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What is India? The easiest way to answer that is by pointing at a map. But the lines on
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a map that we call India are not India. Not the start of it, not the end of it, not all
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of it. Can we perhaps arrive at an understanding of India by first talking about what Indianness
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is? Is it our food? If so, well, most ingredients that we use in our food came from outside
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such as tomatoes, tomatoes, chillies and so on. And there is no such thing as Indian food.
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There are countless unique cuisines within India, countless traditions of cooking, which lines on
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a map cannot capture. Our clothes are the same way. So much about our culture is the same way.
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It is our culture, but much of it originated elsewhere, and there is so much diversity
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and variety that you can't pin it down. Maybe it is this diversity that is truly Indian,
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not any one thing, not even a combination of many things, but the fact that there are many things
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that we are a khichri always in churn, that we will not be contained. And if you try to contain
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this, if you try to define this, to say that it is one thing and not another,
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then you miss a point. In fact, one can say then that you are the true anti-national.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Verma. Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen. My guest
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today is the legendary, the wonderful, the most lovable Pushpesh Pant, a man who embraces the
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multitudes that India contains. Our mutual friend Chandrahar Chaudhary said to me about Pushpesh,
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quote, an hour in his company will make you fall in love with India all over again,
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stop quote. And this is a good kind of love, not the exclusionary kind. Pushpesh is known for the
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many books he has written on food, and he's also taught international relations in JNU for decades,
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truly a man of many parts. He's known both for his breadth of knowledge and his depth of insights
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about the things he really cares about, food, clothing, music, our culture, and so on. We had
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a delightful conversation. Indeed, I think you'll agree after listening to this that this is one of
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my classic episodes. Pushpesh spoke from the heart, without filters, and while talking about
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his life, revealed so much also about his times and about this country of ours. Quick note,
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by the way, I referred to a couple of episodes during this conversation that I recorded before
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talking to Pushpesh, but we'll release later, so don't get perturbed. Fine episodes, but you'll
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have to wait. Meanwhile, meet your new friend and guide, Pushpesh Pant. But first, let's take a
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quick commercial break. Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent years in
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building a reading habit. This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles
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and essays. There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the problem we all face
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is how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put the right
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incentives in place? Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company
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called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com, which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading
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more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader. Every day
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for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read. The subjects covered went from machine
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learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade. This helped me build a habit of
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reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out their Daily
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Reader. New batches start every month. They also have a great program called Future Stack,
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which helps you stay up to date with ideas, skills, and mental models that will help you
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stay relevant in the future. Future Stack batches start every Saturday. What's more,
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you get a discount of a whopping 2,500 rupees, 2,500 if you use the discount code Unseen.
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen. Uplevel yourself.
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Pushpaeshji, welcome to the scene on The Unseen. You're very welcome. You know, I had a mischievous
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thought in the morning. We're recording this in Delhi on April 1st. And you said that at 8.30,
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your taxi will leave Gurgaon and you'll come here. And I thought, today is April 1st. So why don't you
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send a message to Sir in 9.15 that Sir, April Fool Joke, the recording is off. Although I thought so,
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but you were kind enough to send a message that great, it's going to be fun. The first day when
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you shifted to April 1st, that day, something came to my mind that maybe you made an April Fool,
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who got angry, the song will be like Joy Bukharji, but it didn't happen. So no damage done.
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No, no, I never get so angry. I've been looking forward to talking to you a lot. And you know,
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maybe a year and three months ago, something like that in December 2021, Minalji was sitting in front of me
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and we had a lovely conversation. She was very kind with her memories. And she is your first
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cousin. And you were just saying that, you know, her memories, when you heard that episode,
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that there was a lot of overlap. Because in some senses, parts of the childhood were common and all
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of that. Yes, I mean, you know, I would like to add that the first cousin is in a legal relationship.
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But for me, she is more than a real sister. And for her, the situation is that our childhood,
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mine, my elder brother's, Minal's, and her younger sister, Ira's, who is the elder step-sister,
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Binu's, lives together. So, you know, she very evocatively has written somewhere that we were
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four siblings having two sets of parents. So it was a lot of fun for me to imagine that Minal is my
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cousin. So I have an own sister. She's married in Nainital. But there is hardly any shared memories
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I have with her. She's a younger. She was sent out to study earlier. But the childhood we spent together,
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I don't remember any summer holidays when Binu, Minu, and Eru were not with us. I don't remember
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that until we studied, we were together in Nainital for four or five years. Binu had gone to Allahabad,
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but I, Ira, and Miki, her younger brother, were there. My brother Muktesh. So there is a certain age
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requirement that Muktesh, my elder brother, was bonding better with Binu because of their age
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difference. Me and Minal were 10 months apart. We were together. And some of our shared interests
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from our childhood, whether it was language, literature, writing, reading, and a small competitive
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streak, we were not competing among each other because Minal was a year behind in school. And
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that's again a very strange story because my mother, Minal's mother, was in Shantiniketan.
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When my mother got married to my father, she decided to home-school us, which I thought was the
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greatest thing that happened to us. We studied at home. And when we crossed Darda Das and
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formally reached somewhere to study intermediate, that's the first time we saw what a school or a
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college was. But in Minal's house, there was that hospitality. From the beginning, my father was in
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the education department. She was sent to school in a regular school. So the point was that she was
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one year behind, although she was one year older. And both of us were reasonably bright in our class,
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standing first, and so on. And her mother, whom we call Didi, we call Didi because
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she was a hind sight in afterthoughts.
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And also when she started writing, she was Shivani for everybody. So interestingly,
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she used to call my mother Jirja, which means big mother. And she has written a beautifully
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evocative piece about my mother in Har Devi. And also, you see, Didi has written a beautiful
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obituary for my mother. And she's been translated brilliantly by Ira. Now that is the kind of thing,
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the affection between the two sisters, my mother and... And there was another trait, you know,
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which made me and Minal come closer to each other, or Minal and I, to be grammatically correct.
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You put an avala fruit on your, and your 360 degree view. So anything you ask them,
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without referring to a book or a dictionary or a thesaurus, they would explain to you,
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to your satisfaction, and not settle it, also vet your appetite, make you a little more curious.
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To find a lot more about it. That is the kind of thing, which I think Minal and I shared from very
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early childhood, and growing up together through adolescence. We must know, we must know that if
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this is Bhartiharika Ashratak, then what does it mean in Sanskrit? If Kalidas's Shloka is being
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taught to us, then is it right to say that the fourth Shloka of Abhigyan Shakuntal,
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Kimimrihi Mathura Naam, Mandanam Nakriti Naam, Sarasjamanu Iddham, Valkali Naapi Tanmi,
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etc etc. Is this really the best Shloka? We can find a better Shloka than this.
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So it was, Minal was fabulous with mathematics, I was not, but the point was English, Sanskrit,
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Hindi, History. We were genuinely interested in finding out for ourselves, the way our, my mother
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and Didi seemed to know, everything seemed to know, various things. That is something which,
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which we sort of, you know, carried through. So for me, it is very impossible to think that way.
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I want to double click on a few things here, but first, the phrase, we must know.
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Okay, like in today's world, if somebody thinks about something, we must know.
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It is quite easy to begin the search, because there is the whole internet, you search,
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Wikipedia, you can gradually get into it. But just as it is easy to begin that search,
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it is also easy to end that search, where you can be satisfied with some shallow factoid.
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I would go further. I think the problem is that people have forgotten a phrase which was
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fashionable 20 years ago when computers were not so ubiquitous garbage in garbage out.
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You have a Wikipedia and anybody can write any crap there. And unless you know to cross
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check a source, even the references given Wikipedia citations may not be what you know,
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you say that the source does not exist anymore, or the source is not a peer group reviewed journal,
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or it is not a text, it is not like an article contributed to Encyclopedia Britannica by a
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scholar specializing in that subject. So it is crazy. So I get a titillation. It is like
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pornography and immediate gratification, and I know it. And then you don't keep at the back
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of your mind that what you have found out was garbage in and now it has been garbage out for
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you. So I think you go to my Wikipedia page, all information is wrong. My date of birth is wrong.
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Then books are cited badly. Not that I have written much, but then my son said, why did
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you correct it? I said, how do I have to worry about correcting it? I corrected, somebody else
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edits it to Wikipedia page, the mistakes will keep going on and on. And it almost sounds like
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either a job application for a position or an arbitrary piece. It is stupid. So I think
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whether it is Wikipedia, whether it is Google searches, you have to be extremely competent.
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I will give you an example. I am working on a book on Almora. It is a non-fiction novel,
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not a solid work of academic history, but interesting things.
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My maternal great-grandfather was the first graduate from Kumaon in 1970 from Muir College,
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Calcutta University. His son's daughter was married to another contemporary who was a doctor
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in Almora itself. Doctor meant that he was a qualified doctor, not an MBBS, but an LMP or
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LMS licensate who had taken the certificate in diploma in Lahore. He had not traveled across the
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seas, which was taboo. The interesting part was that his son, my maternal grandfather,
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traveled to England against his father's wishes and crossed the Kalapani Sagar. So when he came
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back, he was excommunicated from the Brahman Beradri and his father disinherited him. The story is a
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little more complicated because the person who traveled with him was one Bholadak Pandey. He was
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known as Bholia Japan because he had also gone to Japan. When he was excommunicated, this gentleman
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could not bear the shock, so he committed suicide. And the Orthodox party faction in Almora town
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was my maternal great-grandfather, who was an associate of Madan Mohan Malviya.
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One of the people who helped him found Banaras Hindu University, was a professor of Hindu theology
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there, but spearheading the Orthodox conservative community. He has other credible things to his
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name, founding a Hindu high school to take on the Christian missionary school, Ramsey school,
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and so on. But this was a bad issue. People said, look, your son is thriving.
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That is the one I wanted to know who were the progressive faction. Now interestingly,
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Mrinal's father-in-law's grandfather, who was a contemporary, belonged to the progressive faction.
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So, they were a thin majority, but they opened the way for progress in Almora.
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But to go back to the same story, I was curious, who was that doctor?
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He was very, very orthodox again. He would not let the daughter visit her maika, etc. etc.
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But I could not trace anywhere on the date. I knew his name,
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qualification, period, but could not trace him anywhere in the cyberspace. Interestingly,
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there was another doctor there. My maternal grandmother was born to another doctor,
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who had a fantastic reputation. He was an Almora Brahmin, but practiced in
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Lucknow, and he was supposed to have a roaring practice. But there is a catch. He was called a
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doctor, but was he a doctor or was he a Vaidya? He was treating venereal diseases of the talukedars.
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And you didn't know that he lived in Nazarbagh. His son was a PhD from Ireland and a reader in
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applied economics in Lucknow University. His daughter, my maternal grandmother, had gone to
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a school dressed up in pants and was quite a tomboy in 1908 or thereabouts. Now, this lady,
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when she came as a bahu to this ultra-orthodox Hariram Panditji, there was a mismatch in that
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house. She had lived with a certain openness in Lucknow. She came back to Almora backwaters.
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She had been brought up as a son, educated. She topped the middle school in the province then.
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But then I wanted to say, who was that man? Who was that doctor? Where did he study? So,
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there were four doctors, two lawyers. So, I was not stuck in family history. There was a Thakur Sahib,
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who was a criminal lawyer. There was an engineer, who was a chief engineer. He was Thakur.
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There was a Shah in the Baniya family, whose business was very good. When the British went,
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they brought all the property. They ran the LR Shah stores and a cinema hall there. So,
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I was just trying to plot at the turn of the century, who were the people who had migrated
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from the village to Almora and what are the stories, what trajectories followed.
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Net is not a help at all. You get the same name, but a doctor who is staying in Almora today.
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You get a person who just... Hari Ram Panditji is there, because enough has been written about
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him by various people, good, bad or the ugly. But then the point is, you somehow stop if you move
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out of the politician's range. You get Sumitranandan Panth, his family. You get Goindwala Panth,
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his ancestors. You get C. D. Pandey, who was the second MP from Nainital or the first MP from
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Almora. There was somebody called Devya Hudkiya. He was Sumitranandan Panth's elder brother. He
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was called Hudkiya because he used to play that small drum and he used to dance around the road
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side. He was quite a gay blade and very unorthodox. He had written an article on Soviet Bolshevik
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revolution way back in 1919, which means just at that time. He subsequently became an MP in the
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parliament. There was the General Secretary of the Undivided Communist Party, Puranjan Joshi,
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who had topped intermediate in history in Almora. These people were the ones who made Almora what
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a vibrant, interesting place. So I was trying to say what went wrong with Almora.
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Almora got Uday Shankar. Almora got Rabindranath Tagore. Almora got a visit by Vivekanand. Almora
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had all this activity. And by the time in 1950s, it is a town of widows, lafangas, orphans, failures,
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dropouts who have stayed back there. How did all the indicators of social change
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did not make Almora take off? And the center of gravity moved on to either Nainital or to
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Bareilly and things of that kind. So I was curious about this. Partly somebody wrote me a letter,
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a cousin with whom I have no relationship otherwise. He said, can you talk to me something
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about your grandfather? So I said, look, I have very vague memories of my grandfather.
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The only incident I remember is that he had died. And we had gone for a marriage to Almora
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Chappanwala, which was my father's maternal place. And two ladies came and started crying.
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And they were supposed to be the concubines of my grandfather. And my father addressed them
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as Mausi, Kenja. And my maternal grandmother scolded my father was wrong with education.
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I am your Kenja. Your mother trusted me in my lap when she was about to die. And you called me
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Mausi. How can you call these keeps of your father Kenja? But my father insisted and said,
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my father was fond of them. And they are wailing for him and they are grieving for him. So the
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least I can do is to say, I'm around Mausi. Don't worry about that. So then this gentleman wanted
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to know your grandfather was good for nothing. How could he afford to concubines? I said, look,
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he gambled. He was a contractor. That's what we know. He used to ride reasonably well.
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And he had friends who lent him money. And he kept to nice, maintained to mistresses somewhere
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else. So I'm not interested in his accounting, how he did that. Maybe he died with the debt
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which my father settled, et cetera, et cetera. But he lived his life. His garage was that his father
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was a puritanical, his grandfather was a very puritanical elder brother.
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So how did he do that? I said, look, I can tell you my elder brother did the same.
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My elder brother never did a job for a single day in his life. And when somebody would say,
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why did you work? He said, gentlemen don't work. There are gentlemen and tradespeople,
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and then one day my father, I think was very upset. He said Muktesh, what would happen to you?
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How will you live like this? My elder brother was around 18 or 19. He had just finished his
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master's, I think. He told my father, that's the question which you should have pondered when you
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produce children, whether you could afford to keep the children or not. Why should I, who was not
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given a choice to be born, be asked, that's the last time my father asked him what would happen
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to him. I remember my father telling me, I hope Pushpesh, you will treat your elder brother nicely
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and never be bad to him. I think that is the kind of thing which Almora has fantastic resonances.
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Which family had a black sheep? Which family had a sexual deviant? Which family had a reckless
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gambler? Which family had an English champion? Which family had a freedom fighter? And then
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memories are recreated to make your ancestors respectable. Nobody says, my aunt ran away from
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home. She had become pregnant before marriage and there was a shotgun marriage. You would not say
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that so and so in my family had a relationship with a shiulkaas girl.
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If there was a low caste mistress, the joke was that a high born so-called Brahmin would say,
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you can screw the person, but you can't kiss her because mouth-to-mouth context is
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but what is called the lower coitus, the lower population according to Kama Sutra is fine.
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Lower caste, lower coition, no oral concerns. So I think I wanted to work on that.
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I would like to talk about this a little more if you like. It was snowing. That was the year I got
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married and we had a very unorthodox honeymoon. My wife wanted to go to exotic places, but I wanted
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to have it in the hills. So we went to a place where it was snowing. When we came back, the snow
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had turned into frost and it was very slippery. When we reached Nainita Almora where I was staying,
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you could hardly walk and there was no electricity. The wires had broken down
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and there was nothing to eat and cook. So the friend I was staying with, he said, Pushpush,
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what do you do? You walk down. There was a flight of stairs about 20. There is a shop
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who sells kerosene. So we will light a stove and we will have a lamp and we will eat.
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I walked down and there was this chill. The temperature was so low that he could sell
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in a newspaper. But that is not the story. The story was that he was singing,
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not singing, humming a thumri, Bhairavi, with a very deep bandish. I was spellbound.
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So he looked at me and said, what do you want to buy? I said, I came to buy oil, but you are a very
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good bandish. I am not even singing. He looked at me hard and said, what do you know, boys and girls?
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We are from the time when we used to go to Uday Shankar's cultural centre and learn.
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Ravi Shankar was there, we were there. He dropped a few names. But the fact was that this was almost,
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the year was 71 or 72, 73, I think. And strange how one forgets one when got married, one when
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got divorced also. This gentleman, across three decades, had memories of his time spent with
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Uday Shankar. And he had certainly imbibed his love for music. But what was sustaining him in
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that dull, depressing evening in Almora, in the small shop, was a thumri Bhairavi bandish,
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which he had learned. And I think I walked back, talked to somebody, and he said, no,
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he says the same thing to everyone. But nobody who would have heard that bandish,
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and Shah ji hum so tunefully, would know what Uday Shankar must have meant to him.
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As a young kid of 12 or 13 and so on. Toh mujhi, wo Almora ke baare mein kayi cheeze hain,
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matlab aisi lagti hain, jo bahutti mazeki hain. Jahaan our Naniyal wala ghar tha,
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wahan pe signboard laga tha, Dr. Tularam Joshi Mark. Who was Dr. Tularam Joshi?
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Much later we found out there was a doctor from Almora who had gone to Burma and served there.
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And one of his grandsons was in the IAS, Lalit Joshi, who ended up in the central
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tribunal, CAAD tribunal, Madhya Pradesh carder. But interesting people who had started from Almora,
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not crossed the oceans, gone overland to Burma, overland to Lahore, settled down in
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Lucknow, settled down in Agra, settled down in Delhi. And there is not even a trace of
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memory that exists anymore. Let's take Dr. Nilambar Joshi in Delhi, a surgeon who died during
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communal rioting in Delhi in 1946. There's a road named after him in Karol Bagh. But nobody remembers
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how he died, what happened to him. Did he come out meeting the crowd to pacify them? Did they
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target him because he was sheltering Muslims or treating them? Interesting stories about the
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people from Almora who went out. So we are at Divya Hurkiya. So the family thought that he had
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lost his caste, but he was a very progressive person who was keeping track of duniya mein kaha kya
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ho raha hai. I can't imagine somebody writing an article in a local Almora newspaper about the
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Bolshevik revolution a year and a half after it was happening. So Almora was a fascinating place.
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The question I was going to ask you when we took that diversion into Wikipedia was more a sort of
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a longer, deeper question about the rhythms of life. Like aaj kal agar aap kuchh search karoge,
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the rhythm of searching and knowing and looking into that knowledge is very fast and therefore
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perhaps sometimes very shallow. Whereas back in the day, I remember that, I mean, I grew up in the
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80s and so on, aur jab kuchh khoshte the toh, there would be the concern of the people who
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there would be the concerted effort. Nothing is easy at hand. You have to make an effort and
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kind of look for things. But then when you look for things, you immerse yourself a little more
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deeply. The rhythm is slower. Similarly, agar aap communication dekhe. And I remember chatting about
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this with our mutual friend, Chandrahalsh Chaudhary. Like one of the things I love about Chandrahalsh
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is that wo jab email likta hai, he writes it like we used to write in the 80s and 90s.
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Toh waise uski emails hoti hai, lambi lambi hoti hai, paragraphs hoti hai, wo hoti hai.
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And most of modern communication is ki aap WhatsApp me aapne message bhej diya, email me
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bhi bheja, toh bahut instrumental hai. Jaise ki, okay, let's meet at four tomorrow. And something
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like perhaps our exchange, that it's very instrumental and crisp. Lekin wo jo thairaf se aap batke
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chithi lik rahe ho and the very act of sitting and writing a letter to someone is not just a
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message to them that you care about them, so you're sitting and writing a letter and that's an
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important connection. But it is also an act of self-improvement, kyunki whenever you sit down
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and you write something aaraam se, you know, you are deepening yourself in a sense, you're forming
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yourself bit by bit. And in the frenetic rhythm of the modern time, mujhe kabhi kabhi lakta hai ki wo
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nahi hai. Ye jo thairav hai, jo slow rhythm hai. Like even what you said about the gentleman who
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was humming the thumri, you know, ki maybe you can argue ki theek hai, unke life me matlab
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smartphone nahi hai, Spotify nahi sun sakte, music he can listen to now is very limited
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and you can say that, oh poor guy. But the way I also see it is that he can, you know, the memories
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that he has of that beautiful music he has heard, they are with him all the time, he can revel in them.
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Aap se thoda madhbed mera ye hai Amit, you said ki 80s mein, in 80s I was a 35 year old person,
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mujhe lakta hai ki choice toh aaj bhi humari hai, ki hum thair ke, can I stand back and look around
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and see the world go by? What you said about Chandra Haas, he is a man comfortable in his skin,
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at peace with himself, at peace with you and you can begin anywhere to anywhere, khaane se, gaane se,
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bhajane se. Mujhe lakta hai ki aaj bhi agar mujhe koi khoj karne hai, toh doctor ne mujhe
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bataya hai ki me computer khol ke Wikipedia or Google search karun, internet ne mere liye sadhan
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solubh kiya hai. But still what I do, I use a computer, I am not a luddite, but at least I
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think I am not a luddite, the kids think that I am, well, a prehistoric fossil, main usme
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ek kitab dhoodta hu, jo Gutenberg me hai or Oxford free access me, mujhe ye kitab chahiye,
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us kitab ke PDF ko download karta hu, apne fursat se padta hu, computer pe bilkul nahi padta hu,
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ek 41-42 inch ki screen hai, wo bed ke saamne rakhi hui hai, uspe kitab ka panna kholta hu,
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aaraam se dhiri dhiri padta hu, apne, jo brilliant conversation with Jerry Pinto is there,
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I am severing it at my pace, 20 minutes, 25 minutes at a time and I will revisit it,
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toh mujhe kisne ye kaha toh hain nahi ki main binge watching karu, I mean why should I do that,
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sadhan mere paas hai, aap kalpana kariye, I mean you remember Space Odyssey I suppose,
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there is that bone and it is thrown by an ape and it becomes a space station and there is
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a time lapse, I remember similar kind of a cartoon in New York a long years ago,
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there is a stone age Neanderthal man coming out of the cave, he has a club, stone club in his hand
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and his wife starts weeping and says you have got a weapon of mass destruction now,
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so that is the kind of thing which mankind has lived from times immemorial if to use the cliche,
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ki hamesha koi cheez, cheezon ki raftaar badhati thi, remember the stone from a square turning into
#
a wheel and a wheel the difference it makes, so life is speeded up, communications are speeded up
#
but people have lived according to the rhythm which suits them, now I am by temperament a
#
very impatient person, my mother used to tease me at times ki toh pata nahi 9 mahane peht mein kaise
#
rahe the, and my son has the same problem with me, but the problem is that the things I want to
#
savor, I never try to have an espresso coffee, I never try to
#
hasten things, again my son has been educating me very much, I mean I am a single parent brought
#
him when he was four onwards, we have stayed like siblings, he would quote to me a Jaat teacher of
#
his, he would say that Jaat teacher used to tell us jaldi mat kar vana der ho jayegi, the more you
#
try to hasten you, then I have a nephew whom again I treat as my son, my elder brother's
#
eldest one, he's a computer of his kid, one of the young leaders of the Doha thing, global leader
#
of IT, he again gave me a book, how to live life slowly and what it means and he came out with a
#
nice phrase, he said that you always, I mean everybody has heard of frost, roads not traveled,
#
he says there are two roads always, but is not in the sense of frosts, he says there is a shortcut
#
and there is a slow and scenic route, he says the slow and scenic route is always more satisfying
#
and the shortcut is slippery and dangerous, that's one part, the second part is you know
#
I remember the quip, it is always better to travel hopefully than to arrive, there was a
#
change on this one, we said it is always better to travel first class than to arrive,
#
now what is first class for you is not deluxe travel, jo aap abhi baat kar rahe the na, jo I
#
like to call it in terms of food, aaj kal bada fashionable hai millets khayiye, aaj kal bada
#
fashionable hai bhiye khayiye, wo khayiye, the rougher you eat the smoother it comes out, you
#
don't have lifestyle diseases etc etc, that is what I call the riches of poverty, jisko aap
#
kehte hain gharib aadni ke paas kuch nahi hai, toh uske paas maa bhi hai, uske paas baap bhi hai, uske
#
paas bete bhi hai, uske paas apni memories bhi hai, aaj jo bacha hai, agar wo boarding school me para
#
hai, toh uske paas maa baap toh kabhi nahi the, wo boarding school me tha, jab wo kamane khane
#
lag hua toh maa baap apni petar se independent the, toh kitne log hain jinko budhaap me maa baap ke
#
sangh rehne ka sukhe, kitne log hain jinko bachon ka bachpan sangh vitaaye ka sukhe, I will become
#
autobiographical again, I think one of the greatest satisfactions in my life was, my father a doctor
#
was very keen that his son should become doctors, I threw up when I was dissecting a frog much before
#
Menaka Gandhi's time, so that was the end of my medical ambitions, my father never said ki tumne
#
doctor ban nahi hai, but you know what happened is towards the end of his life, he was suffering from
#
Parkinsonism and he would have lucid patches and he would, the one day he told me, Pushpesh would you like
#
to read with me Grey's Anatomy, very funny, I was 50, he was touching 80, I said why not,
#
so very lovingly he guided me through Grey's Anatomy, I got a classic edition, aaj ke toh Grey's Anatomy ka revised edition bhi hai,
#
but he got me with the photofaximil edition of the original Grey's Anatomy, then he went with me
#
Price's practice of medicine, then he did with me what would have been small six week courses
#
in anatomy, physiology, GNO, so he tried to share an interest with me of teaching of medicine,
#
so again one of those days somebody bright smart alec came and said why are you wasting time,
#
so it gives me immense satisfaction, I'm learning so much from my father and he said but medicine
#
has changed, my father had overheard this, so he said son, my friend he told him, human anatomy
#
has not changed, a single bone has not been added since Grey's Anatomy was written, the physiology
#
remains the same, you can have better diagnostic tools but human system has the same hemodestesis
#
and same sodium synthesis and so on, he says practice of medicine has changed because now
#
people try to cure diseases, earlier people tried to prevent diseases and take care of the patient,
#
now then he went on to a very long enriching conversation as far as I'm concerned, he talked
#
about how when patent medicine was not there, penicillin was not there, streptomycin was not
#
there, chloromycin was not there, broad range antibiotics were not there, sulfonamides were
#
not there, how medicines were compounded, it was interesting, he had passed out his medicine in
#
1934 and he had contracted TB in pre-streptomycin days, so one of his lungs had collapsed and he
#
had survived and he lived to be 81 but interestingly years later I was teaching law in a university
#
and I was teaching a course science technology and law and my interest was what is origin of life,
#
so abortion laws come in, what is death, so euthanasia comes in, what is gender identity,
#
so LGBTQ things and sex reassignment surgery comes in, organ transplant come in and psychiatric
#
disorders come in, personality of a man who's suffering from something up there, what is
#
an identity and clinical trials, so when I was doing all this things came back to me what my
#
father had been discussing you know, then I came across a book by one Dr. Udwadia, he's a 90 plus
#
super specialist in a Bombay hospital in extreme, you would know life care, the book is called
#
tabiyat and there is a sentence, my father would have been 115, nobody is 115, nobody is
#
but born in 1908, Dr. Udwadia seemed to have a philosophy which was exactly the same,
#
man must die, the patient has to be at that stage, you don't put him on life support system,
#
you hold his hand, let him go gently into that night and prepare the family that they should
#
have the last thing, my father had a fracture and knew what would happen to him, he was a doctor,
#
he told me I have crushed my thigh bone, bone must be pulverized, this will travel in the arteries
#
and I will have an embolism in two days, three days, four days time and I will go like this,
#
don't put me in a hospital, no life support systems, painkillers, yes otherwise no, he went
#
that way, I think Udwadia again has that great philosophy that the patient should be prepared
#
to die, it is almost like the Tibetan book of living and dying, now you see the problem is
#
then it came, I remembered my mother, with my mother I had a far less easy relationship than
#
my father, she was disappointed with me in a variety of ways but the interesting part is this
#
that she introduced me to Mahamrithinjay Mantra and Mahamrithinjay Mantra is
#
etc. Everybody thinks it is a mantra for eternal life, it is not, you read the translation carefully,
#
it says when implied, when my time comes, let me be disentangled from the vines
#
like a dried lockie and drop and release me from the mortal coils, not of immortality,
#
so it is not immortality of physically long life, it is goodbye cruel world or goodbye nice world,
#
my time has come, I'm leaving, so I think that is what I thought was the greatest thing I had,
#
from where you started, I think the greatest satisfaction in my life is to have lived with my
#
father when he would have been, he had written a detachment, he was practically blind, he couldn't
#
read, he couldn't write obviously because of Parkinsonism, his speech was affected because
#
of Parkinsonism, so it was nice to sit with him and try to decipher what he was talking to me
#
and ask him questions, something very moving happened one day,
#
my mother said, there is not a smile on your face I see and when you are in love with me,
#
you used to say darling I will bring the stars, I will do this and do that and she went at her
#
spleen on my father and she went away, I asked my father why do you put up with all this,
#
she shouted at you and went away, he gave me a lesson which I will never forget, he said,
#
I loved her very much once, she doesn't know I love her still very much, she doesn't know
#
because of Parkinsonism my face is partially paralyzed, I can't smile, I can't break into
#
a smile which I want to, I cannot recall unless it's my lucid patch what I wanted to tell her
#
and but I am a doctor, I know she is hating me because she also loved me very much once,
#
maybe she still loves me but she expects of me something which I am physically incapable of
#
doing because of Parkinsonism, she knows I am written in a detachment but she was 10 years
#
younger than my father, then it came back to me again I thought that my mother who had taught me
#
something had forgotten it herself, there is a verse in Hindi, it is one of those Hindi poetry,
#
the lovers talk about this, you are the same, I am the same but our hearts are not the same,
#
so I think the love also dies, love slowly the passion the flames turn into embers,
#
the embers may not always be shining bright either, my father who was not a scholar but was
#
a doctor had dealt with life and death etc, I think had greater wisdom to let go of the world
#
than my mother who Shantiniketa and her upbringing, range of interest, learning,
#
it was not internalized, she couldn't let go, she felt sad that the companion was not what he was
#
in 1943 when they were younger, so I don't know, so I think in those relationships,
#
as you said, I have been lucky, I decide my own fate, I don't care how fast life will be,
#
I use a car, I fly a plane but I don't think that I have to desperately save time, again my son,
#
he said I used to save, I will save some time, so one day he looked at me hard and said what are
#
you saving your time for, the time is not bankable, you will not be able to get it out the day you
#
want it, so why don't you live in the present, what are you doing and he got divorced because
#
part of these problems, his wife one day asked him what is your business plan, he said what do
#
you mean my business plan, I make documentary films, I read books, I read poetry, I read Rilke,
#
I read other Shairi and I am very happy with myself, he said no but 20 years time, what would
#
you be doing, he said no I don't have to worry about that, there is enough to eat, they said
#
but no no, we must have nest egg, we must have retirement, we must be in Australia, we must be
#
in Canada, so my son said why should I be in Australia and Canada, he said life is better
#
there, he said life is better here, the barber comes home, gives you haircut, does a champi,
#
the butcher comes home, makes a pasanda, I cook it and I eat it, she said no I don't think I can
#
live a man with like this with such limited ambition, what will you do after the money runs
#
out, he said there is a little land I will sell it, there is a house in Delhi which I will sell it
#
and it will give me enough to send my kids to good schools if they want to go somewhere else,
#
I bought some insurance policies, I see no reason, they finally parted after 25 years of marriage
#
because the lady did want to go to Australia or to Canada and I must say my son was not very fair,
#
when I was in GNU he said let my father retire from GNU then we'll decide, then she got posted
#
in London, he said I don't want to go to London at the moment, we'll decide a little later,
#
then she got posted to Canada the same thing happened, then she wanted to migrate to
#
Australia the same thing happened, ultimately she said I can't live like this, I will have to go,
#
I want to do certain things and I will go to settle abroad, so that is the kind of thing which
#
I have felt that you have to decide yourself what you will do, now I will tell you when I was
#
teaching in GNU I was a lowly lecturer and I got appointed as a professor somewhere, big jump,
#
I was offered a vice-institution in a small university, I did not go for a simple reason
#
that I loved the GNU, you taught three days a week, lovely green campus, nice house,
#
good students, nice library, you could listen to music when you wanted to, you can go out,
#
why should I leave that and go somewhere and become a vice-institution and get implicated
#
in the financial irregularity, student politics, teacher's politics and so on, nobody will make
#
the decision for you. But my day now had I stayed in Gurgaon, I would have got my Drupad
#
collection and listened to what I wanted to listen.
#
Sadhya Dehalvi's son is learning Drupad with Vasudev Nagar, his parents were very kind to me,
#
they introduced me to the joys of Drupad, he has just started singing Katsi A R Rehman in the PS2
#
and in that Drupad's form, not the spiritual meditative form, but
#
Mahadev, Gangadhar, Pinnakadhar etc, that rhythm, that rhythm, so you enjoy listening to that Drupad
#
being set as a backdrop music by Rehman for a Chola music, why should you waste that?
#
You know what happened was that there was Kalidas Swaminathan, I actually should have him sometime,
#
he is fantastic, born in 1953 and his mother was Bhawani Bhabhi from Bheemtal, Swaminathan was a
#
fantastic person and about his paintings, he has written his recollections of Vivaan Sudram that
#
my father was not very famous, had exhibited in 1963, some paintings were sold, some were not sold,
#
they were left for safekeeping in Mr. B.K. Nehru's house, Nori's house, when he retired he gave them
#
to his cousin, years later they discovered that each painting was worth billions of Indian rupees,
#
but the gentleman said that this is your property, we have so many paintings in our garage,
#
you can take them back, so you know the kind of, why I am bringing this up is that you remember
#
half of these things, I remember buying a painting of Rameshwar Bhuta at 300 rupees on installment
#
for Triveni gallery when Puran Devi Acharya used to run the tea terrace there, so he said do you like it?
#
I said yes, I like it, he said it is 300 rupees, can you imagine a Rameshwar Bhuta for 300 rupees
#
and that 300 rupees paid in installment, so I bought that over, I remember Jeev Patel's exhibition
#
there, I remember Mablankar's miniatures there, so you have many things which are your pleasure,
#
Shah Ji was singing Bhairavi Thumri, somewhere in the back corner of your mind there is a painting
#
of Amba Das, which was in my friend's house, D4 Kalindi colony, or you remember that Hemad Shah
#
had a piece of a ceramic pottery which he had given me, so until we didn't have any scrap in our house,
#
I carried all these things with me, but that is where I think Namita Gokhale's Things to Leave
#
Behind is a fantastic novel which I translated as Ragh Pahadi, but I think that you can't carry
#
everything with you, you have to leave things behind, the only things which remain with you
#
are the memories and you only are your memories, if you have Parkinson's, if you have Alzheimer's,
#
if you have dementia, senile, you are no longer the same person, somebody else would remember you
#
as such, but you are your memories, nothing else, memory of food, memory of sex, memory of music,
#
memory of dance, let me tell you, I also walk on the balcony in the evening, morning, evening at home,
#
on the fourth floor, I don't know why for some strange reason when I reach one corner of the
#
balcony, there is a rustling wind at times which reminds me of the pines rustling,
#
siddharth rustling in Muktushwar where I grew up, in a particular place where the road to temple went
#
up, there is one more interesting thing, there I don't know why in my ears without this wind rustling,
#
I hear the sound of the water flowing in the river, and I remember the special river, Pahadi
#
river, which is called Ghar, there was a place called Dhari, there used to be a poor Ghar near Dhari,
#
we used to come that way because there was no motor road, we used to go on ponies and tracks and
#
nandis to railway station, there the sound of the water flowing in the river, it haunts me,
#
excuse me, actually which I wanted to discuss with you, now what happens when I sleep at night,
#
so Stor Panchashika is a Sanskrit poetry, each verse begins with Adyapi,
#
even today I remember this, now you know the story, the thief has been given a capital punishment
#
because he was found in a princess's room and he says, in the jail he says that even today I
#
remember when I was in your room, it's a pretty erotic recollection of his escapades with the
#
princess, to cut a long story short he's finally spared, but what haunts me is even today when I
#
sleep alone, and that's how my novel which I wrote after 50 years, the second novel begins,
#
Even today when I sleep alone at night, I can hear the sounds of bells on the road from the room of that house on the roof of Laltin,
#
now the context is people used to move from villages with their families for winters to
#
Tarai Bhabar and the whole family and the paraphernalia was packed on the mules and
#
went out, our house was next to this road and it was a bungalow built by the British which we
#
stayed in comfort, but when you shut your eyes, they were not crossing the road in the night,
#
but you had seen them crossing the road in the daytime, and you as a child wondered about that,
#
like Mananal says about the refugees and the kachas and so on, you know kahan jaa rahein,
#
you log bachon ko leke basket me rakke kahan jaa rahein, what lives do they lead,
#
that query was ki humari life aur inki life me koi contact point hai ki nahi hai,
#
I remember a lady in the day when they were moving past our house said,
#
what would make a mother say that, they stayed deprived lives in the villages, life of want,
#
no electricity, no water, no running water, uncertain future for kids migrating from hills
#
to plains, plains to hills, half the life spent on that, where you moved in Taraibabar,
#
you didn't know poisonous snakes, man-eating tigers, marshes, mosquitoes, malaria, child
#
would come back or not come back, I don't know, I have never gotten over that, so Muktavishwar was
#
a very strange place, let's get back to my mother, you know my memories are very interesting about
#
my mother as well, she was from Shantiniketan and she was a polyglot, she was born in Kathiawad,
#
spoke Gujarati, Bengali was very close to her heart, so when she would walk back in the evening,
#
there was a small slope in front of our house, about 200 yards and it was not paka sadak,
#
usme Flintstone tha aur maika tha and the maika would shine, maika would shine like scattered
#
gems and she would walk slowly on that path to our house, very nice bungalow with aromatic flowers,
#
gardens etc, my father was very fond of flowers, she would sing a particular song, she would say
#
jakhun parbena mai payer chinne e bate, now I had clean forgotten all about this,
#
there was a serial recently in which the heroine sings this towards them when she's carried to the
#
jail, jakhun parbena mai payer chinne e bate, she would at times sing ekla chalo re, jadhi tor
#
naakshane kehi na aashe, aur utle pare aalok, chadir hasir baat bhenge che utle pare aalok,
#
it would happen when she was walking with a friend from shantiniketan who was a house guest with us,
#
who my father jokularly said is your old flame from your university days,
#
or it would be an officer from Bengal posted in the institute where my father worked who would
#
come home because we were congenial household for Bengali speakers, Gujarati speakers etc,
#
then then Maika comes back to me even today, the flintstone was there because people used to take
#
the flintstone, we had electricity, others in the village 150 yards down did not, so they had the
#
moss, dried moss from the oak trees, flintstone to create a spark and then a fire was lit up,
#
so ulki liye that flintstone was part of their prehistoric discovery of fire kind of thing,
#
for us it was a curiosity yeh kar kya rahe hain, and then the Maika, I did not know what use Maika
#
is, abrak ka kya hota hai, electricity mein kahan jata hai, mother would give a lecture, she was
#
a brilliant teacher and she would leave no opportunity to tell you what was happening,
#
something you gained, something you did not gain, but that Maika spread, or my father
#
in the better days when he was, could express his love, would catch fireflies in his handkerchief
#
and give them to my mother, and then of course my mother would say junu is a cold light and this is
#
that, but this was the kind of romance which they had in Muktushwar, so Muktushwar was an interesting
#
place in more ways than one, it was a small institute, it was a microcosm of India, there
#
was a refugee Punjabi there, there was a Bengali there, there was a Keralite Malayali there,
#
there was a Sindhi there, there was a Tamil Brahmin there, there was a Tamil non-Brahmin there,
#
there was an Ayyar there, there was a Ayyengar there, there was a Khatsad there, there was a
#
Sikh married to a non-Sikh, and this Motlik, the total population of the institute was 1200,
#
of the 1200, 600 to 700 were B. Subhad in the coolies, from Nepal, from Doti, etc., and
#
our house had an access to this world because of this, because my mother could speak Gujarati,
#
she had a smattering of Marathi, she could speak of course Bengali, Assamese,
#
Khamya, Odia, English, Hindi, a bit of Tibetan which nobody used,
#
Sanskrit allowed her to connect to even Malayalis and so on, and this brought people to our house
#
as guests, students in the institute, they were fed, they went out, my father was the only doctor
#
within a radius of 40-50 kilometres, no motor road, but in some ways it was very odd, if you wanted
#
to ring up a neighbour, you picked up the phone and did this, and the ring was sent to Nainital,
#
32 miles away, and came back on the other line to the house next door to talk on phone, you know,
#
strange things, but I remember a manator being shot, and the manator being displayed,
#
it was displayed, now you don't have to fear, but then I also remember the kids who studied with us
#
in school, came to watch a Ramlila and went back home, the chips of wood, and they kept shouting
#
because the tiger could take the last man back, so they created a noise and sound and light and
#
went back home, so the threat from a manator was very real in the early 50s, I remember it had
#
snowed and somebody was scratching on the door outside, it was a small leopard cub, how he got
#
separated from the mother nobody knows, my mother got the leopard cub inside, nursed the leopard cub,
#
the leopard cub stayed with us for three months when it became unmanageable and was given to a zoo,
#
so I remember my father treating a man whose nose had been taken away by a
#
sloth bear, I remember my father stitching, I mean he was very squeamish about surgery,
#
no anesthesia was there, but there was a case where he couldn't help it, this woman came with a
#
leopard who had gotten into the kitchen when it was dark, when the woman got the chula lit up,
#
the leopard attacked her and went out, but her skull was broken open sort of cut, so it had to
#
be stitched, so I remember these things from my childhood, they are almost you know much too hard
#
to believe now, but I think that childhood gave me the life as a totally different pace when you
#
have grown up and when you have descended to a formal schooling when you are 15,
#
13, 14 and you come down to the plains only at 17, 18, I'll tell you something very interesting,
#
I came to Delhi in 65, just short of, I was 19, I'm December born, so I was, everybody said,
#
bus pakdo, bus ke liye kanta par rukte, bus service was really abominable in Delhi,
#
and then you, sweat dripping, you ended up in Sarojinagar where I was staying,
#
so I calculated that if I start walking, I can walk up in less time to Sarojinagar market,
#
where I was staying, sabro ho se chalte the, very pleasant walk to India gate,
#
thoda mausam mein jamun kha liye, phal kha liye, walk further down to Siviraj Road,
#
come to Sabzai Jhanka Madarsa, there was no bridge, no flower, there was a railway crossing,
#
paidhal aa rahe the, idhar-udhar dekha, rail agar nahi aari, toh aapne rail line cross kar liye,
#
ek gata piece, 30 minit mein aap ghar pauch jate the, main uske liye bus pakadne ko,
#
ulta pehle Kannada place jaun, aada ganta ganta par rukun, phir bheed mein dhakke khaun,
#
phir wahan uthun, it never, it was not my cup of tea, so I had a very good friend from Karnataka,
#
Raghwinder Laxman Rao Mutalik Patil, who was staying in Sarojinagar, and we walked,
#
and I walked back from Sapruhos, even after I was teaching in Delhi University,
#
to Rajendranagar, it was crazy to wait for a bus, and I didn't have enough money to always take a
#
scooter or a cab, so I would much rather walk to Karnataka place, have some kela, have some chai,
#
walk down the Shankar Road, Pusa Road, then walk down Shankar Road, end up in Old Rajendranagar.
#
Doh gante lagte the, ab kyun aap kar rahe the, bus mein aare hoti, ganta lag rha hoti,
#
saba ganta lag rha hoti, ab kur rahe hoti, kahin seat nahi mil rahe hoti, latak rahe hoti,
#
jeep katne ka khatra hoti, khat jee mein toh kuch hota hi nahi tha, toh let's not worry about that.
#
But I think the pace of life, to get back to that, you set for yourself. I don't think that
#
wo thairav aapko aajki zyandagi mein ka nahi zyazar aata hai, toh jo aapne Chandrahas ki baat kahi na,
#
Chandrahas is a much younger person than I am.
#
So I want to talk a little bit about the nature of memory, like my father also at Parkinson's
#
and you know I saw what happened to his memory and like you describe your father,
#
he would have his lucid moments but his memory was very sharp at the edges, he would remember
#
the childhood very well and the recent events very well, baaki beach mein, in fact I remember once he
#
told me that you know I have no memories of you growing up, so can you tell me about your
#
childhood and what it was like and whatever and I found it very poignant and very sad because
#
I really think that we are constructed in two ways and one way in which we are constructed is
#
that life happens to us and everything that happens to us becomes a part of who we become
#
and that's how we are constructed but another way in which we construct ourselves in a sense
#
is through our memories, what we remember, what we choose to remember, how we remember it,
#
all of those things also forms us and the tragedy of age I think and age related diseases like
#
Parkinson's and Alzheimer's is that if that fades away what is left, it almost like there's a friend
#
of mine who with justification is really enthusiastic about longevity sciences which
#
extend your lifespan and Roshan Abbas who's been on the show and Roshan once told me that
#
you know the four of us are sitting at the table we'll all live till 120 and I was like sir
#
I don't want to live till 120 simply because I have seen the horrors of memory fading that is
#
like the biggest thing for me that the body in decline is another matter but memory fading is
#
a real horror for me and of course Roshan's point is that no no we can live healthy lives with our
#
memory intact till an old age but let that pass but I want to examine your relationship with
#
memory also very often you make an intentional effort to remember because you have to write
#
about it because you have to make sense of it like so many times in interviews you've been asked
#
about how you fell in love with food and all of that and you've shared different memories
#
at different times and those memories are kind of sparked by that so I don't know what question
#
I'm leading to but I just before before you ask me the question if you can get back to the question
#
I think there is a verse in Mahabharata I think a scribe to Karn which says
#
it is better to ignite for a moment than to smolder and smoke for eternity so I think the age
#
and the memory at the intensity of living is something is what you remember almost effortlessly
#
and what you are asking me about the writer revisiting memories there are two pitfalls there
#
I'm revisiting a memory reinforcing it retelling it but in the process maybe embroidering it
#
recreating it and maybe creating a memory out of fiction which I have told what you said is very
#
interesting and complex what you said about your father because Parkinson's affects different
#
patients differently in my father's case he had totally hallucinatory phases or totally lucid
#
phases so it was not only edges he remembered in between portion also but when you said what
#
happens when the person loses memory what remains I think much remains because memory is never
#
contemplating your navel and all by yourself there's always an another person involved so
#
you remember that person is such even my father was very frail he was weighing about 32 kilos
#
his blood pressure had dipped there was GI bleeding memory was gone but I remembered him
#
not as a very young person obviously I married very late we are born late but as a man who was
#
very fond of good food good feeding good music very nice elegant way of eating and with fingers
#
but not a speck of rice anywhere peeling as a surgeon the apple in one core and offering it to
#
others so I had very happy memories of my father and I the business is not the right word I probably
#
had the intelligence to realize that the body decays and mind also decays and the person slowly
#
dies but you don't remember the decay you don't remember the loss of vitality you also remember
#
what happy times you had with him now my father's problem was he did not remember how we grew up
#
not because his memory had failed he was busy as a doctor in a small place and didn't have time for
#
the kids so I remember that my mother had made me and my brother write two postcards to him
#
once when he was on a tour and he had his shaving kit always what mother had dictated and he
#
preserved that till very very late in his life the other interesting thing is that when I had a son
#
he had time for him and this son would dance on his head sit on his body make it very difficult
#
for him he enjoyed it because he had never had that feeling with us growing up but with the
#
grandchildren he could and then one day he asked very poignantly all of you kids seem to be more
#
attached to your mother and nobody comes and kisses and cuddles me and we are very tactile family
#
a shared memory like you know it's not that what you what the person remembers
#
it also is what I remember of the person and you live in memory of people after you are not there
#
so that's the only immortality which either a writer has
#
I think fame is an odd word what a person remembers of another beloved person in the
#
family or friend circle is how the person lives I'm also interested in what you just said about how
#
you know when a person declines and when they fade you may not remember the decline you will
#
have other memories of theirs which will be you know little episodic snippets from here and there
#
which will stay with you and there also I realized that like when I remember my parents on the one
#
hand I remember them in that stereotypical role they played in my head like my mother was a mother
#
of a certain kind and you know and that relationship mother and child and that's the role that I
#
remember and my father I remember also in a different sort of way and I have realized I think
#
gradually after they passing when I look back in old photographs where they are in their 20s or
#
they are in their 40s they're younger than I am now that they were not that that what I saw was
#
only a little fraction and that there is so much more there and sometimes I regret that I could not
#
connect with them in their lifetime and talk about those aspects so I once did sit down with
#
my father and tried to do an oral history kind of thing recorded with him for an hour but you know
#
and I think what happens in many people's lives is that everybody is a fixed point in space
#
a fixed thing in our head in our mental framework and we never look at them in any
#
any way like I read a beautiful episode one of my favorite episodes with Natasha Badwar
#
and she mentioned that when she had a love marriage she and her husband
#
they had both told each other about their parents and then when Natasha met his parents
#
she found that this is very different and vice versa he met Natasha's parents and he was like
#
they are nothing like what you said you know and tell me a little bit about that that you know the
#
one aspect which I will double click on because I will want to go back to your childhood later
#
and talk about your mom and dad and the one aspect is you know that primary sort of relationship
#
that you have with them and how you remember that where it's a mother-child role but was there
#
another aspect in your life where you related to them separately where you could relate to them at
#
a different level like with your father it seems like I think you know before my father was old
#
and I was staying closer to him there was a time when father had no time for us he was in the
#
hospital and we spent most of the time with mother so all the memories and all the information came
#
through her but the interesting thing about our parents was that they were very unusual parents
#
they not only talked about their parents there it was a love marriage my father had talked my mother
#
about his well affairs and attachments before my mother had talked very openly to him about
#
people in her life she could have married or did not marry the interesting thing is that they
#
continued to talk uninhibitedly even like my the guest would come and my father would say your
#
mother's boyfriend has come from shantiniketan not one but two or three my mother would say your
#
father married me accidentally she was more interested in my sister's things of that kind
#
or some friend of mine and so on they were very uninhibited from I mean as far as I can remember
#
sex was not taboo relationships were not taboo and talking about each we saw them together
#
they fought at times but the fights took place I think we sensed because of the age difference
#
between the two because father married my mother when he was 35-36 mother was 25 so by the time he
#
was 45 mother was still younger more energetic father had had a case of TB pre-step to my scene
#
and nobody expected him to live as long as he did so mother was fond of various things
#
like music dance painting literature languages great food father was not uninterested in these
#
things and they shared a lot of things so it was it was amusing for us children that father would
#
surprise us with like photography there were family albums my mama who had worked in a state
#
as a home minister in urcha had the best of equipment all the time roly flexes like us and
#
so on he made the photographs good photographs bad photographs my father would always say it
#
doesn't really matter what camera you have is what you include in a frame what you exclude in a frame
#
great wisdom I learned it much later when I was studying cinematography semi-professionally
#
to exclude what you exclude is more important than what you include how you compose is the man
#
behind the viewfinder and he would talk very sensibly about photography he would also talk
#
very sensibly about music without having had the exposure of shantiniketan he would say
#
sehgal which is based on this
#
his friends in laknow and he also spoke bengali fluently because one of his roommates for three
#
years running was a bengali gentleman in medical college so he also had visited the chowk and the
#
mujraz and so on it was acquired taste but he also valued listening to his music
#
my mother had been exposed to it as part of her growing up in priestly places
#
but the two were not mismatched you know for a long number of years I would say I was born in
#
46 december we left mukteswar in 59 march I we never felt that the there was there were two
#
different people we know that the department was divided mother would take care of education
#
there was no disciplining amit that is what I would say we I don't remember being scolded at all
#
all the only scolding I remember from my father is when I was 45 or thereabouts one day my son
#
was misbehaving and I was scolding him and my father got in between and said stop it you have
#
been shouting too long so I said can I talk to him he got wild he said to my mother pack up your
#
stuff we leave this place if pushpesh thinks that his son is his exclusive property and I can't
#
talk to him he made me really lick his soul I said I did not know it will hit you like this
#
he said no it doesn't matter if you feel that your son is your son we are outsiders
#
that's the end of the story I don't come here to stay with you all right and I that's the only time
#
I remember I was talked to in a harsh tone given a dressing down and much worse in the riot act I
#
did not expect what had happened to this man I had grown up all my life done all kinds of wild
#
things smoking drinking bringing long friends home boys girls and never any problem and suddenly
#
there was this great preparatorial interest but it's moving also I think it reveals something
#
about him that this particular thing he got angry at oh he got wild and then he told me something
#
later when his temper cooled down he said
#
the interest is always more important than the principal and he said I never had time with you
#
you should be like but that's the only time I remember my mother my mother could scold she
#
could be very theatrical once she was very upset with me after I had grown up she put up water in
#
his anjuli went to the chauraha made a tarpan and I said here I disinherit my son he's worse than
#
parush ram who killed his mother it was a real parsi theater in bhawali chauraha
#
she had turned very orthodox and ritualistic towards her end and she would say
#
this and that so one day I told her
#
now at the middle age you want me to perform some ritual in which I don't believe in
#
that day what happened was I think about my marriage I said I want to get rid of this marriage
#
relationship and she said no once you are married you have to live with her I said look it's not a
#
question of my giving up the woman the woman is not happy with me she wants a mutually concentrated
#
divorce and I have no problems and I also don't particularly enjoy living with her and
#
she got wild that this is not a child's game so I said it's not a child's game but it's not a
#
marriage that's the day I think I got these theatricals tell me more about your mother
#
because I was like everything that you said about her before and that you know that you
#
I could read from your previous interviews is very fascinating in the sense that she's born in
#
Kathiawad she studied in Benaras, Calcutta, Allahabad, stayed in Rampur, Mysore, Junagar
#
you mentioned how many languages she knows but she also knows Chinese which
#
at the time when she left Shanthi Niketan and married my father she was into reverse
#
translations from lost texts of Sanskrit from Sanskrit to Tibetan to Chinese and back
#
and that blew my mind that the original doesn't exist but has been translated into
#
Tibetan and she wants to translate it back to Sanskrit from Tibetan it has gone to Chinese
#
so she had to learn Sanskrit and Chinese and Professor Tan Yun Shan senior was her teacher
#
in China Bhavan and Sanskrit Kithibabu Amar Sen's grandfather and I mean it's amazing
#
I mean this was in 30s and mind-boggling and one she seems to me to be an incredibly
#
accomplished person in all these different ways and I'll ask you for your memories with her also
#
but the other thing that I often wonder when I look at you know elders from the past and so on
#
when I look at my own parents is what would they have been if the particular constraints
#
that they faced did not exist like I feel that both men and women are often trapped by social
#
expectations of what they have to be like that you know men are trapped by this notion of behaving
#
in a particular way you can't show emotion masculinity you are the provider you are a
#
particular kind of person women are also trapped not just by perceptions of what they should be
#
like but also by life itself like a marriage can be a very restrictive environment where
#
somebody with so much incredible knowledge is you know at home a lot of the time looking after the
#
kids you know years can pass and doing that kind of work and so on and so forth and at the same
#
time the sense that I got even from talking to Mrinalji where she mentioned her mom and your mom
#
is that they did have a rich life they were writing a lot they were talking oh yes oh yes
#
you know come to think of it you know there was another thing about our house which I remember
#
from childhood there was no gender divide I mean it was not like that my father could not show
#
emotion she he did not cry but he was moved and pretty sentimental and my mother was not at all
#
constrained by a domesticated role of a housewife for a very simple reason we are a very interesting
#
household in Mukteswar we were a nucleus family mother father and two of us children and one
#
sister who came later and went to study with Mosse now married to Mudumana Arjushi in Tikamgarh
#
she was unmarried then my mother had lots of servants to help her she was not a domestic
#
drudge that is where the difference was Mrinal also says did we had to work on our own with one
#
servant helping her to clean Mosseji was pretty strict about this and my father had no it was
#
something like my son not steal but beg and borrow and keep everybody in great comfort and
#
he had accidentally inherited the perks of a British doctor in that institute including
#
riding ponies sizes 26 27 servants gardeners malice etc etc because he went out to fight in
#
the second world war never returned and nobody expected an Indian doctor to be the doctor
#
before that everybody from Indian medical service used to come there my father was accidentally the
#
right man for the Englishman serving in the institute who was qualified from Luckin University
#
taught by Scottish doctors who was around and available because he was a TV patient practicing
#
in Almoda he got the job so he got the job with the perks and Dr Baker who was his predecessor
#
had left his furniture in the house his wine cellar in the house his books in the house and
#
he very kindly wrote to my father from England I don't intend to come back to India all that is
#
yours use it the service conditions at perks like servants attendants joggidars etc which he inherited
#
there was a club membership which had 18 whole greens there was a tennis court with pickers the
#
caddies there was marker and billiard table and my father made all this available to my mother
#
so I think my mother never had any domestic drudgery or a housewife's chores to do she devoted
#
herself to collecting folk songs people came home to compare with her she just before she married
#
my father she had done two excursions with Elizabeth Bruner and what was the other lady
#
my name is for I'm for reading the name they did the architecture of the couture valley
#
and Alice Bonner and another lady the Austrian lady who was also at Shantiniketan so my mother
#
had I mean the dice obituary which we referred earlier it it never felt when we were growing
#
up that it was a river lost in a dried sand it was a river very much like Saraswati before the
#
lope it was she was flourishing we had guests which were fantastic from all over the country
#
I remember Ashok Mehta coming home came Munshi coming home who was incidentally my mother's
#
local guardian you would have Ali Ram Bhagat you would have people from Delhi coming up her
#
artist painters Yashpal mama and Baldev uncle Baldev Grewal Vikram Grewal's father so all these
#
people came and this was a very rich social life it was a very nice entertainment lavish
#
entertainment and hospitality at very little cost because that place was my father had patients who
#
would send who'd mark trees in their orchard so in summers so much in season so much apple apricot
#
plum pairs would come that my father would send them by railway parcels to his friends in planes
#
their recipe located in the mango season in the guava season so we had I mean I want to go get
#
back to your question my mother was not the stereotyped housewife slogging her backside off
#
she was collecting folk songs she was very easy with the servants from Nepal Doti Pahadi etc
#
she at times she missed her maika so from our house you could see the christened horseshoe
#
shape almora she would look at almora and say that is the church this is our house you could
#
barely make it out but she I don't think regretted having married my father and given up a scholarly
#
academic career or I think she did not have the urge to write and carve out a niche for herself
#
she wrote stories some of them were published most of them were not but I think I'm eternally
#
grateful to her that she took a decision to put all her creative energies and talents to rearing
#
up children I mean we were taught Shakespeare in original before we were alphabetized she would
#
read out loud Sanskrit was recited and it came easy when you went to the school that you had
#
heard it all and also you know it still comes back to me
#
or she was the only person in our house who could read
#
and she's the one who said you must read and we had riches of books which we now referred to
#
we had the whole travel book series we had all the magazines subscribed to and and I think one
#
couldn't expect and she was something which was a central coherence she would say all right you
#
want to talk Bharati Hari you remember the one I love loved someone else he in turn loved somebody
#
else and so on and so forth so she would recite Sanskrit and explain and it gave you an addiction
#
you know that you would like to do your unway yourself you would like to read between the
#
line in Sanskrit yourself I remember there was an old calendar very kish Mulgaonkar's paintings
#
hanging on our wall 10 years after the calendar had been become outdated there was a small hand
#
written note by her grandfather the ink from black had turned into brown it was a verse which says
#
manya manu vidam vishwam maya rachita matmani avidya rachita swapna gandharva nagarupama
#
this world is a construct of mind ignorance has built an illusion like a fairy tale now that is
#
something I have not forgotten like the chor panchashika even now when I try to sleep these
#
bits come back to me from my mother's gifts you know this was kalidas this was bhavbhuti this was
#
mehudut the yaksha finds these clouds shaped like elephants fighting on the first day of that
#
the monsoon clouds came in mukteshwar there was a beautifully rain-washed sunset and she would
#
recite mehudut and she would recite she would recite raghuvansh and ajvilap and cry she was
#
moved to tears by reading the lament of hodge for his dead wife and I think those were the things
#
which one was infected with what literature does and I think that is what the first time I met
#
chandrahas was in a bhutan lid fest and we were discussing something and conversation came to
#
ashokosh so ashokosh buddha charit has a very nice verse
#
on one side buddha buddha's karishma and the spell pulled him other his wife's charms torn
#
between the two like the swan static between two waves he found himself that is where we started
#
a discussion and then one thing led to another and so on no I think there is a play by Mohan
#
Rakesh leharon ke rajans which goes back straight to this verse so you know I think it was it was
#
one of those fantastic influences which my mother had in me till we started having our differences
#
because she was suspected case of cancer which didn't turn out to be cancer that totally broke
#
her so when she thought she was dying everything was trying allopathy homeopathy ayurved and we
#
went all across the land traveling she said ki janayoga lalu mera shaad kaun kare ka tum log
#
that's where I think the differences started getting up I mean one by that time had become
#
agnostic if not an atheist and also one would sensing that my father was an absolutely broken
#
man when she thought that she would go away it didn't happen that way she went he went earlier
#
and she lived another four five years after that we went on a trip to
#
Khajuraho and I distinctly remember an afternoon there late afternoon sun in winters erotic sculpture
#
on Khajuraho and my mother explaining to me what the images meant we were about post-pubescent
#
sick 15 14 15 father not taking any interest in resting in sun and you said this man doesn't take
#
interest in anything anymore that is when for the first time in my life I got the feeling
#
that physical decline vitality lack of erotic desire was probably beginning to rancor my mother
#
that is what I thought when she was almost suspected of a mortal disease
#
what you feel is life and vitality but I think my mother was
#
very interesting in so many ways she would cook fantastically
#
and she would cook everything but she would be very puritanical purist like my son
#
and she would do the same to everything
#
he was very fussy about what he ate but she she made fantastic things for my father
#
she would prepare paan for him with such exquisite loving care but she she was mercurial
#
I'm constrained to look back and think was it at times towards the old age a frustration
#
that life could have followed a different trajectory but when we were growing up
#
I think the satisfaction in what she was doing was intense why she was doing better than any
#
of her sisters diddy had a life of certain want and a very disciplined husband they as
#
miran al said they they got to know each other much later in life opened up her younger sister
#
was married to a doctor in a joint family who all stayed together with the son who was a successful
#
surgeon so she had to worry about the whole of the joint family my mother didn't just husband
#
herself all the facilities made available you want we always traveled first class
#
I mean never a second class we had an attendant traveling with us now I remember that was
#
decadent lifestyle totally and I wonder how my father used to afford could have afforded it even
#
in those cheap times you we never wanted for anything sister even younger than that older than
#
her had lost her husband who was a doctor in an accident in any time the youngest sister finally
#
fell in love and married swami ram of the himal institute so my mother I think was the happiest
#
of the sisters at that stage what we are talking but towards maybe the end she also felt that she
#
could have written like shivani she probably could have I mean she never talked about it
#
she always had praise for her younger sister and her younger sister has been more than generous
#
in her praise to the elder sister and I think miran al has been very very nice to her and she
#
was very very fond of miran al but then towards the end there may have been some bitterness there
#
may have been some frustration why is the husband getting so old why is he not kissing
#
him kissing me and cuddling me I remember his kind coming from the hospital and kissing her
#
and cuddling her and broad view of the children and say hello honey how are you and my mother
#
would say what scandals can you share with me today because hospital was also the place where
#
patients brought stories and things of that kind but I I think there was childhood was an
#
unalloyed bliss I mean I don't have to recreate that I mean I remember we whatever we wanted was
#
given to us a whole elaborate railway set remote control which could be spread on the floor
#
a small eight millimeter movie camera before that a camera before that air guns before that air
#
rifles air rifles and air guns in that order really a remote controlled helicopter balsa wood
#
glider making things from what was it called india hobby center in honby road from bombay
#
philatelic collections coin collections I don't know I mean I don't know we lived like
#
princess I mean there's no recreation
#
we felt very foolish when we went to school that there is not what everybody
#
lived I mean more than these material riches what I'm really impressed by are the cultural riches
#
that you grew up with like most kids and this is something I've also been
#
thinking about and chatting about with a friend of mine and it's very disturbing that
#
most kids a lot of kids today are sort of even if they have financial resources material resources
#
they go up with a mindset they grow up with a mindset that is goal-directed
#
and all their efforts go towards these goal-directed activities and in the leisure time that they have
#
it's complete time pass like cricket or bollywood or whatever very complete basic time pass
#
whereas the richness of your childhood seems to me that you know nothing is goal-directed you're
#
just everything is coming in by osmosis
#
you know everything is just coming together in this beautiful way and I also therefore want to
#
sort of ask you about and and this is something you must have only thought about in hindsight
#
how growing up in an environment of so many different languages shaped you
#
because you know one of the ways in which I feel I am restricted and it's partly my own fault because
#
of perhaps an earlier sort of elite snobbishness but is that most of my upbringing has really been
#
in english you know my hindi may baat kar sakta ho and all of that lekin mai hindi mein padh
#
nahi baata ho you know so and in your case you had that very natural osmotic
#
if you are exposed to five languages you have no problems coping with it
#
amaro deekro chhe toh ladka hai vo
#
agar bengali hai toh bohi kitab hai hindi mein ghar hai aur baadi hai toh ghar kamra hai baadi
#
agar hai jisey hum kaitne hua hai rana hai toh khana hai
#
wo jaman hai toh jimna hai gujarati mein kashi nu mara na surat nu jaman
#
mujhe lagta nahi kabhi iska mahir me sochni ke zurodh padhi thi mujhe toh kam se kam bilkul nahi
#
my question is ki hindsight mein agar aap peechhe dekhenge how much do you think all these helped
#
in shaping the person that you are today because you would have also had peers
#
part of what i find unusual about your childhood also is the natural ease with which you pick up
#
sanskrit like it's not like ki you know school mein kabhi kabhi subject hota hai
#
logon ke liye and they have trouble with it and they do enough to pass
#
mera toh heartache hai, jab maine school mein BA mein vaastava mein sanskrit padhi toh meri
#
100 me se 51 number aaye and mujhe aaj bhi attna pura jo course hain wo contest hain
#
that's the only way to learn sanskrit mujhe geeta ke teen chapters jyothi wo yaha thein
#
mujhe bhoj pradhan kshlok yaha thein mujhe shakuntal ke saare hale preyam vade sammoham upgata
#
wo saara dialogue yaha thein
#
so marks khaan gayi aapke? 100 me swamil nahi chahiye tha na?
#
nahi dikki dikkat ye hoti hai ki at that stage i was not a very good examini mujhe lagta tha
#
ki mujhe aata toh sab kuch hai, magar jab parchi mein puchha jata tha, toh agar main aaj imtahandu
#
toh fail ho jaunga, multiple choice question toh mere samjhi mein nahi aate hain, toh magar mujhi
#
i mean i managed to get a first class after that, magar mujhi sanskrit me number amulne
#
ki ashaati nahi mile, magar jo aap keh rahe hai mujhe usme kabhi amit takleep bhi isli
#
nahi hui jo peer group me kisi ko ek bhaasha aati thi, toh aap uske sangh wo bhaasha se
#
sampar karte thein, magar humare zamani mein aisa nahi hota tha ki lalke ko angrizi aaye na
#
hindi aaye, ya toh se hindi aayegi, ya usse angrizi aayegi, ya thas gaun se aaya hai toh
#
pahadi kumahuni aayegi, kumahuni aap sab log mol sakte thein, magar usme bada maza aata
#
tha ki jaisi jo almoda ke brahman hai, unki pahadi aur gaun ke thakur hai or non brahman
#
hai, unki pahadi me farak hai, toh humare ek naukar tha uska bada maza kudaaya jata tha,
#
wo hindi me kehta tha, shudhe shudhe lukaara ke bot me dunga gile haanthe ho, now it's very
#
interesting, shudhe shudhe, why? Lukaara ka, dosre ke, bot me, briksh me, dunga yani pathar,
#
gile kyun haanthe ho, maarte ho, isme ekhi word hai jo Sanskrit ka abhransh hai, wo haanthe hoi,
#
haanthe, which is a great maitreya Devi's story with Tagorena, haanthe, hanyamane,
#
sharire, every word is from Gita, but what happens sometimes is, if you have your roots in
#
Sanskrit, everything opens up like beautifully, ma aapko yeh batlaon, but go in the mood mate,
#
the stotra, nakuru dhanman, dan jovan garvam, Jyotika Devi is singing a film,
#
aur aap classical Sanskrit toh alag hai, ma sirf classical Sanskrit thodi padha rahi thi,
#
I mean, she is the one who opened my eyes to that, is it Kathopanishad, which says,
#
nachavitte na tarpaniyo manushya, ki aap paise se aapki mukti nahi ho sakthi hai,
#
aur sathika mukh suvan se thaka hua hai, toh aapko agar zindagi me kuch samajhna hai,
#
ya apne ko liberate karna hai, toh it is not with, nachavitte na tarpaniyo manushya.
#
Mujhi, you know, I wrote a small book on Hindu peace recipes, Hindu soul recipes,
#
Buddhist peace recipes, Hindu soul recipes, I dedicated it to my father,
#
because usme Isha Vasti Upanishad ka pehla shok hai, tenatyaktena bhunjitha, Isha Vastividam sarvam,
#
yad kinchip jagatyam jagat, tenatyaktena bhunjitha, ma gradha kasusvin dhanam,
#
don't commit what belongs to others, enjoy with a sense of detachment what has been left out.
#
Now, that is what kind of jal kamalvat, my mother was fond of saying,
#
you should be like a lotus leaf, in mud, clay, water, but floating on top,
#
dew drops drop, they go away. Now, Sanskrit has such similes, such imagery, such things,
#
that you cannot but suddenly realize, ki wo gift aapko kya meti thi, wo jo gift mili thi, usne Gujrati thi,
#
Gujrati jo thi, toh Sanskrit se bilkul farak thi, wo Kathiawadi hamdo hamdo wani thi,
#
magar agar aap Kumaon bhi dekhe, toh towards Kali Kumaon, where you go to Nepal,
#
sa becomes ha, do you say, harke harak hit, sarak sarak chal.
#
So, there are things where you suddenly have resonances, ki Bengali mein jo hi hai,
#
ye mil raha kuchh Kumaoni se, ye aapko wo shabd mil raha, jo yaha mil raha hai kahin,
#
aap kayi ek sab ye nahi hota tamil mein, when I tried learning Tamil, in the Tamil centre,
#
it says, pari kiren, likki kiren, kudi kiren, tung kiren, kriyapat kya hai, pari padana hai, kiren karna hai,
#
tung sona hai, kiren karna hai, neer paani hai, aap agar aap dekhe, jo dravid anti-Hindi log bhi hai,
#
toh naam toh hai, Dayanidhi, Karunanidhi, Dayalu Amma, ye hi saare hai na, toh unfortunately or
#
unfortunately, I think my mother was very sensible about this, she would talk about religion,
#
which much later in life I realised was like Diana Ek, a sacred geography of India,
#
ki ye chaar dham hai, ye baar jyotir ling hai, ye 64 shapti peeth hai, don't believe,
#
this is the mythological story, ye uss mythological story se, I was discussing in JLF with Vivek De Roy,
#
Purans and so on, I realised I didn't have to read anything, because it came back when you needed,
#
ki ye kahaani shuru yahan se hoti hai, aap kal jaha mera video recording thi, wo bada vichitr tha,
#
wo Sanjana Ek bahut murkh tha, woon sawaal pucha, akshma karein, agar wo sunenge kabhi aapka ye program,
#
ye aisa kyu hai, ki Jamuna mein saara architecture Mughlao ka hai,
#
aur jitna culture wo yahan se yahan tak hai, Delhi, Mathura, Agra, toh mainin mungta kaha ki aapko,
#
main dhrishta akshma karein, Sanjana ke koshish karun, the Jamuna flows for, Jamuna is a river,
#
flows for almost 1475 kilometres, and its longest tributary, Chambal flows longer than that,
#
and there Jamuna has other places without Delhi, Mathura and Agra, and have you ever seen the
#
Havelis of Vaishnavas in Mathura? You choose to think Taj Mahal and you choose to see Red Fort,
#
and you get stuck with that, and you are so stuck about Mughals in the present political climate,
#
that you want to either run down Mughals, or say ki unne toh humara sab kuch khatam kar diya,
#
uske pehli bhi Jamuna Delhi mein bahari thi, Mahabharat se vaithi chali aari thi,
#
when it was in the Prasth, toh was that not culture when there was a Khanda Prasth,
#
and there was a Mairat, and there was a fabulous palace built here,
#
but then the more interesting part is this, I said ki why do you say that Krishna Leela
#
and culture is only in Mathura? Why did you see Manipuri Raas? Why did you see,
#
I mean I remember one of the most fabulous dancers I saw, Indrani Rehman in 65,
#
I mean what is evoked in Odissi dancing, back there in Kalinga, and Jamuna is being evoked,
#
toh kyun aap itna parishaad ho rahe hai? Filmi gaane aap dekhli je,
#
tu Ganga ki mauj mein, Yamuna ki dhara ho chalega, milne namara tumhara,
#
but you know the point is that we shut our minds, why do you say that there is no culture in
#
Paunta Sahib, where Guru Gobind Singh in his busy life spent four years in one place,
#
and Mughal miniature showed that happening, what about Renuka Sagar, where from Rinpoche,
#
Dipankar Hadisah is supposed to have flown to Tibet and spread Buddhism, aapka hi hang up hai,
#
ki humko toh sirf Ganga Maiya aur Yamuna Maiya samjh mein aati hain,
#
what is the significance in Hindu religion, I said I don't know what Hindu religion are you
#
talking about, but that is what I think I am very grateful to my mother, ki unhone bachpan mein,
#
kishora vastha mein, in adolescence made us realize that literature and music and when she
#
meant literature, she meant folk literature, folk songs, have so much wisdom and there is so much
#
nature, yeah I mean I was referring to your knowing so many languages, not as a takleef
#
like you mentioned, but just as a privilege, because har language ka ek apna ras hota hai,
#
har ras, uska maza hota hai, uska maza hota hai, kuch cheezein urdu mein hi kahi ja sakti hai,
#
kuch cheezein shayad saskrit mein aphoristic sutra mein kahi jati hai,
#
Patilika yog sutra aap ledi je, yoga shchitta vritti nirodha, you don't need anything more
#
than that to understand yoga, why do you have to get into this crap on the international yoga day,
#
it is unity of body and mind and blah blah, yoga shchitta vritti nirodha, if you can stop
#
and restrain the horses of your thoughts going in different directions and tearing you apart,
#
that is yoga, it will automatically lead to a gita verse, yoga karmasu kaushalam, once you have
#
attained the chitta vritti nirodha, you can excel in whatever you are doing. Now,
#
sukham sthiram asanam, again from yoga sutra of Patilika, if you can sit in a posture comfortably,
#
that is the asan, why do you have to get into kam sutras, chorasi asans and baba ramdev giving
#
you hatha yoga lessons and so on, we unfortunately take things literally, the advantage if you have
#
been exposed to Sanskrit, you say that kam sutra is not a pillow book, it is not a sex manual,
#
I mean if you try to treat it as a sex manual, you will have a crick in the neck and the lower
#
back would have a fracture and if you wanted to have those gymnastics in asans, but it has
#
cooking as an art form, dancing as an art form, riddles as an art form, so I think my mother
#
never waited for the right age to, you asked a question and the answer was given to you
#
and it was given to you as an adult answer, it was not bowed rise, it was not dumbed down
#
and you were left to find more, left to find more yourself. I think you mentioned how you were 10
#
years old aur aapne pucha ki aphrodisiac food kya hota hai. Haan, bilkul, toh she said ki
#
vajikarna ka hota hai, stamban ka hota hai, so you get into busy, vajikarna kya hota hai,
#
stamban kya hota hai, how long can you hold your erection, but by that time you are hardly having
#
an erection, it doesn't make sense to you in practical terms, but then what happens is when
#
you grow up a little, you realize that there are sexual deviations, there is somebody who is a
#
voyeur, there is somebody who is an exhibitionist, there is somebody who is a machoist, there is some
#
BDSM things, there is somebody who is a zoophile, there is somebody who is a pedophile, but that is
#
where the Sanskrit comes in handy. There is an irshak, there is a darshak, there is a soagandik,
#
somebody is aroused by smell, which is of course the basic hormonal thing from musk deer to
#
other things, but I think that is what my mother would take you to Sanskrit route and say ki
#
Ayurveda mein yeh hai, charak sanghita mein yeh hai, magar kaam sutra mein yeh hai and my father would
#
chip in with something and then my mother would say ki wo potrasim nagmat kaha hai and I was in the
#
desire but takes away the performance, so you know much later you realize what is happening to you,
#
you know, but the seeding, what has been seeded in your mind remains with you, it cannot be taken
#
away from you. That is where I am saying that as long as you don't lose your head,
#
that knowledge or that gyan is the only thing which will remain with you,
#
let's take a digression here, tell me a little bit about Sanskrit because honestly in all my life
#
you are really the first person I have met who is talking about Sanskrit as a dynamic living
#
language which is, you know, otherwise in the popular culture is depicted as essentially a
#
dead language, kinda like Latin is for example ki theek hai kitabe mein yeh hai, structure good hai,
#
other languages have evolved from it and so on and so forth, but the way that I have heard you
#
speak about Sanskrit, the way that you are reciting whatever you are reciting now, it just feels that
#
you know, it seems to have so much energy and it seems to have something that, you know, like every
#
language is unique and it seems to have unique qualities of its own, tell me a little bit about.
#
I think, you know, again it goes back to my mother, I must say, you know, the point is that she was
#
very fond of a hair oil and it was not thanda thanda cool cool navratan, she was very fond of
#
a Bengali tail coming from Calcutta called japa kushum, the japa kushum was a red colored oil,
#
had coolant with camphor and all and my mother when she would apply this oil on our scalps to
#
keep us cool before examination, would recite a verse in Sanskrit, which is a verse given dedicated
#
to Surya, it is red, scarlet is a japa kushum flower, greatly folded, Kashyap Rishi's lineage,
#
tamore, you are an enemy of the darkness, you burn away all
#
paps, I bow to thee. Now, how can you ever forget a line that you, it brings up the
#
hibiscus flower to your mind, it brings the darkness dissipating, it brings sunlight which
#
purifies, kills germs, worms, etc. And I remember my brother in law runs an NGO in the hills
#
and he teaches environmental education to village kids, so there was this young village girl dancing
#
because they were told to keep their blankets and clothes to disinfect them, so I was thinking that
#
when you have a bit of Sanskrit, it goes a long way, it goes a long long way and you talked about
#
energy and Sanskrit, I think I was always excited about Sanskrit because the word Sanskrit means
#
refinement, so anything which you are doing it with a certain refinement, it is like a mathematical
#
formula, if you can decode it, I mean I think Mrinal is brilliant with that, that you read Sanskrit
#
yourself, you don't need to read the translation, you are stuck, yesterday I was stuck with Yamanashtakam,
#
I am out of practice like all languages, I said I won't read the translation, I read it once,
#
still it was a bit complicated, I listened to it, the moment I listened to it, it unraveled because
#
the laisons were broken and according to the musical cadence, the accents were there.
#
I think the most people make a mistake about Sanskrit, that is the liturgical language and
#
you made a very interesting comparison about Latin, but the point is that Latin has still survived
#
better than Sanskrit because the classical tripos if you did in Oxford or Cambridge,
#
you would be reading Latin poets, you would be reading original classics in Latin and Greek,
#
but Latin passed on to Roman and it becomes a liturgical language,
#
you think that it is only the language of priests, but you deny yourself the pleasure
#
of, it is not only a Tamsutra, it is Kutni Matam Kavyam, it is Kokshashtra, it is something like
#
a dictionary like Amruk Shatak, it is like the Chor Panchashika, why don't you expose yourself
#
to that if you have access to it, Bhartrikari, Shingar Shatak is there, Nidhi Shatak is there,
#
Veda Ragi Shatak is there, why should one not do that, see the cadence,
#
you know. Now, we do not see the beauty, the music, the imagery, the association it evokes
#
and it is not only Sanskrit, Sanskrit allows you to appreciate that in other languages, cognate
#
or dialects which otherwise would not be available to you at all.
#
So, I think we do great injustice to get stuck with Ramcharitmanas,
#
Kijairam or Goswami Tulsidas, why not Valmiki Ramaraj, why not Bhavbhuti, I mean Bhavbhuti is
#
fantastic again, I mean Bhavbhuti's words are something like that,
#
time is limitless and space is vast, someday there will be somebody else who would understand
#
me and think like me, I mean that is what the hope of a writer is, that is what makes you live
#
across millennia. Now, all these things sustain me in my life, I mean that is what sustains me,
#
it is the Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra, not for eternal life but to have the sense of detachment,
#
Isha Vashya Upanishad and my father's life state to say also bit of Gita,
#
I don't believe there is life after death, I think this is the Nabokov's thing, I think speak
#
memory where it says the two abyss of darkness illuminated by a flash of lightning is your
#
existence but what is more important is this, why not I live this flashed moment of illumination,
#
this William Blake's eternity. Yeah and Nabokov's exact quote is something I love so I'll read it
#
out, he says, the cradle rocks above an abyss and common sense tells us that our existence
#
is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Yes absolutely.
#
And people who have seen my show evolve will also relate with what you just said about
#
time being limitless, it can seem like that sometimes. Again go back to another fascinating
#
part of your childhood which has become fashionable in modern times, people will talk of
#
homeschooling and all that and in fact Natasha Badwar is teaching her kids herself at home
#
and you were taught at home, in fact you were taught Sanskrit at home, you had multiple teachers
#
because Shivani Ji was also teaching you, your mother was also teaching you, you were learning
#
sort of different things to the extent that the way it would work is that you would learn, you
#
would give an exam and you would get the degree and in fact you got your MA when you were 18 years
#
old as you mentioned. Tell me a little bit about what that was like because my challenge in just
#
thinking about it and my challenge in doing anything by myself in a sense is the challenge
#
of structure right that I am incredibly indisciplined though I haven't decided. I'm
#
not a great believer in discipline, I think what you said is structure, I think unstructured learning
#
is the best one, it is not like a riyaz of music to master the few notes and master a few basic
#
raagas and then play around with that. I think you know what happens is if you live by a
#
river or a pond, you are thrown into the pond, you learn to swim, nobody tells you this is freestyle,
#
this is butterfly, this is breaststroke, this is crawl, you learn. So I think that is what happens
#
when you say homeschooling, most people think that the mother or the person at home is giving
#
you a structured course, it never was like that. Mother would say bright sunny day, can we go down
#
and sit in the devdar grove 100 yards away and just chat. So there would be butterfly,
#
there would be some birds, there would be devdars and it would be a very informal,
#
unstructured conversation. Like something is happening right now, do you know why devdars are
#
called devdars? Why is it called timber of gods? Because it doesn't get termites very easily,
#
it has got these resins which keep away infective things and then it would say do you know there is
#
a house called devdars in Nainital which is owned by a timber contractor called Dhan Singh Maldar.
#
So bits of pieces came to you and then you would say baaj and suddenly Sanskrit would be given up
#
and a Pahadi folk song would come, Nikato Nikato Jhumrali Baaja, Baajani Dhurao Thando Pani.
#
Don't chop the Kali oak small because it has water at its roots or there is another haunting
#
Pahadi Kumawani folk song which says, bharpuri baajani dhura baanje ki hawa chho, aajaka jaiya
#
bati kab ki hawa chho. When you are passing through the oak grove, there is a lovely wind
#
rustling through. You are going down to plains to work in search of employment and you say I
#
don't know when I will return, if ever. So the point is she would just take off from devdars,
#
Sanskrit, Shabda Kalpadrum to a Pahadi folk song and it was a stream of consciousness flow
#
which if you were interested you followed, if you did not. Like you see I was listening to
#
T. M. Krishna recently, I'm the man I hold in great esteem. He says ultimately I sing for myself,
#
I don't care what you think of my singing. I've reached a nice state, don't consider it arrogant,
#
egoistic and so on. But each musician ultimately sings for himself.
#
I would say that all alap is vartalap and my brother was a great adept at that.
#
Ki aapka conversation jo hota tha, it could continue some other time somewhere else.
#
I remember a guest came, Dr. Aga. His wife had grown blind. Dr. Aga was a doctor in railways.
#
They were house guests with us in one summer and the wife took a deep breath and said
#
I can smell pine trees, I can smell devdars. My father was constructing a dharmshala in memory
#
of his father. And this woman who couldn't see them smelled and it brought back memories of
#
our childhood in Kashmir where wood was being grained for house building. Now that would take
#
a discussion next time would be blindness and the sensory perception which is enhanced by
#
ears or orally or by nostrils or fragrances. So it was not a structured lesson ever.
#
I think of learning as really taking two forms and one kind of learning is exactly what you've
#
described that in a sense you increase the surface area of serendipity and things happen
#
and you learn from them through these free associations and all of that and you take deep
#
dives when you feel like and that's one way. My lament in my own life is that I think achievement
#
requires structure in the sense that even I'm sure to pass your MA exam you would have had to
#
study for that in a structured way. Not really, not really. I mean I will be very honest with you.
#
The other thing which I would like to share with you is that I found my condition like Vikram Seth's
#
other novel you know A Suitable Boy. That's my favorite. Which one? An Equal Music. Beautiful.
#
That book gives you the understanding that if you make the realization early enough in line
#
that you make music, you love music but you will never be passionate and mad about music.
#
Then you compromise is a bad word. You realize ki jaan denega koi faida nahi hai. I can't do that.
#
This goes to what you say achievement. There was never a pressure to achieve get a first class
#
top of the university. I did end up with the Chancellor's Medal in Agra University
#
which was a great achievement because ek laakh student BMA hoti the. But Agra University was
#
not Allahabad University. So the Chancellor's Medal at Allahabad University or Delhi University was
#
at a higher picking order one way of studying Agra. But that came effortlessly not because I was
#
bright but there was no strain to achieve something ki first class laana hai, top karna hai, yeh karna hai.
#
If I wanted to play table tennis, I would play table tennis. Jo aapne sabhaal kusha MA ke baare me
#
one realized that what was prescribed syllabus had been covered much earlier in school.
#
Aapko pata tha ki Chandel Architecture, Khajuraho mein, Karvi Linear hai. You knew what Stabila
#
Ramrish has written about the presence of Shiva. You had been exposed to Havel and
#
Percy Brown. To aapko boj padta hi nahi tha. You had opened A.L. Baisham wonder that was India.
#
You said, yaar yeh toh translation mein kuch galban lag rahi hai. The original verse is not like that.
#
And you managed to pass. You did. And I was very fortunate to have a very very encouraging
#
teacher in Nainital College, Dr. Shakambari Jayaal, who herself had studied with Puntambikar and
#
other people in BHU. And I think Maastu Ifshana Nagarwal ji. And I think she also exposed you
#
to explore yourself. And I was doing a master's thesis and she said you must read Henry Main's
#
lectures and you must read Pandurang, Vaman K. Netri, History of Dharmashastras. I don't think
#
that anybody doing a PhD would be touching that. But she sent me to Lucknow University to have the
#
Tagore Memorial Lecture and read Henry Main. It came in very useful when I started teaching law
#
after retiring from JNU. Because I would get back to Henry Main and jurisprudence and Dharmashastras
#
and Manu Smriti and Yageval Smriti crimes and punishment and ordeal by fire. I mean everything
#
comes back to you, you know, ultimately. I guess in the rich tapestry of life,
#
every thread plays a part. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you never know
#
Yeah, let's go in for a quick break. But before we go in for a break, I remembered a family
#
connection that we sort of have. My mother in the mid 80s used to compose and sort of conduct and
#
run this thing called the Chandigarh Choir, which Ira ji was part of. And at one point through Ira ji,
#
my mother got in touch with Shivani ji and asked her to translate this Bengali song,
#
Jona Janya into Hindi. And Shivani ji did that. And the choir performed it. And I think Ira ji
#
was also is visible. And there's a video of that, which I helped my father upload on YouTube a few
#
years ago. So I'll link to that from the show notes. And when my mom died in 2008, in fact,
#
Ira ji wrote a very moving sort of a moving memory of hers, which I discovered many years later.
#
So maybe one day I should ask Ira ji on the show as well.
#
You should because Ira again is one of those fantastic translators. I think she translates
#
fiction. I mean, she has done, you know, this Yadindra's Lata Sorgatha, and she's done Manohar
#
Shyam Joshi's novels, which are almost impossible to translate.
#
Amazing. So definitely on my checklist for the future. Let's take a quick break.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen. I'm chatting with Pushpesh Panth on his
#
fascinating life and all his thoughts on food and clothes and international relations and so
#
on and so forth. But you know, it's really your life that interests me more than anything else.
#
And, you know, we've spoken about your childhood and your parents and how you've, you know,
#
studied at home as it were and got an MA at 18. So what happens now? Because you got an MA at 18,
#
but what are the roads?
#
Yes, listen, it's a lot of fun that when you get an MA at 18, you are a misfit in more ways than one.
#
What happens is that you have not gone to medical school, which you could have done.
#
You have not gone to NDA, which you could have done. And the civil service, which was the preferred
#
option of kids who had done first classes or upper high second classes, was not open to me
#
because you had to be 20 before you opted for IPS, which I didn't want, and 21 for the IAS.
#
So I had nothing to do but to do a PhD. So I registered for a PhD in Nainital on crimes
#
and punishment in the spritis of Manu and Yagya Valkya, but decided that I wanted to go out,
#
outside Nainital. There was an ad in a newspaper for international studies PhD in Delhi.
#
I applied and was taken in. So I joined the Department of Southeast Asian Studies
#
in a place called Sapro House, which was the Indian School of International Studies at
#
Deem University. And a new chapter in my life started there. And again, it was kind of
#
educating oneself, which continued more than the guided instruction by anybody else,
#
because Sapro House was a very interesting place.
#
It was a child of the Indian Council of World Affairs established by Satyaj Bahadur Sapro,
#
inspired by Nehru and so on in 1943. And after independence, it became some kind of a think
#
tank, which was independent, not always sympathetic to the government, at times critical,
#
but interested people. And then in 55, they had got a School of International Studies to study
#
foreign policy and international relations from an Indo-centric perspective. I joined the
#
Department of Southeast Asia because it was a natural gravitation from my ancient Indian
#
history and culture to Indonesia, the Greater India, quote unquote, Cambodia, Laos, Majapahit
#
and Singapore, Myanmar and so on. And also partly it was my interest in spice trade and crossroads
#
and mother's connection with Chinese studies and so on. But Sapro House was a very interesting
#
place. People used to quip that it is a great lawn attached to a library and a canteen.
#
We went next door to the modern school. And I remember sitting in the canteen and
#
Gulzar Sahib coming in a spotless white with Pandit Dhanesh Sharma for modern school.
#
Photographer OP Sharma used to come. Next door was National School of Drama. So you had actors
#
coming here. Our canteen was better than any other canteen. In the National School of Drama
#
canteen was a very poor second. So all these actors came here. Painters came there. Artists
#
came there. And Sapro House was the only hall then where performances took place. Vishnu
#
Digambar Jayanti. I listened to Bismillah Khazab, no, sorry, I listened to Vilayat Hussain Khazab
#
play there. I saw Indiraani Rehman dance there. I saw the Dhrupad recitals, Bhim Singh Joshi,
#
Kumar Gandhar, name anybody. That was the principal place. There was another hall, smaller
#
hall, the IFX in Rafi Marg, which was for plays, etc. Now the interesting part about this was
#
that there was an auditorium, there was a rokay, which was reserved for the Indian Council of
#
World Affairs, which owned the auditorium. The caretaker was Mr. Garg. Not too many members of
#
the ICWA were interested in these festivities. So the students in the school who were interested
#
in music, dance, drama could go to Mr. Garg and he would say, ke block mein tum kabhi baat jao.
#
Then the culture vultures sat up in front. Slowly they left. So you could push your way
#
further down to the nearer the stage and enjoy that. So that was education of thought.
#
Where I saw Kathak dancers like Charan Girtharchand, who later became my
#
guru when I thought I would learn Kathak dancing. I met Jyotsana in that school,
#
who for a short while was my fiancee. Her brother-in-law was one of the greatest
#
musicologists and Kathak experts, Dr. S. K. Saxena, professor of philosophy in Delhi University,
#
who opened my eyes to what music was. He exposed me to Suzan Langer, the dynamic image,
#
the philosophy of form, Kenneth Burke, and so on. He was basically a philosopher specializing
#
in aesthetics. He was keenly interested in Dhrupad and Kathak. He opened your mind to that,
#
that Kathak was not just a Mujra dance into the films. It was not a Kathak in Nawab's court.
#
Kathak was from a tradition of Kathakars. There was a Jaipur gharana. There was a
#
Lucknow gharana. There was a Banaras gharana. There was Sitara Devi and there was, of course,
#
Bindadeen Maharaj, Yachchu Maharaj, Lachchu Maharaj. He exposed you to dance. It is a human
#
body in motion and it is a language of gestures. Then when I started learning, I tried to learn
#
Kathak, actually. Then I came to study it a little more sensibly, like the Naat-shashtra
#
aphorisms. Again, we go back to Sanskrit. Yato hasta tato drishti, yato drishti tato mana,
#
yato mana tato bhava, yato bhava tato rasa. You have a movement of your hands, where your hands
#
are your eye follows, where your eye follows your mind wanders, where your mind goes and emotion
#
is generated. And when there is emotion, there is rasa. Then it came back to me from my Sanskrit
#
days, bhavanubhavasanchari sayogadras nishpatti. There are certain sthaibhavs in your mind.
#
There are fleeting thoughts. And when they interact, there is rasa there. So then you know
#
what happens is when you say rasa, sap, essence, and you start thinking, ki khaane mein rasa hota hai,
#
paan lagane wala chaurasiya kehlata hai ki paan mein chaar rasa hota hai. Shadras bhojan hota hai
#
because in India there are six flavors. Even the Japanese post umami have only five. There are shad
#
ritus. Kya ritu aur rasa ka samband hai? Ras bhanga kona kya hota hai? So you started thinking about
#
aesthetics and old thoughts from childhood came back. And you said ki haan, my mother had a friend
#
Kapila Vatsayanji, fantastic, Shaakshash Saraswati, who was in Delhi in culture department.
#
And when she found out that I was my mother's son, she was very accessible. She could be very
#
difficult, but she was fantastic. And she was a trained Kathak dancer. And she had written on
#
Bharat Muni's Natya Shastra. Next door was Sundari Shri Dharani in the Trivedi Kara Center. Once
#
again, a Shantiniketan person, mummy's friend, mother's friend. Ladit Kala Academy Jaya Appasamy
#
and Shanko Khosh, both from Shantiniketan, mother's friends. So doors opened because of my mother's
#
Shantiniketan connections and early exposure to Sanskrit and art forms. And of course, my short
#
lived affair with Jyotsana and her brother-in-law, who was very hard taskmaster. He had a very
#
interesting takya kalam. He used to call everybody younger, londe baasha. It sounded very funny,
#
londe baasha is a word of endearment in a boy lover's community. But once you realized
#
that he didn't mean any offense, but he once asked me to bring Rahimuddin Khan Sahib Nagar
#
from the railway station. Receive him and bring him here. I went to the railway station to get
#
Ustad Sahib and Ustad Sahib told me one, bitte aisa karna ki kaala wala scooter leke aana.
#
You know, Saxena Sahib used to save money. Money was always voluntarily donated. So taxis
#
were not there, scooters were there. Mere samajh mein hi nahi aaye ki kaala scooter ka kya babaz
#
hai. I got a kaala scooter. Then I couldn't resist myself. I said, Ustad ki maaf, izaza
#
toh ek samal puchu. He said, kya? Mere kaale scooter ka aur peele kaale scooter ka kya
#
fark hai? Unka dekho, Barghordar. Kaale scooter, nay wale scooter hain. In mein jhatkhe kam lagte hain.
#
Jo kaale aur peele pute huye purane scooter hain, wo anjar panjar unke dhile hote hain.
#
So I realized that this musician had a great clarity of thought. And then he said something,
#
he sang a little bit. I could not get what arghi rikhap was. But I could get arghi might have
#
something to do with arghia. But Guru ji was very, very kind. He said, bitte jab Rishabh istare se
#
lagta hain, ki usme ek worship ka tone argh ka aata hain. If you use ray in that thing, Rishabh,
#
that is the arghi rikhap. I said, yaar bade kalakaar ka cheez hai. That was the day I decided,
#
ki ye cheez seekhne ki hai. Ki dhrupad mein kitna gyan hai. Ki matlab arghi rikhap kisan ye
#
cheez hai. Toh kahin-n-kahin kisi aur swar ka hoga. Then again it dawned to me. You know,
#
was taking me back to my childhood. What is a swari in music? Swar sadhana hai.
#
Swar sadhana kya hota hai. But before swar sadhna hai, swari kya hota hai.
#
Swari is a joint word, swa arra. Something which is radiant by itself, is swar. So then again it
#
says, swa kya hota hai, self. Swaast kya hota hai, being balanced and centered. So you know,
#
you almost get into saskrit and music and lore and this thing. Toh bada maza aaya hai.
#
Sapru House was an education for me, not in international relations in Southeast Asia.
#
Although, I mean, just today I got the news that one of my old teachers has died,
#
Professor Rahmatullah Khan. He was a junior teacher of law then and the
#
really exciting, brilliant teacher in law was Professor R.P. Anand. He had just come back from
#
Yale with the two volumes of his PhD and he was a short man, five feet, less than five feet,
#
drove a huge Impala and at times he was not even visible driving because he was almost standing
#
from the edge of the seat to the pedals. Brilliant teacher, fired your imagination.
#
He was the only person who talked, but before the Chinese and Islamic countries talked about it,
#
way back in 65, of the Western tradition of international law in which the Asian countries
#
or Islamic nations had played no role. So he would tell us about Radha Binodpal
#
and his dissenting judgment in Tokyo trials and he would talk about the tradition of dharma,
#
nyaya, niti and oriental inputs into international law. You know, a fantastic person.
#
Another teacher who was absolutely brilliant was Professor Manohar Lal Sodhi who had resigned from
#
foreign service, realist to hard court. Professor Anand was rule of law, international law,
#
but challenging the Western concept of world order and so on. Professor Sodhi, a disciple of
#
Nitinji Subhash Bose, follower of Girija Mukherjee who had once been a secretary of Nitinji Subhash
#
Bose, a hard core realist, Shakti Sagar. He was a realist and he was a realist of the variety who
#
talked to us about cybernetics in human use of human beings, Karl Deusch and nerves of governance
#
and so on. Nobody had talked of cybernetics then or cyber words. I mean, he is the one who
#
really blew my four hour long classes, five hour long classes. In between, there was Shishir Gupta
#
who did not teach me but joined Sapru House. He was in the council, interacted. He was a person
#
who had just passed his BA. He did his MA much later, who was a brilliant person, who was a
#
balance between an Indo-centric perspective, not blind to the international rule of law system,
#
but very much Indian national interest policy, etc. His study on Kashmir is still classic.
#
So these were the teachers and there was my PhD supervisor who was not brilliance incarnate,
#
but I think he made me finish my PhD in two years, few months,
#
which was a record for Sapru House then by telling me that PhD is only a key to get an academic job.
#
So take a subject which doesn't involve learning a foreign language, take a subject which is
#
defined in time and place. So I worked on formation of Malaysia, two year period,
#
6365, English language, learnt a little Basa Malayu, had a short field trip to Indonesia
#
and Malaysia, Philippines, came back, submitted my PhD, got a degree. But this was a very enriching
#
experience that I learnt much more in Sapru House, open shelf system, library was there,
#
all the great magazines were there. American Library used to be next door across the road,
#
Bawalpur House, Miss Kapasi used to be the librarian and British Council Library was
#
accessible. So you had access to books and periodicals from all over the world, I must
#
confess. Nainital College had access to all these things as well. We are a government college
#
which paid teachers better than universities. So teachers come from universities to Nainital
#
College. Nainital was the summer capital of Uttar Pradesh, good English medium schools,
#
good hospitals, beautiful climate. So we didn't have books, periodicals there either. But this
#
was a different scale. And people came from modern school, people came from Tiwani. I remember
#
spending hours watching Guru Singh Ajit's disciples having Pong dance, taking acrobatic leaps,
#
spear dance practices, Manipuri dances, male Manipuri dances, bear torsos. And you had the
#
Raas in, you know, you could spend hours in the amphitheatre doing that. So I would say that
#
that was an education between 65 to 69 when I decided that I did not want to take the civil
#
service at all. Why should I take a civil service? And part of the reason was, again,
#
the Mrinal connection. Mrinal's husband was Mr. B.D. Pandey's son, ICS, governor of Punjab in Bihar,
#
chairman of LIC and so on. And his son had gone to Cambridge and was with Rajiv Gandhi.
#
He qualified in IAS with very high rank. And he was posted in Nimach, back of beyond.
#
So he would come to play a very important role in IAS subsequently. But I one day sat and thought
#
that if I have to spend the next 10 years of my life to acquire seniority to come to Delhi to
#
exercise or wield power, or end up as the most powerful person in a district,
#
talking only to the SP and nobody to talk to me because the hierarchy was such.
#
And I got the newspaper three days away from Delhi. Why should I leave Delhi at all? I'm
#
having a great gala time. I'm eating in Kanat place. I'm eating in dhamas. I'm eating in
#
restaurants. I'm going to plays. I'm listening to music. Why should I do this? And by that time,
#
I was writing articles for freelance, for Dinman, for Hindi, Saptaik Hindustan Hindi.
#
Anish Chowk was very kind to me, the editor of Youth Times. So otherwise, I would neither be
#
writing in English till this day. She got me out of my this fear that my mother tongue is Hindi.
#
I can write in Hindi. Why shouldn't I write in English? When I wrote in English and she
#
printed me and she encouraged me, Prithish and I used to, Gandhi got printed around the same time.
#
I got really was enjoying myself. I was learning a little Kathak. I was trying to learn a little
#
Kathakali. I was tone deaf so I didn't make much progress either way. But this was, I thought life.
#
There was a job advertised in Ramjas College. I'd just come back from my field trip in 68 December
#
and I'm talking to you of 69. The girl I was in love with in Jyotsana got a scholarship,
#
went to France, fell in love with somebody else there and got subsequently got married to her.
#
So that is another story. But I decided to sort of stay in Delhi and teach.
#
I asked my father, I've decided not to take the civil services. He said no problems.
#
When you didn't study medicine, there was no, would you do what you want to do?
#
So I applied for a job in Ramjas and it was a very interesting interview. The first interview I was
#
at Bhagat Singh College when I was turned down. Now this was interesting because I was an MA from
#
Agra University, considered to be the third rate university. I was a PhD from School of International
#
Studies, not from Delhi University. I was a double outsider for Delhi University. So I said,
#
my second interview was Ramjas. Dr. Bibi Mishra was the head. The moment the interview started,
#
I knew the interview was doing well. They were asking me questions. I couldn't care less for
#
the job. I answered what I wanted to do. So they asked me something very good. We have a
#
vacancy for an ancient Indian history lecturer and you have a PhD in international relations.
#
How do you think you fit in? So I quoted to them study of history or time B that
#
what the relationship is. Dr. Mishra seemed to be happy. Professor Amba Prasad seemed to be happy.
#
Then they asked me a very strange question. They said, how do we know that you will stay here?
#
Every year we appoint a bright young person and he joins the IAS the next year. That is what had
#
happened to the person who was selected in Bhagat Singh College, Ashok Pradarshi. He got
#
joined the IAS and left the university. I was reckless and young. I said, sir, I have one thing
#
to say. If you give me enough money, as much money as an IAS officer gets after five or six years,
#
why should I leave next year? I mean, I like teaching. I enjoy teaching. So what is very
#
strange is I was appointed with five increments as a lecturer, which was seven increments over
#
the topper of that year's daily university masters, Shimali, who joined St. Stephens as an
#
assistant lecturer. I joined as a full lecturer at Ramjas with five increments. So it was.
#
It was very useful. It was very useful. Dr. Mishra was so happy with me. I was given
#
classes in the masters, which one had to wait for years to teach MA South East Asian History.
#
That got me on the wrong side of Dr. Bhramit Chandra, Ramella Thapar, etc.
#
I was denied a classroom in Delhi University. I took my classes in the lawn.
#
I enjoyed teaching my teaching period. I had a great time. And that is when I decided
#
I never needed to take notes in class. When I went to ancient Indian history class,
#
I could talk about various things, which were part of my education. And the kids were happy
#
and I was open to being exposed to my ignorance, not to be ashamed about that.
#
I was very surprised. 69 I was teaching in Ramjas last year. A student from Assam wrote to me,
#
I found you on the net. I still remember you very gratefully. You are only a year older than us and
#
we had a great time with you and you are very nice. And it made me very happy. Those were the
#
happiest days of my life. I would go in the morning from Saprow House, Bengali market area,
#
teach my classes and afternoon come back to Saprow House, see the evening cultural activities,
#
sit in the lawn, sit in the canteen, make new friends and so on. That was discovery of Delhi.
#
I would discover old Delhi. I would discover University North Campus area. I would discover
#
Jamia Melia. I would discover Bengali market, Karnat place, Karol Bagh, W.E.A., Rajan Nagar and so on.
#
And then I got into trouble with Ramjas principals because they thought that my
#
ways were too wayward. I would occasionally dance a conga dance in the empty classes,
#
classrooms. I dressed up in jeans and t-shirt, which the principal didn't quite approve of.
#
There's another story. So I thought this is not the place for me. I would much rather go back to
#
Saprow House and see what I can do. Freelance, do something else. GNU was founded that year in 1969.
#
And I was given an opportunity to apply for a job in GNU. I got it and then I decided I will not
#
move out of Delhi. So this was the next chapter between leaving Nenital at the age of 18 and
#
joining Delhi University, let's say 22, 23, joining GNU by 24. And it was very pleasant.
#
By that time, I knew I would write film reviews, music reviews, dance reviews, book reviews.
#
Ravi Sahay, the editor of Dilman was very kind to me. Around 71, I was appointed for the first time.
#
I applied as an assistant editor in Navarat Times. I was about to join and I went to my father and
#
he said, son, I have an advice to give you. When you said that you wanted to teach and stay in
#
Delhi and enjoy, I thought it was a good decision. Now you are getting tempted for a little more
#
money, a little more park, a little more name and fame, supposedly. I think that's not a wise
#
decision. So I tendered my resignation. I almost joined my farewell party. I withdrew that and stayed
#
back with GNU and never regretted that. And I think that is where my father understood me
#
much better than anybody else that what would suit me. I enjoyed teaching in GNU.
#
I was teaching Indian foreign policy, diplomacy, and I tried to do things that not teach kids
#
what was in the books. So I would say the books you can always read. And I think my guru and boss,
#
Shishir Gupta, told me, read voraciously, read Gajan, read economics, read whatever you can.
#
Read books like mind of Russia coin, mind of Germany, mind of France, read
#
structure of the post-war world by Hedley Bull, read this, read that, read
#
and Amitai Azzioni on complex organizations. So between Shishir Gupta, Professor Shishir Gupta,
#
not my teacher formally, and Manoharlal Somdiji and Dr. R. P. Anand, I think it was a perfect
#
exposure. Again, something like back home. You were not given a lecture. You were allowed to read
#
and explore for yourself and make up your mind. And you could afford to have a difference with
#
your supervisor. It was very nice. So I think that was very interesting all the way till
#
GNU. And GNU again was a different university then. It had a very
#
eclectic teaching community. It had teachers who were Marxist, teachers who were not Marxist,
#
teachers who had already made a reputation abroad. There were young students who were
#
as bright as Sudipto Kaviraj. There were people, colleagues from SIS, like Govind Deshpande, who
#
got a Sangeetna Tech Academy. And you taught as Jayashankar in 1972. So should we hold you
#
responsible? I think I am very proud of Jayashankar. I think you are kidding, but most
#
people have this feeling. I had a very interesting long discussion on Jayashankar, whose father
#
subordinate I was for three months in IDSA also, in between shifting from Ramjas to GNU. No,
#
I have answered that question very honestly, I think. I think Jayashankar is a brilliant person.
#
Jayashankar is essentially a Democrat. Jayashankar is essentially a secular person.
#
And all of us who have taught him should be proud of him. The problem is that there is a Faustian
#
dilemma. When you want to have all that is beautiful, all that is powerful, it is the
#
temptation to sell your soul comes easy and you think the day of reckoning will never come.
#
This is a quote which Caravan has used in a long-form article on Jayashankar.
#
I think to be fair to Jayashankar, his father was treated very unfairly by Mrs. Indira Gandhi.
#
But I don't think he has joined Modi because of that. I think he's a fantastically bright person
#
who shares like his father, a hardcore realist vision about India's greatness and India's place
#
in the world. Now, one might disagree and I do that I think India cannot be either USA or China
#
or even Russia. But if Mr. Modi is giving you a long leash and giving you the mirage
#
that you can be the Vishwa Guru and if I can be the Patta Shishi of the Vishwa Guru,
#
the temptation I think is strong to sit behind the desk where Jawaharlal Nehru sat. Much less
#
worthy people than Jayashankar have sat in that position. So, I would say that all of us,
#
I mean like Henry Kissinger did say, I mean we started with Afrodisiac in a different context.
#
Power is the ultimate Afrodisiac. So, if you are 63, 64 and you have reached a place where you can
#
actually exercise power and I think Mr. Modi's presidential form of government is not only
#
Jayashankar I have taught. I have also taught Amitabh Kant of CEO of Niti Aayog indirectly,
#
half a dozen ambassadors like Taranjit Singh Sandhu who is now in America, Navtej Sarna at
#
the Academy of Diplomacy. Now, the point is that Mr. Modi has got his Navratans, nine gems,
#
whether it is Mr. Vaishnav in railways or whether it is Hardip Puri in urban development.
#
Now, he has got these ministers. I would not say that they have become opportunistic and joined
#
BJP. I would say that they have had their qualities but the problem is because you hate
#
the present regime and it's harking back to vigilantism, the polarization of the country,
#
the destruction of the composite culture. Everybody who is with Modi is tainted by
#
guilt with association with good reason. I mean including Chief Justice has passed
#
but the problem is too I would not be defensive about Jayashankar.
#
No, I mean I was kidding and I wasn't being judgmental either. I understand the real world
#
is complex and it's so easy to pass judgment. No, imagine Henry Kissinger and imagine his
#
relationship with Nixon, both bending knees and seeking guidance from Almighty, both Watergate.
#
I mean look, the point is that you don't think that Henry Kissinger would yield to that kind
#
of thing but that the highest not US born citizen could reach Secretary of State.
#
So, I think Jayashankar once was passed up for the external affairs, foreign affairs,
#
foreign secretarieship but once when we are conversing after that he says he said to me
#
that the mills of God grind slowly and in mysterious ways but ultimately they do and
#
he did become the external affairs foreign secretary and then the external affairs minister.
#
So, I do think that you get into a euphoric high when you suddenly realize that
#
it's possible that you can shape policy.
#
Human fealty is fascinating and you know actually on this trip to Delhi I feel that my sort of
#
knowledge of a certain period in India's history is being deepened in the way that everything that
#
you're talking about is also connected to two previous guests I've had on the show like you
#
mentioned Kapila Vatsyana and the magazine Dinman and one of my previous guests was Akshay Mukul
#
who's written that great biography of Aageya and the Geeta Press and the Geeta Press before that
#
but Aageya is fantastic book and he was of course married to Kapila Vatsyana and he mentions that
#
Kapila ji said some things will go with me I am not going to do exactly exactly and another of
#
my guests was Rahul Ramagundam who's written this great biography of George Fernandez yes
#
and you were you were of course a big admirer of Lohia ji. I was in the fringes of the Samajwadi
#
movement I used to be not member of the Samajwadi party but all my mentors like the great Hindi
#
poet Kamlesh or my well-wisher and patron Ashok Siksaria who introduced me to Kanta Pitti who
#
was brave enough to print some of my homoerotic fiction way back in 60s in Kalpana and I used to
#
be on the fringes and I had met Dr Lohia once or twice and the gathering was painters like Swaminathan,
#
Hussain, Vijay Devanarayan, Sai from Allahabad so you had these people and the magazines was
#
Jan I used to write I contributed two columns one in my name one pseudonymous in Prithipaksha
#
organized by George Fernandez till the magazine shut down in emergency so I wrote a travelogue
#
after I came back from my field trip for Jan also in mankind so I do think they had a role in my
#
life. Kamlesh was the one who introduced me to Swaminathan and then I discovered his wife was
#
Bhavani ji from Bhimtal. Prithipaksha was being run from an office in Bahadurgarh road where
#
Swaminathan used to stay when he was leading a communal life there. You know it's interesting
#
so before JNU the Sapru house and the coffee house and I was doing this small book which is
#
hopefully finished but like I have not been able to submit it to speaking tiger
#
the deadline was past six months back I was talking about the PRRM coffee house
#
pre-emergency there was a price rise resistance movement coffee house where the metro station
#
is there this was there was a strike in the Indian coffee house the waiter set up a cooperative and
#
openers for 27 paisa you got a hamburger a mutton hamburger which was 25 paisa of the
#
cost of the hamburger two paisa the tax 25 paisa for dosa sambar 50 paisa for omelet
#
slice rupee for a mutton chop and so on 25 paisa 27 paisa for coffee I still remember the waiters
#
Joseph Durga etc now when I went to Delhi University in 69 there was a law faculty
#
bang opposite Ramjas college and in front of that there is this coffee house where I had my lunch
#
and same waiters same prices same something but after emergency Sanjay Gandhi thought that
#
they were seditious subversive people who concentrated in this coffee house this coffee
#
house was destroyed instead of this a very high rarer diesel restaurant called Rambal came where
#
ice cream was sold where neon lights were and so on Sanjay Gandhi talks about that other people
#
have talked about that emergency passed the coffee house came back but the place was not
#
available so they went to Mohan Singh place top floor and the coffee house had a rebirth
#
but not the same thing so I was thinking the pre-emergency period in Delhi and post-emergency
#
period in Delhi also is important in the context of a person who has lived in Delhi
#
where you with mrs gandhi and congress where you against it did you go to jail did you not go to
#
jail did you pay a personal price did you lose a job or did you move where you were optimized
#
forcibly or you were not so you had that kind of a divide it was also there in jane you because
#
menka gandhi thought she was insulted by the satrapati during emergency when she said comrade
#
you are one of us join the students movement against the emergency she did not dig bhinder was
#
rang up people called premier purka i suppose there is a shah commission report is a detailed
#
description of this so there is a pre-emergency media in delhi post-emergency media in delhi
#
pre-emergency judiciary in delhi post-emergency judiciary in delhi apex court and life changed
#
post mrs gandhi's return there was a different phase altogether because mrs gandhi may have
#
learned may have not learned there are other challenges emerging like the khalistani threat
#
there was a cessationism in sri lanka sanjay died i'm sure he used that great phrase death bell
#
final arbiter and mrs gandhi was a broken woman and rajiv came and then the new dreams started
#
computerization national mission sam petroda telecom so i think you know all this had an
#
impact on a life of a person in 75 i was less than 30 years old when mrs gandhi came back
#
to power i was still 32 when i was not yet 40 when sanjay died and rajiv made his appearance
#
so i can look back and say my son was born in 71
#
and my memory is taking out sun to haram guha's close friend shekhar patak my friend took indrajeet
#
on his shoulders and we kept a distance between jp's great rally in which jagjivan babu and him
#
nadir nandan bhavna gave up mrs gandhi and there was a ditch so we stayed on this side of the ditch
#
that if there is a stampede if there is a lathe charge we would have this much time to cross the
#
road and get saved so there are interesting things which one remembers you know i searched
#
searched very hard for all the dope i could get on you leken aapki homo erotic fiction mujhe nahi
#
mili so aapko homo erotic fiction it was a hindi magazine of very high literary value and the hindi
#
magazine of saith academy had a reviewer who had very favorably said that they are refreshing
#
stories and unfortunately what happened was this homo erotic fiction was not the
#
you know suppressed homoeroticism of nirala or pandey bichan sharma ogar stories like chocolate
#
or bhatikulli bhat wo cheeze nahi thi ultimately aap usko condemn kar rahe the i was grappling with
#
the thought and my own feelings that i found boys attractive but not necessarily in a carnal sense
#
but i found kabafi's poetry more interesting than other contemporary poetry i found statues
#
and sculptures and paintings of lunada da vinci or michael angelo antonio i interesting i was
#
reading a lot of i was made to read a lot of andrijid counterfeiters i had read death in
#
venice i was reading a lot of yajane i had read miracle of the rose our lady of flowers
#
the quarrel of breast thieves journal and everything sort of made me realize that i had a
#
empathy and an inclination towards this so he's interesting and then an uncle of mine was very
#
worried about this and he could told my father it seems your son is homosexual so my father told
#
him that it doesn't make a difference to me he's my son you look after your son you look after your
#
problems i don't think that i will interfere with my son's inclinations and things but that is when
#
i had fallen in love with joshana saksena and during my field trip i had been very emotionally
#
attached to a chinese girl so those were the days when i thought that i was swinging both ways and
#
i probably would have no problems living a life which is can we say panmorphous pansexuality
#
polymorphous pansexuality but the stories were interesting in the sense that they were
#
homoerotic to a reader because there were no female characters as an object of attraction love
#
betrayal whatever it is but the stories were not very widely noticed because it was a high brow
#
literary magazine and only those who read it probably read it same thing happened to my novel
#
called jawani ke din it was published in calcutta it was received very well among friends and those
#
who read it but nothing uh it had no circulation no circulation 73 and and you still have those
#
stories that you've written or magazine copies no i'm a very bad archivist i think the stories
#
would be somewhere because kalpana was a magazine which creates i has an archive so i want to go
#
back to your college and even before sort of your experiences in jnu i found it interesting the way
#
you taught in du i think you said you were 22 and one day you your first day in college you
#
had a green t-shirt and jeans and these two boys sadan singh yadav and madan singh yadav who used
#
to sit in my class and snore they were wrestlers they had gotten to the sports wrestlers quota
#
so i said yaar aisa kyun karte ho toh sab sabere saw dand lagaate hain, doodh pite hain, madam khaate hain,
#
neet aati toh i said why did you go away i will mark you present baaki log toh padhe hain na matlab
#
toh kharate lehte toh hume distract hote hain but more interesting than that was i was going around
#
with an attendance register for a classroom nobody noticed the attendance register in my
#
class and somebody thought i was a fresher so a third year boy called me he's like idhra
#
so i went there he said then he was abusive toh maine registrars ko dekhaya uska ka you want me
#
to tell you where shall i put you in which orifice i should put you ka khosu hain aapke ye attendance
#
register ho mai lecturer hoon the poor chap did not know what hit him he had not expected a lecturer
#
to behave like this dress up like this but that was the day my equation with the students was
#
settled i was treated as a friend i was given due respect nobody misbehaved with me
#
and it was tough days there were knifeings and there was abusers there was strikes and so on
#
but i had made my peace with my students and i was treated as a friend i was taken to the hostel
#
that is what was creating problems with the principal no lecturer used to go and eat with
#
the students in the hostel mess no lecturer then respectable would go to the coffee shop and take
#
students with him nobody would smoke there i did not smoke with the students inside the college
#
but i did smoke with them in the coffee house across the road which was public space so i don't know
#
tell me about the shaping of yourself like i'm very interested that this time on the one hand
#
you're teaching these people and all of that and on the other hand with every young person
#
and with me perhaps this took even longer with every one young person there is this process
#
of figuring out who you are what you want to do on the one hand there is the anxiety that you want
#
to fit into people i don't know how much that would be greater that might have been in your case
#
because you know while you had the while you were educated at home that socialization process that
#
school also brings is perhaps something that wasn't there so i you know was it tough to kind
#
of fit in and along with that anxiety of fitting in and you know finding that validation among your
#
peers how was it that's interesting who were my peers i never tried to fit in with the peers in
#
the staff room who were 10 years 20 years 30 years older than me and stuck up i was more comfortable
#
with students who are my age who the ma students were a year older than me
#
probably in delhi university the b honors students were my same age
#
the b part one student was just three years younger than me i was not worried about that
#
by that time the period between leaving nenital and joining ramjas i and traveled abroad i had
#
acquired enough self-confidence that people are of different kinds they don't always aspire i mean
#
i was not aspiring to confirm and meet approval of others i knew
#
were you comfortable in your own skin oh of course yes i had no problems over that
#
i mean that that's difficult to believe but it still is something i find odd with my son
#
he at times gets uncomfortable why do you talk about talk like this i mean my granddaughters
#
when i talk to them then my one day my granddaughter asked me are you gay i said well
#
i have not come out as as fashionable these days but anybody i knew would say that oh you prefer
#
boys but if you say that if i fornicated with boys right left and center is like the woke situation
#
you don't ask somebody when did you first lay a girl or what happened to that girl did you marry
#
her did you do that when did you first lose your virginity i mean which the dom morris poem is very
#
well not gay in the year of my 19th in the 19th year of my youth i lost what some call innocence
#
it snowed gently that night in belgrade i'm very bad at quoting poetry accurately but these are
#
the lines which go you know if you see this this verse so the loss of innocence is two ways loss
#
of innocence is something like that the dead day you became a lover with somebody else but a loss
#
of innocence is a state of mind and the loss of innocence is not the garden of Eden and sense of
#
sin in my case the loss of innocence did not matter at all because there was no purity no
#
innocence from childhood onwards so the it was not a question of whether i had been physically
#
molested in a boarding school or not or whether somebody at home had made a pass at me or not
#
i mean it is very fashionable these days to say that the poor boys are as much
#
molested as the girls are which is true but i do remember that there was a notorious uncle who used
#
to funnel kids in inappropriate places all cousins had been handled by him but there was no loss of
#
innocence part it was a great joke that one cousin had pinched his little thing and the poor chap
#
wouldn't even complain because what he was doing why do you keep the young boy's hand there so i
#
did not have this innocence problem i didn't have the virginity problem i didn't have the pollution
#
problem i didn't experience a rape by a relative or a boarding school bully so i don't know i mean
#
i was always comfortable with the way life flowed and i enjoyed myself yeah the dombrist poem is
#
called john nobody and the lines you were quoting are it was the winter of my 17th year when i lost
#
what some call innocence lightly that night the snow fell on belgrade absolutely and then the
#
beautiful sort of sound to it lightly that night the snow fell on belgrade yes so tell me now about
#
you know an extension to the question of finding yourself that how did you develop the frames
#
through which you look at the world like i'm guessing that of course from your childhood
#
which was so syncretic in terms of food and influences and languages and everything
#
the you know issues like secularism and tolerance and all of those things must already have been
#
imbibed and so on and so forth but when you are actually studying the subjects you're studying
#
when you're studying history and later when you are studying international relations and later
#
when you're just looking at the india around you what are the frames through which you're looking
#
i think the one frame if you put it which has been with me since childhood is being in a doctor's
#
house and suffering and patients dying the death i mean not that very many people died in the
#
hospital in mukteswar but when a patient died my father could not eat for days because he somehow
#
felt responsible for not having treated him sufficiently my problem is the fragility of life
#
the one sense of what is with you i had this sense very acutely from my childhood that what you have
#
can be taken away from you accidentally or suddenly mother could succumb to cancer
#
father could have died to tb or whatever there could have been a nasty accident the cars could
#
roll down the thing somebody fell from a horse and broke the skull skull and you you always
#
i think i have been always looking at the world as a nashwar it will not stay with you forever
#
so nothing is forever and i think that is what makes me look at the world
#
and be very grateful for each moment i mean this it sounds very pompously
#
preposterously you look at it this way but i think that is what i could i could detach myself
#
and say i mean i'm very happy where i am and there is a buddhist signal this too shall pass
#
this is something which myself and my son exchange as a code i mean he is very unhappy he went through
#
a very messy divorce so i wrote to him a small sms but completely punctuated properly dear sir
#
this too shall pass and then you know some strange thing happened he and i were driving together
#
and somebody rang me up on phone and said the joshana the girl i was
#
involved with married a french boy is divorced and staying with her in-laws because the in-laws
#
are more fond of her and the husband has gone away with the new wife so i laughed and i said
#
the mills of god grind in strange and mysterious ways my son stopped the car this was near
#
j new gate he stopped the car parked inside he said you mean to tell me that it still hurts
#
now he had not seen joseph ever in his life i said son shall i tell you something from international
#
relations when nixon lost his election and he was asked to react i think you'll get the exact
#
quote somewhere you're so brilliant with getting them immediately he said i'm too old to cry
#
i'm not young enough to say it doesn't hurt so it is the kind of a situation
#
you think it has healed but it never heals there is a scar tissue and when you scratch it you
#
realize though then he laughed then he said shall we have a coffee i said let's have more than a
#
coffee let's drive down let's have a beer let's eat a proper meal and nothing is cathartic not
#
that it ends that day and it never ends that way a couple of years after that i was looking at the
#
shelves of sapru house and i opened shelf and i suddenly realized joseph not coming out dramatically
#
fill me away from the other he said pushu i said yes then i said let's go and have a coffee it was
#
an ic library she said no no in ic library people will flock and haunt and will not get privacy so
#
i said let's take a cab i've got a driver somewhere else where you think but there was nothing to
#
talk she would talk about old times and i didn't know what how she had lived in france and she used
#
to send to me lara's theme and dr shivya goes to a fashionable movie when she went to france and
#
she's the one who had sent me so many yajanas and books knowing my interest and so on but then
#
she went her way and i went my way and that's the but i realized that was i in love with this girl
#
ever but then it was and she must have looked at me and felt the same i was not the same pushpesh
#
panth or pushu who had the what is this happened in jayport literary festival this time gitanjini
#
shri myself and some other people were of the same dais and she called me pushu twice or thrice
#
so i said gitanjini you must be one of the few people surviving who called me pushu my father
#
called me pushu joshana called me pushu a friend prince's grandson munnu used to call pushu sarah
#
rai calls me pushu but not very many other people i can't think the fifth or the sixth person who
#
calls me pushu she looked at me hard and she was studying with sarah rai in history in jnu in the
#
same vintage when i was teaching in the first year and i said yes and she sort of said ha it
#
goes back there and then when we are walking down the steps were unsteady so she said pushu you need
#
a hand so i had not my specs and i was a little unsteady on my knees i said i'll manage she said
#
something very sweetly pushu at this age there are very few of us who can hold each other's hand you
#
know so it reminded me of a poster which used to be in i had two posters in my office you know three
#
three posters in my jnu office one was an ape which says the boss is always right so i hated
#
my boss who was across the road so that was pasted on the door outside there was a poster it says in
#
case of nuclear attack kiss your ass goodbye that was the second picture and the third picture was
#
one of those denis the menace and it says charlie brownshoulds one sometimes i'm so lonely that i
#
hold my own hand so when geetanjali said this it suddenly dawned on me there comes a time in the
#
life of a man or a woman when you are all by yourself your children grow up i'm lucky my son
#
stays with me but he has his life i have my life and you miss your old friends who are not there
#
and then you suddenly realize things you did with a friend purely on a whim
#
sara in her book mentions the summer when alok and her brother came to muktushwar and spent the
#
summer and mithun was diagnosed with leukemia and the other cousin amit anil's brother died in
#
a freak accident in jamalpur swimming and so on so i don't know because you know you suddenly realize
#
at an age we started with memories and there is a universe of memories which you can't share with
#
anybody else like my son i keep bringing my son because it's a very odd thing he used to eat
#
chicken patties at nirulas and things and vengars no not vengars chicken in nirulas only la bohem
#
in gufa then he used to go to the village and he used to go to village and he said i sat by a
#
water mill where wheat was being ground to flour and suddenly i could smell the chicken patties
#
and chicken patties were nowhere there for 500 kilometers so his memory of chicken patties haunted
#
him in the village i can't get that smell of the fresh flour in water mill i've never sat in a
#
water mill and waited for the flour being ground there so there are some memories which are intense
#
but are so personal that you can't even share you have grown up together you share a meal
#
you share a drink you share a weather you share a smell of grass you share the maika glistening
#
but there are other memories which are it may just be a name it may just be a nickname people
#
called you with i mean i was doing this book on as i said on daily food and things other than food
#
came to me i used to buy my green t-shirts i used to go and get my dark glasses scenic make
#
from laurence and meo for 20 rupees i used to buy my kolhapuri chapals from a janpath shop
#
specifically and you know you sunday remember kya kitab kahan se kharitthe the aap magazine kahan
#
se pickup karte the aap t-shirt kahan se kharitthe the i got a pant tailored at monga tailors at
#
panchkui road on installments ki 10 rupee ki pant thi 2 rupee ki silai thi kishton mein aap paisa
#
didde the way back in 65 and the khana was in aadhaar market 70 paisa ka dhaba tha 4 rotiyan daal sabji
#
aadha plate so you know it but khane ke alawa jo atmospheric memories thi now why did i like
#
kolhapuri chapals i can't tell you why did i prefer i know i know why i preferred a particular
#
shirt and t-shirts i never could stitch buttons again so i prefer jeans and corduroy to anything
#
else because usme history karne ki jarbat nahi padtiye so it was part functional part
#
utilitarian and then it became an aesthetic yeah and it's very striking what you're saying about
#
like the geography of memory like particular places yaad aate hai ki you know yaha pe nirola sa chicken
#
patty tha yahaan se jute kharitthe the etc etc and that's
#
it is madding there were three great bookshops ramakrishna and sons new book depot galgotia all three
#
are gone and what you have is hm lewis and things of that kind saarya restaurant restaurant bar hai
#
khana hai peena hai kapde hai nothing else ulisan ki jute ki dukan abhi bachi hai pata nahi kapta crazy
#
and there is nothing else in corot place but and corot place had those classy stores
#
manohars janki dasis tailors like shlakas and guards and rinkeen waha bhiwa south indian khana hai
#
koi big gane biryani hai corner pe badras hotel me delka store hai i mean i just can't relate i
#
went to corot place and i also i was very badly shocked because this is where you had walked
#
in sun in different weather with a person you loved you you had romanced you had talked and
#
now there is nothing remains the landscape is different there are high-rise there was only
#
one high-rise building in 65 that was akash building number one and statement building
#
now you have kalash building this building that building and crazy i had max rodinbeck on the show
#
who lived in india for a while he was the editor of the economist here and he was brought up in
#
cairo so i remember asking him ki what is home for you and he thought about it and he said that
#
home for me is cairo but it is not the cairo of today it is a cow cairo of the 1960s when i grew
#
that five six years then well it was not snowing gently
#
but it was maybe heat stroke maybe it was raining but that is what delhi was
#
and you know you went to bangalore market but not for the stupid chart which is now famous
#
or the executive meals but but you know all that delhi is gone so but that is what
#
somebody asked me who are you in delhi so said i have been a refugee in delhi for past
#
x number of years this gentleman suddenly left into Punjabi
#
i say no no no there are other refugees i came from the hills anybody who's rootless and settled
#
in another place is a refugee so please consider me a refugee who has not suffered the rape arson
#
looting murder of either bengal or punjab but i am a refugee i am a rootless person i am an alien
#
who edward said while a problem here yeah and i guess even if you were born in delhi you could
#
still be a refugee from that delhi in this delhi of course yes in a different place and you you
#
you mentioned sarah she's a friend of mine and she was a she did a lovely episode with me and
#
and a new book raw umber is just so beautiful so brilliant
#
i can't talk impersonally about that you see i stayed in their house r7 for months at it
#
and the father who was very taciturn was could be very very generous he would bring us home
#
give us a coffee and sandwich in bakura where he was visiting the gallery camuld or something
#
he would bring us home drop us back in his standard herald in sapro house hostel
#
and drive back to hoskas all alone and when we were staying with him i mean i was staying with
#
him every evening there was a little drum there was a session you met ram kumar ji you met other
#
his friends he was man of very few words but he was an absolutely i mean but this doesn't come
#
he could open up with you he could talk about his struggles and how he sold books in cycle
#
how he brought up his younger brother ammi sarah's mother and her sister mugal jan
#
great musically inclined people but they were very subdued in the house
#
because who relationships you could see subterranean i love the phrase you used a
#
while back about how your friend told you that you'll have to learn to hold your own hand
#
right and i think most of us don't learn to do this and and i want to ask you about self-awareness
#
because one thing that i have noticed in life and i think that i only got to be truly self-aware or
#
at least much more self-aware than i was perhaps a few years back well into adulthood and most
#
people are never self-aware at all they just you know sort of drive through life and whatever
#
happens happens and it's tell me about yourself that's very interesting phrase you use self-awareness
#
i think is quite a different category from self-realization like bhagwan maharishi or
#
somebody else i'm talking about self-awareness you don't ever become completely self-aware
#
your body's let's put it very crudely you are a young adolescence and you are tumescent you get
#
erections and wet dreams there is one self-awareness of your body then you get older your prostate
#
enlarges your diabetes makes you erectile dysfunctional and your desire to have sex goes away
#
it is not like harley ballways
#
etc again i misquote poetry but
#
now what happens is i'm talking to you
#
lots of things come rushing to my mind but as my son says i know the moment i quote something
#
it doesn't happen to sanskrit it happens to urdu poetry always it happens to english quotations
#
always i will quote roughly the substance but there would be an inaccuracy of precise
#
that is something which never happened to me in my younger days so it is not only my physical sexual
#
prowess or the muscular dystrophy or constipation or the belching or the sneezing or the eyesight
#
equity of vision impairment of hearing teeth falling out aspiration articulation affected
#
all these are awareness of intubation so mortality so i think at one level the self-awareness never
#
ceases you are made aware of the pain in the knees joints lower back sleep problems this one
#
go with this goes the other self-awareness that are you aware of losing your faculties
#
not the physical muscle tone are you losing the intensity of emotion you felt with the person
#
for a person are you slowly detaching yourself and making it easier for you and for them
#
as you grow older i think as you said are you comfortable with your skin
#
your skin changes are you comfortable with a bald head or have you considered a hair transplant
#
or in weaving of the hair or a topi or cover your head or you know it is not a question of vanity of
#
looks it is you know the awareness is all around can yeah can i still smell the rain on the clay
#
can i still see the same brilliance of the sunset can i hear the bird chirping and does it
#
make me feel good or bad or something whatever it is you know that is something is that self-awareness
#
of existence you know there is a sardar jafari poem again i will not try to even quote it you
#
will try to find it he says
#
and then he says some other form i will come as a crop i will be the glint of the wheat shaft of
#
wheat or whatever it is but my problem is that anybody who's aware of this and doesn't believe
#
in a life hereafter says and when i shut my eyes i go to sleep every night
#
do i know i will wake up tomorrow morning this would not happen to you in youth
#
youth this awareness that what would happen it doesn't bother me but awareness also is not
#
always pessimistic there is always a realization not self-realization that everybody has gone
#
through this and death and decay from the great enlightened buddha's teachings is inevitable
#
so that awareness comes back to you from the buddhist lessons you know and that also shall pass
#
so you don't worry about the physical decay the bad breath the cough the farts the belches i don't
#
know and my son says why did you have an intercept i said i don't want an intercept i mean i have eaten
#
unwisely and i'm burping and belching and farting and i have not brushed my teeth because it hurts
#
my gums i have a periodontal disease i will mouthwash and i'm not going to kiss somebody a
#
deep french kiss so somebody says oh you stink like the sewer it's not going to happen to me
#
so why should i worry so my granddaughters get very upset why do you talk like this i said no
#
but why should you not talk like this i mean i don't lick somebody's ass and say it smells
#
like roses so i don't expect the people to do that i mean people who love you more than like you
#
love you what's it all they love you not only for your physical beauty or your intelligence
#
totally different thing that awareness is a lifelong process i think
#
i'm into shower gels these days and i've been experimenting with them and there is one that
#
has a little bit of the fragrance of rose so if you put that on your if you wash your ass with
#
that your ass will smell of roses but leaving that aside no no your ass will smell like roses
#
but then you'll have to somebody bury his nostrils deep down and tell you yes you are
#
watcher is very good depends on who you are
#
that in the break pushpesh ji and i had both of us had chole bhature from haldiram's so
#
yeah i don't know if that's where this talk of belching and all is coming from you know when i
#
was speaking about self-awareness i think maybe what i really meant in a sense was self-reflection
#
and that also is on a continuum we do it to different degrees through our lives and i'm
#
interested in what you mentioned about looking at our relationships with people like what often
#
happens is that as you alluded to earlier people change you change somebody changes if you are in
#
a constant relationship with them often that relationship becomes this weird thing that it is
#
a bond between two people who actually no longer exist and who are just kind of you know going
#
through those particular motions and at some point they begin to realize and that realization i guess
#
is important equally i think what a lack of self-reflection can do is that it can trap us
#
in a place where we don't realize how we might be using other people as instrumental to us
#
and not you know thinking of them as people itself like i think one trap that we can often
#
fall into is the main character syndrome that i am the main character in a play and the star
#
everybody else is a prop or they are just there for my this thing and i think it's important to
#
sort of step back and be mindful and see other people as people yes i would entirely agree with
#
that i think anybody with an aorta of intelligence would know that in somebody else's life you are a
#
minor character and and the other problem is that there is a hazard of over reflection
#
over analysis it would do a relationship threadbare but you know i would agree with that entirely that
#
if you don't get out of the syndrome that you are the center of universe
#
nothing can be done yeah you mentioned over reflection and overthinking and i'm just
#
i recorded with the musician kiran aluwalia recently and she has this great song called
#
zindagi which has a line that kind of speaks to the question of overthinking so at this point
#
you know tell me also about the desire to learn these new things that you're falling in love with
#
like you said you started learning katak you started learning photography and it would and
#
it seems to me that the way you talk of learning anything that that you learn that you kind of
#
plunge into it like you know to go back to that theme of terror that there is a certain terror
#
that is a part of learning also like elsewhere in your reflections you've at one point in another
#
interview spoken about narasimha rao and somebody asked you that he knew so many languages and you
#
pointed out that yeah it was like he studied each of them for six months you know if at all
#
if at all if at all yeah joe i think kalidas swaminathan had written a review of a autobiography
#
of omita malik it said a life lived richly but only on surface what a phrase remarkable phrase i
#
mean kali is brilliant kali is absolutely brilliant so i think that is the kind of thing
#
which i take a plunge i maybe don't go whole log i get out of it but i'm still enraged by something
#
you do something in photography it helps you study form color space what i meant was actually the
#
opposite like the sense that i was getting is that somebody like him might allegedly sort of just
#
go in shallow and do something for six months and then he can say i know it it seems to me that
#
regardless of how long you did it for that the plunge was deep in the sense that oh plunge was
#
deep and it left a mark on you lifelong if you did photography like i have this basic problem with
#
my son who's a professional photographer videographer and still online light i'd say
#
available light daylight night light you've got a camera you fix up a aperture get he says no
#
available light means whatever light you can afford halogens this that another everything now
#
whether you want to have a candid street photography or you want to have an enacted
#
street photography whether you work or believe in the katia brasson's dramatic moment
#
or the magnum series of photographs with spanish soldier dying in spanish civil war whether you
#
are having ancill adams kind of tara in landscape or you have people trying to imitate ancill adams
#
and i've done texts with ashok delwali i've done texts with rajesh bedhi none of them excited me
#
at all because they they're not original enough you have great cameras you have great resources
#
you stage manage wildlife situation you are a pioneer at a particular time your support from
#
the government and you do that i don't think but
#
it was in a studio in urai jalon back of beyond the bond books you probably know the place
#
that is what graham green writes about rk narayan his minutes of writing again i'll
#
misquote mostly but you'll get the right quote are like photographs turning yellow
#
from a family album at a particular time now similarly you have a similar bond landscape
#
at nainital or you have aquatints and prints and so on and you suddenly realize that
#
every man would wear a gown and take a photo of his graduation
#
all that is gone you know there was a selfie you i me and myself so i think that
#
distracting and reaches your life in so many ways
#
and one thing and second thing and the other thing like i'll tell you when i was trying
#
to learn Kathakali there was this boy young man called C Y Gopinath who used to teach
#
English with me in Ramjas college he was a singer in the Kathakali troupe the India
#
International Kathakali Centre in Delhi
#
Years passed i started teaching not history but diplomacy in JNU
#
and then it came Panikar's lectures on diplomacy he invokes Dutavakhyam now Jaishankar
#
present regime also has Dutavakhyam that Krishna was an ideal diplomat Krishna goes to the corner
#
of court but there is what he did what he conveyed is in Kathakali shown through dance so Duryodhana
#
Vada what is fair and unfair in war and a hit below the belt Vedi Sanghar it takes you back
#
to Sanskrit literature it takes you i mean it's Malayalam it is Kathakali it's Kerala but it takes
#
you to the realm of Sanskrit epics myths language of dance gestures makeup whether you are a gray
#
makeup pitchay what kind of a character you are what how are the masks different in Kathakali to
#
Yakshagana i mean things open up for you
#
i mean i was smoking and i couldn't place the smell of the tobacco with my son i have done a
#
small film on tobacco the leaf of pleasure leave of pain it was a painkiller to begin with it gives
#
lots of pleasure but it can lead to cancer etc etc it was a very familiar smell
#
and he was smoking a cigarette like this last drink till the last corner oh he said i'm trying
#
to give up smoking i said it doesn't look like it because the way you are smoking you are having
#
the last drink that was cigarette quantity i couldn't place the tobacco so he said it was
#
clove cigarette now clove cigarette i remember from my youth i used to
#
shove a clove in charminar and light it and that was the kind of smell which i was not
#
being able to place that was ramjas day's 69 staff room clove cigarette charminar but he
#
of course was having marlborough clove flavored so
#
listeners amartya is doing the sound for us and is sitting there with a wide grin
#
on the other side of the glass partition simple thoughts cross your mind i thought he was smoking
#
hash and he was having purest hash from himachal and i was not being able to place hash and i was a
#
little apprehensive sound recording ka kya hone wala hai iske baad aur aapne hash kya diya to i
#
remembered our good friend chandra haas who i call hash i don't know what everybody else calls him
#
hash although i address him with the hash very little oh he's a delightful person he's delightful
#
and and and the interesting thing about here's an interesting piece of trivia about cigarettes i
#
got this from one of gary toby's books i think one of his books on why sugar is poison and he
#
points out that in the early part of the 20th century cigarettes weren't really selling much
#
when they first kind of came out and part of the reason was the taste was too alkaline and people
#
didn't enjoy it so what the manufacturers did was they added a little bit of sugar which
#
tipped the balance and it is nothing they added phenol they added urea they added other other
#
things also but what the i think this what the sugar part of it it did did it took it from alkaline
#
to acid but you know the alkaline became acidic or the other way around because of the sugar and
#
then everything took off so cigarette causes lung cancer yes but sugar is poison now has
#
and sugar is the more addictive substance than nicotine it is the most addictive drug nicotine
#
is the second most addictive substance yeah sugar is number one sugar is absolutely number one
#
couldn't agree more and what you said earlier about photography about simplicity about not
#
needing a lot of shosha reminded me of this great quote by william maxwell which amitavakumar told
#
me about in the episode we did together where maxwell once said to him and maxwell was this
#
great editor and all of that once said to him after 40 years what i came to care about most
#
was not style but the breadth of life you know and and this really speaks to me because sometimes
#
i'll read a novel by someone and i think everything is immaculate
#
craft is perfect everything is there that is not the breadth of life it leaves you cold yeah
#
so you know if you have the breadth of life you can build the craft around it
#
but if you don't have the breadth of life then what to do and if you like the craft then you
#
haven't done anything it should be effortless it should be invisible it should be invisible
#
absolutely so at this point in time you have sort of plunged into life you know you have done
#
kathak photography is also going on a food we'll discuss in detail after this
#
so here's my question that i feel that when when i hear you the fragments that you've spoken so far
#
about photography about kathak i feel that when you start learning or your interest starts
#
you are going to the very first principles you have a frame you know like what you said about
#
photography earlier that what is important is what you take out you know frame and then you
#
know halogen lam sakini doesn't matter what have you chosen and instead has that been your approach
#
towards learning anything in general and in that like if that is your approach and that is honestly
#
my approach also that i always try to grok everything from first principles and find
#
find a learning in one field which i can connect to other another field like we are recording
#
right now in the studio belonging to a friend of mine gaurav who was a musician and gaurav
#
did an episode with me where he told me about how much cooking and understanding food helped
#
audio recording and audio production you know when you're bringing different elements together
#
the salty and the sweet and the umami and everything and even it's not only the flavors
#
it is also the textures it is also the aromas it is also the tactile feel it is also the
#
transformation which takes place
#
why can't you possibly have a aloo as a garnish with a
#
maggie and why not it's interesting yeah and this is again a reference to young amartya who is
#
making many appearances who spoke about this uh restaurant near his house which sells uh aloo
#
chicken and maggie apparently together so uh which is which is which is interesting
#
yeah yeah it's it's uh i think amartya is finally going to try it now inspired by he's going to be
#
persuaded differently and in any case he should take one for the team and let us know what it is
#
because we are not going to taste it before we get to food which i'll do after the next break
#
and talk about that in great detail because there's a universe of knowledge there with you
#
tell me a little bit about what you know if anyone comes across your bio on linkedin or
#
whatever and so on international relations expert taught diplomacy at jnu for so many years
#
has written so much on it you've also got i haven't actually if you look at the books i
#
have probably written 20 plus books on food and you probably would not even find a single book on
#
diplomacy there is one book on diplomacy in hindi which sunk published by macmillan called bharati
#
rajne way back in 73 again and i probably have one slim volume on nostalgia narcissism in indian
#
foreign policy about southeast asia or i have done a textbook for ios cramming i have not done
#
anything in internet but that's a best-selling textbook for ios cramming at the moment it is
#
moment it is right so tell me about that part of your career like like obviously you're applying
#
that same frame of thinking in terms of just getting to first principles of everything that
#
gives you clarity in your thinking that gives you clarity in your teaching and all of that
#
but is it also one of your passions or is it a question of ki meri jo passionate life hai life
#
of the soul as it were wo toh rahegi jo bhi hai food hai music hai ye sab hai but this is what i
#
do for a living this is my profession is not compartmentalized like this i would still before
#
i die inshallah as they say try to finish a slim volume on international relations in which i want
#
to write about the structure of the world post covid post climate anticipating climate catastrophe
#
and the great cultural turmoil between the confrontation of civilizations islamic chinese
#
russian so post ukraine war post covid post emergence of china is a structure of world
#
which is very different from the one which i started studying in 65 10 years after
#
almost 20 years after india's independence two years after nero's one and a half years after
#
nero's death one year after val bahadur shashtri's death it was a different world three years after
#
the war with china it was a different world altogether and the debate was gandhi versus
#
mao subhash patel versus nehru mistakes in kashmir pakistan etc can we live in peace
#
i think now i can probably bring the distilled essence of my musings on international relations
#
in the world from an indo-centric view without having the arrogance of saying that we are the
#
mother of democracy we are the vishwa guru and say that we miss the bus we miss the bus because
#
if you look at kishore mehbhuvani's work he was doing his philosophy on us when i was doing my
#
field trip he took me to his house his mother cooked me lovely aloo parathas and chole not the
#
haldiram chole but pindi chole of the variety sindhi variety he has written massively about
#
has the west lost it has china won it asian values now he identifies as a singapore citizen
#
and has a different perspective on china but i think nobody in india has bothered to think about
#
how much india has changed from non-aligned days to present day let's not get into modi versus
#
manmohan singh versus nehru versus the rest a nation which had a population of 3,300 million
#
to 1.45 billion to a country which is inherited to an islamic content and civilization in hindu
#
code a buddhist core a singh sikh core a jain christian parsi whatever then you see what has
#
happened to the neighbor root had india been undivided is a not a khanda bharat from afghanistan
#
to arakan from foothills of nepal to sri lanka it's a country which is truly can have a crucible
#
which where it can relate to the islamic world where it can relate to the buddhist
#
universe where it can relate to whatever hindu etc but then it is an ideal situation the country
#
is divided nobody is ever going to have this kind of a thing because if india and pakistan
#
and bangladesh were one we would be the largest muslim nation in the world you would outnumber
#
indonesians indian muslims pakistani muslims bangladeshi muslims we are number two right now
#
basically we have right we may be number two number three but it doesn't make a difference
#
if pakistan and bangladesh join the indian muslims we are far outnumbering the indonesians
#
but if we had if we accepted the most islamic content in our civilizational memory and universe
#
we could relate easily to malaysia indonesia uae qatar etc but then what would happen to
#
the diluted hindu minority you know because you would not be you would only be relating to diaspora
#
hindu diaspora so the point is that if you think in terms of these civilizational terms
#
i think it's a very different construct where you say that what role does india play
#
in terms of technology you might say that look our trade deficit with china is going to be 75
#
million dollars this year and so no it's been before also it's been there but that's not the
#
point we are dependent on chinese import for our pharmaceutical intermediates for our automotive
#
parts for our telecom equipment we are not importing oil from china but whatever we are
#
doing is much more than what we are selling to them so what i'm trying to get into the
#
they are accounting for six percent of the world's total chip production
#
taiwan is 41 percent what are we doing where are we in this intertechnological race
#
we talk of pharmaceuticals and baba ramdev makes claims about coronil and sure cures of covid
#
and there is some standard product which is not only baba ramdev but indian pharmaceutical
#
companies and people die in uganda and other places now i i think that this blind faith
#
in india's greatness and india's glorious past and its relevance for contemporary times is leading
#
to a situation where india is not willing to accept that we are one of the major players in
#
international relations and this change in power equations that we are constantly burdened with
#
enmity with pakistan social discord in india because of polarization of electoral politics
#
and votes between vigilantism erosion of the rule of law and then they were suspecting us
#
whether it is bangladesh whether it is nepal within sri lanka so we are in we are a weakened nation
#
with memories of greatness in past chasing a mirage in future and which might be detrimental
#
to our national interest in realistic terms so i do have in mind the distilled essence of my
#
not wisdom but stupidities my queries what i think now i'm in a position to write this book
#
which is far more a slim volume which goes into the civil irrational baggage we have
#
legacy as well as deadwood and the opportunity we have in a fast changing world where technological
#
imperative and diplomatic enterprise are not matched not coerced and you have people who are
#
ignorant arrogant not qualified to talk about these subjects
#
this is what our civilizational values are so are any civilizational values
#
territorially defined to a nation state which is artificially created after partition
#
that is my query in fact that is going to be my query also because i'm like first of all god
#
speed to you i would really love to read this book and hopefully we can have another conversation
#
about it when it's done but you use the sentence we are a weakened nation i want to double click
#
on the words we and nation like one point that you made in a different context about the
#
incompetence of maps of you know lines on a map so to say is in the context of food where you
#
point out that okay when india nation state happened so we made linguistic states and you
#
can divide it but that has very little correlation with eating habits if you look at culinary habits
#
and so on and it's equally evident that a culture is even much more diffuse than that you know like
#
when i have traveled through pakistan when i was in lahore i did not feel i was in another country
#
at all you know lahore felt so much like delhi with better lighting at night though and karachi
#
felt so much like bombay and you know culturally it is such that the we is all of us and you know
#
food wise there are many ways intermingling peacefully and beautifully with each other
#
and yet we have these harsh lines on a map and people sort of think of the nation state of india
#
as being you know it's normalized it is almost it gains a permanence in our heads
#
but actually it's just 70 something years in a span of human
#
even this arrogance that we think that we are part of something that is easy to define
#
called india and that it will always stay in this shape and it will always be this
#
as a modern nation state is not the india of racial memory
#
or go back to kala das kumar
#
himalayas stretches as a scale all across east to west this is the land from himalayas to ocean
#
but what is ocean it is the gulf of cambia is the indian ocean it is kept pomeran it is bay of
#
bengal all those definitional issues what is sea and what is himadri is it trans himalaya i mean
#
these are interesting issues but my problem is that if you go to the map of the indian
#
subcontinent there is more less agreement geographically climatically we are insulated
#
from arabia central asia southeast asia is within reach but we are one composite land mass
#
what is heartland what is mainstream we don't get into that right now
#
it is not as if there are not forged lines within this but the
#
all those things go there my problem is that since independence for commercial reasons
#
to borrow chomsky's phrase manufacturing consent
#
blackberry, blueberry, cheesecake, pizza.
#
Now you take the Navratri pizza with kutu ka atta
#
with instead of cheese hung yogurt in that
#
uske upar paneer ke dhokde pade ho hain.
#
So I don't know what we have done, but this is not
#
happy coexistence evolving naturally.
#
Ab jaayiye to a shaadi caterer, he will give you the tent, he will give you the
#
decorations and he will give you three set menus which will not be very different.
#
And you know some of the phrases I love from you
#
which I've come across, one of which you just referred to are the alliterative
#
phrases, the tyranny of the tandoor, the curse of
#
the curry, the myth of mughlai and we'll visit all of these and talk
#
much much more about food after another short break.
#
Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer.
#
In fact, chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog
#
which was active between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time.
#
I loved the freedom the form gave me and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways.
#
I exercised 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 on the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Pushpesh Pant and it's my great pleasure now to move on to a subject
#
that I love but I don't actually know much about but I love it anyway because who doesn't?
#
And that of course is food.
#
So tell me about like you've mentioned in other places about and earlier in this conversation
#
about how you know at home you got all different kinds of food because your mother was making
#
food from everywhere and there was never a sense ki this is this cuisine, this is that cuisine.
#
But tell me when you first started to look at food not just in the basic primal way that
#
all of us do ki arey I like this dish maza aega but at a deeper level finding connections and
#
all of that you know when did that sort of start?
#
It's strange that you ask this despite the variety of food which we had at home.
#
We stayed at a place where food was scarce six months a year we were not connected by the motor
#
road seasonal vegetables were grown but when it snowed it snowed four feet deep six feet
#
after it was deposited and there were very few fresh vegetables available
#
and gas was not there pressure cooker was not there so what you ate had to be cooked with minimal
#
fuel and you had very limited supply so although we were affluent by local standards we still had
#
to make do with just roasted potatoes crushed into a mash and some zeera powder and namak mirch or
#
maybe some other tuber like yams like banda like gethi and you ate that and you ate stuff prepared
#
for winters like vadis and our vadis are very different in hills from the Amritsari vadis
#
they are not spiced they are lentil based vadis with radish or cucumber or pitha ash gourd and so
#
on and you cook it without garlic or onions no tomatoes of course thickened with a little
#
roasted flour and it is very interesting that we that is where I think I started thinking
#
that how basic is food is and how and mother used to try to make it tasty and different
#
so if it was vadis two days they would not be similar one day a little dahi or buttermilk will
#
go into that one day maybe they would be cooked with maybe she would deviate and have some garlic
#
and onion potatoes would be roasted in the fire in the fireplace overnight but when they came they
#
came as a chat one day they came as a there is something very interesting in the hills called
#
aloo ki thechwani thechwani is to grind something coarsely with a
#
silbatta or you can't do it in mortar pestle and then you put it in a cast iron kadhai
#
and with a little mustard oil you cook it with dry red whole chilies some green red chilies and
#
salt and water that's it if you have a little ginger you crush it there is nothing else it is
#
just in a poorer household it will be watery in a slightly better household it will be thicker
#
now that is where I started thinking about basics of food
#
I mean it's just aloo and roti it is chawal and badi and badi made differently
#
so this was from the month of late October till end March we survived and sustained ourselves on
#
these things you know of course we could get eggs from the poultry in the institute the eggs could
#
be boiled but no tomatoes were readily available so egg curry was more like an egg roast
#
sans tomatoes and if you had eggs for breakfast you would not like to have a curry in the evening
#
no pressure cooker days in winters you didn't want to cook meat for hours and hours and hours
#
and certain things we did not eat there was no rajma there was no mahardi dal obviously there
#
was no paneer had reached so I would like to say that this was about four or five years of age
#
when I said ki khaana toh roz kha rahein magar tent food bhi available nahi tha aur frozen
#
cheeze bhi available nahi thi the only variety of food which we got was that there was a lot of
#
cheese which came from australia the craft cheese as part of the food aid and not many people in
#
muktushwar ate processed cheese they they were worried and with good reason ki ye kosher vegetarian
#
nahi hai isme renin pada hai jo gelatin kaise banta hai gaan ki hain se usse so father had no such
#
compunctions so we had food at home also to make food more enjoyable at the end of the meal there
#
was a murabba was sev ka tha nashpati kha tha stewed again made in season kept ready for
#
more so you started getting into the basics of taste ki aloo ki thichani me only salt and
#
chilies were there after that you had a little murabba which was the sweetness of different
#
variety whether it was sev ka murabba or astringent amla ka murabba or you had a darim ki khatai
#
which gave you the sourness we did not have amiya so we didn't have even have nimbu very often so we
#
had darim which is a wild anardana in the hills uski khatai thi so one got into these basic
#
categories ki namak ke mazae kya hai so mother would say today i will tweak it a little she
#
wouldn't say so but she would put some black rock salt it would give a different flavor or there
#
would be a tadka baghaar with a little heen so the lehsun would be taken care of or there would
#
be a little crushed saunf or salt dried ginger so you got into these categories ki khana ke basic
#
zayaki kya hai and then there was this that my father would always chip in this is not good for
#
winters you should not give the kids this this might give them a little something or my mother
#
would say this builds up immunity so you got into this musing ki khana ki taaseer kya hai how it
#
will affect your system is there something to say about seasonal things and how you made the most
#
with limited resources in your larder our larder was much better equipped and loaded than anybody
#
else's there were dried vegetables dried in autumn you khar dalna ke the thing which was
#
buried underground so you brought it out and you had some dried mooli you had some dried methi
#
and occasionally is a special treat that was cooked but you have to stretch these things along the
#
winter months so i would say that my interest in basic tastes got down to that and i found in my
#
life and this is a lament and i still suffer from it and try to do something about it that i am not
#
mindful enough while eating so i think when i grew up it was like you don't think hard enough about
#
the food that you're eating like i remember with great shame that i don't think i really thank my
#
mother much after a meal you know even if she made something i like you kind of take it for granted
#
not just the act of your mother cooking for you but also the act of whatever you're eating so she
#
might make like at a bengali childhood of course so she might make shorshe bata maa chanam you know
#
my first two teaspoons of the first two spoons of that are great but then i'm lost in my own head
#
i'm not actually tasting the rest of the food that mindfulness is not there i wouldn't notice
#
a nuance if there was a nuance in the food key you know if there's a difference way of making it
#
and my question is that you know and i'm guessing that that is something in everybody that has to be
#
cultivated because the mind tends to wander so was it like that for you or were you thinking
#
about the mind wandered but wandered not away from food it was always the wandering
#
rooted in that food if you are having aloo ki thechwani there would be a very interesting
#
discussion ki aloo meethe hai ki nahi baby potatoes hai ya aloo mein beej aage ya khitang nahi aage
#
yeah is it carrying a little bit of the kasalapal because of the cast iron karahi
#
isme jo saunth gaya tha wo register kar raha ki nahi kar raha sookhi mirch panjant thi ki nahi thi
#
now till that time i did not know ki naghori mirch hoti hai badgi mirch hoti hai sakleshwari
#
hoti hai lonka hoti hai methani mirch hoti hai guntur hoti hai i had no idea of the chilies
#
but when people talked of something as basic as aloo ki thechwani
#
all these things came and then there would be a comparison my father would say when i was growing
#
up in almoda circa 1920s my maternal aunts used to make badis which were lighter than air so my
#
mother would take it as an offense he would immediately retreat and say nahi badi ischi hai
#
but mommy made them lighter he would not yield ground so there was a discussion ki aapne iske
#
pehle istirgi jeez kap khayi hai kahan khayi hai ye gaderi jo yam hai ye kahan se aayi hai
#
meethi kitni hai kasali kitni hai gali mein kyu lakti hai and so on so i think you know your mind again
#
it was like being shall we say schooled at home you were not given a lecture but you were exposed
#
to arey aaj wo baat nahi hai isme jo kal thi what what went wrong ya aaj kal se bahtar hua hai
#
so when we sat down to eat we did not eat in a rasoi we ate in a dining table and we ate together
#
and the conversation did not allow your mind to stray away from the table and you were participating
#
in that conversation as equals so it was not that my mother and father expressed an opinion which
#
were we're supposed to follow you could say maza nahi aaya, acha nahi laga and next day my mother
#
would ask before cooking or supervising the servants who were cooking kya khauke we knew
#
that the choices were very limited as i told you first once a year the choices were limited
#
and we were at an altitude of 8000 feet the nearest rivulet was about seven miles down
#
so fish was in short supply meat in the pre-pressure cooker days could almost six hours to cook boiling
#
temperature of everything is lowered in the end that height so khane ki cheeze hain garbi ho mein
#
main bhi baat limited range tha there was only one butcher he butchered only one goat and of course
#
the doctor took a priority so we got our hour half a kilo of meat and it was cooked in variety
#
ways kormas or whatever it is shami kebabs or koftas but it was bothersome keema was a little
#
more easy so what was interesting is that the food when you sat down to eat you were grateful for
#
your daily bread and more so you are like you said it was not thanking the mother but you were made
#
to realize that you were still lucky to have a hot meal which was different from one meal to another
#
meal besan ki kadhi thi pakode wali kadhi thi gujrati lehan wali kadhi thi mithi kadhi thi neem ke patte wali kadhi thi
#
sindhi kadhi thi so you know even it was a khichdi so it would say khichdi ke chaar yaar dahi mooli
#
ghi achar and a papad would be brought out papad kaunsa tha urad ka tha aloo ka tha dahi was difficult to
#
sit in that height it took days it was not always sweet but when the khichdi was served you had a
#
paraphernalia achar bhi tha ghi bhi tha papad bhi tha khichdi bhi thi so you know i think
#
jo aapne mindfulness ki baat ke amit humare khar mein wo aapko gently you were directed persuaded
#
subliminally towards thinking about the food which you were having and i love what you said about
#
how the fact that you're all eating together does not allow the mind to wonder because a lot of the
#
meals i'll you know almost have alone and i'll be looking at my phone and therefore the mind will
#
of course wander into whatever you're doing and i've noticed even when people sit together sometimes
#
from a family they'll be looking at their phone and again you know that in a pre-phone age i'll
#
tell you something very interesting about our house i think marnal has mentioned in one of our
#
writings we had a wc we had a bathroom we had six commodes thunder boxes and people opened the door
#
and went in and occupied their commode and there was no inhibition about ki kaun baitha hai kaun kya
#
hazat rama kar raha hai everybody would take a crap shut the thing come out those were the pre
#
pre-water closet flush days so a sweeper came and cleaned them the next morning and so on
#
but the interesting thing is that you are allowed to take a book or a comic book to the loop
#
you could read it but you could not read a book or a comic book at the dining table that is where
#
the discipline was to my mind in force ki khate waqt aap kitab nahi padhenge phone to thei nahi
#
comic book nahi dekhenge you could do that too so i took the other extreme when i started taking
#
my tea cup and coffee cup to the loo i was told that this is not normally done so i said normally
#
books are also not allowed and not community crap is not also taken together nobody believes it
#
there was a house like this and i remember but nobody in our house took it as something very
#
strange but the girls and the boys would shit together as it are there were very few girls my
#
mother was there who was a woman and my younger sister was much too young she had gone to school
#
somewhere else but otherwise the case were very shocked somebody is in the loo but there was
#
there was another loo but this loo was more comfortable it was roomy and airy and it had a
#
window and it had a passion flower wine and it had honeysuckle wine hanging out there and it was
#
nice it was deodorized with phenyl and all there was lots of water there was a thunder box on which
#
you sat and released yourself you converse you exchange stories and i don't know i mean but that
#
was a very satisfying experience but that again was mindfulness my father would say that if you
#
read a little you are not straining for the ball's movement and this posture is unnatural
#
because squatting the Bengali squat is better for evacuation but if you are using a commode
#
you might as well converse like a chair you sort of get low i don't know how this started but
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i think i is very strange i never have never come across any other house where this family tradition
#
was and i love your phrase better for evacuation which is such an elegant way to put it a room
#
say like what a great setting for a one-act play have you seen the louis bonoil film the discreet
#
charm of the bourgeoisie yes yes yes so it has everyone sitting at the dining table but they
#
actually sitting in commodes and then one person takes a bathroom break and very discreetly in the
#
bathroom they're having their meal so from here tell me also about you know the role of circumstance
#
in how food develops and cuisine develops like just in this little micro story the story of your
#
home and everything you're talking about the role of circumstance right what is seasonal meat
#
and you know all of these the regular eating of tubers and all that and i guess as a food historian
#
when you zoom out and zoom out a long way you kind of noticed that in every single part of
#
the world every single micro cuisine as it were you know everything is really a creature of
#
circumstance so tell me a little bit i think you know what comes back to my mind is the title of
#
yak mono's book chance and necessity which he talked the microbiologist talks about that i
#
think food is chance and necessity you are in an arid wasteland bajra khana abhraegistan me
#
kare hain aap billets ragi kare hain aap delta mein toh aapke hain rice grow karta aap rice kare hain
#
so i think there is a bit of a circumstance but bit of it is also chance and that chance
#
is the chance of your being born accident of birth aap kis ghar mein paida hoin what social
#
class was that and what caste was that in india and what community was based that agar aap
#
paak musliman hain toh aap halal khaate hain soar nahi khaate hain ya muslimani nahi hain aap hindu
#
brahman hain toh agar aap bengali brahman nahi hain aap kashmiri brahman nahi hain toh chances
#
are that you are not eating meat either kacchi rasoi pakki rasoi ka chakkar hain ki aapka ghar
#
kitna orthodox hain fortunately for me when i look back my father being a doctor could not afford to
#
practice untouchability and he was almost a person who had lost caste in his own house he was not
#
allowed to enter his kitchen where a very orthodox a servant who had come with my mother as a dower
#
was cooking as a head cook so he was not allowed to do that but then my mother was liberated until
#
very late in her life there was no caste system in the house and there was no this ke aaj purin maa
#
siya aaj ka da siya aaj ye nahi banega aaj wo nahi banega it was not there there were no taboos
#
obviously there was no beef available in mukteshwar but we had no taboos about corn beef when it came
#
in tins it was pork which sausages which is brought from aligarh central dairy farm from
#
nainital or sardines which came in tins which mama was very fond of my eldest mama who was
#
the home minister in urcha and then later ips 1950 vintage so i think we had no taboos about food
#
and we had so this chance and necessity what you are saying was taken for granted
#
when my father came to visit his sister in delhi they were very orthodox hindu brahmans the kids
#
were not allowed to eat pastries or patties from vengars they could eat chaat outside but not
#
how can they observe such taboos
#
the women would not i mean not my mother wore the pants much before margaret thatcher and
#
so she ate what she wanted to eat when she wanted to eat and she would decide what the menu would be
#
after general uh some questions being asked for democratic representation
#
she would cook stuff for my father which she thought he liked but it was not a question of
#
but then it was always shall we say we were made to realize that we are exceptionally fortunate
#
there were others who had to make do with what they got so i think i also got into thinking about
#
poverty and food and what you did when you were poor to create a taste and flavorful meal for
#
yourself like take for instance a case like sakarkandi ki kheer you boil a sweet potato
#
you grated it it did two things you did not have to use sugar because it was literally sweet and
#
it thickened the milk without the milk having to be boiled and reduced to a certain thing
#
and you didn't have to eat expensive rice so the sakarkandi ki kheer was the poor man's delight
#
when he could not afford enough milk to condense it or good quality rice or sugar to make it sweet
#
so i think you know there were things which one was made to realize very as i said muktushwar was
#
a very odd place it was a town of the british surrounded by the sea of villages and these
#
villagers led a very different life and some of them when finally we were given a reality check
#
made to say go to school local school and you said these kids came and they bought one
#
paach paisa worth one ana worth of chana and gud it was enough to last them three three mile
#
walk back to their village then you realize ki the omelette which was being sold for
#
25 paise was a luxury which not everybody could afford the egg then was priced five paise but an
#
omelette in a hotel there or who called himself a hotel a small shop was about 25 paise kids
#
could not afford it so it was a very interesting situation they played a carrom game and the bets
#
were taken that whoever would lose the game would buy the others an omelette not others but other
#
an omelette so yeh badi interesting cheez hain uss hain maane ki jo khaane ke baayar mein jina
#
cost of food type of food taste range and of course i'm talking to you of the days when there
#
was no cold storage so all tomato was desi tomato all gobi was seasonal gobi
#
barish ke baad all turai and kakdi was bahari turai and kakdi so everything had a flavor
#
which was associated with the season so i've gotten into south east asian food recently or
#
my online jake i was buying this korean pepper called gochugaru and i happened to look at the
#
reviews and there was some idiot who had left a review to sort of to the effect of ki nai this
#
didn't do it for me there isn't enough garlic in it or some nonsense and what was clear to me and
#
what is also clear to me when i read the reviews on swiggy of some excellent new but experimental
#
restaurant that might have opened is that a lot of people are leaving their reviews because they've
#
only eaten one kind of food all their life and they expect everything to be like that and any
#
deviation therefore there is a judgment call that is made ki this is bad and you've spoken very
#
eloquently about the two aspects of taste one is the dna of taste and one is the acquisition of taste
#
and everybody has a dna of taste depending on chance and circumstance that you are born wherever
#
you're born and you eat whatever you eat and that's just you know that's your early taste
#
but the process of the acquisition of taste is very interesting to me also because that's where
#
you broaden your mind that is also an act of courage where you decide whether you would eat
#
beef or not whether you decide whether you eat pork or not and i'm not talking as a muslim eating
#
pork i'm talking of a hindu eating pork highly paranoid like me that a pork has liver fluke it
#
can give me encephalitis and i can have a bug in my head which will take away my memory intelligence
#
everything and i'll have those and that will be the end of the story so that till i discovered
#
that the same bug can catch you in the lettuce or in the gobi so that's you take your chance
#
the interesting part is this when you talk of acquisition of taste it means travel experience
#
getting outside the confined of your house also affordability can you i mean you said something
#
very interesting you said southeast asian food now what is southeast asian food it's actually it's
#
a very bad term because it's too gentle because this is the term coined by admiral mount bitten
#
when he was heading the command of southeast asia from colombo during the second world war
#
it includes miyamar it includes malaya malaysia it includes singapore it includes indonesia which
#
is an archipelago spanning 3000 kilometers from achebandar sumatra to java to papua nigini to iran
#
baniyat to kalimantan utara the bonyo most of it and bali it also includes laos and cabodia
#
it also includes vietnam and it includes brunei now if we and it also includes philippines
#
let's keep apart philippines for a while purely for reasons of id context which we had with the
#
rest of southeast and we did not have there is a malaya world and there is a world where the stock
#
is mongoloid chinese excursions millennia what you eat in indonesia in sumatra is not what you
#
would eat in the central java what you eat in central java in the capital yakarta would not
#
be the one which you would eat in puncak or bandung or yogyakarta it would be totally different
#
now what i would say what you would eat in singapore
#
or would you need in malaya the penang curry or the padang rice or the baba chinese cooking
#
would not be what you would be eating in indonesia whether it's nasi goreng
#
or whether it's chicken satay now what you rightly said that everybody has a preconceived notion
#
so when i went i had a very little money i had traveled on p5 p form days with five pounds given
#
to me and a very measly monthly allowance so i stayed in a gurudwara and i ate at a indonesian
#
woman who cooked for me every dinner she cooked me eggs every evening rice and some tea very cheap
#
i ate that every day or when i went to malaysia i could only afford i'd like to drink my beer
#
and afford to eat satays so i had satay but satay at kuala lumpur was very different from satay in
#
johor balu in kelantan in alal star in the north so or or for instance malacca
#
or the sea seafood village in kokop so i am very allergic to the description of south east asian
#
food mea kalpa i think i was acting like the narasimha rao of south east asian food in terms
#
of you know very uh shallow engagement with any of them but korea is east asia oh okay so
#
even further wrong i mean i mean the three cuisines i'm sort of getting interested in
#
in terms of reading cookbooks and doing experiments are thai korean and japanese but
#
thai you know i had a very dear friend who passed away in during covid anirban now anirban bora was
#
a fantastic graphic designer deputy editor for economic times did a cartoon strip for that married
#
to a thai woman siditya who's now in calcutta after that he made me realize that the food
#
on the streets of bangkok is made for the tourists it's like the chaat in delhi kabab in delhi
#
chole bhature in delhi it has nothing to do with food which thais eat at home or eat outside the
#
tourist traps of poket and bangkok and pataya you go to ishan ishan is a direction which you
#
know from saskrit northeast so if you end up in northeast of bangkok is the ishan
#
straight from saskrit now ishan is bordering laos and cambodia the food there is influenced
#
by the laotian and the cambodian influences vegetables use are different treatment of the
#
subseas is different what you eat as wraps in cauliflowers in vietnam is what you get here
#
noodles suddenly disappear and the famous thai curries yellow green and red are no longer there
#
you are having different soupy stuff and you are having maybe korea creeps in with
#
some kimchi like fermented things there but i would say even thai food would have regional
#
variation which would take your breath away if you are in chiangmai region the golden triangle
#
which borders the southern chinese region you would have food which is totally different and
#
if you had cassouet in miamara you would have coconut milk which is common to various other
#
southeast Asian food traditions but flavored totally differently so what you have in cassouet
#
is certainly not manchow soup and so the point is that when you go to vietnam
#
a lot more pork is eaten a lot more beef is eaten no lamb is eaten milk goes away you have more
#
pronouncedly the chinese influence and also if you are in kalimantan utara very much part of
#
indonesia and malaysia sarawak and sabah you have the indigenous people the ibans the zunis the
#
dax not the malay people veneer of islam underneath pagan beliefs headhunters of sarawak and their
#
food traditions are very different now of course everybody is being homogenized in interest of
#
national unity there also as here so i would say that it would be very very difficult
#
but i agree and concede your point immediately we approach a different culinary tradition
#
and try to have our benchmarks i'd eaten in vietnam restaurant in delhi this which was vietnamese
#
this is where nirvana bora opened my eyes to thai food he said no pushpesh bhai the thai food
#
has joys other than bangkok street food and i thought it was fantastic and he introduced me
#
to ishan he introduced me to home cooking he introduced me to village rustic dishes vietnamese
#
dishes and i enjoyed it greatly what was what was the journey of your acquisition of taste
#
like at some point did you make a conscious effort to say that i will not go by my initial
#
reaction towards some kind of food i will be patient i will give it time i will try to
#
understand patience is not my strong suit but but i always went with an open mind to everything
#
and i would say some things are why should i like everything but why should i not try everything
#
there's the detective novel i don't know who the author was peter cheney who says try everything
#
twice so my philosophy was it has been why not try everything more than once at two different places
#
and then make up your mind whether you like it or you don't like it and i never make a conscious
#
effort to either like or prejudge i allow myself to drift maybe i will like this maybe i will not
#
like this but i have an open open mind my father of course said that you more than an open mind
#
you have an open mouth and you are a great one for putting both your feet in it at the same time
#
which few people can do but i think i mean he was entitled to that comment he had suffered most
#
because of my stupidities it sounds like a very loving comment and if you have an open mind
#
towards food you have to have an open mouth no huh but then you put food in that so i i enjoyed
#
like in this first i'll tell you i don't like the amount of grees in kashmiri food
#
but there are things in kashmiri cuisine like a gushtaba like a yakhni which i like greatly
#
i don't love most of the keralite food but i like the ishtus i like appams and i like that very much
#
i don't know whether i would say that i like the antara non-vegetarian dishes very hot very much
#
but i like the vegetarian variations of the tamil ayanga repertoire very much
#
which my good friend rajesh raghunathan rakesh raghunathan sorry i should get his name straight
#
rakesh raghunathan is brilliant about you know he's one of those fantastic people
#
who has done a program in hindi and television to introduce north indians to the riches of
#
tamil nadu not only food but culture i wish there were somebody in north who could do it in tamil
#
for our tamil brothers and sisters to say what north is so there is greater understanding
#
but he told me about a coconut based chicken curry of the poor families in certain parts of
#
tamil nadu he's himself a strict vegetarian he said that the poor who could not afford a chicken
#
would take a dry cobra nariel cut it into pieces and cook it in the masala supposedly for chicken
#
and the kids would suck that and think it was a chicken so it was a poor man's chicken curry
#
well for a moment i heard dry cobra and i thought that's an interesting meat and then i know in
#
thailand you would have had a cobra a cobra skin and a snake wonderful let's sort of i did an
#
episode long ago with my good friend vikram doctor who also writes about food and i'm sure he's very
#
knowledgeable he writes very well very knowledgeable and i think our episode was
#
called the indianess of indian food and it was about how indian food in in that typical
#
nationalistic sense isn't it indian at all you know as you've pointed out in the colombian exchange
#
we got the potato mirchi tomato amruta of course south america so much of our food has come from
#
outside so i was you know very intrigued to learn about this curated dinner you did
#
where once at the india international center you held a curated dinner for 300 people
#
featuring meals eaten by the protagonists of the mahabharata you know which was that was
#
there was a program officer called parmila kosh unfortunately she's no longer with us she died of
#
cancer she was very encouraging and the idea was to plot certain items of food and locate them on
#
the map of india then or the vessel kings brought him kibbutz saffron came from kashmir bamboo shoots
#
came from northeast rajma came from madra in himachal pradesh and so on so you had items
#
ingredients of food mentioned and you said the parties took place for three days and separate
#
kitchens cooked for brahmans the warrior kings and dependents and royal families so you had an idea
#
of whether a roast was being described a dessert was being described a game or bird or game was
#
being described or a curry was being described then there was flavoring mentioned cardamom was
#
there clubs were there kerala so you could have a list of ingredients but not necessarily recipes
#
so what we try to do we try to recreate a menu and you know there were two times in the their
#
lifespan when the pandavas did vanvas once they went to study in gurukul second time when they
#
were exiled and they had to spend one more year in anonymous anonymity so they travel all across
#
the country so if you go to a place called bheemtal near where i was born in mukteshwar
#
there is a nal damenti taal the story in mahabharat in nal damenti taal is that raja
#
nal was an expert cook and when he lost everything much before yudhishthir in his
#
throw of dice he with damenti came to bheemtal he saw some fish and tried to cook them pan grill
#
but it says when you have misfortune nothing goes right the fish where they were flattened
#
marinated and put on the grill jumped back into the pond and this small pond you have colorful
#
fish even today which are tainted with turmeric like hue and flat like pomfret so it is said
#
that these date back to that period now similarly we said that it is not a bad idea to have a
#
pomfret turmeric flavored
#
similarly nal was supposed to be an expert cook and he cooked by a system called nullapak
#
which is using solar heat to cook something not direct direct fire now like a shikhanji is made
#
you put lemon juice and you put sugar and you put pickles and you sun matures it can you do it
#
without solar cookers i mean or where the reflected heat somewhere there so we thought
#
of doing that then there was something which said bheem worked as a cook at one stage so
#
what did he cook how why how was he an expert cook then bheem was given poisoned laddoos
#
and thrown into the water he was bitten by a snake and antidote and he came back again
#
so you had descriptions you had descriptions of akshaya patra no akshaya patra propaganda for the
#
present akshaya patra but krishna gave an akshaya patra to Draupadi to say that whenever a guest
#
comes to you if you have not cleaned it the even if it has three morsels three grains of rice it
#
would be enough to eat for people so you had Draupadi and her akshaya patra you also had an
#
interesting story about sudama going to krishna and giving him three fistfuls of pounded rice
#
chivda and when krishna ate to his wife held his hand because it meant that if you are saying
#
third mouthful you would give that much of riches to sudama so we said why not have something made
#
of pounded rice not poha but a more exotic dish like even maharashtra you have pounded rice with
#
dried fish it is eaten similarly you said there was a king in jarasand in sindh there was a madri
#
the co-wife of kunti in madra in himachal pradesh so why not have madra and rajma from that place
#
rocky mohan again who's a great food lover was very great help he said if you are getting
#
shak from kasmir kashmir let us have a haak with saffron and sochal there so we had a range of
#
dishes which were plotted from all over the country and there is another interesting story
#
that the king of udupi was the in charge of the kitchen during the battle of kurkshetra because he
#
was not fighting for any side so less chances of any side being poisoned so he was in charge of the
#
cuisine of udupi you know so i thought that krishna was fond of makhan mishri malai so you could
#
have a range of food which came out from the vashna tradition dating back to krishna martin
#
udupi udupi king's connection there was cruder things that you had shorshen matra period
#
and you had jaat belt millet belt and all this was there so and the food hasn't changed
#
in panjab from vedic times you refer to chanak which is kabli chana you talk of shak
#
you talk of godhum which is gihun you talk of mash which is black mung lentils so we tried to
#
concoct a meal which was not vegetarian and we did not claim that we had any recipes from which
#
mahabharat it was a mahabharat meal reimagined going into the not so sacred but the historical
#
geography of india during the epics and plot on it the journeys arjun goes bheem goes and married
#
an adivasi girl called hidimba and has a son called ghatotkach arjun goes to manipur marries chitrangada
#
and the story is again very funny it is the latent homoerotic desire which arjun has
#
towards a young prince who doesn't have mustaches taking a bath then she realizes there is a girl in
#
a boy's garb there is chitrangada and he says how i am feeling this feeling of tenderness about a
#
boy i mean that's the description but he had finally married chitrangada so there is a
#
manipul tribal connection there is a adivasi tribal connection for bheem and all these foods
#
why can't they be the mahabharat food
#
so we had thanks to the isc encouragement we plotted the journey and made a meal and i think
#
the person who was very supportive was ravishankar the cartoonist and the consulting editor of new
#
indian express who asked me to write a piece of this so i happily agreed and i think it was
#
one of the most satisfying meals we did not try to give you a biryani we did not try to give you
#
a pulao we did not try to but we gave you a puri because it is mentioned earlier we gave you good
#
quality rice but no frills were added but it was it was it was fun yeah and i remember one of my
#
friends swati banerjee i think did this video where she tried to recreate food of the indus
#
valley civilization what it would have been like and i think the only ingredient i remember from
#
that was bengal archaeological excavations have shown bucharis and cut things and you have
#
granaries the great granary where the rice was there where there was wheat was there so that is
#
there's another boy bennan who runs now a restaurant called malak bari who created
#
halapa meal also it was served in museum at one stage but that is all right nobody knows any
#
recipe but you know they ate everything and you have a tradition of cooking food in a particular manner
#
so let's talk about your journey in food because you love food you know food unlike me you're
#
mindful of the food that you're eating you are you don't just have the dna of taste which itself
#
is quite broad because of your the circumstances of your upbringing but also you are acquiring
#
taste and at some point all of this takes all of this inner sense becomes i don't know what
#
to call it a vocation it's not exactly a side profession an obsession in my case it's an
#
obsession and you start writing you start looking at yes i i think you know the realization was i
#
have to thank another friend jigs kalra was a food impresario who one day told me that pushpesh you
#
write about foreign policy you would be one among many but the kind of background you have if you
#
write about food you would be one of a kind which may not be true but i think i owe it to him that
#
he made me realize that food is something which everybody is interested in like sex and food i
#
often say and reverse order more people are interested in food than they are in sex for a
#
variety of reasons but then the point is that when you bring to food a diversity of interests
#
and resonances you really i mean is obsessive there's no other word it's not passion it's not
#
vocation if even if i am not writing i will still think about it and i think i'm grateful to another
#
gentleman hk dua who used to be the editor of indian times and was time with times of india
#
and was subsequently with tribune he asked me to do a column for tribune a weekly column
#
now it is a fortnightly column but it's the longest running food column or any column perhaps
#
in tribune for 20 years almost so what happened is that every week i had to think of a new dish
#
i have to think of a story in 200 words a recipe in 300 words and i wanted to eat to be accurate
#
so i did that and that gave me a collection of stories and then i must thank my publisher
#
pramod kapoor who had been printing all my books dhabas along the grand trunk route because my
#
favorite book actually one day he came to me and said that pushpesh i have asked you to write many
#
books very honestly he said i have not been able to compensate you enough i will find your publisher
#
who will do justice to your book and pay you well so he introduced me to fiedan and that was the
#
beginning of the the india cookbook which was very satisfying the money that came to me the
#
recognition that came to me new york times bestseller list allowed me to be independent
#
in my food research by that time the money came i was not in a position to either keep a concubine
#
or to have a pet boy or to drink or to gamble so i made a small foundation and started researching
#
food on my own i didn't have to look for a grant by that time i realized that my son was as bitten
#
by the bug as i'm of food and he is far more patient person than i am and is a brilliant cook
#
he has taken over my mother succeeded to that kind of thing and he's a rage he doesn't go beyond
#
indian at all and also within indian is mostly non-vegetarian it is goat meat very seldom other
#
than desi murga the chicken or game but he go when he says indian it means afghan pakistani
#
everything so even today he spends about two hours every night looking up pakistani food shows and
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recipes and when he makes a pasanda i said this looks different color he says you would not
#
recognize it this is a pakistani recipe he makes rosh which is just namak and meat and fat
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he poured on top eaten with some
#
he would say i can't eat this meat with this pulka at home you must get khabiri roti or we
#
should go out and get pav and eat keema like that so the point is that when father and son
#
started doing this jointly together it became easier in a manner that you could do you know
#
and i am grateful to jigs for another reason doing researches for food and consulting for hotels
#
we went to laknow and this galouti kebab usman tunde ka kebab actually is jigs's discovery who
#
brought him out from laknow to delhi for the first time in his life to shiv jatia's daughter's
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marriage who was owning hired who's still on site regency he is the one who got sardhan maya of mtr
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for the same marriage he and i went and spotted muhammad farooq whom we brought for hired who was
#
poached by the itc subsequently but he blossomed there fantastic chef that is a chef with whom i
#
have learned a lot he would not tell kalra much but he would be very open with me one day i told
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him why don't you do that so he came out with something very interesting he said kalra sab
#
khana bejte hai and he called me gurji he said gurji ab khana bejte nahi hai aapko khane ke
#
baare mein jaanne ka shaukh hai aur aapki kuch jaankari bhi hai toh main aapko sapkuj batane ku
#
tayaar hu toh main aapko sapkuj batane ku tayaar hu toh main aapko sapkuj batane ku tayaar hu toh main aapko sapkuj batane ku tayaar hu so maine ka how do you know i will not misuse that and he gave me one of those great pearls of wisdom
#
i mean if you treat me as a swine he was casting the pearls at me
#
he said aapko bhi kuch bhi bataa doon mere haath ki shafa aapkhaan se laayenge
#
i fry a balai ka tukda which is not kaccha inside but not burnt outside i do it with hand how do you
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know that you will be able to do that the same thing is i had a kakori kebab story munna afimchi
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he is no more he was known for his afim addiction he used to ply the trade in the
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city station railway station laknow i first had his kebab at rocky mohon's house in laknow
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and rocky mohon treated us to a very nice meal he was in his tehmad and cooking for us just maski daal
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and one gosht ka korma and kebabs were munna kababiyas so the idea was that you went you paid
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him in advance you collected your order in the evening one day i went there there was no munna
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kababiyan in the evening and i was supposed to collect the one kilo of kakori kebab and bring
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them home i was a little pissed off somebody said who did you give the money to he must have
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gone to the afim pinak somebody else standing next there said no he's a man of honor
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i went there his sister was cooking the kebabs they were not ready but about to be finished
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she was doing them on a lakdi and she gave me an education
#
so i realized that behind every famous kababchi is a woman who does the work for him
#
mohammad farooq was a person who belonged to a family of bhawarchis and he would say
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but i would not say so i have had a brilliant exchange with imtiyaz kurashi sahab's son
#
who took on the executive chef of itc one day and said madam aapko nahi pata hai
#
don't tell us our heritage that is where i discovered it was like a classical musician
#
khana to my mind i have this where tm krishna blows my mind
#
an indian musician improvises on it all the time
#
but indian music is very different every time the same artist is improvising and doing different
#
things to a ragh so mujhe aaj bhi yeh lagta hai what is the pulavness of a pulav what is the kababness
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of a kabab what is the kormaness of a korma what is the khichdi part of a khichdi and what makes
#
it a khichdi and not a tehri not a vegetable pulav what makes it a dopyaza and or a stew or a salan
#
dictionary doesn't help you salan is salaman kalia is basically a small kid goat korma is
#
braised meat slow-cooked marinated with dahi but please please tell me dopyaza main dopyaz hote
#
hai nahi toh mera santa claus tut jayega its kahaani bdi farak hai dopyaza ki team kahaaniya hai
#
if you go by the story of raja sahab selana whose famous book cooking delights of indian maharaj is
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there unki suni sunai chamchow ki jo kahaaniya thi unhone accurately rakhi hai but they can't be
#
taken as gospel truth ki meat main koi bhi sabzi mila diji toh dopyaza ho jata hai gobi ka dopyaza
#
aluka dopyaza and so on but that is a salan actually aluka salan gobi ka salan dopyaza
#
main ye hai ki pyaaz do baar padega ya do taha se padega do baar padega matne ki aapne pyaaz pehle
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guna uska uske baad meat dala phir dubaara dala pyaaz ya do guna pyaaz padega jitna meat tha usse
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do guna padega so you can suit yourself ki mullah dopyaza do the do pyaaz khaate the nahi khaate the
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we don't know unki guzar do pyaaz se hoti thi ke nahi hoti thi we don't know but you can pick and
#
choose so what we have tried to do we have tried to cook at home and tried everything meat do guna dalke
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pyaaz meetha hota hai usme dahi dalna padta hai khatas karne ke liye marne ke liye metas
#
pyaaz do baar dalke dekh liya hai aur usse bhi farak padta hai aur usme kuchh aur milaki bhi dekha hai
#
jisko lakhno me dna pukht kehte hai wo bhi do pyaaza ki taraf jata hai and we had a very nice do pyaaza
#
at muzaffar in his house he fed us beautifully at home to mujhe lagta hai ki ye cheezein har ghar ki
#
ek apni tradition hai jo dish mujhe badi mazaki lagti ho maharaja selana ki gitaab me wo murk
#
shikashta hari pasand hai the origin of the dish is very interesting begum akhtar was faizabadhi
#
woman with a golden voice raja sahab kashmir was fond of good things of life besides food ended up
#
in faizabad and when he was being hosted begum akhtar who was a great fabulous connoisseur of
#
good food cooked this murk shikashta hari pasand why is it shikashta because the breast is split
#
into two it's a broken-hearted murk shikashta hari pasand maharaja hari singh ki pasand ka tha
#
faizabad me bana tha so murk shikashta hari pasand is a dish which is unique created for
#
a particular occasion is neither the beginning nor the end if you try to develop that you are
#
ruining it you know it is a raag which somebody like ustaz amza dili khan sahab or ustaz bilad
#
khan sahab uh composes ke pehle nahi hota tha humne ek banaaya hai aap usko copy karenge to
#
you are faking it but there can be creation like that i would say that you know my problem is with
#
food is something very acute i like comparing food with sex all the time and not that i'm
#
dirty her mind as i grow older what is dirty about sex no the dirty in the age they think
#
now the problem is this that i feel like in sex there is a foreplay like in sex there is an after
#
glow in food there is a lingering memory of the first kiss in the last cigarette post-coition now
#
my problem with food is
#
ultimate orgasm is supposed to be brahmananda sahudhar it is almost as good as ecstasy
#
of finding the lord or the cosmic reality or whatever it is my problem is this ki jab
#
tk mujhe orgasmic maza nahi aaya khaane me toh phir khana kya tha phir toh wo rozmarna ka
#
staple fairy tha na you know the point is that i will tell you this is a very interesting story
#
not so much about food but related to food very much still i told you about vilasa hasa playing
#
bharavi at three o'clock in the morning and i was crying i did not know why i was crying
#
but i was crying of sheer ecstasy as luck would have it years later i had the good fortune to
#
interact with ustasa so we were shooting a documentary called soul of india on music and
#
he was anchoring i asked vandesh sir agar aap bura na maane toh main aap se paat puch hoon
#
he said pucho pucho me he was in a good mood he was very seldom in a good mood but when he was
#
in a good mood he could be like shiva ashtosh so i said maine yeh suna hai ki yeh raag iswakh
#
gaana chahiye yeh raag iswakh gaana chahiye he looked hard at me and said maine toh tumko
#
akalmand aadmi samajh raha tha yeh toh bahut simple cheez hai miya tum uswakh kis raag me ho jab
#
tum gaana sun rahe ho are you ecstatic are you euphoric are you depressed toh tum jis raag me usraag
#
me gaana tumko suit karega pranar gaana suit karega hi nahi then i persisted i said ki sab
#
deepak raag se badan mein aag lag jaatiye malar sunke aakh se paani nikal jaata hai
#
yeh kya hota barsaat hone lakhtiye he next time he didn't say ki maine tumko intelligent samajhta tha
#
he said ki that's a simple question duniya mein sabse sakht cheez kya hai
#
insaan ka dil hai agar wo sang dil hai agar wo pighal jaaye toh se zyada kya cheez piglegi
#
aapne meg malar kaya aur aapki aakh se aasu bahne lagaye toh baarish hogi na it took me back to
#
meera bhajans then he said ki hota kya hai aapko irsha hotiye gwesh hota hai jalan hotiye anger
#
hota hai lust hotiye and your body is set on fire any music which sets you with these passions in
#
fire is the deepak raag badan mein aag lag jayegi that it takes you back to buddha's fire sermon
#
in rajgir there was a forest fire his disciple said guru kitar chalo aag lag gayi hai toh
#
buddha kept sitting and said do you remember you are being ravaged by the fires inside all the time
#
lust envy anger passion aap toh jholas rahe hai 24 gante toh aap us fire ko dekhi kya parishaan
#
hor rahe hai i thought the food is something like that which gives you a range of emotions it is a
#
mood manipulator like music aapne dekha aur jagi badan mein joala hai toh ne kya kar dana
#
aapne kya khana khelaya is not only aphrodisia you gave me a food jisne ek ras ko create kya
#
is it anger it is humor is it wit it is tranquility it is excitement it is veer ras rodh ras adhbut ras
#
you know that is where i thought music and food had such a great connection have such a great
#
connection ki chhe ritu aap aap height of Samaria winter mein toh nahi gaayenge aap vasanth mein vasanth
#
gaayenge but what ustadji i made clear what is rag something which colors your mind in a particular
#
mood is rag mano ranjan is dyeing your mind in a particular hue that's what music does that what
#
food does so there is such intimate i mean i'm so obliged to uh that is the greatness of a genius
#
if i eat great food it is bliss a sheer bliss it may not last forever but the moment you eat
#
that you know that you have tasted sublime it's a taste of paradise it's not food from kashmir
#
beautiful insight and and you mentioned earlier that food should be orgasmic but you know sometimes
#
you don't want an orgasm you might want a quiet hug or you might want a cuddle or you might just
#
want to be alone in fact and i think food can satisfy all of those oh food will satisfy all
#
those who says that you have to go to uh to be a sexual gymnast and perform the asanas on the
#
edge down on the temple you might have a light snack you might have what they say
#
chicken soup for salt you might have a small snack you might have just chawda you just might have
#
a small kacha gola bengali laddu you might have a kada pak shandesh you might have a matthi just
#
with a i mean you you can be by yourself i want to talk about something you alluded to about
#
you know like when you referred to that lady when you went up to that person's house to get the
#
kebabs and that lady was finishing off the kebabs and she said ki you know
#
and that got me to thinking about what i feel is a false dichotomy like people will often talk about
#
the science and the art of cooking and the science will of course be you know like the baker's
#
science everything is exact
#
and the art almost seems mystical ki aapke baas feeling hai like the cook who told you ki you
#
know you can take my knowledge but you cannot take the magic of my hands and it can almost seem
#
mystical like that and but my contention always is that when we call something art we only call it
#
art because and it only seems mystical to us because we do not know enough about it but there
#
is an ingrained science and understanding what is happening is that you are having a false binary
#
you are having a left right hemisphere of the brain logical and artistic and aesthetic and
#
science and art i think in between there is a category where cooking is there is a craft
#
where you have a sound scientific basis you don't know how things work but you know enough that
#
certain things probability wise works is like medicine all people go to the medical school
#
not all become great surgeons or great physicians some kill patients others save them so what
#
happens is that you have to have a field for a patient and practice of medicine is like
#
meteorology you have the computer logarithms and all but you can't predict whether 100 percent
#
substitute i think the cooking is something like that which is based on physics and chemistry
#
but you don't do that i mean like all music is ultimately mathematical but you don't think of
#
let's talk about something that worries you and that you've spoken about and that you know doc
#
vikram doctor also spoke about with me which is homogenization right you've spoken about your
#
pet peeves the tyranny of tandoor and so on and you've also spoken about how weddings may
#
abhi sabko standard ho gaya hai apke bas punjabi menu aayega desert main aayega sab cliché ban gaya
#
and what doc eloquently spoke to me about and that became a metaphor for how i think about the
#
homogenization of culture in general is a cavendish banana ki india me originate hoi bahar gayi
#
fir wahan pe mass production ho gaya abhi now they have exported it back to india and india
#
may it is now taking over and other indigenous forms of banana are kind of dying out and what
#
do you feel about the danger of this homogenization because i i like see two aspects of it one aspect
#
of it is ki theek hai commercial considerations mean that for reasons of scale a certain amount
#
of homogenization ho jata hai but at the same time what i see especially over the last 10 years
#
and i'm not talking about the food industry per se but in general in the creator economy
#
and in the cultural space is that individuals are more and more empowered with you know the
#
means of production in their own hands and as a result of that you know smaller traditions can
#
survive that everything doesn't have to kind of you know become the same and i mean an example
#
of this is i read an episode with a gentleman named vinay singhal sitting right here and it
#
was a very inspiring episode for me because he runs his site called stage.in which calls
#
itself an ott for bharat but that bharat is not hindi punjabi bengali not the major languages
#
it is haryanvi bhojpuri the dialects not the bhasha but the boli and the homogenization
#
worry that i had always had is that i assumed that urbanization which is a massive net positive
#
would nevertheless you know have the unfortunate consequence that dialects would disappear
#
because you go to a city the pressure is to conform to whatever is a dominant language
#
toh aap haryana se kisi north shahar mein jaoge toh your haryanvi will disappear but your english
#
and hindi will become better and that was my worry and i think what vinay has proved with stage which
#
has i think by now more than a million subscribers at netflix rates what he has proved is that that
#
need not be the case that now there is a move in the opposite direction that all the nuances in
#
our food it gives this gives me hope will survive and i also see this see that in the fact that
#
you know in mumbai for example there are all these home kitchens which have sprouted up
#
in fact there's a particular one called i think the slow food something i forget exactly what
#
it is but i'll link it from the show notes because i've referred to their food before they make
#
you know agartala pork stew and kerala beef chilli and it's quite wonderful i'll link them
#
from the show notes and and all of these are also individual expressions where you don't have to
#
scale anymore and therefore you don't have to homogenize anymore i would agree with you
#
because what happens is the younger generation is looking for roots and looking for ethnic
#
subnational subregional roots and once you identify with that you like your food to be part of your
#
pride you know that's number one and artisanal foods are coming back and you want to be different
#
but there also lurks a small danger that you might saskritize foods which were very rustic
#
and rural the tyranny of tandoor is still very much there
#
so there is a passing vogue because of a sub-ethnic sub-regional identity
#
not going we're getting into semantics and those definitions but kerala
#
in coconut lagoon it is cooked as polychartu filled with masala wrapped in banana leaf pan grilled
#
in koji code it is cooked deep fried with the grated coconut and garlic in the saga restaurant
#
in karahi and comes to you chili hot
#
but the point is that home a whole
#
a celebrity chef is cooking with tomatoes which is absolute nonsense so
#
you might be moving out of the tradition totally and creating a fusion which is neither fusion
#
nor originality or improvisation i think one of the sort of the the ways that i think about this is
#
that what the modern age needs and by the way these guys are called the slow fire chef i'll
#
link them from the show notes i think what we need in the modern age and i'm speaking across
#
not a food of which i know another one almost close to nothing but in general in cultures
#
cultural curators like a couple of things have simultaneously happened and one is that earlier
#
you had a very strong mainstream where all the means of production were and therefore you had
#
gatekeepers you had fixed forms you had conventions which could often be deep constraints
#
and if you were a writer or a filmmaker or whatever you would have to go to those gatekeepers
#
and fit in within those constraints and very few people would actually make it today what has
#
happened is that mainstream is irrelevant everybody has a means of production everybody can be a
#
creator there is no need to scale but because you do not have the mainstream anymore to navigate
#
that world like as a consumer if in 1995 if i want to know the news i can take the times of
#
india or the hindu and read it but today what do i consume when there is such a barrage of content
#
and i think that more and more i think that need is being filled by cultural curators
#
like there will be people i will follow on twitter and i know that i can rely on their taste
#
no no worries no the interesting part is this that
#
you have got lots of cultural curators who have forgive the word no qualifications to be cultural
#
98 percent of everything is crap
#
but i will eventually find the people i can trust
#
is not a question of what you consider as a qualification but anybody claiming to be a
#
cultural curator is dishing out things which are neither curations nor
#
i don't think the term is being used very widely so i don't think any anyone is claiming to be that
#
but there are de facto cultural curators who would not think of themselves like that
#
whom i follow like tyler carvin or marginal revolution every once in a while will have a
#
list what i'm reading or he'll have books of the year list and because our interests are common
#
and i respect him a lot a lot of my reading comes from there people say they use my show notes in
#
fact to you know build up their little bookshelves and all of that what twitter pe meme ban gaya people
#
will post a picture of the scene
#
there and if you have genuine interest we'll find you'll find definitely yeah yeah and and i
#
think that solves that particular problem
#
but if i feel i can trust these people that they're consistently giving good food then it
#
which are bamboo shoots which are acuni which are part tribal part regal bengali influence
#
of manicure family fair enough
#
true but i'm not a pessimist i would agree with you
#
okay if enough people are worried about what they are eating they would probably find the
#
level yeah i have a lot of faith in young people you know we can make fun of a certain kind of
#
visible young person who is you know that hipster always posturing avocados
#
but by and large uh young people today have so much energy so much passion so much hunger
#
to learn new things that i'm actually access also affordable also access absolutely
#
so that gives me hope what doesn't give me hope what gets me down a little bit
#
is the politics that we see around us and i want to first discuss it in the context of food
#
abhi kya hua hai that a lot of food has almost become political now as you very correctly
#
pointed out that in ancient times in our ancient manuscripts lo khate the non-veg
#
not everybody ate beef not all brahmins ate beef but mr dr dn cha did show incontrovertibly
#
that brahmins slaughtered a calf for their guests it was supposed to be a tasty meat not that it was
#
propagating befitting but the poor chap's face was blackened his book was almost burnt and he
#
was hounded terribly but the problem is aaj kal jo hua raha hai na what i call the revenge of the
#
vegetarianism the with the vehemence aapko thop thop ke zabardasti hamiki hamari values ye thi hamari
#
civilization values ye thi ye khana taam sikh hai ye khana pure nahi hai and vigilantes will take over
#
and the courts would not protect you enough unfortunately so the politics of electoral
#
politics of polarization and milching vote bans and trying to have goons let loose on
#
people who have conflict with your koda is unfortunate i mean i don't see it receding at
#
all navaratri mein aap gurgaon mein you go and shutters half closed the muslim buchhars are scared
#
hindu buchhars also don't want to push it too far
#
kal raat ko maine chandraaj ko phone call kiya maine bola ki maa kal pushpesh ji se baat kar raha ho
#
you know him very well tell me what you can tell me about him he gave me a long series of notes
#
most of which we can't won't have time to talk about which i call cc on pp is what i'm calling
#
the list and one of the beautiful things he said about you and he had nothing but praise but one
#
of the beautiful things he said about you he said that an hour in pushpesh's company will make you
#
fall in love with india all over again right and and no it's very true because the the four and a
#
half hours or five hours that you know i've had the good fortune to spend with you i just feel that
#
i'm learning so much more and i will listen to this conversation multiple times and process what
#
you've said and of course continue reading everything you've written and that i just feel
#
that this is such a rich and beautiful country there is so much to you know take in and love
#
and at the same time there is this last aspect of the directions that we have taken in a sense
#
a homogenization of thought or an attempt to homogenize thought in a particular direction
#
exactly what is happening is shoving down our throat steam roller it and keep your mouth shut
#
and you're you're slightly older than the country in the sense you are you're an elder brother to
#
midnight children as it were yes i used to say in my youth that i was born and i cried and my crying
#
was like rudra's whales and the british left so what do you feel when you look at the journey
#
i don't feel very optimistic but then in the long run there have been tyrants there have been
#
authoritarian rule there has been erosion of rights of freedom of expression
#
and they pass that also passes the only regret is that it may not pass in my lifetime
#
it takes me back to another of the quotes from my student days first world war and lord gray is
#
having a discussion with his colleague and his the lamps are going out one by one and we will
#
not see them lit again in our lifetime so it is one of those things which you regret that
#
before things before there is a light at the end of the tunnel a person like me who's paranoid
#
would say that might be an express train coming at you but maybe it will it will end and the
#
next generation will see happier days happier times more freedom to eat what they want to eat
#
and what more freedom to speak what they want yeah inshallah let's now you know move on to
#
talking about another aspect of indianness which also is you know extremely rich extremely
#
diverse extremely varied just like food but also at risk of homogenization and some of that
#
richness going away which is clothes which you have taken a deep interest in you have a story
#
about how you went to get pajamas stitched recently and three years back no i think my
#
problem with clothes started because of a very acute skin allergy i put on anything synthetic
#
and i got a very bad eczema so my father said why don't you just stay with simple cottons
#
they breathe easy they don't give you an allergy i tried cottons and i was very happy
#
it continued for 10-15 years till every time you wanted to buy pure cottons you got a slight
#
it became more and more difficult to buy cotton maintain cotton and then it became more difficult
#
to get it stitched if you got very good cotton a long staple cotton you would have to get it
#
tailored you got the right color you got it shrunk pre-shrunk and then you wanted to get tailored
#
and then you found out that this back again to my socialist past Dr Ramanur Lahiya used to say that
#
the best way to dress up in india is kurta dhoti or kurta pajama for this climate but then how do
#
you wear a kurta do you wear a kurta of the jyothi radheet siddhiya variety with collar and collarless
#
vest coat or do you have a kurta which is a round neck with the with the basket which is which is a
#
collar do you want a kurta like the prime minister's the short kurta with the half sleeve
#
which everybody follows like the safari suit of sanjay gandhi's acolytes do you want a kurta which
#
is called punjabi in bangal or a pathani which is a collar like a shirt and pockets and is worn with
#
a shalwar do you want a malmal ka kurta with the great song paan khai saniya hamar malmal ke kurte
#
bachir chalan lal what does it show you malmal ka kurta was worn for summer but the person who's
#
eating paan doesn't have the tameez or tahzeed to eat paan properly mughola nahi raha chhit
#
lal to tabhi aayegi na when he's splitting the rainbow split of the agnew vice president agnew is there
#
so i got into the kurta thing and kablish my poet mentor friend told me akhi kya aap bakwas kar rahe
#
haath ki turpai ka kurta pehne na why are you going to a tailor so then i said ke haath ki
#
turpai ka kurta to humne kabhi pehna hi nahi hai to humne haath ki kurta kurta kurta
#
very comfortable till it came to a day that they went out of fashion everybody was having fab india
#
kurtas or shirts from chirag deen and or friday alan soli dressing so you could get certain things
#
which again were homogenized ki yeh kameez hai yeh corduroyz hai corduroyz hai toh aapko
#
colors ki mil jayenge varna ekhi mil hindustan mein bana rahi hai i think kya uska naam hai vijay
#
i think jo bana rahi hai corduroyz jeans jo thi wo ek denim wali thi till i went to banaras and
#
found zari ke kaam wali designer jeans but the point was that you got what was selling in the
#
market and you could not get something made to your specifications like a kurta which is slim
#
fit kurta what do i do with a slim fit kurta i have got a pot belly i have got a waist which
#
is 39 inches and i don't and i'm not fit like the prime minister i can't wear a short kurti
#
with half sleeves running around everywhere toh mujhe dhila dhala kurta chahiye toh mujhe ek dukhan
#
mila laal bihari tandon ki dukhan mein lakhno wali ki where they take this measure this measurement
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they take a three ways measure and a loose fit kurta is very happy with me
#
chunat kaha se pade hi usme, wo kapda milke cotton ka hai usme chunat nahi milegi usme aapko
#
color nahi milega toh agar aap ek color ka kurta mausam ke hisaab se pehna chahte hai
#
dull pastel kurta beshar marang ka bhi ho sakta hai wo girwa wo basanti bhi ho sakta hai wo hara bhi ho sakta hai wo
#
asmani neela bhi ho sakta hai wo kathahi bhi ho sakta hai fabindia used to bring these loose kurtas
#
now you can't buy them because they don't have a market for that you want to buy i mean you come
#
to kolhapuri chappals later but kurtas are impossible to buy if you want to buy a kurta of your
#
specification you want to get tailored like i told you the tailored like the pajama said ki
#
khan markum ne jayi wahan ladies ke blouse hulte ek chacha wo aapka kurta haad se sell dengi toh buy kar denge
#
but the point is that most people buy off the shelf
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we wanted to give to our customers who used to patronize our
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NGO for foods with tweed lengths so we gave tweed lengths woven on looms by war widows
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which have designs like bird's eye shepherd's skin hound's tooth whatever herringbone nobody
#
would accept that gift even free se selana padega yaar okay selana padega problem kya
#
ki custom made bespoke tailoring would cost you 3500 to 4000 rupees for a coat
#
toh hum jo aapko kapda de rahe the toh aapke liye saza ho gayi na aapko wo jab selana pada
#
toh it was said so you know i mean the problem is that we are so used to buying ready-made stuff
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that we don't even look for variety in ready-made stuff there used to be a
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shop called cottage emporium in inner circle of handloom emporium in the inner circle near
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dhumimal art gallery and near the post office in a block a block yes was it a block or was it b
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block a b ke beech mein tha a block main tha wahan badhe che kabde milte the raw silky kurta
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raw silky coat raw silky basket finished you go to cottage industry emporium some of the stuff is
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very good prohibitively expensive but fitting is all gone i mean you go to fab india they do a great
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job they give their tailoring of pajamas to cheshire homes where people who are differently
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enabled tailor them but the pajamas are horror usme asan theek nahi hai nala theek nahi matta
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se yi elastic lag diya hai jeb hai i mean if i want to use that i will use the pant yara i will use
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the cargo bay pant pijama pahan hai ma chowk se pachta hu bhen ki baitha hu how many people would
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even know the difference between a chudidar pajama a lekar pajama and a khilta murgi ChoR pajama
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khilta murgi choR pajama is lakhano wala jiska pahicha bahut choda hota hai broader than the bell bottoms
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murgi choR isse liye hai usme aapko chhupa ke bhi le ja sakte the hai na aur a lekar wala
#
jo pajama hai usme to wo joke hai communal joke ki bade bhai ka khurta aur chhote bhai ka pajama
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pehen bhiya bade bhai ka pajama chakhne se upar rehta hai it serves a purpose ki gandhan ho namaz ka
#
khurta bhuzu asani se kar sakne but chudidar pajama will suit a person who's jama zeb like nehru
#
who's physically fit it will not fit everybody to hiye aap jodhpur ki vaskar pehen lijiye sadri
#
pehen lijiye coat pehen lijiye fine is all right yeh febidia ka hai buttons saare gandh bade the nahi
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yaha pe salwit hai yaha pe salwit hai yaha pe salwit hai of course my body is also a challenge to a tailor
#
aur yeh audio podcast hai to me sabko bata do ki yeh waistcoat ki baare me baat kar rahe hain
#
bilkul bilkul bilkul yeh khadi ka khurta hai very comfortable tailoring very bad
#
so collar aap bahar nekaliye advantage hai ki ke collar me bakram nahi hai to collar sakht nahi hai
#
soft hai isme wishbone lagane ki zyurat nahi hai is not a collar meant for a tie is a collar for
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indian climate ki button kolhiye fursat se baithiye aur eki khurta paas mein ek kameez se pehen
#
rahat ko bhi salwit ne padegi dusse din dhol lijiye so i have a problem with indian attire and again
#
you know mrs al-kazi did a great job on costumes for theater and indian costume charles fabry wrote
#
a book on indian costumes historically when you see the history of indian costumes in architecture
#
sculpture and try to plot it
#
But linen doesn't suit this climate because aap usko maintain karne mein laakh change athe
#
pehli yeh tha ki aap usme kalaf chadha the the kurta karak hota tha pehenke aap nikalthe the ilaichi
#
false ranke kurta hote the aap usme kaam jo hota tha ki usme jo embroidery hotiye usko
#
dekhta hi nahi hain bada chah kaam hai pura jaala bona hua hai but topchi kya thi wo kaunsa usme
#
stitch laga hua tha is all gone is being lost i mean muzaffar did a very great job by trying to
#
have anjuman and something of that kind the same thing happened to the sadis
#
ki chanderi ki sadi hoi mahaishwar ki sadi hoi or shalini devi holkar and richard holkar jo
#
haan kar rahe the usme muzaffar ni associated the but hum log bhool gaye ki humare kabde ka maza
#
kya tha ki dhaake ki malmal ki kaahani hame yaad aati hai but hume cheat ki kaahani yaad
#
nahi aati hume gareeb aadmi jo malaysia pehanta tha uski yaad nahi aati hume po fernel ki patloon
#
yaad aati hai but the poor man's wool ball ko yaad nahi aata i was recently with malika sara bhai
#
she had invited a story session what a fantastic person and her mother was my mother's contemporary
#
shantiniketan so i was given a very nice deal and i was shown the calico museum where you have to
#
wait for days to get a booking calico museum of textiles very badly curated but still the wealth
#
of riches which is there but you are herded by a very gastapo like guide there who belongs
#
to the other branch of the family not malika's family malika's line to go haka haka dhakka
#
it is almost like going to tirupati govinda govinda govinda dhakka lagra if you blink you
#
will miss the sight of the govinda so you are herded out of the museum but what riches that museum
#
has what kind of textiles and fabrics they have but
#
when you have something in a museum it has to be part of your living everyday life
#
ap kurta pehne yi short kurta NGO wala pehne jharkhand wala yaar juman ka pehne
#
lal bihari tendan ka pehne fab india ka pehne modiji ka to khair ultra designer kurta hai
#
but the point is that aapko fabric pata hona chahiye aapko un ho risham ho suit ho inka mix ho
#
designing kya hai dyeing kya hai printing kya hai weave kya hai you know there is a kabir metaphor
#
tana bana kahe ka tana kahe ka bana kahe ki bharni and the whole thing is jhini rebhini chadariya
#
jaskita sardini is the metaphor is textile fabric is life it is woven as you said tapestry
#
and then you use it then you don't stain it
#
I empathize so much with one part of your lemon that I'm going to go on a bit of a rant here
#
ki yeh india mein slim fit beshte kyu hai kuaan hai slim yaha pe like for example my greatest
#
lament is ki all my life mujhe mere size ki shirt nahi milti because i have a typical indian ponch
#
abhi agar shoulder fit ho gaya to you know there's it's it's uncomfortably tight at the stomach
#
aur agar waha pe lose ho gaya to shoulder pe slump ho raha hai
#
meri sab toh aur problem hai na ki ek bahutti battameez tailor tha usne msse tape yaha pe rakha
#
aur ka pakariya ap main aapki charo toh chakkar laga ki aata then he said ki aapko
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yeh readymade to kahi nahi milega aap mujhse slima lijiye aap koi bhi cheez kharidein ko
#
aapko jo aapka problem ho mera problem fit karane ka if i buy it by the waist size the length is too
#
much is for an american height usko katwa lijiye toh uska fall kharab ho jayega shirt main toh
#
aur bhi zala le se kahan kanda aur kahan kya nahi yeh slim fit ka toh mujhe samajhi me nahi aaya
#
not indians are not very fit i feel it's like you know economics mein term use karte hai maine
#
episode bhi kiye hain uspe called isomorphic mimicry isomorphic mimicry in biology is you're
#
imitating something that has worked somewhere somewhere else and economists talk about like
#
premature imitation is a term i think alex tabarroch and shruti rajgopalan use for it
#
where you are taking a policy that worked in some other country and transplanting it to india where
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the local conditions are completely different aur yeh sir of shirt sizes mein nahi hai you know even
#
das saal pehle ek fashion shuru ho gayi thi ki hotel rooms mein the division between the bathroom
#
and the this thing will be made of glass aur mujhe samajh me nahi aata tha yaar even for a
#
honeymooning couple surely you don't want to see the other person taking a dump right so you know
#
a lot of these sort of fashions come and go oh kiski poem thi oh Celia Celia Celia shits
#
wo WB8 ki dekste ho kiye hain nahi hai
#
Jaldi se google maarte hain, Celia shits
#
Celia Celia Celia shits, mean bilabit is taking a crap
#
Jonathan Swift ki hai, parna parega yeh toh have to read it out because aapne ek baar bata diya toh
#
5 hours and who can do it lessen by haughty Celia spent in dressing the goddess from her chamber
#
issues arrayed in lace brocade and tissues no stefone who found the room was void and betty
#
otherwise employed stole in and took a strict survey of all the litter yeh baat lambi poem hain
#
let me find wo Celia shits kaha pe hain, Celia Celia Celia shits, aa yaa yaa yaa yaa aagaya hain
#
thus finishing his grand survey disgusting disgusted stefone stole away repeating in his
#
amorous fits o Celia Celia Celia shits, jee bilkot, wow so thank you for introducing me to be to me
#
nahi and i find the same problem even with kurtas like typically the impression one has ki yaar
#
the kurta is a loose fitting garment it will hide you know whatever bulges and all that you
#
might have more than hiding it will be comfortable it will be comfortable it would be comfortable
#
to sit and converse why it would be ventilated i've recently found it impossible in fact harder
#
to find a kurta that fits and a shirt that fits but i am solving all these problems because
#
publicly announced kar raha ho next six months i'm going to lose 15 kgs after that it is not
#
my problem slim fit lana hai lao dekh lenge they have given up no and if i'm amuse allowed
#
from an economic standpoint what could be happening here is that there are so many niches
#
that you can't that it is not economical to cater to each of them and therefore you automatically
#
homogenize like in the sense that for example if there are 30 types of pajamas right for a company
#
to cater to each of them doesn't make sense you want to standardize and make just one kind and
#
that is the only kind which is not a slim fit correct which will be comfortable with most people
#
honi chahi hai na kaafi logon kaisang honi chahi hai i have had no problem with lal bihari
#
attendance kurtas which are measured in three places unki sab dikhat hi hai ki unki yaha
#
pe imagination color ki textures ki fabric ki nahi humil se aata dhar sa marha dete hai
#
and also there's more of a tradition for women getting the you know going to tailors and getting
#
their clothes made men don't really do that do they i do that regularly you do that i do that
#
regularly because my ego doesn't allow me to take a cargo pant or any pant from and then
#
cut it cut and get it fitted the fall is ruined the so i go to a old trusted tailor
#
and get him to tailor my thing pant pleat wali banegi aaj kal iss zamani ki kaun pehanta hai
#
oh i must you know this is a audio so i will see i have the same problem he's taking off his waistcoat
#
people no that's where the striptease this is very sensuous i wear no belts but i wear suspenders
#
suspenders wow okay i wear them with pajamas inside with a banyan and to have my kurta
#
fortunately i had a long kurta not like amr's kurta so my innocence was preserved
#
with a girl he wanted to impress
#
so he was very embarrassed and at that point the girl with him said don't worry that's happened
#
to me also and later he told me about how embarrassed he was and i said that actually
#
this is a beautiful moment it is a beautiful moment because in that nightclub nobody is
#
themselves everybody is projecting a persona for the others but in that one moment that all the
#
personas have dropped that you are embarrassed because your pant has literally dropped not just
#
a persona but the girl with you feels that human empathy because she understands your embarrassment
#
and she says it has happened to me too without unfortunately elaborating and everybody else
#
around will also feel sorry for the guy because it will be that the mirror neurons kicking in but
#
that there but for the grace of you know whoever go i never would have been able to speak in
#
somewhere my pants fell but i had a long kurta and the embarrassment was not there at all
#
i was behind a podium i said sorry my pants are falling down
#
long kurta zindabad and i somehow don't understand a fashion like one fashion that i have seen sort
#
of change in my lifetime or just in the last 20 years is women salwars and churidars giving
#
way to straight prants and palazzo's and all of that and all of them have their own logic and
#
their own aesthetic but there almost seems at a point in time to be this mass shift where you
#
move away from one to the other and you can almost make out economic class or age by which
#
particular fashion they choose and it's a very interesting you follow the hurt the hurt mentality
#
you don't have the courage to say
#
so so i've sort of taken up a lot of your time towards the end some sort of final questions
#
which is like one what amazes me is that you are so full of energy and enthusiasm and you know
#
i'm your son's age i'm a little younger than your son and given all the
#
how good he is at cooking and all of that maybe i shouldn't have made friends with him first
#
but what enthuses you about life what fills you with excitement that's the only life i have
#
i mean after i go after sardar jafri there'll be no life so i might as well enjoy every moment
#
why not i mean that that i think is reason enough to be enthusiastic i'm alive i may lose my mind i
#
may have a paralytic stroke i may have a heart attack i may have a kidney failure i might be
#
diagnosed for a malignancy so why shouldn't i make most of what i have and when i have beautiful but
#
you shouldn't have made that list what are you working on right now you mentioned that you
#
wrote an early novel once upon a time and now you're again i just finished the novel and
#
submitted it to the publisher oh lovely the only reason is that i stopped publishing i realized
#
that it might hurt the descendants of some people who are named there so i wanted to change names
#
a very easily identifiable people small community the other book which i want to do is the project
#
almora which i wanted to write about a town where our families began their journey into the wider
#
world from village to almora town and beyond but i would like to do that i would like to do the
#
paan book which i have done as a tribute to my father who was a great paan lover it has
#
and there is one story there which is you know brilliant there is you might have heard
#
the gentleman brilliant he has written a story about a paan wala so he compares everything with
#
paan because a girl comes to his shop to buy paan and purshutam bhai is a brilliant metaphor
#
this is the most delicate
#
travels but this first love never leaves him he has a road accident when he's dying
#
his everything is related to paan beautiful beautiful so i'll sort of end the show by
#
asking you to recommend for me and my listeners books films music any kind of art at all that
#
means so much to you that you just want to share it with the whole world i i would without thinking
#
twice is with translations if you can't read saskar the original is my favorite i would say
#
that written by adi shankar acharya not as a devotional lyric but any memorable lyrics you'd
#
like to share from this is what don't be proud of your wealth you people behind you
#
your fame your youth all will pass and you will you know
#
is the refrain it says you will be born again you will go into mother's womb again you will
#
get old again and like an old man you would be going out with a stick
#
don't be proud of any of these things i think these are the ones which are
#
which i've enjoyed reading i would recommend very strongly and equal music to everybody who
#
is willing to read that i would recommend real case poetry i would recommend me very strongly
#
much more than ghalib any day very unfair comparison but i think i'm very partial to
#
me any memorable verses from me unfortunately
#
the people had given up the world came and called out and then i suddenly thought what was that
#
which pulled me so strongly that i gave up everything else it went away i mean i feel
#
beer is a beer is very very powerful i would suggest that uh films you know i think there
#
is nothing like titashakti now i still can't blink when i'm watching this film that you know
#
something will happen melodramatic totally melodramatic chance etc etc but you think the
#
film is ending and then it takes on a row even where he makes a cameo appearance and started
#
singing kali bhajan and so on when the young marxist is next slide is having a conversation
#
with him i think i have never been more impressed by any filmmaker than i i have enjoyed on other
#
extremes something like these three kasam challenge its music lyrics raj kapoor waheeda rehman
#
dancing duniya banane wale kya tere manme samayi there's the typical indian package
#
ke shailed rahe shankar jayakishen hai raj kapoor hai aur ek hindustani kahani hai panishwana
#
threeno ki tisri kasam urf maare gaye gulfaam i i think i i would recommend that film very much
#
i would recommend guide very much again waheeda rehman dancing away and usme the music is sd
#
berman and he sings the two major songs allah mein ek de, paani mein ek de and bhatyalis
#
e musafar jata hai kahan naache sapera shailed ki lyric hai you know that line was not in the film
#
ki tu ne to sabko rahe dikhai tu apni rahe kyun bhula so the film music in that and i remember
#
anis jung very gratefully of youth times who allowed me to write invited me to write about
#
indian film music and things of that kind so i think again this is an interest which i share
#
with my son i forget film songs he remembers each film song in entirety ye film me kya hua tha
#
onsa recording me chut gaya tha aur ye dubaara sunne mein aapko kaisa lagta hai
#
aur yaha pe sitar ki ghat kaha pe sitar kisne bajaya tha dhol kisne shankar na bajaya tha
#
jayakishen harmonica pe tha you know the point is that that film gives you the insight into
#
the hypocrisy of indian life ki wo jo rosy ka husband hai kishore saho
#
whose wife used to be with my mother again in shantiniketan kishore saho at once come
#
i remember bimal roy scouting for outdoor locations would come for madhumati but those are not my
#
pictures i mean i think guide teesri kasam and ritu ghatak make for me what i would love to see
#
again and again and again and can never tire i would like to recommend that i would also like
#
if somebody can get a copy of that chore panchashika adhyapi even today i think of this
#
you know i i don't know what else i would like to do the books i'll these are my music favorite
#
books oh music there are two two two sets of music i would like everybody to listen to dhrupad
#
anytime at their confusion the dagger brothers the dagger wani not only dagger wani but
#
vidya kharana seeram tiwari ji who without a mic would reach across the audience
#
i would recommend very strongly the tomaris cerebrally interpreted by vidya rao
#
she's the most cerebral one i would say i'm i don't know who am i to recommend but i think
#
tn krishna singing kanhatak music his way is fantastic it's fantastic he's been on my show
#
also by the way i i know i know yeah and i didn't ask him to sing too much to everybody's
#
astonishment because i i think the man is absolutely marvelous you know i i my mind
#
has been blown by his musings on music and i think i would like people to listen to his kanhatak
#
renderings uh full length ones short ones with younger crowd with transgenders with
#
uh young kids so good he's so good
#
a lot of it is osmosis environment around you
#
talking about it with other people i often get questions from you know either listeners or
#
writing students ki mujhe yeh seekhna hai iske liye kaunsi book hai ya iske liye kya
#
recommend karenge to mujhe for example if if i want to understand kanhatak if i want to understand
#
hindustani classical if i want to understand dhrupad and thumri for example to because
#
everybody doesn't have access
#
southern music ke liye to tn krishna ki kitab sabse chhena southern music
#
aur agar north indian aapne sunna hai to raga dk raja ki kitabe dk publishers ki raja ki that's brilliant
#
if you want a smaller version there is bagchis jo isha foundation ne chapiye you know but the point
#
is that chetan karnani was very good introduction wo book is not available sangam books ki paper
#
bag thi with the discography at the end of it but mujhe lagta ki kitab se thodi aap seekhte hain
#
why should you learn everything and why should you like everything
#
you know there was a professor of music in south in kanhatak music in delhi university he came to
#
sapru house he said sing along with me everybody can sing so i said i'm tone deaf i wouldn't do
#
will ruin the fun he said no no no forget it sing so i loudly sang and said i'm sorry i was wrong
#
not everybody can sing so i remember that very well and i think that i said ki music ma seekh
#
nahi sakta hu to sadhana hai wo mere bas ki nahi
#
i didn't mean seek in that way i meant just learn to appreciate oh that is no problem i mean aap
#
kuch bhi khayenge to you will find
#
mitha pasand hai ki namkeen pasand hai kitna mitha pasand hai
#
i remember another episode my father got promoted and a meal was given for everybody including
#
servants wake markers everybody there was a nepali coolie working with us for that time
#
my mother gave him sandesh imarti all kinds of sweets they said you want more his answer was
#
beautiful he said ma'am sab aap to agar aap gud bhi doge to main nahi kha sakta hu the ultimate
#
sweet for him was gud that range baghi mithai to aise thi you know this reminds me of that
#
anecdote about the poison laddu that when you said the poison laddu i thought ki any laddu
#
is poison laddu kyunki sugar to hai sugar is poison to gur me bhi vahi funda haa jaata hain
#
haa agar agar aap achchi mithai kha rahe hain to achchi mithai mein hint of mitha se usme mitha zyada
#
nahi hogi if the mithai is well made a good sandesh a gud motichur ka laddu a good rabdi
#
a good firni would be sweetened by lactose or fructose not by sucrose do you think some of the
#
circumstantial qualities of indian food like the dominance of carbohydrates also has had downstream
#
health effects for example india is like almost a diabetes capital of the world i think given the
#
you know do we blame the carbohydrates for it or do we blame the the proliferation of sedentary
#
no i think largely carbohydrates and processed food are a big problem
#
longevity to medicine ke liye barhi hai no no i'm not not too true the average life expectancy at the
#
time of independence was 27 28 correct lekin hu to medical advances hai and reducing
#
vaccination bhi hai sab kuch hai maagar aisa nahi hai ki sirf carbohydrates ko a blame kiji i mean both of us
#
have this problem of avoiding carbohydrates
#
pakar mera hai mahalna ki carbohydrates agar aap physical labor nahi kar rahein to apko kitne carbs khaani ki zubharthe hain
#
aap ek roti khaenge kista khatam hai
#
if you can afford no i'm agreeing with you i'm saying indians have more carbs than they need to
#
no what i mean is that they had more carbs to than they need to is because they're used to
#
famine conditions yeah their stomach is not satiated till they have consumed
#
power and also carbohydrates are much cheaper of course yeah so it's interesting
#
pushesh thank you so much i you know i'm feeling very guilty like i'm feeling very grateful i had
#
this conversation but very guilty also because i feel ki this feels like still of still of
#
trailer hua hai ki film baaki hai you know there is so much i can talk to you about and i'm sure
#
i hope so we can meet some other time but i think you know i enjoyed this conversation brilliantly
#
and i think you know i'm going back how much chandrahas has meant to me because when we are
#
discussing food in bhuta and he would say pushpesh tumne prasad kaya maha prasad kaya jagana temple ka
#
simplicity kadi hai chawal hai dalma hai saage that is what the real taste is i think you know what i
#
what what i quoted maxwell earlier the breath of life chandrahas's life has a breath of life so
#
enthusiastic about every little thing and i absolutely i wish i could learn from that and the warmth
#
now that we've suitably embarrassed him by mentioning mentioning him like this
#
thank you again this has been such a pleasure thank you so much
#
if you enjoyed listening to the show check out the show notes enter rabbit holes at will
#
buy as many of pushpesh's books as you can cook something nice for yourself tonight
#
you can follow pushpesh on twitter at pushpesh panth that's one word you can follow me on
#
twitter at amit varma a m i t b a r m a and you can browse past episodes of the
#
scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
#
did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
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production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any
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