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There is a lot that is heart-breakingly wrong with India.
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It's a tragedy that so much of this country remains so poor that we are torn apart by
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different kinds of divisions, that our discourse is still so poisoned and still so clueless
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about the root causes of our suffering.
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This is not because of any one political party or person, we've been hit by bad governance
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and worse thinking for pretty much all our 76 years.
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So as an individual, how do we deal with this?
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One way is to say, hey, not my problem, I made it out of this, I'm just gonna do what
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I can to maximize my happiness, that's all I can control.
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Another way is to try and help the unfortunate around us whenever we can, find charitable
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causes to support, help the unfortunate people we come across and generally be a kind person.
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But a third way is to dig deeper and decide to do something about the root causes of our
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backwardness, the poor economic thinking, the bad public policy, the terrible incentives
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of the state, the terrible incentives that it creates for our people.
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To change the system is not a trivial task.
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In fact, it is so big that you might have to go all in and give yourself up to this,
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even though there can be no immediate gratification.
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You have to battle self-doubt, you have to do something not because it brings reward,
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but because it is the right thing to do.
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You have to play the long game.
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This requires a special kind of cussedness and maybe a special kind of person.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Nitin Pai, Director of the Takshashila Institution and an important public
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intellectual of our times.
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I first met Nitin online during the legendary blogging days of the autees when we were both
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I remember him as a sharp thinker on foreign policy in those early days, who also had strong
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opinions on what is wrong with our country.
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He worked in Singapore in those days and unlike many Amche-Argyanis, decided to not just talk
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about change but try to make it happen.
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First, he built a community of thinkers around himself, then he shifted to India and started
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the Takshashila Institution to train people in public policy.
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They have turned out over 10,000 students so far, adding a thousand more to that list
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Takshashila has strong principles in its DNA.
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They do not accept foreign funding and they insist on staying bipartisan and not supporting
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this party or that party.
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They have stuck to these principles at a high cost.
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They've also gathered some fine thinkers in their team, many of whom like Pranay Kota
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Sunny and Manoj Keval Ramani have in fact been on the show.
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Nitin and his team used to run a policy magazine called Pragati and I was the editor there
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for a couple of years and used to hang out with them in Bangalore quite often.
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After Pragati's shutdown, I continued to use their office and their in-house studio.
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That's what I do whenever I go to Bangalore and this episode was one of four recorded
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there earlier this month.
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I have recorded episodes with Nitin before but never in this new format where I dig deep
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into a person's life in an oral history kind of way.
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I enjoyed learning about his life here and also discussing ideas, his thinking is always
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He pulls no punches, neither do I, so if you like some masala, you will actually hear a
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heated argument between us.
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But some disagreements aside, I love Nitin's drive, his commitment, how he stays so engaged
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and this fabulous institution that he's built.
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He didn't just sit there, he did something.
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Oh, by the way, Nitin has also written this wonderful book called Nitopadesha, which is
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great fun to read and will both entertain and enlighten you.
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We didn't discuss a book at all in this episode though.
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Nitin's had a rich life, there was so much to talk about and in many ways a book speaks
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for itself, so do buy it.
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And now before we get to the conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Nitin, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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Hey Amit, it's a pleasure to be back on this show after such a long time.
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You know, it's, we've done episodes before, but in my new format, this is kind of the
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first time I've really had you on where I get the opportunity to know you a little better
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as a person because most of our interaction has been over ideas and we were bloggers once
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and then we worked together over here when I was with Prakriti and all our interactions
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have been in the field of ideas and things we do and all of that.
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But I don't really feel I, I mean, I think I know you reasonably well as a person to
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get a sense of the kind of human being you are, but I don't know any of your backstory.
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So I really want to begin there, but before we even kind of try to get to a chronological
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narrative of your childhood and all, all of which I am interested in, I was wondering
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what can you tell me about yourself, which people who only know your public face do not
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For example, one question to start with is that when it comes to art, like books, music,
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films, what makes you cry?
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What's the last time you cried while consuming one of those?
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I think reality makes me cry more than art, right?
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For me, even to this day, being on a street, being inside a car at a street junction and
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a kid coming there and begging is still a point where I have to fight back tears, right?
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Because it seems unconscionable that you're in 2023, people around you are fairly well
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off, India is not dirt poor country, which used to be 40 years ago.
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And yet you have in a city like Bangalore, where there's prosperity all around, a little
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kid at the street corner begging, right?
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I think that makes me cry more.
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In terms of art, literature, I try to read stuff and watch stuff that doesn't make me
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cry because reality is, there's already enough in reality that can bring tears into your
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eyes and make you feel bad, that you don't need to resort to fiction or art to get that
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same kind of emotional experience.
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So in that sense, my wife calls it an escapist attitude.
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I practically avoid tear-jerking scenarios in movies, arts, et cetera.
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My reading list is specifically tuned towards avoiding those things.
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Which is kind of interesting because I think that there is sort of disjunction or dissonance
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And there are two aspects to that about seeing kids begging outside the car.
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And one is that they get normalized really fast because we see it every day.
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And it's really a case of the seed of the unseen.
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Like I often think of there being like two cities and the scene city is a city you are
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in, inside your car, inside your office, inside whatever.
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And the unseen city is what you do not see because it's normalized, not because you're
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a bad person or you lack empathy, but it just becomes invisible to you if you want to go
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on with your life because you can't have tears every freaking day when you're commuting,
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And that's one angle of it.
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The other disjunction I'm talking about is also sometimes the disjunction between the
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temptation of wanting to do something immediately and the realization that a lot of the sorrows
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that we see around us are caused by things that are unintuitive, you know?
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For example, you might be tempted to pause and give money to every person you see begging
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around you, every person.
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It is correct to think in a sort of an immediate sense that it will help them in an immediate
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sense if you're giving a hundred rupee note to every kid.
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And it will help you in a self-aggrandizing sense because you will feel better about yourself.
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It's good for your ego also.
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But it does nothing to solve the problem and in fact, it might make the situation worse
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for everybody concerned.
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So how does one sort of, you know, it's almost as if we have to adopt two frames of thinking
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and one frame of thinking is that immediate thing, you know?
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So if somebody is hurt, you know, if a child bangs their elbow on the table, your immediate
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thing is, you know, how can I make her feel less pain right now?
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How can I make her stop crying?
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That's your immediate concern.
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But at another level, your mind is thinking, okay, I need to stop having sharp objects
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in the house or tables with ends that are kind of jutting out because there are kids
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So it's almost like two ways of thinking and one could be Nitin, the person who is
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upset by sorrow to the extent that you try not to consume it in your heart.
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But at the other end is also Nitin, the thinker who has to take a dispassionate look sometimes
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Yeah, you're absolutely right.
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I think it's actually a coping mechanism.
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The invisibility of pain around you or even ugliness around you is a defense mechanism
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that humans have when confronted with challenges that they cannot grok how to solve, right?
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I mean, if there's poverty in the country and you're walking in the street of a city
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and you see it every day, if you overly absorb it and it grows into you and you'll probably
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go crazy or you'll give up or you know, something nasty will happen.
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So you defend yourself by sort of beginning to see it less, right?
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And I think that's probably what's happening.
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I used to be judgmental about society for ignoring these things, but now I'm a little
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more sympathetic because I feel that you have to protect your brain, right?
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You need cognitive security, you have to protect your brain from impulses, feelings that can
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consume you and problems that are too large for an individual to solve, right?
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Or even as a community to solve in a finite period of time.
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So you just sort of stop seeing it.
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Speaking of which, as a detour, China Mewill has a book called The City and the City.
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And that's The Seen and the Unseen.
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I've actually referred to that book in this context in an episode I did with Mohit Satyanand
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and Pooja Mehra a long time back, we were talking about the economy.
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So in this exact context, because that's exactly what it is.
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And for listeners, the book is basically, there are two cities inhabiting the same space
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that are invisible to each other, not in this rich poor kind of way, but just in a science
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fictiony kind of way, but it's quite beautiful.
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And I think that's in a way, we are all in that city and the city, right?
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Because we are in this wonderful, well-designed, nice place to live in, nice place to work
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And then we have to transit through the other city, which we then after a while stop seeing,
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especially if you have a chauffeur or a driver who drives your car, in which case you don't
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even have to worry about what's happening in front of you in front of the windscreen.
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I drive every day and every drive, every commute reminds me of the challenges that you have.
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In a way, it's a metaphor for the larger public policy challenges that you have in the country.
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The way people behave on the roads, the roads are constructed, the way you behave on the
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road and the feelings that you have when you encounter other people behaving on the road.
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But back to your question about the micro and the macro, whether if you want to oversimplify
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and frame it, should you give arms to every deserving person that you see or should you
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not give arms at all and do something else in order to alleviate that suffering?
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Of course, there's a third option which says do nothing.
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Don't worry about giving arms.
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Don't worry about doing anything.
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Just pursue your self-interest.
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I think that's not what we're talking about.
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I think any considerable person will have to deal with one of the two options, which
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is you give arms or you do something systemic.
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My thinking on this has changed over the last 20 years.
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20 years ago, I used to have long discussions with two of my friends.
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One is Sameer Wagle, who's on the board of Takshashila now.
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The other is Anant Nageshwaran, who's the chief economic advisor and was a co-founder
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When we were in Singapore, we used to have these conversations all the time.
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Anant was big on charitable giving.
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One of the best features about him is that he has donated to all causes, big and small,
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over the last 30 years and is still very, very philanthropic minded at a personal level.
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I used to say that, Anant, this is not on because you are just giving money to an NGO
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which feeds the children in a city.
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By doing so, you are reducing the incentive for the society and the state in that city
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to do what it's supposed to do.
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The Constitution of India says we are a welfare state, which means that the state has an obligation
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to provide welfare services to the people.
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Whether we agree that it should be a welfare state or not is another story.
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Fact of the ground, it is a welfare state.
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The government, which takes our tax money, should be doing this, should be feeding the
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children or taking care of the poor or providing shelter, et cetera, and the state is not doing
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You have an NGO which goes out there and starts providing these services.
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As a philanthropist, you give money to the NGO and the NGO is doing a good job.
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It's giving arms, the equivalent of giving arms and it's alleviating suffering at the
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But in doing so, you are reducing the incentive for the state to even think of this as a problem
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It still takes your money but instead of spending it on welfare, it spends it on some boondoggle
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I said, look, you're feeding the problem, you're making the problem worse and Anant
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used to say, look, I agree with what you say but I think as a person, I feel I should give
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money and make alleviate suffering and I used to be unconvinced with Anant's answer.
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Now 15, 20 years later, I have a more sympathetic approach to that because I think that the
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systemic solution might take too long and might be too diffused to alleviate immediate
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So if you look at this as a trolley problem, will you now give five rupees or a hundred
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rupees to a person you see and alleviate that suffering immediately or will you work in
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ways that will alleviate that person's suffering in a finite period of time?
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The second answer I think will take too long and you don't know what level of effort you
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need to put in as an individual.
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Forget about public policy wonks, those of us who are in the social sector.
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If you are an ordinary person working in a private sector entity, what is the level of
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effort that you need to put in to get a systemic solution?
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Is that effort more or less than a hundred rupees which elevates the suffering individually?
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I think a rational decision can be that a hundred rupees is a better way to do that.
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Now this answer differs from person to person.
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It's not a universal answer.
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If you feel that giving arms at a particular point is the best way to alleviate the suffering
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around you, I think go ahead and do it.
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But I disagree with that.
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In my calculation, I think those of us who I would consider have entered the ranks of
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the elite of this country or are born to the ranks of the elite of this country have an
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obligation to do what we can to help the lot of those who are not yet elite or not even
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at the baseline of a decent existence.
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So we have a social obligation or a moral obligation to do that.
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And the best way to do that, I think, is to do a systemic solution.
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Because things are complex and things are non-intuitive.
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So intuitively doing something might have counterproductive outcomes and you really
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So systemic solutions which are well thought out, especially involving getting agencies
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of society to do what they ought to, is the right way to do it.
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So for example, you must get the government to do what the government ought to do.
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You must get the business to do what the business ought to do.
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You must get civil society to do what the civil society ought to do, not intervene in
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Do what you are supposed to do.
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In fact, that's a story which comes out in my book about your dharma is not only doing
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what you are supposed to do, it's also not doing what you're not supposed to do.
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In this broad sense, I also wonder if this is not just about the distinction that you
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draw is sort of very often, in the way that you put it, a distinction between the personal
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act of generosity where I give a 100 rupee note to a person at the traffic signal and
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the systemic intervention where we play the long game, you try to influence public policy
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or public opinion or whatever it is that you try to bring about changes in the system because
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you realize that there is a different road.
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You don't want to give, it's like the old saying, you don't give a person a fish, you
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Then you feed him for a lifetime.
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And the problem, one problem that I often see and I'm thinking aloud here is that the
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mindset of the first person, the personal intervention, take a 100 rupee and give it
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to the kid is often a mindset that people extrapolate either because they're mistaken
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or they're intellectually lazy to the larger picture where they feel that the system's
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job is also to give a 100 rupees to that kid.
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And often when the system does it, the system does it through coercion because they're taking
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it from other people and they're giving it to the kids.
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And often in times of crisis, you need to do that.
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That's a necessary anesthetic, the state has to step in, et cetera, et cetera.
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But when that becomes all of the solution space, it is, then it becomes a problem because
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ultimately, and you've pointed this out as well, that our way out is economic growth.
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You've pointed out that for every 1% in GDP rise, something between 2% and 3% of the population
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are lifted out of poverty.
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And the hundreds of millions who have come out of poverty since 91 is a huge moral victory
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just as it is a huge moral failing that they were there to begin with and that many continue
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But in a lot of circles, the mindset is stuck with that zero-sum, immediate, intuitive mindset
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that just as an individual, you want to give a 100 rupees.
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And I agree with you and Ananth that that's a good thing, you should give a 100 rupees.
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But at a systemic level, you need more than that.
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It cannot be the be-all and the end-all of the solution.
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I mean, there is even sort of one of the new and bizarre fashions of the time is all this
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talk of degrowth, which of course is linked to other issues also, and let's not go there
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But you know, so is this also sort of an obstacle one has to face that the systemic kind of
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changes that you and I agree would be needed, mostly agree, I think you and I would mostly
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be in agreement on even the details of that, are actually not widely, you know, considered
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by people to be the systemic solution necessarily.
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And I think it's got to do with the fact that the idea of citizenship and egalitarian citizenship
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in India is only 75 years old.
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Before the constitution of India came into force, I don't think there was an imagination
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of an egalitarian citizenship.
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What I mean by that is that we are all citizens, we are all equal, socially we are equal.
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I mean, we could be rich and poor, smart and not so smart and, you know, fair or dark or,
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you know, they're kind of Hindi-speaking or Tamil-speaking.
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The diversity is there, which are, you know, natural or resource endowments.
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But conceptually, normatively, that we are all citizens and we have equal rights and
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we have equal status as far as the civil society is concerned, this is a very new idea.
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And in the absence of idea, before this idea, what did you have?
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You had a subject and patron or a subject and a Maharaja relationship, Raja-praja relationship.
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Whether it was colonial, whether it was pre-colonial, whether it was Mughal times, whether it was
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pre-Mughal times, you know, all the way back to history, there was never a time when you
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Now, we could argue that there were some places in history where, you know, there were Ganarajyas
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or Janapadas where citizens were more or less equal and so on.
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I think there were, but it was an exception rather than the norm.
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The norm was that you were usually a supplicant, you were a subject and you would go in times
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of need to your patron, to your lord and say, look, I have problems, please do something
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And the lord out of his generosity would do it.
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And now there was also an obligation on the lord to do it in the sense that it was not
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pure altruism on the part of the lord.
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It was part of the dharma of that relationship that your lordship requires you to not only
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look after your subjects, but also in the times of need, you know, you are the insurer,
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you are the lender, you are the healthcare provider, you are the, all of that.
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Now, this is idealized, of course, you know, obviously people would not take these dharmas
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as seriously, but conceptually it was there.
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Now, we've replaced that kind of a relationship with an egalitarian citizenship for the last
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But 70 years is a very small period of, very short period of time given, you know, civilizational
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So it is not surprising that we still have relics of that subject-patron relationship
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in the present day governance, right?
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Classic case is ex-gratia payments.
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There is a bus accident or a train accident and the government announces an ex-gratia
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payment of, you know, two, two lakhs.
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Now I think it's five to 10 lakhs for a person who's, who's passed away.
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Now what's an ex-gratia payment?
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By its very definition, you're doing it out of, it's gratuity, right?
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It's, you're feeling that, oh, I have this obligation or I feel that I must give something
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You're not obliged to give it.
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There's no legal obligation.
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You're just giving it ex-gratia, right?
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That's like, you know, going to the Mughal emperor and he takes out the moti, the chain
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of pearls around his neck and gives it to a guy, hum aapse khush hain, toh yeh leh je,
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It's that kind of, that is ex-gratia.
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And I think it's, it's boring for a, for a democracy to, to have something called an
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Now, what would you do if you didn't have an ex-gratia?
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That's an important question, right?
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In most places you would have insurance.
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You would have a culture of insurance that each person takes insurance to his or her
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level of risk profile or reward profile.
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And there might even be a public insurance.
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So for example, every railway journey will have an insurance of 10 rupees taken by the
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state with LIC or somebody.
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And when there is a, when there is a crisis or an accident, then there is an insurance
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That is a egalitarian way to settle it because you as a citizen value your life so you can
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But you as a citizen are also part of this national community and we as the state, especially
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a welfare state, has this obligation to look after you should anything go wrong.
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So we'll, we'll have a compulsory insurance which is provided by the state to insure you
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You have, you don't have this.
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Instead you have an ex-gratia system.
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Now the problem is you can't move to the insurance based system as long as there's ex-gratia,
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And people will resist moving to that because an ex-gratia seems to be a much easier way
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to get your 10 lakhs versus the same 10 lakhs which you might get with an insurance scheme.
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The end result is the same, but perceptually there are two problems.
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One is citizen is always now, you know, doesn't trust the state enough to do this right, like
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the farm agitations would have told you, that you just are not, you don't trust the state.
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You don't trust the promises that the state makes.
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So you say, look, I'd rather stay with the known devil rather than go to an unknown god.
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The second is very, a lot of people don't know how insurance works, right?
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And they probably think there is a lot more paperwork to be done and so on and so forth.
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And therefore you don't want insurance.
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So you're stuck in that kind of a thing.
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And getting to this idea of being equal citizens of an egalitarian state, I think is a big
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mental transition all of us have to make over the next couple of generations until we get
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to making that mental change that we are no longer in a subject-client citizenship.
#
When your chips are down, it is not that the government must come and give you arms, right?
#
It's the equivalent of, as you said, the hundred rupees which you give to a beggar on the streets.
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It's the trillion dollar government giving a 10 lakh rupee arms to a person who's been
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hurt or has faced bad times.
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That's exactly the relationship.
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We have to change that conceptually.
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And I think until you change that, a lot of the other things which you would expect from
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a liberal democracy just doesn't happen because you're starting off the relationship on the
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And it strikes me that that mindset of thinking of yourself as a subject is actually a dual
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One is, of course, the older Indian tradition of the feudal traditions that survive with
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us, that you go to whoever your local ruler is or your raja is and you're the prajaya
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and they, you know, they bestow largesse and, you know, it works according to the extent
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that they carry out the dharma well, as you said.
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And the other part of it also is that on gaining independence, we essentially took the same
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colonial state apparatus.
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And you know, you change the color of the skin of the rulers, but you're still ruled.
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You still have the same colonial state apparatus.
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You still have most of the same laws which are meant to control a populace and not necessarily
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always to guarantee them their rights and so on and so forth.
#
And also part of the reason and why there is sort of why it, although we need to use
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words like we and the nation, but the reason that even analytically I feel they break down
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at some point in our understanding is that who is this we?
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I mean, if you think about it, the independence struggle was fought by different sections
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of society for different reasons in different ways.
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Perhaps there was a small, I mean, there was not perhaps a small elite group of people
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who believed in a certain kind of Western liberalism and whatever.
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They tried to bring some of those values within the Constitution.
#
But by and large, society may not have, society did not share many of the liberal conceptions
#
Though both you and I would agree that it needed to be far more liberal.
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But if you look at society, it is deeply liberal.
#
And today we seem to be in a place where A, politics has caught up with society and B,
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the elites at some places abdicated, abdicated the task of building a liberal society by
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just saying we've built the Constitution, we are building institutions, we are doing
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We've got rid of the foreign ruler.
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But you know, the mindsets, as you say, kind of remain the same.
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And therefore, it would seem that society is where it is, but our politics has gone
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backwards, you know, in a sense, but perhaps become more reflective of society.
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So my saying, it's gone backwards is more reflective of my bias and my values.
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So I shouldn't be judgmental in the language I use, but I can't really find another term
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But you get what I'm saying.
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What does that mean for your task ahead?
#
Because I would assume, and we'll get much later to, you know, where you are on the journey
#
and what the institution is trying to do, what you are trying to do, the long game that
#
That at one level, the task is that let's make public policy better and let's kind
#
of bring more clarity into the way that the state functions and the impact that policies
#
But another key level is still that old task, which elites of the past ignored and elites
#
of the present shouldn't.
#
That how do you bring about that social change?
#
So people see themselves as citizens.
#
So people don't normalize the way their rights are trampled upon.
#
So that, you know, we move into, we demand better equilibria, as it were.
#
You know, I mean, the preamble of the Constitution, right, that single page, the original one
#
and the 1976 amendment, amended one, I think just one page tells you so much about the
#
history, the politics and the future of India.
#
For example, it starts with we the people.
#
It starts the first thing which is mentioned there apart from sovereign democratic republic
#
is that first thing you want to assure for the citizens is social justice.
#
Then comes liberty, equality, fraternity.
#
So in the ordering of priorities, justice, social, political, economic is right on top
#
And then, of course, there's this thing which is forgotten most of the time is fraternity.
#
And Ambedkar spends a lot of time talking about fraternity and how it's been forgotten.
#
Now, let me talk about each of this, right.
#
And that responds to what you were saying.
#
See, I think my realization in the context of experience of trying to change things in
#
the last 15 years, my reading of history and my reading of genetics and science leads me
#
to one very scary and very, I would say, troubling conclusion that there is no we, right.
#
I like to think of it as we are an us-less nation.
#
There's no we, there's no us in largest numbers.
#
I think David Reich in the book on genetics, right, who we are and how we got here, talks
#
about, he has one sentence there about the genetic diversity of India.
#
He says, India is a large country of small populations.
#
The Han Chinese are one large population.
#
Han Chinese are one large population.
#
India is a large nation or a large country with small populations.
#
The population size of an endogamous community can be a couple of lakhs of people, 100,000,
#
200,000, 1 million, 10 million.
#
And these are endogamous.
#
And endogamous implies that mostly you marry within the community.
#
And the endogamy is so strong in India and for so long, for about 1,600 years, roughly,
#
right, about 1,800, 1,600 years.
#
About 2100 years, I think, according to Tony Joseph's book, what I remember.
#
So there's an early phase of a lot of mixing.
#
For a thousand years, there's a lot of mixing.
#
The early phase of a lot of mixing, if I remember correctly from Tony's book, is about a couple
#
of thousand years after the Aryans got here, but before about 0 BC or 0 AD or whatever.
#
And then for the last 2100 years, it's endogamy and it's that particular ideological Gangetic
#
belt tribe winning over with the caste system and all that.
#
What we know from science is that endogamy is at least 1,600 years old.
#
It could be 2,000 years old or more, right?
#
It's about 1,600 years.
#
So for 1,600 years, endogamy is surprisingly endured.
#
Now this is not the fourth level Varna kind of thing.
#
This is the matrix of jatis, right?
#
So Brahmins in one place will not marry, Brahmins in the other place, Brahmins of one flavor
#
will not marry, Brahmins of the other flavor and so on.
#
So this is that beti-roti-rishta they say, inter-dining and giving your daughter in marriage.
#
So these were the two gateways, right?
#
You wouldn't cross, you wouldn't dine with somebody who's not of your community and you
#
wouldn't let your daughter marry somebody who's not of your community.
#
That effectively is this endogamous community.
#
Now we've lived as a bunch of endogamous communities for almost two centuries with a strong sense
#
of us within that endogamous community, but a very weak sense of us across communities,
#
which is what I said, you know, it's not like any of the Varna's, any of the jatis are not
#
Within that flavor, there are some flavors and within some flavors, there are some flavors
#
and until it gets, you know, it's just mind boggling in terms of its thing and all jostling
#
and competing with each other for social status, for economic privilege and for political power.
#
So you have that, so the history of India, if you look at it in that sense, is a competition
#
for status, economic power and political power among these thousands or hundreds of thousands
#
What this meant is that you ended up with a very weak sense of a national us, right?
#
We are civilizationally of the same belonging, right?
#
Because you know, in terms of religious things or, you know, common philosophical threads
#
like dharma, the idea of dharma is across, whether it's Jains, Buddhists, etc.
#
And there is also an attempt to create an us through, you know, Shankaracharya and his
#
So there have always been attempts to create a unifying thing, whether through language
#
The Maurya empire tried to create an empire, the Akbar tried to create an empire.
#
So there were political attempts, there were social attempts, religious attempts to shape
#
But those common uss were much, much weaker than the endogamous small you uss, right?
#
So when you say we the people, I think the correct way probably to be said we, we, we,
#
we, we, we, we, the peoples, peoples, peoples, peoples, peoples of India, right?
#
There was not one single we and we're still living with the consequences of not having
#
that one single we, which brings me to what Ambedkar was saying.
#
And I think a lot of us have a lot of things to learn from Ambedkar.
#
Those who are pro-Ambedkar and those who are anti-Ambedkar, people who see Ambedkar as
#
a caste icon, people who see Ambedkar as an economist, people who see Ambedkar as a constitutional
#
scientist, whoever, all of us have a lot to learn because I think we've missed many points
#
of what the guy was trying to say.
#
What he said in the 19, mid-1940s and especially when forming the constitution is that unless
#
you have fraternity, the rest of it just goes for a toss.
#
And when he talks about fraternity, what he's talking about is creating a big us, you know,
#
crossing these lines of small we's and creating a big we called we the people of India.
#
And what do you need to do that, right?
#
I think a lot of people have taken the cop-out solution of reservations or affirmative action.
#
It has a place, it does a lot to achieve the first goal in the constitution which is social
#
Given that social justice is a goal in the constitution, are reservations and affirmative
#
actions a way to achieve that?
#
I think yes, to an extent it does.
#
It's not the only way, there are other ways and those other ways ought to be debated.
#
But yes, reservations, affirmative action allows you to get there.
#
But it doesn't answer the bigger question of fraternity because you can't just say,
#
oh, we have reservations and therefore we are going to get fraternity.
#
On the contrary, you don't.
#
On the contrary, the reservation system creates a greater sense of small we's because every
#
caste, sub-caste, etc. wants to jostle for space, right?
#
Because now you've created a prize for being a certain caste.
#
So that sense of small we and weakness of a big we increases because of reservations.
#
But you know, you have public policies which emphasize fraternity.
#
Now, for example, if you have a public park or a ground where kids of all economic and
#
social communities can come and play, they know each other, early childhood experiences
#
are very instrumental in creating egalitarian societies.
#
And I had the privilege of being in such situations as a kid.
#
And we would play with people from rich families, from poor families, from Gujaratis and Tamils
#
and Malayalis and Brahmins and non-Brahmins and many of those distinctions in Muslims
#
are hardly relevant to us when we were kids, right?
#
And Tamil Nadu, I think, was a great place for growing up like that because it showed
#
what egalitarian societies could be, you know, which is agnostic to your backgrounds.
#
And imagine you're in playgrounds like that, right?
#
That creates a sense of fraternity.
#
But if you see cities of today, and I'm aghast after coming back to India, I've seen many
#
of those grounds which are open and now closed, right?
#
There are ring fences around it.
#
Of course, it's private property, somebody's protecting private property from encroachment.
#
But it also means that the kids who would play and have, you know, would play across
#
communities are now excluded, right?
#
So now the middle class kids play in a middle class playground, right?
#
The rich kids get to play in a highly well-manicured lawn, you know, upper class kind of a playground,
#
and the poor kids play on the streets, right?
#
And that division is there, right, from early childhood.
#
Now this is an anti-fraternity measure, right?
#
This goes against exactly what Ambedkar was warning us about, right?
#
To have fraternity, you need those open grounds.
#
I'll use that open ground as a metaphor, right?
#
Public libraries, government schools, public transport, roads which are nice to you.
#
The more you have public systems which encourage fraternity, the more egalitarian a society
#
Now, the corollary to this is why don't we have them?
#
We don't have them because of the sense of we, right?
#
We don't have a big sense of we.
#
So there's no sense that your public spaces matter, right?
#
All private spaces, your private communities, your private gated communities, these are
#
So you don't care if the public building is ugly.
#
I mean, why is it that modern India, the public architecture in modern India is ugly?
#
I mean, let's face it, you have very, the beautiful buildings are an exception.
#
Most of the buildings are ugly and they get uglier over time because you just build a
#
second story, you paint it whatever color you want and then you'll, you know, you do
#
all sorts of modifications.
#
Why are, you know, roads ugly and wires running all around the place nobody cares about?
#
It's because nobody thinks that the public road is part of us, right?
#
You just free ride on it because you need that to conduct some kind of common business,
#
but you really don't want to invest in these things.
#
You know, you are okay with the building being ugly or the road being ugly or the parks being
#
So we, the people, I think need to be constructed and that process of construction was attempted
#
at various times in the past and is being attempted now.
#
The metaphor and the design of that construction of we is different for different.
#
I think Nehru has a different view of that, Modi has a different view of that, the Janata
#
party types had a different view of what that we is.
#
And I have a different view of that, Ambedkar had a different view of that.
#
But I suppose until you are able to create that we, many of these problems won't go
#
So these are profound thoughts and I'm going to think aloud a bit and just share my thoughts
#
rather than lead to a specific question.
#
The first thought that kind of struck me as you were speaking is that out of these three,
#
social justice, liberty and fraternity, I would view social justice as an end and liberty
#
and fraternity as two of the means to get to social justice.
#
And they should of course be an end in themselves for their own sake, but I would view like
#
if social justice is an end to get there through liberty and fraternity.
#
Now the quote of David Reich is something that I bring up often actually in my conversations
#
with people because it was a mind blowing moment for me to read that sentence and to
#
understand what it implies in terms of the framework that it gave me.
#
And it's a beautiful way to put it that we are many small v's as you just did.
#
And I think what modernity does is that it tears us apart by taking us in two different
#
directions which lead variously to liberty and to fraternity.
#
One direction is towards privileging individual rights and privileging the individual.
#
So you take the small v and you break it out to every individual and you emphasize individual
#
liberty and not in a negative sense of an atomized person, you know that whole strawman
#
kind of thing, but in the sense that you recognize the liberty and autonomy of every individual,
#
not force them into conceptual boxes, whether they are identities of birth or location or
#
whatever it is, and that is one way to begin and then that becomes a basis of what individual
#
rights you guarantee of free markets and so on and so forth.
#
The other direction is that you take these smaller v's and you expand them into a larger
#
For example, I mean different terms we could use for it as Schumer's term of the moral
#
arc or, you know, Leckie's term of the expanding circle of humanity where gradually you begin
#
by only caring about yourself perhaps as a little baby unable to conceive anything else,
#
but then about your family and then the tribe and then the community and it expands and
#
expands to the extent that Peter Singer wrote a book called The Expanding Circle where he
#
said it will expand to animals one day as well and it well might and then people will,
#
you know, look down on us for eating the food we do just the same way we say hey, Jefferson
#
owned slaves and I hope the circle continues to expand.
#
Now and this direction of going away from the small v's to the bigger v, to making
#
the v as big as possible is fraternity, right, and that's what you're aiming for and it
#
seems to me that both promoting liberty and fraternity, you know, privileging the individual
#
but also allowing these larger communities and v's to evolve through mutual respect
#
and through, you know, positive sum games and double thank you moments as I put it,
#
you know, and then liberty and fraternity can work together, markets can bring growth,
#
can bring progress, can take people out of poverty, can remove a lot of the scarcities
#
that otherwise lead to our tribal bickerings and again perhaps two ways of reaching fraternity
#
which is one like you said that the state can encourage it by having public parks, public
#
libraries and through different policies and the other is a cultural change that can come
#
about where people begin to see themselves as part of larger communities and just, you
#
know, for example, you know, Pathan recently released is such a big hit, you could argue
#
that at least for a moment at least in this one context is a larger community of Shahrukh
#
Khan fans, right, of which I am not one purely because I don't like his acting, his politics
#
is great and so, and the challenges that we face to both of these in modern times are
#
also, are not just inertia that society stays aware that it is but also the state in the
#
sense that in modern politics you don't want to ameliorate or you don't want to do away
#
with the identity politics, you want to use it to your advantage in whatever tactical
#
way you can which is why, you know, when you think of the 2014 elections win and Prashan
#
Jha is a good book on how the BJP won which lays bare the strategy of saying that, okay,
#
the Dalits don't vote for us in UP but it's not all the Dalits, you know, even within
#
the Dalits the Jatavs are relatively well-off so let's appeal to the non-Jatav Dalits, let's
#
appeal to the non-Yadav OBCs, you know, and so on and so forth across the centre, so you're
#
still thinking in terms of identity though I think there are interesting sort of movements
#
happening here but identity is still to some extent key to a lot of the politics and to
#
a lot of the agitations that we see around us and their fraternity becomes a problem
#
and a lot of the modern politics is of course about different portions of society saying,
#
hey, extend the reservations to us while the original idea was it'll just be for Dalits
#
but now it's kind of become this political tool, this political thing playing into the
#
notion of smaller we's as you said and I had a great episode by Chandrabhan Prasad where
#
he's spoken about this aspect of it but he's spoken about how much markets in the liberty
#
that they play on and in the fraternity that in a sense that they also bring about by changing
#
everyone's incentives have actually played a far greater role in the upliftment of the
#
downtrodden than any measure, any top-down measure by the state but that's a separate
#
matter and the state can sometimes also, I mean the existence of the state is a blow
#
against liberty because the incentives of the state are always to sort of grow its own
#
power at all times and that militates against notions of, that militates against us being
#
more free and we've seen in recent times that it can go backwards as far as individual freedom
#
is concerned and culturally as well there is not as much of a demand for individual
#
freedom as you would expect in fact in modern times perhaps because of the incentives of
#
social media or modern politics where people are incentivized to go on the extremes where
#
those who are tribal get the most rewards from their tribes and everyone else is in
#
a sense incentivized to shut up you know where again it's you don't have that cultural longing
#
for liberty those demands for liberty which at least in the US you still see that if you
#
know taken in strange direction sometimes so these are just sort of my thoughts because
#
I love your you know taking off from like your framing of that there are many small
#
wheeze and how and it just struck me that liberty takes him in one good direction and
#
fraternity takes him in another good direction but we are stuck in this bad place where everything
#
is tribalistic and antagonistic and the discourse is so polarized.
#
Yeah I think you had Pranay Kotestani on your show you had Rohini Nilaykani on the show
#
from the two of them what I've learned is this idea of Sarkar, Samaj, Bazar having to
#
be in balance right there's a harmony between the three you're absolutely right you know
#
left to itself the state will gobble up individual liberty that is why you need the other two
#
you need the market and you have the Samaj or you know civil society to be able to check
#
that similarly you will leave it to civil society and without the state and the market
#
will have you know downward you know you have some other set of problems you leave it to
#
the market alone you have other set of problems so you need a harmony between among and between
#
these three institutions of human living right human society and I think that is a fantastic
#
way to construct public policy and constitutional thinking not only for India but for the world
#
at large especially now I mean if you look at the United States now a lot of the woke
#
social justice agitations are an attempt to get an India like social justice awareness
#
within the political system in the US and for good reasons I'm sure I'm not an expert
#
on US society or politics by any measure I mean in fact I would call myself US illiterate
#
in terms of social and political things but I can understand that there will be communities
#
or groups in the US who feel that historically they have been oppressed or underprivileged
#
and therefore they need some kind of correction and then social justice is a way to get it.
#
Unfortunately that mechanism and that method usually ends up eating into liberty and fraternity
#
and undoing you know is counterproductive to the cause of social justice itself right
#
even if you if you believe that social justice is what you want the mechanism of how you
#
get there can be counterproductive it's been counterproductive in India it can be
#
counterproductive in the US as well.
#
I think what Ambedkar was saying at that point is very interesting you know he was not a
#
champion of reservations as he's made out to be he said that reservations have an important
#
role that's why it was time limited 10 years 20 years whatever it is you can talk about
#
it and he said that for example reservations can't be beyond 50 percent because reservations
#
have to be an exception you know reservations small amount of 20 30 percent is fine but
#
you can't have a majority of your allocations based on reservations because then that would
#
destroy the other parts of what you do a lot of the Ambedkar you know I would say the Ambedkar
#
fans ought to really read what his thinking is he's really one of the most prescient very
#
thoughtful people we've had in the last 100 years I would say for example Gandhi probably
#
as a agitating politician is number one but Ambedkar beats him in terms of constitutional
#
thinking and administrative thinking as a practical administrator who has to run a state
#
you know Gandhi was a moralist he was not really interested in running practical things
#
but Ambedkar had the prescription I think if you look at Ambedkar what he's trying
#
to say is that look beyond egalitarianism and equality right for example banning untouchability
#
banning caste discrimination the state should not get involved in this business of trying
#
to change you know the nature of society through legislation right what he was saying is that
#
fraternity is the way that you would do this have you know state acts in a manner that
#
increases fraternity you leave it to societies to make their own changes so you need social
#
I mean India Hinduism Buddhism whichever Sikhism whichever religion which has been here even
#
Islam in India has had internal reformist movements right so the idea is that you get
#
internal reformist movements in religion religious societies to fix those problems you as a state
#
don't get involved and then as markets you allow maximum amount of market freedom I think
#
the Ambedkarite I'm of course I'm oversimplifying and probably speaking with my bias characterizing
#
Ambedkar from from the biases that I come from but I think the Ambedkarite prescription
#
for how you want to run your affairs is probably still the best one if you don't do that I
#
think you end up with all sorts of gaming behaviors right because if I were to tell
#
you that all people with the name Amit will be allowed into the train first a lot of people
#
will claim their Amits right it's it's nothing to do with caste community identity and second
#
especially now when you talked about you know the social media and the internet thing I
#
think the effect it has on liberty is negative for one simple reason because you make you
#
turn individuals into a crowd and what a crowd does is it erases individualism right that's
#
why you know there's this book called the crowd where you know classic ideas that when
#
human beings get together you're not the same person right the crowd has its identity which
#
basically dilutes or probably destroys individuality ability to think reason etc and the crowd
#
behaves in its own way right a crowd does things which each of the individuals might
#
not have done if they were doing those decisions on their own you know you want to take a diversion
#
a few years ago just before covid I was studying locusts okay because there used to be these
#
locust swarms and locust infestations coming from complex El Nino kind of a La Nina kind
#
of phenomenon and the locusts in Africa would form huge swarms and fly across Iran Pakistan
#
and come into northwestern India and devastate crops all the way to Delhi and you know the
#
British actually set up a locust monitoring station system a hundred years ago right so
#
this is a whole phenomenon of locust infestation but here's the interesting thing about locusts
#
individually they are solitary beings okay they are brown in color or green color I can't
#
remember the color they are in one particular color I think they are brown in color and
#
they are individual beings they are they are solitary beings okay so they stay you know
#
other than for mating they live in deserts they live in very bare circumstances and they
#
go about life like that now because of certain atmospheric changes or you know environmental
#
changes when locust starts coming into proximity with each other they begin to change they
#
change their color they change their body shapes and they change some of the body functions
#
and from being solitary you know organisms they become a group called the swarm and the
#
swarm becomes larger and larger and its entire behavior is different it solitary you know
#
the solitary creature stays within its geographical zone doesn't stay you know maybe a kilometer
#
here and there that's all it moves in its entire life but it when forms these swarms
#
they move thousands of kilometers across continents right that's a great example of how group
#
behavior right it's the same locust it's the same individual right when it comes into
#
contact with a lot of other individuals strange things happen to it and becomes a swarm and
#
behaves in a different way I don't think human behavior online is much different right you
#
could meet a lot of nasty people on on social media we meet them individually they are very
#
nice people you can have lunch you could have coffee with them they hardly appear to be
#
shrill you know bigoted or you know violence-loving kind of people but once they are part organized
#
on I mean they are organized on social media they are entirely different so the ramification
#
of that for liberty is serious right because every society which forms swarms or you know
#
if you call let's say on social media they form tribal communities is going to not going
#
to emphasize liberty right there's going to be liberty is not going to be the first thing
#
which people want so liberty will be deprecated in favor of you know community nationalism
#
tribalism or whatever ism that you want and individual liberty will take a beating so
#
I think the biggest threat that radically networked societies social media networks
#
large transnational communities which are formed because of the internet the biggest
#
threat from them is to individual liberty and then the consequence of that will be felt
#
in almost everything right even imagine you start believing less in individual liberty
#
a lot of your political systems will change your preferences will change what you want
#
from government will change right yeah I sort of love the way that the locus of attention
#
has gone to the locus of identity as it were you know E.O. Wilson the biologist once said
#
about ants one said about communism that great idea wrong species and his point was that
#
you know it's suited to ants it's not suited to humans and I would say it's not suited
#
to locus either or maybe it is because if we are like locus if we tend to go in those
#
directions so but I must tell you something about the locus because this is an interesting
#
I was so fascinated with locust infestation before covid right I was going to study this
#
then covid came and I had to get distracted studying covid so there are very many ways
#
to tackle locus right so these locus early warning stations were set up and they in India
#
and Pakistan they do spraying and you'll be surprised through the thick and thin India
#
and Pakistan have been talking on locus on locus monitoring through all the conflict
#
that's been going on across periods of time because of course it matters common enemy
#
common enemy and it's done at a very low level you know it's done at a very low non-controversial
#
level between experts and they spray this decide where to spray their share information
#
and decide what to spray etc that was the Indian and the Pakistani way the Chinese decided
#
that they have this particular type of geese which eat locusts so they they bred these
#
geese and sent them into areas of western China where locust infestation was happening
#
and they were they were organized I suppose by the PLA or in some military fashion and
#
the geese were sent there and the Chinese idea was that the geese will eat the locusts
#
and we'll eat the geese that's that's mind-blowing and it reminds me of you know the well-named
#
the greatly forward of Mao I mean they seem to like this kind of social engineering right
#
so in 1958 and I don't know if all my listeners would know this but in 1958 Chairman Mao decided
#
that sparrows are eating all our green seeds agriculture is suffering so for the greater
#
good of the country all the sparrows have to be killed and all the sparrows were indeed
#
killed but the problem was sparrows ate locusts and once there were less sparrows the ecosystem
#
balance changed locusts proliferated destroyed China's crops there was famine hunger starvation
#
45 million people died in three years which is again you know insane and also kind of
#
tells you that they haven't learned from history I mean they've learned locusts are a problem
#
but can you really solve it like this what other thing are you changing so I'm going
#
to go to my before I go to my next question a few thoughts sparked off from all that you
#
have been sort of talking about and first of all you know in my episode with Chandrabhan
#
Prasad Chandrabhan ji was also talking about how his two great heroes are Ambedkar and
#
Adam Smith and his contention was that a lot of the people who cite Ambedkar are citing
#
early works and his thought kept evolving and if you read the stuff that he wrote you
#
know right before he passed his thinking had evolved to a large extent he understood and
#
he was always you know a fine economist understood the power of markets but even more so as time
#
kind of went by moving on from there I think the problem with that I have with all identity
#
politics whether it is vokism or bhaktism or whatever is essentially that they hit out
#
at exactly those ideas of liberty of fraternity they hit out at ideas of liberty because they
#
they take the individual away from the center of your thinking you know you are put in a
#
box which is usually the identity of your birth or the identity of your sexuality or
#
whatever it is and that comes along with narratives of oppression or victimhood or whatever and
#
everything is analyzed in terms of group rights and group prejudices and so on and so forth
#
and that's deeply disturbing because but just by thinking like that you're stripping those
#
individuals of their autonomy of their personhood it's a condescending and terrible way to do
#
and obviously it hits against fraternity as well because you are insisting on these narrow
#
divisions which don't allow you to and and if you accept those divisions then you ignore
#
commonalities and therefore possibilities that exist outside of those divisions and
#
that's really why it is so toxic and and and the internet plays towards that because as
#
i keep saying you know the natural tendency when you go online is you want to feel that
#
you belong right you want to be part of a we and you find your tribe of whatever sort
#
it is and if it's an ideological tribe your incentives are always to be strident you know
#
if you're reasonable you're just going to get beaten up by all sides your incentives
#
always are to attack the people on the other side never the argument just the people attack
#
people on your own side for being for not being pure enough and you're kind of driven
#
to extremes and unlike in our times when we were growing up like something that i thought
#
at 20 i would not be tweeting it today there are people whose minds perhaps aren't fully
#
formed and they tweet something and then they have to double down on it and then they find
#
tribal solidarity and they stop growing as people and at an intellectual level and they
#
become ossified in a way of thinking that perhaps they would have moved past had they
#
lived a little bit more seen more of the real world and while i believe that a lot of the
#
noise on social media comes from vocal minorities and the silent majority is largely just staying
#
away the problem is that the silent majority is silent you know and that is kind of an
#
issue and by the way even about mob behavior like one of the fascinating things i learned
#
about mob dynamics and a friend of mine who was once lynched and survived to tell the
#
tale because lynching doesn't mean you're killed it just means you're beaten up by a
#
mob so he had told me the story of how he was you know a bunch of people surrounded
#
him and they were talking to him and they accosted him and they were giving him gullies
#
and then someone from outside that group just from the periphery just gave him and gave
#
him one whack and then another guy gave him a whack and then they all started whacking
#
him and the way crowd dynamics work is everybody has a threshold of violence you know there
#
are some people who won't have a first use policy as far as hitting someone is concerned
#
but their threshold is 10 if they see 10 other people hit somebody they will lose that inhibition
#
and they'll go some people might have a threshold of 100 and there are thresholds all the way
#
along so your initial guy might be someone with no threshold who's just seeing something
#
and he's like huh you know overcome by feelings but then gradually as thresholds are broken
#
down an entire mob of people who otherwise mostly would be sensible individuals respecting
#
of your time saying kaise ho aap and theeke I don't agree mujhe aap se baat nahi karna
#
hai but that's the end of the matter are suddenly all lynching one poor fellow so the mob dynamics
#
is really interesting and it plays out exactly in that locustian manner.
#
But on social media there's another thing right in a physical mob kind of a thing no
#
one's watching you you don't have to signal to anyone that you're part of that mob but
#
in a social media thing let's say someone is getting attacked right and everybody as
#
you said they have their thresholds if you're seen as not attacking you will be judged right
#
so you have to now show to everybody else that you you are also one of those guys who
#
criticize Amit Verma for saying something wrong right so and if you don't do that you're
#
afraid that you will be attacked by a small group of peers for saying oh look Amit said
#
something wrong but Nitin didn't criticize him so Nitin must also be complicit so now
#
you become part of the part of the suspicious group right so that's the cascading effect
#
which happens online I mean mercifully that's not physical violence it is psychological
#
violence to some extent but that's what makes the online thing a lot more scary because
#
physical you know in a mob you're not showing anyone that you've participated in a you know
#
I mean you might be showing a small group of people but here your audience is global
#
online I mean in social media things online if you've not criticized Amit Verma for something
#
that he did the whole world is watching you and the whole world will judge you for not
#
having attacked Amit Verma when the when he was supposed to be attacked you know and there
#
are pathologies at play like I know for a fact that there are people on the left will
#
coordinate attacks there'll be whatsapp groups where somebody will screenshot someone and
#
they'll send it to the whole group and then the whole group will feel the pressure ki
#
isko tweet karke shit on this person or put the screenshot and shit on this person and
#
I personally know our friends of mine attacked in this way I know of this done to me as well
#
we've seen this happen I mean in fact I would say I was one of the I must tell you this
#
is an interesting story since we were talking about we might be going into some other part
#
of this conversation but my first experience of this was during the Anna Hazare movement
#
so this was 2011 and suddenly there was this model panic in the country organized to some
#
extent manufactured to some extent genuine to some extent and everybody said oh you
#
know all we need is a Lokpal bill and at Lokpal once you do it all our problems will go away
#
so I had a FAQ on my blog at that time saying why this is not a great idea and the worst
#
way to get anything you want in a democracy is by doing a hunger strike I mean it's like
#
what can be more undemocratic than saying that oh you know I'm putting a gun to my head
#
and if you don't change the law I'm going to shoot myself I mean that's very undemocratic
#
at that point I think one particular weekend I think there were 2000 tweets or hate mail
#
messages I can't remember this email slash tweets which happened just one over one weekend
#
and that's my first experience of being attacked online right and and this happened long before
#
you know trolling etc became a thing this was early experiences and the good news of
#
that was of course I could block a lot of I think I started blocking people on Twitter
#
at that point my first block was at that point but what good news came about that was in
#
of the thousands of people who are like dumping on you for saying oh who's paying you money
#
Sonia Gandhi giving you money or are you a BJP person or you know all sorts of things
#
were thrown around one person said you know you keep talking about constitutional methods
#
what are they I thought this guy was trolling me and then he came back and asked me this
#
question two or three times and he sent me an email also and then I realized this is
#
a genuine case like out of the 10 million or 100 million people who are you know mesmerized
#
by Anna Hazare I used to call it Hazare mania you know there was a Hazare mania right there
#
was this maniacal thing that you just have to support it you can't stay neutral in this
#
right you can't oppose it so out of the 10 million or 100 million people there probably
#
are a small fraction maybe one percent half a percent who really are interested in positive
#
change but don't know how to go to do what do you do next what's a you know I'm this
#
person I want to change the country how do I do it and that's when it hit me that we
#
probably should introduce a course which allows people to learn how to change the country
#
the right way constitutionally right that's how the GCPP course was born I think November
#
2011 was when this trolling happened late November 2011 was decision to do the course
#
we announced it in middle of December 2011 and January 2012 we launched the course right
#
and and we've done great work after that but through that experience of being trolled this
#
nice thing came out but the experience of being told I still remember was very very
#
scarring because you have all sorts of random people saying all random things about you
#
some of them are threats well threats are okay you know you can deal with them in one
#
way or the other but the worst ones are the ones which says who's paying you to say this
#
or you are an anti-national you know you you know or you're privileged you know some kind
#
of thing people who have no idea who you are people who have no idea what you've said and
#
done in the past people who have no idea what experience you've been through will just come
#
out gratuitously abuse you for saying this right over time people say that you know you
#
should you should not care much about these things but they still hurt and one way to
#
deal with them is of course to mute and block on social media and a better way to do it
#
is to get off some of the worst parts of Twitter of social media entirely right because to
#
the extent that such things affect your work the influence you sort of compensate for that
#
by doing something else I think there are negative influences on somebody who has a
#
positive agenda right you still have to do what you have to do and people who have zero
#
stake in what you are doing should not have a way to influence your work I mean why would
#
they why do they matter right so muting and blocking was something which which I'd scarcely
#
done until that time 2011 was when this whole thing started it's a new phase in my thinking
#
about how do you engage in social media and what's interesting here also is that what
#
you're seeing is a coming together of two opposite worlds which ideally should not come
#
together which is a world of shallow posturing versus deep engagement so you could be a scholar
#
in a particular subject with a lot of lived experience and you're sharing some of that
#
but at the same time because posturing is so cheap you have all kinds of people come
#
out there who have no idea of the real world who have no idea of the depth of where you're
#
coming from who might be responding not even to what you said but to some phrase that has
#
you know like a hot button phrase for them and then they'll attack you and they'll go
#
with it and after a point in time fashions form where it becomes fashionable to attack
#
you know someone for you know anything they do you know like for example no matter what
#
our friend Sadanand Dhumepose he's going to get attacked right he's basically criticized
#
everybody you know been on sort of but he's going to get attacked no matter what he does
#
and so my really experience with realizing blocking was a way out was after demonetization
#
where I wrote a bunch of pieces against it and one of them in TOI went madly viral and
#
was retweeted by Kejriwal and Rahul Gandhi and of course the hoards came after me and
#
the hoards came after me and I realized that blocking is damn effective for two reasons
#
one is that there are a finite number of cell leaders and if you block enough of them it
#
does affect future attacks so you've got to block indiscriminately you've got to block
#
and I'll block just for rudeness you know I never block for this agreement I always
#
block for rudeness even if the person agrees with me and they're dissing somebody else
#
I will just block them for rudeness and the other advantage of blocking is dopamine that
#
every time you hit block there's a dopamine hit to your brain it's possible to get addicted
#
to blocking I don't think that's really the case with me but it's entirely possible and
#
what I have you know even to this day when attacks happen and they can just happen randomly
#
for something you thought wasn't controversial it's disturbing you never really get used
#
to it and part of the reason it's disturbing is that these are real people sometimes they're
#
acquaintances sometimes they're friends of friends they should know they would never
#
ever dream of behaving like this in the real world if they saw you but online something
#
happens and I had kind of two theories about it and my original thing was that social media
#
brings out the worst in us because at early times even I would posture and even I would
#
shit on people like today my policy is I am simply not going to shit on anyone unless
#
I'm talking truth to power and I'm talking about politics and all that that's a different
#
matter but I'm not going to shit on another individual randomly like screenshotting is
#
a screen it's just so toxic you know the whole nature of the code tweet where you and I are
#
at a party and I say something you don't agree with so you call all your friends over and
#
while I am there you point at me and say this moron said this and we would never do that
#
in real life and so that was one thing that that was one theory that it brings out the
#
worst in people but my other theory now is that it also reveals the worst people for
#
who they are the most intellectually lazy people the most you know people who might
#
otherwise socially put up a front of being generous and empathetic but they don't really
#
give a shit but by and large actually I would say that that person who wrote to you and
#
asked you the question and you realized he was genuinely inquisitive and it might have
#
seemed to you that that's a very tiny minority I would actually argue that is one tiny minority
#
of the silent majority who actually decided to contact you and speak to you you know I
#
what I have found is that most people are open most people you know don't actually fall
#
prey necessarily to tribalism most people want to know most people know there are many
#
side to shoes and most people are not judgmental and I guess you must have realized that also
#
over the years with the massive success of your course you know and and a deep engagement
#
matters but this kind of thing that Twitter did where it allowed people who can do shallow
#
cheap posturing to randomly attack and engage with people who are doing serious deep engagement
#
and thereby affect their work is just a really interesting sort of dynamic yeah and I wrote
#
one article last year about how social media in its current form is an existential threat
#
to civilization right I deliberately went out and made it a superlative thing mainly
#
because the way okay let's let's rewind back right why is it that we believe in liberal
#
democracy and free markets why do we believe that liberal democracy is a great political
#
system and free markets is a great economic system it rests on the idea that the individual
#
matters and why does an individual matter because enlightenment thinking told us that
#
the individual is capable of reason the ability to reason makes you an individual and the
#
fact that you are an individual therefore a lot of things follow therefore you have
#
rights because you have rights you have liberal democracy because you have rights you have
#
markets because you can you know your right to property and therefore you can trade and
#
you can trade based on let's unpack that right why is why is a trade good because a thinking
#
person is when engaging in voluntary trade leads both parties to be better off right
#
let's say I have a pen and I value that pen at a hundred rupees and you value that at
#
a hundred and ten you can pay me hundred and ten I give you the pen so I get more money
#
than I think is the value of the pen you get the pen at the value that you think is fair
#
and if both of us are rational in our valuation of the pen both of us are happy right it leads
#
to a positive sum game and that's the entire basis of trade theory and that's what John
#
Strossel calls a double thank you moment that when we make the trade I say thank you you
#
say thank you and we are both better off and I think it's a triple thank you moment because
#
I think society is better off right because we have created this positive relationship
#
between us and you know markets can therefore take liberal democracy is the same right why
#
do you think that a person is entitled to choose you know entitled to a vote to choose
#
who governs that society right because that person is capable of reason is capable of
#
understanding what is good for that person and what is which among the various choices
#
is a better choice for this person and therefore exercise choice right based on reason and
#
the reason basically means you weigh the pros and cons and if the pros outweigh the cons
#
you do it if the cons outweigh you don't do it or if there are multiple options the one
#
with the greatest number of pros is what you do right that's reason that forms the basis
#
of liberal democracy and free markets now for a moment if you think that this person
#
is not capable of reason let's say this reason argument doesn't hold right the argument for
#
liberal democracy and for free trade also falls apart right if you can't reason it out
#
if you are of unsound mind as in legal parlance right if a person is unsound mind usually
#
the person can't enter contracts right because that person is not capable of reason children
#
can't enter into contracts because they are not considered capable of reason children
#
can't vote because they aren't considered capable of reason but social media is exactly
#
attacking your capability for reason right this is where we go to insights from Kahneman
#
and Swartzky right thinking fast and slow now what happens is that your fast brain is
#
intuitive jumps to conclusions and the slow brain defends those conclusions in other words
#
this turns the whole idea on its head the earlier it was thought that you know you deliberate
#
you think you weigh the pros and cons and then you decide Kahneman showed us that you
#
decide first based on various things and then you use your brain to you know sort of justify
#
your decision now what makes you make intuitive judgments again Kahneman shows that social
#
proof is one of them you don't buy a phone or a car based on most people other than us
#
electrical engineers or nerds I mean we look at specs and all of that but most normal good
#
people will you know buy a phone or a car which their friends are buying or which their
#
friends tell them is good right or the kids tell them is good so it's not based on weighing
#
the pros and cons it's done on something called social proof now social proof is at a global
#
scale on social media right so you don't have an opinion based on weighing the pros and
#
cons but you have an opinion on politics on economics on cars on climate change because
#
people around you have that opinion right that is your fast brain and what a slow brain
#
does is this sort of defends that so if I come to you and say Amit you know you shouldn't
#
be thinking about buying this car or electric car or something and I'm not Amit a hypothetical
#
Amit because this Amit is probably going to use reason but a hypothetical Amit who's you
#
know who decides based on social proof will jump back and throw back the whatsapp arguments
#
at me right and when those arguments fail he'll say look you are a climate change denier
#
or you are a you are a privileged person right you are an NRI you're an elitist you are whatever
#
so ultimately that person is not going to be persuaded by rational arguments but going
#
to hold on to social proof right now this what it's doing is it's hitting this idea
#
of reason at its base now social media in its current form to the extent that it perpetuates
#
this particular cognitive mechanism means that it is hitting and damaging liberal democracy
#
and market free markets at the foundations that's why I said it's going to be a risk
#
to civilization apart from the fact that it you know creates tribalism etc which were
#
you know tribalism is what civilization replaced right we before civilization we had tribalism
#
so if social media is going to take you back to tribalism it means it's a risk to civilization
#
so I went out on a limb and made this very purposely provocative case but I believe this
#
you know I believe that unless your technology and the business model of social media changes
#
I think liberal democracy free markets and human civilization are going to have a bad
#
time so I agree with you and but I also think that it can be turned around a couple of frames
#
I'll share with you and one I'll say that even before Kahneman and Tversky Michael Gazzaniga
#
showed us that we overestimate our capacity for reason you've heard of Michael Gazzaniga
#
yeah I mean just for my listeners what basically happened there was Gazzaniga is a great neuroscientist
#
and he was working with patients of split brain epilepsy and one way of treating that
#
was you severe the connection between the left side of the brain and the right side
#
of the brain so they can no longer talk to each other and you know one side of the brain
#
controls the other side of the body so something like that simply put the right side controls
#
the left side and then he carried out an experiment where one side of the brain was shown a certain
#
message such as get up and walk and then the person was asked why did you get up and walk
#
and the person would respond to the message by getting up and walking but then it would
#
say oh to get a coke or why did you raise your hand after a message was shown to him
#
oh because I wanted to scratch my neck and he would scratch his neck and what was happening
#
here was that the right brain was being shown the message and would do what it was told
#
and the left brain was what Gazzaniga or was it Steven Pinker while writing about this
#
I forget which one of them called the interpreter so it was like a press officer that something
#
has been done and you're finding a justification for it you're rationalizing rather than reasoning
#
and now we know that most of human cognition is basically this before we come up with the
#
reason for something we have already decided to do it and we're not aware of it and you
#
know there's a great book called the elephant in the brain I'll also link from the show
#
notes about exactly this and why I am not so negative about this or why I think it can
#
be turned around through through human action is that what has really happened in the last
#
few centuries is that we have acted upon the fact that we are the only species that can
#
be aware of its programming and can work to counteract its programming now we are hardwired
#
through our genes for different often contradictory impulses we are hardwired for tribalism we
#
are also hardwired for altruism you know we are hardwired for different things that militate
#
against each other and the great task of culture is therefore to empower the better angels
#
of our nature as as Pinker would say to use his phrase and I think what has happened with
#
social media is that without there being an intention in that direction purely in the
#
act of maximizing engagement which is rational we have reached the stage where we are actually
#
pushing the wrong buttons we are pushing in a sense of worst demons of our natures empowering
#
them the tribalism and and so on and so forth and I think that once we are now aware of
#
it it is possible to kind of turn this around to stop pushing these buttons and to push
#
different buttons and it is possible to do I've kind of written about it and I don't
#
know if it will really happen but the possibility exists for example if you just think about
#
the meta questions don't think about what features would I change in Twitter or Facebook
#
but if you think about the question of what features would make people be positive about
#
each other and would stop people from shitting on other people you know and so on and so
#
forth that I am sure that there are ways to you know ameliorate some of the problems that
#
are kind of you know I agree with you and I think the reason I agree with you that I'm
#
an engineer right an engineer who's now found his way in public policy also now looking
#
at tech policy it's a big circle for me but as an engineer you look at this as a problem
#
of a massive size and as a problem as an engineer you just look at a problem say look we've
#
got to fix this right you know you're not going to solve it 100 percent unlike a physicist
#
or a mathematician you're not going to get an elegant you know RHS equals to LHS kind
#
of a of a solution what you're going to get is a series of improvements over the status
#
quo and as long as you keep improving on the status quo you're getting there and that's
#
how I think you know I look at policy your public policy as an engineering problem and
#
this especially one is one of that kind now it is difficult exceptionally difficult because
#
it mucks around with the cognitive processes of a brain right it's not something you know
#
it's not a technical problem as in it's not a technical it's not even something like
#
NREGA or some food security or something which which is on the ground and you can see most
#
of the playground of this of this problem is the human brain and the very people who
#
are supposed to be solving it are the people who are affected by the problem so it's it's
#
a little more complicated than or probably a lot more complicated than a than a normal
#
problem but it's something which you can tackle now one of the areas of work which I'm looking
#
at very seriously in this is what I call cognitive security now during the pandemic a few of
#
us were working on information warfare right how do you use information in a geopolitical
#
sense to create political outcomes in third countries without firing a shot right I mean
#
firing a shot is incidental terrorism for example is information warfare terrorism is
#
not about killing people right terrorism is about using violence to persuade people's
#
minds about a certain political cause right that could be you know freedom or jihad or
#
you know supremacy or bigotry whatever the political cause is there is there is a political
#
cause and you use violence to change people's minds about the cause it's a it's a brutal
#
form of information warfare but there's information warfare so you're thinking about it in the
#
modern information age where everybody has tools to influence each other's minds how
#
do you secure a country how do you secure India in the information age right you need
#
information security right just like you have defense you have you know national security
#
internal security counterterrorism you also need an information security apparatus at
#
a national level and we're thinking about deconstructing this how does this actually
#
work what does it actually mean by a national information security framework it boils down
#
to an individual cognitive security it's not about giving you antivirus software and saying
#
please use this right it's about you having a mental framework in order to discern mal
#
information from good information right from being able to make sense of good information
#
and act on it to recognize bad information and to avoid it right so that's at a citizen
#
level right so you need cognitive security I was thinking about it from the perspective
#
of national security and cognitive security when I came across a book by Suzy Allegre
#
Suzy is a barrister in the United States in the United Kingdom and she's working on this
#
idea called the freedom to think so her book is called free to think and I really recommend
#
it to all your listeners where she says that well I sort of I'm not very I'm not an expert
#
in international law but what she says that is under international law as we have it today
#
freedom to think is already part of the basic suite of human rights that we have and our
#
job is to now make that actual in the legislation and the statutes of various countries so make
#
sure that the courts and the system recognizes the freedom to think now I look at freedom
#
to think as the same idea as cognitive security but from seen from a different perspective
#
right as a security thinker I think you need to close I mean protect your not close your
#
mind to protect your mind from malinformation wherever it comes from freedom to think is
#
exactly the same thing it's saying that look as a citizen of a democratic country or liberal
#
democracy you have a whole set of rights right to life right to property right to freedom
#
and your right to freedom includes the freedom to think which means you have a right to be
#
protected against interference in your ability to think that's a very very interesting line
#
of thinking it's early stages because we've got to develop this framework further but
#
these are the kind of things we need to do to protect ourselves from you know or protect
#
civilization from the worst parts of social media I don't you know I grew up on the social
#
I grew up on the internet I created parts of it in my earlier life so I think it is
#
generally as information in the hands of everybody on the planet is generally a good thing right
#
we've got to figure out the best way the best models of delivering this as well as more
#
importantly the best way of governing these things a lot of it is a governance problem
#
I mean the Supreme Court of India are telling you that right to privacy is a normal is something
#
which we have seems like a you and I would have thought this is basic man I mean you
#
didn't need the Supreme Court of to pronounce on it but actually until the Supreme Court
#
pronounced on it you know it did become real now it's it's somewhat a real it's a reality
#
right although the legislation has to become has to form but at least we know that the
#
legal framework of India in the legal framework of India in the constitutional structure of
#
India you and I have the right to privacy right so similarly I think we'll have to work
#
towards a point where the the legal and the bureaucratic system understands that you have
#
a right to the freedom to think and from a national security perspective that you ought
#
to have cognitive security so many things I want to double click on and you know one
#
phrase that I loved which your colleague Prane told me is something that is a concern of
#
yours is cognitive autonomy in the information age which is such a lovely phrase and exactly
#
what you're talking about you've written essays which variously have the headlines liberal
#
democracies must protect the citizens minds from being hacked and then another one technological
#
power must be deconcentrated and they're all on the same let me take a step back and come
#
at a question and the step back is that going back to what we were earlier talking about
#
being aware of our hardwiring one phrase which I think sums up the interplay of nature and
#
nurture very well is Steven Pinker saying that nature gives us knobs nurture turns them now
#
here's the thing that we have those knobs and they are being turned all the time in
#
different ways whether or not we are aware of it right and a lot of the turning is accidental
#
a lot of it is deliberate for example long before social media for me an early model
#
of using these understandings to manipulate human behavior came in casinos because as
#
you would remember I was a professional gambler for a few years and there's a great book I'll
#
link from the show notes by I think Natasha Dowshul about exactly this where you know
#
what casinos would do from the 80s and 90s onwards is if you're sitting on a slot machine
#
everything there the lights the sound everything would be arrived at to manipulate you to just
#
stay there you know they would be able to centrally every slot machine would be monitored
#
they would be able to detect when there is by the patterns when you are 10 minutes away
#
from getting up and just at that point somebody would come to you and say oh sir here's you
#
know thank you drink for playing for so long and blah blah blah and then you stay for longer
#
you know I've played in casinos where if you go to any casino you'll know that there's
#
no sense of daylight there's no sense of time there are no clocks there are no windows there's
#
nothing you're just you know the time passes quickly but some of them might even pump out
#
oxygenated air so you get tired less and so it is that kind of manipulation going on now
#
social media has arrived at the same thing not in an intentional way of let us create
#
tribalistic people but in an intentional way of let us create more engagement which is
#
a noble cause which you'd expect a business to try and do but in the process or these
#
unintended consequences have happened and we know about them and now that we know about
#
them I think the important thing is to realize that there are knobs that they can be turned
#
and to think about being intentional about them now the way I see it this can happen
#
at three levels one is the personal level where you and I take advantage for of this
#
understanding and say that at an individual level I will try not to be manipulated that
#
when I'm bored instead of reaching for my smartphone to check Twitter I will pick up
#
a book and I will read something nice at an individual level I can change my behavior
#
this is one way in which behavior can change then there is the social level where you try
#
to bring about social change through enough understanding of this so it becomes culturally
#
unacceptable that if four friends meet at a cafe it is seen as not cool to be staring
#
at your phone instead you have to look at people's faces and talk to them and that's
#
a cultural change that can happen over time and through osmosis and the third is you bring
#
the state in and you say that look this is harming your citizens your job is to protect
#
them you pass whatever regulations you have to on big social media companies you do what
#
needs to be done I'm ambivalent about this at at one level I'm in fact deeply ambivalent
#
about the state stepping in coercibly to solve social problems because it will normally make
#
things worse and the state is not some random omniscient benign entity the state is politicians
#
with specific interests and people and you simply don't know that once you make it acceptable
#
for them to manipulate business and social media in this way where this is going to lead
#
to is it going to lead to much less freedom is it going to lead to you know the hacking
#
of the brain as it were at an industrial scale on the other hand when it comes to the national
#
interest as you put it and in the later part of the show we'll sort of disentangle that
#
a lot more but when it comes to the national interest I'm kind of with you there that for
#
example if the elections of my country are being manipulated by another country in a
#
specific way through citizens minds being hacked hey we can't allow that right so I
#
kind of get that so these are all the sort of you know different aspects of this problem
#
that I see but the crux that I am coming to is that if you are talking about a person
#
having the freedom freedom of thought my point is that we overestimate free will I don't
#
think anybody really has a freedom of thought in a pure sense but what you want to do is
#
be intentional about whatever parts of it that you affect and try to figure out ways
#
to minimize cynical manipulation of the way our brains are designed yeah in fact we were
#
once thinking about creating a course called defense against the dark arts and offering
#
it to offering it to school children because I think that's where you have to start my
#
wife and I have have had long arguments about our kids using mobile phones and social media
#
and at what age right my wife feels that it should not be given to them because it's massively
#
distracting and of course you don't know what they're looking at and all of that but also
#
the fact that it distracts a lot from the the the important stuff that you need to do
#
right whatever that important stuff is and you sort of go off on a train I have been
#
of the other opinion that the earlier they get it and the earlier they learn how to deal
#
with it the better equipped they are for the rest of their lives and my wife and I we've
#
now if you keep the score there are sometimes when I'm winning and sometimes when she's
#
winning I don't think we've had a sort of consensus on which is the best way to go because
#
depending on the time and the context that there are different things you know there
#
are certain times when you you know my kids for example have a fake news detector which
#
is like almost innate so you send them something they'll say they'll say nah this is not true
#
right so I think that's that's already sort of equipped them with the ability to sort
#
of sniff out many things that you and I probably will not do I mean deepfakes for example right
#
how do you now have an ability to spot deepfakes but if if let's say it's grown with you and
#
you've sort of learned that you're better at spotting them than you're not let's say
#
your accuracy of spotting deepfakes is greater than 50% that's a great thing right without
#
external tools in fact brief timeout moment question for the listeners pause and think
#
about this how do you know it's actually Nitin and me you're listening to pause okay continue
#
right so so that's that's a good thing but on the other hand where I agree with my wife
#
is that you've now seen that it does your screen time does you know it does suck away
#
bandwidth which which is important and kids not don't really know you know how to allocate
#
their time right because you know you have exams but you think this is important forget
#
kids nobody knows worse yeah but in the case of kids is important because they've got to
#
you know they have an academic thing to go through but we were thinking about defense
#
against the dark arts because I think the ability to engage in social life and civic
#
life in an information society requires you to have certain you know tricks you need to
#
have certain skills in order to be able to deal with it right like if someone sends you
#
a link with saying click here and put your father's or you put a phone number right you
#
should instinctively know that you know this this this is not right but imagine you've
#
never you know you're touching a smartphone for the first time when you're 18 years old
#
and you get a message like this and you don't know it looks like HDFC bank right and it
#
says put in and you might just do that right so you might fall prey to very low level low
#
level scams because you're not really prepared now defense against the dark arts if you do
#
it well you know you'll probably still fall for some scams but they are more sophisticated
#
ones so you'll probably avoid 99 percent of the scams and then get caught in the one
#
percent but that's that's great right so I think there is a space for something like
#
that among kids starting with the idea what you said right you know how the brain works
#
you know why do you get agitated why do you you know why do you use a phone why shouldn't
#
you use a phone when you're sitting in a cafe right we should be talking to each other these
#
are kind of skills which I think kids must learn when they are in you know sixth or
#
seventh grade onwards but again putting that into the curriculum requires the state to
#
intervene and then you know that's the problem right if you let the state intervene in this
#
then the state might have its own ideas of what it wants to put in that curriculum right
#
and that's the scary part I think a parent should do it but if the parents are unable
#
to do it then I think you'll have to figure out other ways to do it put it in some kind
#
of a curriculum or a national movement or cultural awareness or some kind of awareness
#
mechanisms which tells parents that look if you have kids in sixth grade this is the time
#
for you to inoculate them against information viruses right no I love the way you put that
#
and I would actually take a step back and say that defense against the dark arts which
#
is a great course I will I would love to attend such a course or even conduct it but that
#
defense against the dark arts to me is just is not just something that encompasses things
#
like fishing and getting scammed and oh don't give away your OTP and all that all that is
#
basic that's part of it but also you know inculcates a kind of critical thinking and
#
natural skepticism which allows you to not be manipulated in other ways for example there
#
are notions which are dogmas of different ideological tribes out there like you know
#
India is a country of Hindus everyone else is an outsider that could be one dogmatic
#
belief for one set of people another set of people could take it for granted that OJK
#
Rowling is transphobic and if you identify with that tribe you just take that as an axiom
#
and don't actually examine it and read her words and see what the arguments are and I
#
think we also need critical thinking where people just don't take just assume that or
#
just adopt all of this dogma as their own beliefs without being skeptical of everything
#
not adopting an ism just thinking through everything for themselves and withholding
#
judgment until you know they feel reasonably certain of it so that's also I think an important
#
part of that and I know through all your different courses your you are pushing critical thinking
#
of different kinds so we'll talk about that and before we talk about that we'll talk about
#
your childhood and the young Nithin Pai and before we talk about the young Nithin Pai
#
we'll take a quick commercial break long before I was a podcaster I was a writer in fact chances
#
are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog India Uncut which was active between
#
2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time I love the freedom the form gave
#
me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways I exercise my writing muscle every day and
#
was forced to think about many different things because I wrote about many different things
#
well that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it only
#
now I'm doing it through a newsletter I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy I'll write about some of
#
the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else so please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
and subscribe 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 indiancut.substack.com thank you welcome back to the scene and the
#
unseen I'm chatting with Nithin Pai and we were going to start by talking about his childhood
#
a significant amount of time has passed we haven't reached his childhood yet so I'll
#
just go straight there rather than leave scope for digression so tell me about your childhood
#
where were you born what was your childhood like what were your parents like what was
#
it like at home you know I belong to the class of people who in the 80s and 90s had to move
#
around India right and mobility I think a lot of people take for granted now but in
#
the 70s 80s 90s mobility across the country was not normal you know people wouldn't move
#
from one place to the other your ration card would be given in one place and you would
#
have it for all you know voter ID you'd always be a voter in that place mobility is a post
#
90 phenomenon my father used to work for Canra Bank so we had you know we had the luxury
#
of moving around the country my father joined Canra Bank because he wanted to travel across
#
the country he was a physics graduate but he became a bank manager because he wanted
#
to travel so I was born in Bangalore and then we moved to Mysore when I was a very very
#
when I was very I mean little still a toddler we moved to Delhi then we moved to Kunur in
#
Tamil Nadu and Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu and back to Bangalore before I left to do my undergrad
#
in Singapore right so moving around the country and being the son of a bank manager meant
#
at that time that you would learn the local language each place you would go to you'd
#
blend in and be a local there right so I'm still a local in Tamil Nadu I have seven years
#
in Tamil Nadu I consider myself partial resident of Tamil Nadu and now a partial I mean partial
#
resident of Karnataka so my second state is Tamil Nadu but I grew up in Tamil Nadu like
#
for I mean conscious memories of growing up in Tamil Nadu in Kunur and Coimbatore and
#
then I'm a pseudo Bangalorean because I was born here I studied for two years in I did
#
my pre-university here before going to Singapore so before moving back to India in 2012 the
#
place that I'd lived longest was Tamil Nadu and now it's Karnataka of course because I've
#
been here since then so Chennai dosa versus Bangalore dosa well that is a very sensitive
#
topic but I don't have divided loyalties on this one because my loyalty is towards the
#
dosa not the state the Bangalore I think still has the better masala dosa Chennai has something
#
which they call a dosa or a roast I think it is crispier but the real dosa feeling is
#
what you would get in Bangalore South Bangalore to be precise and there are no divided loyalties
#
on that account although there are quite serious conversations we've had with our friends and
#
colleagues about the origin of the sambar and which sambar which state makes a better
#
sambar and where it originated that that can lead to conflict but not the dosa I think
#
and for the sambar my primitive knowledge of it tells me that the state that puts a
#
least sugar or no sugar is Tamil Nadu and therefore that must surely be the best because
#
sugar is poisonous is that true or what are your views well I think the sugar and also
#
a little bit of spice but the but the origin of the sambar for those for those of your
#
listeners who are curious and want to attack people for having the wrong view of sambar
#
sambar was invented by the Maratha army of Shivaji on their adventure down south so it's
#
probably Shivaji's father who brought it down to Karnataka and his descendants who brought
#
it down to Tanjore in Tamil Nadu so the the DNA of the sambar is with the Maratha army
#
whether it's in the Tamil lands or the Kannada lands well that's that's still up for dispute
#
for an Amit like me all these lands are the same so you know we're pretty much the same
#
age so I've also you know I had that childhood in the 80s and you know 90s you gradually
#
come to adulthood and I've realized that the forming of myself has really happened in two
#
phases and this is probably unique to our generation in the sense that initially you
#
grow up with a scarcity of books and knowledge and all of that and I was of course from a
#
very privileged house where I had books all around me but there are still nevertheless
#
limited sources you know putting together a good mix tape of music you like is still
#
an adventure and a thrill and you're growing up in that limited way and when I look at
#
myself in college intellectually I was very far from formed you know because you just
#
did not have that same access to ideas and ideologies and frameworks of looking at the
#
world so that's sort of one part of my growing up where you know you you become a sort of
#
confused adult and you're not fully formed in those ways and the second part is when
#
the internet comes and then you're learning about the world again through the internet
#
you're forming friends your frames you're forming friendships through them you are becoming
#
part of communities of choice rather than communities of circumstance right and that
#
there is that clear distinction uniquely for our generation so it's almost like growing
#
up twice being educated twice and so on so tell me a little bit about your processes
#
of forming yourself like when you are young as a kid in the 80s and the 90s what are the
#
formative influences what books are you reading are there moments where you read something
#
and you're blown away and you say shit this explains something about the world something
#
is clearer I have a way of looking at it and then as an adult and in your case it's further
#
complicated because then you go to Singapore for your undergraduate degrees I'm guessing
#
that the ecosystem the mahal the influences around you are completely different and that
#
also must be a moment where things that you otherwise normalize you suddenly you know
#
you see different aspects of them whales slip away from your eyes so just take me through
#
this process of over the years how the form of you changes it's a I was trying to analytically
#
like categories of this it's a little difficult to unpack but be impressionistic rather than
#
analytic perhaps yeah see I think for me the 1991 liberalization was a big event right
#
and for us right because we were we sort of came of age when that happened so we can divide
#
the time when before liberalization and after liberalization right before liberalization
#
you had a few books having a Nike sneaker was was wow you know someone who had a Nike
#
sneaker was I mean this guy was somewhere right now you would have one pencil box which
#
is camel camlin you would have mixed tapes right you would have tapes you would go and
#
record it you would watch do darshan there was nothing else to watch cars meant ambassadors
#
or premier padminis and a telephone was a luxury that you had to wait for 20 years
#
to get and so forth right so pre liberalization even as you would say we were part of the
#
new elite of India at that time it's not it's still middle class in the sense that your
#
income is not great that you don't have great amount of savings and so on assets and so
#
on but it allows you a comfortable life 1991 I think changed a lot of that right because
#
suddenly there was openness but before that you know I think I learnt a lot on do darshan
#
I used to watch krishidarshan regularly I knew a lot about farming what fertilizer to
#
use maybe my interest in locusts also came from that but I didn't know what fertilizer
#
to use because that that cereal that that krishidarshan used to be very interesting
#
to me because I was seeing you know how crops are grown this this is what in applied and
#
learnt a lot of what can you remember any specific thing very little now very little
#
now but the other thing I learnt from do darshan was Tamil because in in the late 80s there
#
used to be an adult education program to for adult literacy so at five o'clock every evening
#
a guy used to there was a teacher with a blackboard and used to teach REE and all of that in Tamil
#
so I could speak Tamil before that but I learnt to read and write because of do darshan right
#
and this was an adult education program then we used to have the UGC programs in the afternoons
#
which had some science programs a lot of that was learning through that but I used to look
#
for material to read right so whatever you could find whether it's a Russian publication
#
or there's a hardy boys or tentacomics or tinkle or children's world newspapers we used
#
to read newspapers cover to cover so just voraciously read whatever you could get your
#
hand at 1991 was dramatic right I'll put it this way I spent a lot of my time in school
#
in NCC right I was an air wing in school and I was an infantry division army in in in college
#
and it was a serious part of my school life right so you know learning about stuff about
#
defense you know leadership analyzing defense issues all of that used to happen in school
#
and college but it was only 1991 that I first saw the map of India the practical map of
#
India on BBC or CNN because that's when satellite TV just came in right and 1991 or 1990 maybe
#
it's just before reform because I think satellite TV came in just before economic reform right
#
I suppose it is 1990 Gulf War so BBC and CNN were available on satellite TV and they used
#
to show the map of India and I said my god where the hell is Kashmir in this because
#
we were used to seeing you know the full map of Kashmir the lady with the sari yeah and
#
suddenly you see this map of India with its ears clipped and then you say oh my god what
#
the hell is this right why is this happening this way first of all you get upset you get
#
upset that the BBC and CNN are being you know they are taking Pakistan's line on this and
#
then you try and figure out why what exactly is this and then you find out oh actually
#
the line of control exists right the line of control is what divides we actually have
#
a claim on the whole of Kashmir but actual control is only till the line of control you
#
know Ladakh the eastern part of Ladakh is in China's hands so in that sense it was a sort
#
of a reality check that you realize that the closeness of your information ecosystem or
#
what you know when you open it up you know a lot about yourself you know about your country
#
that you know that oh this territory is not ours I mean practically not ours theoretically
#
legally probably ours so that's just a metaphor right suddenly you have a moment that you
#
discover a lot about India then after liberalization you suddenly realize oh my god you don't need
#
to have waiting lists for many things right you don't need permissions you can actually
#
conduct business without having to go for licenses but that's the year when I actually
#
went to Singapore right the year I think 92 93 is when I went to Singapore just after
#
reform and they go to a world where suddenly everything is free it's a freaking free market
#
right and it's unbelievable to a person who just spent time I mean we were not communist
#
China communist Russia but I can I can sort of empathize with people who are in that system
#
and suddenly go and see something free go to a supermarket they're like 40 types of
#
toothpaste right 20 types oh no 10 types of toothpaste 40 types of soft drinks this is
#
unbelievable right I mean kids today will not find it strange because that already happens
#
in India but that was a time we had two kinds of soft drinks right you had Campa Cola Campa
#
Orange and I think Torino these were what I mean thumbs up before that right thumbs
#
up in the 80s these were about four or five drinks that you have but you go there and
#
you find out there are 20 types right and what do you do with 20 types of soft drinks
#
and then you know you could do what you wanted there was no there was no of course Singapore
#
was an information close market because Singapore didn't allow satellite TV at that time but
#
in all practical purposes it was open being in an engineering stream meant that we were
#
kept very busy with engineering I remember reading only two books of fiction during my
#
four years of engineering so I always say that NTU Nanyang Technological University
#
where I went I went through NTU without with my education intact right I didn't allow
#
I later found out that there's a Mark Twain kind of statement where he says I don't let
#
school interfere with my education I had similar kind of a thing I didn't let NTU mucker on
#
In fact you have a great term Twainism that you have what you think is an original idea
#
but you find out that somebody perhaps Mark Twain said it so I love that yeah it's a Twainism
#
and it came out because of that right so it was Twainism I realized that NTU but what
#
I learned in NTU is I mucked around with the school's computer system with the university
#
computer system set up things like Facebook and Twitter of that era which is on a on a
#
text based system I had great fun setting up the university satellite system so I did
#
a lot of things which were not really examinable so I had terrible grades for the first few
#
years and then the last last year I just whacked the grades out of the park very strange I
#
don't know why either of this happened but this happened but that period was when I was
#
very focused on technology I didn't read much outside technology but I lost my job my first
#
job in the Asian economic crisis so after four years of engineering I joined a company
#
which was making pagers and mobile phones I was designing pagers and mobile phones and
#
that company went down in the Asian crisis 1997 and I'm on the streets of Singapore without
#
a job and I was looking at the newspapers and applying for every single job which had
#
electrical engineer or engineer and so happens that the government had some positions open
#
the telecommunications authority of Singapore I applied I got in and it was very interesting
#
because at that time the government of Singapore was trying to do something called govern or
#
regulate the internet and when I went to the interview I realized why exactly they wanted
#
me because none of the people there who are interviewing me had any idea what the internet
#
was because they were all telecoms people they knew how to regulate singtel deregulate
#
all of that but internet was this new thing and in the interview I found that they're
#
eating out of my hands they're asking for information and they're learning from me in
#
that first interview and in the second interview it was the same the higher level guys were
#
trying to learn stuff so the cohort which joined the government with me we were half
#
dozen of us we had great fun we were young people we were 21 22 years of age some were
#
25 and we really wrote the liberalization policies for telecoms and internet etc for
#
the whole world I was 21 years of age and one of my most interesting things of 21 years
#
of age was when I was the Singapore delegation to an ASEAN meeting and I signed a I think
#
it was a it's probably legally a treaty on behalf of the president of the Republic of
#
Singapore and I put the chaapa on it it was some treaty or agreement or something and
#
I was the Singapore delegation 21 years of age good fun how was your thinking then being
#
shaped in terms of contrast that you're working in Singapore in the Singapore government you've
#
come from India they're very different in terms of cultures in terms of systems in in
#
terms of all of that so at this point for many people they would think that yeah life
#
pan gayi poori zindagi we'll be in Singapore we'll have a good life we'll chill this is
#
a place to be you know to paraphrase that saying from kashi kashi bhaar mein jaye yuddh
#
duniya hum bajaye harmonia right because things are going well but in your mind was it that
#
right from the start you were kind of looking at these contrasts and you know connecting
#
dots and all of that how are your frameworks of looking at the world being formed during
#
this time like are they coming out of the contrast that you see around them that there
#
is this kind of economic freedom here and therefore things are working better and so
#
on and so forth that this is how this particular state works and you know these are the values
#
which are good these are the values which are bad take me through the process about
#
thinking through all of this yeah i think the value which has stayed longest with me
#
in terms of what i can remember is patriotism which i got from my parents especially from
#
my father it was a very very diffuse very liberal very pluralistic sense of patriotism
#
which is sort of loyalty towards your country and wanting the best for your country so even
#
when i went to singapore when i left in 1993 my idea was always to come back so i remember
#
going landing up there on a sunday and the very next sunday there was a sort of a welcome
#
event where there was a ethnic indian or an nri professor who was there from business
#
school and he was asking me so what do you want to do like what do you plan to do i said
#
look i don't want to finish my my engineering and the bond that i need to serve and then
#
i'm going to go back and he said everybody says that but very few people do it i said
#
oh really i i mean i really mean it and that that i really meant it until i came back i
#
was never on two minds of that i will come back the question was when and how right my
#
first attempt at coming back was between two stints in the government i did a short stint
#
for cintel which at that time had invested in bharti and they were building telecoms
#
infrastructure in in the country and between singapore and india and the cintel guys wanted
#
me to join them because i knew telecoms and i knew india and said hey why don't you join
#
that i had a great time at that point and i still remember cintel we were in driving
#
through in delhi and the one of the chief guys at cintel looked out of the window and
#
said nitin we would like you to be based here and this is where you could live right he
#
pointed at one of those lutians bungalows i wanted to tell him boss even if you pay me
#
i don't think we can stay in the lutians bungalow right but i think they wanted me to stay back
#
uh and do the joint venture with bharti i i enjoyed that stint but i somehow felt that
#
that was not the kind of things i wanted to do after moving back to india uh so that was
#
one attempt which didn't happen the second attempt was the one which succeeded where
#
after doing after studying public policy i said look this is it was an aha moment one
#
of my colleagues who's the co-founder at takshashila appointed a talk we don't have a public policy
#
school in india and that's when it hit me look this is something which i can do right
#
this is something which there's a space for this in india it's of great importance to
#
the future of india and there's something that i can do with my resources right without
#
a hundred million dollars in the bank with with with the kind of people and the knowledge
#
that i had it could you can make this happen and i remember talking to sanjay baru at that
#
time sanjay baru was media advisor to manmohan singh and he was there on exile for a short
#
while and i told him that look i have a two-year plan to go back to india and he says and i
#
told him i have a two-year plan to go back to india but i've been unable to succeed on
#
this for the last four years right i've been planning this it doesn't seem to happen he
#
said two-year plans don't work six-month plans work so at some point decide that you're
#
going to do this in six months and it'll work and true enough that's how it worked out right
#
at some point i said okay six months from now we're going to move this and happen so
#
the reason to move back to india is you can blame it on patriotism i don't think it is
#
of a nature which is you know you can blame it on idealism right idealism patriotism there
#
are a set of ideals which i think would but it's also something where you see that look
#
if you have a career ahead of you what is it that you can do that is most fulfilling
#
right i've worked as an engineer in high tech i worked as a regulator for government in
#
the government i realized that the power of the government to change things is massive
#
but you need the to inject the government with the right side of ideas right and if
#
you can play that ideas game over a long term you'll be able to do a lot of good outside
#
and you'll also be doing fairly well in your career right for example i have a job today
#
where i can think i can do what i like i can explore areas which i'm interested in i hang
#
around with some of the smartest people from almost all disciplines right public policy
#
is the only discipline where you you know you can't say that this doesn't concern me
#
every bit of knowledge in any any domain concerns you you need to know something about something
#
right you need to people you need to know people who know something about something
#
so if you need someone who knows about space i know somebody about space nuclear weapons
#
yes biology yes right arts yes podcasting yes right so you really need to uh and that's
#
really it works for me so maybe i could say that i came here for the idealism but i'm
#
staying here for a mix of idealism and and share joy of doing what i'm doing which year
#
did you decide which year did you finally make it back i moved back in 2012 with boria
#
and bistaria but you know what i spent two years before that bumming around the country
#
i resigned from my last job with the singapore government in 2010 and i spent 2010 to 2012
#
literally traveling the country lowest class lowest fare uh i mean it's not like the gandhiji
#
kind of third class uh thing but you know low-cost airlines staying in you know now
#
you have oyo rooms and fab hotels and others where you can stay uh inexpensively but at
#
that time they weren't right to find inexpensive places where you could stay you know and have
#
safe decent stay was not easy but along with a colleague we sort of went through the country
#
my whole point there was to discover the right kind of model that will work for for us given
#
the opportunities and the constraints that we have right i mean we started off takshashila
#
with zero money in the bank right we had some goodwill from rohini nilekani who gave us
#
a small amount of money to start off decent amount of money but a small amount of money
#
which meant that we had to make that money you know last right so figuring out the right
#
business model was important right right kind of place to stay right kind of place to operate
#
right kind of uh areas to focus on because india has thousands of issues right you have
#
problems agriculture health care this that that you could you could spend 100 lifetimes
#
solving just one of them so figuring out what you want to do where you want to do took me two years
#
what i really enjoyed was talking to people with various various types of social uh spaces you
#
know some people would be in politics some people would be non-profits there'd be journalists there
#
would be academics there would be students who are trying to figure out how to crack upsc
#
so i met people across the country and that was quite a experience and after the two years
#
and i used to stay in singapore at that time that's when i came up with that statement
#
saying singapore is the best city to stay in india because you were just three and a half
#
hours of flight distance from any city you wanted to go and once you were in singapore you didn't
#
have to worry about pollution and traffic and tax payments and compliance and all of those things
#
you could you had a clean place to sort of sort things out move into india do your work and then
#
move back around two years later i sort of figured out the model and then bangalore happened so there
#
are sort of two interesting intellectual journeys that are kind of related to each other and i guess
#
would be parallel that i want to that i'm curious about and one is you know that journey from the
#
abstract notion of i want to do something in this space to a concrete understanding of what does it
#
involve what is this space what are the practical constraints what are the specific areas i want to
#
work on and just having a better sense of ground realities and then deciding to do stuff that's
#
one journey and i guess a simultaneous journey which would perhaps have started earlier and would
#
be an ongoing process is the journey of figuring out the frame through which you look at the world
#
like when we are young what happens early on is that you get drawn to the first explanation of
#
the world that seems complete in itself and which seems coherent and truth doesn't matter there but
#
something seems to explain this complex world and we will usually have a tribe attached to it and
#
there is a temptation just to go for that and then over time if you're intellectually honest
#
with yourself if you have the capacity for rigor you start realizing that the world is really
#
complex no one story explains everything you get a little beyond and then at some point you arrive
#
at the essence of what you believe in the essence of your values in a sense you know like the way i
#
think of myself is that my notion about the reality of the world is constantly changing and open to
#
change because the world is so complex and one can never understand it fully but i know what my
#
values are and in that sense i'm pretty rock solid and our values would have some overlap but my
#
values would really be about individual rights and the centrality of consent and how we need
#
to minimize coercion and you know your values eventually landed up at i guess what you would
#
call liberal nationalism and we can deep dive into that later but first just to go through
#
sort of these two journeys which would have overlapped i think to a large extent getting
#
from an abstract notion of i want to help to i want to help in policy to oh this is what the
#
political economy is like and oh this is what it will involve and oh this is a narrow area in which
#
i'll go down that's one journey and the other journey being that you know these ideas are
#
enticing these ideas seem to have explanatory value and then all the way down to this is who i
#
am this is what will inform everything i do you know i was fortunate to have become an engineer
#
before getting into public policy because when i entered this policy space i was not encumbered
#
by any school of thought any ideological you know persuasion or anything i was an engineer
#
who joined the government to singapore government to work on internet and technology policy
#
and once you're in government one of the things you realize is pragmatism is a very important
#
thing right you do uh in any kind of civil service or a bureaucratic or a political system
#
there is a constraint in which you do most of the time you're moving incrementally from where you
#
are based on the best options that you have right so ideology is there it can be a mooring in some
#
people but most of the time you know you could do delta from where you are right it could go a
#
little bit to the left a little bit to the right a little bit forward two steps forward you know
#
those are the kind of options that you have right it makes you a realist in terms of
#
what policy can achieve but my my education in public policy started with reading the economist
#
so i was in the in my employer's library the telecommunication the telecommunication authority
#
of singapore had this nice old colonial building on robinson road and there used to be a library
#
on the second floor if i'm not mistaken and i used to go to the library often very few people would
#
be in the library so and the economist used to be there right and until that time i hadn't read
#
the economy because it was hard to read you know the small print the economist of the 90s was it
#
was a very sort of nerdy and and relatively expensive compared to everything else it was
#
like like a book yeah and it was it was thick and i started reading it there i got interested
#
right and by you know in a couple of years i was reading the economist cover to cover
#
and they were it was like the economist to me at that time was like this very opinionated friend
#
right this guy has very strong opinions i might not agree with him on many things
#
because instinctively i feel that's not quite right but he has an opinion he had an opinion
#
on everything and it helped me a lot in terms of understanding public policy and maybe pushed me
#
into certain directions in the way that i was operating in government so five years into my
#
job in government i became a critic of government intervention in markets while having a job that
#
required me to intervene in markets you were a regulator yeah and i was a critic of government
#
action while being an actor who's intervening in markets right so i think it helped me a balance
#
a lot a lot of people whenever people in my colleagues used to say we're going to have this
#
big program we're going to do this we're going to do that i always used to be skeptical is it really
#
i really sure you want to do all of this i mean is it really going to help and once i remember
#
asking one question in a staff conference where i became very unpopular i said look guys let's
#
say the whole organization goes for a year-long holiday right and we go all of us go play golf
#
football or whatever and we don't turn up at work we get our salaries we do all of this we don't do
#
any work do you think that the indicators we are measuring in terms of contribution to gdp
#
innovation all of that in the market would it like sort of really fall because we don't exist
#
or will it sort of increase put a hand on your hearts and say right and people sort of said okay
#
these are not the kind of questions we need to ask because hey this is about survival of the
#
organization and entity so i was that kind of a guy in government so to the extent that i was
#
persuaded about liberal economics individual liberties all of that came through a journey
#
much after my undergrad education it came through my practical experience working for the government
#
observing what government can do and observing where governments have failed doing and achieving
#
certain things so in that sense the liberalism has always been tempered by practical reality
#
patriotism and the word nationalism i think you know the u.s. the the european world of nationalism
#
is is is bigoted and i think we are adopting that kind of word of that interpretation of nationalism
#
but indian nationalism i always felt was liberal we'll talk about this later so that's where my
#
so that's where my my sort of political education happens right this is how you start off as an
#
electrical engineer and then you learn a lot of other things about about the world while doing
#
things now your question about you know what's the gateway into this right one realization i
#
had somewhere around 2005 was that india in 2005 looked very similar to the united states in 1905
#
so almost a hundred years behind but you look at the u.s. in 1905 right you had a spurt of growth
#
and because of some kind of liberalization there was a massive expansion of people who
#
were earning new money the rockefeller's and the kanagis and all of those guys made money
#
there was a whole lot of corruption you know u.s. politics was a cesspool of corruption in 1905
#
you know what they call it the gilded age and so on right you had massive amount of social problems
#
i mean it was a very unequal country black people were treated badly to say the least
#
and their external orientation was you know and around 1914 they were saying hey look there's
#
some kind of war happening in the in probably going to break out in europe do we really need to
#
be concerned about it it's highly insular looking at the continent-sized country called the united
#
states and focusing on that thing they were all looking at their navels and figuring out what to
#
do they had very little idea of what's happening in the world outside and yet by 1995 it's the
#
sole superpower global presence great university education globalizing not that the you know all
#
of that helped them make the right decisions in wars and all of that right they screwed up in
#
many places but still you're the you know you're the world's biggest economy and all of that now
#
the question is how did that happen to me i think there were few things which which happened right
#
of course participation in wars and you know those those large things but one of the important
#
things was that around 1905 is when the united state the elite in the united states started
#
seriously thinking about their place in the world right what kind of value systems do they represent
#
for themselves what should it be what should obtain around the world right woodrow widson in
#
1917 talks about internationalism right where did that come from before wilson there was you know i
#
mean theoretically it might have been there but 1917 when he was talking about an international
#
order right which is based on liberal principles so that's all of that is an intellectual journey
#
which the u.s elite made between roughly between 1890 and 1945 not only was there an awakening in
#
that sense there was also creation of institutions the new york public library rand corporation
#
consulate foreign relations harvard universities new schools and out so they spent a lot of their
#
time thinking about what they stand for what they how they should organize themselves how should the
#
world look like and there was money coming in from the rockefeller's and the others right and then
#
you know 70 years later is a different story so i said look if we can learn something from these
#
guys knowing that they were in a similar kind of a place than we are of course per capita income
#
might have been different but more you know many ingredients seem to be in the right place so what
#
was that missing piece to me the missing piece was intellectual establishment we did not have and to
#
even to this day we don't really have a strong intellectual establishment that befits an economy
#
and and a country of our size right we might think parochially it's probably it's the small
#
v problem right but how do we make a big we thinking big we for india and maybe you want
#
to expand it big we for the world right unless you have that you don't achieve the kind of outcomes
#
that the united states achieved so the answer was okay we're going to do something in intervene in
#
the intellectual space and you know blogging started and that's when the other thing is when
#
i met you i met a lot of smart people online the internet made it happen we could connect across
#
like-minded people across countries blogosphere i think really created and educated me and created
#
takshashila right and we were you know working on prakati as a magazine so we were sort of roughly in the space
#
figuring out exactly what to do now one day my my good friend anand who was a works for a tech
#
company in singapore and his colleague was an accountant in chennai we are having lunch at the
#
likwanyu school of public policy where i probably just graduated i was still studying there this is
#
2008 7 2008 and we were talking about what to do and all of that and sreeni the accountant friend
#
of ours says looks around and says nitin sir he still addresses me as sir you know which is very
#
funny probably because he's a ca and cas do that to each other right sir to other people he says
#
we must build something like this then i asked him sreeni what are you talking about
#
says sir like this he waves his hand across the building and says something like this says what
#
you mean cafe we were sitting in a cafe says no no no says we must build something like this
#
institution sir i have never seen anything like this in india and then it sort of came together
#
right that the likwanyu school of public policy as a school of public policy as an intellectual
#
establishment is the singapore government set up for certain reasons but if we if we add that to
#
what happened in the united states that's exactly what the americans did council and foreign
#
relations rand corporation various forms harvard university's school of government so various forms
#
of this come down to creating an intellectual establishment which connects you know the national
#
aspiration to an international kind of a mindset and to the realm of ideas which will take you
#
forward to the next stage right and it all comes together in a school of public policy it comes
#
together in a school in a think tank you know and then takshashila was born out of that i think that
#
was the founding moment of takshashila where where i connected it why takshashila because i connected
#
it to 2500 days ago where the you know if you were an educated person in india or in in the
#
in the subcontinent at that point you would be a takshashila alum you would go there to study
#
grammar you would go there to study arts you would go there to study statecraft you would go there
#
to study mathematics and it was you know in current day pakistan part of gandhara and very few people
#
realized that it was a cosmopolitan place rooted in indian tradition and culture but very cosmopolitan
#
there were greek bactrian influences there were chinese influences tibetan influences persian
#
influences roman influences and of course indian influences which is hindu buddhist jain various
#
traditions thereof atheist traditions jarvaks and so on so it's a very cosmopolitan place
#
where various schools of thought various kinds of people came together and created knowledge
#
right and to the extent that or the who's who of that world had to be from takshashila so that's how
#
all these things came together i said we're going to create takshashila the question is how and when
#
right that's why i talked about the two years of bumming around the country trying to figure out
#
if you have to build a new takshashila based on all these influences what's the best model to
#
build it and that's in that sense what we built was a unique model but all these are you know
#
the inspirations or the dna's motivations aspirations which sort of constructed that
#
right i think to do something like this you do need a strong strong dose of patriotism
#
because the question is why do you want to build it in india right because when i said we're going
#
to do takshashila you'll be surprised there were two foundations which were willing to give us
#
giving me a lot of money they were talking about here one was talking about a million plus and the
#
other one's talking about two million u.s dollars they said this is a great idea why don't you locate
#
it in singapore right why do you want to go to india and do this we'll give you the money
#
and i said no to that right that requires a little bit of idealism and a lot of insanity
#
but and i plead guilty to both but it had to be done in india it had to be done in india in an
#
modern indian way anchored to what india is what we are as a ancient civilization and culture
#
and as a modern republic it it it couldn't have been a singapore or a u.s-based enterprise
#
you know what you said about going around the country is resonant because when mohandas gandhi
#
arrived here from south africa there's this famous story he goes and meet gopal krishna gokhale and
#
gokhale his big hero and uh who by the way he first met in pune in i think 1893 and the first
#
time they met they took a walk around the grounds of my former college ferguson college so a lot of
#
history there but anyway so circa 1914 he comes back from south africa he meets gokale and gokale
#
kind of realizes perhaps also by reading hencevaraj that there's a lot of naive bet here you know this
#
guy doesn't really know the country so he makes him promise that he will not take part in public
#
life without traveling around the country for one full year and gandhi embarks a month later gokale
#
dies you know a great national tragedy and gandhi continues on that journey to fulfill his promise
#
except that because gokhale has died in homage to him he decides to do it barefoot which is you know
#
one of those weirdnesses about gandhi but it seems to me to be like a really interesting journey
#
that's also metaphorical in a sense because you're engaging with reality and you're actually figuring
#
it out and it seems to me that for you there would have been sort of two parts of your journey which
#
you can perhaps demarcate clearly and the first part is has to perhaps include your blogging years
#
where i find that a great way to learn about something is you write about it a lot you're
#
getting immediate feedback and just the act of even writing about it in isolation helps you think
#
better you know as you sometimes discover the way how you think you find holes in your argument you
#
figure out different directions to go and it deepens and deepens and deepens and plus then you have
#
feedback coming in from various places so that's one part i guess of that intellectual journey
#
where you're coming to terms with ideas and concepts and frames and i guess the next part
#
of the journey is where it is interacting with the real world all the time where you're understanding
#
systems of government in india of course you understand it there but systems of government
#
in india how what politicians want what bureaucrats want what is the policy ecosystem here what are
#
the margins in which you can make a difference how do you go about making those differences how
#
do you create spaces so take me through you know these two sort of journeys the first
#
journey of discovery where you're clarifying your own ideas and the next journey of figuring out how
#
to apply these ideas to the real messy world yeah see i think the the the challenge for me
#
and my colleagues in 2008-9 was that look you want to be a think tank or a school of public policy
#
etc right but you're starting with no money in your pocket you don't have a political background
#
you don't have a you know great amount of academic or political experience or working experience in
#
india right and yet you want to create this so i characterize this as a triangle where you need to
#
have a body of knowledge right or you need to create a body of knowledge this could be you know
#
writings it could be books it could be textbooks curriculum all of that which didn't exist modern
#
public policy curriculum didn't exist we still had you know i still remember 2008 people said oh why
#
did rbi do it well you know because dr reddy was there he was a great guy dr reddy managed it
#
right which is true dr reddy is a great guy he managed it but what's the story right what's the
#
logic what was the what was the reasoning right what were the intellectual inputs they had what
#
is the epistemology of that thing right none of that is known nobody talks about it right nobody
#
writes about it there are no case studies nothing right so we just say oh dr reddy was a great guy
#
oh vajpayee was a great prime minister right manmohan singh did the reform very little about the
#
intellectual content of their decisions so body of knowledge didn't exist second you need you need
#
good teachers or you know people who can teach or researchers who can do you look at it in 2008 and
#
nine this even now the bench strength is very weak you have very very few good people in public
#
policy related disciplines you have people in political science you have people in history you
#
have people in all those other areas but very few people in politics you have people in politics
#
very few people who are in in the game with one foot in the policy domain right even now you have
#
a lot of people who say i'm just an academic i just write papers but you don't have a saying
#
person who says look i'm writing this paper i'm doing this research this research is going to
#
inform uh policy direction in this field and it's going to change this right it still doesn't exist
#
in adequate quantity and the third is who's your audience who's your student so we had this triangle
#
all three parts of the triangle were like non-existent so we had to fill that so the
#
initial plan was that let's go and discover how do you fill this so that's the two years of running
#
around how to fill this right so that's how do you do the content the second is also where do you
#
mundane questions like where do you locate what kind of structure do you need who's going to give
#
you money what kind of funding decisions do you need to make you know dna of any institution or
#
a business i seriously i mean based on my experience in government looking at private companies
#
i really believe that the dna is very important you need to get that dna right which includes
#
your value system your sense of purpose your core mission right why do you exist right you need to
#
get that right and then of course there's a lot of compliance all of that so two years spent to get
#
that now if i were to pick this the easy one was to figure out that let's create the body of knowledge
#
as you said blogs because the the blogs brought together a lot of smart people who might be
#
electrical engineers who could be some other you know they are not necessarily public policy people
#
right but deeply interested in these areas now because we had a family of blogs we had my friends
#
and you know extended network of people who were in the blogosphere creating that body of knowledge
#
was a easy starting point right so we could start there from there we could identify people who were
#
who could teach you could build people who could teach and then you also as i talked about the
#
anna hazare movement which sort of accelerated everything my initial plan was to start teaching
#
in 2015 or something we brought it ahead by five years because of the anna hazare movement they
#
said look we have to do it now you can't be a full-fledged policy school doing an ma you have
#
to do this to people who are already working you know their first priority is their job the second
#
priority is their family the third priority is india right now what do you do how do you bring
#
public policy to a person who says look i want to do something for my country for my society to
#
improve etc but i have a job and i have a family you know when do i do this so fill find the
#
interstitial space and provide that i think that was the business model the the success factor for
#
the gcpp program which works to this day right you could be working we have now we have military
#
officers who are working in ladakh or working in arunachal pradesh doing military stuff during
#
the day still can spend three months and get a top-notch public policy certificate uh you know
#
education now that was easy the second part of the dna was a sense of purpose i think was very
#
clear this is going to be a project which is deeply committed to india's growth prosperity
#
and national interest right you can call it nationalism you can call it patriotism you could
#
call whatever but the india centricity was was is key to what we do right so it's not this
#
cosmopolitan the brotherhood of man or citizen of the world kind of thing right we are very conscious
#
that we have 1.4 billion people in this country changing and improving the lot of the 1.4 billion
#
is probably the best we can do for the world right then the second important thing was to do
#
with funding from the beginning we said no to foreign funding a matter of idealism because we
#
at that time i remember we had a tagline which says we want to build the intellectual foundations
#
of an india with global interests i said look if i have such a tagline and i foundation from you
#
know funding from ford foundation or some genuinely good gates foundation good people
#
who will give you money but it looks very funny right i'm saying look i want to build
#
the intellectual foundations of india with global interests and where's my money coming from from
#
these foreign donations right so i said we can't they're not going to take foreign money and that's
#
been a core idea in takshashila from day one like we do not take foreign money we also don't take
#
corporate money as in large corporate money and we don't take political money which meant in 2009
#
that all sources of funding are gone like you have no no sources of money because we wanted to be
#
independent non-partisan that was also part of what we are i knew even at that time that it's
#
going to be a hard slog because independence and non-partisanship is a hard set of values to
#
sustain even in mature democracies like the united states you will get attacked from all sides
#
you will be seen as the other by all sides so it's you're never inside you're like oh nakita
#
you're the other side of any given line in time line in sand line in time elton john
#
whatever i mean it's a good both are good phrases yeah oh nakita you're the other side of any given
#
line in time i think i can now that's elton john so that's what happens to a person who's
#
independent and non-partisan which was very clearly that we are not neutral on issues but
#
we are not we are neutral in terms of political party preference right we support all parties we
#
oppose all parties i later found that a kabir doha works wonderful to describe this says
#
kabira khada bazaar me maange sabki khair naa kahu se dosti naa kahu se bair kabira khada bazaar me
#
so we are market friendly right and naa kahu se dosti naa kahu se bair so all of this meant that
#
financing was hard but it meant that you also had to think differently because if you start off with
#
10 million dollars as most projects like this start you will say where do i get land what kind
#
of building do i build right what kind of administrative structure do i need to have and
#
so on but when you have zero money in your pocket you say that look if i get my first rupee
#
if i get my first rupee what will i spend it on right if i build get my first 100 rupees what
#
will i spend it on and then the answer to it always comes back to you'll spend it on people
#
you you use the money to give it to people let the people think get the right kind of people
#
make them think give them an environment where they can think the right set of ideas or the
#
wrong set of ideas doesn't matter it's a free flow of ideas and then those ideas create policy so
#
your money should go into people and ideas right and then the message was that you take the right
#
set of ideas connect them to the right set of people connect them to the right platforms and
#
then you get change right that's the theory of change which was discovered through the
#
two-year journey right that you don't see the traditional model would be you take 10 million
#
dollars get a big building in somewhere in delhi close to the corridors of power employ a few
#
former is officers or defense officers or ifs officers and you have a think tank and how does
#
this think tank operate it operates by trying to get it in the corridors of power tries to whisper
#
things into the ears of the powerful it tries to formally be part of committees commissions uh you
#
know you know all the feedback mechanism that the state has and that is the theory of change
#
that's if you have a thousand if you have over 10 million dollars you know sugar daddies and
#
access to this but you have zero what's your theory of change especially if you want to
#
be independent non-partisan to me the answer is very clear right you try and influence the
#
elite of the country and the elite of the country are literally people who read op-ed pages of
#
newspapers the elite of the country are not necessarily people who are rich who fly in
#
chartered flights right people who have spectacles and can read are probably the elite of the country
#
right so bar for eliteness in india is quite low although each one likes to accuse everyone
#
else oh you are an elite person right usually a person who's accusing another one of an elite
#
person is an elite guy i mean it's it's it's almost when i describe myself as part of the
#
elite says both a confession and a lament in a sense but perhaps it shouldn't be but continue
#
but we are who we are you know we don't choose our parents so if you have very little money in the
#
bank and you're fighting this battle of ideas being being independent non-partisan you realize
#
that you have to persuade the elite of the country and you have to do it for a long period of time
#
and an agnostic to which party is in power and that's your theory of change you need to go to
#
young people who are going to be in influential positions over a period of time and give them
#
look these are the foundational constitutional values of the country you know liberty equality
#
fraternity social justice is there in the preamble of the constitution and this is the way we are
#
going to govern ourselves and you say this is we are not i mean you're you're pro this party pro
#
that party is all fine all of you guys are welcome you can study this stuff we are going to give you
#
the same education we are going to give you the same policy recommendations whichever party or
#
politicians you belong if you like it take it if you don't like it too bad right so we don't
#
directly try and influence what policy we are not trying to get a seat in new delhi under this
#
committee or that committee that is why we are based in banglore right the distance from delhi
#
is physical but this distance from indians is very very close because you are in banglore you
#
are on social media you are on you know you are on every kind of mechanism and the internet has
#
allowed us to reach everybody in the country without having to be in delhi without needing
#
to be in delhi right so that's the theory of change which is why we are based in banglore
#
in fact we have this pavan srinath who used to work at takshashila and i we were talking about
#
it several years ago and we came up with this idea of distance from delhi right the theorem
#
goes like this your objectivity towards your your objectivity towards india's national interest is
#
proportional to your distance from delhi so the further you are from delhi the more objective you
#
are towards the national interest i think it's i mean it's a mild put down to the people in delhi
#
but i think it works to that extent because you're not you're not caught up in the partisan debates
#
of the day right you're not you're not trying to give advice to the government on what they
#
have to do tomorrow but you're looking at issues you know two five years down the road and you're
#
trying to create ideas and a set of broad consensus on how to approach these issues
#
what you need to prioritize how do you go about it and you're talking to the elite of the country
#
in a way that's what your podcast is doing you're trying to talk to important people in the country
#
and build a sort of broad general alignment in a particular direction that's what we do also yeah
#
and future elites as well like i often kind of you know one of my aims is to put a repository
#
of thinking and work out there so that some 15 year old girl listening to my podcast today is
#
hopefully prime minister of india in the year 2050 and that's a long game that's a difference
#
that you try to make in whatever small way that you act and that bipartisanship is so
#
important to this because i remember when i was editor of prageti for you guys 2016 2017
#
my core principle was that we will talk about ideas and policies not people or parties you know
#
which is exactly the value that you stated as well but sometimes the environment makes it hard for
#
you right so tell me about your sort of struggles with that because what would typically happen
#
is that people are pushed in different directions you know as an institution it's always you know
#
people will try to co-opt you money will play a role in that so what have been your sort of
#
struggles through that period of time with with that question see i think the biggest one given
#
the times that we started 2012 onwards is when the modi phenomenon became massive i think there was
#
there was and to an extent there still is pressure that you join that side
#
well there are many things which we support which which which modi has for example taken
#
up and the modi government and the bjp government has taken up and which are unpopular among the
#
left and the liberals but we still support that there are many things which we disagree
#
with and many things which are sort of neutral on so this there's this desire on the part of
#
many people to want you to be on their side i think is the biggest one people don't understand
#
that look i must tell you of this i would i was at a function a couple of years ago some wedding
#
reception i think and i was chatting with a person who was a member of the one of the members of the
#
rss family it was not the rss itself but she was one of the one of the cultural areas whatever but
#
she was very clearly from the sangh parivar and we were having a nice conversation on on something
#
and one of my friends walked in and he was a congress party politician and we were talking
#
and i sort of introduced them to each other and then she said you know he's she points at me and
#
says you know nitin is not on on you know my side he's on your side and then the congress
#
partition politician tells her that oh no no no he's not on my side he's on your side then i told
#
them hey guys what are you talking about i'm neither on your side i'm on my own side you know
#
i am on the side it's my side and i'm the side i mean i'm the citizen of the country so i have
#
my own side i don't have to belong to your side i think that was the was the was and still is
#
challenge of partisan non-partisanship well it's the same with the the opposition parties as well
#
the congress and the others they're always suspicious of someone who's not them right
#
oh you know be careful you know those guys are pro bjp no we are not pro bjp there are certain
#
things which we said which might be what the bjp is supporting at this particular point in time
#
the bjp changes his position on on various issues right at this particular point in time it seems
#
to be aligning it's not because we are pro bjp or we are not anti bjp we are we are not pro
#
neither are we anti bjp right we are not pro congress nor anti congress but every political
#
party in these polarized times wants to see you as part of them and if you're not part of them
#
you're you're the other right and your your worst suspicions about the other come come about and
#
say okay once you're not us you're you're you're a satan you know you have horns and you have all
#
that i think dealing with that is hard because what it does is it stifles debate right it stifles
#
open debate it stifles your ability to persuade others and internally it creates a bias in you
#
because you feel hey you know these guys are all attacking me so maybe i should sort of see them
#
as adversaries right you don't see them you can't be agnostic to someone who's attacking you
#
so all of that makes this job a lot more difficult than it ought to have been but then we don't choose
#
our reality right just like we don't choose our parents we don't choose the world the kind of
#
world we live in we can try to operate the best that we can but you don't get to choose this
#
yeah and also and in that this course is kind of amusing the way that every side will attack
#
somebody like a you or a ramachandra guha or a sadhanan thume or a pratap bhanu maitha just
#
because you are not completely you know buying the party line on one side or the other and and
#
again what i said earlier about shallow posturing versus deep engagement like i remember when there
#
was a stock of aditya na changing the labor laws doing away with the labor laws now the thing is
#
anybody who's engaged with policy deeply for any period of time understands that the labor laws
#
weren't helping labor weren't helping workers they were doing just the opposite they were stifling
#
indian industry deeply preventing the creation of jobs and are one of the many reasons that we
#
didn't become a manufacturing superpower right from the 70s onwards right so you just know that
#
uh the laws are terrible and doing away with them is a great reform because they weren't helping
#
workers and yet you had so much social media outrage from people who have never who have zero
#
understanding of public policy or economics or and heard of the those laws for the first time
#
then who were just making that classic mistake of mistaking intention for outcome and saying no no
#
these laws are protecting workers they're doing away with them look what a monster look adityanath
#
oh nitin pai is supporting the this thing he must be an adityanath supporter he must be whatever
#
you know and and that discourse kind of completely breaks down and becomes impossible and what has
#
really happened at a wider level than just social media is that a lot of thinking now a lot of the
#
stance that people take seem to coalesce around which party is proposing something you know even
#
with the farm laws you know a lot of those reforms have been spoken about with bipartisan
#
consensus among experts for 30 years they were part of the congress party's freaking manifesto
#
in 2019 and yet the opposition is united on one side the support is united on the other side
#
and it kind of makes one wonder that if these sort of tribalistic and political considerations
#
are going to uh drive policy then it kind of makes a landscape for reform much worse of course
#
most reform just really happens incrementally in the details in the back rooms and this is not
#
it's only a few high profile issues which get into the news like that but you know does this
#
changing landscape complicate uh matters you know and also how much of your of the work that you do
#
like the key focus of the work that you do is of course educating people and we'll talk about the
#
thousands of students you've had and how the courses have grown uh but i'm guessing a certain
#
part of it is also interacting with people in government whether they are politicians or
#
bureaucrats many of whom in fact do your courses and you train them and what is how do they look
#
at you when uh you know they come into the picture do you like when you're going out there with a
#
policy recommendation do you have to strategize on how you're going to sell it can you simply
#
come from a point from the completely rational point of view remove from context of just saying
#
you know this is and x is good because abc or do you have to contextualize it depending on
#
which stakeholder you're talking to so kind of complicated almost a set of questions but
#
three specific things right i think from this from roughly from the 90s we got into a situation
#
where the opposition opposes whatever the government puts up it opposes right and if the
#
parties change that same party so proposes what it had opposed right like the bjp did it yes
#
the whole sort of things and that's not a new phenomenon right at least i've noticed it from
#
the 90s now what is new is that people have become tribal with respect to the political
#
preferences of their parties right like people have started taking positions on farm laws on
#
labor reforms or on gst or on all of that based on their political loyalty in the tribalism right
#
little little knowing that the political leaders themselves are pragmatic enough to
#
change their positions depending on where they are right for example if if a political party
#
which is in the opposition today gets elected and becomes government it's probably going to
#
do some of the things which its predecessor did and which it opposed right and you as a
#
as a supporter of that party are left bewildered to say how the hell did this happen right and
#
you rationalize it by blaming something now that becomes a problem because if you're trying to
#
influence public opinion on a certain set of ideas you get diverted from a debate on those issues
#
to a debate on the politicians and the partisan issues that the politicians are promoting
#
at that particular period in time i think the labor reforms which you mentioned about yogi adityanath
#
or more recently the farm laws which modi the modi government pushed forward good examples right
#
i think we've been long talking about labor reform the necessity of labor reform right
#
for 20 plus years and in in generally i mean there might be some things up which we disagree
#
with and all of that but the general thrust of that labor reform was exactly what up needed i
#
mean up is uttar pradesh is a labor rich demographically vibrant state which needs
#
mass employment which needs labor reform more than any other state and it's within the within
#
the constitutional mandate of the state government to enact those labor reforms but the point when
#
it's i mean there might be good reasons to oppose it i'm not familiar with up politics or economy
#
anymore in great depth there might be reasons to oppose it but the opposition can't be that
#
yogi adityanath is a guy whom i don't like and therefore i'm going to oppose labor reform it
#
makes no sense right i mean you need the labor reform for the state similarly i think the
#
case of the farm laws more complicated because here the government was also at fault but you
#
can't oppose farm laws based on the simple fact that the bjp government led by modi is doing it
#
you can oppose it by saying that look uh the it was not done properly it was uh railroaded through
#
parliament if there is a uh if there is a law that affects 60 of the country you better have
#
a consultation process take your time take one to two years go and sell it to people in various
#
parts of the country build you know build consensus and support for it and then introduce it in
#
parliament bring the opposition on board to the extent that the opposition is willing to play
#
ball you don't have to listen to them but you go through the genuinely go through the exercise of
#
bringing them on board and you don't if they disagree too bad you know you're the opposition
#
you sit outside we are government we'll do it you can fault the government for not going through
#
this process but you can't fault the government for saying uh you know i don't like this because
#
the modi government is doing it it's okay for the congress to say it because that's true to form
#
true to form they're in the opposition they'll oppose everything the government does but if you're a
#
you know you're a citizen of the country with pro-congress sympathies you can't oppose it or your
#
anti-bjp feelings you can't go and oppose it just because one country doing it right and that's
#
become the problem now you even in the court of public opinion it's very hard to have a debate
#
on issues which are in the national interest by taking out the partisan things of it because the
#
partisan element comes in at every point and that's bad for the country we've got to figure out how
#
to sort this out and moving forward one way is the the way takshashila has always been doing it is
#
we never as you mentioned we never talk about the political leadership or the or criticize the
#
politician or the party that is doing this the issue matters if the labor reform is good it's
#
good if it's not good it's not if demonetization is a problem demonetization is a problem right
#
you just call out the the issue for what it is sometimes that is liked by those in power
#
sometimes people don't like it but that's the i think the way to move forward it doesn't you
#
know it doesn't make you popular one of the things which you have to do in a social media era is you
#
know you want to get popularity and eyeballs and engagement you have to make a comment that mr x
#
is bad or x did this thing you know you have to bring a personality in be partisan and then
#
everybody listens to you right so the cost of non-partisanship is lower viewership so you've
#
got to take that now the other question of how do you deal with government you know contrary to what
#
people think in many areas the civil service is open to ideas unfortunately the civil service
#
is caught in a apparatus where the system itself does not generate enough good ideas so what do
#
you do right if you are a civil servant today and you want some let's say you want to find a way to
#
generate economic growth in a particular state what do you do your internal system the way
#
government hires the government promotes the government the you know the the civil service
#
system is broken and dysfunctional except for some people really really conscientious and doing
#
stuff this is so you need to get ideas what do you do you can do two things one is you can go
#
and commission a consultant to do this for you which is a very popular thing now right and the
#
consultant route has a added advantage of getting a view that you want to do when i was in government
#
in singapore i remember one minister telling me that is a consultant is a person who borrows
#
your watch to tell you the time right and the corollary to that is if you want the time you know
#
if you want to tell the time that you want you you lend him your watch right so the consultants
#
usually will do what the establishment wants and there are advantages to this but the disadvantage
#
is that the consultant might sell you a very might bill you at very low prices because he knows that
#
he can build that industry private players in that industry at much higher prices let's say
#
you are writing the policy brief for the government of a particular state on liquor policy
#
right or some tender you're specking out a tender on a on a particular project you can sell your
#
services to the government at very low prices because you know that in the same state or in
#
some other state you can bill you know alcohol industry player or a you know infrastructure
#
player much higher to prepare bids for that right of course you'll say i have you know
#
china wars and all that there's been enough controversy in india to know that that really
#
doesn't work right there there is a the consultants are moving across states even if they do it with
#
some amount of diligence right there are multiple states if you write a law in state a you can help
#
the bidder in state b right it's perfectly okay and it's perfectly legitimate so that's the
#
challenge with consultants the other thing you can do as a civil servant is you can approach
#
think tanks the good thing is to the extent that the think tanks are competent you will probably
#
get a much more independent and critical view of what you need to do the bad thing is many think
#
tanks want the glory and the glamour of saying that we did it right they want to go to their
#
donors and to their supporters and say oh we wrote the you know the tender specifications for this
#
because that's stock in trade you know that's how a think tank shows that it's influential to its
#
community the problem with that is that nobody insists government wants that and fairly truly
#
enough it is if if mr modi signs off on space policy reform it is mr modi who's taking that
#
political risk if there's a civil servant who tabled that space policy reform to the prime
#
minister it's that civil servant who's taking the risks of that so it might be a think tank
#
which wrote the space policy document but the real credit does belong to the prime minister to the
#
to the political leader and the civil servant who's actually putting that in place it's not
#
you're just a scribe in that but if you go out and sell oh you know we did it then it creates
#
let's call it sensitivities within government for for them to listen to you right so the best way
#
to do this is to do it quietly respond to civil servants who ask you questions and ask for help
#
respond to politicians who ask you questions ask for help do it quietly you don't have to go and
#
sing you know don't you don't have to go and advertise that you did this you did that
#
as long as you know they know your stakeholders know privately you're fine yeah this is something
#
my good friend and perhaps our good mutual friend ruben abraham also early blogger once was at
#
pains to point out when he was with the idfc institute he's now with artha global that when
#
you work with government just keep the low profile make sure they get all the credit your interest
#
is only in the work actually getting done and not in posturing to the public that hey i've done this
#
i've done that and what you said about the farm laws i had a great episode with ajay sha where
#
we talk about this how how the bjp for once might have got the economics right but they bungled up
#
the politics so incredibly badly and brought it on themselves and about bipartisanship you know i
#
often the test that i give people is it doesn't matter which side you support and which side you
#
oppose just tell me this what is the one good thing that the people you oppose have done and
#
what is the one good one bad thing that the people you support have done and if you can't think of
#
anything that that means it's just tribal thinking it's purely black and white because the world is
#
a world is complex you know the worst guy out there is doing some good things just by default
#
because they just happen in the administration and vice versa yeah i think and a lot of it is
#
to take what you said further right a lot of our common challenge is to persuade the citizen that
#
the citizen is on his or her own side the citizen you know that party ruling is not my party that
#
leader is not my leader right that you know we get to choose who's our leader i might choose mr x at
#
one point and mrs y at the other right and that is what it means by being my own side we have to
#
make the political leaders in the political parties court us and get our support our support should
#
not be automatic and taken for granted the moment you know your support is taken for granted you
#
will be taken for granted right and i think that's one of the important challenges of our times you
#
know how do you convince and persuade the citizen that look we as citizens are our own side we get
#
to choose they have to come and ask us for support and i also want to drill down a little bit in what
#
you said about how you know extreme political views get more eyeballs and all of that and that's true
#
but there's a nuance i'll add there which is i mean this is something youtube creators also know
#
creators everywhere know that you put a sensational headline there the more the more partisan you are
#
the more eyeballs you get for example if i release this podcast say with the headline that nitin pi
#
expresses his fondness for you the yogi adityanath you know you'll get a lot of clicks but the point
#
there is that all the people who click because of that headline will not listen to the whole
#
podcast will not take in the whole conversation so you're getting the numbers but the engagement
#
is incredibly shallow and i think this applies to all content and the reason incentives are screwed
#
up is that advertisers haven't yet figured it out this difference between shallow engagement
#
and deep engagement which is why i often say that i'd rather have a hundred thousand people listen
#
to an episode than 10 million people watch a two-minute youtube video i put out because
#
the level of engagement is different the average time of that youtube channel might be 15 seconds
#
but the average uh the session on the scene in the unseen for example last i checked is about 40
#
minutes and people listen across multiple sessions and you got to value this deep engagement but
#
because advertisers don't value it or because enough people haven't found ways to monetize it
#
the incentive for the creator the reporter the media house is to go towards the sensational and
#
put up those headlines which are getting shallow engagement and it's kind of a vicious circle
#
but at some point i'm kind of hopeful that uh it breaks yeah and it's also column writers challenge
#
right because there are several columns where i mean very few people know that the columnist
#
doesn't get to choose the headline the headline is written by the editor and it's usually the
#
editor's privilege some editors might consult you some might not but it's the editor's privilege or
#
the publisher's privilege so very often the editor write frame a headline that makes it more
#
interesting right and the engagement levels go up and the column itself might be nuanced
#
but the headline might be very very stark and you know uh you know giving a very simple
#
simplistic kind of a statement and then people just look at that especially on twitter right
#
that's what is tweeted people just look at the headline and say you said this well the actual
#
fact is this is the headline created by an editor of a column that i wrote and the column itself
#
might be more nuanced than what the headline is saying and people don't throw this back at you
#
and say hey you know you said this and i guess it's one of those occupational hazards of being
#
a columnist that people don't read the thing although twitter i think now has that before
#
you retweet or respond they say please read it before i think twitter has it they did that
#
for something i wrote somebody linked to a piece of mine i was trying to retweet it twitter was
#
like do you want to read that first and i was like dude i wrote that but yeah i mean that's
#
twitter can't know that that's that's what maybe that's helped at the margin right but people
#
don't read because usually as an analyst right we always have to be aware of how much we know right
#
we can only be confident to the to the level of awareness of the facts that you have usually you
#
will see like pratap is a pratap bhanumayata is a great example here you will find him writing
#
sentences like to the extent that before you say something to the extent that we know x i think y
#
right that's a very important nuance but what happens in the headline writing is that they leave
#
the to the extent that we know x and just jump onto the i think y right and then the headline
#
is i think y and that's lost and i suppose that's again one of the challenges of this age where
#
people don't read people don't read an op-ed right people want even if you see some of the newspapers
#
now they have bullet points in the first three even if you don't read the rest here the three
#
bullet points maybe that helps maybe it's a quick way to communicate the nuance to the reader without
#
having without the reader having to read the whole thing but i think people are obliged to read
#
articles right you can't be a citizen unless you spend 800 you know two or three minutes of
#
a time reading 800 words on an issue that you think is important i mean you have a right to vote you
#
have a right to mold the future of your country and your children and if you can't read 800 words
#
on a topic that you think is important and understand the nuances i don't think you're
#
being a good citizen i don't think you're discharging your responsibilities of being a
#
citizen pratap once described twitter very beautifully in episode 300 which he did with
#
me as a decontextualization machine which i think is such a superb description and it again goes
#
through the problem of shallow posturing versus deep engagement like if i have written a long essay
#
on something i want to engage with people who have a read the essay and b have ideas that are well
#
thought through enough that they can write counter essays i want to engage with people like that i
#
don't want to engage with someone who's read the headline or who's read something that somebody said
#
about it and then they want to harangue me but that is a majority of the engagement that you kind of
#
get and what you pointed to about twitter saying that do you want to read it first or you know
#
whatsapp talking about a forward forwarded many times you know i think those are great examples
#
of social media platforms on their own doing something to ameliorate the problem that happened
#
because it tried to maximize engagement you know so i think there is hope that solutions can come
#
from within those companies because it to you know paint them in one dimensional ways as a face of
#
evil i think is also not fair you have responsible people in those places who kind of get it but
#
you know it's i guess a long painstaking process my next question is this and takes you a little
#
further back perhaps into how you sort of designed what you teach at takshashila and it is that one
#
way of teaching public policy for example is being purely mechanistic that if you move this lever
#
then this shifts here and so on and so forth and you just kind of focus on that and it's value
#
agnostic it is just about you know you do this that happens etc etc and the other way is to have
#
a core set of values which you then bring into it which you guys clearly do you know those values
#
being realism when it comes to foreign policy liberal nationalism which i'll ask you to speak
#
about soon and so on and so forth so how do these kind of play into each other like at one level
#
the values play directly into the levers that you're moving for example i believe in individual
#
freedom and that's part of my set of values but equally in a mechanistic way the more you
#
enhance individual freedom within the workings of the state and how it's relates to society the
#
more society benefits so the two kind of go together there so what was your thinking on this
#
when you started getting into it and if you want to kind of preface that by talking about how
#
those values formed and fructified in the first place i'd sort of find that interesting as well
#
yeah i think the first thing i wanted to do and i still want to do is that whatever we do must be
#
interesting and awesome right it should be interesting for us to do right i mean and there's
#
no reason why public policy can't be interesting it is one of the most interesting topics that you
#
can think of right it so happens that the the the prevailing orthodoxy in academia is to make
#
everything boring and make it so stultified and you know it's like so so plain and so
#
energy sapping that you end up with a very small number of people who want to study that stuff
#
the what you want what we do at takshashila is make it interesting and awesome right now once
#
you start with that frame then you see that look what is it what is it that people would like to
#
learn and what is it that we have a duty to teach and you bring that together and that's where magic
#
happens right now the good news is having been through a fairly good public policy master's
#
program i came to the conclusion that you don't really need two years of a master's program okay
#
you can actually do it in one year you can even do it in shorter than one year what you need is
#
a good mix of people right in the class composition and the engagement of the class
#
by the faculty makes a huge difference right the curriculum itself the basics and the fundamentals
#
need to be taught but beyond that you don't need to go and teach you know all the application areas
#
how various things are applied and so on right so get the course and the fundamentals right
#
get the class composition right and get a great faculty to interact with the class that's your
#
magic formula it's simple enough to say but you know you'll find it very very few institutions
#
even ones with lots of money and lots of things being they can't do this because they don't think
#
from this perspective right so our curriculum therefore always is one where there's a blend
#
between having a firm grasp of your fundamentals right if we teach economics for example micro
#
economics demand supply price flows all that you need to get a good handle india's constitutional
#
system right how does the india's constitution you had to get a good handle on that now beyond
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that is when you bring the students into the class so in one of my first gcpp lectures i said look
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this is a scam right i'm not going to do anything like you guys are going to talk to each other
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we're going to have a great conversation at the end of it we all come out a little more educated
#
and of course there's an exam you pass the exam you know it's an open book exam you have two weeks
#
to take the exam you take it home you take two weeks you can talk to whoever as long as the
#
process is original you know you don't plagiarize you're fine but the whole magic is bringing the
#
class together which is why from the earliest days although we teach the course largely online
#
i was an i was not interested in making it a mook because public policy is not like programming
#
it's not like learning greek right you have to get this knowledge but most importantly you should
#
learn how to talk to each other persuade each other and learn from each other that's why the
#
class composition is important right what we've done the secret sauce really is being able to
#
put together a class that comes from various disciplines different age segments different
#
professions motivated to learn and is willing to share with each other right so and we create
#
platforms you know the within the class you know there are class discussions online offline written
#
and all of that and then the faculty also i was really impressed by this idea of upanishadic
#
teaching now when i said upanishadic teaching for the first time he says oh you know this is
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hindutva rss hindu brahmanism but i said look you know what the word upanishad means right
#
upanishad means come sit next to me right it upa is near right nishad is set so you you're sitting
#
next to each other close to each other and learning now what the upanishads although you can buy the
#
upanishads as texts the way you learn the upanishad is from a guru because there is knowledge which is
#
textual which is transmitted along with esoteric knowledge when you sit with a guru and he tells
#
you the nuances of this some of this might be sarcasm the some of this might be puns some of
#
this might be counterpoints so what we do with the the philosophy with our teaching philosophy is
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upanishadic so we once had a class where bibik debroy was teaching a class on economics
#
around a table in a cafe and also you know people are all sitting around him and having a there's a
#
photo of him laughing and there's a so that is upanishadic teaching right he's not teaching basic
#
microeconomics which you can learn from a textbook but he's teaching the nuances the things which are
#
not written there and that makes the that's the secret part of the secret sauce now all these
#
three things together awesomeness of the curriculum great classes upanishadic teaching adds up
#
adds up together but you said something about values you know what we don't do in our teaching
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is brainwashing dakshashila as an organization promotes the values of freedom liberty citizenship
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india is a great power and so on so we have strong market sympathies strong individual liberty
#
sympathies but when we teach the emphasis is being more analytically rigorous than on imparting
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values on day one my belief is that your foundation should be analytically rigorous once you have the
#
analytical rigor you can sympathize with one value system or the other right so at the outset we
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don't do the in fact we try very hard to communicate look we will we will give you an analytically
#
rigorous education you are supposed to come to the class by keeping all of your ideological baggage
#
outside the teachers will also do that to the extent possible but be aware that they might have
#
biases but their biases doesn't mean that you have to take it you know at face value you should
#
question and absorb what you what you think so keep an open mind learn that so this is contrary
#
to most you know institutions where they try to instill the values of the institution in the
#
output right in the students we don't do that i think i'll be happiest if people go out with
#
an open mind are able to you know maybe someone is sympathetic to communism someone is sympathetic to
#
i don't know free market capitalism that's fine they make their own calls but when they leave
#
takshashila the first thing they should have is an open mind with a firm foundation understanding
#
firm foundation and understanding of the basics you know economic principles civics of the country
#
ethics ethical frameworks and all that you you choose what you want and is it and i and i'm
#
guessing that self-selection and the selection bias therefore plays a part because anyone who
#
comes in has a certain openness of mind already and you're you're giving helping them with frameworks
#
and analytical tools and all of that but it means that right at the start the quality of your
#
cohorts is at least starting at a minimum base level where you're not going to have the dogmatic
#
type coming in who just want their priors to be confirmed but people who actually kind of want to
#
think about the world and want to engage so tell me a little bit about the kind of students that
#
you have and then also about how have the courses expanded through the year like what is the total
#
number of people you've taught what is their kind of profile like what have they gone out and done
#
in the world then you know what because when you came in there was no ecosystem of public policy
#
education at all right of people actually getting trained in this in a systematic way and going out
#
there so you guys are the OGs right so what's so give me a sense of that landscape first from a
#
point of view what kind of people took your courses how many people have you taught how many people
#
do you teach in a year what are the different kind of courses and then what is the impact that
#
alumni has had and how has the ecosystem changed yeah so today i think depending on how you count
#
we've got about close to 10 000 people who've passed through our programs close to probably
#
7 000 people who've actually passed certificate programs of one kind or the other current class
#
sizes each cohort size we do three cohorts a year for our gcpp program currently the size is about
#
300 per cohort and that's about a thousand a year and the postgraduate program which is a one-year
#
course has about 20 to 50 in the in the class so you do about a thousand people now when we started
#
off we used to have about 30 people in a batch so we used to do 30 times three about 90 to 100
#
students a year about 10 years ago growth is deliberately not astronomical because we have two
#
offline components and this is where you know one of my earliest colleagues used to say look let's
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make it all online you'll get thousands of students i said no you can't teach public policy as an
#
entirely online program you have to have them here shake hands debate with each other you know
#
have this interactive experience which is a human thing it's okay if we just have a few hundred
#
so we used to have one program called a gcpp graduate certificate in public policy which is
#
an omnibus program which tried to do everything for everyone over the years we've introduced
#
specializations so we have something called an advanced public policy which is generic but gets
#
into deeper areas we have a defense and foreign affairs program which is targeted mainly at people
#
in the defense and foreign affairs space obviously as the name suggests we have a technology and
#
policy program which is basically targeting people who are entrepreneurs venture capitalists
#
engineers innovators creators of various kinds people who work in the tech industry
#
uh because that's i think one of the areas where there's a huge potential of these guys to change
#
the world right and then we have a postgraduate program which is a one year long 48 weeks long
#
program which is equivalent to a master's program the short ones are just 12 weeks right what happens
#
is in the 12 weeks and this is i love i love this design okay you have 12 weeks in which the first
#
six weeks where you learn the basics then you come for a seminar and a workshop physically
#
then on the eighth or the ninth week there's another hackathon which is we go to nandi hills
#
we lock everybody up for three days uh people live you know it's like a hostile kind of an atmosphere
#
and we do a lot of exercises role-playing games problem solving etc which happens there and then
#
you have a final exam which is a two-week uh process you you just get a question and you take
#
two weeks to answer it you know you can take anybody's help you can acknowledge it you have
#
to be honest but we are just going to look at the output right so who are the kind of people who do
#
this right to this day i think the most interesting bunch and the largest cohort are a bunch of people
#
who say look i want to know how to do things properly how should things work and if i have to
#
intervene uh how do i do this i'm not i'm not interested in changing my career i'm not interested
#
i just i'm an active citizen right and as a citizen i want to do good and i want to do
#
what's the best way to do this so usually these people are not looking for jobs they're not looking
#
for there's no expected outcome now in the last few years we've had a lot of defense officers
#
taking it because thanks to the generosity of our donors we are offering full scholarships to
#
kernel level officers of three services about 250 of them take the course in each batch the
#
defense and foreign affairs program they are nominated by the service headquarters so the army
#
navy and their force they they delegate these guys and they come and take the course and we don't
#
charge them anything because uh donors were very generous they support this completely right we
#
provide them the most advanced course in strategic studies available right including a course of on
#
the artashastra so we are the only institution in the world which provides strategic studies
#
plus i mean artashastra is a critical component of the strategic store in that sense it's a
#
holistic strategic studies program it's defense it has technology so it has the 21st century stuff
#
it also has the artashastra the evergreen stuff so and you know one of the joys of talking to
#
students is in during my introductory sessions i ask them what's your name where do you come from
#
and tell me your professional specialization right so someone says look i'm i work for
#
microsoft and i'm working in artificial intelligence i write bots some guy says you
#
know i'm working for some financial industry and my specialization is i don't know
#
i don't filing income tax returns something like that and then there's this guy who said oh i'm
#
working for the armed forces and my specialization is dropping tanks into war zones from an aircraft
#
i said boss tell tell me that again so i drop tanks from aircraft into war zones and that's
#
his specialization wow i said boss i'm done now i've achieved i don't think there's any other
#
guy in this country who can boast of having a student who says my specializes dropping tanks
#
from aircraft into war zones so we have a lot of interesting people we have people taking the
#
courses both civilian and military officers taking it from all sorts of interesting places
#
in india you know arunachal pradesh the guy in port blair you know because location doesn't
#
really matter and as long as you have a good bandwidth internet connection you can take the
#
course we have very very interesting people we used to have afghan nationalists who used to take
#
this these are the guys who are fighting the taliban so amrullah saleh and afghan green trend
#
was a liberal nationalist formation in the in afghanistan and we used to train about
#
a few of them each batch i think we've trained a total of about 30 to 40 of these young people
#
age group of 25 to 50 who are now i don't know what they are doing because they are probably in
#
quite they should connect with your other guy and drop tanks on the taliban that's unfortunately
#
what we don't do in fact at that point we didn't have any military officers in the course right
#
uh it so happened and the military things happened later i think it would be great to have
#
you know people like that in the thing but right now it's you know the defense and foreign affairs
#
program as only internationals the other programs don't yeah no these courses are kind of awesome
#
i've been privileged to not i haven't done any of these courses but i've watched recordings and
#
stuff and i couldn't recommend them more highly not just because you guys are friends so i'll put
#
the links in the show notes do check them out what have been your sort of learnings from putting all
#
of this together like learnings one in terms of sort of how to teach how to get across to these
#
guys you know what to teach because i'm guessing at some level there is a craft to teaching also
#
you know uh just as there is you know the craft of writing that i might have a story to tell so
#
i tell it but the first time i do it or the first time i make an argument in an op-ed
#
it's like really boring the structure might be something conventional i'm not really thinking
#
about the reader my initial thing is i have thoughts in my head i want to get it out on paper
#
then the craft begins to come together when i start thinking that there is a reader at the end of it
#
and that magical process of changing his mind you know engaging him entertaining him changing his mind
#
all of that and that's when the craft really begins to become meaningful and i'm guessing there's a
#
similar process like that with teaching as well that sure you have all the material you know you've
#
been to the school of public policy in singapore the knowledge is there but when it comes to
#
actually communicating it making it relevant building local context telling stories you know
#
going beyond the abstract and putting in things that are concrete there so take me through your
#
processes of learning about it and designing it yeah i think the most interesting thing i saw was
#
that people who have come through the traditional indian education system are expected are expecting
#
to receive lectures right somehow the education system makes them feel small they expect to feel
#
small right they're talked down to they are told what to do they're supposed to take notes they're
#
supposed to answer questions in the exam right and what we do at taxtecial is turn this whole thing
#
upside down right in the sense that the one of the things is what do you you know every faculty in
#
every lesson he says what do you think and many times you know students who are fresh out of the
#
indian academy what do you think you know i've never been asked that question in my life you
#
know i go to a class no the teacher doesn't ask me what do i think so changing that relationship
#
is the most interesting thing that i've learned you know and i've realized that we have to do it
#
a lot because the the the a lot of people who come through the education system are caught in this
#
education system are caught in this they have to call you a sir right he said there are no sirs
#
here no one's been knighted by the queen or now the king right so you call each other by the first
#
names you call all the faculty by the first name you are in a relationship where there is a there
#
is a teacher and you're a student but the teacher and student relationship doesn't mean that
#
everything that this teacher says is right and everything that you say is wrong you are allowed
#
to ask questions but do it politely have an open mind and if you feel that if the the teacher
#
feels that look you need to study a little bit more before you form an opinion take that seriously
#
you know it's not that you have to form an opinion right up front based on this so that's what we tell
#
them i think that's the the critical thing in in getting out because i found that the yearning to
#
learn whether it's in a 19 year old student who's a we have some junior students who are 19 year old
#
undergrad who takes the student who takes the course or a 66 year old retiree who's taking the
#
course there is a yearning to learn there is also a level of prior edifice which which has been built
#
there right there is a prior edifice there which is someone has constructed a castle of communism in
#
your mind right or someone has constructed this work world you know this unreal work world in your
#
mind so you do come with that baggage when you come to the class but despite that there is a
#
yearning to learn so the thing is trying to not talk down to people be respectful of their their
#
edifices but yet ask them to open their minds and and compare and this is this is a it's a dynamic
#
thing it's a skill which which comes after a period of time if the organization provides the
#
the the teachers the the autonomy and the freedom to do this anupam manur for example who's the
#
professor of economics i think he does this masterfully he has mastered this and he's now
#
teaching our other colleagues right how do you now go and teach something very non-intuitive
#
for example he has to talk about free markets to a lot of people who walk in with great resistance
#
to the idea of free markets many people think it's immoral right some people think it doesn't work
#
some people think so a lot of pre-existing baggage which they come in and anupam now has to go and
#
talk about how markets work right and then the the the advantages of markets you know compared to
#
other alternatives and so on he has a huge you know bridge to cross right he has to first absorb
#
the the the prior biases and the sentiments of the class digest them and then present it in a way that
#
the students can still pick it up right especially when at time when you're saying look we are not
#
trying to brainwash you now if you you can walk out of the class still hugging your castle of
#
communism i mean you're welcome to do that we're not asking you not to do that but how do you
#
persuade right how do you persuade how do you try and get across i say at least can you sort of
#
give some space in your mind to an alternative point of view and it's it's an art which i think
#
anupam and colleagues have mastered over a period of time but it's important for the organization to
#
give him the autonomy to do and teach as he wants to if you go and say that this is the syllabus
#
this is how you're supposed to teach this is the pedagogy this is how you're going to teach
#
you should not stray you should not get into this territory the moment you do that i think
#
you know you you lose it and you end up back into a regurgitation system there's this famous saying
#
about how if you're not a communist at 18 you don't have a heart and if you're not a capitalist
#
at 30 you don't have a brain and i kind of i and i think i can safely speak for both of us when i
#
say that if you come into a place with you know communist ideas in your head or woke ideas in
#
your head that doesn't say anything bad about you because both of those ideologies will have
#
great intentions at their start and it is natural to be young and to be attracted to those but then
#
the question comes in that are you satisfied with the consolations of an easy dogma or do you have
#
the intellectual rigor and energy and honesty to always keep an open mind and not to drop this
#
ism for some other ism but to always be open to kind of learning more and you know gathering more
#
dots so you can join them and paint a more high definition picture of the world yeah and you know
#
in many cases it's important for people self-realization right and this is my own
#
learning and i think i find this in our students also right the first thing is your certitude is
#
almost always a sign of ignorance yeah you are certain about things because you don't know the
#
full picture right the more you know the less certitude you have this doesn't mean that you're
#
absolutely unsure about everything and you're confused right it only means that you have to now
#
match your certitude or the level of certainty you have about anything to the facts and the
#
knowledge that you have and you should be willing to change that as you go along right it's you could
#
be certain about something now but you discover new facts you change your mind and that's perfectly
#
fine it's perfectly fine to change your mind and say that look i believed in this at this point
#
and now i believe something else i'll give you my own example i used to believe in the death penalty
#
i thought the death penalty was good because it was a i thought it had deterrent effects
#
it would it was also a statement to say that you know a society will take vengeance on someone who
#
takes a life but i've spoken to many people mainly on the blogosphere you know our interactions with
#
our friends and others on the blogosphere who brought in evidence who brought in moral
#
philosophy etc i think i've changed my mind i think especially when there is the ability of
#
judicial systems to make verdicts without you know full information you know judges can be wrong
#
and a death sentence is permanent so you can't sort of say oh guys oh i'm sorry we made this
#
wrong call but sorry we guys are already dead right so and you can also have punishments which
#
are equivalent to a death sentence but are not a death sentence so you you can punish person
#
punish people who make who commit harsh crimes you can come you can punish them harshly without
#
actually having to put them to death and and i've changed my mind on that and i think it's
#
perfectly okay and i'm probably going to change my mind on many things over a period of and i
#
i want to have the absolute right to change my mind on everything that i think of today and
#
this is a very tragic moment for me because i was looking forward to arguing with you about
#
some things later in the show but now you've changed your view on the death penalty which
#
i've always been against so we can't argue about that but we'll find other things and about
#
certitude like my view of things is that i am at a stage in life where i have certainty about my
#
values but i'm open to being to have my mind changed on absolutely every other thing you know
#
and and and i think you know and and there are phases in your life where perhaps you are even
#
open to reconsidering certain values and be that as it may but on facts on thinking that you have
#
a perfect picture of the world it is simply impossible the world is too complex you know as
#
but i i keep referring back to borges's famous short story where he says that if you want to
#
build an accurate map of the world it has to be the size of the world and and it's immediately
#
outdated because the world is always in flux so what is even the point there here's my next
#
question that we are always driven as humans in a sense to seek validation for whether what we are
#
doing is right or wrong not validation in the sense of applause from others and so on and so forth
#
but just in terms of understanding and in some professions you have metrics you are in a corporate
#
you can have quarterly returns right if i am solving a math problem or programming something
#
you know if i write some code either it works or it doesn't work the metric there is immediate
#
others could be playing a much longer game where you you will never have a metric in your lifetime
#
but you say it's okay i'll play the long game but in the limited context of what the takshashila
#
institution does with this courses and all of that are there any kind of metrics like are there
#
moments where you wonder am i making a difference in the world at all or are there moments where
#
something has happened and you say ki haiya it's worth it i don't care about anything else it's
#
worth it because this you know so what are those kind of metrics because in a sense it is a long
#
game you're training the elites of tomorrow you know somebody you train today may have no connection
#
with the policy world but through uh you know through being the butterfly that's flapped flapped
#
its wings could create a storm 20 years later in some strange way you can't anticipate so how does
#
one think about this does one ignore this human desire for validation and just say that i'll just
#
do the right thing you know the whole bhagavad gita thing don't think about the fruits of your
#
action but we are after all human kuch toh chahiye right so what's the way you think about this and
#
what are the sort of happy successes that you you have had that you know i think the honest this is
#
a tough question okay and the honest answer is that this entire non-profit social sector
#
has been plagued by the need to provide metrics okay and this comes from a genuine concern right
#
donors want to know how the money is being spent and therefore you know you need to provide metrics
#
now there are certain kinds of donors which are like let's say csr where it's not your money it's
#
corporate money and you want to ring fence your decision to fund so you will ask for metrics
#
and what ends up what you end up doing is you end up doing supporting activities where metrics are
#
easily available and easy to you know easy to see right for example if you are providing
#
midday meal schemes right it's easy to find a metric there you could just say how many kids were
#
given and what was the nutritional quantity of the food and how many kids received that
#
feed and you have a metric so it's easy for you to support a program which provides midday meal
#
school schemes to two children now what if we were to say that we want to create a performing
#
and performing arts center and you know visual arts center for this city what's the metric
#
you could say oh you know 50 000 people came in and went but what's what's that got you know
#
it's hard to but what's the what's the outcome indicator what you're trying to do is you're
#
saying that look the logic is here let me unpack the logic poverty is a two-dimensional at least
#
two-dimensional problem one of the dimension is of course a multi-dimensional one is a is a lack of
#
material resources right you don't have money so you're poor the second dimension of poverty
#
is very few people realize this is a lack of dignity right you you don't have dignity therefore
#
you're poor very often both these go together but it's not necessary for you to for it to always be
#
the case so what happens in traditional anti-poverty measures is that here's this bag of rice and i'm
#
going to give it to you you stand up stand in line no hundred of you stand in line i'm going
#
to stand on this truck i'm going to give you bags of rice now in that process by giving material
#
benefits to one person you you robbed this person of dignity right you have to stand in line and
#
take this you know with your hands open like this so if you want to fix the poverty problem
#
you have to provide both material material goods money resources and also increase dignity how do
#
you increase dignity first of all you don't do these kind of stupid things by making people stand
#
in line and treating them very poorly and creating status differences the second is one of the ways
#
is that you increase aesthetic content around you okay so if you have beautiful if you live if you
#
have a beautiful garden instead of living next to a railway track right you now live in a very
#
beautiful garden there's you know your dignity increases your sense of ownership on that thing
#
increases right so you live in a when the environment is clean it's safe it's beautiful
#
so you have access to art you have you know access to all of that culture now that increases your
#
dignity right and that's also an anti-poverty scheme now i can understand that a government of
#
a democratic country which has a lot of poor citizens should will find it hard to justify art
#
galleries so it'll say look we're going to do midday meal schemes you're going to give food
#
handouts food security etc that's very hard to quantify but if you're csr you can you can give
#
money to you can give money to an art gallery you can give money to a performing arts center what
#
you do instead because you can't measure the outcomes of that you give money back to the food
#
security thing so you become a fly on the butt of a mouse on the butt of a rabbit on the butt of
#
an elephant right and the elephant is the you know hundred gargantuan thousand crore government
#
scheme for poverty elevation and you are this 500 crore or 50 crores or five crores or 50 000 rupees
#
sitting on top of that you're marginally you're making no difference but you have five crores
#
and you set up an art center right you you can create something which you know which a poor
#
government of a poor democracy can't a small library in a slum small library in a slum right
#
so all of these so but you can't measure uh you can't get good metrics of it so what happens is
#
a lot of the charitable and philanthropic money institutional especially of the institutional kind
#
goes into metric showing activities i've worked for the singapore government i've worked for
#
governments i've worked with consultants i've worked in public policy i can create metrics
#
of anything that you want right even for art galleries or for musical system i can create the
#
metrics and i can fool you into showing how the metrics are improving year after year so that you
#
give me the money but i don't think that's an honest thing to do honestly we have to be able
#
to say that there are certain things that we can't show you metrics i can't show you metrics right
#
i can give you a qualitative explanation of how this works i can give you anecdotal evidence of
#
anecdotal evidence i can give you anecdotes of of how these things are working i can also give
#
you metrics but the metrics won't be honest so do you want me to honestly tell you what's happening
#
or do you want me to give you dishonest metrics right so i think the honest way is what we need
#
to prefer right say there are certain things i can't give you metrics okay but this is what
#
you have to see we can show you our books we can show you how we spend the money we can show you
#
the processes that we use to spend the money we can show you what the spend money spent on
#
but you ask me whether there's a growth in appreciation of art 10 over last year i can't
#
tell you that i can create a metric to fool you but i can't tell you that so in the non-profit
#
sector i think we need in general to be confident enough to tell donors and to tell the ecosystem
#
to tell the public not everything can be measured and not and not everything can be measured and
#
secondly money should not only go to things that can be measured money should also go to things
#
which can't be measured so what we do at takshashila is we have metrics for things which
#
we can measure right i mean number of students what grades they get you know what kind of jobs
#
they do all of those are measured but we don't take them seriously beyond the point that's why
#
i didn't know the number when you said how many students did you have you know depending on how
#
you count we have you know seven thousand maybe ten thousand maybe slightly up and down i don't
#
i don't really track that similarly i don't track how many people visit our websites
#
how many people download our podcasts i just don't track that what we do is that you know like you
#
still need to know you need to get feedback on what you're doing right so we're very alive to
#
contextual feedback on what our students and alumni are doing right so for example if you hear that
#
look one of our alums has set up this institution or won this kind of a prize for something that's
#
good one of our alums has gotten into harvard kennedy school great to know that oh one of our
#
alums was wrote this in the media which was shabby and we didn't you know we know that it's bad news
#
right so whenever we come then i call anupam and say hey look this is this person seems to be a
#
takshashila alum and this is what this person wrote on facebook or on a blog and look the data
#
is wrong like how is it that this person could pass through our program so then we go and see
#
okay what do we need to do to avoid those kind of outcomes so from for the purpose of internal
#
feedback it works but what about the larger thing right how do we know that we are making
#
change in society and how are we changing macro outcomes there are certainly policy changes that
#
have occurred in the last two five seven years in terms of government policy that has changed
#
because of the some of the things which we did and our fingerprints are very clearly on it
#
i don't talk about it right as i said you know it really the credit belongs to the prime minister
#
or to the bureaucrat or the chief minister or the minister who did it we helped maybe there were
#
100 other people who helped we didn't really don't know but i can see some of our statements
#
you know some of the sentences which he wrote appearing in the final copy so we probably had
#
a role right so are you the person who came up with the line minimum government maximum it's
#
not me it was although it was there as a prakati cover at one point it was not me i think it was
#
part of the you know the modi brain trust which came up with that so there are there are cases
#
where there is direct influence on policy but i don't talk about it publicly internally we i tell
#
our staff i tell our donors etc the other things which you know are some things which just happen
#
and you feel happy that it's happening like the conversation on labor laws for example
#
or the idea that a government botched it politically but economically it said that look we need
#
to change farm laws those are the kind of things which make me feel happy because those are the
#
kind of you know issues that we are pushing right and if there's progress on those issues it's good
#
i mean for example you know imagine there's a change in labor laws and agricultural laws in
#
the country the kind of growth and prosperity that can come it's going to be hard you have to
#
push it for multiple years but here we are right so i think that is a better way for us to measure
#
and get feedback on our activity than to count beans right i'm fortunate that we've had donors
#
who are of the kind that want us to do more of these things you know not only do they buy
#
our explanations but they want us to do more of those things because i think they understand
#
very deeply that the sector the reality of the social space is what it is you know it's not a
#
corporate thing where you measure widgets and you have quarterly results which you measure in rupees
#
and paisa and then even that is subject to you know manipulation by accountants right interpretation
#
by accountants so they are they are wise enough to realize it and we are fortunate enough to have
#
donors like that who push us to do the right thing so doing the right thing by way of our
#
stakeholders is probably more important than doing the measurable thing makes a lot of sense let's
#
let's talk about sort of the donor ecosystem because on the one hand as a donor you might
#
want to feel that you're getting bang for your buck that i mean there's an opportunity cost to
#
any any donation you give because it can go to so many other places so the desire for metrics is
#
there on the other hand at an institutional level when we talk about the donor ecosystem
#
there are moments i am guessing when certain themes and certain areas are more fashionable
#
than others for example today you just put climate change on a proposal randomly blockchain for
#
climate change and you know and and and those become fashionable areas and others aren't
#
and and a third issue could be that donors are often constrained by guardrails that they have
#
built in their minds based on previous experience or prior notions and all of that which might not
#
actually be useful you know so it seems to me like any other sector is one where disruption is
#
important you know our friends shruti rajgopalan and tyler carvin they're trying that with emergent
#
ventures where the whole idea is that you know you pick a good person with an interesting idea
#
give the money and then that's it they don't have to report to you all the time you don't
#
care about the metrics you are just going with your gut and backing it and looking for the moonshot
#
and but not everybody needs to look for the moonshot perhaps you know that is just sort of
#
one approach so what is your sense of the way that the donor ecosystem has evolved because
#
in india we also sort of have a new generation of donors like the nalekanese like the premji
#
foundation and so on and so forth i guess who have built successful businesses who've thought
#
deeply about this stuff who have been participants in this new india so give me a little sense of
#
how that is how hard is it for you like i speak to people in social sector organizations who will
#
be like i'm the ceo but 80 percent of my time is freaking fundraising which seems such an
#
incredible waste of resource and then what could happen is that that fundraising could
#
carry its own incentives if you take fund from person x and abc causes are dear to person x
#
it creates an invisible incentive there as well so give me a sense of how much of your time goes
#
into funding what are funders like you said you've been fortunate to find funders who don't
#
really care about these metrics who get it who get what the big game is so you know tell me more
#
about that see i think you're absolutely right the biggest time consuming mental space consuming
#
activity that any non-profit has is fundraising right and it's always a problem even the biggest
#
non-profits i mean harvard kennedy school is trying to raise funds i mean everybody is trying
#
to raise funds so fundraising is critical and it's it's the most important thing resource
#
mobilization is the most important thing that a non-profit leader has to do because that's
#
on the basis of which everything moves i think the challenge in india which i found
#
is that there is a trust deficit and largely i would blame the non-profit organizations for it
#
there are a lot of fly-by-night shifty shoddy kind of organizations out there who are only trying to
#
either run a business pretending to be a private company or do nothing at all scam donors and run
#
away with the money right so there's this that that kind of thing is quite quite common right i
#
don't know the prevalence rate i have no one's i mean i haven't done metrics of this but it's
#
quite common right and donors are also quite wary of that so the first and most important thing is
#
to establish a track record a personal track record of the key stake key people in the
#
organization as well as an institutional track record of being brutally honest about matters
#
concerning money you might succeed or you might fail but be brutally honest in respect to the
#
matters related to money second and this is a harder one also i mean maybe it's i don't know
#
it's harder than the first one the second one but it's it's probably it's equally as hard right is
#
to be brutally honest with respect to telling donors about your outcomes so you say that look
#
we screwed up last year so we screwed up last year we had a bad year last year we couldn't exceed
#
we couldn't succeed we couldn't do this keep the donors informed truthfully about these things i
#
think it's okay to communicate failures right if you if you have donors who walk away when you tell
#
them about your failures probably you shouldn't be having those donors in the first place so
#
communicating outcomes sincerely truthfully is also as important as you know showing how you
#
use the money if you get these two things right i think you have a lot more you know your universe
#
of donors sort of expands it doesn't mean all of them will give you but you can talk to a lot more
#
people and approach them for money because you have these two things now the the good news is
#
that in the last 20 years let's let's call it the 91 generation of people right for example the
#
people like from the Infosys or Biocon Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and many of the tech industry people
#
in Bangalore who made their money in the tech industry tend to look at i mean it's it's clean
#
money you know it's it's and it's money created in that generation it's not even you know ancient
#
money so they have a more of a sophisticated nuanced way of giving and it is quite often
#
agnostic to political preference and ideology and so on the problem is with the donors of
#
a previous generation and the donors which come after that now donors of a previous generation
#
in many cities of the country think that donations are a way to buy a voice right they might not make
#
it explicit it might not be universal but it could be that look hey you know why don't you
#
say something nice about this industry right and that's seen as a way you know you scratch my back
#
i scratch your back you know it's seen as a way and it's very difficult for non-profits in early
#
ages to say no right but it's all the more important to say no because at that point you
#
say okay i'm not going to do this and the donor says oh this guy is not going to do this i don't
#
need this guy right and then you don't get the donor but at least you now don't have to get into
#
this trap of you know having to sing songs just because people gave you money it's a slippery
#
slope one compromise you're going all the way you're going all the way and the word gets around
#
right people know that this is a shill right and okay if you if you feel that that's a business
#
that you want to be in and make money that way by shilling that's that's fine i suppose there's a
#
legitimate way to make money as long as you do it in a law abiding way but that's not what i think
#
what a you know an institution with integrity ought to do the newer generation i think has become
#
in its own way like the older generation to say that look the money is available for certain
#
projects right only these kind of projects and activities will get the money now this presumes
#
that you as a company know more about the profit non-profit sector than the person who's been
#
working in that right i mean if it's not that the guy is a non-profit sector is an idiot it's not
#
that he doesn't know the problem he's probably spent 20 years working on the problem and has
#
sort of figured out the theory of change and how to do it now you can't come in and say that i have
#
a project in i don't know something else xyz and i'll you do xyz and i'll give you the money it's
#
it's not shilling for an industry it's just that you're diverting human resources from a particular
#
problem to a problem which you think is important but you are running a private company right how
#
do you know you know i mean it might be a cause which is close to your heart that's fine but
#
it's not necessarily the the most optimum way to allocate resources i think you should just give
#
money to people who know what the problem is and who are working on i think the newer generation
#
of you know let's call it the latest generation of entrepreneurs and philanthropists haven't sort of
#
figured that out yet that those people who are out there working in the in the trenches know what
#
the problem is it's better to support them achieve those outcomes rather than to divert resources
#
into entirely new ways of thinking right having said that there are new areas which people need
#
to talent needs to go into i mean issues of the future like you know artificial intelligence
#
space you know technology to mitigate climate change you know not just the old style we're
#
going to cut down on emissions kind of climate change but you know what what what innovation can
#
you do what you know what are the kind of social innovation you can do to address climate change
#
those are the kind of areas where you need fresh thinking and those are the kind of thinking
#
uh areas which traditional think tanks will be sort of loath to support climate change a classic
#
example people say oh i am this think tank which finds out better and better ways to reduce coal
#
consumption i'm not going to now focus on this innovation to address climate change you know
#
this looks like this i don't believe in this cause i'm only going to do this coal because i'm missing
#
for the trees right i mean let's say your objective is to ensure that the planet you know life on the
#
life on the planet is sustainable not any particular way if not coal there might be
#
some other ways to do this so there is a mistrust problem which is number one second one is a
#
competency problem third is this diversion of resources problem and the fourth and the most
#
important one is a human resource problem a lot of people think that joining a non-profit organization
#
is like uh let me try this out corporate csr is also like that right oh we have this weekend we
#
are going to this rural area we're going to clean up the you know this this pond in this rural area
#
and go away it's not that you know you need you know once you clean up that thing it doesn't mean
#
that the problem is solved you felt good one of my friends used to call this conscience laundering
#
right so you felt there and went there you cleaned up the river or this lake and you came back but
#
what about the consequences of what you did right do you know what happened there you know what
#
happened to the ecosystem what happened to the people what you just don't know similarly working
#
for a non-profit is not something that you say okay i'll just do it on my weekends although you
#
can volunteer in certain kinds of non-profits but a lot of non-profits are full-time jobs
#
they are more than full-time jobs right so you must be able to you know get in with your eyes open
#
and not and not think of it as a you know let me try this but that's the talent a lot of the
#
talent thinks that oh i'm between two jobs now let me try this out it's not it's not a you know it's
#
not a vacation and a holiday that you have it's a serious vocation yeah i mean i think you guys
#
should totally also now introduce a course for donors you know and your faculty for teaching
#
that could possibly include Rohini with whom i did my last episode and she had some great nuanced
#
thoughts on this as well including the importance of donors being willing to accept failure and
#
you know not look for clean cold metrics on everything but just understand the people in the
#
direction that they're going in let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side of it
#
we'll get back to talking about ideas and values in india and so on and so forth
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welcome back to the scene on the on scene this is my final session with nithin pare by which
#
i don't mean my final final session i mean just for this episode i'm sure it's a semi-final
#
session it's a semi i mean it's a final session today but yeah so i want to ask about the term
#
liberal nationalism which is such an interesting term and can confuse many people and i'm going
#
to quote tagore though you quoted tagore in exactly these words so i'm actually quoting you
#
quoting tagore in a manner of speaking but tagore famously said quote i am not against one nation
#
in particular but against the general idea of all nations what is the nation it is the aspect of a
#
whole people as an organized power this organization incessantly keeps up the insistence on the
#
population becoming strong and efficient but this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency
#
drains man's energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative
#
for thereby man's power of sacrifices is diverted from his ultimate object which is moral to the
#
maintenance of this organization which is mechanical yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral
#
exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity he feels relieved of
#
the urging of his conscience when he can transfer his responsibility to this machine
#
which is a creation of his intellect and not of his complete moral personality by this device
#
people who love freedom perpetuate slavery in a large portion of the world with a comfortable
#
feeling of pride of having done its duty men who are naturally just can be cruelly unjust both in
#
their act and their thought accompanying accompanied by a feeling that they are helping the world in
#
receiving his deserts men who are honest can blindly go on robbing others of the human rights
#
for self-aggrandizement all the while abusing the deprived for not deserving better treatment
#
stop quote and and as you point out that while in the literal sense of the term it seems that
#
he's being anti-national and yet this shows his deep loyalty to the country his concern for the
#
well-being of the people his patriotism even and i i find this a profound sort of excerpt because
#
he arrives at multiple truths within this passage at a time where these truths weren't even this
#
discussed in such detail you know in the literature about political theory and so on one of those
#
truths is just the nature of the state how it subsumes all before it another of those truths
#
is a crowding out effect of goodwill that if the state is doing certain things and humans feel that
#
their responsibility is done especially if they are part of the state and what he doesn't talk
#
about in this excerpt but is explicitly but is nonetheless implied and and something that i think
#
about a lot is the sort of the conflict that can arise between individual rights and the national
#
interest right because in that very term liberal nationalism there is you know liberal should imply
#
individual rights nationalism of course implies the national interest however you define it and
#
the two can often clash so explain this to me and i know you've written many many pieces many essays
#
i'll link all of them on this subject but briefly you know you know explain this explain how you
#
arrived at this conception that these two need to go together liberal and nationalism and especially
#
when nationalism is such a derided term in these modern times and perhaps with justification given
#
the european conception of it what is your sense of why indian nationalism is different in some
#
fundamental way and how do you find it compatible with liberalism tagore was writing this uh in the
#
early part of the last century right where there's a drumbeat of identitarian movements in the in in
#
europe and he could already see that it was capable of a lot of damage right and i think what
#
characterized that european or western idea of nationalism and still does in that conceptualization
#
is that it is about a national community that not only claims that it is a national community because
#
of various reasons ethnicity language color of skin race etc but it also claims a superiority
#
over others and in this claim of superiority lies the you know the the seed of danger seed of evil
#
if you have right and it also contains within it this seed of hatred towards the other right so
#
that's that's where it is so not only do you feel that you're a national community you feel that
#
you're a superior national community and you have been wronged in some way by somebody else
#
and therefore it follows that you have to correct the wrong by you know by going to war usually it
#
means by going to prosecute in a war externally and persecuting your minorities the non-national
#
minorities uh within your country and the history of that we saw uh what happened in europe in the
#
30s and the 40s and probably even in the 50s to some extent in some parts of europe right and
#
again during after the collapse of yugoslavia you saw this happening in the Balkans and tagore
#
writing long before they saw all this coming yeah and he saw this coming now there is a little bit
#
of a romantic poetic license that he has about humans superior motivation and you know aspiring
#
for great things i mean as i said i'm an electrical engineer there's a limit to which i can understand
#
romantic poetic notions of human endeavor and achievement but let's say there is something
#
called a higher purpose right there are higher values there are sublime and superior human values
#
and i think our tagore's argument is that nationalism somehow deprecates those higher
#
values it reduces you down to size and makes you play this small little game of us versus them
#
whereas you could aspire for something larger and transcend all these it's a good argument
#
only but i agree with it only uh in part now now let me explain why right now look at
#
the i mentioned european nationalism and western nationalism being what it is but look at the history
#
of indian nationalism i would trace this to roughly around 1870s onwards right 1870s 1880s onwards
#
when there are roots of indian nationalism developing in every various parts of the country
#
and by 1910 1920 it becomes full-blown right especially after the swadeshi movement in bengal
#
1905 it starts becoming full-blown and by the time gandhi etc enter the scene there's nationalism
#
as a movement so let's let's use the early 20th century as the point at which you have a fully
#
developed sense of indian nationalism now what is this nationalism saying was it saying that
#
we are a people and we deserve to be a nation because we have something in common definitely
#
right there's no doubt about it it's saying that we indians are a nation we have a unique sense of
#
our history we have a unique culture and civilization etc and we therefore deserve to be a people on our
#
own not subjugated as a colonial you know as a colony and a colonial people we are not subjects
#
of anybody the second did it assert a sense of its own superiority over others well i don't think so
#
what it did both from people like vivekanand and also people like gandhi and the others
#
it emphasized its difference right vivekanand saying that our gift to human humanity is
#
spiritualism right or gandhi saying you know non-violence and whole lot of things right
#
the whole gandhian thing i think ram guha can unpack it better than i do but i've done two
#
episodes on gandhi yeah but basically he's saying that he's emphasizing the indian difference
#
so he's not saying indian the indian nation is superior to anybody else
#
at best it's saying that indians are no no inferiors to anyone else and we are different
#
right the metaphor is one of different difference did it did it emphasize on hatred and bigotry
#
towards people who don't belong to that sense of nationhood within the country absolutely not
#
and this is the big difference between the european sense of nationalism and the indian sense of
#
nationalism in fact i think indian nationalists went all the way to try and show inclusiveness
#
that we are diverse we have different castes we have different communities different languages
#
different religions we have you know various kinds of ways of looking at the world and all of that
#
but all of us are indians right and gandhi's special effort to go all the way to try and
#
bring about hindu muslim university hindu muslim unity right is one of course ambedkar disputed
#
that by saying that look you are all these upper caste guys and you left us out we left you left
#
my people out within the sense of a gandhiian compromise and the gandhiian bias i think ambedkar
#
is right but even ambedkar's sense of nationhood is all of us as one big nation right there was no
#
sense that xyz is uh does not belong here and we should persecute them or we should expel them
#
they never never obtained an indian nationalism in in practice or in theory now did indian nationalism
#
see itself as an expansionary power because we've been rank wronged by the by the british
#
do we need to go to war with the british and hate them again the answer is no the the demand of
#
indian nationalism was that you guys are ruling us you shouldn't be ruling us get out of here
#
right let us rule ourselves we don't hate you i don't think at any point the nationalist movement
#
said we hate the british we hated british rule and we hated some of the british rulers but as a
#
as a community as a nation we didn't hate the british it was not i mean there might
#
be have been people who didn't like the british and hated the british but as a movement as an
#
ideology i don't think it condoned hatred towards anyone so i have always taken the view that
#
indian nationalism is different from the western conceptualization of it indian nationalism was
#
only interested in emphasizing its non-inferiority and pressing the case for sovereignty right in
#
the context of national self-determination which was the you know the the metaphor at that time
#
that if you're a nation you are entitled to being a sovereign state and colonial powers are supposed
#
to leave you out right that's national self-determination and that case was pressed
#
and i think the the the whole framework of indian nationalism is wonderful for us to be able to live
#
life as a nation state together in other words if we believe that india is a nation
#
then that metaphor of accepting pluralism accepting diversity accommodating that diversity
#
within the nation may it's it's a tense accommodation right it's not a happy accommodation
#
uh by and large right there is always tension between religious lines there will be tensions
#
between castes there will be tensions on social reform there will be tension on language on
#
geography a whole lot of things but it is accepted that the tension is accepted within the idea of
#
pluralism and diversity if you want to keep a nation of 1.4 billion people uh speaking
#
800 over languages living in such huge diverse uh you know geographies and distances and a
#
and a subcontinental sized country together then indian nationalism gives you the best metaphor
#
right so i don't think there's anything uh uh like something to be apologetic about indian
#
nationalism there are reasons to be apologetic about western nationalism i mean to the extent
#
that you have to go and do a holocaust and kill your national minorities or go to war to press
#
your claim of superiority i mean of course you've got to be apologetic about it but i don't think
#
you have to be apologetic about indian nationalism now if you look at the constitution of india
#
right which is a product of indian nationalism right the the political statutory product of
#
indian nationalism you see liberalism all over it it's not a liberalism that hayek would recognize
#
or milton freedom would uh would uh appreciate but given the context from which emerging is
#
remarkably liberal right and which is why i argue that you know indian nationalism is also a liberal
#
nationalism if it can if the product of that political movement is a non-violent political
#
struggle if the product of that movement is a non-violent economic transformation for example
#
getting rid of colonial rule etc and bringing the you know at least bringing the economy in the
#
hands of indians without killing a lot of people without dispossessing people as it's been done
#
you know the examples you had that was the russian revolution right or the chinese revolution
#
without having all that bloodshed you managed political and economic transition and you managed
#
to create a product in terms of a constitution that is probably the most enlightened way of ruling
#
and governing a society of that nature at that time i think it's liberal and i think therefore
#
that tradition of liberal nationalism is something that is worth protecting
#
it might be a contradiction in terms and i totally agree you know as you said right
#
liberalism implies individual liberty and nationalism at some level involves subsuming
#
the individual into this group called the nation and the two of them are definitely in conflict
#
right i mean you could even say that the strong form of putting it is their contradiction in terms
#
weak form of that argument is they are in conflict but so what right at one point you know i say that
#
in in politics and political philosophy theory often succeeds practice theory follows practice
#
you have this edifice called india which is running on this wonderful complex indescribable
#
system and now you create theory to justify that right you can't start by saying look there are
#
probably very few nation states which have been created based on theory probably communist states
#
israel pakistan probably you know these are the few things which have been constructed based on a
#
theory most others exist and then you build a theory to justify that existence and to explain
#
that existence yeah it's like the interpreter in the brain gazaniga's interpreter after the
#
fact you're gonna exactly back to that so a lot of things to double click on but first i think
#
i'll just make the observation that the whole thing about you know on political philosophy i
#
think gandhi was bringing it a lot right in the sense that naipaul once called gandhi the least
#
indian of the indian leaders and even his philosophy of non-violence is something he picked
#
up from the self-help wu wu books of the 1880s 1890s like tolstoy's post-fiction work when he
#
was in his last phase like uh you know raskin's book in that sense his influences were neither
#
those of the other great leaders of his time the gokli agarkar ranadhe influences of mil bentham
#
etc nor were they particularly indian like i was chatting with arshya satar a few days ago that
#
was recorded earlier this week and the episode will be out much before this and she speaks
#
about how gandhi's interpretation of the bhagavad gita is completely bizarre you know um i mean my
#
words not her but a similar sentiment basically and there also to say that we got our independence
#
via non-violence i don't know how correct it is yes we got our independence but a lot of it
#
was happenstance and time in the sense that you know the the british also suffered in the war
#
they were practically bankrupt empire was a strain on them so you know they could just have gone
#
anyway and we had our elites in place to pick up the pieces now i agree as you know we discussed
#
earlier in this episode that our constitution is more liberal than the society it was but i want
#
to talk about the kind of nationalism that is actually dominant in india today and that is
#
perhaps the organic nationalism because it emerges from society and not from a you know a gang of
#
small elites and in that that nationalism is for example not pluralistic like you have a lovely
#
passage about pluralistic nationalism where you write and i'll quote that and i'm not contradicting
#
this i'm saying this is true but that is also true and what you write about it is that indian
#
nationalism was inherently pluralistic it priced hindu muslim unity and attacked the deep
#
inequities of the caste system the constituent assembly dominated by indian nationalists created
#
a precocious republic that affirmed liberty and individual rights our experience of nationalism
#
was so dramatically different from europe's even considering the communal rights of partition that
#
i could not agree with hanaz's contention that nationalism is always a bad thing stop code that's
#
a guy you were citing but my contention is that the dominant nationalism today is definitely
#
exclusionary the dominant politics today which at least in the hindi heartland is it's definitely
#
anti-muslim right about caste it's a mixed question more dalits voted for the bjp in both 2014 and
#
2019 than any other party in india and so to leave that aside but as you know although that
#
does remain the original sin of indian society and indian religion per se but as far as our
#
politics is concerned the dominant strain the worrying strain is this anti-muslim sentiment
#
which is why whenever anyone points it out they are instantly asked to go to pakistan a binary is
#
straight away being drawn there and it seems that the model of you know a lot of our politics today
#
is to turn us in a sense in a hindu pakistan has been said many times rather than affirm that
#
original idea of india which i naively once thought that mostly everybody shares which is of this
#
pluralistic liberal society and i guess at some level my sense is that this is where nationalism
#
intrinsically kind of gets so before i go to my next point you know what would sort of your
#
response to this be because if we talk about national what you are talking about as indian
#
nationalism being different inherently pluralistic i agree with you i'm not disputing that but i am
#
saying that that we are looking at 20s 30s 40s we are looking at a certain set of leaders there also
#
and of course the the the sort of progenitors of this kind of modern politics that we see didn't
#
even fight against the british rally right but those who did and those who framed the constitution
#
they are not here anymore and those who are are talking about those who dominate our politics
#
are pushing forward this kind of nationalism so when you talk about liberal nationalism
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are you talking about an ideal end state which you would like to take us towards and which is
#
your personal value system in which you believe is possible because hey it did happen once here
#
or are you saying that there are still living strains of it around and we just have to isolate
#
those strains and fight the bad strains yeah i think the first realization i had over the last
#
10 years is that i mean this is my own education right nothing is settled right we are i think
#
it is very complacent to believe that matters or issues are settled i mean it's probably that i
#
mean we are when we thought that we settled maybe we were kids we were not educated or you know
#
informed enough nothing is settled it never was settled and it will never be settled so in the
#
sense that there is a constant churning a constant ongoing debate of who we are what we want to do
#
where we want to go and there are multiple threads or multiple vectors which are sort of influencing
#
where things are going so it was our mistake to believe that things are settled and it was
#
complacent and because of that mistake we thought we became complacent and took things for granted
#
that was wrong right and i think we've got to realize that i think the case for liberty has
#
to be made every day the case for liberty has to be made with every new generation it has to be
#
made constantly it cannot be that we believe you know we expect people to accept that the case has
#
to be made persuasion is a daily exercise you cannot say that oh you know we are a liberal
#
democracy and this is how we should behave i think the case is that we should persuade everyone that
#
liberal democracy is a good way to run our affairs and it's a daily exercise right and to the extent
#
that we don't do it we come into grief right and it's not just us look at the united states i think
#
the first time in you know 50 years they are trying to re-examine who they are and what they mean i
#
mean you you have people who are trying to i mean you have trump who tried to pull off a coup and
#
not step down and this is supposed to be a stable mature democracy which has been around for much
#
longer than the republic of india right so the message for us in india as well as for citizens
#
of liberal democracies anywhere in the world is that you cannot take your state of affairs for
#
granted you have to make that case every day in terms of persuasion and you have to defend what
#
is good in your society every day and this is what it's an ongoing thing now there is no doubt that
#
the idea of indian nationalism and the idea of india as a plural democratic liberal republic
#
is under severe stress and challenge there is a certain virile nationalism which is out there
#
which is majoritarianism which is powerful which has a metaphor of of strength of youthfulness and
#
vigor and it is definitely attractive to a lot of people and i think it has gone unchallenged
#
because who's defending indian nationalism i don't see any political leader definitely
#
defending indian nationalism in that sense if you see hindutva on the rise it's not so much
#
a success of the hindutva but the surrender of the people who had other views of life
#
now whether it's communism whether it's secular republicanism whether it's liberal nationalism
#
whatever it is the counterpoints don't exist the counterpoints have just folded up right
#
and that for that reason those of us who believe that indian nationalism is a superior metaphor
#
it's a better way to organize our society right to achieve everything that hindutva promises but
#
more i think it's important for us to you know stand up and fight this battle of ideas
#
battles of ideas are not street fights and i don't want to see them as street fights because street
#
fights are not battles of it i mean you have a street fight when you run out of ideas right
#
when you when you have to persuade people using force the way to do this is still using you know
#
public conversations engage in the public sphere speak about indian nationalism confidently
#
without having to apologize for anything and talk about the tradition which has gotten us here
#
if india is where we are today you know 75 years of an independent country it's been
#
a under a liberal nationalist regime for well three or four three quarters of that time
#
and a lot of that i mean our existence owns to that so there's something right there
#
it so happens that there are very few votaries there are very few stewards very few champions
#
of that today and that has to be corrected it is also true that only when you have challenge
#
are you sharp with your arguments you you're not complacent right so in that sense for those of us
#
who believe that a liberal nationalism or an indian nationalism is a way to go i think we
#
have to sharpen our arguments and get out there and make that case to every citizen every year
#
and if we don't do that yeah you know whoever is around we will win it by default
#
and it's not just us i mean now that we've seen what's happening around the world i think we know
#
that there is a global phenomenon out there and persuasion is therefore necessary domestic and
#
abroad but here's a counterpoint to it right even during the constituent assembly debates
#
there was this question of why the word socialist was not included in the preamble and umbedkar
#
quotes i think jefferson and somebody else and says that we should not hard code certain things
#
into the constitution every generation should have the freedom to live by you know organize society
#
by as it wants to you shouldn't constrain them with economic systems and so on so every generation
#
you know should have the right to determine what it what what's the metaphor what's the national
#
ideology or you know ideology or not by itself which which is a great thing which means you know
#
we have the ability to shape the future we don't have to say that look the past was so good
#
somebody wrote this wonderful constitution so we need to preserve it we can also make the argument
#
that look these values are better than anything else we want to see this we want to see greater
#
freedom we want to share greater individual liberty we want to see greater social justice
#
and these are the ways that we can achieve these outcomes better than anything else that's out
#
there right so it's not only a reference to the past but as importantly uh appeal to the future
#
that this is a roadmap and this is an architecture this is the the perspective we want to have
#
yeah speaking of the preamble you know when uh during the ca protest young people all over the
#
country were going to these protests with the preambles and my sense was number one it is
#
fantastic that young people are carrying the preamble around but i wish it was ambedkar's
#
original preamble and not indira gandhi's version with the word socialist added in
#
you know socialist feels like a really good word for the good of society actually what socialist
#
means is a state ownership of private resources it means extreme coercion according to the court
#
socialism can mean whatever you want it to mean what in which case i have it there yeah because
#
yeah it was exactly there was a case which somebody took it to court and the high court said why do
#
you want to take this out socialism can mean anything you want it to mean yeah but actually
#
it is a philosophy of extreme coercion i i liked your definition in one of your columns which again
#
i'll link from the show notes of liberal nationalism so i'll read it out and i'll go to my next question
#
where you write quote this is how liberalism nationalism and realism are connected with each
#
other liberalism or libertarianism and its american usage is concerned about individual
#
freedom to enjoy freedom in practice the individual gives up some of it to the state the state a
#
nation state in india's case exists to ensure the rights freedoms and well-being yogakshima of its
#
people so ensuring the survival and security of the indian state by maximizing his relative power
#
internationally is wholly consistent with allowing its citizens to live in freedom stop good and this
#
makes a lot of sense because the the fundamental liberal paradox as i call it is that to make sure
#
that our rights are protected we have to give up some of them because we need the state to
#
protect our rights and for the state to protect our rights we are giving up some of our rights
#
in the sense that we are giving up the monopoly on violence and the state you know every act of
#
government is an act of violence as you know a headline of mine and times of india column once
#
read because the state exists from our taxes which of course are taken by coercion and under threat
#
of abduction and so on and so forth so i get it it equally follows immediately from there that
#
if you have a state and you've given up some rights so that the state can protect the rest
#
of your rights then the state also has to protect itself so that makes sense to me my unease is this
#
and i will go back to our earlier discussion and your framing of small v's and big v's right that
#
what we have done when we talk of the nation state is that we have agreed upon a particular
#
v it could be narrower it could be broader but this is what it is and i'm kind of you know when
#
you think of conflicting v's i'm reminded of why you know gandhi's alliance with the ali brothers
#
and their khilafat movement was so incoherent even though it helped him take over the congress
#
because gandhi was arguing for a v that was india the indian nation state that we need to be
#
independent the ali brothers and the khilafat movement was about a v that was a umma and they
#
were arguing for the restoration of the caliphate and all of that so you know there were two
#
conflicting v's and i think you got a question every v wherever it lands up because it is
#
exclusionary in some senses or the other and where i find unease is that why this particular v one is
#
of course the circumstances and the the accidental circumstances that led to this particular these
#
particular lines being drawn on a map but i i find unease and i think we've argued about it maybe
#
15 years ago when it comes to an issue like kashmir where i look at how ordinary kashmiris
#
have been treated and i think there is a point of view that i sympathize with that the india
#
that the indian state has been like an occupying force in kashmir and that they have treated
#
kashmiris worse than the british empire treated us there is no argument that we used against
#
the british that they can't use against us right and yet uh your point of view on this would be
#
that look our national interest matters and therefore we have to treat kashmir as an integral
#
part of india and we have to do whatever is sort of required over there and i think both
#
you and i can find easy meeting ground because i don't think it is necessary to treat kashmir
#
as an occupying army would that there were peaceful win-win games that could have been
#
played here and you know could have sorted uh the problem out but given the way that we proceeded
#
and given where we landed up um you know i think there were tremendous infringements of your
#
individual rights a massive amount of human rights violations and this is uh you know and this is to
#
me a classic case of that conflict uh between liberalism and nationalism where you know my
#
liberalism forces me to believe in individual rights and therefore that applies to every
#
individual including kashmiris who are my fellow human beings because my we at the moment is
#
humanity and you could argue that that's a constricted we but whatever that's a separate
#
question but that is where it is right now so what's what's your sort of response see i like
#
the i like to bring kashmir into this discussion because it allows us it makes us think very
#
seriously about the principles that we profess or we claim to profess right whether it's liberalism
#
nationalism or even uh if you say islamic exclusive islamic fundamentalism or islamic
#
exclusivism or whatever principles that you have it forces you to to think of them a lot more
#
seriously because it's like an edge case it's a boundary case it's not a normal situation right
#
you have when i when i talk about a normal situation if you're talking about somebody
#
in nagpur or somebody in karnataka or somebody in kerala or these are all territorially culturally
#
all of that the all the small v's exist but there's very little tension between the small v
#
and the big v right there's no there's no conflict between them no one's saying uh you know someone
#
saying i belong to community x i just want more reservations no one is saying i belong
#
to community x and therefore i want to be a nation state right the challenge with analyzing kashmir
#
now this is after i don't know 30 plus years of thinking about it seriously as an adult
#
is that we are never we have never been in a zone of normality we have always been in a zone of
#
conflict and war and that changes the game a lot because even if you look at hindu philosophy
#
right there's this thing of dharma which is your sahaj dharma like what are you supposed to do
#
on a day-to-day basis right you're supposed to you know be bathed or you're supposed to eat and
#
you're able to do a b and c that is your normal dharma that's how you conduct yourself whether
#
it's doing a ritual or especially comes to when you have to do rituals like weddings and all of
#
that right there are there are processes there are rituals you need to follow in your normal dharma
#
now hindu philosophy x you know it understands and accepts a condition called apad dharma
#
and an emergency situation in an emergency situation all bets are off you can do what
#
you want right saving your life is more important than you know doing this particular ritual right
#
if you don't have time to you know complete your marriage ritual you can just elope with
#
with a person who's your beloved right so you don't have to so the idea that in an emergency
#
situation the normal standards of behavior and the norms of social engagement are different
#
is well understood in in hindu philosophy in most philosophies i'll give you another example i'm an
#
electric i keep emphasizing me being an electrical engineer now one of the things in communications
#
engineering is that everybody is given a frequency of operation right typically in the old days of
#
wireless you're very strict about your frequency and how much frequency you can you can occupy in
#
a band because the moment you exceed that frequency you go into somebody else's band and there's
#
interference and you know signals break down so it's almost like like it's you're like it's like
#
a fatwa written to given to you as an engineer that thou shalt not exceed the bands and thou
#
shalt only use this frequency in this band for this purpose this is the kind of modulation you'll use
#
all of that is very well written down you should not violate it okay but even in the radio rules
#
of the world international radio rules of the world if you are in an emergency you can transmit
#
at any band at any power at any any kind of modulation you do what you whatever you can
#
because they're in an emergency right so this brings us to this this makes the kashmir thing
#
a lot harder to man a lot harder to analyze from a matter of principle because principles don't
#
matter here exigencies matter right why is the indian army in kashmir right wherever in let's
#
say in kashmir why the security forces in kashmir because there was there was an externally abetted
#
internal insurgency now why was there an externally abetted internal because there's
#
something else happened right because there's proxy war then then and ultimately you come to
#
a situation of proxy war where there is a external belligerent out there and the fact that you have
#
a line of control and not a border means that it's not it's a live situation right it just
#
seems to be that there's a ceasefire there so you're not having a shooting match but you are
#
technically in some form of war you know it's not it's not peace so using principle to determine
#
you know the rights and wrongs of the kashmir situation becomes very hard and becomes tricky
#
right and that that is how i would i would respond to it today now you're absolutely right that even
#
given these conditions the republic of india the union government and the state government
#
could have done a lot of things better and can do a lot of things better right you know just because
#
it's a situation is enough an emergency doesn't mean that you should you should do unwise things
#
you know wisdom is very different from legitimacy so that wisdom has been lacking now can we blame
#
the political leadership for lacking lacking the wisdom to be able to sort this out be more
#
respectful of rights of humanity and be be act in manner in act in a manner that can resolve the
#
situation in a liberal way definitely we can fault them right and we do fault them but i don't think
#
it changes the the overall calculation about kashmir and its place in the indian union and
#
the need to defend that territory and that state given the situation that you're in right so it's
#
a complex answer i think it's very hard to simplify this answer but if i have to put it down to two
#
statements it'll be this right things are not normal things were never normal in jama and
#
kashmir since 1947 so the the rules and the principles that we would use to you know argue
#
a case about some other place in the country versus kashmir will be different and the second
#
point is even so we can be wiser more respectful of rights more more conscious of our own
#
liberal nationalist identity in the way we deal with the situation in kashmir
#
fun of all really good points i mean my sort of my dispersed thoughts around this is that number
#
one yeah in times of emergency and exigency the normal rules do stay do change but the question
#
is we kind of created the situation as david devdas also points out in his book the generation of
#
rage in kashmir in the auties things were much better it was going towards normalcy there was
#
a generation that was aspirational wanted jobs in india and our security forces blew it up with
#
the oppressive way in which they essentially ruled you know which and there are kind of two
#
objections i have to how it was handled and the first is sort of a strategic um objection in the
#
sense that we kind of made the same mistake there and continue to make the same mistake in troubled
#
areas that uh say the u.s made in vietnam david galula had written this great book which became
#
a bible of the u.s armed forces later after they messed up in iraq were called counter
#
insurgency warfare theory and practice and the the central premise was that gorilla warfare
#
counter-insurgency warfare requires a different kind of treatment that in the words of one of mao's
#
generals in fact when you're tackling a gorilla insurgency what you need is 20 military action
#
and 80 political you have to keep the people with you instead of alienating the people and treating
#
them as the enemy and you know i've written about this and i'll link that stuff from the show notes
#
so there's just one the way it was handled was completely messed up but apart from that i would
#
say normatively the way that we look at it we did not look at it as a democratic republic dealing
#
with a problem in one area but you still have to respect your citizens and there are still
#
normative rules you need to follow but rather as almost a medieval empire emperor finding a
#
rebellion in one of his areas and it's okay you can do whatever the hell the collateral damage
#
doesn't matter you can follow a scorched earth policy right which is exactly the opposite of
#
the approach that you should take when you're trying to cut down a counter-insurgency where
#
you need to carry the people with you you need to go in there and you know in manker manker
#
allsons words be a stationary bandit instead of a roving bandit who doesn't give a shit about
#
what things really are like on the ground and how the people are being treated so in that sense we
#
kind of did mess up phenomenally we continue to mess up in the way ways that we look at it
#
and i mean i guess you agree with this i guess you agree with you know the you might not agree
#
with me on the extent of the damage that we did and the extent of culpability that you know we
#
have to accept but i mean my problem with this kashmir case has always been what's your starting
#
point of analysis right when did the screw-ups start it's easy for us to go back to any period
#
from t minus now three my three years five years seven years and depending on your personal
#
experience and your political preference you might take an arbitrary period of time and said we
#
screwed up at that point and had we not screwed up then things would have gone better and gone in a
#
different way right i don't know how much of that is true because it ignores the agency of
#
two maybe two and a half sovereign powers that are outside india right if you look at the 90s
#
it was pakistan abetted by the united states which is doing a lot of mischief there
#
by the mid-2000s it was pakistan abetted by the chinese who are doing a lot of things there
#
yeah in the last 10 years all three all three actors external actors are sort of quiet and down
#
but it doesn't mean that there are no subterranean you know subterranean movements
#
which are keeping the pot boiling right so it's hard to you know i mean definitely i'll agree from
#
one point of view we can it is very not only important but necessary for us to go back to
#
every single point and figure out where we screwed up and why we screwed up and so that you don't
#
screw up again right there's no way we can excuse ourselves and this is what as a national security
#
analyst this is incumbent on us to do this right for example one of the things we've been saying
#
from the i've been saying at least from the late 90s is that you can't have the same the
#
indian army being stationed for counter-insurgency duties for a beyond a certain period of time
#
because you need the army to employ lethal force against an external adversary right the the the
#
you can't give too much of nuance to the army right the army is meant to external only lethal
#
force against external adversaries now you're saying that look i want you to use semi-lethal
#
force against some people who are our citizens but some people who are not our citizens who are
#
terrorists from outside who infiltrated who look by the by the way exactly the same as our citizens
#
we really can't tell from the way they look and but we want you to apply different rules to these
#
people you have to be respectful of citizens but hostile to i mean how does a person in combat
#
determine this right if a person is shooting at you you're not going to be like you know you
#
don't have this kind of a radar in your mind saying that this is this person he's an indian
#
id holder or this is a pakistani id holder in afghan who's coming through the thing right you
#
just you're just in combat so it's it creates a certain psychology within the army it creates
#
a certain conflict economy within the society and it creates a certain kind of relationship
#
between the citizens of that place and the army all of which are bad for the indian not just for
#
jammu and kashmir i'm talking bad for india as the republic of india as a whole and we should have
#
long ago it's very easy to say this right benefit of hindsight but i can say this because i've i've
#
said this at those points in time you know it was very important for us to get the army out and let
#
a counter-insurgency force do this so that the army is retained for use for you know for external
#
adversaries with with lethal force now we've created a generation of officers or two generation
#
of officers who've seen a lot of conflict and interpret international events and national
#
events from the perspective of what they've seen from their narrow foxhole in kashmir you can't
#
blame them because that's how they've they've lived and that's that's the kind of living experience
#
they've had and that has its consequences for national security now could we have been more
#
you know in fact i must tell you this i once spoke to a game theorist one of the world's
#
foremost game theorists and i asked him how would game theory address the kashmir problem
#
and would you write about this for prakati the guy said no i can't write about this for prakati
#
because i will be the center of controversy and i don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting
#
this controversy off i said why do you say that he says game theory says that we should never have
#
taken kashmir in 1947 should have let it lapse to pakistan your all your problems would have been
#
much simpler by not having a muslim majority border state right and that was the original
#
set now you could take that as an example and say yeah you know we would have been perfect
#
perfectly fine all of that all the problem you never had that problem and you would have been
#
a multi-denominational republic without a muslim majority state right and you could have it's like
#
the european union without turkey right it's great to be a european union but european union with
#
turkey inside would have been a very different kind of a union right so that's his view you
#
could say that was that was the original sin or you could say that you know this whole when
#
the maharaja thing happened we should have gone in and uh you know established by brute force
#
and stayed there longer a whole sheikh abdullah nehru things there was a particular thing where
#
nehru just dies before uh that famous meeting with sheikh abdullah then there's something in
#
indira gandhi in 1971 she should not have accepted you know there's a lot of what ifs and counter
#
factuals which are out there i believe that many of them make sense but that's water under the
#
bridge right the question if you ask me is what now right what do we what what what is the
#
prescription i think the first thing is ensuring that the state of jammu and kashmir is part of
#
the indian union is critical for the national interest not because of the romantic reason that
#
unless we have a muslim majority state our secularism is not real you know i don't believe in
#
that kind of thing it's mainly for geopolitical reasons a territorial you know uh seeding
#
territory at this point in time under circumstances like this when you have unresolved
#
political conflict with pakistan and china is a recipe for weakness you don't want to be in a
#
situation where you know you you create these things out of the goodness of your heart and then
#
you face uh you know the walls closing on you the second thing is that the constitution of india
#
allows you a massive amount of space in the way you want to conduct yourself in jammu and kashmir
#
as the 370 thing has shown you right we lived under one regime we changed it under another regime
#
now you have 370 which is waived now you have three union territories now you can create two
#
states or three states you have you have a whole lot of options which are out there and the indian
#
state is capable of actually working on those options what you need is i think political
#
sagacity to come up with a configuration that is acceptable to the most number of people
#
i do have a say in what kind of a state it should be but my say is much weaker than a person who
#
lives in the valley or in jammu or in ladakh right so it's a matter of ensuring that the people of
#
that state people who live in that state or now the three union territories have a configuration
#
that works for them right and where new delhi and the rest of us can support that kind of a
#
configuration but such a configuration cannot be denominated on the basis of religious exclusivity
#
however liberal you are if someone says that oh you know i'm going to set up
#
this particular district under islamic rules or hindu rules or buddhist rules that's that's not on
#
i mean it's the the rules obtained which are the same for everyone else you are a particular
#
minority you can have a hill counts i mean there are many states in the northeast which have a hill
#
council right there's a gorkha national council gorkha hill council in the in the darjeeling
#
areas so if you're worried about your ethnicity being challenged by outsiders etc there are
#
mechanisms which we already have to secure that you don't need to create a you know a zone where
#
a separate set of rules apply the indian constitution and politics political experience
#
has thrown out multiple options it can be done the question is do you want to do it
#
or is it in the interests of the national political parties to keep the situation unresolved
#
i don't know maybe there is a reason why they want to keep it unresolved so let me respond to some
#
of these like number one i did for the longest time my most downloaded episode was my episode
#
on kashmir with srinath ragaman which was right after the abrogation of 370 which i think was
#
clearly morally wrong on our part to do what we did over there and if you ask me to what point
#
or what point of time am i talking about when i talk of all that we did wrong in kashmir i'm
#
saying practically any point in time like of course when pakistan was helping the insurgents
#
there we had to fight back pakistan there's no disputing that but the point is it isn't a
#
question that the pakistanis are mixed up with local kashmiris and if somebody is shooting at you
#
how do you know how do you assert that the point is it wasn't about somebody shooting at you
#
the sort of things that we did on their civilian population is unconscionable from breaking into
#
homes from taking boys away and they never return from the mass rapes from the sort of
#
incentives given to army units that how many kills can you produce so you take laborers from one
#
village and you kill them in another village all of this is documented that's what i'm talking
#
about that you know all we had to do was not give them any special privileges but just treat them
#
as we should treat our citizens in any part of the country we simply did not do that you know
#
but but i mean that that that sequence of events is not right because i do remember the 90s where
#
it was all simultaneous there's no sequence of events there was a very very conscious move from
#
okay there was a screw up during the 1987 elections after which began this whole thing
#
which yeah but that was not human rights violations that was no no i'm not talking about
#
that i'm saying that by the time like first that was from that period that was a trigger it gave
#
fertile ground for pakistanis to help local insurgents but then you know it's one thing to
#
fight local insurgents and pakistanis who are coming in it's another thing to treat the civilian
#
population the way that we did and this is documented and i agree but the point here is this
#
it's it's it's very easy from the perspective of people living in outside outside the conflict zone
#
who who don't have to do conflict management to make these kind of distinctions
#
they will make the distinction what i'm saying is that when you're trying to fight a counter
#
insurgency war let's say you're in the mid 90s right we're not even talking about the 2000s
#
you're in the mid 90s you're actually fighting a counter insurgency war against combatants who
#
are shooting at you who are taking shelter in some homes some homes are willingly giving them
#
shelter in some other homes here you know taking shelter under the point of you know under gun
#
point and you're in a conflict zone right now you you have been placed there that's the the only
#
instrument the state had to tackle it at that point now at that point you can't really say
#
that you know we have to mention all of these things look that's that's a bad scenario
#
uh it was a war zone civilians were caught in the war zone let me put it this way i accept that in
#
moments of conflict in the fog of war mistakes can be made that is not the point i'm making the
#
point i'm making and this is well documented in many books much literature including david
#
david as a generation of rage in kashmir for example is that a lot of the time they were
#
willfully for private profit you know doing things that they had no business doing and that could
#
not arise from confusion for example you're getting incentives to show how many people you
#
know how many people you've killed you take people you know to be innocent laborers from one area
#
kill them in another show the bodies for their families these people have disappeared forever
#
this is not a confusion that could this man be a terrorist you know he's not you're trying to
#
get that money yeah but you see that's what i mean by saying that this is this is very nice
#
if you believe that the kind of you know state infrastructure that we have is some kind of a
#
scandinavian you know scandinavian quality stuff i mean look at the police how do the police do
#
policing in your city and my city right look at the kind of capability they have to do policing
#
so you're talking about a state which has an apparatus which is crude which is not sophisticated
#
which is often not trained for it these are not mistakes of crudeness these are not acts of
#
omission these are acts of commission yes even among your local police there are acts of commission
#
i mean of course and they should be punished and of course but what and they outraged them
#
of course we are no one says that these are the right things to do right the point is you go to
#
go to that context and understand the context in which this is happening right it's not to condone
#
any of those wrongdoings which are there but first under this is that chemotherapy and cancer
#
argument which always used to make right no it's not because the chemotherapy is meant to cure the
#
cancer yes see here's the thing the chemotherapy is meant to cure the cancer the intent is fine
#
but if a crooked doctor is also taking out a kidney and selling it in the black market
#
that has nothing to do with the cancer that is unconditionally i totally agree but if you're
#
in a situation where the only guys who do chemotherapy proportion of them are crooked
#
will you reject chemotherapy you have no choice you've got to go to the doctors that you have
#
you've got to set the incentives right if there are missing kidneys you
#
at that point the incentives which everybody has in the political system is to defeat the
#
insurgency the incentives at that point in time in mid 90s is to keep that place part of the
#
indian union right but to go back to the doctor argument the first time you find a missing kidney
#
you put that put that doctor behind bars immediately take away his license the other
#
doctors are going to stop taking the kidneys out instead you institutionalize taking the kidneys
#
out i think the analogy is way too long but i think the the bigger point really is that
#
chemotherapy followed the cancer the cancer came first the chemotherapy followed look we put the
#
cancer there no i don't agree with that we put the i don't i don't agree with that i mean come on
#
there's from Pakistan came later oh we had a kashmir problem well before that no that's why
#
you're saying that you can start in 1947 we might we should not have had this in the first place
#
right no i'm not even saying that and i'm not sure that would have been better for the kashmiris
#
if they were part of pakistan they were between hell and no no you cannot you you cannot divorce
#
divorce the fact that the situation in kashmir was exacerbated by the involvement of pakistan
#
and to some extent the united states and the other great you know here's the thing
#
it's a complex issue i'm agreeing that your fact is right you're refusing to accept that
#
my fact is right even though there's so much documentation we did wrong things i i totally
#
agree that there were wrong things that have done i i don't disagree with that a lot of this is our
#
fault ours is who you and i the indian state okay the indian state's fault but the point here is
#
that you cannot have had any other option at that time would you have found okay you have the most
#
you have the most elaborate human rights conscious armed forces in the world and look what they did
#
in afghanistan look what they did in iraq these are not third world poor country armies these
#
are rich country armies with billions of dollars spent on human rights education and all that
#
living in a country where there's wonderful rule of law all i would like is that we acknowledge
#
the complexity and say that the army needed to be there shit happened it is bad it shouldn't have
#
happened instead if we say that this shit happening is justified because hey what do you do
#
all i would like is for us to understand the situation where there is conflict and there is
#
a need for the state to to tackle that conflict it is not a walk in the park it is not even policing
#
it's not even managing a riot i mean look at how the riot is managed in india right do you think
#
there are any niceties which are which are respected when the riots are managed look at the way the
#
police i mean they're not even kashmiris or there's no pakistan there's no islam or anything there
#
right these are people rioting on the streets how do the police manage are there any niceties
#
do the police were the police right and beating up those guys little kids on during the riots of
#
course they were wrong do you have any other option other than that do you have some miraculous uh you
#
know police force which will land from somewhere and take care of human rights and quell the riot
#
no you have to deal with what you have you had at that point the best you had was what you had
#
and you dealt with it there were mistakes that were made some people were punished a lot of
#
people are not punished but in the broad scheme of things i don't think you can go back and say oh
#
you know it's our mistake right the whole point is that chemotherapy followed the cancer the cancer
#
did not come because anything that we did of course there'll be people who are disaffected
#
with the way your politics goes but only when there is an external exacerbation of that right
#
when pakistan plays that i mean it's no forget about kashmir they were doing this mess in panjab
#
now where did the panjab riot happen because of the panjab crisis happened because entirely
#
india screwed up in panjab or the republic of india screwed up in no there was definitely an
#
external uh involvement there right the external info our army was nowhere near as brutal in panjab
#
or our security forces were nowhere near i think the panjabi have a very different view on that
#
perhaps kps gil used to have high level of security for what right even now a lot of people have i
#
mean people have a different view on it now let's let's not compare uh you know who got who got
#
worse but the point is both of these kind of things these are tragic statecraft is not statecraft is
#
not a exercise as a walk in the park it's not a beautiful thing there are nasty things which you
#
have to do when you're doing statecraft going to war for example right i mean what are you talking
#
about i mean looking at going to war with let's say pakistan in 1971 a lot of people dying uh you
#
know of course the pakistanis started the genocide in east pakistan but when you go to war you kill
#
people this is not a pretty thing by any side right it's not something which i would like to do
#
and imagine me doing you know i'm going to go to war you know it's not like it's that you are forced
#
to a situation but you know there's no equivalence and what devdas writes about in his book is also
#
in the autees after nawaz sharif and vajpayee had those peace talks pakistan had stopped interfering
#
in kashmir the internal insurgency at quell well i really made it come on pakistan stopped
#
interfering in kashmir is i mean it's it's impossible i mean things were much better
#
well they were much better because they were managed in a certain way right because there was
#
a there was a sense that okay something is going to change but remember there are multiple actors
#
there now to to go and claim i am a critic of the indian state i mean i work with uh i mean some of
#
the work that i have done with the army is like for example trying to figure out how do you govern
#
kashmir better for example right we've done a lot of these things now within the army there are people
#
who want to do good things within the army there are people who want to make a quick buck within
#
the army there are people who want to do nasty things with the army there are people who can't
#
care any of this they just want to follow orders right it's not about any one entity of the state
#
you know which could have done better everyone could have done better right but to go back and
#
say that oh you know it's all our fault we screwed up it's our you know it's our failing i think it's
#
a luxury which we can't afford i think i remember in 2008 there were people who were writing op-eds
#
in the newspaper prominent columnists were saying we should give up kashmir 2008 i mean they're
#
saying we should give it up who said that there are prominent liberal commentators i mean the
#
liberal cognizant wrote that i mean you can go and your show notes can find it out right there were
#
people who wrote that openly famous nationally prominent people said you give it up i mean how
#
silly can you be i mean would you would you would that you know you let's say you walk out of kashmir
#
in 2009 and miraculously you'll have this wonderful liberal state there what about the shias there what
#
about the you think the i mean it's in a sense it's a straw man because i'm not saying anything
#
like that so let's not even go there i'm not i'm not even saying what i'm saying is that the the
#
argument that we screwed up and it's all our fault leads it's not an argument i'm making no no leads
#
it's not an argument but fine but let's say the argument someone makes that it's all screwed up
#
and it's all of our fault leads to the conclusion that we have to give up you know we have to walk
#
out of there we are the bad guys i don't think so yeah but nitin you're arguing against something
#
that i haven't said all i'm what i am an all-existent straw man it's a no it's a story man
#
all i'm saying boss is that and i'll let you have the last word on this because i think we both set
#
up bait and the listeners can make up their own minds and think about it but what i am essentially
#
saying is that this is a classic example of where the national interest can severely go against
#
liberalism because there is no question that human rights while ever violences were committed at
#
scale over there now it doesn't mean that the entire entirety of what happened is necessarily
#
our fault you did have a third party intervene and i completely agree with you that we had to
#
do whatever was necessary to get that to you know solve that particular problem however i think we
#
did overstep a lot and that's the kind of the the conflict between individual rights and the
#
national interest that i mean but i also agree with what you said that it is an edge case most
#
of the time it is manageable and yeah and i think we just have to ask ourselves one question right
#
why is it that the army did all these nasty things only in jammu and kashmir and not in other places
#
you tell me no that's the question why is it that it didn't happen in odisha it didn't happen in
#
karnataka doesn't happen in tamil nadu doesn't happen in maharashtra doesn't happen anywhere
#
else why does it happen only in places where there's insurgency right that tells you the
#
thing in the sense that what i've come to realize it's a bit circular that's i mean i could throw
#
that back at you and say that why was there insurgency and why was there always disaffection
#
to begin with there's disaffection everywhere we have been unfettered kashmir right from the
#
birth of the republic there is disaffection in about indian rule or the rule of new delhi in
#
many parts of the country even to this day but you don't send the army there now the the argument
#
here is that there is a certain historical context and a geopolitical context which creates those
#
conflicts and the indian state has very blunt capacity to tackle anything forget about i mean
#
that's what i'm talking about riots right forget about riots the police force doesn't have a
#
detective department to figure out how if your bicycle is stolen they don't have detectives to
#
go and find i mean you have tv serials which shows you all this kind of cid this and other
#
the police departments don't have detective departments so your state capacity of every
#
kind especially of the coercive kind is very very blunt and we've used a very blunt instrument
#
called the indian army which is designed to fight an external adversary with lethal weapons
#
to go and fight in a counter-insurgency conflict whether the maybe half the population or more
#
than half the population are our own citizens so it's a very i think judgments i would be very
#
careful in making judgments i would be a lot more careful in learning lessons and ensuring that we
#
don't make the same mistakes again rather than to go back and make you know easy judgments yeah but
#
it's not black or white like the judgments i'm making are not blanket judgments the judgments
#
i'm making is that in particular wherever there were there was oppression wherever there was
#
atrocities especially when it's a case of not fighting a cancer but taking a kidney out of
#
a guy who's got nothing wrong with him to take that metaphor a bit too far you know it's important
#
to kind of call that out and accept that there is an issue there that something is fraying at the
#
edges of that alliance between liberalism and nationalism as you put it if it is an alliance
#
at all but i'll you know we can kind of move on from there to matters where we are bound to find
#
agreement and i think this is i mean our listeners can kind of make up their own mind i loved a
#
phrase that you used in one of your columns where you said that liberal our liberal democracy needs
#
a new operating system elsewhere you have spoken about and you were responding to a certain gentleman
#
saying we have too much democracy and i think both of us found it hilarious and your response
#
to this was no we need more republic right so elaborate on this for me yeah i think the second
#
one is easier right the second one is a lot of people uh conflict democracy with being this
#
wonderful system of government right they don't look at it as liberal democracy just talk about
#
democracy now what does democracy mean let's say there are 100 people in a room and democracy
#
means they make decisions based on majority uh you know majority vote if 51 people agree on
#
something that's a majority if it's 75 percent you can decide whatever it's like two wolves
#
and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner exactly right so if the if 99 of them vote
#
and decide that the hundredth guy should be killed it's a perfectly legitimate democratic
#
decision everybody had a right to vote including the hundredth guy and they decided that the
#
hundredth guy should be put to death and legitimately carried out that that sentence
#
right so that's democracy now a republic is a place which allows everybody a certain bill of
#
rights right so let's say the bill of rights says that everybody has a right to life so even if 99
#
percent of the people 99 people vote to kill the hundred person the hundred person cannot be
#
legitimately killed because he or she has a right to life right that's what we call the basic
#
structure of the constitution and so on various countries have a various form of it so the the
#
entity the the the mechanism that allows this bill of rights to exist is called the republic
#
right or if you use that in another sense it's called liberal democracy because liberal democracy
#
implies that there is a democracy is a voting liberal is ensured that you have set of rights
#
which which can't be violated by the majority right so a lot of the republic is constructed
#
to prevent the tyranny of the majority otherwise you'll have the majority deciding whatever they
#
want to do and majorities are transitory right you could have 99 percent be voting on something
#
today and five years later they'll realize it's a mistake the brexit referendum being one of them
#
you could decide that oh you know we are out and then we are out and now you realize oh my god we
#
are out what the hell do we do now so to clarify the rules of the game are not for how the people
#
should behave they are for constraining the behavior of the state and through the actions
#
of the people limiting democracy limiting democracy right so that's that's the that's the reason to
#
have so when we talk about republic day very few people in india understand what republic day is
#
for you know even we had it a few weeks ago right and people say oh this is for soldiers to do a
#
march past this is for us to sing patriotic songs i mean no it's none of the above the republic day
#
is for us to remember that we are a republic all of us have rights and the preamble of the
#
constitution tells you what the republic is for and to understand that we have to live according
#
to the rule of law right it's a recommitment to the rule of law it's not about military parades
#
or singing patriotic songs right for which there is there are other days now when people say there
#
is too much too much democracy i think they are making that mistake they are they are just saying
#
that look it's it's you know people are making too much noise so there's too much it's not true
#
it's what we have is a shortfall of republic very few institutions whether they are state institutions
#
or their citizens or civil society groups follow what you know follow the dharma which is set out
#
for them in the constitution which is you know if you're a state power you have a certain duty and
#
you can't overstep your power if you're a citizen you have certain duties you can't so we need we
#
need more republic in our lives and not so much democracy i think we are quite okay with majoritarianism
#
as it stands now the other part is the operating system of liberal democracy needs a change that's
#
a more profound and forward-looking thing now what happened why do we have representative democracy
#
right why do we have a situation where you have i don't know 500 people in parliament or 800 people
#
in parliament who are elected and then they then they go and then they deliberate on bills and they
#
make laws for us right why is it that you have these 800 people or 500 people whatever the number
#
might be the argument is that look you know two sets of arguments one is a billion people they
#
can't be experts in everything so they can't you know apply their mind on various technical issues
#
so they have to appoint people who will then apply their mind on all those various issues
#
and then vote in parliament based on on the right so they in that sense they're aggregating
#
expertise and knowledge the other argument is uh technical to say that look how will you get 1.4
#
billion people to vote on every single issue every day right like you know how are you going to what's
#
the mechanism you just don't have the technology for it so this goes back to the u.s constitution
#
so you had representative democracy or maybe the british parliament where you would appoint these
#
guys and these guys would do this so the the operating system of liberal democracy was
#
representative democracy parliamentary democracy but look at parliamentary democracy and the way
#
it's fared in the last 20 to 50 years in in india in the united states in europe elsewhere right
#
do we really think that the 800 people we send to parliament understand all the issues
#
uh you know reflect on all of this and vote according to you know the rights and wrongs of
#
the issue i mean a typical parliamentarian has 40 bills in a day right can this parliamentarian
#
really apply his or her mind to 40 bills and make comment on them and debate on them even if the
#
anti-defection law didn't exist right even if the party leadership allowed them to vote according
#
to the merits of the issue do you think they could have done that to 40 issues a day over 100
#
100 days 400 issues i don't think it's humanly possible in in the current context to legislate
#
on so many things you need to be a superman right a super person you just it just doesn't happen
#
so that's one the second is back in the day when representative democracy was set up you know
#
people who was traveling on horsebacks and ox carts and so on so you had these sessions in
#
parliament where you know the you go back to your constituents spend some time there and then you
#
have a session when all of you it takes about 40 days for you to come to the national capital
#
in the u.s and all that so you had you had the technological problem of trying to ascertain what
#
people believe today you have technically you can build a system today which takes 1.4 billion
#
people's votes on any particular issue and sees yes or no you know technology is no longer a
#
problem to aggregate public opinion so the question is what do we do uh representative
#
democracy there's nothing holy about it liberal democracy is something which we can say hey this
#
is something which we want to retain but do we want to retain a parliamentary democracy just
#
because we've had it for the past 100 years or 200 years i don't think so i think if there are
#
better ways for you to achieve the same legislative and governance outcomes using other forms of
#
organization we should explore that there's nothing sacrosanct about parliament there's
#
something sacrosanct about liberal democracy but not about parliament so what can you do right so
#
there are various thoughts which we've put across right you could say hey let's build a system now
#
i'm just you know this is hypothetical freewheeling yeah freewheeling right you could build a system
#
where you can ask 1.4 billion people to prioritize a set of problems right you have you anybody can
#
list any problems that you want so you can have thousand five thousand ten thousand hundred
#
thousand problems and you can go and upvote the problems that you want to be taken up right and
#
then you you have an engine which says okay as a 1.4 billion people nation state we've prioritized
#
these 50 problems that the parliament should take up every year now it's obvious that 1.4 billion
#
people are not the right people to discuss and debate on the merits of how to solve this right
#
there are technical i mean if you have to do vaccination there's a technological and there's
#
a science behind it not everybody knows that now you could have a bunch of you know experts
#
who build these particular solutions open source software development a good example right you know
#
it's there there's a particular problem and there are thousands of people around the world who are
#
contributing their expertise to building a software solution for for code now you can do that for the
#
same thing for legislation right now this is an expert group this is not 1.4 billion people but
#
it's not exclusionary don't leave anybody out now what happens is for each of your 50 problems that
#
society has identified you have a candidate legislation which has been put together by
#
experts in the field now you go to these parliamentarians and ask them to vote on it
#
because what they do is they represent the legitimacy of political power right because
#
citizens have not only entrusted uh voted in these people because they are experts in legal
#
you know reflecting on the law etc they've also given them power as their representatives
#
right and therefore political power is important so they can now look at the legislation and vote
#
on it right so what you've done is you've changed the operating system from being you know who drafts
#
the laws today do you know do you know whether the person who drafted the epidemic or whatever
#
the health act last year is an expert who knows anything about health do you know i don't really
#
know who did it right there's somebody who did it we don't know we don't even know that that's the
#
best possible way to draft that bill right but if you can do that in an open open source kind of way
#
you can do that so the argument here is that information age democracies can be different
#
information age democracies afford certain kinds of capabilities that allow you to improve the
#
outcomes of liberal democracy and solve and fix some of the problems that you've had with
#
representative democracy without necessarily throwing up everything into the sky and saying
#
hey you know we're going to destroy everything and start from scratch so that's that's what
#
i meant by saying that you need an upgrade in the operating system and it's you know everything
#
which i told you just now is in the realm of the possible right there's none of this is science
#
fiction i'm not talking about black blockchain and artificial intelligence these are these are
#
all things i mean if you can create open source code you can create open source law if you can
#
create if you can have a voting system using social media for a b and c you can also build
#
a similar one to aggregate public opinion and with things like other and other things you can
#
also make sure that the people voting in those things are actually human beings who need to you
#
know who have a right to vote in that so i've been thinking for a while about how many of the forms
#
that we take for granted and treat as if they are set in stone were actually products of the
#
constraints of their times for example you know the reason that the pop song is three minutes is
#
that you know around 1904 that is how much music that this could hold then you had the long playing
#
record which could hold about 40 minutes right so that became the conventional length of an album
#
a book can only be so many pages and therefore there is a convention of how long a novel should
#
be you know a newspaper can have so many pieces not more or less you know to be optimal and that's
#
why you have the length of an article and today none of these constraints matter to us we discovered
#
that as bloggers for example when it came to writing that we are not restricted by form we
#
don't have to be 800 words we can be 80 words or 8000 words and so on and so forth musicians
#
today are discovering that you know forms are fluid you don't have to be three minutes album
#
you don't even have to have an album it doesn't have to be 40 minutes cinema similarly you know
#
90 minutes for hollywood 180 minutes here you don't need that and i'm just thinking that this
#
is another great example of that that the current form of parliamentary democracy evolved at a time
#
with a certain set of constraints constraints of distance constraints of geography constraints of
#
you know just some mechanics of making your opinion known how do you do it every person can't make
#
their opinion known so the easiest way to do it is you elect one dude and then that dude goes to
#
parliament and so on and so forth and in india the anti-defection law of course has ended all
#
parliamentary debate because it means that you know you have to vote with the party whip so you
#
could really run parliament from an excel sheet so even that aspect has been defanged and everything
#
that you're saying is so thought-provoking because especially at a localized level i can see this as
#
a fantastic disruption you know at a nationwide level i still think that shit is too dispersed
#
and there are issues of information asymmetry and all that but at a localized level at an
#
andheri level if you have you know local government which where power and accountability are aligned
#
which is not the case right now but if they are to be aligned then mechanisms like this can actually
#
make better citizens of all of us because then there is actually point to being a citizen we
#
can make an immediate difference and you know get away from the apathy that is otherwise rational
#
in a system where power is so centralized so that's kind of you know i guess food for thought for
#
everyone to kind of yeah what i think is that the information age is different right it's different
#
from the industrial age in terms of how you organize organizations organize organizations
#
i mean you look at the typical bureaucracy or a typical company of the industrial age it's
#
hierarchical right you have the managing director then you have the general managers then you have
#
the managers then you have the supervisors and then you have the sub supervisors and they have
#
the crew and so on right now whether it's the army whether it's a bureaucracy whether it's a
#
corporation they've all been built on a hierarchical thing because information flows used to be like
#
that right you you send up information up the chain wherever the chain is authorized to make
#
a decision on it it makes a decision and sends down the information right so the you know as
#
you go higher the more difficult questions come up to you and then you each time you make that
#
decision it has to come all the way down right so there was a there was a there was a logic to that
#
the information logic is gone i mean you can you are in a network situation now you can
#
you can be in like in takshashila all of us are on the same what's a signal group or matter most
#
and a message which is sent is sent to all and anybody who's able to provide information or
#
make a decision can make it right there right it doesn't have to be that oh person employee number
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one finds it and sends it all the way and then someone else makes a decision and tells him what
#
to do right so these basics things have changed because of the way information flows through
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human society and that means that you have to adapt a lot i think we're just beginning to see
#
a lot of this i can see this in the government space i can see how the army needs to reorganize
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i can see how the bureaucracy needs to reorganize i can see how we need to reorganize the
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government parliamentary structure in the light of this right but what about corporations what
#
about public transport networks you know what about families what about civil society all of
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this i think the way they organize the way they conduct their affairs make decisions all of this
#
is going to change and we've not even sort of scratched the surface of it and what i kind of
#
sense is that everywhere the mainstream is crumbling everywhere the old way of doing things
#
is no longer valid but the change is so fast that there is a massive lag between new institutions
#
and structures coming up to take its place by the time there is an acceptable way of redesigning our
#
modern democracy to make it more efficient and reduce the friction and make it more responsive
#
and all of that perhaps we would have moved on again and it will already be irrelevant it's like
#
the world is changing so fast that any map of it is immediately false yeah and it's in historic
#
terms this is just amazing right i mean it took you a couple of hundred years to move from the
#
agrarian age to the industrial age right it took you like 15 years to move from the industrial age
#
to the information age 15 years is half a person's career forget about a lifetime right so the changes
#
are definitely jarring i don't think it's coincidental that there's so much of anxiety
#
and a sense of anomie in the world's populations right because there's so much of dislocation
#
so much of fear of the unknown and the recognition that the known is not really working
#
and it's across the world so societies are reacting in various ways some of some i think
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one of the things which is happening people are holding on to what what is you know the the thing
#
that is most firm in their society identity tends to be one of those things which is very firm
#
right so end up holding up to identity and people who want to promote their identity and then you
#
have identitarian polarization so a bunch of final questions and one of them is this
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that however things change there are still lessons we can learn from the past as i was
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telling you before we started recording i asked at gpt what lessons does ancient indian philosophy
#
hold for modern governance and it gave me a five point answer which is starting with dharma which
#
you loved and which you know you said you agree with all the particulars and the order so clearly
#
he's doing a good job and i hope it doesn't make you redundant soon but you will always have your
#
friends i can guarantee you that so but on a serious note tell me a bit about this because
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one of the sort of one of the many ways in which we demonstrate our hubris is almost with the
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pretense that everything in the past is outdated and primitive and irrelevant to what we are doing
#
and that the modern world is moving fast and you know there isn't particularly much of use
#
from what came before especially if it is 2000 years old now that is certainly true when it
#
comes to things like medicine i had a great episode with dr abby phillips where we debunked
#
the different kinds of quackery which have come down from ages immemorial but it is not the fault
#
of our ancestors they worked with the scientific knowledge available to them such as it was
#
but leave that aside you know if i i've always i mean there's a great book by italo calvino called
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why read the classics you know and it's essential for us to read the classics for lessons on humanity
#
and lessons on ourselves it's essential for us to read early philosophy which is almost like a kind
#
of proto science in a way to understand that whole process of asking fundamental questions of
#
crawling towards the answers because much as technology and sometimes science seems to move
#
at an alarmingly fast pace our understanding of the world and our understanding of fundamental
#
questions can almost crawl and it might seem that we have got nowhere so for you how important is it
#
to have that sense of terror in your life where you keep sitting down from time to time and looking
#
back at the past looking back at ancient wisdom and saying that hey there are lessons in there
#
for us also and i'd like you to perhaps answer this question beginning with the personal level
#
that as you have gone on through life you know what are the sort of things that you know you
#
reflect on from the past where have you taken comfort and wisdom from what have been those
#
things that have helped you live your life better and then perhaps you can talk of it in a general
#
sense yeah i think for me the most interesting book i read which we just which gave me a jolt
#
was russell's history of western philosophy and fall i followed it up by reading other
#
books on philosophy and and most recently during a pandemic i wrote the book ideas by peter watson
#
all i mean i would recommend ideas by peter watson to everybody right it tells you about the the
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history of human thinking from the prehistoric times to now now what is what you find in this
#
is it's the you know it's like little like going to your you know grandparents attic right there
#
are lots of things there some of them are valuable because they are heirlooms some of them are just
#
junk right some of them are uh implements that have been outpaced by newer implements right but
#
they're all there right and for you to go and discover so the process of discovery is interesting
#
so when you read the classics or for me when i was reading the artha shastra for the first time in
#
the english translation i'm hampered by not knowing sanskrit right i didn't try the sanskrit
#
anywhere so i always have to read the english translation so whether reading the shama shastri
#
or artha shastra or russell's history of western philosophy it's that this excitement of being in
#
your grandparents attic right and then now you've got all sorts of things which are out there and
#
now you find out oh okay this is really useful this is of great value because this came to me
#
from somebody and sometimes you find something in the attic which tells you who you are right
#
it might it might be a piece of it might be a document which is 500 years old and says this
#
is who your great great great grandfather was it tells you a little bit of who you are right how
#
you're connected to the past personally or it'll give you a valuable thing which you can sell you
#
know or uh something which you want to keep as a keepsake and there are things which you know you
#
have to throw because to making that decision of this is not useful to me or this is entirely
#
rubbish and i have to throw it implies that you're using your mind to make those calls right or if
#
you're if there's an instrument there which you think oh this is no longer useful i have a newer
#
one to use it that also allows you to make the call i think reading the classics or reading the
#
you know reading books from our history or reviewing our history theology all of that is
#
this experience it's not i mean i've put it in a less poetic way than calvino did but that's how
#
i see it it's like going into an attic and figuring out of things what are the concrete apart from the
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artha sastra for example what are the concrete works or ideas that you've come across that
#
you know made you sit up and think hard that's a you know that's a tough one i've read a few of the
#
upanishads not entirely right these are english translations and i've sort of picked up things in
#
there this is how i told you about upanishads as the way of of you know is a way of education
#
right where you don't necessarily learn from the text but you learn from a guru and the importance
#
of learning from a guru right that's what the upanishads tell you reading the mahabharat various
#
parts bbq de broy's translations most most importantly quite a lot of insights into the
#
political diplomatic and human condition of that time and how it relates to now right there's you
#
know it's just there's an analogy everywhere and figuring out how they dealt with those dilemmas
#
right they had very much of the same dilemmas at a lower level of technology but the dilemmas
#
were the same how did they deal with it and i reflect on it and say would i deal it with the
#
same way as this you know my favorite example i mean this is being flippant but you know bheeshma
#
is sleeping on the bed of arrows right and he's choosing when to die this is old man who's dying
#
and he's on his deathbed and the pandavas come to him and say they ask him all sorts of questions
#
about how to rule a kingdom what's the meaning of life and he's a great grandfather man i mean some
#
some great grandsire of theirs the man is in pain he's dying and you're asking him all these
#
kind of questions i mean let him be in peace right that was my first reaction you don't go
#
and disturb people the only question you should ask him at that point is uncleji phone lo otp
#
right so so so so you do have funny moments like this and more serious moments in other places
#
but one thing which i realized there was a vacuum of and that brought me to writing the book was
#
that we have so much or the others before i got there i must talk about this wonderful corpus of
#
literature that we have it's called the brihad kata we have the ramayan where the mahabharat and the
#
third one is the brihad kata the brihad kata is not it is not a religious text it is not mythology
#
right it is it is legend it's stories it's like lord of the rings the whole corpus i think is
#
available in a few redactions though much of it is lost but the katha sarit sagar and katha manjari
#
and others they're wonderful stories of wizards and princes and all of that great thing to read
#
okay it's it's the lord of the rings and the mythology in the indian context we don't get
#
that so easily but while i was reading it i was uh was impressed now what i found there was a
#
vacuum of was texts about what it means to be a citizen very few people know this i mean
#
artashastra a lot of people know right but artashastra was written for a king it operates
#
in the amoral world of international relations right in in the relations between sovereigns
#
there's no superior morality so power is the most important thing right power denominates everything
#
so you could do whatever you wanted to achieve power that's artashastra that's why it's considered
#
immoral and it's immorality is the morality of it but we used to think and i used to think that
#
the panchayatantra and the hito padesh and all these uh classics right we read stories of them
#
in various books when you're in school or in in amr chatrakatha and so on we thought these were
#
stories about moral stories for us to conduct our lives when i was reading the brihad kata corpus
#
of which panchayatantra is a part i figured out that the panchayatantra was written to educate
#
princes the hito padesh again is a book to educate princes but how to be a prince how to conduct
#
yourself as a ruler there are very few books to instruct you on how to conduct your life as a
#
citizen of course there's mahabharata and gita and all of that that takes you into spiritual
#
into the spiritual context and some of it is there in the secular context also but
#
you know it's it's the metaphor is very religious spiritual following a certain code which is
#
which is you know otherworldly right what about day-to-day worldly affairs none whatsoever and
#
that's how the nito padesh came into being to correct that vacuum right now before i move on
#
i should tell you something the other thing which i found greatly useful is the tradition of indian
#
atheism the charvax and the idea of atheism and my favorite philosopher of them all is a guy called
#
jayarasi bhatta jayarasi bhatta i think is about 800 ad or something like that nobody knows exactly
#
he wrote a book called the tatvopaplava simha which means the lion that destroyed all other
#
philosophies so what he does is this whole book and he's an arrogant guy okay it is quite unusual
#
for an indian philosopher usually if you read old texts they are very humble you know i am so and so
#
i'm sometimes they don't even tell you their names right i'm just the so and so i'm this
#
i'm kind of this guy says i'm jayarasi right and this book is the one which destroyed all other
#
principles what he does is he takes methodically he takes every single indian philosophy that
#
existed until that time and goes to deconstruct it and says that this is nonsense right so at the
#
end of the book he says that this book has showed you that everything is nonsense don't take anything
#
seriously including this right and just go by what common sense tells you to do a brilliant guy right
#
and there's only there are only two translations they are not great translations i've i've struggled
#
with the translations but they are brilliant and professor pradeep gokhale from from pune came down
#
to dakshashila to talk to us about jayarasi's schema it's just brilliant i just love jayarasi
#
bhatta i just wish there were more translations of him so that people like me could actually
#
understand that in in much better you know in much lucid terms than what is there in these very
#
technical translations so i'll go on from here to my penultimate question normally my last for my
#
guess but for you my penultimate one because i'll save something else as the last one which is for
#
me and my listeners recommend books films music which you love which mean a lot to you and you'd
#
love to share it with the world and you feel everyone should also enjoy them and all of what
#
you've just named obviously is in that category i'll say avoid movies throw the television out
#
of the window so okay that's those are my movie and tv recommendations done book recommendations
#
i think i can we can spend another eight hours talking about book recommendation i'm sure you
#
have another so we can be talking to each other for years about books i would recommend the
#
hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as a starting point right if people have not read it should
#
read it catch 22 people who have not read it should read it it tells you how not to take
#
yourself seriously ideas by peter watson is what i would recommend recently i came across a book
#
called commanding hope by thomas homer dixon which talks about how hope is a rational strategy in a
#
complex adaptive system right and one of the things i've realized over the past several years
#
is that we cannot model human societies in this deterministic mathematical models that we've had
#
or you know classical economics models because things are more complex and a better way to model
#
them is as complex adaptive systems which is a lot of maths and a lot of theory but what it tells
#
you there is things are not deterministic right you can never predict the outcomes and the outputs
#
uh you know to any degree of certainty based on the kind of inputs that you have for india as i
#
mean what happens what's going to happen in india next year what's going to happen in the world two
#
years from now five years they're very hard to predict right and because they're hard to predict
#
and there are certain kind of things which are called emergent right which means if you run
#
the same simulation five times you'll get five different answers because things emerge along
#
the way because things are emergent hope is a very important thing to have because you know
#
things can happen you know and you will have an outcome which is entirely different from
#
what you thought so those of us who come from a mathematics engineering technical kind of a
#
background or science background who are used to looking at society in a deterministic way
#
will benefit a lot by reading about complex adaptive systems and the need for hope because
#
it gives you uh it tells you that there is a rational basis for hope hope is not an irrational
#
sentiment hope is a very rational thing to have now i have a short-term bias when i'm recommending
#
books so i read a lot of paul austa especially the older ones i read a lot of uh david mitchell uh the
#
mitchell verse number nine dreams cloud atlas i read a lot of murakami uh which murakami haruki
#
i'm guessing since you just said is there any other there's a great writer called ryu murakami
#
who wrote famous books like audition and in the mezzo soup which were turned into films but my
#
favorite book of his is a book called piercing which begins with a newlywed couple lying in a
#
room and their baby is in a crib and this guy gets up in the middle of a night and he looks at
#
his little baby girl or baby boy i forget whom obviously he loves a lot and then he goes and
#
gets some a big night for some stabbing implement and he stands over the baby and he realizes that
#
the impulse in him to stab that baby with this is so incredibly strong that he can't help himself
#
but obviously it's his baby you know another part of him will be broken if he does that so he
#
realizes that to save his baby he has to go out and stab someone else and then he plans an elaborate
#
kind of murder and it's a brilliant book at many different levels because just that sense of
#
uncontrollable impulses the need to not have to explain everything you know the way you know
#
lives are set with a particular trajectory and momentum and just movement and all of that
#
it's it's it's fabulous but this is about your recommendations not mine so let's get in here
#
murakami is quite mesmerizing i mean it's keeping the murakami name
#
it's an honorable name it's an honorable name right but i was i mean i'm trying to read a lot
#
more fiction i i try to read or listen to audio books i think your recent essay about all the
#
books you read last year which is and i tried to do a lot of that reading but these would be the
#
ones i would strongly recommend right because i think douglas adams ultimately and terry pratchett
#
to to some extent you know the the night watch series are deep meditations on the human condition
#
right terry pratchett especially he starts off with you know being a sort of a science fiction
#
comedy kind of a guy but once he gets into the sam vimes things there are great books on state
#
craft you could one day write a book called v is all the way down instead of turtles yeah v is
#
all the way down that's a nice one in fact i hope it doesn't i hope it becomes one v and not all
#
way down music bheem sain joshi kishore kumar hemant kumar take five did you just say take five
#
yeah the boy band not not the band david brubeck oh okay okay cool oh the boy band is take that
#
take that yeah take that is not bad actually oh i used to listen to them when i was in university
#
because it played on the radio i was reacting with delighted surprise radio head nora jones
#
louis armstrong nina simone these would be but i i'm very eclectic in my listening and i
#
i listen to whatever sounds nice i'm not snooty at all all the way from himes reshamia to
#
i don't know uh i guess everybody's everybody's welcome i'm an inclusive listener
#
uh so yeah inclusive nationalism inclusive music so my final question supposing there are young
#
people listening to this who are animated by the same drive that let's make things better
#
right who want to do something to make india a better place and whatever whether it is with
#
reference to policy or not but now they might listen to this and say that hey policy is one
#
route and obviously the standard advice i would of course give them is come and do some of your
#
courses but apart from that uh apart from specific things like you know do this course or whatever
#
what kind of approach should they take what advice would you give them what kind of mindset should
#
they inculcate what should they watch out for uh are there cautionary tales that you want to warn
#
them about see first thing i would say is that if you're in school study science and maths up to
#
the 12th grade because in the 21st century whatever you do uh whether it's to uh for employment or to
#
understand reality to to live a happy successful independent life you need to have a basic
#
understanding of science you cannot you know mathematics might be hard but you know you do
#
science up to 12th grade and then you can do anything else you want to do after that
#
right learning english and learning philosophy and economics during school in some way the other
#
maybe extracurricular activities additional courses is also great to have uh if you have this under
#
your belt before your 12th grade you're prepared right what do you do after my first response is
#
that you have to first be independent as a person right can you support yourself and your family
#
based on what you've learned whether it's through being employed being an entrepreneur
#
doing whatever it is that you do to to support yourself right because unless you are able to
#
support yourself and the family which is your first obligation it's very hard for you to know
#
how to support society right or help society if you can't even help yourself and your family how
#
can you help anybody else right the sense of responsibility the arc of responsibility i think
#
starts from you yourself don't be a burden on anybody else those of you you know your family
#
members who depend on you take care of them once you've mastered your ability to do that or you
#
have some proficiency in that i think it's the time for you to think about what to do about society
#
in a sustained way of course when you're when you're working as a you know when you're employed
#
you can always give money to charity you can donate money to non-profit organizations etc
#
that that's so you instead of doing it yourself you let money do it right you give donations
#
smaller big 500 rupees 50 rupees you know it really doesn't matter you can donate and do your part
#
for employees but if you want to do it yourself i think you first got to be independent on your
#
own that's when you think of okay what do i do next right and as i said earlier on in the show
#
it's not a vacation right working in non-profits working in the public policy space doing social
#
work entering political life none of this is a vacation it's not a it's not a small holiday
#
that you take and then you can go back right it's not a round trip vacation it's a vocation you've
#
got to stick around for a long period of time you've got to go all in you've got to go all in
#
so you've got to be committed you need to have passion and you need to have this thing to face
#
adversity in the short term things don't change face disappointment and yet continue right which
#
means you also need to have a good friends and family network in order to do this that's that's
#
the point at which you have to think about now what do you want to do about it there are a lot
#
of things right one is the easiest way is to be an active citizen take an active interest in the
#
affairs of your apartment community of a local local community which is your ward or participate
#
in elections you know participate in the electoral process talk to political leaders and potential
#
political leaders go and engage right and this doesn't cost you anything you can just do this
#
as a citizen you can then decide whether you want to do activist kind of things advocacy kind of
#
things or you just want to do administrative kind of things right all of these kind of things are
#
available as options and india in 2023 i'm really happy is very different from the time when
#
takshashila was started in way in a way takshashila was started to enable and to become a platform
#
for others right there was no harvard kennedy in school in india so we created it now it's
#
available to you you can take a harvard kennedy course in india i mean equivalent course you can
#
take a takshashila course the best in the world right and then you can do whatever you want to
#
do right you have that opportunity and you also have a lot of organizations which are forward
#
looking which do tech policy you know which are which are not boring right these are doing
#
exciting new things for you you can join organizations like that spend two three years
#
before you do you can join the media you can and i would suggest join political uh join political
#
life if you are of uh if you are politically saleable right if you are from a community from
#
a setting from a family background which allows you to do political activism and get into electoral
#
politics you should uh there's no reason which is you say it's just a bad word i mean there are
#
certain sacrifices you need to make to be in politics but if you can make those sacrifices
#
you should be in politics i don't think uh people like us should uh avoid or shirk from those things
#
it's hard it's probably the hardest job you can have in any country but you can do it and and and
#
administrative services the civil services the foreign service armed forces police all
#
these are places where good people should go right because the cost of good people not going is that
#
you leave the space open to not so good people and then you have the terrible things which happen
#
i always say that the outcomes of a system is the net result of the consequences of good people and
#
bad people in the system okay now here's the thing if there are good people they'll always do good
#
things if there are bad people they'll do bad things regardless of what happens so how good a
#
system is really depends on a minus b right if the outcome of the good people is greater than
#
outcome of the bad people it's outcome okay it's not numbers there can be one person who does a lot
#
of good and that can sort of outweigh the hundreds of bad things a hundred of bad people do if it is
#
good enough right so you keep a system sustained you keep a system in good health you improve a
#
system by increasing the number of good people in it and the effect of the actions of the good
#
people that's why good people should do this stuff i mean the cynic in me is just thinking that the
#
incentives of a system can sometimes make good people do bad things and that's the way the cookie
#
crumbles but at this moment i would urge my listeners to ignore my own cynicism and instead
#
be inspired by your story because what i think you've done what you've done is phenomenal you
#
know in the blogging days all of us used to sit around and give gyan and give opinions
#
you actually got down on the ground you built something you built something that is way beyond
#
you and you built something that i think might you know reach further than even you realize so
#
you know thank you for that you know takshashila is a public service and at a more proximate smaller
#
level thank you for spending six hours of your time with me this was great fun well i hope
#
your show continues to succeed after spending six hours with me well i i do hope that you know
#
the people find it attractive but but the message of hope is very important right and cynicism is
#
is is a is a tempering quality but hope should be the driving quality you know you have hope
#
you temper it with cynicism i think you're all right just for one evening at least for one
#
evening you made me hopeful as well thank you i'm hopeful for a good cup of coffee now
#
if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
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you can follow nitin on twitter at acon that's a c o r n you can follow me on twitter at amit
#
varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene
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unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the scene in the unseen
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