#
There is nothing as arrogant as an arrogant North Indian.
#
For a North Indian man, here's what is seen and here's what is unseen.
#
The seen is himself, his language, his culture, his sense of proud superiority.
#
And one huge unseen is the fact that South India does so much better than North India,
#
that some South Indian states could be compared to Western countries, while some of the states
#
up north are like Sub-Saharan Africa on some measures.
#
Now, I say North Indian man because to many North Indian men, women are invisible.
#
They are instrumental to his needs, treated as property, fully unseen.
#
I know I'm generalizing, but I think as a partly North Indian man, I can talk about
#
And also, I just happen to be an Amit.
#
Over the last 10 years, Amit has become more than a name, a bit like Karen in the US.
#
The term Amit is used for the clueless North Indian male who combines arrogance with ignorance.
#
The more idiotic ones among them, and it takes a lot to be stupider than a median Amit, actually
#
think that every Indian should know Hindi.
#
Some of them think that all Indian languages come from Sanskrit, which is daft because
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Tamil is actually older than Sanskrit, and even Sanskrit didn't originate here.
#
All this would be tolerable if the country wasn't run by Amits.
#
Sadly, this country is run in a top-down way from North India, and the South suffers.
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India was defined in our constitution as a union of states, some Amits object to this
#
But in an ideal union of states, power would be decentralized, the states would compete
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with each other, and that competition would lift everyone's standards.
#
But in India, power has been centralized from the start, the states have become weaker and
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weaker, some rich states end up subsidizing some smaller ones, and this affects growth,
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welfare, and holds us all back.
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And whether you're North Indian or South Indian, you may not even realize the extent
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of this problem, and why everyone loses here.
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That's why you need to listen to this episode.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Neela Kantanaris, a data scientist who's just written an excellent
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book called South versus North, India's Great Divide.
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On one hand, the book has great data that shows how the South has consistently performed
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better than the North and has actually punished for it.
#
It shows the dangers of centralization and talks in great detail about the structural
#
problems with India's democracy.
#
Neela Kantan discusses the dangers of delimitation and also talks about one possible structural
#
fix to our democracy, which he calls gamified direct democracy.
#
He tried to sell the idea to his RWA and they didn't listen, but hey, remember what happened
#
to Socrates and Galileo.
#
Neela Kantan was also an early blogger, by the way, we used to call him Neelu, though
#
he spent more time shitting on others than blogging himself.
#
I was a particular target of his.
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I guess he's never liked omens.
#
Anyway, time passes, we all change and mellow down, at least we change and pretend to be
#
And we had a great conversation about many things, including why Madras is special, his
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brand of virtue ethics, and the danger of telling stories.
#
I love this chat, there's a lot of food for thought.
#
But before we get to the conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
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There are many exercises, much interaction, and a lovely and lively community at the end
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That's IndiaUncut.com slash ClearWriting.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
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a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Neelu, welcome to the scene on The Unseen.
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Well, how do I say this?
#
A meeting after a long time, but we used to sort of both be early bloggers in a sense
#
or active during the blogging days, which is how, you know, I'll just inform my listeners
#
As we started, I said, what should I call you?
#
And he said, anything is fine.
#
Neelu is fine because that's how we knew him then, but we don't sort of, no one calls
#
No one calls me that anymore.
#
People call me Neel at work and my official name is Neelakantan RS.
#
So you know, one of the things, and this is really the first time we're meeting, though
#
I think we've had one telephone conversation 15 or 16 years ago.
#
But what has also happened in the year since is that I've done a bunch of episodes with
#
people I've known pretty well from that time.
#
People like Chandrahash Chaudhary, Deepak Shanoi, you'll be familiar with those names.
#
And I have realized when I have done these long episodes with them, that even though
#
I've met them many, many times and hung out with them a lot with Chandrahash all the time
#
because he was in Mumbai, it's only in the course of the conversation that I realized
#
that I knew practically nothing about them because that's when you actually start talking
#
about someone's childhood and where they grow up and what all of that was like.
#
And I think in the sort of the grammar of every day hanging out, as it were, you don't
#
You might have common interests or common pursuits that kind of bring you together,
#
but you sort of beyond a certain set of areas, you don't really go elsewhere.
#
And so I'm going to go elsewhere with you.
#
Tell me about your childhood.
#
What was your childhood like?
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I am what is called a Madras man.
#
I was born and raised there.
#
And you know, I don't know if I wrote a book which I dedicated to my city, right?
#
Because it's a it's an it's among cities in India, it's sort of, you know, everybody
#
thinks of their home as a special place.
#
And I genuinely think that it has resulted in the person that I am, which is that, you
#
know, since a deep insecurity about one's own intellect, but a need and a necessity
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to contribute to intellectual life, which is, in my mind, what Madras is.
#
And this could be very, very different for, you know, all manner of people who are not
#
But to me, Madras is this and that's interesting because, you know, I discovered this lovely
#
phrase when I did an episode with Amitabh Kumar.
#
And in his book, he quoted from Raheem Azum Raza's famous book Adha Gaon.
#
And there's a scene in Adha Gaon where partition has just happened.
#
And these bunch of enthusiastic young Muslims have gone to this village and they're trying
#
in a place called Ganguly.
#
And they are trying to sort of convince him that, you know, why don't you come to Pakistan
#
And they're trying to convince him that he should come to Pakistan.
#
And then at one point he says, quote, I am a Muslim, but I love this village because
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I myself am this village.
#
I love the indigo warehouse, this tank and these mud lanes because they are different
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On the battlefield, when death came very near, I certainly remembered Allah, but instead
#
of Mecca or Karbala, I remembered Ganguly, stop quote.
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And a question I like asking guests of myself since then is, where is your Ganguly?
#
And you've kind of just given the answer, obviously, your Ganguly in a manner of speaking
#
But nevertheless, what Madras?
#
Because in the course of our lifetimes, the cities that we've lived in and that we call
#
home have changed so profoundly.
#
So in a sense, you know, when you think of Madras, what do you think of?
#
How much of it still exists?
#
Like one of my guests, Max Rodenbeck had grown up in Cairo and he said to him, it's Cairo,
#
but not the Cairo of today, but the Cairo of memory.
#
And in a sense, every city is a little bit like that, where it is not just different
#
across geography, across different neighborhoods, but even across time.
#
And the Madras of my mind, I'm sure, like your guests have said, is the imagination
#
of the people you think constitute that city and their validation thereof is what you seek
#
And those people all from your childhood who sort of, you know, decided what is, you know,
#
something worth validation, that is the city of Madras in my head.
#
And that city was a very, you know, like, how do I say this?
#
My city, the Brits built my city to be a bunch of clerks to the white man and therefore excellence
#
in a narrow field was considered, in a narrow academic sense, was considered like, you know,
#
And therefore, if you didn't do that, like, you know, that there was a, I wouldn't call
#
it stigma, but like, you know, like the absence of that was a failure of something, right?
#
And therefore, you know, like, how do I say this?
#
The end point of all of these achievements hopefully ended in a Nobel Prize, but most
#
people didn't win Nobel Prizes and therefore, like, you know, at least you went down that
#
path and like, you know, contributed towards expanding civilizational thought.
#
At least that's what I absorbed of it.
#
I'm sure like, you know, that's not the way in which everybody else in Madras absorbed
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But like, you know, that's what made sense to me.
#
And you could argue then, like, you know, like, that seems absurdly self-aggrandizing.
#
If you're young and you have this thought, it is not self-aggrandizing.
#
It is deeply, it just makes you deeply insecure.
#
So, you know, one of the themes I keep coming back to on the show is how contingent the
#
In the sense that everybody has a particular idea of I am like this, but that is contingent
#
It's contingent upon where you were born, how you grew up, the family you were part
#
of, is contingent on your genes, is contingent on the chemical composition of your brain
#
at a particular point in time.
#
We've all heard the story of Phineas Gage, you know, this 19th century railroad worker,
#
iron rod went through his head and he retained all his memories and his knowledge, but his
#
personality changed completely and he became a, you know, and we often sort of underestimate
#
how contingent our sense of self is and how it could just have been so different.
#
And with that regard, I wonder then about Madras that, you know, how much of you are
#
And to put, you know, a related question in a different way, if you were born somewhere
#
else in a thought experiment, what about Madras would you still love because it speaks to
#
what you feel you are inherently?
#
I would, again, right, like the idea that this is something unique to Madras is a story
#
that I tell myself, right?
#
Every city in this world has, you know, people who are similar to whom I consider as thinking
#
Like, and the truth could well be the opposite and like whom I consider thinking people could
#
just be the opposite of that.
#
But the point is that, you know, if I were born elsewhere, the hope is that, you know,
#
as children of enlightenment, our idea of, you know, what reasonable and rational thinking
#
is, is some version of that.
#
And my understanding of Madras hopefully would be that, you know, this is a city which
#
sort of prides itself on, I don't know, rational thinking.
#
And therefore, which is the same reason, like, you know, when I, when I visit the cities
#
that I most feel at home when I sort of go visiting, Hanoi, Barcelona, like these are,
#
I don't know why they give me the vibe.
#
They're not the biggest cities in their respective countries, but they have, if you go and sit
#
and they're not even the most party town, so to speak, or the whatever, they're not
#
the wealthiest, any of this.
#
But like, you know, if you go sit in a small place and start eating or meeting people
#
off the street, they're very, very insecure about their place in the world.
#
But they also want to seriously contribute towards expanding, you know, what is civilizational
#
And of course, like, you know, these are the three people I've met in either Hanoi or
#
Barcelona, it could well be true.
#
And it's just that, you know, because of who I am, I meet people like myself.
#
And therefore, you know, this happens.
#
But this is the, you know, it's a vibe, right?
#
Like, there's no scientific explanation to it.
#
Yeah, no, I used to once say that whenever I travel, I judge cities by how good their
#
And for a brief while, I was, not for a brief while, for five years, I was like a professional
#
poker player, and I spent a lot of time in Macau.
#
And there are, of course, no bookshops there.
#
And I would kind of become judgy because of that.
#
And I guess it's a similar vibe, like even, you know, in my times as a cricket journalist,
#
people always say the Chennai cricket fan is the most knowledgeable, right?
#
And test matches there could be a pleasure because you would just talk to anyone and
#
it would not be a question of, you know, them being celebrity obsessed or looking at the
#
game in a shallow way, but they'd know their history, they'd sort of know all of that.
#
So tell me about how that rubbed off on you as a kid.
#
Like, what were you drawn to?
#
What kinds of learning were you drawn to?
#
What were your pastimes?
#
So I would imagine one of the most important things that looking back, sort of, you know,
#
again, it's one of the things that I don't do, which is look back or think of myself as the
#
protagonist of my story, which I don't know if it's a Madras thing or if it is a my thing,
#
but, you know, I genuinely don't do that.
#
And sort of, and I think that is antithetical to the idea of pushing civilizational thought
#
So I don't want to do that.
#
But if I were to do that, like I'll give you an example, right?
#
Like when I was in class 11, 12, whenever we are taught integration calculus,
#
a favorite game amongst at least there was one idiot in my class who would call you the day
#
before the exam and give you a non-integrable function and ask you what the answer was over
#
And remember, this was time before, like, you know, there was easy internet access and
#
like, you know, people who weren't really great at mathematics like me would basically try and
#
attempt to solve that and like fail at it, not realizing that it is, you know, it had problems
#
and therefore you couldn't actually integrate it.
#
And like three hours later, he would call you and say, haha.
#
And like would have wasted your time.
#
And this was the kind of, I don't know, I don't want this to be like, let me paint a picture
#
of like circa 1996, Madras, but like, you know, this was a kind of like a normal thing
#
Like I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to argue that this is the mean, median and mode
#
of Madras, nor am I trying to argue that, you know, this doesn't happen in Bombay, for
#
instance, it could well be.
#
But in my imagination, this is Madras, right?
#
Like where people genuinely tested you all the time, whether you belonged, right?
#
And that belonging had this weird test of sorts and passing that meant a lot to you.
#
And then I guess that runs into two simultaneous anxieties that we have to grapple with in our
#
lives. And one of those anxieties is of fitting in into the world which you value, the part of
#
the world which you want to fit in.
#
And your case of Madras, this Madras is intellectual, learning oriented,
#
civilizational thought Madras that you want to be part of.
#
And that's one anxiety of fitting in.
#
And the other anxiety is sort of one of, in a sense, finding yourself, right?
#
Because those are sort of, and I think that anxiety of finding yourself is quieter and
#
it really comes over time and all of that and you can't force the issue, really.
#
But that anxiety of fitting in does come.
#
And I guess, I mean, therefore, there would have been a dual process for you of, you know,
#
going down certain paths because you wanted to fit in or you wanted that respect or validation.
#
And at simultaneously realizing that you like those parts, that there was something in it,
#
True. So here's the thing, right?
#
And I'm sure, again, this is true for almost all people in this planet,
#
which is that you want to fit in and yet stand out at all points in time, right?
#
And the moment you fit in and you were part of the club,
#
you wanted to stand out from the club, right?
#
And therefore, what did you do if you weren't as good as the next guy in,
#
I don't know, calculus?
#
You hope that, you know, either in probability or algebra, you were as good.
#
So some version of that, right?
#
Or better than he was or, you know, I don't know, wrote a...
#
I don't know, you did organic chemistry better or, like, you know, wrote better arguments or,
#
like, you know, I couldn't do any of this drama English all that well because I had,
#
you know, language was...
#
I wasn't very good at languages and so it was always difficult for me.
#
So any of these other things, like, for instance, I was...
#
For some reason, until the time we had, you know,
#
chemistry break into organic chemistry, I was quite good at it, right?
#
And therefore, you know, that used to be my card in school.
#
And then afterwards, I was terrible at organic chemistry and then that ended, so...
#
I would not be able to tell you the difference between chemistry and organic chemistry, so...
#
Yeah, but going back, this idea of fitting in and the anxiety,
#
the long-term anxiety of finding one's...
#
That is, the short-term anxiety of fitting in versus a long-term evolution slash anxiety
#
of finding oneself, the finding oneself part is, again, like I said,
#
It is probably conditioning, which is that I never want to see what I do,
#
which is some version of a reluctance to see yourself as the protagonist
#
and therefore finding yourself as some version of seeing yourself as the protagonist of life.
#
And I don't want to do that if it is conditioning or if it is the way I think.
#
I don't know, but I don't.
#
So let's digress and talk a little bit about that
#
before we come back to the chronology, as it were.
#
And I think you mentioned this in our email exchange as well,
#
that you're uncomfortable when people are talking about themselves.
#
And at one level, I get that, that so much of what we do is ego and self-aggrandizement
#
and everybody's got the main character syndrome,
#
they're the hero of their own little play in the heads
#
and everyone else is instrumental to them.
#
And I can imagine why it seems morally important to kind of avoid that trap,
#
treat other people as an end in themselves, not as a means to an end,
#
as Kant would have said.
#
But at the same time, I think there is a lot of value in personal stories,
#
because that is how we relate to each other.
#
Because without that, there is a danger that we are atomized,
#
living in our little worlds and falling by default into a main character syndrome,
#
which I think is a default for everyone.
#
And it's only through intention and conscious effort that we kind of get out of it.
#
And that's where I think stories are important,
#
that when you tell me a story about yourself,
#
that I relate to, that I pick something up and I say that,
#
yeah, man, when I was 10, you and I felt like that, you know?
#
And then there is that connection that we have made as humans.
#
And I think that that also applies when you're reaching out to larger audiences,
#
like the part of my show that I've really come to love the way the show has evolved,
#
is the personal bits when I'm listening to people's stories.
#
And in a sense, how do we figure ourselves out?
#
We figure ourselves out by telling stories about ourselves to ourselves,
#
this is what I want to do.
#
This is my place in the scheme of things.
#
And there is no avoiding that.
#
You are always the main character there.
#
So for me, there is this trade-off.
#
But I think that if you then, if you realize, like looking back at myself,
#
I can of course see times where I was posturing
#
or where I was too anxious for validation
#
and you behave in particular ways because you do that.
#
But I've come to the place today where I am like,
#
I will throw myself into this thing where I'm just being authentic to myself
#
and let the pieces land where they may, as it were.
#
I've kind of come to think of that.
#
And obviously you want to avoid the elements of self-aggrandizement
#
that do come with that or even if you think you're not posturing,
#
that itself is a form of posturing, right?
#
So one deals with all of this.
#
But I'm interested in sort of having you elaborate
#
on why you come to this sort of strong position.
#
And I would say that this is perhaps like,
#
would it be fair to say that this is also therefore that
#
that you distrust people who talk too much about themselves,
#
who have this main character syndrome, like in our blogging days.
#
And we can talk about that later.
#
But you were pretty acerbic, if not extremely harsh
#
about a whole bunch of people who were kind of putting themselves out there.
#
And my sense was that of all the people who is shitting on everybody else,
#
this guy is a little different
#
because other people are shitting for understandable reasons.
#
You're not from their tribe or they're jealous or whatever.
#
But your shitting on people almost seem to be coming from a place of,
#
I'm superior to you and you're not even worth engaging with
#
or there's something about you I find distasteful,
#
which I'm beginning to wonder, is what you found distasteful a storytelling bit?
#
Because that whole blogging age was really everybody going on about themselves
#
in a sense, in a good way, in a bad way.
#
But finding themselves.
#
Blogging, we'll come to that in a little bit.
#
But to answer your question on what makes me uncomfortable,
#
I was just thinking about it.
#
I think the easiest and possibly the true answer is that
#
the threat of weaponization of that storytelling,
#
of it becoming what is, I don't know, authenticity porn or something,
#
there is that threat and that it gives an easy in
#
to people who are willing to weaponize it.
#
And that is probably a threat to the notion of our purpose in life
#
being pushing civilization thought forward.
#
Is that my entire anxiety about it?
#
I just made the shit up in the moment, but it could well be that
#
anxiety is somewhere the reason.
#
But more importantly, what I want to,
#
if there is a need to tell you a story in order for me to belong,
#
as opposed to solving that integral or coming up with something that I
#
did as an adult, either, let's say, gamified democracy or something of that nature,
#
which you sort of have serious engagement with.
#
And therefore, the connection is organic in terms of you having
#
thoughts which are either tangential or taking that thought forward, etc.
#
That I would imagine is organic.
#
And then narrating, like your life story becomes.
#
The idea of elements of a life story becoming the plot points with which you
#
connect to others seems to me to be a self aggrandizing,
#
but like that's less important to me.
#
More importantly, it gives me the threat of what is some version of a great man
#
theory of all our lives.
#
I don't know what the word is.
#
It's anxious and at the same time, very worried.
#
I don't imagine the world to be that in the way in which I am.
#
I don't imagine that kind of a world resulting in pushing thought forward.
#
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, though.
#
You know, when I meant about stories helping you connect with other people,
#
I didn't mean in a cynical instrumental way that I'm telling you a story about myself
#
because I want that connection and whatever.
#
But we are, in a sense, storytelling creatures.
#
When you're sitting with friends, what do you do?
#
You're telling a story.
#
Everything you say, no matter what it's about.
#
You're telling a story, whatever the story is.
#
And it is a byproduct of that, that there is a connection.
#
And I have a couple of follow up questions, but before that,
#
I'll just to expound on the value of a story.
#
And I'm glad you said, you know, gamified direct democracy,
#
because to someone who's listening to that term,
#
or even to someone who's reading your book and reaching that chapter
#
in the way that you intend them to read it, you know, after reading the rest of it,
#
it is still an abstract concept.
#
Intellectually, you try to figure out what the concept is.
#
And as always happens when you come across a new idea,
#
you will instinctively just find objections first, right?
#
That's the way human beings are.
#
And I feel that having a story behind it actually helps make it more relatable.
#
Just as an example, and I hope you won't mind my giving this example,
#
but I was very moved by it.
#
I did an episode between the first wave and the second wave of COVID with Tamal Bandopadhyay.
#
So Tamal Bandopadhyay is a veteran financial journalist
#
who wrote a very good book on banking.
#
And I hadn't met him before that.
#
And that was before the second wave, but after the first wave.
#
So I did a couple of episodes in person and not remote.
#
So I booked a studio in a car and we went there and we were sitting across.
#
And for me, it's a good book.
#
It's got insights, you know, everything's right about it.
#
But the subject banking will be very boring for everyone, right?
#
Also, the subject of what financial journalism is would be most boring for everyone.
#
But I started off by asking him about how his months during COVID were.
#
And he told me about how when the lockdown was on, he went for a walk one day.
#
And he saw this boy who used to sell things who was now begging.
#
And he felt so bad and he described that.
#
And then he spoke about how this well-dressed man grabbed his hand, took him by the wrist.
#
And he got scared for a moment.
#
But the guy took him into a gully where there was a biryani wala.
#
And he said, don't give me money, I just want some food.
#
And Tamal told the biryani wala, I'm not carrying my wallet,
#
but you know who I am, I'll give you the money.
#
And as Tamal was relating these, all these familiar places, but now no longer working,
#
I think I teared up as well.
#
It was a very emotional moment.
#
And from there, then he goes on to talking about how when he got into business journalism,
#
his credo was that he is going to write in such a way that even the lay person can understand.
#
And he said that even when I would meet top bankers,
#
and even when I would meet top people in finance, I would avoid the jargon.
#
And even if I knew what the subject was, I would ask them questions as if I was a layman.
#
You know, I wouldn't mind them thinking that I'm a fool or I don't know,
#
but I would ask them questions like that.
#
And the intention of my writing was to make it accessible.
#
And now to me, this whole thing, where he's seeing a kid on the street
#
and he's feeling that empathy and he's staring up, he's got that connection with the guy,
#
coming to that ethic for himself as a journalist,
#
that I will not write the way other financial journalists do with jargon and everything,
#
but I will make every reader understand what I'm writing about.
#
All of it is off a piece.
#
And then when you have this story, and then you talk about the book,
#
it's a completely different ballgame.
#
Your willingness to engage with the book just increases massively.
#
And there were no controversial ideas in the book, but had there been controversial ideas,
#
your willingness to be open to them would also have gone up.
#
Because now you kind of have this human connection.
#
I think this was a bit long-winded, but I remember this as an example.
#
And this happens to me time and time again when I do episodes,
#
that I just feel that this is priceless, kind of making that connection.
#
We are all the time playing roles.
#
We are all the time personas.
#
And to me, it's a beautiful thing when you can leave that persona aside for a moment
#
and you can just sit and kind of...
#
I mean, does that make sense to you?
#
I'm thinking about it because I come from the exact opposite school.
#
And I'm thinking when you said persona, I'm different personas to different people.
#
I don't know what my persona is.
#
And I genuinely do not want my persona to corrupt my thought.
#
And therein, what you just described is my worry,
#
which is that if I have to do...
#
You and I would obviously not go to a physicist or a mathematician
#
or somebody who has won the Nobel Prize to ask us to explain their latest work
#
in jargon-free terms because, well, the jargon itself carries so much knowledge.
#
So it has a certain function.
#
But the point I'm trying to make here is that if I were to tell a personal story
#
and then build a thought on top of that,
#
There is a certain way in which I know you didn't mean it like that
#
and you expressly said that you're not weaponizing it,
#
but the threat of it being weaponized exists in the back of your mind
#
and that you want to avoid that.
#
And therefore, what you do is you just lay the...
#
And if you do want such a quote-unquote connect,
#
which is an example would be because this book exists right in front of me,
#
I would say that the subject matter of the first two-thirds of the book,
#
which is the various divisions in India, blah, blah, blah,
#
the subject itself hopefully offers a connect
#
and the solution is an intellectual follow-up to that.
#
That is possible without bringing the author in, which is another...
#
Now, let's go back to the old blogging days.
#
And this is the reason why I used to probably shit on people,
#
which is that the idea of the I, the first-person account of anything,
#
would grate me so badly that...
#
Your personal experience of something does not matter.
#
That would be the place from which I came in.
#
And their entire write-up would be one of privileging their personal experience over what is.
#
And I would be like, who cares about where you're coming from?
#
Tell me what is, right?
#
If your point is that the latter actually connects better
#
and therefore lands better or sells better or whatever,
#
the point I hope to make is that if that thought requires that pull,
#
I am worried that the pull can be weaponized.
#
No, I get what you're saying.
#
And again, you know what?
#
I did not mean that you use personal stories in an instrumental way
#
or that you use it as a device, right?
#
It is almost like I had the data journalist Rukmini S on my show,
#
your fellow madrasi, as it were.
#
And she was talking about how it's almost become a cliche for a data story,
#
So you begin with an anecdote and then you go on to the larger data point.
#
And she's like, oh, it is such a cliche.
#
And it doesn't really do that much because you can just cherry pick
#
your anecdote as well as your data.
#
And I completely get that.
#
And it's a problem when you do that.
#
All I am sort of thinking of is that it's not that you have to use stories everywhere.
#
Sometimes it is not appropriate in your book, for example.
#
Why would it be appropriate for most of the book?
#
But at the same time, I don't see the sort of hesitancy as well.
#
And I'm intrigued by the term weaponized.
#
Like, is there then a fear of vulnerability?
#
It is not vulnerability on my own behalf.
#
I genuinely don't care.
#
Like one way or the other, the reason why I don't put myself out
#
is also the reason why I don't care how vulnerable I am or the absence of it.
#
When I say weaponized, I mean it for the thought, which is that
#
if you open this door of the idea of storytelling becoming a desirable aspect,
#
let's take our incumbent prime minister, for instance.
#
I mean, he wouldn't sell well with the kind of oratory in Tamil Nadu, for instance,
#
because we have a different style of oratory.
#
But in much of northern India, he goes and says what he does in a very, quote unquote,
#
bringing himself like, you know, I used to sell tea or something of that nature,
#
which it pulls Barack Obama did that, right?
#
Like most American presidential candidates would do that, right?
#
Like there's that hook that they use.
#
And what I mean by weaponizing it is that, you know, they are in it to win it.
#
And to them, the personal story is a hook, right?
#
And what I worry is that, you know, our stakes are not that high.
#
And if each and every one of us, writing whatever it is that we do,
#
feel that this is a good device, regardless of...
#
Nobody intends to weaponize anything.
#
It's just that, you know, things end up being weaponized, right?
#
And if it is true that, you know, this particular idea,
#
if you care too much about it, then what happens is that you're privileging
#
the entry point to the story in some way, shape or form.
#
And that sort of creates an entry barrier to the thought,
#
and therefore taking thought forward is my concern.
#
Let me phrase this better, which is that, you know,
#
if you basically are to say that my thought connects with you
#
and therefore I engage with your thought, and therefore the thought becomes,
#
has greater salience amongst the public,
#
and therefore then that thought gets taken forward.
#
That's your arc, so to speak, right?
#
Now, my point is that if it becomes like normative, so to speak,
#
that greater arc becomes a normative thing,
#
then what happens, and it probably is already a normative thing, if I'm not wrong.
#
Is that a fair thing to say?
#
Storytelling in politics is very much normative.
#
But normative, right? It is normative.
#
And it'll be in writing books and in talking, whatever, right?
#
Now, the thing that I worry about is, you know, for instance,
#
you know this better than most other people,
#
which is that, you know, I'm kind of infamous on the internet.
#
And one of the things that really annoys me about it
#
is that people hardly will think about what is being said
#
and very often think about who's saying it, right?
#
And that becomes problematic, right?
#
And this entire storytelling connection, in some way, shape or form,
#
sort of privileges the person or the position from which they are telling the story,
#
and instead of the actual thought that sort of, you know,
#
rests at the end of that rainbow, so to speak, right?
#
And if we were to do that, we are short-circuiting civilizational thought, is my worry.
#
Yeah, no, that's very fair.
#
And I think I get where you're coming from now,
#
where, you know, and I'll try and paraphrase it
#
and tell me if I've understood you correctly,
#
where what you're essentially saying is that
#
the danger of using storytelling as a means of connecting with people
#
is that as in politics, it can become a cynical exercise
#
and then what is being said can get lost
#
behind how it is being said and that connection that is being made.
#
And therefore, our discourse can get corrupted
#
by too much storytelling and too much personalization.
#
And more importantly, storytelling then becomes a necessary condition
#
as opposed to being a good thing,
#
which then, you know, nobody in this world is going to vote for,
#
you know, somebody who doesn't tell a story
#
as opposed to somebody who tells a story in that case in politics
#
or somebody who tells a story and then let's say that, you know,
#
I have come up with the greatest idea called greatest gamified direct democracy.
#
It could, you know, for argument's sake.
#
Now, let's say that, you know, you come up with a more inferior version of that theory
#
and that, you know, you tell a better story and therefore you win that.
#
Like, my point is that if we make storytelling the entry barrier of it,
#
we pay a cost for moving thought forward.
#
I agree with you in the abstract, but given human nature,
#
I think there's no way around it because we will only vote for people
#
where we have a particular image of them in our head
#
which comes from a story that they tell.
#
So, you know, that is why Modi's Chaiwala story,
#
he can't be an abstract figure, you know.
#
If you're going to win an election, you can't stand for an idea.
#
You have to stand for something that is flesh and blood and in a sense,
#
that's unavoidable, but I'm not even arguing with you.
#
I totally, you know, I get the worry that, you know,
#
that discourse is corrupted not just by this,
#
but like in so many different ways these days.
#
Can I go back to, you know, our old blogging days one more time?
#
Because this is sort of, remember my blog used to be called recursive hypocrisy.
#
Right. And the logic that I had for that,
#
I can't believe I'm bringing this up for 15 years.
#
I've not thought about it.
#
But anyway, the logic I had for that was something very,
#
very analogous to what we're discussing, which is that, you know,
#
I hated the idea that people would point to hypocrisy as an argument against them.
#
Right. Now, if you ever were to point to somebody's hypocrisy
#
and act as if that is an argument against them, then what would people do?
#
People would basically argue their status quo,
#
which then means that no progression in civilizational thought is possible
#
because everybody would argue their status quo.
#
Do we want to live in such a society?
#
Right. Like that was the reason why, you know, that entire thing happened.
#
And the other side to the same coin is that therefore you don't argue
#
against anybody in terms of who they are.
#
Also means that you don't care what is the story that they're putting forward.
#
And ergo this entire...
#
Did you see how that sort of flows back?
#
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally.
#
I get that now, but see, here's the thing.
#
I didn't know it then, right?
#
So, you know, had I known it then, it could even have led to some self-reflection on my part
#
that, oh, this thoughtful person is shitting on me because of these reasons
#
and it bears thinking about, and maybe I'm doing something wrong.
#
Not that I necessarily was.
#
I have no idea what I would write or what you would shit on me about.
#
Shitting on people was also very pleasurable.
#
No, there's no denying that.
#
But yeah, but you're not taking civilizational thought forward by shitting on people.
#
But if you tell them a story of, you know,
#
that this is why I feel you're worthy of being shat on, you know,
#
and that puts you at the center of that story,
#
then maybe you take civilizational thought forward.
#
Probably, right? Like, you know, again, like I said.
#
In other words, the story is a tool, right?
#
And like all tools, it has a certain place.
#
My worry is that it could be weaponized in the manner in which we just discussed.
#
Ideas get debased as well, if you try to...
#
And that is the reason why we want to...
#
I'm sure we'll discuss this later.
#
But that's the entire...
#
One of the entire reasons why I want to remove the representative
#
from our entire governance model is precisely that,
#
which is that, you know, people, because they react to stories and emotions,
#
if you, you know, then they want to belong to a tribe of which,
#
you know, whatever the alpha male or alpha female, I don't know.
#
There's that worry of critical mass, which is story driven.
#
And we want to move away to, you know, rationality.
#
And the way to do that, hopefully, is, you know,
#
engaging with some versions of the model that I proposed,
#
which sort of strips away the story.
#
So we'll talk about that in great detail, of course.
#
And I would guess that then this distaste towards story
#
is not just a distaste towards the stories that people tell about themselves,
#
but the stories that we tell about others,
#
which is so much a part of our tribalistic politics that,
#
oh, so-and-so is saying this because white supremacy,
#
or so-and-so is saying this because, you know,
#
you're an anti-national, go to Pakistan.
#
So all the time, what we see in our political discourse is stories
#
where people are not addressing an argument,
#
but they're just attacking the person, attacking the intent behind it,
#
saying that, oh, you have an agenda, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And your point, I guess, it would be fair to say,
#
is that that just engage with ideas for their own sake,
#
story, to put it in a North Indian way.
#
And in fact, the crystallization of that,
#
the crystallization of that to me came with this chat GPT, right?
#
And, you know, what is the success of chat GPT?
#
It's a, you know, LLM has existed for a very long time, right?
#
Like, you know, it is not an innovation in that sense.
#
The, you know, chat GPT is a success for the same reason
#
that Narendra Modi is a success,
#
which is that it gives you its answers very confidently, right?
#
And it doesn't care whether the answer is right or wrong.
#
It gives you that answer, and it gives you,
#
and it tells you this is the answer, right?
#
Now, when you, the storytelling has the same effect,
#
which is that, you know, you've couched something in a narrative
#
and you're pushing that forward confidently
#
as some version of this is the answer.
#
The opposite is some version of a Google, existing Google search,
#
which is that, you know, I'll give you 100 links,
#
you go figure out what it is, which is the opposite of a story, right?
#
Now, in my mind, the latter is a more honest way of doing things.
#
The former, LLM is like, that's right.
#
You know, like grad students would have been able to do this 10 years ago,
#
Like we didn't, but what changed was two things.
#
One is, you know, they had better training sets, much better, whatever.
#
Let's not go into the details, but the point is that at the end of it,
#
what you get is a wonderful answer in the form of,
#
what is the equivalent of a story via chat GPT?
#
Or do you want the actual Google links as they exist in the world, right?
#
Now, the former, when it is correct, is spectacular.
#
I don't deny that, right?
#
But it is correct by accident.
#
Whereas the latter is where we are in terms of civilizational thought.
#
And we would rather have the latter than the former, right?
#
So, yeah, I agree with you, but I'll add some stuff to it.
#
Number one, even the Google search results,
#
you're getting millions of searches, but even the order that they are there in
#
or the way that they are presented contains a story, a bias, a direction or whatever,
#
you know, so that's kind of there.
#
And this is something that I was just, I've been playing a lot with chat GPT, by the way,
#
as long as you don't look at it for facts, it can be incredibly useful for various purposes.
#
But this is a thought that struck me yesterday also is that, you know,
#
Harry Frankfurt wrote this great book called On Bullshit.
#
Again, like I told you, I don't read much nonfiction.
#
So Harry Frankfurt is a philosopher.
#
And this was first an essay and then a book he wrote called On Bullshit.
#
And his thesis there was that there is a difference between bullshit and lies.
#
When you lie to someone, you know what the truth is,
#
and you choose to disregard that and go in the opposite direction.
#
When you bullshit, you don't give a shit what the truth is.
#
You are just saying the first thing, the most convenient thing
#
that comes into your head at that moment in time.
#
It may be true, it may not be true, it's entirely coincidental if it's true.
#
And in a sense, Trump bullshits.
#
You know, Trump is a classic bullshitter.
#
He'll just say whatever comes into his head.
#
And sometimes Chad GPT will tell you things with such incredible confidence
#
that, you know, like I asked at the difference between a Bangalore dosa
#
and a Chennai dosa and it told me the opposite, basically with incredible confidence
#
that it is in a manner of speaking bullshitting.
#
But I see that as a temporary problem because these are really early days right now.
#
And the other part also goes down to the crux of storytelling
#
where what you said, you compared Modi and Chad GPT in this,
#
telling a simple story with confidence.
#
I feel this was why Trump won in 2016, for example,
#
that he had simple stories for everything.
#
And I don't think it was intentional.
#
He is just a simpleton, so the stories happen to be simple, but simple works.
#
So for example, why do people in middle America have no jobs?
#
One simple story is they're being shipped to China.
#
The other simple story is immigrants are coming and taking your jobs.
#
Both simple stories are incredibly simplistic and not true
#
or a small part of the truth of it all, but basically not true.
#
And if you go with your economist hat on
#
and try to tell a complex story of the multifactorial reasons and all of that,
#
it's simply not going to wash, which I think again goes to the heart of the human need
#
for making sense of the complexity of the world
#
by telling stories and therefore the attraction of stories.
#
And I don't think that's an impediment necessarily to you.
#
I think there's a role, for example,
#
for someone like you to write a book like this, to put the ideas down.
#
And then there's a role for other people to come
#
and do a version of what you did and take these ideas forward.
#
And then there's a role for someone who comes and tells a story about it.
#
All tools exist, right?
#
So yeah, I mean, different people have to kind of do what they do.
#
Again, like I said, I have no problem with the story being a tool.
#
I just have a problem with it being a defining tool.
#
And also, perhaps then the necessity that comes of
#
feeling that you have to play a double role,
#
where one part of your role is of being a thinker or an intellectual,
#
but the other part of the role is being of a storyteller.
#
And I can imagine you're thinking,
#
boss, I don't want to be a storyteller.
#
My deal is I want to have ideas and I want to think about them
#
and I want to write that stuff down.
#
But to feel that public intellectuals, as it were,
#
and once you've written a book, whether you like it or not,
#
you are that in a manner of speaking also.
#
You know, Ram Guha keeps telling me I'm not a public intellectual.
#
And I'm like, boss, you know, you can't fight these things.
#
That's part of the disdain is that I don't want to play that double role.
#
I want to write this book.
#
You want to read it, read it.
#
You don't want to read it, don't read it.
#
But so let's kind of go back to your childhood.
#
But let's go back to, I think, another foundational question
#
where, you know, during this conversation
#
and before this, when we were having lunch,
#
you spoke about how your purpose being to take
#
civilizational thought forward.
#
And I'm very interested in that because
#
I never thought about purpose when I was young.
#
It's something that perhaps well, through adulthood,
#
one, I mean, I don't think I was self-reflective at all.
#
You are kind of, you build a persona for yourself,
#
even to yourself, you live that out.
#
And then maybe later in life, if you're lucky,
#
you self-reflect a bit, you think about things like purpose.
#
And I'm curious about how you arrived at this particular sense of purpose,
#
try to take civilizational thought forward.
#
Because when I think of purpose, as you'd imagine,
#
the ways in which I think of my duty to the world
#
is in terms of things that I should not do,
#
that I should not hurt others, that I should not take their property,
#
that I should not blah, blah, blah.
#
And it's not, not, not everywhere,
#
except when it comes to people close to me,
#
where there is also a desire to be intentional about their presence,
#
to not take them for granted and so on and so forth.
#
And I find that through life, what happens is you can begin your life
#
with a grand sense of purpose.
#
I will change the world, I will do this, I will do that.
#
And I feel that at least in my life, that as you go through life,
#
reality checks come in the way.
#
And you realize that most of your big thinking is like,
#
you know, you're nothing, you're nothing.
#
All you can kind of control is your immediate circumstances
#
and your immediate actions.
#
You're not changing nothing more than that, you know.
#
And you try to find purpose and happiness in the small things.
#
So tell me about your journey with purpose.
#
Like, did you have a clear sense of purpose from when you were young?
#
I would imagine that, you know, you think this is your purpose,
#
does not sort of stop you from being happy in other realms of life,
#
It is just that I don't know.
#
I've always viewed myself through what is the agent model of the world
#
and imagine myself to be an agent and the world to be a model.
#
And, you know, how do you expand this model has always been the way
#
in which I've thought about this world, right?
#
And that I don't turn it back and basically,
#
I don't know, it's always an inside out view of the world.
#
And sort of, you know, if this world exists,
#
I almost see that as my responsibility
#
because it gives me occasional pleasure here and there
#
and that it allows me to sort of live this life.
#
It's my job to sort of expand that in its glories.
#
Somehow that's always been my thought.
#
Why is something that if you've always thought
#
that this is the way in which you view the world,
#
sort of the why question does not even arise in your head
#
because that seems to be sort of your function, right?
#
The idea of purpose is a grand word that adults tell, you know,
#
it's a story that you tell yourself, right?
#
But, you know, this was instinctive even when I was a child.
#
I genuinely thought that everybody's job, you know,
#
it's not as if, you know, if there is Isaac Newton and there is you,
#
obviously, he's going to move civilizational thought
#
But the point is that we all try
#
and therefore expand it a little bit in our own sort of, you know, sphere,
#
And this was taken as a, I don't know, no,
#
I don't think anybody told me this.
#
I always assume that everybody thought like that.
#
And did you assume everybody's purpose is also right?
#
So then do you look down on people you see around you
#
or would you look down on people you see around you
#
who clearly are not doing anything about that purpose?
#
Like we were discussing earlier,
#
if, you know, it's okay if people have sort of,
#
you know, we all do this, right?
#
Like we sort of say that, you know what,
#
I'm going to take it light or whatever,
#
some version of that and sort of, you know, slack off.
#
But when you inflict that on another person,
#
be it your child or something of that nature,
#
that's when I really sort of get angry about it, right?
#
Like we have discussed, like, you know,
#
people who either give birth to or raise children in countries
#
where they're not given citizenship,
#
regardless of how many years that you live there, right?
#
That seriously hinders that child's ability
#
to participate in civilizational thought, right?
#
And those people I really have a problem with, right?
#
There are enough number of people,
#
they don't care that I have a problem with them.
#
But like, you know, but in other words,
#
like, you know, the average person, I don't know.
#
I assume that that's their purpose.
#
I don't discuss this with them, right?
#
Yeah, that's interesting because I look around me
#
and I don't think other people have this sense of purpose.
#
And I don't think everyone has to share one sense of purpose.
#
But if you look at the world around you,
#
you have, you know, influencers making funny videos
#
to, you know, get more views.
#
And then when they have the influence that they do,
#
they are then peddling Ayurvedic products
#
or peddling, you know, shady crypto sites and all of that.
#
And there's no purpose in all of that,
#
but they're doing it for the benefit of the world.
#
But they're doing what is the best for themselves.
#
And I don't know whether that is less honorable
#
or where this notion of honor would come from.
#
So I want to make sure that, you know,
#
having this purpose of pushing civilizational thought forward
#
does not mean that one gets to not be dishonorable
#
or shady in one's lives, right?
#
These are very different things.
#
It doesn't mean that in my daily life, you know,
#
I work a capitalist job and like, you know,
#
that is no worse or better than, you know,
#
somebody being an influencer on social media,
#
peddling Ayurveda, right?
#
We're all trying to sort of, you know,
#
live life in this order.
#
And in that, in our lives,
#
we still think of this as our purpose.
#
It's perfectly compatible.
#
I don't see them as antithetical.
#
Like that influencer that you spoke about
#
in their spare time could probably be writing
#
war and peace is equivalent for our times.
#
Who are we to charge that person, right?
#
So you mentioned, you know, not,
#
you mentioned people should not have kids in countries
#
where the kids cannot be, you know,
#
they should not harm their children in that manner.
#
Should people have children?
#
Okay. So what are your reasons for it?
#
Because I got massively trolled when I wrote a column
#
saying it's immoral to have children.
#
It's absolutely immoral to have children.
#
Let me listen to your reasons.
#
Okay. I mean, people better than I am
#
have written books on this.
#
David Benatar wrote this rather famous book.
#
But that was a utilitarian argument.
#
It's a utilitarian argument, right?
#
Like, you know, okay, let's just lay out
#
the few arguments that he has.
#
His argument is essentially that
#
the idea, it doesn't matter.
#
There is an idea of harm,
#
which will befall that child regardless.
#
If you bring that child to life
#
and that, you know, regardless of how much pleasure there is,
#
the little, the idea of harm
#
is sort of indistinguishable from life.
#
And therefore you're inflating on that.
#
And therefore you shouldn't bring.
#
Yeah, that's, that's one argument, right?
#
The other argument, another utilitarian argument
#
is essentially one of, you know, given the world where we are,
#
which is that, you know, in the next hundred years,
#
we're probably by the most conservative estimates,
#
we're probably, you know, the temperature of the planet
#
is going to go up by three or five.
#
Like between three and five is a fair number, right?
#
Like what, firstly, you're bringing a resource
#
which is likely to result in greater emissions
#
and therefore increase that temperature.
#
And B is going to live through the consequences of that.
#
Like, why would, like, you know, that again,
#
that is a very, very practical argument saying,
#
why would you ever do that?
#
But the argument that I had far before any of these,
#
I came up with like the kind of confidence
#
that it takes to bring another life form to earth.
#
Like, who are you people?
#
Like, if your purpose is to push thought forward
#
and if you bring another,
#
you should have understood all of life
#
in order to give birth to another life form.
#
And nobody in this world, I imagine,
#
has that much amount of thought clarity.
#
So like, what gives you the confidence to do that?
#
that you bring another life form to a thought structure
#
that you have not fully understood.
#
That seems seriously problematic.
#
Yeah, I mean, my argument for it was really,
#
I get, you know, the utilitarian arguments,
#
but mine was more sort of deontological.
#
And my argument was, look, we'd all agree
#
that it's wrong to do three things to people.
#
That one, you should not do something to them
#
Two, you should not cause them pain.
#
Three, you should not kill them.
#
And by having children, you're bringing people
#
on this planet without their consent,
#
which, of course, is impossible.
#
And they are going to suffer pain
#
and they are going to die.
#
So, you know, it's just...
#
But having said that, you know,
#
we say a lot of things are immoral,
#
Like, I think lying is immoral,
#
but you give me a particular situation
#
and I'll also lie, right?
#
I mean, again, like I said,
#
hypocrisy is not a bad thing.
#
But, oh man, the kind of trolling I got from parents,
#
you know, people who haven't connected with me
#
since school literally,
#
getting in touch just to tell me what an asshole I am
#
and, you know, that my parents should have
#
read my column before I wrote it
#
and not had me, that kind of thing.
#
How does that even make sense?
#
they were just trying to be rhetorical.
#
But, you know, it's very interesting,
#
the kind of different...
#
Like, earlier we spoke about how
#
it is to be trolled by the right-wingers
#
on the one hand, the vokes on the other hand.
#
But there are also all these little tribes
#
I've pissed off at various times.
#
There's a parent tribe,
#
then there are the Shah Rukh Khan fans,
#
then the Salman Khan fans,
#
and they're all a unique kind of tribe
#
and they all come down hard
#
and they all disappear after a week
#
and you're like, just like,
#
what the fuck happened there?
#
so that's anti-natalism sort of done with.
#
So, let's go back to...
#
Let's go back to what you're uncomfortable with,
#
which is the story of you,
#
and so tell me about, you know,
#
And let me add this, right?
#
Like, that discomfort about myself
#
and my place in the world
#
is again a reason as to why
#
I do not want to sort of
#
beget that onto a new life form
#
that I'm entirely responsible
#
for bringing into this earth, right?
#
Which is the reason why
#
you don't want to have children, right?
#
Like, this particular way of life
#
demands you to sort of...
#
is probably one manifestation of it,
#
which is that, you know,
#
sort of get more and more,
#
sort of, how do I say this?
#
Shrink yourself into like
#
an agent model of, you know,
#
and therefore you don't want
#
to expand your footprint, so to speak, right?
#
And if that is your general view of life,
#
it seems immoral to have responsibility
#
in any way, shape or form
#
to either expand your footprint
#
that would have that footprint.
#
I absolutely agree with you.
#
I mean, there is so much hubris in this.
#
before we go back to your story,
#
another digressive question
#
you spoke of having children,
#
People can get there from hubris,
#
but people can also get there
#
what is expected of them.
#
that I sometimes like to explore
#
the themes of thin and thick desire,
#
from a book called Wanting by Luke Burgess,
#
where he refers to this philosopher,
#
to take a literature class,
#
even though he was a philosopher
#
and he needed the money.
#
the literature reading,
#
when he was reading the stuff
#
he was supposed to read,
#
that everybody in those books
#
who want something wants it
#
because somebody else wants it.
#
And the frame that I got out of it
#
from Burgess was a frame
#
of thick and thin desires,
#
where thick desires are desires
#
which are intrinsic to you.
#
I'm guessing would be to, you know,
#
contribute to civilizational thought,
#
And thin desires are desires
#
which without realizing it,
#
we want because other people want them.
#
So I could want the latest Mercedes
#
And if I'm a young person growing up,
#
I could just want kids,
#
not because I want kids,
#
but because that just seems
#
You get married, you have kids,
#
you have a family, all of that shit.
#
And I'm genuinely curious,
#
because when I was young, right,
#
this desire to stand out
#
of the norm is very strong, right?
#
if there are young people
#
who genuinely think they want this
#
because society expects them to have it.
#
that's the proximate reason,
#
but that's the ultimate reason
#
in the sense that just as in some people
#
I had both those desires, right?
#
You have the desire to rebel.
#
and you're listening to grunge
#
and you've got holes in your jeans
#
and everybody else is listening
#
and you feel you're rebellious.
#
But there's also a desire to belong.
#
So you're trying to impress
#
and at some level you want to belong.
#
So there might be a domain
#
where you want to belong.
#
There might be a domain
#
where you want to rebel.
#
of following the conventional path
#
is that that's what everyone does.
#
People won't even question it.
#
Let's say you're a young woman growing up,
#
you're 16 years old at some point,
#
you smile and you say something sweetly
#
and your uncle and your auntie say,
#
oh, what a docile girl.
#
She's just like a girl, you know?
#
And I'm getting this anecdote
#
from something one of my guests said,
#
I forget which episode.
#
And then you said it, okay,
#
I should not raise my voice, you know?
#
I should let the men interrupt me.
#
I should get married and have kids.
#
And you kind of internalize that.
#
you internalize stories.
#
You know, men are, in a sense,
#
as much victims of these structures
#
where you internalize a story
#
that this is what a man is like.
#
And, you know, I'm a man,
#
and I'm going to be the provider,
#
and I'm going to be this.
#
And we straight jacket ourselves
#
because we adopt these thin desires.
#
and the interesting thing
#
with thin and thick desires
#
is that the thin desires
#
You know, it can be intense.
#
You might really, really want it.
#
what is intrinsic to you,
#
could be something, you know,
#
And maybe you'll never figure it out
#
And this is kind of something
#
that I've thought about
#
and spoken to my guests about,
#
what have my thin desires been?
#
And what are my thicker kind of desires?
#
And Pratap Bhanumaita, in fact,
#
two separate categories.
#
He said every thin desire
#
out of the thick desire of belonging.
#
that I was coming at, therefore,
#
is a picture or a story
#
That you have a certain sense of purpose.
#
You have certain modes of behavior
#
for example, storytelling
#
and so on and so forth.
#
But as you look back on yourself
#
that you shouldn't have had
#
or that wasted your time
#
or that you managed to let go of
#
And in terms of thick desires,
#
the one that we spoke about,
#
you know, what is there?
#
So, okay, this again brings me to a very...
#
I don't regret anything, right?
#
if there are thin desires
#
which I sort of disapprove of in the past,
#
which I still hold on to,
#
I genuinely think that, you know,
#
if you adopt this agent-based approach
#
to the world as a model,
#
then, you know, all positions
#
that you take happen to...
#
in literature is called exploration
#
of the human condition,
#
Like, you know, all things...
#
Every step that you take
#
and therefore it is useful...
#
I don't want to use the word useful.
#
It is what it is, an exploration, right?
#
life was that at that particular point
#
and I'm at a different point
#
Like, I am in this model
#
in which I look at that world,
#
those were points in life
#
where the agent went to those places
#
and now the agent is not in that place.
#
And generally, that is kind of
#
and therefore, if you ask me
#
what were my thin desires
#
and what were my thick desires,
#
I don't know if that's the prism
#
Okay, let me rephrase this.
#
I would be able to argue
#
propelled me towards the model,
#
I don't think that's the way
#
in which I engage with the world
#
is a thick desire for me, I guess.
#
I don't know if it's a thin desire
#
and I assume that is true
#
in some way, shape or form
#
and therefore, I'm not too sure
#
how to answer this question, right?
#
Like, the need to like and be liked,
#
right, is a fundamental desire
#
and there are various ways
#
in which you can like and be liked
#
and as agents in this world,
#
we sort of occupy various squares
#
or cubes or whatever they are
#
in those instantiations
#
and sort of view my life through that?
#
No, I get what you're saying
#
about regrets being pointless
#
because everything you are now
#
is a result of everything
#
you've done in your life.
#
So how can you regret any of it
#
because you are what you are?
#
when everything you do now
#
and everything you want now
#
shapes your future self,
#
there is perhaps, you know,
#
it is perhaps important to then
#
sit back and think about that at least.
#
and even when it comes to validation
#
of liking and wanting to be liked,
#
I think there are different ways
#
one can move towards it.
#
Like one way of moving towards it
#
are having a party tonight.
#
I'm not a party person,
#
but I will go there and be cheerful
#
and have a gin and tonic
#
Or the other way could be saying that,
#
no, I don't need to do this,
#
but I will be good at my work
#
and make things easier for everyone
#
and that is how I will, you know,
#
so there are different kind of
#
and I guess the question
#
or a future spending this evening
#
such that a future self will like you.
#
Like that's an important version of like.
#
Yeah, that's an interest.
#
So validation from your future self.
#
Yeah, very important, right?
#
So I was struck by another thing
#
you said when we were having lunch,
#
which is that you don't
#
that your reading is really
#
in two categories and one is fiction
#
that have to do with whatever subjects
#
that you are into at that time,
#
whether you're professional,
#
you know, data science subjects
#
or I guess during this book,
#
you must have read a lot around it,
#
which therefore indicates
#
that there are also two parallel strands
#
and maybe it's a false dichotomy
#
or maybe you can make these categories
#
but when you're growing up as a kid,
#
therefore that there are these strands
#
where you're reading fiction
#
and you're and I'd love to know more
#
about other kinds of engagement
#
with art like you were in Madras,
#
were you also into classical music
#
What was the cultural scene for you?
#
And then the other strand
#
that what are your interests?
#
Like, are you a data scientist
#
just took you on that path
#
there are intrinsic qualities to you
#
that made you suitable for that?
#
it would have happened anyway.
#
So first on my reading itself,
#
so, you know, I have ADHD,
#
so I can't read and for, you know,
#
to read a non-textbook as an adult,
#
it took me a very long time
#
I don't watch movies, for instance, right?
#
So when I read and early on,
#
if it was not a textbook, then, you know,
#
because I couldn't read for a long time,
#
it would almost feel like a test
#
and therefore, you know,
#
I'd be very, very anxious
#
I sort of figured out what to do,
#
which is that because I don't have an exam,
#
I can put the book down,
#
take a walk, come back and read it
#
and nobody's going to judge me, right?
#
And because of which I take,
#
sometimes I take three to six months
#
to read one book, right?
#
Which to most others would just seem like,
#
But, you know, I probably read
#
like five books a year,
#
which are mostly fiction
#
and that's probably one reason
#
why I don't read, you know, non-fiction
#
because I read fiction for pleasure
#
because, you know, I work in a sort of field
#
which sort of is growing so fast
#
that I have to read to keep up, right?
#
So those are the two kinds of things.
#
But in terms of my and again,
#
in terms of growing up in Madras
#
and my sort of cultural input,
#
Like I had low middle class parents,
#
we were in patrons of the high art.
#
So, you know, like the kind of things
#
that I read was probably the Hindu.
#
So until like, you know, well into my teens.
#
But, you know, like you said,
#
classical music was in the air.
#
So, you know, we'd go to concerts,
#
but like, you know, those are again
#
very structured things which,
#
you know, I'm not trained in classical music.
#
So, you know, they just exist.
#
As an adult, I sort of appreciate them more.
#
But then that's about that.
#
Why do you appreciate them more?
#
What about them do you appreciate?
#
Like I have tried when I was,
#
I heard some like, you know,
#
that's how I spend my time
#
which is listening to podcasts,
#
which is weird and meta saying,
#
talking about a podcast on a podcast.
#
But like, you know, there was this guy,
#
Timothy Cleveland is his name.
#
He's written this book where he talks about
#
the purpose of literature being that,
#
you know, there is something unsayable
#
that actually gets said.
#
And that is the function of,
#
the philosophical function of fiction, right?
#
I think music plays a similar role,
#
which is that it's undescribable.
#
It sort of gives you a certain connection.
#
But, you know, you can't really put it in.
#
And it's a cultural connection for me,
#
which is, you know, Carnatic music.
#
But, you know, I'm not good at it.
#
I'm not a connoisseur of it.
#
But it is in the background.
#
And certain times it just feels like home.
#
There's no other explanation for it.
#
I'm assuming since you're a data scientist,
#
you're good at math also.
#
And, you know, people often talk of this connection
#
between math and music at a certain level.
#
You know, does that play into it
#
or is it overthinking it in your case?
#
what is good at mathematics?
#
I'm not like, you know, ordinary people, right?
#
medal-winning mathematicians, right?
#
Ordinary people talking about being good at mathematics
#
and being good at music,
#
Like, it would be terribly immodest of me
#
to speak about being good at mathematics
#
when I'm doing what I do is
#
apply applied mathematics on a daily basis, right?
#
It's essentially clerical work
#
in some way, shape or form,
#
except that it requires you to have a slightly,
#
like, you know, clerical work
#
that involves probability theory, right?
#
That's kind of what I do, right?
#
You know, I'm no better than the next person
#
in terms of mathematics
#
and I'm worse than the next person
#
in terms of music, right?
#
Like, the connection between these two,
#
I'm sure, like, you know,
#
people who know more about both these subjects
#
I don't see the point of these connections, right?
#
Like, you know, anyway, not for me to comment on.
#
No, I mean, a point of the connection
#
in that sense of over intellectualizing something
#
and saying, hey, the structure of this raga is,
#
you know, reminds me of the geometry of this,
#
not in that sense, but just that in some intuitive sense.
#
Can I sort of say something?
#
So I have this friend of mine
#
and both of us sort of, you know,
#
when we were doing rather poorly in grad school,
#
we used to have recurring nightmares
#
because the lectures that began with,
#
consider the Hamiltonian and like, you're gone.
#
I'm like, dude, I still don't know
#
what the bloody hell Hamiltonian is.
#
It's a mathematical operator.
#
And, you know, like any lecture that
#
or parts of the lecture which began with,
#
consider the Hamiltonian,
#
you know, you're not going to understand
#
any of it further because you're just lost.
#
And like, you know, people then saying,
#
you know, oh, I can take that forward
#
and sort of link it back to a music I like.
#
I'm like, clearly you have greater capacity
#
Consider the Hamiltonian is.
#
That was the stuff of nightmares for me, right?
#
Maybe one day if you do
#
give in to the self-aggrandizement
#
of writing an autobiography,
#
that could be the title of the book,
#
consider the Hamiltonian.
#
So, take me through your academic journey then
#
that how did you, like, what did you study
#
and how did you land up studying that?
#
I studied what is electrical
#
and computer engineering, right?
#
And my specialization was in machine vision, right?
#
much of machine learning was essentially
#
machine computer vision, right?
#
Like, much of, you know, my first job was.
#
So, I studied, you know, like,
#
it's a treadmill if you go to school in Madras.
#
I don't know what it is now.
#
I hope people have better, you know,
#
diversity in terms of what they do.
#
But back then, you finish high school,
#
you went to engineering college,
#
you finish engineering college,
#
you went to America to further study
#
and then you went on to a job.
#
I, you know, went to America.
#
I studied electrical and computer engineering.
#
Then I got on to a job.
#
At that time, it was called
#
algorithmic development engineer.
#
That's what we were called
#
because we did machine vision,
#
computer vision, essentially.
#
I still remember, it's so funny.
#
My first job was basically rendering
#
3D models of faces for,
#
because, you know, this was right after 9-11
#
and there was spectacular federal funding
#
and my company in Washington, D.C.
#
had procured one of that funding
#
and they did this 3D rendering of the, you know,
#
phase in what's the Denver airport
#
and basically the, what was ICE then,
#
they're called something, you know,
#
whatever the equivalent of customs was.
#
Our algorithm took about four seconds
#
and it was such a terrible program
#
that it had so much false positives.
#
The company shut down and, you know,
#
So, and, you know, it's so embarrassing
#
that, you know, our first work
#
is probably like a simple library call these days.
#
So, tell me a little bit about that as well
#
because it seems to me that
#
you can approach a subject like that
#
at one level, at the narrow level of
#
and this is what I'm learning
#
and this is the immediate task I have to do.
#
But you can also take a step back
#
and see the bigger picture
#
that in a sense, you are in a field
#
which helps propel us forward
#
and which helps understand
#
what is happening in the world around us
#
So, was your sort of engagement
#
with the subject as it were
#
that kind of narrow engagement?
#
I have to pass this exam or whatever
#
or did you start applying those frameworks
#
and applying those ways of thinking
#
start looking around you
#
and just seeing everything that is happening?
#
Again, we all like to think we are the latter.
#
We are in some way, you know,
#
but the former is a stepping stone for the latter
#
and how much of the latter we are,
#
we always give ourselves
#
the benefit of doubt, so to speak, right?
#
And so, to answer your question,
#
I would like to think that, you know,
#
I am this great, for instance,
#
people whom I work with
#
are all terribly, you know,
#
like five, six years, 10 years ago,
#
they were all like really,
#
you know, about decentralized blockchain technologies.
#
Now, they're all about AI technologies, right?
#
You know, when I go to office,
#
I sort of, you know, do a narrow job
#
because I cannot, for the life of me,
#
understand the implications of this downstream.
#
I don't think that is for practitioners
#
of machine learning to sort of say anything.
#
Like, firstly, generative AI is distinct
#
and different from machine learning,
#
to see how this will result in products
#
which will then change the culture
#
is, I don't think I'm qualified to.
#
I mean, I have opinions on it,
#
but that's the difference, right?
#
Like, I can say something on politics
#
or as somebody who does something
#
and, you know, it'll carry a certain weight
#
and it'll be taken at face value.
#
But if I were to say something about AI or ML
#
as a practicing data scientist,
#
it takes on a different hue entirely.
#
And I don't think I'm qualified enough
#
to do, afford that hue.
#
You mentioned that you can have opinions about it.
#
What opinions do you have about it
#
that you feel most others would not share?
#
I don't think AI is going to change the world dramatically
#
That's my personal opinion.
#
Is my employer going to listen to this?
#
We're not allowed to name your employer here,
#
but we are already past the one-hour mark,
#
because optimization algorithms is what,
#
again, I'm biased to my side of that trade,
#
which is machine learning,
#
which is largely optimization algorithms
#
and some version of classification,
#
like basic algorithms, right?
#
Generative AI is an entirely different thing,
#
but let's consider chat GPT for a limited,
#
because everybody seems to be talking about it now.
#
The difficulty there is not the LLM that it runs on.
#
The difficulty there is after the LLM,
#
which is essentially knowledge, representation,
#
and reasoning, which is,
#
how do you extract that data
#
that you get out of that LLM model
#
and build it, sort of formalize the symbolism
#
in some version of a set theoretic notation,
#
so to speak, and then figure out truth from it.
#
It's a really, you know,
#
there are really clever people
#
who have written textbooks on it,
#
which I failed courses in, right?
#
I don't think we are ever going to see
#
a seamless sort of move from the first to the second,
#
which will result in the third,
#
which is like you Google something
#
and instead of giving you 100 links,
#
gives you the exact answer that you want,
#
which is like a trivial use case.
#
But the full impact of this is that an LLM model,
#
which does not care for the truth,
#
then, you know, feeds a KRR model,
#
which then sits on top of it
#
and does mathematical symbolism
#
and then spits out what is truth.
#
At least that's how I see this chain
#
and I don't see that happening at least in my lifetime.
#
I'm people whom I work with,
#
sort of are gung-ho about it.
#
It is beyond my abilities, all I'm trying to say.
#
So this is sort of in a narrow domain of where truth matters.
#
But if I am to say, for example,
#
like Jerry Pinto was on my show,
#
he's written this great book called Murder in Mahim
#
and I was saying that, you know,
#
I want 10 more books in that series.
#
Jerry Pinto, why is he so kind?
#
He doesn't even know me and he's...
#
How was he kind to you?
#
I met him at a random lit fest and he was...
#
He said the kindest things to me.
#
I was like, I don't deserve this kindness.
#
I was a little embarrassed to be, you know,
#
if people are so kind to you
#
and, you know, they're like accomplished people,
#
you're almost embarrassed by it, right?
#
I think he's kind and I'm just thinking aloud
#
and perhaps I'm saying this just to troll you.
#
But I think that what makes him so kind
#
is that he wants to know everybody's story
#
and he's engaging with the world in terms of stories.
#
And therefore, even without knowing you,
#
he would know that there's a story there
#
and a real human being there.
#
And therefore, kindness is good.
#
Probably, because, you know,
#
I had the strangest experience.
#
So I was carrying around this book
#
at the Kerala Lit Fest and he suddenly stopped me
#
you're so-and-so, I sort of heard about your book.
#
So I gave him the book.
#
He said, how much does it cost?
#
I was taken aback and I said, you know, you can have it.
#
And he said, no, give me a number.
#
And I said, I don't know.
#
And I just realized I sold the book to him for 500 rupees
#
and it's like cheaper on Amazon
#
and I feel so bad for it
#
because I just was supposed to give a number on the spot.
#
Yeah, no, there you go.
#
So, no, he is very kind.
#
He spent eight hours with me over two days.
#
So if that is not kindness, what is?
#
But what I was speculating about was
#
that he's written a book called Murder and Maheen.
#
And I said, what's going to happen is that
#
10 years later, there'll be some AI.
#
You know, orders of magnitude more advanced
#
and whatever chat GP3 is.
#
And I'll be able to tell it that, you know,
#
write me nine other books in this series
#
with these same characters and it will be able to.
#
And maybe not 10 years.
#
We cannot be always overestimate the short term,
#
underestimate the long term.
#
So let's not put a time to it.
#
But sooner or later, I feel it's inevitable
#
that I can get more books written in that series
#
in Jerry's style so well that even Jerry won't know
#
it's not him and that I can ask AI
#
that I want to hear Malik Arjun Mansoor and Pimse and Joshi
#
sing together in this particular raga
#
that they actually never sang in their lives.
#
And I'll get something so beautiful that,
#
you know, even they would have approved.
#
And I think for stuff like that,
#
I feel that it's surely possible.
#
That's a possibility simply because it will.
#
As you were telling me that, you know,
#
suddenly I thought, you know,
#
what is going to be the greatest use case of this?
#
As it happens, chat GPT doesn't allow,
#
will fuse erotic prompts.
#
But I have figured out ways to get it to write erotica.
#
Like, you know, anybody can train an LLM.
#
But just working with chat GPT,
#
the interface that you see,
#
which is told not to write erotica,
#
you can still get it to write erotica.
#
The thing to remember is,
#
there should be nothing erotic in your prompt
#
because it will figure that out.
#
So, but if you take it in those directions,
#
just by predicting what the next sentence should be,
#
it will take up long stories.
#
And I'm reminded of Paul Krugman's quote from 1998,
#
where he said, by 2005 or so,
#
it will become clear that the internet's impact
#
on the economy has been no greater than the fax machines.
#
So similarly, I hope your words on generative AI
#
are not kind of famous last words.
#
Like, I see where you're coming from,
#
which is that, you know,
#
my, you know, imagination of it being actually a thing
#
is its ability to generate truth.
#
Your imagination of it is very different,
#
I mean, the way I look at it
#
is that I think human hubris plays a part
#
in sort of undervaluing AYA or underscoring it also,
#
because I think if you,
#
like, how are we having this conversation?
#
We are able to have this conversation
#
because through our lives,
#
we have also been trained on LLMs,
#
which are possibly much smaller
#
than the LLMs that these computers get trained on.
#
And our ability to process the information that we've got
#
is also much less than these computers, right?
#
So if I crack a joke now,
#
which has never been cracked before,
#
and therefore it is an act of creativity,
#
and you laugh at that joke,
#
you know, for us, it almost feels like a mystical process
#
that we've got something out of thin air,
#
only because we don't know enough
#
about how our brains are working
#
and how they are doing this.
#
But for an AI, it should be trivial.
#
And I have given, like, really interesting,
#
like, one of the prompts I gave Chad GPT was,
#
imagine you're a naked man
#
standing on the ledge of a building
#
with an egg in your hand.
#
Tell me your story of how you got there.
#
Now, it's, and I'll probably reproduce
#
an image of this in the show notes,
#
but it was mind-blowing.
#
You know, if one of my writing students
#
was to give me that kind of a creative story,
#
I'd be like, shabash and all that.
#
Yeah, you used an adverb, but the story is great.
#
You know, and this is not something
#
an LLM can train you from in a direct sense
#
because the premise of a naked man
#
on the ledge of a building with an egg in his hand is unique.
#
It is absolutely unique.
#
For it to then spin a story
#
about how the guy got to be there
#
and how, before he jumps, he realizes
#
that he's been asked to hold an egg
#
because the egg is a sign of human fragility
#
and how he has a change in mind
#
and then becomes a godman
#
and he's known as the Eggman.
#
That's all the things the story was saying
#
It is what we would call creative, you know.
#
the truth plays a role in this
#
is that you can generate five of them.
#
Probably three of them will be good,
#
but the two of them will suck.
#
The model does not know any difference
#
between the two that are stupid
#
and three that are good.
#
The difference between a human being
#
and generating this is not...
#
What do we value in human beings?
#
It is that there is judgment
#
In the absence of judgment,
#
I can also say a hundred different stories
#
two of them good, 98 of them bad.
#
You would not think of me as a great person.
#
Why is it that you give Chad GPT
#
the benefit of that doubt?
#
I mean, A, I think Chad GPT
#
is as early to generative AI
#
as a mainframe computer
#
would have been in 1950 to computing.
#
So one doesn't know where it's going to go.
#
But here's a thought experiment.
#
Supposing you can feed into an AI
#
that consists of all the knowledge in the world,
#
but also all the knowledge
#
of every human brain in the world,
#
why they react the way they do.
#
A particular combination of notes
#
can make me feel melancholy,
#
but a different combination of notes
#
and get my endorphins pumping.
#
If all the knowledge in the world,
#
and it's a thought experiment, obviously,
#
if all the knowledge in the world
#
could be made available to an AI,
#
then that judgment issue
#
would also be taken care of
#
because then it's a question of utility.
#
How does it want to make us feel?
#
And then it would make us feel that way.
#
That is where I have a disagreement.
#
The LLM model is not knowing what truth is.
#
The problem that I have
#
does not distinguish truth
#
from the absence of truth.
#
The other model that you're talking about,
#
what kind of model is it going to use?
#
Is it also going to use
#
a similar LLM equivalent model,
#
which also does not differentiate
#
and distinguish between truth and non-truth,
#
in which case, if you marry these two,
#
The combination of one model
#
with enough false positives
#
with even more false positives
#
If you combine two models,
#
their false positive rate exponentiates.
#
It's not a linear growth there.
#
The same problem will exist,
#
which is that instead of getting 100,
#
Instead of getting 50 false positives,
#
you'll get 500 false positives.
#
imagine it's an omniscient model,
#
but it doesn't care about it.
#
It just cares about that instrumental matter
#
of how it wants me to feel.
#
It doesn't know the truth.
#
In order for it to know the truth,
#
you need to build this KRR,
#
which is not there yet.
#
That is my limited point,
#
which is that you can do all of this,
#
and it will spit results out,
#
you will be unable to distinguish,
#
or it will be unable to distinguish,
#
whereas you will be able to distinguish
#
what is good and what is bad.
#
Since the time of the ancient Greeks,
#
we have known what a good argument
#
Yeah, but if it knows how my brain works,
#
then if I'm able to distinguish,
#
It doesn't know how your brain works.
#
But in my thought experiment,
#
What is the model that you're using there
#
So are you using some version of LLM?
#
Let's say some neural network model.
#
It basically spits out something.
#
Neural network models, by definition,
#
do not know what they're spitting out
#
They're just spitting out
#
based on what they've learned.
#
you're marrying model A with model B.
#
The product of that is going to be
#
or whatever you want to call that
#
is going to have exponentially
#
than either one of them individually.
#
That is my limited point.
#
Fair enough, fair enough.
#
I think the spirit of the thought experiment
#
where it was actually seeing a computer
#
See, that is the point or problem
#
that I have when technology crosses over
#
which is that this idea of omniscience
#
It's a jump I'm unable to make
#
because I do this for a living.
#
I think the interesting thing
#
about thought experiments is that
#
it can help you think out of the box
#
by taking you out of the box a little bit.
#
So obviously, in and of itself,
#
omniscience is impossible.
#
it's an interesting way to...
#
you know, in areas where truth doesn't matter,
#
it doesn't matter what you have to say either
#
and therefore, why not do that?
#
No, but I get your point also about judgment
#
It can churn out five stories,
#
but I might think one of them is good.
#
You might think another one is good.
#
It doesn't have any judgment of its own.
#
And even our judgment is flawed
#
and conditioned and biased and all of that.
#
No, but the same problems arise.
#
How will it know what smart is good?
#
People are willing to read a lot more smart.
#
So one thing I've noticed about ChatGPT
#
is that it produces bad writing
#
in the sense of tons of cliches,
#
abstract instead of concrete,
#
a lot of tell-don't-show
#
and especially the erotica
#
that I've gotten it to write.
#
You know, I'm not going to read anything out
#
because I hope family audiences listen to this
#
and I would like it to continue.
#
But a lot of it is just cliched tropes.
#
that we are actually conditioned by now
#
to react to those cliched tropes
#
So let's again go back to...
#
You've done your electrical engineering
#
It was called electrical
#
and computer engineering back then, but yeah.
#
You were doing machine vision and all of that.
#
I don't know the answer to that question.
#
You did not not enjoy it, I guess.
#
I did not not enjoy it, yes.
#
And what was life like in the US?
#
So like moving from Madras,
#
from a middle-class family, like you said,
#
where you have a particular kind of ethos and all that.
#
What was it like adopting there?
#
Because I guess the same anxiety sprang up again.
#
You want to figure out who you are.
#
The nice thing about that was
#
I had no money to sort of explore the United States
#
and therefore I had to live in my cocoon of,
#
you know, not out of choice, but out of necessity.
#
So, you know, if you're a poor Indian grad student
#
and I'm talking about the early 80s, right?
#
Like 2002 is when I went to grad school.
#
You know, we had no money.
#
Like, you know, your idea of a Friday night
#
was doing the same things, but a lot more slowly.
#
Was your decision to come back
#
not just a question of practicality or, you know,
#
sort of trade-offs that you weigh against each other,
#
but also an ethical choice?
#
I thought the idea of letting capitalism dictate
#
my political dignity was problematic.
#
Why the term political dignity?
#
Because I had to keep my job
#
if I were to continue living in that place,
#
which then means that the late capitalist order
#
had a say over my political dignity
#
and I found that problematic.
#
So you decided to come back for that reason?
#
Probably the biggest reason why.
#
And was there also, in that same ethical reasoning,
#
was there also a component of your owing something
#
to your society or to Madras or to...
#
Not to Madras, but I just believed that,
#
you know, my thinking belonged in that milieu, so to speak.
#
Because, you know, a lot of my friends tell me that,
#
you know, because of the fiction that I consume
#
or the, you know, what is my news diet, all of that,
#
my thinking actually does not exist in Madras,
#
but sort of exists in what is the NPR world.
#
But I genuinely do believe that my thinking does exist here
#
and it exists here for the simple reason,
#
you know, hopefully my book explains that,
#
but like, you know, I genuinely think
#
that my thinking exists in the imagined Madras
#
that exists in my head, right?
#
A Madras where intellectual validation
#
and the idea of pushing thought forward
#
and the Madras where this entire Dravidian movement came about
#
and the entire political firmament thereof
#
and the fight for states' rights and all of that.
#
Because a lot of my friends,
#
whenever I have had discussions with them,
#
tell me that, you know, your insistence on states' rights
#
is just like a ripoff of the Federalist Papers
#
and you, like, does not belong in the Dravidian movement.
#
Maybe they're right, but I don't think that.
#
Tell me about this imagined Madras
#
and tell me about who are your colleagues
#
in this imagined Madras across time?
#
Right, I'd imagine my chemistry teacher from class 11,
#
like who, you know, I don't know if,
#
she's probably not even alive anymore,
#
but, you know, she was like a,
#
like you imagine a woman who was extraordinarily knowledgeable
#
but extremely humble and of modest circumstances.
#
Maybe someone from her family is her name.
#
So I, I don't want to name others because I often feel that...
#
In a positive context, I'm always happy to name others.
#
I would not ask you to bitch about someone.
#
So she, this woman also happened to be
#
the mother of one of my classmates, which was, yeah.
#
Anyway, so, you know, she, my chemistry teacher
#
was amazing like that, right?
#
Like, true of many of my teachers in school, right?
#
Like my friends, like many of them live this complicated life
#
where, you know, for instance, you know,
#
now that you've asked me to name him
#
and he'd be happy to hear his name
#
because I know him quite well.
#
My friend Eshwar, right?
#
Like he built, he, I would,
#
he often comes to exact opposite conclusions
#
of what I do, what we do, actually do in life.
#
But I know that our thinking exists in this imagined space
#
and therefore, you know, and we don't like, you know,
#
I would say that he's my best friend,
#
but like, you know, we talk about once in three years.
#
So it's, but I would imagine these people
#
look at what I'm doing and hopefully say that,
#
you know, this is taking our,
#
if the point of our imagined origin is that this,
#
what you're doing is taking this thought forward
#
and that I imagine that they would sort of validate me
#
in that sense and that I think is important to me.
#
So in your book, in a very different context,
#
but the speech kind of struck out,
#
you've quoted the speech from half a century ago
#
by Anadurai, where he says, quote,
#
I claim, sir, to come from a country apart in India now,
#
but which I think is of a different stock,
#
not necessarily antagonistic.
#
I belong to the Dravidian stock.
#
I am proud to call myself a Dravidian.
#
That does not mean that I'm against a Bengali
#
or a Maharashtrian or a Gujarati.
#
As Robert Burns has stated, a man is a man for all that.
#
I say that I belong to the Dravidian stock
#
and that is only because I consider
#
that the Dravidians have got something concrete,
#
something distinct, something different
#
to offer to the nation at large.
#
Therefore, it is that we want self-determination, stock quote.
#
And we'll come to the precise context of this
#
and the self-determination later,
#
but I am struck by the way in which he is, in a sense,
#
Like earlier, I was telling you about the episode
#
I've recorded with Anitin Pai, not yet released,
#
but it'll be released before this episode is released,
#
where we speak about how it's important to break out
#
of the many small tribalistic we's
#
that we have built for ourselves,
#
like my community, my race, my this,
#
and perhaps I could argue that Anitin is guilty
#
of confining it to the national we
#
and thinking of the national we
#
and thinking of the national interest too much.
#
But my question to you, therefore, is that
#
if you are to use the term we,
#
Like we have discussed in the past,
#
my view of the world does not generally,
#
I don't generally imagine a we,
#
but if I do imagine a we,
#
it probably has my chemistry teacher
#
and my best friend and these people,
#
or people in my office who are all fellow data scientists,
#
or that's about it, right?
#
Like, because I do not particularly think of myself as-
#
And are these we's then we's of circumstance?
#
In the sense, one circumstance is you
#
and your chemistry teacher and your friend
#
are in a particular place at a particular point in time.
#
You and your fellow data scientists
#
are working in a particular company
#
on a particular project in time.
#
Or is there another we that you can construct
#
out of something that is intrinsic to you
#
I want to imagine that that we is atomized
#
post-enlightenment and that it is atomized
#
for a very good reason,
#
in that the opposite of that is deeply problematic.
#
The atomization is also problematic,
#
but it is less problematic than what came before it
#
and therefore I'm happy to sort of not have that we.
#
But I understand where you're coming from
#
in that civilization has always existed,
#
predicated on that we, right?
#
And it is a necessary component of what we are,
#
So I get where you're coming from,
#
but my hope is that if the version of the thought
#
that I'm pushing forward provides a structural path
#
the we can coexist and slowly dissolve over time.
#
So I'm just kind of thinking aloud
#
and therefore this may be a bit sort of incoherent.
#
But I mean, I also obviously am sort of an enlightenment child,
#
intellectually at least,
#
and I think of everything in terms of the individual
#
and I think most of the time we are toxic.
#
Now, this atomization is desirable
#
at the level of individual rights and autonomy
#
and freedom and dignity and all of these things,
#
that people contain multitudes.
#
You never want to put a person inside a box.
#
You always want to respect them
#
for being complex individuals
#
and respect their rights for that reason.
#
At the same time, the other level
#
at which atomization is a problem
#
is that it's a human instinct that you need to belong.
#
You're not away from the world.
#
Like there's this lovely phrase
#
that Sugata Srinivasa Raju used when he was on my show
#
where he spoke about rooted cosmopolitanism
#
and obviously that describes him perfectly,
#
but it got me to introspect and think that
#
I'm kind of deracinated in a way
#
that I am cosmopolitan, I am not rooted,
#
and I feel that as a loss,
#
that there is in a sense no place I can call home
#
except for, you know, so I don't have a Ganguly.
#
My Ganguly is a sort of a floating sphere
#
in which things that I'm comfortable with are around me,
#
like the things that are in this room right now perhaps
#
and even those are, you know, are replaceable.
#
And in that sense, I have communities of choice,
#
but which are dispersed
#
and there is no feeling of belonging.
#
And in that sense, I think that it is a problem
#
that without getting tribalistic about it,
#
you want a sense of home, you want a sense of belonging,
#
like another kind of atomization
#
which I sometimes feel to be a problem is
#
I'll go to a cafe and there'll be
#
four people sitting at a table next to me
#
and they're all looking into their phones.
#
And I think that's another kind of,
#
a different kind of atomization that is a problem
#
that human connection is so important.
#
they're probably each reading a paper
#
that somebody put out and there is that connection, right?
#
Like the atomization that you talk about
#
is predicated on an idea of a we which is geographically,
#
or, you know, it is based on an understanding
#
of a world that no longer exists, right?
#
This rooted cosmopolitanism, like for instance,
#
I genuinely imagine Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker
#
Because whatever, right?
#
Like he doesn't have to know who I am.
#
I don't like, I know who he is, but like, you know,
#
the reverse is not true,
#
but I genuinely think that he is a part of my we, right?
#
Like, you know, every day morning I wake up
#
and like sort of listen to NPR
#
and Michelle Martin is a we, right?
#
Like, you know, I read, you know,
#
Paul Harding, whose Tinker is an absolute favorite of mine.
#
You know, I imagine him to be a we, right?
#
Like, and, you know, Timothy Gowers, who, you know,
#
despite being a Fields Medal winner, sort of, you know,
#
takes his time to sort of explain mathematics
#
I imagine him to be a we, right?
#
So, you know, there are similar friends of mine
#
at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madras
#
who sort of take their time off
#
to sort of explain mathematics to me sometimes.
#
Like sometimes I don't even know them well
#
because they're friends of friends,
#
but they take the time off to sort of explain this to me
#
and I imagine them to be a we.
#
The bus conductor who sort of, you know, puts,
#
I don't know, instinctively puts public transport front and center.
#
I imagine that person to be a we.
#
That's beautifully put in the way you put it.
#
You know, it has the rhythmic eloquence
#
of a Martin Luther King or a politician.
#
You know, I have a dream.
#
I imagine them to be a we.
#
And no, no, that's beautiful.
#
But where this sense of we that you are feeling
#
with all of these people comes from
#
begins with a deep engagement of their work, right?
#
Whereas a lot of the people are looking at their smartphones
#
are not doing deep engagement
#
and I'm not dissing anyone
#
because I'm kind of describing myself a lot of the time, right?
#
So this is about me in that sense.
#
That you're looking at your smartphone
#
and you're just swiping left, right, left, right,
#
and you're taking in entertainment in bite-sized nuggets.
#
There is no deep engagement.
#
It's a kind of time pass.
#
You know, whether it's doom scrolling on Twitter
#
or on Instagram or TikTok
#
where it's not banned, you're going up and down.
#
I'm very thankful to sort of those doom scroll things
#
especially when you have ADHD
#
and you have to sort of deal with this.
#
It's a, you know, you do that for a little while
#
and then go to deep work.
#
That's how I wrote the book.
#
That's how I do my job.
#
Otherwise, you know, it gets to me.
#
So, you know, if you're designing an algorithm or a system
#
or if you're writing a book
#
or doing anything of that nature, I just need that, right?
#
Like, so, you know, it's easy.
#
So when I was a child or even well into my adulthood,
#
movies felt like a test to me, right?
#
Like because it was, we were in the time demand
#
that the director set, right?
#
If you're going to watch it,
#
like, you know, David Lynch basically set how much
#
and, you know, if you had, you know,
#
everybody said that it is a great movie.
#
So you have to sit and watch it.
#
Now, you didn't know that you had ADHD.
#
So you can't sit there and watch it all the time.
#
So you had to, you know, stop watching it.
#
If you stop watching it, is that a reflection of your taste?
#
Like all of those questions came about
#
when you were in your 20s and you felt like a failure, right?
#
Like, you know what doom scrolling does?
#
It gives you validation in 30 seconds.
#
And then you can go back to deep work.
#
But dude, there are times I'll be watching these YouTube shots,
#
which are one minute each and my mind will wander, you know?
#
And then it will start again.
#
And I won't know it has started again
#
because it's just on that kind of...
#
But once you realize that, you know, hey, I'm doing this,
#
it is a sort of a trigger for you to go back to work.
#
At least that's how I did that.
#
How did you deal with it?
#
Because I imagine that you go through that initial phase
#
where there is stuff that you don't do
#
and you feel inadequate or bad that you don't do it.
#
You wonder if something is wrong with you.
#
You gaslight yourself in a sense.
#
And then you realize that, hey, fuck it, it's okay.
#
I'm like this, you know?
#
And I'm going to embrace myself.
#
What a great thing adulthood is.
#
Because when you were younger,
#
you did not have this luxury of saying it's okay, right?
#
But it's not like you turned 21 and became an adult
#
and it suddenly happened.
#
Yeah, I had to be 35 to sort of do this.
#
Tell me also, you know, since we are, you know,
#
before we go into the break,
#
since you brought the subject of deep work up
#
and that's something I struggle with as well.
#
Of just being disciplined and, you know, getting work done.
#
Like in theory, I know that you have to build habits
#
and you have processes matter, goals don't matter.
#
And, you know, these are the ways in which you do it.
#
I teach all the theory.
#
But when it comes to myself,
#
I find that for much of COVID,
#
I did what NYT called languishing
#
where there's so much stuff I want to do
#
in my writing and whatever.
#
But it's just so hard to find the discipline.
#
It is so easy to say, okay, one more game of chess I'll play.
#
You know, I play a lot of bullet chess and so on.
#
See, it's a way to deal with ADHD, clearly.
#
Have you tried any of the variants?
#
So, you know, another thing that I'll tell you,
#
I measure my anxiety by how well I play chess.
#
Because when I'm anxious,
#
I know that the path that I'm going down is terrible.
#
I can't stop myself from it.
#
And I end up losing game after game after game.
#
And when I'm sort of recovered, it's like remarkable.
#
I sort of, you know, I just win.
#
So on that note, and it's, you know,
#
playing chess the way that I do,
#
which is for time pass and that no desire to improve, right?
#
So what I know, I know in terms of openings
#
and I know nothing else and I'm just playing by feel.
#
The good part is that it then suddenly becomes
#
a way to measure how clearly you're thinking.
#
So when I take, on the days when I take modafinil,
#
such as today, for example,
#
which is a cognitive drug,
#
it just helps you think really clearly.
#
Or when I'm on a keto diet,
#
my elo rating on chess.com goes up by 100, 150 points.
#
And if I have carbs on a particular day
#
and get off ketosis, boom, it'll drop 150 points.
#
If I'm sleep deprived, it'll drop 150 below my usual level.
#
And I find that, I mean, do you find the same kind of thing?
#
In fact, not to bore you with my sort of, you know,
#
there is anxiety, which is kind of sort of related
#
to family life, et cetera, right?
#
So there's this wonderful book called Letters to Memphis,
#
I think it's called Letters to Memphis.
#
Like a long time ago, I read that.
#
And there is this anxiety about home that, you know,
#
it's a beautiful sort of, whatever.
#
When I'm at home, there is this anxiety about home,
#
which is indescribable, but there is anxiety about home
#
and my chess rating suffers.
#
If I go to Delhi, which is my workplace,
#
I'm like three leagues better
#
because that anxiety drops.
#
So I'd urge you to check out the variants on chess.com
#
because they have variants like fog of war,
#
where, for example, each side can only see
#
their half of the board to start with.
#
And then you can only see those squares
#
which your pieces can attack.
#
So it becomes a bit like poker in the sense that
#
an element of incomplete information comes into play,
#
probabilities come into play.
#
You know, you are actually in chess,
#
you are calculating expected value.
#
So that's a great variant.
#
There's a great variant called Atomic Chess.
#
In fact, in the rapid form of Atomic Chess
#
for a very brief while, I was number one on chess.com.
#
And as that's the only site where it's played,
#
I was world number one.
#
So these two variants for a brief while, you know.
#
And the good part about these variants is that
#
your typical heuristics of how you play chess
#
go out of the window because that shit doesn't work, right?
#
Atomic chess, you try to do your E4, E5,
#
you'll just be blown away straight away.
#
Atomic chess is when you attack,
#
when you capture any piece,
#
everything around it except the pawns explodes.
#
So you don't actually check anyone.
#
You have to capture a piece next to the king or the king itself.
#
So all your heuristics are completely different
#
because the way you deal with space and initiative,
#
it's a different ballgame.
#
So maybe you should try them out.
#
I'm totally doing that.
#
And to answer your question on deep work,
#
these days I just keep a very strict schedule
#
for health reasons, whatever.
#
So I wake up at four anyway, regardless of...
#
You wake up at four in the morning.
#
I wake up at four because I work out at five.
#
So I have to go to that place.
#
So five to six I work out
#
and then I come back and do very whatever.
#
When nine o'clock status meeting starts, right?
#
When I was writing this book,
#
I sort of didn't work out all that well.
#
And so I use that time to write.
#
Because I cannot write later in the day.
#
My brain is just useless.
#
And during the day I have a full-time job, right?
#
So I listen to that and do evening walks
#
and then come back and I sleep at nine.
#
So it's a regimented life that I live mostly for health reasons.
#
But it's also because it's one that I imagine
#
helps the way in which I view this world
#
as an agent model interaction.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break
#
and on the other side of the break,
#
we'll talk about your book.
#
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
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write
#
will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with RS Neelakantan,
#
Aka whatever you want to be called.
#
And so, you know, before we go on to talking about your book,
#
a quick question, you know, when we were emailing to and fro,
#
one of the terms you used a couple of times was virtue ethics.
#
So I'd like you to talk about, you know, what it means to you,
#
how did you arrive at this, you know,
#
take me through not just what it is and what you believe now,
#
but how you arrived at it, that kind of process.
#
I think we've already discussed that in some way, shape or form.
#
This idea that, you know, my ethical onus towards what I do
#
is entirely like viewing it not from a utilitarian viewpoint,
#
but my own ethical onus of doing that and not of consequentialism either
#
is I would imagine how philosophers define it.
#
But in my mind, the way in which I define it is precisely the
#
agent model view of the world, which is that, you know,
#
I want to do only those things where I'm absolutely sure that
#
A, it is necessary and B, that it sort of is,
#
like, you can warp my view of thinking,
#
look at antinatalism in the way in which I described it
#
as a virtue ethics way of looking at it, right?
#
Because the reason why I don't want to do that is because
#
I don't want to cause harm, right?
#
Like, and doing that basically causes harm
#
and therefore I don't want to do it, right?
#
Like, philosophers might seriously have a different take on this
#
because their definitions are different,
#
but in my mind, this is how it engages, right?
#
And this is true for, let's say, my response to climate change,
#
for instance, or the reason why I take public transport
#
or like I'm extraordinarily reluctant to sort of, you know,
#
buy a car or drive a car or things of that nature is the same thing.
#
Like, that is not to say, like, I'm trying to explain this,
#
which is that, you know, doing things have a certain cost
#
in terms of our ethical onus is how I imagine it.
#
Don't do something where I try not to do something
#
where the cost of it is obvious to my own ethical standard
#
is my simple definition of it.
#
I think one question that we all struggle with
#
or that we all should struggle with,
#
I'm sure many people don't struggle with it,
#
is the question of how do we live our lives?
#
What is the right way to live our lives?
#
Again, that basic ethical question.
#
And even if you start thinking about it early in your life,
#
your early answers are all going to be fuzzy.
#
It'll be kind of dictated by field.
#
This feels right to me, that feels wrong,
#
and you don't keep asking the why, why, why
#
that takes you to sort of a root understanding of what it is.
#
And that's sort of what I was curious about,
#
that is a lot of this, how you define your ethics,
#
is a lot of it about what just instinctively feels right to you.
#
Like for example, if you understand climate change,
#
it could feel right to you that of course I must take public transport
#
and of course I must walk,
#
which also is normatively good in health terms,
#
that you walk wherever you can walk and so on and so forth.
#
Or have you, you know, did you try to figure it out?
#
Did you actually kind of go down those rabbit holes
#
of reading those kinds of books and asking those why's
#
and going all the way back to the last why?
#
Okay, actually this is easier to answer, right?
#
Which is that, and I think it gives you a better idea
#
of my understanding of what I mean by virtue ethics,
#
which is that, you know, we, to not do things
#
when there are good reasons to not do things
#
is my definition of virtue ethics, right?
#
Which is that, you know, and this ties back to the idea
#
of sort of minimizing your, you know,
#
the agent model interaction of the world
#
and sort of minimizing your impact or imprint on the world,
#
And in that, if there is enough literature in the world
#
to basically tell you that, you know,
#
the climate change is about three to six degrees,
#
most likely, and that, you know, and on top of that,
#
you know, you can just see outside that, you know,
#
using a car is likely theft of public space.
#
I don't know, it just feels wrong to do that.
#
So don't do that is an easier option than to say that,
#
you know, I will take public transport, right?
#
I think that's my definition of it, which is that, you know,
#
don't engage in things which seem obviously wrong.
#
Yeah, yeah, keep potentially harmful interactions
#
with the world to a minimum.
#
But then if you're thinking about not doing something
#
which there are good reasons not to do,
#
like we had some chicken for lunch, right?
#
And I hope you don't mind my saying that, but yeah.
#
So, I mean, there are good reasons not to eat chicken,
#
Hypocrisy, yeah, and such is hypocrisy.
#
Sometimes you do what you have to do.
#
Yeah, like, you know, for instance,
#
I very often take vacations, right?
#
I've flown all the way to Peru, right?
#
Like, it's an extraordinarily carbon expensive thing to do,
#
but I do that because I sort of in my head trade off
#
the idea of fighting climate change now
#
versus expanding my understanding of the world.
#
I value the latter to the degree that I'm willing to
#
afford carbon expense and therefore rationalize it
#
Yeah, so before we get to the book,
#
tell me about your, like earlier you spoke about
#
how part of your purpose, the way you defined it
#
was to expand civilizational thought.
#
Now, I would imagine this to be in particular domains,
#
like there are subjects you're interested in,
#
or there are rabbit holes you want to go down on.
#
And so on and so forth.
#
And I think the typical kind of trajectory that one would take
#
when one makes such a journey,
#
whether I look at myself or others I have known,
#
is that when you want to engage with the world of ideas,
#
you begin with these really grandiose sort of interactions
#
And then it eventually gets narrowed down
#
till it reaches some particular place
#
and that's where you are.
#
Now, when I sort of look at this book,
#
it is one kind of narrow, and by narrow,
#
I don't mean narrow, narrow in a pejorative way,
#
but compared to the universe of thought
#
that lies in front of you,
#
it is one particular engagement with the world of ideas
#
where you're looking at democracy
#
in the particular context of what India has been
#
through North versus South and so on and so forth.
#
But surely this was not the first engagement you had
#
or the first effort you might have made
#
to fulfill that purpose of yours, as it were.
#
So give me a sense of your sort of interests,
#
like what are the issues
#
that meant a tremendous amount to you
#
and what are the problems in the world
#
which you wanted to think about solving?
#
It's obviously too hubristic to say
#
any of us can solve anything.
#
But what were those problems that excited you and so on?
#
Give me a little bit of a sense of that
#
before we get to the specific one
#
because this book is lying in the concrete
#
on the table in front of us right now.
#
that was never concretized in that sense.
#
Right. So the idea of self-government
#
and representation of the people's will
#
and what is the people's will
#
and how does it get represented
#
and the idea of structuring society
#
and the idea of situating authority
#
and how much of authority
#
and on whose behalf and how.
#
These are all questions that I'm assuming
#
all citizens in all democracies have.
#
And I'm no different and this is hopefully,
#
and in my mind, while it is situated,
#
in the context of south versus north
#
within what is the Indian Union,
#
I would imagine this is true
#
for any and every democracy.
#
And therefore, going from the individual circumstance
#
or the situation to what is the global
#
is hopefully what the book has achieved
#
or at least that was my intent
#
which is to arrive at a structure of democracy
#
which will result in a just representation
#
because all civilizational progress
#
sort of depends on that as a prerequisite, right?
#
Like we need a proper representation
#
and order and whatever of civilization
#
in order for it to progress.
#
So at the first level, you're saying that
#
it is about being able to conceive
#
which can work in the actual world
#
and not necessarily with a way
#
that can come about in practical terms.
#
Yeah, I think that's a necessary.
#
So in other words, the idea of having
#
philosophical rectitude
#
in our systems of representation, right?
#
Achieving that was important to me.
#
Right, and do you think just kind of looking back
#
that we should not have come anywhere close to that,
#
that many of the directions we have gone down on
#
are in a sense inevitable
#
and ordained in a different kind of way.
#
For example, there are, you know,
#
one of the themes of the book, of course,
#
is the different sort of centralizing impulses that come.
#
Now, you know, you talk of this early centralizing impulse
#
which is, you know, when we are born, you know,
#
our founders, as it were,
#
do not know if the center is going to hold.
#
So therefore, you know,
#
the whole country could just split apart.
#
In fact, those sort of three years from 1947 onwards
#
are a kind of fast-track colonization
#
where what the British took a couple of centuries to do,
#
they're trying to put it together in just a few months
#
through all kinds of shady means
#
and they eventually kind of manage.
#
And obviously, the thought there is
#
the whole project could fall apart at any moment.
#
So there is one kind of centralizing impulse
#
happening at that point.
#
There's another kind of centralizing impulse
#
that comes from the nature of the state itself
#
that, you know, power corrupts
#
and absolute power corrupts absolutely
#
as Lord Acton supposedly said,
#
I think even this is apocryphal.
#
But then, and therefore, the nature of the state
#
is always to consolidate power into itself,
#
which makes, which essentially means that
#
unless you are sort of decentralized
#
right at the beginning,
#
you're never going to move towards decentralization.
#
You can only possibly move away.
#
And therefore, that would indicate
#
that the place where we are today
#
where power is centralized to an extent
#
where, you know, the states are getting weaker and weaker,
#
is in a sense, it was always going to be this way.
#
And I don't mean to be fatalistic
#
or say, you know, be deterministic about it.
#
But I'm looking at it as a combination
#
of the circumstances of the time
#
where, you know, just historical circumstances
#
that anybody in the position of our founders
#
would have wanted to centralize power.
#
And the notion of India would have been
#
the notion of the colonial India, as it were.
#
And therefore, they would not have been able
#
to conceive of it otherwise.
#
And that's a circumstantial sort of imperative
#
And the other is just human nature
#
that once you are in power,
#
you'll always want to consolidate and centralize
#
And even, you know, even at sort of a micro level,
#
leave the country aside,
#
you look at the Congress Party.
#
That's what Indira Gandhi did, for example, in the 70s,
#
where that is when it became the norm
#
for the chief minister of a state to be hired,
#
to be appointed rather by Indira Gandhi,
#
rather than come up through an internal process
#
So that's a different kind of centralization
#
that happened, which eventually left
#
the Congress Party hollow and devoid
#
of a second rung leadership.
#
Sure, like, you know, that the founding fathers,
#
such an American term, founding fathers.
#
I kept saying founders because, you know.
#
Yeah, that's what the media diet that I have does to me.
#
Our elites who were lucky to inherit
#
the reins of power, as it were.
#
So, you know, they acted in good faith, right?
#
They believed in something like Ambedkar
#
and Nehru and Jinnah, like, you know,
#
they basically acted in good faith
#
towards their own ideas.
#
And, you know, if at the end of the day,
#
Ambedkar and Nehru won out
#
and Jinnah and Mountbatten did not,
#
Narayani Basu has written a wonderful book
#
where she explains the Mountbatten plan, right?
#
Anyway, so the VK men and plan won out
#
and anyway, Nehru and Ambedkar,
#
kind of their version of it won.
#
And we had the state that we had,
#
which has now sort of increased its whatever, right?
#
Fair, I don't deny that.
#
But the point I'm trying to make is
#
we as stakeholders of that state,
#
just like they acted in good faith in their time,
#
it is incumbent upon us to act in good faith in our time
#
and arrive at new structures for ourselves, right?
#
Like that good solution for any one point in time
#
or an inevitable solution for any one point in time
#
or acts of good faith in one point in time
#
does not preclude us from doing the opposite
#
at a different point in time.
#
So that is the reason why I want to reinvestigate
#
what the Indian Union is,
#
propose alternative arrangements thereof.
#
And you're right, like what this is,
#
if anything that gets formalized
#
and gets sort of powered by itself
#
is going to get quote unquote corrupted over time.
#
That's the nature of power, like you rightly said, right?
#
And therefore, in a century's time,
#
if this gets formalized,
#
like somebody else would come over and give alternatives.
#
Yeah, and a couple of the other sort of imperatives
#
for centralization, one is, of course,
#
Nehru felt that industrialization at a national level
#
is necessary for the country to get advanced.
#
And therefore, the Singh and Ambedkar felt
#
that at the local level,
#
parochial interest groups would just take over our society.
#
And again, that's a fantastic reason
#
to not allow those interest groups in power.
#
And also you've pointed out how in today's times,
#
quote, the rise of nationalism
#
as a dominant political ideology in Northern India
#
does not look at diversity and polity
#
and policymaking as desirable, stop quote.
#
So that's kind of driving the centralization forward.
#
But I agree with you that at least
#
let us have a conception in our heads of firstly,
#
what has gone wrong and secondly, how to set it right.
#
So let's start by talking about what has gone wrong,
#
where right at the intro,
#
you start the book beautifully with the lines,
#
consider the Hamiltonian, I'm just kidding.
#
What you wrote was consider a child born in India.
#
Do you want to read this out or should I read this out?
#
Consider a child born in India.
#
This child is firstly, far less likely to be born
#
in South India than in North India,
#
given the former's low rates population growth.
#
But let's assume the child is born in the South.
#
She's far less likely to die in the first year of her life,
#
given the lower infant mortality rates in South India,
#
compared to the rest of India.
#
She's more likely to get vaccinated against diseases
#
than the average Indian newborn,
#
less likely to lose her mother during childbirth,
#
more likely to get childcare services
#
and receive better nutrition.
#
She's more likely to celebrate her fifth birthday,
#
more likely to find a hospital or a doctor
#
in case she falls sick,
#
and more likely to eventually live a slightly longer life.
#
She will also go to school and stay in school longer.
#
She's more likely to go to college
#
than her contemporaries elsewhere in India.
#
She's less likely to be involved in agriculture
#
for economic sustenance
#
and more likely to find work that pays her more.
#
She will also go on to be a mother to fewer children
#
than her peers in the rest of India.
#
And her children in turn will be healthier
#
and more educated than she.
#
And she'll have greater political representation
#
and more impact on elections as a voter
#
In short, the median child born in South India
#
will live a healthier, wealthier, more secure
#
and more socially impactful life
#
than a child born in North India.
#
Or even kind of better,
#
I did an episode with Sajith Pai,
#
the venture capitalist from Bloom who made a similar,
#
who wrote a great essay on this
#
about how people misunderstand
#
the Indian market fundamentally.
#
And his whole point was that
#
50 lakh to a crore people are a certain,
#
are living almost a westernized kind of lifestyle.
#
And then you have another, I think 10 crore people
#
who are just a level below that.
#
And the rest of us, 90% of India are sub-Saharan Africa,
#
which is something important to kind of note
#
because in the kind of self-selected elite circle
#
which you and I and the listeners of the show perhaps
#
go around in, it is too easy often to be oblivious of this
#
to drive through a traffic signal
#
and think that the world is a world in our car.
#
And the kid on the traffic signal
#
who's begging outside is unseen to us
#
And here the question comes in that,
#
we've spoken earlier about two important things
#
which kind of have an interplay with each other here.
#
One of them is truth, right?
#
That it is important to arrive at the truth.
#
And we were speaking of this in the context of AI,
#
but obviously I think you and I
#
and everyone listening to this
#
will agree on the importance of the truth.
#
But the other is stories.
#
We live in a time where we are surrounded
#
And those narrative battles will include stories
#
about how our Prime Minister,
#
does Vishwa Guru, India is doing really well.
#
You've pointed out how certain metrics
#
like the ease of business ratings can be so misleading
#
because they show Madhya Pradesh is doing so well
#
as you've pointed out, for example.
#
And for a lay person who doesn't understand economics,
#
who can't navigate data,
#
it can sometimes get too complicated
#
to listen to these different stories
#
and try to parse what is what.
#
You can look around you in your immediate world
#
and things could seem great
#
or things could seem non-great
#
and you don't know what the hell to make of it.
#
So take me through how you thought about this
#
and decided that what are the indicators
#
that really matter for me?
#
What are the indicators that I am going to look at
#
to figure out what is A, the state of our country
#
and B, because that is such a ridiculously general
#
and broad statement to kind of parse down
#
how different states have done better and why.
#
Right, so if you, and to answer your question,
#
how does a middle-class person sort of understand the country?
#
The most basic thing is,
#
the basic functions of government in what is 2023
#
or the 21st century, one can reasonably assume
#
is to provide basic health and education, right?
#
Like everything else, hopefully.
#
If you're a child of enlightenment, right?
#
Like you and I hopefully are,
#
we basically think that if the child is healthy enough
#
and is given sufficient education,
#
critical thought will propel it forward, right?
#
Like that is hopefully, you know,
#
and it also has the greatest impact.
#
I mean, that it has the greatest impact is one thing.
#
It is also the most visible aspects of a government, right?
#
Apart from security and it's, quote unquote,
#
monopoly and violence, right?
#
what a government can do is essentially provide
#
basic public health and basic public education, right?
#
Like all other things are slightly one step removed, right?
#
Like people need this and everybody can see
#
that this is sort of not just a service
#
that is provided for the moment,
#
but it builds a future in terms of building
#
the resource of inner democracy,
#
which is actually people, right?
#
And if you were to take that basic health, right?
#
And if you take health,
#
I go into the reasons of why IMR is sort of,
#
you know, the most robust metric,
#
which is that, you know, you and I,
#
like you rightly said, I have gout,
#
which is like obscenely wealthy person's disease, right?
#
Like it used to be called the king's disease.
#
Now, like middle-class people get it.
#
But like the point is that that is not the way
#
in which you measure a government.
#
The way in which you measure a government is
#
the reason why IMR is considered that
#
in developing societies is that, you know,
#
it doesn't matter whose child gets sick.
#
If the child is really sick,
#
their parents will, you know,
#
its parents are going to rush it to a hospital.
#
And most people, like you rightly said,
#
that 90% of the people that you were talking about,
#
they are not going to go
#
to the nearest large private hospital.
#
They're going to go to likely a government hospital, right?
#
Or something thereof for that to exist
#
in the large rural hinterlands of this country.
#
There needs to be a government facility present.
#
And that is the job of a government,
#
like a primary health center in rural areas, right?
#
And it is not just enough
#
that that primary health center is available,
#
but like doctors should be available there.
#
And facilities to treat the child
#
should be made available there.
#
And all of these are input parameters
#
which results in this output parameter
#
called a low infant mortality rate.
#
And therefore, looking at health
#
and tracking all of these input parameters,
#
which is, you know, how many PHCs are present,
#
how many doctors are present,
#
how many nurses are present,
#
whether, you know, these are equipped
#
with sort of, you know, operation theaters or not,
#
all of these input parameters.
#
And then eventually look at the output parameter,
#
which is the infant mortality rate.
#
If you look at it, you see that Kerala
#
is comparable to the United States.
#
And you see that Madhya Pradesh
#
is comparable to Afghanistan.
#
It's even worse than Sub-Saharan Africa.
#
It's comparable to Afghanistan and Niger.
#
Many of these Sub-Saharan Africa
#
are actually better than Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh,
#
which is what is a tragic state of India, right?
#
And, you know, Afghanistan, Niger,
#
these are seriously war-torn places.
#
Like, I want to really think back
#
and see if I have ever heard of any of these two countries
#
Like, I don't think I have in the last 40 years
#
that I have been alive, right?
#
So anyway, that, you know,
#
health sort of describes itself.
#
Similarly, education, again,
#
like the way in which you measure education,
#
this is, I've heard this from a BJP politician
#
and I've heard many middle-class people
#
tell this again to me, which is that, you know,
#
they would measure Tamil Nadu
#
in terms of how many entries into IITs,
#
that is, how many people it sends into IITs
#
and they would give, quote, some number
#
and say that that number has come down
#
and say that that is the reason
#
why our education system is failing.
#
I'm like, seriously, what is wrong with you people, right?
#
Like, the way in which we ought to be measuring education
#
is a basic, you know, one basic metric
#
that the world over people use is literacy rate, right?
#
And one of the things that I again point to in the book
#
is that, you know, if you take absolute literacy rate,
#
it's a complicated thing.
#
So what I do in the book is sort of, you know,
#
measure literacy rates of adults,
#
measure literacy rate of children
#
and see the relative change in this
#
to see what the government has actually done, right?
#
Like, because it's very difficult to sort of,
#
you know, regardless of adult literacy programs,
#
if there is an adult, there is an adult.
#
Like, you know, if they're illiterate, they're illiterate.
#
It's very difficult to send them back to school.
#
But like, you know, the government should have built
#
sufficient schools, invested in teachers,
#
had sufficient incentive programs
#
to send children to school in the last decade,
#
decade and a half to sort of bring that literacy of children
#
close to 100% and that is how we should measure literacy rates
#
and the easiest way to do this
#
is to measure the difference between the sort of, you know,
#
people who are 80 plus and people who are under 15
#
and see how this movement has happened.
#
southern states have done remarkably well, right?
#
And northern states have sort of not done that well.
#
And then there is West Bengal, which is a weird case.
#
So we will leave that aside.
#
And then once you sort of move past literacy,
#
how do you achieve this is just by the ability
#
of a state government to enroll children into school,
#
which is what the gross enrollment ratio is.
#
And that has a whole series of ways
#
in which you sort of do that, which is, you know,
#
in Tamil Nadu, the famous example
#
is that of the midday meal scheme.
#
You know, it was in its time called
#
the most fiscally profligate, you know, idea ever,
#
like populism on steroids was what it was in its time.
#
But the proof of that pudding is that
#
it has been the most remarkable thing
#
in that Tamil Nadu now has a gross enrollment ratio
#
at the higher secondary level,
#
which is greater than Kerala, right?
#
Like, you know, Tamil Nadu was indistinguishable
#
from Northern India about 50, 60 years ago, right?
#
In terms of gross enrollment ratio.
#
It was basically, you know, it was indistinguishable.
#
But the effect of proper government,
#
of building its schools, of, you know,
#
investing enough teachers, having this midday meal scheme
#
is that it's done better than Kerala
#
in terms of gross enrollment ratio,
#
which is the most important input metric, right?
#
And you can also see the same thing true
#
for gross enrollment ratio in higher education,
#
which is colleges are equivalent, right?
#
So once a government does this, these two,
#
that is health and education reasonably well,
#
that is, you know, has its children who are born firstly alive
#
and then have reasonable care
#
and send those children into school
#
and does make sure that, you know,
#
those children do not drop out of school
#
and sort of at least half of them,
#
over half of them in the case of Tamil Nadu,
#
If you have this overall pipeline
#
and infrastructure and system set up,
#
it's a reasonable society.
#
From that point forward,
#
you can do second order government things.
#
If you don't have this, like, what are we doing?
#
Like, consider Bihar, for instance,
#
its gross enrollment ratio
#
and higher secondary level is like 29%, right?
#
Like more than two thirds of the children
#
are not going to school in a school going age,
#
at a high school level, you know, age group.
#
This is a disaster, right?
#
Like, if you have such a system,
#
it doesn't matter what economic policy you have.
#
You're always going to sort of be in deep trouble.
#
And anyway, so that's kind of, you know, what I...
#
Yeah, lots that I want to double click on,
#
but first, just thinking aloud
#
what you said about that ridiculous argument
#
you said you saw this BJP politician made
#
about less people from TN are getting into IITs.
#
I did an episode on education
#
with Kartik Mallidharan, which in fact is...
#
I've done episodes with him on education,
#
healthcare and state capacity
#
and they're all great episodes.
#
And in the episode on education,
#
he sort of said something very interesting,
#
which gave me a nice frame
#
for looking at education system,
#
where he said what our education system is good at
#
is not teaching, but sorting.
#
And that's what your IIT entrance exam will do.
#
That, you know, you have a very large population of people
#
and it'll sort out the brightest among them.
#
But, you know, but everything else
#
that you said about Tamil Nadu,
#
more people in secondary school,
#
more people at the higher thing,
#
there is a sense that hopefully
#
they're also learning something.
#
It's not just about sorting.
#
So that sorting parameter alone is, you know,
#
perhaps sort of a bit misleading.
#
Also for my listeners, you mentioned IMR,
#
that of course means infant mortality rate.
#
That is a number of kids who die per thousand, right?
#
A number of children who die per thousand
#
And you've pointed out that India's IMR was 32 in 2018.
#
So that's 32 kids dying before the age of one
#
out of every thousand, which is,
#
which ranks India alongside Kenya, Eritrea and Senegal
#
and much worse in Syria, which is only 14 kids.
#
But the much more interesting stat you give there
#
is of the disparity between states,
#
where you point out that Kerala
#
has an infant mortality rate in 2018,
#
when all this data is from, of seven, right?
#
While the U.S. has six.
#
So Kerala doing, you know, as good as the U.S. in a sense.
#
Tamil Nadu is doing okay.
#
It's an IMR of 15, which puts it in the
#
upper middle income country-wala group.
#
And then Maharashtra is 19, Punjab is 20,
#
West Bengal is 22, Karnataka is 23.
#
Madhya Pradesh has an IMR of 48, right?
#
And that's like Niger and Afghanistan, as you point out.
#
Now, similar disparities with life expectancy,
#
where India is 69, but Kerala is 75,
#
There's a difference of 11 years in between them.
#
And you've used other kind of data,
#
like infant mortality before the age of five,
#
where you see India doing really badly as a whole,
#
but forget the whole number.
#
The similar disparity between states,
#
where Kerala is doing really well,
#
The rest are sort of looking horrendous.
#
You've looked at statistics for stunted growth in children,
#
and it's a similar kind of thing happening, right?
#
So the first question I want to do
#
as we drill down on this is why?
#
So the answer to that is very simple, right?
#
Why do children die within the first year of their birth?
#
If you have sufficient antenatal and prenatal care,
#
that is, if you care for the pregnant woman,
#
and if you make sure that enough of your deliveries
#
are happening in institutions,
#
as opposed to at homes with midwives,
#
your IMR goes down dramatically.
#
It's well-established, right?
#
And for a couple of generations now,
#
like Kerala was always doing a relatively good job of this,
#
because they've always had high literacy rates.
#
Tamil Nadu did not have those high literacy rates
#
a couple of generations ago.
#
The way in which it achieved that was it sort of,
#
you know, it did a few things.
#
One was it incentivized women to go into hospitals
#
which now the union government has copied,
#
and I don't know what they call it now,
#
but it used to be called Dr. Muthalakshmi Reddy Thitam
#
which then was copied in neighboring Andhra Pradesh
#
as well, if I'm not wrong.
#
But the union government has copied that
#
on a nationwide level, which is problematic,
#
but like, you know, so you incentivize women
#
to go deliver their children in hospitals,
#
those primary health centers, right?
#
And equip those primary health centers
#
to deal with pregnancies and childbirth and whatnot.
#
And if it goes to an extent
#
that their small operation theaters
#
are unable to deal with,
#
have a proper system where, you know,
#
referrals to tertiary care hospitals
#
are instant immediate, et cetera.
#
And more importantly, in the early 90s,
#
what Tamil Nadu did was they engaged
#
a series of nurses at the village level,
#
where they would go and note down,
#
I encourage all your listeners to go to a PHC
#
in an obscure village in Tamil Nadu
#
and open their register and sort of see this, right?
#
They would have every single woman
#
of reproductive age in that registry.
#
And, you know, they would basically,
#
it's probably like some version of privacy invasion,
#
but they do that, right?
#
Like even if somebody marries
#
and comes into that village or like goes out, whatever,
#
basically the point is that, you know,
#
they note down everything to the, you know,
#
when their pregnancy began, like, you know,
#
And then since the time that their pregnancy began,
#
they basically then go in
#
and give them antenatal care for injections.
#
Like there is data for how many of these women
#
get four injections, right?
#
And how many antenatal care visits are happening, right?
#
Like all of, if you care sufficiently
#
for the pregnant woman,
#
your IMR automatically drops down, right?
#
And if you care sufficiently for the pregnant woman
#
and that woman delivers her baby in like a proper facility,
#
the IMR automatically drops down quite significantly, right?
#
And the biggest reason why Tamil Nadu
#
and then followed by Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka,
#
they have achieved this is basically this.
#
If you look at their institutional delivery rates,
#
they're close to a hundred percent.
#
And that is the reason why they have low IMR, right?
#
And if you look at the equivalent number
#
in the Indo-Gangetic Plains,
#
which is Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar,
#
like they're all pretty bad.
#
and if you look at the number of antenatal care visits
#
that these women get, they're all pretty bad.
#
So if you do not care for the pregnant woman
#
who's already less educated,
#
given that their overall literacy levels are low
#
and their female literacy is even lower,
#
and then, you know, the woman is already kind of not,
#
unlikely to be literate in the first place.
#
And then she goes on and gets pregnant
#
and she gets no healthcare.
#
And then she delivers her baby in her home with a midwife.
#
What do you expect will happen?
#
The child is going to die, right?
#
Like if we live in sort of 19th century, you know,
#
this is what happened in 19th century Europe.
#
We are living that in the 21st century.
#
We are going to have 19th century IMR rates.
#
At one point at the start of your chapter on health,
#
you write about how it can become a kind of vicious circle.
#
low and middle income societies
#
have a vicious cycle on their hands.
#
Their per capita income is not high by definition.
#
That means their ability to spend on healthcare is limited,
#
resulting in poor health outcomes to start with.
#
And poor health outcomes mean a diminished ability
#
of the population to earn significantly
#
to improve their economic situation,
#
which in turn affects the society's future investment
#
So the vicious circle, you're not healthy.
#
People keep dying all the time.
#
You're at the substation level.
#
So you don't have the good health as a tool to lift yourself
#
out of that kind of situation that you're in.
#
Now, I would imagine that there's a virtuous cycle here
#
that can be at play as well,
#
that once you start getting the health up
#
and once you pass a certain critical mass
#
and better health will mean, you know,
#
more prosperity, better outcomes for everybody
#
and increasingly better health.
#
And you hit a virtuous cycle.
#
And part of it may not even necessarily involve
#
the government per se, because I would imagine
#
that it's not always that the government
#
is the only causation factor.
#
I guess when people get more prosperous, you know,
#
they can A, purchase healthcare on their own
#
or as empowered citizens, they can make demands
#
on the government to provide the necessary healthcare.
#
In fact, of education has often been said that, you know,
#
there used to be this way of thinking that
#
education and prosperity are correlated,
#
but it isn't that the causation goes one way.
#
The causation also goes the other way,
#
that as people get prosperous,
#
they get their kids more and more educated
#
But leaving that aside, my sort of question here is
#
that when you look at India since independence,
#
you know, are there states that kind of buck the trend?
#
Because I imagine that there would have been states
#
which would have been on a virtuous cycle kind of route,
#
like I imagine Kerala would have been.
#
And there would have been states
#
which would have been going downhill,
#
like I imagine the Gangetic states would have been,
#
Are there states that buck the trend?
#
What were the kind of factors which made it happen?
#
Like to some extent, I think you referred to
#
the Gulf dividend of Kerala,
#
that you have so many people going to the Gulf
#
and sending back remittances.
#
So there's kind of more money to spend on education
#
and health and all of that.
#
So, you know, is there sort of,
#
can it sometimes feel like a trap that, you know,
#
how the hell you break out of the vicious cycle you're in?
#
And what are the sort of examples of movements
#
in different directions happening in India?
#
Like I think you've pointed out about West Bengal
#
that it actually went downhill since independence.
#
Right, so West Bengal is a weird state
#
and I don't know what's happening with it, right?
#
Like, so beyond my understanding.
#
But to answer your question,
#
I think it's very useful to compare the,
#
I list this in the book,
#
it's called improvement in IMR 1981 versus 2018.
#
So you look at 1981 data.
#
So if you look at that,
#
Tamil Nadu was like doing worse than even in Southern Beers,
#
Like it had more children die than Karnataka,
#
it had more children die than Andhra Pradesh,
#
it had more children die than Maharashtra.
#
So classic example of a state suddenly doing much better
#
than what it was earlier, right?
#
And right now it has only Kerala to catch up to.
#
so Tamil Nadu used to be like ninth or tenth
#
in terms of that ranking.
#
It's now like number two, right?
#
Whereas, and the answer to that,
#
We've already discussed that,
#
which is an extreme focus on like, you know,
#
just achieving this, right?
#
Now, to answer your other question,
#
which is that, you know,
#
how does prosperity in general affect health, right?
#
We see this in two ways.
#
In general, it is true that,
#
and I draw that regression chart in the book as well,
#
which is that, you know,
#
in general, it is true that slightly more prosperous states
#
have a lower IMR, right?
#
But there are a few states that stand out.
#
It's doing way worse than, you know,
#
for a prosperous state.
#
It's a relatively prosperous state in India.
#
It's one of the richest states in India,
#
and yet it's doing terribly relative
#
to its level of prosperity in terms of its IMR,
#
which then points to sort of extreme inequality
#
in that state and, you know,
#
relatively low levels of actual functioning of the, you know.
#
If you assume that care-seeking behavior is a constant, right?
#
And you don't want to essentialize that.
#
this reflects a lack of availability of services, right?
#
And you could argue it could be private,
#
but the point is that there is a lack of availability of services.
#
And if there is a lack of availability of private services,
#
it's incumbent upon the government to then step in.
#
And states like Haryana have not done that
#
commensurate with the degree of their prosperity, right?
#
Madhya Pradesh, even for a poor state,
#
if you look at the kind of residual that it has,
#
will tell you that even for a poor state,
#
Bihar is like relatively okay
#
for the kind of poverty that it has.
#
But Madhya Pradesh, for the kind of poverty that it has,
#
it does not even do as well as it should, right?
#
Which is like deeply troubling.
#
the answer to this question is that,
#
you know, we have states where,
#
even when you consider the fact that,
#
you know, well, they had similar starting points
#
and the states that have done well,
#
some states have done even better than the others
#
in the similar level of economic prosperity,
#
which is clearly explained by the kind of,
#
you know, public policy interventions
#
which the government did in health, right?
#
The absence thereof in Haryana,
#
which despite its prosperity proves that.
#
just not to take Tamil Nadu and Haryana as examples,
#
because these are relatively prosperous states,
#
take Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, right?
#
Which basically proves that,
#
you know, even for relatively poor states
#
with like really, you know, problematic metrics,
#
one state has done relatively better off,
#
which is Bihar compared to Madhya Pradesh,
#
which just means that, you know,
#
what is going on in Madhya Pradesh?
#
Because, you know, I would speculatively,
#
just thinking aloud the two obvious factors
#
that come to mind is that one,
#
is there a cultural difference of some sort
#
which is playing into this?
#
And the other is that is it possibly
#
in the overpopulated states that this is a problem
#
because as we'll discuss in detail,
#
you know, voters get less bang for their vote
#
and therefore a public demand for health care
#
among those who are savvy enough to want it
#
may not necessarily translate into better governance.
#
But none of those would apply
#
to a Bihar versus Madhya Pradesh kind of scene
#
because your population densities
#
would be similar, I'm imagining.
#
Culturally, they would be similar.
#
In fact, Bihar's population density is higher
#
And yet Madhya Pradesh does a lot worse.
#
You know, why is this happening?
#
Are there cultural practices which result in this?
#
I don't know and I don't want to essentialize that.
#
Are there working government programs
#
and functions in Bihar which we are not aware of?
#
Quite distinctly possible.
#
But, you know, this is a chart that,
#
you know, we sort of need to look at, right?
#
Like if you look at the number of government beds
#
in hospitals versus IMR of the state,
#
like Bihar has, you know, fewer beds per capita
#
than Madhya Pradesh, right?
#
And yet it has a better IMR compared to Madhya Pradesh.
#
Madhya Pradesh has, you know, for two poor states,
#
it has relatively, you know,
#
better facilities in Madhya Pradesh than in Bihar.
#
And yet its outcomes are worse.
#
I don't know why that happens.
#
Yeah, I mean, Madhya Pradesh is 48, right?
#
Bihar is, okay, in the excerpt I have taken it.
#
Yeah, which is such a significant difference
#
that it's not even like some kind of statistical artifact
#
which is, yeah, it's just weird.
#
And it just goes on to prove that, you know,
#
Bihar probably has some actual government intervention
#
programs which don't have to do with hard infrastructure
#
but have to do with either nurses
#
or like just monitoring or things of that nature
#
so that it sort of does slightly better.
#
And if you look at this again, right?
#
Compare Bihar and Madhya Pradesh
#
in terms of antenatal care visits.
#
Bihar doesn't do that well
#
in terms of antenatal care visits of pregnant women, right?
#
Madhya Pradesh does much better.
#
Yet its actual outcomes in terms of IMR is,
#
you know, for Madhya Pradesh is far worse.
#
So what is going on that it manages to care
#
for more pregnant women but loses more babies?
#
Fascinating, but the sort of impressive figures
#
that of course come from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, from the South.
#
And there's the crux of the book, right?
#
The central point of the book
#
which I think not enough people realize
#
is that in such a diverse country
#
that we are practically as diverse as the world
#
that, you know, some places are as dirt poor
#
as Sub-Saharan Africa or worse, you know,
#
so much worse than Syria and Afghanistan for God's sake
#
and so many of the parameters
#
and other places are actually doing pretty well,
#
like the IMR of Kerala being practically the same
#
And you would imagine that the right way to go, ideally,
#
is that each state makes its own policies
#
to deal with its own problems
#
and it raises its own taxes or, you know,
#
all your budgetary allocations are according
#
to specific local problems which are identified from there.
#
And that's how the game is played.
#
But the problem with our structure of governance
#
is that it is so centralized that you have,
#
you know, the same policies,
#
the same solutions for the entire country.
#
And at one point you point out, quote,
#
Southern India, for example,
#
has seen an increasing trend of obesity
#
and diabetes in its population.
#
which is to reduce caloric intake
#
and improve the nutritional composition of the diet,
#
is at odds with much of what
#
Northern and Central India are trying to solve,
#
namely insufficient caloric intake.
#
So you need opposite solutions.
#
But, you know, a uniform policy dictated from the center
#
will only cater to one of them.
#
And of course it will cater to the North
#
because it is from Delhi where the whole,
#
everything is too North Indian centric,
#
too Amit centric as it were,
#
as one could use internet jargon to put it.
#
So expand a little bit on how pernicious this is
#
and are there concrete examples of specific policies
#
Right. So as we've discussed,
#
the IMR is a classic example of this, right?
#
So the IMR of, in fact, you know,
#
after I wrote this book in 2021,
#
this data, which Kerala has now caught up
#
even the difference of its IMR is now six, right?
#
Like it's equal to the United States.
#
Now, and Madhya Pradesh continues to be a laggard, right?
#
Like, now, if you, like you rightly said,
#
there is no clever bureaucrat anywhere in the world,
#
who can come up with a single policy prescription
#
for both the United States and Afghanistan.
#
It just is impossible, right?
#
And yet there is this program for maternal and child health.
#
It is, you know, I'm Tamil, I can't pronounce that.
#
I encourage all of you guys
#
who know a little bit of Hindi and Sanskrit
#
to go math through something.
#
But the point is that, you know,
#
the union government forces states such as Kerala
#
to sign up for programs such as this
#
to improve their maternal and child health.
#
Now, what do these states do?
#
They do end up signing for this.
#
Like it is not in Kerala's best interests
#
And yet every politician in Kerala will sign up for this.
#
They do that because there are enormous sums of money
#
that are attached to each of these programs.
#
They are under the central flagship programs, right?
#
And if, like, which government in Kerala
#
is basically going to say,
#
you know what, on principle that we should be running
#
these policies for our own state, of our own money,
#
we will not sign up for it
#
and therefore forego that pile of money.
#
No politician is going to say that, right?
#
So the way in which the union government
#
sort of centralizes its policymaking apparatus
#
perniciously is through the power of its purse, right?
#
Like if you do this and the state's option
#
is to either sign up for it
#
or forego enormous amounts of money,
#
why would they do that, right?
#
And if they do sign up for it, what do they have to do?
#
They have to, you know, implement the exact policy
#
that the union government does.
#
It also has to follow the reporting protocols of it.
#
It has to follow the targets and that is,
#
like you rightly said, it is a program
#
and an implementation schedule that is set
#
for what are the Indo-Gangetic planes.
#
And it is templatized for that
#
and they have to be applied to Kerala.
#
And Kerala ends up signing for it and follows that
#
because it doesn't want to let go of the money.
#
And so it is in a situation where it pays taxes
#
through direct taxes to Delhi, gets a little money
#
but like implements like a policy
#
that is unrelated to its needs
#
because it's stuck in this bind.
#
And this is true for every other policy,
#
you know, area in health, in education,
#
We'll come to education probably in a little bit,
#
but you know, this is like you rightly read there, right?
#
Like, you know, the requirements of Kerala
#
with its population, which is sort of growing old, right?
#
Its median age is much higher than that of Northern India.
#
So, and its diseases are diabetes
#
and lifestyle diseases, right?
#
Like, and North India has the exact opposite problem.
#
Nobody in the world can sort of have a same policy
#
for these two, but you know,
#
we are where we are, unfortunately.
#
Yeah, and it sounds so funny that,
#
you know, at a simple level,
#
I can well imagine somebody saying that,
#
you know, why don't you take some food from Kerala
#
and give it to MP because hey,
#
that solves a calorific problem,
#
which reminds me of the, you know,
#
that the famous Bengal famine that happened in the 1940s
#
was at a time where Punjab actually had excess grains
#
and so on Punjab and a couple of the North States.
#
So what the British who were then involved
#
in World War II were really saying was that
#
why don't you just take it from them?
#
But of course it didn't,
#
but that's a whole different sort of story as it were.
#
Let's talk about education now, you know,
#
and I particularly want to, you know,
#
one great example of how simple incentives
#
make such a massive change is the midday meals,
#
where you've pointed out that they were first
#
experimented with in 1923, you know,
#
after the Montego-Jamsford reforms.
#
Then in 1956, Kamaraj launched another version
#
and then finally in 1982, MGR launched a version,
#
which as you pointed out,
#
everybody said was way to profligate,
#
but the thinking there was
#
that the positive externalities are massive
#
because you're getting kids in school,
#
you know, it's fantastic incentive therefore,
#
and not only are you getting kids in schools,
#
but you're also getting girls in schools,
#
which is sort of hugely important
#
and sets of a virtuous cycle of its own.
#
So tell me a little bit about that,
#
because I think there's a lesson for example,
#
I mean, there are many lessons in the many episodes
#
I've done on education on how the government
#
can also get out of the way of private parties
#
and enable the private sector to,
#
you know, provide education where it can't,
#
but even within its ambit
#
of where it is actually providing education,
#
you know, interventions like this
#
can make such a huge difference.
#
Like so, and we need to understand
#
why this happened as well, right?
#
this is a hundred year old program, right?
#
Like it started, the Madras Corporation
#
was the first to sort of implement it
#
what happened was that they wanted to sort of,
#
you know, give this incentive of a midday meal
#
to certain corporation schools in Madras,
#
but in a couple of years,
#
the colonial administration sort of,
#
you know, the budget ran out.
#
The Kamraj tried it again in 1956.
#
And again, the same problem,
#
but, you know, he wanted to extend it across the state,
#
but it was a sort of an arrangement
#
between the state and local bodies
#
in terms of cost sharing,
#
some local bodies work better than the others.
#
And because of which it again,
#
you know, the implementation was uneven,
#
Like it is only when MGR basically took it upon,
#
it took on the entire financial burden on the state itself
#
and set up a separate and distinct bureaucracy
#
that it actually yielded results
#
and sort of, you know, kept,
#
you know, went on that virtuous cycle,
#
But what I want to point here is
#
why was MGR able to do this
#
is far more important than the policy itself, right?
#
Like if you have all the 28, 29,
#
how many states do we have now?
#
Whatever you should know.
#
I don't have to know, you should know.
#
I think we have 29 large states, right?
#
Like anyway, each state,
#
you know, it's a happy accident
#
that MGR came up with what he did.
#
It could well have been a fiscally profligate policy,
#
which was a disastrous failure, right?
#
But the point of it is that MGR used,
#
you know, because it was such an enormous strain
#
he increased sales tax, right?
#
And the state had the budgetary
#
to impose that additional tax
#
to support this, right?
#
Now, what have we done?
#
We have eliminated the ability of the state
#
to do any of this additional revenue generation
#
to do sort of, you know,
#
quote unquote pet projects
#
of what it deems fit, right?
#
is the biggest problem that we have,
#
if states are the laboratories of democracy
#
as they are meant to be,
#
then they should have fiscal space
#
for them to experiment with policy.
#
they're not laboratories
#
and they're just glorified bureaucracies.
#
And what we have done in the past 40 years
#
is rendered states into these glorified bureaucracies
#
where no state in the country right now
#
to come up with the equivalent
#
of what was the midday meal scheme 40 years ago, right?
#
And what did the midday meal scheme achieve?
#
You know, M.G. Ramchandran was not thinking of this,
#
you know, that it resulted in an increased GER,
#
that it resulted in falling anemia levels
#
sort of equalized the enrollment ratio
#
between boys and girls,
#
then resulted in greater sort of, you know,
#
GER and college education,
#
and then best of all resulted in Tamil Nadu
#
having the highest female labor force participation,
#
which is instrumental in it,
#
sort of moving up in terms of per capita income, right?
#
Like MGR did not think of any of these things.
#
He thought this was a moral objective, right?
#
Like that the government should do this.
#
like that moral objective across these very many states,
#
some of them could end up yielding utilitarian results
#
as the midday meal scheme had,
#
or it could end up doing the opposite.
#
But the point is that every state should have this.
#
Now, people like you might argue
#
that it's the role of the private sector.
#
Fair, like let a hundred, you know,
#
let these states experiment amongst themselves
#
and have the freedom to do that,
#
and let people like you pressure the state government
#
to do one thing in one state
#
and another thing in another state,
#
and may the best policy win.
#
But in order for any of that to happen,
#
states should have the fiscal space.
#
The absence of that is what is the problem today.
#
Yeah, I know eloquently,
#
Said Anand drill down on a couple of those,
#
but as far as people like me
#
seeing the private sector as a sort of solution,
#
what I keep sort of reminding people
#
when it comes to education is that
#
You know, I would never say that
#
government education is not the government's responsibility.
#
Just let the private sector handle it.
#
No, my thing is you get out of the way of the private sector
#
and you continue doing whatever you can
#
to the best of your abilities.
#
And the best case scenario is that
#
you might reach a situation
#
as you did in telecom or airlines
#
where the private sector does it so well
#
that you're not required.
#
But it is not an either or.
#
And health and education are clearly areas
#
where the government has to be responsible.
#
I want to double click on a couple of
#
one important phrase that you use,
#
which I think conceptually it's sort of important,
#
where you spoke of states as laboratories,
#
sorry, my pronunciations are terrible,
#
Now, what does this mean?
#
The whole idea here is that
#
one guy sitting in Delhi
#
won't necessarily know what the best policies are
#
and a policy that works in one state
#
might not work in another.
#
In fact, I've done an episode
#
with Shruti Rajgopalan and Alex Tabarrok,
#
which is a term that means that, you know,
#
you have one policy that worked in Scandinavia,
#
so you implant it in Chhattisgarh
#
and you think it'll work there.
#
But the same holds true for a policy
#
that works in Haryana, not working in Kerala
#
So the whole idea of a state being a lab
#
is you let different state governments
#
experiment with different kinds of policies.
#
That's why laboratories,
#
you let them experiment
#
with different kinds of policies.
#
States can learn from each other.
#
States can compete for labor and investment
#
And it's a great incentive.
#
It pushes everybody upwards.
#
And that's not happening
#
because what the centralization has done
#
is that states are no longer
#
independent laboratories like this.
#
They are all satrapies, I think the word is,
#
where a paternalistic state will, you know,
#
decide what is good for each state.
#
And generally, it'll be the same damn thing
#
that they decide to be good for all states.
#
So what I want you to do is break down
#
Like you've spoken about sort of
#
the fiscal aspect of this.
#
You've also eloquently spoken in your book
#
about the disaster that GST was.
#
And I'm really glad you did that.
#
And I want everyone to read that part of the book
#
because I feel like this becomes a losing argument
#
these days when I argue with people about it
#
because I like GST, this GST, that.
#
Every small and medium businessman I have met
#
has told me that it is a freaking disaster.
#
And just principally, the problem with a GST
#
is that while governance depends on
#
being as decentralized as possible,
#
so your government is more and more accountable to you,
#
GST takes you in the other direction entirely.
#
But with GST being one aspect of it,
#
tell me about the fiscal system
#
because again, I don't think most people realize
#
the extent to which states are not,
#
states' independence is so limited
#
and they are so dependent on the center
#
for the monies that they get.
#
And in the case of the rich states,
#
what they are really doing is
#
they are subsidizing the smaller states
#
and not getting enough bank for the buck.
#
And this is really an important picture to paint.
#
So I think what all of your listeners should do is,
#
whatever their state budget is,
#
if they have not already done so,
#
look at all revenue sources of their particular state.
#
It's very, very instructive
#
because people like you and me-
#
Is there a link where they can do that?
#
Every state government puts up its budget, yes.
#
Or the PRS legislative, they put that up as well, right?
#
So the point I want to make here is that most...
#
So consider you, consider me,
#
and consider all listeners of this particular show.
#
But majority of our taxes are essentially
#
in the form of direct taxes.
#
Or in your case, you pay GST.
#
In my case, because you're on your show,
#
in my case, like wherever other indirect taxes,
#
which are also GST, right?
#
With the exception of perhaps house tax
#
and some other local taxes that I pay,
#
I pay almost no taxes to my state government.
#
Like 95, 98% of all taxes that I pay
#
are essentially in some way, shape or form through this.
#
And it goes all the way to Delhi
#
and it gets sort of, you know,
#
it comes back to my state.
#
So let's understand this, right?
#
Now, these direct taxes,
#
and I'm sure like I don't know people more qualified than me
#
have come on your show and probably explained this,
#
but the way in which every rupee,
#
the government calls this the divisible pool, right?
#
And that is what gets divided amongst states and the union.
#
And then there is the non-divisible pool,
#
which is sets of surcharges,
#
which the union government sort of keeps for itself, right?
#
Now, this divisible pool is again,
#
devolved back to the states
#
using what are the finance commission allocations, right?
#
So the finance commission is constitutionally mandated
#
to basically take this tax money,
#
the divisible pool of that tax money,
#
and then distribute that money back to the states, right?
#
Now, the way in which this happens is, you know,
#
they, so there are, how engaged do you want this to be?
#
Get as detailed as you want.
#
So anyway, so there are two things, right?
#
One is, it's called the vertical devolution.
#
That is how much of the money
#
that the union gets to keep for itself
#
versus how much it gets to vertically devolve to states, right?
#
That's an important question.
#
So the way in which, you know, economists have multiple theories,
#
the general accepted principle is that you want it such that
#
the richest state is able to sort of, you know,
#
afford its basic services,
#
and that is the degree to which you want to do this.
#
I'm sure economists will explain this better.
#
But the problem in recent times has been that the,
#
so you remember in the 14th finance commission,
#
what it did was we went from, you know,
#
what was 32% that the union had to devolve to the states,
#
And it looks like a good thing,
#
which is that states are getting more money.
#
But if you look at the actual money
#
that has been devolved to the states
#
in terms of the ratios,
#
you see what an absurd thing
#
that the union government has done,
#
which is that it has almost gone back to the 32 percentage levels
#
simply by virtue of collecting money as a tax from us
#
by another name, which is cess and surcharge, right?
#
And cess and surcharge happened to not belong
#
to that divisible pool,
#
because of which the union government
#
does not have to share with it, right?
#
So essentially, what has happened is that
#
the union government's argument over the last five, six years
#
has been that given that we are giving you more money,
#
you should now take on more responsibility
#
for what are central flagship programs,
#
which are essentially programs designed in Delhi
#
and pushed down to the states.
#
And then they will argue that
#
because we are now giving you 42%,
#
you should fund a significant portion of it in Tamil Nadu.
#
They divide states into a few categories,
#
and some states such as Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra,
#
the state has to fund 80% of it,
#
while the union funds only 20% of it, right?
#
So essentially, what has happened is that
#
in the name of greater devolution,
#
states are saddled with greater sort of expenditure
#
on policy that they did not design,
#
but was designed in Delhi,
#
and roughly the same amount of devolution,
#
because essentially the central government
#
has siphoned away a bunch of money
#
in the name of cess and surcharge.
#
So that's the problem with vertical devolution.
#
In terms of horizontal devolution,
#
what happens is that there are...
#
So if you look at 2010-11,
#
before the 14th Finance Commission was in vogue,
#
at which point the overall devolution was only 32%,
#
the overall union transfers
#
as a percentage of gross tax revenue in 2010-11
#
to states was 62.1%, right?
#
when the devolution is supposed to have increased
#
it's actually gone down to 59.7%, right?
#
And that's because of this jugglery
#
that the union government...
#
Like I think you mentioned the cesses
#
went up from around 10% to 20%.
#
So in this exact period
#
where the devolution has increased
#
cesses went up from 10% to 20%.
#
I don't know why we allow this to happen,
#
and I also want to sort of...
#
Before we go into horizontal devolution,
#
I want to make one more sort of point very clear here,
#
which is that all union governments,
#
it's not the current incumbent government,
#
all union governments uniformly argue that
#
there are greater responsibilities for the union
#
and they generally say that
#
we are responsible for defense
#
and national interest and whatnot.
#
If you look at their overall spending on defense,
#
again, from 2011-12 to 2020-21,
#
it's actually shrunk, right?
#
And while they have taken more money for themselves,
#
the most significant argument that they put forward
#
as the reason why they need more money,
#
that particular argument has...
#
That particular bucket has shrunk.
#
So it just makes absolutely no sense.
#
And if you see the area where
#
they have increased their, whatever, their expenditure,
#
it is on the revenue side,
#
which essentially goes to all these flagship programs,
#
which are spent on state subjects,
#
which the state should be spending, right?
#
So that is the problem.
#
In other words, what the union government has done is that
#
it has siphoned off more funds for itself
#
to come up with new schemes to spend on state subjects
#
because at the end of the day,
#
when a politician from Delhi comes to your constituency
#
and asks you for votes,
#
if you see in the last 20, 30, 40 years,
#
increasingly what they've been doing is
#
they don't argue about what are central subjects.
#
Instead, they argue about what are state subjects.
#
You would have seen the prime minister of this country,
#
no less, coming and saying that,
#
I'll give you clean streets or whatever, better schools.
#
These are all state subjects.
#
Why is the prime minister talking about that?
#
if there are an absence of schools
#
and there is a politician who's coming and saying
#
that people are not going to be such enlightened voters
#
that they're basically going to say,
#
That is not your subject.
#
You're not supposed to talk about it.
#
Therefore, I'm not going to vote for you.
#
People will listen to any politician who's sort of,
#
you know, it seems just listening to them, right?
#
So there was this perverse incentive for the center
#
to use up more and more of this fiscal space
#
from the states towards itself.
#
And politicians who are good at it do that, right?
#
With like very little cost to them, right?
#
And so let me, before you go into horizontal,
#
let me kind of drill down a bit
#
to make sure I've understood it correctly.
#
And at one point you write over here,
#
when you talk about the vertical imbalance,
#
the union government currently receives roughly two-thirds
#
of all the tax revenue raised
#
while being responsible for just over a third of all expenses.
#
Even those expenditures, for the most part,
#
are in areas that are either explicitly state subjects
#
or areas the union usurped from states.
#
The union spends a rather small ratio
#
of its overall expenditure
#
on the core functions of the union government,
#
such as defense and foreign affairs.
#
And elsewhere, you've kind of detailed out how low these are.
#
And then you write, the states, meanwhile,
#
are responsible for close to two-thirds of all expenses
#
while they receive only a third of the revenue directly.
#
That is, the revenue capacity and fiscal responsibility
#
aren't evenly matched between the layers of government.
#
And these centrally sponsored schemes,
#
where it is getting money from the center
#
to spend the money according to how the states want.
#
For example, a state could ask a southern state like Kerala
#
to do something to increase caloric intake among its people.
#
That is part of the one-third it's receiving, right?
#
Exactly. Exactly, right?
#
And that is the significant problem,
#
which is that not only is it that you are receiving money,
#
which is, well, the quantum and the way in which
#
you're receiving it is problematic.
#
You're also receiving it tied to a certain policy,
#
which is antithetical to your own progress.
#
And which is the reason why elsewhere in the book,
#
I basically call southern states as being in a bind
#
of becoming a vassal state.
#
It's precisely this reason,
#
which is that you do not have control of your taxes,
#
nor do you have control of policy.
#
So I have another question for you.
#
Let's say in this hypothetical and really simplistic example
#
of a centrally sponsored scheme
#
to get people's caloric intake up, right?
#
Is the central government imposing that on the states
#
and making sure that they crowd out the fiscal space
#
or a particular amount of money only has to be spent for that?
#
Are they doing that because of a mistaken paternalistic way
#
of thinking where they simply do not have the imagination
#
to think that Keralites will have different problems
#
from, say, MPites or Biharis?
#
Or is it that there are incentives driving them for that
#
even though they know it's wrong policy?
#
I would often, I would imagine it's the latter.
#
Politicians are smart people, right?
#
They resort to incentives.
#
So what could those incentives be?
#
Like if you're giving some money to Kerala anyway,
#
why not just tell them that fine,
#
take the money and use it for what you want
#
instead of for saying, no, no, implement our program?
#
Because if you're one, you want to use a power
#
for power zone sake, which makes you more powerful.
#
But if you're running a political party in India,
#
you want to make sure that the Indo-Gangetic planes
#
are in your sort of column, so to speak, right?
#
That's the way you win elections in this country.
#
And therefore, let's say, you know,
#
if you want to increase caloric intake,
#
which is the priority of those regions,
#
the prime minister goes and says,
#
I am going to feed you because not on my watch
#
is there going to be hunger.
#
It's a fantastic speech.
#
And therefore, what does he do?
#
He asks his bureaucrat to basically,
#
so somebody in Kerala basically says,
#
hey, but you know what?
#
The bureaucrat will basically say,
#
do you want the money or not?
#
Like it could, one, you know,
#
it feeds into two things, right?
#
One is it feeds into this ability of the government
#
to sort of say, you know what?
#
I'm going to solve your problems.
#
Two is it also feeds into this notion of one nation,
#
So just to kind of refine my question a little bit,
#
like one, I got to point out that, you know,
#
you know, goes against the whole notion of
#
increasing caloric intake, but let that be.
#
What is to stop the politician at the center
#
from saying that this is the X amount of money
#
I'll give for health care.
#
it will be for increasing caloric intake.
#
And in Kerala, it can be for whatever that guy wants.
#
Because they do not do it on the basis of the domain
#
They do it on the basis of a single,
#
what is called a central flagship scheme
#
or something of that nature, right?
#
Which is that, you know, this Mathru Vandana,
#
something, something that is the program that is funded.
#
Like when Nirmala Sitharaman stands up in the parliament
#
and basically makes her budget allocation speech,
#
she says that, you know, children are poor
#
and we are going to take care of them.
#
And therefore I allocate so many crores of rupees, right?
#
Like that's the way in which.
#
So this actually comes down to the toxic nature of stories
#
because rather than say, rather than use an abstract term
#
and say that I will, you know, do something for,
#
there'll be a healthcare budget for this thing.
#
It's much easier to say nobody will go hungry on my watch.
#
And who has, yeah, you're right.
#
It's that we're probably victims to stories.
#
And we're also victims to stories that are very removed
#
from our lives in far away Delhi, right?
#
As stories come, you know, I mean,
#
to be fair to your version of looking at the world,
#
as stories come down closer and closer to us,
#
they'll reflect our lives better, right?
#
Be they stories or policies, you know, they're hopefully that.
#
It's the problem is that, you know,
#
if you're sitting in Delhi and you want power
#
and you want to win elections and you want to sort of, you know,
#
and this is true for everybody.
#
It's just that the latest version of the government
#
seems to be the worst version.
#
And this is true at all points in time, right?
#
Like if you go back in time, at all points in time,
#
the latest version of the government
#
seems like the worst version.
#
Yeah, and it's going to continue this way.
#
So, you know, fasten your seat belts.
#
Right, so I interrupted you.
#
You were going to talk about horizontal imbalances.
#
Okay, so now what we have done is the vertical devolution,
#
wherein the government decides, you know,
#
I'm going to keep X for myself and devolve Y.
#
And we have seen significant problems in terms of,
#
increasing X and decreasing Y, so to speak, right?
#
Now, the horizontal devolution is of the money
#
that it decides to sort of devolve to the states.
#
How does it share that money is the question, right?
#
Now, until very recently, what was the compact was that,
#
you know, in 1971 census is kind of a touchstone
#
of Indian politics and we'll come into that later
#
when we discuss population growth.
#
But the parameters by which this particular money was,
#
the money was sort of divided amongst the states,
#
one of the parameters was population.
#
And 1971 census was taken as the basis
#
for much of the population,
#
for these resource allocation problems, right?
#
In 2014, and let me just read out to you
#
what the latest, you know, parameters on which,
#
you know, the horizontal devolution happens.
#
One is population, right?
#
The other is area of the state.
#
Third is forest and ecology, which is 10%.
#
Then bulk of it is income distance.
#
And this is important, so, you know,
#
they say income distance, which seems like a good thing,
#
but I'll get into the details where it's a terrible thing, right?
#
And then there is something called demographic performance
#
and tax and fiscal efforts, which is a tiny thing, right?
#
So the problem is that population by itself is population.
#
the way in which they have calculated it,
#
is that they've, let me actually, can I read on?
#
Yeah, yeah, please, please, please.
#
The biggest criterion for deciding the overall allocation ratio
#
in the 15th Finance Commission's report is income distance.
#
One may agree or disagree on the merits of having 45%
#
of the total weightage assigned to income distance,
#
but income distance in the way in which it's calculated
#
is again basically a proxy for population.
#
Income distance has been calculated as the distance
#
of a given state's per capita GSDP
#
taken over a three-year period from that of Haryana.
#
So far, it seems reasonable, except that this distance
#
is then scaled using the 2011 population of each state.
#
The end result, much like that of demographic performance,
#
renders the income distance as another proxy
#
for population figures of 2011.
#
And this is true startlingly for demographic performance.
#
And I want to talk about that a little bit, right?
#
So when the 15th Finance Commission came in, right?
#
And finance commissions are generally the way
#
in which horizontal devolution happens.
#
That is, they allocate the money
#
which is left at the end of the vertical devolution across states.
#
So they basically said, you know,
#
these will be our parameters on which we are going to devolve
#
horizontally to the states.
#
And they said for the first time that 100% of this population
#
would be in 2011 population as opposed to 1971.
#
At that time, people like me made a lot of noise, right?
#
Because we said, you know, if you do that,
#
states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala will be really affected
#
and they'd pay a price for having sent their girls to school,
#
which is what results in lower population, right?
#
Like, why do you want to do that?
#
At that time, people in government basically said,
#
okay, we will, because a lot of us made noise,
#
they said, you know, we will add a factor
#
called population performance as one of the ways
#
in which we calculate this.
#
And that will give an incentive for states
#
like Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
#
But when the government of India says that,
#
you take that at face value in good faith, right?
#
You assume that they're saying in good faith.
#
Except when the actual report came out,
#
this demographic performance was a shocker of sorts.
#
Please, please, please.
#
The weightage the finance commission assigned
#
for population and demographic performance
#
when one reads the main report
#
looks like a reasonable compromise.
#
Assigning 15% weightage to 2011 population data,
#
but assigning 12.5% weightage to demographic performance
#
sounds like a good way to counteract
#
the demographic divergence of the last half century
#
among states, for example.
#
The annexures reveal why this isn't
#
much of a balancing act at all.
#
The twist lies in what the finance commission
#
has used for calculating demographic performance.
#
It has taken the inverse of TFR in 2011
#
and multiplied that with the population figures of 1971.
#
In other words, the parameter that was explicitly
#
supposed to be about population control
#
has been scaled against absolute population figures.
#
The result is the very criterion supposed
#
to reward demographic performance
#
and punish lack of population control measures
#
gives states with the highest populations in 2011
#
the maximum scores based on those very factors.
#
Uttar Pradesh, the state with the highest
#
and with the largest population
#
and above replacement TFR will,
#
TFR still scored the highest for demographic performance.
#
This defeated the very purpose of introducing that metric.
#
What they have done is essentially,
#
so you do one by TFR, right?
#
TFR is generally a number,
#
so it's basically the number of children
#
the median woman gives birth to, right?
#
So that's going to be a number between one and three, right?
#
So if you have one by two or one by three,
#
that's a number, let's say, you know, 1.5,
#
one divided by 1.1 or 1.5, somewhere around that, right?
#
That number is going to be a small number
#
of about 0.5 or 0.6 or something.
#
If you multiply that with the population of Uttar Pradesh,
#
it's a simple law of arithmetic
#
that the larger number will just enormously
#
overpower the smaller number, right?
#
And like, why did they scale it?
#
And they sort of put this in the annexures of the report, right?
#
Assuming that nobody would read it, I guess, I don't know.
#
this is my problem with the horizontal devolution, right?
#
So in the end, if you look at it,
#
close to 75% of the weightage
#
given to all horizontal devolution factors
#
are essentially either actual population
#
or proxies of population, right?
#
And therefore what happens is that in,
#
in the earlier thing that we discussed,
#
which is that, you know,
#
most of us pay our taxes to the union government
#
and want the union government to devolve it back to us.
#
But what happens is that the union government
#
essentially devolves it back on the basis of population
#
and states which are actually economic power centers
#
are states with a lower population
#
and a population that is growing even slower, right?
#
And therefore it adds to this idea of the Basel state
#
that we spoke about earlier,
#
consider the state of Telangana, for instance,
#
and consider the state of Uttar Pradesh.
#
Uttar Pradesh is four times the population of Telangana.
#
And if you use this particular metric,
#
essentially what you're doing is you're transferring money
#
from Telangana to Uttar Pradesh.
#
There's no other way of looking at it, right?
#
Now, in a federal union,
#
this is a reasonable thing to do, right?
#
And most other federal unions have some version of this.
#
But the problem is that in the Indian context,
#
what happens is Telangana itself, it's not Sweden.
#
It has a large number of poor people within its own state
#
and it has to feed them, et cetera.
#
it has absolutely no control over its own taxes, right?
#
It is imposed by somebody else
#
and people of that state pay into that taxes
#
and those taxes are sent elsewhere.
#
And in Telangana's case, why I pick up Telangana
#
is if you look at the difference
#
between the overall central transfers that the union has
#
and the state's own taxes
#
in order to meet its own budget for the state's budget,
#
Telangana has the maximum difference.
#
In other words, the state has to tax its own people twice over
#
in order to meet its own budgetary requirements.
#
Let me read this bit out just to make the figure stark
#
where at one point you write quote,
#
consider Telangana, the state's own tax revenue
#
was 7.7% of its GSTP for 2021
#
while central transfers accounted for only 2.5% of GSTP.
#
That is a state received so little from the union
#
that it was forced to tax its citizens at the state level.
#
In contrast, Bihar got 31% of its GSTP
#
as central transfers for the same period.
#
So 7.7% versus 31% and it's just nuts.
#
Let's talk a bit about the demographic issue.
#
You have a whole chapter on population
#
and that's got many aspects to it
#
as being a source of different kinds of problems.
#
Now, one familiar rant I go down on quite often on the show
#
which doesn't contradict anything in your book,
#
it's kind of orthogonal,
#
is about how the whole focus on population as a problem
#
was so problematic, this common thinking
#
that every problem that we have with governance
#
was ascribed to population
#
and it was thought that overpopulation is a bad thing
#
and as we have seen from history,
#
as I keep pointing out,
#
that population density is a great thing.
#
People are brains, not stomachs.
#
The clearest indication of that
#
is the most prosperous parts of any country
#
are the cities which have the greatest population density.
#
You know, you also pointed out
#
how in the US and in Germany,
#
you see disparity between states,
#
nowhere near the same extent as in India,
#
but you see disparity between states,
#
but the states that are well off
#
are the ones with population density.
#
Now, that's not quite the case in India
#
and one reason for that,
#
and there are a variety of reasons for that,
#
but one basic fact that accounts for that
#
is that poor people have more children,
#
that as you grow up the ladder of prosperity,
#
you simply have less children.
#
A great example of that
#
is the effect of having girls in schools, for example,
#
where at one point in your book, you write quote,
#
keeping girls in schools
#
is the greatest force multiplier
#
for improving development outcomes.
#
Education among girls is the most significant variable
#
correlated with low fertility rates worldwide.
#
It also results in a higher
#
female labor force participation rate.
#
Moreover, if and when an educated girl
#
her own children will almost certainly
#
be as educated as she is.
#
It produces a virtuous cycle of fewer newborns
#
who have access to better basic health services,
#
and higher per capita income, stop quote.
#
and I have to use the word story here,
#
but that's a good way to think about it,
#
is that what has happened over the last few decades
#
is that our southern states
#
have progressed in all of these indicators,
#
health care, education,
#
and therefore they have less kids,
#
while our northern states
#
haven't progressed in all these areas
#
and they have more kids, right?
#
is that it comes into play
#
not just in terms of, you know,
#
the way the money is devolved
#
and the horizontal imbalances that you pointed out,
#
but most worryingly in what is known
#
in the delimitation exercise
#
that is due upon us soon,
#
which has to do with the principle
#
of everyone's vote being the same in the country.
#
Now, I want you to explain this to me
#
because I think this is a bigger problem
#
that can explode in a crazier way
#
than most people realize.
#
And if you want to refine anything I said,
#
I get shat upon quite a bit on the internet
#
whenever I bring population as a prism
#
through which we look at it, right?
#
The only people who use the term Malthusian
#
as a pejorative are people
#
who haven't read his 1798 paper, right?
#
Like he was a complicated man
#
and he was in continuous discussions
#
with various people through his lifetime
#
and even after his death,
#
like people such as Karl Marx
#
have sort of critiqued him, right?
#
So it's a long, whatever.
#
But anyway, long story short,
#
the reason why population is sort of,
#
population growth or the lack thereof,
#
is tied with development,
#
is that whether we see it
#
as a cause or an effect,
#
it's like highly correlated
#
that you're not sending your girls to school,
#
actually having more kids of their own
#
and because then it puts
#
on your existing infrastructure,
#
which then results in those kids
#
sort of having even more
#
suboptimal of an outcome
#
is an example of a vicious cycle
#
that is not to say that, you know,
#
a population is the problem,
#
is a contributing factor
#
because it's a present problem.
#
No, I would just sort of add to that
#
that I agree with that process
#
that you don't send your girls to school
#
and therefore they don't participate
#
and therefore they have more kids
#
As far as a correlation
#
between population and development
#
A, like you've pointed out in your book,
#
that's not the case in US and Germany,
#
it's exactly the opposite.
#
our most prosperous places
#
with the greatest population density,
#
Let's get into the actual thing.
#
I mean, this is digression.
#
I think the starkest example
#
would be the difference between,
#
let's say, Kerala and Rajasthan.
#
Kerala's population growth
#
in absolute terms was about 56%.
#
Rajasthan grew by 166%.
#
in terms of population.
#
Currently, Rajasthan is as popular
#
And therein lies the problem,
#
if you're trying to run a union
#
and have resource allocation
#
as we have seen for horizontal devolution,
#
that each state gets from the union
#
is based on population.
#
then we have a serious problem
#
because essentially states
#
just because we didn't grow as much,
#
and the reason why we didn't grow
#
is because we sent our girls to school,
#
you're basically depriving us of devolution.
#
And to add to what you have said,
#
like the earlier problem
#
of horizontal devolution
#
like in any large federal union,
#
this kind of equalization happens
#
across the various regions,
#
like New York and California,
#
sort of subsidize Alabama and Wyoming
#
and whatever other states.
#
and like you rightly pointed out,
#
the more populated regions
#
such as New York and California
#
who happen to be economic power centers
#
where population grows the maximum
#
because people from middle America
#
migrate into those places.
#
Same is true for China,
#
where people from the interior of China
#
migrate to coastal regions,
#
and therefore coastal regions
#
have a higher population,
#
but they also end up being
#
are the high economic centers.
#
it's true for every other country in this world.
#
The reason why India is unique
#
is because greater population growth
#
is happening in those places
#
which are not the economic power centers.
#
It's happening in the Indo-Gangetic plains
#
did not send their girls to school,
#
and it is not happening
#
When you essentially have a state
#
with a much lower population growth
#
and a lower population base
#
trying to then equalize a state
#
which is a much bigger state
#
with a much higher population growth,
#
it's like putting a finger on a dike.
#
You're not going to ever
#
That is one part of the problem.
#
The other part of the problem is that
#
This is resulting in essentially
#
A, states in the Indo-Gangetic plains
#
raiding the southern states
#
in some way, shape or form
#
for their tax money as we have discussed.
#
The second is representation.
#
What do you need these southern states
#
to do in order to fight against
#
what they perceive as unfair?
#
It is for their MPs to go stand in parliament
#
and say that the finance commission's
#
allocation ratio should not be based
#
on this particular formula,
#
and we protest against it, blah, blah, blah.
#
when MPs are most important
#
that we stand at the precipice
#
of what is going to be the impending disaster
#
Let's look at what delimitation is.
#
which is likely India's
#
most liberal constitutional amendment,
#
but it had a little thing,
#
which each state sent to parliament,
#
which is that they basically
#
had population control as a policy,
#
and they didn't want to have
#
perverse incentives, right?
#
people are the primary resource,
#
and if a policy essentially aims
#
to restrict the production of that resource,
#
then you wanted to have a freeze of some sort
#
so that you didn't have perverse incentives, right?
#
because they announced population as a,
#
it was called a policy of national importance.
#
I think that's what it was called in the 70s.
#
A lovely title for a book.
#
originally they froze it until 1999
#
and then they extended it to another 25 years,
#
which is set to expire in 2026, right?
#
every other country in the world,
#
after its decennial census,
#
sort of redraws the boundaries
#
based on the latest population,
#
and therefore some states gain,
#
It's true in the United States, for instance,
#
after the most recent census,
#
because it's been a recent population center, right?
#
The problem here is that,
#
because in those countries,
#
like we have discussed,
#
the economic power centers
#
which are gaining population
#
because like we have discussed,
#
that is driving population growth,
#
what is happening is that
#
these states exactly at a time
#
that they need the maximum representation
#
are at a threat of losing representation
#
because if that delimitation expires, right?
#
is the state that is expected to have the first,
#
Tamil Nadu is supposed to be the state
#
which is expected to have
#
the negative population growth first
#
in the decade of 2031 to 41, right?
#
if they do that delimitation exercise,
#
they unfroze that and did that again,
#
according to 2011 data,
#
it would lose about seven MPs.
#
It sends 32 MPs to parliament now,
#
it would lose seven MPs
#
and most of those seven MPs
#
would go to Uttar Pradesh, for instance, right?
#
what do you go and tell a person in Tamil Nadu?
#
That because you sent your girls to school
#
and that because, you know,
#
you had this successful policy experiment
#
which yielded dramatically good results
#
called the midday meal scheme
#
and because you had high female labor force participation
#
and all of those good things,
#
we are essentially going to take away seven MPs,
#
is that what we're going to tell them?
#
No, that's one side of the argument, right?
#
The other side of the argument is,
#
it's also not pleasant for somebody from Uttar Pradesh
#
and I do this calculation and show that,
#
which is that, you know, my vote,
#
my vote is in what is South Madras
#
and if you do the probability of impact of my vote
#
on electing my MP versus a person in Guna,
#
somewhere in Madhya Pradesh, right?
#
My vote is 40% more powerful compared to that person.
#
So if we extended this freeze for another 50 years,
#
essentially what we would end up creating
#
is that we would create a second class citizen
#
of people in Indo-Gangetic Plains.
#
People whose votes are not valid as my vote is?
#
We don't want that either, right?
#
Like the foundational idea of a democracy
#
is one person, one vote
#
and all votes are counted equally, right?
#
So this is that, you know,
#
there are no good solutions to this, right?
#
Like if you, like a solution
#
that political scientists have often put forward
#
is that let's, what we can do is that
#
we will increase the number of MPs that,
#
from the Indo-Gangetic Plains or states
#
with high population growth
#
but retain the MPs of southern states in particular
#
which have experienced low population growth.
#
Like that's the first solution by a different name
#
because at the end of the day, MP, what is an MP?
#
An MP votes on our behalf in parliament, right?
#
It's a zero sum game inside parliament
#
because they all vote, right?
#
And therefore this is not going to solve anything.
#
So essentially the problem comes down to two choices then.
#
Do we want to punish southern India for its success
#
or do we want to sort of, you know, end up with North India,
#
much of North India being second class citizens?
#
Neither of which is a good solution, right?
#
Which is why what I argue is that we need to devalue
#
what is at the prize at the end of this race, right?
#
Which is power in Delhi.
#
If you reduce the value of that power,
#
it's an automatic solution
#
instead of trying to solve this
#
essentially intractable and unsolvable problem.
#
And I'll read out a couple of passages from you
#
with the numbers which kind of drive home
#
what the difference really is.
#
At one point, you're talking about the 2011 census.
#
You write, quote, consider Uttar Pradesh.
#
The state's population,
#
according to the 2011 census was 203 million.
#
It has 80 MPs representing those 203 million people
#
So each MP represents over 2.5 million people.
#
In the case of Tamil Nadu,
#
39 MPs represent 72 million people.
#
That is, each of his MPs represents 1.8 million people.
#
Basic arithmetic shows that the average Tamil citizen
#
had about 30% more representation in the Lok Sabha
#
than her counterpart in Uttar Pradesh in 2011.
#
And then you write, quote,
#
a rough back of the envelope calculation suggests
#
that between 2011 and 2026,
#
Uttar Pradesh will have added 62 million adult citizens
#
That this would mean a single MP
#
for 3.36 million people in the current scenario.
#
In the same time period,
#
Tamil Nadu would have added 15 million,
#
which should mean 2.2 million people per MP.
#
So 3.36 million people per MP
#
and 2.2 million people per MP.
#
And you're right, it's almost intractable
#
that if you have the delimitation exercise
#
and you adjust the MPs accordingly,
#
you're punishing all the states that did well.
#
In fact, you're punishing them so badly
#
that any party that then wins the Indo-Gangetic plane
#
You really have effectively no say in the matter.
#
if you keep things as they are
#
or kick the can down the road 15 years,
#
you're going against the principle of every vote
#
And as you pointed out that solution makes no sense.
#
Just keep these MPs the same,
#
because basically the power of each MP just goes down.
#
So it doesn't make a difference at all.
#
What do you think happens in 20...
#
What are the possible scenarios
#
I'm just trying to think?
#
I know you haven't spoken about politics
#
You've just focused on policy numbers,
#
economics, all of that.
#
But I'm just curious about what happens
#
because on the one hand,
#
the incentive for the party in power,
#
assuming they're in power at that time,
#
to do the exercise is incredible
#
because if it goes through,
#
and they've conquered the Indo-Gangetic plane,
#
the South is no longer a threat.
#
The incentives are incredible.
#
I know inertia and all that,
#
but the South can't just take it, right?
#
You know, almost perversely,
#
I'm starting to wish for the BJP
#
to become a pan-India party,
#
including Southern India,
#
so that their own voices within their own party
#
will then start questioning this.
#
Because if the DMK or the communists
#
or the TRS is going to raise this issue,
#
I don't think the BJP cares.
#
which is the easiest thing to do in politics,
#
then they would have increased the number of MPs
#
in what is their core vote base, right?
#
And at the end of the day,
#
they are a political party who aim to win elections.
#
So if by doing nothing,
#
they are going to become stronger,
#
why would they not do that, right?
#
And people in the South like me
#
or political parties that represent me
#
can cry horse about it,
#
but hey, at the end of the day,
#
it is a zero-sum game in parliament
#
and the arithmetic is with them.
#
Except what this will end up doing
#
is that it will seriously...
#
All long-term problems will...
#
Which fester for a long time
#
will blow up in some way, shape or form in the future.
#
And this is going to be
#
one of the most serious significant problems,
#
which is that you're essentially robbing people
#
of their own hard-fought success.
#
And I don't think people in a democracy
#
and the politics of it will erupt in ugly ways, right?
#
I mean, I propose a solution,
#
we'll come to that later,
#
but just the politics of it, right?
#
We need to understand the DMK has
#
sort of given up its secession demand
#
only from the 60s, right?
#
It was a party in which secession
#
was an active demand on its actual,
#
whatever vision document, so to speak,
#
40, 50 years ago, right?
#
Like, do we want to go down that path?
#
And that path is, you know,
#
given the nationalist fervor in this country,
#
like, you know, that is instantly likely
#
Do we want that as a question, right?
#
Like, the way to defuse that
#
is to voluntarily give up power in Delhi.
#
And are the incumbents ready to do that?
#
So we are either looking at statesmen-like behavior
#
where, you know, you give up power to sort of, you know,
#
maintain the territorial integrity of the country
#
or explicitly give up the territorial integrity
#
Yeah, no, sometimes, you know,
#
I think that we normalize the present so much
#
that we think that it is etched in stone.
#
Like, how long have nation-states been around?
#
Like, this particular map of India,
#
it's about 75, 76 years.
#
You know, we take it for granted.
#
We assume it will always be like this.
#
But surely the world can't look the same
#
like 100 years from now, right?
#
And perhaps you shouldn't take it for granted.
#
So at one point, you have this passage where you write,
#
one simplistic, risky and often unviable option
#
that has been considered in the past in this country
#
and in several other countries too
#
is a politics of explicit cessation
#
that often hardens stances on both sides
#
and descends into violence.
#
It's a high-risk option
#
that probably isn't a good solution in the first place.
#
Divergence within a large system
#
is a symptom of structural flaws.
#
A simple realignment of the map
#
with the same structure of governance
#
is likely to yield the same problem downstream
#
in two countries instead of one,
#
even if the cessation magically did not descend
#
into violence top court.
#
So for those people who suddenly started paying attention
#
because they heard the word cessation,
#
what Neelu is saying is that it is impractical.
#
However, while you are saying do not do this,
#
you are also coming up with interesting ways
#
of thinking about the problem.
#
So let's kind of, you know,
#
talk about the last section of your book.
#
And I know we've skipped over parts of your book.
#
There's a wonderful part where just as you talk about
#
how on health and education indicators
#
the South States are so far ahead,
#
you do a similar thing for general economic indicators.
#
You use agriculture also as a metric.
#
I'll encourage people to just read the book.
#
Let's sort of talk to the deeper first principles
#
thinking on, you know, systems of government.
#
And tell me how you started thinking about this.
#
You know, just take me through your thought process.
#
So when I was thinking about
#
why these problems exist in the first place, right?
#
Like what is the fundamental problem
#
that we have with this government?
#
It is that the government is supposed to be
#
a representation of, you know, of me and my ilk,
#
so to speak, in my local, whatever,
#
constituency or geography or whatever.
#
And if there was good transmission efficiency
#
and we got the policy that we wanted
#
implemented for us, none of these problems would exist.
#
Like if we wanted, for instance, you know,
#
and when I say policy, it includes policy outcomes
#
in areas such as health, education, et cetera.
#
It includes tax policy.
#
If we are taxed like the people in my constituency want
#
and if that tax money is spent on us
#
in the way in which we want,
#
that is definition of a good democratic government.
#
And when that happens, it means that, you know,
#
the will of the people has high transmission efficiency.
#
Now, if you look at India
#
and the way in which elections are run
#
and if you do simple calculations,
#
it becomes very, very clear
#
that the transmission efficiency
#
of the will of the people is practically zero.
#
The reason for that, as you discussed,
#
is that, you know, our constituencies are too big.
#
They are, you know, between 2.5 and 3.5
#
to sometimes 4 million people
#
is the size of a small European country.
#
One constituency in our country
#
is the size of a small European country.
#
And within that constituency,
#
like, you know, wherever we are,
#
this is some part of Bombay constituency.
#
I don't know what the constituency is called,
#
but I think it must be some Northwest kind of thing.
#
Now, there is no way, like, you know,
#
there's a wonderful theorem,
#
Aero's theorem, which basically states that, you know,
#
it is impossible for your MP
#
to reflect all your policies on a one-to-one basis.
#
It's just mathematically impossible.
#
Even if there is perfect alignment
#
between you and your MP,
#
given even though it is mathematically impossible,
#
she or he or she cannot then go on to parliament
#
and vote as he or she deems fit
#
or you tell her to vote.
#
Because they are governed by their party whip.
#
So, and so firstly, what do we have?
#
We have about 2.5 million people
#
in a first-past-the-post system,
#
which essentially, you know, makes your vote.
#
I do a little bit of calculation.
#
The power of your vote is E to the power minus 534,
#
So, you know, it's practically zero.
#
And on top of that, your policy alignment
#
with your MP is, again, impossible,
#
given, you know, the way in which Aero's theorem works.
#
And even if it does, on top of that,
#
that person, you know, has to vote
#
by the way in which their party says.
#
and because of these transmission efficiencies,
#
each time that the MP votes in parliament,
#
there is, you know, this multiplier effect
#
of the transmission loss.
#
And therefore, your policy,
#
the effect of your vote on policy is practically zero.
#
Now, therefore, it seems that the way to improve our democracy
#
and the way to improve the way in which
#
we govern ourselves in self-government and whatnot,
#
is a way to improve the transmission efficiency
#
If we were to magically arrive at a system
#
which did that, we would have solved much of these problems.
#
It doesn't like the devolution or, you know,
#
all of these would magically solve themselves
#
if we solve this transmission efficiency problem.
#
Now, that is where I come up with this idea
#
of gamified direct democracy.
#
So let me just give you a little bit of a context.
#
I'm sure all of us in school would have sort of heard
#
this Athenian democracy, we all, you know,
#
where I guess property owning men sort of,
#
property owning men assembled at the public square
#
and basically discussed the issues of the day
#
It's something like a residence welfare association of today,
#
except one where, you know, at the end of the day,
#
the uncle didn't have the way.
#
Like it's something like that.
#
Now, the majority of uncles did, not a uncle.
#
So, you know, if you have such a system where, you know,
#
like, I don't know, like a limited number of people
#
were in a society, but they all, all the people
#
of that particular society gathered in a public square
#
and they voted on every single issue of the day
#
instead of electing a leader.
#
And there will be perfect transmission efficiency.
#
Even if you dislike some particular policy,
#
you would have chances of.
#
So you, your policy is a reflection of you
#
and your belonging to that particular society.
#
If you're a real oddball, you would never ever sort of
#
see your policy get implemented.
#
But hey, you're an oddball.
#
So there's a, there's that there.
#
Now, the problem with this way of direct democracy,
#
of course, is like well-documented.
#
Like, you know, Socrates was poisoned by death.
#
He asked people to think.
#
He tried to inculcate a scientific temperament,
#
a skeptical temperament where people ask questions
#
all the time and he got sentenced to death for that.
#
Secretly reflective of our times.
#
That's what I was thinking.
#
Now, immediately naysayers will come on Twitter
#
and they'll say, show me an example where this has happened.
#
But hey, you get what you're saying.
#
So anyway, so the, the descent into majoritarian tyranny
#
is the threat of this, this particular Athenian democracy
#
of and of high transmission efficiency.
#
It has great transmission efficiency,
#
but it descends into majoritarian tyranny.
#
At the other end is what we have currently,
#
which is a, what is quote unquote a liberal democracy.
#
But in India, it's neither liberal nor democratic,
#
but we'll call it a liberal democracy,
#
which has sufficient guardrails where, you know,
#
hopefully ignore the recent events of the recent past.
#
But like, you know, we, we, we cannot basically say
#
that, you know, hang that person at least legally.
#
Like they do that by extra constitutional means.
#
So how do we arrive at a situation
#
where we have constitutional safeguards
#
to stop the descent into tyranny
#
and at the same time achieve a high transmission efficiency?
#
And there are also, you know, other functions
#
that parliament serves, which is that, you know,
#
it has what are parliamentary committees,
#
which have expert expert committees,
#
which basically it has drafting experience
#
of legislation, et cetera.
#
So how do you design a new system
#
which basically retains the good things of our existing order,
#
but maintains a high transmission efficiency?
#
So what I propose is a version of gamified direct democracy.
#
So what we will do is imagine,
#
and this is true for all levels down,
#
but in the book I sort of discuss it
#
at the level of parliament
#
and leave the rest as exercise to the reader.
#
So imagine that we did away with our MPs, right?
#
And we adopted the old Athenian model
#
that everybody can vote.
#
But what we also do is, and how we vote,
#
let's, I'll come to that.
#
Let's assume that, you know, we all get a vote,
#
not a vote, N votes, but I'll come to that.
#
But we also retain what is a committee.
#
One of the biggest powers that the political party of the day,
#
especially the party in power has
#
is the power of owning the legislative calendar.
#
That is the BJP in this country
#
or in the United States, the speaker of the house.
#
Basically they get to decide what comes up for vote
#
in on the floor of the house.
#
And that is an important power, right?
#
So what this model imagines
#
is that it divorces that power of bringing legislation
#
to a vote from the actual vote itself, right?
#
Or the politics of the day.
#
And imagine that is run by a special committee
#
and that committee is chosen by sortition,
#
which is that, you know,
#
members of the committee are chosen at random.
#
So that, you know, however, it's independent.
#
And imagine that a third stool of this.
#
One is, you know, the people itself who are the voters.
#
Second is the, you know,
#
the committee that owns the legislative calendar.
#
The third will be the drafting panel, so to speak,
#
which has, you know, expertise in terms of,
#
you know, drafting legislation, right?
#
And imagine that is also chosen by sortition,
#
but with sort of gatekeeping of sorts,
#
because, you know, you need experts at the end of the day
#
So, you know, hopefully we can achieve that.
#
And so imagine these two committees
#
plus this set of all people who get to vote.
#
So it's kind of a three-legged stool, right?
#
So what you've achieved is you've divorced the politics
#
of the day from the calendar.
#
You've divorced the politics of the day
#
from the technical details of what,
#
you know, the legislation itself is.
#
And now let's come to the actual vote itself.
#
Imagine that every voter is given N votes.
#
And the value of this N is the average
#
of the last 10 years each year,
#
how many, you know, bills were passed, right?
#
So imagine I have N votes, you have N votes.
#
I asked an MP, he said 183 is the number.
#
I hope, you know, if you don't pass that many laws,
#
but, you know, whatever that number is,
#
and hopefully it will come down over time,
#
So everybody, let's say is given 183,
#
or for ease of calculation or holding in your head,
#
let's assume it's 20, right?
#
So let's say you have 20 votes,
#
I have 20 votes, so on and so forth.
#
Let's say that, you know, you want to bring up a new bill.
#
The idea is that you now then have to sort of bring it up
#
for it to be, so you need to make sure
#
that at least 20% of the people agree with the fact
#
that this is a good idea to become a law
#
to be put to vote amongst the larger set of people.
#
And therefore the sort of a pre-vote, so to speak,
#
is where you basically bring this legislation
#
up for consideration by others,
#
so that at least 20% of the people are with you, right?
#
And then once it passes that,
#
you then bring, it goes through the committee,
#
two committees, one decides the calendar,
#
the other decides the actual wording of the legislation,
#
and it comes back to the people where they again vote.
#
And here in voting, in both these stages,
#
I want to make sure that, you know,
#
the threat that we were worried about,
#
which is majority or in tyranny,
#
the way in which we'll handle that is this, right?
#
Which is that we've designed a system
#
which is conservative by design, small c conservative,
#
which is that, you know, it is status quo biased.
#
And any change is very, very difficult to achieve
#
in the way in which the voting system is done.
#
And once it's done, it's very difficult to undo it.
#
And the way in which we do this is,
#
firstly, you have to first convince 20% of the electorate
#
to basically even bring this up.
#
And the way in which we sort of,
#
privilege status quo is by this, right?
#
If you want to vote yes, you get to use only one vote.
#
If you want to vote no, you get to use all your N votes.
#
And if you vote yes, and it becomes law,
#
your value of N becomes N minus one.
#
Whereas if you vote no, right?
#
You retain your votes to be N, right?
#
In other words, if the law that you did not want did pass,
#
then those who did use their vote to pass the law
#
in future will have lesser of an impact on society,
#
whereas you retain your old impact.
#
And therefore, whatever you want to change the world right now,
#
you have to be prepared for your opponent
#
to change the world in his image in the future
#
when you will be weaker, right?
#
And whenever there is a no,
#
he or she gets to use all their might,
#
and people can band together and use all their might
#
to stop anything that you want if they think it is...
#
In other words, when will that happen?
#
It is only when minority gets threatened
#
that they will use all their N votes
#
to stop something from happening, right?
#
So that way, it is tending towards a status quo bias
#
with a conservative system design.
#
So if you do this, what will happen?
#
Let's take an example, right?
#
So consider the budget that Nirmala Sitharaman passed,
#
which has been our sole point of contention,
#
which is that the center usurps all of these things.
#
It puts it under central flagship schemes.
#
The budget that she presented last week or week before,
#
about 4.56 or 5.7 lakh crores of rupees
#
for what are central flagship programs, right?
#
And most of these central flagship programs
#
are essentially state subjects, right?
#
And like we have discussed the problems with these,
#
no rational person in either Tamil Nadu or in Kerala
#
or in Maharashtra or in Punjab is ever going to agree
#
it is not in their interests, right?
#
Now, what will they do?
#
They won't vote for this.
#
If they don't vote for this and the system is stacked
#
towards a no as opposed to a yes,
#
they will always win in terms of a no, right?
#
So she cannot pass it at the level of Delhi.
#
So what will happen like the government in Delhi
#
will just not be able to pass all of these
#
national centralized overarching schemes
#
and therefore the hope is that
#
if the central government is not able to do that, right?
#
It will naturally devolve downwards, right?
#
And the other side of the token therefore is if taxation,
#
just like they are unable to do the expenditure side
#
of what they want to do,
#
they won't be able to do the taxation side as well.
#
And therefore that too will devolve
#
to the lowest common denominator, right?
#
And therefore it will result in orderly movement down
#
with a status quo bias so that we don't descend into chaos
#
but achieve radical decentralization, right?
#
And this is at the level of, you know, what is the parliament,
#
but you can imagine this at the level of state governments.
#
You can imagine this at the level of your city governments.
#
You can imagine this at the level
#
of your residence welfare association, right?
#
So this is a systemic idea
#
to achieve radical decentralization
#
without what is representative democracy
#
because representative tell stories and I don't like stories.
#
Beautiful way to kind of end it.
#
It's like, you know, a guitarist has this long guitar solo
#
and he ends at just a perfect point where you wonder like
#
how the hell is he going to, you know,
#
come to a neat conclusion with this.
#
And I will also tell my listeners
#
that Mr. Neelakantan here has actually tried
#
to convince his residence welfare association
#
to bring about gamified direct democracy in the RWA
#
and the uncle shouted him down more or less, right?
#
So a couple of points in what you said earlier
#
which I want to underscore for the listeners
#
and then I'll sort of go on to the next question
#
and which is that one, a big part of the transmission loss
#
is of course, as you pointed out, just the scale
#
that you have one MP for so many million voters
#
like how the hell are you going to get anything through?
#
But the other is something that multiple guests of mine
#
have spoken about and I link those episodes,
#
Barun Mitra, Amar Madhavan have spoken about it
#
which is the anti-defection law.
#
What the anti-defection law did was that
#
it forced all MPs to vote with the party whip
#
and that basically means that MPs cannot show
#
their independent discretion
#
or voice their own views in parliament.
#
They are not allowed to.
#
So you could actually run parliament from an Excel sheet
#
which basically means that for the purpose
#
of our democracies, MPs actually don't exist.
#
It's just a game that is kind of played.
#
You know, our prime minister can just,
#
you know, and the opposition,
#
they can all just get their Excel sheets out
#
and everything runs automatically defeat
#
which is also why the quality of parliamentary debate
#
The other central issue is that
#
as Shruti Rajgopalan pointed out
#
in this great episode we did on urban governance
#
that at the local level,
#
there is no connection between power and accountability.
#
The people I can vote for have no power
#
and the people who actually impact my life
#
in big ways are too far away from me.
#
There's simply no accountability
#
and especially true if you are in cities.
#
And if I understand your plan correctly,
#
there are sort of three important aspects of it.
#
One is that these committees are kind of chosen by random
#
though in the case of the drafting committee
#
but there are entry requirements
#
so they are actually experts and literate and all that
#
but they are chosen by random.
#
So it is beyond political incentives.
#
You're not going to get elected
#
or you're not going to aim for the next elections.
#
The second aspect is that the veto power in a sense,
#
each person has much more veto power
#
than they have power to get something through.
#
So if people do not want something,
#
it is easier to stop it than it is to make something happen.
#
So it's not pure majoritarian numbers per se,
#
And the third aspect is that at every point
#
where a policy doesn't get through,
#
it gets devolved down to the next point.
#
So you're getting more and more local
#
and more and more towards direct democracy
#
without many of those ranges coming into play.
#
In other words, it's a system that is optimized
#
for local maxima and not the global maxima.
#
Yeah, brilliant, brilliant.
#
Sounds sort of great to me.
#
And I was just, you know, as an aside,
#
I was taken by the phrase of conservative in means.
#
And, you know, I often think of the leaders
#
I really admire from our freedom struggle.
#
And I think of like my heroes are really that generation
#
of Gokhale, Ranade, Agarkar, those guys.
#
And I often think of them as liberal in their ends,
#
but conservative in their means.
#
And I think that is really the only way
#
you can move society forward.
#
If you're not conservative in your means,
#
and I have a discussion on the book exactly on this,
#
which is that it is anti-democratic.
#
This is something that a lot of my friends have asked me,
#
which is that, you know,
#
hey, at the end of the day, if you really do this,
#
let's say that a majority of people
#
do not like their pet preference,
#
let's say trans rights or whatever, right?
#
Now, there are two things.
#
One is, you know, at its worst,
#
this will descend into what we currently have, right?
#
You know, at all points in time,
#
it's either better than or equal to what we have
#
in terms of its outcomes, right?
#
Now, let's assume that we are at its worst
#
and it is equal to what we have.
#
And let's say the majority of people just like now
#
are against this pet idea that you think is progressive
#
and enlightened and whatever.
#
The point of a democracy is not
#
achieving optimality in outcome, right?
#
The point of a democracy
#
is the representation of people's will.
#
And if people end up being bigoted,
#
let their governments reflect that and let their...
#
And, you know, if they are truly bigoted,
#
there will be a cost for that.
#
And, you know, the representation of people's will
#
in government is a mirror to us.
#
We don't want to change what is in the mirror.
#
We want to change ourselves, right?
#
And hopefully with education,
#
that is what the idea of enlightenment is, right?
#
Like with education, we improve ourselves
#
so that we improve our image in the mirror.
#
You can't get like a new image in the mirror
#
and imagine that we have improved.
#
Yeah, you know, very well said.
#
And that's of course a democratic angle,
#
but there's also the Republican angle as it were,
#
where ideally what a republic should do, right?
#
I don't think a republic does it well enough
#
is protect the rights of everybody anyway.
#
But, you know, protect against government overreach.
#
So I have a broader question.
#
I'm very struck by the term transmission efficiency
#
and I'm going to think aloud a bit.
#
And I'm going to think aloud by thinking about
#
other domains in which this can apply
#
and in which the world is changing rapidly.
#
For example, I think of the creator economy, right?
#
Back in the day, in the 90s, if I'm a creator,
#
say I'm a writer or a filmmaker,
#
I can't reach my audience directly.
#
I have to, if I, you know, I can write to Times of India,
#
sell them an article, I'll be restricted by format,
#
news cycle, form, et cetera, all of that.
#
And I have to go through gatekeepers
#
and subscribe to a particular, you know,
#
write within a conventional band of thinking.
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And I have no direct connection with the reader.
#
What the Times of India is doing is that
#
it's aggregating eyeballs, selling advertising,
#
and I get a tiny chunk of that.
#
Now today, a way in which that has changed
#
is that creators are getting closer and closer
#
to capturing that value directly.
#
You don't need Times of India and don't need
#
to be bound by form or anything.
#
I mean, imagine a mainstream radio house
#
would never buy my five hour podcast, right?
#
I would never discover the niche or create the niche,
#
And what has happened is that I think that
#
what is perfect transmission efficiency?
#
Perfect transmission efficiency is,
#
let us say that I read something you write.
#
And even if I'm reading it on the internet
#
and the article is free, I am paying for it
#
And I would not mind transferring some of that value to you,
#
but I can't because those ways,
#
those mechanisms don't exist.
#
Now the mechanisms back in the day
#
were these incredibly clumsy mechanisms
#
like your Times of India or like your television channel,
#
which is selling advertising and all that.
#
Today, mechanisms have become somewhat better
#
where people can pay me directly and they do.
#
People can buy products directly from me
#
like my writing course and so on and so forth.
#
So those mechanisms have become better
#
for creators across the board.
#
So you have better transmission efficiency.
#
And what has happened here is that there is a lag,
#
that the old technology, as it were,
#
is not relevant anymore and the mainstream is crumbling.
#
But due to either a failure of imagination or whatever,
#
something new hasn't yet come up to take its place,
#
but it is inevitable that at some point it will
#
and transmission efficiency will be better.
#
And I'm wondering if this has a parallel across everything.
#
Like I think about the mainstream crumbling
#
when it comes to the creator economy,
#
when it comes to media,
#
perhaps when it comes to nation states
#
in this age of globalization and technology
#
and so on and so forth.
#
And is this, in a sense, therefore a similar problem,
#
that the technology we have for voters
#
to express their preference is incredibly outdated,
#
but there is a lag and nothing has taken its place?
#
And the big question is that in the creator economy,
#
if some mechanism comes up,
#
it will be easy to implement because everybody will want it.
#
But within this domain,
#
it will be incredibly difficult to implement
#
because people who are in the system right now
#
will never allow it to happen.
#
Which is why I sometimes flippantly call this
#
blockchain for democracy in the book.
#
You're right, which is that,
#
essentially, most systems that we have evolved at a time
#
when the idea of scale was largely limited.
#
Like the population of the world that it is currently
#
was unimaginable 500 years ago.
#
And I think that plays an important role
#
in any sphere that we have.
#
And then we have this enormous ability now
#
for decentralization, given that the basic plumbing,
#
which is the number of people that there is, has exploded.
#
And two, that we now have the technology to sort of
#
decentralize and put it on a blockchain, so to speak,
#
whether it be democracy or it be your podcast or anything.
#
We are operating with a technology
#
that was for an era that was 500 years ago.
#
And I think we need to update ourselves.
#
And I imagine one way to do this because it allows,
#
like you said, for peer-to-peer interaction.
#
Yeah, and that's why for me,
#
your book is of value for these two reasons.
#
One is it makes this brilliant argument about
#
the South versus North and lays it all out
#
and the facts are all there.
#
And you understand exactly the way the structure
#
and the structures in the system at play.
#
But the other also is I think it's sort of a starting point
#
for a particular kind of thinking about how we can change this.
#
I'm sure that even you will think a year later
#
differently of gamified direct democracy
#
than you perhaps do now.
#
Hopefully, there'll be more people
#
who will be thinking along with you.
#
That is the hope, right?
#
What the system does is it allows for people
#
to continuously evolve,
#
which is what I argue somewhere in the book as well,
#
which is that the point of a democracy
#
is to allow for change at all points in time
#
to sort of change itself.
#
And the idea of a constitutional amendment now
#
versus a change in a gamified direct democracy,
#
I would argue that despite the latter being status quo biased
#
and having conservative means,
#
it will actually achieve it better,
#
more efficiently and even quicker
#
because it devolves into the lowest layer,
#
whereas a constitutional amendment
#
does not do that natural devolution downwards
#
to the lowest layer of government.
#
And that is its greatest advantage, right?
#
If one place, just like we were discussing
#
about states being laboratories of democracy,
#
this will allow for a million such laboratories to happen.
#
And because the authority devolves
#
and if one or two of these places get it right,
#
for the others to either copy or improve upon is infinite.
#
And I'm sure there'll be ongoing discussions around this.
#
So I've taken up enough of your time
#
and I'm realizing that you woke up at four in the morning.
#
So I'm even feeling even guiltier
#
for keeping you here for so long.
#
So while I will, of course, encourage all our listeners
#
to buy the book and read it in full,
#
I think we've only scratched the surface of it.
#
It's incredibly thought provoking,
#
especially the last section.
#
And I think everyone should participate in that discussion.
#
But let me end you with a customary question
#
And especially because I planned to ask you earlier
#
that what kind of fiction do you read?
#
At one point, you said that your friends often say
#
that your fiction indicates you're not of this world
#
and you're not of this place, rather.
#
So what I ask my guests to do is recommend books, films, music,
#
any kind of art at all, which they absolutely love
#
and which they want to share with the world.
#
It need not be on this subject or that subject,
#
but stuff close to your heart.
#
So The Walk by Robert Walzer is one of my all time favorites,
#
especially it speaks to you,
#
especially when you're seriously wondering
#
about your place in the world and seriously traumatized.
#
Tinkers by Paul Harding is another absolute favorite of mine.
#
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell,
#
again, an absolute favorite of mine.
#
Edward P. Jones, his collection of short stories,
#
All Aunt Haggard's Children and The Known World,
#
both of them are spectacular.
#
The Slow Man by Qadzi, I really liked that.
#
I have a recency bias, but okay.
#
The Changeling by Kenzabiura Oe, I really loved that.
#
It gave me an understanding of Japanese society that I did not have.
#
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
#
So the little non-fiction that I do read are kind of sort of related to my work.
#
So Birth of a Theorem by Cedric Villani is another,
#
it's a memoir of his Fields Medal-winning work.
#
Oh yeah, Jilliad by Merlin Robinson.
#
And well, the one that I'm reading right now,
#
which is If I Survive You by Jonathan S. Coffrey.
#
And then I really enjoy sort of reading Adam Gopnik, whatever he writes.
#
You're making me sort of mentally go through all my favorites.
#
Oh, music, like we discussed earlier, I'm not,
#
you know, I sort of music just, it seeps into me.
#
I don't particularly go seek it.
#
And much of what seeps into me is Carnatic music.
#
So yeah, that's mostly it.
#
And you know, that is when I'm in Madras.
#
If I'm in the US, it's mostly jazz and that's what seeps into me.
#
Otherwise, you know, Tiny Desk Concert of NPR is what I generally had at one point in time.
#
But you know, I don't go seek it and I'm not a connoisseur of it.
#
Movies, I think we've already discussed Eraserhead,
#
which I had a lot of trouble watching.
#
But you know, I can't sit through an entire length of a movie.
#
I enjoy Johnny Darko, but otherwise I don't watch movies.
#
Wonderful. Thank you so much.
#
I hope this is the first from any conversations.
#
And what are you working on next?
#
I am a data scientist by trade.
#
And so I want to go back to my job and sort of see how
#
gamified direct democracy sort of takes a life of its own.
#
I want to see that happen, right?
#
I obviously like to dig more into data whenever I have time,
#
but I've sort of I want to go back to a life and see what happens given that,
#
you know, we live in 2026 is not too far away and I'm really worried about that.
#
So I just want to see what happens.
#
So something else that you also have lived experience of besides Indian democracy is life
#
Do you think company structures are also sort of outdated and,
#
you know, is a disruption waiting to happen there as well?
#
So that is an interesting question, right?
#
Because in democracy, we take for granted that, you know,
#
some version of egalitarianism in a democratic sense is taken for granted,
#
at least philosophically, if not in practice.
#
That is not true for capital.
#
And those pressures still exist, which is why you would see that,
#
you know, these pressures sort of burst more in areas of knowledge economy than
#
in many other areas, simply because in knowledge economy,
#
many of these entry barriers are often invisible,
#
because people who work in tech like me imagine we have greater power than we actually do.
#
But, you know, I see this as a lot more complicated in work, in companies than I do in democracy.
#
Great. Thank you so much.
#
This was great. Thanks for coming.
#
Thank you. I really enjoyed this.
#
Thank you for listening to Anamit.
