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One of the great temptations of the modern world is to appear certain of everything.
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Another great temptation is to pass judgement on everything.
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Certainty and moral posturing get us likes and retweets and raise our status on social
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And yet, those who are sure of themselves and sanctimonious towards others also tend
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to be both ignorant and useless.
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And while we do need to tell simple stories to make sense of it, we also need to be humble.
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And in the face of the multitudes around us, we need to nurture the multitudes within us.
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The less dots we join to paint a picture of the world, the less accurate that picture
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Also, while it is tempting to pass judgement all the time, as that makes us feel both knowledgeable
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and virtuous, it again ignores nuance, context, circumstance.
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When it stands in the way of our actually changing those aspects of the world that we
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do not like, those who change the world do not stand at a distance and pontificate.
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Instead, they plunge right in, get their hands dirty and try to move that needle one inch
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is my friend Sohiyesh Rai, who I often describe as the finest sinker no one
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Sohiyesh has been on the show a couple of times before, but in older, shorter formats.
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And I think I've described him as someone who always makes my brain expand a little
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He always makes me rethink my beliefs and examine my character, though I do have some
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disagreements with him.
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Sohiyesh used to work at an IPFP.
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He was a consultant with the finance ministry for a while.
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He has been in the weeds when it comes to actually changing and shaping policy within
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the government of India.
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And he's now a deputy director at Carnegie India.
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Sohiyesh has grown up in villages and towns, worked in government.
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And this conversation, in many ways, is a close look first at Indian society, then at
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the Indian state, and then at the Indian economy.
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We discuss tradition, modernity, urbanization, family, ethics, and he even mentions, quote,
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the limitations of the canine condition, stop quote.
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It's a great conversation with one of our finest thinkers.
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And it was recorded, by the way, in Delhi in August this year.
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I've made you wait since then, and I'll make you wait another minute because, hey, it's
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time for a commercial break.
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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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There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
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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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So, Yash, welcome to the scene on the on scene.
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Thank you, Amit, for having me.
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So I just realized this is the third time you're on.
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And the first time you were on, we chatted about demonetization, which was like 20 minutes
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or something, episode two, and then episode 120 something, we chatted for two hours.
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And then I started that episode by saying that, you know what, the podcast has changed.
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I do deep dives now, which is LOL, because that was only two hours and I was listening
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to it and realizing that I didn't do anything deep dive into some of the things that I like
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So, you know, we've known each other for six years.
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And as you correctly pointed out, there are very, very few people in India who've known
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each other that long, if you look at a total set of possible pairs.
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But I feel like I still don't know enough about you.
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So tell me a little bit more about, you know, where were you born, where did you grow up,
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what were your childhood years like?
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I'm not very comfortable talking about these kinds of things, but so I come from Eastern
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My village is in a district called Mau and my father was the first from his family to
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come from a village to a city for the first time and get his college education, get a
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job and basically live in the city.
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So I was the first person from my family, from the father's side, to actually be born
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And so my father first made the move basically to come to the city and find a footing in
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And so it's like, basically, he was the first amphibian in that sense in the family.
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He's a man of the village, but he also found a place in the city.
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And that itself is somewhat of an interesting story, I would say that he studied in a local
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village school and in that school, there were a couple of good teachers who were interested
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in teaching as an activity worth pursuing seriously.
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And he was touched by their excellence in some ways.
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And he worked hard and he got a good schooling education, even though the village is far
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from any nearby city, it's 30 kilometers away from the nearest town.
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And the school was right close to that village.
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And he did well in school education and basically would have studied in some nearby college
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But it just so happened that that year when he passed out, there was a census or some
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large case survey was being done, perhaps census, that's what I am told.
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And they came to our family home in village and they were taking basically all the details
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of all the members of the family, two persons had come to do this.
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And they asked the head of the family, so to speak, who's my uncle.
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My grandparents passed away when my father was still a young boy of nine or 10 years
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So my uncle was the senior most person who was also not very old, frankly, just 15 years
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And so he was, he's the one who was, he took charge, I mean, that was his virtue that he
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saw that as his duty to take care of his family after having lost a parent at a young age.
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So the census asked him about who all in the family, then my father's name came up and
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they asked him, what is he doing?
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They said that he's just completed schooling and is now going to go to some degree college
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Then they asked him how much, how many marks have you got, how well has he done?
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And he told how my father had done, they said, this is a very good score that he's got.
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He should actually try for a better university, not go to college somewhere nearby, which
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I mean, the degree college near village was okay, it wasn't great, but he said that he
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has done quite well and he can get admission in the Banarasandhu University, which was
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the best university in that region, BHU in Varanasi.
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My father was very moody.
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He didn't want to do that.
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He didn't want to leave the village.
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He never left his village since he was born, maybe traveled a little in 20, 30 miles in
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one direction, but not further than that.
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But my uncle had the good sense to basically insist that he should go and he should move
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to, I mean, he should try to get an admission in BHU.
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And he listened to him because he was his elder and he did listen to only one person
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and that was the elder brother, otherwise he didn't listen to anyone.
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So we went to BHU trying to get an admission in engineering.
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But by the time we landed there, the engineering admissions had closed.
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So then he was coming on his way back, he thought I should have some, have a meal sitting
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in BHU itself at a dhaba.
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And there another student he met who suggested that even though the engineering admissions
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are closed, you can get admission in BSc physics.
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Like the census came and then this person gave him advice and he said, okay, that sounds
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I mean, physics is interesting.
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That's how he basically made it into a city, you know, and he got his education at BHU.
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He did his masters also from BHU.
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Then he worked in the private sector for a few years and then he got a job in the railway
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So, I mean, I was born a few years into his first job.
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And then when he got to railways, we used to get transferred every few years, three
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So I lived all over UP, we moved to Gujarat for some time, I lived there.
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So my schooling was basically all over three to four years in a city and then we would
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move on to another city.
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So that's the way it was.
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Fascinating couple of things I want to double click on and one of them is you spoke about
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your uncle that, you know, after your grandparents were no more, he had to take charge.
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And I'm just thinking about the question of how sometimes character can be shaped by necessity
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in the sense that his path also, you know, had his parents not died, might have been
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But here he is in this position of being the eldest male in the family, I'm presuming.
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And therefore he's got to look after everyone.
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He's got to, you know, take almost premature parentship of these younger brothers of his
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And his life, you know, hit as much by circumstance as your father's was, then just goes off in
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And I'm thinking of how it can work both ways in the sense that on the one hand, necessity
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can shape you and shape your character.
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So like another example could be like any number of single mothers out there, you know,
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who are widowed early or husband leaves them or whatever, and then they become completely
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different person, maybe prematurely when they are very young, they get a different kind
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of responsibility and they discover a different kind of strength within themselves.
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And that's one way it can work that your character is shaped by situation.
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But another way it can work is that circumstance can be oppressive in the sense that your true
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nature is something that you then have to suppress because you're going along a particular
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you're following a particular destiny, as it were, to use that term loosely and there's
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And I think many women in India, for example, would say that this is what happens to them
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because, you know, in a sense, they have no choice but to follow the conventional path.
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You get married, you have kids, and, you know, maybe even if a couple decides not to have
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kids but accidentally ho jata hai, even that can kind of take you along a certain path
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which you may not otherwise have gone down and that can affect character in a different
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way and that can affect a person in a different way.
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So what are your thoughts on this sort of broad question about, you know, how circumstance
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can change character and how the notion of duty falls into all of this?
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Yeah, so if I look at my uncle, when this situation arose when in his early 20s he lost
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both his parents and with two younger sons, younger brothers and a sister, I mean, he
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had to decide what was to be done, there were different paths to take.
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So he actually had a job offer at that time to become a teacher.
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He gave up on that, to actually take care of the family, to take care of the family
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We are not a large farm for farmholders, we have a medium sized farm.
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But it is, it was a mainstay and if you had taken up the job, it would have probably meant
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neglect of the farm and also the family, it's not just about taking, earning money, it's
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also about the day to day business of running a family with their social obligations to
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be met and all of that.
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He made a major sacrifice and I wouldn't ever take it away from him that it was his choice.
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He exercised a choice and he saw that in that situation what he had to do is to prioritize
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the family and he and my aunt both together basically decided that this is something that
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they needed to do and they did their duties fully and completely.
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So there was a necessity that arose in some senses, but the necessity leads to different
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kinds of choices that people make.
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You still have a certain set of choices available to you within that situation that you find
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I would say that he was a very virtuous kind of a person as far as the practice of running
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He was very much devoted to the virtuous side of that practice and he was a great role model
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Even though he didn't study much, he was, I mean at that time, if you remember, he didn't
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even have to be a high school pass to get a school teacher job, you know, the education
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standards weren't as high.
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So he didn't even do his high school, but he was good in his studies, whatever he studied
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and he still gave up on a path of further education and a job and all of that to be
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able to take care of family.
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So that's on the side of individual choice and virtues and how you define your situation
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in life and what do you do when you face a situation.
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The other side is the largest setting in which you find yourself, right?
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That if you look at a few centuries ago, basically the main predictor of how prosperous you would
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be would be where were you born, you know, like which family you were born in, not even
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Basically it was a Malthusian word, not much productivity growth.
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If you're born in a rich family, that's great and chances are that you're going to die in
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a rich family and if you're born in a poor family, chances were that you're going to
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die in a poor family and there was little bit of mobility at that time, but in the last
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few centuries, especially since the industrial revolution and since social structures have
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become more liberal and open, there's been much more opening of opportunities and there's
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much more, I mean, there are many more chances for a person to find ways to flourish in different
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It need not be just pursuing a particular kind of career, but whatever your interests
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are and it's become possible because the larger society has changed, right?
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Because the economy has changed, the society has changed, the polity has changed.
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In many countries now you have a little somewhat more open polity, more open societies and
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also economies have changed a lot.
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So resources are much more available now.
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So now, for example, the main predictors of how you're going to do well, you're going
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to do in life is which country you are born in.
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That's the most important because I think the, I mean, if you're born in a rich country,
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there are just so many more opportunities that you have and so much more that you can
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do as far as your own kind of past circumstance.
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And there are less constraints basically imposed upon you.
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And then there are other factors that go into play to define how will you do in your life.
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But even if you're born in suppose a country, which is a little poor, then quite a few countries
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have shown that, you know, fairly short period of time that can change, you know, and societies
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can change, things can become different, families can become more liberal and open.
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My own family I've seen is that there was a certain opposition initially when I was
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I remember when I was a kid, there was some opposition of the idea of women working, you
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know, in a job, like a formal job.
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The only job that was acceptable at that time was a teaching job because a half day job,
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you know, in that sense, you go in the morning, you come and then there are things to be done.
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But now it's completely changed.
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Like my, my family is still, most of them live in the village, my, my, my father, my
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brother, I mean, I mean, we are the only ones who live in the city, the family is still
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a rural family, but the opinions are completely changed in terms of education and being open
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to having women work outside.
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It just happened in less than a generation basically, because they saw, I mean, what
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works more or less, and basically they're following some kind of her ma, what's good
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for the family and what would work.
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And then they're changing the opinion.
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In fact, my uncle who passed away a few years ago, I mean, he was at a very old age, he
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changed his opinions about all of these things on education, on question of work and all
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So I think both things have an interplay.
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So what is the kind of larger social setting?
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And I think modernity in many ways offers many more opportunities, there are fewer constraints
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on people don't feel so hemmed in by their circumstances as much, no need to.
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So more and more societies offer more opportunities, but you still have to exercise your virtues
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and have a sense of your, what is it that you should be doing in a particular situation
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and what would be the right thing to do for yourself and for your family and for your
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friends or your society, for your nation, for the world, in that sense.
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So both of them have to go hand in hand and to be able to make most of your situation
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So a bunch of broader questions and one of them sort of, there's this beautiful story
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I share with my writing students as an example of really great simple writing and what it
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It's a story called Paper Menagerie by Ken Lu, I'll link it from the show notes.
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And it's really about a young man discovering his mother anew after she is no more and discovering
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that he judged her as what we would call unparagawaar kind of person, somebody who was an embarrassment
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to him, he could never speak to her.
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And then when he discovers circumstances of his life, he just sees her in a completely
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And it's an interesting, so I recorded an episode with Natasha Badwar just before this,
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I don't know whether it will come out before or after this, but she revealed something
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She married someone from a slightly different background, a Muslim man who came from this
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village and she grew very fond of his family and vice versa.
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And she realized that initially they thought that their respective parents would oppose
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the marriage and not like each other and all of that.
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And they found just the opposite.
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But what she said was that she, that one thing that surprised both of them, both her and
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her husband is how much their respective in-laws turned out to be different from the portrait
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painted of them by their child.
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So you know, her husband had portrayed his parents and the village and in a particular
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way and she meets him and she finds out that no, they are completely different, right.
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And the realization there was that there is this human tendency that we have that we fix,
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you know, we know a person, they become a fixed point in our head and then they are
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that and that fixed point remains that, that, you know, they are frozen in our mind as a
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particular kind of person, even when they change and you know, those changes can sort
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of be invisible to us and roles can do that.
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Someone is fixed in a particular role, like she says, she looks at her mother so much
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more differently today in her early fifties as she did when she was 20, you know, but
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you can look back and see that no, that, you know, then you are relating with that person
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just within the bounds of that role and what it means.
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But now you can look at them as a fully fledged human being and all that.
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And I'm just thinking that in this fascinating story of your uncle and your father and the
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younger generation, you and your cousins and all of that, you know, I get a sense from
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this of your uncle in one way being a profoundly interesting man who is faced with difficult
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He thinks about within, you know, the limited bounds of how he can understand it.
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He thinks about what is the right thing to do.
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He makes a choice, that choice involves sacrifice and courage.
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He does all of that, but it is possible that a kid growing up in the family may just see
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him as an old fogey and may not ever see that side of him and may not see him or pay attention
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to some of his opinions, which may seem a little politically incorrect at times.
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So, you know, today we pay too much attention to just a spoken word and not the whole complex
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set of deeds that people actually, the choices they actually live.
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Opinions are, I mean, you know, they are not held in a manner which is very deep, you know,
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so you may have all kinds of opinions and they can change at times through experience
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or you may not even mean them very seriously.
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But yeah, I mean, there is a, I mean, this is the story of each human being, right?
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In some ways, there's a lot more than meets the eye and it takes a lot of effort and that's
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where literature, I think, plays a very important role that it is able to show us this reality
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of human life and it's very much in our, the nature of human beings to be able to change
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in some ways, you know, in terms of human nature as such may be permanent, but our ability
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to change our opinion or adapt to circumstances, do things differently.
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So I was, I think 10 years old or something.
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I used to spend my summer in my village, usually, it's a month or so doing summer vacations.
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So I was in my village and I fell ill, I mean, I had very high fever and I was just basically
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So they got me some medicines and I took some, took them, I mean, they were helping the symptoms
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a little, but the fever wasn't going away.
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They took me to a proper doctor and they gave the medicines.
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So I was taking the medicine, but in the meanwhile, they call this old Muslim gentleman, you know,
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it must have been at least around 70 at that time.
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And he said that this guy is unwell and you have to cure him now, you know, like I said,
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what is he going to do?
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So he said, he's a, you know, he's a kind of person who does this kind of thing, you
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know, like, so it's an alternate way of looking at the situation.
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I was a young kid and I was very much situated in our kind of, you know, what Auden says,
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believing still versus believing again, I was still believing still stage that you are
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very naive about these things and you actually accept that, yeah, there is a kind of a magical
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side of the world and things can be cured in this way.
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So he gave me a Tawiz, a talisman, you can call me and say, you tie it around your arm
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and then this will cure you, you know.
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So whatever it may be placebo or whatever, I think it may have been placebo, but it worked
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and I got better a few days and he used to come and talk to me every day for one or two
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hours and really comforting talk.
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He has a very, I would say, gentle kind of a soul, very refined, uneducated, but very
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refined in that sense, his talk in a very, very fine way, you know, his language is very
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He spoke very pure Urdu and he used to live basically 20 meters from our house.
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And when I got better, he used to still come and talk to me every day for an hour or two.
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It was just a ritual for him and he told me that when his family got into trouble many
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years ago, when he was younger, my family basically gave them some land, very close
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to our house for them to settle down.
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This is a Muslim family, you know, and very conservative Muslim family.
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And they said that, please, you can, and they had a house at that time and they were living
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Then the family did better, so his sons got handloom, got into handloom, learned a skill
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which could turn into a kind of a livelihood opportunity.
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And then they built a pucca house on the same land and they live basically like 20 meters
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Although a village is very much, I mean, divided around communities, but there are these interspersed,
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interesting spaces where people kind of intertwine with each other.
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And I was just, at that time it was nothing, you know, it was just something that I had
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an experience and that was the last time I met him, a few years later he passed away
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and I never got a chance to meet him again.
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And he gave me a story about how that happened, how that land was given as a, like, you know,
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it's a small land, we were not a very large farmer, so giving a land is not a small thing,
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but we had some land and we gave to a family that was, that needed it.
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And I was thinking, I mean, just a few months ago about that episode just came to me, my
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memory had suppressed it.
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Then just think about it, I mean, we are a Hindu family and living in a, basically a
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Hindu area and some small patch of land we gave to a family, a Muslim family to kind
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of build a small house for some time.
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Then they basically settled down there.
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They did better economically, but they still continue to live there and there was no question
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of taking the land back or anything, it was their home.
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And it is also that all the neighbors agree to that, right?
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Because you're basically a family settling down right in that area.
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And the way our village works is that basically if you go back hundreds of years, it's the
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same family that basically broke into parts and set up houses nearby.
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So they are our distant cousins all nearby, but they all agreed to that, you know, to
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And there was a kind of a very complex intertwining of lives, I would say, which I experienced
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at that time, you know, that the eldest son of the only member of the family that has
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moved out to city is, he has a high human capital potential and still you bet on this
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one guy, you know, magic to cure him, while of course also giving medicine, you know,
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that's the way belief works.
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Last time also we spoke on the podcast, this kind of a dynamic came up in the discussion.
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And when you talk to my uncle or someone about their views on Muslims, they were, I mean,
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a little suspicious, you know, that, okay, they have many wounds of the Mughal Empire
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There are lots of stories that you hear.
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But the fact of the matter is that there is also this side of it, you know, and that in
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actual decision making and actually day to day living together, my village has a large
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number of Hindu and Muslim families, both, and in many ways they are very intertwined
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and in some ways they are separate, you know, so they live in different areas.
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In some places, as I just gave an example, they also live in the same area as well.
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So I think the, what matters more is that when a situation comes to take a decision,
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What do you do at that time?
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What are the, are you following some kind of a, some notion of dharma, I would say,
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or some notion of virtue or righteousness at that time or not.
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For the rest, I don't pay too much attention now, at least as I've spent, because my family
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lives in different centuries at the same time, you know.
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So we've seen that, you know, how things can change and what really matters and what
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doesn't matter in some senses.
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So I told you the story mainly to be able to highlight this or the question that you
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asked about people and how complex they can be and how they can, their actions can be
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very different from their stated opinions if you ask them in a survey, whether it's
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a Pew survey or whatever.
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So give me a sense of the, you know, but before you get in, there's a book recommendation
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So there's a book on Ghazi Miya, which Shahid, I mean, has written it.
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So I think it's worth reading carefully in terms of how modernity changes our imagination
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of identity and how, in a way, it hardens it while also pretending to give us the opportunity
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to make and remake ourselves continuously, you know, so sometimes it also can harden
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So this is an interesting book about this conquistador who comes to India and gets intertwined
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in our lives in very, very interesting ways.
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Actually, my question was just going to be about that, about modernity itself, because,
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you know, through our lenses and my lens, a lot of my lens really comes from the West
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in a sense, the Enlightenment and so on.
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We think of modernity in a particular way, but modernity plays out in, you know, different
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kinds of subtle ways when it comes to our towns and our villages and all of that.
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And what you sort of describe here, for example, where opinions on women have, you know, subtly
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changed over a generation where you're moving in so many directions.
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And at the same time, it is true, what you said of your family is true of India, that
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we're living in many different centuries at the same time.
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So what is your sense of modernity?
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Like how is that village changing?
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I can look around me and in a sense, we have a sense of how a city is changing like Bombay
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And of course, it's deeply complex and there's a lot there, but it is whatever of that we
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don't know, I think would fall in the realm of the known unknown.
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But in villages, which especially for, you know, city slickers like me is such a dark
#
space and you know, and it's been either romanticized by Gandhi who, you know, which he started
#
doing from a time when he hadn't actually been to a village as Ram Guha points out in
#
the 19th century, or it's been condemned with some justification by Ambedkar as a den of
#
localism and all of those vices, but it's a complicated space.
#
It's a complicated space of real people, you know, who are reacting in unusual ways, which
#
are hard to pin down, as you just pointed out through the story.
#
So give me a sense, maybe using your village as an example, that how do we look at modernity
#
What does it mean to be modern?
#
What does it mean to progress?
#
And is some of this movement in a direction which others may not call modern, which can
#
lead to, like you said, what Mr. Amin's book can lead to a hardening of identities rather
#
So, I mean, this is something that I've been thinking about, but my thoughts are not at
#
the level of articulation.
#
This is the show for thinking about, thinking aloud, so I'll give you a few kind of images
#
of and then see how, let's see where it goes.
#
So another short story, I went to my village and so to get to my village, you have to take
#
a narrow lane away from the, I mean, there's a branching off from the road and then that
#
lane takes you to my village.
#
My cousin had come to Picumia from the bus stand.
#
So then I was on a bike with him and we were going, this is a few years ago.
#
And then as we got into the lane and came near the village, there was a Maruti van,
#
a car parked next to the lane and with this very bright light, fluorescent light glowing
#
from inside and very loud music being played.
#
So I said, it's very odd for us to see that in a village, right?
#
And then some guys sitting there and drinking Limca, Limca Coke, mostly Limca.
#
And I said, what's going on?
#
So my cousin said something about, you know, basically a caste-related thing that these
#
guys have gone and earned some money abroad from the city and showing off in the village.
#
So I said, yeah, very interesting.
#
Another image is of locked houses.
#
So quite a few people in my village have basically left the village now.
#
I mean, the urbanization is happening at a much rapid pace than perhaps even the official
#
data actually indicates.
#
So lots of people are moving into cities in a manner that the entire family is gone.
#
So lots of houses are now basically locked.
#
I mean, I wouldn't say the percentage, it will not be very large, but it's conspicuous.
#
So maybe 5% or 10% of the houses are now basically locked and earlier what used to happen is
#
that obviously some member of the family will go to the city to earn and maybe even settle
#
But there will be people in the village, like in my family, most of the families still live
#
in the village, but there are no families that are basically just up and left and that
#
will have some impact on kind of village life there, you know, if you're part of the village
#
Third is that you see, and market has entered significant ways.
#
So my village, slightly larger village than the nearby village, so people come there for
#
transactions, economic transactions, over 30 years ago, you could only see basically
#
agriculture commodities being exchanged there on a Thursday market that used to be held
#
You see much more, you know, there are many more products being sold and bought in this
#
And this is of course outside of the APMC, you know, the India markets work if the state
#
is not looking at it very carefully.
#
So the market is expanded very significantly, because this is something I've got a very
#
clear 30 year, year on year time series on, what was being sold earlier, I used to go
#
there to get five rupees to go and go in the market on Thursday evening.
#
Now it's much more selling, many more people are participating across different cast ropes
#
So there's urbanization, there is some degree of mobility, I think, as far as people going
#
to cities, especially is concerned, there is some degree of market activity in this
#
in the villages, but overall, I think the village productivity story is not taken off.
#
So if you look at my own village land and how much we earn from the land per acre or
#
something, it's a very, very small improvement over 30, 40 years.
#
And that's a big problem, because it's basically become that so much of the migration in India
#
is now pushed that you don't have anything to do in the village, so you move out and
#
So we need to get the agriculture productivity story right, invest in infrastructure, get
#
the markets working, whatever is required.
#
I study a little bit of this, I'm not an expert myself, my colleagues have worked on it, that
#
per acre productivity in countries like Taiwan and China and all is much higher than us and
#
we need to get it right.
#
So that's become a problem because especially for people who have land, it's become like
#
a albatross around your neck or I don't know what the right metaphor is, it basically ties
#
And in fact, people who don't have land are more free, because they don't have much anyway.
#
So if I have a property, they freely move and go try to find, it's not easy to make
#
So I wouldn't underestimate the struggle, but there is at least less to be tied down
#
And that is creating, I think, some degree of bad blood also.
#
So I think we are seeing a little bit more of conflict in some ways.
#
I'm just talking about my little microcosm, there's a little bit more conflict across
#
identity groups, a little more, perhaps because there is a little bit more envy that people
#
who are supposed to be in a different class have suddenly, in just a few years, gotten
#
a little cash rich and therefore are able to assert their identities in a little more
#
So it is a time of churning and it's been a time of churning because I'm talking about
#
So basically, this is a period of economic renewal in India, revival, renewal, whatever
#
It's a period in which there has been quite a bit of economic activity in India, even
#
though UP has been not as much touched, but UP has done better than it had done earlier.
#
Plus also people from UP go and work all over the country.
#
So in my village, in fact, the main destination is Bombay.
#
People who go out to work, they work in Bombay mostly.
#
Lately, many of them have been going to Kerala, Bangalore also, and some come to Delhi.
#
But main destination is Bombay and Bombay has always had cash opportunities.
#
You land up there and you can make 500 rupees a day basically at the beginning itself.
#
And that's the thing Bombay even today offers.
#
So even though UP itself hasn't got its kind of economic story right, there is a long-distance
#
migration that is to be done to be able to make some money.
#
My village has always had, at least for the last 30 years, has that.
#
So this churning is economic and social and also to some extent political, you know, like
#
I see so much of these coalitions happening across because every election there are different
#
party wins in my part of that constituency.
#
And caste alignments are becoming far more flexible in some senses.
#
And I think BJP has a lot to do with because BJP has been making claims for all kinds of
#
identity because they believe that pretty much anybody who identifies as an Indian can
#
And they make claims for everybody's vote basically.
#
So they've been able to make headways into a number of communities and then others have
#
to hit back and try to claim what they think is there.
#
So political mobilization has also become very, very, very intense, I would say.
#
So whenever I go to my village now, there is some kind of, I haven't been in the last
#
two years to be very clear because of various reasons.
#
But until then, whenever you go, basically there's so much activity happening, you know,
#
like something will be happening, either BJP doing some kind of a Ramayan Katha or some
#
kind of bhajan or some social, we are socially very active and politically also very active.
#
So these things come together sometimes.
#
So one of the things about my village is that it holds the entire Ramayan, it stages the
#
Ramayan during the Dashera time.
#
So every day, somebody will play Lord Ram, somebody will play Sita Ji, somebody will
#
Somebody I used to know, Pasa recently used to play Hanuman, he was a local Palwan.
#
And it used to be a very seriously done thing, you know.
#
So those traditions have continued, but there's a little more commercialization around it.
#
So now they get sponsorships, all of that earlier used to be just Chanda, go to hand,
#
family after family, it's called Chanda.
#
So I think the association life is still very rich.
#
So there is, there are all kinds of this, I know there is a Jawahar Yuva Mandli, which
#
is basically a Nehru Ji ke naam pe, it's kept after Nehru Ji's name that it's an association
#
Most of the BJP supporters, but the mandli is still called Jawahar Yuva Mandli.
#
But then there is a Gau Raksh Samiti, but not the kind that gets the bad news, but they
#
take care of cows that are basically abandoned by others and all of that.
#
There is a market and I think because more resources have become available a little more
#
than earlier, people are able to do these things in a slightly grander scale.
#
So yeah, so there's churning, there's a little more conflict, there are more opportunities
#
There is more opening to different people of different identities, men or women of different
#
And I mean, I would say, I mean, to put a long story short is that we are modernizing,
#
you know, in our own way.
#
Yeah, and those two stories, the first two stories you told have such resonant images.
#
I mean, I can totally imagine a book called The Village of Locked Houses or the image
#
of people drinking Limca in a car with fluorescent light from inside.
#
And both those stories in one sense are stories of escape.
#
Like in the Limca case, it's like you pointed out a bunch of people that they are trapped
#
within this caste identity and so on.
#
But then they go to a city and they feel like with, you know, with what they've earned and
#
living a better life, perhaps they can transcend it, perhaps they can escape it.
#
And the other story of locked houses is again very overtly a story of escape.
#
You want to get away from the village and you spoke about how, you know, a lot of people
#
leave villages and go to cities because of the push factor.
#
It is not what is attracting them, but it is life is so nasty, brutish and short as
#
Not really nasty, brutish and short, but yeah, it's not an easy life.
#
And if you have better opportunities, you go out.
#
Yeah, so my question therefore is about how have aspirations changed?
#
Because I imagine that in an earlier generation, you know, your typical aspirations would be
#
that if life is tough in a village and you can't make it there, that you get some kind
#
of government job somewhere, either in the village or the nearby town or the city or
#
But you get a government job because the government is everything back in the day before liberalization
#
and you become part of the rent seeking apparatus and being part of the government raises your
#
social status and all of that comes into play.
#
But in these times where number one markets are much more visible, there are many more
#
different kinds of opportunities.
#
And number two, technology and the spread of the smartphone, especially post geo when
#
broadband kind of became much more widely available.
#
You know, how does that change aspirations and the way that you look at the world and
#
How does that also change the politics, because I imagine in the past from the views I have
#
and you can correct me if they are not nuanced enough.
#
But in the past, I would imagine that your village politics would really revolve around
#
One is you vote for whatever tribe you have taken.
#
And I don't literally mean tribe, but whichever side you have taken.
#
So you get some of the spoils of power are shared with you or shared by whatever identity
#
grouping you're part of that you voted for.
#
And the other is an assertion of that tribal feeling.
#
You know, a lot of voting is actually all voting is, in a sense, irrational at the individual
#
level because one vote doesn't make a difference.
#
But people still do it for a variety of complicated reasons, one of which is you're asserting
#
You're saying I'm part of this group.
#
You know, I'll go to watch a Manchester City match because that's my tribe.
#
So I'll go vote for Bhajapa or whatever, because that's my tribe.
#
And I would imagine these would in the past have been the dominant two reasons for voting.
#
And I'm wondering if aspirations regarding to that have also changed since you point
#
out that politics has become much more fluid in a sense.
#
So you know, in contrast with what we think about voter apathy, like again, I have an
#
old impression from a long while back, you probably know better, that people in urban
#
areas vote less than people in rural areas.
#
Is that true or am I getting it the other way around?
#
And because people in cities tend to be sort of more apathetic and whatever.
#
So what's your sense of all of this?
#
How have aspirations changed?
#
What does a young person in a village now want?
#
Like what would your nephews and nieces in the village, what would they want as a kind
#
What are they thinking of?
#
And then as a secondary thing, how does that play into the politics?
#
So you started the question on your government job.
#
So yeah, I think it's even now because of wage compression and similar issues, privileges,
#
government job is still a preferred kind of an entry point into the urban life or even
#
if you get in the rural area, a government job, I mean, it's pretty good because the
#
kind of wage compression that we have.
#
What do you mean wage compression?
#
So the entry wage to top wage ratio is quite compressed in there.
#
So the entry wage is quite good here.
#
If you start even as the lowest rank official in government, you get at least twice of what
#
you would make in any other comparable kind of position in privacy.
#
Though you would rise faster there, but you're getting a guaranteed income and stability.
#
But it's also a secure job, other privileges as I said.
#
So it's still there, but it's basically become like a lottery.
#
And some people who are good in studies, they aspire to good government jobs, like they
#
write UPSC exams and all.
#
Although once in a generation, once in five, six years, somebody will crack a serious PCA
#
provisional services or IES exam.
#
Others will try to get entry into CRPF and police and all, and that's a larger number,
#
I know at least quite a few people personally who've become, who at least got into CRPF
#
or BSF and all these kind of places where you have a clear entry condition and you pass
#
that and you can get in.
#
For the rest, as you said rightly, that the economy has changed significantly and we are
#
See, it's just a question of longer train rides, right?
#
Because you take overnight to get to Delhi, a little over more than overnight, get to
#
Travel for 12 more hours, you get to Bombay.
#
You travel for 12 more hours, you get to Bangalore and travel a little more.
#
And then, I mean, if you're going there for a long time and you're trying to run, it's
#
And one of the things that I think about India is that you feel like it's India wherever
#
That's something that I always felt.
#
I've been to most states of India and you feel some kind of familiarity, very strangely,
#
but the language is very different, cuisine is quite different.
#
But there is, in the unconscious, there is something about Indian.
#
Of course, you go to temple, you see some other form of the deity, but you see, you
#
can make a connection, you know, like I didn't have as much difficulty doing darshan in temples
#
in the south, you know, because I could see where the larger mythology is coming from.
#
So anyway, so the point of the matter is that the opportunities have really increased in
#
terms of not in my village as such.
#
They have increased a little, but you know how you pay, then how it's not been as bad
#
as say some states like Bihar have done, but it has also not done as well as some of the
#
states like Haryana and Tamil Nadu and all of them.
#
But so you have the opportunity to move out.
#
So there's a lot of seasonal migration, basically, to get a fine and have footing in the urban
#
So I'm now talking about large numbers.
#
So there are some who get a government job or something, some who get a better, higher
#
quality private job, like a formal job.
#
But most of them, actually, most of the people can't do that, you know, even, even if you
#
have a slightly better family, unless you have very good studies and all, it's very
#
So there are two paths.
#
Either you go and work as a entry level worker in any, you can get into a private bank, basically
#
trying to in the sales side, if you have got a little bit of education, or if you are actually
#
got no education, then you have to basically work as a manual laborer and then work, get
#
So within that, there are directions.
#
Some people have become contractors.
#
So some people who went as manual laborers, then in 10 years, they became contractors
#
who then so start sourcing laborers from, from our village.
#
Then that's, so that's one set of paths.
#
The other is a trading path.
#
So you start trading something.
#
So you start getting stuff from some other part of the country and selling here or get
#
take something from here and sell somewhere else.
#
Because markets have become a little more vibrant, there are more opportunities of that
#
So for example, in my village, there are a few shops that get, the person takes a truck,
#
travels to Punjab, buys clothes and sells here at 2x basically the price and including
#
the transaction costs of going and coming and, and still the reasonable business.
#
Somebody does the same thing with shoes, they'll go to Agra or somewhere else and get it and
#
So the opportunities are now much greater.
#
India has become basically a much smaller part of the economy.
#
That's the main, main thing that has happened.
#
So earlier as a share of the activities in village, if you're a landless laborer or something
#
and it's not just Narega, Narega has had an impact on that as well because it's pushed
#
the wages up, but there's just so many other opportunities going on at the same time because
#
the economy is growing and not just maybe not in UP, but you just see Haryana is the
#
richest large state in the country in per capita income.
#
And it's basically overnight from our, from our part of the country.
#
So you can just go there and if you go to Gurgaon, you will, you will, you will end
#
up earning at least a decent way so that, and what you send back is actually has a much
#
more purchasing power, right?
#
Even if you send back 200 rupees a day, that 200 rupees a day goes a long way in the village
#
So the, so economic aspirations have really diversified a lot.
#
So people are seeking different paths because they're also good at different things.
#
Obviously we have to keep maintaining the dynamism in the economy to be able to do that,
#
you know, to have these opportunities growing.
#
So I think these are still, I'm talking about mostly about men.
#
For women, it's still, if you're a woman born in a village, it's still, there are very few
#
paths that are available to you directly unless you get very, like I know one of my neighbor's
#
daughter, she actually got very good, she's very good at studies.
#
She got admission in Ames, you know, and did medicine there and basically settled here
#
in the national capital territory only.
#
Otherwise, basically the best thing you can aspire to be is a government school teacher.
#
Still because one of the main reasons is very poor quality education in my village.
#
So I told you about my father and how he studied in a village school and there were two good
#
teachers there who basically, you know, there's, I think Henry James or someone says teachership's
#
identity, you know, so it's like that, they basically were so virtuous and so devoted to the,
#
what you call goods internal to the practice of teaching, you know, they just enjoyed teaching
#
so much that they just changed lives, you know, and now it's just gone.
#
And that just shapes the paths of so many kids in my village.
#
So the small number that I'm talking about who are able to get good jobs and all, could
#
If you are just one good teacher, you know, or one good school with two, three good teachers
#
who just did their basic duties, you know, and then there's so much hunger in this, in
#
my part of the, I mean, my village on young kids, whenever I go and try to talk to them
#
or what they plan, they just want to get ahead, you know, they're young, they're full of dreams,
#
but I feel that many of them will basically settle down at something which is much below
#
So when my father retired, he started this practice of basically going and doing counseling
#
for kids in his village schools.
#
So he used to just take, he had a driver in a car, just go and give a talk to all the
#
students in a school orientation talk, then give each of them a psychometric test of their
#
These are the ninth or 10th standard kids.
#
So they have some, some understanding of, you know, some aptitude has formed in some
#
senses clear, what are the good direction for them to take and then give them some guidance.
#
He developed these tools with some psychology professors in Gorakhpur University only, who
#
also seemed keen to at least contribute to their community in some ways.
#
And he did, there was thousands of kids, you know, to just give them some kind of guidance
#
about what would be good for them, what would be a suitable path for them.
#
And he used to tell me the hunger with which he was, you know, received, because nobody
#
You know, nobody would say, see internet is full of a lot of information, but guidance
#
is not information, guidance is somebody's to take interest in you, you know, somebody
#
has to care about you, somebody has to follow you up and somebody has to push you when you're
#
feeling down, you know, and that's just missing from our, I mean, at least in my village,
#
the private schools that we have and the, and the government school.
#
And I'm sorry to say one of the private school is run by my family also where the teachers
#
simply are not, they're just going through the motions, you know, and whenever we try
#
to say, okay, can you do with the, but the whole economy is set up in such a way that
#
you get teachers who play a little, you can't pay as much, you know, in a private school
#
as the government schools get paid and they do it only as a part-time thing.
#
And you lucky once in a while, you find a good teacher, but then they leave and go elsewhere
#
in the government school.
#
They get paid a very good entry salary for a young teacher in government school is several
#
times of the per capita income of their village, but they don't teach.
#
And that's a big problem, I think, because for the private or government, nobody teaches
#
basically, you know, people send under the illusion that private schools are doing better,
#
but they have better, you know, looks, so to speak, in terms of, you know, teachers
#
come, come on time and leave on time, but whether you're learning, I really doubt it.
#
So that's what become a very big impediment to the opportunities are there.
#
And if you had a little bit better thing going for you, more guidance, not even so much skill,
#
you know, like if you look at like low end manufacturing, decent salaries, one of my
#
neighbors, I mean, a few, not neighbor, like 50 meters away from us, he got a job in escort
#
young man, and his whole family got lifted out of difficulty because he, and then he
#
got his brother also there, then his nephew also got, you know, three people with a formal
#
sector job, their entry level only, but they got skilled in the, in the job, because see
#
at entry level jobs in manufacturing, you don't need to be a very well educated person.
#
Apprenticeship works very well.
#
Only thing is some basic education and some guidance, where to go and where to look that
#
even that is sometimes missing.
#
This is kind of a big information asymmetry, there are transaction costs that come in the
#
way and there is a, I think if a little more of that would be there, then these aspirations
#
will be fulfilled in a more, in a better way, but markets are working.
#
So more or less we'll have better situation than if we had earlier, but public systems
#
and even the private systems on education and all are failing and it's, it's a great
#
strategy I see, because I've grown up with these guys, like who were my eyes to play
#
Now I'm in my late thirties.
#
They are also late thirties and they have nothing, you know, like a childhood friend
#
of mine, he drives a taxi in the village from one place to another and then plies and it's
#
It's a very tough life.
#
It's also not a life of great dignity because people don't treat you very well.
#
So it's a, and I mean, I wouldn't say, I don't know what he would have done, who knows,
#
but I mean, if just a different setting, he would have done completely different, his
#
life would have been very different.
#
So overall Indian economy is a low middle income, low middle income economy.
#
So it's not like we're a rich country.
#
So, and within that, I think these failures of systems in our part of the world may fit
#
Now on the politics, I mean, which is all intertwined in this because it's like democracy
#
is working its way through India and it's been working its way through India 77, 75
#
There is more or less now a sense of, you know, that even in my lifetime, you know,
#
I've, I was born about halfway into the democracy's life and I've seen like, there is much more
#
of a sense of equality, people, the way people assert themselves and talk, talk, you know,
#
there was a much more subservient sense.
#
If you're poorer, then you would assume that you are inferior, you know, in that sense,
#
forget about whether I, a person of upper caste will say that you are inferior.
#
There was a subjective sense that your place in society is such and such.
#
And that I think is so significantly changed in just last 25 years itself that I've seen
#
because this whole, that local myth has broken, right?
#
Like there's now boundaries are broken, urbanization, capitalism, all of that has come in and there's,
#
it's just much more of a, when people talk, they'll say, okay, we're talking with peers,
#
you know, and there is some degree of at least democratic equality is there and everybody's,
#
people vote very enthusiastically in my village, you know, like 70% types of turnouts.
#
And in fact, India generally does very well for its level of development in terms of voter
#
It's a pretty, and it's improving in fact, last few years, so much for the death of democracy,
#
but people are voting and they're participating and that's the process through which any change
#
It's not, you may not like what they vote for, but you have to still, I mean, engage
#
That's the, that's the right mechanism that we've built as a people.
#
So, and that is what you see, as I said earlier, there is much more mobilization and when politicians
#
come, there is the rallies are raucous, you know, like there is so much discussion and
#
so much conversation, so much questioning and you know, it's a, it's a very interesting
#
And in fact, India scores very highly, even if you look at the data and all of it, it's
#
very highly on citizen participation and in these kinds of forums.
#
So people will go like, there is a power station near my village, substation through which
#
other villages get power.
#
Whenever there's a power cut, if it's too long, people will go into dharma, dharma there.
#
Once they try to actually break it down also, it's a self-defeating kind of, that was many
#
years ago, but they will resist, they will try to fight, they'll try to, you know, voice
#
So it's, I mean, if you're sitting in your room and you're assuming that Indian citizens
#
are apathetic and they're not worried about the common good or association life of democracy,
#
It's simply not true, at least in my part of the world, in many ways, I've lived in
#
many cities, I've lived, traveled the length and breadth of this country.
#
I think it's a very, you know, we are, we are now understand that we are a democracy
#
and we, citizens more or less to various degree, each individual has a different view, think
#
that we have a say, our voice is there and we can exercise it, it may not always work.
#
The state is very impervious and a little opaque and often also very quite low capacity.
#
So many things will not get done.
#
But you go to a government office, it's full of people trying to petition for something
#
or the other, you know, it's full, people are approaching, they have trust in institutions,
#
they want institutions to work better.
#
So participation in electoral democracy is one thing, sense of democracy as equality
#
of people is one thing and then assertion with the state and demanding the state to
#
do more is also, I mean, one thing.
#
And I think in all these three, there is compared to say 30 years ago or 25 years ago, I would
#
say 25 years ago because that's when I became a teenager.
#
So I have a sense of what was going on a little bit before that I was a very young kid.
#
So it's, there's a directionality is I think, I mean, much more of a spread of democracy,
#
And I'm talking about Eastern UP, you know, which is actually a pretty underdeveloped
#
part of the country economically, socially very conservative.
#
But look at the politics is so much earning.
#
You can't take your seat for granted, you know, you can't take it, nobody can take
#
You may whatever cast you have to still come and ask for my vote and I can vote you out.
#
And every election some other person wins, some other party wins, you have to still make
#
that demand and then hopefully you will be honored with my vote or you will not be.
#
So before I ask my next big question, a small question, quick question.
#
When you meet your old friend who now drives a taxi and your childhood friend, what do
#
We talk about whatever is he has a kid, so I talk about his kid, his family or we talk
#
I mean, it has nothing to do with anything else, like, I mean, he has, I mean, we are
#
friends, there's nothing else to.
#
So he lives in the, so he's from a poor Brahmin family, they don't have any land.
#
So his elder brother did migrate and earned some, but he never settled down in the city
#
because he never made it big, he didn't get any skills.
#
So he goes and comes back, goes and comes back.
#
So his elder brother's family also lives in the village and his family and he live in
#
the village and they have a small house near our, where I used to go and he used to, used
#
It's basically like 20 steps or something from my house.
#
And so when we talk, we talk about what's going on in the village.
#
He asked me about my life in the city and, you know, let's we go to our, to the farm
#
and we walk around, I mean, see, there's no grand theme in the conversation, right?
#
It's just a, you know, like.
#
Do you sense a sadness or a bitterness or a regret on his part that?
#
Yeah, so I think, so he, let me be very clear, he wasn't very good at studies.
#
So his expectations of himself was very modest.
#
He got into bad company at a young age or whatever, but even then he would have, at
#
least he got a job in a factory, you know, he did, he did high school and all of that.
#
That didn't happen, you know, and, and after you miss the bus, you miss the bus, you know,
#
And I also didn't have the way to, you know, get help him at that time.
#
We were roughly the same age, he's slightly elder.
#
So then he took this path.
#
He started driving, he was driving, I mean, the big auto that you have there, you know,
#
which can have 25 people inside it, then he started driving a taxi.
#
He's planning to drive, buy a car and basically drive his own car.
#
There is some sense of what you call, see, the good thing about the village life is that
#
your basic consumption is not to be worried about, you know, if you're living in the
#
village and you have a little bit of cash, you'll be okay.
#
You don't have to pay rent, you know, you don't have to say, so there is that.
#
So it's like the city, city poor can be very, very harsh life, you know, very harsh.
#
Like you can, why did people just walk back to their villages, you know, because this
#
whole city ecosystem is very cash intensive.
#
Everything is paid for.
#
You have to pay for the rent, you have to pay for the power, you have to pay for water,
#
everything you have to pay for.
#
And if your cash flow stops one day, you're done.
#
You can't stay here for one minute.
#
And anybody who knows India knows this, the reality of India.
#
So people just literally walk back, there's no train, there's no bus, I'll just walk
#
back to home because there was urban poverty, rural poverty and he's not, I mean, very
#
He has some income, his brother also earns a little in the city and sends a little bit
#
of money back to his family.
#
So he has got some sense of, I mean, stability in that.
#
But yeah, there is always once in a while that conversation about the counterfactual
#
that what if he had got a job in a factory, he did try, he went to Kerala once, but he
#
couldn't make it there.
#
He tried to go to Gulf once, but that didn't work out.
#
He got the money back eventually, but so these things they've tried, I mean, everybody tries
#
these things in my part of the, sometimes it works, sometimes they don't, it doesn't.
#
But if you look at overall, the number of people who have been able to be mobile economically
#
compared to say 30 years ago, it's not even close.
#
Earlier it was just a few people who could get good education.
#
Some who could just deal with the hardship of, I mean, the limited opportunities that
#
were there, basically in Bombay and a couple of other places.
#
Now it's just spread out.
#
There are some people who go to Gujarat also now and earlier that wasn't at all a migration
#
Like Odisha to Gujarat pipe is very well known, South Gujarat, South Ayasthan to Gujarat is
#
So there are these like, but now it's very spread out and people are trying to find opportunities
#
It's a very hard life because you have to live away from the family.
#
That's a very tough thing because you can't, there's no, when you're seasonal migration,
#
you can't really take your family to eat up all your resources.
#
So it's a very tough life, but once you make it there, then you settle down and then you
#
Then it's interesting how language evolves.
#
Like people call people from UP who come to Bombay, they typically call bhaiyas, right?
#
So once we had a domestic help at home and we asked her where she's from and she said
#
maitu bhaiyan ho, which was an interesting evolution of the language.
#
So the next big question that I want to drill down on is what you mentioned earlier, where
#
you spoke about teachers, that your father was lucky that he had good teachers and how
#
most teachers are going through the motions and all of that.
#
And what you meant by good teachers, I'm guessing, was not someone who is teaching the syllabus
#
well, you know, ki geography achche se para diya, ya math achche se para diya.
#
There's something else you meant by teacher that, you know, you spoke about the virtues
#
of it, that aspect of it, of how a good teacher can lift you.
#
So a good teacher in that sense is not just teaching you what's in the syllabus.
#
In a sense, he's within the system, but he's also standing outside the system.
#
He's in a sense, helping shape your character, showing you something that you may not otherwise
#
So can you elaborate on this for me, both in the microcosmic context of that particular
#
village and, you know, what your father may have picked up from those teachers or what
#
you may have picked up later from teachers who inspired you.
#
And can you, and that's a microcosmic context, but also a broader context that everybody
#
needs teachers in their lives, right?
#
And most of us, if we are fortunate, we'll probably find, we might find teachers who
#
are actually in that official position of authority in a school or a college, or we
#
might find teachers elsewhere in life, mentors or people who teach us things and all of that.
#
So elaborate a little bit on both these microcosmic and macrocosmic aspects and in the macrocosmic
#
aspect, perhaps even, you know, a sense of that, do you sometimes feel that you have
#
a responsibility also to pay it back, not in a formal sense, but in the sense of if
#
you have something to teach, if you can touch somebody's life in some way that lifts him
#
a little bit, that you should do that.
#
So take me through all of this, a big question, I know.
#
Yeah, it is a big question.
#
It's about life itself.
#
So I think, so there was a teacher in my father's school before he went to school.
#
This is a story that he heard who used to insist when it came to the 10th standard,
#
that the bottom third of the class in the ninth standard, he will teach.
#
And then he used to produce good results from them in 10th.
#
He said, this is my duty that I will take the worst performing third on the ninth standard
#
or fourth or third, whatever, but basically the people were doing very badly.
#
And then he would make it his life's mission to spend a year with them and basically prove
#
that, you know, there's nothing wrong with the kids is basically, you know, you as a
#
teacher can do a lot, even if there's something wrong, there's a long big dent that a teacher
#
can make, you know, a good teacher, it should be all consuming, right?
#
It's a, it's a very intensive process, not just going through the class.
#
Lots of kids require special attention.
#
You have to spend a lot of time after the class and to keep track of this.
#
So one story that a friend of mine, who's a very senior civil servant in the government
#
now, he told me is that when he was in school, he was in 11th standard or entered just 12th
#
His teacher called him home.
#
And she gave him a piece of paper in which the list of top hundred of CBSC in CBSC exam,
#
the students was given and he said, this is the list of people who came in the top hundred
#
You need to be on it next year.
#
What do I need to do to make sure that happens?
#
You know, and, and he did, he came in top 20 in the country.
#
So he went to St Stephen's and all of that.
#
And I mean, but he's, yeah, he's a great guy.
#
So now do two different categories.
#
One is this guy who says, okay, I'm going to raise a large number of kids who are not
#
doing well to a level of standard in which they're able to get through the 10th, you
#
know, and then they will find a path hopefully forward.
#
And then there is the other where you pointed a few kids who just need a little bit, you
#
know, special attention to go that extra mile and basically get to a completely different
#
So teaching involves both of these things.
#
I have not really done teaching in my life, but I have been on the other side of the receipt
#
You need to be in a larger setting in which education is happening and whatever, or learning
#
is considered to be a good, to be an important thing.
#
And it's, it's being pursued.
#
And sometimes in life, you need somebody to give you that extra push, you know, where
#
you're lost and you, you don't know where you're headed.
#
You need guidance, you need mentorship, and more than that, you just need emotional support,
#
you know, that, yes, I have faith in you, you don't have faith in me, you know.
#
And that actually, you know, it's kind of a preference that is there inside the person,
#
you know, who's the teacher.
#
And I'm not one of those believers.
#
I have a lot of long standing debates with friends about incentives and all shaping it.
#
These are virtues that actually people basically the combination of factors, perhaps something
#
to do with their childhood, how they socialize, how they saw, they got into this profession
#
and how they saw it as a meaning of their life, you know, in that sense, how they saw.
#
So we can talk about the philosophical framing of it, like the way Alexander McIntyre and
#
all of these guys have done about how to think about virtues.
#
But it's something which is, which happens, I mean, I would say upstream of the markets
#
in some senses, you know, it happens.
#
And then these are the preferences within the market can take and do whatever it wants
#
to do with it, it can reward them or punish them as well in certain circumstances.
#
Like there are situations in markets punish bad behavior because a good doctor may take
#
a long time to treat a patient and the markets may, I mean, the way the hospital corporates
#
are set up, they may want to do it in a quick way so that you have a lot of people are being
#
So and then there is a conflict between virtues and the working of the market in that particular
#
The markets also have working segmented, you may find a good segment in which you are actually
#
the best placed because that segment rewards this kind of a performance with respect to
#
your patients, patient.
#
So I think what you need, especially in a country like India, where you have still a
#
long way to go, we are quite poor, you know, we are a lower middle income country, is that
#
you need to basically have lots of teachers who are, who have at least raised the basic
#
standard up, you know, like do the basic thing that teach the kids on a regular basis, get
#
them to a minimum standard and then they'll find and then you will have a few who just
#
go above and beyond and they say that I'm going to give my life to it in some senses.
#
And for that you need, I mean, I don't know how that is done, you know, because I've seen,
#
I've been lucky to have some mentors in my life, like maybe it'll make them uncomfortable
#
if I name them here, but there are people who have touched my life in very important,
#
where my father was one, my mother, my uncle, I said.
#
Can you elaborate a bit on each of those actually, I'm very interested in the ways that they
#
So my father was a heroic figure, right?
#
He came from a, he had a hero's journey from the village to a city and he settled down
#
He, he got an education, he got a decent stable job in his 40s, it is his PhD, again from
#
BHU and then after the retirement, he goes out and helps kids who are really hungry for
#
guidance and support and all of that.
#
My, some of them may not be very comfortable if I talk about them in public, my uncle,
#
I told you how much my uncle and aunt both, how they took control of their family, took
#
charge and how basically they saved the family from utter ruin, utter ruin, you know, it
#
would have been a complete ruin if they hadn't performed their duties at that time.
#
And in fact, it was a very difficult time generally for the, for our village.
#
There was one year in which there was a major drought, for two consecutive, there was a
#
We had to walk for 50 kilometers to be able to get some help from a distant family, you
#
Walk means they took a bullock cart and all.
#
It's part of our family lore and I mean, he's the kind of person, so I remember I went
#
to a village once and I had a Spanish Ark beard, you know, and he saw it and said, this
#
I immediately removed it, you know, there was a question that I'm going to debate with
#
him, it's my right or whatever, he didn't like a Spanish Ark beard, he said, this won't,
#
this is not looking good.
#
What's a French beard, what's a Spanish Ark beard?
#
There's a basically like a small arc that you make below your chin.
#
So I was a teenager and I said, okay, let me try a different look.
#
And I landed on a village and he said, this is not looking good on you.
#
This is not going to do.
#
I just removed it because a lot of fear just loved him, you know, that I had a sense that
#
I come from these people, you know, and whatever I am is because of these people and my father
#
and my mother, my uncle and my aunt and, and I have a written history of eight generations
#
back and I know the stories and how much it takes to keep a family together, to have,
#
to stabilize in this world, especially in a poor country, you know, we were poor at
#
that time, now we're a low middle income country and it's hard, especially in that Eastern
#
So there is a sense of my mother's side, for example, my Nanaji was like that.
#
He also came from a village and he became a teacher.
#
He was a college teacher in Agra and he came from Eastern UP again, from Azamgarh.
#
And he was again a very, very amazing person, you know, he did his PhD and all of that.
#
He wrote a book, which is still going on in Hindi book on research methods, which is still
#
in circulation as in thought.
#
I have a copy of that book, very nicely written book, Anusandhan Parichay, Anusandhan Parichay.
#
So it's an introduction to research methods.
#
So and he came from a, he used to teach in a village school and then he got into college
#
and then he did his PhD and became a professor and all of that.
#
Very happy man, you know, one of the happiest person that I've ever met, always smiling,
#
always laughing, always joking, always trying to make everybody very, very happy.
#
He passed away many years ago, but I was like, he passed away 15 years ago.
#
So I was not that young, I was still 20s.
#
So he, he was also like that and many of the stories of people who actually make these
#
difficult journeys, you know, and are like, and each family has this, you know, like these
#
are the great heroes, you know, and, and they are, they live private lives and their heroism
#
is basically limited to the, to serving the immediate good, which is the good of the family
#
and the friends and the communities, you know.
#
He started a school back in his village, which ran for many years.
#
I don't know that it's still running.
#
In fact, that part of my family, my mother's side has left the village.
#
So the village home is literally logged now because everybody moved to the city.
#
So another one logged home.
#
So he was there and as, when I was in school, I had a few teachers who really helped me
#
I, when I started working, I mean, I had last 11, 12 years, I've had a number of mentors,
#
not a number, a few really good mentors who I look up to, they're very virtuous people,
#
especially one person, I will not name him, you know him, he's an economist.
#
I don't want to embarrass him, but I really look up to him as someone, a very decent human
#
being, you know, and very good person to learn from, not just economics, but also what life
#
and things in general and consistently good person, I've known him for not 12 years and
#
I've never had a feeling about him that there is something, what you see is what you get
#
He's a very, very, very interesting guy, a very good thing to have in a mentor.
#
So yeah, I think it's a very, so this is how societies improve, I think, like one person
#
at another time and you go through an internal process.
#
In some ways I've improved as a person over the last 10 years and it's, and I'm trying
#
to get better, you know, and it's a, it's a, it's a journey that you go through internally
#
and you, others can help you, you know, and there is, and there's a very important role
#
that others can play in that sense.
#
We are not completely isolated human beings, we are very open to influence, but not lecturing
#
in subtle ways, you know, like Jung has this insight on how, if you want to change somebody,
#
then you know that Gandhi also has the same insight that you want to be the changes you
#
I think it's a misquote, he didn't say that, but it's often attributed to him is that,
#
you know, you have to be the change, you have to see the world.
#
Similarly, Jung has a very interesting portion in one of his last books, Undiscovered Self,
#
where he writes about how in the some tribes that he was observing in the Pacific Islands,
#
it was this, there was a term, I forget this term, it was called, It'll Come to Me.
#
It was basically a quality of a person that you just watch him and observe him and try
#
to, you know, don't copy his bannerisms, just try to, you know, take his character in some
#
ways, you know, in some senses, it's almost like a mystical participation in that person's
#
personality and you're trying to, and that's the way to, you know, lecturing and hectoring
#
is not the way any human being changes, it puts us in a defensive mode.
#
It's much more of a, we learn and get better by observing others who are better than us.
#
One of my favorite examples on this is Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a great, great author,
#
and I love his work and he was one of the great thinkers on human nature and very, very
#
humane kind of a writer.
#
And there's a book called The Life of Mary Anne, oh, this very young girl who was stricken
#
by cancer and she passed away at a very young age.
#
And there was a convent in which she was being taken care of.
#
And the convent basically took care of only cancer stricken or very badly sick kids.
#
And this young girl was very, very, what you call, was considered to be a bundle of joy
#
and very wiser than her age, basically nine or eight or nine years of age, very wise and
#
made everybody very happy.
#
And of course she passed away later.
#
So then the nuns from that convent came to Flannery O'Connor, who's also a great southern
#
writer in America, a really great writer.
#
I love her work and said, why don't you write her life?
#
So Flannery said, I am in no position to write any life of a person I didn't know, but she
#
sounded like a perfect, a great, great person and you should write it.
#
The nuns should write it.
#
And I'm happy to write a foreword to it.
#
So in the foreword, she writes actually very interestingly, it's a very interesting life
#
to read about, but foreword is also more interesting, is how Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a very
#
humane person who wrote a number of very interesting stories about human life and dignity of human
#
life and the beauty of imperfection and I mean, basically the antithesis to the Aldous
#
Huxley's, you know, utopia of trying to make best human being by taking chemicals and by
#
doing genetic engineering and all that, taking human life as it is.
#
And his daughter started this convent.
#
And in a way, she draws a line between one of his stories, Hawthorne's stories and the
#
life path that his daughter took when she started the convent to take care of young
#
stricken children who were terminally ill and then how this little kid who got a good
#
life, even though short life, a good life in a convent because of that.
#
So I think that is the main thing I've learned more recently in life, I wish I'd learned
#
it earlier, is that, you know, the big ideas and the abstract thinking and discussions
#
and great grand ideologies are one thing and maybe in some context they're useful.
#
But the most important thing is to nurture these ways of improving things, whether it's
#
in professions, different professions in which good virtuous professionals can create role
#
models for others and help others and aid others, whether it's within families, you
#
know, how to be a good father and how to be a good mother.
#
None of this is easy, not easy to be a good professional, not easy to be a good parent,
#
not easy to be a good professional, a good worker, a good politician or anything like
#
All of that is challenging because there are so many necessities, quote unquote, and demands.
#
But I think that is the main thing that needs to sustain, that is the hidden thing which
#
you don't see in the, because it's kind of a quality which is not easily captured.
#
But that's a hidden thing that makes a civilization country great and other things can flow from
#
there, other utilities can flow from there.
#
But this kind of a continuity of good, you know, that, and that's where I think that's
#
the way I draw the arc between teaching and life and all of that.
#
Does that answer your question or?
#
Yeah, you know, a lot of my guests say this to me, does that answer your question, thereby
#
kind of missing the point in the sense that the answer to the question is not the point,
#
but the thoughts it can spark are the point.
#
So I certainly found it very illuminating and it, I think did its job of giving me more
#
The first of which is this, how important to you is the rootedness which you feel?
#
Like you mentioned that, you know, the genealogy of your family going back a long way, that
#
you feel rooted in that village, you know, your friends are still there, your family
#
still there, all of that, and you carry that with you.
#
And I'm guessing part of that rootedness is not just a memory of people or a sense of
#
place, but also this bedrock of values that, you know, you carry with you.
#
And I see myself in a sense in contrast to that, that I don't really feel that rooted.
#
It's, it's something that I bemoan that I do feel, you know, deracinated and I, I mean,
#
I see, I embrace the positive aspects of what comes out of that.
#
The fact that I feel like a citizen of the world, I take ideas from everywhere.
#
My influences are from everywhere, but I also see the loss that there is.
#
And maybe you and I are sitting here and you are an extremely rooted person and I'm not.
#
And maybe it's a good time for you to sort of talk about what you feel your rootedness
#
brought you in terms of the way you think and the way you see the world and how it would
#
be different from somebody like me.
#
Like what is perhaps then lacking in my vision?
#
Like one of the themes that I've looked at in past episodes also is that many of our
#
English speaking elites, like myself, grew up in this small urban bubble where we looked
#
at the country the wrong way.
#
We didn't really know this country, right?
#
And one way of reacting to understanding the country when we do see, see it a little better
#
is to perhaps swing to a negative extreme.
#
Like I might sometimes have done and say, oh, we are so bigoted.
#
We are so this, we are so that, right?
#
Which also might be an overreaction to whatever.
#
But you know, just, so just going back to that sense of what does rootedness bring you
#
and what do you think the absence of that rootedness does to somebody?
#
As I said, that my family lives across many centuries at the same time.
#
So there is of course some rootedness that I feel and I, it's just a, I know where I
#
come from, more or less.
#
My family has been in that one spot for 400 years.
#
Same house, same place.
#
This house has been 400 years has been built and rebuilt many times.
#
We have a written record of eight, eight generations.
#
We have some sense of who we are, but it only goes some way, you know, it's a, it's just
#
a sense of gratitude that, okay, there are people who started the family, who kept it
#
together, who continued the kind of values that went into our family, who had different
#
difficult junctures, kept things together when they could have fallen apart.
#
They kept the center, the center held, so to speak.
#
But if you look at me, I actually, a lot of what I've learned is not just, I mean, that's
#
I would say that's the bedrock.
#
And then you go and it's great, right, to be in the modern world, you can read and think
#
and talk about, talk to anyone.
#
You can learn from many, many sources.
#
See, one word that all we, I always grew up hearing is dharma, dharma, dharma.
#
It's like, okay, what's the dharma, it's difficult to define, but you know, it's a, it's a basically
#
a way of thinking about what is the right thing to do, you know, and what would work
#
And then you need to learn, you know, it's not, there's no substitute for practical judgment
#
and practical judgment requires learning from many, many sources.
#
And for that, you need to be able to open and, I mean, you know, it's not like I figured
#
I'm still struggling and learning and trying to get better at what I do, whatever I do.
#
And that, for that, the sources are many, right?
#
But I got basic set of, you know, starting because of my, what my father did, my uncle
#
did and others may have done.
#
And that's my past and that's my history and I'm very cognizant of that.
#
Not a day goes by before I feel gratitude for what they've done for me in some sense,
#
in some senses, because, but because of the way I am and my family, nobody was talking
#
I'm sitting here and talking about it on a podcast, but I've never ever said this to
#
anyone, family, because that's not the way we are, you know, we're not over the top over
#
I never hugged my uncle and said, thank you so much for what you did for me.
#
But you shaved your funky Spanish beard.
#
Yeah, those are small, small ways in which one makes it clear that what matters and what
#
So it was not my right to keep a beard was certainly not at the top of my mind when he
#
asked and it wasn't much of a demand, you know, I remember when I got married within
#
a year, my wife had to, Shamvi had to go to do higher studies in the US.
#
And my uncle was one of the first ones to support it, you know, he's a 75 year old man
#
living in a village and within a year of a marriage, I mean, so-called daughter-in-law
#
of the family is going abroad for a few years to study and he was the first to support it,
#
you know, because and he's the guy who for 30 years ago, I remember had very, very conservative
#
views on not just for a job or even on education only teaching job is good, all of that is
#
And so, I mean, there are people who earn respect, you know, in some senses because
#
they act according to situations, they learn, they change and they do what's good in many
#
So I'm very grateful for all that, that, I mean, a certain kind of, in fact, I wish I
#
was able to make more of what I got from them, you know.
#
It is my own failing that I'm not a better person or a more virtuous person, I'm not
#
done more contribute in many ways, you know, it is my own failing and I could do more.
#
And to be able to do more, one has to actually expand, you know, it has to venture out and
#
understand how things work, learn and you know, it's a, but it's the love that one
#
Like one of my favorite courses from Chesterton that he wrote somewhere that Romans didn't
#
love Rome because Rome was great.
#
Rome was great because Romans loved Rome, you know.
#
So and that's the foundation, I mean, one loves one family, one village, one's community,
#
one country, even if they have done you some harm, you know, and they may have like, we
#
have been betrayed so many times as a family by others in my village, there's been violence,
#
there are a number of court cases going on.
#
I mean, in fact, one member of the family is always fighting court cases, designated
#
that this person will go and appear in the court.
#
So much conflict, violence, all of that has happened.
#
But we still, this is our village, this is our family, we love each other.
#
And there is a tension and conflict with that, all that happens.
#
So then the question comes how to make Rome great.
#
And for that you need to be, you know, the past is not a great guide, it's just a little
#
bit you get from their sense of rootedness.
#
And they're actually, in some ways, people like you have more advantages because you
#
are much more seeing and learning and I learned a lot from you and others, like my friends
#
I'm not an economist, but I learn a lot from economists, political scientists, I learn
#
a lot from different people and say, because my work is in political economy.
#
So I try to learn as much as I can to be able to say how we can, how the Indian economy
#
can grow better, how can we do better?
#
Similarly, I work a little bit on professions.
#
So I learned, in fact, my main thinking on professions and be shaped by Alastair McIntyre,
#
who's completely rooted in the Western tradition of philosophy, Aristotelian and Thomist and
#
you know, that tradition.
#
But one can actually learn from many, many places, because dharma is universal, you know,
#
and there is a, I mean, it is not something which is a monopoly of a particular people.
#
In fact, that's, that would be the completely wrong way of thinking about it.
#
It's, it's about what you, how you think about the world and what you do.
#
And there actually you see a lot of dharma all over the world in many ways and one has
#
to be able to learn and see what is, what would work, what would be the practically
#
the right thing to do, and morally also the right thing to do at the same time.
#
That's the combination that you need to be able to do.
#
And for that, being open, being, learning from the world, understanding things from
#
different perspectives, you know, the, because you don't see from your perspective is the
#
only one side of the mountain and there are other sides of the mountain.
#
So you need to talk to others, learn, you know, you to wake up with the moderns, spend
#
the day with the medievals, you just ride with the ancients, you know, and have a sense
#
of all encompassing perspective to form a worldview and then contribute.
#
That's in the world of think tanks and intellectualism as where I am.
#
Right, suppose you're working in a bank, you can still feel rooted with your family,
#
but you still have to be a good banker, right?
#
You need to figure out how to do banking well, how to be a good banker.
#
If you are a teacher, you have to do that.
#
Whether you're a, if you're a civil servant, you still have to figure it out.
#
But the love for this land or this, this people, we as a people and our whole long history
#
of common suffering and struggles and the way we have come is the root on which all
#
Basically, that's the way I look at it.
#
That root is not the future, but that is where we come from.
#
So I want to now move to the question of virtue and there are many angles to it, but I'm going
#
to start with the personal angle in the sense that, you know, one question that I ask myself
#
a lot is how should we live our lives, right?
#
How do we live our lives?
#
How do we think about what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to do?
#
And I think how we come upon it early in life is there's a conventional way of thinking.
#
This is good, that is bad, and we kind of go by that.
#
And of course, you know, we are hardwired in certain ways with different sort of codes,
#
which often conflict with each other.
#
There's a great book by Robert Wright called the Moral Animal, which kind of talks about
#
some of this and that's one sort of way of looking at it.
#
But you know, those are knobs that nature gives you and nurture turns them and nurture
#
turns them in different ways where you pick up values from your immediate surroundings.
#
You know, religion is one codification of it, but that's also diffuse and contextual.
#
But then there comes a time where you actually start thinking about it, where you go beyond
#
your broad moral instincts, as it were, and you start thinking about, you know, what is
#
a good way to live one's life and why is it a good way to live one's life and start thinking
#
So what's sort of your journey been towards?
#
And I ask you this question, I won't ask many others this question, but I ask you this question
#
because I know you've thought about this deeply, read about it deeply, done that self-reflection.
#
And it's something I struggle with in the sense that struggle with in the sense that
#
it's an ongoing journey, obviously, for everyone.
#
But so I'd be very interested in knowing what was your intellectual journey towards,
#
you know, figuring out what one should do.
#
Like we've been using the term dharma and, you know, we can talk about it in the context
#
of professions after this.
#
But first I kind of want to focus on the personal, that when it comes to your dharma as a person
#
or perhaps broken into roles, your dharma towards your family or dharma towards your
#
wife and kids and so on, you know, how have you thought about it?
#
What are the books that have shaped your thinking on this?
#
And what are the lessons that you feel you've learned in time?
#
Yeah, so I don't think this is an intellectual kind of exercise.
#
One reads about these things, but I think it's much more of an experiential thing.
#
And one has to engage with one's situations and try to do the best one can.
#
And sometimes one can get it wrong, sometimes one can get it right.
#
And later you realize whether you got it wrong or right.
#
But yeah, I think reading and thinking about these things helps, talking about these things
#
So the way I see human life is basically there are different phases in which look backwards
#
and you see what, what, what is going on.
#
It's not when you're living in it.
#
So basically when you get into this world, initially you're a family person, like in
#
many ways, your behavior is shaped by a family in significant ways and your friends and
#
a circle in which you find yourself, your teachers and all of that.
#
Then you have to make a place for yourself in this world.
#
So you enter into the educational and professional realm and you start working on start business
#
or whatever it is that you want to do, get into politics.
#
At that time, you're playing a game, right?
#
Because the, what is the game that there is some situation that you find yourself and
#
you want to get ahead, right?
#
And that's the game you played basically, at least in the middle age, you know, and
#
within that game, if you're not playing a game, then it's a completely different world.
#
But you, you, if you've just kind of, like some people do at a young age, they decide
#
that the spiritual path is for them and they basically take sanyas.
#
There is a small number who do that in India, even now.
#
Other traditions also, there is a very small number that used to do that.
#
But otherwise you're in a game, you are basically, if you're in politics, you want to get ahead
#
If you're in a corporate setting, you want to get ahead in politics.
#
And then in certain qualities of your life get accentuated and other qualities get suppressed
#
You know, to some extent you can have this, you know, both ways a little bit, five days
#
you work and two days you do whatever, you know, weekends.
#
But more or less, I mean, that's talking about our milieu, many people don't have that
#
eventually also, there's hardly a weekend, but, but the structure is the same, that there
#
is a period in which you are basically trying to find a footing in your life and trying
#
to find a place in this world.
#
And you are playing a particular, to repeat myself, game in which you find yourself, right?
#
You entered, you did an MBA, whatever, you got into a job and then you're trying to get
#
And in that, I mean, you may have a sense of right and wrong, but in many ways you find
#
yourself in a situation in which it's very expensive and then you have to take a decision
#
and then those decisions can be hard.
#
If you're lucky, you will not have to take those decisions and you will find yourself
#
walking a path of virtue and something which keeps you and your moral sense, pride to conscience
#
is not suppressed too much and you keep walking that path and you still do well.
#
But there are situations in which you have to actually pay a price for that.
#
So the point I'm trying to make here is that it is not just about you sitting in a room
#
and deciding what is virtue and what is not.
#
It is more experiential and you are actually interacting with the real world and dealing
#
with situations and trying to say what would work and what would, so there is a kind of
#
dialectic between virtue and success and there's sometimes they go together very well and more
#
And so the point I'm trying to make is that two journeys happening at the same time.
#
One is the journey which is of you being a person in this world, trying to find a place
#
You have a family, you may not have a family, you're trying to make a career of whatever
#
kind you want to do and there is a journey because young person, you don't know what
#
the world is like, you're uncertain how much the world will accommodate you.
#
So you accommodate a lot of the world, right?
#
You try to adjust yourself to a significant extent and if you're lucky, you will continue
#
to be virtuous and get ahead and your sense of yourself, your own righteousness and what
#
is required to be done will not be unmatched much.
#
But often there are compromises.
#
Then you get to something like a middle age, where at that point you need to actually because
#
you've at least in our setting not universally true, but in many, we will find some kind
#
Like after 15, 16, 20 years of working, you'll find some kind of footing, you've got some
#
sense of who you are and all that.
#
At that time, it's important to say what did you suppress?
#
What all that you actually compromise, what got hidden inside you?
#
And then you need to deal with that.
#
And then there is another rediscovery at that time and that's where I think the most important
#
obligation comes in that you actually start living your life at that stage.
#
That is your life, that you have a better sense of who you are and you have an obligation
#
to have a better sense of who you are because in some ways you've done that bulk of the
#
Maya part, that you've played those games and you've done whatever to the extent keeping
#
And then the real moral obligations start that now you need to have a very clear sense
#
of who you are and what is the right thing to do and all of that.
#
So when you're younger, the obligation is not so much on you.
#
It's about people around you much more.
#
So when I, so again, I always think in a social sense, it's not myself as an individual, I
#
think in an isolated way.
#
So when I was 22 years old, if I got something wrong, it is the elder near me who should
#
have known better to tell me or guide me or whatever.
#
Or I'll just say I was unlucky.
#
I didn't have a good, better sense of what is right or wrong.
#
As 42, I don't have that luxury.
#
But when I'm 42 years old, then one has to, those excuses go away, you know, like, or
#
will say that at 50 everybody deserves a face they have, like at 50 everybody deserves a
#
character, you know, that's the character they have actually, in a way, chosen to have.
#
So then you actually have to ask this question.
#
And I think more and more I'm thinking about it is in terms of trying to find a way in
#
which you, you're more cautiously driven by some values, you know, and that's those values
#
can be, I mean, it depends on where you are situated.
#
But broadly speaking, there has to be some sense of virtues, you know, that, okay, this,
#
this is what the right thing to do, these, these are the broad kind of markers of what
#
right and wrong are in my setting, and I'll try to follow those.
#
So example, if you are in the intellectual world, some commitment to truth is very important.
#
Some open mindedness is very important.
#
Some sense of rigor, some bit of rigor is important, depending on the purpose and the
#
timeliness within which you're working on whatever you're trying to find out some kind
#
of a social commitment in terms of that you are not just doing this for your own sake,
#
but actually there are some consequences that are going to flow.
#
All those are important, you know, in that sense, in the work life.
#
Similarly, there are obligations that you feel in the virtues towards your family, towards
#
your spouse and your children and your parents and all of that.
#
And as a situation comes, it can, I mean, you'll have to then make a decision about
#
how to, how to approach it in a way that is, that is the right thing to do.
#
But one thing to always keep in mind is that you will always fail.
#
You will always fail and it is important to try to get up and still try to do better the
#
And the only thing is that by the end of your life, you should try to be as good as one
#
If you're unlucky, you'll die young.
#
But towards the end of the life, you once should try to be, you know, there's a great
#
Catholic writer who wrote, I think it was Catholic, who wrote that, you know, the only
#
tragedy of life is if you don't die as a saint.
#
You know, so something to that effect that at the end you should, you know, all that
#
thing about playing the games of the world and trying to compromise all of that and not
#
knowing what's the right thing to do.
#
All those issues should fall apart, fall away.
#
And what should matter is what is good.
#
And it's a great tragedy if you see someone who's at an advanced stage has seen this world
#
live through many ups and downs and made a place on the world, but still haven't figured
#
out what being a saint is like, you know, and don't have that sense.
#
There's a very interesting story by Isaac Singer, Gimple the Fool.
#
It's a very interesting story about this guy who's fooled by everybody in his village,
#
you know, and everybody just takes him for granted.
#
His neighbors take advantage of him.
#
He's a baker and his wife is very promiscuous.
#
She also takes advantage of him.
#
So lots of people take advantage of him.
#
And you know, the basic thing is that it's better to be fooled than to fool others.
#
And that's the message of the story.
#
It's a very nice story.
#
It's based on some old kind of folk tale from Judaism, from those traditions.
#
And I think there is a kind of interplay between trying to find a place in this world.
#
And then we also need to create a social order or a setting in which virtues are easier to
#
practice in some senses.
#
The right thing is easier to do.
#
And I think that's very important because if you put all the onus on the individual,
#
it just becomes a very, very difficult situation.
#
So what is good is something that we discover over time and in specific situations, but
#
also to be able to do that good and to be able to behave well and to be fair to each
#
And it's very important to find a setting in which it's something which doesn't destroy
#
your life or take too much away from you, you know, and that I think is very important.
#
That's why you should think in social settings, virtues.
#
Don't know anything about profession.
#
You think about professional bodies and professions as such, not about the individual heroic professional
#
rising up and doing whatever.
#
So when you talk about, for example, these days we talk about institutions and judges
#
I think it's completely wrong to put things on individual judges and why didn't you stand
#
What did we as a polity do?
#
I mean, why don't we have more balance of power in the polity?
#
Why is a heroic judge has to stand up to a dominant power structure and say, I will stand
#
I mean, we as a polity have created a situation in which judges have to take very difficult
#
diseases and you say, it's very easy to say, right, that could destroy everything and stand
#
up to basically for a meaningless quest, because if the government really, a dominant party
#
really wants something, it's very difficult for a judge to stand up to it.
#
And you can stand up, but it won't be structures because they'll find a lot of ways to undermine
#
whatever you did that the judge writes in an order.
#
So these are, I think, corresponding themes across institutions, professions, families,
#
all of that, that there's a setting in which it's easier to exercise virtues and be a good
#
judge or a good teacher or a good doctor and all of that.
#
And then the owner still remains on the individual to figure it out and do it, and then you'll
#
always fail and you will try to do better.
#
So, I mean, I do have, I mean, situations where I behave badly and I still I'm haunted
#
by them, but that haunting I try to now process towards doing better in the future.
#
I've been spoken with somebody, fought with somebody, said something wrong, but it's
#
just a part of human life.
#
If you long, I've now lived for almost 39 years in this world.
#
So there is a certain sense of past, you know, and then there are wrongs and rights and all
#
But one thing is for sure that one keeps getting better is I think what one has to do that
#
the arch should be in that direction and hopefully one dies as a saint.
#
You mentioned you're almost 39, listen, my episodes go on for a long time.
#
So by the time this recording is over, you might actually get there.
#
You mentioned Orwell, who is of course one of like two of my intellectual heroes, Orwell
#
and Bastia, and they both both died at around 50 and they both kind of wrote their greatest
#
works just before they turned 50.
#
And I have like a year and a half to go till 50.
#
So, but I, good luck, good luck to me.
#
But and that's a great quote about, you know, how, which I hadn't heard before where you
#
quoted Orwell as saying that by the time you are 50, you should know your real face or
#
And you mentioned sainthood and Orwell's thoughts on sainthood are also interesting, where in
#
this great essay he wrote called Reflections on Gandhi, this first para is just a work of
#
genius and he wrote quote, Saint should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
#
But the tests that have to be applied to them are not of course the same in all cases.
#
In Gandhi's case, the questions one feel inclined to ask are to what extent was Gandhi moved
#
by vanity, by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man sitting on a prayer
#
mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power?
#
And to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of
#
their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud?
#
And this leads to a couple of themes which you and I have sort of discussed in the past.
#
And one of them is my sense that sometimes the quest for virtue can be driven by the
#
vanity of wanting to see yourself as a virtuous person.
#
And this entangling that can be, you know, interesting, like for example, what I see
#
on social media is that those who project the most virtue are often the least virtuous.
#
And we can both think of examples of people like this.
#
And that's therefore something that makes me question myself when I think of the right
#
Like one test I have for myself on social media these days, I have failed this test
#
in the past, but these days is that if I'm putting out a tweet, I need to ask myself
#
that am I doing it for the validation of other people so that other people think better of
#
Because that is a natural motive, but it is a little suspect.
#
Now the other aspect that it leads me to think about is the way you presented these phases
#
You almost seem to be saying that once you reach a certain age, the examined life will
#
lead to the virtuous life that you need to sit back and introspect and whatever.
#
And thinking about this, I think about your earlier reference to spending your younger
#
years playing a game, which is a great description and the term is apt, but I'm just thinking
#
that you can look at it and retrospect and know you were playing the game.
#
In the moment, 99.9% of people don't know they are playing the game.
#
And the thing is that the game is shaping who they are.
#
So after the game, there is no point in introspecting, they have changed.
#
And the morality that they had to or the ways of doing things that they had to adapt while
#
playing the game is something that would have sort of changed them so much.
#
Like I think it was you who once told me about how politics corrodes character because the
#
incentives of the political game are such that you can enter politics with the finest
#
of intentions, but all the necessary compromises that you make will eventually will shape your
#
actions and your actions will eventually change who you are.
#
And then you are a different person at the end of the process.
#
And that's exactly what Orwell talks about in this para as well.
#
And therefore, you know, I'll just sort of end this by saying that therefore I completely
#
agree with you on the centrality of thinking about the systems from which these incentives
#
emerge, the incentives which drive us to do the things that we do.
#
Like one thing that I've always said of our system of government is that we should design
#
our system of government in such a way that even in the worst, most immoral psychopath
#
is in power, there's limited damage he can do because the system is one that rewards
#
good behavior and punishes bad behavior.
#
And it works in that respect.
#
And you know, so a lot of the responsibility is therefore, you know, comes from the system.
#
You want to design the structures in place in our society.
#
And in and by design, I don't mean in a top down way, obviously, as you know, but you
#
know, we need to think about how to move society in the state in directions where they are
#
providing incentives for good behavior rather than just the other way around, as we see.
#
Yeah, it's a lot to chew and talk about.
#
So I think that two questions that you asked, one is that when is virtue, virtue, and one
#
And the other question is that what is the point of introspection after a point when
#
you already become something by having played a particular game?
#
So I think both of these questions go back to the nature of human consciousness.
#
I mean, in some senses, and it's a big term, human consciousness.
#
And I'll put a simple kind of a beginning frame to it that if you reflect back on yourself,
#
at least when I reflect back on myself, I know that my conscious thinking, rational
#
mind is only the tip of the iceberg.
#
There's a lot of me that I actually don't know, because that's the past that is suppressed
#
And I feel it in terms of emotions and sometimes certain longings rise out of it and certain
#
things come to my mind, conscious mind, and I have to pay attention or ignore or whatever
#
there are complexes hidden.
#
And psychoanalysts study this and write about it and all of that.
#
And who we are is often not what the stories that we tell ourselves, right?
#
But the stories we tell ourselves at the readings we do and the conversations we have do have
#
And in fact, the fact that we read something or talk to some people about some things itself
#
reflects the kind of a deeper longing, right?
#
And the fact that we're sitting here and talking about virtue is maybe partly vanity, but there's
#
also more to it perhaps because we're talking about this and not something else, which could
#
also serve vanity at the same time.
#
So there are different paths to vanity, which path to vanity do you take?
#
But one key point that I've at least experienced in my own life is that can you keep a distance
#
between what you need to do out of necessity?
#
Because it's again going back to human consciousness and the nature of the self that you have.
#
So do you have this kind of a clear sense that this is a persona that you're wearing
#
and there is a certain role that you need to play and then there is a self that is within
#
it and that remains a little less uncontaminated, you know, because it's a duty that, for example,
#
if I was the prime minister of this country, I would have to do horrible things.
#
I would have to, just the nature of the responsibility is such that you need to sometimes order violence
#
Sometimes you order violence on your own citizens because they are doing things which are trying
#
to break away the republic or something.
#
There are things, difficult decisions to be taken, which will create harsh hardships,
#
but maybe create good things on the whole utilitarian kind of logic is particularly
#
sound, but it will create some harm.
#
So if you're sitting in a position like that and you have to take decisions, at that point
#
of time, can you simply get your personal morality into it and make it completely transfer
#
into a position that demands by the virtue of you being sitting there?
#
I mean, it could be any other human being, the same demands will be made on them.
#
It's not about you as such.
#
So there is a possibility, I think, that we need to give that there are people who behave
#
badly but are quite virtuous, actually, because the bad behavior was necessary in the context
#
in which they found themselves, because of the nature of the world that we live in, that
#
there are power struggles and you have duty to play those power struggles and defend your
#
own, especially in the international order, right?
#
You're more or less an anarchic kind of an order where you're trying to protect your
#
country and further its interests in a way others are also fighting the same game.
#
And many of them don't see it as a win-win situation, some of them actually want to impose
#
So you have to do things that are necessary, you have to hide things, you have to lie a
#
little bit, sometimes you have to cheat, you do things that you may not do in person life.
#
So I think if you want to, I mean, if it's particularly interesting for anybody to understand
#
someone's character, then you have to watch and see how they behave in different situations
#
and then make a view about, is it vanity or is it virtue or is it a bit of both, you know.
#
But I see the point that Orwell is making that sometimes something like this can also
#
be presented as, and we see that in some of the scandals that come out about our Babas
#
and all, sometimes very rare, it's a very small percentage, very clear.
#
There are many, many spiritual people in this country, Gurus and all who are not like that,
#
most are not like that, there are small number who come out and give a bad name to everybody
#
else, who play that game that this is a path to glory and vanity and all of that.
#
So I think there's a distinction that McIntyre draws, which is very important and it's easy
#
to state it, very difficult to actually assess it, what's going on.
#
So he says there are two things, whenever you are doing something, there are two kinds
#
of goods that you can be pursuing.
#
One is the goods external to the practice.
#
So you're doing podcasting because you want to get money, fame, all of that, or the goods
#
You're doing podcasting because you love the joy of podcasting and you want to be a better
#
This activity itself makes you feel very, I mean, good and you want to do better at
#
And just a great podcast, even if it makes no money for you and basically you die in
#
penury, that's not the case with you, thankfully in your case, both are more or less aligned.
#
But in many cases, there is a conflict between goods internal to practice by trying to be
#
a good practitioner of something, being a good professional or whatever it may be and
#
goods external to practice, which is the money and the fame and all that comes with it.
#
So the virtue is the latter, which is the goods internal to practice, the person who's
#
being generally virtuous is the one who's acting well because he's actually wants to
#
act well because for the sake of acting well, the right behavior is the right behavior for
#
them and they do it because it's the right behavior, not because it'll give them something
#
A completely different example, recently I read an interview with this Harshal Patel.
#
He said that I'm not the kind of person who needs 10 crore rupees in his life.
#
He got 10 crores in IPL, but it's a signal of the fact that I'm a good player, something
#
to that effect, he said.
#
It was very interesting to me because he sees that 10 crore rupees as basically a sign of
#
what he's good at, but he actually plays it because he enjoys playing cricket.
#
If you go by what he said and I take it on a space value.
#
So he plays cricket because he enjoys playing cricket and he wants to be better at playing
#
It's just incidental that is getting him 10 crore rupees.
#
He would still play cricket maybe if it's giving him less.
#
So he said it, I'm not the kind of person who needs 10 crore rupees a year in his life,
#
but it just shows that I'm just good at this.
#
So that I think distinction is very important.
#
What is it that you're seeking when you're seeking, you're working on doing something
#
in a professional life, political or whatever.
#
So there are politicians who do all the bad things, looking from a very simplistic perspective
#
of some principles of good or bad, but in their situation that was the right thing.
#
They may still be very virtuous actually as human beings, their duty is demanded and even
#
vanity can sometimes, if you're a particular position, you have to appear a certain kind
#
You can't say that I will not give public talks, I will not do this and that because
#
if you are in public life, you have to do all of these things.
#
There's a vanity or is that your duty?
#
They have to do, you know, giving speeches is your duty, right?
#
It's not just vanity, seeking people's attention and all that.
#
The other question is a harder one, what you become and what you can become by reflection
#
This is a much harder question because I mean, I'm at a stage of life and actually I'm going
#
through that kind of a process, right?
#
Because one is looking back and saying, okay, I've had this kind of a life and what can
#
So there is a becoming which I'm actually not aware of because it's just kind of unconscious.
#
I've shaped, I've been shaped in certain ways, the directions that they took me and
#
now I'm trying to gradually understand it by trying to imagine myself and trying to
#
through my dreams and all whatever to understand what is it that I suppress and what is it
#
that I elevated to the level of my, this kind of illusory category that I created with my
#
name and put a lot of, you know, cool features into it and said, this is what I am, you know,
#
which is what actually the persona is.
#
And then the rest of it is basically to be discovered and figured out and to, as I said,
#
you can try to do better and try to go without being too, I mean, you don't have to be self
#
No, it's not some kind of a project where you start, okay, this is the start date that
#
's the end date I need to do, this is a critical path I have to follow to get there.
#
It's just a longing and you need to be aware of it and try to do.
#
It's not something which can be fully planned in advance and there'll be surprises in life
#
and sometimes you'll dream something and it'll mean something to you and it'll change the
#
way you think about something.
#
Sometimes you meet somebody who can provide you guidance, you can find a guru or something.
#
Sometimes you'll have a conversation with a friend which can suddenly strike you, okay,
#
yeah, I didn't realize that about myself.
#
Now I'm trying to be, I'll try to think more about it and thinking will go some way.
#
I don't think we can change completely by just thinking about ourselves, but it's one
#
part of the puzzle and self-reflection has in many people's lives made a difference.
#
Not by yourself only, but talking to others, reading, thinking, talking, behaving differently,
#
building better habits, those kinds of things, having some kind of rules of thumb as well
#
sometimes although they're often kind of meant to be broken.
#
But I don't think that we are completely formed by our experiences by the time we are in middle
#
At least also that's not the bed I'm taking.
#
I think there is room for a new birth, you know, in some senses, a renewal of sorts in
#
I think in a sense we are our own projects and the projects are bound to fail because
#
you're all going to die one day.
#
But you know, just to go back to what you're saying.
#
I mean, life is essential.
#
Life is an essential part of life.
#
I'm being glib though I won't go so far, but I mean, it's the end of life.
#
It's not a part of life, but life would have no meaning without death.
#
But life has no meaning.
#
But just to just to kind of go back to what you said about how even someone who does bad
#
things can be virtuous.
#
And I'll say yes and no.
#
And yes, in the sense that we are responding to incentives within a particular context
#
and yeah, so I get where that is coming from and I sort of get where that is coming from.
#
But equally, I think that there are places where you have to draw a line, otherwise you
#
can do the worst of things and you can rationalize them and say that, hey, you know, these were
#
the incentives and this is why I did them and there's a danger in that because you internalize
#
And you know, just when you were thinking of having to do bad things and you could still
#
be virtuous and like the two men who came to mind are Vajpayee and Modi.
#
And I think Vajpayee, if he was still alive and still active and still in good shape and
#
if he took over in 2014, he would be very different.
#
He was a pretty good prime minister.
#
And in my view, the diametrically different from Modi, who is a terrible, terrible prime
#
minister and a terrible, terrible man.
#
And the thing is, they would have done different things and you can see this in the sort of
#
not quite the conversation because they weren't talking to each other, but that sort of conversation
#
through intermediaries that they had after the Gujarat 2002 riots, which Vajpayee came
#
out against and he, I think, used the phrase Rajdharma, right?
#
So there was a sense there that there is, you know, a sense of ethics that remains overarching
#
and that pervades what you do within sort of the context of within the context of politics
#
and what's within the context of that particular profession.
#
And after this, we'll also speak about how virtues relates in a professional context,
#
which you have thought about deeply and studied and all of that.
#
So I think, so I agree that, you know, the incentives around us shape our behavior and
#
we, you know, and it is what it is.
#
But at the same time, I think there is a danger in letting that excuse and justify everything
#
else that letting that excuse and justify crossing certain lines, which we should not
#
cross regardless of context.
#
So, I mean, one thing is that I didn't know Mr. Vajpayee, I don't know Mr. Modi.
#
Personally, I'm not going to comment on that.
#
But you have to judge people by their actions finally, right?
#
But in politics, things are very different from the way you and I, it's a unit of analysis
#
that which our mind kind of, you know, we have to be applied very carefully to be able
#
to make sense of what's going on.
#
But one thing is for sure, as I said earlier, that virtues exist in a particular setting.
#
And I mean, sometimes it's easier to be virtuous, sometimes it's easier to be vicious also.
#
So one of the things that is different, like just a setting is that Mr. Vajpayee ran a
#
government which was a coalition government.
#
We never really, he never really had the kind of power that is required to actually reveal
#
what he would do when he was a kind of a, he had real power in some senses.
#
Mr. Modi has run, is now the second term of a single party majority, a comfortable majority.
#
In both times, the second largest party has been one sixth or one seventh of the largest
#
party in the house of the people.
#
So when you have so much power, it's, there's no, there's no check on you, right?
#
No real check, especially in a democracy because power comes from the people and the people
#
And so you, you feel that you can do anything and you can experiment, make big experiments,
#
make, try difficult and painful things and hopefully they'll work out and all of that.
#
So one thing that you have to control for is the kind of power that when you have, especially
#
when you talk about politics and when you have power, you will behave very differently.
#
The same person will behave very differently when you don't have power.
#
So I don't know whether the counterfactual of Mr. Vajpayee would have done better than
#
Mr. Modi when he had this much, these many MPs.
#
I think we think about this in a simplistic way.
#
We underestimate the social setting, right?
#
What is social setting?
#
If you're a prime minister, how important is it to you for you to actually consult and
#
take others on board for the median person?
#
There are lots of exceptions, but in the median person, they just want their ideas to be implemented.
#
You know, who wants to go and take six months to create consensus and all you do it because
#
you need to, right, because you need to do consensus, you need to create constituencies
#
because otherwise you can't get anything done.
#
But once you get that kind of power, the chances of making a mistake are much greater, even
#
with the best intentions.
#
So you listen to the three or four people who are close to you, many of them may not
#
feel like giving you negative feedback.
#
And even if they do, I am the one who has people's, you know, imagine the kind of ego
#
inflation you've gone through when some people have voted for you twice that.
#
So then a completely different kind of a situation emerges, social setting in which decisions
#
And I think, I mean, much more, I mean, it's an old Actonian kind of a wisdom, right?
#
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
#
And there's a version of it, power makes mistakes and absolute power makes mistakes more mistakes.
#
And that's what I think that's one part of it that you need to consider before making
#
a judgment about the person as such, because I don't know, there was certainly a PR image
#
of Mr. Vajpayee, which was very good.
#
And I also hold that in my mind, I come from UP and there's a nostalgia about his kind
#
of very, in our belt, he was very popular.
#
I even went for a rally once and it was amazing, it was a big show, you know, because people
#
just thronged from all over the place to actually listen to him.
#
He had that kind of a connect.
#
And people just loved him in my part of the world.
#
There was that, but we don't know what he was like, right?
#
And more importantly, we would never know what he would have done with so much power.
#
Because see, one of the main things about politicians, they always tend to hide who
#
You know, they are always trying to play a particular kind of game in terms of where
#
projecting a certain kind of image is more important than, I mean, being just be yourself,
#
you know, like we saw that with President Obama also, you know, he had a very clear,
#
I mean, he projected a certain kind of persona.
#
We'll never know what he was like in your personal life or whatever.
#
He was bombing the shit out of Afghanistan all that time.
#
And also like doing other things, which in some other principles that you may apply will
#
say are bad things to be done.
#
So it's very, very, all I'm saying is two things.
#
One is that in politics, you have to control for the power that person has before judging
#
their actions because that changes the social setting.
#
The other is, it's very difficult to figure out what a politician actually is in that
#
they are always, always, because in democracy, always looking for power, right?
#
And how do they get power?
#
What does it mean to be popular?
#
To actually pander, to appeal to what would seem acceptable to people.
#
So who you are becomes three layers down, something which you and I will not have access
#
I mean, I agree with you, power corrupts, but, but I think that that is a powerful explanation
#
and not a justification in any way.
#
So I would still say that if power has corrupted you.
#
We, you and I are not in the business of justification, we are in the business of explanation.
#
Justification requires some kind of a legitimacy and authority to be able to finish what I'm
#
What I would say is that what I mean by we can use it as explanation or justification
#
is that if we say that power has corrupted you, you are by definition not virtuous because
#
Perhaps you had the seeds of virtue within you till life took you in another way, but
#
we have, we arrive at sort of, if we speak of someone's virtue by looking at the actions
#
and I agree that that's nuanced, that, you know, where do you draw the line and say that
#
this, this is part of the job.
#
See also in democracy as citizens, it is our duty to pass a judgment on our leaders, right
#
You're contradicting yourself.
#
No, it is our duty, but we have to be also mindful that it is, we often get it wrong
#
and we shouldn't assume that we are right about it.
#
So when you made a comparison in two persons, I made this answer.
#
But if you ask me, I've been very critical of the decisions that Mr. Modi has taken and
#
the demonetization was a big mistake that he made.
#
He has made other decisions, which I don't agree with.
#
So I think he could have done much better with the power that he had.
#
He has had now for eight years.
#
We can have those discussions, but I was making a limited point about comparing in the, because
#
you put a counterfactual in front of me.
#
So I had to push back and say, are you really sure about that?
#
No, I agree with your answer.
#
You have pushed back successfully that the incentives were different, that Modi had much
#
more power and power does corrupt.
#
But at the same time, I would say that intellectually Modi is a far more limited person in the sense
#
that Vajpayee was a man of culture.
#
He had a deeper interior life.
#
He was into all of that.
#
And none of that is a guarantee for behaving well as we have seen in the past.
#
But you also have to account for human agency and the differences between people.
#
But who knows, perhaps everything is just how we are shaped by circumstance and everything
#
Let's take a quick commercial break.
#
And on the other side of the break, we'll continue our discussion.
#
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.substract.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.substract.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.substract.com.
#
Welcome back to The Scene In The Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Suyash Rai and, you know, being, you know, one of the virtues of a podcast
#
is that once you have embarked upon a particular narrative line, you kind of continue as far
#
And we were talking about virtue while before the break.
#
So you've also spoken a lot to me in the past about the role of virtues in professions,
#
where your point is that in every profession, you know, it's not just about following incentives,
#
but professionals need to think about what are the ethics of that profession.
#
And there is sort of a deeper meaning that they have to bring to work in what they do,
#
you know, almost in contrast or in addition to playing the game, as it were, the phrase
#
So can you elaborate a little bit on this?
#
What sparked your interest on this?
#
What is the kind of work you've done and what are your thoughts on the subject?
#
Yeah, so the interest got sparked by just observing professionals at work.
#
I worked with lawyers, I've gone to doctors, I have dealt with architects, I have worked
#
with others who are not professionals, professionals, but work with researchers and civil servants
#
and politicians and so on.
#
And basically it was trying to reflect on experience, you know, about who was a good
#
professional and who was not a good professional and trying to understand it in a conceptual
#
way, but trying to basically from observation itself.
#
And I found help in some philosophers and all of that, but primary focus was on actually
#
trying to understand what does it mean to be a virtuous person in a work setting primarily.
#
That was my kind of thing, where the work means anything, like outside of the home sphere
#
And not so much in the social, friendship, those domains, there are of course, very important
#
for that, but my research or thinking on this has been primarily about the workspaces.
#
So what's going on is that we have two grand kind of types of powers that are playing out
#
One is the state power, you know, which is legitimized by, in some places, many countries
#
now legitimized by democratic vote, but still it is a particular kind of political power,
#
which is there to command, control, use coercion sometimes, or do some nudges or something
#
to get some behavior out of people.
#
It is a, there are different ways in which states imagine their role in the society for
#
various reasons, historical reasons, but there is some degree of a top-down perspective involved,
#
at least at the apex level.
#
In some countries, there is much more decentralization and local liberties are still intact, there
#
is local governments and all local association life really matters.
#
But in many countries, the trend is generally towards more centralization and greater kind
#
of trying to find the same principles that apply at the entire country and trying to
#
impose those principles in some way or the other.
#
And they're all done in the name of certain kind of good, nice, cute, cuddly things like
#
rights, certain objectives, which may be utilitarian in nature, trying to maximize good for more
#
and more people, maximum good for maximum number of people, happiness for maximum people.
#
The other force that is playing out in this world is the force of markets, which at least
#
wherever they work as markets, it's based on voluntary exchange, that you and I enter
#
into a contract and there is some kind of an understanding of, I'll pay you something
#
for a service and we'll both be happy at the end of the day.
#
But the markets also work in a way that is, I mean, there are intermediating structures,
#
there are corporate structures, there is competition in market, different corporates are trying
#
to compete to be able to get more of the market.
#
And those create certain incentives then in which the professionals have to operate.
#
Now, if you look at the global trend earlier, what used to happen is that you saw economies
#
of scale in manufacturing, you have a large manufacturing company with economies of scale.
#
Services are not considered to be economies of scale.
#
There's a recent research done in the US and also now being replicated elsewhere, we show
#
that even services now, there's more corporatization and more economies of scale are being seen.
#
For various reasons, for example, there are some common things that you can provide to
#
all professionals working in a corporate which reduces the transaction costs for that.
#
Each professional acting on their own, for example, the famous example is dentists.
#
Dentists are getting more corporatized, that now more and more dentists are working for
#
larger dentistry practices than they used to earlier.
#
It was just always one standalone dentist procuring all the products and using their
#
clinic as a proof to provide the service.
#
But corporatization is happening to a great extent, at least in large part of the economy.
#
Professionals operate, so lawyers work in law firms, doctors work in highly corporatized
#
hospitals, including dentists, architects, all of those.
#
And similarly, many of them work in state and the state has its own concerns for working,
#
for how they should operate.
#
Now the question comes about, so these processes are playing out, the state is trying to do
#
certain things, the markets are expanding and corporates are growing.
#
Corporatization is happening, there's economies of scale to be had.
#
What is the role of professional thinking, the profession by itself?
#
What is the role of a professional's own understanding of his or her own responsibility towards their
#
clients, towards their professional, other professions, is the question that I basically
#
started by asking that these grand processes will play out.
#
But are they just basically to be buffeted by these winds and basically land up somewhere
#
Or do they have anything to say about it?
#
And is there anything that they can do to shape these things?
#
Because in some ways, the question I'm asking is upstream some markets or state both.
#
In some ways, it's basically about preferences itself, what are the preferences of the professional
#
and then they'll participate in these processes and they'll probably make some compromises
#
and do whatever is necessary to continue to practice their profession.
#
But do they have a sense of what is right, what is the right thing to do as a professional?
#
So that was the kind of point of departure.
#
So I've been studying and talking to professionals across lawyers and doctors and structural
#
And structural engineering in India is not a professionalized kind of a practice, but
#
in other countries it is, architects, urban planners and all of those.
#
And trying to understand what is the setting in which, how do they decide what a good professional
#
How do they see their ability to practice that conduct in their respective setting?
#
What can be done to make it easier for professionals to do better?
#
So I was participating in some conference and conversation where this young person,
#
this lady spoke about particular profession of doctors, where their role is to deliver
#
And the statistic shows that like in the private hospitals, almost half of the children are
#
delivered through a operation, which is a C-section operation.
#
And the government hospital, it's a very small percentage, I think like 14, 15 percent or
#
It's the same profession, right?
#
And they are responding to different situations, acting very differently as professionals.
#
They go through the same training, they're part of the same association, all of that.
#
So it was, I was thinking, why, I mean, why does this happen?
#
This is the same question I've come across in many settings.
#
And what does it take for a professional to navigate the landscape in which they are situated
#
And how can this landscape be changed to make it easier for them to do better?
#
And there are certainly compulsions, there are constraints, there are economic constraints,
#
there are constraints on power, politicians have to respond to certain kind of incentives
#
themselves to deliver certain things which have to be delivered quickly.
#
And then there are that play out, play down through the system.
#
So, but you see big differences if you just look at the same profession in different settings,
#
So then I actually started studying and talking to these people.
#
And then, so what I see is that, okay, there is one role that is played by education.
#
So what do they, what are they taught when they enter into the college to get a professional
#
degree or whatever it may be, or even if it's not a college based thing like a chartered
#
accountancy, but they do get a kind of training and an apprenticeship.
#
So in some senses, by working with a chartered accountant, all doctors, lawyers, they do
#
at some point in education get apprentices with either they do a residency in the hospital
#
doctor or a young lawyer usually starts with basically being a rookie for another older
#
And a lot of their learning happens in that early stage.
#
Then they enter into the professional field in a more slightly more independent way.
#
Usually it varies from profession to profession.
#
Sometimes you have to take many years to actually then strike it on your own.
#
Otherwise it takes some time and I mean, it can be quick also, and depending on you as
#
a person also, but then the settings do differ.
#
So and that time you actually are looking at the market and what's possible and how
#
others are doing and what are the standards in which you can operate.
#
And in that there are actually many challenges in different professions that the standards
#
are so low and so much focus on getting shortcuts and trying to find the least cost path instead
#
of trying to think about what would be the right thing to do for the client and all that.
#
And also public goods are missing.
#
One of the things that happens across professions is that if a young professional wants to grow
#
as a professional, there's not that much by way of support from the larger professional
#
I will not name any of them because it's kind of simple light.
#
But most of them in India are very self-serving bodies.
#
They are just there to protect their professionals.
#
They don't hold their professionals to account when they behave badly.
#
They don't supply enough public goods to young professionals who are coming up.
#
So for example, in some sectors, some areas, there's not enough standard form contracts,
#
legal advice, you know, different ways in which you can reduce the cost of business
#
for the professionals so that they can just focus on the professional practice.
#
And then transaction costs are related to virtues in some way or the other in this sense.
#
So I mean, the method I've used is basically, as I said, observing, reflecting, interviewing
#
lots of professionals and doing study groups.
#
So sometimes then I'm not going to detail because they're all off the record conversations
#
with taking a group of professionals and running through them for several weeks about their
#
profession and saying what is it that shapes behavior in their profession and how do we
#
ensure in the language that we spoke earlier that more and more professionals pursue goods
#
And that becomes consistent with goods external to practice that being a good professional
#
actually pays off, you know, I'm not expecting professionals to compromise on everything.
#
So the one thing is the market versus virtue thing that can how do we ensure that markets
#
are structured in a manner that virtuous behavior is rewarded more and more.
#
V means it's not for me to design, it's more something that evolves and emerges from interactions
#
between the professionals among themselves and professionals with their corporate kind
#
of counterparts with whom they work.
#
And the other is on the side of the state, right, that how do you as a professional work
#
with the state to do the right thing.
#
So there the themes are very different.
#
So one thing that I learned from talking to some of the professionals is that in fact,
#
virtue the way we think about sometimes in abstract ways in impediment to improving things
#
in the state, because you may have a simplistic notion or not simplistic, you may have the
#
right notion, perfectly right notion of what good professional ethics are and how to implement
#
But you work with the state and state is a very messy creature.
#
It's a very, it's actually far more informal than we sometimes understand.
#
There are shortcuts taken, there are favors to be done, there are compromises to be made,
#
you know, and many professionals feel very uncomfortable doing any of that, because they
#
feel that it compromises the integrity to work with the state.
#
But one thing that I think is very important to keep in mind is that when you are moving
#
from one kind of a society to another kind of thing, it's a journey, you don't make
#
a leap, you don't go to open access order or a fully well organized society where complete
#
rule of law, all of that in one giant leap.
#
So the way to think about it is to make progress.
#
How can we make the next step?
#
So more and more professionals should engage with the state while keeping as much of their
#
professional ethic intact.
#
And how do you make that easy?
#
How do you make it easy for professionals to work with the state?
#
Because state is a very important entity.
#
If professionals don't join the state or work with the state, at least if they feel very
#
suppressed by the state, then it's a big loss for the country.
#
It's a big impediment to building genuine state capacity and improving one of the most
#
probably the most important organization in this country, which is the state.
#
Many organizations constitute it, but there is a state as such.
#
And there are government, there are judiciary, more and more professionals should join that
#
and good, excellent professionals should join that.
#
And they should become judges, they should become civil servants, they should behave
#
like professionals while working.
#
They should join government colleges, medical colleges, hospitals, they should be teachers,
#
So how do you actually work with the state while actually being a professional who is
#
virtuous and how do you define virtue in that context?
#
So there again, I think the idea of, you know, what is the right dharma to follow in a particular
#
context is very important that yes, there are professional, but the main thing is that
#
virtues are forged in the practice, right?
#
If you're not in the game, if you're not in that field of practice, if you're not actually
#
making things, if you're an architect or if you're not actually serving people here as
#
a doctor, if you're just in an abstract way, in some fields, actually, there are NGOs or
#
the academic types who just write critiques about their say, they're not in the game,
#
but they are writing critiques of the game, so to speak, because they think their abstract
#
notions are far superior to the actual practice of that thing, which is always messy, which
#
Critique is always been very easy, right?
#
It is the easiest thing to do in a, especially in a relatively disorganized society like
#
ours and which is also struggling to grow.
#
So how do you actually make that easier, but also more realistic, that how do you socialize
#
professionals about the realities of the Indian state and that what will it take to work with
#
the state and how do you socialize them into starting working with the state and doing
#
And I have some friends in different professions who have been guiding me, helping me a little
#
I've never written about this at all.
#
It's just all, as I said, most change happens when individual at a time.
#
So I work with some professionals and individuals and trying to think better about these issues
#
and get something started, some practices started, some kind of a course is started,
#
which can reflect on these issues, some thinking started on these issues.
#
But I see both these, whether the state's functioning and virtues, how they interact,
#
the political and governance imperatives and how they can have a very suppressing world
#
has been bearing on the professionals without actually rewarding the professionals.
#
Markets can reward you, but they can also suppress your virtues in certain contexts,
#
especially under certain kind of a corporate setting.
#
And because, and so there is an interplay here.
#
And then there's a tripartite thing, there's professional virtues, there's state and then
#
there's market because markets and state also interact.
#
And many times the problem in the market is because state has issued some regulation,
#
which actually makes it very difficult to run a good business.
#
So those are the interplay that I'm interested in, I'm just taking a few professions and
#
It's been just three years since I started it, so it's not too much work.
#
I think this is a 20 year kind of a, I'll understand it maybe in 20 years to have something
#
But yeah, in the meantime, there'll be something that I'll hopefully write and publish and
#
maybe some things will come out in terms of actual change in behavior and all of that.
#
Some new practices will come out, but that's my aspiration that something will happen on
#
So ultimately I need co-conspirators, I need virtuous senior doctors and lawyers and architects
#
and structural engineers and chartered accountants and company secretaries and all those to engage
#
and think about these issues so that we can do better.
#
Because professions are sites of virtue and they are in a way the most important, among
#
the most important associations that we have, we're not just professional, but also democratic
#
They are participatory, they are member bodies, in theory everybody is equal because they
#
are all qualified professionals and you can learn a lot by participating in these bodies
#
and helping each other do better.
#
There's a lot of collective common good that they can provide to each other.
#
They can reduce transaction costs for specific members.
#
They can help them be more virtuous on the market side.
#
They can also try to find ways to work with the state and do better in terms of professional
#
input into working with the state bodies.
#
If you look at the public infrastructure in India, so much of it is going without proper
#
It's just ugly buildings, badly designed public spaces, so much, so much of it.
#
The cities look so unloved, you know.
#
So I feel that there is a lot to be gained by engaging with those professionals.
#
Similarly, whether it's hospitals, schools or build bridges and everywhere, professional
#
input is very important and you need the best of the professionals to work with the state.
#
So a larger question going a bit deeper into this, but first let me recontextualize, try
#
to recontextualize what you said in a context that I understand and that I've sort of spoken
#
with past guests about, which is the context of journalism.
#
Now one question that I've often come at journalists on the show with is that how do you look at
#
journalism in the sense that on the one hand, there is an instrumental purpose to journalism
#
that people want information, people want news, you're providing it to them.
#
It is supply and demand and therefore the bottom line matters.
#
You are after all running an enterprise, you have people to employ, mouths to feed.
#
You know, you need to look at ROI for what you do.
#
So all those standard business imperatives come into play.
#
And on the other hand, there is also a higher notion of journalism, which without quite
#
being able to justify why those higher notions exist, I believe they do at least.
#
That's what I have adopted as, you know, the way I think about the profession and what
#
I might extend into other things that I do, which is that there is a value to speaking
#
There is a value in trying to write that first draft to history with as much fidelity to
#
the truth as possible, nebulous as the truth is.
#
And in modern times, there appears to be a conflict and this is where the state and the
#
Now, in an ideal world, the state would protect your rights and you would just do what you
#
have to do and there would be free speech, so no interference.
#
In an ideal world, the market would, you know, reward good behavior on your part because,
#
you know, you benefit in the markets by you make money in a free market basically by making
#
someone else better off.
#
It is a positive sum game.
#
You provide something that makes them better off.
#
Both of you are better off.
#
That's the whole nature of the beast.
#
However, what we see in India is issues on both these fronts in the sense that the state
#
is the oppressive predatory state, which I go on about all the time.
#
And it is anything but a free environment.
#
And our constitution also does not protect free speech as much as it should.
#
So that is one problem at the level of the state.
#
And the state can also use its power to clamp down on critics in the sense that, hey, I
#
might own a big newspaper, but I'm a business family.
#
I might also have a chemical factory.
#
So you know, the incentives are messy.
#
Everybody who's of a certain size has so much to lose that the incentives are to toe the
#
And as far as the market is concerned, one, we don't really have a free market, free market.
#
But even if we did, you know, the issue that would come up there is that what if people,
#
you know, I might have the highest of values, but what if the world today is full of narrative
#
battles and people want to engage in those battles and the demand from the market is
#
to provide those narratives which they already believe in or which give them comfort or whatever
#
and not necessarily for a bipartisan pursuit of the truth, then do you play to those forces
#
And I would actually not be so negative about it in the sense that I think that one of the
#
beautiful things about the market is that it's not just majority wins.
#
And like in politics, everybody can express themselves, you know, in that sense, my podcast
#
is not a mainstream thing, but it reaches a lot of people who crave depth, who otherwise
#
the market does not, you know, otherwise the mainstream players don't cater to because
#
you know, they want numbers and they are going, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep.
#
And there are people who want a lot more depth.
#
So the market has created spaces for all kinds of different voices, put the tools of production
#
in our hands, all that is fine.
#
And the, but the question that this leads me to is that notion of journalism as having
#
Where does it come from?
#
Like when you're talking about virtues within professions, what you are in a sense implying
#
when you say that it is upstream of the state and upstream of society is you are implying
#
that this is not just something instrumental, right?
#
It is not, there is each profession has a set of ethics or maybe that's a question.
#
Does it have a sense of ethics that exists independent of all these forces?
#
You know, and, and to turn our attention on medicine, for example, doctors are taught
#
the Hippocratic oath, for example, you know, thou shall do no harm and all of that.
#
And it would appear that there is a code of ethics there, but as we have seen, you also
#
have to look at the incentives of doctors and you know, you could be a doctor who loves
#
to spend 20 minutes with each patient, but your incentives are at five minutes, apply
#
fast and furious heuristics, tell them thus test for each of which you're getting a commission
#
and that's how the business runs.
#
And you can even rationalize it at a utilitarian level saying that I'm serving many more people
#
and giving less service to many more people.
#
That is the main thing about it that it's not, it's not good versus evil, right?
#
It's a truly tragic situation because different goods have to be balanced against each other.
#
So two questions that arise from this and the first of them deals with this directly
#
is that have you seen a philosophical justification for these kinds of virtues in any profession
#
existing, independent of the instrumental reason for that profession coming into being
#
an existing independent of the state in the markets?
#
No, I actually shouldn't because you are here to serve, right?
#
Like a doctor is not someone who is sitting on the top of a mountain and basically being
#
a doctor without actually dealing with a patient and as soon as you deliver a patient, you
#
are actually in a social setting.
#
The independent ethic could be to serve, but then how do you define that and where does
#
But when you start serving, then you start dealing with constraints, demands, expectations,
#
market forces, state regulation, state's own constraints, political governance constraints.
#
And then in that you end up shaping your behavior according to what you think is the right thing
#
and then what is the kind of situation that you find yourself in?
#
So let's talk about journalism.
#
It's not, I don't know whether it can be called a profession.
#
I mean, in a philosophical sense, but many journalists think that they're professionals
#
and they think about what they do in terms of a profession.
#
But so let's talk about it in terms of maybe something akin to a profession where there
#
are certain structured practices which are there and finding truth out and reporting
#
And that's the core of the, I mean, speaking truth to power and all our secondary things,
#
You know, truth is what really matters and finding important truths, which are I think
#
consequential and having some degree of direction of attention to things that really matter
#
is another kind of aspect of a journalistic ethic.
#
Having some degree of rigor and some, some, what you call triangulation of whatever you're
#
trying to say is important.
#
Then also stating it in a manner which is non-sensational, it should be clear, it should
#
It should be saying what you know and accepting what you don't know, you know.
#
So as a citizen, I have expectations from citizens as well, right?
#
I have expectations from journalists as well, that there are some things that I expect from
#
a good doctor, something expect from a good architect, some things I may expect from a
#
I expect certain things from journalists as well.
#
Now journalists say that they have a freedom of speech, right?
#
That's what they want to get.
#
And now what is the, so structurally what happens is that whenever you have any right,
#
each right creates some elites, right?
#
Because people who are good at exercising those rights will become elites through those
#
rights and society confers those rights.
#
I mean you may use the language of natural rights and whatever God given, but ultimately
#
society has decided, it's a decision that it's taken, that those rights have to be conferred
#
And then each right creates some kind of elite.
#
So when you have a right to property, you have property, people who either by their
#
sheer ability to run better businesses or by their rent seeking behaviour are able to
#
become rich and they become the property elites.
#
Similarly, when you have freedom of speech, some people are better intellectuals claim,
#
so they are better at becoming, at the use of speech and they want to influence society.
#
The I mean perhaps the most important of those are constitutional judges and lawyers, lawyers
#
who say that their speech is so powerful that they should transform society in some sense.
#
It's just their views, right?
#
And they think they have the philosophical confidence to say that they should transform
#
It takes quite a bit of vanity to say something like that, but they do.
#
Journalists are also in that category, right?
#
They are the elites of the speech, right?
#
That society is confirmed on everybody in some senses, but some are elites in those
#
See, most of us will never use most of the rights in a manner that society would want
#
to regulate it, most of us, for most of the time.
#
Most of us will sometime use it, and only some of us use it all the time.
#
Journalists are those who use right to speech, push the boundaries all the time because
#
they are in the business of finding things out that are not commonly known and reporting
#
Now, why does society confer these rights?
#
Because it thinks it works for them, right?
#
Everything is an instrumentality in that sense, when you think of from a society's point of
#
view and why it's conferred those rights, it thinks it will work for them.
#
So how does a property elite, which is a big business person or someone say that, hey,
#
So democracies don't like elites, right?
#
Everybody is equal and so on.
#
Why they justify is by saying that my being rich has helped the society because voluntary
#
exchange, invisible hand, everybody has been better off and I have been a little better
#
because I've done better for you.
#
Same thing intellectuals, journalists, everybody also claim that I deserve this disproportionate
#
uses of this right because my speech is helping society do better.
#
Intellectuals say that, journalists say that, similarly other rights, you can go to the
#
list, each right creates some kind of an elite, who are just good, better or more inclined
#
towards using those rights in a disproportionately, I mean, intensive way.
#
Now the tensions come, right?
#
Because you have some right and you are the one small sliver of society, which uses these
#
rights a lot to speak the truth and so-called the truths.
#
And you say that you should be listened to and you should continue to have that right.
#
You say something about a business person.
#
That business person says, this is not true.
#
Now there are two possibilities.
#
Maybe it is true, maybe it is not true.
#
Maybe it's true, but you've misstated it.
#
Maybe it's not true and, but you're not accepting that it's not true and the business person
#
has again a right to fight back against you, through legal means or whatever it may be,
#
defamation and all is there for that.
#
You say something about some politician, okay, which may or may not be true.
#
And even if it's true, the politician doesn't like it because, hey, I mean, it basically
#
weakens him in some senses because it's maybe something negative.
#
That's why it's being reported and it wasn't anyway in the public domain earlier.
#
So at that point all the tensions come.
#
And then it's basically a question about this profession or this set of people who are exercising
#
these rights versus the people who are trying to fight them out, whether it's the property
#
elite or the political elites who are the powerful, basically, or the administrative
#
elite, the civil servants and all of those who are holding the powers, so to speak, and
#
the journalists pushing back.
#
When that situation comes, and that's an unavoidable situation, all societies have to deal with
#
Even the most developed society, even today, you have a president who said the media are
#
the enemy of the people, right?
#
Because he felt aggrieved by the media, so rightly or wrongly, but he felt.
#
And he's fighting the media on a daily basis.
#
He suspended some reporter from coming to his press conferences temporarily, and then
#
it got reversed in the court or something.
#
So there is a constant struggle.
#
The basic point I'm trying to make is that if you, the first duty of a professional and
#
professionals as a collective in a particular domain is to try to do reasonably well as
#
far as their own professional ethic is concerned, you know, in terms of within the situation.
#
I'm not saying that there are infinite resources and you can do whatever, but whatever.
#
I just, I mean, drop on my head, say four or five quality, I as a citizen think that
#
as a journalist should at least aspire towards.
#
And then what happens when the conflict happens is that people should be with you.
#
So we should never have an illusion that in democracy, there are many sources of the main
#
source of power is the people, are the people, whether it's the person getting rich or powerful
#
in state or journalists getting legitimacy, you know, it has to be earned and it has to
#
be, and some degree of faith in the democracy and the people is required that if I'm doing
#
the right thing, maybe sometimes there'll be unfair outcomes and I will be very badly
#
But to at least begin with the assumption that if I'm doing the right thing in some
#
way or the other, people will say and stand with me and say, Hey, you are wrongly implicating
#
But for that, it's very important to have collective unit in action within the profession,
#
One professional can be destroyed very easily.
#
And for the, from the other elites, because they've been hurt by it.
#
I'm just talking about for journalists right now, but it's true of others as well.
#
Because hey, I mean, nobody will pay attention also.
#
It's just a, I mean, very easy to forget also, you know, that's the tragedy of human life.
#
In our minds, we are everything, but in the larger scheme of things, we don't mean that
#
But when a collective, there's professional unity is there and for good reasons, not in
#
the self-serving way in which many professional bodies in India work, you know, so we have
#
to be realistic about how professional bodies work.
#
And when do they actually stand up to bad behavior by their members?
#
When do they stand up to defend good behavior by their members, which is under attack from
#
So the basic point I'm making is that, yes, these are situations that arise and there
#
are structural good reasons why they arise.
#
Conflict is good in society when it's not a good versus evil thing.
#
Journalists get a lot of things wrong.
#
I remember how some IAS officers who took a decision in good faith, but got badly implicated
#
in cases later were completely demonized by some of our journalists a few years ago under
#
I mean, the moment of cacophony around corruption that happened in India.
#
And I think many of them went overboard.
#
I mean, whether they should have a right to say that or not is a different question.
#
I mean, it's a legal question one can answer.
#
But as a moral question, you know, did you actually exercise the thing before supporting
#
somebody's criminalization, putting someone in jail?
#
Literally, there are senior journalists who wrote that they should be in jail for not
#
standing up to their political leaders.
#
Is that a standard form of someone who goes to jail?
#
I mean, that's the kind of language that was used against some IAS officers who are in
#
jail right now for basically not having taken any money, but they didn't stand up to some
#
wrong decision by senior politicians who themselves are not in jail, by the way.
#
So there are many examples of this type.
#
And all I'm saying is that when the conflicts happen, the most important thing is to appeal
#
to the public, you know, in some ways and as a collective stand up for what is good
#
and punish what is bad.
#
I'm not an expert on journalism in India, one has to think and these are very hard questions
#
and they require practical judgment, a lot of detailed situational awareness of what
#
is the state of journalism in India, what are the conditions in which journalists practice.
#
But my big picture is that the question that we should ask is are journalists as a community
#
behaving in a way that a good profession should behave?
#
Are they punishing the bad or are they censoring their own bad behavior of the journalists
#
at a corporate level, at the level of the professional bodies and all, are they standing
#
up for the good behavior of the journalists and then the conflicts will happen.
#
I mean, everybody has a legitimate right to fight the other person.
#
This abstract invocation of rights as something magical, as if it's some kind of fetishized
#
power, which will just suddenly have an impact on you while we have a ban and it is meaningless.
#
It has to be each right has to be sustained through political activity, you know, and
#
ultimately it comes down to the people and whether it's journalists or any other professional
#
and it has to earn that kind of a legitimacy and hopefully people will have a good sense
#
to side with them and support more virtuous journalism than less.
#
And they will also get things wrong sometimes.
#
I mean, all of us get things wrong sometimes in just as it happens, but that is the structural
#
reality in which this thing has to play out.
#
Yeah, I think number of points, I mean, firstly, just as an aside as far as sort of the question
#
is concerned of rights producing elites that, you know, you have the right to free speech
#
and then, you know, some people use it more than others and equally the right to property.
#
Some people benefit more than others, but I think they act as incentives for everybody.
#
You know, the right to property is important as an act as an incentive for everyone to
#
work hard because they can accumulate wealth and they can keep it and that's how you rise
#
And it's a positive sum game.
#
It's not a zero sum game.
#
So that's an essential right, which actually is no longer a fundamental right.
#
About 26 of my show Vishruti Rajgopalan deals on that.
#
And also the right to free speech is essential to democracy.
#
It might be the case that, you know, some people exercise it more in an overt way, but
#
that's neither here nor there.
#
So I'm not disagreeing.
#
I'm just stating a particular way in which I see reality that ultimately you and I can
#
discuss this and agree with it.
#
But society as a whole has to confer it.
#
And even if you claim no, no, it's my natural light, God given light, God is not going to
#
come to give it the right.
#
It's politically constructed and sustained.
#
Now, I'm not disputing that, but I'm saying that it is something that has to be fought
#
And even if you look at the US, for example, for all their flaws, they do have the right
#
to free speech in as close to a pure form as you can get.
#
And it's worked for them.
#
And yeah, and it was politically constructed and they have a historical reason why they
#
We have a right to privacy, which was sustained over four or five hearings.
#
And we, I mean, we all celebrated it, but do we really have a right to privacy?
#
We'll come to that later, but just to finish my thought that, you know, when you speak
#
about as a society, we expect truth from journalists.
#
And my thing is, I think there is a danger in talking from the point of view of abstract
#
groups like society, like what is society even?
#
I think some people might want their journalists to be prepared to pursue the truth.
#
Some people want their journalists to pursue.
#
No, no, I only said as a citizen, I, that's how I framed it.
#
But you know, you, you've sort of used that group phrase, you know, what society expects
#
and we should fight for that and all of that.
#
And my sense is that my, my lament at the start was that I might expect, you and I might
#
expect one thing from journalists, but you know, others want sensational news, others
#
And that is sort of a contestation that is happening.
#
But the deeper question was about, is there a philosophical way to arrive at the notion
#
that there is a particular sense of ethics that pre-exists the pressures of society and
#
the pressures of state.
#
And, and, and like you said, in my mind, I don't think there are, but I think we have
#
to construct for ourselves as individuals something that is constructed in the practice
#
and experience of practice, of doing something.
#
And it's the, it is very harmful, as I said, people who just stay away from a practice,
#
but throw stones at that practice and say that, Hey, this should be the way it should
#
be in the game, at least to know what the constraints are and try to understand.
#
I mean, that's why I was not passing a judgment on the way journalists in India work.
#
I don't know exactly what's going on there.
#
I'm just putting a frame to it.
#
And when I say society, I'm just, I mean, obviously it's a collection of individuals
#
and they may have different views and expectations.
#
And if their expectations are to have more of the yellow journalism and all of that,
#
then there will be consequences for them and their society itself.
#
But ultimately we are a self-governing society and we are as individuals and as a collective
#
jointly and severely and individually responsible for our future.
#
And that's where there's no shortcut to it.
#
You can't just go to a court and get an injection and expect that now you have that right.
#
That kind of thinking I think is very anti-democratic in many ways.
#
And that's what we are seeing that we think there's some shortcut that there's some kind
#
of a magical right you can get without convincing a large number of people of this, this kind
#
of right is instrumentally good for society.
#
I mean, the messy business of politics is something that we have to keep engaging with,
#
not in the narrow sense of electoral politics, but I think even what you and I are doing
#
by just adding this conversation to the discourse is a form of politics.
#
We are all in this game and in fact, much more than public conversation, private conversations
#
are very, I mean, that's where most of the actual meaningful discussions happen.
#
Because to be able to convince someone, you need to first earn their trust.
#
And that really happens with friends and family and the colleagues and all.
#
So after floating around in the air of abstract ideas for a while with reference to the concrete
#
world, let's kind of get back to your personal story.
#
And I know you don't like to talk too much about the personal stuff because you underplay
#
yourself a bit too much, but I'm really curious to know about your early life in the sense
#
of what were your early sort of influences like?
#
What were you reading when you were a kid?
#
Which language were you reading in?
#
Who were the writers you liked and who influenced you?
#
I want to get a sense of how you were formed in a sense.
#
I guess the most important thing that comes to mind is that I always escape to books.
#
So, I mean, I was introverted, I still feel that I'm quite generally shy of interaction.
#
I used to go out to play with kids every day.
#
That was a routine, it was just something that was fun also.
#
But whenever I would get time, I was reading something, you know.
#
So the first time I came across like a library was, I think, when I was in sixth standard
#
or something, I went with a friend into this, we were living in Gorakhpur and there was
#
an office, government office, and we entered and then there was a library inside that office.
#
It's an office of basically where engineers in government railway used to work.
#
And you go inside and there's a library.
#
And there I found all the children's classics, you know.
#
So till that time, I only had access to mostly, I mean, Hindi literature books, but like children's
#
So at that time, someone like Premchand, you can read as a kid or as a grownup, you know,
#
that's the greatness of Premchand.
#
And you I was reading in these stories and poems and all and whatever was available at
#
But having the access to the first library, completely open, so many books can be found
#
It was a complete sense of wonder because the idea of library wasn't really so much
#
And then I started picking up and one by one, I remember I read Adventures of Robin Hood,
#
I read Ivan Ho, I read Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, which later also I got my
#
school to read Treasure Island as part of my coursework in school.
#
So and it kind of most of my reading when I was in school was basically fiction, more
#
I hardly read anything else.
#
And I used to love reading novels as I grew older, I started enjoying in my teens serious,
#
I mean, literature a little bit and cultivated some taste for it automatically, I mean, just
#
snowballing, right from one to another, start spending a little bit of time in bookshops
#
and libraries and pick up.
#
And I actually, the first time I actually started reading serious nonfiction was in
#
college only, like, I mean, started picking up books from different disciplines and reading
#
I also got a little bit more money in my hands, I was doing internships and making some money
#
and spending all of that on books.
#
I remember I had done an internship where I got eight thousand rupees.
#
I went to this bookshop in Baroda, Baroda Book Centre, where the owner actually knew
#
I said, I've got this full money, all of it turns to be inspired on books, you tell
#
me which ones would be good.
#
He gave me a nice set that all discounted, like new books on decent discount, because
#
he saw that a student should be given a discount and he gave me really good books.
#
Eight thousand bucks you spent on books.
#
Yes, and that was many, many years ago.
#
So this was, I think, about 20 years ago.
#
So all of the money was spent, he gave me and he was very gentle and kind and it took
#
And then he gave me suggestions, which all I accepted, I was in no position to.
#
So it was eclectic, like the book collection was pretty, but it basically tripled my book
#
collection because I put all my money into the books.
#
So basically, I now read very little literature.
#
I mean, I still read a few books every year of literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.
#
But at that time, it was still substantially reading literature.
#
I really enjoyed that kind of experience of literature, you know, I mean, literary critics
#
have a lot of words for it, but I actually felt it opened up the whole world for me in
#
some senses, you know, and I was a person who didn't really enjoy too much social interaction
#
and going out and spending too much time in large gatherings and all.
#
It was like, I'm sitting in a room and reading a book and this is my kind of, you know, I'm
#
participating in something, initially it was so I the first great book I read was 100 years
#
I think I was 19 or something when I read it and it was an amazing level of, I mean,
#
it was just magical, you know, literally, I mean, I think the genre itself is called
#
magical realism, but what you can achieve in a book, you know, in terms of the quality
#
of writing the story, the unfettered imagination, put everything, even something as bad as incest
#
and all looks very magical in that book.
#
It's a stunning achievement.
#
So I started reading a lot of that genre.
#
And one key point came when I read my first Saul Bellow, who continues to be my favorite
#
writer and his first book I read was this at a very strange time in my life, in my early
#
twenties, I was going through some difficult time when this book really spoke to me directly,
#
which was this basically a thin volume that he'd read.
#
It was his second book, I think.
#
The Dangling Man, I think.
#
The Dangling Man, it's called.
#
And I was like, wow, I mean, literature can be written in this way also, because it is
#
completely different from the magical realism and all that I was reading until then and
#
before that children's classic and all of that.
#
So I went into this whole, which then I actually branched out to other writers of that genre.
#
I was still reading a lot of magical realism, Salman Rushdie, who, I mean, recently has
#
been in a lot of trouble, a great writer, and then, I mean, basically branched out in
#
a different type of literature.
#
So you know, Philip Roth, I like Isaac Singer, Malamud, all of those, and it was just a part
#
So in a day, one or two hours, you spend reading a nice novel and it's just a very nice part
#
of the day, generally, I mean, and it's whatever may have happened in the day, that those couple
#
of hours, nobody can take away from you.
#
And then I started actually reading more of non-fictions, books, and I didn't have any
#
sense of, because I was, my education was in computer science and I did my MBA later.
#
So I didn't have any, I mean, I was studying other things and formally, but because I had
#
this kind of a routine of reading regularly, but it was more like chance, you know, what
#
I go read, if you think back, there was no community of readers with me.
#
There were some elders, my father's friends who helped me pick a few books here and there,
#
who were kind enough, who had gone through experiences in their life, who had seen some
#
So they gave me some hints about what to read and all, but still it was mostly chance what
#
Like for example, my first philosophy book I read was actually Aristotle, like I literally
#
So I actually read the dialogues directly.
#
I didn't know that there were commentaries to be read before all of that.
#
I straight away went to the source and started reading Plato, I remember specifically Plato's
#
Gorgias was my first serious philosophy, it's a short dialogue, but a very, I mean, raises
#
So and I kind of snowballed from there and went, first I read the Asians, I had no clue
#
about the modern, but then immediately soon I got into some of this modern existential
#
philosophy and all of that and started reading that our home always had Mahabharata Ramayana
#
and all those, so those I read when I was young.
#
We also used to have these Amarchitra Kathas, you know, which is, and one of my neighbors
#
had these bound volumes, which each volume had five of these comics and you just go through
#
them and it's amazing, each one of the standalone story.
#
And so I was seeped in that throughout, but this literature, which is modern and, and
#
also the, I mean, nonfiction writing and philosophy, I read a little bit of psychology, read a
#
little bit of sociology, I read a little bit of economics at that time.
#
It was just, I mean, why was I doing it?
#
I couldn't really put a, more like a routine, you know, that almost like a, that character
#
of autodidact from nausea, who just goes from one, but a little better than that because
#
it, you're, you're trying to understand some things and you are actually, you have some
#
reasons for understanding them, but still there was a kind of a routine and then because
#
you read, you have more questions, right, and you want to read more and you want to
#
think more about those questions and then you branch out.
#
It was just, I mean, kind of a serendipity that I ended up chanting about some of these
#
great books and then I developed a taste for great books and what I, I have a category
#
I have never defined it formally, but I know what a great book is when I see one.
#
So we spent a few months ago, right, looking at 6,000 books in a day, you and I, and when
#
I look at a book, I have a sense of where it belongs, how much, how to read and how
#
much importance to give to it.
#
And that cultivation of that habit in the early 20s, I think was a very important point
#
And it's been a part of my life.
#
I really just, because we come very late in the history, there's so much has happened
#
I have to give dues to those who have come before us and there, there's really, I mean,
#
the questions that we are wrestling with, others have also wrestled with.
#
And I think reading really helps in many ways to, you'll not get answers by reading, but
#
you will certainly get better at asking the right questions.
#
And that's what I think, especially if you read like more fundamental works on philosophy,
#
psychoanalysis, social systems, sociology, even some of the great books of anthropology.
#
So you get politics, of course, political theory.
#
So and it's a lot, it's a vast world out there, right?
#
And more recently, like just a few years ago or five, six years ago, I got back to our
#
own kind of reading our own scriptures and trying to see, trying to put them in conversation
#
with other traditions and saying, what do we have?
#
Our main concerns have always been consciousness, our main concerns have always been the human
#
consciousness and its kind of liberation.
#
And there, I think our own traditions have a lot to offer and because those questions
#
are now more urgent for me as I'm growing older.
#
So I've gone back to more of those and I read, still read the Western philosophy and all,
#
but I read more of the ancients there, again, going back than the moderns.
#
And I mean, those, that journey continues, but yes, this habit of reading regularly and
#
trying to find great books and trying to have, it's a background.
#
It's just there every day of my life for the last 25 years or so, pretty much.
#
And if there are good days and bad days, there are times I'm traveling and all, but I still
#
find at least two hours to read every day.
#
And I should tell my listeners that when you speak about going through 6,000 books, my
#
dad had died last year.
#
So in December, I had to go to the house, which we were selling off and decide what
#
And he had more than 6,000 books, 6,000, 7,000 books.
#
And I had figured out a community library in Delhi to donate them to, but I thought,
#
let's, let me go with three of my friends, Suyash being one of them, and ask them to
#
pick out whatever they wanted.
#
And I would pick out whatever I wanted, and then we'd give the rest of it away.
#
And it's kind of heartbreaking for me in the sense, all his collections of modern library
#
books and everyone's classics and all of that.
#
And me making the choice to kind of give it away and not keep it because I just want to,
#
the only physical books I took from there was stuff that I wouldn't actually find anywhere
#
otherwise, which are out of print or something, I can't even, you know, read it on a Kindle
#
So that was kind of, I mean, I mean, there was a life of the mind happening there as
#
First of those is this, that how did you begin to form frames through which you could look
#
at the world and explain the world?
#
Because in my case, I read voraciously when it came to fiction, again came to nonfiction
#
a bit more slowly and a bit later.
#
But you know, today everyone, today young people are so full of certainties and the
#
internet is there and there are ideological tribes that are so appealing to join and all
#
But in those pre internet days in the 80s and the early 90s, you know, it took a long
#
time for me to be formed.
#
I think I arrived broadly to where I am in terms of values and beliefs and all well into
#
my adulthood, really well into my mid 20s, where I could even look at the country and
#
say, oh, these are the things that have gone wrong.
#
This is what is wrong with our economics.
#
This is wrong with our politics.
#
I suspect if when I was 22, if you asked me what is left, what is right, I would, I wouldn't
#
So tell me a little bit about how, what are the different frames that you began to adapt
#
to look at the world and to, you know, begin to understand it?
#
What was that process like?
#
I mean, we are always constantly evolving, obviously, but in the major ways, what are
#
the sort of frames that were useful to you, who were the writers who influenced you?
#
Were there any phases where you felt that scales have fallen off your eyes, that you
#
see something with a clarity with which you hadn't seen it before, whether it is in the
#
personal domain or the economic domain or the social domain?
#
Yeah, it's a, I wish you had sent me this question a few days in advance and I had thought
#
But I mean, just reflecting on something you said, that there are many disadvantages of
#
But one of the advantages that you don't feel the need to belong to a tribe and signal anything
#
to anyone to feel that you're part of a particular tribe and you're not going out on, I mean,
#
whether it's in physical setting or a virtual setting to signal things, to feel complete
#
as a person, you feel pretty, I mean, comfortable being a little away from any tribe and doing
#
your own thing to the extent you're doing those things.
#
And I think that because I have always had that, so I've never really needed to belong
#
So I never had to, I mean, it's a good thing or a bad thing.
#
Sometimes it's a good thing that you belong to a tribe and you join and you take the views
#
and then hopefully if you are independent minded enough, then you outgrow those, you
#
know, there are many people who get mugged by realities and different types of transformations
#
So it's a good thing, but can also be a bad thing because it can end, stop thinking because
#
So I mean, one had to find my own way.
#
And so, so there are two types of beliefs.
#
One is that where you actually something very serious for you to act upon, you know, there
#
you have to take it very, very, you know, to excite a lot of due diligence.
#
So you have to, because you're acting upon something, right?
#
But many of the, I mean, so our act, word of action, because we're not in, we're not
#
prime ministers and you're not doing those kinds of things is a limited sphere, right?
#
For that, you need to have a few things, you have a little bit of excellence in some things
#
and that you need to be good at.
#
The other types of beliefs are held in a different way, right?
#
We don't act upon them.
#
We just, we hold them, we revise them, we, it's just trying to understand, make sense
#
of the word, you know, because the old mythological understandings have broken down.
#
The word is not so self-contained in our, in a particular cosmology and we need to now
#
remake the meanings in many ways.
#
So we need to understand to some extent, or you just say, it doesn't matter.
#
I'm just going to do what, take what comes to me and move on.
#
But if you have a belonging to understand, then you need to keep engaging with the word
#
and trying to have some kind of working hypothesis about, you know, what's going on, you know?
#
And there, I think it's a, I don't know, it's just my memories doesn't work in this
#
How much of it is reading?
#
How much is observation?
#
How much is reflection?
#
How much was it influence of others?
#
How much was it reflect, I mean, just habit, you know, it's very hard to say, but I think
#
it was a mix of these things.
#
So one thing that you learn from the ancients in any tradition is to look at things directly
#
and observe them and comment on them and analyze them directly.
#
Some of the moderns also do that, like Tocqueville does that in very well on democracy, but don't
#
get too impressed by frames and ideologies and clever turn of phrase, you know, you're
#
a human being, you're talking about human life and human society.
#
You can look at it directly and observe and by the power of your observation and careful
#
thinking, you can make sense of some of these things, books, other people's views are useful
#
and interesting and important to kind of reflect your, what you are seeing.
#
And sometimes even you can adapt some of those, but you need to have your own thinking.
#
There is no substitute for that.
#
And I think that one of the things that has always helped me is an intuition that I, when
#
I look at something, I have an intuitive sense of what's going on.
#
And then I keep revising it all the time, because whatever I'm studying, I start with
#
something with like a, so I'm a rationalist, not an empiricist.
#
So I have a kind of a rational view of where I'm coming from, you know, and what's going
#
And then I look at data, look at trying to figure out what's going on.
#
So that's the method that I apply.
#
And it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't work and it keeps evolving, right?
#
It's not a, there's never a permanent thing because descriptions are not reality.
#
Map is not the tree, you know, and we are making man remapping the map.
#
But in what I'm working on, I try to be as careful as possible so that I get it right
#
and have some, for the rest, it's more like a hobby and habit and hopefully someday in
#
some work becomes useful, but otherwise it's just a kind of a need to understand things
#
and have a view around things like human consciousness, social processes, workings of democracy,
#
all those things, which I don't directly work upon, but it's something that you need
#
to have a view on, right?
#
Like you need to have a sense of what's going on here, you know, because we are part of
#
that reality and you can have a nuanced and reasonably complex understanding of something
#
or you can have a very simple and simplistic understanding also sometimes.
#
And one cannot understand everything as Saul Bellows says, there's simply too much to
#
think about, you know, and, but there are some areas, some issues on which I do try
#
to, I have tried long-standing themes to understand, for example, how literature works on our consciousness,
#
the question of moral philosophy, we have already discussed some of that here, working
#
of democracy in societies, we've touched upon it a little bit, and of course in professional
#
life working on political economy and all.
#
So we're, and I mean, one always lives and learns.
#
I have actually abandoned more of my views than I have now, I have been completely wrong
#
In fact, in my even professional work, there are so many issues on which my views are completely
#
different from what they were 80 years ago, seven years ago.
#
And that's kind of a humbling experience because, you know, you're so sure I have figured it
#
out, but then you think about it or you see new data and you read something or you go
#
through an experience and you say, Oh, I was completely wrong about this.
#
I think that is something which, in fact, I've become more open now than I was 15 years
#
ago or even 10 years ago about how much I know and how much I know.
#
And one of the things that one actually doesn't know much, you know, that is the most fundamental
#
humbling realization that really one doesn't really know much.
#
It's really difficult to understand even your own consciousness, forget about social political
#
systems, the extreme complexity, and we should be humble and modest.
#
That's why, I mean, in my work, I generally suggest light touch approaches, less coercion,
#
less political economy work also, because, and that's why I was so upset with decision
#
like de-monetization or something modest about how much you know about the world and don't
#
do something so drastic and so path-breaking that you because you think you know.
#
So that is something actually, as I said, more recent realization that these frames
#
are very, very fragile and one comes to them and one revises them when one gets upset and
#
then one has to move on and try to do better in the future.
#
How much of a difference do you think it made that you came from a sort of a different background
#
and a different mental space to your profession than many others who are in the profession?
#
Like one way in which it is different is, of course, that you've gone up reading Hindi,
#
speaking Hindi, you've come from a different background where you've seen a different view
#
I remember, you know, both Akshay Mukul and Rahul Verma, if I remember correctly, in their
#
first episodes with me spoke about how they grew up reading Hindi newspapers and therefore
#
they looked at the world very differently from what they...
#
Yeah, I also, I mean, we had Dhani Jagran and Amar Ushala coming at her.
#
So that's one way in which the background is different and another way in which the
#
mental makeup may be different is that you said you read a lot of fiction and interestingly
#
English speaking elites often don't read so much, especially in these kinds of policy
#
So that rich imaginative interior life that reading a lot of literature and fiction gives
#
you is often not there and you can sometimes be hobbled by it.
#
So do you think that this made a difference to how you view the world where you would
#
come at things from a different place, you would see things that others sort of may not
#
Yeah, I think it's different, but I don't know whether it's better, whether it's just
#
a path that I happened to take.
#
Literature was available, I read literature and I just liked it and I really enjoyed it
#
in terms of what it was doing to me, into my inner life, you know, and it put me in
#
touch with, I mean, my own kind of, you know, like you go through a...
#
It sounds like a cliche, but you go through some suffering and you read gutters, sorrow
#
Actually, it may sound like a cliche, but really it works, you know, it's a comforting
#
thing to, what do they say, afflict the comfort, comforted and comfort the afflicted, you know,
#
But even, I mean, one is not always comforted or afflicted, usually it's somewhere in middle
#
and even at that time, it's just something that takes you in a different territory as
#
far as a human possibility of thought and understanding a concern, right?
#
It's a very empathetic exercise, writing literature, it comes from a place which is not quite available
#
to us, you and me, when we talk about or talk to each other.
#
Proust has this kind of, you know, he wrote this essay against, leading critic, literary
#
critic of his time about where literature comes from, you know, and it's not the kind
#
of self that you and I have direct access to and it just opens up so much possibility
#
and literature, great writers know that it's more like a gift that they perfect the form,
#
obviously they perfect the language and all of that.
#
They work very hard on it, but the source of imagination is in the subconscious and it's
#
kind of comes from a place which is not directly accessible to them, it just comes to them,
#
you know, like when you write like Proust, certainly it sounds like it comes from a different
#
kind of place and it's magic, right, it's magical, it's like some of the religious scriptures
#
you read and they immediately hit you and it has that magical feeling, hey, wow, I mean,
#
this speaks to me as if it's my personal conversation with someone that's happening and great philosophers
#
also do that, like that's the greatness of the dramatic way in which Plato writes, right,
#
that it's drama and of course you can make the mistake of associating with one side or
#
the other without, I mean, understanding that you shouldn't try to look at both all sides
#
but, but it just immediately hits you, it's not going into a extreme level of qualifications
#
and I mean, explaining each term in so much detail that it becomes meaningless to read
#
something like that, like some of the, I've tried to wrestle with those also, but much
#
more of a direct thing which immediately hits you and then you have to critically think
#
about what it's doing to you also and, you know, and yeah, so, yeah, and I think it is
#
a interesting path that to take to read broadly, widely, if you're so inclined and read great
#
literature and great philosophers, great thinkers on psychology and society and religious scriptures
#
I think are very, very powerful, I mean, I wish more people read them regularly across
#
traditions, you don't have to be narrow-minded about it, there's wisdom to be had, wherever
#
Tell me a bit more about this because many people who will read your Plato and Aristotle
#
and so on and who will read a sort of Western philosophy and who will read these great novels
#
will also be of a rationalist bent of mind where they will say that, you know, we don't
#
want to engage with religious scriptures and at best that they might have an anthropological
#
value in explaining why people thought or behaved a particular way and that's how they
#
kind of sort of think about it, but you've been speaking and our previous episode, of
#
course, was on the role of religion in Indian society as well and that was very illuminating,
#
but what you're sort of saying is that that's a wrong way to think of religion, that religion
#
plays a central role in our society and in our existence and that if we are open to it,
#
there is a lot of value to be had from religious scriptures, in fact Pratap Bhanumaita once
#
while speaking about his own religiosity spoke about the purest form of religion, what he
#
got from the elders in his family as being a form of deep skepticism, right?
#
So I forget the exact terms he used, but it was a very sort of, it gave me a different
#
picture into what an engagement with religion can be like, which was quite different from
#
the normal, you know, one that is full of blind faith and superstition and idolatry
#
So tell me a little bit about the role that religion has played in your life and in your
#
So I'm not religious in the sense that I don't go to a temple regularly, I mean, I pray sometimes,
#
but it's not something which is a, but I'm more, I mean, philosophically religious in
#
So it's much more like, so as I said that to understand the nature of our consciousness
#
to begin with and we have an unconscious and the language of the unconscious is symbolic
#
and it doesn't speak to us in the language that we speak of.
#
And I think that's the level at which religious, I mean, whether it's mythology or, or even
#
the more abstract texts speak to that level within us.
#
And therefore it's a very humbling experience because the experience of religion is basically
#
the experience of the new newness, right?
#
It's a sense of newness and it can be represented as some God that transcends the world or it's
#
something can be represented more psychologically, some people represent it, or it can be represented
#
in the sense of the Brahman that exists and we are basically, I mean, our Atman is a part
#
is the same as that or differently, you know, there are different ways in which this has
#
been put in different traditions.
#
But the core common point I think is the experience of this numerosity, which basically the religion
#
is supposed to give you and that's a humbling experience.
#
That's a very humbling experience because you are, I mean, if you start associating
#
with your gods, I mean, psychologically, then you can have a huge ego inflation and you
#
can actually be the worst kind of religious person, you know, because while if you actually
#
think about it as a, as one consciousness experiencing the presence of newness, then
#
it's a much more humbling experience actually.
#
It's much more about your journey as a individual soul or consciousness or whatever you may
#
call it towards a particular kind of spiritual experience or like one of the things that
#
I've always, I mean, remember when I think of religion, I don't think about it all the
#
time, but is that when I was like 12 or 13 years old, my family has a guru, he passed
#
away a few years ago, he was, he had an ashram in Mathura and my, I asked my uncle just like
#
a naive kid about how do you know somebody is a guru, you know.
#
So he said something very interesting that the way to tell is that the guru will always
#
or the person who's enlightened will always treat everybody alike, whether it's the prime
#
minister of the country or somebody who's completely under destitution or powerless
#
He will treat everybody alike, you know, that's the one test he gave me that if you want to
#
know who's a real guru, he's not going to treat the prime minister in a special way
#
because of some ceremony or something, we will treat him the same way as anybody else
#
and that also, as a kid, it didn't mean anything to me.
#
But to test this, you need an available prime minister.
#
No, no, I'm just kidding.
#
I'm just, yeah, I mean, that was a test.
#
Prime minister is one, but any level, you know, class differences, anything, skin color,
#
So at the kid, I said, well, what does it even mean, how can you treat everybody alike?
#
But as you grow older, you realize that's the truth of it, right?
#
When you, when you're truly religious or truly, I mean, spiritual in that sense, then you
#
actually see it's a very humbling experience.
#
It's experience of equality in some ways, you know, that we are all in the most important
#
ways equal, you know, all the surface level differences, intelligence, wealth, all that
#
I like in the most important ways we're equal and that's represented in different ways.
#
So for example, in some Western traditions and Abrahamic traditions, it's some God and
#
against that you're equal.
#
So there's one and in our tradition, it's represented differently and the experience
#
and paths are different.
#
I'm not saying they are the same thing.
#
They are saying they are offering different paths, whether they're leading to the same
#
thing or not, I don't know.
#
I'll experience that hopefully later in my life.
#
I don't have the kind of religious experience that is required to comment on that.
#
But these are the things that I think are, as you actually practice this thing and think
#
about it and engage with this seriously, that this is what religion and I mean, one doesn't
#
have to, but I link it to democracy also in some, some senses that, you know, these are
#
the kind of values in some ways that democracy could use more of, you know, that a guru who
#
teaches, who treats everybody alike and a citizen who treats, who genuinely and deeply
#
experiences equality, you know, and not pays too much attention to the surface level differences
#
And that's something actually, so I've also gone through many phases.
#
I had a very naive belief early on, which was as a kid, you know, like literally every
#
day pray and there's Lord Shiva, there's this, there was deities to bow in front of
#
and it's a ritual, much more of a ritual.
#
It still comforts and calms me very much, but that I kind of outgrew in my twenties
#
Like I didn't have that kind of a naive belief anymore.
#
So then I had a long March back.
#
That March is too long to talk about here.
#
Hopefully once the March is complete, I'll have something to say about it.
#
But it's been a long, long March.
#
Once the March is complete, you will be giving five hours slots to every podcaster because
#
you have to treat everyone equally.
#
So you know, earlier I'd asked about whether your background set you apart from the other
#
sort of people you worked with in the policy space or the quote unquote intellectual circles
#
We come at that question from another angle where one fixes the lens on the intellectual
#
elites of Delhi as it were.
#
You've written this lovely essay on Tocqueville, which of course I'll link from the show notes
#
where you quote Blaise Pascal as saying early on quote, what a great advantage to be of
#
noble birth since it gives a man of 18 the standing recognition and respect that another
#
man might not earn before he was 50.
#
That means winning 30 years start with no effort, stop quote.
#
And this of course is a comment on privilege of sorts that we should be aware of.
#
But it's also a comment on how so many of these intellectual elites and policy elites
#
and all of that, everything kind of just fell into their lap.
#
They were born in a particular place in a particular time, perhaps in a particular family.
#
And this was an easy sort of route to take.
#
You do your PhD in a foreign university, perhaps in the course of things, you come back a quote
#
unquote expert in a particular subject with a particular kind of lens, which is the fashionable
#
lens at the time, which might have been acquired from wherever you studied and all of that.
#
And you're on a groove and it's a set groove and it's a set path.
#
And it is natural when one is on that path to not gain epistemic humility or not to use
#
fancy terms, but to not gain the humility to recognize that you're often wrong.
#
That maybe the lens that you were indoctrinated with might be the wrong lens, might be simplistic,
#
might be looking at the wrong things.
#
That there is more to the world that you have to, you know, first engage in good faith and
#
with respect different points of view that, you know, you can't just sit back and pass
#
judgment on people all the time.
#
You have to make that effort to get down and dirty and really understand what's going on.
#
And everything that I'm saying sounds incredibly harsh, but it's certainly my view of a lot
#
of the so-called Lutyens elite that I see around me.
#
And that is one thing that I think Modi is absolutely right on.
#
I think, you know, as everybody knows, I've opposed Modi so strongly that I've been mobbed,
#
I've faced threats, all that shit has happened, you know, especially after I opposed him on
#
So I'm like at one level the biggest opponent in the policy sphere, but he's right about
#
And this is perhaps one reason that, you know, that a lot of people instinctively support
#
him on this issue because there is that sort of understanding that our clueless elites
#
led us down the wrong path, tried to reshape our country in a way that, you know, wasn't
#
in consonance with what the country really was.
#
And what is happening today is pushback.
#
So give me a sense of these elites because, and I don't want to sort of make it sound
#
as if every individual who works with you is a scoundrel or something like that.
#
You know, I know many of these individuals.
#
I am in a sense one of the privileged elites.
#
Many of these people are my friends, but there is a systemic problem that we keep going on
#
and on about an idea of India that has nothing to do with India and that we never did the
#
hard work of trying to shape this country and shape it from within the culture and from
#
Instead, top down back, we thought that we would change everything from our high ideals.
#
Like the, you know, like, like earlier you were speaking of hypothetical constitution
#
or lawyers who don't really want to engage in the dirty work of politics, but just change
#
it from their pedestals and ivory towers.
#
So tell me a little bit about sort of this community.
#
And I suspect you, you're going to be very diplomatic because you are after all in their
#
Who wants to be a class enemy?
#
But yeah, I mean, so you said earlier that politics is corrupting, you know, but intellectualism
#
is far more corrupting, you know, because if your job is to describe and understand
#
the word and basically make a commendation or to make and remake it, it's impossible
#
to be actually, it's a very unnatural thing, right?
#
It's a very unnatural thing to do, to be done at scale, you know, when you think about
#
large society, complex adaptive systems, which are kind of evolving and emerging and you
#
will try to describe them in a way, which is not sufficiently complex in representing
#
that reality and is much more of a top-down perspective of it, then it's impossible to
#
I mean, for the most part, unless you completely reorient yourself and talk in a language which
#
is respecting of the complexity of that reality and whether it's a social reality or economic
#
or political or different spheres and all of them are overlapping all of that.
#
So it is extremely difficult and one of the most common things that all of us fall to
#
different degrees is intellectual pride, you know, that just because we know a little,
#
we have read a little and we have, we can quote a few serious, we can from Dworkin to
#
Kant, Kant, we can quote people who sound serious.
#
We think that we have some special knowledge, you know, it's something that the best of
#
us have, can fall for and I mean, so have I, I mean, it's not like I've never said
#
anything about let's do this in this way, you know, which underwent many, many assumptions
#
There was not a, it was the recommendations based on things that one thought one knew
#
and then later one thought that maybe one was not right about it.
#
So the fundamental thing is that it's very hard to do this, you know, that think tanks
#
and working in, I mean, bringing intellectualism to this is to begin with very difficult to
#
But I mean, there are obviously, as you said, many shades of this, like if you work closely
#
with people who have a sense of constraints, you're working on specific problems that you're
#
trying to solve in a democratic way, the role of the intellectual or expert in democracy
#
is a very small role, you know, it's a very limited role.
#
Democratic processes are basically, there is a system which has been put in place constitutionally
#
and that system has its own internal logic to working.
#
And even if you forget about the constitutional system and the words that are put in the constitution,
#
that's not so important.
#
The important thing is the reality of the way societies work and the society that supports
#
certain kinds of constitutional practices and oppose certain kinds of constitutions
#
and nothing even do about it because the people are sovereign, you know, that's the fundamental
#
Everything else is just language games on top of that.
#
So you have that and so you have to define your role in a manner which is more modest
#
and you're trying to frame issues, you're trying to bring out facts for people's attention,
#
for the experts, for the policy makers attentions, policy makers have legitimacy, right?
#
Because politicians get elected, they are elected and empowered to take decisions.
#
They don't have to go and do a referendum every time.
#
They have some limited amount of power for which they have some power, a little bit of
#
time for which they have some power and they can take a decision.
#
You can give them some alternatives about these are different ways, pros and cons.
#
They still have to go and figure out what will be politically feasible or not.
#
They have to ask their constituents sometimes, at least some stakeholders about what would
#
So there is a role, no one shedding lights on facts, analysing facts, but you stop there
#
and then you start, I mean, you accept that there is a democratic process through which
#
things will happen and you will often be disappointed.
#
I worked on one particular reform for three years, three years I've devoted to that one
#
issue in my previous job, it was to reform a particular kind of, do a particular fascist
#
sector reform on bankruptcy of financial firms.
#
And after three years, it was withdrawn.
#
I mean, in fact, from the parliament, the bill was withdrawn.
#
I mean, there was a democratic process.
#
There was some opposition and I believe there was some wisdom in the government's decision
#
It wasn't the right time perhaps.
#
My intellectual vanity was certainly hurt that I have worked on this and I was a very
#
I'm not even an IAS officer and working inside a system which has its own kind of ways of
#
I have some bit of expertise, I have done research in that area for many years and I've
#
worked on it for at least six, seven years even previously.
#
So I had some ideas, but that's, I mean, those ideas are not there for, nobody's waiting
#
for those ideas to come, oh, wow, you've now saved me.
#
So that I think is very important.
#
The most important thing to avoid is intellectual pride, which all of us usually fall for.
#
And I think the best way to avoid is to accept that you don't know, you don't know anything
#
But there are also other kinds of problems that emerge in the way these things are happening,
#
that there are more localized games, right, that some intellectual and some politicians
#
are in a happy relationship, like, okay, I'll give you certain ideas that look very good
#
on surface, we'll give you some short term wins.
#
And the politicians are, yes, it sounds, it sounds something I can work with.
#
Whether the long term impact will be good or not is something which there the intellectual
#
actually has a duty to actually do the right kind of advice and not get too political about
#
it that, okay, what will help this person win elections only.
#
It's obviously a constraint that the person has to worry about, the politicians to worry
#
Intellectuals have to worry about the general equilibrium impact, you know, about what are
#
the common good, how and long term how it will be served.
#
I think there are quite a few compromises that are often made, and I mean by individuals,
#
it's not a comment on everybody.
#
There are lots of people who don't do it like that.
#
But I think if some distance is maintained, some principle distance is maintained, and
#
you say, okay, I'm here to do research and put out analysis and ideas.
#
And it's a privilege, right, to be paid to read and think and write and analyze things.
#
And I'm not playing the power game so much, you know, then it's more kind of an endishing
#
I think the intellectual class can serve the political class better and political class
#
can benefit from the intellectual expertise better.
#
And also, I mean, you can be true to your fear.
#
And these are, this is what breaks down often, because everything is political, you know,
#
there is a person is a political, this is political, that is political, if everything
#
is political, then, I mean, is there anything else which is to be considered, is power the
#
only thing that really matters?
#
And as I said, intellectual pride is one thing, but also greed in some ways, you know, a hung
#
of a power that can get into this and epistemic humility is then shaped by all these other
#
Like, if you are really in it for the reason of seva, so to speak, service, then you will
#
sooner or later figure out that you were wrong and you don't understand much.
#
And therefore, you need to be humble and you will you need to know that you're just one
#
citizen among 1.4 billion, all of them have the same vote, just because you read a little
#
bit, you don't know much.
#
In fact, reading is one way to understand the word and data analysis is one way to understand
#
Experience is another business people know a lot.
#
I have talked to a lot of business people, they have a lot more wisdom out in the political
#
economy that all the political economy researchers put together, including me, some of them,
#
not all, because those who reflect about their word and who have lived through the last 30
#
years of Indian economy and have thought about it deeply, some of the civil servants have
#
deep wisdom about politicians generally have a lot of wisdom about how the society works
#
and what is possible, what is not possible, most of them actually.
#
So I think a way of much more of a modesty is required from this class, I think, and
#
a little bit more honesty about what our role is and again, being true to the virtues of
#
being an analyst and intellectual or a thinker or a researcher in policy space.
#
I think generally quite a few people do have that.
#
I worked with quite a few of them, I still work with some of them, and I admire them,
#
I learn from them, I'm trying to do to be like more like them.
#
And I need to see more role models of that type, and so otherwise, if you're only looking
#
for power or a lot more attention all the time, the whole thing is going in the direction
#
The game is of eyeballs, getting more and more views and getting access.
#
Access comes at a cost, it's not so easy, but that's the game, everybody, the philanthropists
#
pay for access and impact and all of that.
#
So there's a complex system in which different things have to realign a little to get good
#
practices flourishing and bad practices diminishing as it is in other domains.
#
And overall, I think the space is expanded, there are now more think tanks in universities,
#
more things to be done, more specialized areas of work also, somebody wants to do tech policy
#
can do tech policy, other areas.
#
But ultimately, I think, because you are here to serve society, you have to first understand
#
the society a little bit, like try to make sense of, I mean, maybe all the major premises,
#
you know, like in major premise, minor premise conclusion.
#
So all the major premises don't come from you only, right?
#
People have their own preferences, like they want to, they want certain things.
#
Why are you here to impose your values upon them to transform their lives, you know, who
#
are you, you're one citizen.
#
And to get that through shortcuts that I'll get this one, I mean, order passed or something
#
is really, I mean, initiating the democratic atmosphere.
#
And in some ways, I mean, I think Mr. Modi goes overboard in his populist rhetoric.
#
But it's a symbol, right?
#
He said Khan market, how many people in India know Khan market?
#
Only people, it's a Delhi thing, right?
#
But it somehow resonates in other parts also, because every place has its Khan market, you
#
know, and there's something to be said about that kind of rhetoric working, why is it working?
#
So it's and therefore, I think there is some need to understand why something like this
#
I know, I don't think populist politics is a good thing in democracy.
#
It's a perversion of democracy and but democracy is perverted in many ways, not just populism.
#
Yeah, and I think just speculating aloud when I look at either some of the Latvians
#
elite or whether I look at many people taking harsh stride and strands on Twitter, for example,
#
I see two simultaneous, you know, things driving this.
#
And one is intellectual laziness, that you arrived at a frame through which you look
#
And now you don't want to put in the cognitive energy to modify that frame or to engage with
#
other ways of looking at the world or to enter a deep meaningful discourse where you're not
#
lecturing someone but you're actually engaging with them.
#
And the second drive is a drive to sanctimony, that, you know, it makes all of us feel virtuous
#
if you're giving lectures on morality to others, if you're condemning others, if you're passing
#
judgment and that sort of becomes problematic.
#
So like, I mean, see, this is happening because of influence, we want to influence.
#
Influence is requires certainty, at least appearance of certainty, even if you may be
#
a little bit doubt inside, you have to appear that you are certain so that you can make
#
Otherwise, you need to appear at least somewhat sure yourself, right?
#
Otherwise, why would other person say that there's something worth listening to?
#
And so one thing is epistemic certainty, other is moral superiority.
#
That is also required for influence because you have to not just say that you're sure
#
about this, so this is a morally better thing to do.
#
And both are actually, if you think carefully, are important for influence, but also in a
#
way, intellectually and morally corrupting in some senses, that you have to pretend to
#
have a particular position, which you may actually inside you have many doubts about.
#
The first time we met, we met in Bombay, our mutual friend Kumar Anand, God bless his
#
He's alive by the way, we are talking like he's very much alive, shout out to Kumar.
#
And I think we met at car social, was it?
#
And one of the things that immediately you and I were on exactly the same page was demonetization
#
where both of us felt equally strongly and we both agreed that it was a litmus test for
#
us, whether you're really a liberal or you're not in terms of the classical sense of the
#
And I later wrote a piece called the Beware of the Useful Idiots, which was an editorial
#
for the online magazine I edited, Prakriti, where my argument was that any economist who
#
supported demonetization was either a bad economist or a bad human being because demon
#
was just so evidently daft and dangerous.
#
And like I keep saying, the largest attack on property rights in human history.
#
And that also shows how some of our intellectual elites are not driven by what they project
#
as a power of ideas or believing in certain principles, but rather other kinds of contingencies.
#
Like many of the people who supported demon were people who had allied themselves with
#
the government because they thought, okay, they'll bring about the change we want.
#
At least that was their reasoning then.
#
But even when they saw that this government was far more status than previous ones and
#
were thinking and were doing completely daft and dangerous things like demonetization,
#
they continued rationalizing that, they continued supporting that.
#
At one hand, of course, the government had given out this order to all its house dogs
#
as it were that defend demon.
#
But many of them did it.
#
Many of them actually did it.
#
Many of them wrote columns and came on TV supporting demonetization when you and I know
#
that they knew that it was a disaster and yet they willfully lied.
#
And that makes me, and there are two thoughts connected with this, and one is that a lot
#
of what people claim to believe in is a front to themselves and to others.
#
And people are more tribal than they are principled by and large, with exceptions.
#
Yeah, we are also to some extent, I mean, let's not have an assumption in this conversation
#
that you and I are morally superior to others, you know, that is one part of the community.
#
So the thing is, just to address that and that's, which is why I don't like labels
#
being attached to me anymore.
#
And which is why, you know, why does a person like me, I mean, in a sense, I have no friends,
#
right, in that, in the ideological space, because I've attacked everyone, because I'm
#
just going by my principles.
#
It doesn't mean that there is no circumstance in which I won't compromise, who knows, you
#
know, you put me in a dungeon and you torture me and you make me watch Shah Rukh Khan movies
#
all day, even I will bend at some point.
#
But in general, we've avoided tribalism, which is something I can, you know, confidently
#
say, whereas, and this is something I'm lamenting, I'm not, you know, judging, I'm just lamenting
#
that, like earlier, you said that we do things for reasons that we ourselves may not understand,
#
you know, what is going on in our subconscious, we don't know most of it.
#
So that's sort of one thing I saw during that, that kind of made me feel that, you know,
#
people are more tribal than their principle, even when they appear principled.
#
We saw this in the US with the Republican Party, where so many Republicans supported
#
Trump despite the fact that Trump stood against so many of the principles of the Republican
#
Party, like on trade, for example, where his positions are identical to Bernie Sanders.
#
So is this something that kind of strikes you that people have chosen sides and they
#
are going with those sides?
#
Is it, is nuance therefore difficult in these times for a person like you who works in the
#
Yeah, I mean, as I said that there is a cost in terms of some influence that you have to
#
pay in the, at least for some time, maybe forever, because I mean, the times are such
#
that if you want to be autonomous, you will be isolated.
#
So it's just two sides of the same coin right now, but the times can change.
#
And when demonetization was a very disappointing time, because many people I know who should
#
know better, I mean, still said something different from what I, I mean, it was apparent
#
to me what was going on and the harm that it would do, not just in terms of direct harm,
#
but also unsettling the assumptions about the way policies are made in India and implemented
#
the process and kind of diligence that is gone and the direction of India's policymaking
#
in some ways was completely, it was a shock event to that, right?
#
There was a general directionality of more openness and liberality, a little bit more
#
policy certainty they were trying to establish.
#
Even they, between 2014 and 16, the government had stabilised the economy in many ways.
#
They had taken quite a few sensible decisions and suddenly two and a half years into the
#
government this thing was announced and I wish there had been more civil society, at
#
least among intellectuals, economists, there had been a little bit more scepticism about
#
even trying something like this and I think more than economics, economics can justify
#
many things because it depends on the assumption you make about the future, right?
#
It's a future assumption of analysis of future impact and which variables you consider.
#
So some people highlight the digitisation and all of that.
#
It's more full political philosophy, right?
#
What is the political philosophy that you have that you would support a decision like
#
this as a citizen and that too taken in such a way which was completely sudden and arbitrary
#
and in my view at least harmful and wrong.
#
But that's the thing, everybody has their reasons, they have their reasons to do what
#
But I agree that wherever tribalism comes in, tribalism becomes a reason and then it
#
substitutes many other reasons, the reasoning and the rationality that should go into at
#
least decisions for people like us who are in that luxurious space of thinking carefully,
#
analysing data and having scenarios of the future and saying what are the plausible scenarios,
#
typical way in which you do policy analysis.
#
If you have that and you don't exercise that, it's much more tribalism, it's harmful.
#
That's why I think that yes, politics is very important.
#
It is the main way in which you organise society.
#
Politicians are the ones who have greatest legitimacy in a democratic setting to take
#
decisions and all of that.
#
And democracy has rewarded that decision in some ways, they have won the election and
#
all of that and it's very important and that is the way in which our society settles these
#
I mean there is nothing else.
#
But each one of us has our duty to when we think that something is going to do some harm
#
and we have some basis to say that and we have thought carefully about it and then we
#
put it out and hopefully some people will listen to it, some course correction will
#
happen and all of that.
#
And that is our role and whether democracy will listen to us, whether people will listen
#
to us, whether the politicians will listen to us is not something that we can really
#
We are, I mean our influence is a matter of more of our time than our own self or what
#
happens with the ideas that we have.
#
And so I humbly say that you and I, I for sure thought it was a harmful decision, not
#
just in the short term cost but also the long term impact on the political economy of India
#
and it disrupted many things that are underpinning our growth in my view.
#
And but reasonably people always disagree.
#
I mean some reasonable people can disagree about the economics of it.
#
But the political philosophy, the kind of citizens, I mean perspectives that came out,
#
I thought because the way it was presented, it was like a fight against corruption, right.
#
It was a sacrificial kind of a process through which you fight and cleanse your body politic
#
And that became very difficult to oppose for many people.
#
Politically appeared like if you are opposing demonetization, you are opposing corruption.
#
People like us who wrote about it in a critical way analytically, I mean we had to go to extra
#
lengths to say that we are not supporting corruption quote unquote.
#
Corruption is a complicated business and we can come to talk about that a little later
#
if you want, what is corruption and what is not.
#
But at that time it was a pretty binary situation and quite a few people, I mean disappointingly
#
for tribal reasons or for reasons of appearing virtuous at that time basically said that
#
hey, at least it's an experiment worth trying or they said that this is going to work, all
#
of that which without offering enough evidence of why it may be.
#
And even now there are lots of people who defend that decision.
#
Even after these many years, they still think that it worked.
#
So I guess there is a possibility that I may be wrong about it.
#
And I have to accept that because I don't know everything, obviously, but I still hold
#
the view that it was a wrong decision.
#
And like you said, we still have to do what we have to do even if it seems futile.
#
The dharma of the wolf is to howl at the moon, how's that for a lion?
#
The dharma of the wolf is to howl at the moon.
#
So let's get back to your...
#
Or in the way Bello puts it, Bello writes about that dog who's looking up about what
#
is he thinking and he's, you know, he's humiliating on the limitations of the canine condition
#
and asking the God to open the universe a little more.
#
Yeah, actually dogs behave with a lot more.
#
I think dogs are perhaps less self-delusional and humans in the sense that no dog would
#
So let's get back to your sort of personal story.
#
And what I know of your past is really from when you joined NIPFP in 2011 and, you know,
#
worked with the finance ministry after that, eventually joined Carnegie in 2018.
#
But bring me to a sense of your journey in the sense that what was your early conception
#
of yourself and what brought you to NIPFP to begin with?
#
And just give me a sense of, you know, how did you look at yourself and the things you
#
wanted to do and so on and so forth?
#
So I actually didn't have a plan to get into the policy space.
#
I just met this person who was at NIPFP, was a professor at NIPFP.
#
Ajay, you know that, we were common friends.
#
And he had come to a conference that I had organized in my previous job.
#
I had helped organize on financial system reforms.
#
And at that time, a commission was being set up, Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission.
#
And they were looking for researchers to work on that.
#
And he made me an offer to come and join and work for the commission.
#
It was a two year commission.
#
So good amount of time to work on something.
#
Usually policy work often gets done in very short period of time and it's not very satisfying
#
because it was a very short time, but this was a two year thing.
#
So I thought it would be interesting to do it for two years and then come back and go
#
into private sector or whatever it was, microfinance or anything that, I mean, whatever the experience
#
at that time working on.
#
So I joined in 2011, basically National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, which is a,
#
I mean, basically a policy research shop, but it's an autonomous body promoted by the
#
So it's a, you work mainly with the government, closely with the government and you do some
#
research also, I mean, of your own.
#
And I stayed there for almost eight years and main work there was to do policy research.
#
I worked on different, I mean, projects, I worked with different ministries and departments
#
and government agencies and I really enjoyed that work.
#
So what I had thought I'd do for two years, I ended up doing for eight years.
#
And so give me a sense of the insights of the beast.
#
How does government work?
#
Like, you know, NIPFP of course worked closely with the finance ministry, you were a consultant
#
for the finance ministry for a short period, for a short period later on.
#
So how does government work?
#
Because the general sense that you have from the outside is of, you know, very sclerotic,
#
very slow, bureaucratic, a lot of discussion, not much gets done, committee by committee,
#
But give me a sense from the inside of how it works and how was it like, what were your
#
expectations of it going in and what did you discover once you were there, which was different
#
from what you had expected?
#
So I actually didn't have a very clearly formed view of what the government would be.
#
You know, there were some stereotypes, but I mean, not much of a hard view as such.
#
And then I had a bit of a soft landing because I worked for a commission, not directly with
#
the ministry or department or agency of government work with a commission, which was an expert
#
body set up under a former Supreme Court judge and with her very good leading economist,
#
former regulators, experts, and a good bunch of researchers working together, mostly lawyers
#
I was an outsider, neither a lawyer nor an economist, a bit of an odd one out there.
#
But I really enjoyed working and learned a lot from these lawyers and economists and
#
the regulators and civil servants and also the judge who was leading it.
#
And it was a soft landing because although it was work for a government policy research
#
reform project, it wasn't in the heart of the beast, so to speak, you know, that you're
#
not actually changing policy immediately.
#
It's just research and analysis and presenting a set of ideas that may work.
#
So two years is a good time to do this, you know, it's a right amount of time to think
#
about a problem and a set of problems.
#
And I worked on a couple of areas intensively in that, collaborated with some people and
#
learned a lot from them.
#
And some of those people had been doing policy research for years earlier.
#
And then actually, after that, I had a more direct interaction.
#
So again, my role was very small, to be very, very clear, it's a research policy researcher,
#
You're not an office, you're not a politician, you didn't get elected, nor did you crack
#
a difficult exam many years ago.
#
So you are here to provide analysis.
#
And so when the commission submitted its report, it became more implementation.
#
So parts of it was taken and implemented in some ways, inflation targeting grew out of
#
There was a reform of capital controls that was done where powers are divided between
#
Some reforms have come out of that process, and it was basically done by bureaucrats.
#
So joint secretary is a key rank and joint secretaries are the ones who drive the world
#
because they had a division and then secretaries have to support ministers to support many
#
things go to the cabinet for approval.
#
And one of the main things about government is that it's a relatively low capacity organisation.
#
It's a very difficult thing to do things because you don't have the kind of capacity, there
#
are smart officers inside who really know a lot or at least have the capacity to quickly
#
pick up because they have moved from one department to another, which completely unrelated subject
#
But the below director level bureaucracy is very, very weak in terms of just a number
#
Also the kind of quality that you get in terms of training that you provide them, the kind
#
of expertise that they have.
#
So it's a constant struggle to do anything.
#
So they do value outsiders like us who are working in a semi-Sarkari government kind
#
of think tank and helping them out.
#
So they did value and there was a lot of interest from secretary, joint secretary, minister
#
to get help and get some support, research support and analytical support to push things
#
And so one thing that happened when I was working in this area, I'll talk more about
#
other things that I did, is that I developed a lot of empathy for people who work in government,
#
whether it's the ministers or the IAS officers, that I really felt that it's a very difficult
#
situation and they're taking, partly they're responsible for it because government of India
#
has taken on too many responsibilities and for our stage of development, it is trying
#
to take on too many things, more things than it should, you know, I mean, we should have
#
a much smaller set of issues that government is trying to solve and others you should just
#
leave to civil society and market organized markets and accept it.
#
But on some four reasons which I don't fully understand, our democracy makes many, many
#
demands and for reasons that again, I don't understand our political leadership is not
#
able to resist those demands.
#
So the ministry of agriculture, agriculture is a state subject, it has 30 joint secretaries.
#
So why should a government of India have 30 joint secretaries working in a ministry which
#
is a state subject because, but still, they're not able to resist these demands.
#
So I mean, again, as I said, democracy, so there are things that are done, which our
#
intellectual worldview may find a little odd or inefficient, but allocative efficiency may
#
appear bad, but it is done.
#
So it's very difficult because you've got a small number of IAS officers and a small
#
number of other civil servants, revenue services, auditing accounts and all that who have to
#
do a lot of these things and the bureaucracy, lower bureaucracy is very, very weak.
#
Also I mean, in the 90s, there was a drop in the hiring of IAS officers to the UPSC
#
So again, that middle bureaucracy is very, very small and same number of same officers
#
basically going around and doing things.
#
So that was the one big, I mean, change is becoming more empathetic and understanding
#
So one of the most important things in government to understand the constraints within which
#
James Q. Wilson, the great political scientist has a great book on bureaucracy, it's worth
#
reading, everybody should read it.
#
So his whole frame is to understand government through constraints, that there are things
#
that should never compare a government organization with a private organization and don't have
#
a simplistic thing that some private CEO will come and transform government.
#
Can't be done because they can add value for sure, but for that they have to first be empathetic
#
towards the situation of the government.
#
Government cannot hire or fire, government cannot procure freely from wherever it has
#
to follow a due process.
#
Government cannot just decide without following a very complex set of laws, there's also
#
And there are many things that the government is held to and the government doesn't really
#
choose its own priorities.
#
There's a complex democratic process through which priorities are chosen, they can change.
#
You start working on a policy project and then government changes and suddenly the priorities
#
These are very significant constraints, right?
#
And you see that when you actually work in the government, you see how things happen.
#
So in fact, some of the most satisfying work I did was this commission called Expenditure
#
I was coordinating research for the whole commission, which was again two years.
#
And we looked at the entire central government expenditure and trying to understand how its
#
operational efficiency can be improved, not allocative, allocative is political business,
#
how can we do a little better implementation and trying to get more bang for the buck,
#
The report is not public, so I can't talk anything about it at all.
#
It's still confidential, but I'm talking about the process.
#
So there the commission was basically led by a senior economist and also a former public
#
It had another economist as a member.
#
It had some couple of bureaucrats, one serving, one retired as members.
#
And then the research team was basically, I mean, the staff was mostly all civil servants.
#
And what I really enjoyed about working in that commission was that I could have a sense
#
of where the binding constraints are.
#
See, that's one of the most important things in policy is that you may have some abstract
#
notion of here is a system and there it should be.
#
But what is the next step?
#
See, you can have some UK is doing this, US is doing thing that, but you can't go from
#
And maybe that is not the right path for you because your path is different and therefore
#
you can take a different kind of optimal path.
#
But there's the next step.
#
And that is about easing the binding constraints that are most important right now.
#
And people who are in the thick of things, these civil servants, and if they're reflective
#
and thoughtful, and if you work closely with them, they know that very well.
#
I mean, if they get the opportunity to reflect on it and like which we did for two years,
#
we got an opportunity to reflect and think about what can be done to improve government
#
procurement, expenditure efficiency in health and education, expenditure efficiency, subsidies,
#
all subsidies, all of that stuff that we looked at, public set enterprise and autonomous bodies,
#
everything, defense, all of that.
#
And then you actually have a sense you're talking to something which matters now and
#
not painting some, you know, most of the policy work is basically best practice type.
#
Hey, look at this UK, US did it and do five countries study and then why doesn't India
#
There's many things that these countries do that we don't do, you know, we are in the
#
bottom third in the world in per capita income and in almost all measures we are in the bottom
#
So why compare only with frontiers?
#
And not even compare with others.
#
Look at your own path and say, okay, where can we go next?
#
And that's where I think this, because these civil servants, the good ones who are reflective
#
and have an opportunity to think about these things, work with researchers closely, they
#
can identify the binding constraints and find an optimal next step, which is what matters.
#
Ultimately, you have to evolve to the next step, then the next after, and then in the
#
generation, many, many problems will get solved.
#
If you try to say the ultimate objective, which anyway, you can't say, right, you don't,
#
you can't see what would be the right institutional design, you know, it's not, again, you will
#
fall for the planning and top down design kind of a trap.
#
So yeah, the understanding of constraints, empathy for difficulty of capacity and political
#
demands and all of that.
#
The most disappointing was that work that I did on the reform of financial resolution
#
where for three years I was at it as a researcher only, it's a small role, but I was really
#
at the thick of it, in the thick of it, working on it almost continuously.
#
And at the last moment when it had to be passed, it got withdrawn for the parliament and it
#
was a disappointing moment, but it was a really instructive moment on how political economy
#
It was also very humbling that, okay, maybe it'll happen later.
#
I think it is an important reform to pursue, but it didn't get pursued.
#
I did some work on infrastructure a little bit, but most of our work was on financial
#
sector reform and regulation and financial reform and on public finance.
#
So my subject matter expertise, such as it is in these areas, but there I have a lot
#
of meta insights on how to work with government and what I did, what worked and what didn't
#
work, which I just talked about mostly, I didn't get into the subject matter as much.
#
But government is a completely different feature from companies and it will always be, it's
#
a permanent fact, always very different from, you can bring a little bit of so-called private
#
sector experience into it, have a little more alignment of incentives and all of that.
#
But not a whole lot can be done on that front.
#
So you mentioned James Q. Wilson and we were talking about virtue earlier and one book
#
I remember reading of Wilson was a book called The Moral Sense.
#
And I read this around the same time as A Moral Animal by Wright, though I liked Wright's
#
book more because it seemed more right to me.
#
And again, about state capacity, I have an episode with Karthik Muralidharan on this
#
and I've discussed this so many times actually, completely, I mean, Fukuyama gave an interesting
#
frame of looking at the state, which is a frame of scope and strength.
#
And with the Indian state, the scope is too much, the strength is too little.
#
We do too many things badly while we should do a few things really well, which kind of
#
So it is simultaneously the case that the state is in too many places, but it is also
#
incredibly weak as you pointed out.
#
So here's a question, it strikes me that when you are in this policy field, your mindset
#
has to be different in two fundamental ways from anything else you did before.
#
One is that any change, if it happens, will be incremental, it will be a tiny thing.
#
You know, you can aim for the moon, but things move really slowly and you'll just get incremental
#
and you won't get big moon shots working out.
#
And even those incremental change at scale can make a huge difference to people, but
#
in ways that cannot be traced back to you or quantified sometimes.
#
Yeah, that's a good part of it that you never get any credit for it.
#
And the second, which also ties in with the credit thing is that your rhythm of looking
#
at what you are doing and why you're doing has to slow down a lot because you're really
#
playing the long game that you may work on something for three years and nothing may
#
And sometimes you'll work on something for 15, 20 years and then change will happen and
#
when it does, sometimes, you know, change can happen really fast and in dramatic ways.
#
But by and large, you're playing the long game.
#
There's no immediate gratification.
#
If you're working in a company, for example, and you implement something, who pay off the
#
time, like water may sales will go up or sales will go down.
#
New branches will open.
#
You see the payoff here.
#
You don't see a payoff.
#
There is no causality that can be kind of given to you.
#
Your validation doesn't come from measurable results, right?
#
So at one level, you have to sort of be internally driven, yet I would imagine given human nature
#
that most people in any field are not internally driven.
#
They are ticking boxes, going through the motions within the set group that they are.
#
And some people in every field will be internally driven and will be dynamic.
#
Sometimes that is just because of incentives.
#
Like if you're the founder of a startup, you're going to be way more driven than somebody
#
three rungs down the ladder.
#
And sometimes that's just the kind of person you are, that whatever you do, if you're doing
#
something you love, you're driven by it, even if you're not too high up or there isn't gratification.
#
So this change in mindset, am I sort of characterizing it accurately?
#
Are there things you'd like to add to it?
#
And what was the experience for you coming from a private world to the world of where
#
you're working with government and change happens at a glacial pace and there are all
#
these obstacles and so on and so forth?
#
Yeah, so two, three factual things is that one is that when it happens, the impact is
#
And I wouldn't say that I'm completely indifferent to the impact that obviously we do this because
#
we want things to change and we want things to improve and subject to democratic agreement
#
and consensus building, all of that, the best possible path that is possible.
#
Sometimes it's second best, but at least when it happens, it's the impact is very large
#
and it's, it can be quite satisfying to see that impact that, okay, you had a small contribution
#
Even if nobody ever knows about it, you know, and, and it's, I mean, you are part of the
#
Can you give examples of this from your own work?
#
No, I don't want to attribute anything to myself because everything I did was in teams.
#
Can you give examples of this from your team's work?
#
Yeah, I can, I can, I mean, again, the credit should go to politicians, a hundred percent
#
of it, zero percent should come to anybody else, but there's been a cleanup of capital
#
controls regulation in India.
#
There has been, I mean, introduction of inflation targeting in India, there has been a push
#
for consumer protection, regulation improvements in finance in India.
#
There's been quite a bit of expenditure management reform in the last several years, a few years
#
I can't say anything specific because the report is confidential.
#
Raja Chellaia founded NIPFP, you know, he was our founder and he was a great tax economist,
#
public finance specialist and special expertise in tax.
#
He worked for many years, you know, on bringing, rationalizing our tax system.
#
It was only in the late nineties that we actually got to this 30% tax rate that we now have
#
right under the third front government, that UDF government that we had.
#
So that's the other part of it that you have to work for many years.
#
And then there'll be a moment suddenly when things fall in place, human beings have tried
#
everything else before doing the right thing, so to speak, you know, or finding a optimal
#
kind of a solution that works at least for a particular kind of social welfare function.
#
Social welfare function also changes, right?
#
People have different views about what should be the social welfare function.
#
And then you have a particular analysis, assuming a certain kind of social welfare function.
#
And then suddenly these things align and it works.
#
Hopefully it's a good thing it will work because some of the reforms within nineties, the thinking
#
was back to seventies also, right?
#
There were committees set up in the late seventies, eighties, people like Mr. Ahluwalia and all,
#
they were preparing proposals for reform.
#
I had an episode with Montek, where he talks about how from the late seventies itself,
#
I mean, the work started and then the payoff for the society, not for the person who worked
#
on it, who you're here to serve, happened many, many years later.
#
I mean, some of them may have passed away in the process.
#
Raja Chalaya worked on tax reform for many years, you know, and things got better gradually,
#
but the genuine kind of settlement of the current relatively better tax regime that
#
we have on the direct side tax side came in the late nineties.
#
And I think that's the way it is that many of the things that we work on will not never
#
Some that will get implemented may have a huge impact, some will have a smaller impact,
#
but generally you will have a significant kind of impact.
#
And then the timing may mismatch that you may have done something and it's there in
#
And then five years later, you are doing something else, but it gets implemented.
#
Even now I get calls from people I worked with, okay, why was this drafted?
#
We are now pushing it through to the system, putting up a cabinet or whatever.
#
And then we need a clarification of this because institutional memory is required to interpret
#
Even now, like literally last week, like, so this is a part of that, the way the system
#
And again, it's a democratic system and there are many people who can say no to something
#
and then can literally stop it from happening.
#
And that's good because many mistakes don't get made because people like me may recommend
#
something very bad also and harmful.
#
And then it doesn't get, thank God, because if it hadn't been done, we would have been
#
feeling much more guilty.
#
So I have faith that, okay, at least now, I mean, if I was living in 50s and 60s and
#
70s, it would have been very, very frustrating because hardly any good ideas got accepted
#
and bad ideas were taken up very easily.
#
But now we're in a different kind of a polity since the 90s at least.
#
In 80s, at least the elite consensus was shifting.
#
And now I think the shelf life is, I mean, the life from thinking about working on some
#
analysis and bringing out something which may work and that being heard is, I mean,
#
a shorter period of time.
#
And whether it gets done or not is something which cannot be controlled.
#
It's left to the democratic processes.
#
And that's the way to think about it.
#
And in fact, I was, I was eight years, I never got great for anything.
#
And it was the best time of my life because a lot of things get got done because we were
#
just enjoying the work.
#
It is just so much and it was a good place, a good team, a good set of people to learn
#
from, work with, most of them were motivated intrinsically because they were enjoying that
#
And we had good leaders in the team who were so kind of who kept us motivated because they
#
also was doing it for that reason.
#
And I think that's what it is that, you know, it's like, why does a soldier fight?
#
Fights for his buddies in some senses.
#
So similarly, I mean, nation is there, but the immediate impulse come from being a part
#
So and going through that process, we are overestimating like some of the least most
#
dangerous professions pay very little firemen and all for example, but they're very dangerous.
#
You put your life on the line.
#
Soldiers don't get much money, but they go and put a line, overestimate the power of
#
material incentives in human nature.
#
I mean, people find meaning in a variety of ways.
#
And the question is whether you find meaning or not.
#
The work is very meaningful.
#
Working with government and policy reform in a lower middle income country is a very
#
And they'll never have any shortage of meaning while you're doing that.
#
So you know, earlier you had mentioned about how at various points in time, you've changed
#
our mind about various things.
#
So take me through some of this because my just as an outsider from outside, my thinking
#
about government has also changed from painting broad brushstrokes, like how dysfunctional
#
it is to still thinking it is dysfunctional.
#
But understanding the dysfunction much better, understanding the incentives that work, understanding
#
the pressures that people inside go through and the ways in which they fight them.
#
You know, so you know, as someone who was an insider, you know, you began with a commission,
#
but then you worked much more closely with them.
#
You even consulted for the Ministry of Finance for a while, though obviously your work there
#
We won't talk about it, but you know, what was your sense of the innards of government
#
and what are the ways in which you changed your mind, both about the state and also about
#
broad ideological ideas that you might have held, you know, before you actually got into
#
the belly of the beast?
#
So I partly answered this question in terms of what I said earlier about having some empathy
#
for people to work in a very difficult situation and with lots of constraints and understanding
#
of those constraints before making any recommendations and expecting things to change.
#
And that's absolutely essential for anybody who's working on policy to understand who
#
you're working for or with and who you're recommending to.
#
There is no substitute for that.
#
In fact, if you, you know, there's a famous quote that all happy families are alike and
#
all unhappy families are different, unhappy for different reasons.
#
And it's quite true that if you're working in developed countries, there is a certain
#
commonality in which the state works there.
#
There are different institutional design choices they've made, different varieties of capitalism,
#
different varieties of separation of power and all they have.
#
But there is a certain more or less formality to it.
#
And it works in a particular way, there's high capacity in most of those states.
#
But developing countries are all, each one is different when there's a different dynamic
#
in terms of capacity, how it's utilized, how, whether it's democratic or not, most developing
#
countries are not democratic.
#
So that makes a difference.
#
Some of them have a permanent civil service, others have a much more mixed, mixed and match
#
of permanent civil service with more of when hiring from outside.
#
So there is a, when you understand who you're working with and Indian state is a particular
#
And each within that each state has its own, there's a national level dynamic and there's
#
a state level dynamic, sub-national and different agencies, if you're working with the Bank
#
of India, it's a particular kind of agency is very different from SEBI, for example.
#
So you need to understand who you're working for and working with and try to add value
#
And as I said that it's very important to try to figure out the next step, how do you
#
evolve to the next step, how to do little better than you were doing earlier, because
#
Growth is about improving from where you are.
#
And development is something grander and you want to get there, some kind of a state you
#
want to get towards and that opinion about what that state is may also change over time.
#
But you may have some kind of a load star in your mind and you work towards it.
#
But growth is about getting from here to there and then from there to there and a step at
#
And that's what I think is a big change that earlier I used to think much more in terms
#
of best practices, I think much more about abstract notions of what rights should be
#
preserved, what kind of things should be pursued.
#
But now much more of a sense of what is possible and also about what is possible now, given
#
the political economy, given the way the institutions work, what would be an improvement over from
#
Like somebody says, well, how should we improve tax enforcement?
#
I'll look at more closely at where can we make some of the improvements now to the next
#
And then there's a blueprint that you can actually decide in 20 years where you should
#
So the next step will then in a complex kind of way, I mean, there will be interactions
#
with other parts of the system with stakeholders will then reveal the next binding constraints
#
and then you go further.
#
And I think that's the most important kind of realization I've had.
#
The second is that earlier I used to take the de jure as de facto.
#
What I mean by that is I used to assume that whatever is written in the rule book and laws
#
is what happens in reality.
#
But that's a very, very wrong assumption.
#
I mean, it's completely wrong.
#
In fact, more wrong than even I have fully fathomed till now.
#
I know intellectually, but I haven't fully taken a grip on this kind of realization that
#
in fact, in developing countries like India, in most circumstances, laws are completely
#
not descriptive of what actually goes on.
#
And the way the executive implements the laws is very different than from what the laws
#
may have written or intended.
#
And the reality is shaped much more by decisions by politicians and civil servants and the
#
order in which that decisions are taken is much more important than what's written in
#
And the correspondence can be very, very weak between these two.
#
And sometimes even very counterintuitive in some senses that you've written something
#
in the rule book, but the reality is completely different from that.
#
You already see that sometimes when you talk about rights, do we have this right?
#
I mean, you read a hundred, dozens of different rights into the constitution through jurisprudence,
#
but do you actually have that right when you go and then the reality is very different.
#
Similarly on the regulatory side also, similarly on the side of regulation of businesses, side
#
of different types of delivery of schemes and welfare programs, implementation of projects,
#
procurement, all of that.
#
There is a lot more goes on in terms of informal decision making, use of discretion, deal making,
#
which may be actually developmental in its purpose and may actually work towards improving
#
things overall, but it's a hidden way in which the state works.
#
And unless you understand that, if you just work on policy in terms of just saying change
#
this law to that law and things will get better, unless you can first establish that law actually
#
is the real framework for governing reality in actuality and not just a potentiality,
#
then you are actually sparking up the wrong tree, because what matters then is basically
#
how the people who are actually taking the decisions define their worldview and what
#
are the incentives that are shaping their behavior, what are their socialization that
#
Those are things that become much more important and it's not about India only.
#
Whatever I've read about this kind of things, there are other countries also in developing
#
countries generally have this kind of a reality and there are hard reasons for it and there
#
The hard reason is the state capacity constraint that we make many, many more laws than we
#
can realistically implement.
#
Everything will come to a logjam.
#
We started implementing all the laws, especially on the business side in the economy.
#
And sometimes the laws are made at a time when now the current executive is not so keen
#
to implement them and they do have some discretion.
#
We may not like it, we want rule of law, this and that, but political reality is that the
#
current executive has a lot of legitimacy to exercise some discretion about how laws
#
are to implemented and all.
#
And that was a big revelation when I started actually studying this literature and also
#
talking to lots of people in different sectors like infrastructure and all about how they
#
enter a 30 year contract in a developing country which changes so fast and so many realities
#
change and risks they were holding could go bad.
#
How what were the assumptions and actually the assumptions were very informal in the
#
sense that they expected that the contract is one thing, but there will be concessions
#
made and some reliefs will be given if things go bad.
#
And I think that was realistic because contracts are by definition typically incomplete and
#
much more incomplete in a developing country context, which is things are very disorganized,
#
they change very rapidly.
#
And it's just a completely different word.
#
When you've gone through 10 years of 5% or 6% growth or 7% growth, the country completely
#
changed and you entered a contract for 30 years.
#
So there are hard realities because of which our discretion, some degree of informality
#
and implementation of rules and laws is required and then there are softer.
#
Sometimes you actually want to exercise discretion because you have the power and you want to
#
do certain things with that power and the law becomes a constraint for you and sometimes
#
for good reasons, sometimes bad reasons.
#
So those are things which are on a case by case basis to decide.
#
But these were I think the main changes in my view.
#
Usually the difference is between having an idealized conception in my mind.
#
Even if it's a negative conception, it's still an idealized and stereotypical conception
#
from having a little better understanding of how the state actually works and something
#
as simple as transparency and secrecy.
#
Earlier I had a very simplistic notion of transparency, more transparency, more transparency,
#
is better for accountability, cliches like sunshine is the best disinfectant and all
#
But now I've kind of overcome that, I mean, in fact, a lot of my reading these days is
#
to try to philosophically understand it, right?
#
So I read a lot more on decisionism, a lot more on utilitarianism, what are the kind
#
of frames in which this behavior can be understood, not just justified and rationalized but understood
#
so that you can make an informed opinion about what's going on, not have some kind of arbitrary
#
normative commitments, which alienates you from a reality, which may actually be what
#
it is for good reasons.
#
I'll double click on a couple of things, but first, why did your views on transparency
#
Yeah, so if you look at our policies on transparency, they have changed over time, right?
#
And it is not like we had complete government transparency to begin with.
#
In fact, the Right to Information Act came out only in this century after almost 55 years
#
of independence or so, more than 55 years of independence.
#
And what I think is that transparency is a means to ends, you know, it's not an end
#
Like I said, many things like rights and all their means to other ends.
#
And in many contexts, transparency works quite well, because it's important for accountability,
#
it's important for public debate to nudge the politicians and civil servants in the
#
And in some context, some specific context, it can be a double-edged sword and can even
#
do harm to the ability of the decision maker to actually do the right thing.
#
For example, quite a few areas in which even in the developed countries in which there
#
is a lot of transparency, otherwise emphasis of transparency, they keep secrecy.
#
For example, for quite a few meetings that are held, the minutes are released after decades,
#
And so, what does that show, that you will take a decision on a case by case basis and
#
when the transparency is beneficial and when it is not.
#
It is not something that you can take as a slogan, is all I'm saying, that the sunlight
#
is always better than darkness and democracy always dies in darkness, you know, it's true,
#
by and large true, but there are exceptions to that.
#
In the regulation making process, there are exceptions.
#
In the executive decision making space, not just in national security, but also in economic
#
governance, there are exceptions to that, in which you may need a little bit more discretion
#
to exercise and immediate public scrutiny may actually shut out the discussion, may
#
disincentivise genuine open discussion, difficult decisions to be taken and much more posturing.
#
So if you look at, for example, some of the high courts in India started streaming their
#
And it's a double-edged sword, I mean, there are some advantages to it, but I watched them
#
and some of the judges are literally posturing, you know, they are trying to signal to quote
#
the title of a book, quoting the people in some ways, you know, that they're trying to
#
signal a certain kind of persona to them and appear in a certain way.
#
So I think it's a case by case basis, you have to decide in what situation it will work
#
and what situation it will not work.
#
You means the people who have the legitimacy to decide, I mean, the basically in the elected
#
and custodians of democracy, the within judges and the elected representatives, they have
#
So let's turn our attention for a moment to, you know, a term that you've used at different
#
parts of this conversation, which is utilitarianism.
#
Now my issue with utilitarianism or consequentialism is that there is a knowledge problem that
#
you cannot possibly forecast the future or really be able to tell what happens and so
#
on and so forth, and therefore you can justify any decision by saying that these are the
#
In fact, in a different context, you were talking about the jury de facto, and you pointed
#
out that many people will come up with laws and things that solve the problem and they
#
will be mistaking intention for outcome, which is the most popular and lazy policy mistake
#
that people will, you know, mistake intentions or outcome and not care about the outcomes
#
of something as long as the intentions are good.
#
And my issue with utilitarianism is exactly that, that it can be used to justify really
#
anything because you can forecast anything about the future.
#
It depends on what your assumptions are and therefore it becomes a problematic frame.
#
And therefore I think that no matter, I mean, obviously when you're framing policy, you're
#
framing policy because you want it to end up in the right outcomes and you are thinking
#
of those, but at the same time, there should be a few principles which are just normative
#
that they are the way they are.
#
And we agree on some of those, for example, defending the right to life of citizens, the
#
right to free speech and so on and so forth, that these things should not be contextual.
#
These things should not be case by case basis.
#
So I understand your argument for, you know, transparency in certain cases being case by
#
I'll take some time to kind of process those examples and read your work on it.
#
But certain things I think should not be looked at in a utilitarian way because that can lead
#
you to terrible places like the great utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer had once argued that
#
in certain situations it's okay to kill an infant child, not a fetus mind you, but an
#
infant child if well-being of the world goes up under certain conditions, which I think
#
is a barbaric way to think that there are certain things that should be considered sacred.
#
We both agree the right to life is one of them.
#
And I'd add other things, other negative rights like free speech and property and so on and
#
So what's your sense of, I mean, you know, using utilitarian arguments?
#
Yeah, I think by default, the state is a utilitarian creature.
#
So for political reasons, more than anything else, that because you're trying to appeal
#
to a large number of people and trying to improve or at least make the claim that you're
#
improving their happiness, the general pressure in a democracy, especially, and even in other
#
regimes where you need to get some degree of popular legitimacy, you know, like Communist
#
Party in China is seeking legitimacy through delivering certain things for the citizens.
#
It's not just pure repression that works for them.
#
They're doing other things as well.
#
But in democracy, for sure, there is a general kind of pressure towards serving a large number
#
of people and their goals and utilitarian frame actually takes you a long way in that
#
And when you think about something like pure utilitarianism, it is what direct power fit
#
There is full of repugnant conclusions, you know, especially when you think of population
#
There are lots of repugnant conclusions that are there.
#
And you have to, you means, I mean, we as a collector have to take a view on what would
#
There is no one like rule of thumb or a formula, like even something like right to life.
#
Obviously, we all agree right to life.
#
But there are situations in which I support the state taking a life, right?
#
Like there are situations in conflict in which the state will rightfully take lives, not
#
just of invaders and people who are attacking us, but also when people who are fighting
#
and taking up arms domestically, there are criminals who are killed in encounters.
#
And that was the only option in that they are authorized to kill somebody, the police
#
are authorized to do that, paramilitaries are authorized to do that, you know.
#
There are variations of privacy that for utilitarian purposes and actually for protecting life
#
itself because it's not just utilitarian, but also there is life against life, right?
#
One terrorist can kill another person.
#
So you kill the terrorist before the terrorist comes in and the situational awareness is
#
required because obviously it's better to arrest and bring to justice than all of that.
#
So there are situations in which they are authorized to do those things.
#
I mean, those I imagine like in this case, the terrorist is about to shoot someone, so
#
you shoot the terrorist is in the case where you are defending someone's right to life
#
So, you know, that calculation is not utilitarian.
#
I mean, the system's calculation for establishing this kind of a system of authorization of
#
violence and maintaining a certain kind of order is a utilitarian to basically preserve
#
and enhance happiness for maximum number of people, basically, is the underlying logic
#
in a particular situation that may actually require basically protecting one life by taking
#
But that's not all that happens, right?
#
There is a kind of a systematic repression that is done for, for example, if you want
#
to secede, for example, secession is in that sense, if you think about secession, I mean,
#
it's a somebody just wants to leave the republics, for example.
#
But even then for the larger good of the republic or society, citizens do authorize quite a
#
bit of violence all over the world to be able to keep that part of the body politics from
#
And it cannot be life against life.
#
But there are utilitarian gains for of having a republic of a particular kind, which may
#
be lost if one part leaves.
#
So political reasoning generally, I think, supports a lot of utilitarian thinking.
#
And there are obviously, in our moral imaginations, in public imagination, some kind of our deontological
#
commitments that we make that say, okay, there are these things that we think are very worthy
#
of preserving at the individual level, that we are not thinking only at the collective
#
that we need to preserve life as default, and there's a dignity to it, we have liberty
#
we need to preserve, and there is a degree of sanctity to that.
#
And we have put in place some systems to be able to do that, and systems can take a decision
#
And those systems have to be improved over a period of time so that they do these things
#
All I'm saying is that there is no general formula that can be applied which will be
#
It depends on the state that the society is in.
#
There are situations in which you have to suspend certain rights, there are situations
#
in which you have to look the other way from these so-called deeply held values, because
#
the larger good demands it.
#
And that's where I think these trade-offs are made, and they're done, they're made
#
through these systems rather than because it requires certain kind of practical judgment
#
and situational awareness which is not available a prior.
#
But suppose you say there's a particular situation, and what should you do?
#
There should be a rule book about it.
#
If you were in a situation where every situation can be described, and you have a rule book
#
that says okay this is what is to be done in that situation, then that's preferable
#
because every situation has been thought about, every scenario has been thought about, and
#
you've put rules about it.
#
But that's not possible always.
#
So discretion comes in.
#
Discretion means somebody has to legitimize the use of that discretion.
#
And that's where I think we get into the territory where these trade-offs have to be justified
#
exposed rather than ex ante.
#
Let's go back to what you said about the way government functions and the ways in which
#
And one was the de jure de facto thing, where you said that we sometimes pay too much importance,
#
we sometimes take the existing laws as being reflective of the state of the world, and
#
And it seems to me to be a very profound point.
#
So can you dive in a little deeper into that with concrete examples so I can understand
#
So one example, obviously we've brought it up a couple of times in discussion, and I
#
always try to bring it up whenever I can, is to look at the constitutional protections
#
that we have been given, so guaranteed, first by writing them into the constitution and
#
secondly by reading them into the constitution through the judicial process.
#
And if you actually go to seek relief under many of them, you may be surprised that it's
#
not so easy to get relief.
#
Actually actual de facto protections are not what is written, and there are political and
#
governance reasons for those which we can discuss.
#
The other is on the economic regulation side, there's quite a bit of work done on economies
#
that are governed by rules and economies that are governed by deals, where basically they
#
compare the de jure expectation of what would happen if the laws were implemented, and de
#
facto what actually happens.
#
And they say there's no correspondence at all, like we spend so much time worrying about
#
ease of doing business, which is basically a measure of de jure requirements.
#
But same World Bank, when it did surveys, it found reality is very different.
#
So the construction permit de jure, it's supposed to take 150 days, de facto it takes 30 days.
#
People who actually do the construction say, I only got the permits in 30 days.
#
Because some shortcuts were found or some pragmatic decisions were taken on the ground
#
and by the frontline bureaucracy, and they had some incentives, maybe there was some
#
corruption, maybe not, who knows, but they got it done.
#
It's not just of India, there are lots of researchers who work on this, and we show
#
that this is a very common phenomenon in developing worlds.
#
As you go to a developed world, this gap narrows between de jure and de facto.
#
There are also some gaps, but the gap in developing countries is very significant.
#
The law will say one thing and the reality will be very different.
#
So these two examples are there, and I mean, they can think about any aspect of state action.
#
Like one of the things about security, we were talking about utilitarianism and rights,
#
and are we sure that the security agencies use their discretion when they should be using
#
It's always a mystery because lots of people in the ground will say, no, no, no, that was
#
It's really difficult for us to find out, as citizens who are living very far from where
#
this kind of conflict is going on.
#
And that becomes the question of who do you get the benefit of doubt to?
#
And then of course, it usually goes in one direction.
#
So there is the reality is very different from what the rule book says in many parts
#
of the world, mostly in developing countries and across the board in many, many areas,
#
whether it's rights, whether it's regulations, whether it's use of power by the state for
#
security purposes, intelligence, and so on.
#
So I think there is kind of a commonality in the literature across different domains,
#
which reveals something very deep, deep about the nature of developing countries and much
#
more of a kind of a decisionist orientation that exists without we actually acknowledging
#
In fact, in our episode together, I brought up Hayek and the distinction he makes between
#
And the way he defines law over there is just a way of doing things, a convention that has
#
evolved over time from practice.
#
For example, there may be a particular road which is built in a particular way where people
#
just drive at 80, where it's completely okay to drive at 80 and that's what people do.
#
The new institutional economics scholars, they define institutions as the rules of the
#
And what are the rules of the game?
#
The one that actually exists, not what's written in some rule book.
#
So if you let me finish, that's what for the sake of the listeners.
#
So yeah, and the way he defines legislation is what we would typically call laws, which
#
are the quote unquote laws made by the government where on the same road, they'll put a speed
#
And the speed limit could just be ridiculous and no one actually follows it.
#
So that's again a de jure, de facto sort of distinction right there.
#
So it's the one that people actually follow.
#
And in fact, rules are many, many more than written in the books.
#
So one thing is that what rules are written may not be followed and some different rules
#
Plus there are other rules that the community itself has evolved.
#
Like people who are practicing, I mean, driving in a particular road may have evolved certain
#
kind of rules, which are unwritten, not written and neither have any correspondence with what's
#
written in the rule book.
#
And that's what matters.
#
If you want to change reality, you have to first deal with reality and then say, okay,
#
where do we move further?
#
Because if you're playing the whole de jure versus de jure game, you're nothing to do
#
with what actually goes on in many parts of the country, actually.
#
Not just in economy and various insecurity and urban planning and like if you look at
#
Delhi, so much illegal construction happens, right?
#
And what does that got to do with the rules?
#
Rules are saying very different things, but the reality is I had to deal with this situation
#
a year ago and then it was a learning moment for me, you know, how things happen.
#
And also there's a third layer.
#
Like one layer is, of course, what the state wants the rules to be.
#
Another layer is what society has decided the rules are because society knows how it
#
And often it functions despite the state.
#
And a third layer is when the state sets really oppressive rules and nothing would be possible,
#
but then another third set of rules evolves under which people can find a way to do Jugaar
#
and, you know, get past whatever the state rules might be, which is why, you know, in
#
a place like India often, you know, one, you're happy that the state capacity is so weak in
#
some areas because it would perhaps be more oppressive if state capacity was adequate
#
to carry out some of his rules.
#
And two, bribery can sometimes act as, as grease, reducing friction and letting things
#
actually happen, you know, and perhaps even in that ease of business example, which you
#
pointed out, where a permit that may take 150 days actually takes 30 days.
#
And we benefit, society benefits if it takes 30 days.
#
Sometimes it benefits, sometimes it harms because it's not something that everybody
#
can get access to and it's not an, and it increases transaction costs significantly
#
It's better to have more reasonable rules than to have this kind of deal making going
#
And even if it's a deal making, it has to be more ordered, right?
#
So that more and more people can move and so that more people can access it.
#
But a lot of it is, so yes, the state is low capacity.
#
Sometimes it's a good thing, but often it's a bad thing also, because see, one thing is
#
there that states rules are there to be implemented and people can manipulate that fact.
#
So those rules don't shape the reality for the most part, but in some ways they do.
#
So when someone wants to invoke a rule, you know, they can go and get it invoked by paying
#
a bribe or something by, you know, going after someone under some obscure rule written somewhere.
#
So there is a problem that exists simply because of the rule that is in the rule book.
#
And is that in a way the existence of those rules threatens to crowd out the rule making
#
that is possible voluntarily by collective action, you know.
#
So what happens practically is that communities do evolve their own rules, but there are always
#
a threat hanging, right?
#
That someday the state will say, no, no, no, you can't follow these rules, we'll come
#
So the scary part of the state is still there.
#
So the scare is still there, which is at the back of the mind for everybody, so which prevents
#
long term investments and all done by communities.
#
So I'll give you an example that I myself experienced, okay, I referred to it briefly
#
that about a year or so ago, I live in a South Delhi locality, which was constructed by the
#
Delhi Development Authority, it's governed by the municipality.
#
And I was on the second floor and the third floor, the top floor, the person on the third
#
floor, top floor started, took control of the rooftop, which is common property, which
#
is actually common property for all the flats, took control and started building a new flat
#
there without anybody's permission, it's illegal, she can't do it anyway.
#
And then obviously all the neighbors got worked up and we called a meeting and we got together
#
and we said, you can't do this, stop it.
#
Then we actually, a week or 10 days passed and then the construction started again.
#
Then I went and asked the neighbors what's going on and all of them had backed off.
#
They had said they had basically been threatened by her that if you go after me, then I'll
#
How will she go after them?
#
Because they had made minor modifications to their flats, like you have balcony, you
#
got, they got covered it, which is illegal in the rules, you know.
#
So by making small, I mean, modifications illegal, you have basically destroyed collective
#
What was happening earlier is that there's one major violator who's taken control of
#
a large collective common property and privatized it basically, which is not a socially beneficial
#
thing because we all could enjoy it earlier.
#
And we were all together in fighting that, that major kind of a violation of the law
#
and also the moral norms of society.
#
But by criminalizing or illegalizing something very small, the state makes everybody a criminal,
#
potentially criminal, right?
#
Because everybody is implicated in some way or the other.
#
The laws are such that somebody wants to go after you, they'll find something to say
#
that this guy has violated this law, like he wears black t-shirt.
#
They'll find some obscure law which says black t-shirts in the evenings in Delhi are banned
#
This was a direct attack on me.
#
So, so this is the dynamic which we should be mindful of that it happens in many domains
#
that, yes, we say the law is saying one thing, reality is different, and maybe sometimes
#
But the law being bad actually is a problem.
#
The capacity being not used properly for solving the kind of problem, for example, in this
#
case, solving it against most blatant violation of property rights, taking control of a common
#
property is a problem and we should, ideally the state should basically do what it is meant
#
to do, which is solve big problems, certain big problems and let other people do.
#
The community can solve many problems, markets can solve many problems because the states
#
want to micromanage our lives.
#
Urban planning in India is all level of micromanagement, right?
#
What you can construct, which direction you should have windows, this and that, everything
#
is regulated under the bylaws and the big violators just get away because everybody
#
is implicated so nobody comes together to fight against that small percentage to do
#
And therefore, we are not able to get collective action to the extent that we could.
#
I mean, we still try, we have fairly active communities and all, but we could be doing
#
much better if the state said that, okay, this will I leave to you.
#
I have experience, I've seen when the state actually leaves it, how things happen, I've
#
seen my own, I've studied these examples, done field visits to see how it happens, you
#
know, and can give examples of how this happens.
#
So, I mean, first example, many years ago, I was doing an internship with government
#
of Gujarat, this is I think 2005 or something.
#
And where basically my job was to study the implementation of certain government orders.
#
And what are the government orders?
#
The government orders was very short, one page order, which was handing over the minor
#
canal to the community to manage.
#
So you know how irrigation system, there's a major canal, and then the minor canals branch
#
off and feed the villages.
#
So they said that minor canal will now be given over to the community to manage, maintain
#
and decide how to release the water and who gets the water when.
#
So they wanted to study how it's being implemented, if there are any impediments and inefficiencies
#
So if any minor repair is there, then the community was supposed to get it done, if
#
any major repair is there, then you call the junior engineer, get it done.
#
But all the rules of basically distribution of water locally, monitoring of those rules,
#
implementation of the rules were to be left to the community.
#
So I went to 12 villages in that period.
#
And in each of the village, what I found is that at the tail of the canal and at the head
#
of the canal, the same amount of water was being given released, which means a fair arrangement
#
was there, an equitable arrangement.
#
And the community evolved the rules and actually implemented the rules.
#
Because literally the farmer at the tail end of the canal was happy and they said, yes,
#
I'm getting much better than I was to get earlier, because earlier there was to be excessive
#
I'd use Elinor Ostrom's framework to understand that governance of the commons.
#
And if you leave it, the decision should be taken at the level at which it is efficient
#
to take it at and no higher level, basically, subsidiarity is the principle.
#
And that is completely missing.
#
It's so much of this management, we blame it on democracy, maybe it's rightly blamed,
#
but I doubt that many of these things are just vestiges, which can be, even with a little
#
bit of forethought, can be cleaned up.
#
And government of Gujarat did that, right?
#
It was basically they said, you handle it.
#
And they did it, communities.
#
And this is the same thing, joint forest management has been done in some of the places, tanks,
#
water tanks are maintained by communities.
#
And whenever it's a nicely designed thing where the government doesn't micromanage,
#
doesn't put its own people on committees and all of that, committee is formed, rules
#
are made, monitored, everything is done by community, there is some leader who rises
#
to provide a little bit of public good of getting this started.
#
And it almost always was better than that's what the state would do.
#
So I mean, there are so many examples that I can give just from our own democracy where
#
local liberties when given, I mean, literally have to give it because unfortunately, we
#
don't have them naturally, because the state has just become a boiler of collective action
#
And if you do it, then they deliver, they do, because it's in their interest.
#
And they have long-term, it's a repeated game.
#
So short-termism doesn't happen, they settle communities, they have long-term interests
#
and long-term equities with each other.
#
I would even bet that even in some urban areas, because there's more mobility, even
#
then it can work under certain conditions on many, many problems.
#
So and there, I think, I mean, we have these debates about rights and utilitarianism and
#
These are grand frames in which we try to put realities and make sense of it, have interesting
#
intellectual debates about where the trade-offs and all of that.
#
But the trade-offs and decisions are much more intensely taken by people who are in
#
a particular situation, who have a good sense of the common good, and they are able to come
#
to an agreement, especially if they take decisions based on consensus, rarely will you actually
#
need to go beyond consensus, because only when the kind of transaction cost is very
#
high and there is somebody who is just kind of making it very difficult, then you have
#
to go voting and all of that.
#
But otherwise, it works.
#
And I think that's one community-based solution.
#
And markets, a lot of this can be achieved through markets.
#
Market can solve any problem.
#
And then there are things that government should do, and those should do, and it should
#
And there, I think this is just an opinion, right?
#
I mean, ultimately, these have to work through the democratic system.
#
In some states, we have seen a little more action on this front, but not much.
#
I mean, we still have a very strange idea of what the state should do.
#
And every day we add up new laws, new demands on the state.
#
We want the state to regulate this and that.
#
It's a very strange kind of a phenomenon that reality doesn't change, but we keep piling
#
on more and more of expectations from the state.
#
In fact, this takes me back to Fukuyama's frame of the scope and the strength of the state.
#
As we discussed earlier, we should have a strong state that does very little, but instead
#
we have a weak state that does a lot.
#
And the thing is, wherever the state does something that should not be in its scope,
#
that weak state capacity can sometimes be a feature, because otherwise it is too overbearing
#
and nothing can be done.
#
But at the same time, the flip side of it is that even if the state doesn't have the
#
strength, the fear of the state still is there and the bad laws play into that.
#
So what happened to your fourth floor issue?
#
I mean, that's a great title for a novel, the fourth floor.
#
But eventually how did that get solved?
#
So in that situation, because collective action failed, I tried at a personal level to some
#
extent and I eventually got an order from the deputy commissioner to basically take
#
enforcement action against that violation of the law and also of morals.
#
But it's been now more than a year and it hasn't been implemented yet.
#
Oh, so no one's going to demolish it.
#
Yeah, I really doubt it.
#
This is the game, right?
#
This is the game that you take.
#
So you take charge of a common property, you build out a nice looking flat, which be immediate
#
payoff is maybe 40, 50 lakh rupees.
#
And then you pay off 10 lakh or 8 lakh to the municipality, which is what it is.
#
And the rest of it is yours.
#
And you basically threaten others on very small minor, like somebody covered their balcony.
#
They don't lose that, right?
#
For them, the payoff of the balcony is higher than the loss of utility from access to the
#
But the stupidity is the illegality of doing that minor modification, right?
#
Which the state has done.
#
So, but that is the game that is, and that's a great opportunity for rent seeking for the
#
So you were stuck there.
#
Is it a rented flat or do you own your flat?
#
I had to leave that house because they were bullies and they made it very difficult to
#
It tells us a lot about both our society and the lack of state capacity.
#
So just going back to that original thing we were talking about, I think seven or eight
#
It hasn't been that long.
#
Maybe it feels that long.
#
Just before you mentioned De jure de facto, you also mentioned the really important point
#
of when you are proposing a solution or proposing a policy, you need to be clear about what
#
Just be clear about what is the process, what is the next step.
#
Can you illustrate that for me with an example?
#
So, I mean, there are many examples, in fact, this is a theme of my work for last few years
#
So just a few examples where I have participated in some way or the other small way is why
#
one is, for example, when government proposed under basically pressure from Supreme Court
#
that India should have a data protection law and a data protection regulator.
#
And there was a lot of noise to have a very all encompassing data protection law and a
#
very powerful data protection authority.
#
And about five years ago, something I wrote about it, a long essay, why that doesn't make
#
We should start with something more modest, you know, start with this narrow scope.
#
Again, I quoted Fukuhama's book in that essay as well, the one state building book that
#
And I suggested what would be the first step to get things started so that for next decade
#
or so we have some improvement on data protection regulation a little bit and modest state capacity
#
expectation, modest scope of the work.
#
And then if that works, it may fail, it may not work at all, you know, it may not get
#
any benefit, at least you would take a smaller risk, right, instead of giving an all powerful
#
authority, a huge amount of power and loading it with so much expectation.
#
So that was something that I had written about later, some of my colleagues also wrote about
#
And hopefully that's what will happen because the bill has been withdrawn.
#
Government, I think now is thinking more in pragmatic terms about what can be done in
#
data protection rather than trying to just try to build a copy of first word frame, which
#
is very compliance heavy, overarching, regulatory kind of a overkill, I would say.
#
So that was one example where I think there is a different way to think about the next
#
step and then we may get somewhere eventually, you know, we don't know right now.
#
Similarly, there is a question about, for example, what is to be done with public sector
#
I've maintained whenever I've written about it is that privatisation will not work.
#
Because they are very fragile institutions.
#
The only reason they are not having a run on the banks is because there is a government,
#
implicit government guarantee.
#
So you can do privatisation either by selling it to another large private bank.
#
But I don't know how many private banks in India have appetite to buy some of the larger
#
public sector banks because it's very, they're too large for them, right?
#
Like there are only a couple of very large private sector banks in India.
#
And they are, the largest bank is a public sector bank.
#
And then there are a couple of private sector banks and equally big public sector banks.
#
So it's not easy to, you know, just absorb the public sector bank and take a run.
#
So privatisation is a sensible decision, I think, in the long run.
#
But what are the next steps to get there, right?
#
You need to create an order in which privatisation will hold.
#
So I'd say resolution, for example, if you have an effective and working failure resolution
#
mechanism for banks and all financial firms, then it creates trust that even if the bank
#
is fragile and is failing, my money will be safe.
#
And that's the way in which quite some other countries have been able to do that.
#
Get that thing corrected, right?
#
And then you can give lots of bank licenses and lots of, you can privatise public sector
#
One key kind of binding constraint right now in our system for giving many more bank licenses
#
and also killing two birds with the same stone is also for privatisation of public sector
#
banks is an effective and working resolution mechanism for failed financial firms.
#
So otherwise, I mean, if you do it ideologically, privatise, privatise, you can say, but it
#
won't work, you know, like it will create, potentially create instability in the financial
#
system if you have, suppose, rams on some of these banks and it will not even happen
#
So you create conditions to get there.
#
So similarly, on government procurement, there's a lot of complaint about how government procures
#
pure poorly, contracts poorly and makes a lot of mistakes in just going by L1 and all
#
There have been some action on it recently, but one of the core issues is not so much
#
the contract design, but what happens before the contract design is done.
#
So how do we create conditions in which pre-contractual preparatory work is done more thoroughly?
#
We spent very little in pre-contractual processes than most comparable countries.
#
So we are penny wise, born foolish in that sense that because some of the pre-contractual
#
work often doesn't lead to an actual contract procurement.
#
So then who is going to answer to the three Cs, where does this money go?
#
So because of that, perhaps they don't do it, but if you do get that right, that indirectly
#
you will get potentially better procurement practices.
#
So I mean, there are different intuitive way of thinking about it.
#
One is what is the next step?
#
Then there's obliquity, that you do one thing and something else gets solved in the process,
#
Obliquity, you must have read about that.
#
It's a frame of solving a problem where you want to solve something, but you do something
#
else and then indirectly that problem will get solved.
#
Always start a virtuous cycle towards solving that problem.
#
I mean, these examples that I gave you basically like bank privatization, you see, prime of
#
SI resolution privatization, I mean, it's not obvious what the links are, but if you
#
get that right, it creates political economy, I mean, incentives to then go in the direction
#
of privatization, give a direction of doing more bank licensing and all of that.
#
It creates conditions for that.
#
So I mean, you can think about it that way as well, I mean, if it helps.
#
But at least it's the next step that could ease some of the binding constraints.
#
And like example, when the proposal to give corporates banking license was given, I mean,
#
most people around me had supposed it, but I thought key under the current constraints
#
that we have and the way our banking is going, where private sector banks are the only ones
#
that have grown in the last few years, foreign banks have not been growing their credit,
#
I mean, adjusted for inflation, and public sector banks have also not grown their credit
#
because of inflation by much, it's very marginal, only better.
#
We need to get more, give more banking licenses.
#
And right now it seems that it is not an ideal solution.
#
I agree with people who criticize it, but can it be seen as a next step?
#
And then you go towards a better solution for it's a second, often in life, second
#
way, third way solutions are what you need to, you need to be able to accept and then
#
move towards better, I mean, from there, you know, similarly, if you want to have less
#
political intervention in banking, I mean, I don't like it, but it is better to have
#
some development bank set up separately to do that with them and let these banks be more
#
There are lots of such kind of ideas toward discussing and debating, you know, as next
#
And I mean, I don't know whether what the right next step is.
#
I mean, in some domains, I have some ideas and some specific, because I've worked on
#
those areas, but one doesn't really, I mean, it's, but I think it's a frame of thinking
#
of thinking about what the binding constraint is, easing that first and then gradually kind
#
of moving towards a better kind of a set up and also thinking in more oblique ways that
#
But let's just keep that aside and say, where can we go now so that the goal becomes easier
#
All this is very illuminating.
#
Let's move back to your personal journey that after, you know, 2011, you joined NIPFP and
#
2019 you joined Carnegie.
#
So what sort of prompted this move?
#
Because on the one hand, you're in sort of the belly of the beast.
#
You are, you know, working on policy.
#
You managed to get stuff done.
#
It's given you great satisfaction.
#
No, I got a little done, got a lot of satisfaction.
#
You got a little done and got great satisfaction.
#
So which is, it seems like incredibly satisfying at so many levels.
#
But you decided to move on to Carnegie and enter the think tank world.
#
So what prompted this decision?
#
And tell me a little bit about the think tank world in general, in the sense, what role
#
does it play in practice?
#
What role does it play in practice?
#
Because what one can say about a lot of think tanks is, okay, you're taking out the position
#
paper, you're doing this, you're doing that.
#
But you're not really making a dent, you know.
#
So how is it, so tell me a little bit about the think tank ecosystem in general.
#
And then in particular, why you chose to make this move and why you thought, you know, that
#
you can make a difference here.
#
What excited you about it?
#
I don't know why it would be interesting for your audience to hear why I did that.
#
But yeah, I mean, I'll tell you because you asked.
#
But basically, I had been doing this policy analysis work for eight years and I was an
#
engineer, it's good in many ways, but I wanted to do more of political economy research and
#
more thinking on institutions, basically, and political economy that shapes institutions
#
in the real sense, you know, the de facto sense.
#
And the work policy research is interesting and exciting, but it's just, I mean, after
#
a point, it became a little repetitive for me.
#
And also, when I left at that time, there was no grand project at that time, like nothing
#
like take one or two years to work on something, you know, and at that time, just recently
#
this bill that I was working on had withdrawn from the parliament.
#
So I mean, that was a bit of a setback, so I wanted to, it was an experience also, right?
#
Because going through that process, I thought that, you know, it is kind of naive to think
#
that a law like this just will go through, there will be pushback, especially in public
#
sector banks and for and also from some ideologues, very significant pushback was there.
#
So I should understand this a little bit, you know, because I do policy analysis, I
#
do policy research, and I'm okay, I'm not be great at it, but okay at it, but I need
#
to understand the larger system in which this stuff works, political economy, institutions,
#
shape policies, and implementation of those policies, most importantly, and the way they
#
get implemented, all of that.
#
So I wanted to get more into research, more thinking and writing about these issues.
#
And Carnegie came along at the right time for that, you know, and me and a colleague
#
of mine, both of us moved together and started a small kind of a research program, political
#
And we thought, because this is a more pro play think tank, you know, they don't expect
#
you to work with government or have projects with government and all.
#
If it happens, it's fine.
#
I mean, they don't, they're not averse to it.
#
We do things with government as well, but it's not something which happens on a regular
#
It's not something that is considered to be necessary also.
#
You need to keep some distance, you keep your, do your research, put it out, it's a small
#
It's not a very large think tank, it's probably the smallest think tank here.
#
And so there's a little bit more freedom to do research and thinking and writing on these
#
issues in a more broader sense.
#
So I wanted to broaden my horizons is the main reason I actually got into this world.
#
And I think that I've got here, I mean, it's a pretty good place, which gives you, I mean,
#
an opportunity to think broadly and identify issues, work on them, take some time to work
#
on them, put out short pieces, work towards long pieces, you know, and, and that's what
#
the think tank is supposed to do that.
#
So what is the think tank?
#
Think tank is not a university, but it's also not a consulting firm, right?
#
So I think normatively, I think the best role a think tank in play is to bring the best
#
of academic learning to have a bearing on political and policy decisions.
#
That's my least framing of it.
#
That's what I try to do in my work, try to get the best academic thinking, plus I would
#
say situational awareness, awareness of what's going on in India, in the state and the domains
#
in which you're working.
#
So for that, so there are two ways in which mainly I learned.
#
I learned by doing data analysis and research review of reading of other people's research,
#
bringing that consequences of that into my thinking and by talking to and meeting people
#
in political economy, whether it's government, outside, private sector, all of those.
#
So trying to get an awareness of what's happening and put that in a broader frame of, I mean,
#
comparative political economy, economics, research on economics from political economy
#
of growth and all, and say, how do we make sense of what's happening right now in India
#
in a conceptual way, you know, and then therefore, what does that mean for what is to be done?
#
So, so that's something you can do in a think tank, which is harder to do in a university
#
because the focus is much more on teaching and also more fundamental research, journal
#
You need to get that journal publication, otherwise you will not survive in that system
#
And it's harder to do that in the consulting firm business also, because you're trying
#
to solve day-to-day problems with government, it's much more, I mean, much more pressure
#
So there's a unique place that think tanks have and at their best, they can do this much
#
So I don't think think tanks should react to day-to-day events.
#
We shouldn't, I mean, but, but we have to, I mean, that's just the way it goes.
#
I wish think tanks did fewer events, but we have to, because that's also our duty to do
#
events and hold workshops and seminars and all of that conferences and all of that.
#
But the core of it is still research and one should try to do it.
#
And much more than original research on some one kind of narrow topic is to make it, make
#
different types of research that is happening by others, bring together, review it, consider
#
what the implications of policy, political economy, institutions are, and inform thinking
#
on these issues, you know, and I think there is a value to be had for this kind of work,
#
And now it's, Carnegie is the world's oldest think tank, 1910.
#
So this institution firm has existed for now almost 112 years.
#
And now of course there are many, many think tanks and they're trying to do this thing
#
So there are different self-definitions, there's no one ideal type.
#
I have my own ideal type of what the best of think tanks should try to do.
#
I mean, whether we live up to those is a different kind of question, but, but there is a value.
#
There's certainly a value in doing something like that.
#
In fact, that's why I'm a think tank.
#
So in 1910, when Carnegie was started as a think tank and the ecosystem of this course
#
was completely different.
#
The nature of this course was completely different.
#
Media was completely different.
#
It was, you know, almost seems like a prehistoric world.
#
It was before World War I.
#
It was Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
#
Four years later, there was a, it was a war.
#
But so just, but now everything has changed, right?
#
The nature of this course has changed.
#
There are, you know, in that vibrant bazaar of ideas, there are many more voices from
#
many more places, often with far greater reach, with many different imperatives coming from
#
places and so on and so forth.
#
So you know, what do you think about the ways in which this course has changed?
#
Like we have discussed in the past very often offline about how incredibly polarized it
#
has become online, how tribalized it has become online, where reasonable dialogue like you
#
and I can have where you respect the other person and you can disagree in a civil way.
#
You can enter an argument in good faith.
#
You can assume goodwill from the other person.
#
That seems completely absent from the public space.
#
And a lot of the agenda for other sort of debate also seems to be vitiated by what is
#
happening, especially on Twitter, where there is this angry tone of condemnation which will
#
just spread everywhere.
#
So what do you just think about this ecosystem of discourse?
#
What it does for the environment?
#
And does that in any way change the role that either think tanks like Carnegie have or that
#
public intellectuals can play?
#
Whether or not you consider yourself one, you know, in some small way you are, right?
#
You guys have a newsletter, you and Aniruddha are writing.
#
Yeah, I don't think of myself as public intellectual because I mean it is a certain kind of ideal
#
Yeah, but it's not something you get to choose.
#
If you're someone who is in part of public discourse, you know, that's a role that,
#
you know, just gets thrust upon you in a sense.
#
It's no longer a decision you can make when you're airing your opinions and your insights
#
on a regular level in the public.
#
So leave that label aside of public intellectual, but what is…
#
So one, what do you think about this changed ecosystem of discourse and the way things
#
And because in a different kind of ecosystem, you know, a think tank or a public intellectual
#
or anyone who is trying to make a difference could have perhaps had a greater chance of
#
making a difference because there's less cacophony, the imperatives are different,
#
there is less posturing in the public space.
#
But today, with the tribalism, the polarization, everything, how has discourse changed and
#
what are the new challenges that then emerge for a think tank like Kanangi?
#
And for you, you know, a private person sitting quietly in the middle of all of this, thinking
#
about matters with depth and nuance, having experienced the whole process of being part
#
of the state and trying to change things, what do you then see your role as in all of
#
this, because I can bet that in some way, beyond your personal duties and whatever,
#
in some way, there is some kind of dharma you defined for yourself within this role
#
So I described the role for a think tank that I think the role for, I mean, as individual
#
researchers also in think tanks, right, to bring the best of academic thinking and research
#
in conversation with facts about the economy and society and polity right now, to suggest
#
in some modest ways, you know, how we can think about the future.
#
That's the research dharma.
#
We also have platforms in which we bring in different voices, we usually ensure diversity
#
of opinions in those forums.
#
Every single seminar that at least we have held where there's more than one speaker,
#
there's diversity of viewpoints.
#
There are people from across different views on that issue.
#
So that's something that we do, we do quite a bit of public writing, it's not just trying
#
to inform policymakers also, I mean, other peers, political economy, researchers and
#
all to, I mean, to say that, okay, we are in conversation with you, we are learning
#
from you, and we are also trying to feed back into that system.
#
And so that we will continue to do, I see that the social media and this kind of explosion
#
of media as such, they're much more connected, so virtually intertwined than we were earlier,
#
is kind of what you make of it, right, like, when you have to harness these things towards
#
the purpose that you see, I mean, I agree that if you get into the game, then I'm not
#
Heideggerian, but you know, Heideggerian enough to worry that, you know, that then it becomes,
#
it consumes you, you know, being instrumental becomes that, being a Twitter user becomes
#
your primary identity and everything else becomes subsumed under that.
#
So, but, but it's a choice, right, that you, whether you get to that or not, and how does
#
human technology relation work to use Don Heide's framing, we still have some choice
#
at the level of persons and families and institutions and organizations on how we define it.
#
For example, I am not active on social media at all, in fact, I have a Twitter account
#
where I put out whatever I write and then run away from there.
#
And no activity on Facebook, LinkedIn, also nothing, that kind of stuff.
#
So and but I find it useful to put out stuff there, it's just a way for me to archive and
#
Newsletter I find useful because it just gives me a rhythm to write on a fortnightly basis
#
And it gets to some people whose opinion I care about and I want to engage with them.
#
And that's something that I enjoy doing, but the core of it continues to be our activity
#
of research, right, that policy oriented research, political economy research, where we're trying
#
to do what I just said we're supposed to be doing.
#
And we're trying to do it, hopefully do better of it in the future.
#
And technologies have changed many times in human history.
#
But human nature remains that and, and in different eras, people have under different
#
technologies have still maintained their commitment to whatever they were doing and others get
#
got swayed by the technology and change their way of living technology and all but that's
#
I see that as far as democracy is concerned, it's a great thing that people have so much
#
ways to express themselves and express their opinions and give feedback and all of that.
#
As citizens, we still have a duty to be more careful when we give anybody feedback we I
#
hope nobody will trust anybody what people do.
#
I hope when you critique somebody you have thought about it and thought deeply about
#
Those are virtues that you have to exercise because technology without some virtues that
#
work in the world of this kind of technology, we can do harm than good, but it can also
#
So it's something which we need to decide on a at a level of individuals and families
#
and organizational communities about what do you want to make of this and think tanks
#
So for example, we have a YouTube channel, we have Twitter accounts, we have Facebook,
#
we have LinkedIn, all of that.
#
And we harness it to for expressing our ideas and all of that.
#
But we try to do as much I mean focus on what our work and these are just new ways for us
#
to reach out basically, you know, like till now at least I have never been asked about
#
how many views are you getting or how many retweets are you getting and all those are
#
not things that really, I think, fortunately, my own nation people care about.
#
I mean, hopefully, they never care about it.
#
But if they do in the future, I'll have some difficulties.
#
But I mean, and it's true of I think technology across the board, you know, like how doctors
#
use technology, they can use it to do good or they can do it, you use it to do I mean,
#
to not do good in other domains as well think tanks because we are in the world of ideas.
#
One good thing is that we're getting challenged much more you put out something which doesn't
#
make sense to somebody, they will tell you that earlier that they couldn't it was hard,
#
They have to write a letter to you.
#
You need not open the envelope before before email or anything like that.
#
Then they could write email to you need not read the email, delete it quickly, whatever.
#
But now you can't everybody's in your living room, basically, in some some senses virtually.
#
So and it puts some pressures to be more careful, I think, you know, in some ways.
#
And one has to be careful about whose feedback you care about what kind of feedback you take
#
But it is, I think overall for our life, not yet so clear that these things are bad for
#
It's good to hear from lots of people and to have people citizens have the opportunity
#
to tear down the mighty, you know, because often the mighty also have clay feet.
#
And it's a good thing that anybody can be challenged and questioned immediately.
#
And the only thing I say that hopefully we will use this power with great power comes
#
great responsibility, as the wise philosopher, Uncle Ben said.
#
And I think that's for each citizen to exercise.
#
And it's a great thing.
#
Politicians have always lived like this, you know, even before social media, where average
#
pollution, you could meet 50 people in a day who tell them different things.
#
So they have taken to social media like a fish to water for others is more kind of getting
#
Hi, you know, this could also be the title of a book.
#
Everybody is in your living room.
#
Like, can there be something that is more terrifying for an introvert like me?
#
I don't want anyone in my living room, not even me.
#
You still have a choice, right?
#
But as of now, there are still avenues available where you don't have to get into any.
#
I know people who don't even have a smartphone, don't have any social media at all.
#
And they're able to live perfectly good lives.
#
Professionally, they're not compromised in any way.
#
I think what happens there is that like there is that saying right from Kashi Kashi, bhaar
#
mein jaye duniya, hum bajaye harmoniya, right?
#
So you can take that choice and say ki chalo harmoniya bajate hai.
#
But the point is, if you want to engage, if you want to make a difference, you actually
#
kind of have no choice.
#
You have to go out there in some way or the other.
#
I mean, I also use my Twitter like you're saying you do just broadcast the links and
#
not really engage because no one's engaging in good faith.
#
There's very little point in doing that.
#
But you know, sometimes there are there are just kind of trade offs everywhere.
#
Some of our best callers in Carnegie don't even have a Twitter account.
#
That's why they are the best callers.
#
So I think this is sometimes useful, sometimes not useful, but it's certainly avoidable
#
if you want to avoid it.
#
As of now, in the future, maybe you will have to put in your CV or social media and all.
#
When it comes to that, we'll see.
#
But as of now, it's not a necessary thing for at least in our milieu.
#
And quite a few scholars, at least in our community, they use it very sparingly or use
#
it in a manner that is constructive, you know, and those who don't and who will get become
#
to tech creatures, then it's I mean, I think it changes them as a researcher in some ways,
#
you know, that when you start using a technology and then your primary identity becomes the
#
user of the technology, you know, and it's sometimes works, I mean, it is not a universal
#
insight about technology, I think, as some philosophers have argued, but it is something
#
that is applicable in some cases.
#
And what's the worst case scenario if Carnegie ever comes to you and says, so yes, you have
#
to put out 40 tweets a day and you got to engage and let the world in your living room,
#
you can just say matter fakir admi ho jhola pakar ke nikal jaunga.
#
Let's talk a little bit about some of the areas in which you've you know, in which you
#
worked and thought about and so on and so forth.
#
And one of them really broadly is sort of the Indian economy, like in one of your recent
#
newsletters, you begin by quoting this famous paper by Robert Lucas, where he, a 1988 paper
#
where he asked, quote, Is there some action a government of India could take that would
#
lead the Indian economy to grow like Indonesia's or Egypt's?
#
If not, what is it about the nature of India that makes it so the consequences of human
#
for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering.
#
Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.
#
And this was, of course, written in 88.
#
And as it happens, we turned around, we have a broad, mota-mota sense of what we needed
#
to do differently because we did a lot of it.
#
Some of that momentum has gone.
#
I've had episodes with people like Pooja Mehra and our mutual friend, the wonderful
#
Ajay Shah and Shruti Raj Gopalan and all that on how we had this golden period between 91
#
and 2011 and hundreds of millions came out of poverty.
#
But a lot of that has reversed, slowed, changed.
#
And at some level, it's also a question of mindsets, like something that Ajay has said
#
in past episodes with me and has made a deep impression on me is that there was a time
#
where there was this community of policymakers and changemakers within government, both bureaucrats
#
and sometimes politicians who saw sense in it, who wanted change, who played for change,
#
who knew the game, who knew the direction.
#
And his lament was that they may be dying out, that within the government, there may
#
not be so many people in policy who are thinking in those sort of ways and looking ahead.
#
And also another lament that he had is that many of our finest minds are in economics,
#
are actually involved in playing the academic circle jerk game.
#
My words, not his, but this is broadly the sense of it, are involved in playing the academic
#
circle jerk game, which entirely loses connection with the real world, right?
#
So what is your sense on kind of both of these?
#
And these are like two really large questions, so I'm really sorry for unleashing them.
#
But one, your potted view on where the Indian economy is today and how hopeful should we
#
And two, this ecosystem of change, you know, that can we turn it around again?
#
That fine, you know, we had some tough times and we were already, you know, not doing well
#
COVID, of course, exacerbated it to some extent.
#
But where is the hope for the Indian economy?
#
And to drill down on that, is that hope coming from within the ecosystem?
#
Is there still, you know, are there young Shahs and Kalkars in the system?
#
Shah, these are big questions.
#
So let me offer like, as usual, a stream of consciousness answer and see if it works.
#
So first thing is that in our milieu, in the way you and I move around, we overstate the
#
role played by economists and understate the role played by politicians and civil servants
#
in the achievements that we have had as a country, especially since the 90s and maybe
#
in parts of 80s as well.
#
So there is obviously credit where it due, to give credit where it came a good idea,
#
pushed it, had the perseverance to see it through.
#
But there is a, as I said, there is a system in which we operate and that is a democratic
#
There is a permanent civil service and there is a democratic system of elections and shifting
#
of power based on elections and people who are in power do things.
#
One is that we are a political economy in which we did 91, which was a big bang reform.
#
Reforms continued through the 90s.
#
In the 90s, we had three very different orientation governments.
#
There was a Narsimha Rao government, then there was a third front government under two
#
different prime ministers, UDF, then the right of center, so to speak, PGP led NDA government
#
So these reforms continued throughout.
#
And that was a political decision that there was some kind of a consensus you can say that
#
was there within the political and administrative class and that this is important and we will
#
continue to do this and continue to ease the binding constraints, continue to push the
#
policy in the right direction and do whatever is necessary, not just policy reforms, do
#
I emphasize that because it can mean many things to keep growth going.
#
And so we had, I did a literature review on when did India's high growth episode start
#
and there's a literature on this and reasonable persons have disagreed on where and when it
#
But I had concluded based on a recent paper that it's 93 onwards basically.
#
And then 2002 onwards, we had a really high growth episode.
#
And the question is whether the high growth episode has ended or not.
#
That's the question that we need to ask.
#
These things are unfortunately understood only retrospectively, but decisions have to
#
be taken right and there's a famous quote by R. L. Stevenson that even the worst of
#
the historians know much better about the period they study than the best of us know
#
about the period in which we live.
#
And unfortunately or fortunately, we have to think about what the current period, the
#
past is the past and to the extent possible and it's not easily available to us, all
#
the facts are available to understand what's happening right now.
#
We need to understand what's happening, have situational awareness, awareness of the state
#
of the economy, underlying sources of dynamism in the economy, which are continuing, which
#
are not continuing, what can we do to keep the dynamism going.
#
There is a very important role to be played by this.
#
And I'm not saying this needs to be done on a local level.
#
This is a national conversation because nations grow, you know, I mean, obviously growth drivers
#
are local and individual set of businesses, local governments solve problems and all,
#
but it is we as a country, we started growing in the nineties, right?
#
I mean, it wasn't like before nineties, some states were rich and other states were poor,
#
you know, obviously relatively some were better off, but it was a very narrow range, you know,
#
obviously was clustered around that same small, the richest state was only three times of
#
the poorest state, you know, at that time, as we opened up and we started seeing growth
#
accelerate, some streets just rushed forward and became fairly, I mean, in fact, some of
#
the richest states in India have the per capita income of China, basically, you know, so,
#
and the poorest states are quite poor and, but the most important thing is that the rate
#
at which our poorest state, Bihar, namely, has grown since the nineties is higher than
#
the rate at which India, Indian economy was growing previous to that.
#
So let's not forget that improvement, even in the state, which is the bottom of the pile,
#
which had a decade of almost zero real growth in the nineties has benefited from this episode.
#
So inequality, we have emphasized too much and we don't pay enough attention to that
#
whole, you know, cake is growing and everybody's getting, and then constitutional mechanisms
#
are there to make sure Bihar also gets some part of the benefits from other countries.
#
So it's able to provide some minimum level of services for its citizens as well through
#
the finance commission mechanism and all.
#
So we have one country and some states marched ahead and Bihar, which is remain poor, UP
#
is also poor, they also, their entrepreneurs went and set up businesses in Bangalore and
#
Bombay, their labor went, workers went, capital also flowed in fact, because they didn't have
#
enough businesses in those states.
#
So capital flowed to the richer states from these states.
#
And we have one country and being a part of this country is very beneficial for each state.
#
Those states that marched ahead benefited from being a part of this country because
#
their products could be sold in these states, factors of production other than land, everything
#
can move across state boundaries easily, relatively, they could move and set up.
#
So we've benefited a lot from this period, and it's been done because there was some
#
kind of a political consensus at the national and state levels in many states.
#
There's a variation in different states, how much they could make of this period, and some
#
states couldn't make as much as they could, and others could make a lot more.
#
Like Punjab, for example, is example of a state fell behind, right, was the richest
#
And now it's basically very close to the national average.
#
It's a pretty bad story in that sense.
#
And it's not doing as badly in absolute terms as say, Bihar or UP, but its relative position
#
And there are states like Tamil Nadu and Telangana, Haryana and all, which have really marched
#
ahead since these reforms happened.
#
And overall, I think lots of ways to problematize what has happened, but I think it's been a
#
pretty significant success.
#
Compared to our own past, and also compared to what is generally seen in comparative sense.
#
So one of the things is that democracies usually don't go very rapidly.
#
I mean, democracies are rich, so obviously you say why, rapid growth is a different form
#
You can get rich over 150 years, which is the story of the most mature democracies in
#
the world, developed countries in the West mostly.
#
But democracies usually grow at a moderate rate, and generally not just democracies for
#
any country to grow for a rapid rate for a very long period of time is very difficult.
#
So regression to mean is the rule, and these are exceptions.
#
And the longer the growth episode is going, the more the chances of you regressing back
#
So the adaptive efficiency you need, which I mean, using Nicholas North's language,
#
to continue with the growth episode is quite significant, and you need to have a political
#
economy which is very adaptive and which is very mindful of the imbalances that are getting
#
built up across different parts of the economy.
#
What are the kind of new problems that are emerging and address those?
#
And it's a political and administrative problem.
#
Economists, researchers can play a small role in that, very small.
#
And the main thing is the political settlement and political agreement and having the right
#
incentive to solve those problems, having a sense of importance of that.
#
And some degree of, I mean, even though people fight elections and they are always trying
#
to destroy each other's political legitimacy, there is some underlying agreement that development
#
and growth are very important and there's something not to be disrupted.
#
I think that is the foundation on which this is built.
#
And I think we had that, whether we have it now or not, I have a question, but we had
#
that for a long time, and especially in the 90s.
#
So one of the things that I always point out is that our private investments took off in
#
In the 90s, there was no noticeable growth in private investments.
#
And because, I mean, we had to, the polity has to establish some degree of one way to
#
So we had to read these facts, I'm not saying that my way is the only way.
#
Same facts can be reconciled with multiple narratives, that's the way history works.
#
But one way to read it is that we had to establish that credible commitment that we are here
#
to do the reforms and the direction will be one way and we will keep popularizing and
#
opening up and giving you more opportunities and please invest.
#
And then in the 2000s, private investment took off.
#
In the early 2010s, private investments have been very low.
#
Private investment basically fell and private investment was the main driver of growth in
#
the 2000s, which are the best years for our economy, 2002 onwards.
#
And then they have been low.
#
Export was the other major driver, continued from 90s to 2000s, the export of the major
#
driver that has also slowed down significantly since 2011 onwards, 12 onwards.
#
So 12 or 13, if I'm not getting the year right.
#
So these are drivers of growth, you know, for an economy like India.
#
And some people can make an argument that it's the consumption that should be driving
#
and we have done enough of the accumulation, now we need to do redistribution and all.
#
My own judgment is we are not in that stage of growth.
#
There will be a situation, there could be a situation in the future like Japan, which
#
is the 90s, where domestic consumption suddenly take off and it just stagnated, you know,
#
that it just kept on the accumulation cycle.
#
Hirshman has this dynamic between accumulation and redistribution, which is the dynamic has
#
to play out for the economy to sustain itself, its growth.
#
So anyway, there are matters of judgment, but the basic thing is that the two drivers
#
of growth, export and private investment, which were driving a growth in that way, basically
#
slowed down significantly in the 2010s.
#
And they didn't really pick up before the pandemic hit at that time.
#
And there were some short periods of upswing, but nothing substantial that was happening.
#
And lots of different narratives have been offered to why that happened and all of that.
#
And I mean, we can go into that.
#
So, but before the pandemic hit, our growth in the previous year, 1920 was 3.7%.
#
If I'm not remembering it right, it was 3.7%.
#
And investment growth was very, very low.
#
And basically all across all the components on the demand side, there was a low investment
#
in government consumption, private consumption was actually the fastest of the lot.
#
But it wasn't, the economy was not growing much.
#
Then the pandemic hit and we had a obviously lockdown and all, and we had a very low, very
#
big contraction in the economy.
#
And then we had a recovery in 2021, 22, right?
#
And now last couple of years, what has happened is our ability to make sense of the year on
#
year data is intuitively, it's not the same, right?
#
Because we need to track with the pre pandemic performance.
#
So a lot of headlines look very different because year on year growth looks very bad.
#
But the main question that I have in my mind, which I'm trying to understand is that did
#
the issues that were there in the pre pandemic period just go away or are they still there?
#
What were those issues?
#
Why was private investment not taking off for 10 years?
#
Why was exports not picking up at that time?
#
Now we've had some short term periods of good export growth.
#
I pray it sustains because it's a major driver of growth in India.
#
But that's the question that we need to answer because it's very important and very difficult
#
to sustain long periods of rapid growth.
#
But that's what we need to do.
#
That's what China did, right?
#
China did 40 years plus of rapid growth.
#
Economy has been slowing recently, it's changed its political economy approach.
#
But India has had rapid growth for at least two decades, perhaps longer.
#
In between the debate got a little bit shaded because of the GDP numbers controversy, whether
#
the GDP is capturing the actual economic activity and growth in it.
#
But lately, I mean, especially just before the pandemic, there was some correspondence
#
because other indicators are looking bad and GDP indicator itself also looking very bad.
#
So I mean, but apart from these debates, I think there's a substantive question about
#
what would it take to continue a rapid growth episode by defying history, you know, because
#
very few countries have been able to sustain growth for more than two decades or something.
#
They do regress to the mean and then there are periods of relatively moderate or low
#
growth and then they go back to what because we gained a lot from this period, you know.
#
So in fact, growth, one thing I want to just focus on growth is the most important thing
#
Economic growth is the thing.
#
So if you look at all other, you can pick any development indicator you care about,
#
which is material development, I'm not talking about political and all, we've been in democracy
#
All of those things are there.
#
But in material development, if you talk about improvement in health, education, improvement
#
in availability of material, I mean, things like housing and those things, the nature,
#
natural environment and all of all of that very highly correlated with economic, I mean,
#
GDP per capita, all of those not as no exceptions.
#
I mean, it is stunning how much growth can do for you.
#
So for one level of income, you can do a little better by spending a little more efficiently
#
in some areas, but not a whole lot.
#
Ultimate binding constraint is having more resources, which is what GDP per capita reflects
#
that how much resource is available, what is basically the value of the goods and services
#
they produce and that reflected in a per capita basis.
#
So in some areas we do a little better, some example, primary education and all we do worse
#
than our even our level of income in terms of the educational quality, right?
#
The learning outcomes are quite poor in India.
#
So we could do better on those perhaps even for our level of income, little better than
#
some area like air quality, we do worse than even countries at our level of income, we
#
could do better on those.
#
But in most areas, if you want any significant improvement, you need to get growth going
#
to have more resources to be able to do more with those, because this is the main kind
#
of underlying driver, you know, when everything is one thing, then you have to think about
#
is it just correlation or is there some kind of causality going one way?
#
So I see that there are complex relationships, for example, human capital, we talked about
#
There is actually some other side, I mean, the two way causality, growth helps you do
#
more of those, but the more better human capital gives you growth.
#
So there is that, of course.
#
But focusing on growth gets a lot done is is my worldview, I mean, reasonable persons
#
can disagree about how much weightage to give to it.
#
But I think it is the most important thing to get it right.
#
And it is in our own history, right, our impact on poverty rate, our impact on well being
#
across many, many indicators has been much better since we grew.
#
It is, I agree, in some areas, an uncertain glory.
#
We have done worse than we should even have at our level of income in some areas.
#
But if you want to get much better, this is a necessary condition, you know, and in many
#
cases sufficient, in some cases not sufficient, but it's certainly necessary to get continue
#
And then later we'll get into demographic issues as well.
#
And in the essay, I think, which you have cited, I had shown how India has been related
#
to the rest of the world, you know, and in the first three decades of our day after independence,
#
our relative position in the world may have fallen, at least from the data that I'm referring
#
to, it may not be fully representative because all countries data were not available at that
#
But it was a pretty bad performance, especially in 60s and 70s.
#
It's only in 80s we started growing at a moderate rate back to against a very bad two decades.
#
So, I mean, it was more of a recovery happening at that time.
#
And in the 90s, we actually got embarked on a proper rapid growth episode and we need
#
to be able to sustain it.
#
I mean, and that requires, I mean, consensus on growth, you know, that this is a very important
#
This is the top priority.
#
And we are a federal polity.
#
We are a polity where power resides at multiple levels, even in dominant party system where
#
there's one party dominant at the national level, state level, there is still quite a
#
Even at national level, even though you're a dominant party, there are other places where
#
Sometimes judges can do something, others can do.
#
So you need to create consensus for these things because you can do some try to do something,
#
but it can be disrupted either way.
#
So state government is trying to do something, center can disrupt it.
#
Centers trying to do something, state governments can disrupt it.
#
So some degree of consensus building around these issues is very important.
#
So that at least from a developmental perspective, when reasonable policies are made and implemented
#
and reasonable systems are put in place to take the right decision at the local level,
#
even if the policy is not necessarily fully followed to the letter.
#
And I think those are important questions.
#
And I've thought about in many ways how anti-corruption strategies in the last 10 years have worked
#
out and changed bureaucratic behavior and incentives of bureaucrats to take decisions.
#
How state capital relations have changed, might have changed, looking at rising disputes
#
between the state and private capital, especially on the tax side, but also in the enforcement
#
directorate and all those.
#
So one is trying to make sense of things which are not easy to directly study because it's
#
a hidden aspect of our political reality.
#
What we read is the de jure and the headline, but what happens on the ground is not so easily
#
I talk to business people, I try to get a sense of before after, what changed, what
#
was happening earlier, what has changed now.
#
I look at whatever data is available, try to make sense of these things.
#
And I couldn't agree with you more strongly about the importance of growth.
#
You know, Nitin Pai once pointed out that for every 1% rise in GDP, 2 million people
#
And I think the estimate has actually gone up since he last mentioned that.
#
That has staggering humanitarian consequences.
#
Growth is not just, you know, statistics or lines on a graph.
#
It affects the lives of real people.
#
And I'm sometimes astonished that there is still an intellectual class of people, quote
#
unquote, who still question the 91 reforms, who still question growth, whose brains are
#
still full of the nonsensical dogma that was in vogue 70 years ago.
#
And it kind of just boggles my mind.
#
But luckily, like you said that, you know, maybe intellectuals are not that relevant
#
And that's a good thing.
#
People can see what's good for them.
#
So I think one issue is inequality.
#
They focus too much on that one metric and some of them have some ideological or psychological
#
reasons for giving too much emphasis on that one value.
#
If they give so much emphasis on that one value of equality, then obviously last 30
#
years look a little worse than they do to you and me, who have a different set of values.
#
So there is a difference on that.
#
So I mean, it is what it is.
#
Just to reiterate, and regular listeners of the show will know, but it's something I feel
#
really strongly about that inequality and poverty are different things.
#
You know, the thought experiment question I often ask people is in which of these two
#
countries would you rather be poor, the USA or Bangladesh?
#
And obviously, everybody would rather be poor in the USA.
#
Yeah, because the poverty there is better than being better off in India or Bangladesh.
#
So in that same essay...
#
But let me finish the point I was making.
#
And the reason for that, the reason they would choose the USA is because poverty is less,
#
even though inequality is far greater in the US than Bangladesh.
#
You know, it's a pattern of developing countries that when you're coming out of poverty, your
#
poverty rates go down as your inequality goes up because we don't live in a zero sum world.
#
It is not the case that if the rich are getting richer, the poor, poor must be getting poorer.
#
It is a case that they're both getting richer and the rich are, of course, getting richer
#
at a higher rate, so inequality increases.
#
And the moral imperative for any country which has these rates of poverty is reduce poverty
#
So what we have had since 91 is poverty has gone down massively, inequality has gone up.
#
We are not in a zero sum world.
#
In fact, if you look at income distributions, I've done some quick analysis on this and
#
performed my essays that the household income at the 90th percentile in India is about the
#
same as the household income at the 15th percentile in the US.
#
So I mean, a poor household earns as much as a much better off, right?
#
Their 90th percentile is better off than nine out of ten households is basically so, I mean,
#
that's the impulse for immigration, right?
#
That you suddenly go and become a part of a history of another place because each square
#
foot in this planet has its own history.
#
And suddenly you supplant yourself from one history to another's history and profit from
#
the years of struggle that went into making that history, right, where you could just
#
land up in a place and suddenly be much, much better off, at least materially.
#
And it's quite a painful thing.
#
I was I remember I was on a flight from here to Europe and there was going to Abu Dhabi
#
and I was sitting next to this guy who was crying and he was like a middle aged man who
#
And after a while, I thought I should talk to him, at least I don't know if I can comfort
#
He may have gone through some tragedy or something, but he was literally like crying, you know,
#
and he was from Punjab and he told me that he's going to work at Abu Dhabi.
#
And I said, okay, I didn't ask him why I do crying.
#
I just kept talking to him because, you know, I don't want to approach that directly and
#
also to a middle aged man, it's very difficult to talk about this thing.
#
But he opened up immediately.
#
He said, I am a plumber from the district of Punjab and I'm going to Abu Dhabi for work
#
and I was there and I came back with my family for a month and a month or two months, I don't
#
And now I'm going back there for work and my daughter is six years old now and I last
#
I saw her when she was four and now I'm seeing her as six and now I'll see her and I can't
#
So I said, then I asked how much do you earn and all that and it's a completely different
#
kind of level of income that you get there, right?
#
Like even as a plumber, you get four or five times or something, but you earn as a plumber
#
And simply, I mean, human beings are the same, we are not dumb or anything like that.
#
It's just institutions.
#
Basically, I mean, of course, there are natural resource rich countries.
#
That's a different category.
#
But for the rest, all kinds of countries have become prosperous.
#
South Korea didn't get rich by natural resources, which Kuchana didn't get.
#
It's just getting the institutional mechanisms right and having the right kind of arrangements
#
to just, you know, do what is necessary to get rich.
#
It's an amazing tragedy.
#
People from my village, I mean, within the country, you go to Bombay to work and then
#
come back and see your family after six months or a year and go abroad.
#
In fact, they don't come back for two years often because it's very expensive to come
#
back and you lose wages plus pay for the flight and all of that.
#
So two years, once in two years, go see your children and your family.
#
And it's a moral failure to not get growth going and it was so this kind of, I mean,
#
I give a lot of benefit of doubt.
#
People have their reasons to believe what they believe.
#
But I can't get this too much now, especially now that we have seen all kinds of explanations
#
have fallen apart and fallen away and we've actually delivered good growth.
#
Maybe some sources of growth had histories going back to the before 90s.
#
But even earlier, we could have grown more rapidly.
#
This argument that, oh, if we hadn't done the patent act earlier, then we wouldn't have
#
been able to benefit from trips and all these are all just excuses.
#
Broadly speaking, for three decades, we didn't deliver on the promise.
#
And then since then, we have done much better.
#
Inequality is one thing that some people quite, quite obsessed about it.
#
They have their own reasons for it.
#
I mean, these are foreign fashions, right?
#
These are kids who'll go abroad, they'll do PhD in American University, import a mindset
#
from there and intellectually lazy fuckers not doing any thinking for themselves.
#
I mean, I'm not going to mince my words there, you can make your words.
#
It's just the question that, I mean, I think the country has more or less moved on from
#
Most people now understand that.
#
I mean, intuitively, there is some sense that this happened and I wish there was more
#
of this consensus in the class in which we move.
#
There is still much more doubt about these things and the economy and neoliberalism is
#
I try to understand, but I'm not able to understand.
#
Because these are people born to privilege.
#
They never had to fight for their next meal, right?
#
These are people born to privilege.
#
It is okay, they can abuse.
#
But ask the people who are benefiting from the, who have benefited, who have come out
#
of poverty from the opening up of markets, you know, and ask that plumber who is crying
#
on a plane why he won't see his daughter again for two years.
#
That is, it's a moral tragedy and it's a moral tragedy caused by flawed thinking.
#
And yeah, I think anyway, I mean, they're all, there are worse people in this world.
#
So, I mean, we can, I don't obsess too much about this stuff.
#
People have all kinds of views.
#
I think you're worried that all your colleagues will think I'm talking about them.
#
I mean, fortunately, none of my immediate colleagues actually think in this way.
#
So, but anyway, the point I want, I'm trying to make is that this is an important moral
#
imperative that we have.
#
And it's a, it's, it's, it's a political priority, should be a political priority.
#
And it should be, in a way, if we get focused on this, hopefully, some of the other steps
#
that we are too focused on right now, simplistic identity politics and all will also kind of
#
fall lower on the priority.
#
But that's just a side, I'm not saying that's going to happen.
#
I'm saying that it should be a priority.
#
It should be the top three priorities or four or five priorities.
#
And then we do other things because many things are tied to this, many, many other things
#
that we want to have are tied to this.
#
And the one, one thing about this word is that now many, many countries are rich and
#
you, the best of your people will leave and they already were leaving earlier than we
#
So a country gives you two things, right?
#
It gives you opportunities to build some capabilities and the other is to use those capabilities
#
well to flourish economically and materially.
#
And there are other things that they do.
#
I mean, I'm talking about economic aspects, but country economics does two things.
#
We had institutions that will give you capability, but not opportunities to do make more of these.
#
So the decisions were very one sided that you get easy to take a decision to go to IIT,
#
but very difficult to take a decision to stay in India.
#
So there you had this huge brain drain.
#
Fortunately, some people are now coming back, they're setting up or somewhere, many are
#
not going in the first place to set up businesses here.
#
So that's a very good thing.
#
I mean, all of that happened because we did better on governance and institutions.
#
We're still a young country and there's so many people who want to do this, build businesses.
#
Across various sectors, we can do much better.
#
And I think we should continue that story.
#
And if we fall off that and if we lose that sense of consensus and we try to think more
#
in Malthusian ways that, hey, if that state party succeeds in delivering growth, then
#
I will lose my political legitimacy and all of that, which is creating a lot of this interstate
#
conflicts in some ways because politics is just overriding everything else in this kind
#
We will probably compromise on this because one thing is there that I keep harping on
#
Some consensus was there.
#
And also coalitions, coalition politics, formal politician politics that made consensus necessary
#
where different regional parties went out and helped create consensus for specific reforms.
#
And there are a couple of good books on this worth reading.
#
And I mean, that's the way a political economy of growth in a democracy works.
#
And unfortunately, when a dominant party, then the need for consensus goes away and
#
you end up making more mistakes.
#
So then you have to willfully go and seek what would work or what are the different
#
interest groups, who's going to lose out, how do I make it good for them?
#
You know, it's a democracy, purely utilitarian frames may limit because even a small vocal
#
minority can stop a reform from happening.
#
And we've seen that happening a few times.
#
So I think it's very important to think about it through democratic and political processes.
#
And how does that shape to the institutions and policies that actually deliver the conditions
#
in which growth can happen?
#
Which is done by markets and private enterprise primarily.
#
But there are things that state has to do to be able to support it.
#
And yeah, I think it's a very important question.
#
And so as I was saying earlier, that it's a national question.
#
I always think about it as a national question.
#
The way it's framed is that nations are economically consequential political units, you know, they're
#
politically consequential because you see so much difference across nations.
#
And within nations, there's not that much, you know, like for all the inequality that
#
we have in India, if you compare inequality across India and other countries, especially
#
developed countries, it's not even close, the intra country inequality that we have.
#
Even our richest state, for example, is maybe a quarter of the per capita income, the poorest
#
So it's not even close in terms of where you are.
#
And we harp so much over this inequality as an issue.
#
So I always say, like, I never write about inequality in that sense.
#
I care about it in some ways, some specific ways, like gender inequality, for example.
#
I worry about low female, I mean, they were forced participation.
#
I worry about inclusion across, I mean, if there are some systematic ways in which certain
#
people are being excluded, then it's a problem, not just for growth, but also a moral problem
#
for society in that sense.
#
But not in this macro way of inequality, that class thinking that, okay, you have to go
#
one level below and say, okay, is there any structural kind of bias that is going for
#
certain people who are not able to participate in the process?
#
That obviously we all care about, because in that sense, inequality actually harms your
#
That's a different kind of inequality.
#
That's a different kind of analysis.
#
But that's not necessarily to critique the entire growth episode that we have had.
#
And it was a kind of growth episode, we actually competed with the world, right?
#
We look at our export growth, you know, our export as a percent of GDP in 1990 was about
#
the same as it was in 1950.
#
And it just increased very rapidly after that.
#
Even then we are a very small part of the world trade.
#
We have a very, very long way to go.
#
We are punching way below our weight.
#
In many areas, we have moderately complex products that we make and export.
#
We can make more complex products, which are more valuable and give more GDP.
#
We can move more kind of products to export.
#
So export can be a major driver of Indian growth.
#
We are punching way below our weight.
#
2% of the world trade is not where we should be, you know, much higher in terms of GDP
#
But trade share is much smaller, we should be able to do much more.
#
We need to create conditions for more private investment.
#
And that I think is a show-shot, I mean, more or less show-shot way to, you know, at least
#
I mean, there will be a situation in which we need to worry too much, much more on domestic
#
consumption and all of that worry.
#
But my judgment of this situation is we are not there yet.
#
We need to go at more, continue the accumulation stage and then we can say, okay, the distribution
#
and all the issues become very important.
#
Also see, for our level of income, we tax more of the GDP than most countries did at
#
Or we borrow more as a person with GDP than most of our comparable countries.
#
So it's not like the state is not taxing and borrowing.
#
And we can talk about how to tax better and borrow better.
#
Maybe we can do less financial repression on the borrowing side.
#
We can have more efficient tax system.
#
On the expenditure side, we can talk about better allocative and operational efficiency
#
We can debate what is worth spending on, how to spend on it.
#
All those are very important conversations.
#
But if anybody argues that we should be taxing more and borrowing more at level of GDP, the
#
onus is on them to prove why, why it can be done well.
#
Because I'm showing you very clear evidence that we are actually taxing a pretty large
#
part of the GDP larger than we should at this, I mean, we usually continue at this level
#
So all those are myths, obviously.
#
So without growth, how are you going to even deliver on all the good stuff that you want
#
to redistribute and do more for people?
#
So I think there is a and we could do so much more when we started growing.
#
We could do more subsidies and welfare schemes and all.
#
There's a lot of critique on how it was done, how much of it went to middle class and all
#
I completely agree with that.
#
That's what I should study also.
#
But I'm telling you, it's a very small part of the problem.
#
Much bigger problem is how to get to that $20,000 GDP at least per capita.
#
I think without growth, we are like a guy standing in a bucket trying to lift up the
#
You know, ain't gonna happen.
#
That's how futile it feels.
#
We've been talking for like 19 hours or something in a basement studio.
#
We are running out of air by my calculations, a current level at the current levels of oxygen
#
will kind of survive for eight minutes, maybe nine or maybe an hour.
#
We could try it out and see which one of us collapses first.
#
So what I'll do is now I'll ask you a bunch of questions, kind of like a rapid fire, but
#
not rapid rapid, but ask you for potted answers on these issues, because I feel like I haven't,
#
you know, got even 10% of the insights that I know you have within you to give.
#
So first of my potted questions, and you can think about this because it's what nuances
#
does conventional thinking on economics in India miss or the political economy in India
#
You we've already spoken about how conventional thinking is wrong and you know, inequality
#
that poverty is a bigger problem.
#
You've already mentioned how people think economists are more influential than they
#
And it's really politicians and bureaucrats who make a much greater difference.
#
What other insights do you have about the political economy and our economy, which go
#
against conventional wisdom or which people may not know?
#
Yeah, I think we should pay more attention to incentives of bureaucrats to take the right
#
decision in the right circumstances and feel secure in taking those decisions, which are
#
developmental decisions, you know, pay attention.
#
Second is we need to pay more attention to the political settlement, which basically
#
has bulk of the power to decide who gets what and how things are arranged and creating the
#
necessity of creating some baseline agreement on developmental issues across different levels
#
of government is very important.
#
Third is we need to focus more on the reality of political economy than just the de jure
#
I mean, those are important for sure.
#
And in some cases, their change can also change reality.
#
But we need to turn to reality, which means we need to shape the incentives of people
#
who take decisions and who invest and what do they look at?
#
What are the signals they're looking for before investing and all of that?
#
What kind of signals do you want to send to it?
#
So the communications and narratives matter quite a bit, I think.
#
And they will shape future expectations and you can have, you can sustain growth.
#
Then there is a, I think it's quite important to, in some senses, do reforms, you know,
#
but like for example, we always talk about their factor market reforms that are to be
#
done in India and land, labor, all of that.
#
But in that, we need to think more carefully about what are the kind of bargains that can
#
be struck, which will make the reforms more sustainable politically, you know.
#
You can't have reforms where there are losers of the reform who feel aggrieved and it's
#
a democracy and you don't think democratically about reforms.
#
And there are people who you may think are getting undue benefits through whatever existing
#
But the fact of the matter that they have a voice and they can make things difficult
#
and they have a right to make it difficult for you and therefore finding bargains, whether
#
it's in agriculture, whether it's in labor, whether it's in land markets and all, which
#
make the reform more sustainable is, should be the focus of the reformist, when reform
#
minded thinkers and civil servants and all of that.
#
And I think we are seeing some of that.
#
I mean, not as much as it would be good, but we are seeing some of that and also continuing
#
the strength of our democracy, we should harness the strength of our democracy.
#
All of these points I made is working towards this one point, which is that we got rapid
#
growth in a coalition era with all kinds of arrogant independent institutions saying whatever
#
they wanted to say, a press which made the life of government very, very difficult, often
#
challenging it, weak governments with minority leading parties and the necessity of coalition.
#
And smallest party could basically make the government fall.
#
And we got really rapid growth, I mean, for especially for a democracy, but even generally
#
we were among the fastest growing economies in the world.
#
The second fastest growing large economy in the world for a very long time while having
#
those kind of institutional settings and that kind of a democratic setup.
#
So we should harness those and we should harness those very carefully and see how we got that
#
So most important thing to learn from our own past experience.
#
It's good to look at Korea and China and all of that for some purposes, but our own past
#
There's a lot to learn from there, how it worked, what worked, we will not replicate
#
That's not going to work now.
#
The economy has changed, the world has changed.
#
But at the meta level, there's a lot of insight on how we harness the democratic institutions
#
and our democratic processes to get things done.
#
Wise words, what are your views on our democracy and particularly relevant since for years
#
you've been telling me to read Tocqueville, talking about Tocqueville.
#
His thoughts on democracy were also particularly acute and came out of, again, the experience
#
of it, specifically of traveling through America at that stage in the history.
#
So what are, you know, when you look at India's democracy, it's, you know, there are many
#
There are many things wrong with it.
#
What is sort of your sense of, you know, where we stand?
#
I'm actually very, very hopeful about India's democracy.
#
Even though we are going through some difficult times right now, there's a kind of populist
#
train to our democracy right now.
#
And it at times is quite nasty and difficult to deal with as a citizen.
#
But I'm still very hopeful that democratic sources of resilience will come into play
#
and there will be some moderation that will happen.
#
And I think as a democracy that we have sustained as a democracy for such a long time, hardly
#
anybody gave us a chance when we became democratic.
#
And in fact, in the colonial era, the best liberals in the 19th century, you mentioned
#
Tocqueville is a big supporter of colonialism, including British colonialism in India.
#
He was a great thinker on democracy.
#
He had strong moral commitments to democracy, but he had a different view of how colonialism
#
in countries like India.
#
But we kind of, you know, pushed back against those views and so we made democracy work
#
And now, I mean, compared to that immediate era after independence, we've had much more
#
of distribution of power in society.
#
More and more groups are getting incorporated in different ways, finding representation
#
of society into the democratic system, through different political parties, through state
#
apparatus and all of that.
#
So, democracy is working as a social principle.
#
We should never forget that democracy is fundamentally a social principle.
#
It's a quality of society, you know, that you're democratic, you have a certain commitment
#
to fundamental equality of conditions.
#
I mean, we didn't have the American kind of beginning, right?
#
We started with equality of conditions.
#
There wasn't any central government, local liberties, all of that.
#
We had a colonial state and it was the top heavy state.
#
And even though villages and communities were pushing back a little bit, there was still
#
a quite a bit of top heavy interference in life.
#
And we democratized and we started, we had a, it was a matter of faith for our founders
#
that we will work as a democracy and we live up to their expectation more or less, you
#
We've continued our democracy.
#
We had a brief interlude of a kind of a democratorship or dictatorship, you can call it, and we've
#
So on, we had a big failing on the economic side for a few decades.
#
We corrected that in a very big way.
#
I would say we should not underestimate what we've achieved in those, in these three decades.
#
We've, we can do much better.
#
We have a long, long way to go, but we have our own one generation of record to show that
#
we can do quite, quite well.
#
On the side of whether, I mean, there is a set of social kind of civic life and social
#
life which needs to have, there will be conflicts, there will be, I mean, multiculturalism is
#
We should never compare ourselves with Western multicultural discourse.
#
Their multiculturalism is a very different context.
#
They are highly secularized society where religion has taken a very, very small role
#
in society and accepted that role for itself.
#
People who are religious also practice in very different ways, you know, from us.
#
We have a strong number of, large number of people who are true believers, strong believers
#
and very suspicious of other communities because they are very, they're very deeply embedded
#
in their own traditions, religious traditions.
#
So multiculturalism is very hard in India and therefore controlling for that we've done
#
quite well, I would say, because democracy itself creates, you know, incentives to mobilize
#
one group against another, all of that happens.
#
But given all of that, we've not done too badly if you took a long view, don't get
#
too upset about some particular events or something which are obviously bad in themselves.
#
So and that's a surprising thing because democracy creates incentives to do much worse on that
#
and we have not done so badly and hopefully we will not do worse in the near future.
#
So across, I mean, a phase in which democracy works, I think we, I'm much more hopeful,
#
I mean, then I would have been, I was too young at that time, 30 years ago, we are going
#
through on some aspects of our, especially on the aspects of identity politics and all
#
some difficult patch right now.
#
And I think we cannot take it too lightly, we should take it seriously and we should
#
try to find low cost ways to get out of this kind of a politics, which is pretty, I mean,
#
harmful for democracy because ultimately equality is a foundation of democracy and nobody should
#
feel less lesser of a citizen than anyone else.
#
So that I think is very important, but I think our democratic resilience is there and we
#
can certainly find ways to moderate whatever is happening and I'm not, I never put democracy
#
up to some abstract standard and say, if you don't meet my standard, then you're not much
#
You have to judge democracy on its own terms and given our complexity of our society, different
#
identities, different regional religious identities as a multicultural society, given the level
#
of poverty and all we had earlier, we've come a long way and therefore one of the most important
#
things I feel, at least in private conversation is that do not give up on India, don't give
#
up like this is a rotten society and this and that, because some events happen and somebody
#
reacts in this way, that puts the society, which is the whole, democracy does one thing
#
that empowers the whole and parts become very weak and you can feel very small because of
#
If you think about it this way that, hey, what am I, there's this large body politic
#
is there and who am I to, I can't change it, I should just give up on it and be a part
#
of some other country's history, just move.
#
But I say that, I mean, let's keep trying to go back to Chesterton, that Rome would
#
be great because Romans love it.
#
So we need to keep that faith and keep working whatever we need to do as citizens, especially
#
at local, I mean, friends and family level to try to kind of keep doing better because
#
I think it's the most interesting country in the world in the sense that what we are
#
trying to do right now, the journey that we have made, the future, I mean, the stakes
#
are just staggering to quote, misquote, Lucas, that, you know, the consequences are simply
#
staggering and we have to invest in this process.
#
And ultimately democracy is self-governance, democracy is ruled by the people, anybody
#
who has power has the power from the people and it's ultimately people who will decide
#
what will be rewarded and what will be punished, what will work and what will not work.
#
And therefore we should, even though the hole is much larger than us, we are part of that
#
hole as well, constituent of that hole and we need to keep that democratic faith and
#
keep working towards perfection of this democracy.
#
When you say the hole, I mean, do you mean W-H-O-L-E or H-O-L-E, but penultimate question,
#
which is that you mentioned that we are in a fix, but we have to find a low cost way
#
So what do you mean by low cost and what would be high cost?
#
I don't know, but what would be the right way out of it, but there's a particular dynamic
#
that is at play, which is an identarian dynamic where basically a community is reduced to
#
And it happens with different communities at different points of time and it happening
#
with some communities at this point of time that you obviously all communities have some
#
fanatics in some way, but the vast majority don't like that, don't live like that.
#
And although, I mean, they can do something more than they do to moderate the fanatics
#
and maybe they can't, we don't know, but when it's reduced to the worst of their motivations,
#
then obviously it becomes a question of can we coexist and all of that.
#
Those kinds of questions are getting raised more and more now, I think in India and democratic
#
politics is working in a way that these questions are getting more and more raised on a regular
#
basis and there's much more mobilization around those kinds of issues.
#
Now I believe, at least my understanding of what's possible is that if you focus on, I
#
mean, where the real problem is, where there's actual genuine fanaticism and there's genuine
#
kind of a threat and not make it something broader and focus on solving that problem,
#
you can find a way to kind of overcome this sense of anxiety and fear that we have kind
#
of, there's so much fear in India right now, like this strange fear, like if you open the
#
television just, it throws fear at you.
#
So many news channels are just throwing fear and anxiety all the time.
#
It's really something which has become a part of our air in some ways, you know, Delhi
#
air is very thick anyway, and it's thicker because I don't have a TV at home, but whenever
#
I go somewhere, I watch TV and I'm like, Oh my God, what is going on?
#
The level of, you know, over the top rhetoric and the oversimplification of issues, like
#
you go anecdotal when you want to avoid someone and statistically you want to defend yourself.
#
So yeah, that guy did it, that identity, so it must be the entire community like that.
#
It's not good for coexistence in a multicultural society, you have to be more precise, talk
#
about what's going on, find facts, report on the facts, there may be problems, there
#
may be fanaticism, there may be some degree of extremism going on, but attack that, identify
#
that, it has to be more precise.
#
And fear, anxiety that is being pervaded, social media has done that to some extent,
#
mainstream media, television media is contributing a lot.
#
And that fear, I really worry that at a subconscious level, it is making us into something which
#
we'll see the consequences maybe in a decade or two.
#
If we can change that, if we can get, I mean, leadership basically, it's something that
#
we've done at the level leaders, not just the current leaders, people who are leaders
#
who rise, who have the wisdom to see the problems of these ways and say, okay, can we do better?
#
Can we be more precise about actual problems and not create demons of our own to destroy?
#
The other is, as I said, perhaps if we focus on other things, which is common good, collective
#
action, cooperation for development and growth, hopefully we can have a little less of a focus
#
on these things because our psychological wounds are many.
#
We have been as a civilization being ruled for many, many centuries and we don't even
#
know the depth of our sufferings.
#
And if we bring those out on a regular basis and spread fear and anxiety, I mean, this
#
is a tiger that you will eat the ones who are riding it also.
#
I'm not saying that we are there yet.
#
One good hope is that we are not completely modern.
#
We don't think in those clear cut category ways, many of us, some are.
#
So there is still much more intertwining of lives and much more of an amorphousness to
#
the identity in India, I think.
#
So like I said, I still go to Dargah sometimes, there's that and not just me, my family.
#
So there is some of that sources of resilience.
#
Democracy itself has both sources of risk and also sources of resilience.
#
And we have a big hope for progress.
#
We've got a taste of progress in three years, three decades, got a serious taste of progress,
#
We've got some states of social progress.
#
Let's get that appetite a little more.
#
Let's work together towards, you know, progress towards a richer, more, I mean, more robustly
#
multicultural society, you know, because I don't think we're going to secularize in
#
And I don't know whether it's a good thing at all or not.
#
We exist in a multicultural society with different religions, coexisting, different
#
regional identities, all of that.
#
And it's a great advantage to be a part of India, like subregional, subnational sentiments
#
and all should be kept under some kind of a limit because it's great to be a part of
#
And there are many benefits, economic and otherwise, of being part of this country.
#
So that's another element that we shouldn't stoke too much because being a part of a whole
#
like this, you know, like a country as big as India is culturally and economically and
#
politically very beneficial for different parts, even the parts that are doing much
#
I hope your hopes come to fruition, though I also worried that the fear and the anxiety
#
are real and we might be trapped in a vicious circle where they just spiral and take us
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into a very dark place.
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Final question, which I always sort of end my episodes with, which is, why don't you
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recommend for me and my listeners, books, music, films that mean a lot to you?
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Books, music and films or whatever, any art.
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So the book recommendations that link up to the themes that we discussed today.
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So one theme was democracy.
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And I think the best book on democracy is talk with democracy in America.
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It's a great book and one should try to read it and engage with it seriously.
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And if you want to get a book about that book, it's basically, I think the best in that category
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in my view is Pierre Menon's Tocqueville and the nature of democracy.
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It's a short book and it's a really great well done book.
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Then a lot of the books by Pierre Rosevala is also very, very insightful, but especially
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I really like this latest book on populism.
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I think it's the best book on populism and it's important to understand our times and
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how democracy is getting transformed in some ways by populism and why that may have happened
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and how to think about it theoretically.
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We talked about virtues and there are many books on virtues in different traditions.
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But I just recommend one which we mentioned indirectly so that if one wants to go and
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get into it and more deeply is Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.
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I think it's a great book and we mentioned it and others I am not going to.
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We talked a little bit about technology also, right?
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So I would recommend Don Aide's work on human technology relations, philosophy of technology.
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There are a couple of recent books I enjoyed reading.
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One was a book on technology and virtues by Shannon Valer and another one on nihilism
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and technology which takes a Nietzschean perspective on technology by this young philosopher Nolan
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Then we talked about political economy also.
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That was a large part of our conversation.
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So I would suggest at least from a more comparative perspective and understanding theory
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of growth and political economy, a lot of new social economics work by people like Douglas
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North, Elina Ostrom and others is quite illuminating and gives you a good way of thinking about
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So also the work of Albert Hirschman is very powerful even now in thinking about growth
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and development, economic progress.
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Then I benefited a lot from accessing the empirical work by people like Lan Pritchett
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There is a community of people who do this kind of work and it's worth engaging with
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them because it gives you ways to think about these issues and there's a book which is
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not an economics book but I found it very useful to think about political economy.
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On complex adaptive systems, there's a book by Robert Axelrod called Harnessing Complexity.
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So it's one of the best books on complexity and it gives you a language to speak about
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complexity and move away from the language of top-down thinking in that sense.
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In religion, there are basically the best ways to read scriptures and try to engage
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with them, whether it's philosophical texts or religious books, holy books or mythological
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But also epics, I really enjoy reading epics, so Mahabharat, Odyssey, also like epic poems
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like Divine Comedy and Rashmi Rati and all are very interesting to me.
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So I would say, yeah, I mean, that's where I'm linking it to themes that we discussed
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I mean, music, I mean, I don't have much of a recommendation, only music I really enjoy
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is old Hindi film music.
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I just listen to that only now.
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That's my music life, should I speak, nothing more than that.
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So Kishore Kumar, Muhammad Rafi, Lata Vangeshkar's old songs, that's my kind of music.
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Musical life, so to speak.
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Then movies, I would say, because the movie's word works more through authors and all that.
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So some directors who work, I enjoy, Tarkovsky, for example, especially movies like Andrea
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Rublev and all, I mean, perfect achievements on what you can do with cinema, Bernouel Kurosawa,
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And then I enjoy good fun movies like Mission Impossible movies, good funny movies, well
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done funny movies like Bad News Bear and all, you know, or this old Hindi movies I like
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a lot, like movies like Anand and Dilip Kumar movies.
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So I mean, that's where my current kind of taste lies.
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So I mean, it is what it is.
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Great, Sush, thanks so much for coming on the show.
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Thank you, Amit, for having me, always good to talk to you and you have a very intriguing
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skill to bring out, get people to talk about things that they would not normally talk about.
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You didn't talk about many things today, but we shall get you on the show again and we'll
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Sure, sure, very happy to.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to the show notes, enter rabbitholes
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You can follow Suyash on Twitter at Suyash Rai, all other relevant links to him are in
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You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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