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One of the questions I often ask myself is, how should I live in this world?
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At one level, this is a question of personal ethics.
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What bounds do I place on myself when it comes to my behaviour?
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At another level, it's also a question of responsibility.
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What do I owe to others, apart from not harming them or infringing their rights?
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This question has perhaps been moot for most people for most of human history.
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We've been shaped by scarcity, shaped to worry about ourselves and the people in our
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immediate vicinity, simply unable to influence a world beyond that or to help others at scale.
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But in modern times, thanks to markets and technology, many of us now have the means
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to help other people at scale.
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And that brings us to the question, what is my responsibility to others if I have great
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I'm not sure this is a question that can be answered coherently from first principles.
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Each wealthy individual has to decide this for themselves.
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And if they do decide to use their money to make the world a better place, there are further
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How should one spend this money?
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Do you aim for low probability moonshots that can have a crazy outsized impact, as many
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Do you play it safe and do only things where you can see the impact right away and you
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get immediate gratification?
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Should you be lowkey about your spending as your personal values might insist?
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Or should you make a noise about it so others can also get inspired to follow you and they
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have a template to follow?
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My guest today has spent years using her wealth to make a difference.
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And more interestingly to me, she has constantly been writing, constantly been examining all
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these no-anses questions.
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And there are lessons there for all of us.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Rohini Nilakani, who began life as a journalist and writer, made a lot
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of money with an early investment and has since plunged into spending that money to
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She's also been writing constantly and I love reading her recent book, Samaj Sarkar Bazar,
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A Citizen First Approach.
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Rohini knows the corporate world intimately, she has seen the state up close and she argues
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that samaj came before sarkar or bazar, that each of us should see ourselves as more than
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a subject of the state or a consumer in the market.
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It's a wonderful book and I quote from it often during this conversation so do pick
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She's an original thinker who questions everything, including herself.
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I was struck by both her personal and intellectual humility and especially by one more thing,
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that she is still moving, working hard, a work in progress.
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So many people I know become one thing and then they stay that way, maybe out of complacence
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or laziness or inertia, I certainly think that can happen to me if I don't watch out.
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And so it's inspiring to have a conversation like this with someone who is so engaged,
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so alive, so determined to make a change.
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I think you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did but first, let's take a quick
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Have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it?
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Well, I'd love to help you.
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Since April 2020, I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear
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Writing and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
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We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase the work of students and vibrant community
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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about the craft and practice of clear writing.
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There are many exercises, much interaction and a lovely and lively community at the end
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The course rupees 10,000 plus GST or about $150.
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If you're interested, head on over to register at indiaankar.com slash clear writing.
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That's indiaankar.com slash clear writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
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a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Rohini, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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Thank you so much, Amit, for having me here.
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You know, we've actually, we've been talking about doing this for three or four months
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and one of the things I was sort of struck by is how you and your team are so meticulous
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about getting a time about calendarizing and so on and so forth.
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So the impression I got is, okay, if, you know, we fixed a recording at the end of Jan
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in I think November or October, we fixed it, that you must be an incredibly busy person
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and so on and so forth.
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So I want to kind of start by asking about what do you do in your me time?
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Like in the course of this conversation, we'll talk about all the great work that you do
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in social work, in philanthropy, in writing, all of that, right?
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But what do you do in your me time?
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What's your personal time?
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So for the past six years, it's really trying to get as much time as I can with Tanush,
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But other than that, I really love to go out into the wild, the first chance I get, I'm
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I read a lot, like you, not as much as you, and listen to music, walk, meet people, like
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So and how were the pandemic months for you?
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Because you wouldn't have been able to travel, you wouldn't have been able to go to work,
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even your interactions with people would have been?
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Actually, strangely enough, I was able to use the pandemic to travel, because except
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for the shutdown times, the Karnataka forests were open.
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So Kabini, the forest was open, which is four hours from my home.
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And I spent 80 days in the forest during the two years of the pandemic, I would just push
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At that time, I was having this romance with the black panther, local black panther there,
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who they call Kariya, and I decided I need to see him for whatever reason.
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And so I spent a lot of time, I was also part of a team that was making a film there.
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I mean, a very peripheral part of the team.
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So we were able to go into the forest and it was really a marvelous time I had.
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So the pandemic was special, plus my grandson lives next to my home.
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Many grandparents couldn't see their grandchildren.
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One of the big things that made older people lonely was they were cut off from their families
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in those two years, but we were very lucky, we had our loved ones around us.
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Yeah, you know, these children who were two, three years old when the pandemic hit, before
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they had time to make social formations, they suddenly got out of that whole peer group
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Luckily for my grandson, his, the nanny's children live right in the compound and they
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were very kind and they took him under their wing, so he always had playmates.
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But I saw a lot of children become isolated and fearful of adults when they went back
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to school, when we started looking at what teachers were saying.
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One of the things that was very stark when I heard the feedback that my teams gave was
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that the adults said that they no longer look to each other first, their eye contact is
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first with the adults because they wouldn't meet, they would look at the teacher, but
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they wouldn't, first few months, wouldn't talk to each other laterally, to their peers
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because they had lost touch with other children.
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Wow, I mean, I guess it'll be years before we fully know the impact of COVID on kids
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at this kind of formative stage, you know.
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But kids are very resilient, Amit, they've already gone back.
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You can see they've already gone back to their earlier practices.
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Now learning loss is a whole different thing, but I hope if we adults do the right thing,
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the learning loss can be bridged, but not if we don't, because the ASSA report just
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came out and you could see the impact of the pandemic.
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Many of the learning levels have gone back to 2012 across the country, a lot of progress
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had been made in till 2018-19 and these two years caused a massive slip back.
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The good news is that the education system is well aware of it, so hopefully in this
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year especially, we should be able to help most children catch up, fingers crossed.
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Because it's so critical, not only for every child, but really for the country.
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So let me take you back to the child you were, tell me about, you know, your years growing
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up in, you know, you've mentioned you grew up in a middle class household in Bombay and
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So tell me a bit about those years, your family.
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Yeah, I was born in Mumbai in 1959 and the cusp of a new decade.
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So the 60s were my childhood and, you know, when I look back now, what a wonderful, easy,
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comfortable, fun childhood it was, because what I call normal middle class is probably
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already a very privileged setting in India, right?
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For us, it felt like normal middle class then we lived in apartment buildings, my father
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was a salaried professional.
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So when he moved jobs, he would have to move houses.
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But that was all in South Bombay, which is now, if you look at it, the very elite part
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But we lived like, it was definitely not a rich life, but it was rich in many other ways,
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There was love, there was friendship, there was education.
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But what strikes me now in that carefree childhood playing downstairs, we played strange games
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like French cricket because there wasn't a place to run around.
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So we had to turning the bat around our bodies was one run, that was so much fun.
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But I realize now that the safety in my childhood is something many people can't take for granted
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We could walk anywhere in the streets of Bombay and our parents also didn't seem to restrict
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We would go outside the gates, Bombay itself, Mumbai, that was Bombay really.
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It became Mumbai later and it was Mumbai earlier, I guess, Mumba Devi, but the public infrastructure
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now when I think of it, we had running water, 24 by 7.
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We had electricity, never faced blackouts till I came to Karnataka.
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And we had wonderful public transport, bus number 84, still I remember taking everywhere.
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We had, as I said, safety on the roads.
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We had, there were playgrounds for people like the maidans.
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The sea was there so people could walk along the seashore.
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So many things when I think of that allowed us to not necessarily want so much because
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a lot of it was available in the public domain, going to movie theatres was not a big deal.
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A meal outside, there was a sandwich outside my building gate, started with 50 paisa for
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a marvelous triple decker sandwich and then it became one rupee which we were really upset
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about and so on and so forth.
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But what I mean is now when I think of it, for the middle class, life was not that.
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Now you have to struggle through the traffic everywhere in the country, so much deficit
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of public infrastructure, it has not caught up with the rate of population growth.
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But now when I think back, Bombay was really bliss.
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Yeah, and just to, you know, you brought back old memories of mine by saying French cricket.
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Just for those of my listeners who may not know what it is, basically you're not allowed
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So your feet are exactly as they are and then, you know, you hit the ball somewhere and the
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bowler has to go to that place where the ball went and bowled from there, no matter what
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So if you hit a ball to long leg or something, you've really got to twist your body to play
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And sometimes because you do that, you trip and fall and you're out.
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So yeah, yeah, purani yaade aagei.
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So at that point where you're kind of growing up through the 60s and the 70s and all of
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that, what's your conception of yourself and what your life is going to be?
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Like, are you a kid who reads a lot?
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Is it from that time that you decide that you want to write?
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Because of course you became a journalist and you've written many, many children's
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books apart from, you know, Sarkar Samaj Bazar and your columns and all of that.
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So you know, what were you like as a child?
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What was your kind of vision for what you want to go on and do?
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Probably the creative side appealed to me and writing and words, because yeah, I started
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Looking over my sister's shoulder or we were not taught that formally, but somehow we learnt
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quickly how to read and I would read all the time.
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I mean, my mother had to literally drag me as to hide sometimes because I had some duties
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in the house, which I hated, like wiping down the furniture of the dust and I would avoid
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it and avoid it and be in the middle of just wrapped up in the pages of a book and she
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would have to drag me out of there.
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So yeah, reading first and because of reading, writing.
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So I used to write really bad poems from the age of five.
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So yeah, I could see myself as a writer.
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I would definitely have been writing something.
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That was how I would see myself on the creative side for sure.
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So yeah, we grew up among books.
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Now when I look back, I regret that a lot of it was English.
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My parents were among that generation post-independence that wanted to be upwardly mobile in an urban
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My father's family came from Belgaon side, Khanapur side actually, which is now in Karnataka
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and my mother's side was from Dahanu, which is 120 kilometres north of Mumbai, both rural
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settings and that whole generation obviously came to Bombay, Delhi, the big cities to make
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What they had was education and they were able to convert that to prosperity for themselves
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and the next generation.
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So this family came for that to Mumbai and I think that meant in those days that their
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children had to be educated in English, to be upwardly mobile and belong to this new
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And so I feel bad because my mother was a Marathi and Sanskrit scholar and we saw that,
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but we also felt that we had to belong to the world of English education, right?
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So my one regret is I didn't read Marathi, my mother tongue, books in Marathi.
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I would hear things a lot from my mother, but I still regret that I didn't read early
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because then after that it's a bit of a struggle to go back to another language.
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People have done it, I have been less successful, but yeah, so we read a lot of English books
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and what was available at that time was of course there were some comics that told us
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about all the epics, etc. and Indian history, but inevitably we were reading Enid Blyton.
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And now when you see how much of Enid Blyton is aimed to be redacted, but I always feel
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how innocently we read Enid Blyton, how much fun it was.
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We didn't think of the racism, we didn't think of anything.
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I wonder if he even took it like that, but I suppose I shouldn't say that because when
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I was 4, when I was 5, when I was 6, I was more enjoying what the children were able
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to do in terms of the freedoms they appeared to have than think through what it all meant
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But yeah, you're surrounded by books like that till one started reading the bigger books
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at about 10 or 11 or 12.
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Yeah I guess from sort of my generation and your generation, I think what we kind of share
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is there just weren't that many books.
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So we've all read Enid Blyton, we've all read Famous Five, Mallory Tars, all of that,
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and I guess everything…
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William, there was that William.
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Then there was, there were a few, even Winnie the Pooh, I remember reading, there are a
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few other things now I have to think back, but yeah, Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys or whatever,
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but yeah, they were pretty, there was a definite pattern to what they were writing about those
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Give me a sense of the kind of values that pervaded the household because from what I
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can make out, there are like two sets of possible values and one is that you have these upwardly
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mobile parents who want a good life and they've come from different places and they're in
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Mumbai and you've mentioned that, you know, you were taught that wealth does not come
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from possessions or money, but a good education and how it is applied, stop quote.
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And again, I think that would be common values that a lot of parents of that generation would
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have had because that is their one road out.
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So you are taught the importance of education, you're taught the importance of frugality
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because times of scarcity, you know, finish what you got on your plate and all of that.
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And that's, and also the sort of English is an aspirational thing.
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And I guess that's one set of values, which is, you know, in that new independent India
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and another set of values, I guess, would have come further back from your grandparents.
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Like you've mentioned your grandfather, Baba Saheb Soman, who, you know, he was in the
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legal profession, but he would spend most of his time convincing his clients that don't
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Let's find an easy solution.
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Even though it's hitting his wallet, you know, when he does that and he's someone who kind
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of gave up everything to join Gandhiji in the Champaran movement and all of that.
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So there's a certain lesson there of values and self sacrifice and something that is bigger
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And equally, you taught a talk of your grandmother who, you know, lived the last 30 years of
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her life, I think an extreme austerity in just a single room.
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You know, again, there being a set of values that surely you don't have to live that kind
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of life in a single room, times are better, et cetera, et cetera.
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But you choose to, because there's something more fundamental about that.
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So tell me about, you know, these different sort of influences in your childhood, how
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Like today, you can perhaps look back on your grandfather as, you know, just an individual
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and admire him for the things that he did.
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But growing up there, was there a sense that, oh, no, they're talking about grandfather
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again or, you know, because, you know, family members then become, you know, their kind
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And of course, you never met him per se, as you point out.
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But he turns from a family story into part of a much larger history and all of that.
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So give me a sense of that mahal sort of when you're growing up and how you're being brought
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I would say one of the themes in my life is about contradictions.
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And one of my big journeys, I think, is how to live with contradictions without getting
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So for example, yes, Baba Sahib's story.
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For me, Baba Sahib, my paternal grandfather, the stories I heard, and then watching my
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own paternal grandmother, whom we called Atya, for me, that was extremely, extremely
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inspirational, because there is a part of me which really admires that austerity, that
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self-discipline, that almost self, well, not denial, but actually finding abundance in
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That I find extremely inspiring because I know just how hard it is to do.
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But on the other side, my mother's family came from a landowning, you know, horticulturists
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that were doing pretty well.
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And with all its, in those days, big landed farmers, there's a kind of, almost a feudal
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sort of establishment over there that we used to go to all the time.
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And then on, so that was on my paternal side, on my maternal side, you had this Baba Sahib,
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Gandhi and all the stories we heard, then Atya, who, when her son was chief of naval
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staff, my father's brother was Admiral Soman, second chief of naval staff of India.
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And when he's at the height, she would have stayed in those Lutyens bungalow.
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She chose to go to Adandi, which is the home of Ganeshwar, not far from Pune, and stay
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in the vicinity of the temple for 20 years in a single room.
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And I just somehow thought that was remarkable.
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And on this side, of course, my parents were upwardly mobile, but they had to stay within
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What they meant by upwardly mobile is our children's future should be good.
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I think that everything was for the three girls, their daughters, and no son, unfortunately
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for them, and I'm sure my mother would have liked a son, but here we were.
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And she did whatever she could, with whatever means she had to make every rupee stretch,
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so that her daughters would never want for anything.
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So there were some contradictions on these things and even politically, but I must say
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Atya's life, Baba Sahib's life, inspired me.
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But most of our vacations were in Dahanu at my grandfather, a maternal grandparents farm.
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And that was also another form of absolute bliss, fruit orchards, we used to get mangoes
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by the bushels, guavas, and what are called jambus, which is, I think, what are they called
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And I just remember like stacks and stacks of it.
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Every holiday we were there, we were encouraged to help out.
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I used to make flower braids, which were then sold at the railway station.
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I would get 10 paisa if they got sold for each braid I made.
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It's just so innocent and so marvelous, yet at the same time, Amit, what stayed with me
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was the contrasts and the contradictions again, which is, on my grandfather's farm, they were
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And all of them were from the Wadli tribal community.
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And while my poor grandparents were hardly draconian or anything, the fact is, there
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was stark difference between their lives and my vacation life in my grandparents' home.
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And from early childhood, that contrast used to bother me, right?
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On this side, I have the inspiration from my paternal parents.
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Here, of course, my grandfather was also a philanthropist, set up colleges and scholarships
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But their life was like that and not much about it was questioned then.
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But those contrasts stayed with me and have stayed with me throughout.
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So how do you hold all these contradictions?
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Even politically, my families were so different.
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A lot of my mother's side actually were very strongly into at that time the Janata Dal,
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the Janata politics, Hindu Mahasabha even, RSS, and on this side, it was obviously Gandhivaad.
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So having seen all of that, it's been interesting to me that India has all these diversities
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and they occur within families.
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And so how do you, how do you without becoming extreme on any one side, how do you absorb
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and understand all these many threads?
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So somewhere in my early teens, all these things started coming into my consciousness
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much quite early because of what I'm describing.
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And then of course, in the 73, 74, India was in quite a situation politically, there's
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no way even for young people to not know what was happening in the country.
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In 75, when I joined college, of course, the emergency came and those two years were really
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interesting in the Indian political scene.
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So by that, so I guess how much was I, 14, 15 when the emergency came about.
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And you know, it really impacted all of us because those discussions on the emergency
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The middle class kind of liked the fact that we finally had queues.
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Many middle class people began in Bombay began to feel, oh, things are in order now.
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And yet you knew that you were giving up a lot of your freedoms for some unknown good
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future that the government was telling us was there.
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And then we saw the politics arise of the alternative to the current government then.
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And I think it was a bit in two years, my generation who entered while the emergency
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learned very quickly about politics outside of our textbooks and classrooms.
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So a bunch of things I want to double click on here.
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And the first is I'm struck by how you mentioned that you're surrounded by contradictions and
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you're getting used to them from an early age.
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And like one of the themes that I find through all of your writing permeating through is
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this sort of openness to complexity, right, that the world is deeply complex, that our
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country is deeply diverse and you're open to that, you're not rushing to judgment anywhere
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And that's just part of your entire work there.
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And I was kind of wondering that, you know, how much of this sort of openness, which I
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find too lacking in most people, I find it lacking in the discourse where people take
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absolute positions, where they stand in judgment over others, where someone who disagrees with
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them is not just wrong, but evil and so on and so forth.
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Our discourse has become very polarized and equally some of us when we think of solutions
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and we'll talk about this in more detail later, but when we think of solutions, we'll come
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up with this one grand frame and just try to force fit it everywhere and not look at
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local contexts and all that.
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And you seem to have an awareness for this now.
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This sort of attitude of embracing these contradictions, of not being shaped by any one thing, I'm
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guessing that two kinds of forces play a part in it.
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That either you're like this by temperament, that's for bhav se, you're someone who's
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open and who's, you know, just looking around and seeing past those layers.
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And the other is circumstance that, you know, you could grow up in a cocoon and not, and
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there could be layers of blindness preventing you from seeing various things, you know,
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what the patriarchy may do, what caste may do, what class may do and, you know, all those
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layers, you may simply never have had the opportunity to look past them and perhaps
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later in adulthood you do or you never do.
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So you know, in your own case, circumstances clearly work in favor of making you a more
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open person because like you said, you're, you know, your paternal side, the Gandhian,
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your maternal side, you know, landowners, Hindu Masaba, all of that.
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So you're seeing those interesting contrasts there, you're noticing the Wadli tribals
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who are working as laborers, all of that is there, so circumstances are there, but do
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you feel that Swabhav also plays a part?
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Do you feel that you were always someone who kind of has that openness and that attitude
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and the ability to hold contradictions and, you know, because a lot of people who reject
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contradictions, who become dogmatic or rigid in their thinking, I think do so out of intellectual
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laziness because it is hard work to live with all different ideas together, different notions
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No, thank you for this question, it's a central question I think today in the polity, but
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my Swabhav is very, actually my Swabhav is not, I'm trying to tame my Swabhav, though
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my mother used to say in Marathi, Swabhavala Aushad nahi, there is no medicine for Swabhav,
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but so actually I have to tame my Swabhav because my Swabhav is aggressive and I want
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to win the argument and now that I'm 63, I'm trying to say that's not the right thing,
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but my mind is actually, so I can, I am myself such a person of so many contradictions that
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I can see that and I think, so I would say it's more circumstance and than my personal
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Swabhav because, but as soon as I make, I see one point of view, I can also see the
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other immediately, so I'll say something, but I also know the opposite can be true and
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I'm comfortable with that, I've learnt to be comfortable with that and I think it's
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because of all these things that happened in my life, because of all our reading, obviously
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we all read and again I would say Bombay is one of the star characters in my life and
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upbringing, outside my house, we are Kokonasta Brahmins living in this apartment with all
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the weight of tradition on us, next to Gujaratis, Marwari, Sindhis, Punjabis, Muslims, Christians,
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you name it, were in our building of all castes, classes, languages, cultures, behaviours,
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all in one building and you met them every day, that allows you to see how many ways
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there are of being and there is not that much space for conflict in those crowded, the conflicts
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are quickly resolved because they have to be, so you realise there are pathways to conflict
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resolution also and there is ways to contain contradictions also, so I think in some sense
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Bombay taught me that, being a journalist taught me that, you are forced to look at
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every point of view before you wrote your 800 words or whatever you had to write, you
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had to, you were always asked to ask the other side before you filed and that also allowed
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me, so I would say unfortunately it's not my Swabha, I wish it were, but I try to be
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open, I try to train myself to be open, I am quite happy to have more questions and
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curiosity than certainty, I am quite happy with that because I can see it in nature as
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well, because I go out so much in nature, the wonderful people I support through my
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philanthropy ask so many questions about nature and if anybody studies nature properly, there
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is no way you cannot keep your mind open because things contradictory are always happening
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at the same time in nature, in your own garden, in one flower pot you can see it, forget about
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going into the wild, so I think it was less me myself than things that kept happening
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around me and all the marvellous books I kept reading that allowed me to see just how much
#
diversity there is and how human beings had this enormous capacity, really enormous capacity
#
what Peter Watson called in that two volume tome, a terrible beauty, right, so the enormous
#
capacity to do things to each other which is not very great, but also to do things for
#
each other, right, that ability for empathy is so immense and so creatively immense that
#
seeing both is very interesting, you can sometimes be depressed but you can't be bored.
#
A question I often ask myself with reference to myself, when I look back on myself as someone
#
who when I was younger, I wasn't as curious as I should have been, I didn't have as much
#
humility as I should have had, you know, and I certainly didn't have as much empathy as
#
I should have had and therefore the question that strikes me about empathy is that sometimes
#
you are not a particular way and that is fine, but can you work towards it, can empathy be
#
something that you work towards intentionally in the sense that most of all live our lives
#
with the main character syndrome, right, that I am the main character in this play, everyone
#
else is a side character or even a prop, right, we live like that, but then, you know, it's
#
important to snap ourselves out of that and look at other people as actually being other
#
people like Iris Modoc has this great quote about love where she says that love is a terrible
#
realization that something other than oneself is real, right, which is so beautiful, but
#
the point is you should not have that realization only when you are in love, you know, we should
#
carry that with us all the time and therefore more and more I think that these are efforts
#
we have to make, that I find that to expect everyone or to expect myself to be naturally
#
humble, to be naturally open, to be naturally empathetic is perhaps not fair, but one can
#
make an intentional effort towards being more humble, being more open and all of that and
#
I guess the related question that would tie in with that is that, you know, when I look
#
back on myself as a young person in my twenties or as a teenager, it's almost like an out
#
of body experience, it's almost like I am looking at someone else, that guy is not me,
#
that guy is so limited in a hundred different ways, right, and today I can sit back and
#
construct a story about that person that this is how he became this and construct that story,
#
so with you, you know, when you look back on the younger you, you know, how much is that also
#
playing a part, like, you know, some people I notice are very sorted when they are young,
#
they are almost fully shaped when they are young and they don't change much, some people
#
like me are just a mess, you know, you get shaped over time and so on and then you look
#
back in hindsight and you, you know, you can see things that you never did, so what was
#
the shaping of Rohini like?
#
No, I was definitely a mess, I continue to be a mess, I think messiness is part of the,
#
you know, really what humanity, human, humanness is all about, but yeah, we kept learning,
#
you were talking about empathy, which I really am interested in as a subject and of course
#
in neuroscience today we are seeing a lot of things, why are some people naturally
#
more empathic than other people and it's a lot to do with the wiring in our brains and
#
we have to accept that, but I also believe that you can be trained or train yourself
#
again out of curiosity, right, to occupy another person's shoes, the minute you do that, the
#
very second you are doing that in some humility, you can never put that toothpaste back in
#
the tube, you will always be able to see from the other person's point of view and I think
#
somewhere in our schools, in our families, today if we can encourage more people, especially
#
men who are not necessarily required to be empathetic, to just constantly practice putting
#
yourself in someone else's position, I think it is the continuous unfinished business of
#
samaj to do that because there for the, but for the grace of I, you know, but for the
#
grace of God goes everyone, so for me that empathy, I think perhaps I had some ability
#
to see distress all the time and that was distressing for me, sometimes you close your
#
eyes because you can't bear it and you saw a lot of, you see a lot of poverty in India,
#
in South India now you see much, much less, in Bombay you see much, much less than I saw
#
in the 60s, right and there were always, every child has a question, why is that beggar outside
#
the window, outside the bus, outside, why is that person in that situation and I am
#
not, that's the first thing that occurs to a child and if he doesn't, she or she doesn't
#
get the right answers or if the question is pushed down, then I don't know what happens
#
to that child, but we were able to ask that question and we were able to participate in
#
sharing something, if you had coins, you gave coins, if you had something else, you gave
#
something else to the person at the window, but I think that was an important part of,
#
it still remains an important part of my life, do I have the courage to be empathetic, do
#
I, just because now my circumstances are so different, do I still retain, how do I practice
#
the retention of empathy is a very important question for me and I think again the childhood
#
seeing poverty, seeing so much stark differences helps you because you don't get to look away.
#
In India actually you don't get to look away, most people can see what's going on with others
#
less fortunate than them and in fact it's, you have to do practice of looking away because
#
if you, otherwise it would be hard for many people to see because then they say, okay
#
so what are you doing about it, right, if you're seeing so much distress, pain, poverty,
#
what are you doing about it, is it okay for you to just walk on in your nice comfortable
#
whatever life, is it okay and for those who don't want to do something actually they have
#
to practice not allowing the emotions to rule them, so in my case I kind of allowed my sentimentality,
#
my ability to feel other people's distress to actually play a part in my life and I was
#
able to do that now that you're asking all these questions, one doesn't sit around talking
#
about oneself like this, so either thank you Amit or no thank you Amit, I will decide later.
#
But yeah I think in some sense that ability to feel empathy which may be natural, which
#
may be more swabha, I was able to convert to an action plan once we became very wealthy,
#
right and I'm able to use that to do my philanthropy, maybe in that sense I was able to get some
#
strength from it because sometimes it's really horrible when you realize how little you can
#
do about other people's suffering, it can make you numb because you can't do, how many
#
people's suffering can you alleviate right, so in that sense people who are very empathetic
#
also have to suffer themselves quite a bit.
#
So you mentioned neuroscience, I don't know if you remember but the first time we I think
#
met or were physically at the same place at the same time was in Ted India, in Mysore
#
in 2009 where I was one of the Ted fellows and I was hanging out there with the great
#
neuroscientist V.S. Ramchandran and he was talking about…
#
I forget which book had just come out but it had this big chapter on mirror neurons
#
which he told us about and basically for the benefit of my listeners mirror neurons are
#
those neurons in the brain which basically when something happens to someone else you
#
can imagine it happening to you so automatically empathy comes which says that in a way we
#
are hardwired for empathy but also because we are hardwired for so many contradictory
#
things we are also hardwired for self delusion because that is one of the ways that is one
#
of our coping mechanisms to deal with the world and I think that while it is true that
#
for example poverty is everywhere right, I also think that it's a case of the seen
#
and the unseen, people block it out, it's like I always say that in Bombay there are
#
like two cities and you know one is the city that is inside the cars at the traffic signal
#
and the other is a city that is outside where the beggar is begging outside it and the city
#
inside doesn't see the city outside, you know it's kind of like a parallel thing and
#
I think that it does take an intentional effort for most people to remind themselves ki nahi
#
ye bhi hai, you know mujhe bhi kuch karna hai, I can't just roll up the window, roll up
#
But then look we have a 5000 year system of thought which allows you to believe in Karma
#
at least for the Hindu communities and in some sense that's a nice escape route also
#
right so if you are, it's like I guess in America there is a political strand which
#
says you are what you make of yourself and if you are poor that's because I don't believe
#
that but there is a whole strain of thought right which is that you make of yourself your
#
own life and in that sense the theory of Karma allows you to say that I am like this because
#
of something good I may have done in my past life or that person is like this because they
#
may not have and bhog rahe hain karam ka phal, so in some sense an escape route for
#
many people but I do think that we need to be, the idea needs to be better socialised
#
that human beings capacity for empathy is what has got human civilisation to this point.
#
You know there is this lovely quotation, lovely lyric by Sahil Udhyanbhi which one of my recent
#
guests Raghu Jaitley sort of had shared with me and you mentioned Karma so it came to mind
#
where the lines go yeh paap hai kya yeh punya hai kya, reeto par dharm ki mohre hai, har
#
yug mein badalte dharm ko kaise aadarsh banaoge right and I am just thinking and the idea
#
being that religion merely sort of, religion merely sort of consecrates or puts in a book
#
what is already there in society and you know when one thinks of Karma I think it is a convenient
#
cop out, it is again you know how do we cope with the terrible miseries around us and one
#
way of coping with the miseries and making sense of them and finding some meaning is
#
this one particular explanation which is, which feels to me to be a bit of a cop out
#
I guess in you know some senses.
#
I mean you can look at it as a cop out but it is a very interesting theory however because
#
it doesn't allow you if you look at the theory more carefully it doesn't mean that you can
#
cop out actually it is laying the ground for you to do better and better deeds in this
#
life and you have to constantly strive to do good Karma now because there is a future
#
life to worry about right so in that sense while it is a cop out when you look at that
#
person and you don't have the energy to do something about another person's life it doesn't
#
absolve you from that duty, it doesn't absolve you from the duty of trying to do good every
#
minute whatever good into inverted commas so in that sense it depends on how you look
#
at it you could frame it as a cop out but I think it is also a pathway and an urgent
#
sort of call to action to do good deeds rather than bad.
#
Yes divine incentives for this afterlife which many people believe in yeah.
#
My other sort of issue with it is that it then seems to posit that morality is instrumental
#
that be good because you will have a good afterlife or a good next life or whatever
#
be good for the sake of your Karma while I think that the ways in which many of us try
#
to frame our morality is and find out what is like I think a central question all of
#
us struggle with is what is the right way for me to live right and I don't think that
#
a lot of people really answer that in an instrumental way that I want to live in this way because
#
mujhe ye fayda hoga next birth mein, next birth mein whatever we so what is your answer
#
to that question for yourself or rather what is your process for having arrived at something
#
because a lot of what you do all perhaps all of what you do has nothing to do with instrumentality
#
it is not because you want to be seen in a particular way you want karma brownie points
#
No, no I don't think like that but remember apart from that there is also karman ne vaadhi
#
ka raste you know so it says don't think of the fruit of your actions so that's much
#
more inspiring to me that you have to you have to constantly do something without worrying
#
about the fruit of your actions that is left to a later time so again all these contradictions
#
so that is your duty doesn't absolve you it doesn't your karma of the past and all that
#
forget doesn't absolve you from having to do your duty now and without and you do it
#
in a way where you do your best you are not absolved from that duty you have to do your
#
best you have to think you have to use your viveka buddhi your discriminatory intellect
#
to do and not just blindly but then without worrying about the fruit for yourself so in
#
fact it is not at all transactional it is that your input matters right now the outcome
#
That's a beautiful way of putting it.
#
What has your journey been like towards thinking about what is the right thing to do you know
#
how should one live one's life and the question also of course becomes complicated because
#
at a certain point in your life you know you come into wealth and then those other questions
#
arise that what is the obligation that wealth brings with it you know and you know how does
#
that change perhaps you know does it sort of widen and broaden the responsibility that
#
you might feel and so on and so forth so I just want to sort of if you take me down this
#
journey of just thinking about this question of what is good what should I do.
#
Yeah so I told you we grow up thinking about austerity being the ideal you grow up thinking
#
about simple living and high thinking you grow up being told education is more important
#
than anything else in your life you don't have any great wealth and even around you
#
in society the wealthy are quite hidden from your life so you grow up like that and then
#
Infosys is an idea that happens at the same time as my marriage and we are so young and
#
we are able to take any risk so we say of course you should do this Nandan and I put
#
in ten thousand rupees which is all I had at the time into it and then a few years later
#
that ten thousand rupees becomes some ridiculous amount okay and we grow up remember India
#
is in the grip of socialist thinking and in fact the world look at the 60s look at all
#
the popular cultural movements of the west which by the way we also heard about we heard
#
about all the hippie culture of the west even though there was no mobile phone no internet
#
and we were still reading newspapers and listening to the radio so we knew what was happening
#
around the world there was a counter it was a there was a rebellion against material prosperity
#
by the young there's a romantic new energy key love peace etc etc and not necessarily
#
material pro there was a rejection of a certain kind of modernity for a short while and we
#
were swept up with that social as Nehru Nehru socialism fame was the idea of the day rush
#
I mean the big movements of the day were more to the left despite America and so somehow
#
though it now seems very weird but somehow the nation was to progress without being obsessed
#
about wealth creation I don't know how it was meant to do that it to me now it looks
#
like we would have to cut into the same pie into more pieces you would have to make but
#
there was no such thing right about and in fact as I said to you once when we were speaking
#
earlier is in that time the culture was that wealthy people must be doing something wrong
#
how did they become wealthy in the first place in an era of high taxation in a socialist
#
economy how did so wealthy people were not looked upon as ideals to hold up to and then
#
here suddenly in the 90s we come into extreme wealth so well as a journalist or as a person
#
in the kind of family I grew up in thinking about wealth in a particular way suddenly
#
you find yourself on the other side and how are you going to deal with it came quite suddenly
#
and I must say I spent a few years not being able to grapple with it very well you know
#
I just I was very disturbed because I had to change my whole way of thinking about wealth
#
and the wealthy right I had to understand that maybe I had been too judgmental maybe
#
my framing itself was wrong that there because this was good ethical wealth and it was because
#
the country had chosen a certain part the new path of development these murti nanda
#
and chris everybody they were in the right place at the right time so much luck was involved
#
but yes here we were we were going to be very wealthy now and it took me a long time to
#
deal with it but after that three four five years I realized that I had to use that opportunity
#
to perhaps be able to do a little bit what of what I had always dreamt of right that
#
idea that I want to belong to a society which is much more just and kind and equal not equal
#
but people have equal opportunity at least and then maybe this is a chance to help create
#
the more level playing field for everybody to go back to the idea idea that I was I could
#
see myself in other people's shoes maybe this was a chance to redress some imbalance
#
in societies not because I have the talent or anything but I know there is a thriving
#
civil society out there of people who have the moral courage to do something and create
#
positive change maybe the wealth can be used to help that cause a little bit and once I
#
truly understood that I settled down a bit again this was contradictions right here I
#
was believing in this civil society this that and then I myself it sat very uncomfortably
#
with me that I was going I began to be called a philanthropist whatever that meant you know
#
what is a so philanthropist naturally is putting somebody in the position where they have power
#
of money so I had to deal with all these contradictions and I mean it's a continuing journey but when
#
we had an ADR which was an American deposit receipt we got I got a hundred crores and
#
it was like today's billion dollars okay and I said good god I don't need it my life was
#
quite comfortable so I put all of it into my foundation Argyam every last paisa of it
#
and that made me feel comfortable because I didn't have to deal with it I put it into
#
Argyam and then we had a big team of professionals working and that money could hopefully be
#
put to good use rather than sitting with me but that's how I started to deal with these
#
contradictions and wealth and as we went along we started giving away more as we could you
#
know it's a learning journey okay it's not so easy and we started to give both of us
#
Nandan and I we signed the giving pledge after thinking through is it in the Indian culture
#
to publicly declare I have this much money and I'm going to give half of it away is that
#
what Indian culture so to speak is took us a while to get there I realized that no that
#
signaling is critical there are so many wealthy people in India so many and that maybe some
#
of us were hiding behind the comfortable proverb left hand should not know what the right hand
#
is doing when it comes to charity but I felt we need to create a new culture around the
#
responsibility of wealth in a society like ours and that's where we went public and signed
#
the giving pledge so it's a long answer to a short question so the journey of wealth
#
has been somewhat like this and today we live very very well simple living high thinking
#
was told to us simple living I hope there is some high thinking but what I've decided
#
is so long as I'm giving away ten times more than what I spend on myself at a minimum that's
#
how I deal with with some of these things that have been happening to me so a good mutual
#
friend of ours told me something about you that struck me very said that you know she
#
is generous to others but not to herself and he said that you know her idea of luxury for
#
herself is to go in the forest for ten days it is not some big swanky whatever you know
#
whatever other rich people do which was interesting and you know the moment he told me this I
#
again you know thought of your grandmother austerity living in a single room for so many
#
But she had a great life huh?
#
Did you speak to her about her life?
#
Of course all the time all the time she was she was an amazing woman really Aatya and
#
she became very spiritual and that's why she did what she did but others were feisty woman
#
like she her family her father was an ambassador from the court in Pune to Gwalior and she
#
grew up in the Gwalior Maharaja's outhouses she said once she used to go to school for
#
a few days in a carriage drawn by a deer she lived in the lap of luxury and she as a young
#
bride came to to be married to Baba Sahib Somand was a wonderful human being but certainly
#
could not look after her material all her things were sold that time the congress party
#
was fighting for India's independence she gave away all her maternal things that she
#
came with there's with all the congress workers she had to feed every day she learned in a
#
in that environment what is important in life and I think she came to the conclusion that
#
the higher spiritual simple life was going to give her more peace than anything else
#
that she had experienced and so that remains so I used to ask her why do you do this she
#
said that's what she kept saying that it gives me peace it gives me when we need it she would
#
come she used to tell us she was the world's best storyteller she used to tell us stories
#
of the bhakti saints today also I'll cry when I remember her telling me the story of
#
Naneshwar there was no food for those four siblings and Mukta bhai the younger sister
#
was very very hungry and they used to take bhiksha they were outcasts because they had
#
their parents had a marriage unapproved of by society so these four siblings were outcasts
#
and they used to beg for they used to get grain but how what do you do with grain if
#
you don't have fuel and Naneshwar lies down on his I mean sits sits on all fours and allows
#
the sun to heat his back enough for her to cook a bhakri on Naneshwar's back to feed
#
the siblings that kind of stories she used to tell and we used to be weeping with the
#
feeling of that sentiment and so she gave us that she instilled a romance of austerity
#
and high thinking I guess in us so what I told you we live very well I don't want to
#
pretend at all we have a wonderful we have two wonderful houses we we never have to think
#
before we buy anything do anything right how much whether it is to do with health travel
#
I mean never never have to think but I think just like buying things or doesn't give any
#
pleasure it just doesn't if I like something of course I'll buy it but I don't think about
#
those things I like many of this younger generation and I have this weird idea that we are going
#
to enter into a post consumption generation in the next few decades that there will be
#
people who have gone beyond consumption of material things because too many other realizations
#
are hitting these young people but yeah so I feel there are so many other things that
#
bring more pleasure like going into the forest I must say you know I love the phrase that
#
you used earlier that you realized your wealth was good ethical wealth because I think that
#
there are three powerful reasons that wealth was demonized before this like Nehru famously
#
said to JRD Tata do not speak to me of profit it is a dirty word right and one is of course
#
a sort of the colonial connection because after all they came here first as traders
#
and all of that so you know tied up with exploitation and so on and so forth so mentally you just
#
thought of capitalists as akin to colonialists so that was one mental connection then the
#
other one would have been that wealth would have been almost synonymous with a kind of
#
oppressive feudalism that it took us a long time to get out of and maybe mentally we still
#
haven't and the third factor was that given the overarching influence of the state and
#
how much they didn't allow free markets to progress like you pointed out if you were
#
a wealthy businessman it was probably through cronyism and all kinds of shady dealings the
#
license raj was really truly only about that only about that yeah such arbitrary use of
#
power yeah yeah and state power yeah and how that changes in the 90s and becomes good ethical
#
wealth because in a free market you only create wealth when you make other people better off
#
it is always a positive sum game you know I had once written a column called profit is
#
equal to philanthropy though you don't like that second word because I just felt that look if
#
you're making a profit in a free market you are by default already making people better that's
#
right that's right it's it's it's it's it's virtuous making money that way that's right
#
tell me but you know one thing that interested me in what you were talking about is that is what
#
like I was I did an episode with Arshya Sattar yesterday and she uses beautiful almost academic
#
term but I like the term called individuation right where you assert yourself as an individual
#
you see yourself as an individual and not as part of a setup not as a wife or a daughter or a mother
#
or whatever but you are an individual and when you spoke of coming into wealth you are not saying
#
you are talking about your investment of 10,000 and what it brought you as an individual and not
#
necessarily you know being Nandan's wife or any of that right yeah but that I'm really lucky okay
#
that's luck see most women in India except the ones who are business people themselves like say
#
Kiran Mazumdar but most people actually the family wealth is pooled right it's not my wealth and your
#
wealth and in that sense it is of course and it's not like Nandan and I calculate oh this is your
#
money and my money but I got really lucky because I got a chance to invest so-called my money
#
five hundred five thousand was it of it was actually given by my parents so my parent should
#
probably say is their money but and five thousand was my savings from my grand salary at bombay
#
magazine which was some 500 rupees a month who says journalists can't get rich yeah not through
#
their writing they should invest their money in company startups I guess but so you know and to
#
think of it whatever Nandan would have done he happened to do a successful IT company but he
#
could have done anything and I would still have invested so I got lucky no I'm not disputing the
#
luck I think where I was coming at is that a lot of people would still not see themselves as an
#
individual in that right right whereas you have always kind of been clear that you were a journalist
#
yes you were not somebody's wife you are not somebody's wife you were a journalist you do
#
your own things you you've chart your own path you have your own views so is that something that
#
you know where did the frames come from where you begin began to assert yourself like that because
#
in an India of the 1970s and I grew up in the 80s and 90s but it's it's similar right pre-liberalization
#
I'm not sure you are much younger but yeah remember we were reading we were the early feminists right
#
young teenagers reading German Gria reading even my god we read Nancy Friday now when you come
#
Betty Friedman you read all you read all the western feminist authors and you had a real
#
sense of gender politics you had a real awareness of what it is to be a woman in a patriarchal feudal
#
society you could see it around you even though our parents were so liberal you could see it all
#
around you so the need to carve out your own identity as a human being as a woman was very
#
much part it was essential for me being who I am it was an essential part of you had to make your
#
own identity was very hard and I think perhaps that's one of the reasons why I always emphasize
#
that this wealth by luck or whatever happens to be mine and therefore my choices that I make with
#
the wealth in any case my husband is incredibly progressive open supportive and all that so even
#
if that had not been the case I would still have had a lot of control over our joint wealth but
#
it was important for me it's very hard you know in India to have an identity as a woman people
#
don't see you sometimes like you know how many people call me Nandini Nandan's wife must be Nandini
#
so I have nobody calls Nandan Rohan by the bad I'm going to call him Rohan but yeah so it's very
#
hard so you have to actually work much harder to if you want your identity and you know beyond
#
the point it no longer matters but yeah in those days I had to present myself as a journalist
#
present myself later as a serial social entrepreneur and then now as that dreaded word
#
philanthropist philanthropist and author so a couple of the guests I've had on the show Urvashi
#
Bhatalia and just yesterday Arshia who's pretty much the same age as you born 1960 spoke of the
#
that excitement of discovering and engaging with feminism in the 1970s in India where you're reading
#
all these books suddenly they're toppling in and it's as if a world is opening up and all of that
#
so take me a little bit through that process in fact I'll just broaden the question earlier you
#
also spoke about the emergency happening when you're 14 and suddenly becoming aware of politics and
#
all of that and I want to know about how in those years in those teenage years you develop
#
different frames of looking at the world like when emergency and all of that happens I'm guessing
#
that there is a political frame where you're thinking of rights and where questions and
#
freedom rights and freedoms and where questions of what is good and what is not is getting a
#
certain kind of shape and then all the feminist lenses that are coming from these great authors
#
and what you're seeing around you and how you know all these budding young feminists I guess
#
must be reinforcing each other there's a sisterhood there as well so tell me about the different
#
frames that then go into shaping you as an adult so definitely the I was in Elphinstone college in
#
1975 we joined and the emergency hit and that campus was full of fiery leftists did you know
#
her she was also I didn't know her so well but there were many others some of whom are well some
#
of whom are definitely in trouble with the law but just for their political thoughts which is what
#
worries me that you should be able to think anything freely in a democracy without the fear
#
of being incarcerated but we and that was what was happening to all the political leaders
#
they were being incarcerated for what they believed right and so many of them and there was a lot of
#
protest there was a lot of underground movements we saw all that my mother was closely following
#
the Janata Dal and all the movements at that time and so the political framing for me was very clear
#
you need a strong civil society with moral leadership and political courage
#
because eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and we saw that in front of us right
#
what is the price of liberty you can't be fighting after you lose your liberty
#
your societal institutions its leadership its education its public discourse has to be about
#
the values of freedom liberty and justice so in that sense my political framing was quite a bit
#
shaped from that earlier also through what what gender rights are what is equity among populations
#
again i told you about the influence of the feudal systems etc so what is equity justice
#
gender liberties those things were very much we had the freedoms to think through all these things
#
in spite of the emergency in some sense without fear because we were not on the streets protesting
#
likely to be locked up we were all thinking in our safe spaces but it was an important time and so
#
that was the political framing that came out as a woman of course reading all the feminists i was a
#
little bit you know sometimes women can get very aggressive about their feminism and before i
#
learned that that doesn't work i was an aggressive feminist it doesn't work at all in fact and
#
i don't know this is the right segue to talk about my uh philanthropic portfolio called
#
LIAC which is we work with young men and boys i think that also came out of my understanding that
#
that aggressive positions on feminism actually might have caused a huge backlash and an inability
#
to do what we've been talking about put ourselves in other people's shoes maybe we stopped doing
#
that as feminists we stopped putting ourselves in the shoes of men for example and couldn't see
#
from that side maybe and i'm not saying the the job of getting even dignity for most women is over
#
yet i'm not saying that but i'm saying maybe the pathways have to be different so i got sort of
#
distracted you were talking about framings political framings and you said something else
#
yeah i i spoke about political framing and your framing as a feminist and this is fascinating
#
let's continue down this uh digression because i was going to cover it anyway but since you've
#
sort of brought it up now i was i i did an episode recently with nikhil taneja called the loneliness
#
of the indian man where we explored how men in india are also victims of patriarchy and perhaps
#
it is worse for them because women at least have frames available to them to understand what is
#
going on and to fight it they often are not in the circumstances to fight it but they at least
#
understand whereas i i think most men don't even have an intellectual understanding of what the
#
patriarchy has you know done to us and so on and so forth and you know what you said about the need
#
for empathy you know bell hooks speaks about where she speaks about the need of not seeing men as
#
enemies but being empathetic and i'm also reminded in a different context of this great quote i love
#
by jackson katz where he says quote we talk about how many women were raped last year not about how
#
many men raped women we talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year not
#
about how boys harass girls we talk about how many teenage girls got pregnant in the state of vermont
#
last year rather than how many men had how many men and teenage boys got girls pregnant so you can
#
see the use of this passive voice as a political effect it shifts the focus of men and boys and
#
on to girls and women even the term violence against women is problematic it's a passive
#
construction there's no active agent in the sentence it's a bad thing that happens to women
#
it's a bad thing that happens to women but when you look at that term violence against women no
#
one is doing it to them it just happens men aren't even a part of it and i think part part of what
#
you have said and written about this and part of what nikhil said about it in that episode
#
strikes a chord because the problem is men the problem you know in the sense that you know we
#
are trapped by patriarchy by expectations of what it is to be masculine and so on and so forth
#
and you know shifting the focus there and realizing that there is work to be done there as well
#
that it is not enough for women to aggressively assert that i will you know offend for myself or
#
i will get get autonomy for myself and so on but there's another part of the problem that you also
#
need to solve so my dual question to you is one when you spoke about aggression not working as
#
a feminist you know when did you come to that realization was there something concrete which
#
brought you to that and two when you turned your focus to working with young men in in the way
#
that you've sort of described like one of your chapter titles in your book is want to empower
#
women start thinking about how to help young men and then you talk about in some detail about how
#
you know india has one of the largest cohorts of young men between the ages of 13 to 26 years
#
their situation within the country however needs to be addressed far too many of them are
#
undereducated underemployed and stuck in a low equilibrium far too few of them have positive
#
role models and secure family lives top code so a dual question when did you you know what you
#
said about aggressive assertions of feminism not working in the real world when you know what
#
brought you to that realization and then how did you turn the focus to also realizing that young
#
men also need help yeah so i think first whenever i have been aggressive and there's some innate
#
aggression in me i have found that so i i'll lead with emotion and conviction that something like
#
i'm a feminist so i'm going to assert my rights now when somebody's asserting their rights and
#
especially using language of assertion what does it do to the other person it makes the person
#
either withdraw recoil or fight back okay and that's not the goal right of why am i asserting
#
because i believe not just for myself in a world that is more just and fair right that that that
#
feeling is there from childhood we need a more just and fair world even if they really let it
#
like anything but then you realize this doesn't work it doesn't get you more justice and more
#
fairness at all it just turns people off and that happened across several years and i started to
#
temper myself a bit some friends will say i wish you could work harder on that but so i realize
#
it's not working and if you want something to work then you have to look at are you doing that
#
doing it in the right way and started definitely to temper myself and then seeing that as something
#
located in the broader work that i do right so if then just the assertion of rights whichever
#
rights there may be just asserting them aggressively in demand which is needed by the way but i'm saying
#
not all the time what are the other things we have to do to achieve the societal goals of equity
#
justice fairness etc and that's when i began to see as i was on my many travels for akshara
#
foundation arghyaam going around the countryside looking often dealing with women because we would
#
first go to the women because they were better able to socially organize themselves in the
#
community and also because of the amazing self-help group movement in this country
#
70 80 million women in this country and i'm sure it's more by now are in proper formal
#
formations for collective action i mean that's a remarkable empowerment to have men don't have it
#
so seeing all this then i would see the men on the sidelines it was so odd you would always see the
#
women in fact because we are going into such situations of empowerment the women would be
#
while they were sitting separately they were more capable of talking to us the men would actually
#
hang around quietly on the sides never expecting to be asked questions about they had power but in
#
those social movement situations the women were able to speak more of their own issues kept
#
watching all kinds of incidents that happened where i saw the frustration of young men even boys
#
that they had so much ambition they had so much sense of responsibility but the pathways were
#
blurred they didn't know there was nothing no light shining on that pathway and they were
#
frustrated and asking questions what should i do and that made me think a little more it took me
#
three four years to first internally think what am i saying why why am i believing this and then
#
to start articulating it as a philanthropy portfolio to my team and saying what how should
#
we look at this and we went first there was just one organization that even was thinking about
#
any of this and then ecf and then more and more started to join in where we realized that young
#
males as you said are trapped in absolutely patriarchal identities not fully aware that
#
that's what they are trapped in can only feel a sense of frustration and often whether it's
#
testosterone or whatever the reason is can quickly turn to aggression and they're seeing also women
#
thanks to fantastic public policy in india for 40-50 years to empower women and girls yes they
#
have more opportunity thank god but the women sometimes feel that they don't rightly or wrongly
#
see perception matters to how we behave with other people and so i feel that the work is much ahead
#
of us and it's not just india think i mean one billion young males of those ages in the world
#
think what is happening in the world when young males are being feel that they are left out of
#
the future of work or they don't know what the future of work looks like they don't know if
#
they have the skills to be equipped for this new future that is coming they can see their roles in
#
their homes in their families in their communities and at their workplaces changing they have to be
#
much more sensitive to the rights of women and other genders they have to change themselves very
#
fast and they are definitely feeling not all of them obviously many are feeling insecure afraid
#
and have no safe shared spaces to speak of this and to be able to create new social formations
#
to advocate for new forms of public policy programs backed by public funds to to equip
#
them for what's coming both close to them with the women being now different and out there
#
where the world is changing so rapidly i think it's an important discourse to have calmly again
#
not as binaries women against men that's just not working i really hope we have reached peak
#
polarization in every way because it's not working for anyone even the polarizers so similarly in
#
gender there's women against men or it's just not working at all and i think we all need to
#
all need to start from the family dining table i don't know if families eat together anymore
#
but this discourse is critical i guess even if families eat together everybody is individually
#
staring into the screen in front of them so what do i do and once the children have become so old
#
that if they're eating with us they say so sorry we are going to be on our devices
#
nobody listens anymore to their parents
#
yeah that's a very insightful way of framing the problem almost as a dual problem that one there is
#
a economic problem that with the world is changing that jobs are changing the future of work is
#
changing and you have a billion young men who suddenly like don't know what they're going to
#
be doing in their lives and then there is a social problem that you know that they're trapped in
#
certain roles and that actually sort of increases the burden that they feel to be earning members
#
to go out there and all of that and that can be crippling and if you add to this the fact that
#
you know in male brains i think it's a frontal cortex which finishes developing by the age of
#
25 yes and therefore you know until which is why the bulk of violence that is carried out
#
is by men below the age of 25 you know because those socializing parts of the brain haven't
#
yet fully developed and settled down and when you put all of this together it's a dangerous
#
mix tell me more about what you guys are doing about this like it's the one thing to identify
#
the problem how does one sort it out so because as you know now i'm not going to myself be
#
implementing like i did with helping to implement like i did with akshara foundation pratham books
#
argyam ek step but so now it's more about supporting others who want to do
#
and all our grantees partners are doing very interesting work for example some are using
#
sports see this one thing i wanted to say before i go there is while women that we did research we
#
did some research to make sure we were on the right track women would talk about their their lives as
#
circum they talked of restrictions right you can't go somewhere can't do this can't do that all the
#
time the family is telling you what you can and cannot do and men kept on talking about responsibilities
#
all the burden is on my shoulders you know and i don't know if i can carry this that was just a
#
side that i thought was important in the framing but yeah so there is some co-row for example is
#
continuing its work with young men and boys as adjacent to all the work they've done with
#
young men and women creating spaces to talk creating common things that they do with young
#
young females for positive social outcomes of it could be of any kind there are some there is some
#
some organizations that are talking about the simplest of things menstruation with young males
#
what does it mean and that allows conversations about their own sexuality their own sexual
#
frustrations how it would be to support women what not to shame women about menstruation such
#
a simple thing but it has led to so many other things and some some organizations are using sport
#
some organizations are just using repeated space for safe social interaction so there are a dozen
#
ways in which these organizations are working with young males and i'm sure that we want more
#
people to innovate ways of engaging young males in a positive way we are more very happy to support
#
and we're very happy to see in just six years how many such innovations have happened talking to
#
young males about what kind of society they want to create like even peripheral organizations like
#
re-benefit create solve ninjas and many of them are young males to say what is some positive change
#
you want to bring about in your locality it could be anything it could be street lights or it could
#
be something much bigger water problems and how will you engage other people like yourselves to
#
make that outcome happen i think these kind of positive spaces for young males in addition to
#
scholarships the whole educational thing skilling skilling for this for understanding what are your
#
abilities and strengths that you should work on to get better livelihoods jobs career so a million
#
pathways to the same goal great so you know we'll come back to your social work and you work with
#
samaj later and talk about all those things in detail but let's go sort of back to chronology
#
as it were and kind of talk about your life i think we reached sort of elphinstone and you're
#
developing those frames there's a political frame there's a feminist frame and in one of your essays
#
you mentioned about how in december 1977 you met nandan when he was in iit you were in elphinstone
#
and all of that so tell me about the two mini journeys that are kind of happening in the sense
#
in the sense that one is meeting him and deciding to live a life together and what his journey took
#
you on as well and the other is your own journey into journalism you know and i'm guessing these
#
are parallel tracks for a long time so tell me about that phase of your life from 18 on
#
so after elphinstone college i went to sainsbury's to do a diploma in mass communications
#
and just as i finished our wilson i think his name was he said you know bombay magazine is
#
looking for journalists and i said great and i walked in and i got a job it was as simple as that
#
and so that's how my journalism began before that i'd done very little one or two articles as a
#
tried to be a freelancer but having a job was fantastic what freedom my goodness i remember
#
i got 450 rupees salary but that was enough for my bus passes and everything amazingly enough
#
but that's how i became a journalist and i really enjoyed it i really enjoyed it and i mean i always
#
thought of myself as a writer because i write small fiction poetry and really bad stuff but
#
i used to so writing was always i always kept journals always wrote out my thoughts you still
#
have them well i have some there in so many different places i think i should digitize some
#
of them or burn and burn the rest digitize all of them what is this burning things
#
i mean it's quite immature obviously but anyway i'm just joking but so i'm very glad i got to be a
#
journalist because i really enjoyed the few years that i was able to and i still the reason i still
#
write opinion pieces is part of that continuing journalistic side of me and at the same time i
#
met nandan what fun we all used to have we were in big gangs you know the romance was very different
#
in those days quite innocent and we were a big gang then became a foursome then became a twosome
#
kind of thing and did all things in public in chowpatty juhu beach or we used to go in buses
#
and it was all very and yeah when he he asked me to marry him i took a little time but i was very
#
sure i had done the right thing i could see nandan's future he was like an uncut diamond at
#
the time he had all this funny hair and hawaii chappals and faded jeans but his mind was like
#
uh so so like lightning and that's and he had a great sense of humor two things i think that
#
make for long-lasting relationships using your mind well and remembering to laugh so yeah so the
#
nandan's and then infosys happened at the same time as our marriage nandan came and asked me
#
we were engaged and he said murthy has asked me to join this idea what do you think because after
#
all he had a new responsibility with the fiance and i said of course you should do it you know
#
we were so young there was not very little to lose unlike for murthy and ragavan and others there's
#
very little to lose but of course i didn't know that infosys would become the thing in our lives
#
and that the idea of infosys would take over every single thing we didn't know but we said yes and
#
and so i was in bombay magazine bombay magazine was india's first city magazine by the living
#
media group india today group and we were in some sense pioneers mohini buller was the editorial
#
veer sangh he was the editor mohini buller was managing the whole outfit and
#
bombay was such a vibrant city and we had to represent it every week it was really fantastic
#
fortnightly i think it was and we had to talk about the politics the social life we had to
#
talk about everything in that one magazine and i think we did a great job for a few years till
#
it had to shut down but so two years i was able to be there then i got married and then in those
#
days all software was written on site which seems very quaint now so everything was developed on
#
site which meant nandan and all of us all of the infosys at that time hardly a handful of them
#
now they have 300 000 goodness but there were just a few of them and they to physically go
#
to the client site and write from code from morning to night literally so i had to pack my
#
bags all our possessions for seven years used to fit in four suitcases it was the best time
#
of our lives because we had no i mean no responsibilities we didn't have much money
#
but again america public infrastructure there's a big theme of mine we need great public
#
infrastructure if you want good thriving societies and in america amazing the
#
kind of libraries just blew my mind i used to go by bus or walking when depending on where we were
#
and come home literally with 35 books at a time because you could take as many as you wanted
#
couldn't read all of them but it was like being in a goodies candy a small child in a shop full
#
of goodies and i used to just go and i think my education happened through the public libraries
#
of america but that's what our life was and i could i was continuing to write from there
#
i didn't have a work visa so i couldn't work as a journalist but i could send back articles and
#
i had really some good experiences i'll mention only three for your listeners because an old time
#
right it's quaint old times it seems like from 2023 looking from here so i was there for the
#
launch of insat 1a which was the first satellite we launched from cape carnivorel and in those
#
in those very sterile environments i think ambassador narayanan was very sterile environments
#
our space scientists had a puja before the launch of the satellite remember coconuts being broken
#
and all the white americans and all watching while this little traditional ceremony happened
#
and then standing there as the satellite took off and the rain came down unfortunately that
#
satellite failed which was so heartbreaking for the country but i got to be there i got to be
#
there interestingly at the opening of epcot center at wall disney world they allowed the journalists
#
to go in the previous night and they showed us exactly what it takes to run something like that
#
they get 100 million visitors a year and that whole infra underground is quite remarkable actually
#
i was there i went to report on rajneesh's ashram in oregon that was quite a fun story and i drove
#
up there on fairly precipitous highways and the first thing they said to me was oh you're brave
#
to come here alone and that's when i got scared because till then i didn't think i was being brave
#
at all but yeah it was quite an empire they had set up so i had a good time writing stories for
#
india today as a journalist so my journalism career again picked up in sunday magazine when
#
i came back to bangalore i spent two years at sunday magazine but then i gave up because
#
unlike so many million women who have to do it i couldn't seem to juggle motherhood and my profession
#
so i decided to stop working and look after the kids what role did the sort of stories you did
#
play in your understanding of the world like i think you've written somewhere about how
#
if you went to cover a murder it meant that you're also finding out about the how the law works you're
#
also finding out about how the people live wherever the you're just all these different
#
aspects of the city are making themselves known to you yeah no absolutely as a journalist as
#
a journalist you get to see so much more than you would because you can live only so much in your
#
own life but as a journalist you're almost required to peep into other people's lives
#
and circumstances as you are doing to me now and so you get to see so much that you would not have
#
others see what a what a gift it is really to be a journalist because you get to see so many things
#
from so many points of view we have to cover things like the antule cement scandal which
#
we had to work so hard to understand exactly what was the corruption in that we were so naive and
#
we had to learn so so much we got to see like yeah i had to cover some murder at a laundry
#
of all things then we had to you know cover stories on even later in sunday magazine the
#
devdasi story so completely separate right from my social setting or anything and to see all those
#
things you got to cover accidents you got to cover public movements you got to cover strikes you got
#
to cover corruption you got to cover highfalutin celebrities you got to cover bollywood and so
#
you really got to see what india is made of how many things and how many as i said that that theme
#
of diversity keeping the strength of a nation today these things are questioned but as i said
#
anybody who looks in nature and we are part of nature and we tend to forget our hubris as a
#
species has allowed us to separate ourselves but the pandemic jolly well showed us that we are not
#
separate but that diversity is absolutely critical for resilience absolutely critical for strength
#
it's not comfortable diversity is not always comfortable not at all in fact and i can see why
#
we are all returning in some ways to our tribal forms we are afraid of the future humanity is
#
afraid we have only brought this on ourselves in 350 years but we are afraid and so we are returning
#
to simplistic maybe this makes sense we are also wired for returning to simplistic that's others
#
how are we going to cope with so much complexity but my belief in diversity being essential for
#
strength and flexibility and resilience has not faded and being a journalist has allowed me to
#
see all these strands of diversity so i'm grateful for those opportunities just thinking aloud do you
#
think that there is a kind of bell curve in our comfort with the world the more we understand it
#
like initially i would guess that the world is complex we tell ourselves simple stories to make
#
sense of it they give us comfort we are very comfortable but then the more we find out we
#
realize all our simple stories are wrong the world is deeply complex and anxiety goes up the bell
#
curve is at its peak and then we come to terms with all of this we revel in it we look at it as
#
something beautiful we lose our hubris we gain humility we gain curiosity we see the abundance
#
around us as it were and again the bell curve goes down the anxiety goes away beautifully said
#
you're exactly right and of course experience and maturity of yours allows you that luxury right
#
to be able to experience in life allows you to see different things but you're quite right you
#
reach a point where it's too late for pessimism it's too late for anxiety you have learned
#
that human beings are incredibly resilient you know otherwise how do people suffer so much so
#
silently we get used to almost anything but you're right that it allows you to use your
#
primal anxieties better in a more positive way right that we are all so capable of creating
#
change right we are capable of driving ourselves to that midnight clock move to some 15 seconds
#
doomsday clock move to 15 seconds before midnight which is too big an idea for most people what
#
does it even mean what am i supposed to do about that but we have seen that people look remember
#
i also grew up in the generation of nuclear anxiety the 70s we were petrified that the
#
the nuclear powers were had so much ridiculous amount of nuclear weapons which in those days i
#
remember we used to know that it it could kill all of us 300 times over just some of those weapons
#
just to make sure just to make sure and then of course the mad the mutually assured
#
all those deterrent policies came up and it's quite a touch wood touch all the wood i can find
#
we have not had in how many 50 years 70 years after world war two a very serious of course i
#
recognize chair no bill and other places pen pen island up in what was that penn state in
#
penn state there was an accident three mile island sorry three mile there have been accidents but
#
we have not so human beings can also contain their own terribleness and we should remember
#
that because you know adam verbock who's an environmentalist now works for amazon sustainability
#
from being the head of sierra club he he pointed out to me that the future is actually more
#
optimistic than we should than some of us think and that he believes just in terms of say carbon
#
emissions in 40-50 years there'll be much much less carbon in there than there is today so my
#
he said your grandson will have really different issues there'll always be issues but this one may
#
have receded and then we were thinking together that imagine today humanity all of us okay all
#
however my eight eight billion people many of us are involved in this first time ever in human
#
history grand mission to rescue us from ourselves together from climate change i mean just we don't
#
know the potential of such a thing never happened before everyone with a common goal that yes we
#
have made mistakes and now we have to rectify them in 20-30 years just imagine the beauty of such an
#
idea it's never happened before and if more people engage with the potential from such a thing first
#
time ever in human history we thought you know in those sci-fi movies that some alien will come
#
and then we'll all come together to fight against some alien but the alien is us only now so but
#
imagine the romance of this idea and how young people could be fueled with optimism by thinking
#
of the potential of what humans can actually do yeah i'm actually you know people know me as being
#
a dark and a pessimist and all that and i am a pessimist in the sense that of course we're all
#
going to die and life is meaningless but i'm an optimist i'm an optimist about the world i think
#
the world is going to become a much better place and i think we will tackle all these problems
#
it's very true isn't it that the long arc of history bends towards justice of many forms it does
#
it does when you're in the middle of something bad of course we read the newspapers or on our social
#
media you can get pretty depressed but the minute you just stand apart and use a little witness
#
be a witness rather than a participant it allows you to get a much brighter picture you you that
#
allows you to let in more light that's a beautiful thought about being a witness rather than a
#
participant and is that again something that you worked on in yourself over the years trying hard
#
trying hard not yet there but especially when i and you know being with nandan really helps
#
he's a genuine optimist okay he can't help being optimist optimistic so so if i feel depressed he
#
will give me some counter to whatever i'm saying suppose i say something grim he'll say but what
#
about this this and this right and that again allows you to shake yourself out of this because
#
as we know things happen together contradictory things hold themselves together at the same time
#
and there are always pathways out of the grim things so it's good it's good it allows me a
#
practice being a witness so long journey ahead though so you know before we go in for our lunch
#
break final digressive question which really doesn't belong to any of the other narratives
#
around you which is i'm curious about this love of wildlife because when i think of someone growing
#
up in bombay though maybe i'm thinking of the bombay of today i don't even know where you
#
encounter wildlife right so tell me about your sort of romance with animals or wildlife and so on how
#
did it happen was it just like a natural affinity that you just kind of love animals or is there a
#
particular phase in your life where you kind of got drawn to this because they're also like like
#
what you said about the hubris of the human species and i can also see totally why embracing
#
nature perhaps as a witness and not a participant and just you know stepping out of your own ego
#
can just build that humility and curiosity as well yeah i'll answer that question but i do
#
want to say something before i forget that i'm very honored to be on your show amit but i'm
#
just wondering is this and i want you to answer see i'm a journalist so you you you got a journalist
#
on your show so i'm bound to ask you a question is this also going to be a form of self-indulgence
#
i never talked about myself for so long right so how do you in your guests help them to counter
#
that this podcast can be a form of extreme self-indulgence so that's my question to you
#
before i answer the other part i think you're being very harsh on yourself by calling it
#
self-indulgence because i i mean think about what interests you in the world it is stories
#
and stories about people it is people you know there's a deep joy in getting to know someone
#
and getting to know their stories it is not and it is not an irrelevant thing i mean i feel that
#
i connect to the world through through listening to people's stories you know i could just think
#
of you as oh she does philanthropy or oh she does this or she does that or whatever but now i can
#
you know now i'm beginning to get a firmer self of the kind of person you are the kind of
#
values you cultivate in yourself you know and i think in a general sense the reason i have moved
#
in my show from an interest in subjects to an interest in people is that it is also self-discovery
#
i think for all of us listening to people's stories and their lives and maybe from there we
#
can pick up frames which we can apply to ourselves and become better people ourselves and so i
#
absolutely loved that thank you that's such a beautiful you flipped it that's that's good it's true though i
#
listen to your podcasts of other people and the first thing that occurs to me is not that they're
#
being self-indulgent but i was just a bit nervous so i thought i'll put it out there because very
#
easy you know you can fall in love with yourself as the main actor of this thing and i just wanted
#
to be a little sensitive to that possibility can i tell you something and you must be familiar
#
with this that so many women guests on the show have this sort of imposter syndrome that who will
#
be interested in my life and male guests never do it's just an interesting observation right
#
but it's true that people's histories are the most interesting things on this planet yeah
#
that's also part of us our hubris because we think we are the greatest things created or evolved on
#
this planet but yeah thank you for answering that my interest actually yeah in bombay there's not
#
much there crows pigeons sparrows there were as we were growing up but we never look at the small
#
things that were around my parents used to take a can a spray can of flit and kill everything that
#
lived okay because we didn't know what diseases the cockroaches and the spiders were bringing
#
today i never wouldn't do that but remember i was also going every few days to dahanu where there
#
was a forest right behind the house and you could see so many beautiful things birds animals but
#
really it was from my reading whether i read just something as simple as jerald darrell or
#
reading a lot whether it was about mogli or it was about black beauty or so in that sense the
#
world of animals because those were very personalized in fiction but interested me and being out
#
karnala bird sanctuary was a place we used to go to for picnics i remember i used to just love
#
being out there in the open no horns i hate traffic noise i really even hate it viscerally today thought
#
that you could hear bird sounds instead and that was such a treat for us from bombay to go there
#
so always liked going out we used to go to mahabaleshwar lunavela matthiran those were
#
the highlights for me that peace that quiet that beauty and the song of birds so when my work on
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the environmental issues started coming out of understanding more about issues that affect even
#
human beings that's when i got to go out more and i loved it more and more and more and really the
#
pandemic has completely sealed my devotion to the wild and you know learning that india is i would
#
say the only country with the kind of population pressure that we have with the kind of biodiversity
#
we have retained and it's so deep in our culture now today we have adopted a development model that
#
is going to seriously threaten and i'm not challenging it because i know 300 million people
#
are saying who are you to tell me not to develop so i'm not challenging that i wish we could alter
#
it a bit but it's work in progress but today we still have the most amazing biodiversity right
#
around people and for me that is something to just absolutely treasure in our culture
#
we must never allow that's why my poor grandson i've been doing he's also a total total
#
animal lover he has more knowledge about animals than i do at the age of six
#
but that's it they have to be custodians and stewards of this planet's natural environment
#
not just a human built one and so for me this is now really a mission and such a joyful one such
#
a joyful one i hope everybody can go into the wild more than they're able to do now and and don't
#
you know maintaining the biodiversity and development go hand in hand because i guess
#
development means more urbanization more people in cities this means more of your forests get
#
preserved and there is you know it's actually good in that sense but it depends on what kind
#
of urbanization because the footprint of our urbanization on even places that are not close
#
by is is something we need to begin to understand more of so emissions in urban densities have
#
rippling effects through all ecosystems right so it's not as simple as that so what will be
#
preserved is more spaces i agree but of course india's urbanization is not as fast as people
#
as they thought so there's a new story happening in india today and i hear it and i don't have
#
enough data so let me first say that i don't have enough data but i feel there is a river people are
#
rethinking some people are rethinking coming to urban areas for the good life there's a lot of
#
especially in the pandemic and the reverse migration that happened some people have stayed back
#
because i have a feeling that people are going to the gdp we still haven't figured out how to
#
include natural capital but people are seeing the genuine impact of bad air and bad water on
#
their lives and their health and at least in rural india you have access some access
#
to natural resources you have some access to clean air and clean water and i see that people
#
are rethinking what they what are they settling for by coming into urban areas but i think the
#
data will reveal itself over time so i'm just thinking aloud and final tangent before the break
#
that could it be partly because of technology because the reason urbanization happens is that
#
we have the most opportunities in urban in conglomerations where people are together they
#
can form economic networks and blah blah blah but maybe now some of those networks can be formed
#
without the need to physically go to a city and be around people because of technology and the
#
internet do you feel that's a fact that in america a bit but of course they are at a different level
#
of economic development but uh yeah i definitely think the the the benefits of density and
#
clusterization which which drives a certain kind of economy new opportunities are coming because
#
of technology that you could work without those kind of densities you don't have to because you
#
can especially your digital mobility gives many new forms of physical freedom so we don't know
#
and i can't see india i don't know okay some i don't know i'm not at all an expert but will we
#
have 10 cities of 20 million people each or will we have 10 000 cities that are smaller and more
#
distributed i think the jury is still out on this we don't know yet how india right now at
#
least we are seeing a dispersed urbanization right we have 8 000 towns and some of them are
#
growing very fast whereas while banglore is still growing other big cities are slowing down their
#
rate of growth not expanding it so we'll have a different form of urbanization its impacts on my
#
what i care about the natural ecosystems if we want to keep that positive then we have to
#
and one of the institutions we support is the indian institute for human settlements
#
which dwells on these long-term questions of what kind of urbanization should we aim for
#
so that it's much more sustainable within the city we can't if we think of the city as being
#
the unnatural world and the wild as being the natural world it will not work at all so how do
#
you incorporate natural ecosystems into the way you develop your urban centers is going to
#
is going to unleash a lot of innovation let me say yeah that's that's actually a profound thought
#
about digital mobility bringing physical freedom so you know while i process that let's take a
#
quick break thank you 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 india uncut dot subtract dot 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 india uncut dot subtract dot com
#
and subscribe it is free 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 india uncut dot subtract dot com thank you
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with nandini oh not nandini
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if i ever get nandananda show and i will invite him i promise you i'll call him rohan at the
#
start and see how he responds let's sort of you know your journey is kind of now
#
reached that sort of fascinating point where you start getting into social work
#
seriously and i was very interested in how you speak for example of 1992 when you set up nagarik
#
you know friend of yours died tragically in a road accident you decided you have to do something
#
about it you set up nagarik and and it failed and you have written at one point the early failure
#
left me with a strong understanding of what could be done better the next time around
#
i realized that social change requires collective action where citizens are inspired to actively
#
become part of the solution i also learned that any team that claimed like us to be acting on
#
behalf of citizens must be empathetic innovative organized and strategic and elsewhere you have
#
said about your early activism and your early work that quote i must say that i was an activist i was
#
a bit aggressive which i don't recommend but i was like that and then you've spoken again about
#
something that i found evocative and i'll explain why where you've written quote it was a different
#
time in a different city but sometimes people used to throw garbage i used to get very upset
#
and i used to go and pick up the garbage in front of everyone and glare at the person who had thrown
#
it now while that seems like the right thing to do i soon realized that it didn't make me any
#
friends why because even though i was doing the correct thing which is picking up trash from the
#
public i think my attitude was not right i was doing it in a superior way not accepting that i
#
i also have so many faults other people have faults we are all on individual learning journeys
#
a stop quote and later you point out about how you know when outside where you and nandan were
#
staying there was a tea stall they used to throw that and you kind of did the same thing there
#
because they were dropping cups except you pick them up with a smile and one of my close friends
#
from delhi mohit satyanand told me an identical story that he there was an office that opened up
#
next door to his residence and they would later outside and he would just go every day and pick
#
it up and they just completely stopped when they saw this you know dignified gentleman
#
doing all of this work and this also seems to me to be such a gandhian way of acting be the change
#
you want to see right and so what should we discuss first your early experiences with activism or
#
or let's leave that for later and tell me about gandhi's influence on you gandhianism like one
#
thread of course is your grandfather and all of that but i guess at another level once you get
#
serious about social work once you encounter failure in social work once you start thinking
#
about what do i do to not fail you have to look at the past and you have to look at how other
#
people have engaged with indian society and gandhi is a spectacular model in that regard so tell me
#
a little bit more about your journey with gandhianism yeah so definitely what is the
#
thing that i admire most about gandhiji is one is of course in the family just seeing somebody who
#
was look at his moral suasion that he gets a man like baba sahib from belgao to leave everything
#
leave his pregnant wife leave his what profession leave everything and just dash off in pursuit of
#
a bigger vision bigger than us right it's not about only us it's about something much bigger
#
for humanity that time they were not even talking india freedom of india in 1917 that is the power
#
of this man that he can inspire so many people to do something for a cause larger than themselves
#
i think that's one so how do you get there was always fascinating how do you become like that
#
and clearly in his case it was his life was his example and there's so many contradictory
#
things about gandhiji that i was very very aware of in my family my god the number of
#
arguments i've had with my mother about gandhi and savarkar still more on the savarkar side
#
though she appreciated gandhi but she saw many of his flaws which he himself has written about at
#
great length of course and but he still remains very inspirational his utter commitment to truth
#
his utter selflessness even however he was whimsical in many ways but that integrity
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that hard work and discipline to aspire to much bigger ideas starting from swarajya which is
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rajya over the self which is the biggest human struggle of all to swarajya of the nation and
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never forgetting the underlying value system which says that the swarajya of the nation cannot be
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built on anything that is against human justice so you can delay the nation swarajya but that
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inner to outer journey where you are constantly fighting against the seven evils or whatever is
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the more important journey and impossible to tell that to an impatient nation waiting for its freedom
#
but he did that that's what so those are getting people to do simple things that become powerful
#
symbols against injustice or fighting for freedom fighting for truth like the salt satyagraha so
#
getting inspiration from those kind of things was just a master in social and political craftsmanship
#
right to inspire not thousands and millions of people so in civic life you have to look to people
#
like that to learn how do they do it so in that sense that's where the interest in gandhi came
#
from from his socio-political life and no way one can keep up any i mean i'm nowhere close to any i
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don't even i can't even put myself in the same i don't even aspire to many of the things that
#
he aspired to but his one thing became very clear based on the question you asked which is when i
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was earlier aggressive i told you and i'm doing it because i think i'm so great or morally righteous
#
the way i present myself is exactly the opposite to what i want to achieve and i'm doing it just
#
because i was sometimes continue to be impatient like so but those two things like when i would
#
pick up trash and put it deliberately in front of someone's nose into a dustbin saying look i'm
#
better than you and look this is what we need to do i don't think that person would ever bother
#
with trash wouldn't even have except what an irritating woman is all that person would have
#
registered whereas in delhi when i genuinely and if i had done it enough with false modesty it would
#
still not have worked it has i had to genuinely feel and i waited for a few days to decide what
#
is it that i want to actually do if i don't want the place outside the house to be full of
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unnecessary trash and one day i just decided i want to pick up this thing myself so i went
#
and quietly picked up all the paper cups and smiled at them and went and put them into my
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trash in my bungalow and i did that again the next day then i had a conversation with them saying
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not even one day till i left delhi was there one cup left anywhere from that tea seller stall not
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even one day and i didn't do anything i didn't have to be aggressive and how much more was
#
achieved so it was a real lesson for me i've tried a few of those things and now you can call it
#
gandhigiri but it's powerful only if you have actually made some small transformation
#
but if you haven't it can't be used as a transactional tool you can't and that's why
#
it's so powerful because it has to begin with you and i think those are the kinds about things
#
about gandhi that inspire me i'm really struck by what you spoke about going from swarajya
#
of the self to swarajya of the nation and how swarajya of the nation should not come at the
#
cost of swarajya of the self or justice or whatever and i'm reminded of you know calling
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of the satyagraha after the violence at chorichhora for example which is a great example of gandhi's
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sort of assertion that means matter that you cannot and for him that was the thing right today so
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glibly we forget about means and ends and it's the most difficult thing to do to focus on the
#
means and not the end because many times you have to give up the end when the means are wrong and
#
how can you give up something that you've thought about for so long that this is where we want to
#
reach and we keep saying many paths to one goal etc etc etc but he's saying the opposite right
#
he's saying how you go the journey is far more important than the destination how you walk to
#
that goal is more important than reaching the goal and that's really hard to do but we've seen in
#
world politics in human history that when you forget this when the means get disregarded
#
sometimes the end you thought you were trying to reach actually becomes quite different from
#
what you had planned so that's again very inspirational how do you focus on the means
#
and this also leads me to sort of one frame that i have for looking at the world where i really
#
you know look at all action in two categories and one is voluntary action which respects consent
#
and the other is coercive action and which is why i am sort of so inspired when i see civil society
#
action for example during covid civil society got together in so many different ways to help
#
migrant laborers to feed those who couldn't get food and all of that and why i'm so suspicious
#
of the state because anything that the state does necessarily involves coercion you know and we've
#
kind of normalized that i once wrote a piece in times of india called every act of government is
#
an act of violence and of course we need the state we need the state to defend our rights it's a
#
necessary compromise in that sense that we give up some of our rights so that the rest of them
#
are protected but too often whenever we look for state solutions to social problems they they
#
involve coercion coercion inherently and also then there is a chance of you know unintended
#
consequences i think a lot of social issues can only be solved from within society and it does
#
this almost reflexive tendency that indians have especially that her cheese solution you know is
#
in state action you know in fact so like i i had a conversation with pranay kota sani and
#
raghu jetli recently on the show where i referred to the samaj sarkar bazar framework
#
that you've written about raghu rajan's also written a book on the thing and my sort of
#
reframing of that was that i would not make these three categories i would think of markets as a
#
mechanism through which society fulfills its own needs like i see society essentially working
#
through voluntary action in many different ways and the market is one mechanism and markets can
#
also be a mechanism for the state you know when you have cronyism and you're using state power
#
to achieve ends and nothing good can come out of that so you know markets are just a mechanism it
#
depends on but i'm not saying that to argue against your framework your framework is powerful
#
because as you point out your original pillar is society and then the state comes because we need
#
the state and then markets come because that is a mechanism and now you have to see the relationship
#
between all of these but you know in in that sense you know since you mentioned gandhi and
#
means and ends and all of that you know my kind of deep suspicion of the state comes exactly from
#
this because power always corrupts and the power of the state just continues to grow exponentially
#
and i think a lot of social problems just need to be sorted out in in society and as you've
#
correctly pointed out and also written about in the book that state overage can have such
#
terrible consequences as we have seen in the last century yeah no i agree with you you began with
#
volunteerism and the ability of people to voluntarily do something for others to voluntarily
#
collect themselves for action in my life at least definitely volunteering one's self one's time one's
#
effort one's talent is been seen as the highest personal ethic right but from there to come to
#
the idea of samaj so as i say in my book and i've been saying probably too often for 15 years
#
is that i have begun to believe that samaj is the foundational sector and it that's fairly obvious
#
that we are people first as in in different formations whether it's from the family to the
#
nation and globally as well and that over time in history maybe the bazaar came first after samaj
#
for the samaj just people exchanging things and creating a value of that exchange
#
which was commonly understood became the bazaar and then the markets and of course you needed
#
the sarkar and many forms of it developed from monarchy to what we see today as the modern
#
democratic nation state in order to help people because people are not a monolith we fight with
#
each other brothers fight with brothers siblings fight everybody fights with each other when there
#
are trade-offs to be faced so you need a neutral authority which we have created many forms of
#
which is the sarkar the state to enable us to resolve those conflicts in a publicly accepted
#
manner you also need rule of law to be framed that everyone can abide by and it can keep changing
#
but something that is held which by consensus reduces conflict and creates the space for
#
innovation for markets to provide goods and services to continuously improve the life of the
#
samaj it's a very simple framing actually and i do understand it is not stark so samaj
#
ends here and sarkar begins here it's a continuum samaj blends into sarkar blends into markets at
#
many many points but i still the reason i keep tom-toming this is because i think the balance
#
has got so perverse like you're saying deep suspicion of the state not this state or that
#
state but any state because power does accumulate and in fact we have designed the state to have a
#
monopoly over violence only the state has the legitimate power to arrest to imprison etc nobody
#
else has that no other formation has that except the state and that can be abused
#
which is why we have to always see ourselves and this is my exhortation to myself and everyone is
#
can we see ourselves as members of a samaj first and only then position frame ourselves as subjects
#
of a state or citizens of a democracy but are we not first human beings first and then part of our
#
samaj first however small however large now it is even more confusing because it is even easier to
#
think of yourself as a consumer first that has created the maximum complications in this past
#
century that you can be a consumer and be consumed at the same time without even realizing it so
#
that's why my my hope to reframe this discourse so that we see samaj as the larger envelope in
#
which we all reside and of course there is bazaar and sarkar to improve samaj continuously and make
#
life easier for people but the moment we flip that and see ourselves as citizens first as human being
#
first i hope that creates that what you call volunteerism that empathy that ability of
#
restraint the sense of duty as much as assertion of rights it that's what will then throw up the
#
kind of people or the kind of conversations so that the members of the bazaar and sarkar are
#
also influenced by that discourse so today i'm talking to you as a citizen but suppose i was a
#
ceo or suppose i was a chief minister or something like that if i remember to that i'm samaj first
#
then the way i occupy my ceo position or my cm chair would perhaps be different would perhaps
#
retain more elements of that human empathy and the understanding of how power operates
#
and knowing that it's fluid today i'm a ceo tomorrow i'm back to being a citizen
#
but that will never change my citizeness will never change my humanness will never change
#
every other identity is fluid so to keep that always in mind no matter which temporary identity
#
you occupy i'm just hoping that means that we have more human empathy floating around
#
and a constant awareness of how power operates i'm just wondering if part of the reason that
#
voluntarism that voluntary action is all around us but as is coercion but voluntarism is limited
#
and too many people seem to settle down to be as you've pointed out either subjects of the state
#
or consumers of goods and not citizens not active engaged citizens it's perhaps because they see
#
how you know the huge role that the state plays and therefore they abdicate the duties they say
#
that hey i'm you know i'm paying so much tax every year i've done three episodes with ashwin
#
mahesh who's also bangalore based does such a lot of good work and i once asked him that boss what
#
you are doing is that you are organizing civil society groups to solve problems which it was the
#
government's job to solve which you know which is in the state's domain so you know it's almost
#
like a duplication you are already paying taxes for the state to do x the state is unable to
#
do x and then either you do x or you get together with the state to help it do x and whatever
#
and i am not so firm on that question anymore because i kind of see where he is coming from
#
but i wonder about that apathy because that apathy is not universal like at one point you write quote
#
when citizens simply wait for the state to solve their problems they lose their sense of agency
#
they feel helpless and hopeless i have witnessed firsthand the differences between an apathetic
#
community and those that band together to create solutions for themselves for example in east bihar
#
which receives abundant rainfall people were still unable to harvest it for safe lifeline water
#
whereas in parts of kutch in gujarat communities work to work together to safely catch every drop
#
of scanty rain to last them the rest of the year similarly i've seen communities that
#
enthusiastically ensure all the children are enrolled in schools and learning and others that
#
simply leave children to their fate in underperforming local schools maybe this apathy stems from being
#
unable to see a path to self-efficacy or from an excessive belief in the efficacy of the state
#
or the markets stop code and at one level if i'm going to think of the whole of the country it sort
#
of strikes me that this apathy doesn't come from faith in the state i think people have just kind
#
of given up in a lot of areas and there's this inertia that prevails where they assume bad
#
governance and they do their jugat to get on with things but what i want to ask you about and what
#
i'm interested in are these local differences why is it that in some places people mobilize
#
themselves and in some places people don't is it like a cultural thing is it like an accidental
#
thing that somebody sets a ball rolling in a movement forms you know what's your experience
#
i think i'm scared to use the word culture but sometimes it's just natural circumstances like
#
in rajasthan it rains so little that every drop is precious and in bihar it rains so much
#
that you forget about you you get submerged in issues of quantity without worrying about
#
quality it can happen so one is that the second i think is leadership i think there's something
#
that triggers one person to act on behalf of a community there is some inner propulsion
#
right it is intrinsic desire to do good that some people have and that inspires everybody
#
very quickly so it can be two of these it can be these things it can be as a result of prior
#
conflict when there's been so much conflict that everybody's really fed up and like the
#
mohalla peace committees came up after much conflict right when they came up and then people
#
felt it was worth investing in peace before the next conflict broke out so it really depends on
#
a bunch of things but i have definitely seen and that's been the 30-year journey of work
#
is that when you are able to allow people to see that they can be part of a solution
#
it unleashes a lot of innovation it unleashes a lot of effort it unleashes a lot of talent
#
and it unleashes good collective action so that's what i believe in because who has decided exactly
#
what belongs in the state domain everything is actually in the social domain we created the
#
state for that and it's not something that you can just sit back and say okay only the state has to
#
do this and therefore i don't and won't do it don't have to and won't do it who's going to suffer
#
for that you only so we cannot unfortunately sit back and consume good governance as i have been
#
saying unfortunately paying taxes is not enough you have to do more again we talked about the price
#
of democracy liberty and all that it's not something that you can say okay i voted i paid
#
my taxes i'm done i've done what i'm supposed to do unfortunately it doesn't work like that
#
because the state is also an evolving entity and we know how power works we know what kind of
#
incentives there are we perverse and otherwise but unless citizens are constantly driving
#
and hoping and making the state more and more accountable to them and their larger interest
#
it's not an automatic process and it will never be because otherwise then it's what
#
louis mumford 50 60 years ago a colleague recently reminded me talks about the
#
the magnificent bribe right people otherwise all of us will be constantly doing the work of the
#
state and the markets and we don't want to do that we want to be with our families we want to watch
#
tv we want to do or see you can tell my age because i said watch tv i didn't say you want to watch tv
#
what is tv but so he calls it the magnificent bribe right the technological imagination is
#
that we'll give you wonderful stuff all you have to do is participate in this magnificent bribe
#
whether it is your what's happening on social media or your devices and many of us without
#
thinking about it enough are willing to give up many freedoms for conveniences and again it's
#
evolutionary biology of course that's what you should be doing but at some point that
#
becomes counterproductive for you and society and that's why that eternal vigilance especially in
#
a digital age it's even slippery more slippery a slope that they say that you are being consumed
#
rather than consuming things so that's why the discourse of samaj is so important that's why
#
i believe in it so deeply because the state and the markets can become inordinately powerful
#
whereas because samaj is fractured margaret thatcher said wow how can you go and meet
#
society what is that society business there's no such thing which i don't agree i think you
#
can meet society i think she meant it in a different context so i agree with you in this
#
context too much yeah but i agree with her in that context because often people will
#
invoke society to justify clamping down on individual rights and at her point was that
#
individual rights are foremost and paramount and then you talk of collective good but right no i
#
paraphrased it wrongly perhaps but i think you can meet society it's not that you can't
#
what a society it's a bunch of people and you can listen to them and hear them they can talk to you
#
and they can meet you you can meet society there maybe i disagree but if you're talking
#
about the trade-off between individual rights and societal good and in fact now that you're
#
saying this is something that's been coming to me in the last few years that maybe one of the big
#
issues of our times is really an age-old age-old divide between the limits of individual freedom
#
freedom and the the growing of public order and it's almost like you can draw line down the globe
#
somewhere somewhere i don't know somewhere near along turkey or something where this side of it
#
the so-called east was willing to value public order higher than individual freedoms and then
#
in the west of course very high premium on individual freedom individualism and maybe
#
those things are what are playing out in societies and nations today all over again i love the way
#
you cough turkey i don't know what the british used to do sitting in their offices and draw
#
imaginary lines across countries somewhere there this side of europe where you know the
#
enlightenment all happened i mean the mystic religions the eastern religions even the
#
ibrahim well really islam and this side towards the east right beyond china japan
#
just just a very broad generalization and i recognize the limits of that but all i'm
#
saying is again that big word culture but that individuals in some sense are willing to
#
restrain their freedoms for families communities religions their tribes their cultures their
#
nations i don't know maybe that is the idea playing out today in more ways than we understand again
#
you can see the clash between the ideas of individual freedoms and the state
#
in many countries putting what they see as reasonable restrictions on those freedoms
#
yeah i absolutely agree and it's not just individual freedoms versus the state which is
#
a constant battle requiring eternal vigilance as you said but it's also the clash between
#
individual rights and group rights and there also it is a trade-off like i think the most
#
incredibly toxic and dangerous thing we can do is privilege group rights over individual rights
#
because that has led to so much that has gone wrong in the 20th century fought for individual
#
individual rights and so much that is wrong with modern politics but all i see the flip side of
#
it also yes i see the comfort that people take in community and in being part of a tribe and
#
there is a flip side to it like though frankly in these modern times i see the toxic side much more
#
from both the left and the right the tribalism and the identity politics is just
#
tearing us apart you know we were talking about citizen apathy about people sort of you know just
#
kind of you know not caring for their duties as citizens as part of society but just saying
#
restate and you've also spoken in your book in various places about elite secession where you
#
know elites have had the sort of the the privilege of you know building their gated communities
#
taking care of their own water and generator and getting away from it but as you point out
#
that there are some things elites can't secede from they can't they breathe the same air they
#
drink the same water by and large and they suffer under the same laws and these are just things that
#
even the elites can't secede from give me a sort of a sense of and and this is you know a question
#
that arises out of this but it's kind of tangential and i just to give perspective on all the work that
#
you've been doing is give me a sort of historical perspective of what has been happening in india in
#
terms of civil society action over the decades like you've pointed out in your book about civil
#
society organizations how you have one wave in the 70s where there is all the enthusiasm so many
#
things are happening around the world you have another wave in the 90s as the markets open up
#
and all that then you have another wave perhaps in the 2000s with technology coming in and all
#
of that so you know give me a sense of this broad movement of people's participation as citizens
#
and what's kind of been happening there again i'm no expert amit i'm just uh you're a practitioner
#
and yeah whatever you see so uh in india i mean after the obviously after the freedom movement
#
everyone must have heaved a sigh of relief and now let's get down to the business of
#
building this nation in our individual capacities as whatever livelihoods we are engaged with and
#
the state was busy keeping india united in the first place such a difficult decade right 47 to
#
mid 50s but to 56 in fact but so i don't know enough about civil society in that first decade
#
what exactly new was happening but say definitely i know especially from the late 60s the bihar
#
famine seems to have triggered a lot of the first early pioneers of civil institutions they left
#
they were highly educated some iit people people like bunker miners who had who had gone to college
#
could have taken any uh corporate job decided to give up everything and look at fundamentals
#
of society why can why do we have famines where so many people poor what can be done what is
#
voltage so that first wave in the 60s and continued in the 70s this time uh with more foreign funding
#
a lot of for afford foundation rockefeller many others um came in to support broadly issues of
#
justice rights some working very closely with the government passed after the green revolution
#
etc also they spawned professionals in civil society working in their offices here again
#
looking at various issues there are so many issues to worry about whether it was food and nutrition
#
agriculture urban and well urbanization not that much was done then but just basically issues of
#
expanding rights and expanding access to justice a lot of work was done education health care
#
women's rights so much work began to happen in the 70s and 80s then again as you yourself said
#
after india opened up there were new issues to worry about a lot more people a different kind of
#
class was being left behind so understanding how they could participate in this economic
#
surge that was going on i think that took the interest of civil society a lot the bangladesh
#
refugees that came in also spawned a whole myrada came out of that the settlement of some of those
#
so many incidents global and in our neighborhood spawned new waves of civil activism and you're
#
right that the digital era has spawned the latest lot of leaders and organizations who are trying
#
to use the benefits of the digital age to reach many vulnerable left out people and yet at the
#
same time also try and hold the digital era accountable the states the markets and civil
#
society more accountable in in in because the digital age has brought new issues new exclusions
#
and how do you hold again same framing justice equity access but in new waves like i kind of
#
described i'm sure there are experts who describe it differently but this is what i have seen
#
and is there has there been sort of a deeper involvement in these movements from people at
#
large and especially money people because of course what is happening after the 90s is there
#
are many more people with money there's a burgeoning of the middle class 300 400 million people come out
#
of poverty there's a lot of that happening equally there is a class of the elites in the super rich
#
which is forming and you know so what's happening there you know are these new elites for example
#
also rushing in enthusiastically where perhaps in absolute numbers greater than they were in
#
the past because the numbers are so huge yeah but i think the middle and upper middle classes are
#
engaging more in civic issues in urban india definitely i mean you know rwas for example if
#
we take just one civic institution they are very vociferous about their rights and their and they
#
also bang together to improve their own neighborhoods i live in third block kolo mangala in banglore
#
which is of course very an elite neighborhood but not all of it is elite some of us have become
#
very wealthy but the rest of them are wealthy enough but see they are there how much time my
#
neighbors give to civic work to gather all of us we work together all of us we have secured our park
#
we fight court cases kolo mangala is very active that way we did just recently my neighbors did
#
a big vigil because the one highway is one expressway has been just stalled for years and it's made us
#
also frustrated so i see a lot more of this kind of civic actors activism especially in banglore
#
for the last 20 years 20 to 25 years definitely and i can see it only growing because our people
#
are becoming more innovative about how to create like like flash activism some something will
#
happen my god the world gets around and they gather which is kind of new way of doing things
#
and young people are getting involved so i feel that young people and the middle class in urban
#
india is finding new ways to participate in in this great big experimental democracy that we have
#
going on in india yeah and you know you you cited rwas you know i think rwas are actually you know
#
if someone is looking for material for satire there's a lot there because rwas have become such
#
fertile playgrounds for wannabe uncle dictators oh yeah like in the place where i used to live
#
when covid started i don't live there anymore but the rwi of that place sent homeopathic medicine
#
to every flat because you know that guy's relative was a homeopath or whatever i was like what are
#
you even doing what is yeah no the pandemic offered many people new spaces to exercise petty power
#
and now when the states officials have discovered that it's up to citizens to now push that back
#
again which is not so easy every beat cop could push you back into your home without even using
#
much coercion we just went and it's hard to give up power somebody said to me that a stick is never
#
given away it has to be taken away yeah with another stick sometimes or with again if you
#
have five people one stick won't do much so it's the force of collective action that what i believe
#
in but yeah no of course you can have but i'll tell you even though it's a meme now right some
#
dictator uncle in a rwa who's exercising but that's also dynamic dictatorship you know some other
#
uncle can also come and push away this dictator and so so long as there is mobility of power and
#
people are kind of people are kind of know and they also won't take the dictator that seriously
#
in that rwa beyond the point he can't do much okay and so there because here there is proximity to
#
that power in an rwa there is proximity even if somebody is using their power in a bad way
#
there is enough proximity that you can actually turn that situation around if 10 of you get
#
together so that's what's interesting in these things they can be pretty i mean i know how much
#
in my building oh my god the general the general body meetings and somebody standing up and saying
#
this and that we but that is the practice of how human beings will organize themselves that's
#
exactly how it's going to be both the good and bad of it but eventually it is constantly a movement
#
to improve their surroundings right then so there's no sorry this is this is the practice
#
of democracy this is exactly how it is going to be yeah and and in a sense what is good about
#
rws is that there is a direct link between power and accountability which sometimes gets lost in
#
uh you know because our governance otherwise is so centralized yeah but this is so far away as
#
citizens from the seats of real power right how do i get how do okay i am in an extremely privileged
#
position but how do normal people get heard otherwise because our system of electoral
#
electoral democracy doesn't really mean in villages it is different in rural india it is
#
quite different because the 74th amendment has not really stuck yet somehow it hasn't it's such a
#
sensible amendment but it's not yet been realized you don't even know who your counselor is and in
#
some cases uh you know you don't even have the elections with some excuse or the other
#
so the seats of real power have become very distant from the ordinary citizen in especially
#
in urban india i want to also take another digression you you spoke about how in bangalore
#
civil activism has you know uh increased and the young are taking part and a lot of that
#
participation by the young is incredibly hearty like if something gave me a lot of hope for example
#
during the cae protest it was young people on the streets waving the preamble because at least then
#
there is awareness of it you're thinking about your rights that's mind-blowing but what we also
#
see from the young is perhaps a mistake you pointed out in yourself where the first time you
#
you know picked up the rubbish that people were leaving it was almost self-aggrandizing in a sense
#
that look i'm better than you there is that sanctimony and i find that uh what social media
#
has exacerbated is that it has these incentives built in for posturing posturing posturing all
#
the time like back in the day to be known as a feminist you actually had to do real work in
#
the field improving the lives of people and so on today you can just go out there and put a few
#
snarky code tweets and show your outrage and so on and so forth and that feels you know it's a very
#
cheap way of sort of uh you know signaling what you are and and i've done a bunch of episodes with
#
various uh feminists from manjima bhattacharya to urvashi butalia and all of that and gavita krishnan
#
notably who pointed out how a lot of these online feminists so to say online activists are not
#
engaging with the complexities of the real world where everything is not cut and dry black and
#
white you really have to wade into murky waters exactly right so what i would say is this having
#
thought about this for a while now is that i think we are in a transition period see the technology
#
is pretty new right and the public norms around this have not settled yet and it may take five
#
ten years even how should you behave in the digital sphere you know what is going to eventually work
#
for you so maybe that initial my god i can say anything with anonymity and i feel so good my
#
god i can vent right and now there's enough written we don't need to repeat it on this podcast about
#
why the technology they are attention seeking the the click baiting all that we know the rewards
#
are how they are aligned we know what the rewards of the market are we know what the rewards for
#
people are so we won't talk about that but i do feel that now you can hear people talking about
#
how this must change and i think we're the beginning of that change and i think some new
#
norms will come around how to behave and i think of course regulation may also come but i wish
#
before all the harsh regulation comes some of this i i really hope we are at peak polarization
#
peak venting and that in the next few hours i think some new norms will develop because it's
#
not really working for anyone anymore it was fun while it's it lasted but i think at some point
#
it will have to settle and it will settle most new inventions people do overdo things but then
#
new discourses emerge new restraining factors emerge and we will see that so the way i would
#
see it as a slightly older person is that we are in a transition and so i'm hoping that in a few
#
years it'll be different i i love the term peak polarization if this actually is peak polarization
#
and things get better better can you describe anything worse than this i can't think of
#
something much worse than this so it's probably at its peak i kind of look at the incentives both
#
within social media and within politics and i'll kind of briefly just talk about like within within
#
social media the incentive is you go online everybody wants to feel they belong to a tribe
#
you find your tribe and then you want to raise your status within your tribe all natural and
#
rational and how do you raise your status within your tribe by attacking people on the other side
#
never engaging with arguments or attacking people on your own side for not being pure enough and
#
any kind of nuance will have you beaten up by every side so it creates an incentive where you
#
keep pushing towards the extremes and this is social media and these are vocal minorities i
#
think the silent majority is kind of more sensible knows there are many sides to issues and all of
#
that but they're scared to speak up and the incentive within politics is that today like
#
earlier i think and this is something that in my mind is a thought in progress so i haven't gotten
#
anywhere with it but earlier you know we used to talk about the median voter theorem that ultimately
#
you're going to go towards the center so you'd look at american elections where the your republican
#
and your democratic candidates in the primaries they will swing to the extremes for the true
#
believers but they are pretty much adjacent to each other in the main election eventually and i
#
think in 2016 this broke down because i thought the candidates are going to be hillary clinton
#
and jeb bush and they're pretty much identical some interest groups differ on each side but they're
#
basically the same right and suddenly you had trump and everything changed sub and the republican
#
party has pretty much been demolished all their values just wiped out by this man who stands for
#
nothing that they stood for and and equally on the democratic side there is again that push to the
#
extremes uh extreme left yeah extreme left which is happening and even within indian politics how
#
do you really shine in your party for example if you are in the bjp today and there is really one
#
big game in town you know the way that you stand out within a party like that is by going more and
#
more extreme like i think of that notorious dharam sansat video from i think december 2021
#
and the reason you had all of those sadhus giving one incendiary speech after the other
#
was that they were competing with each other for attention and the only way is to get more
#
extreme and more outrageous if you're one guy speaking it would have been more moderate than
#
any speech made there but so i i see you know both the incentives in social media in terms of
#
posturing is driving you towards the extremes and within politics but i agree with you that
#
at some point my brain can't compute something's got to give yeah and you know the media talks
#
more about the dharam sansat and who said what than anybody else right people are not sitting
#
around thinking about what some sadhu said in an incendiary manner about any of the groups
#
said from all sides of the religious sphere apparently in that sphere there is as you said
#
rational reasons to increase your power base by being more inflammatory but tell me how many
#
people are thinking about this in their normal lives and how many people actually hold moderate
#
views so and more sensible views most people actually if you just go a little below the skin
#
one of that's why one of the reasons one of the portfolios that we have set up i did this show on
#
nd tv some time ago called uncommon ground where i asked corporate leaders to talk to the counterparts
#
in that sector in the social realm so like medha patkar was in conversation with anand mahindra
#
and so on and so on and i really found that there was a need and a space for that kind of dialogue
#
so one of the things we are trying to do is to help build the societal muscle for dialogue
#
and conflict reduction and it's actually a muscle right now suppose you and i have opposite views
#
about something we can sit around shouting at each other or we can suspend judgment and perhaps learn
#
from each other and you may not change my mind and i may not change your mind at all
#
but believe me in the human mind things marinate and at the right time in our evolutionary learning
#
path i will remember something you said and maybe he was right i will think if not today three days
#
later if i had given myself and really it's a reward to myself the time and space to listen to
#
you and i think people are thirsting for that and i think it is up to civil society to help create
#
those spaces and we've got a great response a very small attempt to begin with but we hope to expand
#
that and i think young people especially may be searching for those spaces and it is up to us to
#
create them the political field is like that for the electoral vote things like that will happen
#
but most of citizens lives are way beyond all those uh fractive very fractious contentious
#
issues right we are just everyday people are just running around trying to keep the families
#
together and their lives uh sane um so let's not exaggerate and and that's why i am not not so
#
pessimistic because if you go around india and you talk to people as i have to for my field visits
#
you see much more of the it's a 5 000 year civilization that's gone through every conflict
#
known to human beings and accommodated so many things along the way when you actually talk to
#
people and break down yeah but actually most of them will back off from violent confrontation or
#
any confrontation there's so much of adjust in this country that i have more faith in that
#
undercurrent of indian society than the very turbulent waves on top do you think that there's
#
a danger in all of us having too blinkered a view of the world in the sense that you know i don't
#
get around in terms of just going around meeting people engaging with society even a fraction as
#
much as you surely do and therefore my view is restricted by what i am taking in through the
#
media that i consume and there is a danger there because once i consume one piece of media the
#
algorithm will push similar things towards me will lead me to the next and therefore i'm in my bubble
#
somebody else is in his bubble but your point is that no the real world is so complex and this
#
shit doesn't matter and don't go by you know any don't go only by that it doesn't make any sense
#
diversify your points of input and use real people for that use your neighbors for example we learn
#
a lot from our neighbors nowadays you don't even need to meet your neighbor anymore you may know
#
someone across the world much more intimately than you know the person who lives in the flat next to
#
you but i think reaching out to real people more and engaging in more non-fractious discourse is i
#
think some of the abundance that we can harvest around us it's abundantly there we have to harvest
#
it so you know let's go back to your personal narrative that you have sort of uh you work on
#
nagarik for a while and it's kind of heartbreaking doesn't work out but then in 2000 you you know you
#
help pratham set up the akshara foundation which is a kanataka branch in 2001 you set up argham
#
to work on water issues so tell me a little bit about this journey from learning from what went
#
wrong in nagarik to moving on to these areas and why these specific areas take me through a bit
#
of this yeah no again circumstance after nagarik sort of wound down i i was doing very small why
#
did it fail by the way it failed because i think we didn't put the nagarik in nagarik as i keep
#
joking now you know forgot about we're just thinking about uh you know that we have to
#
solve this problem but you can't just solve problems by wishing them away so the nagariks
#
have to be very interested in whatever cause you are espousing and i think it was ahead of its time
#
traffic safety was not on top of people's minds though it should be by the way 160 000 people die
#
on indian roads every year that's a shocking number considering how few vehicles we have on the road
#
compared to our population and how many of them are heartbreakingly young people who die quite
#
unnecessarily on our really haphazard roads but even today there is not that much of public
#
agitation about this 160 000 number is the highest in the world is dispersed all over the place if
#
they were visible if there was a massacre in one field everybody would be going mad possibly
#
but so we were probably on the wrong we just had the wrong mission and so we couldn't gather the
#
enthusiasm see if you don't get the people behind it if we are not tapped into what is already an
#
angst then it's an uphill battle you are going against the stream and we were also very new at
#
it you know there's so many things that i would do differently now we didn't know there's always
#
going to be a learning curve so that's fine but we we were very sincere let me say so that
#
sincerity is still important but so that we had to wind down because we're not going anywhere
#
and then i was actually just i was like ripe for doing something big and madhukar cb madhukar who
#
was with pratham at the time here they are already established with the state government of karnataka
#
took the lead on setting up akshara foundation as a public private partnership and he came home and
#
it was just the right time because the kids were a little grown up and i had free time and i put
#
myself into it um it was that in karnataka at least in banglore every child should be in school
#
and it was a big enough mission that i wanted to sink my teeth into it so i got lucky that i got
#
drawn into pratham and the pratham network and really we did a lot of work we did a lot of
#
innovation we did get a lot of children enrolled we did a lot of bridge courses we worked very
#
hard on preschool education helping neighborhoods set up their own preschools where sometimes
#
children were charged sometimes not charged especially in many muslim localities where
#
young muslim girls became balwadi teachers and helpers and all the children would come it was
#
really wonderful community feeling and we achieved a lot i went on to the pratham board and then i
#
set up pratham books because and that's really one of the most joyful parts of my work life
#
we don't never think about this but you and i had books i mean you said we didn't have too many
#
books and that remains true for indian children but i had kamal book house down my road and it had
#
a few hundred books right that's much better than nothing but most children in india 15 years ago
#
had zero access to books all my childhood was about the joy of reading i mean you cannot
#
separate my idea of childhood from that from reading and how many children have never had
#
that joy to me it was just it's an unbearable thing to think of so when we started pratham books that
#
what we wanted to do is to democratize the joy of reading and we really disrupted the publishing
#
industry for children's publishing if i say so myself it was not me alone obviously it was so
#
many many many of us but today the success is that there have been almost 100 million reads across
#
the years of everything that pratham books and story we will have put out children have for the
#
first time in their lives got a book to hold in their hand which has a marvelous story with
#
colorful illustrations in their language and so that's what we did from 2004 in the meantime in
#
2001 i set up argyam but i didn't have that much money till i told you the adr came in 2004
#
but i wanted to learn the ropes of giving forward by then we could see that money may come
#
and so that's what i did and learn to that you have to first listen
#
you have to first listen and then decide what needs to be done
#
and tell me a bit more about you know pratham books and reading because i keep talking to
#
people about the importance of reading you know that's how we grow that's how we you know join
#
i mean we make sense of the world by joining dots you know the more we read the more dots we join
#
the more nuanced and complex our view of the world is and all of that but the counter view
#
is that in every generation there'll be a certain percentage of people who read and others are just
#
not interested and i wonder if that's true and i think it cannot possibly be true i think that
#
everyone can read probably you know some of it can be you know some people might be more inclined
#
to reading than others but if the circumstances are right everyone can read and simultaneously
#
i see in small town india in young india there is this hunger for knowledge right so what was
#
that experience with pratham books like especially like what was your sort of thinking going in and
#
how did that thinking evolve about what the challenge is and then you know what are the
#
pivots you made and what did you learn from that yeah the stories told often so i'll say it very
#
briefly that when pratham the network pratham we started a read india campaign and trying to
#
trying to get children to read imagine not to being able to read just imagine not being today
#
one of us goes into say for example you go into tamilnar most of the signs are in tamil right
#
and if you don't know tamil that's how you feel if you can't read and it it is horrible a whole
#
part of the world shut out for you if you can't read and so a lot of children have begun to
#
learn how to read through all our campaigns young children but they have nothing to read
#
and you cannot sustain a reading habit without something to read and so our first job was to
#
just make a lot of reading material accessible and available to the children of india in their
#
own languages and so that's what we started to do and what it meant was since there were not
#
that many writers especially the kind of money we were willing to pay and there were not that
#
many illustrators and there were not that many translators or editors so how are you going to
#
do it so actually madhav savant rukmini banerjee and myself we used to write many of those first
#
stories and some of our team members and then we started attracting more and more this is a nation
#
of storytellers we attracted people from every corner of the country voluntarily sending our
#
stories not even expecting money nothing and that's how the movement began and whenever we
#
took the books out we had to learn everything about publishing my colleagues ashok kamath and
#
all we didn't know anything about how paper was printed or nothing we had to learn everything
#
from scratch and he did such a phenomenal job and we built such a phenomenal team that we were soon
#
able to get thousands of books out into the hands of children through the pratham network
#
i have seen with my own eyes a child receiving a book like like this is mine this is for me
#
for me this book yes it's for you and then how they'll sit and sit and look at it and
#
treasure it and love it everybody loves a good story so when you give children good stories
#
they get attracted to reading and it's criminal not to let children have books good books to read
#
from the age of two i think from the age of two children should have lots of books to touch i
#
think it should be from the age of six months my grandson certainly my children got books at the
#
age of three to four months and they had relationships with books from that age and
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that's the correct age to introduce books to children and never should a child be deprived
#
of a book because they can have a personal learning journey the system will teach whatever
#
but your personal learning journey your learnability to teach yourself to learn begins
#
with good books or any books for that matter when you're very very very young so we were able to do
#
that and build out the community find all kinds of business models to sustain it philanthropic
#
models to sustain it and today i mean pratham books is a success story very much in its own
#
right with the new teams that are running it but i think we have definitely put books into children's
#
lives and that makes me personally incredibly happy because we said democratize the joy of reading
#
right that is that was the societal mission that we subscribed to and tried to make happen and i
#
think we have succeeded and even today nipun bhara the government's programs we are looking at
#
foundational literacy very seriously for the first time the national curriculum framework is out
#
lot of plans to get very little children to be fluent to have more words heard and read
#
to understand simple arithmetic i think it's a serious national mission now the groundwork
#
has been laid before but now i think the state governments and the union government very serious
#
about this and samaj has to get very very serious because even if you have only x number of teachers
#
how many caregivers do we have around a child millions right if everyone does a little bit
#
to help a child in their vicinity can you imagine what that magic that can do and it's easy
#
so if we focus on the abundance again i think this is the time and it's a reducing problem amit
#
because today about 25-26 million children are born every year in india but the rate of growth
#
of the population is dipping quite dramatically actually so that number will keep reducing so in
#
fact the problem is reducing in size and scope so i think three to five years we should be able to
#
do this it strikes me that you know one of the gratifying things about doing work like this
#
is that you can have a massive impact sometimes at scale right and it's a massive impact if so
#
many kids are reading again it's huge but as humans we also tend to want immediate gratification
#
we also want tend to want something that is measurable you know if you build a big business
#
you can sell out you can make money you can do all of those things it's visible it is there you can
#
say i built Infosys or whatever it is right but when you do when you work in the social sector
#
one of course there is a problem of scaling and we'll come to that later but even when you do
#
scale you know it's not measurable in a concrete sense you just know that man i'm i'm proud of i
#
mean this is huge right but and that you know after the fact after it has happened but in a lot of
#
work that people do in the social sector i'm guessing that there is no immediate gratification
#
even if things work out you know you will never really see the benefits in front of your eyes
#
sometimes like i think in a sense all of us are doing we are playing the long game you know you
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do something because it's the right thing to do the whole bhagavad-gita gandhi thing you do something
#
because it's the right thing to do even if you know you'll never in your lifetime perhaps see
#
the good that comes out of it right it's nebulous so does that mean that someone who like you know
#
a capitalist and a social worker they're both problem solvers right many of us are natural
#
problem solvers yeah this is a big problem i want to solve it but if you go the capitalism route say
#
i'll do it for profit i'll raise some money i'll get venture capital i'll do this these are my
#
measurables your metrics are clear you get that gratification you know and that's a particular
#
thing that's out there but in the social sector sometimes a gratification is not coming sometimes
#
whatever good you do may be invisible so you have to find other ways to motivate yourself and for
#
some people i guess just the challenge of solving a problem is enough but for some people you know
#
even that might not do so in your experience as someone who's been peripherally part of the
#
corporate world in a sense you've interacted so much with people within that world and at the same
#
time your world is really this world of social work of making change happen within samaj per se
#
so what are your thoughts on this do you think fundamentally different kinds of people get
#
attracted to it for example one thing that you've pointed out in your book and we might talk about
#
it in more detail is how when someone who's built a successful company will try to do something in
#
social work they'll lose a risk-taking appetite they'll just approach it differently so what is
#
the difference in mindsets you know i don't want you i mean obviously i know you don't want to
#
generalize or paint broad strokes but in general these are such different challenges do they require
#
different temperaments what kind of adjustments did you have to make how much did this change you
#
do yeah no you're right it probably is different there are different worlds with very different
#
metrics no question about that and in the corporate world of course there's a broad consensus on if
#
you make profits you're successful if you don't obviously your shareholders are losing and
#
obviously our enterprise is failing and then all the consequences of that have to be borne
#
in the social sector also we have a lot of failures with different kinds of consequences
#
and the metrics are very hard to agree upon i mean most most social sector work doesn't
#
allow you to work at population scale or anything even though for example pratham's mission statement
#
is every child in school and learning well it doesn't mean that actually every single child
#
will be able to be in school that's a big hairy audacious goal you set the target and everybody
#
moves it may not happen in your lifetime but that in that sense you can have a big broad mission
#
like that but the interim goals are very hard whereas here quarter to quarter the culture is
#
completely taken over the corporate world and you have to deliver quarter on quarter in fact
#
that's in some sense much harder here the time frames are much longer in the social sector
#
but you're right that people want to have quick wins that naturally we all want to see success
#
but that's why much of the discourse in the social sector is how to create sensible mileposts every
#
child will not be by tomorrow in school but what are the indicators that at least you're on the
#
right path and i think a lot of work has gone into developing interim metrics which help you to know
#
that and most people who come into it come from such high intrinsic motivation that that much
#
sustains them and unless you're making really big mistakes then you have to course correct
#
so does it require a different mindset yes if you're looking for quick wins and if you're
#
looking for very clear definitions of success and if you want to achieve monetary visible goals
#
then maybe the social sector is not the right place for you but i'm seeing so many more corporate
#
people walking out and coming to the social sector because at the end of it fine you want money and
#
you want prosperity so that your children can also be in good schools and universities or whatever
#
but you know there is a diminishing return even to that kind of wealth and many people
#
are left dissatisfied really so many people i meet of course it's obviously self-selection
#
they're going to come to me but people want more than anything they want meaning in their lives
#
they really need meaning they need to feel part of something good so long as they are in that
#
mindset that we are doing good all entrepreneurship is social as some of my friends say that by
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creating jobs by creating profits we are spreading wealth we are spreading prosperity so it's a good
#
thing but if that is still not giving them that deep human satisfaction more and more of them
#
and middle management level are trying to come and do something meaningful in the social sector
#
so maybe it's also an evolution of the human being that you achieve your material things and then you
#
graduate to wanting to give more of your human self to more human causes i've seen that happen
#
for sure but yeah the social sector is a hard space to be even even bill gates have had bill
#
gates has said it's much harder to create social change when we are in conversation we recognize
#
how much harder it is than to have a magnificent business empire like microsoft so uh definitely
#
it's harder let's talk about samaj now like you've written so eloquently in many many pieces about
#
how democracy cannot be a spectator sport and civil society has to you know take the lead and
#
do things and i want to double down on this essay of yours where you laid out five challenges before
#
civil society right and i want you to kind of elaborate on them one by one and what you've
#
learned about them because just the framing of these has obviously come from hard experience and
#
you know being on the ground seeing things not work out and a kind of understanding these
#
and and and the first of these five challenges in front of civil society that you've written
#
about is enabling good governance so you know explain this to me so for example in in banglore
#
right ramesh and swati ramanathan set up janagraha right so they what they wanted to do was to see if
#
people would are willing to get more involved in local governance so they help people to understand
#
that they could actually participate in formation of budgets what should the money first of all that
#
money should be transparent that this much is available and then you should be able to have
#
some kind of mechanism by which you can input before the state the civil civic budget is formed
#
so those are the kind of things innovations that have been done in indian civil society
#
to enable good governance because as i keep understanding and keeps coming back to me that
#
it won't happen on its own we all want good governance when nandan's election campaign was
#
going on everybody wanted actually just basic good governance they were asking for roads that
#
are not so treacherous they're asking for water supply they're asking for electricity they're
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asking for more decent housing just just like very basic building blocks of public infrastructure
#
and yet it is not there and it's we can't unfortunately afford to just sit there and
#
blame the politicians or the state so one first thing i would say is how do we participate in
#
co-creating the good governance that we all claim to crave we all crave it i could see it in that
#
campaign every naturally everybody wants that and remember how i described mumbai bombay to you
#
that we had that and how much it helps citizens to move ahead without every day being hassled
#
out of their wits so enable good governance is exactly what i mean by those three words
#
that that is the role of civil society to engage people in becoming more active citizens
#
because in a democracy you can't sit back and you can't enjoy the fruits of democracy without
#
that participation you can't you have to be really lucky to be in a country where that
#
happens automatically and i guess some of it would be just getting data and making it transparent
#
what government is doing right what they're doing wrong yeah so agreed there are many ways that
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people have been helping to enable better governance and you're very right a big part
#
of it is data the whole right to information movement just what work e-government's foundation
#
does is to help government to organize its own data better for disclosure and to make the whole
#
grievance redressal process much simpler and more transparent today you know many bureaucrats return
#
immediately information on what grievances had been have been redressed of course it's a continual
#
process so i think there have been many innovations in india on this on on open data on many pathways
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for addressing grievances so and we need much more of that the second way the second challenge
#
before civil society is scaling up yeah and that's a real huge challenge so because first of all they
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don't have access to two things which is money and talent not necessarily the kind of talent
#
that you actually need because you don't just need passionate people trying to change the world
#
unfortunately you also need accountants and admin people and legal people and everything
#
and those people are not necessarily intrinsically motivated to come and join this so it's very
#
difficult to order to establish organizations ready for scale even if you had the capital so
#
it's a real problem and the way to see it and this is what we try to do in our teams today
#
to help organizations to scale by thinking differently about what scale means so if we
#
were to think that what we really want to scale is the mission and not the organization
#
then the way you design your work will be very different because then what it means is instead
#
of me saying i okay suppose the thing is every child in school and doing well or whatever doesn't
#
mean i will set up 2000 schools and 5000 colleges it means i'll work on public policy or so many of
#
us will start small units wherever we are so instead of pushing solutions from the center out
#
what if we could distribute the ability to solve then your organization need not scale but your
#
mission will scale to the participation and co-creation of a million other nodes so if you
#
think of scale like that but this problem of being able to scale is something that civil society has
#
to grapple with so think differently about scale you may not be able to scale to a million person
#
organization like corporations do but if you can scale people's own agency to respond in their
#
context then you have succeeded so opening that idea of scale out a little bit can you give an
#
example of that where you know you took a problem you took a movement or an organization or whatever
#
or a mission and you manage to scale it by thinking differently prasam books is a very good example
#
because see there were a handful of publishers producing a few hundred books a year today there
#
are many more publishers today there are non-profit publishers today because of digital technology
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books are available in your hand anytime anywhere in any language there are 330 languages on the
#
website on story we were today so that scale was easy but books are easy but if you look at say
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eggstep where we set up this foundation in 2014 shankar marwada nandan and i the goal was to be
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able to enhance learning opportunities for 200 million people by 2025 no earlier than that i
#
think 2023 or whatever the reason we were able to do that is we were looking at this issue of scale
#
and nandan's and others experience in designing the adhar platform made us think the team was
#
already thinking differently i'm not going to go to every school or something like that right so how
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am i going to create some infrastructure which allows many many people to participate in move
#
driving this mission of accessibility to learning opportunities further and together with the union
#
government the team was able to develop the deeksha platform which means it's a platform
#
for teachers the national teacher platform which then became called deeksha and our teams helped
#
the government to achieve this it was ready just before the pandemic and overnight schools were
#
shut down colleges were shut down especially schools which we were we cared about more at
#
that time and this platform came in really handy to allow teachers to keep talking to each other
#
and learning from each other how to operate in a completely new environment a digital environment
#
how do you teach children virtually there's a pedagogy that you have to develop to teach
#
digitally and so the platform came in really handy 12 million teachers came onto that platform
#
in the height of the pandemic there were billions of transactions every month on that now it has
#
come to some steady state because schools have opened again but that's what if you can design
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not for a one too many but a many too many interactive situation where people can learn
#
from each other and then take it out to scale locally in their context that seems to us to be
#
the example of one way to scale up fast while distributing agency not solutions so that's some
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of the kind of thinking that we are doing and right now what we call the societal thinking team
#
is enabling many many many social entrepreneurs to take their missions to scale that's a lovely
#
distinction between distributing agency as opposed to distributing solutions and the moment you said
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12 million my desi mind translated it to 1.2 crores and just went wow so absolutely phenomenal and
#
and the third challenge before civil society which you kind of touched on while talking
#
about scaling is creating effective partnerships yeah so what happens often is because in in the
#
social sector see you have to really position yourself for that scarce donor capital and
#
therefore rather than think in terms of collaboration you think in terms of competition so it's not
#
reserved for the market sector this happens here too because of very scarce philanthropy capital
#
and so rather than focus on collaboration you focus on making your own work look very good to
#
the donor right and that is natural but then at some point you realize that's not good enough
#
that unless you bring in those strategic collaborations anyway you won't get anywhere
#
and your donors won't be happy so i think learning how to partner effectively is a big challenge for
#
social organizations but we are seeing more of it we are seeing more of it because especially
#
say for example in the environment sector the environment NGOs need to collectively have a
#
voice to speak to the government on because their issues are so critical for all of society and if
#
they are going to be in isolated silos they are not going to be able to forcefully impactfully
#
speak to government on policy matters so slowly those collaborations are happening and i think
#
more importantly donors are evolving to see that too that i need not put all my dollars donor dollars
#
into one thing but rather encourage collaboration and that i will therefore allow the distribution
#
they can also decide sometimes say a tree which i have been involved with for a while they get
#
allocations to help other organizations so then a grant can be made forward but today the government
#
is coming down on forward granting so unfortunately that form of collaboration is getting restricted
#
the fourth one was capacity building of the third sector yeah now who's going to pay for this right
#
that's why it's such a challenge somebody has to pay for the capacity building today for example
#
the government has so many regulations for any outfit to be ready to comply you need capacity
#
it's not automatic how many new rules you have to have certain kinds of bank accounts certain kind
#
of reporting so many ministries to report to you need to build up first for compliance all
#
compliances and all transparency that is required who's going to pay the cap money to allow these
#
organizations to be able to develop their capacity to comply and to grow and to be more and more
#
effective a huge dearth of capital for that huge huge dirt so i'm very happy to say that recently
#
through with edelweiss we started a fund called grow so hundred organizations have been selected
#
and a pool of philanthropic capital has come in and that is going to help these hundred organizations
#
to build their capacity and two three more funds like that are in the offing so it's happening but
#
it remains quite a challenge considering how many NGOs we have that need that and is it also a
#
challenge like i'll take a digression and we'll come back to the fifth point but is it also a
#
challenge like you pointed out when the state takes an aggressive attitude towards civil society
#
initiatives whether it is you know all the fcra regulations that kind of came in to stop foreign
#
funding and so on and so forth or just a general distrust people tend to have sometimes towards
#
how does one deal with those challenges let me be very honest it is a real challenge right now
#
there seems to be a deep mistrust of the social sector and i wish there wasn't because i know
#
many of these people and they're genuinely just trying to do good for the people and the country
#
and i think i believe that if you start with trust you end up with trust you can end up with
#
more trust but if you start with distrust then it's kind of difficult to get that trust back and
#
there is not blame on only one direction there is a lot of stuff that could have been done
#
differently in the last 40 years but i do wish that even people would recognize the value of
#
civil society in a democracy it's absolutely essential and governments around the world seem
#
to have become much more sensitive about dissent and people clamoring for rights and i wish that
#
wasn't the case because there is no state good enough or powerful enough to be able to reach the
#
first mile where the real vulnerabilities are you need intermediaries you need good good people you
#
need people who are willing to give of their time we talked about volunteerism and need to do good
#
deeds we need those people to help us reach the last what people call the last citizen
#
i call the first citizen of this country and so i wish there would be much more trust
#
between the state and civil society organizations recognizing that they have to sometimes be at odds
#
with each other you can't be very very friendly because you need to be able to point out to the
#
state what is going wrong and the state should see actually civil society organizations as a
#
very welcome mirror that allows you to course correct and i hope that will happen and that
#
we will have a slightly less fractious relationship between civil society organizations and various
#
governments in the country and your fifth point the fifth challenge before civil society was
#
unleash creativity of the civil sector yeah so in that sense is sometimes you know there are some
#
old ways of doing things you get used to doing things in a particular way what i meant was that
#
we need much more innovation we need fresh thinking and i think that also comes with having fresh
#
leaders in the sector and we are seeing a lot of young people actually one of my portfolios
#
precisely to support young leaders creating new organizations and i must say they think very
#
differently from my generation and beyond me also first of all they think digital first of all they
#
think of quick they're ready for quick quick cycles of success and failure like they have a
#
very different risk appetite i think they are willing to fail faster and try new things so
#
we need much more of that that is the creativity that needs to be unleashed i also think people
#
need to be able to tell their stories much much much better one of the reasons for the distrust
#
is you really don't know the civil society has not been able to tell it's few organizations have
#
but many simply haven't been able to convince both the state agencies and their own civil
#
society at large that what they are doing is incredibly powerful so that creativity in
#
communication we have to support in building let's talk about philanthropy now you know to
#
kind of zoom down on that and you've quoted swami vivekanand in your book where he says take risks
#
in your life if you win you can lead if you lose you can guide and then you point out that indian
#
philanthropy doesn't take enough risks again the same thing as a capitalist startup may i'll have
#
a moonshot idea and i'll do crazy things but in the social sector i'm just playing it safe going
#
within certain guardrails not kind of trying hard enough so what experiences brought you to the
#
conclusion that we don't take enough risk and how you know how did that change the way that you
#
operated in terms of thinking about risk so it's it's the see mostly wealth is in the hands of the
#
capitalist right i'm a bit of an outlier in that so so the way they do their failure is glorified
#
right in the in the world of all the backers of crazy ideas failure is glorified and there's if
#
you fail there's more capital to help you in your next venture now nobody's those same people want
#
to succeed all the time in their social ambitions one is because they don't know how the sector
#
behaves and those who have tried to have understood and have course corrected but changed their
#
way of change their expectations but till then it is quite natural for them to think why are they
#
why can't you have more impact and show me why so then they stay in safe areas right they stay in
#
safe areas like education if you set up a college you're fine right if you set up a university or
#
a college at least you know you're doing the right thing you're definitely benefiting people
#
but there are so many million things remaining to be done this country's infrastructure has still
#
to be built out for this century and there's just so much work to be done and how much can the state
#
do it can't do everything so i wish people would take much more risk whether it is just in i mean
#
there are hundred things that need to be done but most of philanthropy capital is going into
#
education and some into health care whereas there are all these other million things for me it was
#
easy because one is as i said i don't come from the business sector but as a journalist because
#
all the things i told you in my life i wanted to do different things and that's why my portfolio
#
is slightly different from that of other people and basically the way i develop my portfolio i
#
look for ideas individuals or institutions that are doing something right and of course integrity
#
is the first thing one would look at commitment is the second and then doesn't matter which sector
#
my portfolios get built out because i found ideas institutions and individuals that were willing to
#
do so much and put out so much of good stuff out there so there's one way to frame what you're
#
going to do and a lot of people come to us actually to nandan and me young people especially how should
#
i do philanthropy and so that's where we say be ready to take more risk be ready to fail much more
#
right just like you do a venture capitalist willing one out of 10 investments they want to succeed
#
similarly it should be in the social sector if you if one out of 10 succeeds the impact is
#
completely outsized completely so need to bring that same mentality here don't play it safe that's
#
not what philanthropic capital is not safe it's not a safe harbor at all it is genuine societal
#
risk capital is very very badly needed another very insightful you know essay you wrote spoke
#
about how the you know there are three key things that you need to create an enabling environment
#
trust patient capital and allowing the conversation on failure and innovation to be upfront and
#
transparent so let's talk about trust like at one point you write quote one factor is a trust
#
deficit although the wealthy want to give there is a lost there is a lot of philanthropic capital
#
all dressed up and with nowhere to go largely because of this trust deficit how do you give
#
who do you give to how do you get impact stop code and like simultaneously there is a question wait
#
follow-up question waiting to be asked on what you think of effective altruism and that must be
#
something that you know any the wealthy face that how can i get most bang for the buck but before
#
we even get there there is a trust question so can you can you elaborate on this a bit yeah i think
#
i've often said to my friends in civil society there is also a fault from the civil society
#
sector that we haven't built bridges of trust to the india's wealthy at all because there's foreign
#
money coming in which seemed to be politically and ideologically aligned to what india civil
#
sector was doing india civil sector has been a strange mix of marxism and gandhianism so
#
so in the past at least now we are seeing a lot of other kinds of organizations coming up and
#
there seemed to have been alignment you know worrying about the rights of the smallest guy
#
and how do you create the systems to reach that person is i think more or less what people are
#
broadly speaking doing and there's alignment for that so they did not really make any great
#
effort to reach out to india's new capitalists right new capitalists also busy from the 90s
#
onwards but that didn't happen so first i will say every time we point one finger there three
#
are pointing back at us so i'll start with that but on this side also i think yes they want to
#
do philanthropy they have excess capital they want to deploy it but remember political ideologies
#
matter in such situations like as i said this our sector is quite a bit to the left and i don't
#
think the capitalist political mindset is left right gandhian okay to some extent reach out to
#
the vulnerable you know feed the hungry cloth the naked and all is fine but after that when it comes
#
to political rights i don't think there was much discourse debate understanding from the side of
#
the industrial capitalists and no attempt on this side i feel to bridge any kind of because if people
#
understood each other there would probably be more space opened up so the trust deficit has been a
#
long time coming but today there are many new kinds of organizations that are much more savvy
#
about how to communicate to to india's new wealthy and so you are seeing philanthropy on the rise
#
not as much as you would need or want but because these bridges are being built some trust is
#
developing but trust comes slowly and i guess you've seen this from both sides right you're
#
involved in social work at the same time you're also giving money and when you're giving money
#
with that hat on like how does at some point like at one level you give money to causes you care
#
about so i want people to read and obviously i care about water so you give money there so at
#
one point it's just driven by that inner conviction but at another level it is also about how can i be
#
most effective get most bang for the buck as it were and you can even here like you said it depends
#
on risk appetite you can take a lot of equivalent of fixed deposits i guess and make safe bets in
#
safe areas and you know the the typical silos or you can take a venture capitalizing and try
#
10 moon shot ideas and see what kind of works so tell me about how your approach towards i
#
won't even call it giving i'll call it investing if i may is that an apt term because
#
you know the returns are not monetary but they are psychic i guess so no i'm investing for a
#
good samaj yeah exactly that's what i want to do so which is why actually doesn't matter which
#
sector of course there are some sectors i care about more than others but as i said throughout
#
my book i say and throughout my work it is apparent that whatever i do is how can we build the
#
resilient strength of the samaj to solve its own problems and that's where i see the role of civil
#
society right so whichever sector that's why i have so many different portfolios people say
#
why you're opening one more portfolio right but for me it's not that water education environment
#
it is that underlying strength of the samaj to unleash its creativity its innovation its
#
leadership and its participation actually that's what i want to invest in in whichever sector
#
because i think that is going to create the stable foundation on which the next layers of
#
productivity efficiency equity will happen so no matter what i do that is that is where we are
#
coming from and that's where i am coming from nandan has his own very different philosophy
#
so for me that doesn't matter so much which sector this is what we want to this is what
#
we want to increase social capital actually you increase social capital the ability of people to
#
act as citizens in their in their context to create the better society that they also can
#
belong to in whichever way it doesn't matter which way that's and we saw bits of that emerging
#
in the pandemic the pandemic taught all of us so much but that's really my been my philosophy
#
of what you're calling investing that no matter which sector if we are not doing those are the
#
metrics we are looking at are we doing that or are we not doing that it takes time five years
#
10 years 15 years some of the things i we have started will take 45 50 100 years i don't know
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and some solutions create the next set of problems so we don't know it's an on there's no end point
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which is why because i don't believe there's a sharp end point again that ends and means the
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means of getting to any end is to create that active so much so that's where i invest so i'll
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take a digressive question since you mentioned nandan's approach to investing as well and what
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uh sort of and the first is about the commonality in the sense that what this mutual friend i
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referred to earlier told me about you is that he was he said one thing both you and nandan have
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in common is that a lot of people sometimes they will look from the present towards the future and
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try to figure out what they need to get there but what you and nandan do is that it's almost as if
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you're sitting in the future and you're looking at the present and you're figuring out how to
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build a bridge right which i suppose is a is a vision thing or whatever but you know can you
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elaborate on that i found that very interesting and even though it's not something you said
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certainly something that i have learned from nandan nandan has the amazing ability to look
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from 100 000 feet and at one one foot he can see from very close by and he can see from very far
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at the same time so while he'll be thinking of that very large almost architectural way of
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of systems thinking he will get his teams to look from here and the detailed way of you know building
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the design into it at the block level it's uh to achieve that goal is something that i've been
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watching him doing for a while now and i don't know i don't think much of it has come to me
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but in terms of the societal mission i think that we have and you have to start from there so
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so i mean like we said every we said a book in every child's hand not in every third child's
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hand right so it's a big thing like then if you are going to say every every child right you're
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not leaving out some children then i have to design something or support something that has at least
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a reasonable chance of looking at every child without exclusion then how do you design you're
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forced forced to think about inclusion and scaling the mission you have to and then you want to do
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certain things like i won't say okay i'll start with giving three books to the five children you
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won't do that you will save every child has to get then what do i have to unblock what how do i
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go from scarcity to abundance how do i allow people to solve so you have to start thinking
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and designing very differently once you know that your goal is of inclusion for all right whatever
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sector everyone should have that same opportunity that same access and i think that's what helps
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to start from there and come back from here to do the actual work i guess in a sense rather than
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give a hungry man a fish you teach a hungry man how to fish building those processes yeah but
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it's more than that you know we we misrepresent people when we say they don't know how to fish
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what's really happening is their access to the lake is gone they know how to fish they don't know
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how to get to the they don't have the political or whatever space to exercise their abilities in
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many cases and we have we have to increase that access people teach us how to fish what's the big
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deal but that access and that sense that i can do this i don't need you to do this for me
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if this the state's job is to make sure the points to that public access are kept via viable
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that is where i see the state's job really people are more than capable of figuring things out for
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themselves they really are so we have to just keep enabling people so which is why i also don't like
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the state's role of of maibab sarkar the state has to make things possible for samaj to do
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better off so actually they have to focus on inclusion and access and creating better laws
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then society takes over society knows how to organize society knows how to innovate
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but if channels are blocked is the access how even if he knows how to fish what is he going to do
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you those are the things to think about because today's lakes are digital lakes how do i give
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everybody access to a digital lake so that that person can digitally fish god this analogy is
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terrible but you know what i mean no it's a lovely analogy i mean the digital kind of made it but
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it's it's lovely i love it access to the lake is the key thing here and this is of course a
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commonality between you and nandan but if i am to sort of ask you about a possible difference
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between you and anybody else that do you think that being a woman philanthropist change you know
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you bring a slightly different gaze to it than others do because i am guessing that many male
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philanthropists would come to philanthropy after success in business they would bring with them a
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problem solving engineering mindset or whatever and that would perhaps make them that would perhaps
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mean that there are some blind spots somewhere and you are sort of coming at it from a different
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kind of place so did you feel that your gaze also has you know made you look at things differently
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and learn things differently no definitely being a writer being a journalist being myself a social
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entrepreneur never having to have to worry about is quarter code did i meet my investors expectations
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right that that that disciplines you in a completely different way i was lucky that i
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got to do what i love to do and to write and to start i'll be a social entrepreneur so obviously
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my gaze will be different right it will be i have not seen the world of market regulation of that
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constant need to feed the the information for your investors that's a whole different race
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very hard very hard and naturally you'll bring that with you if you come into this sector
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whereas i was just able to be fairly innocent in that sense and just go with whatever that issue
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that i was involved with and see who's doing what good work so actually much easier much much easier
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for me the other key thing to an enabling environment which you mentioned was patient capital
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and at one point you write quote i know how difficult it is to have to respond to donors who
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don't understand the ground reality the reality is that things keep changing and you need to be
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able to respond to the changing situation in a flexible manner whereas if you're stuck with some
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programmatic kind of back donation or something very specific it really makes the organization
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very rigid and makes people very anxious about reporting to the donors top code so one element
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is a donor should be able to recognize that failure is honorable and that it's a probabilistic game and
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you know have that kind of mindset but the other aspect of it which i also want to ask about is
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that sometimes what can happen is that donors can be restricted by their own thinking by the
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kind of guardrails that they put on any project by the way that you know and also by the systems
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and processes around it like our friend shruti rajgopalan for example what she and tyler carvin
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do with emergent ventures is just saying that we'll remove our biases from the question we'll pick
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people that we believe in and then we'll give you money and we won't come back to you you do
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what the hell you want and that seems to me to be a disruptive and a very interesting and a delightful
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model as well so what's your thinking on this whole ecosystem look at look at innovation
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mechanism is also brought in right of course they do some due diligence as agency is doing due
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diligence but after that she's doing exactly what you said right she's saying i'll give you x
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million dollars do what you have to do and i mean i will come back at some point but i'm she's
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beginning with patient capital backed by trust and with obviously some data and knowledge so those
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kind of innovations are what we need right patient capital is the name of the game both in the venture
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sector and in the social venture sector so yeah more power to patient capital if we can get it
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there's so many rich people amit in this country so many and we are not even counting the politicians
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but more of them and many want to we have to make it easier for them to give much more okay so here's
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a question for you before i move on to you know my last question as it were but this digressive
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question is that supposing someone listening to this is a person with capital and they want to
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invest it in society in samaj and they want to give and they're looking for causes and right now
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they're just confused that where do i give how do i measure if it is the right thing to do how do i
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how do i measure my money is being put to good use i want to enter you know is there any enabling
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organization that helps me you know etc etc what advice would you give to investors there are
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plenty of organizations now five or six of them there is like nudge there is of course give india
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there is dasara there's samita there are five or six at least if not more there's bridge span india
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there's so many that will help you right away and you know some people do go to other philanthropists
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who've already started their journeys you can learn from them but don't hesitate at the door
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you know all you have to do is give okay fine it it won't be used well and then you'll think again
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but don't hesitate at the door just jump in don't wait for advice the best advice you need
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is your own action will give you show you the light do something even if you fail at it but
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that hesitation is causing analysis paralysis okay i'm saying to people you have excess wealth
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you want to do good with it don't wait just do any okay i don't know restore an archaeological
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monument or i don't know anything there's so much to do in india right do anything and the minute
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you actually do it within six to nine months you'll know what to do next that i will guarantee
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of course take advice go to intermajories but in the meantime just do something with your money
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that is in any area that you like that is really the best advice bias for action so as i go to my
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last question what i will urge everyone to do is just to you know pick up your book you know samaj
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sarkar bazar and also and you've got this lovely message for the young which i will quickly quote
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where you exhort the young to stay curious stay connected stay committed and then you also say
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quote participate with humility participate without judgment participate with self-reflection
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and you will see the difference between doing it one way and doing it another stop code but my last
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question for you is about none of this because now people can just go and read your book and it's
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about time but my last question is like a traditional question for guests on the show
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that for me and my listeners i'll ask you to recommend books films music any kind of art that
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you care deeply about and love so much that you want to share it with everyone oh dear these
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questions i always don't like because i always forget what i wanted to say books oh my goodness
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where do i begin i don't know look up lewis hide it's just an unusual recommendation come lewis
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hides books read as many bio just i came late to this read as many biographies as you can find
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it's kind of like listening to amit's podcast i guess which are the most memorable biographies
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i know just now this recently i've been reading i mean i read of course i've read just recently
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even i've read of devaki jay and ishar alu wali of course i read the saavarkar one and i read all
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the big name ones but i've been reading others of people whom i didn't i read indiranvi like
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a lot of women as you as you can see a sabeera merchant and a lot of people who've written slim
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autobiographies but read autobiographies and biographies i see i think it's teaching me
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a lot rather than just reading about people especially reading in their own voice really
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gave me a lot and even biographies i read the two volumes on saavarkar as well and i've been reading
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ramachandra guha as well so you get two completely different perspectives read diverse rather than
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mentioning books by name like i always have a pile of books and i always try to read one fiction and
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one non-fiction at the same time and rather than mention books i would say read different kind of
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books and go out of your way to read books that you of authors that you may not agree with my
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friend manish sabarwal sends us bucket fulls of books many of them are different say things
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different from what i thought i believed but any book you pick up will teach you something so more
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than name a long list of books i can put them out on my website later now that you've asked this
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question but always have a pile next to your bedside always have one fiction one non-fiction
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read a lot of biographies and autobiographies and go out of your way to read authors whose opinion
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may be different from yours that's how you create the good a good reading society becomes a good
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thinking society a good thinking society will eventually have more curiosity than certitude
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and i think that will help all of us move beyond polarizations to more
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empathy and acceptance not just tolerance but respect
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wonderful and i'll i'll you know end with uh something that you've said somewhere i don't
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know where i picked it up but but i absolutely love this phrase humble in approach but not modest in
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ambition yeah and we can't afford to be modest look at what we are all facing we can't afford
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to be modest in our ambition for society yeah but if we are modest we can't afford to be modest
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but if we are not humble in that approach arrogant people make a lot of mistakes a lot and we can't
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afford those things are so urgent around us right now that i think and humility comes immediately
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when you realize just exactly how ignorant we are when you engage with the real world so that's that's
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that's fairly obvious but more than that every morning keep a mirror in front of you not just
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to do your makeup but to really look at yourself and maybe every evening try to put yourself in
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someone else's shoes such wise words Rohini thank you so much for coming on the show it's an honor
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thank you amit i do want to say you're a phenomenal moderator and you do so much hard work so no wonder
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your listeners appreciate you so much thank you amit for what you do thank you so much namaste
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if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
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do pick up Rohini's excellent book samaj sarkar bazar the citizen first approach
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Rohini doesn't happen to be on social media which is why she's so productive but you can
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follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene
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and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the
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scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go
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over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this
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