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I've done many, many episodes on gender and the lives of women in India.
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And they have all struck such a chord.
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And they haven't struck a chord because they necessarily showed you something new.
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Instead, they highlighted stuff that is all around us and has been normalized.
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They spoke about things that were widely seen, and at the same time, widely unseen.
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The toxic nature of marriage, why it is always a daughter and not the son who gets water
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for guests when they come home, how women live with an extra layer of awareness that
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men are clueless about, how women so often feel cold in offices and even wear jackets
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and sweaters there, and how both men and women are trapped in their roles, condemned to lives
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My biggest complaint about the people around me is how little self-reflection they do.
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So few people take a step back and look at their lives, look at the conventions they
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fit themselves into, look at how, while they are complex beings, they ignore most of the
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multitudes within them.
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Because if we want to change towards a better world, we must first understand what's wrong
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Before we act, we must learn to see.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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I'm your host, Ashwin Chopra, author of the outstanding book Sisterhood Economy.
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Shelly started life as a business journalist, earned great success at a young age at places
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like NDTV and ETNOW, chucked it to become an entrepreneur, and is best known for SheThePeople.tv,
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a platform that aims to empower women, and she also now runs Gayatri, a comprehensive
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health ecosystem for women.
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All these links are in the show notes.
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Sisterhood Economy has some stunning insights on gender, and I love this conversation as
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I did this episode around three weeks ago in Delhi at her home in Gurgaon.
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She has a giant drum set in the living room as she's learning drums, and you'll find
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during this chat that she brings such excitement and enthusiasm to everything she does.
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And she also brings anger, which I love.
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It's an unapologetic, no-holds-barred anger at the lives of women around us.
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And it is expressed with a clarity that will make you pause during this episode because
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you want to write down something she said.
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Fantastic conversation.
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Before we go there, let's take a quick commercial break.
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In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
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There are many exercises, much interaction, and a lovely and lively community at the end
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The course costs Rs 10,000 plus GST or about $150.
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If you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing.
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That's IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing.
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Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
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a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Shaili, welcome to the Seen in the Unseen.
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Fantastic to be with you, Amit.
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Let's start by talking about your childhood because one of the sort of interesting things
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I read about you is that, is how well-traveled you are, that by 18 you'd seen 10 foreign
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countries, lived in many different cities, changed 17 schools, et cetera, et cetera.
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So tell me a bit about that childhood.
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Like I know you were born in Jalandhar in 81, but what sort of the journey from there?
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You know, what was your childhood like?
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What were your parents like?
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Take me through your early years.
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So it's interesting changing 17 schools.
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Yeah, that is a bit of travel, I think, within the school world as well.
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For me, the option to not travel was not even on the table.
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Born to a military dad.
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So essentially kind of saw the length and breadth of the country, literally lived there.
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So we lived in a small place called Chabua near Assam, in Assam.
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And then we spent majority of our growing up life that I have distinct memory of in
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This is, of course, all connected to the planes that my dad flew.
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So for us, stations and armed forces camps is where we literally grew up, which basically
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meant that you had only one shop that stocked everything you needed or the one badminton
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court where everybody had to pray roundels because, you know, there was not enough slots
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available through the evening.
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So I think growing up was a great sense of shared living.
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We're a big one these days about the shared economy, very much so back then.
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Potlucks, the way to go, no calls to a delivery app that will deliver food for you.
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I never thought about where people come from.
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They were people and they all come from where we were, literally, right?
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So essentially never really felt the creation of a stark identity of one's own in standard
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terms, you know, who you are, what your caste is, where you grow up, what your class is,
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And that was also this this element of being a multitudes person who came from all kinds
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of places and identified herself very differently from, let's say, from where I was born.
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I'm a Punjabi by name and by birth, never lived in Punjab, right?
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So for me, all of these things really shaped the person I became.
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And traveling countries, I think for my dad, one of the things that I was an early lesson
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from him seems very feminist now, but was not not something I really paid attention
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to when he said that you grow up and you earn your own money.
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And it was clear to me from my early teens that money is an important factor of where
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I have to be in life, right?
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This is not about how much it's about just being independent.
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And so when he took us around the world, whenever he got the opportunity to do so, he said at
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least before you choose to find whatever is your definition of settling, you should have
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had a childhood where I did my best to show you what I could.
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As a human being, I have valued exposure over education, always.
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Even now, if I have the option of letting my children lose in a farm for 10 days and
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miss school, I'll miss school.
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So that was the kind of childhood I had.
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Get up and go, sit in a car in the morning, land up on a new journey.
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We actually did a lot of driving journeys in India.
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We went from Gwalior to Kanyakumari in a car.
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And this is a tiny car, you know, a Montana.
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So it was really fascinating for me to have a childhood which was very fluid.
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It didn't come with a instruction booklet, right, that at class 10, you do this, at class
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12, you're going to do this.
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And at class 10 to 12, your parents will decide to freeze their location and just to finish
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your education because perhaps you need stability.
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In class 11, I changed three courses and three schools because my parents moved and they
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moved in places where there was no commerce.
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I had commerce initially.
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Then I had to, you know, moved into, move into non-medical and I'm like, I don't understand
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I'm not a physics person.
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I can understand chemistry, but not physics.
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Then I came back to India and I started commerce again.
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So you know, the teachers were very puzzled, how are you going to do commerce in two months?
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And I said, you know, for me, it's like very clear.
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If I have a desire to do something, I will find a way.
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It's just a bit about being from a standard middle-class house where being resourceful
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The situation is given.
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Now please find your answers.
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You know, so I was sort of raised like that.
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My parents are both Punjabi brought up in Punjab in a way.
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My dad happened to move into a scenic school when he was seven years old.
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So in that sense just happened to be in Punjab, but not quite right.
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My mother came from a traditional family.
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And so it was a marriage of a person who was extremely exposed, my dad, to a person who
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was moving out of a city for the first time with my mom.
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And when you move in the armed forces, it's a bit like going from the frying pan to the
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fire because, you know, the armed forces are so fluid and open-minded and exposed that
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everything seems like a shocker.
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So I think to an extent, from what I remember, my mother telling me that that was very much
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so her experience, you know, just casual parties and dancing, you know, which is very,
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very normal in the armed forces.
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As a result of which we grew up, I mean, we're two sisters, we grew up very free-spirited,
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I mean, we like to be the life of a room wherever we are, not because we want attention.
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That's just how we were raised that enjoy wherever you are, make the most of your circumstances.
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If your flights got delayed, enjoy the airport, you know, meet new people.
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So change was literally the constant that we live with.
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You know, we had a decent amount of austerity.
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We always seem like people who have access when you're in the armed forces.
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There's a different nature of access.
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Yeah, you'd love to see night flying or fighter jets like in Top Gun.
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But we didn't have like amazing libraries growing up, right?
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We were just stuck or reduced to school libraries.
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Videos like, you know, we literally had like one video shop, one copy of each film, and
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we would have to wait for hours and months and years for that neighbor to return it.
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And then we knew who was it going to the next and the next and the next.
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And when was it going to come to us?
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We knew that at four o'clock, the samosa jalebi guy would open only on Saturday and Sunday.
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And that was like the high point of everybody in the camp.
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So there were all these kinds of things that were small, but very deeply cherished.
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Bought my first pair of jeans from a from a cart puller who used to sell clothes in
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a little location called Murar in Gwalior.
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The only other shop there was Siddiqui Taylor's who did armed forces and uniforms for schools.
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So it was really interesting to see that, that sort of growing up, which basically meant
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that when I moved to Delhi and started working, you know, the first car came in because I
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earned my first car from my company.
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The first brand that I wore, I bought from my first set of earnings and I started earning
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I started earning when I was in class 12.
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Not because I had to, because I wanted to just happened that class 12, I started contributing
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to newspapers with self-addressed envelopes, which used to come back with a little smile
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But yes, those that used to get accepted were a big, you know, sort of big cheer.
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They also brought in money.
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But yeah, throughout college, I went to Venky.
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Funny reasons to go to Venky though.
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I was an all round kid, never wanted to come first, second, anywhere between third and
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seventh seemed like a good place to be.
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I wanted to have a lot of fun, play a lot of sport, hang with the guys, didn't ever
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want to go into a convent.
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So yeah, I did have all the girls colleges on offer.
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And then there was North Campus.
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And I was like, I don't know.
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This is like being between a rock and a hard place.
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North Campus means long mudrikas, mudrika is basically a long journey bus to Delhi University
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when there were no metros.
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So that just seemed like too hard a life, right?
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So I said no North Campus.
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I got through all colleges, but I said no North Campus.
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And in the South Campus, there were only girls colleges really speaking.
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And I was like, I can't go to a girls college.
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So I went to Venky and I found so many people who were just like me, who wanted to have
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a blast, who wanted to have guys in the college, who wanted to play sport.
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And my dad said, OK, I'll get you a bike.
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I think he traveled through a blue line for the first time.
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He was horrified and he decided to get me a bike,
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which changed my life entirely.
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So I think among the many pivots of my life, getting a two wheeler in first year of college
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was definitely a game changing moment in my understanding of what a woman can do.
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How did the bike change your life?
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You know, wheels are like wings.
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You always want to do things and you're like, oh, my God, I'm not going to do this
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because I don't want to be bottom pinched on a on a bus.
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Or I I'm scared of doing this, right?
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The fear of lurking around in some random street at seven in the evening
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because the bus is late or the auto is too expensive.
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It doesn't fit your bills and all of that.
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So I think that fear, I grew up in that fear, I'll be honest.
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I mean, camp life, 100 percent safe.
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But there are men everywhere. Right.
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And while there's always fear of discipline and authority in the armed forces,
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there is a civilian world.
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And that's part of the world that includes your schools,
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Chowkidars, for example, or you step out to a market and your parents leave you
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as two girls in a in a car that's locked till they finish the chores and come back.
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And you wonder what to do with all those stairs.
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So very much so was gripped in that fear growing up.
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And so when my dad gave me the option of that bike,
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I swear I would have just gone down to any damn college.
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I mean, I got through everything from Stevens to to LSR.
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But I made my choices that I wanted to be in a in a chill zone college,
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which was in South Campus.
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And the bike was just what I was looking for because it helped me step out,
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find a life outside of college, find work.
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I worked every single day of my college life.
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I stopped taking money from my parents for a large number of things.
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At that point, I felt a very different sense of.
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So, yes, I think that was it, really.
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You know, I often say this that luckily for me, my parents,
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when they were raising me, they emphasized a lot on the importance of confidence.
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And we don't do that enough.
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And I feel that that's a very important piece because it takes away
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so many intimidating moments of your life.
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And that confidence allows you to literally hop, skip and jump on some fronts.
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And that confidence essentially took me out to say, OK, let's find a job.
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I don't have to stay near college to get a job, right?
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Which basically meant I didn't have to settle for a job.
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I could go for a job that made that I made a choice for.
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And I did. I found out from people where I could go.
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I could drive up to Bahadur Shah Zafar Mark to the Times of India office,
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meet the editors, get some work going.
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I could do that to the Pioneer, where I had also written quite a bit.
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Then I started going towards South Delhi, where they're a bunch of new age,
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you know, website houses coming up back in 2000, 99.
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Right. This is actually 98 to 2001,
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when the first era of Y2K was it?
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Right. Y2K was on the onset.
#
There was an expectation of digital world emerging and all of that.
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There was a red boom before the NASDAQ crash of 2000 crippled everything.
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That's right. So there was this massive boom and everybody wanted a website,
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like something called a dot com.
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Right. I think that's what they called it, the dot com era.
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And so I found so much work as a writer and paid bills.
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But most importantly, paid bills for a party. Right.
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In college, what did one want?
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We wanted a safe place.
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Safety comes with money.
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And I'll elaborate that along this interview.
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But the second thing that comes with it is that,
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you're not answerable for anybody.
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So when people say, what does financial independence mean to you?
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I'm like, it just means two alphabets and an O.
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I said, if I can say no to something, that is the power of money.
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And that is the reason I want to have money.
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So I think for me, the the bike was a game changer because it helped me earn
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and it taught me what money meant to me.
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And I never looked back.
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And that's such an evocative and poignant phrase
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earlier when you said, but there are men everywhere, you know, which is
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I'm sort of interested in the role of circumstance
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and changing us in various ways.
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Like one small thing is, of course, you're getting the bike
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and how that empowers you in different ways.
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I'm also struck by that itinerant life, the army life, the traveling life,
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because I think for someone like me, an extreme introvert,
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it would just be very difficult to be uprooted every year or every few months
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and have to make new friends.
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And I simply would not be able to do it.
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I would probably withdraw into a shell or whatever.
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But there are others who are more outgoing.
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And for them, it's easier.
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And it strikes me that some people can then be forced to adopt a personality
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or to perhaps to amplify a part of the already existing personality,
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just to be able to get by and to kind of manage with this.
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It's that same jugaru middle class mindset that you, you know,
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you mentioned in a way.
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And, you know, I want to ask about the impact of all of the traveling,
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visiting all of these countries from two different points of view.
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And one was in the shaping of you yourself as a person
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that had you been in one static place, not seeing all of that world,
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I imagine you would have been very different.
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But is it easy for you to put a finger on the different ways
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or to perhaps look around at the people around you
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who haven't moved around as much as you and realize that difference?
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And that's one part of the question.
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And the the second part of the question is just about,
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did it make you look at the world differently?
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Because most of us growing up in the 80s and the 90s,
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the way you look at the world is so constrained, you know,
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especially for a woman, but really for everybody.
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You know, it's like you've been told a story about who you are
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and where you have to go and what you have to do.
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And you're stuck in that story. Right.
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And in your case, it seems that the traveling is exposing you
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to different ways of thinking and different kinds of people.
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And you have the extraordinary good fortune of having a dad
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who's telling you to get you have to earn money and so on and so forth.
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I remember I did a long eight hour episode with the legendary Shanta Gokhale.
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And she spoke of how in the 1950s, when she was going to college,
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her father told her never marry. Right.
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Which is such a remarkably enlightened thing for a father to say to her daughter.
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You know, and especially when you think of, you know, back in that day.
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So elaborate a bit on sort of all of that, you know,
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like apart from this, what were your parents like?
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What was your mother like?
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Because on the one hand, she is adjusting from what you said
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was a conventional upbringing to being part of the thing
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where you have to party, you have to do all of these things.
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You have to be more outgoing whether you are that way or not.
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And at the same time, she's mothering two kids.
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And I presume she's learning how to mother them
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as she herself is changing at the same time. Yeah.
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So, you know, the first part about being uprooted, you know,
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I've never really looked at shifting my base as an idea of uprooting.
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It always has been a sense of excitement and expectation of what lies ahead,
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what could I do, a new canvas, how can I play with this opportunity
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to meet new people, eat new things,
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you know, see new places, settle in new places and
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and just sort of, you know, the smells and sounds, so to speak.
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I'm a I'm a believer of many cities and their journeys
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are discovered through your eyes shut and just by what you put in your mouth
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and what elates your senses. Right.
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So I think for me, that's been one very, very special part.
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Yes, there's always been the little tug at the heart of losing some friends.
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But what happens is when you're geared up to kind of lose them,
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because that's what a physical transition does to you.
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You also know that life is such you meet them again.
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And particularly in the armed forces, it's basically one large family
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in transition in different places and you bump into the same neighbors again.
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Right. So there is that reconnect connect.
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I somehow interpret it as that moment, which gives you enough time
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to let the distance improve the relationship and bring love to it in some way.
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Because I still feel like I can go and meet somebody
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I met when I was in class three.
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And we would still reconnect with some fun things that had happened
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at that time and literally start the conversation.
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I meet a lot of people even now who are either with me in hostel
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or I met them in the armed forces with my parents and stuff like that.
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So I think there's also a visceral connection about just the type of people you are.
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And you know that this person knows where you're coming from.
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The other is that I've actually never really looked at my life
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where I'm not a big believer in compartmentalizing.
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I've probably done that professionally a few times.
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And maybe in hindsight, I don't think it works.
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Sometimes I had to compartmentalize because I was a woman.
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So you could only say that much.
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You could only raise that much of a voice, even in a sector like media.
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Or it wasn't what the times permitted me at that time.
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Like the times as in the time of our times.
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I just want to be careful, given that I'm a journalist, not the media house.
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So there's all of that.
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But I did see some value in what my very close friends,
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who've been close friends forever with the same people.
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Like, yeah, I see that in my husband.
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I see that in my cousins.
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They've just been like, I got admitted into Wellam.
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I chose not to go for it.
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It was the last minute decision.
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I just I wanted to make the choice of my parents.
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Transitionary life over sticking to a hospital.
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So that particular moment did come where lots of people felt,
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of course, it's a great school,
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but I did not want to get into a place and just land up forever in one place.
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I wanted hostile exposure, which I got in college.
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And I basically moved to a Air Force Girls hostel and I lived out of there.
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So, again, great milieu of people from different levels of education,
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some PhDs, some MA, some BA, you know, so a great mix of people.
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And it gave me everything that a hostile life needed to give me.
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And I had my bike that time.
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So it made my life a lot easier to adjust and enjoy what would be hostile life
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rather than remember, let's say, a strict warden,
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which really didn't quite happen in my case.
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So I did value a lot of thick long term relationships.
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But as I grew and I still feel this, I'm in my early 40s
#
and I look at the fact, you know, friendships don't necessarily
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get benchmark on length of knowing somebody.
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I have made really good friends.
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In like two days and then built and worked on that relationship.
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And perhaps I would say they're still young as a relationship,
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but do I passionately value them? I do.
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So I think for me, that's the other thing that one learns from being this person
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who's off a ship one day and on to another, that you you realize that everything
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around you is going to keep changing.
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It's sometimes your career, it's sometimes family, sometimes partners,
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sometimes anything. Right.
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How do you make the most of what you have?
#
So that was, I think, perhaps coming in from it's it's sort of distilled
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from my parents, fairly simple upbringing.
#
My parents happen to be from families that ran businesses,
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but not like as if some insane business that would pay for four generations.
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You know what I mean? Like like a business that had its ups and downs and whatever.
#
And so I think for all of us, it was very clear growing up
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as a nuclear family that had stayed away from the rest of the joint family,
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that you're on your own, figure it out.
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And that's how my parents raised me and my sister.
#
So my mom, as you said, had two girls
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who were being raised in a way that she wasn't raised.
#
So certainly there was conflict, this conflict of what she believed in
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and what was happening to her children.
#
Little by design and little just by, I guess, you know,
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we're all born with a wire of our own.
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And then we then stayed wired for life.
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And things we didn't accept or expect both.
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So my sister and I basically, if there is a terminology
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that Amartya Sen thought about the argumentative Indian,
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swear to God, we kind of fit into that term so well.
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You know, it we just have a why for everything.
#
And my parents must have answered a million whys for us.
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It was hard for my mom to raise us with this discomfort
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of what she was raised to believe the way things should be
#
and the way these things are turning out to be.
#
And by that, I mean a change in environment.
#
The time that I was in class five and cable TV emerged in India post
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Suddenly we're watching English television, right?
#
Like in a very different English and a different style.
#
You had like white people on television, which is not usual.
#
And then also the time I remember little, little things were signs.
#
And my mother laughs about them now, perhaps, you know,
#
we had an interesting argument about us not doing our homework,
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but watching the tennis match with Jim Courier and somebody else.
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I can't remember who's the other side.
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And my dad was like, let's just watch the match to hell with the homework.
#
Right. I never forget that incident.
#
It was so tiny in the scheme of things.
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And I remember what it did for me, you know, exposure versus education.
#
The fact that I just sort of lapped up tennis
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and what was going on in that world and saw what people were doing.
#
And it just sort of brought a different sort of understanding
#
of what what drives the world, right?
#
What can be rather than what should be.
#
So I think that was that was another thing.
#
This is also, by the way, the era that was certainly funny
#
that I'm saying that it's an era.
#
I mean, I'm very young.
#
Let me just contextualize that.
#
I feel very young as well.
#
This is like the 1990s, the early 1990s.
#
And, you know, we were essentially seeing only one kind of thing
#
in the market and also on the streets.
#
It was called the the dummy's guide to a career.
#
OK. And it was these thick books.
#
And so early enough, my dad bought a bunch of them.
#
We didn't have computers at that time.
#
Or certainly not. We couldn't afford one.
#
And the the dummy's guide to a career was essentially that defined
#
But basically meant that you took this line and you became a doctor.
#
You took this line and became an I.S. officer.
#
So imagining myself as a district collector was not something I had,
#
My dad was a fighter pilot.
#
He said, become an air hostess.
#
And I said, but that's not something of any interest.
#
And his point was, but you'll see the world.
#
And I'm like, yeah, but I want to be on a factory floor
#
running something that comes out of a machine and I can see it.
#
And it's not like I ended up doing it.
#
But, you know, like, I don't know why and how that fascinated me.
#
Perhaps because I think my dad very early on,
#
I think my first factory visit as a child was when I was class three.
#
I must have seen about 45 kind of factories from choir to how to make sunglasses
#
because we learned a lot on factory floors.
#
And my dad happily took us.
#
And they were the easiest ones with no cues
#
because nobody's children were dying to go into factories, except my dad's.
#
So we went to like Tirupur.
#
You know, we knew how the handloom worked at Coimbatore.
#
We saw how, you know, T-shirts were made.
#
We're very disappointed at one such visit because we're two young girls.
#
And we walk into this Tirupur factory and we're so upset.
#
They only have one T-shirt at that time.
#
The production line had one T-shirt.
#
And, you know, the owner came and said, take as many as you want.
#
And my sister said, you are only making one type.
#
How do you expect us to take enough?
#
What are we going to do with like tens of the same? Right.
#
So there were these funny things that matter to us.
#
But so essentially coming back to the fact that, yes, my mom
#
and dad were conditioned in environments where boys were full stop,
#
girls were comma and girls essentially had to find their way out of the household
#
and guys would stay and run the business.
#
But I think my dad having two daughters is sort of.
#
It was a bit of a quake in his life to figure out.
#
He's like, no, I can't have more kids.
#
And then this is what it is.
#
And let's just give them what they want.
#
So, yeah, so I think there's there's always been some conflict to that extent.
#
But what made it a lot easier with my for my parents was that we just didn't take.
#
We didn't take on some of their beliefs.
#
We rebelled for way too long till they gave up.
#
And we're thankful that we had the I should say this
#
with some amount of recognition of my privilege,
#
which is simply the fact that we had the luxury to not listen to our parents.
#
So that was something they encouraged.
#
The reason I say it's luxury is not only the fact that I have it,
#
but they let a lot of things pass, which is a.
#
Combination for success.
#
Lots to double click on there, and I am very struck also
#
by the phrase about boys being full stops and girls being commas.
#
What a beautiful way to put it.
#
Let me start by double clicking on
#
on the notion of friendship, for example, you know, like
#
I'm just a few years older than you, but we are both from the generation
#
that in a sense grew up to see this great transition
#
from an offline world to an online world where today we are online all the time.
#
Everything is essentially completely online.
#
And we grew up at a time where you are,
#
you know, you are part of communities of circumstance.
#
You are restricted by geography or restricted by which school you go to,
#
or which college you go to.
#
And those are the sort of friends you have.
#
And that's the kind of friends we make.
#
And then later on, suddenly you could you have the you can have communities
#
of choice based on shared interests or whatever, you know,
#
and which is incredibly liberating to, for example, to someone like me
#
or some of the introverts I've had on the show, like George and Singh
#
and so on, where we'll talk about how in the 90s
#
it would sometimes feel as if you have no friends or you have a handful of friends
#
or whatever. And then suddenly the world opens up.
#
And on the one hand, I see people like myself where most of my friends
#
come from these communities of choice, where you manage to reach out
#
and then geography doesn't matter anymore.
#
But then I had Abhinandan Sekri on my show and he was talking about,
#
hey, all my friends are from before I was 25.
#
I can't make any friends after that.
#
So I'm interested by, you know, your notions of friendship
#
and what kind of keeps it going, because, you know,
#
people have different approaches to friendship as well.
#
You know, people will often think of friendships and indeed all human
#
relationships as being instrumental in some way or the other.
#
And a lot of sort of conflicting views come into play here.
#
Like one definition of friendship, which I love, which a friend of mine
#
once told me is friendship is when you can just sit with a person
#
for a long, long time and neither of you has to say anything.
#
You're just comfortable like that.
#
And equally, another definition which kind of in a sense
#
militates against this is that you don't even have to know each other.
#
You can interact with someone online and you can feel this tremendous warmth
#
and you can feel like you really know the person.
#
Like yesterday I recorded with a friend of mine called Meeta Kapoor, right,
#
who is in publishing and heads a literary agency, CIE and all that.
#
And I've interacted a lot with her online when I was judging
#
a literary prize that she was administering.
#
But it was the second time we met.
#
And, you know, but there is that warmth and that chemistry and whatever.
#
So how do you sort of look at friendships?
#
Do you have friendships back from the time where you were in school,
#
And do you feel that there has to sometimes be an intentionality in friendships?
#
Once you decide that so and so is your friend,
#
you have to then make the effort of staying in touch and staying connected and all of that.
#
I don't have a single answer to this.
#
And I'll tell you why, because I have all kinds of friends
#
and I don't define friendship in one way, right?
#
I mean, in a simple Instagram way that comes to my head is that,
#
you know, the person I can spend four hours with it
#
and feels that it's only been 10 minutes and I have no pictures with that person.
#
To me, that is a huge value to friendship, right?
#
But I'm a big fan of having friends who I disagree with.
#
And that is actually taking me to this conversation around communities
#
One of the most magical parts of my growing up was essentially
#
not having the choice of finding the type of friend I wanted
#
or the type of community I wanted to be in.
#
It was just something that was there, right?
#
Now you always have the option of choosing to retract and stay away
#
or just enjoy it, right?
#
I think there was another thing that really helped us going was
#
and maybe we are now a population of overthinkers, right?
#
There's absolutely no overthinking about what things should be, where they should go.
#
Electricity has gone, the whole world has come out
#
and we're chatting with every human being on that street, right?
#
Which is pretty much next to whatever was called the dry Nala or something like that,
#
which is pretty common in the camps.
#
They make the best shortcuts.
#
So here for me, meeting so many people
#
like the Sharmas, the Chauhans, the Arunachalums, the Baruas.
#
I mean, I just remember them as their surnames
#
because that's that's how their homes were, right?
#
That's the Barua house.
#
That's the Arunachalum house.
#
And so for me, it was like people with great backgrounds,
#
with great stories, with with how they do what they do,
#
with how they cook what they cook, with the things they tell us about their childhood.
#
Right. I was horrified.
#
And I should I should cushion this by saying only because of my ignorance,
#
that people in different parts of our country marry within the family.
#
Right. It's not what we were taught in the Punjab, for example.
#
And same thing that, you know, there are there are parts of our country
#
where kitchens are sacrosanct, you know, for many people,
#
kitchens are places where even men don't want to enter
#
because it's supposed to be dirty or whatever. Right.
#
So, I mean, like, like, for example, when I went to Bombay,
#
I met I made friends who had amazing ways of keeping the kitchen.
#
I think the the Marathi kitchen is still like the epitome of shine.
#
You know, if I may say like, it's like the place of it's spiritual.
#
Anyway, so the thing I'm trying to say is that for me,
#
these these little layers about people,
#
they mattered a lot to my idea of friendship. Right.
#
Also about the people I made friends with.
#
Very strangely, not just my own peers, my age group,
#
I made great friends with like, like, you know, a young woman
#
who was recently married in the armed forces and just arrived into this camp.
#
And even though I was a young girl, I could connect with some of the things
#
that she was going through or vice versa.
#
Maybe she was able to connect with me.
#
So for me, I've got a large number of intergenerational friendships.
#
I think the other is that, like I was saying, that for me, it's very important
#
that my, you know, my nervous system comes alive when I'm with somebody.
#
And that is a big barometer for me for friendships.
#
If I learn something from someone, if someone's able to just tell me
#
a story of their life, not because I want them to sit there and narrate a story.
#
I mean, it all happens very organically or grabbing a drink.
#
And somebody tells me about how they worked and at what point
#
they stop talking to their dad or what point they do something else,
#
you know, things that are just crossroads in everyone's lives.
#
And to me, those are the friendships that stay.
#
I love being with people who who contest political connotations
#
of who people should be, who shouldn't be, what they are.
#
I'm not a fan for linear thinkers, and this has nothing to do with friendships.
#
I mean, in some cases, I would overlook people's linear thinking
#
if I love the person that much.
#
But mostly, if I have to make a first attempt to build friendships,
#
I want people to be literally mad.
#
I want them to have crazy desires and passions.
#
And I really want to know what that is.
#
And it could be as simple as I do nothing all day.
#
I'm like, to me, that's a passion.
#
And I would love to know how does somebody manage that?
#
So I'm kind of inclined
#
just as a human being towards people who
#
who have like a nebulae of action in their heads.
#
And and I find that that that makes friendship very rich.
#
I don't believe that I barrow.
#
I don't I don't put my friends through a barometer
#
or whether she supported me on that argument.
#
I don't like getting into that space at all,
#
because then it's only a judgy space and it's no longer a logical space.
#
Friendships in that sense, for me, are about people who agree, disagree, who
#
who also are more passionate, but also, I think, in some ways, who
#
who don't necessarily just mirror who I am.
#
Right. I don't like the idea of I mean, I think we all go through this moment.
#
I certainly I don't like myself 24 7.
#
And I I'd like to like myself because I think that's
#
at least girls should see that my daughter should see I like myself and all that.
#
But, you know, the world's complicated.
#
It's very imperfect and we find it very hard to deal with imperfection.
#
So so the armed forces upbringing helped me helped me with that.
#
It helped me with I think culture is a big part of friendship.
#
Like I say this to a lot of my friends in Delhi,
#
especially if the school is too homogeneous in terms of where people come from.
#
I said, this is not the education we should be seeking,
#
not for our kids, not for ourselves, because you're essentially
#
kind of prototyping yourself and wanting to live a prototype life.
#
I think you have to go through pilot projects nonstop in life, and then it's fun.
#
So changing school by changing cities and countryside and locations,
#
that's what it teaches you.
#
I was in a classroom of four when my parents were posted in Moscow.
#
Two Nigerians, one Pakistani and I.
#
And the only reason I was in this central school is because the Indian
#
Indian government has a rule that you cannot go
#
to a city overseas that has an Indian school
#
and access, let's say, the British or the American school.
#
In hindsight, I think that that little classroom,
#
which really did upset me because it was a very unclassroom like learning, right?
#
It forced me to not land up at a British American school.
#
And then I would totally have been a prototype, right?
#
The 11th, 12th American come back or go straight to America
#
and do some sort of thing like that.
#
Nothing wrong with the choices people make, but
#
it helped me rewire myself to understand what it is to be in a school
#
where in a class there are only four people and how you can learn
#
from somebody who is based out of Nigeria, a very different
#
sense of economics than what you have.
#
And that taught me a lot or a lot.
#
I learned in, let's say, in Bangalore schools where I did central schools.
#
I should say that aloud. I'm very proud of that.
#
So I did KV number two, number 18, things like that.
#
And lots of the schools, at least about six, seven of them were KVs.
#
And Kendra Vidyalaya is our great place for pilot projects.
#
So I think everything from how people break windows,
#
how do you enter a class from a broken window?
#
You know, what all can be stashed under your desk?
#
How do you learn in SUPW to knit when you're in class three?
#
How do you make bouquets with practically some gas?
#
How do you burn utensils with two matches in scouts and guides?
#
Jazz, I learned there, you know, all my real learning happened here.
#
Right. Including going and figuring out, you know, this is what people
#
get ekey about because now it's fashionable.
#
I went to my school canteen and had a Ram Laddu.
#
I'm like, I have been growing up eating Ram laddus and
#
Imli ki chutney and little starfruit on a thela from the day I was in school.
#
Right. These are things that have become fashionably pillow packed
#
with jujube style gummy bears.
#
I was like, bhaiya, wo jar me se I'm helping myself
#
and giving 50 paise to get it.
#
So these are things that I really value because they're so rudimentary.
#
They're so basic. They have no airs.
#
So I'm always that kind of person, you know, kind of giving up the.
#
I think it's so apt that the daughter of a pilot should do pilot projects.
#
But she she has damn big fear of flying.
#
Yeah. No, the damn big fear I have, which is actually now inevitable,
#
is that I can't follow every single interesting thread that I think about
#
while you're speaking, because there are so many of them.
#
But I loved the image of, you know, there's a power outage
#
and everybody's outside and you're talking to the Sharmas and the Arunachalams
#
and the Baruas and all of that.
#
And that takes me to something the author Anshul Malhotra once told me.
#
Anshul's written this lovely book on partition, now multiple books.
#
And when I recorded with her, she spoke about how when she was researching
#
for the book, she'd gone to Pakistan and she was sitting there
#
with a family that had crossed over at the time.
#
And at one point, they go, the elders who had actually physically crossed over
#
themselves, they go into this diatribe against Hindus, Hindus, I say,
#
Hindus, I say, Hindus, I say.
#
And then they realize Anshul is sitting there and they say,
#
you're not a daughter, you're a good son.
#
And that got me to thinking about a subject I've tried to explore with many guests,
#
which is a difference between the abstract and the concrete,
#
that in the concrete, when we encounter people, we can be human with them.
#
We can make human connections.
#
We can find the idiosyncrasies charming.
#
But in the abstract, we can learn to hate each other.
#
Like a lot of the concepts that I think are tearing our country apart,
#
whether they're notions of a certain kind of nationalism or purity
#
or whatever, are all abstract concepts. Right.
#
So it is possible for someone to say hate Muslims,
#
but be perfectly polite to an actual Muslim that you see.
#
And in your story, what I see is that you're constantly engaging with the concrete.
#
And in the times we had to engage with the concrete, in a sense. Right.
#
So you're out there and you're talking to the Baruas in the Arunachalums.
#
You're being moved about all the time.
#
So you have to make new friends and talk to people.
#
You are going to the Thela Wala and you're having Imli ki Chutney.
#
And all of those things are happening.
#
And in modern times, my worry is that even when we are with someone in the concrete,
#
we can get lost in the abstract because you could just be looking into the black screen
#
in front of you. Right.
#
So you'll go to a nearby cafe and everybody who is sitting alone
#
and even most of the people who are not sitting alone are looking into their phones.
#
You know, in fact, you know, the one time I wasn't doing that
#
and my battery had run out and I was sitting alone in a cafe.
#
People were looking at me like I'm some kind of sociopath.
#
You know, and and what happens then is that you lose more and more
#
that touch of the concrete, of those human connections.
#
Like, why are other people's stories fascinating?
#
They're fascinating because you're making that human to human connection
#
and it's a concrete thing. Right.
#
They tell you something, it awakens something within you.
#
And is that something that you feel we need to be on the watch out for
#
or that is a problem, this constant disconnection from each other?
#
Even when we are together and we might be connected online,
#
but a lot of the nature of that connection is an abstract thing,
#
where especially on social media, you join your little tribe,
#
you form your little echo chambers and everything is so to, you know,
#
use another word that you mentioned, judgy,
#
but you're always judging others, attacking others,
#
because doing that makes you feel more knowledgeable and more virtuous.
#
So what's, you know, what are sort of your thoughts on, you know,
#
the abstract versus the concrete in this sense?
#
So, you know, I have multiple thoughts there, also because I don't want to take
#
an absolute stand on this, because I
#
I see a great value in in my little black screen.
#
You know, it's it takes me places where my world hasn't.
#
And that's really an example of why I wrote this book in the first place. Right.
#
I sometimes meet people and that's only started happening
#
after she the people was born, the platform that I set up
#
is because I realized I was making connections
#
with people I'd never even seen, and they would either meet me
#
or drop me a message saying, you know, today I was able to tell my mother
#
that what she was saying was wrong, because I could prove it to her
#
that, you know, all of you who are having this conversation
#
in this this digital world on our black screen
#
are trying to make an effort to change what has not had
#
one on one physical connections.
#
That's just a little context, and I'll keep that aside and come back to it.
#
I hear what you mean when it comes to, you know, my example of when
#
there's a light outage.
#
I actually think that the fundamental problem is not about
#
the concrete or the abstract.
#
I think the fundamental problem is that a lot of people today are making
#
some of these very stark, stark extreme conversations
#
as the conversations of the identity.
#
Many of them may come from certain places of
#
They have good reason to do that,
#
basically make their issues, their identity.
#
These things were not very, very visible back then.
#
Even then, the one thing that I even look back and say is that
#
I actually see myself so non-religious as a character, as a human being,
#
because to me, there is no greater
#
power than being able to make connections
#
and be tolerant with people of different choices.
#
So I think in that sense, having
#
raised myself on that diet, I'm pretty unfazed by this
#
incessant desire of people to find their identity through the abstract
#
because it gives them an identity, right?
#
It gives them the comfort of an identity sitting in a room like this,
#
which is a happy study where they can comment on something that has happened
#
in a part of the world that they've not even stepped into.
#
It also gives me a big red flag because I'm inherently a journalist
#
who kind of sees the necessary
#
space today required for saying all sides of a story.
#
So I think what is happening is that
#
we are as humans becoming terribly lazy
#
and we want to be manifested in little squares of Instagram.
#
And that is to me problematic, right?
#
As much power as it has to change, it has that much power
#
to make you conceited and silly because you're constantly seeing yourself,
#
you put something out there, it's like a little release you've done.
#
And now you have sort of left it for the world to deal with
#
and you feel very good about yourself.
#
I just find that really transient as an idea.
#
So I am struggling as much as you are.
#
And perhaps again, you know, it is these days,
#
I think generations change with three years or something like that,
#
because people who are three years younger to you have a very different view.
#
And the next six will have an even different view
#
when you keep thinking that suddenly you sound like you belong to an era.
#
But really, these conversations must happen in person.
#
They must at least start somewhere and get to a physical space
#
simply because they bring that that humanity back.
#
Right. They bring back a sense of feeling.
#
Multiculturalism, to me, has been just the way I live.
#
Even after I chose not to be married, let's say, to an armed forces officer
#
and chose a life, what in the armed forces is called civilian
#
and basically chose to have a house of my own and stay in one place.
#
You know, I realized that I can't live with the same kind of people.
#
I mean, we at any point have all kinds of religions represented in our families,
#
in our staff, which to me is sometimes bigger than family.
#
And I find that that life is so much more enriching
#
than anything I know of.
#
Right. Anything I know of.
#
So I am always at conflict to to take a side on this abstract versus concrete scene,
#
because I think both have their, you know, their energies.
#
But if somebody is trying to fake it,
#
if somebody is trying to fake it, it's going to be the same in both sides.
#
If I point out, I wasn't condemning black screens, per se.
#
I mean, I think I know.
#
I mean, this technology is such a huge boom.
#
We're hoping we're being heard on somebody's black screen anyway.
#
Heard on somebody's black screen.
#
Indeed. And, you know, technology more than anything else.
#
And we'll talk more about this has empowered so many of us
#
who didn't have a voice and especially can hopefully solve some of our problems
#
with gender. But you mentioned the sort of the
#
you used to face Instagrammable.
#
And I'm just thinking of, you know, I think one of the pressures
#
that this generation does face and, you know, Jonathan Haidt's written about
#
how this has been a particularly a problem for teenage girls in the US.
#
You said it's a gone up mental health issues are the pressures of social media
#
that Instagram forces us to compare our real lives
#
with other people's projected lives.
#
And it can never match up.
#
And and which, according to Haidt
#
and according to what, you know, figures and studies show
#
has affected teenage girls more than otherwise.
#
Like I imagine, like if those pressures were there in your time,
#
then perhaps you would have given a little more thought to shouldn't I join
#
a cool college like Stephens or LSR rather than, you know,
#
go to North Campus or whatever.
#
And of course, one of the delights of getting your bike
#
would be all the pictures you could post from different angles of you
#
on the bike and all of that.
#
And today you're a parent and you have kids growing up as well in in this world.
#
And like you said, you know, your mother had to figure out how to parent you
#
because it was a different world from what she had grown up in.
#
And in a sense, it's the same with you.
#
You know, so how do you how do you kind of and I know it's a digression
#
and we'll come back to your story, but how do you sort of view
#
this in these changing times?
#
Because you are in that sense, you're a settled person
#
in the sense that you are who you are.
#
You know, you've become what you were in a different kind of time.
#
But now, you know, it's a completely different world for them.
#
So back when I was making college choices,
#
my extended family was horrified that I was letting go of Stevens.
#
Luckily, I was not horrified.
#
It's a beautiful college, loads of friends.
#
And I love the way the campus is.
#
I just wanted a life that was more comfortable.
#
And North Campus back then did nothing for anybody who wanted to earn.
#
You could only go to Patel chest and eat some something,
#
you know, like whatever I forget, bhel puri.
#
So I wanted that to be my weekend life.
#
And I let that be my weekend life.
#
It's a different matter.
#
I had to hitch rides, you know, showing my thumb up for those of you
#
who've been in the 80s and 90s and had to hitch rides on Dholakua to North Campus.
#
But brands have been no different.
#
Today, the brands are called technology apps.
#
Back then, it used to be like people in my college, I remember,
#
they wouldn't be caught dead in something that didn't speak of a brand.
#
Right. I'm pretty positive that 80s
#
was the time when the logo alone was driving T-shirt sales.
#
Right. It's probably true even now, but at least we are wanting to look beyond it.
#
Right. So I think it just comes in different packages.
#
It's very much so alive.
#
This constant question about who do you work for?
#
Right. If you're not a doctor engineer,
#
I think they were all equivalents of what we call Instagram today.
#
Right. Or brands today.
#
You all had to kind of you had to get the you had to get the green
#
tick from society, as a friend of mine said, because I went to Madras to study.
#
He said, I'm a Tam Bram who's choosing not to be an engineer.
#
You have no idea the pressure I'm under.
#
Right. And the fact that he didn't choose to go to San Jose
#
was like the death knell on his life and career.
#
So I totally thought that women and particularly people of our time
#
when we were our time in who went to college in the late 90s, essentially
#
suffered this and suffered it in a big way.
#
I had 90 percent marks and I was making a choice
#
in a college which was not, you know, Hindu or Stevens,
#
even though I had my courses there.
#
So the question was, what is it that I was planning to do? Right.
#
I think that's the part you start becoming
#
a teen to an adult at when you say, I'm taking a decision.
#
It's my decision and I will live with it.
#
I think Mark Twain said this, right.
#
You first collect your information, collect your facts
#
and then decide what you want to do with it.
#
I'm a bit that sort of person.
#
So I want to define what I was to be.
#
I did not want somebody else to define my identity, which, by the way,
#
at that point to me, was going to Stevens would define my identity
#
and not me defining what I was choosing.
#
I've taken that decision at many times in my life with many large brands.
#
I think the part that you talk about these kind of
#
make-believe identities that we have.
#
My worry is not so much about people
#
who are actually spending copious amount of time on social media.
#
My worries, people are busy making fake profiles of themselves
#
and then believing that that's who they are.
#
When I say fake profiles, I basically mean that it's not like the profile is
#
fake fake, but it's like that they're creating a personality for some themselves.
#
I think that bothers me that that bothers me and concerns me
#
because that's really what I don't want myself or my kids to be.
#
Or anyone. I don't wish that for anyone,
#
because the drop from that height is going to be irreparable.
#
If your day is driven by checking who people liked,
#
which people liked what I put out, and why did that person not like it?
#
So I think it's about and therefore takes me back to what I was earlier
#
saying about kind of being OK to be uprooted.
#
When you know things are temporary, you're like, you know,
#
I'm not going to stick with this like it's my life, right?
#
I'm going to use this to what I need to use it and then move on.
#
But the minute you make that your most important thing,
#
you kind of lose who you are.
#
And this plays into that idea of the importance of instilling confidence
#
over anything else, because if you're confident,
#
you'll be fine when you're falling, you'll be fine when you're rising.
#
And you know how much of that rise is.
#
Temporary, I mean, I mean, at some point,
#
I could say that about my own career as a person who was the nine p.m.
#
you know, business anchoring star.
#
The day I decided to get off it, I got off it.
#
It's like my share of dopamine is going to be off.
#
And how will I take it?
#
My parents were not so worried.
#
They might have said this to me at some point that.
#
How can you let go of a salaried job?
#
You know, it's the it's the way we're raised, the way my parents are raised.
#
How what do you mean you're going to do a business like all of that?
#
But I think the most thing that they were worried about
#
would not verbalize is that what if I regret not seeing my face on television?
#
So I'm just saying if one has been raised or one is convinced of who you are,
#
this stuff doesn't matter.
#
This stuff becomes secondary.
#
And that to me is an important lesson.
#
I mean, that happens to be a lesson that I personally had.
#
But I think it's a lesson across the world.
#
Instagram is not forever.
#
It's probably going in a year or two.
#
I keep asking myself, what is the next?
#
Let me get on to it now.
#
But what I'm trying to say is that these things are in and out.
#
And so therefore, we are all in that journey to say, OK, social media, digital.
#
The next thing you and I might be doing, like a Web 3 interview at some point.
#
Fundamentals, therefore, don't change.
#
And if some of us can keep reminding ourselves and our children that
#
it's important, hugely important.
#
I do that with my kids and I'm learning.
#
Motherhood for me has been a complete blast because I feel like a student.
#
There is nothing that my children are doing to me,
#
which has been done by me to my parents.
#
My daughter has questioned me three times as to why her name is not first
#
in the dedication in this book.
#
Why is it her brothers?
#
And I have not taught her the F for feminism yet.
#
So I don't know where it's coming from.
#
It only is very exhilarating to remind ourselves that children are born feminists.
#
You don't have to teach them.
#
Just don't teach them otherwise.
#
You know, I'm I'm struck by
#
whenever I speak with a guest who tells me about the decisions
#
they took when they were in their teens.
#
And, you know, they tell me with such certainty that this is why we did it.
#
And there is so much clarity.
#
And part of it is perhaps hindsight, but part of it is not.
#
They knew what they were doing. They took great decisions.
#
And I'm like, Jesus Christ, I look, think of myself at that age
#
and the zero clarity, everything is just a cloudy mess.
#
And I'm just wondering about that clarity and the role that confidence plays in that.
#
Because I think sometimes even if you don't have all the information
#
for clarity to be possible, as long as you're confident
#
and you have decisiveness, it amounts to the same thing.
#
Right. That you're taking action no matter what the action is.
#
You're taking action. You're sure of why you're taking it.
#
And, you know, you've spoken earlier about how your parents instilled
#
And over here, again, you're confident about your decisions,
#
you know, that you're joining, that you're not going to Stevens or Hindus.
#
And instead, you're joining this other college.
#
And so when you kind of look back,
#
do you find yourself precociously clear about these things?
#
Or do you simply think that you were confident, you knew you would figure it out
#
and therefore you could take those decisions and it didn't matter?
#
Yeah, I think this is a great question.
#
And I think maybe in hindsight, I have far more understanding of why
#
I took certain decisions and why they turned out to be all right for me.
#
Right. I can also see sometimes, and especially in our world today, right,
#
which where you went and where you worked sometimes can help you much easier.
#
Like I'm a startup founder now.
#
If I had gone through certain colleges and schools and, you know,
#
Ivy Leagues and had co-founders who worked in certain consulting firms,
#
I might have found it much easier to raise 10x.
#
But this is not what drives me from my childhood, right?
#
If I have to be the same person who's doing what 45 others are,
#
And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong.
#
I'm just simply saying that I don't do this by design.
#
I do this by error and madness.
#
And it's very simple to me that the reason that confidence was,
#
you know, I sort of tilt so much on that term and we can call it anything.
#
We can call it self-belief.
#
We can call it whatever you want is simply because it allowed me
#
to stand by my wrong decisions also.
#
And I took many wrong decisions, right?
#
But at least I didn't blame anybody.
#
So I think being comfortable in your own skin is the only thing
#
that brings you longevity in in whatever they call life, really,
#
because I don't want to be stuck.
#
Living a philosophy that somebody else has offered me,
#
I'm happy to interpret 10 of them and make my own,
#
but I have to make my own.
#
And I think that to me is very important.
#
And I say this because I have never forgotten.
#
And this is the practical answer, because I'm putting the parents
#
We're a country, 1.4 billion people.
#
Even if all of us are educated,
#
who is somebody going to listen to?
#
Why are some of our leaders who they are?
#
Why do we listen to a certain kind of speaker
#
and we don't listen to a certain kind of speaker?
#
It's not about their language.
#
It's not about their mastery or oration in English.
#
It's about what they say, how they say it, how they take people along,
#
how they make connections.
#
And somehow storytelling for me has been a very central part
#
of life from the time I was a baby.
#
And I'll tell you why. And nobody called it storytelling.
#
My granddad is a basketball player
#
who's completely in love with poetry, Urdu poetry.
#
He grew up in Kapurthala and became India's first,
#
independent India's first basketball captain.
#
Obviously, like most sports people, a 35 career was over,
#
set up an industry which he aptly named Sportsman Rubber Industries.
#
And he moved into business, right?
#
He was terrible at business, OK?
#
And I don't know what his life could have been otherwise.
#
But what one thing he did well,
#
he enriched his life with words and poetry.
#
And I keep thinking about what is it that attracted him towards it?
#
And I didn't have an answer for 35 years of my life, but I still now think
#
he became this this love of the city because of how he could appreciate
#
or talk or deliver a share just at the apt moment.
#
Not because he was some famous poet, but he just basically heard a lot of it.
#
So I just feel like between sport and exposure,
#
he brought out a personality of his that could beat any rich man of that city.
#
The same thing, I think, was true for my dad.
#
He's a military guy who trained on Russian aircraft
#
and brought the French jets into the country.
#
But he's a poet at heart.
#
And even now, if he actually just for a moment stop thinking defense,
#
I know that he'll sit and write a really nice poem.
#
So I think just kind of having the chance to see these oblique personalities
#
of my own family in some ways or the other, or my uncles or even my grandmom,
#
who's, you know, who I think is definitely almost 90 now.
#
She is, you know, she moved from Lahore in the partition time.
#
She's enamored by Nehru and Gandhi.
#
And, you know, like the girl with two plaits would sit around wherever they were talking.
#
But she came and she wrote and she spoke about things that she did.
#
And what they told me was stories, morning till evening stories. Right.
#
My parents lived abroad for some time.
#
They left me with my grandparents. Again, stories.
#
I think these things just reminded me that you can tell a story and grip a person.
#
You don't have to be educated.
#
You don't have to go to the best schools that people call the best schools.
#
You can go to simple schools.
#
I'm a great example of that.
#
I don't know which school I am from.
#
I just know the last school I went to.
#
And I changed 17 schools. Right.
#
At times, I know this sounds almost frivolous and perhaps
#
it's a bit funny when I say that.
#
But it is the reality that the last 15 to 20 years,
#
many people like me who have not spent enough time overseas
#
have been asked, how do you speak this good English?
#
Or how do you know these words?
#
Like, I'm in Hong Kong and I spoke about something.
#
I'm like, how can you even, you know, like, where is your accent?
#
And I don't even know what accent they're looking for.
#
Or I went recently to Bangalore and I spoke at a startup event
#
and they were like, these people were like, can you teach us?
#
How do you speak without fear on stage?
#
And I'm thinking to myself, this comes so easily to me, right?
#
There's always a talent gap in the world.
#
At least I now know what is my ability to fill,
#
because I keep looking at all of these startup guys and how do you
#
how do these guys do it, man?
#
I really need to know how do they make big startups?
#
But what I'm trying to say is that all of these realities
#
and realizations took me back to that very point when my dad said,
#
it doesn't matter what kind of education that you pursue.
#
When I say education, I'm thinking it in terms of bookish.
#
I'm not talking holistic education,
#
but I'm just simply saying that it's stuck with me.
#
And I raised my kids like that.
#
We in COVID moved to Little Patch on the Hills.
#
Just told them to dig up earthworms and get to know them.
#
Learn how to put a seed and grow it.
#
Learn how to clean a village or collect garbage and show others
#
how they can also join this, right?
#
Go and eat in the villagers house, play with their children.
#
Not because I'm trying to give them exposure of the farm.
#
I don't have that sense of them, I don't have that sense of other people.
#
I really think that's the reality of the world.
#
If you can grow something, you can live.
#
Pretty much it. Just the same thing.
#
A man can go to the kitchen, he'll live without a wife, without a problem.
#
Same thing for a woman.
#
She can go in the kitchen, she can cook.
#
Basic skills sorted, you know.
#
So these things, I think, to me, have been a very
#
central part of this whole confidence curve.
#
To me, it's not as if it's like a...
#
It's a session I will buy on LinkedIn by paying 800 rupees.
#
It's just the sense that I am designing the person I am going to be.
#
Whether it's good, bad or ugly, I will deal with it.
#
You know, like many other people,
#
I have taken very, very tough decisions and told myself,
#
OK, at the end of the day, the only person who's going to be hurt is me.
#
And I'm fine with that.
#
I'll double down on a sort of a double click, rather, on your phrase
#
about being comfortable in your own skin.
#
And it strikes me that, you know, as we are growing up,
#
as we go through our teenage years, there are these two simultaneous anxieties
#
that we have to deal with.
#
And one is the anxiety of what others will think of us.
#
And you want validation, you want to fit in and all of that.
#
And it seems to me that in your case, amazingly enough, there's not much of that.
#
You know, while I think most people grapple with it all their lives
#
and never quite let go of that anxiety.
#
And the other anxiety I want to ask you about is that anxiety
#
of finding yourself, figuring out what you want to do.
#
Like at one level, it feels quite clear to me what you don't want to do.
#
You don't want somebody else's narrative imposed on you.
#
So you're not going to Stevens and you're not doing X.
#
You're not following any of the dummies guide to blah, blah, blah. Right.
#
But how did you then begin to sort of figure out who you are
#
and what you want to do?
#
And this thing you said right at the end just now about how
#
when you do things because you are deciding the person that you want to be.
#
And that also interests me a lot, that role of intentionality in shaping yourself.
#
So then it becomes like almost a dual process.
#
So the first is finding yourself just in the sense of, OK,
#
I know what I don't want to do, but what do I want to do?
#
And then it becomes a question of, you know, that intentionality
#
in terms of shaping who you are, not necessarily just in a career term
#
that I want to be a journalist tomorrow.
#
So today I will do this.
#
I will go to this college. I will do that.
#
But just in that broader sort of personal sense.
#
So I just want to add, I know we spoke about college
#
and it sort of become the conversation, but this was just a reference
#
to say things that were referred to as branded back then. Right.
#
Or what was expected of me, right.
#
90 percent or whatever.
#
But I was making choices.
#
My other choices are far more attractive.
#
You know, like I said, my pair of wheels
#
or the ability to earn and pay my own bills.
#
These all essentially shaped me.
#
But I think the point about intentionality is this.
#
None of us or certainly I had no capability
#
of sort of planning a recipe and saying this is what I'm going to be.
#
And that's not how I kind of also approach things.
#
While I do make an extra effort to not kind of imitate
#
or try be like somebody else, which is essentially to know
#
what I don't want to be, I also don't have a simple
#
experiment to who I want to be.
#
But I'm willing to let myself.
#
And the reason I say that is because in one sense, I was fairly clear
#
that in class five, when I first read the news
#
through a dot matrix printout, right.
#
And I still remember there's some dots were missing
#
and I couldn't get those words right.
#
I was on the assembly reading the news and in some funny way,
#
you know, after a news, typically people don't clap.
#
But a lot of the people clapped after my news and I was very amused.
#
So I asked them and the principal said, you spoke your news very well.
#
That day, I made up my mind to be a newsreader till class 12.
#
I wanted to be a newsreader.
#
And when it came to going to college, I bumped into somebody
#
because I was very clear I'll join a journalism course.
#
And this person worked, I think, with one of the newspapers back then.
#
Just stray conversation.
#
And he said to me, don't take journalism.
#
He said, pick any subject, whatever you like.
#
Master one, pick up an honor subject.
#
You'll still become a journalist.
#
Just never occurred to me.
#
Those rapidex books and those dummies for careers
#
were just clear to me in my head.
#
But this guy broke it all down to me in exactly one sentence, right.
#
But it made complete sense to me
#
that pick a subject that you love, enjoy and choose what you do.
#
Did I enjoy doing economics by third year?
#
I think I would never do it again.
#
But, you know, it came handy.
#
It sort of drafted my journey from wanting to be a newsreader
#
to becoming a business journalist.
#
And for those who don't differentiate,
#
there's a huge difference between a journalist and a newsreader.
#
So I think that was great.
#
Same thing happened with me when I joined CNBC.
#
Two out of 65 people in my batch of journalism school got jobs.
#
OK, two jobs, period, period,
#
because television and print and everything.
#
This was just that transitionary period of the dot com bust.
#
And people were not hiring and television had gone from one to many channels.
#
And I was like, who's going to ever leave CNBC?
#
But as luck would have it, CNBC decided to move to Bombay.
#
And I couldn't imagine myself in that little piddly salary
#
hanging on to that little handle inside the local train.
#
Fast asleep for two hours till I reached Vassai, not happening.
#
I was not because I'm some fancy lady who doesn't want to do this.
#
I couldn't afford that.
#
I couldn't imagine a life for five hours.
#
And I also felt that, you know, Bombay is a city
#
that needed you to earn much more to live, still is.
#
So I made my choices, right?
#
I joined what was a startup at NDTV,
#
which was going to become a business channel, not going to become who knew.
#
So I'm just saying that the intent can't be so planned.
#
And I'm very happy being unplanned, very happy being unplanned.
#
And the reason for that being unplanned essentially is
#
I'm very methodical, very ambitious in what projects I might take up.
#
But I totally see myself that, you know, if I'm going to actually live till 90,
#
I should at least have six more careers.
#
I just don't see why or why not, right?
#
Never thought I'll be an entrepreneur.
#
Never thought I could do business.
#
Never thought I'll ever leave journalism in its real sense.
#
But at the time I left, I don't think I have been luckier
#
in terms of the timing of it.
#
So I think, you know, this whole intention, it sounds like possibilities.
#
And I think in hindsight, a lot of people would say, especially, I guess,
#
in a sort of startup way, I could say, oh, you know what, really?
#
Looking back, I kind of figured this would be the next thing.
#
It'll make me sound amazing.
#
Right. Because you take a chance.
#
And only thing that you need to take a chance, honestly,
#
is having a little bit of savings,
#
which is the only reason I tell people that
#
risks should be taken if you have your baseline money in the account.
#
I especially say this to women, because for women firstly, to have the intent
#
and then to not follow what other people's intent is, takes a bloody lot of guts.
#
And I think at many places I had to resist
#
falling in that trap where girls had to do what they had to do, even in college.
#
I'm struck by what you said about Bombay, that you have to be rich to live there,
#
because when I was sort of traveling to your house just now with Amartya,
#
who's helping us with the sound, and he was asking about, you know,
#
where all have I lived?
#
And I said, I lived for a year in Delhi in 94, 94, 95.
#
Right after college, I was here for my first job.
#
And my main reason was I thought Delhi is a great city to live in if you're rich.
#
But otherwise, it's not, you know.
#
And Bombay, I found, was awesome.
#
I fit in really well, though I would not relive the years I spent in that local train.
#
You know, landing up at Dadar station and slipping on some sack of
#
sabzi, because the station was only full of sacks of vegetable.
#
And you didn't know where your foot was going.
#
That's the memory of first time arrival in Bombay.
#
You literally arrive there, you know.
#
You know, the first time I saw Dadar station, it felt like,
#
you know, we used to play those video games back in those days,
#
Wolfenstein and the Prince of Persia and all of that.
#
And Dadar station felt like a level, felt like, you know, one of those levels
#
in one of those video games with all these different kind of bridges
#
and everything going in different places.
#
And you could just, you know, spend a day in that place.
#
You were almost chopped.
#
So tell me about the journalism bit, because fine, you take your decisions,
#
you stumble into it, you're doing what you're doing.
#
But you did very well in journalism.
#
You know, CNBC, NDTV 24 7, NDTV Profit.
#
You know, you again kind of travel the world.
#
You covered the G20, the World Economic Forum,
#
the Bretton Woods Conference in 2011 and so on and so forth. Right.
#
You interviewed really, really big people.
#
The biggest names there are mostly men, as you point out.
#
And one would think that when you're in the middle of it, that is success.
#
How else would you define success in a place like NDTV Profit or CNBC?
#
So what was that itch which made you not look at it as success
#
and not get complacent and want to move on?
#
And, you know, what was going on there while you were in that process?
#
Because I can imagine if you're someone in your 20s
#
and you're doing all of these things and you're meeting all of these people.
#
What else is there? You made it, man.
#
You know, you are the envy of everyone who studied journalism with you, no doubt.
#
And yet there's something else that's going on in your head.
#
So. So let me take a quick detour to to college,
#
because journalism was not my, you know, standard option of choice,
#
as I mentioned, I picked economics.
#
Journalism was clearly about opportunities as well.
#
Now, I was in a hostel where there are a bunch of girls who are doing journalism
#
and they all had internships at the best newspapers.
#
And every day they would come cribbing, saying, you know, we just have to
#
pick that yellow postcards from a sack of some 400 of them
#
and decide which one will get published the next day in the newspaper.
#
So back then, postcards were pretty normal
#
and they were sent to the editor.
#
And so they had that job and they were really disgusted.
#
And to them, journalism was not what they wanted to do.
#
So many of them went to journalism school to discover that they didn't want to be journalists.
#
They were just the people I was looking for.
#
So I one day told them, I want to be a journalist.
#
Can you take me to whichever editor this is?
#
I'd love to go and pick postcards.
#
So one of them took me to, you know, what was the India Times office back then.
#
And I went and met this this young guy, maybe he must be in his mid 20s
#
and was handed over this job of setting up something called India Times,
#
which is perhaps at that point relegated as the extra job in the organization,
#
because the brand hadn't picked up at that time or whatever.
#
And he said, yeah, lots of work, but these interns are not interested.
#
So I said, I'm interested.
#
And but I asked him very clearly and I don't know what might at that point
#
have asked me to ask this question, led me to ask this, I said, does it pay me?
#
I don't want a free internship.
#
So he said, then don't be an intern.
#
Freelance with us, it will pay you.
#
And he told me it's 500 bucks an article.
#
I mean, I have not gleamed like that in a long time,
#
because 500 bucks in 1998 was a lot of money.
#
And for one article, which means basically that you could at least do two,
#
if not four in a week or something over in a month.
#
So but he said, you know, he said, we don't have very intellectual writing.
#
So you'll have to just write whatever.
#
I wrote on everything from dog collars to lip balms to celebrity interviews.
#
I needed the money and I had the attention of this editor.
#
These were two things that I went in for and I got those two things.
#
When I say attention, I had the ability to at least have a foot in the door
#
in a company that essentially drove jobs at that point.
#
It was some of the most exhilarating moments of my life.
#
It also helped me decide if I wanted to be a journalist.
#
I remember I was judged by my friends in first year for writing
#
a fair degree of nonsense and nonsense simply to the extent of,
#
you know, what we call listicles right now.
#
The Times used to do a bunch of those and it did seem fairly unintellectual work,
#
which I used to sometimes compensate through an occasional op-ed
#
But for whatever it was worth, it was paying the bills
#
and it kept me connected to the world.
#
By third year, my father had seen my bank balance and said,
#
if you don't want to do economics and an MBA, you're more than welcome.
#
And I said, that's exactly what I want to tell you,
#
that I'm not doing any of this as per our dummy's guide to careers.
#
I'm becoming a journalist.
#
So he just told me, please go and figure out what you need to learn,
#
because I have zero connections in the world of journalism.
#
I know nothing about it.
#
And that's exactly how it was.
#
So that's how my life with journalism began.
#
And then I, of course, you know, went on to study.
#
And then I went to Asian College of Journalism in Madras.
#
Madras is such a great melting pot in terms of stories,
#
literally melting also because it's so damn hot.
#
And you go from Delhi thinking you've seen the worst of heat
#
and then you arrive in Madras and lose four kilos in like 10 days.
#
You're like, hello, Madras, nice to meet you.
#
So Madras taught me a lot of amazing things
#
other than the fact that we were trained by the BBC and never had a book,
#
only a camera in the hand.
#
But yes, getting to CNBC, again, an accident.
#
I remember at that time, I was dating somebody in Madras,
#
was very happy to stay back in Madras.
#
So Ajtak offered me a bureau job.
#
I was almost going to write on the dotted line.
#
My Dean called me and said, if you don't leave the city tomorrow morning,
#
I will make sure you don't get any certification from this course.
#
So I was like, why are you so passionate?
#
He was like, no, I don't see you wasting your time here.
#
Don't join a damn bureau.
#
Go and take up this internship at CNBC in the headquarters
#
And I just heard him out.
#
And I just said, if this guy is saying this, I'm doing this.
#
And that's how my career started.
#
And at CNBC, I joined as an intern
#
who happened to see the news flash that Dhirubhai Ambani was in the hospital.
#
The executive editor had met me as a ticker person and I was sorted.
#
So what I'm trying to say is that, you know, these were accidents.
#
I was sitting there and just monitoring the ticker
#
because that's what interns do.
#
But when I brought this news out, even the editor wanted to know
#
who took this news out and who noticed that this was important
#
and you wanted to talk.
#
And this was Senthil, I remember.
#
And it was interesting because, you know, now he knew
#
that at least there's a smart person at the ticker.
#
And slowly somebody was absent, like one editor comes.
#
Unfortunately, he's not there, Radha.
#
He used to work with CNN.
#
And he said, you know, that sport anchor is absent.
#
Do you want to give it a shot?
#
I was like, give it a shot.
#
This is the shot of my life.
#
It's not like I wasn't trained.
#
Radha knew eventually I would opt for some sort of auditioning.
#
But my one accidental live on television went so well
#
that when Raghav saw me from wherever, I think he was
#
he was he was office hunting at Kamla Mills back then.
#
And some television showed that this was a new face
#
that CNBC had put out because somebody was absent.
#
He came back and I started anchoring.
#
So they were just full of accidents, but great accidents.
#
And so the reason I constantly moved was when I say moved
#
is that I'm just I'm a person who somewhat to an extent
#
in her life will be defined by ambition.
#
And that's a big deal for me.
#
And it stems from many things, including the fact that when I was trying
#
to join media and I think I write in this book or certainly I've spoken about it
#
and like a far off relative thought that being a person on television
#
was akin to being a prostitute and I'm nothing against prostitutes.
#
And I respect the profession.
#
But I'm simply saying that, you know, back then for somebody to think
#
that, you know, women who don't sit at home and do what they're told
#
I met a lot of editors who would say this to me on my face that
#
you can't become an editor.
#
You're too young. Right.
#
That was a total, total no gamer for me.
#
I was like, you know what?
#
You say it and I'm going to want to be it.
#
And by the way, I'm not unique in that sense, because I think everyone
#
in that generation who was constantly pushed back
#
would want to push forward.
#
It's different what their circumstances permitted.
#
So when I left NDTV, the reason I left it is because it's such a gorgeous place.
#
You could retire there and become totally complacent.
#
But I couldn't have become complacent at 27.
#
And I went and applied for a job in Bloomberg International
#
as a wires investment banking reporter.
#
I wanted to get off television because I wanted to report.
#
I get a high reporting on big deals, which is really
#
what became a big deal for me because I did a lot of investment banking.
#
And then came, you know, Times of India saying, we're doing this.
#
We need a face. We're not happy with what we have.
#
Let's do something with you.
#
So I am just saying these are accidents.
#
But what was fun was that I was always joining a channel that was starting out.
#
Never a channel that was already established.
#
And there are many reasons for that, but I think most rudimentary
#
is the fact that you can help build it rather than go and whatever,
#
you know, be the dressing of the cake over pilot projects, pilot projects.
#
But the only thing that people still remember for is that how
#
how short my resignations were.
#
There were only two, because after that, I set up my own business.
#
My resignations were two words.
#
At least you could have made it properly grammatical.
#
I know it should have said I am off.
#
Yeah. Well, you know, no, but there's so many memorable sentences
#
in what you just said, like if you ever write a memoir,
#
the title should totally be.
#
I'd love to go and pick postcards.
#
Yeah, that's such a lovely line.
#
Yeah. So let's let's take a quick commercial break.
#
And after that, continue with the rest of your journey
#
and also your wonderful book.
#
And and there's a lot to discuss.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me
#
because of my blog, India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009
#
and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I love the freedom the form gave me, and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think
#
about many different things because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons.
#
And now it is time to revive it.
#
Only now I'm doing it through a newsletter.
#
I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy.
#
I'll write about some of the themes I cover in this podcast and about much else.
#
So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and subscribe.
#
Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your email inbox.
#
You don't need to go anywhere.
#
So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com.
#
Welcome back to the scene in the on scene.
#
I'm chatting with Shelly Chopra about her life, a wonderful book,
#
sisterhood, economy and all her insights.
#
So, you know, we had just reached the stage where you were in television.
#
You're having a great career and then you decide to quit.
#
And you've written a quote, when I left the television studio to become an entrepreneur,
#
nearly everyone I knew thought I had really lost my mind to quit a job
#
that put me in front of global audiences to one of hiding.
#
I got calls from all of my friends, journalists, bankers,
#
politicians, CEOs, well-wishers, family, asking me who retires at 30
#
from being a national TV anchor.
#
So tell me a bit about what was it that you were retiring for?
#
What did you want to do now?
#
And what drove you to take such a radical step?
#
Because when you have a career that's going so well,
#
one can imagine that if you reach that phase where you're kind of tired of it,
#
you take a break and you come back.
#
But over here, it seems that your reason for changing was not so much a push, but a pull.
#
It wasn't television pushing you away,
#
but it was something else you wanted to do pulling you towards.
#
So tell me a bit more about it.
#
Yeah, only others saw it as retirement, to be honest.
#
I was just getting off one pedal and getting on to the other.
#
I think for me, it's always been that
#
I don't want to leave anywhere
#
in a moment of weakness or being tired.
#
I want to leave somewhere when I'm energetic to pick my next piece and move with it, right?
#
So for me, that was the one thing that I was clear about, that let's
#
let's leave something because that I want to do something else
#
and leave it at that point when I have the ability, the energy,
#
the enthusiasm and the ambition to build something different.
#
So you're right, I was completely pulled in by the world of digital
#
and it started, you know, the sort of it started embedding in me in 2008.
#
I had just joined, you know, the Times of India
#
and I went to Davos within a few months of my joining there
#
and consecutively went there a few years.
#
And I realized that I had the ability to connect with a large number of global
#
speakers and journalists, pretty much because I was one of the very few Indians on Twitter.
#
And, you know, we were becoming like a clique of people who have a life outside
#
their own organizations, and then they catch up in Davos,
#
a bit like a bunch of privileged people.
#
But it was very fascinating to see that we could actually see
#
a trend, which was that there is something brewing
#
and it has the potential of becoming big and all amazing people were getting on to it.
#
And I simply felt that there was like an intelligentsia that was emerging there.
#
I mean, it's hard to say that about Twitter now, but I'm just simply saying that
#
there was an opportunity to see that you could make connections with people in other
#
parts of the world without being on ICQ, you know what I mean?
#
So I think it was a very, very interesting turning point of
#
my expectation from what digital could do.
#
And by this time, for those who did watch television, would remember that I used to
#
kind of dabble a little bit in a sport called golf, which still quite struggling in India.
#
But for me, it was a very big deal because, you know, it was considered an elite sport.
#
And I ran a show on television for nearly 10 years to remind people that Indians who
#
made it big in golf literally have a rags to riches story.
#
Their first checks came from the game.
#
So I think for me, that part was very interesting.
#
And therefore, so I'd started a blog, which is picking up in the digital world.
#
And I don't understand like what is picking up in a digital world mean, right?
#
I would ask myself, but there was a parallel universe getting created.
#
So much so it kind of cemented my thought when one of the editors I met who said,
#
you're way too much on Twitter.
#
You need to spend more time figuring out what's happening in the channel.
#
And I'm like, that means that somewhere people are getting uncomfortable with what
#
Twitter is doing to them or, you know, whatever else there was back then.
#
And people were noticing that.
#
I remember people's contracts in some media organizations being reworked to say, you
#
will tweet everything that the organization tells you.
#
These were signs that there was something scaring people and a great place to be when
#
you can kind of, you know, intimidate with technology.
#
So I think it fascinated me.
#
And so 2008, nine and 10 just went by.
#
And then 2012, I got an opportunity to go to the United States for two months and
#
cover the election reelection of Obama.
#
And in this period, all hell broke loose.
#
Vikram Pandit had to step down from city for his reason.
#
Rajat Gupta was in controversy for his reasons.
#
The iPad mini was coming out and I was seeming like a girl with a mobile phone
#
creating her own studio.
#
And I'm like, wow, I don't need those crows to set up that studio.
#
I don't need flow managers and camera people.
#
My little phone, the original Chotu iPhone was not worrying anybody.
#
They were talking to it.
#
They were giving me soundbites on it.
#
I literally came back from one of those trips and I remember this was in a hotel
#
room in San Francisco and I announced that is my new studio.
#
The question is what content am I creating?
#
I'll get to that, right?
#
So it was literally a bit like that.
#
And I struggled a little bit to decide what I wanted to be like every journalist.
#
And I say this because it's happened now so much that I can say it.
#
It's a bit like every journalist.
#
I started the Shelly Chopra show and I decided this isn't something I'm
#
going to do very early.
#
I just did not want to do another news thing that somebody else was going to do.
#
And so I started thinking about these conversations around women, something I
#
was always passionate about, but just never really paid enough attention to.
#
And along that US trip, I remember going for a bunch of theater shows and seeing
#
the voice of women being talked about, et cetera, and came back and said, you
#
know what, all my life I've interviewed men.
#
Let me at least give women a chance.
#
And see what I can build with them because they are not the corner office holders.
#
And I think in 2015, people did laugh at me.
#
And I still know some of these people and they've all proven wrong and they
#
still smile back and remind me how they laughed at me that this was a hobby.
#
That when you do a platform for women, it's nothing but a hobby.
#
It's a bit like the Silai school, when you're in the camp and then you're like,
#
okay, let's send them to Silai school, at least they'll be a little capable.
#
So it was a bit like that, you know, the tone, but again, I survived that because
#
I was like, somebody's got to do it.
#
Even if one fails at it, at least I'll know, right?
#
Somebody will be proven wrong in this exercise and somebody will be proven right.
#
And so she, the people actually did start with literally interviewing everyday women.
#
The first person I interviewed was my neighbor.
#
And she was a woman who had three big struggles in life.
#
She had moved from Calcutta to Bombay.
#
She was in the stock market.
#
So she was fighting tooth and nail with other, with a male dominated industry.
#
And she wanted to lose a lot of weight because she was obese.
#
And I was like, you know, this woman comes with a three-year-old daughter, right?
#
So there was a lot on her plate and she went about fixing each part of that life to
#
In like four months, she was sorted.
#
I mean, she had a path that to me was hugely inspirational, right?
#
I looked at her and said, if she can do this, yeah, even I can take a chance or I
#
can build a hobby or whatever one wants to call it.
#
And I said, if I'm thinking that somebody is not even supposedly in the eyes of the
#
world as successful as me, she'll find her a rock star, right?
#
And that's exactly what we did.
#
I mean, we, meaning it was me and one other colleague and then, you know, slowly
#
we built the team, went around just meeting women.
#
My own colleague's mother was such an inspiration for me just to just see her.
#
She lives in Prabhadevi, runs a little idli thing out of her home, has polio partly
#
sort of disabled, has had many falls.
#
Yeah, she just keeps going.
#
So I think all of these stories, I mean, we've done a million and a half stories on
#
She The People and it just tells me that not one million of these would have gone
#
viral if they weren't, if they were of the usual suspects.
#
So now we leave it for the usual suspects to want to be on the channel because they
#
want to be where the everyday woman is.
#
They're tired of having to carry the superwoman cart for themselves.
#
Yeah, I'm struck by the way you, you shifted in a sense from the disrupted to the
#
disruptor and also by something that you remarked on earlier, when you looked at the
#
landscape of the women who are being covered by the major news magazines and the television
#
channels and blah, blah, it's really 10 or 12 women you keep going back to.
#
And this is extremely resonant for me, the way you're looking at the stories of everyday
#
people, because, you know, I get along with my writing course, I also teach a podcasting
#
course a couple of times a year and I've had questions like, you know, what should I
#
focus on? What gap in the market should I look at?
#
What niche should I take?
#
And so on and so forth.
#
And I always tell them that the only thing that can ever be unique about you is you
#
yourself, you know, just be authentic to yourself.
#
And then the question that comes up is, why should anyone be interested in me?
#
And women will ask this question more than men.
#
And there the answer always is that every one of us is on a journey of some sort, which
#
others can identify with.
#
You know, so many people are on different points of the same journey.
#
If you're obese and you've lost weight, for example, just to take this one person.
#
So many people want to lose weight.
#
So many people struggle with that.
#
So every story kind of has a value of its own.
#
Now, what you're doing is you've come from television.
#
What you're doing is again in the audiovisual medium.
#
But you know, you now sort of have a way of thinking beyond the formats and conventions
#
of television itself, as you are, you know, as you're YouTubing, you know, you can do
#
something that is shorter than conventional, longer than conventional, take a different
#
approach. What was your relearning of the medium like?
#
It was pretty significant.
#
You're right. I came from television.
#
I did get very excited looking at the mobile phone, being able to record and build.
#
But there were a large number of platforms at that time who had the luxury of studios.
#
Who had built little, little places.
#
But I'm also thinking that when I, when I took some of these hard decisions for myself,
#
my first question was, do people care where this video is produced?
#
And the answer to that was no.
#
Do people care sometimes if the video is pixelated, but the story is so damn good.
#
People are like, I'll lap it up.
#
And then I realized that you can't create something which is not sustainable.
#
It's a very rudimentary concept for me.
#
One, because I was a salary journalist.
#
Secondly, I was like, if you put some money, you should get some money back.
#
It's pretty simple economic theory here.
#
And I also knew that I was an awkward startup founder because I didn't understand this,
#
this whole game around raising money, valuation, take one, pass it to the other and all of
#
that, which in hindsight, I think a lot of people are suddenly in 2023 talking about
#
with this great sense of wisdom.
#
But honestly, for many years, I was fed that, that, you know, if you have money, spend
#
it, build the brand, build the brand, go and advertise, do this, that, and the other.
#
So I was very clear I had to make money.
#
And if I would make money, that would mean that this can run, which basically meant
#
that costs had to be controlled.
#
So I went literally with a machine approach, lean, mean machine approach and said, keep
#
our costs at bay, fix 10 interviews a day, hire camera for those 10 hours, fix the
#
number of hours you're going to spend per interview, cut to cut literally so that we
#
But I think the reason all of this ended up working for me was that I think it really
#
needed somebody to come out and say, and I don't know how many people at that point were
#
doing this because I saw a lot of them trying to say, we'll build the studio, you come
#
there and we'll create for digital.
#
Somehow it didn't seem right.
#
I'm a big fan of going to places where people already are, rather than getting them to
#
places where they should be or where it'll cost them or cost me to get them.
#
So that was one good reason for me to just say, I have no money.
#
I'm not even going to try.
#
I just need to find a way to make money.
#
Make it on the phone, put it on the phone.
#
Pretty much as simple as that.
#
The second thing that I did was that YouTube was a very big deal that time.
#
I did not put content on YouTube.
#
I did not want to spend my day and night thinking when are my views going to hit a
#
I just did not want to get into that rut at all.
#
So I just straight went to companies and said, put your money behind this content.
#
For every 10 who said no, three said yes.
#
That was good enough for me to move.
#
So I didn't again want to get into, you know, how many app downloads, how much this
#
it's like, it makes you breathless and then you lose it.
#
There's no plan to lose it.
#
I didn't want to do it.
#
So I think some of these basic lessons really helped me, which were kind of common
#
sense and somewhere those economics of economics, honors finally played a role
#
here to say, let's just do something.
#
If you make money, you don't have to depend on others' money.
#
Somebody wants to give you take it when you need it.
#
So I did go through a bunch of ups and downs torn apart with this thing that,
#
okay, you know, to scale, you need lots of money to scale.
#
You need to do lots of like, you know, whatever bus stop advertising and whatever
#
was the equivalent back then.
#
And, um, I didn't fall for the trap and as, as some luck would have it, we were
#
creating content that nobody had created at some point, practically two other
#
organizations around the world may be talking about these conversations.
#
And, um, to go with your own gut, that was one thing.
#
The other thing we did, which is what a lot of people ask me, how do you guys
#
create new content every single day?
#
Like, how do you tell us these stories every day?
#
And I'm like, these are not my stories.
#
And because you are telling me these stories, they're relating to you.
#
So literally one day when we said, how do we just literally, you know,
#
we break out the story, we were five team members, all sat down, spoke for four
#
hours, there were 40 stories on the table because of the experiences we faced.
#
And our experiences are everyone's experiences.
#
In fact, one thing I find very unique for most women, they have large
#
number of relatable situations, whether you live in a mansion or you live
#
in a little slum house, the relatability is so high that the connections
#
automatically start happening.
#
And this of course was a discovery after the platform was built and after we
#
started putting out things and stuff like that, but it also allowed us
#
to help women open up about it.
#
I say this with a degree of thankfulness and gratitude.
#
We started as a website, you know, we actually, we started as an idea.
#
We became a website, but today we're a movement and we don't need to go and
#
find content, it comes from our audiences and to tell people what our audiences are
#
going through is almost like giving them an embrace and saying, we're all in it
#
together, which is very different than editors sitting in organizations.
#
And I've sat in many of them in the edit room saying, but this is what
#
our consumer wants to hear.
#
We're going to feed them this, but our consumer already knows
#
what is the technology scam.
#
I'm like, that's not your consumer.
#
Your consumer wants to be told everything simply in the language they understand,
#
not what you think they understand.
#
That was one part of my learning from hardwound media editing schools.
#
I mean, editor schools, editor oriented schools that I just let go.
#
Can my mother understand this?
#
If she can, let's put it out.
#
Literally, you know, and then of course the kind of content we put out.
#
I mean, we were, we were talking about why can't women dry their
#
undergarments in the sun?
#
It was our first post, which went so viral that we don't know, we like
#
gained some 40,000 followers in one day.
#
And I'm thinking, really?
#
And then came stories and stories of women saying, how much do I have to hide?
#
Hide myself, hide my clothes, where I dry them, dry them in the night,
#
dry them in the rain, cannot dry your clothes in the sun.
#
And I think this is an experience every woman, including myself, has faced, not
#
because somebody told me I'm just conditioned to hide my clothes under
#
somebody else's clothes on a clothes line.
#
So these are the kinds of things that just exploded in people's faces.
#
They needed somebody to say it.
#
And we were saying it because we couldn't be bothered whether some sponsor will walk
#
out, somebody will not come to us.
#
Will we put this post and also put somebody else's post?
#
It is so, it's exciting, but it's also a little bit of glumness.
#
I have to say now after seven years feels very good that some brands who came
#
the day one and said, you guys are too controversial and now embracing
#
controversy in their language, which is according to me, not controversial at
#
all to talk about women's issues and specifically, you know, about things like,
#
you know, birthmarks on your faces or questioning stretch marks on your buttocks,
#
whatever natural stuff, right.
#
Which we were just talking.
#
So, you know, bunch of questions that arise from this.
#
And the first of this comes from what you said about the pressure startups
#
often have to scale, like one typical pattern of startups and unicorns in India
#
is that, you know, with all the easy money that has now ended, you know, the money
#
would flood in, there would be tons of funding happening and then you would be
#
in a race to just grow somehow, get numbers, even if the engagement is really
#
shallow, even if a lot of the metrics are being gamed to get the next round of
#
funding and so on and so forth.
#
And A, it seems that you avoided that pressure entirely of not going
#
somewhere where you don't want to go by not just getting into that game at all.
#
And B, my other question is about this whole notion of scaling, because my sense
#
of one fundamental way in which the creator economy has changed is that back
#
in the day, if you were a creator, you needed to scale, you know, 1% of the
#
music out there is, you know, going to be super hit stuff and the rest is going
#
1% of the writers will make money.
#
The rest will make nothing at all.
#
So therefore everybody is thinking of scaling in that sense.
#
And therefore there becomes a danger that everyone is playing to the
#
lowest common denominator.
#
Everyone is trying to second guess what the audience wants rather than go in
#
directions which they want themselves.
#
And what's kind of happened over the last decade and a half and it's profoundly
#
exciting as an, in fact, as a reason this podcast exists is that you don't need to
#
scale anymore, that that realization has now come in what Kevin Kelly calls a
#
thousand true fans, right?
#
That you don't need to scale as long as you find a dedicated bunch of people who
#
are engaging deeply with your content and are willing to pay for it, then you
#
don't need to hit the millions or the billions or whatever, you know, that's
#
enough to keep you going.
#
And, and I have seen this happen repeatedly from the vantage point of
#
individual creators in a sense that, and the reason this kind of frees you up as
#
a creator is that I don't need to sit and say that I, you know, like for
#
example, if let's say pre internet, if I wanted to do an audio show with five
#
hour interviews, I would have to go and try and sell it to a radio station.
#
The radio station would exist because if invested a lot of money in building it,
#
they bought a license from somebody, they have the restrictions and constraints.
#
And the only way they can recoup that money is by aiming for some kind of
#
lowest common denominator, which is why India's FM stations are just playing
#
Bollywood all the time, right.
#
And so on and so forth.
#
And that constraint is kind of gone.
#
Now as a company in the creator economy before all this stuff that I'm talking
#
about was even articulated or thought about by people, but these changes are
#
happening beneath the surface, what is there for your experience with these
#
aspects of it, because suddenly you don't need to think like a traditional media
#
house would 10 years before you started it up, you know, you can think in an
#
entirely different way.
#
And where this frees you up is you can do what you want.
#
You don't have to try and second guess what is the audience for this.
#
You can do what you want because you feel it is worth doing.
#
And then there is that joy of discovering that yes, there is an audience for it.
#
So, you know, I'll, I'll be honest.
#
So when I started to see the people, so many people said it's niche.
#
I couldn't understand it.
#
I'm like, I don't know which world you live in.
#
How can you say half the country's population is niche?
#
At the, at, at even at the most conservative figure, let's assume 30% of
#
the internet in India is female, right?
#
We're still talking 30% of 750 million women.
#
And even if I say it was just urban with digital and at least some access to a
#
phone, we're talking of a cohort of about 20 million, right?
#
At the, at the most hardest filters to me, that scale.
#
So first thing is that I am hungry for scale because I am building a platform
#
for the everyday girl from Indore to Ita Nagar.
#
I want everybody to have she the people.
#
And I'm not wanting people to think that I'm building for just feminists in
#
whichever way certain feminists like to define themselves, right?
#
I want to make feminism mainstream and respect different definitions of
#
men, what is feminism and what is just simply women's rights, right?
#
So I think that to me was very clear.
#
So the question is whose definition of scale am I going to fall for?
#
This was very hard for many years.
#
Despite all my confidence and upbringing and this, that, and the other, I was
#
seeing my platform from the eyes of what people call success.
#
So-and-so raised so many millions at so much valuation, right?
#
This was a pop-up on my pages every single day.
#
And there were days when I would just be crushed.
#
Thinking, why am I not able to raise money?
#
It's not like I didn't try.
#
I spoke to a bunch of investors, but I just couldn't understand the
#
language they were talking in.
#
They couldn't understand a media business.
#
They didn't kind of understand that you have to be kosher and straight
#
up in the media business, you can't twist and turn or not just media.
#
Look, I was media on day one.
#
Actually in six months, I was a community tech business, right?
#
Because I had a community.
#
So for me to say that you are going to lose your morals while doing your
#
business because you want to raise money and that'll put you on these
#
bus stops, not happening, maybe a little bit of that journalism was perhaps
#
that moral yardstick that kept me in place.
#
So my question to myself always was, you know, the world says raise
#
money when it's available, you know, you're talking about the pipeline,
#
people raising all of that.
#
Somehow I just felt you raise money when you need it.
#
Anyway, any VC listening to thing will say it's stupid girl.
#
Maybe, but the point is that if I don't need it at that point, I don't even
#
know how do I rationalize to you that I needed and please give me all that money.
#
So until I knew I needed it, I didn't go to the market.
#
By the time I hit the market to ask money for she the people, it was too late.
#
And by the way, at this point, from day one, even before the she
#
the people website was born, Anand Mahindra had given me a little pool
#
of money to start it out on an idea basis.
#
And I had used it to the hilt in first six months.
#
I earned that money back through the, through the commercial model I built.
#
That's a totally different matter.
#
But I think for me today, in 2023, when we talk about scale, I have
#
rationalized to myself and my audience.
#
I am as big a brand as Flipkart is.
#
Now you'll say, how the hell?
#
What are your measurables?
#
I don't need measurables.
#
Flipkart and I are non-comparable.
#
I am a brand which is talking with about for women.
#
There's no bigger brand than mine in this country.
#
How can I not be the Flipkart equivalent?
#
Just because I'm not bought over by Walmart, just because I don't have
#
as much money as the Bansals, just because I have not raised that
#
much money as they did, or just because their validation in life is some
#
VCs who paid them that much or whoever paid them, whatever, right?
#
I'm not validated by somebody else's definition.
#
And it's taken me a long time to try and put this together.
#
Simply because this is possibly the first public show I'm kind of bringing
#
this, you know, presenting this argument, because I think our definition
#
of what is scale is flawed and it's not about what is scale within a sector here.
#
Women are not a sector.
#
And if I have that scale and size, I am just as a big brand, as a bigger
#
brand, as you know, Flipkart or whatever else in the market today, right?
#
I just simply think we are shortchanging ourselves as founders by thinking that
#
Moby Quake or Paytm are bigger brands because they raised a lot of money or
#
they are in sexy areas like FinTech.
#
I am just a sexy brand and I am in a different sector.
#
Day in, day out, people remind me how I parachuted at a time when no one
#
else was even thinking about it.
#
Makes me feel good today.
#
And I'll be honest, very hard at that point.
#
But the reason it makes me feel good is because I tried doing something
#
different and with some amount of intelligence and some amount of good
#
will of everyone, we made something out of it, right?
#
So I think scale is very important, but how you let people define your
#
identity and size and scale is something you've got to control and guard.
#
Because until I started talking about this, the way I'm talking about it to
#
you, people are like, Hey, I never thought of that because to me,
#
fundraising tells you scale.
#
And second, which is public knowledge, she, the people is a profitable
#
media business from the day one, suddenly people are talking profits
#
and margins and unheard of in this world, right?
#
I'm not even blaming a specific segment.
#
I'm just saying the entire business world has been a revenue game.
#
Revenues are easier than making profits, but what's the hardest is building a
#
It is the single hardest thing to do today when startups go out there.
#
They say, hi, listen, I'm doing this amazing app, put some money in it.
#
The money is used to build a community.
#
I'm saying I've got the community and now I'll build for them.
#
To me, that's magic because I've hard earned that magic at a time when, and
#
I want to say this again, it's not me alone.
#
It's she, the people, it's the team, the people who've invested themselves
#
The people who've invested themselves in she, the people, we did this hard
#
work without an intent to raise something or prove to the world that we were
#
scared, but now we are finally seeing that this is what people want to acquire.
#
They're going out there acquiring communities.
#
So it just tells you that sometimes a little bit of your gut and common sense,
#
actually, sometimes a lot of common sense just comes handy in the longterm.
#
Yeah, there is one way in which actually, I think you're much bigger than
#
Flipkart, which is just in terms of the intensity of engagement, right?
#
Like, I think one place where we see advertisers, many people who just look
#
at the raw numbers, get things wrong is you look at the absolute numbers, but
#
not look at the depth of engagement.
#
Like just in the podcasting world, I like to say that I'd rather have a
#
hundred thousand people listen to an episode of mine than 10 million people
#
watch a video I put out because on YouTube, you're getting engagement
#
that is really thin, 15 seconds, 20 seconds can often be the average drop
#
of time while for this show, it's, you know, 40 minutes per session and people
#
listen across multiple sessions and podcasts get that kind of insane
#
engagement and similarly with you, the fact that you built a community, you
#
know, people who are loyal, people who will be suggesting subjects, adding
#
to stuff and all of that, that depth of engagement is something a Flipkart
#
can never have, you know, there it's a shallow engagement.
#
So you're, you know, I'm absolutely kind of with you on that.
#
I think a lot of people who think in conventional ways haven't yet kind
#
of figured, you know, this aspect of it out, that it's not just the
#
absolute numbers that count.
#
It's, it's also, you know, what is the depth of engagement?
#
What are you doing with it?
#
And building a community is bloody difficult and what companies spend
#
money on when VCs tell them to do that is really not even building
#
communities as customer acquisition.
#
But if that isn't deep enough, you don't have a community, you know,
#
it's a shallow, you enter, you leave point you made about how people think
#
of women as a niche or used to think of women as a niche.
#
And you've pointed out in your book that, you know, quote, at approximately
#
50% of a country's population, women were being called a segment.
#
And that just didn't go down well with me.
#
And later on, you've, you've given these wonderful figures, which
#
puts it in such good perspective.
#
And you say, quote, Indian women are almost 50% of India's population
#
as a ratio of the world's population.
#
That is 9% to give you an idea of women in India are three times
#
the size of Brazil, five times the size of Japan and twice the size
#
of the United States of America.
#
We women are not a number.
#
We are a force, stop quote.
#
And later you point out how mainstream media just doesn't get this.
#
Like you talk about how this 2016 survey showed that out of every thousand
#
stories done in the Indian media, 80% were in the Indian government
#
cricket in Bollywood, right?
#
So the conventional thinking is ignoring that women are half the people.
#
The conventional thinking is making an assumption that no one is
#
interested in these stories anyway.
#
And this is normalized in the sense that many of us will talk about India's
#
economy, but we won't think about what happens when workforce, workforce
#
participation in half of them is so low.
#
I remember when I used to edit this policy magazine called Prakriti and
#
Vinal Pandeyji wrote some pieces on me on Indian agriculture, and she pointed
#
out something that is very wise and that people don't think about.
#
And you've pointed out a similar thing in your book, where she said that in
#
every crisis area of our country, you know, you look at the agriculture crisis,
#
you look at, you know, health care crisis, education crisis, beneath all of them,
#
there is a deeper crisis, which is a crisis of the women in there.
#
You know, like what happens to women farmers, you know, you've mentioned
#
in an evocative talk, you gave an anchor anger about how we notice farmers
#
suicides and the story ends there.
#
You know, you're not then reporting what happens to their wives, what kind of
#
debt spirals they get into, what kind of mental health issues happen there.
#
You simply don't look at that.
#
And beneath each of these, there is a layer of women.
#
And yet the way, you know, the way the media speaks, and even today, I mean,
#
that's a 2016 survey, but that could be true more, that could be more or less
#
true today, at least if you look at mainstream media content, right?
#
That is so male dominated.
#
It's just looking at men, not looking at women.
#
I mean, the classic example of how, you know, it's a world
#
designed for men by men is obviously air conditioning is an iconic example.
#
I keep going back to that air conditioning was designed in the fifties
#
where offices were had mostly men working in them.
#
So a particular temperature was set, but women's bodies feel colder
#
at a higher temperature.
#
And therefore women are always feeling cold and wearing sweaters
#
and mufflers in offices because the air conditioner is set for men.
#
And yet that is normal. That is still normal.
#
So how is it so? So two part question.
#
One is that I guess a lot of this stuff must have been normalized
#
even for you and taken for granted, even for you.
#
And then gradually, as you go through life, the layers begin to slip off.
#
So how did that process of just taking that step back
#
and noticing this shit and realizing that this is a problem and this is wrong?
#
How was that journey for you personally?
#
And then, you know, through she the people or your other initiatives
#
writing this book, so on and so forth.
#
How was that awakening for other people,
#
you know, in terms of both women and men, just realizing that these layers exist
#
and we've normalized so much shit?
#
So actually, part of my answer is in the question.
#
I didn't realize it for a very long time.
#
I never questioned the air conditioning.
#
I never questioned why women had to wear certain clothes in certain places.
#
I never questioned why we were offered less salaries.
#
I never questioned why we were told to serve the water
#
when somebody came home and not a guy in the house.
#
I just did not question it.
#
And therefore, I didn't have the realization.
#
And so I think when I finally started telling these stories.
#
I didn't realize how often women put themselves to self-doubt.
#
And the reason I say that is because the first time when I went around
#
talking to women on the road, they were like, why are you asking me?
#
What have I done to be featured in your platform?
#
I'm like, but why do you think your entire journey is not important to me?
#
She said, what's written in my journey? Is it a normal journey?
#
Grew up, got married, worked, gained weight, tried to lose weight.
#
Some random thing like that.
#
And I'm like, by the way, the way you've managed to move your life
#
around is actually inspirational.
#
And she started laughing.
#
This was true of every woman I met.
#
At some point on the other, they were apologetic.
#
Maybe at some juncture of my own life, I realized that I have just been
#
immune to a system that has been created, not for women.
#
And some amount of anger erupted in me when I had just joined a new media
#
organization and an editor came out to me.
#
I think this was his second meeting.
#
The first was a cursory one.
#
And he said to me, don't ever think you'll get that cabin there.
#
This is a male dominated newsroom and I was a poached entry.
#
So I had kind of ruffled a lot of feathers here.
#
Only the management kind of was pretty much backing me.
#
I suppose it's standard office, right?
#
When you bring somebody and then on top of that, a woman who knows her jazz.
#
So when he said, don't think you'll ever get that cabin.
#
You know, this was 2008.
#
I don't know what came over me.
#
I said, editor, that cabin is for you.
#
My face is for 9 PM television every night so that audiences can see me.
#
And I was shaking under the table.
#
I don't know how I said it.
#
First, the fact that I had the realization that what I was being dished
#
out was absolutely patriarchal stereotypical nonsense happened for the first time to me.
#
Second, which is absolutely stupid.
#
The only thing I thought of what I could do was like, I'll go to HR, you know?
#
And I told myself while walking to the HR, if you walk into that HR,
#
the only person to lose anything is you.
#
Finally confronted this with another editor and said, you know, get this solved.
#
But the only thing that got me going there, listen, girl, you swim with the sharks B1
#
and be comfortable with it.
#
And these are things that started helping me question my world around me,
#
which I hadn't questioned till then.
#
And truth be told, it takes some time for your general confidence
#
to get cemented in professional confidence because you're like, look,
#
I'm here because I am Kat's Whiskers.
#
And sometimes you say that to yourself in a mirror because you're like,
#
you know, let me be humble.
#
No guy says this to him.
#
I think we need to learn from them.
#
And that is a good starting point.
#
What this man did to me, other than making me feel ridiculous,
#
is he showed me how you can use your arrogance.
#
And I think women are under arrogant.
#
They need to be a bit straight faced with a great deal of plain speak,
#
telling people when they are bullshitting at their face
#
that I'm not going to let you pass with this.
#
And the reason I say that it takes a little bit of professional confidence
#
is also because you know that these people need you more than you need them.
#
And I came as a poached play person.
#
So I felt very good that, oh, listen, they got me here.
#
They better deal with me now, right?
#
It wasn't easy because you're constantly second guessing
#
when you can be that person and most people,
#
including women, think that being that person is not ideal.
#
So I think there was that.
#
So personal experiences absolutely have helped me
#
realize the need for having a space that's speaking my mind.
#
Because there are too many naysayers in the system.
#
And that system starts from home.
#
You know, somebody said this,
#
Ratna Pariksha said this to me in a conversation.
#
Shelly, patriarchy begins at home.
#
And that is absolutely true.
#
Home is a nursery for patriarchy.
#
I think that was the exact quote in your book.
#
So the reason she says this to me is a very simple mathematical logic.
#
We have 50% of the population.
#
We raise the other half.
#
Actually, we raise both halves.
#
We get one wrong and then we get the other wrong too.
#
So here's where I think some of my conversations, I remember, started breaking down for me.
#
And then it sort of kind of brought in that little rebel that I was born as
#
to say that, you know what, let's start questioning our mothers.
#
Let's start questioning our fathers.
#
This is very sacrosanct an area.
#
It's a line you don't cross.
#
But to me, this is really rattling me.
#
The same thing with anger.
#
I mean, you heard my TED talk on, you know, let her be angry.
#
Because I really don't see without anger how you can do any change.
#
And this persistent encouragement to women to lower their voice and not be angry.
#
It's not about lowering voice.
#
Sure, you can be angry with a lowered voice.
#
But, you know, if I want to raise my voice and make myself heard in a country that has
#
1.4 billion people, I've got to be loud and I've got to let my anger lose.
#
So let people know that you better take me seriously.
#
We're a country of crabs, right?
#
We love to pull each other down.
#
Standard theory, it's so real, even now, right?
#
And this is not just about men and women.
#
Women are doing this to each other, right?
#
So I think there are things that we need to ask for ourselves.
#
There is a cultural context in which you're growing.
#
There's a reality in which you're growing.
#
And if you don't normalize the importance of being angry and unleashing yourself,
#
you're not going to be heard.
#
Be comfortable in your anger and don't feel guilty for being angry.
#
I'm tired of this possibility.
#
Oh, do they see me as an angry leader or do they see me as a nice leader?
#
I don't want to be nice leader.
#
I just want to be myself.
#
When I'm nice, I'm nice.
#
When I'm angry, I'm angry, just like any other human being.
#
And this again, by the way, was a learning from newsrooms
#
where when male editors take the newsroom, it's called a town hall.
#
When women take the newsroom, they're like, oh, she's giving some lecture
#
and she's way too loud.
#
Maybe we'll just leave it for another time.
#
And I saw this with many iconic editors.
#
I mean, I actually think I was an admiration for most female editors
#
because they could speak loudly in command.
#
And I never had any filter.
#
To me, loud is not a bad thing.
#
Anger is not a bad thing.
#
But no revolution in the world for anything good,
#
for any humanity has happened without anger.
#
We have picketed fences with anger.
#
Great example, we say that the Indian independence movement
#
was led by these men, all of who we know from our history books.
#
When these guys were in jail, their wives and sisters
#
were at the picket fences protesting.
#
Where are the stories of those wives?
#
And I keep thinking about this.
#
We keep making such a big deal out of these stories.
#
These women were angry.
#
These women were out there with their Quit India movement piece.
#
Very few of them got documented, only the privileged few.
#
So I just think that both anger and just simple experiences of stereotypes.
#
I mean, I'm not even going to give you a list of the times,
#
like any other girl, one has got molested on a bus,
#
or got an absurd sexually random comment from a boss,
#
or a random guy on the road who's singing or whistling
#
while you're crossing by.
#
Life has been about looking back with one third eye.
#
And I'm no different from any woman who has had to do that.
#
All these experiences remind you that
#
if we just get out there and start verbalizing them,
#
one, it makes you feel lighter.
#
Second, it reminds you that there's a sisterhood out there who's facing it.
#
And third, somebody will watch your back
#
if you are able to at least be with a gang of girls.
#
I mean, I'm talking figuratively, not literally.
#
That makes a big difference.
#
I mean, today I feel very good with the notion
#
that I have such a large gang of women around me.
#
Who are just busting ass, literally doing stuff.
#
And I can call them and say, listen, you know,
#
my technology breakdown has happened.
#
Now, can you tell me something?
#
Rather than calling a coder who will then give me time four days later
#
and kind of pretend that he's like the top of the pyramid chap
#
when he's really not, it really helps.
#
But I would add a caveat because somebody's already thinking about,
#
oh, you know, even girls do this.
#
Like, yeah, of course, women are patriarchal too,
#
just as men are feminists too.
#
So I always keep that in mind.
#
I feel sad you felt the need to add that caveat.
#
Why do you need to add that caveat?
#
I sometimes need to, especially because, you know,
#
the audience that's listening to this podcast is woke plus plus plus.
#
Sometimes in our wokeness, we sometimes tilt the other side.
#
And so I'm glad that you called this out for me
#
because I am often telling myself that, you know, people ask me,
#
oh, setting up a platform for women,
#
you're actually alienating the whole discussion
#
on normalizing equality.
#
We haven't been equal for centuries.
#
To get here, we need to first give them voices.
#
I'm not with anyone who says that highlighting the fact
#
that she's a female mathematician is problematic.
#
I'm very happy that it's a woman I see who's a mathematician.
#
But if I'm reporting on her,
#
I want to say she's a female mathematician.
#
I want the world to know that there is a woman mathematician who's done it.
#
And the reason I say that again and again
#
is because your audience and some of our audiences in certain platforms
#
are now tilting to say, we need humanism.
#
We are doing more hurt by having separate platforms for women.
#
I don't hear that at all because I don't see it.
#
We're very far from it, you know?
#
Like somebody yesterday at a conference asked me,
#
ma'am, but for the last five years, lots has changed for women.
#
I'm like, that five years is only visible to this room of 150
#
because we have a reading about the Beti Bachao campaign.
#
That's where it starts, the four letters, four words.
#
It's really not having any material impact on how that girl in whatever Pratapgarh
#
is being told by her dad that...
#
There's a girl who reached out to me.
#
She works in German multinational here.
#
And her brother is 10 years younger.
#
Parents are just heckling that girl to get married.
#
Leave her multinational job.
#
She happens to be the only member who's earning.
#
They can't see the fact that the kid is still in school.
#
She's kind of subsidizing his studies.
#
These are not people who are living in the village.
#
You know, we love to utter the problem.
#
You talk to women from South Bombay.
#
Have a faceless conversation with them off record.
#
They'll tell you horror stories.
#
I don't know what South Bangalore is called or whatever part of Bangalore is the equivalent.
#
Same stories everywhere, you know.
#
We are in some lala land.
#
We think that having a specific space or any conversation about women is now overdone.
#
Or as a guy, the other said to his other pals, we were in a casual setting.
#
And this guy is saying, these girls have their own space.
#
Now we men need to have our own space.
#
And I'm thinking the whole world has been your space all your life.
#
We're trying to fix the system a little bit.
#
And it's so difficult for them to adjust.
#
I have no problem people making their own platforms as men.
#
But the fact that the last few years is making men uncomfortable
#
is something that just doesn't get past me.
#
Because I really want them to recognize this is how we've felt for centuries.
#
This is how small we have felt.
#
Because what you called equality was never equality.
#
So I have nothing against men or women or any gender that doesn't believe in women.
#
I mean, in the so-called platforming of things.
#
But I really think our problem is that we just make this about us versus them.
#
Women are not doing that.
#
When you celebrate another woman, you're not putting somebody else down.
#
You're just celebrating a seat in an absolute way.
#
Lots to double-click on and I'll come back to a lot of the things you mentioned.
#
But first, my audience is not Vogue++.
#
I would say my audience is certainly liberal and certainly feminist.
#
Which are very different from Vogue.
#
But let's not get into those weeds.
#
And you know, you mentioned that incident in the newsroom where that man said, you know, whatever.
#
I remember this cartoon you posted on Instagram recently.
#
Which is of a man asking a woman, what's your favorite position?
#
And she says, see, you know, I don't know.
#
And I think, you know, that's so lovely.
#
And it kind of speaks to the same thing.
#
And you are also, I have to tell you that out of the last 10 or 20 or 30 women who have been on the show,
#
you are perhaps the only one who hasn't said, what have I done to deserve to come on your show?
#
You know, the imposter syndrome is so ridiculously common against women.
#
And every time it's, you know, somebody says, what have I done?
#
I mean, I just burst out laughing because and but it's so sad in a sense.
#
And there are so many ways in which this is deepened and it keeps coming up.
#
You talk about the pay gap, for example, in your book.
#
But you also write, quote, it is disturbing that women and girls are internalizing the gender pay gap
#
and are looking for low paid jobs themselves.
#
They assume that they can never compete with men.
#
And so they settle for low paying jobs.
#
And then you describe a game developer in Bangalore as saying that it is disappointing
#
that women themselves are looking for low paid jobs.
#
If they internalize the discrimination, how do we move ahead?
#
At a later point in time, you speak about how one of the key insights you got from She The People was
#
that women don't pick high paying jobs, not because they don't know coding or math or business,
#
but because there are no female role models.
#
And because there are no female role models, there is this sort of lack of belief that,
#
you know, they can sort of they can do those things.
#
You know, I remember this great quote by Sharana, our mutual friend in her book,
#
Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, where she writes about how in the mating market,
#
men are full of unwarranted self-confidence and women are full of unwarranted self-doubt.
#
And, you know, your confidence in that sense, the way you describe the confidence that you also
#
spoke about how your parents encouraged you to be confident is in that sense, such an outlier.
#
And even when you kind of speak about anger, like I want to follow up on that.
#
And this is a question I have asked other women on the show.
#
How do women deal with this anger?
#
Because what you've pointed out and what every woman I've met has told me is that essentially
#
there is no woman in the world who hasn't been sexually harassed or assaulted,
#
who doesn't live with this third eye always looking behind them.
#
You know, when you walk down the street at 11 p.m., women have a level of a layer of awareness
#
that men don't have. You know, when I enter a lift at any point in time in a big building
#
and there are eight other people, I don't need to look around to see who is there.
#
And you do. And just everything about a woman's life, the fact that you're so constrained,
#
that there are these guardrails you have to walk down on, the roles that are forced onto you.
#
How does one sort of deal with that anger? Where does it go?
#
Because what astonishes me is that I don't see enough of that anger.
#
Is that also because women just kind of internalize that there's nothing I can do?
#
Let me be practical. Let me juggado-fy a way out of this. Let me just continue the way I am.
#
Is it all pent up in a sense?
#
What you speak about a sisterhood, there's this great concept called preference falsification.
#
There's a Turkish sociologist called Timur Kurran. He wrote this great book in
#
1999 called Private Lives, Public Truths. And the idea was that often we are lying to the world
#
about what we really feel because we feel our views will not be acceptable. The example he gave was
#
that when the Soviet Union collapsed, right up to the end, everybody believed that they were the
#
only ones who felt the way they did in opposing the Soviet Union and everybody else was for it.
#
And then as they realized that everybody feels like them, there was what he calls a preference
#
cascade. And we've seen a similar thing perhaps with social media with the rise of Trump and Modi
#
where people realized that they felt a way about women or about Muslims that they cannot express
#
politely. But then with social media, you kind of have unclehood becoming visible and then there's
#
a preference cascade into that ugly direction. And I just wonder if there's something similar waiting
#
to happen here in India in the sense that women are taught that they should not shout, that they
#
should not be loud. As you pointed out in your talk, that in an office when a man loses his temper
#
and shouts, he's being assertive. When a woman does that, she's being hysterical or whatever.
#
I forget the words you use, but it's looked down upon. And maybe what we need here is just that kind
#
of a, maybe we are hopefully we are building towards a preference cascade where you want women
#
to look at other women, not just in terms of role models and all these industries where they're not
#
represented, but in terms of just expressing that anger and saying, I'm not going to take this shit
#
anymore. So do you feel that there is sort of a journey towards that? And India, of course,
#
contains different centuries at the same time, the 19th, the 20th, the 21st, and maybe there is
#
one corner of the 21st century in India where it has already happened in women assert themselves,
#
but in most of India, they just can't speak up. What are your thoughts on this from all you've seen?
#
So this thing about self-doubt, right? So all our parents inherently want their children to grow
#
the way they want, in a good way, find their feet.
#
I think the intent is all there. The way one takes one's parenting and runs with it as an individual
#
to an extent is dependent on, could you become an independent thinker? So the reason we've been
#
talking about this whole thread of confidence, I think one of the things that helped me think out
#
of the box was the fact that I could think out of the box because my environment enabled that for
#
me. Not everyone has that opportunity. Also, it's much harder, and I have gone through a fair degree
#
of hardship for being the person who, what they call the outspoken woman or the outspoken child
#
or niece in the house who would always say things or ask people like, why are you sitting on my
#
seat or whatever, and kind of got the wrath of it for being somebody who didn't have her graces.
#
So growing up, I was repulsed by the term elegant and graceful. They're beautiful words in the right
#
setting, like a butterfly on a flower, but I'm just not interested in these words being expected of
#
me. And the reason is not even the fact that maybe somebody noticed, oh, why are you sitting like a
#
man? And I've seen my own relatives, perhaps even my mom only who must have said, oh, you know,
#
sitting like a man. I'm like, have you ever asked a man to sit like whatever else, I mean, there is
#
for anybody to sit like. And the reason I give you all of these is that some of my anger and
#
this confidence in this fact that I don't want to take any more of people's arguments that
#
women should have that self-doubt is because I am extremely aware that people who are listening to
#
me can go back and fight the fight better and not fall for the fact that even she went through this,
#
yeah, it's okay. I'll also have some things. I am, I'm kind of, I'm angry about the fact that
#
sometimes we just want other women also to go through that suffering that some other women have
#
gone through. You know, it's a, it's a very funny example, but just somebody recently brought this
#
to me in a very inverted way. She said, you tell that girl that she can do it and she'll do it.
#
Don't tell her this is going to be tough. We are so used to telling, giving a reality check to each
#
other. It's always helping us stumble further. And that's why for me, I want to be the person
#
that my daughter should see is inspiring her without doing anything. Just by being who I am,
#
I should be able to inspire my daughter to be who she wants to be. Right. This is a very big ask.
#
You know, it takes an India to launch rocket ships, to run a large biaceutical company and
#
be the self-made woman to get the voice you deserve to get. I want women to know you don't
#
have to be a CEO. You don't have to be the president of India to become inspirational.
#
That is not the benchmark of your success. That is not what you need to aim to become.
#
That is not how we should put ourselves up against. It's a, it's a, it's a very
#
shallow way to encourage yourself to do something, to say, I will only be worth it. The day I
#
become superwoman, just want to crack what you want to crack, fulfill what you want to fulfill,
#
get through to doing the subject you want to read. Don't have to do double PhD to push marriage,
#
can say no. Big successes. And therefore it's important for me to at any point,
#
literally say it how I feel. And I have learned it the hard way, like many of the other speakers on
#
your show. I don't have to be shy and I will not be shy. And I, you know, like the other day,
#
a guy met me for the first time and he didn't know even that there was a place like she the
#
people. And he said, so, but why do women want to take this position? And I got closer to him and
#
said, this position is two words. They call women's rights. They don't get it. I think there's a
#
position. We're not posturing. We're asking for our rights. You know, it's as fundamental as that.
#
And the reason for this whole thing is that one is that we have problematic issues around role
#
models. Who's the role model? What does she look like? And whether she looks like her or whether
#
she's a Rambo in a suit, you know what I mean? So there's an expectation that a role model looks
#
like somebody. And second is this massive expectation that pretty much an empty headed guy
#
can get away with a lot of fluff and confidence without having zero material.
#
And yes, I am pointing out to an empty headed guy, right? I'm very clear that this is an issue
#
when it comes to men and women and how they're judged. And this is across the board. You can't
#
tell me today I'm building a platform for sexual health for women that you can't understand female
#
libido, but you understand male libido. How do you think this country's population is like jumping
#
at this rate? It is. How can you not understand the concept? Ignorance is no longer an argument.
#
I'm buying. And I say that to both men and women because you cannot be so ignorant of the fact that
#
you're being negated all your rights and you don't know how to deal with it. So I think first thing
#
is to be okay to be angry. I don't have to please everybody. I'm not chocolate, not interested,
#
have no time for it. I want to hang with people who get my point of view, hear it, because they're
#
raising boys. They're raising girls. When I had my son, I was horrified. I didn't know what to do.
#
I was like, I know how girls are raised. I have no clue how boys are raised. And this task is going
#
to be even harder. Teaching feminism to a boy will be much harder than doing this to a girl.
#
And exactly that happened. First day in school bus, one mummy of a girl says, my daughter will
#
start crying if he goes and sits next to her. And I'm thinking, there go all my plans of how well I
#
can raise my child. Welcome to the real world. You're not alone. You have to cater for all other
#
accidents that will happen around you. And these are true. So between role models and the ability
#
of what role models should and can do is the Delta. Because a role model should be okay to be angry.
#
She shouldn't be told you're PMSing. Most men, if they are listening to this, should know their
#
hormones fluctuate three times a day. Women's fluctuate three times a month. I'm just making
#
this point because men don't even know they have hormones. It's a women's problem. We don't
#
understand that humanity is biological and biology has some basic places that cannot be changed.
#
Some placeholders are there in every human being. We're not willing to scratch that surface.
#
And a man who cries and cooks and hugs his mama even at 42, perhaps knows what I mean.
#
You know, so I just think that we have to really make it normalized about
#
what our definitions of role models are. And I'm a role model. And I'm a role model,
#
not because I have worked in television or created She The People. I'm a role model because
#
my daughter turns around and says, you're the best mama. Good enough reason for me being a role model.
#
That doesn't matter. That matters. And I'm sure your son thinks that. Oh, my son does that too.
#
My son actually does that. He came down. Actually, this is a story I'm very proud of.
#
His first report card said that he told the physical education teacher to not separate
#
teams by gender. So I felt very good about that. Lovely. Good job. And I also love, you know,
#
another title for you. Memoir could be I'm not chocolate. And you know what you said about these
#
idiot men who are lecturing women reminded me of this great cartoon, which my friend Shruti
#
Rajgopalan once shared on Twitter after someone was mansplaining her, which is this cartoon of this
#
man sitting across the table with a woman and telling her, let me interrupt your expertise
#
with my confidence. Exactly. That's the story of the word. Tells you why I'm cribbing about
#
confidence all the time. We just need to get to that man's place. Yeah, we really need to get to
#
that man's place. I mean, you know, you're from Bombay. When in the morning at five,
#
you're walking good, driving through that Dada traffic jam because there are vegetables and
#
coriander everywhere. And that woman with her head tightly tied is yelling at some guy there
#
to come and lift his, lift her sack and get, you know, get the area cleared up. That woman is such
#
a sense of power, you know, she's out there. She knows her jazz. She knows what money she has to
#
charge. She knows who's got to pick up the sack and do what. She's a woman on the move, right?
#
I mean, you were talking about us as women having this third sense of the persons in the elevator,
#
who's trying to get closer, who's not, and all of those senses being alive. Like I don't know how
#
many senses we have beyond those six, but this is the reason why when a woman goes to Bombay,
#
and this is my own story, I have gone to Bombay for a weekend to be alone in a taxi and breathe.
#
And men find this funny. I was talking earlier about safety comes at a cost. I have spent
#
one third of my entire earning in my life upgrading for the sake of safety. Upgrade in a hotel,
#
upgrade in a place where men are not there, cannot stay in this hotel because somebody will come and
#
knock at your door in the night, stay in a better hotel, get into the better class in the train,
#
get into a corner seat in the plane. I'm paying for this damn thing. It's costing me. Safety has a
#
huge cost on my wallet. We don't care. We don't think about it either. Women don't think about
#
it either. Each time I go and get that taxi in Bombay and I'm able to roam around at 12 in the
#
morning, it's pumping up my confidence. It's literally the portion that I need to make sure
#
that my confidence doesn't slip. Can you put an economic value to that? You can't, but we should.
#
That's exactly what I argue with every single chapter in my book. We're not putting economic
#
value to things that are not seemingly economic on its face. They have huge value, huge value.
#
I mean, housework is the most obvious and widely reported conversation.
#
Sexual rights, rights to pleasure, the ability to just say no. These are all economic decisions I
#
can take, but nobody's letting me take them. Worse, there's an economic cost to it. I just
#
think that our problem is that we don't recognize what women go through. Recently in one of my
#
fellowships, we had a discussion on the second sex and the conversation went very interestingly
#
to the idea that maybe men should listen to what women go through. When I told a man that
#
from Gwalior to Bangalore, it takes you more than 38 hours or 42 hours to travel in a regular train,
#
which is not a fancy, fast train. And I went to the loo twice to pee. Like, oh, how does that
#
even happen? I'm like, buddy, because you can just like use the window. I can't do that.
#
In your book, you mentioned a lady who for a 36 hour train journey didn't go to the loo even once.
#
I have aunts who do that. I have told my daughter, this is on our first train journey.
#
She said she wanted to go to the loo. And I hadn't factored in this conversation at all.
#
I'd forgotten that we were on a train. So I asked her for the first time, are you sure?
#
She was like horrified. She said, you asked me, am I sure? She said, you say go to the loo like
#
10 times a day. And, you know, of course, when you take a child to a bathroom and Indian railways,
#
they're going to come back traumatized. I mean, they don't feel tremors anymore because they've
#
felt the train. So the point I'm trying to say is that the mothership shakes suddenly because when
#
she's put through these precarious situations where you're doing what you've done to yourself,
#
you're like, shit, you're right. I shouldn't have said this to her because I'm giving her books
#
every day. Do not hold your pee. This is what happens in the train or whatever jazz. And she's
#
like, you're doing exactly opposite of what you're telling me. But this is the situation.
#
Thankfully, now there are some rules about using restaurant loos and you don't have to wait and
#
know your drive extra miles to get to a loo. It's getting better. But what I'm trying to say is that
#
things can be really lopsided on the women's side. And all that men need to do is learn a
#
little more. It's very simple. Not be ignorant. Very simple. These are things that I find common
#
sense for men to just pick up. It's a skill they need to have. Small skill. Listen, understand,
#
help. How difficult can that be? You know, you mentioned upgrading hotel rooms. I remember
#
something Nikita Saxena once told me on the show that as a reporter, one of the things she
#
was really very often she would go out to report is that a lot of hotel rooms don't have a latch
#
on the inside, you know, so they can be open from the outside. Now, I had never noticed this till
#
she told me about it, you know, and I don't even notice it now. Why should I care? But you know,
#
and just, you know, the seen in the unseen right there. And you speak about men being less
#
ignorant and you speak about men figuring this stuff out. And there is a pessimistic side of me,
#
which is, I guess, simultaneously optimistic in the long run, which goes back to that old and
#
famous quote about how paradigms change one funeral at a time. And one of the things that
#
sometimes we have to get used to is a glacial pace of change, where the sense is that there are some
#
people who will never change. Your RWA uncle is not never going to become an enlightened feminist.
#
He's never going to listen. But the hope is in the next generation, let it take time,
#
something changes. And you've mentioned, for example, you know, the term role model,
#
you know, you've spoken about how you try to be a role model, you've spoken about that woman
#
in the other station saying, what are you doing? You know, being a role model in sorts. And in one
#
of your chapters about, you know, how daughters are brought up to be, you have this beautiful
#
section where you point out, where you write quote, here are some things no daughter should
#
have to see her mom do. And the four points you make, I'll just quickly read them out without
#
elaborating. I'm sure everyone who listens to this is going to buy your book. Number one,
#
accepting unjust treatment in the name of adjustment. Number two, sacrificing career
#
for family rearing. Number three, asking for permission. You know, kids ask something,
#
can I go out and the mother say, I'll ask, you know, ask your dad. And number four, putting
#
themselves last. And the example you give is at children's birthdays parties, women are in the
#
kitchen cooking, men are having their single malt or whatever shit they're doing. And you've also
#
earlier in this conversation, at one point, you said something to the effect of, I want to see
#
my daughter doing this or I don't want to, you know, and, and I find it such an interesting
#
sort of way of being intentional and aware that there is a long game being played here,
#
that even if you can't change the RWA uncle, you could change a son, you know, which kind of
#
makes such a difference. And all of these four cautions that you gave her don't behave like
#
this in front of your kid. If you're a mother, all of these are within the context of a marriage.
#
And that's what I want to ask you about, because one of the conversations I've been having with
#
guests on the show increasingly is that more and more it is becoming evident to me that marriage
#
as it is, in a sense, is an incredibly toxic institution. It's, it's really like an office
#
air conditioning is designed for men. You know, it is incredibly unfair to women. It sort of enslave
#
women and, you know, at you referred to this recent Instagram post, which went viral, which,
#
which said, ambitious women really have only two options, a super supportive partner,
#
or no partner at all. And yeah, and there's another social media graphic you referred to,
#
which says, quote, they want to marry you off ASAP, because they know that as soon as you hit 25,
#
you will realize you don't actually need a man. And at another point, you've quoted how you know,
#
Sonia Mirza was who had won six Grand Slam titles at the time was she was being interviewed and a
#
journalist asked her, and this was before she was married, and a journalist asked her, when are
#
you planning to settle down? And Sonia's fantastic answer was, I'm already settled. Right. And so
#
what is your sense of just this institution of marriage and, and just this fact that women are
#
just brought up to believe that the default conditioning is, this is just a default
#
conditioning. You never even question it. It's just so normalized. It's like part of your DNA.
#
That's the way it feels. So what do you, what do you feel about, you know, just what is the future
#
of this institution? Does it need to be redefined? Like personally, the other thing that I realize
#
now about marriage is that we have a very homogenized concept of it, that this is a man's
#
role. This is a woman's role. This is how it plays out. And I think that like, when I say
#
marriage is sort of outdated as a concept, I don't mean marriage itself per se. I mean,
#
in this conventional sense, and otherwise I think any two people or any three people for that matter
#
should be able to come together and arrive at any kind of consensual relationship. And as long as
#
everything is consensual, it doesn't matter what the boundaries are, what the rules are,
#
you kind of know what you're doing. But we are of course, a long way away from that sort of
#
libertarian paradise as it were. But what are your feelings on marriage in India? The stresses
#
under the fact that at one point, I think you had a stat about how 90% of marriages in India are
#
arranged. And people point to that with pride and say, see, there's only 1% divorce rate because of
#
that. While I remember getting told for a column I wrote 12 or 13 years ago, where I argued that the
#
biggest sign of women getting emancipated in India is rising divorce rates, that it is a fantastic
#
thing and we should celebrate it. So what is your sense of how all this is playing out and
#
how women increasingly look at marriage and what is the pace of change that you see, mindsets?
#
So it's interesting you said, shaadi ho jayegi bache ho jayenge. But you know, one of the things
#
I think is even more problematic than that. Parahi kar liye, job to mil nahi nahi hai, ab shaadi kar lo.
#
Husband aur tum lad rahe ho, bacha paida ho jayega, sab theek ho jayega.
#
First child, nothing happens, aur ek bacha paida kar lo, bilkuli theek ho jayega.
#
So I think certainly that narrative exists and it exists in every part of the world.
#
And certainly in India, in every part of India, right? Now, I think to an extent this narrative
#
from parents' point of view is like, ki they don't want things to break.
#
But I also find it such a lazy argument. Parents just don't want to see things not go as per what
#
society. I am tired of society. I have always been so disgusted as to how people live together
#
for society's sake. I'm like, is that a joke? Somebody just pinch me, right? It seems like
#
common sense that we live for the outside world. We don't live for ourselves at all. I mean,
#
I think even that 1%, I think 99.9% of India lives for lo kya kehenge.
#
And loko kuch kehna nahi chahiye. And that is true everywhere. Even in,
#
to an extent, in the work and the social media, this, that, everyone.
#
But I think institutional marriage, according to me, should go through an earthquake.
#
And why? Because I just don't get the logic. And you know, we debate this conversation a lot at
#
home as, you know, people who just want to kind of wonder where the world is going.
#
How can human beings be expected to live with that same one person
#
for their entire life? It just seems problematic. For those who make the choice because
#
something works for them, great. But actually it just doesn't work for most people.
#
At some point you're going to say, this is just way too boring. It's way too slow. Or I need out
#
for some reason and so on and so forth. Now, I'm not saying that this should be,
#
you know, a system where people can just leave people and keep getting married in a,
#
in a sort of law sort of way, right? I think all things equal, people should have rights to live
#
that one life the way they should want to live it. Now, whether they, you know, whether they make
#
mistakes, they want to make mistakes totally. And everybody's definition of mistakes is different.
#
So I just think that it has to be looked at in a completely different perspective. I, for one,
#
I don't want my children to even think of the word marriage. I just hope it doesn't exist.
#
And, you know, I just hope they live their own lives, have their own bank accounts, enjoy their
#
own world, become teachers, become scuba divers, whatever. But having said that, one thing I find
#
really fascinating and, you know, I kind of cover this in a fair bit of detail in the book is what,
#
for example, Harini Kalamur talks in my chapter in Single and Rocking It. She's like, when you
#
see people's marriages, pretty deadpan, right? Which she calls like marriage to her in her home
#
was past the salt. It's just such a moving picture of two individuals on a table with a newspaper,
#
perhaps an ashtray and some namak. And yet it's got zero spice. I'm just saying there is a problem
#
and we are not willing to see it. And more and more women who confess and confide
#
amongst each other are basically talking exactly this. They don't understand their parents' marriages
#
at all. They don't know how they've made it till now. They don't know things they have in common or
#
don't have in common. I, for one, am just fascinated by people who have no marriages or defunct,
#
dysfunctional marriages, but can happily have coffee together, read a book, live their own lives,
#
much better to be hostile mates, and at least not pretend to be in this lovey-dovey marriage.
#
Marriage in India is a bit like a social media post. You look much happier in there
#
than you really are in reality. And it's a puzzling moment. And I think some of us are beginning to
#
question this institution for many reasons. I have seen marriages crumble because the
#
woman earned more than the guy. She didn't say anything. How many times a woman has been told
#
just like men's anger is justified, right? But how can a woman say that? She's showing off that she
#
earns more? Dude, this is the reality. I mean, working women half the time are scared to get
#
married because this issue is a big issue. And parents are reminding girls. I have seen this in
#
my own extended family. You're overqualified for marriage. You're earning too much to be married.
#
I'm like, wow, now she should earn less, right? Then, of course, the whole stigma around women
#
who just say, I don't want to get married. No, I want to just live the way I want to live and enjoy
#
my life in a different way. I think again, we put a stigma to that. I think marriage has to be
#
questioned like a thousand times, particularly in the Indian context. We have made for too long
#
fun of the Americans where marriage is like girlfriends, right? Like you have a partner
#
every few years and you move on. You have kids, you move on. You rare your kids in different ways.
#
Absolutely makes sense to me. And I'm not for or against anything here. It's like individual
#
choices, right? People make their own choices. Would I love to have a companion when I'm old?
#
Absolutely. But do I want to have a companion who I'm just feeding in my life? Absolutely not.
#
I'd rather have a companion who's feeding me instead. You know what I mean? So I mean,
#
just say, I mean, in this book, that's one of the reasons I enjoyed writing it because pre-COVID,
#
I had envisaged this as a book that would be like a research paper, which it partially is.
#
But post-COVID, I scrapped everything and rewrote it and put a little bit of myself in it.
#
And it really became the book I thought it should help women relate to because I,
#
I, like many other women was married really early and I separated from that. And then I
#
remarried after that. And, you know, maybe I say this somewhere that the kind of determination a
#
single divorced woman has, it has the power of lighting up a few power stations and she will go
#
about getting her work done. Like, I don't know what, right? So that's something that I am really
#
very, very passionate about. This whole idea of topoing what marriage is. But that said,
#
I'm very disappointed in women who are literally parachuting out of Ivy League colleges and saying,
#
I just want to get married now. I can't deal with it. I can't deal with the fact that there's a
#
massive opportunity cost wasted for somebody else who could have taken your position and done
#
something with it. And therefore I often say this, that everybody deserves their own definition of
#
a working woman. But I particularly am still inclined to say this for a few more decades,
#
that a working woman needs to work outside of her house as well in order for her to get that,
#
that extra confidence, that money, the ability to have her own decisions and,
#
you know, just be the person who's not answerable for a children's homework.
#
You mentioned Harini and she's an old friend from blogging days and I loved one of her quotes
#
in your book where you quote her as defining singlehood as quote, the exuberance of being
#
yourself. You know, after my dad passed away last year, we were getting rid of his house and
#
throwing everything and my mom had passed away some 15 years ago. And I remember finding a bunch
#
of my mother's letters and kind of reading them and going through them. And at the same time,
#
I think I knew my father pretty well in his last years. And my sense was that throughout their
#
lives, throughout their marriages, they were two lonely people trapped in a relationship,
#
not even able to see that they are themselves trapped or understanding the other person's
#
sort of the situation that they are in as well. Like I, my episode with Shreyaana was called
#
The Loneliness of the Indian Woman, but then I did an episode with Nikhil Taneja called The
#
Loneliness of the Indian Man. And what we discussed there was that, okay, before that,
#
I had done many episodes about patriarchy and how it affects women, but patriarchy fucks up
#
men also, right? And it is when you have a bad marriage, you see what the woman is going through,
#
but it is equally true that the man is trapped in a role that has been set for him. And the women,
#
interestingly, at least are beginning to realize the situation in the sense that you can go online
#
today and you can see some role models and you can hopefully access she the people and
#
these feminist frames are around you to be able to, you know, situate yourself in the world and
#
understanding what you're going through and articulate that anger. Men don't even have that
#
frames mostly. Most men who are, all men are trapped. Most men who are trapped don't even know
#
that they are trapped. They wouldn't be able to see it that way. You just kind of play those roles,
#
sort of go through the motions, live life that way. And you know, you've referred to it at
#
different times in different ways, but overall, what are sort of your thoughts about it? Because
#
somehow that feminist vision is not just about freeing women. It's also about freeing men.
#
It totally is. I'm so glad you say that because I say that every day that feminism is actually,
#
you know, it's applicable to every single person who's fighting patriarchy. It is not men versus
#
women. It can be women versus women. It can be women versus men and men versus men. And we don't
#
seem to get it right. I mean, I don't know how much abuse I get in my DMS every single day about,
#
you know, trying to break marriages. I'm not breaking marriages by telling women about their
#
rights. You know, I have gotten mansplained, I think recently at the Jaipur Lit Fest when a guy
#
came and said, but what if my wife is absolutely fine serving me water when I come and picking up
#
my shoes? I'm like, how the hell are you fine with it? Forget whether your wife is fine or not.
#
I'm like, how are you fine with it? And then the guy didn't know how to respond to it.
#
So what I'm trying to say is that it's inherent to them that this is how gender roles should be.
#
Right. But in the book as well, I say this so many times that my parents expected me to
#
be in the kitchen, but they found my husband there. And they don't know how to react.
#
That was very funny. In your book, you mentioned he was making a biryani in the kitchen and you
#
were having a gin and tonic. Yes. And truth be told that I didn't budge from my seat.
#
My parents are very uneasy. And this was exactly the dialogue. First, though, this is your second
#
marriage. Second, we've come here for the first time to Bombay. Third, your husband's inside your
#
drinking gin. My parents are progressive. Just want a gentle reminder underneath that. Now,
#
what were my options? I said, you know, this is what I'm saying that this is the thing that women
#
don't give themselves a chance at. Try not getting up. Just try not to hold the seat and just make
#
sure the seat doesn't let you get up. Even if everything in your body wants you to get up and
#
do this, just try it. You will normalize it. Our problem is we will fall for this drama.
#
And we will go behind and do a little some karchi hilaung. If I'm terrible at making biryani and I
#
don't want to offer you khichdi, may as well let's stick with the guy who knows how to make it.
#
One of my friends who's been on the show, Mahima Vashisht, writes this newsletter called Womaning
#
in India. And one of her most popular posts is about the Raja-Beta syndrome. That when the
#
boy's parents come visiting and if he's in the kitchen, oh my God, Raja-Beta kya kar raha hai?
#
Listen, the Raja-Beta syndrome is the syndrome that Indian men have, with all due respect.
#
Indian parents have, Indian mothers have. Lots of them don't even get it. So you can keep trying to
#
explain to them what's flawed with the Raja-Beta syndrome. They don't get it. There are only two
#
ways to solve these problems. One is that women shouldn't budge. Second is they don't get it.
#
Just move to a person who gets it or eject that situation. Because the
#
onus of fixing people's problems cannot be mine alone. We also have that problem. I will fix this
#
system and then you will spend the next decades gizzling that fixing of that system and it won't
#
fix itself. And by the way, I hear this and in the book as well, I hear this from women who are
#
hotshot consultants, married to hotshot consultants, who come back and say,
#
we live in the same house. Our lives are completely different. And one day I asked her,
#
I said, can you scratch that out for me a little bit? What does that even mean?
#
She's like, we don't know how to talk to each other. Our only common conversation is our work.
#
Our friend doesn't believe in going out for a coffee or a musical concert.
#
I want to be with somebody who actually even wants to hear me out.
#
Right. Apparently you can hire people now for that. But the point I'm saying is that women
#
essentially are asking themselves, if I'm in a relationship with a man, what am I getting out of
#
it? There is some research recently that the second relationship that women opt for is with
#
another woman. Whether or not they are gendered that way. And there are many such women around
#
now I can see even in my own circles. And I'm just trying to be honest and logical about it.
#
If you find empathy and love, which are basically gender agnostic concepts,
#
then I don't know if women really need men for most things. I'm just saying this deeply honestly.
#
And I'm not saying this for myself because, well, I still like men. I'm attracted to men, but
#
I just feel that somebody who's had really tough experiences of a certain kind and is opting out
#
of it, absolute legit reasons to do that. And in our world where acceptance is finally coming in
#
some parts of the world, let's put it this way, I don't know if this will be okay in some parts of
#
India or most parts of India, but I really think that these gendered roles need to be swapped. And
#
sometimes kitchen is a great place to start. And even though it sounds like the argument is jaded
#
because every man should cook and this, that, and the other, nothing hits home like the role in the
#
kitchen. Or sometimes there'll be this posturing where a man actually does go and cook something
#
and then everybody's like, wow, what did you do? Okay, you're helping. I hope there's a starting
#
point at least. You can praise him for the right thing. You know what I mean? Because we know how
#
it is that some legacy is still continuing among people. So I think COVID saw that as well, like
#
this exuberance of Instagram posts. I thought COVID was very interesting in the sense that it
#
had the potential of breaking down a lot of facades, that you have people living together
#
who probably can't stand each other or who probably live different lives and suddenly they are forced
#
to be together all the time. And you might realize that you cannot keep the shit up anymore,
#
or you might think about it for a moment and say, I really don't like this guy or I really
#
don't like this woman for that matter. What am I even doing here? And I think one of the great
#
tragedies is that men and women just don't talk to each other in the sense that I think what women
#
want and what men want are often not related. I mean, it's a pretense, right? A woman wants something
#
and she's with a man and a man wants something and he's with a woman, but they're not getting
#
what they want from each other. And it's just this pretense and it's just these sort of personas that
#
are living together while the real people are kind of cringing inside or and I mean,
#
that depends on whether how much self-awareness there is, which there isn't much of in men.
#
You know, here there's something I want to just mention. Again,
#
some things are really about men versus women. Men don't ask and they don't listen. It is a problem.
#
Women are conditioned to listen and conditioned to ask. Men have not been conditioned to do that
#
and I think it's high time they start recognizing that. They don't listen to somebody. They don't
#
want to know what other person's needs are. They want to not ask. Most men around me I see,
#
even in their common relationships, professional relationships, too busy telling us what they're
#
doing and too busy to ask how the other person is. Very annoying and I think that is not just
#
annoying. I think it's fundamentally to the point that they just don't see beyond themselves.
#
This is a huge gap in why women don't find themselves speaking up.
#
Very interesting to see why do women land up being silent? Who's giving them the opportunity
#
to talk? Silence becomes status quo. That's all they get to know.
#
The other side of it, parents with just boys, I want to hear from them how they're raising their boys.
#
You know what I mean? We need more public discourse from those parents. They need to take the front
#
foot. So that when they grow big and decide to be a mother, they can be a mother, they can be a mother,
#
they can be a mother, they can be a mother, they can be a mother, they can be a mother, they can be a mother,
#
so that when they grow big and decide to be in relationships, these are the things that they
#
don't do. These are the things they do. We are often spending majority of the time on what not
#
to do rather than talking about what to do. There's a difference between what I keep saying that our
#
world is so busy looking for red flags. Green flags to batayi nahi hum kya hai. Because you can't just
#
tell them not, but you also have to tell them the other part to the point that you said about this
#
conversation with men. We're too busy saying ki men kya naa karein, par unko yeh bhi toh batao kya karein.
#
Same thing with situations on these counts, on gender, equity. Abhi se hi log bol rahein,
#
equalism ki baat kariye, feminism ki baat nahi kariye. I just don't even know how to wrap that
#
conversation around in my head. I don't see anything equal around me for a long time to come.
#
I'm just saying that if women are conditioned not to be able to express,
#
their stories will be buried. And some women, including myself, that fear is at my face here,
#
right next to my nose. I'm like, shit, we can't let that happen. We don't want the invisibilization
#
of the female and her ability to do so many things. You know, it's just really ironic.
#
I mean, we're in a country where we worship women. When we see a powerful Kali, whatever,
#
Chandi, woman, Durga, 99% of the priests in the Durga puja are men.
#
But that worship is posturing.
#
Yeah, I don't know posturing hai ki nahi hai. My point is ki visibly kya power hai.
#
I mean, majority of the guys who are managing Durga puja are men. Who are the ones who bring
#
the Pratima and put her in there and bring her in, you know, invoke the goddess in her, are men.
#
They love her. They wish good. Everything happens. Chalo, Lakshmi tum hai, I understand selfish
#
reasons hai. Bahut auron ke liye toh selfish reasons nahi hai. But I'm just saying ki hum
#
itna kuch kar sakte hai. But that same woman is angry. She lets somebody bleed in the house,
#
toh bas ho gaya. You know, she kills somebody, koi issue pe lekar, tab ho gaya. Why? That means
#
a woman has to be Durga to be heard. Huge problem. We don't have to be that.
#
That's an incredible point about listening and it reminds me of this quote by Stephen
#
Covey where he said that too often we listen to respond. We don't listen to understand.
#
And the difference there is the act of the ego, right? You're listening to respond.
#
And I think that's why women are silent because the men who are listening to them are listening
#
to respond. They're listening with ego. So it's going to become adversarial. There are very few
#
men who actually learn to listen, just to, you know, sit back and chill out and kind of try and
#
understand what's going on. I've always stated this as a human problem, but it's probably a
#
problem that applies more to men. Is this whole main character syndrome, you know, you know,
#
Emmanuel Kant, one, his categorical imperative is that don't treat other people as a means to an
#
end. Treat them as an end in itself, you know, and too often when we suffer from the main character
#
syndrome where in our story I am the main character, everyone else is a proper aside
#
character. I am the main character. I'm only thinking me, me, me. I'm listening to respond
#
so I can show how smart I am or how right I am. And, you know, all of those things. And I think
#
that's a default. And just at a human level, I have to keep reminding myself that just chill out,
#
you know, just take a step back. You know, you don't always have to make everything,
#
everything is not about you. You are nothing, you know, you just observe, just listen, just kind of
#
do that. And everything that I just said, I normally say it in general that we are like this.
#
But would you think, and I'm just thinking aloud here that is it the case that mostly men are like
#
this? No, because there are lots of women who behave like men. Right. And I say the term like
#
men because that's what is called the status quo. Okay. Hopefully in another generation,
#
in another world, we will perhaps say like somebody else. I don't know, like a lion.
#
But I'm just saying that this isn't about behaviors of men alone. Just as large number of men,
#
I find that actually docile characters who are dealing with other men who are basically alpha
#
male. Right. There's an alpha female as well. I don't think that is something that I'm,
#
you know, sort of ignoring. But even there, the acceptance levels to an alpha man versus
#
the acceptance to an alpha female. Just look at the disparity and this attachment of labels. Right.
#
And alpha female is a label and alpha man is a description. Okay. I think there's a problem
#
for us to just constantly have these conversations and early enough, which is when, which is, I think
#
we're very early in our discourse on gender equality. We're already hearing people saying,
#
Oh, she's the alpha male type. Why is she alpha male? 99% of men I know will call me alpha female.
#
Why? Because I'm just talking my mind out and I'm not succumbing to that self-doubt
#
conversation that you were earlier alluding to. Somebody will turn around and say, Oh,
#
she's the girlfriend type, not the wife types. This is the conversation that's happening around
#
us 24 seven. And I'm thinking, who the hell are you to give me a label? I don't care which type
#
you want me to be. I'm not interested in your label at all. I am who I am, but it's not easy.
#
And I am saying this and I'm sure thousands of others who are listening to this will say,
#
Arey Shelly, you can say this because you know, nobody behind you is sitting there and your
#
husband, when you walk out, is not going to question you about what you said and how you said it.
#
Your father-in-law is not going to question you on how you said it. He's perfectly okay that you
#
talk to him at an equal level. This is not happening. This is not the situation. Right. Now,
#
I can say I'm privileged. I can fight with my husband. I can request him to cook when I'm tired,
#
whatever else. The other way to think about it is maybe they hadn't seen the person who could
#
seek this out of them. Right. I think that's the part that women have to think about sitting and
#
not budging. I'm married into a Bengali family. I cannot eat the same dal every day. So I told
#
my dad-in-law, I will not eat a yellow dal on a daily basis. You have to give me five colors of
#
dals through five days a week. Sounds silly, but Bengalis are very territorial about their food.
#
Right. As you know, they love to get the yellow dal. So I said, you know what? I can't do it.
#
So give me a solution. Next day I got my solution. Somebody gave me a different color dal.
#
I didn't ask for it. Or I would have just festered with the thought that this is what my life is
#
going to be about. I have to do this because I'm in my in-laws house. I will not raise my voice.
#
Small things become big pebbles in your shoe. We don't give ourselves the chance to seek our
#
rights. All women are expected to change into their daughter-in-law syndrome and they move.
#
What is a daughter-in-law? It's your label. I'm that same girl. I asked my father to help me
#
out with something. I'm going to ask you. I need extra money. I'll tell him you go pay this. I'm
#
going to ask you the same thing. We also dawn ourselves into some daughter-in-law as arriving
#
somewhere. We have to stop doing that. I treat my in-laws like my parents. I expect them to
#
treat me like their daughter, which means when I'm upset, I will scream. I will answer back. I will
#
disagree. I will tell them that children's homework is not my job alone. I will say it.
#
I have an equal relationship. I have leveled the plane. It's tough. I'm not denying that.
#
If you make a start, 20% of your issues will be solved on day one.
#
So the problem of patriarchy setting up expectations from us is one.
#
Us agreeing to those conditions is another one. We don't fix that. We're a problem.
#
It's really genuinely true. And I often tell women to say that before you crib about this situation,
#
ask yourself, what have you done to seek? Same thing. Want a promotion? Raise your hand.
#
Want something at home? Raise your hand and say, I want this differently.
#
You know, and don't buy into things like, oh, what gift should I give? Who will wrap? It's for
#
girls. It's not. Go get the gift. Okay, I'll help wrapping. Done. I'm just saying that there are
#
small things, actually, in majority cases and conversations in marriages, other than rare
#
circumstances, it's these stupid things that are bothering women a great deal. And I really think
#
it's amazing how small, how accurate, how little it should take to solve these in any relationship.
#
Forget marriage, any relationship, right? How difficult can it be for somebody to treat
#
their daughter and daughter-in-law the same way? What is the bloody difference? I don't see it.
#
If you want her to come and live there, then make it as comfortable as it was for her back home
#
or give them a different house to live. That's also peaceful. I just, you know, these are so
#
common-sensical to me that I just find that they have been made into these howas in our world
#
and our lives are being defined and designed by them, which is a tragedy. And that is the
#
reason why marriage should be rethought. You know, women being married off and all of that.
#
That's a good reason for marriage in India. Perfect. You know, we wouldn't have to hire
#
a banquet. I was like, are you real? This is real. This is India. You know, in the 19th
#
century, Tharo speaks of men who live lives of quiet desperation. And really women lead lives
#
of quieter desperation. Just like yellow dal is so evocative. Imagine if there is someone who feels
#
that way but doesn't say anything because you don't want friction. And then every day of your
#
life, you will see yellow dal on the table and something will go off inside you. And that pain
#
is just growing, growing, growing. And it's such a crazy, it's such a crazy sort of tragedy.
#
So the next question I want to ask you is about how, not just about how men look at women,
#
but women look at themselves and how pop culture solidifies that. You've got a great quote in your
#
book from John Berger or John Berger, forgive me, I don't know how to pronounce it, from the book
#
Ways of Seeing, where he says, quote, men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at.
#
This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women
#
to themselves. The surveyor of women and herself is male, the surveyed female, thus she turns
#
herself into an object, and most particularly an object of vision, a sight. And later you have this
#
excellent chapter of pop culture across the world, where, for example, at one point you speak about
#
the survey that was done of the Booker Prize by IBM, which showed that based on features like
#
occupation, introductions, actions associated with the characters, how the males are one way
#
and the women are one way, and there's such stereotyping. You refer to the 2017 Gina Davis
#
reports, which states, quote, Indian women are three times more likely than men to be portrayed
#
with some nudity, 35% complete to 13.5%. They're also three times more likely to appear in revealing
#
clothing than men, 34.1% compared to 12.2%. Then you speak about this research called Overmania,
#
which found that in trailers, men get 81% of the dialogues, women get only 19%. And in Bollywood
#
also, and often what happens is that films can act as a mirror to real life. So I get that,
#
you're depicting reality. But in Bollywood, particularly, you're not depicting real life,
#
you're not holding up a mirror to society, you're glorifying it. Like there was this recent
#
documentary series on the Yashraj films, which really irritated me that so many people were
#
celebrating it because I look at all of those movies, like a celebrated film like DDLJ and
#
our mutual friend Shreyaana Bhattacharya will forgive me for this, but I have said it even to
#
her on our show, that it is such a regressive film that at the end, you have a man saying to
#
his daughter, as if she is his property, and he is now giving her away to another man. And my scene
#
is what I would have liked is I would have loved Simran to just decide for herself what she wants,
#
which is basically leave the dad and also dump this ludicrous simping boyfriend and, you know,
#
find another life away from these two men. But they all sort of celebrate and glorify these
#
regressive notions. And it's just normalized. And perhaps now there are some signs of hope that,
#
you know, things are changing a little bit. But tell me a little bit about this aspect of it,
#
because a lot of this, like the way Bollywood films will typically always portray a romance
#
as stalking, as you have pointed out, it is always a man stalking the woman, right? It's
#
horrendous. It's harassment in most cases, frankly. And both men and women have normalized that.
#
So much so that men feel so entitled to that, that then they lash out with anger and throw acid and
#
whatever, because they have been denied something that they are entitled. And this goes back to,
#
honestly, this goes back to in popular culture before Bollywood. Like I once jokingly and
#
provocatively remarked that all of Urdu poetry is really a lament of incels, right? That they're
#
not getting any. And it was meant to be provocative. And luckily, lots of people responded to it by
#
posting poetry that was not like that. But this is a problem in popular culture as well. And
#
men and women alike are just looking at this and, you know, this is how they get to understand real
#
life and the real world and relationships and romance and everything is coming from, it's like
#
a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself. So you've written a detailed chapter on, you know,
#
the arcs of this, the various different arcs. So tell me a little bit about that, that, you know,
#
how big a problem is popular culture? Is it changing? Et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I think the symptoms of all the things that you have manifested in that question, whether about
#
how women see themselves, how men see women, how they're portrayed, what's wrong about that
#
portrayal actually has a three word answer. It's called the male gaze. And why is that so important
#
in our dialogue or in any form of writing is that we have been defining the notion of what
#
and how through that very gaze, right? You mentioned how Amrish Puri leaving the hand
#
of Kajol. It seems like he's doing such a big righteous act. Finally, it's dawned upon him.
#
But I'm thinking about even today, that movie, and I kind of watched that movie
#
now and then pretty often, it still stirs an emotion in me. And I ask myself why, you know,
#
I'm that hardened person with multiple magnifying glass and she's not going to let anything oblique
#
past her eye, which is trying to be demeaning of women or their rights. But the truth is,
#
it strikes a chord with me because I still see this around me all the time. And so we say,
#
her husband's a nice guy. He allows her. The father is very, very progressive. He let her.
#
The mother, you know, she doesn't stop her. This is the language we've been growing up
#
with. And this is not, I'm not from an alien century. The girls who are in their 20s right
#
now are telling me this. The girls who are 15 are telling me this. Therefore,
#
it's very easy for us to think that this is changed. It's not changed. That's exactly my
#
point. Everywhere I go saying the same thing. Nothing is changing. You know, one female director
#
launching a really progressive film that bags awards. Absolute celebration. Kudos to her.
#
How many people are watching that film? They're celebrating her on Instagram.
#
But how many are watching it? And how many are changing their perspective after watching it?
#
Anda. Literally. I'm not kidding. I just think that this is a lot of posturing happening in the
#
system. Everybody wants to show, let's do it. I will do it for the wise, for this.
#
Lots of men are very upset that girls are getting a lot of attention. Okay.
#
Now it's just conversation attention. There is zero execution happening on the ground.
#
I'm simply making the point in the book with the chapters on pop culture. There's nothing new here.
#
What is happening in pop culture has a mirror to society, this, that and the other. You talked
#
about heroes and how they get space. I have heard heroes get this in the contract.
#
In the poster, two thirds of the poster will be my body. In fact, in your book,
#
you write about this hero who demanded that I think Tapsi Pannu's dialogue be dubbed differently.
#
He was determining what she should say. But that's exactly why we should remember
#
how many heroines thank heroes for making them into heroines. I don't know much about
#
the film industry, but I have read enough as a common person to know
#
30 heroines in front of my lifetime have said thank you for Salman Khan for making my career.
#
Why? He must have had a view to which heroine is going to be in the movie. What will she do and say?
#
I'm just saying put ourselves in the bunk, make Sonakshi Sinha the police officer,
#
make a guy, one mushy fellow, that girl with a little, you know, ability to give a little
#
smart aleck comment. That picture will be flop on script level. We just don't have the appetite.
#
How do we garb all of this? By saying the market's not ready for this standard dialogue
#
and this continues. So therefore have a work script, go to OTT, have a commercial script,
#
come to theatre. Now, all this said, I'm at least happy there is somebody putting something out.
#
Today, I think Mardani is called, Rani Mukherjee. I think that's what it's called.
#
It's a film that was accepted. Vidya Malan is the hero of her films. I just feel so goosebumpy
#
saying this also, because I can watch any film which has Vidya Malan. I don't care about heroes.
#
Few years ago, I would have said my favourite actress, Aamir Khan. Today, I don't have a
#
favourite actor only, only favourite female actors. I love them. They bring so much life to their
#
films, right? Why am I excited about it? Not just because it's a woman. I'm not used to seeing her
#
do this stuff. The thing is that we are wanting to suggest that, oh, you know, this, when a woman
#
does it, how many things can a woman do? I'm like, she hasn't done this. If she does it at
#
least a crore times, that's when it will get normalised. We do it once and we've checked the
#
box. So, film industry has its own problems. Film industry has not only the problems, they now are
#
raising, this is not acting, she talks too much. Why do we need an actor to say, act? Why do you
#
have to be an activist? There are all kinds of questions. So, it's almost like saying,
#
do you want to act? Come here. Just do what you're told, right? Do not have to go out and speak. You
#
ask actresses, I'm sure you've met so many of them in Bombay. They have to live a life for their
#
profession. They have to live a life outside of that profession. They have to be very conscious
#
of what they say. The actresses who can afford to say what they want to say and still get work.
#
Hats off to them. I have real admiration for them. And there is another lot of, you know,
#
our film industry's elements that I am now appreciative of. And here also,
#
we never had a conversation about an actor who was pregnant. That's a change, right? We finally
#
realized pregnancy is not a disease. And second, I mean, I do remember, for example, when Juhi
#
Chawla got married, I mean, as of today, even I still don't know who her husband is, but I know
#
that now finally people know that she's married. Such a hush-hush thing. Nobody wanted people to
#
know that she was married, right? And that's changed. That's another good thing. Now, of
#
course, I'm kind of overdosed with how much Bollywood is getting married. And they're just
#
like adding to another stereotype, right? You have to have a big Instagram wedding. There's no other
#
way to get married, which is a totally different discussion. But it's just nice to see that women
#
can be women, still act and still talk. Looking at Neetu Singh, who's constantly been accosted
#
for being like a person who's really enjoying her life, even though her husband's dead.
#
She's not dead. She has a life. Let her live it. So there are some things that are getting normalized,
#
but not without the labels, not without the baggage that comes with it. It's a bit like the
#
Neetu story. Ask an actor who came out and spoke about it and find out how much work she got after
#
it. Not happening. So I think Bollywood is a great way of bringing change. Any conversation,
#
like lovely movies, Badhai Ho, Badhai Lo, all of that. But I think even in this building,
#
if a woman is pregnant at 45, it's going to be a viral case, right? I don't know how many
#
Badhai Lo's will happen. And you've had Neena Gupta on She the People and she's so great.
#
She's amazing, right? But these are women who give me so much hope, right? I was telling you
#
earlier in the show, I want to have six more careers if I live up to 90. I really am in great
#
admiration. Madhuri Dixit made a comeback on her terms. Couldn't have happened a few decades ago.
#
Neena Gupta has made a comeback. Like how? I mean, like how, right? Same with so many other
#
people, you know? I just am amazed that there is that space finally created, right? Well,
#
anyone who's listening to the show, please, if you have anywhere you can cast me. I'd love to
#
be cast. It's a tick box I also want to do in some form. Only because I just feel like there is
#
such great ability to create different characters, right? In different formats today.
#
And talking of formats, we should praise what social media has done. In short format,
#
allowed for us to, allowed a safe space to say what we want. With characters we don't care.
#
So that's the other thing. I think the reason a lot has changed about our world is because we are
#
putting, at least majority of audiences are putting less and less emphasis on who and more
#
and more on what. I think that's a, that's a good thing. But will our industry change everything
#
about how they treat women and what they portray? Very hard. I mean, Kabir Singh is not such an old
#
movie. You know, my sense is that I am pessimistic about Bollywood changing very fast, but I am
#
optimistic about change coming because I think Bollywood will just get more and more irrelevant.
#
And I want to read out this quote of my friend Paramita Vohra, who also did a really memorable
#
episode with me and you've quoted her in the book as saying, so when we say popular culture,
#
we must include all of these, where she's talking about social media, web series, short format,
#
TikTok, where she says, so when we say popular culture, we must include all of these. Unfortunately,
#
all of the conversation online tends to cherry pick only say five movies. And then it's common
#
to say item numbers are bad. So is object objectification. This is a kind of undergraduate
#
level of understanding. Stop code. And the words Paramita chooses sometimes she's just magical
#
undergraduate level of understanding. And my question here is, in my sense is, you know,
#
going back to what we were saying earlier, when we were talking about scale, that you don't
#
necessarily have to scale. And a related thought to that, a sister thought to that is perhaps that
#
the mainstream is dying everywhere I look, the mainstream is dying in media in the 90s,
#
there used to be a consensus on the truth, you had gatekeepers, you know, there were only a few
#
places and over the last 30 years, that's opened up the creator economy looks drastically different.
#
We have the means of production, the consensus to the truth has vanished, which means that there
#
are narrative battles everywhere. And that's a negative side of it. But overall, it's an
#
overwhelming net positive. And I also see that in the space of entertainment, like to me,
#
Bollywood for all the numbers on the scale, which it achieved due to the structures of
#
distribution and all of that was actually a hopelessly outdated and out of touch.
#
Right. You had either the incompetent children of old school producers who were still there,
#
or people who had gotten educated abroad and come here with their out of touch attitudes.
#
And for me, the great hope and it's a pity TikTok got banned. But TikTok was a window to what's
#
really happening out there for me. It came simultaneously with Jio taking broadband all
#
over the country. And, you know, initially with TikTok, what you just saw was, you know,
#
the low hanging fruit of hey, you're imitating something or you're mimicking something or you're
#
recreating a meme. But that the kind of creativity that was evolving there, like even in the context
#
of gender, I briefly even taught a course on Indian society and TikTok, I put it together
#
because I was so excited. And, you know, even in the context of gender, you had so many videos
#
where women were wooing men, where the men were clueless and women were doing creative things
#
to woo men and just turning the whole thing around. You had so much happening with alternate
#
sexualities where you could be a kid in a village who thinks you're a freak. You're all alone in
#
the world. There's no one like you. No one gets what you're saying. And then on your mobile phone,
#
you see that there are many people like you and you're just normal. And then that shock of
#
recognition that you can turn that mobile phone around and you can shoot yourself and you can be
#
a creator and you can participate. And I thought that was magical. And to me, a lot of change will
#
be driven by this decentralization. You know, sure, Bollywood is hopelessly out of touch and
#
blah, blah, blah. I don't care because I think they will matter less and less, that there will
#
be just so much, so many more media, so many ways to entertain people out there and audiences will
#
be fragmented. You know, in a sense, I think this whole Shah Rukh Salman and all these guys are
#
really the last superstars. I agree. In a sense, right? And so delighted. So yeah. And so you've
#
been in a sense, a part of this in some way with everything that you have done. So tell me your
#
learnings, your feelings about all of this. So, you know, it's interesting that we are talking
#
about acceptance, Bollywood and the fact that conversations are changing thanks to how
#
large number of Indians see themselves, right? I'll give you an example, which relates to the
#
chapter on sexual pleasure on the platform, right? In the book and even on She the People.
#
You know, women like it, they want it, they do it. We just don't find it something that we can
#
accept. Now, the reason I'm bringing this up, you mentioned TikTok. We started putting such content
#
out, which basically reflected on women telling the world that we're just as sexual as beings,
#
as men are. But there's a problem in that acceptance, right? The same narrative, by the
#
way, is in our entertainment industry. I don't know if you remember this amazing movie called
#
Astitva, in which Tabu is there and her husband goes away and she has a sexual desire and she
#
doesn't know what to do. And I remember the how I had created, you know, it's ahead of its time,
#
as if they had showed some sort of a thing that didn't exist, you know, it was not artificial
#
intelligence by any means. So there that movie, of course flopped, but it also sent the signal
#
to anybody trying to show female sexuality, sexual desire, pleasure, anything on television
#
will be penalized. And that seems to have been the case despite all this opening up of conversation
#
that while women are talking about this in insta reels, they're not still making enough movies
#
focused on that. You'll find a film or a program called Lust Stories, but you have to then make
#
the choice of watching something called Lust Stories to know that this is something that happens.
#
It's not normalized like in Hollywood films where lust and love and everything else happens part
#
and parcel of let's say two people who are going to office literally, you know. This is something I
#
feel is one of the last frontiers that needs big attention. And why do I say that? Because,
#
you know, validation of who a woman is, what she can do, how she can have agency over her body
#
is an economic factor. And if we don't start solving for that on even at the most superficial
#
level of entertainment, we're never going to get to face to face with that. Because in many ways
#
around the world today, the world's headed to more conservative behavior than democratic.
#
And many places where women are seeing a sort of Lakshman Rekha around themselves,
#
whether it's the abortion rights in the United States, I think, I don't know which country
#
recently just talked about the ban on talking about periods just yesterday or the day before
#
yesterday. And these are all first world countries, right? Here in India, we were so happy to see the
#
mess that happened on abortion rights that while it's not it's allowed in our law, it's not as if
#
any woman can go anywhere and get it. They often end up in the wrong places for abortion, probably
#
just leave a kidney behind while they're being surgery, you know, surgery for something else.
#
All of these things need to play out. And again, this is a little bit about women
#
being okay to talk about it and being okay to to communicate that they want this, right?
#
We make a moral judgment of characters about people who want to have sex. Like,
#
no, animals do this all the time. They have no morality over it because it's the reality
#
of animal spirit, which is exactly what humans have.
#
The terms playboy and slut are used in such different value judgments attached to them.
#
That really, I mean, and you know, in any case, in India, the bar of what you call a slut is
#
something else only. I mean, it's just so it's so easy to call anybody anything, right? And playboy,
#
by the way, is not a bad word at all. As you know, I mean, I'm being very sarcastic. It's
#
considered he's the playboy types, you know, it's like a little feather on his shirt. Labels are bad
#
for women. They're really good for men. But I'm just simply saying that here, the reason these
#
conversations must happen, and they are what are central to taboo. Little wonder that even our
#
generation of the 50s and the 40s are calling these, you know, sexual cool gurus to come and
#
address industry bodies. I've been to a few of them myself. I'm finding this really amusing
#
at some level. They're talking and listening to somebody as if that guru is imparting something
#
they don't know. They know this stuff. They are waiting for some guru to remind them, talk to your
#
wife. She needs to know that she has the same rights, or that if she wants something, you know,
#
you have to be available to give her something. So I just feel that there is this shyness.
#
And there is this other thing. For women to become empowered, there'll be somebody who'll create a
#
system that will empower them from below and above and left and right or something like that. That's
#
somebody else's responsibility and nobody else's responsibility, right? And the reason I bring that
#
up is because, you know, women empowerment is a good thing to do. And all of these conversations
#
that Paramita Harini and I are talking about in this book, these are not good things. They're not
#
reflective of good girls. They're very chalu girls. So for us, we have to break these things
#
because they're all interlinked. And that's the argument in the entire book that please don't
#
think that parents creating the opportunity for the girls to do anything, as in basically choose
#
the stream, what they want to choose in class 10, is not empowerment. It's a small part of it.
#
Let's not make this a big deal. Let's not permit the permissions to exist in the system.
#
Let's make this equal from behind the closed doors to the open spaces. Open spaces. I can't
#
go out in the night in Delhi. I have a different wardrobe for Bombay and a different wardrobe for
#
Delhi. Wow, that much. Of course. I cannot wear the clothes I wear in Bombay on streets in Delhi.
#
Cannot. Impossible. I thought I was the only one. I just met a woman in Bangalore who literally
#
told me that. I was like, I thought I was the only person. She's like, no, we are loads of us.
#
And this is true. Rights to open spaces, rights to do nothing, rights to having coffee without
#
looking into blank screen. Can't do stuff like that. You know, one of the initial thoughts when
#
this book was getting curdled in my head was exactly this. Then a woman sat in the first
#
Starbucks in Bombay back whenever it came. She was alone. And I was waiting for somebody to come
#
and meet me. And in this 10 minute period, four gangs of office people had decided what this woman
#
was like, because she was drinking coffee alone. She's a mate, you know, the alpha male,
#
maybe, you know, the guy didn't show up, somebody stood her up, you know, maybe she should
#
not come and have coffee alone, gives other people ideas. I mean, everybody had something
#
to say about her, right? And that's amazing because when she, the people who were starting
#
and we were missing content, content was walking around us, sitting alone on tables. Content was
#
trying to go get themselves a bottle of rum from a theka. This was content to us. We didn't have to
#
look far. Like, just look at your backyard. How does the guard check that girl out when she's going
#
up? Who is she going up with? Today a different guy, tomorrow a different girl, day after somebody,
#
as if it's the guard's business to know. These are the stories that made us who we became.
#
And these are the kind of women we constantly spoke to. Not much has changed. You know,
#
the word woke is four letters. It's still rarely behind in the dictionary. And very few people
#
have dictionaries that have it in it in the first place in their bridge versions. The same is also
#
true with how this sense of television, books, large number of women are writing. Finally,
#
it's just great to see a female perspective on writing. And all the bestsellers are men.
#
And they're not necessarily writing anything that's of value changing.
#
Majority bestsellers right now are basically dishing us religion and epics in some different
#
forms. I mean, many favorite living authors are actually women like Alice Monroe, Marilyn Robinson,
#
you know, Mary Oliver till she was alive. She died recently. I think the majority of readers
#
must be women. So I mean, more than 50 more than half perhaps. So why is that really the case? Why
#
do you think that is the case? Or are you talking about India? No, I think world over why JK Rowling
#
is a great example of how she succeeded under a name that sounded like gender neutral. But everybody
#
knew she was a woman. So who's everybody? I mean, the logic for having that name at the start might
#
well have been that make it ambiguous. But when she succeeded and became a phenomenon success
#
is very obvious a reason for somebody to come out and talk about it, right? Most importantly,
#
if she hadn't succeeded, people wouldn't have known it's a woman. I think thinking with success
#
success is masculine in nature. And therefore it gives people the energy to come out and speak
#
feminine success is what look at how much controversy has erupted ever since Jacinda Arden
#
has stepped down. At one point, even I was conflicted. I was like, Oh God, we just had her.
#
We shouldn't let her go. I wish she wouldn't step down. Why? Because I wanted to hold on to
#
that energy she brought for everyone, right? At the same time, by stepping down, she normalized
#
something, which is making a choice that she does. But the number of men who have interpreted this
#
as weak leader, phenomenal, right? So I'm just trying to say that we do have
#
discourse that is trying to change a bit. And it's a good starting point. But you and I can
#
think about the fact how many readers are reading women? How many readers are there in the first
#
place? We're talking about a small sliver of people, right? Yes. When the Maharashtra government's
#
textbook shows a man in the kitchen, I'm very impressed. The numbers are something else there.
#
It'll show something different, right? Or they, they de gender the, the roles. I think that
#
conversation is important, but are we doing enough to, to move the needle? I think still a lot is
#
tokenism. Even with corporations, you know, somebody recently said to me, an HR department person,
#
I'm very scared to do something for women because all the men in my organization get a little hassle
#
that we're doing something special for women, multinational. If an HR person is scared, what
#
hope do we have for that organization? If an HR person doesn't recognize that medical benefits
#
from men and women are different and they don't start and end with maternity, how is that different?
#
How is that different? How are organizations not recognizing women who are going through
#
life-threatening daily diseases, which can be solved, you know, whether it's PCOS,
#
whether it's perimenopause, whether it's just stress and mental health. No, these are things
#
I think are not changing. And I again find this almost like mocking the idea when somebody says,
#
why do women need something? Why do women produce children and men don't?
#
These are fundamental questions we're not asking for ourselves. So, you know,
#
Bollywood will tell us something, but after how, how much detail can Bollywood also bring us?
#
You know, and there is only that much we are still making fun of girls and how they dress
#
and what they say and girls are making fun of themselves. Often that guy likes me or doesn't
#
like me. You know, I've seen these stupid things in colleges. Girls will take one of those leaves
#
and break them. He likes me, he likes me not. He likes me, he likes me not. What nonsense.
#
Somebody will ask in a room of girls, how many men will marry an outspoken girl like her? I'm like,
#
why is this a conversation? Ask these women, how many women want to marry this Lallu who's
#
not going to go to the kitchen and give me an equal hand in the kitchen? That's the question
#
we are just not asking. We are asking questions that we are victimized. Stupid. Wasting our time
#
and opportunity. When you spoke about Lallu's, you spoke about one aspect that he doesn't give
#
a hand in the kitchen. I would say Lallu's contain multitudes. They are Lallu's in various different
#
ways. And one of which possibly is sex. So let's talk about that. You've got a fascinating chapter
#
in your book on that. And you, you know, earlier you sort of referred to the, the asymmetry of
#
consent as it were, if I can use that term. And you've got a great, a great quote in your book where
#
this lady says, I give in every time my partner wants sex, but he's probably very comfortable
#
saying no to me when I really want to make out. It's amazing how easily men say no and just how
#
easily women give in. You know, the whole idea of sex being something for the man's pleasure.
#
And of course, the posturing is part of the family. We are producing kids and all of that.
#
And women's pleasure and desires are just completely underplayed. You have another great
#
quote about orgasms where someone says, quote, I never knew what a big deal an orgasm was
#
because for the first six years of my life, I had never experienced one. Penetrative sex is so
#
overrated. Stop quote. And your words later, which I found again, really poignant and, you know,
#
spoke to me where you wrote, quote, many women I spoke to admitted to living two separate lives,
#
one where they tore the line, live by family rules, don't talk about themselves or their
#
personal and sexual needs. And then there is a life they have on the internet hidden behind
#
avatars and personas. Stop quote. You know, and which is kind of so poignant about this double
#
life that you need to lead. And there's this great book by Seth Stephens Davidowitz called
#
Everybody Lies, which is essentially about what he does is he got access to data from Google and a
#
bunch of other sort of sites. And his thesis was that people are most themselves and not posturing
#
when they're searching for stuff. So those search terms will indicate what they really want and what
#
they really desire. And a lot of it is bizarre. And some of it speaks to the needs of women that
#
women have sexual desires to women also search for, you know, different kinds of pornography and all
#
of that. And you see some of these secret lives kind of playing out. What is your sense of whether
#
this is something that can change because of technology in the sense that once upon a time,
#
you could really have believed that if you if you're a woman and you have a desire,
#
that there's something, you know, it has to be a guilty pleasure, you should feel bad about it.
#
But now we are surrounded by media where, you know, from all over the world,
#
where women are accepting and even celebrating their sexuality. And do you feel that in the
#
long run that will lead to a kind of preference cascade the term I used earlier that that women
#
can sort of have more healthy approaches towards this and not just, you know, normalize that whole.
#
So I think there's a very big Indian context to it. Right. As I mentioned in the book, sex is just
#
something we pretend we don't do as Indians. This is the land of the Kama Sutra. We just export it.
#
So I think largely the issue around this has been that we are just too shy to talk about it
#
because it's not appropriate to talk about desire. Right. We are not interested in being priests and
#
priestesses. So I think for us, the huge challenge is that we are not going to get to a point where
#
women will seek their claim for a long time to come. We are just conditioned not to. It's so much
#
easier to suffer in silence and enjoy pleasure in your other part of the world because there is a
#
life you live on a daily basis and there is an underbelly of your life that you live somewhere
#
else. And I think that the person who did that Google research is a hundred percent bang on.
#
I don't think, you know, pleasure is gendered. It's only the pleasure discrimination is gendered.
#
Right. What that woman said that is so easy for a guy to say no, not only is it easy for him to say
#
no, it's very easy to make him, that guy make her feel shit because she wants to, you know,
#
because she's aroused and wants to make out. And this is normalized because we have only seen that,
#
you know, this is the domain of a man. And we are far from recognizing female pressure,
#
which by the way, shouldn't be confused with sex because Indians are having a great deal of sex
#
in towns, in, you know, villages, and of course in big cities. In fact, I think in parts of India,
#
that's the only entertainment they have. The reason for that is simply that many women in
#
villages are having sex, but not having sexual pleasure because they don't know the difference.
#
And the woman who I interviewed for this was in a town outside of the big cities. She's not telling
#
us anything. That's not the truth. Most women don't know what it is to have sexual pleasure
#
because they've never experienced it. Now to the point that you're making is that
#
could we come to a point where people will normalize this conversation
#
very hard because I can't have this conversation in my drawing room.
#
And even if we do, the chances that out of the 50 people,
#
42 are actually living the life of suffering is a hundred percent true. Takes us back to the
#
discussion about will the institution of marriage survive? I think this will be a big role play,
#
play in terms of whether, whether marriage is sustained because more women start recognizing
#
that they have one life and they don't deserve to miss out and miss out on whatever is their,
#
you know, source of pleasure. Huge issue. You know, marriages get broken because families
#
come and say you can't eat chicken, you can't eat garlic, you can't drink alcohol.
#
You're like, I'm coming for a marriage, you know, I'm not coming to change my entire lifestyle here,
#
right? But large number of women have to do that in the name of love. What love is this?
#
I don't get it. Large number of men who make women do this go out to a ship in Sardinia and
#
will have everything in the world they want to have, but they'll come back and make others feel
#
guilty. So to me, this whole thing is that any kind of guilt, which is a problematic word in
#
the first place to me, pleasure is not guilt. It should never come together. You know, pleasure is
#
a right and everybody deserves it. And we will, if we don't normalize that and we don't kind of call
#
it the Gandhi bath, that will take us a long time. As Indians, we're very uncomfortable. We can
#
publish 10 books, which talk about this. We will read them also. And we will be like, okay, okay.
#
Back to square one. It is so deeply entrenched in our caste system. We are taught purity is top,
#
impure is below. And everything in the middle is, as we know, I mean, there is serious amount of
#
sex from bottom to top and top to bottom. We know how people who are privileged treat sex.
#
They're the worst offenders. They know better, apparently. We know the Vatican stories.
#
Celibacy has a definition only for textbooks. So I just think that this, this lala land that
#
we've created for ourselves about what's okay, what's not okay, how much skin to show, how much
#
not to show, you know, whose skin showing is okay and whose is not. We are not asking ourselves real
#
questions. Why have I landed up on this earth? If I have to live up to my life, I have to be able
#
to have experiences of every kind, right? What experience is good? What is bad? I don't know.
#
These are fundamental questions. Therefore, I think the challenge is that we will end up using
#
this, the right to orgasms and equality in the bedsheets as a very thin crust of a conversation
#
that happens to just please each other in the drawing rooms, knowing fully well that those
#
people are just sleeping with somebody else because they just know it's a fucked up marriage
#
or there is a fucked up situation, but we're not willing to admit it, right? The other thing,
#
pleasure is directly linked with ability to have money
#
because it's also linked with ability to have agency over your body.
#
We have, as she the people, 200 million video views on the female body,
#
video views that only show a doctor telling you what your body is like,
#
right? Where you bleed from, where you pee from. They're different.
#
Left breast smaller than right breast. Why? Talking about biology here. Women don't know this.
#
Men definitely don't know this. But why are these important conversations? Most women don't know
#
what is okay and what's not okay to be done with their bodies. If they don't know that, they will
#
settle for less. They will settle for bad. And that is an economic cost. We're not talking about
#
that. Therefore pleasure is actually at a level of profitability. If you ask me based on this
#
whole scenario, because women are like, that's extra. I'm able to get it, which is very different
#
from saying, I even know what my body is and what I will allow to happen to my body.
#
Like that woman in the book says, men think that women and marriage gives them the license to have
#
somebody to go make out with. Not even make out. Make out sounds like something done by two people
#
to have sex with. We don't look at that as an economic issue at all.
#
Somebody who was interviewing me during my book tour kept saying, I still don't get it,
#
why this is economic. And I said, I just don't understand why agency over your bodies is not
#
economic. It is economic. And to me, a person, and it's not even as simple as somebody who has
#
good sex as a happier person will be happier at work. I mean, that's a simple equation anyway,
#
but that's true for men also. If you're just happy, you're happy. It's your hormones that
#
have kicked in. Now you go for a happy work. But I think for women, it's much more than that.
#
It's like saying, hell, you know what? I could say no. Wow. That's power.
#
Is it a horrendous truth ignored by everybody and the biggest reason that marriage is toxic,
#
that so much of sex within marriages is therefore rape? Because even if the woman doesn't protest,
#
she's not really, really consenting. She just can't say no. And that's what the situation is.
#
So there is a part in the book that says why sexual pleasure is such a taboo discussion is
#
because many women have direct or indirect experience of sexual trauma, including in their
#
marriages, simply because it's not something that they've given consent to. And you've pointed out
#
30% of violence against women is domestic violence. And to me, that must be an understatement
#
because most women would not be reporting it, right? And this domestic violence figure probably
#
is about physical violence. A lot of the sexual violence is actually garbed under the right of
#
the man. It's not called sexual violence. It's perhaps normalised by the women themselves.
#
Because they're conditioned to believe that it's normal, right? I find it absolutely ridiculous
#
that mothers and mother-in-laws are waiting to know whether the people made out or not
#
of the first day of marriage because apparently they're looking like plums or something after
#
that. I'm thinking, you know, these guys have just got married yesterday. So in case there is
#
any confusion about this, this is exactly how our film industry has fed us, right? The whole
#
world needs to know what happened. It's no different in Egypt. They put out a flag outside
#
after the woman has had sex for the first time. What are these rituals? What is this thinking?
#
We obviously have it all wrong. I mean, the book also says there's a little more conversation
#
about how women were called hysterical if they were not having babies because apparently their
#
ovaries had lost it. Hysteria comes from, you know, the idea of the hysterectomy comes from
#
the word hysteria, you know, and that comes from the fact that when women didn't have babies,
#
essentially they were single or they were called spinsters, et cetera, is because they just didn't
#
have a life. And so they were termed hysterical by society. Language could be so revealing.
#
Language is revealing and wrong, both. And there are enough and many words. I think they
#
can be a full dictionary of these words and I really wait for whoever plans to kind of put it
#
together. But the problem here is definitely with women as well. Women are not asking for their
#
rights, not asking for their pleasure rights. Part of it is that they have been conditioned,
#
but what makes it worse? I don't see why young mothers in their forties, like me,
#
who have much older children than mine, are not talking sex with their daughters.
#
I run a women's health platform where a popular package is mums getting daughters and letting
#
them have an ask me anything with the gynecologist because mama doesn't want to talk about it.
#
Because daughter is going to university in America, please sab kuch sikhado. I'm like,
#
she must have already figured everything in class eight, you're late to the party.
#
And even if you're not, why can't the mother at least start a conversation?
#
I know I'm trying to fulfill a gap in the market, but I really feel that mothers can't be shy.
#
You can't only talk about protection. That's one part of it. Talk about other things that every
#
girl should know, every guy should know. Teach your sons how to make sure that girls also have
#
their share of pleasure. Don't teach them how to get, extract the most for themselves. I think
#
these are the problems. And more conversations on this are very important. We make fun of these
#
films that show older aunties looking at young boys. Where does this all come from?
#
It's not that okay, there's attraction and all that, but why is that Indian bhabi ji is like the,
#
you know, the sexual fantasy of YouTube porn. Of course, I've totally researched all of this.
#
I've seen videos of those bhabi ji's. Why are people watching all that jazz? You ask the bhabi
#
ji, she's like, bloody, nobody cares about me in my house. At least this person pays attention to
#
me. Pop culture. This is pop culture. Pop culture is not just theater. Pop culture is this. What are
#
people consuming on YouTube and why? And why are women searching for these terms? Because for the
#
same reasons that men are. Men want extra. Women want at least what they should get.
#
There is a gap again there. I just think that we are making such a big deal, a discomfort deal
#
about conversations on sex, which is why the last five months I have seen about eight books on sex
#
come in. Thankfully, the next generation doesn't have to read Jackie Collins or whatever is the
#
equivalent of Sidney Sheldon, which makes your palms sweat. They can read stuff that they need
#
to read, right? Literally go get a book that tells you what, how and whatever else.
#
Another interesting aspect of your book was at various times you speak about caste and it's
#
interesting how these social evils kind of feed on each other. And there's a great quote by
#
the feminist Jyoti Langevar, where at one point she says, quote, Dalit women are also Dalits in
#
relation to Dalit men within the Dalit community, which is so mind blowing and again underscores
#
that thought that within every great problem that we have, there is another layer that is
#
a deeper problem. And that's what the women go through. And, you know, I had done an episode
#
with Tony Joseph on his book on early Indians and one of the great revelations there. And while
#
researching for the book, I read Robert Reich's book as well, where he also a geneticist, where
#
he said this really interesting thing that if you're looking for a large population, the Han
#
Chinese are a large population, but India doesn't have a large population. India has many small
#
populations. And what he was referring to was what started about 2000 years ago when caste
#
endogamy took over. And there is so much caste endogamy that everybody's marrying within their
#
caste. As you pointed out in your book, you'll have these matrimonial ads, which will say so and
#
so, so, so caste looking for so and so. And that endogamy has also led to, you know, what the
#
economist Alice Evans on my show elaborated upon as the drive to female seclusion, that, you know,
#
marriage becomes key to this. You have to marry within your own caste. So controlling women's
#
sexuality becomes key to maintaining the caste system in a way. And therefore you have these
#
restrictions that women belong in the house and are not allowed to go out, blah, blah, blue, blue,
#
all of that. I mean, one of the reasons for one of the many reasons for women's workforce
#
participation falling, in fact, is that once families get above a certain level of income,
#
they feel that it is no longer necessary for the daughter-in-law to go out and work. She should
#
now stay at home. You know, it's they can afford honor in a sense. Right. And I've discussed that
#
female labor force participation with various people, Namita Bhandaresh, Rayana, Alice Evans,
#
Ashwini Deshpande on the show before. And you've also got a great chapter on it in your book. And
#
it's interesting how all of this is linked. So I've taken a lot of your time in the last
#
section of your book that I want to kind of focus on is something that your startup guide tree is
#
also about, which is health, women's health. And you've spoken at length about how it's so
#
normalized that a woman has to constantly, you know, prioritize others and deprioritize herself,
#
you know, their self-awareness of their own health suffers enormously and the kind of
#
consequences of that. So tell me a little bit about that, what you guys do with your startup
#
and, you know, just give me a sense of that. So, you know, the chapter on health is actually
#
the biggest chapter of this book. And to me, it's also the biggest area around women that has been
#
ignored, both in conversation and also in any form of access to solutions. Because in India,
#
women's health equals one word called maternity. If you don't plan to have a baby, you don't have
#
any health needs apparently. And I think that's something that had become pretty much a source of
#
anger for me because I can't imagine women being looked at as walking wombs. You know,
#
women seem to have no other identity. Even back when I was studying, a number of people came and
#
said, you sell diapers, you sell lipsticks, you'll get faster fundraising. I said, why?
#
I said, because you know, that's what women want, right? And I don't think much has changed about
#
how people think about what women want, including women. You sell vibrators. You sell vibrators,
#
right? So I'm just saying that this notion that women are, you know, their needs are very,
#
very specific to vanity is so deeply problematic. Other than the fact that what vanity sells them
#
is even more problematic, but their desire to have it in the first place is problematic.
#
So for me, Gayatri, which is written as G-Y-T-R-E-E dot com, Gayatri, but it's pronounced as Gayatri,
#
very much so as the idea of Gayatri in India, is to create this space that is safe, confidential,
#
private for women to come and talk to health providers in a way that they're not judged.
#
I'll give you an example. First gynecologist that I've met and thousands of other women have met,
#
their first question is, did you breastfeed your child? I'm like, how does this matter to my
#
question? The chances of this problem happening, this problem not happening are much different.
#
I'm like, to me, this is a very loaded question. You solve for my, whatever requirements I have,
#
don't ask me these loaded questions. Don't, you know, young girls these days, you know,
#
don't have time for sex. That's why they are getting so much cancer or cysts in their uterus.
#
I'm like, doc, why am I here? I have a problem. Why are you here? Offer me a solution. Cut the drama.
#
Enough research has been done in India. More will happen. Gynecologists, among others,
#
are judgy. They make you feel guilty about the choices you make.
#
I remember a gynecologist telling me she had a patient who came with a gap of two weeks with
#
a different guy. She said the one reason why that woman literally fell to my feet is like,
#
I didn't judge her with who she came when and who she came the second time. It's none of my business.
#
And for her, as a doctor to take that decision, went against a lot of her other doctor community
#
people because they're like, oh, you know, you've got to tell them this is not okay. We're not going
#
to doctors to ask them to be our moms, right? So I think the problem has been one that there is
#
judgment. Second is that we just think that any doctor should be okay for a woman, but that
#
shouldn't be the case. If women have certain calcium issues, they need to have a different
#
protein. They cannot have the protein that men have. Same thing with various other things.
#
Doctors have specialization. The female reproductive system is so complex. We need somebody for every
#
part of it. And the female reproductive system automatically has an impact on other health that
#
leads to mental health issues. We don't talk about that. Half the time we're trying to delineate
#
the health system as this is the doctor for this problem that cannot be connected with the other.
#
So when we started guide three for us, the goal was very simple.
#
Everything can be looked at with a lens from four different doctors in a female body, nutrition,
#
dermatologist, gynecologist, mental health. And that's how we've tried to build everything
#
that women should know symptoms equal problems, not disease and lumps equal problems.
#
Wake up early. Second, there's a problem of access. We're creating it judgment-free doctors
#
who are constantly trained inherently non-judgmental and offer you a solution instantly. Third is that
#
we constantly remind them that they need to have access and availability along with awareness.
#
So our doctors actually spend a lot of time asking them if you have doubts around this,
#
please ask. You know, the hashtag we're using in our initial months is called Khulke Poocho.
#
So it's simple. It's very simple. That ad that used to come about period sanitary napkins.
#
Because women have to be quiet about their situation. We're saying just Khulke Poocho,
#
ask whatever comes to your head. Any question is no stupid question,
#
including the question what to ask a gynecologist on the first meeting.
#
10 million video views on one video like this. What does that tell you?
#
Women have zero knowledge of their own bodies because nobody gave it to them.
#
Nobody's offering that free conversation with them. So I think for me, this platform emerged
#
from the Sridhar people community. We have issues. We don't know who to go to.
#
I put a bunch of people who are using these videos to learn and a bunch of doctors who
#
are helping me provide saying, shall we create something? And then we ran a few surveys and I
#
think I must have done an empirical, you know, sort of piece with close to 30,000 people in
#
different touch points over two years of COVID. That's a damn solid experiment.
#
Women are here and they are coming. We are young as a platform, but the number of women
#
who are using Gayathri for perimenopause, for mental health, for gynaecology questions,
#
for their daughters. Huge. There's even a couple's therapy. Because couples should know,
#
men should know what women are going through. And couple's therapy really is useful to iron
#
out very stupid things because men were like, we didn't know. So we want to solve for all these
#
issues. And I think for me that is, you know, really the future where women will find some
#
fundamental issues sorted for themselves, because it's very important that we have access
#
and not just dadi ke nuske and not just, you know, this is what happens in hamare gharana,
#
that you should follow this, you know, this is what my mother said.
#
You know, I remember first day of first child's birth, my mom and I had an argument about how we
#
were going to go about some things. And in hindsight, I think that was the right thing
#
to have done. Because there are some things that have been okay in their generation. Some
#
things should not be okay. We have to be not scared to call it out. We just say, you know what,
#
I'm taking therapy. Therapy is a bad word in our world still. But therapy does not mean that
#
there's something wrong with you. Therapy is basically for you to figure out if there is
#
something I can solve for myself with external help, who will not judge me. It's pretty much
#
as simple as that. Right. It's like finding a stranger in, you know, a station metro station
#
and getting talking thinking, oh my god, so relatable. It's that. So I think for us, this
#
is very important. We cut through the chase, get to the point, solve things for women because
#
conditions that women have had. And the fact that medicine has been misogynistic as a field
#
needs to be really fixed. I mean, I don't even need to go into the history of chemists and
#
microbiologists and the numbers there. I mean, the terms itself will remind you how male dominated
#
these platforms would have been because very few people make it. And those who study also
#
don't go beyond it. Right. So we need more women's health experts. And you mentioned mental health
#
and therapy and all of that. And is that an epidemic that's been completely ignored? Like,
#
I remember many years back, maybe a decade back, there was all this talk of farmers'
#
suicides in Vidarbha and farmers' suicides across the country. And I remember a study coming out
#
showing that hey, farmers' suicides weren't the number one, you know, they were more housewise
#
committing suicide than farmers. And that should really have been an argument, not for undermining
#
farmers' suicides, but for underscoring that there is a serious problem there. There is a serious
#
mental health problem there, except that it's diffused, it's spread out everywhere. It's not
#
in one location like Vidarbha, so you don't even notice it. And do you feel that mental health is
#
another, is it gradually getting de-stigmatized or is it still a massive problem? Because both men
#
and women have mental health problems. But I would imagine that for a woman to kind of
#
admit to it, to be able to take treatment, I mean, all of it is just impossible, right?
#
The way it goes. Yeah. So I think firstly, it's still a very big taboo.
#
Very few people are willing to take it. Even fewer are willing to talk about it.
#
Those who take it don't share it. Even if they could benefit somebody else, they don't share it.
#
I think it's happening in very small circles. Men, they'll never say it. I mean, I'd be really
#
impressed with the guy who says it. It's just not becoming of them to say it. And it's not
#
permissible for them to say it. They have to wear the mask. And part of it is also kind of living up
#
with like how a man should be. Many men will say it on social media for woke posturing reasons,
#
but we can discount them. Yes. And they may not actually be either going through anything or
#
taking it. So their posturing would be absolutely, you know, sort of fake. So I think the thing with
#
mental health is it's not an epidemic today. It's been an epidemic for decades. You don't even go
#
to Bidharba and their wives, farmer wives, look at your own house. What have your mothers been
#
going through? All their rights taken away. They're slaves to their husbands. The, the,
#
the bua of the house who got widowed at 21. She lives till 90 and wears white.
#
Cannot eat eggs. Her bones are shriveling, but cannot get protein.
#
I'm just like stunned permanently with how much women have gone through and continue to go through
#
these buas are still there. Large number of communities in India will not let them do anything.
#
She will still stay the unmarried sister in the large rich household going to art exhibitions.
#
The irony of this world knows sometimes that you want to just shake up people and say,
#
can she go live her damn life rather than being this piece of porcelain in your, you know,
#
your shelf. Why? What are these? These are all mental health issues. Every single one of them,
#
they need therapy. They've been needing therapy for decades. The therapy didn't come in forms
#
that they needed. They always had that one aunt who'll come in like bitch about things or whatever
#
and talk about it and you know, anxiety or so many people go through that. Then they're only
#
diagnosed. She's gone mad. There's that. So I think mental health, we are talking about it.
#
It's a very Instagram world that we're talking about. You ask any Instagram mama who's talking
#
about mental health that get your child therapy, her antennas will go up and she'll think 45 times
#
because she's like, I don't want people to know that my daughter's in therapy.
#
Yeah. So this is what I'm trying to say. And also women themselves are scared.
#
No, no, no, I don't want to take therapy. I don't need it. I don't need that. I'm fine.
#
This is the nature of everything in Indian society. This is not our problem. This is happening in
#
somebody else's house. It's somebody else's story. They need empowerment.
#
It's a different matter. My daughter has been asked to have her fourth child so that the boy
#
is born. They don't have empowerment issues in their house. I'm just saying we have this very
#
strange filter to our world. It's a solid problem. What you said about keeping money in the family.
#
I really feel that if it's about the money, they should just make it simple and keep it about it.
#
Unfortunately, make it about caste when the truth is it's about money.
#
They make it about community where the truth is about money.
#
If you want to keep the family money in the family, just say it because this caste piece
#
is just causing an unnecessary amount of absurdness in people's lives. I mean,
#
you know, when I read that line about Dalit women are the Dalits of the Dalit community,
#
I just still can't get over it. It is just such a powerful statement because at one of our
#
conferences, one woman said, you talk to women, but you talk to Dalit women. They'll tell you
#
what privilege is. And that's exactly part of the problem. And even women don't realize that often.
#
You talk to a Muslim woman. It's just another world. And therefore you talk to a young Muslim
#
woman fighting the patriarchy. That fight is three X from a Hindu woman fighting it.
#
Are we willing to admit it? No. Why not? We are scared because we are not playing to the gallery
#
then. I think these are things that we are not thinking about and caste therefore is a very
#
important element of gender in this country. So, you know, we've I think finished talking
#
for almost four hours and I'm blown away by all the different things that you do. I hope you are
#
a role model to many people listening to this, both male and female, and that, you know, more
#
and more people get inspired to take up pilot projects like this. So I'm going to sort of end
#
the show by asking you a traditional question I ask my guests, which is for me and my listeners,
#
recommend books, films, music, any kind of art at all. That means a lot to you. You know,
#
doesn't have to be about this subject or that subject, but just that gives you so much joy.
#
You want to share it with everyone? Yeah, I mean, that's a that's a tough one. It's one of those
#
things that, you know, you never have on your fingertips. It's one of those Instagram reels
#
where you're expected to answer everything in 10 seconds and make it meaningful. Take your time.
#
No, no, no. We'll edit out the pause and the silence while you think. Yeah, no, actually,
#
I do have a bunch of books that I would recommend and particularly recommending these books because
#
I think if you don't read them, you can't be a person of the future. I literally mean that.
#
One, I would recommend the biography, which is called Code Breaker of Jennifer Doudna,
#
who basically is a scientist and has done gene editing and created these path breaking crisp
#
of the new gene and interpreting what that lies, you know, what that brings ahead for humanity.
#
It's written by Walter Isaacson. I'm a big fan of his biographies like many others.
#
So that's one. It tells you a great narrative around anti-feminism in the world of chemistry
#
to how even pulling your way through to claim your own work.
#
You know, it's a dance in the doldrums. So that's one. It also tells you a lot about how to think
#
about the future, your children and where to sing. It's a solid book. Another book I'd like people
#
to read is called Lessons in Chemistry. Fantastic book about women in science and reads like a
#
binge watching show. I must have finished it. I literally made time for it in between my work
#
and said I have to just finish. Delicious pages. I would certainly recommend, it's called Cast,
#
right? Isabel Wilkerson. Isabel Wilkerson. I would recommend that. I would recommend Normal People
#
by Sally Rooney. I think we like to see ourselves as unromantic humans, finding purpose.
#
I love the idea of being plunged into confusion and madness and passion.
#
Just restrain. Normal People brings a lot of that together. I've not loved her new book,
#
but I loved Normal People and Conversation with Friends.
#
So that's the other thing. I know we didn't have too much time to talk about it,
#
but you know, there's this expectation from role models and feminists and women's rights activists
#
that you don't have a bone that's romantic, that you're always picketing fences and that you're
#
not like, you know, that you don't have crushes every time you see a cute guy or whatever.
#
I think that's also very problematic. You need to start a series about the romantics
#
with feminists, you know, who love as passionately as they love to do what they do,
#
right? Or how things, how they cry at romantic films or what happens to them when they read
#
whatever. Another book which I really enjoyed was White and Royal Blue, which was my first same sex
#
love story. And I actually was very hesitant to pick it up. Wasn't sure that I was
#
ready for a book, despite all my various, you know, and I watch a lot of it as well, but
#
that book to me just told me that love has nothing to do with sex or gender choices. Brilliant book
#
there. So I think that's a bunch of books. There are a few other good books that I would still
#
recommend. Like, of course, I'd recommend my own book. I'm one of those authors who loves
#
their own book. I've read it eight times. And when I read it, I was like, you know what,
#
if you love your book, that means this book's really good. So there's that. But I think even
#
in terms of some of the other really good books, I recommend a book, unusual recommendation,
#
but a book called The Curry, I think her name is Lizzie Cunningham, tells you the history of food
#
and cultures and women and cooking. I'd recommend Lady Mountbatten. Is that what it's called?
#
I think that's what it's called. It's the story of Lady Mountbatten. Gives you a different
#
perspective of women, English women in India at that time, and what they had to navigate,
#
what they did or didn't navigate. Actually, there are lots and lots of books. I'm reading
#
It's a Labour of Love, but Figuring by Maria Popova. Again, a great book.
#
I'm inclined towards reading a lot more about women. And Maria Popova's website,
#
Brain Pickings, is also mind blowing. It is mind blowing. So I've been following
#
that for donkey's ears. It was one of the early blogs that I started following.
#
But Figuring is also, it's literally how these powerful women, who were never considered powerful,
#
how they navigated their journeys. We have this vague sense, oh, she's such an eye gone.
#
They've all gone through shit. Hell. And of course, I'd recommend another great book,
#
Great Indian Context by Anita Anand, and the book is called Sophia. Sophia is about
#
a princess belonging to the Ranjit Singh family out of Punjab. I grew up in Kapoorthala
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during my vacations, which is where my family's from. And Ranjit Singh is a very powerful
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character there. But it's amazing how many women in that entire family have done far more
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for suffragettes than the men. They kind of wild away their world. So I think there are like
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a bunch of these books. I would also recommend a really good book to all parents. It's called
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Mama. It's by Pauli Dunbar. It's just a book that's scribbled with her art and tells you the journey
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of parenting in a thickish book, which you will laugh and laugh and laugh and cry and laugh again,
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without reading a word. You almost said Dolly Panbar, didn't you? I did. It is the tongue
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twister. I'm terrible with names of directors and authors, but I'm making an extra effort to
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remember them because they should be remembered. Yeah, I think these are some really good books
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of my recent reading. There would be actually a lot of Indian authors, which I haven't thought of.
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Any life-changing films or music? Music. I love music, but I like a lot of music which
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shouldn't be heard with children around. Bruno Mars. I love Bruno Mars. I like music that's kind
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of badass, right? I like a lot of old hip hop by a band called Blue. Almost very sexual hip hop,
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but really good. I love Michael Jackson's music. Hard to get out of that. I love Amjad Ali Khan.
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It's what starts my morning each day. I hear a lot of Bengali music came with my
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marriage, but I also hear a lot of Thumri. I'm a huge Hindustani classical fan.
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So yes, Shobha Gurtu, a lot of the less popular stuff of Shobha Mudgal.
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On an occasion, I would give my patients to Kishori Amonkar as well, particularly if it was live
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once in a while, and she probably took longer to fix her instruments than to sing for us.
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But music is certainly very well-defining for me. I think Bollywood music. I love Bollywood music.
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Music kind of lifts me up from my lows. It's like my everyday therapy, I'll be honest. I'd kind of
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given this up for a long time because, you know, we get, life happens, and then you forget what
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music can do to it. And it's just been absolutely phenomenal getting back to random stuff like,
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you know, if I start mentioning songs, people start judging me already. But there are many,
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many typical Bollywood songs that would... Let people judge you. We will judge people who judge.
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Yeah, no, like I love Chor Bazari. I love that song. I like Prem Ki Nahiya. I love that song.
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I think I love girls like to swing. I wish I could do an item number like Anushka Sharma on
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that ship with that song. So I mean, these are things that just have been great.
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Great entertainers. I love Shakira and what she does with Vaka Vaka. So I like to hoop. I'm still
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a student of hooping. But, you know, it just reminds you what a body can do, what music can
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do to a body. And, you know, hooping plus music is madness. It's fun. I think music has really been
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really powerful for me. Of course, you know, so I started playing drums the day I turned 40.
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And it's like new sensibility in life. Yeah, I saw that big drum set in your living room.
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So it's like music just lifts you up in ways that you really don't think that anything else can.
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So yeah, music. Films, I'm okay with films. You know, I'm a sucker for long, lengthy Spanish OTT
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serials. One because they don't put me back on choice again. They run for 60 episodes,
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so I don't have to think again what I'm watching. That's an easy thing. With OTT,
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you're spending more time searching what to watch than watching what to watch types.
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So that's one. What's your favorite one? So I actually have a bunch of them. I watch
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Valeria. I watch Unauthorized Living, which is essentially sort of masala, family drama. I watch
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Monarcha, which is about women getting control of a tequila empire. I watch High Seas. Again,
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you know, women playing very sharp roles there. Again, very inclined towards having at least half
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decent female roles. Otherwise, I don't like watching anything that kind of belittles them.
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Traitor, female-centric. So yeah, lots of old World War kind of stuff. Female spies love it.
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I even enjoyed watching that one, which was based on the Russian. I forgot. It was really,
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really powerful. Basically, she's essentially a con artist around the world and is Russian and
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brilliant. It's lovely to see women do bad things. We just want to normalize that.
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You have a chapter heading, I think, called The Bechari, The Badass and The Bitch, something like
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that. Badass is the one we all want, right? Yeah, actually, I love bitches too, right? I am one.
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I just don't want anyone to be a bechari. No becharis, please. Act out your anger.
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Yes, and they shouldn't call themselves that and nobody else should have the right to call
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themselves that. So I think that is definitely problematic. Again, you know,
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bitches are gali. All the galis are female. Why? We don't need that. You know, even the syndromes we
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were talking about, all syndromes are reserved for women. No syndromes for men. Raja beta syndrome.
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Only one. Yeah, somebody in India has created that because it must have just come so naturally
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out of the angst that we see. Yeah, that is definitely an Indian syndrome for sure. But yeah,
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I think like, I think there's a great amount of learning and there's a lot of pivot in life that
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happens through music, books and art. I love art also, but again, I love digital art. I can't
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understand too much traditional art. I have a funny story about my five-year-old girl who loves to
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draw and somehow her art teacher really indulges her. So she knows a lot about the impressionists
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and the modern artists and so on and so forth. So we are going in a car and this is a conversation.
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Bani, who's my younger one, says, you know, I need to get some art supplies. I need to draw
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the sitting women of Matiz. And so my son, who's nine, says, who's that? She turns around and looks
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at him and says, you don't know Matiz? She said, are you real? You don't know Matiz? And I'm like,
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having like, this is a real conversation. My younger one really knows names of artists and
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my elder one can't believe that he knows every footballer, but he doesn't know Matiz. And the
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daughter's like, I know something you don't know. I think this is an example of what
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art can do. It can inspire you to know things, push boundaries, get a level playing conversation
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with your brother, you know, things like that. I think that makes it very, very powerful. Just
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sport is very similar. I have learned to watch cricket and football thanks to my children.
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And I see my daughter, who's also a footballer, throw names like, I think it's called, his name
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is Levin Dosky, or I know, of course, Mbappe and Messi are kind of more this thing, but she knows
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someone called Neymar. I mean, these are familiar names. I'm imagining for football lovers, but
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for my five-year-old to kind of take on my son on those cards with, what are they called? They call
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some cards, right? In which all the footballer details are the stat cards and all that. Playing
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cards. We used to call them trump cards, right? Because we only had WWF, but these are basically
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equivalent cards in the football space. And it's just fascinating what a level of sport can be,
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what a level of music can be, you know, despite all the ugliness of these industries in its early
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stage. It's really good to see. Good to see my son know names of all female players. Amazing.
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And your daughter has taste. Levin Dosky is awesome, but if she ever says Haaland in front
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of you, please be informed. She doesn't mean the country. She means a player.
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Yes. And she does. She does test me by saying, do you remember this face? And I'm like, I don't.
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Shelly, it's been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And in fact,
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for inviting me to your house to record this. This has just been, I've had such a great time.
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Thanks, Amit. It's been so long coming and I'm so glad we could sit together and
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that I could show up and make time. Thank you. Thank you.
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Unseen at scene unseen.in. Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen? If so, would you like to support
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the production of the show? You can go over to scene unseen.in slash support and contribute
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