try
#
to figure it out that way.
#
And sometimes you can't.
#
Sometimes it, you know, they are individuals, they are different from you in certain ways.
#
They are, you know, different things are happening to them.
#
And sometimes you just have to kind of let it go like an absence of the ego, as it were,
#
that you crush your ego and you let it go.
#
And is it the case that the sort of easiness in the parenting of your third child, Naseem,
#
was because you were able to let that go?
#
Because when she is ambling down the road, going here, going this, you don't have the
#
instinct of saying, hey, don't go there or come in, you know, you're just watching it.
#
And there's a kind of love there that is something pure and detached, you know, not that the
#
love before for the other two is any less, but this, this has that sort of detachment.
#
You know, there's a lovely love song by Warren's, even in his last album, where he speaks of
#
a breakup and he's talking about this person who's left him and he's saying, I'm happy
#
You know, that situation where your ego is not kind of there.
#
There's an almost, I would use the word surrender, you know, that it's, it's really not about
#
I'm just reveling in your presence.
#
And that, that I was able to do a lot with Naseem.
#
Also I was, she's the only child after whose birth I am at home.
#
I don't have to go back to work.
#
You know, so I, I am, I have figured out a way to, I gave myself a year's maternity leave.
#
I said, I'm your boss, tu ek saal ki chutit, then I said, I give you another six months.
#
Because with the other two I'd been in a job and I'd got six months each and it was great.
#
But yeah, I was able to do that.
#
And it's, this whole journey is, actually this conversation is kind of revealing so
#
many things to me as, as we talk and especially as, as you comment on some of the things.
#
So with, with the same Naseem, for example, she grows up and she does have a much more
#
complex, you know, kind of interior self and the experiences that she has in the world
#
are not something that we can anticipate or imagine.
#
And however much I try to control them by choosing this school, that school, volunteering
#
this, that staying in touch, I am not able to, and you know, it takes sometimes a year
#
or two years before she opens up about something that hurt her.
#
And it's, and I find that now, so while that will continue to happen, one will not always
#
be able to, you can be there, but, but they will go on their own journey.
#
They will experience things absolutely differently.
#
They are living in a different world and they have different sensitivities that because
#
we may have either dulled us or we may not have them at all, we are not able to imagine
#
and therefore we are not able to imagine their hurts or their pleasures or their joys.
#
An aspect of this, an additional aspect of this is that we are almost like a team of
#
caregivers for each other.
#
So I get a lot of clues about how to respond to the youngest from the oldest.
#
You know, I'm also watching how, with fascination actually, how the sisters are sometimes compensating
#
for each other, sometimes protecting each other, sometimes expressing to me about the
#
And it was in the early years, Naseem, she was the youngest and there were times when
#
she would get frustrated and pick up something and attack her sisters.
#
And it must have happened a couple of times when they came to me and said, well, she's
#
misbehaving and I would say, well, she's small, let it be, et cetera.
#
So they complained to me, they said, you never say, you never take her off.
#
So I said, oh my God, did I make a mistake?
#
So I take this feedback seriously.
#
And the next time it happens, I tick off the little one and the little one shrivels.
#
And then these two are like, how dare you do this to her?
#
That's not what we asked you to do.
#
And in a way, that's also very reassuring because while I am the irrelevant judge and
#
an empire who should be there, but should not overdo her role, they're also kind of
#
very clued into each other and unable to support each other, you know, in the absence of what
#
parents and fill the gaps that parents can't reach.
#
Tell me about how, you know, you're writing about them.
#
You know, you're sort of live blogging your motherhood as it were.
#
How that changes the way that you relate to each other.
#
Like at one level, I can imagine that it's actually positive because you're examining
#
yourself much more and you're being self-critical and all that.
#
And at the same time, you know, another positive is that perhaps it picked that up from you,
#
that act of not, don't just go through life like an automaton, but question everything,
#
think of everything, think about other people and what they are feeling and all that.
#
But at the same time, then there can be this sense that, oh, whatever we do could be written
#
Mama will write about this.
#
She'll write about that.
#
Or, you know, there might even be sort of a performative sense to it where they want
#
to be recorded in a particular way.
#
At one point you quote Naseem saying, go take a photo of me eating butter, right?
#
And perhaps she was just trolling you or just being sarcastic or whatever.
#
So at one level there is this heightened self-awareness and empathy.
#
But at another level to them, you know, there might be this wariness also.
#
So how has all of that played out?
#
I have been, I have, you know, I have kind of kept all of this in mind constantly.
#
And one of the things that I have done is try to be as accurate as possible in the writing
#
and not try to solve problems, not look, not write to, not necessarily close an essay,
#
you know, not necessarily find a closure to end an essay.
#
And a lot of them just, it is a feedback that I get a lot, like, but you just finished,
#
you stopped in the middle or what happened next or, you know, I want more.
#
And I'm kind of staying with the moment and if there is no lesson to be drawn from it
#
at that time, I won't draw it.
#
They have always read everything that I've written.
#
They are finicky about accuracy.
#
And if I say blue when I should have said pink, then they will, you know, they'll remind
#
And particularly if I, if I've got an age wrong, if I've written 12 and I should have
#
written 12 and 0.8 or, I mean, any of those small details.
#
So now I make sure that I kind of ask them to proofread and to check.
#
But there was a time when they were too young to do that.
#
And so some of the ways in which I'm doing this is talking only about my experience or
#
talking, you know, from a perspective of how I felt of trying to understand what the other
#
may be going through without passing judgment or without being over sure of whatever they
#
And it seems to have worked in that sense.
#
But there's no, there's no substitute to knowing that this is my responsibility and carrying
#
it to as much of an extreme as one does.
#
And in a sense, Amit, you know, this is about family, but we often write profiles of other
#
people, you know, as writers, as journalists, we represent people who are, do not have access
#
to the same platform and could not, cannot write their own story.
#
But their story must be told and we, and one is mindful in the same way that you don't
#
want to, your writing must not in any way be condescending, it must not take away the
#
agency of the person, it must not make assumptions for them.
#
I mean, one of the very simple ways in which we can do that is just extreme accuracy, extreme
#
accuracy to facts, to dialogues, you know, to what one felt in the moment, not guessing
#
what they may be feeling, but what I felt when I heard this or when I saw this.
#
And I guess those are ways in which one has gone forward and literally never writing about
#
anybody who's an adult without, you know, sending it to them, getting them to read it,
#
talking to them about it, asking them about each thing and, and making sure that that
#
is all, that is all done.
#
At one point you write, and this really struck me where you say, quote, in all this though,
#
there has been a most unexpected gift, the wisdom of children.
#
Please remind us what we were like when we started out, what we can be like and what
#
As Aliza once put it gently, quote, I know everything already, but you have forgotten
#
So tell me what you learned from your children.
#
What did they teach you?
#
You know, you use the word jaded, the ideas of hope, justice, of just being nice, of being
#
happy in the moment, all of that just kind of, you don't have to do anything.
#
It just kind of begins to fall, you know, fall by the way in many ways.
#
And especially being so much out in the world as journalists or as activists, justice is
#
an idea that is very difficult to hold on to.
#
And you almost begin to believe that, that there is no right, that, you know, that nothing
#
is going to go right and I can do nothing about it.
#
And really conversations with children always remind me that there is something I can do
#
about it, that there is, you know, that this is the right thing to do and this is not.
#
And I'll often kind of unravel my own doubt or dilemma with one of my daughters, especially
#
the youngest, who's very good at saying, no, I think you let this be, but you do this.
#
You can do this and that they will like it.
#
Is there an example of that you can think of?
#
So I'm, you know, let's say, visited a home in which, after the violence in Delhi in 2020
#
in Mustafabad, because we were also based in Delhi as a group, very quickly we were
#
able to visit some of the victims and some of them are in shock.
#
Some of them are saying things that may, you know, make them look bad or they may not want
#
It might be inconvenient for those things to go on record for them at a later time,
#
because they need to claim compensation or the adults have many reasons why they may
#
want to change their version of what has happened to them.
#
And yet we need to tell the story because we need to tell the world that this is happening.
#
And I'm wondering how to do this.
#
And she says to me, were there any children there?
#
And I say, yes, there were.
#
And she said, what were they doing?
#
Why can you write about that?
#
And just like that, I'm like, if I just describe five children I saw in a refugee camp, I can
#
tell this story without compromising anybody else.
#
And it's just this image.
#
Because she's a child, she's thinking, what about the children?
#
You know, where are they?
#
And she also asked me what happened to their animals.
#
And one of the women was wailing about her goat.
#
She said, I went back because I had left my goat behind.
#
And she didn't find the goat.
#
The goat was burnt to death.
#
So to be able to then, you know, she made me realize that that animal's life mattered
#
because I was overwhelmed by the scale of what we had witnessed.
#
And I didn't know where to start.
#
And I didn't understand, you know, I was feeling like I don't have the tools to do this.
#
And she just kind of took me, a little bit held my hand and took me there.
#
So there's a lovely post where you speak about the lessons you learned from parenthood.
#
And again, I won't read it all out, because if I wanted to quote the memorable bits, I'd
#
have to read the whole damn thing out.
#
But so it'll be in the show notes.
#
But these are sort of the bullet points and there are like five of them.
#
And the first is trust children, two, let your children protect you, three, accept kids
#
gratitude, four, ask children for help, and five, love yourself like you love your child.
#
And actually, I think these are all worth elaborating upon because they're all so interesting.
#
So let's start with trust children.
#
I wish that when my parents felt lost as, you know, now I look back at them when they
#
were raising us and we were eight, nine or 10 and they were like in their early 30s.
#
And you know, a person in their early 30s at this, you know, in this generation has
#
no particular responsibilities, most of the time, we remember how much support we had
#
and how little they did.
#
But I, you know, I wish that when they were in that kind of lost, vulnerable time, that
#
they were, that they could turn to us and, and allow us to help them or, or be, you know,
#
be able to know that we would be fine with that, that they, that they, that we had some
#
tools that the children actually have a lot to contribute to the family, particularly
#
and to their parents' wellbeing also, that it's not a one way street.
#
And from, with my children, I was able to learn that and, you know, this, this calling
#
out is something that my children do a fair bit and I, and I know that they are able to
#
do it because we don't quash their voices, you know, we, we, we do not react with how
#
dare you speak to me like that, we, whatever we do at that moment, if I'm able to then
#
write about it, you know, they, they know that I have taken it seriously and I've,
#
so yeah, to, to, to trust that they have mechanisms by which they can cope and that they, you
#
know, if you're just there, they will know when to ask for help and that they can help
#
you when you need help, that all, all, all three of those.
#
Let your children protect you.
#
Yeah, pretty, pretty much.
#
Except kids' gratitude.
#
I find that that is something that we make, we, we really make this mistake a lot.
#
You know, we repeat these platitudes that we have inherited that are part of popular
#
Kitna, Kitna shatir hai, she's so clever, she's always trying to get something out of me.
#
To see children as manipulative is the popular narrative.
#
And that is so rude and inaccurate, both towards them and towards the family itself.
#
And we totally confuse our children.
#
You know, so when they do express gratitude, we'll be like, oh, he wants something more
#
That's why he's being kind to me.
#
And I've watched that constantly, particularly when you're part of a large family and, and
#
you know, you have extended family get togethers and you'll be, it's, it's so hurtful and
#
so sad to see how moments of gratitude are just destroyed to the point that that person
#
is confused about themselves.
#
They can only see themselves after a point, they do have a very strong sense of self,
#
but it gets overwhelmed by what their adults tell them they are, it, you know, it just
#
And I, there are fights I remember in which I have started with saying to my father, holding
#
my ground and saying, I want this and I, but if, you know, if an adult is constantly telling
#
you that you're selfish, you'll say that may be selfish, but I'll still do it.
#
And what have you done?
#
You may do what you want, but you've internalized that you're a bad person.
#
And why would we do that to our children?
#
And you know, and then they're just going to play that role.
#
Your fourth point is ask children for help, which you've already sort of elaborated upon.
#
That one is interesting and I think one that can be sort of forgotten or not considered,
#
which is love yourself like you love your child, right?
#
And you know, you've spoken elsewhere about how, you know, in a different generation,
#
in a different context, you know, self-sacrifice can be celebrated.
#
You have a line somewhere in a different context where you say that, quote, there are those
#
who will celebrate the sacrifice of women.
#
I insist on calling out abuse, top quote, which is, I mean, it's a different context,
#
nothing to do with motherhood there.
#
But I think something that a lot of people don't, and I'm sure especially women don't
#
do, is be kind to themselves, that they get into that role of motherhood and you're sacrificing
#
everything and you're, you know, you're making the food for your husband and you're doing
#
all the unpaid labor and then you're looking after the kids and it's, you know, and there's
#
a lament there that a lifetime can go by that having a kid is like the end of your life.
#
You know, 25 years later when the kids have grown up, you're too tired.
#
How do you reclaim yourself if that's, you know, you have not preserved that self in
#
some corner, even when you were not able to care for yourself openly.
#
If that's, you know, that energy is destroyed or written over by bitterness and anger and
#
you know, all of these unexpressed negativities, then when the time comes when you can reclaim
#
your creative energy, it's not there anymore.
#
And my worry for Sudha, my mother, was that she didn't have time for herself.
#
And when she was neglecting herself, I was neglecting myself as her daughter and you
#
really can't love your child unless you're loving yourself.
#
And now, and I think that she's able to be such a wonderful grandmother and such a support
#
to me as an adult daughter is because she preserved that part of her.
#
And now we're just seeing her blossom, you know, when she has time and resources and
#
she's not depleted by having to care for others.
#
I think a great metaphor for this, just thinking aloud, is what they say on aeroplanes, right?
#
If there's a pressure problem and the oxygen mask, they come down, first put your own mask
#
before the other person, because otherwise you may be able to do neither.
#
So tell me about now the whole decision of unschooling in the sense you've already spoken
#
near the start of the episode about why you decided to do that, the problems with school
#
and so on and so forth.
#
But you know, how did the girls adapt to it?
#
What does it really involve?
#
Because a lot of people listening to this must be like, you know, they would have heard
#
of homeschooling as something that, you know, eccentric Americans do over there and individual
#
freedom and blah, blah, blah.
#
But over here in India, tell me a little bit about the community of homeschoolers or unschoolers,
#
as you put it, are here and, you know, how long did it take you to come to that decision
#
and what has the experience been like?
#
How are your girls taken to it?
#
So I'd always been curious about homeschooling, but we kind of seriously began to reread about
#
it when our middle child was very distressed about being able to go to school and it had
#
nothing to do with academics.
#
She continued to be involved with academics and be very excited about learning.
#
It had much more to do with not being able to cope with the socialization and the social
#
And much later, two years later, when our younger child also opted out of school, it
#
She loved the structure of school.
#
She loved, you know, what she was learning over there.
#
But what was happening when the teacher was not in class or how the teacher was reacting
#
when she was not at her best moment and those became very difficult for her.
#
And that's when we went and attended a learning societies unconference in 2017 in Bangalore
#
at the end of the year in Bangalore.
#
And we found, you know, a large network of families and people, not necessarily all of
#
There were lots of young people, a lot of single people, a lot of elderly people, people
#
whose children were in school or had opted out completely.
#
And also people who had chosen farming or forest life, you know, living away from the
#
So they come together and through over five days, through various activities and various
#
kind of loose ways of meeting each other and exchanging information and sharing things
#
You kind of discover that there are so many other ways in which people are living their
#
There are so many other ways in which people are learning what whatever they want to do,
#
how they are combining their passions with something that is also financially viable
#
And so it was for the first time we were able to see that it can be done and that these
#
are not, you know, people on the margins of society or like highly unconventional people.
#
They were just like us, they were many of them had, you know, very conventional jobs
#
But for various reasons, they were responding to their children's need to learn in a certain
#
And it's both kinds of children.
#
Some children are learning beyond their years or they have special interests that school
#
is not covering or some children are, you know, learning at a very different pace.
#
And how can we make space for the individual needs of children?
#
And by that time, our daughters were 12, 9 and 14.
#
So we had to some extent matured as parents.
#
We recognized that each one has a very different energy level, has a very different need for
#
physical analytical activities and also socializes in a very particular way and is getting over
#
overwhelmed or traumatized by certain set patterns.
#
So how can we figure this out?
#
And I also then began, when I came back from there, I read a lot of blogs by families.
#
And some of the ones that I found very resonant were South African, you know, women in South
#
Africa who had written about their families.
#
And then I began to kind of pick up words like unschooling, like digital natives.
#
You know, these children who are born in the internet age, parents who have been through
#
schooling and need to go through a de-schooling process to be able to understand.
#
Because we may say, okay, you don't have to go to school, but we can end up, you know,
#
recreating the same oppressive expectations in the home.
#
Just because you're not going to school, you still have to wake up, you still have to do
#
your assignments at a certain pace and stuff like that.
#
And I read a lot of parents.
#
I saw a few videos and I kind of came back and whoever I had heard about, I read what
#
And I guess that's my self-learning.
#
I'll just kind of go into a topic and then read everything that I can find on it.
#
And then I realized that all our confusions, all our inabilities, all our doubts about
#
what is the next best step is really literally part of the process.
#
It's going to be a time of unlearning, a time for all of us to let go of many of the expectations,
#
primarily that you have to make children go through a certain grind for them to become
#
And you know, the fallacy of that, that you can let them be who they are, let them claim
#
their agency and that they will figure out a way.
#
And also then you kind of look back at your own life.
#
You look back at your own choices.
#
Why did I quit full-time work?
#
How did I become a self-taught entrepreneur or a writer?
#
How many projects did I start and stop?
#
Where are my own life's learnings coming from?
#
And you discover that many of us are unschoolers by nature.
#
You know, that many of us, we've gone through what we had to go through and then try to
#
reinvent, rediscover, recreate ourself.
#
And there's a lot of reclaiming of self-esteem.
#
There's a lot of re-parenting of yourself that, you know, we do through our middle years,
#
sometimes with therapy, sometimes with other forms of self-help, through our own communities.
#
And why do we have to follow the same pattern with children?
#
Why, you know, why can we not let them kind of walk into the same claiming of their agency
#
And it seems like a radical idea.
#
It's a very, but it's not, I don't think it is.
#
It's not easy to live with because suddenly you're like, do I wake them up or not?
#
Do we still live together or not?
#
How much fixation on a particular interest is too much?
#
You know, if they are not exercising at all, then, you know, when do you intervene, when
#
And it really then became a time of looking at your own life, your own choices, your own
#
exercise routine, you know, and learning to be far more accepting of the ways in which
#
And I think that one of the finest part of this whole unschooling journey has been reclaiming
#
You know, it's not just something I'm doing for my children.
#
It's something that I'm also doing for myself.
#
I am being able to see why I'm good at, you know, a certain kind of interaction, why I'm
#
not so good at a certain kind of meeting.
#
What kind of choices do I need to make?
#
What kind of ideas about myself can I now just let go of?
#
You know, it's not necessary for me to prove to anybody or to myself that I, you know,
#
have certain efficiencies.
#
And when I accept that in myself, I will let my children explore it in themselves.
#
And so in that sense, it's an ongoing journey.
#
And it can be chaotic, but it's also very liberating.
#
Yeah, it's so fascinating.
#
And you know, just thinking aloud, it seems to me that this is both radical and not radical,
#
as you said, at the same time.
#
And radical perhaps in the sense that it seems to go against the conventional structure of
#
how you do schooling and all of that.
#
But not radical because if I think back on myself to, you know, to use that phrase of
#
yours, which I will presumably use all the time now, I'm also an unschooler by nature.
#
Therefore, you know, I learned absolutely nothing in school and college.
#
I almost made it a point not to out of rebellion, but everything that I learned and like I still
#
take great joy in learning, I try to systematize what I'm learning, get to first principles
#
And I think that that's a beautiful way to learn.
#
And I think where parents can perhaps come in is that if I look at my own weakness as
#
a middle aged unschooler, my weakness is or where I fall short, I fall short in things
#
like mainly in terms of discipline, but I can imagine other areas where other people
#
And I guess if you're working with, you know, teenagers, then what parents can do is just
#
be just help them with those weaknesses, which they'll also recognize and want to change
#
as I do, but not push them along paths that may not be meant for them, which, you know,
#
takes up so much time and psychic energy away.
#
So, you know, perhaps they don't have to suffer as we did.
#
And I mean, there's so many things that we become ready to learn at very different times
#
You know, so as a camera person in a news organization, I was extremely disciplined.
#
I could work for hours on end.
#
I, you know, I could, I won't say I was not hungry, but I was able to work on an empty
#
stomach for hours on end.
#
It took a toll on my body eventually.
#
It was something that I loved to do for eight years and then I didn't want to do for another
#
And that was fine, you know, and then I did something else.
#
And I'm glad that, you know, and we grew up in a time when you had to, you had to choose
#
And that was perhaps okay for my father's generation where you were an engineer and
#
then you remained an engineer for life or I don't think that it's true for anyone.
#
I mean, he's a very keen gardener.
#
I have an uncle who's an engineer who builds the furniture in his house.
#
You know, there are so many of these talents that we claim at different times in our life.
#
So many people start painting in their middle years or learn a musical instrument and it's
#
not like they wasted early years or this whole idea, you know, you, you made that analogy
#
You, you spoke about schooling being something that was relevant at a time when you wanted
#
to create workers for industries.
#
And look how far we have come from there.
#
We are, you know, we are in a time of the gig economy.
#
We are at a time when you can make a living out of being an artist.
#
You can make a living out of exploring your own talents at different times in your life.
#
I know young people who, you know, come out of college and love trekking and within two
#
or three years they are earning enough from their passion to be able to fuel some other
#
And all of these things in conventional terms are called, you know, are, we have very perjurative
#
When will you settle down?
#
What will you do in your old age and stuff like that.
#
But we know we, I mean, you, you came into podcasting, you know, so late and you've stuck
#
And who's to say you don't have discipline?
#
I mean, imagine the, the, the kind of discipline with which you've completed that.
#
So a lot of times when I'm having a conversation with other adults about unschooling and, you
#
know, it's, it's a shocking idea and they'll try to make me understand what perhaps I'm
#
losing out by making a choice like that.
#
But we, we always go to, okay, let's look at our choices.
#
Let's look at when you changed your subject or what you did with what you studied in school
#
or when did you switch careers or what is it that you've discovered you're good at.
#
And what an, what a flexible time we are living in, you know, where, where you can really
#
do multiple things at the same time.
#
I mean, yeah, we should be a little careful about doing too many once in a while.
#
But it is, we are kind of in a time where we can realize so many of our dreams and still
#
be able to put food on the table.
#
And the new generation is going to invent so many newer ways of living.
#
As Tolkien said, all those who wander are not lost.
#
And in fact, if you don't wonder, you're probably lost in this day and age.
#
I want to talk about writing now.
#
And I absolutely loved the epigraph at the start of your first book where you write quote,
#
I wanted to be all of myself at the same time.
#
So I wrote, wrote, wrote myself into fullness, stop quote, beautiful.
#
And it just so ties into that, the theme of journaling, which we mentioned earlier as
#
a way of discovering and shaping yourself.
#
And elsewhere you have written quote, I write to see myself through the tunnel of darkness.
#
I write myself out of the bottomless well.
#
I sought out my position and my feelings by writing about them.
#
I write also to make place for love.
#
And these are reasons for writing and perhaps some of them might even be kind of a post
#
And you've written eloquently about all of this, about, you know, the importance of sharing
#
writing for a very personal reason to connect yourself to your mother and understand that
#
What I'm interested in particularly is how you sort of taught yourself the craft of writing.
#
Because when I'm reading something by you as a reader, I never noticed the writing,
#
which is, you know, the best compliment I can give obviously, as you know, and how did
#
you arrive at, you know, being able to write in that easy, straightforward, lucid way,
#
what was that process like of finding that voice?
#
I did blog for some time.
#
I have learned actually to see that as part of the process, especially because my blog
#
continues to stand where I had first created it.
#
And it's as raw and unprocessed as it was always in the, you know, as I had created
#
And I can't say that I did anything conscious to learn craft.
#
I did gravitate towards certain writers.
#
In this horrendous school of mine, this amazing school of mine that I went to, the best part
#
of the school was a library.
#
It had, there was a huge basement library and a very kind librarian who did not call
#
you out if she found that you were spending a period in the library when you were supposed
#
to be in some other class, she allowed you to do that.
#
And this school library of mine gave me access to many writers that I would not have been
#
able to, that were neither part of the syllabus and certainly in my home where we didn't have
#
a lot of books, we only had Reader's Digest, you know, I would not have been able to get
#
And what I began to read from the library, some significant things I read, this is the
#
age of 15 and 16, black American poets who are writing, you know, almost in a haiku style
#
in these very, very short sentences.
#
Like who were the memorable ones?
#
Richard Wright is one, Langston Hughes is another one.
#
And then there was a copy of Cyrano de Bergerac and I was just fascinated by this character.
#
And I think I borrowed it week after week after week and then found a copy of it in
#
a bookshop and just managed to buy it with some birthday money so that I always had a
#
copy of Cyrano de Bergerac.
#
We had access to Time and Newsweek.
#
Then I became, as soon as I went to college, I became a member of the British Library as
#
well as the American Centre Library, as well as the IP College Library and continued to
#
And I would say John Steinbeck and J.D. Salinger would be two very strong influences.
#
And Sweet Thursday is one of Steinbeck's books, lesser known books that I have read
#
And if you look at it, it's so unconventionally written.
#
There are different chapters written in different voices, some of which I could not understand
#
because he was using a southern accent of a homeless black person.
#
And I just couldn't make any head or tail of it, but I knew I could kind of hold on
#
to that book and over the years understand it.
#
The extraordinary authenticity of the voice of Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.
#
I mean, sure you're using a young narrator's voice, the writer is doing that, but he's
#
also breaking all the rules of writing, the kind of abuse words that are being used, the
#
kind of expression that he's using, the kind of repetitive way or the meandering way in
#
And because that worked for me, I think what I did with some of these, and they were great
#
So what I may have done for myself subconsciously is give myself the permission to write similarly.
#
And in a sense, what you are then giving up is the fear of not writing in the way that
#
is supposed to be good writing.
#
Because certainly Holden Caulfield's voice will not fall in that category.
#
To Kill a Mockingbird was a book that I also read again and again.
#
So not just for the story or the plot, which of course spoke to me.
#
On the first page of Kill a Mockingbird, Jem is 12 years old and he breaks his arm.
#
And I was 12 years old and I was going through all of these injuries similar to Jem.
#
And so it's just crazy how some books will speak to you.
#
Alice Walker, I picked up The Color Purple recently and I was so shocked to find out
#
that I had read this book when I was 16.
#
When I read it, my first instinct was put this away so your daughters don't pick it
#
And I said, well, I read it until I was 11.
#
And there's rape, there's incest, there's abuse, there's so much trauma in that.
#
But look at the voice that Alice Walker is using.
#
She's not even able to put two perfect sentences together.
#
And I guess what you get from there is then the confidence to tell your story in your
#
voice and not worry about whether it's well-crafted or not well-crafted so long as it speaks,
#
it expresses what you want to say.
#
And it moves you in some way to put it out there.
#
And this blog of mine that I mentioned, so it was, I started it when my middle daughter
#
is two years old, one year old.
#
This is before I've quit my job and in the first entry is I have two amazing children
#
and a wonderful marriage.
#
I have a job that I love.
#
These two loves are clashing with each other.
#
What am I going to do about it, we'll find out.
#
And then entry after entry, I'm trying to solve that problem.
#
At some point I quit and then I carry on with the deconstruction of myself and picking myself
#
off the floor in my second life post that job.
#
But I think that it's like a practice ground because I didn't open that to anyone to read.
#
Again, what I was doing was perhaps just cultivating, giving myself a safe space to be fearless.
#
So because no one is going to read it, so I'm literally writing as if no one will ever
#
And therefore I can let all the ugliness also come out.
#
I don't have to be afraid of either being judged or offending someone.
#
And just continuing to do that to the point where I start to get read and I learn from
#
the readers that it seems to resonate.
#
And then I just kind of build on that with time.
#
And I was just sharing with somebody recently with one of the writers in my memoir that
#
to this day I don't know when I write and I send a column whether it's going to work
#
But the only thing I know is from experience that you do your job and the rest will just
#
You're not going to crash.
#
You're not going to be fired.
#
It's not going to be the last thing you ever write.
#
Just kind of trust your voice in a sense.
#
I just feel in that question whether it will work or not, the term work is wrong.
#
In the sense that it has already worked if you have written it.
#
It's worked for yourself.
#
What the world makes of it is we can't control that.
#
Like there's this great quote by Joan Didion of I don't know what I think until I write
#
So in the act of writing something down, it's done what it had to do for you.
#
And then your voice is so consistent over the years.
#
And perhaps like you said, you shaped it in your private blog.
#
So perhaps there is more sort of visible development there.
#
But otherwise it's just so consistent that worries like will readers be able to understand
#
or relate would never just strike me.
#
Going back to the theme of shaping yourself with your writing and you know what Didion
#
said, I don't know what I think until I write it down.
#
How did your writing change you?
#
Like I would imagine that if you had continued just parenting and not writing about it and
#
if you maybe continued down that job or done something else or whatever, I'd imagine you'd
#
be a different person today.
#
Writing changes everyone.
#
I see that with myself, that everything I do changes me in some way or the other, even
#
if it's podcasting or whatever, you know, our actions shape us and we shape our actions
#
back but more our actions might even shape us more.
#
So how did writing change you as a person, as a mother, as a wife, just in every sense?
#
Yeah, I'm absolutely sure that I would be a different person.
#
And in fact, every time I, every time I begin to find that I'm becoming bitter and angry,
#
I know that I must write in a, that I must allow myself to write it out of my system.
#
To answer your question, you know, the second column I wrote for Mint Lounge talks about,
#
it's just in that moment where the editor calls me and asks me to write the column and
#
And I put the phone down and I have a meltdown.
#
And in that, in that meltdown, I'm saying I will want, I will want to be seen as a certain
#
person to, to be seen as that person.
#
I will have to become that person.
#
You know, I will want to be seen to be doing a good job.
#
And for that to work on paper, I will have to do a good job.
#
So I'm kind of lamenting that I will have to be a better person to be a better, to be
#
a good writer, to be the kind of writer I want to be.
#
I'll have to be a better person.
#
And why couldn't I have lived the unexamined life?
#
I'm kind of laughing at myself in that moment.
#
And I don't think I, I mean, I've just wrote that out.
#
It came and I wrote it and I thought it would work and I sent it.
#
And I, over the years, I, you know, sometimes when I come, go back to that passage, I'm
#
like, oh my God, I had to do it.
#
You know, I had, there, there is, you know, if you want it to ring true, then, then it
#
has to be the truth and then, then you have to live it.
#
Otherwise it's not true.
#
So you can't, you can't be seen as a gentle mother or if you're not being one.
#
And in that sense, the fact that you're going to tell this story, it defines how you play
#
the character in the, in the story to some extent.
#
There have been times Amit, when I'm in a situation that is kind of, you know, emotionally,
#
in which I'm kind of very emotional and I'm, back of my mind is ticking, I'm going to
#
And also is ticking, how are you going to end this?
#
Because if you don't act now, you don't have a story to tell.
#
So if, if I'm very angry, then I have to do something about that there because I, I am
#
not allowed, I have not given myself the permission to rant.
#
I am not allowed to go and write a story in which he said this to me and I felt so bad.
#
What did you do about it?
#
What, you know, what is, what is your reaction?
#
What is your agency in this story?
#
So if I want to talk about it, then I have to, I have to do something about it.
#
And I find that I, and in many times, if something's happened in school, I have to go through the,
#
the whole thing of going to school, talking to them, giving them a chance, listening to
#
And then I can tell the story and say, I didn't like the way this happened and this is what
#
I can't, so yeah, I mean that I've not given myself the permission to, to just tell stories
#
in which I'm this little victim and I can blame other people about it.
#
I have to exercise my agency and, and, and therefore I do.
#
If something's happened between my husband and me and I, I want to figure that out, then
#
I have to, I mean, whatever the situation may be, even if it's with a child, I have
#
to have the conversation that I am not being able to have to be able to, to be able to
#
This is such a fascinating paradigm shift in the sense that you're not writing about
#
your life, you're writing your life.
#
That to write, you have to live it and, and you know, everything is kind of, these are
#
sort of feeding into one another.
#
Tell me about your course.
#
What made you think of sort of teaching this?
#
Because obviously over a period of time, there's intentionality behind the writing and the
#
You've thought about it, you've developed to a certain stage, all that is there.
#
But teaching a course then means that you are explicitly taking all of these things
#
that you might have implicitly learned and you're, you know, drawing a code of writing
#
conduct as it were and sharing those lessons and giving it form and structure and then
#
And like, what I have found is that the act of teaching, I think is even more intense
#
than the act of writing in terms of how deeply you have to think about something.
#
Because if you're teaching something, you bloody well better know every little aspect
#
of it, you know, in the sense that you have to know it really well, you have to think
#
Tell me about that process.
#
Yeah, so one of the things that I had kind of internalized over time when I, you know,
#
when I came out of school and decided not to study English, but to study psychology
#
and then I came out of Mass Communication course and I decided not to be a reporter
#
or a writer, but to be a camera person.
#
And over the years, I began to feel that maybe I didn't know how to write.
#
And maybe I, you know, clearly I didn't know that's why I didn't do it.
#
And I kind of internalized that stupidly.
#
And then when I began to write the column in a kind of hypersensitive way, I remained
#
a little aware of the fact that nobody else wrote memoir in weekend columns, that personal
#
writing is often judged in a certain way.
#
And then, but I had enough time, I had enough time of writing that column for 10 years to
#
be able to shift from that position.
#
Also when the books came out and they were highly successful and I met my readers in
#
literary festivals and there was time for all of this, you know, garbage to go out and
#
a kind of a comfort level to settle in with why I was writing, how I was writing and what
#
But in 2020, mid 2020, for various reasons, my column was discontinued in Lounge.
#
And to be fair, it was immediately started in the Tribune.
#
So there was even not even a week's gap, the minute one paper didn't take it, another paper
#
But times have changed and my audiences were changing, my editors' concerns were changing.
#
And more and more, I felt that I was writing in a space that was constricting, where, you
#
know, don't write this because this can get us into trouble, don't write that because
#
And it was just from a very, very, you know, like a river and spate kind of space of what
#
I want, what I could choose to write about.
#
It was just kind of narrowing into a canal.
#
And that began to get to me and I guess in a, not consciously again, but I get, I'm,
#
I suppose in a subconscious way, I felt that I need to heal, I need to heal this in myself.
#
And because I was feeling frustrated, so this is again, I'm analyzing it in retrospect.
#
I started, I announced, I called up a friend and I said, you organize writing workshops
#
and I think I can do a workshop with you.
#
This is Yoda Press and Arpita Das and she immediately said yes.
#
And then one of her colleagues literally sat me down, pursued me, followed me through my
#
imposter syndrome over the next two months and put the course together, put it out on
#
social media and the first lot of people joined.
#
And when they began to join and I looked at their profiles and they were senior to me,
#
there were writers who had written more than me, very prolific, working journalists, all
#
kinds of profiles, people who did their own magazine and I was like, why are they coming?
#
And you know, so clearly in my moment of doubt, I had forgotten the body of, you know, I had
#
forgotten the body of my work.
#
I haven't met a single woman who doesn't have the imposter syndrome in some way or the other.
#
Yeah, so sometimes it, you know, you can completely wipe out like decades of your work in a moment
#
So I did, but at the same time, looking at these profiles, I was like, if they are paying
#
to do this, then you, you know, if they're taking this seriously, then you're going to
#
And of course I was going to take it seriously anyway, it's just that I expected new learners.
#
I didn't expect, you know, writers with so much talent as well as experience to come
#
to me and say, you know, we want to write in a certain space and we need help with that.
#
But that's how it happened.
#
So I kind of went into the first memoir workshop, especially the first session, blinded by fear.
#
But knowing that, I mean, it's, it's a little bit like my public speaking experience, you
#
know, just before going on stage, I'm like, I don't remember any, I don't remember anything.
#
And then you go and you begin to speak and later you don't remember what all you've said,
#
but you know, people are appreciating it, so it must have worked.
#
So I, so I did the first memoir workshop and that really kind of gave me a sense of what
#
I, what I was, what I had in me to offer.
#
And so we had announced four sessions and immediately I was kind of being able to see
#
what the specific needs of each writer was.
#
And I set up an individual session with each one of them outside of the group sessions.
#
And that was very, very, it was a little bit like your podcast.
#
It was, you know, very rewarding on both sides to, to, to explore what is it that our barriers
#
are, what our strengths are, you know, what, what our histories are and what do we want
#
to do with all of this?
#
How do we break through?
#
And it was just such an intimate and engaging experience that it convinced me that I, that
#
I was ready to go independent, that I was ready to kind of just put myself out there
#
and announce it, announce more workshops.
#
And the minute I announced the second one, it got oversubscribed to the extent that I,
#
you know, simultaneously ran a third one on another day of the week.
#
And we've, we've done these seven workshops, so seven cohorts.
#
One of my friends used to say, you know, there was a time when, before my column was stopped
#
for a while, there was a conflict over it.
#
And every few weeks it would seem like now we're like really at loggerheads and this
#
is the end, this my call.
#
And it would make me feel, it would make me feel really bad.
#
It would make me kind of begin to collapse, which also made me realize that what I was
#
doing was writing much more than a column, you know, that something much bigger than
#
just 1300 words is what was coming out because my whole body was reacting to the idea of
#
So I needed a substitute.
#
But in that time, you know, one, I must have said to one of my friends who's a writer,
#
I said, will I still be a writer if I don't have a column?
#
And she said, Natasha, you will become a writer when you stop writing this column.
#
And I was like, what does that mean?
#
That's what I was about to say just now.
#
And I, and for me it was like, what does that mean?
#
But from, it's when I started doing the workshops, that's when I really kind of began to get
#
a sense of what it means to be a writer.
#
You know, to be able to read in that way, to be able to distill your learnings in the
#
way that you described just before I was talking, to become much more aware of things.
#
And I really strongly feel that it has given more body and form to my own writing.
#
You know, ever since I've been doing, I have taken more ownership of what I do.
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I make sure that when my writers in the cohort are writing, I'm also writing.
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I make sure that I go to them, when they show me their writing, I show them mine.
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And then I have to deal with shame.
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I have to deal with doubt.
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I have to deal with, will they still take me seriously as a mentor if they see that
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this is what I've written this week?
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And I have to stand by what I've written.
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And that's a different level of confidence from, you know, it's being published because
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an editor needed to fill up some space or whatever.
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It's a different level of really literally standing next to what you've written.
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It's a little bit like what the books make us do, is when we have to stand with them.
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It's an identity then you have to take quite seriously when you...
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And I think it's interesting how, and I've also obviously taught writing, and it's interesting
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how the act of teaching writing can make you a better writer and that in turn can make
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you a different person, I won't say better, but different, that all of this kind of feeds
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So it's not only that you're teaching and the students are benefiting, but you're also
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It's really, I mean, one of the things is that despite the fact that the books came
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out and, you know, there was all the literary festival circuit thing to do, and I met readers
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in person and people wrote to me and they continue to write to me, but a lot of these
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people who are coming to the, you know, these cohorts are made of people who have been reading
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me for years, and now I am privy to stories of how other people's lives are influenced
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or changed or, you know, they are so hungry to tell me the story.
#
And these are people who have never written to me over the years.
#
You know, they are not the fan people who will kind of come out and meet you somewhere,
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but they've kind of signed up immediately as soon as, you know, this thing is happening.
#
And sometimes it's so overwhelming that I really have to kind of put on a mask because,
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you know, in front of me there are these 12 windows and everybody's saying, you know,
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talking about you as if you're a little guru or something.
#
And so temporarily you kind of have to protect yourself from kind of exploding.
#
But it does, in a moment of quiet, it does give you a sense of the importance, the relevance
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of honest writing, of telling your story, of, you know, demonstrating courage in a sense.
#
I mean, a lot of people say how brave you are to write like that.
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And I don't get it because I have, you know, I feel so fearful.
#
The process is kind of, I'm conquering so many fears.
#
And you don't realize that the act of conquering fears is bravery.
#
You know, you're so much like looking at yourself saying, I'm so scared.
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But the fact that you're acting despite your fear is what it is.
#
And then, yeah, so it really teaches you, it teaches you about yourself, about your
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I'm guessing that many writers would be plagued with self-doubt when they start, like I certainly
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was, where you think that, hey, is it an act of self-indulgence where you might wonder
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if you're being incredibly arrogant, that why would someone want to read me, right?
#
And then that moment comes like the one that you've described where you realize that, hey,
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your writing is meaningful to so many people.
#
You know, it's the opposite of self-indulgent, you're actually doing a service to the world.
#
Yeah, and while I wouldn't put it like that, but I do, you know, just the last column that
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went last week in the Tribune about it's being called high bichari because I'm talking about
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this concept of people expressing love by calling you bichari.
#
I had very little time, I was in the middle of hospital visits, there was some crisis
#
in the family, and I took some time off into a cafe and wrote it because some parts of
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it I had recorded in my notes.
#
So I had some dialogues and then I built the piece from it.
#
And I had no time at that point for fear, doubt, anything.
#
I had no time for any rewriting.
#
I just had to clear the copy, I had to write it, clean it, send it.
#
And at that time, what I was able to do was separate myself from the act of writing.
#
This needed to come, it has come, it will go, it will find its destiny.
#
And you just learn so many times over and over again that this act of surrender is actually
#
so empowering and so necessary.
#
That's a beautiful way of putting in this act of surrender.
#
So we are almost out of time, I think we have a few minutes left.
#
So a couple of final questions.
#
And one is that, tell me about what else you're doing these days.
#
You're writing, you are doing the course, and of course you're parenting and wifing
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and all of those things.
#
What else sort of involves you?
#
You said you were involved during the CAA protests, you're clearly someone who's socially
#
conscious out there trying to make a difference, especially in these times.
#
So tell me a little bit about what you've been up to.
#
One is something that I've been involved in since 2017, which is this people's campaign
#
called the Karwane Mohabbat, the caravan of love that was announced by Harsh Mandar.
#
It was a call to people from civil society to come together in solidarity with victims
#
of violence who are not receiving the support that they should be receiving from the state,
#
from the media, from their social groups.
#
And it's been an amazing learning journey.
#
It's had its moments of pain and trauma and even burnout, emotional burnout in many ways.
#
It's been hard on the family, although it nearly started as a family project.
#
It was the first thing that Afzal and I were doing together that both of us were equally
#
And I was just out there publicly because as a writer, I had a role to play.
#
So that then got us involved when the NRC was announced in Assam, we were working with
#
Quite naturally, it became part of the anti-CA protests, then the rehabilitation of victims
#
of the Delhi violence, and then immediately when lockdown happened, this huge civil society
#
role that needed to be played when we had migrants hungry and homeless, migrant labor
#
on the streets of India.
#
And so that's kind of been very intense in many ways.
#
I've revived the filmmaker in me to kind of lead the media team of the Karwani Mahabat.
#
We've been not only documenting stories of victimization, but also stories of solidarity
#
of India's very living, throbbing, syncretic culture, the vestiges of it in some places,
#
but also the very aliveness of it in other places.
#
Documenting stories of people, it's been quite amazing.
#
What I'm starting to do next month is kind of also revive the teacher in me.
#
And teaching is, it's been my calling.
#
And at various times, it's either been a very conventional teacher type role or it's been
#
more of a trainer role in media.
#
But after a long gap of teaching in Delhi University and the Express Institute of Media
#
Studies where I was teaching regularly, after a longish gap of about five or six years,
#
I'm going back to work, teach undergrad students, undergrad and post-grad students.
#
And I'm really excited about it because I have not spent time recently with this age
#
And this is at Ashoka University.
#
So I'm a little more excited than a professor should be.
#
At Ashoka, all the teachers are called professors.
#
So I'm already Professor Badwar, I'm already being addressed as such, and I'm suddenly
#
having a little bit of a, wow, this sounds good moment.
#
But I think that it's really fantastic to have the opportunity to work with young Indians,
#
to be able to share your experiences and your hopes and dreams with them, and to be able
#
to participate, to be witness to what it is that they are thinking, doing, and help them
#
channel it in some way.
#
So these things are coming back.
#
I'm also taking on freelance filmmaking projects.
#
So for the first time, I'm kind of independently working with a group of younger filmmakers
#
so that all of these things can happen at the same time.
#
And I'm very tempted to employ my children soon, but I shall be careful.
#
I was just thinking that they must be so terrified that you'll combine two of these things and
#
start a vlog featuring them and you'll have a camera all the time at home and all that.
#
They're very sagacious in how they advise me.
#
And they'll be like, no, mama, I don't think you should do that.
#
And of course, I'm very obedient.
#
So OK, final question, which I ask many of my guests on the show, recommend for me and
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my listeners some books, films, music, which you absolutely love.
#
And a little while earlier, you spoke about a lot of the books which influenced you.
#
But apart from those which you've already named, books, films, music, which mean so
#
You'd want to share them with everyone.
#
Let me start with music.
#
Last week, Naira Noor passed away, and I certainly would want to mention her to a new generation,
#
to many generations of people who are listening.
#
She had the sweetest voice.
#
And I'll send you a link, Amit.
#
She sang a very beautiful song that stayed with me so much that it was the lullaby that
#
I would sing to my children.
#
But it's a very dreamlike song about butterflies and fireflies.
#
Hame titliyon ke jugnuon ke des jana hai.
#
It's almost like a child and a mother kind of in a dreamscape.
#
I love the metaphors in it.
#
So I would very much like to recommend Naira Noor as a writer, as a singer.
#
Books, yeah, I mentioned some.
#
I'd say read everything, really.
#
It was one of the little learnings on the way of has been because I grew up in a home
#
It was my ambition to raise my children in a home full of books.
#
And I did then fill up bookshelves with my books and expected my children to read them.
#
And my children don't want to read any of the books necessarily that I have brought
#
But they discovered a whole new set of writers.
#
They read entirely different genres.
#
Sometimes they come back and read Pride and Prejudice and they're fond of Little Women
#
and some of the classics.
#
But they have brought in a whole new library into my home.
#
And that's really taught me to let readers go.
#
They just totally really let them go and read everything, read whatever you like, fiction,
#
I think there is something, many of us have a little bit of a magical ability to just
#
find what we need, left alone in a bookshop or in a secondhand bookshop.
#
We tend to gravitate towards certain kind of readers and we should give ourselves the
#
permission to do that, not worry about whether it's famous or economical or on sale or not.
#
What's the third thing?
#
Oh, watch a lot of animation.
#
Watch Miyazaki with your family.
#
It's something we do a lot.
#
And one of our favorite dialogues, my husband's favorite dialogues is respect your father.
#
It's from a film called Ponyo and we always answer him with suspect your father, but that
#
you didn't hear it right.
#
That's what the real dialogue was.
#
And it's got this eccentric looking father trying to protect his daughter who's on her
#
Yeah, so watch a lot of animation, watch films from Southeast Asia.
#
My daughters are discovering, the rage in my home these days is bad buddy.
#
So shows, I would say watch a lot of Southeast Asian shows, I think they're very sensitively
#
made and there's a whole new language of emotions that they're expressing.
#
Like which are the ones which have struck you?
#
As far as names go, I can only name bad buddy.
#
But you send me the links and I'll put them up.
#
I'll definitely send them to you.
#
I watch very few films, but Masaan has stayed with me.
#
Mirch Masala is a classic that I often tell my children the story of Mirch Masala and
#
they insist that they cannot watch the film because they can't take this kind of intensity.
#
But they like to hear the story and yeah, I just go for popular culture.
#
You know, it's been an incredible, however many hours we sat here and you know, during
#
this time also that phenomenon I described to you, that was happening with you.
#
Whereas three, four times you've looked like different people I know and I won't name them
#
and it's very interesting.
#
But one thing that I found is when you were talking about your daughters, you know, at
#
one moment I just saw that you looked like you were dancing, there was so much rapture
#
on your face, you know, and it was perhaps just because of the way the light was falling
#
So I wish I could have taken a picture and you know, saved it for your kids.
#
But Natasha, thank you so much for your time today.
#
It's been wonderful having this conversation.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at www.sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
